King Acid

7- STOOL PIGEON DROP

Sixteen hours Boyd spent inside that dark room dotted by flickering lights garnishing the electronic equipment, with no other weapons but his headphones and his frayed knowledge of how to clean the ambient noise from the tracks. He could barely hear the recordings with clarity. Most of the time he could only make out the far-off noise from a radio, a TV, both at the same time, or nothing at all. But Landau rarely appeared in them; just some comments to the dog, some phone calls, a monologue to an empty audience, too much silence. In some specific moments, laughter, curses, clicks of chips, glasses thudding against the table, short words, silences, lies and curses, more laughs, occasional sounds that Boyd identified as those relating to poker games in the living room. Beyond the purely anecdotal, he couldn't find a single truly useful recording that would provide a reliable hint, a confession, a motive at best, to cut that Gordian knot. Even the recording of the murders provided nothing really useful, beyond the curiosity of the shooting themselves.

From the very moment he began the legwork, he had already acknowledged there was no logic to what had happened. The pieces of the puzzle didn't fit, and he suspected Norton was keeping the missing pieces within his guilty conscience. For Boyd's old age endowed him with a class of mastery which allowed eyes once the scholars of toga and papyrus to see that Norton was much more engaged in getting Landau, if he was still alive, than in knowing the reasons for what had happened. And that was because he already knew, because he was to blame, and because he felt embarrassed. So, Boyd knew that the real reason for these recordings was, ultimately, to provide the place where Landau might be or who had killed him. Nothing else.

Sixteen hours he spent in that dark room, and he found nothing of value. If he had been a rookie, his first instinct would have been to try collecting all the useless files, structure them carefully and with pageantry, and then be cheeky enough to present them to Norton with formal solemnity, fleeing from the stage after the minor backhanded slap of the air he would give as a sign of dismissal. But that would have been one more head impaled on the tyrant king's pikes, and Boyd was burned out enough by life to speak to his boss face-to-face. With those rusty certainties, he stood up, took his coat from the chair, and left.

He calmly made his way through the facilities and up to the waiting room with the vending machine. This time, he had in his pocket a blue coin that allowed him to get into the elevator and go down to the room. There was Norton, wearing the same clothes, in the same position, with the same insane gaze. It looked as though time had stalled, as if nothing more than a few seconds had passed between Boyd's departure and his return. This time, the anticipation of news made the wretched Norton twist his head and look Boyd in the face.

"Talk," he said flatly.

"The camera feed shows a hooded man with a polar neck over half his face entering the house to burn Landau's office. Clayton comes in with a copy of the key to see what's going on, and the two meet in the dining room. Looks like they have a quick conversation, and then Clayton seems to forget about him and goes straight up to the office. The killer follows him, shoots him in the back when he's entering the room, and then leaves him there while the desktop burns. He's about to leave when Page, who's watching from the street, pulls out his gun and wounds him in the left arm. The killer shoots back, and Page dies right away. The man leaves, and the dog follows him."

"Have you tried facial analysis?"

"Impossible. The resolution's too low to single him out, and he only shows less than half of his face."

"What about his way in?"

"A camera spotted him arriving in a blue Chevrolet and parking it on the street, but neither our database nor the FBI's has been able to identify its registration. We believe the car's geared not to be tracked."