A frog on a high wire--not just a frog, but one of the Koo-veya, amphibians of a humanoid build that had traveled along a parallel evolutionary path. They often found work in circuses, but I was used to encountering them in the freakshows, not at center ring, and certainly not thirty feet in the air. His (or possibly her, since the ringmaster had not specified) skin glistened prominently in the spotlight. Did the Koo-veya sweat? The question had not occurred to me until that moment. If so it was indistinguishable from the natural secretions that kept their soft, olive-colored flesh supple outside of the water.
The performer now edging its way out into space wore a pair of canvas trousers, tied at the waist by a length of hemp rope strung with colored beads. The ringmaster had announced their name--Ool'uhvulgo--but since it derived from the Koo-veya tongue I still had no clue as to their actual sex.
Beside me, a Panther folded his arms across his chest (cloaked magnificently in seersucker) and purred, each inhalation and exhalation marked by a change in the pitch of the purr. Unlike the Koo-veya I knew the Panther well, and this one in particular. His name was Von, and he was my associate. A single golden earring in each ear signified that he was a married male.
For the record, I was a run-of-the-mill, quite single, American male of the ape-descended persuasion. Why all this preoccupation with gender and species, you ask? And the answer is simply this: somewhere in the great rolling miles of Iowan countryside there was a missing Koo-veya, female, aged twenty-nine, who stood a fifty-fifty chance of either being guilty of murder or the inheritor of several billion dollars.
And Von & Winston were on the case.
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