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Sinfonia de la Inamorata
An Interlude for Sweet Lovin'
Movement Two
II. An Air on a Single Heartstring
April 26, 1999, Groveport, Ohio
Drummond reached out an arm to snug Dolly up against him and actually patted the empty air at his side for a second before he realized that she wasn't there. He sighed and reached in his pockets for a packet of gum. It was difficult to work without having her in sight all the time.
He calculated that, since the time she had attacked him in February, they had not been at much more than arm's length from one another for more than an hour or two ... in over two months.
Hard to believe, but in the middle of one of America's larger cities, among a group of several dozen colleagues, he was lonely. He was continually missing his little inamorata, the feel of her shoulders under his arm when -- as just now -- he pulled her close, the clasp of her hand slipped reassuringly into his at odd, tense moments, the sight of her thick red-gold mane of hair out of the corner of his eye, the scent of her close to him in a car or an elevator, the sound of her soft husky voice like a fine brass cymbal hit with a steel brush, the curve of her breast under his possessive thumb where it rested against her side, the playful glint in her liquid green eyes.
But she was taking enforced bed rest in the VIP suite on the top floor of the East Medical Center. On Director Terence Hallow Britten's orders she had been removed from all but the lightest administrative duties, (only those which could be performed from a networked laptop computer in her hospital bed, more to occupy her than to get work done, per se), and was to be pampered by the medical staff as though she were their beloved only child.
Of course, Drummond found his way clear to visit her at every opportunity but, while she made it clear that she missed him as much as or more than he missed her, she was still having a grand old time bullying the medical staff into treating her like a princess.
Not that she hadn't earned it. In the space of eight days, she had been: shot; drop-kicked six feet; thrown against a stone wall; raped and nearly impregnated by an extraterrestrial.
Now, however, she was hors de combat and resting. Which meant that her partner and lover had to soldier on alone.
So here he was, supervising the tear-down at the scene of their most recent battle in the war against the clones. Not only did he have to revisit the scene of his lover's rape -- where he had been so disappointingly unable to avenge the wrongs against her -- but he also had to deal with Columbus's sterling deputy commissioner of police, the esteemed P. Throckmorton Cadwallader-Cholomdolay, (known to the Center's paramilitary types as Chumley).
Cadwallader-Cholomdolay was an honest politician of the old school... when he was bought, he stayed bought. Trouble was, he had been bought by agents of the alien-clone alliance and was therefore dedicated to causing trouble for the Center.
This time he was on Drummond's back about the lack of search and arrest warrants for the actions taken in the warehouse where Dolly and Cally had been held and raped and Dolly inseminated by an alien, that the Troll Guard -- ostensibly a city police force -- had operated beyond its jurisdiction, the Guard's Federal writ notwithstanding.
Drummond contained himself with difficulty -- glad to take this burden on for his younger, more hot-blooded friends and colleagues -- and kept reminding himself that Chumley couldn't officially know all of what went on here, as the evidence had been removed before the police's forensics teams were allowed on the premises.
Between that and the fact that the forensics folks were told not to look too thoroughly at what had happened, there was little chance of any of this coming to light.
What would they make, for instance, of thousands of DNA samples from dozens of supposedly discrete individuals that all showed identical genetic markers? It was well known fact in the world at large that human cloning was years down the track, if it was ever to come to pass at all. So how could such findings be accurate?
What would they make of chemical samples that bore every marker of human blood except that they had copper in place of iron in their chemical makeup? Would cuproglobin finally be discovered?
No, they would be forced to assume that their samples were simply too contaminated to be of any value and that there was no usable forensic evidence from the scene. And no bodies. Eyewitness account were all that could be trusted. And, of course, the eyewitnesses were either loyal Center soldiers, or dead clones and aliens.
Cadwallader-Cholomdolay suspected, of course, and the aliens and clones who tugged on his leash knew damned good and well... but they couldn't prove that anyone had been killed in the building or, indeed, that anything had happened other than the Center's claimed live-fire exercise in hostage-rescue techniques. Was anybody missing, commissioner? Had anyone filed a complaint of a kidnapping or charges of rape? Well, then, no crime was committed, right?
But there were a zillion little details to be taken care of... clone genetic material to be gathered, (and scoured from the crime scene), leads to be tracked down on other cases, loose ends to be tied up. It was work for a detective or a criminalist, not for a covert ops specialist.
But without his better half, Drummond didn't feel very covert right then. So maybe it was better that Prosper Book got sent off to Scotland to rescue Rose, and Mick Tan got to run amuck and get all bloody. The vengeance wrought on the clones was, after all, on behalf of all of them. He sighed. What he was doing was important, sure...
But still, it would have been so nice to have kicked a little ass.
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