Conscience of the Beagle Read Online Free PDF Page B

asks.
    I jerk my head up. “What?”
    “To the crime scene. Don’t you think we should go?”
    I nod. There was something in Lila’s hand. Something . . .
    “Will you wake the others, or should I?”
    I scrub my hands over my face. “Let’s both do it.”
    We wake Szabo from a sound sleep. Arne has been sitting up staring at a sunlit ocean with white-crested rollers and a pale golden crescent of a beach.

FROM THE STREET it looks like any crime scene. A crowd, awed into quiet, clusters behind barricades. At the mouth of the subway tunnel God’s Warriors compare notes like cops anywhere. Only the bright green of their uniforms makes them unique.
    They look up as we approach. Cautious. Not knowing what to expect. I pass without speaking, and just inside the tunnel I take a breath. Prickly dust. And — yes, of course. I recognize it. Nothing smells more gummy, more cloying than blood.
    I turn to the Warriors. “Who’s in charge here?”
    A cop with gold braid gives me a quick measuring look. “I am.” He has a huge Alpine slope of a nose never touched by MedAltering.
    “Get everyone out.”
    His eyes are an irate, molten brown. “We haven’t finished searching for survivors.”
    “If we see any survivors we’ll tell you. Now order your men to leave.”
    The team at my heels, I continue down the stairs, into a dingy fog of dust. Under the mobile floods Permacrete lies in chunks like the vertebrae of a huge Jurassic animal. Optic fiber nerves splay from the man-made bones.
    A scattering of God’s Warriors pick up their equipment and begin filing out. Arne doesn’t wait for my orders. When I stop, he shoulders his analysis pack and continues down the stairs, Szabo behind him.
    Beagle says, “Helluva deal. You’re going to the store, maybe out to eat. Everything’s fine, everything’s safe. And the world ends.”
    The cavernous room below is the littered monochrome of disaster. This isn’t the way murder is. Homicide is close-up and dirty. It leaves blood on the hands. It happens in dark, deserted alleys.
    The subway had been a crowded, well-lighted place.
    I tell him, “It isn’t important if a bomb was used as the weapon. It’s still murder.” What happened doesn’t look like murder. It looks like an upheaval of nature. “You feel sorrier for these people because they weren’t killed by a knife? A garrote? Or doesn’t that sort of thing happen up on M-8 level?”
    Ceiling tiles don’t fail on M-8. By day M-8s live deluged by sunlight. I wonder if it bothers Beagle that the subway riders of Hebron felt safe once, too.
    “Don’t lecture me, Major. I know crime.”
    “Oh, sorry. I forgot you wrote the fucking book on it.”
    Two passing Warriors eye me. One whispers something to the other. Too young for rank, so it doesn’t matter. A backward glance, and they walk on.
    When they’re out of earshot, Beagle asks, “Do you want me down there? Or should I come with you?”
    I don’t want him with me. He’ll listen to every question. Every word. “You’ve got infrared. I want you to double-check Arne’s work.” I turn and push my way up the stairs, past the Tennyson police.
    At least thirty God’s Warriors have gathered around the subway entrance. I find the cop with the nose and gold braid.
    “I need to interview witnesses.”
    “Anyone left alive in there?”
    “Now would be convenient.”
    He starts to say something, thinks better of it, and walks away. I follow him.
    They’ve taken the witnesses to a building across the street. Seated, they line the halls. Their clothes are gray with dust. Their heads are lowered, their eyes empty. Catastrophe has made Earthers of them all.
    I kneel beside a woman. “Ma’ am?”
    Unfocused eyes stray past the patch on my shoulder. “I lost my daughter,” she says.
    “I’m sorry to hear that. I need to —”
    “She was right beside me.”
    “I’d like to ask you some questions . . . Ma’am? This is important, or I wouldn’t bother you. I’m