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different and far more threatening tone of voice. Cops weren’t supposed to be like
ushers. They were the teeth and claws of civic authority.
Still, she did need help. “Yeah. What was stolen from here?”
The cop looked her up and down, then looked at Rondeau, who’d chosen a bad moment
to pick his nose. “How do you know anything was stolen?” the cop asked, forcedcasual,
and Marla could see him mentally flipping through the Police Procedural
Handbook to the chapter about stupid criminals returning to the scenes of their crimes.
Marla shrugged. “It could have been an act of vandalism, I guess, but it looked like a
smash-and-grab to me.” Plus, of course, there was the dead yellow frog in the vicinity,
which suggested to Marla that there was some connection between this mess and Lao
Tsung’s death. She wasn’t here to investigate his murder, but she had a couple of hours
to kill before Finch’s party, and this was interesting.
The cop nodded, then reached for a notebook. “If I could have your name and address,
I’d be happy to send you some information as soon as we have it.”
As far as ruses to get names and addresses went, Marla had seen better. She sighed,
shook her left arm slightly, and felt a stone fall out of the concealed pocket sewn into
the cuff of her sleeve. The stone was small, smoothly polished, and heavier than it
should have been. “Catch,” she said, and tossed the rock at the cop, underhand. He
caught it instinctively, and his eyes widened. Then he just stood, pupils dilated, mouth
hanging open, stone cradled loosely in his palm.
In Marla’s city, every cop took an oath that put them under her sway, and she could
activate them with a hand gesture or a word. She almost never had to do that—the
police chief was handpicked, he belonged to her, and she generally got her information
through him—but it was reassuring, having an army at her disposal, the cops themselves
unaware they were sleeper agents. This rock was just a temporary charm, a one-use
compulsion that she’d spent a long night imbuing. She hoped she hadn’t just wasted it,
but the cop belonged to her now, and would for the next few days. “What was stolen?”
“A statue.”
“Can you describe it?”
“I saw a picture.”
“You have the picture?”
The cop nodded and fished in his pocket, then came up with a neatly folded piece of
paper. Marla opened it up—it was a photocopy of a photograph—and squinted.
She grunted. “I can’t even tell what the hell this is. I hate pre-Columbian art.”
Rondeau, who had progressed from picking his nose to picking his teeth, leaned over to
look. “I think it’s a frog,” he said.