He nodded once. “It’s true.”
She shook her head without even realizing she was doing it. “That’s why you’re here,” she said to Kir.
“It is,” he said.
Laughton felt guilty trying to take advantage of her distress, but he was now in even more of a rush. He repeated, “Moira said Smythe came in, but she couldn’t remember who he saw.”
Jamie’s mouth went sideways and her eyes narrowed, replacing her concern with caution. “Why do I think I still shouldn’t tell you?”
It had been worth a try. “No problem,” he said, making it sound like it really was no problem. “Have Betty call me when she gets in.”
He had his phone out as he went through the front door, and was surprised to find the text was from Dunrich. It said “Call now.” Dunrich would have to wait a minute. Laughton needed to get his damn subpoena first.
The phone buzzed in his hand. Mathews. “Laughton,” he said, answering it.
“Are the tech guys supposed to be human?” Mathews said.
“I would think so,” he said.
“What is it?” Kir said.
“Because a car pulled up across the street. Two guys in it, but they’re not getting out, so I tried a facial scan from here for the one that’s closer, and it’s a bad angle and at a distance, but, files say robot.”
“That doesn’t mean shit with a crappy angle.”
“Why are they just sitting in the car?”
Laughton didn’t even want to consider how there could be robots on the house. “Sit tight,” he said. “Wait for the real techs, and keep an eye on the guys in the car.”
“And if they try to come in?”
“Alert me if they even move.”
“Okay, Chief,” Mathews said, but it didn’t sound like it was okay.
“Hang tight,” Laughton said. “And send me a visual.”
Mathews hung up.
“What is it?” Kir said.
The phone buzzed, and Laughton opened up the photo. “These guys mean anything to you?” He held out the phone to Kir.
“Where is this?” Kir said.
“Outside Sam and Smythe’s place.”
“Those are off-the-shelf faces,” Kir said.
Robots. “Shit.”
“Titanium has a few working for him, but it’s impossible to know if these are the ones.”
“They’re on the preserve, it doesn’t matter who they work for.”
“I forwarded it to the secretary,” Kir said. “She’ll tell me what she wants to do.”
“What the fuck, Kir? You don’t ask me first?”
“Like you told Jamie,” Kir said, “we’re ex-partners.”
“So you’re ‘the man’ now?” he said.
“I’m ‘the man,’ ” the robot answered with no hint of a smile.
“Because, if we’re working together, I need to know you’re not broadcasting everything. Otherwise, you can get off now.”
Kir was silent, his robot face impassive in a way that was inhuman. “You’re right. It won’t happen again.”
“How do I know?”
“Because I’m telling you.”
Laughton tried to fight the feeling Kir would be sending everything back to Pattermann, and to remember who he was dealing with. He thought back to Erica’s birth. Kir had come to the hospital, and had been the first to hold Erica other than Betty, Jesse, and the medical staff. The expression on Kir’s face had been completely human—if he had been able to cry, he would have. The memory made Jesse’s eyes sting. “All right,” he said. “And if there is shit that’s ‘need to know,’ I need to know.”
“Jesse, if you need to know, I’ll tell you. I promise.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “You better.”
They were at the car. As they got back underway, Laughton said, “Who’s Titanium? You said someone named Titanium has robots like the ones at Sam and Smythe’s.”
“Sims distributor.”
“Sam and Smythe used someone called the Sisters.”
“Titanium is new to the preserve. I’d hoped your case would end up being part of that turf war, but when you said Smythe wrote a burning program… Now if they’re here, I don’t know. Any luck in there?”
“Director of the clinic wants a subpoena before she’ll reveal anything.” He took out his phone. “I’ll email the district attorney now. Maybe we’ll still get lucky.”
“Maybe.”
As it was the first murder on the preserve, and the first suspicious death in his jurisdiction, Chief Laughton had no idea where the coroner’s office was. The Medical University of South Carolina was the only major hospital on the preserve, but it was a confusion of buildings spread over several blocks, some linked by walkways that bridged the city streets, others isolated, cut off from the rest of the medical campus by houses and food establishments and phone stores. The sheer number of people was disorienting. Laughton had become used to Liberty’s sparse population. Here there were nurses in scrubs carrying takeout, doctors in white coats chatting on benches, wheelchair-bound patients with their bags piled on their laps waiting for rides.
The car navigated to the front entrance, bringing them to a triangular drop-off loop with painted yellow curbs. He shut off the car.
“This is a No Parking zone,” Kir said.
Laughton opened his door. “We’re the police,” he said, and got out, just as his phone started buzzing. He stopped to check it, feeling the air-conditioned air wash over him as the hospital’s automatic glass doors slid open for someone else. A photo of Betty and Erica, cheek to cheek, showed on his phone. Erica was laughing, not looking at the camera; Betty had clearly tickled her to get her to smile. He answered it. “Hey.”
“My mom fell,” Betty said. Betty’s mother was in her midseventies. She lived in a house around the corner from the Laughtons.
“Is she okay?”
“She hit her face on something. She has some broken teeth, and I don’t know what else. Mom, no, don’t try to talk.”
“She’s with you?”
“We’re on our way to Charleston. About half an hour out.”
“I’m just getting to the hospital now,” Laughton said.
“Well, you’re going to have to get back to Liberty and pick up Erica at aftercare.”
“Okay.”
“She can be there until six.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know how long we’ll be once we get to the hospital, so you need to get back there.”
“Get Erica by six. Got it.” Uncle Kir could surprise her with Laughton.
“How’s your day going?” she asked, but Laughton knew she didn’t really want to know. Her mind was in emergency mode.
“Fine,” he said. “Let me know if you need me.”
“Okay.” Her tone changed to frustration. “Damn.”
“It’ll be okay,” he said.
“Mom, it’s fine,” Betty said to her mother. “Don’t talk!”
“You go,” Laughton said. “I’m busy here. Keep me posted.”
“I love you,” she said, and hung up.
The chief felt so far away that that didn’t even land on him.
“What now?” Kir said.
“Betty’s mom fell and needs to come here, so we need to get back to Liberty to pick up Erica by six.”
“When it rains…”
Laughton pocketed his phone. “Let’s find this guy.”
There was a security guard just inside the door. The chief asked him for directions, and he smiled and nodded, pointing out the front desk. “Don’t forget your masks,” the guard said.
Laughton rolled his eyes. Wearing surgical face masks was his least favorite part of being in a hospital. He hated the warm, damp feeling of his own breath coating his cheeks and nose, but it was the law. He took one from the dispenser, and fit the elastics over his ears. “You better take one too,” Laughton said to Kir. “You’ll call attention to yourself if you’re not wearing one.
”
Kir smiled, amused by the novelty of wearing the mask. “Human?” he said when his was in place.
“Sure,” Laughton said. “Come on.”
A heavyset, middle-aged woman with an extravagant glass necklace and matching earrings stood as they approached the desk. The wrinkles around her eyes gave away the smile hidden beneath her own mask. Everyone was very cheerful here, it seemed.
He showed her his badge. “I’m looking for the medical examiner.”
Her face scrunched up. “I don’t know who that is,” she said, reaching for a phone on her desk. “Give me one moment.” She dialed, waited a few seconds, and then asked someone named Terry if she knew who the medical examiner was. Terry must have asked some people on her end, because it was at least a minute before the woman in front of him hung up, and said, “Let me just try someone else.” She dialed and put the phone to her ear again, waiting.
Great, Laughton thought. Maybe he should have just waited for the ME’s report. It’d be sent to him in the morning. For all he knew, he’d missed the autopsy.
The woman hung up, and said, “I’m so sorry. No one seems to know who that is. Is there anyone you could ask on your end?”
Laughton looked at Kir.
Kir shrugged. “Can you tell us where the morgue is?”
She looked at the screen in front of her, typed something on a keyboard, swiped the screen, and then pointed toward a bank of elevators. “Take those elevators there down to the basement,” she said, and gave intricate directions that Laughton didn’t bother to remember, knowing Kir recorded them automatically.
A pair of doctors in long white coats exited the elevator when it came. It wasn’t until the doors closed and he’d pushed the button for the basement that Laughton registered that one of them had not been wearing a mask—a Dr. Check model, the ubiquitous medical robot he’d seen all his life. Perhaps he was naive, but he’d really thought there were actually no robots on the preserve. He guessed some medical procedures must be best left to a robot, which explained why one would be in the hospital. Still, if he’d thought it was jarring to see so many people, it was even more shocking to see a robot. He’d never have believed there’d ever be such a time in his life, but it had actually been months since he had seen a robot. With his record broken, he realized how much he had liked it.
He started to say something about it to Kir, and then it struck him that Kir was a robot. His streak had already been broken that morning, he just didn’t think of Kir in those terms.
The basement was like a tunnel, with bundles of pipes and wires hanging overhead. The lighting was naked bulbs, and there were painted metal doors along the way with scuffs and dents. They reached another elevator, and Kir stopped, pushing the call button.
“We have to go back upstairs?” Laughton said.
“There’s actually another floor below us,” Kir said.
This elevator was an oversize freight elevator, large enough to hold three gurneys at once. Empty, it felt like a room.
Downstairs, the hallway seemed narrow, a result of the sanitize chamber that had been retrofitted along the outside of the morgue in the aftermath of the first pandemic. Inside the chamber there were benches and spare hazmat suits. It was cold, colder than the rest of the hospital. Through the window of the inner door, Laughton could see eight cadavers laid out on stainless steel tables and covered with sheets. Three medical students in hazmat suits were gathered around one of the tables, their corpse uncovered, its chest open. One of them was hunched over the body, her hands in the cavity as she made careful cuts to remove one of the organs. A tablet on a stand showed a painting of some anatomical structure.
Sitting on a stool at a high shelf was an older man with thick gray hair, not wearing a suit or even a mask. If he doesn’t have to wear one, Laughton thought, then no way I am. The chief pressed the release button to the side of the inner door. A red light flashed, and with a thunk, the outer door locked, and the light turned green as the lock disengaged on the inner door.
The smell in the room was like a physical assault, a burning in the back of the throat. It mixed with Chief Laughton’s headache to send a wave of nausea from his gut to his mouth. Where did they get this many human bodies?
The older man had stood when Laughton and Kir walked in. Now, as they approached, he said, “May I help you?”
Laughton showed him his ID, taking off his own mask. “You are… ?”
“Dr. Conroy,” the older man said. Then the ID registered. “You’re working the murder?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why he’s here,” Dr. Conroy said. Then to Kir, “Why are you bothering to wear that?” he said.
Kir said, “Jesse thought it would help me blend in.” He left it on. “I kind of like it.”
Dr. Conroy shrugged. “I was just finishing up the report,” he said, gesturing to the tablet sitting on his high desk.
“The autopsy’s done?”
“I didn’t get any word that someone was coming.”
“Nobody knew who to contact,” Jesse said.
“They knew where to send the body.”
“Bodies go to morgues,” Kir said.
Dr. Conroy said, “Well, you want to look?” He stepped around Chief Laughton, and led them the length of the room. Built-in cabinets and a counter ran down the back wall. Fluorescent lights under the cabinets lit the various bottles and supply bins neatly organized on the counter. A large bank of stainless steel sinks was along the short wall. A light array hung on an articulated arm above each table. Dr. Conroy took them to the farthest table. He pulled the sheet off of the body, bunching it up in his arms.
Carl Smythe, his torso sporting the traditional Y-shaped incision, stitched up now, was laid out on the table. The simul-skin on the arm and leg had been peeled off, leaving just the metal skeleton. Seeing the metal alongside the organic body was disorienting. It reminded Laughton of photographs he had seen as a child of fantastical creatures that showmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used to make by gluing parts of different animals together, claiming they had mermaids or missing links on display. He had no problem with cyborgs. He knew some like Smythe had no choice.
Dr. Conroy tilted Smythe’s head to the side with gloved hands, and raised the shoulder in order to better reveal the Taser wound. The area around the two puncture points was red and slightly shiny. The punctures themselves had been cleaned, any encrusted blood washed away, but they still appeared darker than Laughton would have expected. “The subject was Tasered at close range,” Conroy said. “The puncture points are singed, which suggests to me the Taser might even have been pressed up against his neck when it was fired. The burns aren’t so bad to suggest that the Taser was left in place for a long time, though, and without a continued or repeated charge, a Taser shouldn’t have killed him. But the wounds are right on the wiring for his prosthetics, in fact with almost impossible precision. High enough charge overloaded the system, instant heart attack. Like ancient electric chairs.”
“Go back. You said ‘impossible precision.’ Why ‘impossible’?”
“Because the wiring can’t be located from outside, and it’s not like the victim would have stood still while his killer looked for it, anyway. To have caught it so perfectly is either luck or—”
“Someone with X-ray vision,” Kir said. “Meaning, a robot.”
Conroy shrugged. “Possibly.”
“Any signs of struggle? Fingernails? Scrapes?”
“No. If you ask me, I’d say the murderer came up behind the victim, grabbed him and Tasered him before the victim even knew someone was there.”
“And what’s with the arm and leg?”
“I’d say childhood accident,” Conroy said. He pointed out the spot where the metal met the flesh. “The electronic ports are old, maybe fifteen, twenty years. The limbs are newer. Means they’ve been replaced at least once. If they were from childhood, probably more than once. They’re a basic model, though. Nothing s
pecial.”
“So why were they cut up?”
Conroy went over to a sink and counter in the corner and came back with an oversize Ziploc bag that contained the mess of simul-skin he had removed from the corpse. He pulled a piece out. Simul-skin didn’t hold fingerprints well. They’d no doubt been dusted already. He unraveled the skin and pointed out what looked like a little pocket on the underside of the forearm. “My guess is that they were looking for something.”
“Was it there? Did they get it?”
“Well, we didn’t get it, so I’m guessing they did. Couldn’t have been bigger than a finger, probably a memory stick.”
“He hid it in his body?” Laughton’s face clenched in disgust.
Conroy shrugged. He was indifferent to the practice. He returned the simul-skin to the evidence bag, and tossed it back on the counter.
Laughton looked at Kir. “Thoughts?”
“Yes,” Kir said without elaborating.
“We have no way of knowing anything was actually in the arm,” Laughton said, although it seemed likely.
“No,” Conroy said.
Laughton closed his eyes for a moment to think. He shook his head. So if something was hidden in the arm, that could have been the motive. What was it? He opened his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
“I’ll have the report tonight, but I told you everything that matters.”
“Thanks,” Laughton said again.
“I know it’s not much.” The doctor seemed almost embarrassed in his apology, like he’d failed by not finding more.
“Nice meeting you,” Laughton said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but, I hope I never have to see you again.”
Conroy looked at Kir. “And I hope I never see you again.”
“So do I,” Kir said. “Tell me, why don’t you wear the suit? Isn’t it required?”
Dr. Conroy said, “The suits just make people feel better. If another plague is coming, it won’t be a suit and a couple of doors that save me.”
Laughton replaced his mask, though, just so he wouldn’t get a hard time from security. “In the long run,” he said, “nothing can save you.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” the doctor said as they filed past the filled tables, back to the air-lock door.
The Preserve Page 7