Larry Richman and the kid Ryan had almost the same expression—
lips tight and drawn back toward the ears, eyebrows pulled together—anxious bordering on fear
The produce deliveryman stood separate from the others, but his face bore almost the same expression. Laughton remembered that micro-expression that had flashed across the driver’s face when he’d asked him if he knew Smythe. What was the guy’s name? Laughton minimized the photo and tapped his notepad, scrolling back up to the top. Barry Slattery.
Laughton jumped back to the photograph. The program had automatically returned it to its usual size, showing the whole scene. Laughton began to zoom back in on Barry, when he noticed the truck behind the driver. The lettering on the side— “Shit,” he said.
“What?” Kir said.
“I’m so stupid,” Laughton said. The lettering on the side of the truck, above the hand-painted picture of the cornucopia, said “Sisters.” “Look.” He held the phone so Kir could see.
“What?”
“The truck. It says ‘Sisters.’ I knew that guy was hiding something when I talked to him, but I was too distracted to push it.” He turned the phone back so he could get into the police database, and searched for Barry Slattery. “The Sisters use their produce business to transport their sims. One of their men just happens to be at the crime scene? I thought he was nervous just because who wouldn’t be? He didn’t seem worse than that.”
The database had returned an address for Slattery, and Jesse leaned forward to input it on the GPS’s touch screen.
“This bastard better be home,” Laughton said.
“We better let Commissioner Ontero and Secretary Pattermann know we’re going to be late,” Kir said.
“Fuck them,” Laughton said.
“I’ll stick with we’re going to be late.” The robot sent the message.
This stretch of road was becoming familiar to the chief. The mixed vegetation, fields, then woods, then fields, didn’t seem quite as wild as it had a few days ago. Now it was simply the corridor to civilization.
The commissioner’s name popped up on the dashboard screen. He’d gotten the message they were going to be late. Laughton opened up the line. “What the hell, Jesse. I told you, you needed to be here for this meeting. I need you to be here for this meeting.”
“We’ve got a lead. We need to bring him in while we can.”
“Who?”
Jesse felt an overwhelming reluctance to say. He wasn’t quite sure why. “I don’t want to jump the gun,” Laughton said.
“Damn it, Jesse, what did I say about professional courtesy?”
“Look, if you know, the metals are going to try to pull it out of you. It’s better that you can answer truthfully you don’t know.”
“Or you could tell me and I can send out some cars.”
“Can’t risk scaring him off,” Laughton said, not trusting anyone else to make the approach. “This guy knows me.” And would be just as likely to run at the sight of Laughton, if he had anything to hide, but this was the chief’s case and he didn’t want other people working it.
There was a pause while the commissioner thought. “Okay,” he said at last, resolve bolstering his voice. “Go get him and I’ll cover here as long as I can.”
“Right,” Laughton said.
“Good break,” the commissioner said.
“About fucking time,” Laughton said.
“You said it, not me.” And he hung up.
Laughton didn’t envy Ontero his job. He looked at the arrival time estimate on the GPS. Fifteen minutes. Come on, Barry. Be there.
Barry lived about a mile west of the Ashley River. Laughton didn’t know the name of the neighborhood. The roads were narrow, just wide enough to maybe allow two cars to get past one another. The weedy lawns gave way to sandy dirt at the edge of the street where cars had driven onto people’s yards to avoid collisions. The houses were glorified shacks, probably called cottages by real estate agents when they were built—one story, maybe twenty feet wide with a door and a single window in the front. They were only a driveway’s width apart. Some indeterminate green growth coated the lower half of most of the houses, making them look rundown and shabby. They passed a single well-tended lawn being cared for by a gardening bot, a low-order robot classed as a machine with no artificial intelligence, and therefore legal on the preserve. Barry’s house was two away from where the gardener was working. The awning over the front door was tilted, pulling away from the house on one side.
The chief pulled into the empty driveway, hoping the driveway was empty because Barry didn’t have a car, not that he had already taken off.
“Anyone in there?” the chief said to Kir.
The robot, using his infrared vision, nodded. “Someone is.”
“Just one?”
Kir shook his head. “Two.”
“Okay,” he said, and he got out of the truck.
The front door opened, revealing Barry in red basketball shorts that fell below his knees and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Before he could say anything, the slap of a screen door slamming out back shot through the quiet. Barry turned and yelled into the house, “Sam!” Kir had already vaulted onto the roof in a rare display of his engineered prowess, running across the top of the house toward the back.
Laughton, pulling out his gun, pushed past Barry into the house, rushed through the living room without even registering his surroundings, into the kitchen, then plunged into a weed-tangled backyard. Kir, jumping from the roof, landed in the alley in front of him and started running after a motorbike that disappeared between two of the other houses, its motor grinding like a buzz saw.
Kir followed, but Laughton stayed behind, lowering his weapon, knowing he couldn’t hope to make any progress on foot. He could hold on to Barry at least, prevent the young man from following his friend’s lead. But the genial vegetable deliveryman was standing just inside the screen door at the back of the house, watching. “Who was that?” Laughton said, opening the door.
Barry stepped back as Laughton let himself in. “Nobody.”
eyes avoiding the chief’s face, lips thin, lower eyelids barely visible—lying and afraid
Laughton stepped toward the man, and Barry stepped back, pressed against the kitchen wall. Laughton was in his face. “I don’t have time for you to lie to me. And don’t think you’ll get away with it this time.”
“This time! Ah, man, what are you talking—”
“Who was that who just flew out of here?”
“He’d just come in late last night, like middle of the night.”
“Who!”
“Man, I don’t want any part of this,” Barry said, turning his head down and away, holding his hands up in front of him.
“It’s too late for that.”
They both turned to look as the screen door opened, and Kir appeared. The robot shook his head, one short movement.
Laughton put his face uncomfortably close to the deliveryman’s. “Who was that?”
“I swear, I didn’t know that was who you were after, or I would have called.”
Laughton put both his hands flat against the wall to either side of Barry’s head, boxing the man in.
“It was Sam,” Barry said. “Sam McCardy.”
Laughton dropped his hands and took a step back. McCardy? He’d hoped maybe it was Jones, who had clearly ditched his original car, since GPS showed it sitting in place out in Santee, still at the drug club.
“He say where he was going?” Kir said.
Barry’s shoulders dropped in relief. He must have figured if they were going to arrest him, they’d have done it already. He shook his head. “I really don’t know.”
no micro-expressions—he’s telling the truth
“Could you make a guess?” Laughton said.
Eyes widening for a moment, shaking his head, he said, “I don’t know. The Sisters?”
“But he came to you first,” Kir said.
“Co
uld you give me a little more space,” Barry said to Laughton. “You’re making me nervous here.”
“Maybe we should sit down,” Kir said as Laughton stepped back. “We’re not here to arrest you. We just need your help.”
Laughton wasn’t so sure they weren’t going to arrest the guy—being at the scene of the crime made him a suspect—but he knew Kir was trying to make him comfortable. The last thing they needed was for Barry to suddenly decide he wouldn’t talk until he saw a lawyer.
“Yeah,” Barry said, nodding. “Yeah, sure, okay.” He stepped past Laughton. “Can I get either of you anything? A drink?”
“No, thank you,” Kir said.
Laughton tapped his wrist at his partner. They were short on time.
“Maybe in here?” Kir said.
Barry nodded like he just remembered that he had another room in the house. He led the way into the living room. There were two puffy, leather couches facing one another, worn tan where people had sat on them over the years. A projector sat on the metal-and-glass coffee table between the couches, pointed at the blank space above a defunct fireplace.
“You live here alone?” Laughton said as he and Kir sat down on the couch opposite the one Barry had selected.
“This was actually my grandma’s house, way back,” Barry said.
“You grew up in Charleston?”
“Only in summers,” Barry said.
Laughton nodded. The memory had relaxed Barry further. Laughton didn’t want to risk losing that. “It’s a nice city,” he said. “We lucked out when the government decided to locate the preserve here.”
“That we did.”
“Did you know,” Laughton said, “that robots from various branches of the government are on the preserve right now, arguing that this murder…”
lower eyelid shrinking—rising anxiety
“… proves humans shouldn’t be allowed to govern and police themselves.”
“I saw something of that on TV.”
“I’m just trying to prove them wrong,” Laughton said.
Barry looked from Laughton to Kir, and Kir to Laughton. “I don’t know how I can help you.”
“First, and I hate to have to do this, but you were at the scene of the crime and work for the Sisters…”
“I didn’t kill Carl.”
Laughton held out a hand. “All right, I had to ask.”
“I didn’t.”
no flicker in expression—most likely the truth
“You’ll have to understand if I’m a little skeptical of what you say, because let’s go back to what you told me at the crime scene. You said you didn’t recognize Carl Smythe, but seeing as it was Sam McCardy that just rabbited out of here, I kind of don’t think that’s the truth.”
“I didn’t recognize him,” Barry said, “because I’d never seen him before, but I heard you guys mention his name, and well, Sam and I were friends—are friends,” he corrected himself. “We trade ROM files online for old video games.”
Laughton remembered all of the old video game consoles in McCardy’s place, now melted and destroyed. “He didn’t come here last night to play video games,” Laughton said. He waited for Barry to speak. After a minute he said, “So he got here last night…”
Barry nodded. “It was like midnight, I guess,” he said.
Laughton sought to prod him some more. “He was looking for a place to stay?”
“What he— Yeah.”
“He wanted something else too,” Laughton said.
“He’s scared out of his mind,” Barry said. “He wasn’t really making sense. He wanted me to introduce him to the Sisters. Said they were going to kill him otherwise.”
Kir said, “Because they’d killed Smythe? Is that why?”
Barry shook his head. “Naw. No. You think the Sisters killed Smythe?”
“Do you?”
He wiped his lips with his hand, and shook his head. “Naw.”
“You work for the Sisters,” Kir said.
“I run deliveries—legitimate deliveries,” he hurried to add.
“They run a vegetable farm,” Laughton said.
“Most of the produce in the state comes from their farm,” Barry said.
“But you also deliver sims and drugs.”
Barry shook his head. “Never drugs. Never people drugs.”
“But sims,” Laughton said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“How long have you been working for the Sisters?”
“Two years.”
So before the preserve. “Do you think the Sisters would kill a hacker who was causing them trouble?”
Barry’s eyes darted between them, a slight panic. “I wouldn’t know.”
“But Sam thought they would.”
“I couldn’t say. All I know, he came because he wanted me to introduce him to them. He said he’d screwed something up, and he had a really good deal for them if they would protect him.”
“From who?” Kir said.
Barry shook his head. “He wouldn’t say.” His expression remained consistent. He was telling the truth.
“So his best friend was killed. He’s worried someone’s going to kill him too. What did he have to offer the Sisters? A sim?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t think?”
“He didn’t say, but I think…” He took a deep breath. “I’m just the delivery guy,” he said. “Don’t shoot the messenger, right?”
Laughton and Kir both stayed silent.
Barry watched them, waiting for reassurance. When none came, he sighed, and said, “I think he meant that he had the antivirus for this thing that’s killing robots.”
Laughton felt his stomach drop down into his bowels. It was possible there was an antivirus and it hadn’t burned up in the hackers’ house?
“Why do you say that?” Kir said.
“He had a memory stick in his pocket, and he kept pulling it out, like he was making sure it was still there. I guess it could be a sim, but it just, he kept saying it was worth more than just money. They’d want it because it would be leverage.”
Laughton nodded. It was still just as likely a sim, but Barry’s theory made sense. “But he was afraid if he went to them directly, they’d kill him?”
“Yeah,” Barry said.
Laughton tried to figure this. When the hacker ran at first, it was clearly with something else in mind. Jones had been making inroads with Titanium. Maybe McCardy thought that was what he needed to do too. But something changed that? Or he’d gone somewhere else? “Did he say where he’d been hiding?” Laughton said.
Barry shook his head. “No.”
“What else did he say?”
“Nothing,” Barry said. “He crashed soon after he got here. Woke up like twenty minutes before you showed up. Then he was just eager to meet the Sisters.”
So, Sam and Smythe release the virus together, Laughton thought. They then can sell the antivirus for huge money to the sims traders, to preserve their client base and reputation. When Smythe gets killed, however, McCardy panics. Doesn’t know who to trust. So he comes to his gamer buddy who has connections. “One thing that’s bothering me,” Laughton said, “is that you were at the crime scene. If the Sisters were going to kill Sam and Smythe, having one of their men there seems like a huge coincidence.”
“You think I haven’t thought that?” Barry said. “It’s driving me crazy.”
“You’ve got an explanation?” Kir said.
“I don’t know. Look, if they were trying to get to the Sisters around Jones, then maybe Carl came to meet me for that purpose, and someone killed him before I got there.”
“What do you think?” Laughton said to Kir. This was one of their old routines, to discuss something openly in front of an interviewee as a way of playing their anxieties.
“Makes sense to me,” Kir said.
“But we should still bring him in, just in case, while we go check things out.”
“Wh
oa,” Barry said. “No need to bring me in. I’m not going to rabbit, I swear.”
The partners both turned toward him.
“Is he telling the truth, Jesse?” Kir said.
“Tell us where we can find the Sisters,” Laughton said.
“Ah, man,” Barry said.
“Did you tell McCardy where to find them?”
Barry shook his head very fast. “No.”
“Okay,” Laughton said. “Tell us where we can find them, and I think I’ll trust you to be where we can find you when we need you.”
Barry sighed, his shoulders dropping, and his eyes opening up. “I don’t know if there’s any address. There are no numbers around in there.”
“Show me,” Laughton said, holding out his phone, open to the maps app. Without letting go, he allowed Barry to move the map around until he pointed to a building. Laughton dropped a digital pin into it. “Let me give you my info so you can call me if he comes back.” Barry fished his phone out of his pocket, and they tapped phones. “One more thing,” Laughton said. “You think McCardy did this? Maybe he and Carl got into a fight?”
Barry shook his head. “I really don’t know. All I know, he was panicked.”
“Don’t you panic now,” Laughton said.
Barry shook his head, but his eyebrows were knit in fear.
“Worst thing you could do would be to disappear.”
Barry nodded.
“Jesse,” Kir said with the polite sternness that said he had something that couldn’t wait and couldn’t be said in public, but before Laughton could respond, a text came through on his phone, and then it began to buzz almost immediately thereafter. He pulled it out, and his eyebrows frowned, the commissioner’s office. Barry’s cell was ringing now too. What happened?
“All our friends from Washington just hit the news,” Kir said as Laughton accepted the call. His stomach felt as though it had been pulled through his feet. “Laughton,” he said.
The commissioner’s secretary said, “One moment,” and then the commissioner was on. “Chief Laughton, I need you to come in now, please. The federal authorities are not happy about the delay. They want to speak with the man in charge of the homicide.” His tone was chummy, but stilted. He was not alone.
The Preserve Page 15