Prodigal Son

must've had keys."
        "Somebody knew what you'd find in Allwine," she said, "because maybe he's not unique. Maybe there're others like him."
        "Don't go off in the Twilight Zone again," Michael half warned, half pleaded.
        "At least one other," she said. "The friend he went to funerals with. Mr. Average Everything."
        Almost simultaneous with a knock, the door opened, and Frye, Jonathan Harker's partner, entered. He looked surprised to see them.
        "Why so glum?" he asked. "Did somebody die?"
        Weariness and caffeine sharpened Carson's edge. "What don't you understand about 'buzz off'?"
        "Hey, I'm not here about your case. We're on that liquor-store shooting."
        "Yeah? Is that right? Is that what you were doing yesterday at Allwine's apartment-looking for clues in the liquor-store shooting?"
        Frye pretended innocence. "I don't know what you're talking about. O'Connor, you're wound as tight as a golf ball's guts. Get a man, relieve some tension."
        She wanted to shoot him accidentally.
        As if reading her mind, Michael said, "A gun can always go off accidentally, but you'd have to explain why you drew it in the first place."

CHAPTER 45
        
        COMFORTABLE IN HER ROBE, ensconced in a wing-back chair, Erika spent the night and the morning with no company but books, and even took her breakfast in the library.
        Reading for pleasure, lingering over the prose, she nevertheless covered a hundred pages an hour. She was, after all, an Alpha-class member of the New Race, with superb language skills.
        She read Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, and when she finished it, she did something that she had not done before in her weeks of life. She wept.
        The story was about the power of love, the nobility of self-sacrifice, and the horrors of revolution in the name of political ideology, among other things.
        Erika understood the concept of love and found it appealing, but she didn't know if she would ever feel it. The New Race was supposed to value reason, to eschew emotion, to reject superstition.
        She had heard Victor say that love was superstition. One of the Old Race, he'd made himself New. He claimed that perfect clarity of mind was a pleasure greater than any mere sentiment.
        Nevertheless, Erika found herself intrigued by the concept of love and longed to experience it.
        She found hope in the fact that she was capable of tears. Her built-in disposition toward reason at the expense of emotion had not prevented her from identifying with the tragic lawyer who, at the end of Dickens's novel, went to the guillotine in place of another man.
        The lawyer had sacrificed himself to ensure that the woman he loved would have happiness with the man she loved. That man was the one whose name the lawyer had assumed and in whose place he had been executed.
        Even if Erika was capable of love, she would not be capable of self-sacrifice, for it violated the proscription against suicide that had been embedded in every member of the New Race. Therefore, she was in awe of this capacity in ordinary human beings.
        As for revolution… A day would come when Victor would give the command, and the New Race living secretly among the Old would pour down upon humanity a storm of terror unprecedented in history.
        She'd not been created to serve in the front lines of that war, only to be a wife to Victor. When the time came, she supposed that she would be as ruthless as her maker had created her to be.
        If they knew what she was, ordinary humans would consider her a monster. Members of the Old Race weren't her brothers and sisters.
        Yet she admired much about them and, in truth, envied some of their gifts.
        She suspected that it would be a mistake to let Victor know that her interest in the arts of the Old Race had evolved into admiration. In his view, they deserved only contempt. If she could not sustain that contempt, Erika Five could always be activated.
        As noon drew near, when she was certain that the household staff had cleaned the master suite and made the bed, she went upstairs.
        If the maids had found something extraordinary or just peculiar in the bedroom, if they had uncovered even a few rat droppings, she would have been told. Whatever had been in the bedroom the previous night must not be there now.
        She prowled the suite