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

the features all lost in darkness and blur.
    The emotional context was starting to force its way through the merely physical. This was inevitable, but Lee resisted it for the moment and concentrated on seeing. What she saw was no longer a fall, but a run, the tall slender blur running around the corner, away from the light of Melrose, garish through the Heisenberg blur. The second shape, the stocky man, running after, bringing up the sawed-off shotgun.
    Lee watched as they ran toward her, seeing the first blast again, and saw dil’Sorden’s arms fling up as if in surprise as he stumbled; but before the second blast, she turned away from the fall she knew was already beginning, and saw the second shape come around the corner.
    But not all the way around. Close to the wall he stopped, watched, a shadow. He was in sharper focus than the others, the uncertainties about him less, though still present. Tall, taller even than dil’Sorden; a slender man, erect, very still. After a moment he slipped back around the corner, out of sight.
    Lee knelt there and considered going after him. That had its dangers: pull too much energy out of the forensic “field” of the area right now and it could be exhausted for further investigation later.  I have   enough to go on with as a start , she thought:  after we’ve pulled his profile and coordinated with   physical forensics, I can have another run.
    She closed her eyes, let the state of investigative vision lapse, and looked around her again, closing down the recording her implant was making and adding her digital “signature” to it as it closed. The sealed record would feed itself wirelessly into the city judicial-data system as soon as she got near a transponder: it might be doing so now if there was a ‘sponder in one of the black-and-whites, which seemed likely. Blessington was standing not too far away: as Lee replaced the tarp and got up, brushing herself off, he walked over.
    “One triggerman,” she said. “Human. A hundred seventy centimeters or so, stocky, very square-built, say a hundred kilos. Wearing a business suit of some kind, to judge from the color and the contour of the artifact.”
    “Good, that’s good,” Blessington said.
    “But look for someone else, too,” Lee said. “Alfen. Tall, say two hundred ten centimeters. Thin. Not muscular. Another business-suit type, but more elegantly cut.”
    “Aren’t they all,” Blessington said rather sourly.
    Lee smiled slightly. “Maybe just a witness,” she said, “but somehow I don’t think so. I’d see if physical forensics finds any trace of his involvement on the body…fibers or whatever. They might give us a lead that would be useful.”
    “That’s confirmed already,” Blessington said. “The guys at Parker have picked up some of that. And Gelert smelled him straight off.”
    Lee nodded, followed Blessington’s glance. Gelert was about halfway down the block, walking very slowly, stiff-legged, bristling, while the uniformed cops watched him with idle curiosity. Lee smiled very slightly as she watched him stalk along. Her paraperceptual cues came in visual form when she was working, but Gel’s, predictably, came as scent. Gelert’s people were the greatest trackers in the worlds; at the core of their nature as a species was the understanding that what they hunted, eventually they found. The hunting could take all kinds of forms, quarry variously concrete or abstract; all over the Worlds,  madrín  were researchers and scientists, consultants and advisers. But finally it all came down to noses, one way or another, a situation Gelert often complained about as seeming awfully undignified in someone with a doctorate. Yet nothing could have moved him to give up this particular form of the talent, and the hot fierce look in Gel’s eyes after he had been working on a crime scene always made it plain to Lee that this particular style of discovery was what he lived for.
    “What’s he after now? Did