Free Arc D'X by Steve Erickson Page B

concierge out and closed the door, and now it was just the one man and the woman. Sally still hadn't said anything and stared at her hands in her lap. "Hey," the man said, snapping his fingers.
    Slowly she looked up at him. "Mrs. Hurley," he said, "my name is Wade. I'm a policeman. I have to ask you some things and you're going to have to try and tell me the answers to what I ask you."

    Sally looked around the room, at the walls and the bed.

    "Can you tell me what happened here?" Wade said. She looked vacantly ahead of her and then at the dead man. "Can you tell me who he is?" Wade asked, and she looked at the bloody knife in the handkerchief on the table. "Is that yours?" She reached to touch it. "Just leave it, Mrs. Hurley. Sally. We're going to have to check that out and if it's not yours then you don't want to touch—"

    "It's mine," she said.

    Wade gnawed on his cheek again. His brow furrowed and he looked around him to see that the door was closed. "Now you should be careful what you say," he said to her in a low voice. "In this city you can be locked up for nothing other than the fact that someone in my position just doesn't happen to like you, which I've done in the past but don't want to do now." Wade was trying to figure out if she was black. It was a tricky situation for him. It wasn't beyond Mallory to be spying for either Wade's superiors at headquarters or some low-level priest up at Church Central; everything was fucking intrigue in this city and here was Wade, a black man in a room with a very beautiful woman who might be black and might have just murdered a white man. So he couldn't cut her much more slack than he'd be able to justify later on.

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    "It's mine," she repeated with determination. She was determined about it because it was the only thing she remembered now, or thought she remembered, though as the moments passed since she woke she became less and less certain. It seemed important to be able to lay claim to this singular memory. The legal ramifications of the knife's being hers either hadn't occurred to her or weren't as important as the sanity of being able to remember this single thing.

    "I've got to take you in then, Mrs. Hurley," Wade said. He got up and went to the door of the hallway, where Mallory was waiting.
    "You make the call?" he said to Mallory.

    "They're coming in now," Mallory said. He looked into the room at Sally and then at the bed. "Should we check out the body?"

    "Let the coroner do it," Wade answered, "that's his job." He nodded at Sally. "I'm taking her in. I want to hold off a little while before notifying the husband." Sally turned slightly in her chair.
    Talking to Mallory, Wade lowered his voice. "You said there's a child?"

    "A daughter," Mallory answered. Sally turned back in her chair.
    "This is the way I like these babies," said Mallory, "open and shut."

    "That's because you've got an open and shut brain," said Wade.
    "When the others get here I want you to go over this place top to bottom. The whole hotel and the streets outside. Go around back and see if you can figure where that door used to go."

    "You're going to have to take my altar shift this afternoon,"
    Mallory told him, with no small satisfaction.

    "Shit," Wade fumed. "Where?"

    "Humiliation."

    Wade heard sirens outside from down the street and then the sound of them pulling in front of the hotel. Doors slammed. "That was actually damned punctual," he said. Two other police came up the stairs and into the room. One looked at the body casually and the other, who was new on the detail, turned a little white. More cops were on the stairs and Mallory started giving directions. Another older cop came in and started on the body. "Either of you got a rosary?" Wade asked the first two cops who had just arrived.
    Rosary was the name they used for the irons and the new cop pulled some out. Wade nodded at Sally and the new cop clamped A R C D'X • 56

    the rosary around Sally's wrists.