Read Online Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut by Diane Duane - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Diane Duane
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center were all underground, and access to them was backed up as always, so Lee had another fifteen minutes to pore over dil’Sorden’s personnel report between the time Gelert surrendered the hov to the local traffic management system and the time it deposited them in a slot at the back of beyond, six levels down and easily half a mile from the main complex.
They hiked through the catacombs to the nearest elevator/escalator stack and made their up through the levels to the sun and the air again. Ten minutes or so later they broke out into the windy central plaza. Lee glanced over at the main court building with a slight smile of triumph as she and Gelert made their way over to the LAPD’s HQ building, identical to the other porticoed white edifices around the plaza except for the department’s shield.
Inside the building was huge, open, and airy—a rebellion against the claustrophobic facilities of earlier years, which had been all too conducive to making the people inside think they were a fortress against a prying world that had no right to know what they were doing. In its latest incarnation, the LAPD headquarters looked more like a Silicon Lakeshore facility than anything else: the central atrium let the diffuse sunlight in everywhere, the colors were pale and cool, and voices murmured on all sides, individual words lost in the rush of the four slender waterfalls that poured down from the roof level into the central basin five floors up. Lee and Gelert took the escalators up around the sides of the basin to the fourth floor, where Forensics was located, and went hunting across the right side of the big open-plan space for the team of analysts working on the dil’Sorden case.
Four or five rows of cubicles in they found the team assigned to the case, or at least three of its members. One set of four cubicles, arranged in a square, was notable amongst its neighbors for having a truly disreputable-looking ficus in the middle of it, its every skinny, straggly branch decorated with paper ornaments and less identifiable objects hung by strings: crayoned Christmas balls, foil dreidels, cellophane Jul fires, crumbling Day-of-the-Dead bone cookies, and here and there the occasional stranded paper plane. Under the spreading Whatsit Tree, in one of the cubicles, a young, short, round, dark-haired, dark-skinned man sat staring at the high-res vision plate set into the cubicle wall, with his hands in midair before him, seemingly twiddling with nothing. On the plate was an image of what seemed like a piece of thick rope.
Lee came up softly behind him and stood still, looking at the “rope,” as the seated man worked with the virtual glove box program. “Silk,” the man said, without turning to look at them. “Hi, Lee. Hi, Gelert.”
“Hi, Telly,” Gelert said. Lee said nothing as she watched Telinu Umivera manipulate the fiber under the scanner—definitely something worth watching, as he was possibly one of the best materials people in the department.
“Alfen silk?” Lee said.
“Yup,” Telinu said. “Look at the bump ratio.” The definition on the scanner’s enlargement changed, so that the “rope” filled the view. A pattern of shallow semi-hemispherical bumps became visible all across the view area. “It’s a dead giveaway: Earth-sourced silk fibers don’t bump that way. I teased this out of a thread someone left on the back of dil’Sorden’s jacket. Fifty-fifty blend: Alfen silk, Earth-New Zealand merino wool. Spun in Auckland, woven in Singapore.”
“But not from dil’Sorden’s suit?” Gelert said.
Telinu shook his head. “Wrong color, wrong age, wrong everything else. Someone he’d seen within the last…”
“Could have been a week,” said a voice from the other side of the cubicle. A head looked over the cubicle wall—blond, green downturned eyes, fluffy short hair: Stella de la Roux. “This guy wasn’t real good at taking care of his clothes,” she said in her soft breathy
They hiked through the catacombs to the nearest elevator/escalator stack and made their up through the levels to the sun and the air again. Ten minutes or so later they broke out into the windy central plaza. Lee glanced over at the main court building with a slight smile of triumph as she and Gelert made their way over to the LAPD’s HQ building, identical to the other porticoed white edifices around the plaza except for the department’s shield.
Inside the building was huge, open, and airy—a rebellion against the claustrophobic facilities of earlier years, which had been all too conducive to making the people inside think they were a fortress against a prying world that had no right to know what they were doing. In its latest incarnation, the LAPD headquarters looked more like a Silicon Lakeshore facility than anything else: the central atrium let the diffuse sunlight in everywhere, the colors were pale and cool, and voices murmured on all sides, individual words lost in the rush of the four slender waterfalls that poured down from the roof level into the central basin five floors up. Lee and Gelert took the escalators up around the sides of the basin to the fourth floor, where Forensics was located, and went hunting across the right side of the big open-plan space for the team of analysts working on the dil’Sorden case.
Four or five rows of cubicles in they found the team assigned to the case, or at least three of its members. One set of four cubicles, arranged in a square, was notable amongst its neighbors for having a truly disreputable-looking ficus in the middle of it, its every skinny, straggly branch decorated with paper ornaments and less identifiable objects hung by strings: crayoned Christmas balls, foil dreidels, cellophane Jul fires, crumbling Day-of-the-Dead bone cookies, and here and there the occasional stranded paper plane. Under the spreading Whatsit Tree, in one of the cubicles, a young, short, round, dark-haired, dark-skinned man sat staring at the high-res vision plate set into the cubicle wall, with his hands in midair before him, seemingly twiddling with nothing. On the plate was an image of what seemed like a piece of thick rope.
Lee came up softly behind him and stood still, looking at the “rope,” as the seated man worked with the virtual glove box program. “Silk,” the man said, without turning to look at them. “Hi, Lee. Hi, Gelert.”
“Hi, Telly,” Gelert said. Lee said nothing as she watched Telinu Umivera manipulate the fiber under the scanner—definitely something worth watching, as he was possibly one of the best materials people in the department.
“Alfen silk?” Lee said.
“Yup,” Telinu said. “Look at the bump ratio.” The definition on the scanner’s enlargement changed, so that the “rope” filled the view. A pattern of shallow semi-hemispherical bumps became visible all across the view area. “It’s a dead giveaway: Earth-sourced silk fibers don’t bump that way. I teased this out of a thread someone left on the back of dil’Sorden’s jacket. Fifty-fifty blend: Alfen silk, Earth-New Zealand merino wool. Spun in Auckland, woven in Singapore.”
“But not from dil’Sorden’s suit?” Gelert said.
Telinu shook his head. “Wrong color, wrong age, wrong everything else. Someone he’d seen within the last…”
“Could have been a week,” said a voice from the other side of the cubicle. A head looked over the cubicle wall—blond, green downturned eyes, fluffy short hair: Stella de la Roux. “This guy wasn’t real good at taking care of his clothes,” she said in her soft breathy
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