Whoever had done this one was either a neophyte or someone who had a good reason for hauling a victim around.  But what reason?  He figured that the purpose for the style of murder had to be to keep her from being identified, not dementia driven, and that the location of the murder might have been as big a clue to her identity as recognizable pieces would have been.  Why else would you put your victim into a chemical blender...unless you were a stark raving wacko?  Dalworthy had decided the murder was the result of considerable planning and not the work of a nut.

He stepped into the alcove of a drab, gray apartment block closest to what was left of the marks the cops had sprayed on the pavement and slammed his fist into the super’s button.

“What the hell?  It’s only seven o’clock, man.  Come back later.”  The voice from the answer box was as lackluster as the scheme of gray on gray out in the street.

“I need to talk to some of your tenants.  Open up,” Dalworthy demanded.

“You from the cops?”

“Something like that.”

“Something like that don’t serve.  If you’re a cop, show me your ID.  If not, go to hell.”

Dalworthy raised his old badge card to the lens and the click-hiss of the security seal followed.  He grabbed the handle and pulled hard.  The massive steel door creaked and ground its way along a hidden track.  He stepped into a dark corridor where the only light was supplied by an ancient and bare incandescent bulb of just enough wattage to define the filthy floor of a narrow corridor covered in odd sized carpet remnants.  He could barely see the edge of a stairwell, several doors to first floor hovels, and a dingy, yellowed ceiling.  The ceiling was festooned in dusty cobwebs being shadowed by large slabs of paint ready to fall.  He went straight to the stairs.  No sense talking to first or second floor residents.  They had no windows.

It was approaching noon when he tapped on the door to 406.

“Cops?” the voice of what sounded like an old man queried from the other side.

“Cops.”

“Badge?”

Dalworthy held up his badge card for the fifty-sixth time and waited as the sound of multiple security locks being opened issued from the doorway, then the door swung until it stopped at the end of a short, stout chain.

“Well, damn it.  Always ferget that one,” the voice said as a skeletal hand wrapped tightly in gnarled, brown spotted skin reached up to release it.  The door opened.

“C’mon in and find a spot suited to yer ass, kid.”

“Thanks,” Dalworthy said.

The room he entered was stuffed from floor to ceiling.  Books and magazines were everywhere.  Thousands of them filled every available space.  Dalworthy looked more closely and noticed they were ordered according to topic and age.  It was not the mess he thought when he first entered.  Against one wall were shelves loaded down with nothing but books on law and civil order, some of them very, very old.  The air in the place was heavy with the stench of food going bad mingled with the smell of unflushed toilet and liniment.

“Name’s Dalworthy, Lieutenant Patrick Dalworthy, but you can call me Pat.  And you?” he said, his eyes still roaming the law library against the wall.

“You like law, kid?”

“Yeah, I guess so.  Quite a collection you have here.”

“Yep.  Got everything from the Code of Hamurabi to the WGB Manifesto Update of 2190. Funny, you know.  We’ve come full circle.  Well, maybe not full circle.  Guess we went a little bit short of that.  Code of Hamurabi was organized raw law...no ethics...no moral stuff. Now we got this WGB crap.  Ain’t even good raw law, and it sure as hell don’t have no ethical or moral content, huh?” the old man said.

He wheeled around to face Dalworthy.  His expression was stern.

“So, let’s get a couple of things straight, kid.  I ain’t no dimwit, and you sure as hell ain’t no cop...not now, anyway.  That badge you flashed is a good ten years out of date.  If it’s legit. Besides, if you was a cop you’d still be in the hall with yer thumb up yer butt.  Don’t talk to cops and I sure as hell don’t talk to nobody corporate.”

He tilted his head down and squinted at Dalworthy through a cloud of bushy gray eyebrows.  “Sit yerself while I get us some coffee.  From the look of you, you could use some of my special blend.”

“Yeah, you’re right on all counts.  The badge was real.  I quit in ‘79.  How did you know about the badge?” he called out to the retreating figure.

“Used to be one, kid. Back when the law still meant a little somethin’.  Name’s Stan Lauderbach, sergeant, retired, but not dead...yet.”

The coffee was good.  Strong.  Black, with a jigger of the smoothest blended bourbon gently stirred in.

Where did he find real bourbon?

Lauderbach clutched a cup in his bony hands and settled onto a short stack of Astrophysics Today across from a small coffee table supporting a single copy of War and Peace.  It was an original from the look of it, and in nearly perfect condition.  Since the advent of electronic networking in the late nineteen nineties, books became increasingly rare...and to find so many in one place was...unheard of outside the upper city private libraries.

“Let me guess.  You got fed up with all that WGB bullshit and now yer workin’ private contract.”

“Right again.”

“And yer lookin’ fer the perp what terminated that little sweetheart.  The one what soured down there in the street.”

“Close.  I want to know who the victim was.”  Paydirt.  Lauderbach knew the victim was a woman and that meant he saw what happened.  “Why didn’t you tell the cops what you saw?”

“Like I said, I don’t talk to cops.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“Why not.  Figger you had the balls to quit...the good sense, too.  I guess yer okay.”

“So, what happened, Stan?”

“Well, at about one forty-five—that's in the mornin'—I hear this surface car stop in the street and I get up to have a look.  You know how it is down here; nobody stops nothin’ fer nothin’ in the street after sundown.  So, I watch.  Anyway, this woman gets out...a real eye magnet...and she opens the back and drags out another chicky, but this one’s naked. Naked and not too long dead limp.  The two of them could have been twins.”

“How could you know that from twenty meters?”

“I ain’t blind, kid.  Old, but I ain’t blind.  Besides, I got these,” he said, raising a pair of autofocus ten to forty power night vision binoculars.  “With these I could have counted every hair on her...you know.  And I got cop curiosity.  Besides, at my age, when you see a naked woman, you're gonna look...and you grab yer...course, you don’t know nothin' 'bout all that, but you will.  Trust me, kid.  Anyway, they could have been twins.  Thing is, one of'em was standin' so I can't say that fer sure...but they looked a lot alike.  Got a good look at the dead one, though.”

Dalworthy handed him the holoplate of Pamela McGavin.  “Did she look anything like that?”
Lauderbach rotated the plate to study the image from all angles, then handed it back to Dalworthy.

“Yeah.  Same ass, same tits—different face somehow—but the basic bone structure’s identical, far as I can tell.  Yeah, she looked like that, except fer the face.  Somethin' different 'bout the face.”

“She was listed IDU.  Why couldn’t the cops identify her?”  Dalworthy knew what Fuller had said, but here was a trained observer with a pair of the most modern night vision binoculars.

“By the time they got here she was already jelly, kid.  Ain’t nobody could have ID’d what was down there.  Nobody.  Damnedest thing I ever saw.”

“Tell me what you saw, Stan.  What happened to her?”

“Well, I wasn’t goin’ to call it in er nothin’.  Do that and I gotta talk to the cops, you know. Anyway, I figgered old lady Stewart...crazy old bat what lives in 109...would do that fer us all.  She’s always out in the street real early lookin’ fer stuff.  You know.  Cans, papers, bottles, things like that what people toss in the street.  Would you believe she actually takes them cans and...sorry, gettin’ off the subject.  Anyway, ‘long 'bout three thirty I thought she shoulda started gassin’, what with the heat down here, but no.  It was like she was meltin’.  No, no...that ain’t right, either.  More like somethin’ was eatin’ her from the inside.”

Lauderbach stared into his cup as if he were seeing it all happen again, and shuddered.