"Charles de Lint - Mulengro" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

“I know what you mean,” Will said. “If we go by Cooper’s report and what the rubbie told us, we should
be out looking for a guy with a panther that can sometimes change itself into fog. Unless, of course, our
boy in black is like one of those people in Cat People. You ever see that?”

Briggs nodded wearily. “It was bullshit. And so’s what we’ve got so far. But they’re not the same kind.”


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/de%20Lint,%20Charles%20-%20Mulengro%20v.1.htm (14 of 319)8-12-2006 23:49:09
 MULENGRO


He glanced at his partner’s lanky frame. Will’s feet were draped across the top of his desk, head tilted
back against the headrest of his chair as he went through Miller’s photographs. One by one, Will tossed
the B&W glossies over to Briggs. The detective frowned down at them. They were Stan’s usual
excellent work and didn’t look any prettier this morning than the real thing had looked last night. But at
least they had a name to go with them now. Cooper had managed to pull the victim’s prints—from the
hand that hadn’t been chewed up or whatever had happened to it—and, once they’d run them through
ceepik, they’d come up with a prior’s sheet as long as the desk. Ceepik was an abbreviation for the
Canadian Police Information Computer—a teletype information-sharing computer serving all police
departments in Canada and, in some cases, the United States.

The victim had been one Romano Wood, aka John Yera, aka Kalia Winter… In fact, he had as many
names as he had arrests. Thirty-seven of them, ranging from vagrancy to fraud, with fourteen
convictions. All told, Wood or whatever his real name was, had served a total of six years, ten months
and three days in various county, provincial and federal jails. But the most interesting snippet of
information, to Briggs’ way of thinking, was the fact that Wood was a Gypsy. No fixed address. No
occupation. They weren’t even sure what nationality he was. He’d been picked up with everything from
Canadian ID to a Brazilian passport.

Gypsies weren’t the same problem now as they had been when Briggs had had to deal with them on a
continual basis back in his days as a patrolman in the late sixties. They had a much higher profile then.
He could even recall a fortune-telling joint on Wellington Street—right across from Parliament Hill.
These days you hardly heard a peep out of them, though he knew his counterparts in Hull, just across the
river, still had to deal with them. Harassment charges. Vagrancy. Welfare, check and insurance frauds.
Squabbles between the extended families that seemed to operate on the same principles that the Mob
did. He’d have to check with Castleman in the Fraud and Commercial Crimes Unit to see if there were
still any in Ottawa.

They were a weird people, no doubt about that. It wasn’t so much that they were lawless, as that they
didn’t believe that non-Gypsy laws applied to them. They were asocial—except within their own
communities. Briggs wasn’t sure that he cared all that much for them. They were always causing trouble
of one kind or another. A headache, more than a serious problem—though he’d heard some ugly stories
about the families in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Briggs shrugged. His own feelings were irrelevant. What he had to deal with was the fact that someone
had killed a Gypsy on his turf and he had the uncomfortable feeling that it had been a premeditated ritual
killing. There was the symbol scratched in the dirt beside the victim’s head, and the way he’d been
killed… Bad juju.