The master bedroom was in San Francisco, somewhere on Presidio Heights, looking down on the Golden Gate Bridge in the far distance. San Francisco was three hours behind New York, so the streetlights of that fine town were blazing bright into the night while the citizens headed for the Marina and Mission districts to start their revels. Looking at the bed, Alik started to appreciate Kravis and Rose Lorenzo’s privacy dogma. It was a broad circle with a black leather base, the gelfoam mattress covered in a sheet of royal-purple silk. The four posts were also leather clad, with several insect-eye cameras clustered around them like crystal tumors erupting through the padding. The ceiling above had a circular screen practically the same size as the mattress—that is, before a shotgun blast had reduced it to a rosette of glass daggers and a snow of shattered crystal across the sheets—and the wall behind the headboard (also black leather) sported a broad screen.
Both the duty cops had opened the nightstand drawers to smirk at the pharmacological and electrical aids the Lorenzos took to their marital bed. When Alik and Salovitz came in, they quickly stood upright and studiously ignored the kinky treasure.
Salovitz gestured, and the coroner’s sheet was pulled back. Body number four was another male, African, who had been hacked to death; the coup de grâce was a horizontal blow to the mouth, leaving the jaw hanging by a thin strip of skin. Judging from the size and depth of the wounds, Alik reckoned it was done by an axe rather than a machete, like a Viking on the rampage. There was another of the big shotguns beside him, identical to the one on the Moon.
“So Hacked Off here was in the same crew as Mr. Shotgun,” Alik said. “And the boss is badging his guys with these bulled-up shotguns. Anyone like that operating out of New York?” Even as he asked, Shango was searching the FBI database for gangs who had adopted the model. Plenty of crews used them, but it wasn’t standard issue, more a symbol that you were no longer a foot soldier. The higher up the shitheap you crawled, the bigger your gun.
“No,” Salovitz said.
“But you’ve got to have a decent fabricator to produce one of these,” Alik continued. “For a start, the barrel will need forty-one, fifty ordnance steel at least.”
“I know where you’re going,” Salovitz said. “And you can stop right there. New York doesn’t have fabrication substance permits outside of hazardous or toxic compounds.”
Alik exhaled a martyred sigh. “The Twenty-Eighth?”
“Yeah. It’s coming, and we’re ready for it like the progressives we truly are.”
Like every FBI agent, Alik hated the Twenty-Eighth Amendment: the right for all US citizens to fabricate for themselves whatever they wish unless it endangers the life or liberty of others, or they seek to use it to overthrow the government. It hadn’t been fully ratified, but that was just a matter of time now. In his opinion, the AFA (American Fabrication Alliance) made the NRA look like a bunch of pussies when it came to strong-arming Washington. The outcome of Twenty-Eight was that any upright citizen could buy and use weapons-grade material as long as they did not utilize said material to fabricate a weapon. So Alliance members were free to sell whatever raw materials in whatever quantities they wanted. Individual states were already starting to incorporate Twenty-Eight into their legislation in anticipation. The result being in New York, you don’t need a permit for pretty much anything outside of uranium or nerve gas. Which made life an order of magnitude tougher for law enforcement. In Alik’s opinion, Twenty-Eight was storing up serious trouble for the near future, and all because midlevel politicians were money junkies in it for every wattdollar they could be bribed with.
He regarded the shotgun blast in the ceiling. The impact looked like it was a vertical shot, fired from the bed when Hacked Off was on his back, under attack from Viking Berserker. A last, desperate act, or maybe reflex? That suggested they were creeping around the bedroom, Viking Berserker stalking Hacked Off, while the others were duking it out in the rest of the portalhome.
Alik pulled the sheet back over what was left of Hacked Off’s face. “So this killer got out?”
“Of the bedroom? Sure.”
“How many rooms left?”
“We’re over halfway.”
“Fucking wonderful.”
Beijing was the kids’ bedrooms. He hesitated in front of the portal door. Kravis and Rose Lorenzo had two kids: Bailey, age nine, and Suki, age twelve. After everything else, Alik wasn’t entirely sure he could face dead children.
“It’s clean,” Salovitz said, guessing the source of the hesitation.