Free Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut by Diane Duane Page B

Soon the list would have been completed, and other things, even more final, could be brought about. Satisfaction filled the thinker, colder than that of the tangle of scents which had held the gun and pulled the trigger.
    And abruptly as a trumpet note that does not fade, but simply ceases, the scent of satisfied deathlessness was gone.
    Lee leaned back in her chair and let out a long breath. “That’s the third time I’ve run through it,” she said, turning her back on her commwall, “and I still don’t understand it.”
    “You think I do?” Gelert said from his own office.
    The wall between their offices was down. It was after seven in the evening. Mass had gone home for the day, and the two of them were going through the recordings of their “sniff” of the Vida Loca nightclub scene.
    “Lee,” Gelert said, “I’m telling you that that perception is of someone simply  vanishing . Not going away, not walking off. Simply not being where they were anymore.”
    “And they do that how?” Lee said, getting up and starting to pace. It was her third outbreak of pacing for the evening, most unusual for her. “These are  Elves  we’re talking about here, Gel, not the Tooth Fairy! They don’t just fizzle out into nothing, any more than you or I do. The DA sees that attached to a prosecution case, he’s going to throw it out. Or us, on the grounds that one or the other of us has taken leave of our senses.”
    “Or both,” Gelert said. “You’re going to have to review your own perception of that angle, and you don’t like the idea much, do you?”
    She didn’t bother answering, because he was right. “Lee, stop stonewalling,” Gelert said. “If we both see it, then—somehow—it happened. Whether we like it or not! It’s both our business to perceive the truth, and we’re both good at it. So stop assuming I’ve had some kind of brain failure. Assume that I smelled what I smelled. How do we explain it?”
    “I can’t,” Lee said.
    “So for the moment let’s concentrate on what we can explain, and leave the inexplicable to the DA: it’ll be his problem anyway, once discovery is over. Let’s take it all from the top.”
    Lee leaned back, and Gelert brought up the image of Omren dil’Sorden that appeared in his ExTel personnel file. “So here he is,” Gelert said. “Born in the Alfen equivalent of Rio de Janeiro, birth date sometime in the 1970s if the computer is converting correctly between our dating systems. Standard educational history—taught at home until seven, fostered out to a relative on his mother’s side in exchange for her own son, educated at what passes for a public elementary school and then a fast-track private secondary—”
    Lee turned to her own commwall. Gelert had already brought the precis up on it, and the “long” version of the data was flowing by in a larger window to one side. A name stopped her. “Laurin—” She blinked.
    “Wait a minute. The  Elf-King  was on his school’s board of governors?”
    “Don’t get excited. Apparently he’s on all of them. There’s some ceremonial connection—I think the Laurin is supposed to be ‘patron of learning’ for all Alfen children, directly or indirectly. Even private schools get a lot of funding from the central government, such as it is, in Aien Mhariseth—Geneva, as we would think of it. Except it’s not Geneva; it’s somewhere in the Dolomites instead. An imperfect congruence.”
    Lee nodded, went on to the other data. “University afterward,” Gelert said, “at Mehisbon, which corresponds to our Chicago. Another government-funded school, this one like the Sorbonne: strong on physical sciences and art.”
    “Interesting conjunction.”
    “Not for Elves: they don’t see them as separate. Dil’Sorden took a joint degree in computer sciences and economics. Afterward he did some postgrad study in intra-universal economics at their version of Columbia, which strangely enough is a religious school in