were you?” Wayne asked with a yawn. “Rusts, man, you make it hard to loaf about properly.”
“I don’t see what my insomnia has to do with your laziness, Wayne.”
“Makes me look bad, ’sall,” Wayne said, looking over Wax’s shoulder. “Proper loafing requires company. One man lying about is being idle; two men lying about is a lunch break.”
Wax shook his head, walking over to look at some broadsheets. Wayne leaned in, inspecting Wax’s paper. It held long lists of ideas, some connected by arrows, with a sketch of the way the bodies had fallen in both the ballroom and the saferoom.
“What’s all this, then?” Wayne asked, picking up a pencil and drawing a little stick figure with a gun shooting at all the dead bodies. His hand trembled as he drew the stick gun, but otherwise it was a right good stick figure.
“Proof to me that a Steelrunner is involved,” Wax said. “Look at the pattern of deaths in the ballroom. Four of the most powerful people in the room were killed with the same gun, and they were the only ones up there killed by that weapon—but it’s the same one that killed the guards outside the saferoom. I’d bet those four above were shot first, dead in an eyeblink, so fast that it sounded like a single long shot. Thing is, judging by the wounds, each shot came from a different location.”
Wayne didn’t know a lot about guns, seeing as how he couldn’t try to use one without his arm doing an impersonation of a carriage on a bumpy road, but Wax was probably right. Wayne moved down to start sketching some stick figures of topless women in the center of the picture, but Wax stepped over and plucked the pencil from his fingers.
“What’s that?” Wayne asked, tapping the center of the sketch pad, where Wax had drawn a bunch of straight lines.
“The pattern the killer used baffles me,” Wax said. “The four people in the party he shot, they all fell while in random conversations—look how they were lying. Everyone else who died was part of the larger shoot-out, but these four, they died while the party was still going on. But why did he shoot them from different directions? See, best I can guess, he fired first here, killing Lady Lentin. Her dropped drink was stomped on many times over the next few minutes. But then the killer used his speed to move quickly over here and fire in another direction. Then he moved again, and again. Why four shots from different places?”
“Who was standing where he shot?”
“The people he killed, obviously.”
“No, I mean, who was standing near him when he fired his gun. Not who did he shoot, but who was he near when he shot?”
“Ahh…” Wax said.
“Yep. Looks to me like he was trying to set them all off,” Wayne said, sniffling. “Get everyone in the room shootin’ at each other. See? It’s like how, to start a bar fight, you throw a bottle at some fellow and then turn to the person next to you and cry out, ‘Hey, why’d you throw that bottle at that nice fellow? Rusts, he looks big. And now he’s comin’ for you, and—’”
“I understand the concept,” Wax said dryly. He tapped the drawing pad. “You might have something.”
“It’s not catching.”
Wax smiled, writing some notes on the side of the pad. “So the killer wanted to sow chaos.… He started a firefight by bouncing around the room, making it look like various parties were attacking one another. They would already have been tense, suspicious of one another.…”
“Yup. I’m a genius.”
“You just recognized this because the killer was making others do his work for him, which is an expertise of yours.”
“As I said. Genius. So how are you going to find him?”
“Well, I was thinking of sending you to the Village to—”
“Not today,” Wayne said.
Wax turned to him, raising his eyebrows.
“It’s the first of the month,” Wayne said.
“Ah. I had forgotten. You don’t need to go every month.”
“I do.”
Wax studied him, as if waiting for a further comment or wisecrack. Wayne said nothing. This was actually serious. Slowly, Wax nodded. “I see. Then why haven’t you left yet?”
“Well, you know,” Wayne said. “It’s like I often say…”
“Greet every morning with a smile. That way it won’t know what you’re planning to do to it?”
“No, not that one.”
“Until you know it ain’t true, treat every woman like she has an older brother what is stronger than you are?”