Necropath by Eric Brown

the child. "I thought you said there was no one
home?"
    Vaughan nodded. "There isn’t."
    Chandra looked at him. "Shielded?"
    Vaughan shook his head.
    He crossed to the bed and pulled back the sheet to
reveal the little boy’s face, still and pale. He felt for a
pulse at wrist and throat, found none. "He’s been dead for
a couple of hours."
    Chandra unfastened the boy’s pyjamas,
checked the thin torso. He found the puncture marks on the inside of
the arm. "Hypo-ject. I think you’ll find that whatever
killed him was administered through the vein."
    The two men exchanged a glance and hurried from
the room.
    They found Genevieve Weiss sprawled on a
Chesterfield in the lounge, her scarlet gown flowing to the floor as
if arranged for maximum aesthetic impact. Her head was thrown back
over the arm of the Chesterfield, long black hair hanging in a sheer
fall. Her throat, a beautiful exposed arch of cream flesh, was marred
by the ugly bruise of a hypo-ject entry point. The gun had fallen
from her limp fingers and skittered across the chessboard tiles.
    "You said that Weiss called his wife?"
Vaughan said.
    Chandra nodded. "Around three hours ago."
    "Did you hear what he said?"
    "Of course, I was in the same room."
Chandra shrugged. "He told her he’d been delayed and
wouldn’t be home till dawn."
    Vaughan thought about it. "It might have been
a prearranged signal, warning Genevieve that he’d been
rumbled."
    "Maybe." Chandra shrugged. "But
why? Why would she kill her son and take her own life, just because
her husband’s fake identity is about to be discovered?"
    Vaughan regarded the dead woman, thinking of the
cold oblivion that had taken Genevieve Weiss. Some intimation of that
oblivion, recalled from all those years ago, sent a shiver through
him.
    Chandra glanced at him. "She’s in a
better place now," he murmured. "They both are."
    Vaughan turned a withering look on the cop. "Are
you quite sure about that, Jimmy? Are you sure they’re not both
stone cold dead and gone?"
    Chandra opened his mouth to reply, then thought
better of it. He turned his back on Vaughan and spoke into his
handset.
    Vaughan moved across the room, pausing before an
archway leading to an unlit room. He passed into the room, and the
concealed lighting obligingly illuminated Genevieve Weiss’s
studio. Compared to the rest of the house, this room was spartan: a
big com array stood on a desk in the centre of a polished parquet
floor and a dozen plasma graphics adorned the walls.
    Vaughan crossed to the computer and seated himself
before the screen. He activated the machine, accessed files, and for
the next ten minutes scrolled through the portfolio of Genevieve
Weiss’s collected work.
    He spent a second or two with each graphic, not
sure what he was looking for—some clue, some visual link to
anything that had gone before.
    He was almost ready to give up when he struck
gold.
    The girl stared out of the screen, the expression
on her beautiful face caught between ecstasy and agony. She seemed to
be floating, bare feet trailing, arms outstretched in the
approximation of a crucifix.
    Vaughan stared at her face. He commanded the
computer to create a print of the graphic.
    Chandra appeared beneath the arch. "I’ve
just spoken to the head of the dispatch team at the ‘port.
They’ve been through the ship from top to bottom."
    "And?"
    "It’s empty. Apparently an outside team
of hauliers came for the container an hour ago. The security guards
had voice-code authority from Weiss himself, so they let the hauliers
through."
    "I’ll scan the guards when I get to the
‘port," Vaughan said, "read the hauliers’
faces. I might come up with something."
    "Weiss must have thought of that. The
hauliers were Zen cultists, wearing the masks of Denied Identity—or
rather they were disguised as cultists. The case could be anywhere by
now, even off the