Free Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman by Duncan Eagleson Page B

blasphemy.
    “ What about the other victims’ friends, family?” I asked Robles. “Your people interviewed most of them, any of ’em seemed like there was more there, worth following up on?”
    “ Maybe.” She consulted her notebook again. “I sorta thought it might be worth taking a closer look at the harlot, Mascarpone. She only joined the Marilynists recently, but she’d held several elected posts in the Guild. A real activist, and it sounds like she was kind of a spitfire. Probably pissed off any number of people along the way.”
    “ Activists usually do.”
    “ Could be a real rat’s nest there. I wonder about the teacher, too.”
    “ Juan Castro?”
    “ Too clean. Everybody we asked thought the sun shone out of his ass. Sounds too good to be true to me. Not a soul walking the earth hasn’t pissed somebody off, got some kinda dirt in their closet. Either some of these witnesses were lying, or we didn’t dig deep enough, talk to enough people.”
    “ Unless it really was random,” said Morgan.
    “ You want to assume it was random, Ma’am, you tell me, where do we start with an investigation?”
    The “Ma’am” might have been respectful, or it might have been sarcastic; it was hard to tell. I could feel Morgan bristling. This could quickly get ugly again, so I held up a hand.
    “ She’s right, Morgan,” I said. “If it’s really random, we’ve got no place to go with this. For the moment, we have to assume there’s some kind of method to the Beast’s madness.” Morgan scowled at me, but didn’t push the issue further. “Anything else?”
    “ Don Whitehouse, second mate of the Bay Queen —that’s Hawthorne’s boat. He seemed like he was holding back on something. I’m thinking maybe they were doing a little private import-export on the side.”
    “ Smuggling what?” asked Rok. “I thought everything was legal here.”
    “ Legal, yeah, but taxed. Booze, tobacco, pot, you name it, if there’s a tax on it, there’s a profit in smuggling. Could go either way, too—tax-free coming in, or might be going out, to one of the ports where they’re not legal at all. Small-time fisherman like Hawthorne, even just a small shipment now and then could make a big difference to his bottom line.”
    “ Might be worth a follow-up. What about Guardsman Fitch?”
    Robles shot me a look that told me she wasn’t happy I’d brought that one up. “He was a right guy, a straight shooter. Everybody liked him.”
    “ They all thought the sun shone out of his ass?” asked Morgan. “Sounds too good to be true.”
    Robles looked at Morgan with a laser gaze. After a beat, she said, “I’ll thank you to remember you’re a guest in my city, Railwalker, and these are my people you’re talking about.”
    Morgan came away from the wall and stepped toward the desk. “If it’s your city, then they’re all your people, aren’t they? Including the fucking Beast.”
    “ Enough!” I put a Force into my voice as I spoke up and stepped between them. Morgan stepped back and Robles sat down again before either of them realized what I’d done. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rok trying not to smirk. “You,” I said to Robles, “don’t need your City Boss on your case because you picked a fight with a Railwalker. And you,” I turned to Morgan, “know better than to antagonize a city guardswoman when she’s cooperating.”
    Both were breathing a little heavy and glowering, though they were each now studiously looking anywhere but at the other.
    “ My associate’s rude way of expressing herself aside,” I said to Robles, “she’s right. Guardsmen make enemies. It comes with the territory.”
    “ I never said he didn’t,” the sergeant allowed. “Sure, there might have been a few lowlifes who didn’t like Fitch much. But, hell... Even though he was career guard, nearly the Old Man’s age—due for retirement in another three years, he never made it above Guardsman First Class. He was never