Hyaki's brows rose, but the sergeant kept his scat and said nothing. Turning away from the gleaming, dark brown wooden carvings, ignoring their whispered plea for him to linger and admire, he headed for a back hallway that opened onto the den. What Cardenas had detected instead implied an entirely unnatural ordinariness. Surtsey Anderson's response had been neither awash in sorrow, nor tinged with remorse, nor flickering with false jollity. The eccentric might respond with unaccountable cheerfulness, to the point where most folk would be repelled. Everyone reacted differently to moments of personal crisis. No, it was something in the tone, in the timbre, of her response. It was not that Anderson had failed to apologize for missing their rendezvous at the morgue, or even that she had declined to acknowledge it. But then, he was not trained to detect, or suspect, miniscule variations in human voice patterns that were discernible only to perhaps one hundred-millionth of the population. Nothing in the woman's straightforward reply or tone had unsettled him. On the couch, Hyaki had spread out a hardzine and was manipulating the core projection with his fingertips, adjusting it so it could be viewed from different angles. At the same time, something he'd heard in Anderson's voice nagged at him. "Just another couple of minutes," came the response.Ĭardenas paused before a pedestal on which a Seri mobile signed "Francisco" revolved in stately polished procession. Did you forget about our appointment this morning?" Our friends the Andersons also have good taste." Raising his voice, he addressed himself to the rest of the house. It was far more impressive in person than it had been when viewed via the phone's pickup. "Whatever this poor dead homber promoted brought in some real green."Ĭardenas was admiring the art on the walls and in the display cases. "Designer furniture." Absently, he hunted for a label. Hyaki settled down on a curving couch that had been designed to resemble a pile of red sandstone. The Madrasink vit phone the spec had accessed was still in its charger. Cardenas recognized their surroundings immediately: it was the first room Semagarya had remotely viewed. Polarized light filtered down through the translucent material of the domed ceiling.
The two officers wandered out of the entryway and into an open, circular den. "I'm in back," exclaimed the voice of Surtsey Anderson. Hyaki pushed it aside.Īir-conditioning enveloped them in its comforting, artificial embrace as Cardenas shut the door behind them. Won't you come in?" Emitting a soft, disengaging click, the door popped inward a couple of centimeters.
A voice greeted them from an artfully concealed speaker. As he was sliding the unit down the front of the door preparatory to snapping the second, the inner lock slid back. It took his tracer less than a minute to unravel the electronic combination, and only seconds to undo the first. Hyaki ran a tracer over the wood-grained composite until he located the upper and lower bolt. There was, of course, no visible lock or door plate. The Inspector stepped back to give his partner room. So far the two officers had seen nothing to contradict that assessment. Semagarya had said that the place was empty. He was not surprised when no one hailed them from within. The units would be concealed among the decorative stone facing. Generale Electric or Thompson, maybe a Dynamo if they had the money. A residence of this class would be protected by two or three individual security sensors, Cardenas knew. Variant: A Mountain Man and a Cat Walk Into a Bar.Translation: Spiriti indiani ( 1992)Ī Mountain Man and a Cat Walk Into a Bar ( 2017).Translation: Alien: Covenant - Origins ( 2017).