"Van Lustbader, Eric - Black Blade(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

He took several long slow breaths, so that Amanda was aware of just how deeply he was being affected. 'I feel as if - I don't know how to say it - there's something growing out of season.'
'Do you know what it is?' Then, because she could feel the words congested like lead in his throat, she took his hand in hers, said, 'If you want my opinion, this is not a matter of metaphysics. Something has disturbed you, and that, great sex or no, is why you came onto campus today.' She pressed close to him. 'Is it Breathard?'
'It's always Breathard,' Wolf said. 'But, in a curious way, now it's becoming what he stands for. He and I are members of an exclusive club. But I never bought into using my badge as privilege. For guys like Breathard, it has become second nature. It's symptomatic of how they see themselves: different, apart, a member of an elite group, above the law.
'It's a disease, Panda, I've seen it in action. The first step - and, believe me, it's only the first - is flashing your badge to get special attention. The next step is using it to cadge free meals when you're on the run, then expensive free dinners just once in a while as a return for a favour done for a restaurateur, then getting some criminal off a bust charge because he's part of your snitch network or important to you in some other way.
'Cops like to say they make their own perks, but they're not, in fact, perks at all. What they are are bendings of the law, cops saying to themselves, we're a brotherhood apart, we take risks, and we don't get paid shit for taking those risks, we've got to have some other compensations. But those compensations are dangerous because they're by definition amoral, and so represent a special corruption of their own: a contempt for the law. You bend the law once, Panda, and it only gets easier to bend it just a little bit further until you no longer realize you're bending the law at all.'
'So it's the system that's getting to you, right?'
He said nothing, and she waited patiently beside him, knowing he was used to the vast silences of Elk Basin, Wyoming, that he needed the silence to build now before he could get to the core of his distress.
At length, he nodded. 'After seven months, we were closing in on this madman who had already killed three times before. I had him, but I allowed my need to get to him alone to get in the way. In the process, a girl was killed, and so was one of my men.'
Amanda's eyes were deep and as dark as amber. 'Of course that's tragic, Wolf. I'm terribly sorry. But to be brutally frank I doubt that you were negligent in any way, I know you too well. Something else entirely has disturbed you so.'
Vipers uncoiling. 'I don't know who killed Junior; I couldn't feel him,' he said in a rush. 'Then, later this morning, the commish dropped the Moravia murder in my lap. I came here from Moravia's apartment. I couldn't get any hint of who had murdered him. There was no psychic trail at all.'
Amanda said, 'What you really mean is you're afraid that in both instances the psychic trail was there and you couldn't detect it.'
He nodded.
She caught his eyes, held them with her own. 'Wolf,' she said, 'whatever mysterious thing is inside you has not abandoned you. I felt it before as I always do when we're making love.' She squeezed his hand. 'Nothing's changed.'
'But it has,' he said, sitting up abruptly. 'I feel as if I'm a dog chasing its tail, like I should be carrying a white stick.'
"Then there's a bigger mystery to solve than just two murders,' she said. 'Have you considered the notion that whoever killed your man might also be the one who murdered Moravia?'
'Why? There's nothing to connect the two.'
'Perhaps not on the surface,' Amanda said, 'but what about the lack of a psychic trail? You said in both cases you felt nothing. Do you think that can be explained away by coincidence?'
Wolf felt the vipers climbing his spine. It was such an obvious conclusion, standing there in plain sight, but he had missed it.
'Poor Wolf,' she said, not unkindly, and she kissed him hard on the lips. 'Do you want my suggestion? A little R and R. Stevie is hosting a party tomorrow night downtown in Alphabet City, for a group of new artists. She promises it's going to be a lot of fun. I want you to come with me.'
'I can't, Panda. The commish made it clear that this new case is politically explosive. I've got no time for - '
She put a hand over his mouth. 'If I know anything at all about you, you're already doing everything you can. But you can't work it twenty-four hours a day - even you, Mr Iron Man Wind River Shoshone.'
'Is that how I appear to you?'
She laughed softly, hugging him affectionately. 'That's who you are. But since even you are made out of flesh and blood, a brief time away from work will do wonders for your concentration - ' She reached down between them, stroked him softly. '- Not to mention your mood.' She laughed again as he grew in her hand. 'Here's a case in point staring me right in the face.'

TWO
New York City/Tokyo
Vernon Harrison, the Chief Medical Examiner for New York, was an exceptionally tall, stoop-shouldered man with the dolorous face of a basset hound. His thick glasses attested to his poor eyesight, but that was about the only thing poor about Harrison, Wolf had found. He was a man who always seemed calm and cool in the midst of the kind of political, administrative and forensic chaos that could only be engendered by a metropolis on the verge of collapse.
They were in the basement of the CME's building on First Avenue and 30th Street, in one of the autopsy cells that adjoined the cold room where the city's corpses awaited disposition. It was almost three o'clock in the afternoon, Wolf having spent the morning going over forensics on Moravia's office and apartment, catching up with ballistics reports (nothing, so far) and past due paperwork. A Chief of Police Breathard memo had been waiting for him, the gist of it being that he was continuing the internal investigation into the manner of Junior Ruiz's death, and he would advise Wolf of the disposition of the matter at his (Breathard's) convenience. More intimidation; Breathard was a master shake-down artist.
'You get to Arquillo, the drug dealer yet?' Wolf asked.
'What a mess!' Harrison said, snorting. 'Looked like some lunatic took a blowtorch to his face.' He shrugged. 'Well, as the Romans so eloquently put it, you live by the sword, you've got to expect to die by the sword, eh?' He put down his bone saw. The smell of human tissue hung in the air like a pall.
'So the blowtorch snuffed him?'
'Looks that way,' Harrison said, lining up his instruments. 'Someone did a nice job on his right arm, too.'
'That was me.'
'Chalk up one for our side.'
Wolf, unaccountably relieved that the CME had found nothing suspicious in Arquillo's death, decided to change the subject. 'About Moravia.'
'Ah, now you've given me something to sink my teeth into,' Harrison said, as he pulled back the tallowy skin on Junior Ruiz's chest. 'Except I honestly don't know what to tell you.' He wielded his chrome tools as if they were batons, and he the drum-major at the head of a parade. 'The whole thing is beginning to give me agita. Blood samples, tissue cross-sections, the whole nine yards are being run through every toxicological test I can think of. So far what I got is bupkis.' Wolf had noticed that Harrison, very much a WASP, must in some way be self-conscious about his status, immersed as he was in the rich ethnicity of the city; his speech was peppered with idioms from as many different cultures as he could pick up.
'You check out the rouge on his cheeks? Anything there?'
'Not unless you're Estee Lauder,' Harrison said. 'Ingredients were choice quality stuff but just what you'd expect in a premium rouge.' He looked up. 'No exotic poisons, if that was what you were thinking.'
Wolf shrugged. 'I need some answers and soon.'
'Madre de Dios, I'm dancing as fast as I can,' Harrison grunted as he peered into Junior Ruiz's open chest cavity. He pointed. 'Now this guy is different. O-yasui koto desu, no trouble at all - he got whacked with two thirty-eight slugs at point-blank range that just about tore his lungs and heart out.'
Wolf was having difficulty looking at the yellow corpse, mottled by purple bruises and red-black patches of dried blood, that had been Junior Ruiz. 'Back to Moravia,' he said now to Harrison, forcing himself to focus. 'Any sign of drug addiction?'
'Good question,' the CME said as he began to sew up the long vertical incision with a thick suture. 'He was shot full of coke, no doubt about it. Was he a long-time user? No. Was he a user, period? Quien sabe?'
Wolf waited while Harrison finished dictating his postmortem report into the steel microphone. Wolf wished he would set the sheet back over Junior Ruiz.
'So what killed Moravia?' Wolf said at last.
'The billion-dollar question,' Harrison said, then paused, frowning. 'I'll tell you what didn't kill him. He was already dead when he was shot. And as for the coke, we found none of the telltale signs of an OD. The coke was okay and the levels we found in his system were not consistent with a lethal OD.' He pulled the sheet up over Junior Ruiz at last, turned to Wolf. 'I'd say we've got a helluva mystery on our hands, kahuna.'
Wolf was on his way out when Harrison stopped him. 'One funny thing about this guy Moravia.'
Wolf turned. 'What's that?'
Harrison rubbed the side of his nose. 'Well, you ever hear of an adult lying about his age to make himself seem older?'
'No. What would be the point?'
'Exactly,' Harrison said. 'According to his birth certificate, Moravia was forty-eight years old. And yet, when I did the autopsy, it was clear to me that I was looking at the insides of a man who was no more than thirty.'