A Monster with Two Tales

Obligatory disclaimer: does anyone realize just how difficult it is to come up with a fresh approach to the simple phrase 'gee, not mine'?

Author's Note: I'd like to publically acknowledge Jane Mays for her efforts with this story. If it weren't for her, I'd still be letting this one languish.

Colby Granger let his knees lift him up from where he'd squatted to examine the windowsill at close range. "No question about it," was his opinion. "Sniper's nest. Somebody's been planning this for a while. Got some scratches here on the sill, where the sniper rested his weapon. Some are fresh, and some are old. Like I said: someone's been thinking about this for more than thirty seconds."

Behind him, Lt. Gary Walker of the LAPD nodded, vindicated. "That's what me and mine thought," he told the group. "Eppes?"

Don Eppes shrugged. It was either that or heave a sigh, and somehow a sigh didn't have enough indignation in it to describe what he was thinking.

The scene across the street was bloody and ugly, and Don was grateful to have left the remnants to David Sinclair to deal with along with their LAPD counterparts. He, Colby, and Walker were ferreting out the sniper's nest to see what they could discover. There wasn't much question as to 'how' the murder had occurred. Now it was up to the FBI and LAPD to figure out the 'who'. 'Why' would also be helpful.

The victim had been one George Remini, one of several vice presidents of SW Chemicals, Inc., a company that kept its name out of the news and its wallet fat. The bullet with Remini's name on it had shattered the large glass window to the conference room and gone on to put a substantial hole in his chest. He'd started gushing blood at that point, gasping for air and yelling. His fellow vice presidents had called 911 and anyone else they could think of with a modicum of health-related knowledge—the company occupational health nurse had arrived with bandages and CPR—but the damage had been too great. Four hours later the nearest hospital trauma team gave the bad news to the wife and the company executives that all the surgery in the world wasn't going to be enough to save the victim's life and everyone had better stop wasting health care dollars on a lost cause.

There wasn't much at the crime scene itself. It was obvious that more than ninety nine percent of the blood on the rug belonged to the victim, and it was equally obvious that no one present in the conference room at the time was the sniper. Eppes and team could rule them out immediately.

Don didn't think they'd find anything in the conference room, but there were reports to be filled out and he had a choice of himself, David, or Colby to do it for the FBI. Colby would be slower than cold molasses flowing uphill on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and Don himself realized that rank had its privileges. That left David, and Don grinned grimly to himself. David Sinclair was also less likely to put up a fuss. The man would do his job, no matter how little he liked it, and go home at the end of the day that much closer to a promotion and the ability to delegate unpleasant tasks from himself to others.

Besides, Don had justification for taking Colby along with him. Colby Granger, prior to joining the FBI, had been with the Army Rangers, an elite fighting unit. The man knew his stuff, and would be able to ferret out a few more pieces of intel in the room across the street where the sniper had sat.

The room across the street from SW Chemicals belonged to an upscale hotel, one that catered to businessmen instead of actors, and thus avoided its share of drama and news cameras. The Lyonsgate management team was clearly not happy to be part of an FBI investigation, but manfully swallowed their disappointment and cooperated with the enforcement arm of the legal department in order to get the ordeal over and done with as quickly as possible; nothing if not practical. The sniper's room was twelve floors up, slightly higher and looking down into the conference room where the group, including Remini, had been conducting business. There wasn't much to see in the hotel suite, but the three were still careful not to touch anything. There was always the chance that the murderer had left a fingerprint or two behind.

Frankly, Don doubted it. The murderer had left none of his tools; no scope, no weapon, no convenient cigarette ashes in the ashtray—oh, wait. This was a non-smoking room. There were no ashtrays. Even the glass in the bathroom was still wrapped and unused.

He scanned the rest of the room. It was pleasant, and probably cost a small fortune for whoever got put up there for the night—this was, after all, Los Angeles, where the real estate prices were outrageous. The overriding theme was beige: beige carpet, beige walls, beige prints edged with beige matting and beige frames. Clearly Lyonsgate's management wanted to bore their patrons to sleep each night. The bed, a large California king, bore a beige spread with—egads!—a dark brown stitched-in pattern. The chocolate mint sat untouched on the pillow. Don frowned to himself: high probability that the sniper was not a fan of chocolate. No fingerprints there.

"Don't see no footprints, neither, Eppes." Walker was reading the FBI agent's mind, doing his own assessment. "Looks like this place has been recently vacuumed. You think maybe the maid's been in here, tidying up?"

Don looked more closely at the tracks in the carpet. Then he looked again; something wasn't right. "You sure, Walker? These don't look like any vacuum treads that I've seen. Too even. Too parallel. Too wide."

Walker pulled himself back to the carpet. "You're right, Eppes. Didn't see that." He folded his arms across his chest, puzzled. "What d'you suppose made those marks?"

"Good question." Don straightened himself up. "We can ask Forensics to take a look while they dust the place. What did the manager say? Anybody staying in this room?"

Walker shook his head. "Nobody, Eppes. Room's been empty for the last two weeks."

"How about the housekeeping staff? They see anything?"

"Not a thing."

"How about anybody lose their key card?" Colby put in. "Whoever it was had to get in somehow, and these locks aren't the easiest to get through. You gotta know what you're doing."

Walker agreed. "And they didn't leave any scratches. Real puzzling."

Don sighed. "Let's see what David's come up with, and why someone would want to kill the vice president of a chemical company. After all, it's not as though hydrogen peroxide tends to have a lot of enemies, or even competition. Anybody up for checking out the wife?"

If asked, Professor Charles Eppes would not be able to identify the music that had been blaring through his headphones for the past three hours. In fact, understanding that three hours had passed was also beyond him—the time simply flew by while he was 'in the zone'. The white board in front of him had little space left for additional equations, yet Charlie continued to squeeze them in where ever he could, faster and faster as the thoughts flowed from his brain cells onto the board.

This particular session was in the classroom where earlier this morning he had taught Freshman Calc for math majors. That class was one that he always enjoyed because it consisted of young minds who had already discovered the joy of math, the wonder of how an equation would simply fit together. They challenged him, those minds; they asked questions, and the questions—not always right but always thinking—showed real insight into the world of math.

Something one of them had said struck a bell for him, and once they'd trickled out of the classroom Charlie had turned to the white board and jotted it down. No, what he jotted hadn't been exactly what he'd thought of, but it was close and he worked on it until it got closer and closer—there.

Yes, that was it, and it was similar to what he needed for that particular aspect of Cognitive Emergence. He'd need to alter it here, and perhaps there? Charlie stepped back to examine the overall view of what he'd just accomplished, tugging the headphones off of his ears, suddenly realizing how tight the headphones had become.

"Professor Eppes?"

"What?" Charlie whirled around, startled.

It was one of his students, but one not from his Freshman Calc class. No, this was Kate Tierney, one of the upperclassmen. She didn't have any classes with him this semester, although Amita had mentioned that Kate was in her Combinatorics and doing nicely. Charlie remembered her well, less for the fact that she used a wheelchair for getting around than her deep appreciation for math as an application tool. Physics, that was her major, and Larry Fleinhardt was already pulling strings with some of his friends at upper level universities to look favorably on her applications to graduate schools.

Charlie relaxed and pulled the headphones from around his neck, tossing them onto the desk beside him. "Hi, Kate," he greeted her. "Sorry; I didn't hear you come in. How's it going this semester?"

Kate shrugged. "Okay, I guess. Combinatorics is tough."

Charlie nodded. "Amita says you're one of her top students in the class."

"I am?" Kate's face lit up. "Good; I thought I was bombing it."

"Just keep at it," Charlie reassured her. "It's a tough subject, and Amita doesn't water it down." He cocked his head. "You here for some extra help?"

"Not exactly." If Kate could have dug her toe into the floor and stared at it, she would have. The wheelchair got in the way.

This was different. Kate rarely had difficulty asking for what she needed. Charlie assumed it was a trait that she'd learned when she'd had to start using the chair. Kate needed help to reach things on a tall shelf, help getting up and down to different levels in a building that had been built before such things as civil rights and handicap-accessible had come along. Charlie himself had led a brief fight to have the elevator repaired in a timely fashion when the Powers That Be had tried to delay over budgetary objections, and management had caved pretty quickly. The elevator had gotten fixed.

Charlie seated himself in a chair a few feet away from her, to be on the same speaking level. "What's up?"

He could almost see her gathering her courage. "I've got…kind of a project that I need help with," she confessed.

"Okay." The subject shouldn't be this hard. "Senior project?"

"Sort of. Kind of."

This was puzzling. Charlie fell back onto the safest—for him—topic. "What's it about?"

"I want to do an epidemiologic study. Of a town," Kate said in a rush. "It's got, like, this disease going on, and nobody's doing anything about it, and I kinda' thought that if I could prove—"

That, Charlie could get behind. "—if you could prove a significantly higher incidence of the disease than surrounding areas, you could give someone ammunition for starting a political movement to solve the problem." He grinned. "This could be fun. You've already partially identified your population."

"Partially? I was going to use the whole town."

"Partially," Charlie confirmed. "You need to figure out a strict definition for the statistical analysis: how big is your territory? Is it the confines of the town? How about someone who lives just over the town borders, in an unincorporated area, if that's applicable? Who are the members of the set? Are you going to include any other towns? Lots of things to work out. And then we come to your disease: what are the parameters? Does your disease affect men and women equally? How will you define if they have the disease or not? It's not that easy, not if you expect to do it right. Do you have someone with some medical knowledge helping you with that part?"

Kate's face was crumbling. "No."

"Okay, we've identified some of the initial barriers, then." Charlie pulled it back. For all of her intelligence, Kate was still young and this was heavy duty stuff. Oh, like I'm so old? Or has exposure to Don and the NSA made me old before my time? That would be a laugh: a child prodigy, now older than everyone else. "Do some research and come back to me…" Charlie pulled up his calendar in his head, "later today, after three. That work for you?"

The crumbling disappeared. Kate brightened. "Then you'll help me?"

Charlie grinned. "Of course."

He could hear her whoop for joy right outside the classroom. He could imagine the wheelies.

David Sinclair put up a man's head shot onto the screen in the conference room of FBI headquarters. "George Remini," he identified the portrait from the California driver's license. "Fifty four, had been with SW Chemicals, Inc. for the past sixteen years, working his way up from sales to account manager to area manager and from there a leap to vice president. He's been in his current role for over four years. Seems to have been well-liked by his peers. Not so much by his underlings, but sales is a rough business. I got the feeling that every one of his people will be applying for his job. No lack of self-esteem by any one of them."

"Enemies?" Walker asked.

"Still working on that piece," David confessed. "Everyone's still a bit shell-shocked. I can't get anyone to talk. It's the 'I can't believe this happened. George was such a nice guy' sort of thing."

"That'll change, once we put the screws to 'em," Colby predicted. "He'll be held responsible for two thousand years of war in the Middle East before the week is out."

Walker snickered. "My turn. The wife: a former Miss Tulsa or Chattanooga, or some such, married to George for the past thirty years. Still a looker, takes real good care of herself. Not too likely it's her; she gets more out him alive than dead. They got two kids, one in college and the other one doing some sort of fancy graduate work on the East Coast. The kids are flying in for the funeral."

"Any grudges there?" Don asked. "The kids, I mean?"

"Not so far as wifey says," Walker returned. "Not likely they did the deed, not from out of town. 'Course, we'll check 'em out when they get in."

"You do that," Don agreed. "How about SW Chemicals? Anything there?"

It was Colby's turn. "They've had a few protests in recent years, the 'killing Mother Earth' stuff, but nothing out of the ordinary. They've also had their share of lawsuits, cutting close deals, a few patent violations, that sort of thing."

"Anything that anyone would want to kill over?"

"Doesn't look like it, Don. Not that I can find, anyway."

"How about those protesters?" David asked. "Some of them can be pretty extreme."

"Good thought," Don approved. "Tell you what; you and Colby check 'em out, see if there's anything there."

Colby brightened; anything for a chance at field work and away from his desk. "You got it, Don." He grinned at David. "C'mon, bro. We got some real work to do."

David rolled his eyes.

"What about you and me, Eppes?" Walker wanted to know. "How's about I give all the LAPD evidence to you, and me and my boys'll bow out of this case?"

"Not a chance, guy," Don told him. "LAPD's not getting out of its share of the work so easy. This is a joint operation, not a dump job. Introduce me to the wife."

Colby banged on the door. There was exactly one person inside the office, trudging back and forth between the file cabinet and the open box on the table, putting mounds of papers into the box. Another box, taped shut, sat on the floor. The desk in one corner of the room held a telephone, but the phone had an easy job. None of the lights were lit. No calls were either incoming or outgoing. Colby banged again.

The person—a young woman, Colby thought, although he wasn't sure—yelled through the glass panel. "Go away! We're closed!"

Colby exchanged a look with David, and hauled out his badge. He held it up to the glass so that she could see it.

She wasn't impressed. "You bastards have won! Can't you leave us alone?"

David rapped smartly on the glass. No, we're not going to go away.

It wasn't the time to practice his lip-reading skills, Colby decided. It would only upset him.

With a sigh that would blow over the Statue of Liberty, the girl marched to the door and flung it open. "What do you want?"

It was a good thing that David led the interrogation, Colby decided. His partner was polite. Colby wouldn't have been.

"FBI. Agents Sinclair and Granger." David tucked his badge away, acting as if the girl had just invited them in for tea and crumpets. "We need to ask you a few questions."

"We've been asking a few questions," she snapped back, "and all we get are lawsuits filed against us. What about Mother Earth? When does she get to ask a few questions? When does she get to file lawsuits with fancy pants lawyers?"

"This is the office for the Association for Mother Earth?" David asked, keeping his cool.

"It used to be, before you decided to run us out of town!"

"Could we see some ID?"

They established that her name was Susan Whitehold, that she was the second in command of the organization known as the Association for Mother Earth, and that the organization had run out of money for office rent, hence the packing of the boxes. A little more investigation revealed that there were some four volunteers who had previously worked alongside Susan (who worked part time for the Association for Mother Earth, but gave back her entire salary because the cause was so righteous. "Dude," Colby said later, "doesn't that make her a volunteer, too?" "Not in the eyes of the IRS, man," David replied.) but who had drifted away to some other, better-funded organization to Do Good. Susan was quite bitter about 'the traitorous bitches' as she'd dubbed them, which led David and Colby to believe that the erstwhile volunteers had all been female. That supposition was moderately well confirmed by the list of names that Susan handed over, and that list was the last thing that she handed over voluntarily. The rest of the documents were staying put.

"Hell, no. Get a warrant."

To his credit and Colby's amazement, David remained calm. "We can do that, Ms. Whitehold. If we do, then I can guarantee you that we'll be returning with an entire team of forensics specialists who likely won't be concerned with keeping things neat and tidy. They won't permit you to stand around and request that we not disturb the piles of papers that you've already packed away. They won't allow you to help us find what we're looking for, and then leave without troubling you any further. They'll be looking at everything, and requesting additional details on each file."

Ms. Whitehold looked at them both with an expression of extreme dislike, bordering on loathing. She came to a conclusion. "All right. Get it over with. But you'd better not mess up anything, you hear?"

"Certainly, Ms. Whitehold." Another point for David: no gloating. That would come later, Colby was sure—or maybe not. There were times when his partner could be outstandingly reasonable, and this appeared to be one of them.

David pushed on through the papers. "We have the names and addresses of the previous volunteers. How about the leader of this organization? What was his name again?"

You know that she hasn't given that name to us yet, dude.

"He bailed," Susan said. There was more than one emotion in her voice: unhappiness. Anger. Betrayal. All of the emotions negative.

David refused to respond to the overwhelming flood of emotion, while Colby used his partner's distractions to leaf through the other box of documents. "How long ago?"

"Two days. Didn't even have the balls to say good-bye."

"Tough. Sounds like he left you holding the bag." David pulled out a paper with a picture on it. "This him? Vince Zelakis?"

"Yeah. That's him. Bastard."

"We'd like to keep this photo, Ms. Whitehold, if we may."

"Go ahead," Susan told him bitterly. "I sure don't need it."

"Thank you." David paused just long enough. "Do you have any records of the association's activities? Did you participate in any rallies, that sort of thing?"

"Yeah. Some." The woman was getting tired of being angry. Her mood was melting into depression. "We ran a few, went to some others. Helped out where we could."

"Did you ever protest against a company by the name of SW Chemicals?" Carefully casual. Colby held his breath, trying to remain inconspicuous in the corner of the office.

Susan didn't have to think twice about that question. "Yeah. A bunch of times. They're the bastards that put us out of business. Put a restraining order on us, if you can believe that. They're killing the globe. All you have to do is visit some small towns where they dump their waste. Places like Bowtown, Chadford. Places that don't have anyone to speak up for them." The energy, the heat, was gone.

"Tell me about it." Not a muscle did David move, but he still seemed to radiate encouragement. I may be The Man, but I still love Mother Earth. I'm on your side. Colby was impressed with his partner's technique.

"Bastards buried their poison up on Red Wolf Mountain." Susan now oozed with eagerness to tell her story, to share her disappointment. "They contaminated the land. They thought they could get away with it, but they're not. The story's going to come out."

"But it hasn't, yet." More noise than anything else.

"No," Susan admitted, her face falling. "We went to the newspapers, to the TV stations, and nobody will touch it. They keep demanding proof, as if watching the ground go brown and barren isn't proof enough! Then the lawyers at SW Chemicals found out about us, and got their pet judge to write a restraining order against us. We can't even go up to Red Wolf Mountain to check on how bad it's getting!"

Colby made a mental note to check on that restraining order.

"Then they starting leaning on us," Susan said. "Gloria—she's one of the volunteers, or she used to be—she got audited by the IRS. She had to pay up like a thousand dollars or so. And Amy's husband made her quit because some inspectors started coming around his shop. He told her that one of the inspectors, one of the guys that's always been decent, told him that somebody pretty high up was making waves. That the inspectors were 'told' to inspect and make sure that they found stuff." She sniffed. "You want to investigate somebody, Mr. High and Mighty FBI Agent? You go investigate SW Chemicals, then you come back and tell me what you find." She leaned over toward David to make her point. "Or did they tell you to come out here and harass me, too?"

David shook his head. "Nobody tells me and my partner to go harass anybody, Ms. Whitehold."

The damage was done. What little trust had been there, was gone. Susan looked at him suspiciously. "Then why are you here?"

By now David was willing to give away that piece of information for free. "Someone just killed the vice president of marketing as he sat in the conference room in the SW Chemicals building."

"George Remini?"

"That's him. You know him?"

"Yeah, I know him, and I'm glad he's dead," Susan snarled. "I don't even care if it makes me a suspect. That bastard is one of the ones who ordered all the crap to be done."

Good cop, bad cop. David had done a nice job with good, and Colby didn't want to give any of that up. He took over. "Since you mention it, where were you at approximately ten o'clock this morning?"

"Me? Is that when my brand new hero did the deed?" Susan gestured at the boxes sitting on the floor. "Nine AM: box number one. Ten AM: box number two, and half way through number three."

"Any witnesses?"

"Considering that everyone else vanished when the Big Man came around, no." Susan leaned forward, deliberately letting her shirt hang open, daring the two FBI agents to call her on it. It was insolent, and made it clear as to what her feelings were—as if the previous discussion hadn't. "I guess you'll just have to take my word for it, Mr. FBI Agent."

They weren't going to get anything more here. Colby gave David a slight shake of his head: nothing in the papers.

They had enough to start with. This group would definitely be of interest to the case. Where had the organizational leader gone to? Two days could be a very long time, especially for someone setting up a sniper's nest. Somebody would very soon be running a computer search to find out a little more about one Vince Zelakis, and where he was at the moment.