"Anyway, look." I took the bag containing the handkerchief out of my pocket.

Denny looked at the bag and then up at me.

"What? You get a nosebleed or something'?"

"It's Hendry's. The blood. I was chasing him and he tripped over a curb or something." I suddenly felt uncomfortable and lifted the bag for a closer look as if I might be able to recognize the blood.

"I'm not sure it was him, though."

"Hey, he ran. Sounds guilty to me," Denny reasoned.

"So would a whole pile of other people." I put the bag back in my pocket.

"I'm gonna run a DNA scan on it, anyway."

Denny climbed out of the cab, and we walked over to the control center.

I swiped my ID card and pushed through the wooden door into the lobby.

A heavyset man in a gray uniform with a dark complexion was sitting behind the console reading a paperback. Reflections from the monitors before him danced across his gla.s.ses, as if he were playing scenes from the book on them. He looked up as we approached.

"Still here? Thought you'd be long gone by now."

He delivered the words one at a time; it was a wonder anyone ever let him finish what he was saying.

"We ran into a bit of trouble. We need to head on up to the Datacenter, check something out. Okay if we go on through?"

The guard's eyes flicked to a monitor, back again.

"Sure," he said, and rolled his huge shoulders.

He buzzed us through the main door. It opened onto a short corridor with two further doors on either side. A large metal door stood at the far end- As we walked through the corridor, the sign on the door gradually came into focus: TRANSIT LABORATORY--AUTHORIZED

PERSONNEL ONLY.

We reached the door, and I gave it a gentle push with the palm of my hand. It was locked. I knew the guard was watching us on a monitor, so I turned to the camera above the door and gave him the finger. I heard a soft click, and when I pushed the door again, it was open.

Another corridor stretched before us. I walked on, looking at the sign on each door. I could hear Denny breathing heavily behind me and his footsteps clipping the tile floor.

We came to a door marked DNA SCANNER and stopped. I squeezed the plastic bag containing the handkerchief in my pocket and then knocked.

After a few moments there was the sound of soft footsteps behind the door and then it was slowly opened- A man about my height, six two, with thinning red hair stood there, white lab coat wrapped around his shoulders.

He looked us up and down through half-moon gla.s.ses on the end of his nose. I felt my DNA twitch.

"Yes?" He kept one hand on the doork.n.o.b and the other on the frame, blocking our entrance.

"Blon." I held up my ID card.

"Detective Bion.

We've come to run a scan on some blood?"

"I know who you are." His voice sounded weary.

Denny looked at me, at the technician, shrugged.

"So now we all know each other, what are we waiting for?"

The technician looked at his watch.

"Hey, don't you worry 'bout the time. We got all night," said Denny and gently but forcefully pushed the door open.

The technician sighed and stepped back. He seemed to deflate as if his skeleton had crumbled, leaving only tired flesh.

I followed Denny into the lab.

It was a small room, ten by ten, with computer hardware floor to ceiling on three walls; on the fourth wall a solitary window overlooked the camp. In the gla.s.s I could see my reflection: a face drawn by shadows, pale and cold. One eye seemed to be twitching, but I could feel no movement in my face.

The technician pulled himself up to his full height.

"Detective Blon, this is not a private lab, and we are not here to service your private actions. You are in breach of everything you have ever learned in the force and you know it." He held my stare.

A minute pa.s.sed, our eyes locked. I felt every muscle in my body tense.

Eventually his eyes flicked away.

"You think you got him this time?" he said. There was genuine concern in his voice.

I shrugged and handed him the evidence bag. He disappeared through a door next to a large gla.s.s case.

Inside the case were rows of bottles of blood in deepening shades of red.

"You better hope this is the real thing," said Denny, "or you're gonna get yourself a reputation." He pulled himself up on to a desk and leaned back with his head under the extractor fan and the cool pulse of the air.

"You gotta take this guy out. And soon. You understand?"

I knew what he meant. This was not the first time I had been to the lab with a blood sample. But I had to be sure I had the right man.

That way it wouldn't matter when I killed him, shot him in the back.

That was something Victims' Rights allowed me to do, administer my own punishment. d.a.m.n, it even encouraged me to do it, go right out and shoot the guy in the back of the head and not feel like a coward.

It took the technician ninety minutes to run the scan. I was watching shadows shifting around in the camp when he came back into the room.

Denny still had his head under the extractor fan.

The technician was trying to hide a smile and not having much success.

"We got him?" I said. My heart thumped deep in my chest.

"Ninety-eight percent match. I ran it twice, just to be sure. I didn't wanna f.u.c.k up and have you coming back here in a couple of weeks with another dirty handkerchief."

The camp covered two square miles and held an average of twenty-six-hundred vagrants at any one time. Finding Hendry was not going to be easy, and there was always the possibility he had already left the camp- It was not a prison, people were free to move on as they pleased.

With only the two of us, there was no point in being too systematic about the search. We took off in opposite directions.

Cold blue moonlight threw the camp into dark relief as I made my way to the first tenement, in my right hand I carried my pistol, in my left a heavy duty torch.

The building seemed to shift in the darkness as I approached, and the splintered gla.s.s of the broken windows looked like burned-out stars captured in wooden frames. Occasionally I heard signs of life: a barking cough, the death rattle of the bronchitic; feral screams dragged from the deepest of sleeps; angry calls to silence.

I hoped that somewhere among the grumbling mess of people was Hendry.

Denny had still been p.i.s.sed off with me for losing him the kidney, and I had had to agree to rush him a couple of thousand for helping me out, more if we caught the guy. But he was under threat of death himself not to shoot him. That was my gig.

The stairwell smelled of stale alcohol and decaying flesh, and I was reminded of the dogs behind the diner on the freeway. I hurried up the stairs.

At the top of the building were two doors, with tribal markings slashed across them in red and green.

The one on my right was open. I lifted my gun and followed the torch beam into the room.

The concrete floor was covered with the tools of the dead and the defeated: cigarette b.u.t.ts, broken vials, cracked needles. The bundle of rags against the far wall were probably vagrants. I crossed the room and kicked the first one on the foot; gently, I didn't want to break it off.

A hand appeared from beneath the rags and dragged them to one side. I shone the torch into a face that twisted to look up at me, blinked in the strange light. The eyes were sunk deep into the skull and the mouth hung loose, saliva spooling from the corner.

I moved the beam off the face.

"Go back to sleep," I said.

I lifted the blankets from the other two mounds in the room and saw identical faces, a single mask that took on the contours rent by the latest hurt.