The man froze, then took a half step back, as though he was going to retreat, only to stop himself, and took a step forward.
Laughton was on him now. Mathews went and immediately stood behind the man and to the side.
“I’m just walking here,” the man said.
“Guy whose house it is know you’re walking here?” Laughton said. He pushed a button on his body cam, and his phone buzzed. He looked at it, and it showed a picture of the man, but without a beard. “Carter Jones,” Laughton said, reading the name off the face recognition ID.
“No shit,” Mathews said.
“We’re looking for a Jones.”
eyebrows down and together, both eyelids narrowed, chin pulled back—concern
“Why?”
“You friends with the people who own the house?”
“Yeah,” Jones said, trying to figure out what the police wanted. “Did I do anything, Officers?”
“You’re going to tell us. But first, let’s see if your friend is home.”
“No answer. That’s why I was around the back. To see if there was another way in.”
No answer, Laughton thought. He didn’t like that. “Come on,” he said.
Jones hesitated, but Mathews poked him in the back, and the sims dealer walked forward. The police flanked him.
They went to the front door. The outlay of black solar panels sucked in the light, leaving not even a reflection of the sky, just a harsh, hard darkness that stripped away any sense of being in the natural world, the grass beneath all dead or dying.
The chief knocked. “Body camera,” he said.
“Already on,” Mathews said.
Laughton knocked again.
“Was there anything out back?” Mathews said.
Jones shook his head.
The chief went back to the truck and retrieved a crowbar. At the door, he handed the crowbar to Mathews, letting the younger officer fit it into the space between the door and the jamb. Mathews pulled back, and the doorjamb splintered. He reset it and applied more force, causing the wood to crack further, then he put his shoulder against the door and it popped open.
The whirring of the computer fans met them, and nothing else. “Mr. McCardy!” Laughton called.
There was no answer.
He pushed Jones in ahead of him. Inside, he pointed to the stairs, and Mathews started up while Laughton headed back to the room where they had spoken to McCardy the day before, herding Jones before him. It was deserted. He continued through the kitchen and out to a little sunroom off the back of the house. No one was there either. The backyard was fenced in by a six-foot-high wooden fence. The back gate was open. The rear of the house from the neighboring street was visible through a sparse stand of trees.
Laughton went back to the room where the hackers’ workstations were set up just as Mathews came in shaking his head. “Nothing.”
Laughton pointed to a door in the kitchen. “Check the basement.”
Mathews crossed to the door. Laughton examined the desk where McCardy had sat last night. Jones had wandered over to the shelf of memory sticks. He reached for one, and Laughton said, “Don’t touch anything. It’s all evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” Jones said.
Laughton didn’t bother to answer, continuing to examine the desk. One of the screens showed a distorted, wide-angle view of the front of the house. They had cameras, but if McCardy was telling the truth about Smythe’s programming, if they tried to access any recordings, the whole place would probably burn down. It’d have to wait for the tech team.
Mathews returned from the basement. “Place is empty.”
“Shit,” Laughton said. “The idiot must have panicked.” He damned himself again for not leaving someone posted the night before. That should have been automatic. Now they’d lost the one person they knew knew Smythe well.
“Guess Jones is in the clear,” Mathews said. “He’d be pretty stupid to come here if he’d killed Smythe.”
“Wait, what?” Jones said.
jaw dangling, eyes wide—surprise
“Someone killed Carl? Carl’s dead.”
“Unless he was coming to kill McCardy,” Laughton said, “and that’s why McCardy ran.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you saying?”
head tilted, eyes narrowed, brows lowered—suspicion
The surprise had been genuine, the suspicion natural. Seemed like Jones genuinely didn’t know Smythe was dead.
“Is Carl really dead?” Jones said. He ran his hand over the top of his head. “What the fuck?”
“Let’s take this outside.” They led him to the curb, and had him sit down. His leg was jiggling with nerves.
“What the hell are you going to do with me?” he said.
“You’re not under arrest, if that’s what you’re asking,” Laughton said.
“Under arrest? For what? Check me.” He held his arms out to either side as though he expected to be frisked right then. “Check my car. No sims. No memory sticks. Nothing.” He let his arms fall. Then his eyebrows crumpled into a groove above his nose as he realized. “You don’t mean Carl?” He scoffed. “You think I killed Carl?” Jones stood up then. Tall as he was, he probably wasn’t used to looking up to talk to someone. “I didn’t. You’ve got to believe me.”
“Then tell us who did.”
“How would I know?”
Laughton held up his phone, and read, “Carter Jones, six counts of sims possession, two with greater than twenty sticks.” He looked at Jones. “Given that you’re a sims dealer, and Smythe wrote sims, and you showed up at his house the day after he was killed says to me, you probably have a very good idea of who killed him.”
“You need to help me,” Jones said.
“Why do you need help?”
“Hello? They killed Carl. And where’s Sam? What happened to Sam?”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Do you really know shit?” He looked around for someone to share his incredulity, but was met with blank faces.
“Who killed Smythe?” Laughton said. “Do you know? Maybe we can protect you if we know the people to go after.”
“ ‘Maybe,’ ” he sneered. “At least you’re being honest.”
Laughton shifted his weight. “Mr. Jones. I know you’re scared, but unless you tell me what’s going on, I don’t know what I can do for you.”
Jones closed his eyes and put his fingertips to his temples, talking to himself. “This fucking app.” An edge of panic had entered his voice. He opened his eyes. “Fuck!”
At the word “app,” Laughton’s stomach seized. If Kir’s case was connected, the shit would really hit the fan.
“What app?” Mathews said.
Jones focused on Laughton. “My job is the hackers. My job is to protect the hackers, because I’m the only one who knows them. But if someone got to Smythe and now Sam’s gone, what do you think that’ll do to my reputation? And worse, what if they want to get to me so they can get to my other hackers?”
“Why would anyone be killing hackers?” Laughton said.
Jones’s shoulders fell, and he swallowed.
Dropping the pose revealed that he was much younger than Laughton had at first thought, maybe twenty-six at oldest. The beard was deceptive.
Jones shook his head. “You really don’t know shit, do you?” he said.
Laughton noted the inner corners of his eyebrows raise in sadness.
“You haven’t heard about the killer app? I thought it was all over the news.”
“Hot shots killing robots,” Laughton said.
“Yes. Thank you. God.”
“What?” Mathews said. “Someone want to fill me in?”
“You’re sure it’s connected?” Laughton said. “You’re certain?”
“No, but…”
“But what!”
“It just—what if it is?”
Laughton remembered what McCardy had said the night before about his partner’s work.
Computers actually burning down. These robots melting from a program? Of course it was connected.
The dealer’s hand was shaking uncontrollably at his side.
tucked chin, the mouth stretched wide toward the ears—panic
Laughton knew the amorphous fear that victims’ friends and family felt after a murder. Off balance, generalized apprehension. This was more specific. “You know who did it,” he said.
Jones looked at him. There was a flash, a micro-expression, a fraction of a second that showed remorse before defensiveness replaced it. “What? No.”
He felt guilty about something. “What are you afraid of?” Laughton said.
“I told you.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“What? Nothing. It’s just, if people start pointing fingers at me… But maybe somebody thinks they know who wrote the code, and if it was Sam and Smythe…”
Laughton’s whole face felt heavy, as though his visage was going to slough off. “Who!” he snapped.
“Look,” Jones said. “I’m not saying it makes sense. Maybe they’re not connected, but all I know is that I was Sam and Smythe’s middleman, and I don’t know if that puts me in the line of fire. I came to find out what Sam knew about the robots who got burned, but it’s too late for that. Fuck.”
Jones had regained his sense of outrage. Whatever he was suppressing was gone. Laughton tried to think. He asked Jones, “How many hackers do you handle?”
“Six, no, seven. But you’re crazy if you think I’ll give up their names.”
“All on the preserve? Outside of Charleston?”
“Yes.”
“So you pick up the memory sticks. Then what?”
Jones hesitated, his eyes going up, searching for an answer.
“You know what,” Laughton said. “Fuck it, you are under arrest.”
“What! No! The Sisters.”
“Like nuns?” Mathews said, and laughed.
“The Sisters,” Jones said. “They get the product off the preserve. Pack it in with their produce, and then I don’t know where, out to stupid metals who like to fuck with their brains.” Seeing the next question, he said, “They run a farm.”
“Okay,” Laughton said, trying to get his head around it all—dead robots, farmers. Jones looked like he was ready to bolt, his fear growing as he stood there. For talking? “Sure you had nothing to do with those hot shots?”
“Why the fuck would I want to mess up my business? Use your brain, man.”
Laughton thought, If only he could use his brain. If only it didn’t feel so far away. He wished he could just plug in a memory stick and fix his head.
“You’re coming back to Liberty with us,” the chief said.
“Like hell I am.”
“Like hell you are,” Laughton said, and Mathews grabbed Jones’s upper right arm.
“You wanted help. Come with us. We’ll protect you.”
“I don’t know, man,” Jones said.
Laughton flexed his jaw. “Mr. Jones, I know you’re scared, but think for a minute. Forget whoever’s killing hackers, or sims, or any of that. We’ve got a murder on the preserve. We don’t come up with a killer, and the robots are going to use it as an excuse to come in here and take over the investigation. And then how long before they’re claiming we need robots on the preserve as peacekeepers, and then this whole place is an open-air prison instead of a wildlife preserve. You think they’re going to ignore the sims traffic the way we do? Like you said, who cares if the robots want to fuck themselves up, but if we don’t close this up fast, they’re going to fuck us all up, and then you can forget about sims.”
The part of Jones’s face that could be seen above his beard had gone splotchy, whites and reds. He pulled his arm from Laughton’s grip. “How do I know it wasn’t you guys killed Carl?”
“Two of us…,” Mathews said.
Jones whipped around at the sound of Mathews’s voice.
“And one of you. If we were going to kill you, you’d be dead.”
Jones looked back to Laughton.
The chief knew the dealer hadn’t really thought the police were dangerous. But he didn’t trust them either. Laughton could see him weighing his options: police protection or running.
“You leave the preserve, how safe are you going to be?” Laughton said.
Jones pulled his shoulders in. His eyes turned toward the ground. He was withdrawing.
“Just help us out with a couple names and addresses—”
“You’re asking me to kill myself?” Jones said without looking at Laughton.
“Not if you’re with us. We will protect you.”
Jones started to shake his head. “Nah,” he said, “no.” He stepped back. “Forget this,” he said, and turned toward his car.
Mathews reached for him, but Laughton held Mathews back.
“No,” Jones said, walking sideways to his car, so he was half facing them. “I’m not under arrest. I’m not sticking around.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Laughton said. “We can’t protect you if we don’t know where you are.”
He was at his car now. “You can’t protect me if you know where I am,” he said, opening the driver’s-side door and getting in. “Ask around about the Sisters. That’s all I’m going to say.” He got in the car and slammed the door.
Mathews took a step toward the car as it came alive.
“No,” Laughton said. “He’ll be more useful as bait. We’ll track the car.”
“Won’t he figure that?”
Laughton watched the sims dealer as the car drove away. Jones’s face was stricken. “He won’t be thinking straight long enough for it to occur to him. Start recording the scene in there.” Laughton nodded at the house. “3-D scans, catalog everything. Ontero’s already sending Computer Forensics in from Charleston to start digging through the mess of servers in there, and I want you here when they get here. I’ll head back and see what I can find out about these Sisters.”
Mathews’s jaw tightened.
“You don’t agree with letting him go. Soon, I might not either. But we had nothing to hold him on anyway.”
“Sure we did. A laundry list.”
Laughton nodded. “Let me know if you find anything.”
By the time Laughton made it back to Liberty, he’d exhausted every database he could access looking for the Sisters. It was just too common a word, and with nothing more to go on, he couldn’t bring up anything in the system that seemed right. He was thinking over next steps when he heard Dunrich laughing, and his tension turned to anger. The officer was leaning far back in his desk chair in hysterics. Manuel Guthrie was in the slatted, wooden chair to the side of Dunrich’s desk. He was holding out his phone for Dunrich to see. Whatever had the officer in hysterics was displayed there. Kara Letts was at her news desk on the muted flat-panel TV on the wall. The closed captions said something about garbage dumps. At least Kara had other things than homicide to get people worked up about.
Dunrich sat up suddenly when he caught sight of Laughton, his chair almost rolling away with him. He grabbed his desk and pulled himself in. Manuel Guthrie turned to see what had spooked his friend. “Chief,” Guthrie said.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he said, ignoring Manny. “You’re supposed to be out canvassing.”
Guthrie held his phone out to the chief, trying to run interference for his friend. “Check this out.”
“Another time, Manny,” Laughton said. He wasn’t in the mood for any humor. He raised his eyebrows at Dunrich.
“I did canvass,” Dunrich said, his eyes not meeting the chief’s. “Nobody knew anything.”
“You canvassed the whole town in two and a half hours? Everyone?”
“You just said the bars.”
“Show some initiative! Anyone, everyone. Did you even ask Manny?”
“I don’t know nothing about anything, Chief,” Manny said.
“I’ll go now,” Dunrich said.
&
nbsp; “Damn right you’ll go now. You— No, just wait.” He needed to get to this autopsy. Time was just draining. “Did you at least find out who the ME is?”
“I—”
“That’s a no,” Laughton said. “And you’ve got nothing better to do than sit around joking?” He threw his hands up with a “God!” and went to his office. He sat behind his desk and rubbed his forehead. Who’d he know in electronic narco who might know who the Sisters were?
Before he could even reach for his tablet, Dunrich called from the front of the station, “Chief! You want to see this!”
Laughton jumped up, yelling, “Fucking Dunrich,” heading out of his office, but Laughton’s attention was already on the television screen. The sound was on now, the closed captions a few paces behind. The commissioner stood at a lectern outside Charleston Police headquarters with the preserve governor and the mayor of Charleston flanking him. Two other figures stood just behind them. One—a small woman in narrow red glasses, black hair pulled back in a loose ponytail—Laughton recognized immediately: Kir’s boss, Grace Pattermann, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Her presence as a representative of the federal government was worrisome, but it was the other participant that had Laughton’s attention: a seven-foot, uniformed military robot called Colonel Brandis. The sight made Laughton’s stomach drop. Here was the nightmare, a robotic intervention, and Brandis the worst possible representative, a seventy-year-old robot of the old guard, and one of the most vocal anti-orgos in the world.
Laughton realized he was holding his breath, and forced air into his lungs. The on-screen text read “Homicide Sims Connection.” Damn! This was the opposite of keeping the investigation quiet. The commissioner was saying they had multiple leads, and nobody had to worry. As though Brandis and Pattermann weren’t reasons to worry on their own. He went on to say there was no evidence that suggested robot involvement. The text switched to “Robots Not Involved.” The robot government had sent a delegation to assist and consult only.
At least they weren’t publicly linking Smythe’s death to the virus that was killing robots. There was that, at least.
“Fuck,” he said. He turned and saw Dunrich just standing at his desk. “Get on the phone,” he said. “Find out about that autopsy.”
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