"The Transgenic Falcon"
Chapter Twenty-One

By the time we’d made it down the main cop-shop in G-T Round’s men were busy processing Taylor. It was the first place I’d seen here that wasn’t sparkling new. Maybe it’s something about the work or maybe it was a grand psychological ploy, but the place had the look of a long used city precinct house. Hard bright light bounced off of hard linoleum floors. Hard plastic counters, all scuffed and mysteriously, yet tellingly, stained. The place was filled with beefy, stern-faced men and women in uniform.

I got a look at Taylor while they were taking his finger prints. He looked somewhat worse for wear. He still had the same tee-shirt and jeans I’d seen him in yesterday, but now they were very rumpled and a little soiled, like Taylor himself.

Round’s men must have taken some of their frustration out on him. There was dried blood around one nostril, and what looked like the beginnings of bruises on his arms. He held himself stiffly, like someone had given him a few prods in the ribs. It’s a nasty way to make a prisoner nice and compliant; knocking them in the ribs with a fist or stick. It hurts like hell and reminds them that more could be coming for several hours.

Johnny Round had a smile so wide it looked like it might meet in the back, on his dark face.

“See, Hunt? I told you my team would run him down”

I pointed towards the bruises, “What did you use, a car?” It was a good quip, but it didn’t put a dent in Rounds smile.

“Oh, you know how it is, Eamon. Perps’ often resist when they know the game is up. I’d say he got off light.”

One of the many, many reasons I am not a cop was the cavalier attitude a lot of them develop to civil rights, but I let it slide. What was the point of bringing it up when Round had already told me they planned to frame Taylor if there wasn’t anyone better before the deadline?

“Has he said anything yet?” Belinda asked putting herself in the conversation for the first time.

“Not yet,” Round told her, “But he will. They always say something eventually.”

“I assume you’re going to let him sweat a while?” I asked.

“Standard operating procedure” Round confirmed.

“I want to talk to him, before you sweat him.”

Round shook his head, “No way, Hunt. You know the drill.”

I looked over at Belinda for a second, then asked, “I have completely open access for my investigation, right?” She nodded. “Then I want to talk to him, as soon as they are done processing him.” I told Round.

“What are you playing at, Hunt?” Johnny asked suspicious, “Are you trying to screw-up our collar?” I suspected Belinda wasn’t in on the orders from Johnson to frame Taylor. Even if she was, he was hardly likely to blurt it out where God and everyone would hear.

“I’m not part of your force, Johnny. Plus, I don’t think he’s the killer. So there is no harm in letting me talk to him. Or should we take this up with Otho Johnson?”

Chief Round gave me a hard glare, but it slid right off me. A day ago I wouldn’t have played the Johnson card so bluntly, but since we’d agreed to cash our friendship out, there wasn’t any upside to being nice.

After trying to bore through my skull with his eyes for another moment or two, Round conceded. “Fine, if that’s what you want. But he’s already calling for a lawyer, so I doubt you’ll get anything out of him.”

“Thank you, Johnny,” I said graciously.

“Don’t thank me, Hunt. We’ll be recording everything you both say. And if you sour this collar, I promise you, you’ll be in a cell right next to Taylor.”

“Wow, you’ve been waiting your whole career to say that line, haven’t you, Johnny?” I asked with a big grin on my face. Nothing shuts down a blowhard like pointing up their clichés.

Round started at me for another few beats, and said, “I’ll have someone come get you when he’s ready,”, then turned and left.

“I guess we’ve have a few minutes,” I said to Belinda and looked around for somewhere to sit. There were a row of hard plastic chairs bolted to the wall. They looked about as comfortable as a sandpaper condom, but it was either them or standing, so I plopped down in one and fished out my handheld. The chair was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked.

I wasn’t really reading, I just didn’t want to talk to Belinda right now. Cops weren’t the only ones who let guilty people stew. I was still holding out hope Belinda would come to the right choice.

I went over what I knew about Taylor. His running away right after I interviewed him looked bad. But was it really the action of a murder?

So, Johnny had a motive and plenty of opportunity, two of the three legs. I’d love to say I wasn’t worried for Taylor, but there have been a hell of a lot of people convicted without the murder weapon. A significant number of them were innocent too.

Still, I couldn’t make my impression of Taylor fit the role of killer here. People kill for all kinds of reasons, true, but the majority of them are basically crimes of passion. Some tension builds to the breaking point, with or without the help of drugs or alcohol, then bang! They go off and someone is dead.

This murder wasn’t like that. Whoever killed Cho thought enough about it to cover their tracks expertly. Someone like that would know they were going to get interviewed and might even be a suspect; they’d plan for it, not bolt at the first sign of adversity. Something made Taylor high-tail it out of G-T, but I’d lay folding money it wasn’t murder. Hopefully he’d tell me. There had to be something other than Cho’s murder to make his actions make sense.

After running it over and over in my head, I decided there wasn’t anything productive I could do until about it until I spoke to Taylor. Still not wanting to talk to Belinda (and dying by inches because of it), I turned my attention to O’Neil.

I pulled up her file and began cross checking things I’d been told by her and others with the official record.

Her life was pretty open, and boring. High achiever back to high school, a Westinghouse prize for a new model gene-splicer while a freshman at MIT, BS from same, PhD’s in biochemical engineering and computer science from Stanford. A record of co-authored papers while a post-grad, then hired on at G-T and a long list of projects as supporting and lead investigator.

About the only trouble spot was an arrest for assault and drunk-and-disorderly at Stanford. It was a small note in the HR new hire file. Apparently Tara had gotten drunk and confronted an ex-boyfriend and the new girl at a fraternity party. There’d been a bit of a brawl between the girls, enough to scare the brothers of Zeta Psi into calling the campus police. No charges filed and no repeats of that kind of behavior. It was the kind of thing that happens in the hot-house environment of college.

I scanned the list of projects. No variances there. Each project was listed in chronological order. There was a trio of projects that all culminated at about the time O’Neil said she and Cho started seeing each other. That checked against Cho’s known preference for women on the rise.

The last entry, the first project Cho and O’Neil worked on, seven years ago was different. It listed the two of them, and a third scientist, a Dr Sri Chandrakar, the dates of the project start and completion and nothing else. No project name, no project number and no description of the project. Very odd.

Just then the handheld rang. It actually made a sound like a bell being struck repeatedly, ultra-old school style. The caller ID showed a corporate photo of Dr. Ferguson. Curious I accepted the call.

Ferguson looked the same as she did the last time I saw her, but there was something undeniably flustered in her eyes, and the way she moved her head.

“Mr. Hunt,” she said by way of greeting.

“Doctor, what can I do for you?”

“I know you’re busy but I was hoping you might come to the Eolin-I habitat for breakfast in a couple of hours.”

I was confused enough to shake my head. Nothing in that sentence made any sense. “Uh, isn’t that a little late for breakfast? Besides I already had mine.”

Ferguson sighed, “You’ve been invited to have breakfast with the Eolin-I. Invited by the Mother herself.”

Now that was a whole different kettle of fish! One of the ways that Gen-Tech proposed to limit the spread of the ’lin-I was to limit the number of females to one per nest. She and the Father were the only ones allowed to reach sexual maturity. Even then it required intervention in the form of a hormone not produced by the little creatures for them to both be fertile.

And now this being was asking me to join her for breakfast? I weighed my options. I didn’t really have time to spend with the Eolin-I, every minute I did was one less minute I was spending on Cho’s murder. And keeping that poor bastard Taylor from taking the rap for a crime I was convinced he didn’t commit. On the other hand, a chance to meet the Mother and see more of the Eolin-I was not something to pass up. Add to it the chance there might be some new information from other Eolin-I about Cho, and it was clear I was going to breakfast for the second time today.

“Sure, I can do that. We’ve arrested Mick Taylor and I need to speak with him, but I can be there about one-thirty, if that works”

“That would be fine. Thank you, Mr. Hunt,” Ferguson told me, then signed off. Huh, a thank you from Simone Ferguson, will the wonders never cease?

I kicked the door to the interrogation room where Mick Taylor sat closed behind me. I was one hundred percent sure this room had been designed with the help of a psychologist. Everything in it was metal.

The table that Taylor was shackled to, the chairs, even the walls were all very serviceable and severe aluminum. It was the kind of room that said you’ve lost your last friend and from now on things could only trend down.

Taylor looked up and when he saw it was me gave a weird half smile. I smiled back and set the pair of paper cups full of crappy police station coffee down on the table and then sat.

Hiya, Mick,” I said, “You’re in a lot of trouble here”

“Hiya, Eamon. Nice of you to tell me, I hadn’t figured it out yet” he said corralling his coffee with both hands, unable to separate them, due to the cuffs and the fairly short chain through an eye-bolt in the table. “Did you come to gloat? Got your man and all that? I didn’t think that’d be your style, mate.”

“I’m not here to gloat, Mick, I just want to ask you a few questions.”

Taylor eyed me for a minute.

“Well, you can fold that until its all corners and shove it right up your bum. I’m not saying a thing until I have my solicitor here.”

“Lawyer, we call the lawyers here in the States.”

“Whatever. Get back to me when he gets here, I’m not talking to any cops without him.”

He was making a good choice. It is flat insanity to talk to the police without a lawyer. The amount of ex-cons who’ve learned this lesson could fill Michigan stadium twice or three times, easy. And that would only be the ones from the last couple of decades.

Good decision or not, it didn’t help me, nor for that matter him. So I decided to try another tack.

“You don’t want to talk, fine, but you can at least listen.” Taylor didn’t reply, but bent down to take a noisy sip of his coffee, the chain being to short for him to bring his hands to his mouth.

“Like I said, you’re in a lot of hot water. You’ve done your best to look guilty to cops like Johnny Round. Avoiding the security cameras; running away; lying to me in the interview, and the gambling problem. It all adds up nicely to them.

I wasn’t sure what Mick had lied about, but it was a safe bet he’d lied to me. People almost always do when they are being questioned about a crime. Everyone has their little secrets. But the really important part of the sentence was the gambling problem. It had the intended effect; Taylor sat up straight in his aluminum chair at those words. But he held his tongue. I took sip of my cup-of-mud. Bleck! That stuff has to be against the Geneva Convention.

“Still don’t want to talk?” I asked. “That’s okay; I bet I know what you want to ask. How’d I know about the gambling?” I spread my hands to the side, like an actor ready to take a bow, “Detective, remember? Or did you think that I wouldn’t put together the lack of savings, the cash withdrawals and the ban at the G-T casino?”

Taylor just glared at me.

“Now, Round and his detectives might need a search party to replace their asses, but they are good enough to put together a theory of the murder that a jury just might buy.”

I paused to give Taylor a chance to think. “They’re going to say you have a gambling problem, that you owe money to people who can be very unforgiving about such things. Maybe you were slipping secrets out of the labs here. Selling them to pay your debts and Cho found out, so you killed him. When I showed up, you panicked and ran.”

Mick broke eye contact and looked away. Before he did I could see something I’d said had hit a nerve.

“Thing is, Taylor, I don’t think you killed Cho.” His head snapped back to me. “Still sure you don’t want to talk to me? Maybe I can help you?”

I thought I’d done a damned good job of laying it out and convincing Taylor to open up, right to the point where he burst out laughing at me.

“Oh, Hunt! You’re one smart bugger, but you don’t know everything,” he said between laughs. Finally he sobered a little. “But I do appreciate your wanting to look out for an innocent man. Thing is mate, I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time, and I’ve got things handled. They might hang Cho’s death on me, but I’ll come out smelling of roses in the end. Hell, I even like the theory of the crime you laid out, except for the panicking part, makes me sound quite the badass, yes?”

That was all he had to say. I tried a few other ploys to get Taylor to open up, but he only gave me a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin at me and stayed silent.

Damn.