He moved in, edging past the rolls of plastic, climbing over a low stack of plywood, and spotted, in the harsh light slung from the scavenged fluorescents closer to the pedestrian stroll, two frosty-looking white marks, something aerosoled over two darker stains, and he knew what that was. Kil’Z, this stuff you sprayed where bodily fluids had gotten out, in case the person who’d lost them was seropositive. He knew what Kil’Z looked like over blood, and this was that.
Not much of a crime scene. He stood there staring down at it and wondering how Laney expected him to look like he was conducting an investigation. He put the duffel with Rei Toei’s projector down on the rolls of plastic.
Kil’Z residue was fairly waterproof, so the rain hadn’t washed it away. But then he knew that the victims, whoever they had been, had died the night before.
He felt like an idiot. He really had wanted to be a cop once, and he’d dreamed of crossing the yellow line and looking at the scene. And
being able to do something. And now here he was.
He took out the glasses and called Laney. But now Laney, in whatever fine hotel he might be in, in Tokyo, wouldn’t answer.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Rydell said to himself, listening to a phone ring in Tokyo.
A 171 •1 “You do have a sense of humor,” Harwood says, behind him. “I know it.” Leaning closer to the window, looking down. Foreshortened perspective up the side of this obelisk, this pyramid so-called, and midway the dark bulge of that Japanese material, placed to counter old quake damage. This is new, replacing earlier splines of polycarbon, and the subject of architectural and aesthetic scandal. Briefly fascinated, he watches as reflections of the lights of surrounding buildings shudder slightly, the thing’s glossy surface tensing in response to winds he cannot feel. The truss is alive.
Turning to face Harwood, who is seated behind a broad dark plain of nonreflective wood, across which an accumulation of architectural 172 41. TRANSAM
‘HIS name is Rydell,” Harwood says. “Image matching gave us that immediately. He was briefly associated with Cops in Trouble.”
“Associated with whom?” The knife, with its sheath and harness, was secured in a twilit alcove off the central elevator stack, approximately eight hundred feet below.
“Cops in Trouble,” Harwood says. “A cultural treasure. Don’t you watch television?”
“No.” He is looking east, from the forty-eighth and ultimate floor of the city’s tallest building, toward the shadow of the ruined Embarcadero, the gypsy glow of the bridge, the feral darkness of Treasure Island.
Stepping closer to the window, he touches his belt. Stitched between two layers of black calf is concealed a ribbon of a very particular, very expensive material. Under certain circumstances, it ceases to behave as though it were some loosely woven, tissue-thin fabric, something a child might accidentally pull to pieces, and becomes instead thirty inches of something limber, double-edged, and very sharp. Its texture, in that state, its sleek translucency, has reminded him of fresh cuttlebone. models and hillocks of documents suggest the courses of imaginary rivers: a topography in which might be read change in the world beyond the window, if meanings were known, and one were sufficiently concerned with outcomes.
Harwood’s eyes are the most present thing about him, the rest giving an impression of existing at one remove, in some other and unspecific dimension. A tall man, he seems to occupy relatively little space, communicating from elsewhere via deliberately constricted channels. He is slender, with that agelessness of the aging rich, his long face free of tension. His eyes, enlarged by archaic lenses, are seldom still. “Why do you pretend to not be interested in this former policeman visiting the site of your recent activities?” On his wrist, gold and titanium catches the light; some multitasking bauble with intricate displays.
“I don’t pretend.” On the large flatscreen that stands to the left of the desk, four cameras present angles on a tall, sturdy-looking man who stands, chin down, as if brooding. The cameras would be no larger than roaches, but the four images, in spite of inadequate light, offer excellent resolution. “Who placed these cameras?”