Free Tourquai by Tim Davys Page B

matter of driving through the Star and into the southeast part of the city.
    “I did a little research this morning,” he said as he stopped at a red light. “Nothing to speak of, but I thought it would be good to be prepared. Oleg Earwig is thirty-eight years old. He has no criminal history, has never been arrested, and, apart from a few parking tickets many years ago, the authorities have never been interested in him. According to his tax returns, the last few years have been meager. Even a police officer earns more. Earwig owns shares in the company he has with Nova Park, but they’re almost worthless.”
    “Hard to be an inventor,” Anna commented, taking a drink from her still-hot coffee as Falcon put the car in first and accelerated.
    At the next red light Anna took the opportunity to drink up before she spilled. In the car alongside sat a peacock, looking straight ahead and putting on his seat belt without letting on that he was doing so. The sight of a police car instilled guilt in most. The peacock hesitated when the light turned green.
    “I was forced to search eight years back before I found traces of the vacuum-cleaning wall in his tax returns,” Falcon continued.
    “Do you mean you’ve searched through eight years of tax returns already this morning?”
    Falcon sat quietly. During his career this was the third murder investigation he had ever taken part in. This was major. Coming in early this morning and sitting hunched over a computer a few extra hours was the least he could do.
    “I took the opportunity to look in the Patent Office’s registry a little, too,” Falcon admitted.
    “Lunatic. Did you ever go home last night?”
    “I got home before midnight,” he lied.
    “I don’t want a partner who spends the nights on research and then isn’t sharp when we need it.”
    “I know,” said Falcon.
    Anna shared Larry Bloodhound’s sense of priorities. Police work was something you did out on the streets; cowardly bureaucrats sat behind desks.
    Falcon turned out onto the bloodred avenue and increased speed.
    “And the Patent Office?” asked Anna after a moment of silence.
    “Oleg Earwig has four new patents being processed right now. He has registered a hundred inventions since ‘the wall.’ But apart from the self-cleaning oven, none of them seems to have been a success. At least I’ve never heard of any of the others.”
    “So, an earwig hungry for cash and recognition,” Anna summarized.
    “Hmm. Might be right,” Ècu agreed.
    A few minutes later they drove through the golden Star, Mollisan Town’s geographic center and the roundabout from which the four avenues ran. You might get the impression that these broad streets had been the starting point for the city planners when the city was divided into districts, but nothing was farther from the truth. On the contrary, the fact was that before the four independent towns of Amberville, Tourquai, Lanceheim, and Yok grew together, political boundaries were the scene of battles for centuries. Today these boundaries were reduced to multilane expressways; only scattered monuments were a reminder of history.
    Western Avenue separated Amberville in the south from Tourquai in the north; Eastern Avenue separated Lanceheim in the north from Yok in the south. When Falcon turned into the poorest part of the district’s labyrinthine swarm of cramped, discolored streets and squares, as usual he could not avoid wondering what it would be like to work down here. Larry Bloodhound was the toughest police officer the falcon had ever met, but Bloodhound was also sitting safely in north Tourquai, where things were actually pretty good. The superintendents who worked at the police stations in Yok were made of different stuff. In these neighborhoods you never asked first.
    When they arrived, the address on Carrer de Carrera proved to consist of a large, freestanding warehouse, built of corrugated sheet metal, without windows, and bombarded with graffiti.