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"That's confirmed already," Blessington said. "The guys at Parker have picked up some of that. And
Gelert smelled him straight off."
Lee nodded, followed Blessington's glance. Gelert was about halfway down the block, walking very
slowly, stiff-legged, bristling, while the uniformed cops watched him with idle curiosity. Lee smiled very
slightly as she watched him stalk along. Her paraperceptual cues came in visual form when she was
working, but Gel's, predictably, came as scent. Gelert's people were the greatest trackers in the worlds;
at the core of their nature as a species was the un-derstanding that what they hunted, eventually they
found. The hunting could take all kinds of forms, quarry variously concrete or abstract; all over the
Worlds, madrin were re-searchers and scientists, consultants and advisers. But fi-nally it all came down
to noses, one way or another, a situation Gelert often complained about as seeming awfully undignified in
someone with a doctorate. Yet nothing could have moved him to give up this particular form of the talent,
and the hot fierce look in Gel's eyes after he had been work-ing on a crime scene always made it plain to
Lee that this particular style of discovery was what he lived for.
"What's he after now? Did he say?"
Blessington shrugged. "He growled. I couldn't under-stand him."
Lee raised her eyebrows. "He tends to drop into dialect when he's distracted." Gelert had put his nose
down to the sidewalk, and his pace was speeding up: he was nearly to the end of the block.
"Lee, you want us to keep this end of the scene locked down for a while?" Blessington said.
"It's a good idea. I need to talk to the people at Parker and have a look at the victim's profile and recent
history before I come back for another look."
"Okay. Bensen, Echevarria," Blessington called over to two of his people as Gelert turned left around the
house on the corner lot and vanished from sight, "better go with the gentleman and keep people out of his
way while he's work-ing." The two uniforms nodded to their boss and headed off after Gelert at a
dogtrot.
"You know this neighborhood at all?" Lee said to Bless-ington.
He gave her an amused look. "I lived here before I was married."
"What's around the corner?"
"A nightclub: a couple of restaurants. It was the nightclub dil'Sorden came out of. He'd come in earlier,
alone. Had a snack and a few drinks, listened to the jazz combo that was playing there last night, paid his
bill, and left."
"He didn't meet anybody?"
"Not according to the club owner."
"Did he go there often?"
"The owner said he saw him occasionally. Not a regular, but he would drop in for something to eat after
working late. The place has a rep for its ribs."
Lee nodded. "Jim, he was already running as he came around the corner. Whoever shot him came
around after him, fast. He had to have been waiting for dil'Sorden in one of the doorways that face onto
Wilshire: I'm going to have another look at that later. Here's how it went—"
She and Blessington went up to the corner, and Lee re-enacted for Blessington what she had seen. At
the end of it all they stood there again over the tarp, looking down at the spot where dil' Sorden had
fallen.
"Contract job?" Blessington said at last.
"I can't see why, but then I only had time to skim his pro-file on the way over," Lee said. "There seemed
to be some urgency 'Upstairs.' "
Blessington made that sour face again. "Which smells weird to me to start with," he said, "but then I'm
just a de-tective." The delivery was ironic but not hostile: Lee smiled slightly. "Speaking of smells,"
Blessington said, and gri-maced. "Bensen, what the hell are you guys up to?"
He listened for a moment, face immobile. "How about that," he said. "Yeah, bring it back. Be careful
about how you wrap it; it might have been handled two or three times before it got there, and maybe
after."
Blessington looked over at Lee. "He's good," he said. "He found the murder weapon three blocks over
and two blocks up, in somebody's front yard, two feet deep in pachysandra."
"You owe him one, then," Lee said. "Think how many manpower-hours he saved you."
"He'll remind me of it, I'm sure," Blessington said.
Down the street, Gelert and the two uniforms were com-ing around the corner again: one of them,
Echevarria, was carrying an antistatic evidence bag, glancing back smoky silver reflections in the hot sun
as they approached. Gelert was trotting along with his tongue hanging out, looking to Lee's eyes unusually
pleased with himself. As the officers stowed the shotgun in the car, Gelert sat down beside Lee and
Blessington.
"The murderer caught a bus," Gelert said. "About twenty minutes after the killing: one of the night buses
down Melrose."
"Stupid," Blessington said. "Too many witnesses."
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