Fang and Claw

by Markie Madden

  “I assume it logs each time the card is swiped?” Colton folded his arms across his chest.

  “Yeah, but it’s all wireless. The logs go right to the office, they’re not kept here.”

  Lacey nodded. “Then, we won’t keep you from your work any longer.” Her voice held a dismissive tone. “I still advise you not to take any trips for the time being.”

  Blyge’s eyes grew wide and he audibly gulped, but he said nothing, just turning on his heel and heading toward a small restroom off the elevator foyer. Lacey had already pushed the down button to summon the elevator, and in moments, the silver, highly polished doors opened with a soft beep. With a gesture, Colton held his arm over the car’s infrared sensor, waiting until Lacey had stepped inside before following her. As they listened to the quiet bing of each floor passing, he turned to her.

  “So, our next stop is to his office?”

  She gave him a tight, humorless grin. “You read my mind.”

  9

  Colton was silent on the ride over to McCormick Shine, the company that was contracted to do the majority of the window washing in the city. Lacey had been surprised to find that there were several companies that did this sort of work; McCormick’s seemed to be the busiest. In appreciation at how her partner had handled himself on the roof, she put the car on auto drive and turned the radio on to a popular music station. They were halfway through the snarl of late afternoon traffic when his head began to bob with the beat.

  She kept her eye on the road ahead, a habit long-ingrained from a time gone by when you HAD to steer the car. Lacey wasn’t certain if her partner’s aversion to her driving was due to the fact that he, too, remembered the days when people actually did drive their cars, and technology hadn’t advanced far enough to prevent the horrible accidents that came with monotonous regularity, or if it was because he was young enough to have never known people to use manual driving rather than the auto drive. In her opinion, doing it yourself was just much more fun.

  Whichever the case may be, she could see with her peripheral vision that he was beginning to relax. She cracked a window and let the cooling air and the sounds of the city in. She could feel the rush of wind on her skin, and her hair ruffle with it.

  “Why are we bothering with getting these logs?” Colton spoke up as if afraid he would forget the question if he didn’t ask right this minute.

  “Well, so that we can see if he scanned out of the cage around the time of Mrs. Smith’s home invasion.” She assumed that fact had been obvious.

  “I know that, but would he have told us about it if he were guilty? If there was a way we could break his alibi with the logs?”

  “It’s not like a state secret. For all he knew, we already knew that it kept a log of who went in and out. If I’d known more about the process, I would have asked the receptionist about it the first time I talked with her.”

  “You have a point there. Still, it seemed like he volunteered this information too easily.”

  “Most criminals are, deep down, not very smart,” she said as the car chimed for her attention; they were coming abreast of a large parking area, and auto drive couldn’t operate in a parking lot except as an aide for backing up into a space. “That’s why they get caught.”

  “You are so right about that!” He chuckled.

  Lacey expertly parked the car, and they made their way across the black, pitch-sticky pavement that had the smell of fresh tar. “This place makes a lot of money,” Lacey commented, looking down at the smooth dark lot.

  Colton took a moment to bend down and put his fingers to the solid surface. “I’d say this has only been here a few months, at most,” he agreed. “I guess I never gave much thought to how the high-rises kept their windows clean. I bet they pay good wages.”

  “Well, let’s see what they have to say about Mr. Blyge.”

  The building had a facade of gray-toned, smooth river rock, with huge windows covering what seemed to be entire walls, except in those areas where weight-bearing was needed. Vinyl trim, in a drab color that reminded Lacey of automotive primer, surrounded the windows, the door frame, and the roof overhang around the entire structure. The windows sparkled, as one would expect from a business whose living was made by cleaning the glass of other buildings. A cheerful bell rang when Lacey opened the door.

  A short, pert woman sat behind an over-sized oak desk covered with live, flowering plants. A gigantic, multi-line phone sat next to a flat screen computer monitor. The brunette woman had a hands-free unit on her head, complete with earbud and small microphone near her prim and lipsticked lips. She smiled and held a hand up in greeting when she saw Lacey and Colton, making it obvious she was in the middle of a phone call. Her fingers flew across the keyboard of her computer.

  “Thanks for calling McCormick,” she said pleasantly, then touched a button on the phone.

  “Welcome to McCormick Shine! How can I help you?” Lacey pulled her badge. “Oh, I bet you’re the one was talking to earlier! Did you find Jason okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we sure did.” Lacey pulled out her tablet. “I need to get the key card scans for this job Mr. Blyge did. Not clock ins but the scaffold log.” She read off the date of Mrs. Smith’s home invasion.

  “Sure, I can get those to you in a jiffy!” She clicked a few keys on the computer, and the sound of a printer from somewhere under the desk could be heard.

  “You ever notice any discrepancies in the logs?” Colton asked her. “False readings, glitches, anything like that?”

  “Oh, I don’t audit the logs, Jessica does. But she’s out sick today. Caught a touch of the flu or something. But she’s never mentioned anything like that, as far as I know.”

  “Any way to falsify the scan at the other end?”

  The woman shook her head at him. “I don’t know about that, I really don’t know much about the system. You’d have to ask one of the IT guys who set it up.”

  The printer stopped its gentle purring, and her head disappeared briefly under the desk. When she straightened, she had several pages of paper in her hand. Using a stapler hidden in a recess of the desktop, she attached the papers together with a snap and handed them to Lacey, who gave a small groan. Real paper. I thought everyone had gone electronic?

  “Thanks for your help.” Colton turned his back to the woman and headed for the door. Lacey followed.

  Once they were back in her car, Lacey handed Colton the list. “Paper!” She said in dismay. “Can you believe that? I didn’t know anyone used it for files anymore.”

  “Probably they don’t have to access the logs very often.” He started rifling through the pages. “And when they do, it’s on a computer linked to their system. They probably don’t have much need for a print out of them.”

  She could see his point, but it didn’t make her much happier at the prospect of slogging through the pages. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him flip to a page, then to the previous one, and back again.

  “What’s the date and time of that home invasion?”

  “I don’t remember the time.” She pitched her voice to alert the vehicle’s on board computer system. “Computer, access case file U-8192118S.” A soft tone alerted her that the information was on screen. “Check it out there, you’ll find it.” He leaned closer to the screen nestled in the dash between them, squinting to read the small print. He flipped a few more pages.

  “Damn it, son of a bitch!”

  At his outburst, she grabbed at the wheel, forgetting that the car was on auto drive and thinking a collision with another vehicle was imminent. However, when he threw the pages onto the dash, she relaxed.

  “What?”

  “According to this, Blyge was just where he said he was, up on a scaffold hanging from Fountain Place. So he’s completely alibied for the home invasion!”

  “Not 100 percent.” Lacey’s voice was quiet. “I’ve been thinking on how it would be possible to falsify the log. I want someone from CED over at McCormick’s, to run a fu
ll check on their system and make sure nothing was tampered with. But, I think there’s another way.”

  Colton looked up from the computer, where he had been sending a message to the Computer and Electronics Division requesting a tech. “How do you mean?”

  “He scans the card to enter the gondola, and it unlocks the safety ring for his harness, right?”

  “That was the impression I got.”

  “So, what happens if he doesn’t actually secure the harness line to the ring and swipes his card again? Can the safety ring verify if the harness was placed in it when it was locked?”

  “Oh, you mean he scanned in like he was hooking up, but really didn’t? So his harness wouldn’t be attached to the safety ring?”

  “Right. Then he could come and go at will without having to scan the card.”

  He rubbed his chin, lost in thought. “I’ll append that to the CED geeks, have them check it out. Do you really think he’d be that stupid? That’s a long way up to have no safety measure.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s a possibility I’d like to check off or have as a bargaining chip, one way or the other.”

  “I got you.” He turned back to the computer and finished his task.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  Lacey drove to the lab first. Colton had been there many times before, but he never did like the place. It always felt as if someone were watching him through the opaque glass walls. Not to mention the smells of the place: the salty scent of sweat, the acrid bite of formalin and other chemicals used to preserve samples of skin and tissue, and the flat, metallic smell of human blood. Rather than make him hungry, as one might think, the overpowering scents of the lab often left him feeling a bit nauseated. He hated his trips to the lab.

  Lacey strode through the lobby with her long-legged stride, and he struggled, with his unusual wolf-like lumber, to keep up with her. She never hesitated as she hopped onto one of the escalators, something he knew he would never be able to do. The floor isn’t supposed to move on its own, he thought as his stomach did a flip. After his customary pause to get both legs properly under him, he took a step onto the moving platform, reaching for the hand rail with both hands. Lacey looked back at him, a perplexed and curious look on her face. He tried to evade her but knew she wouldn’t let it go.

  “So, you don’t really like heights, I don’t much care for moving steps.” He said it quietly enough that none of the humans who were nearby would be able to hear it, but he knew that she did. “I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”

  A look of understanding passed between them, and Lacey turned to stare at the backs of the two people in front of her. Colton gritted his teeth until they reached the 5th floor, and sighed in relief to feel solid ground under his feet once again. He took a moment and shook himself, much like a dog shaking the dust from its coat. It was an instinctual movement that always made him feel better when he came across something that stuck icy fingers of fear into his spine. He felt a slight embarrassment that he had told the Vampire of his fear, but, he thought, she had shared something personal with him earlier, and quid was pro quo in his book.

  One they arrived at Blood and Tissue, Lacey went right to Linus’ station. Colton had never worked with the man, though stories of his excellent and often quick work had reached him even when he was a drone cop.

  “Nice to meet you, after all this time,” he told the other man, sticking out his large hand. Linus shook his hand with enthusiasm.

  “How are things going on over there, in the, what are they calling it?” Linus asked.

  “The Undead Unit.” Colton sneered as he said it. “They think they’re rewarding us by setting up a special unit, but they have to be snide about naming it.”

  Lacey laid a hand on his arm. “I don’t think anything else would have sounded any less derogatory.” He looked down at her hand, and after a moment, she let him go.

  “Did you bring me something?” Linus spoke up.

  Lacey pulled the DNA kit from the small shoulder bag that she tended to wear cross-body, and used her tablet to scan the bar code on the vials containing Blyge’s mouth swabs. Linus did the same. “This is a swab from a suspect, known as Jason Blyge, you’ll find all his pertinents in the meta-data.” Any information she entered in her tablet that was flagged as being connected with their suspect would be included in the bar code system, making it easier for lab techs who had to handle massive amounts of evidence that came their way each day.

  Linus took the kit. “I’ll get on this right away.”

  “I want you to run it through CODIS and against that unknown DNA you pulled from the tissue sample I sent in earlier.”

  “Your gut telling you something?”

  “I’m not sure,” she replied. “But it would definitely be helpful to have something to tie him to that attack. The vic can’t really identify him in a lineup, she says it was too dark.”

  “All right!” Linus clapped his hands together. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have something to tell you. Might be a few days, we just had a round of new Academy recruits to put through the system.”

  Though DNA testing had improved over the years, and became cost-effective enough, samples were now taken from a wider variety of people: anyone in law enforcement, those in the military, politicians, people suspected or convicted of a crime, those in jail, and of course, the Immortals. Even recruits to the police academy were required to offer up their DNA. Once in the lab, each sample would undergo the process of DNA profiling and therefore be stored forever in the database of CODIS.

  From his studies at the Academy, Colton knew as much as the next person about human DNA. A large percentage of the population had around 99% similar DNA; what was used in forensic studies was the very small percentage that was unique to each person. PCR and STR testing could provide a fingerprint of sorts of certain locations on individual chromosomes. And that was as far as he understood the whole genetics process.

  He also knew that the DNA of any registered Undead was stored in the database, likely right next to the country’s worst and lowest criminal offenders, knowing how the majority of politicians felt about the Immortal souls that shared their planet. Just a few decades ago, the DNA of any Immortal was of incredible interest to scientists and politicians alike. Science had studied their genetics for years, ostensibly to learn how to extend the human lifespan and cure diseases, but he had always thought they were looking for a way to give the human lifespan to the Immortals instead. He loved conspiracy theories.

  In his line of work, DNA had become essential. It was recovered at crime scenes with ease, tested in labs in a rapid way, and juries leaned heavily on it for conviction or acquittal. Colton could remember a time when, though he wasn’t in law enforcement at the time, DNA hadn’t even been admissible in court cases. Now, it was akin to a body in a homicide case a hundred years ago: no DNA, little chance for a conviction.

  Lacey nudged him with her elbow, and he nodded a goodbye to Linus as he followed her out the door.

  10

  “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” ~~Socrates

  Lacey parked her car in the parking garage, and stepped from the vehicle with ease. Knowing that it took her partner more than just a mere moment to heave his bulk out of her luxurious seat, she waited for him to stand and close the car door before she said, “I want to go down to CED.”

  “I already sent a tech over to McCormick.”

  “I know. But I want to talk to them about the system that’s set up in the gondolas, maybe learn a bit more about the way they work. If it’s possible to tamper with the logs and how easy or difficult it might be.”

  “All right.” Colton stretched his arms and arched his back as they walked. “It’s been a while since I’ve been down there.”

  The Computer and Electronics Division, the Geek Squad, was located in the basement of the cavernous police department building to control access to the computer networking area, and to insure the prop
er regulation of temperature for all the major computer servers. Lacey and Colton scanned their badges in the elevator before it started its descent toward the subterranean level. After just a few moments, the doors opened and deposited them into a dimly-lit foyer with dark brown carpeting from wall to wall.

  Just ahead was a single, large, double door with an electronic reader. If it so happened that anyone not associated with the police department managed to get the elevator to bring them to the floor, this was as far as they would be able to get. The double door was as strong as a bank vault, though the opaque, bullet-proof glass windows allowed some light to seep out from the room beyond. Once again, the two officers swiped their badges; the camera built into the electronic reader would have registered there were two of them and required verification from both before it would allow them through.

  Inside, the space smelled bland, as if there was almost an absence of scent. Lacey knew part of the reason for that was the supercharged air filtration system that ran on a continuous basis, so that there was never so much as a speck of dust in the large room. It wasn’t quite a Class A clean room, but it was damn close.

  The techs who worked in this bunker, as well as anyone visiting, as they intended to do, were all required to first pass through a series of air-lock doors, one of which hit them with a blast of air in order to flush dirt and debris that might be in their hair, or on their clothing or boots. On the way out, the airlock would also scan them, checking that they hadn’t slipped anything into their pockets or bags.

  The walls were a blinding white in color, and the overhead lights just added to the brightness. Each side of the long room contained light brown counter tops, which were littered with a number of different items, most of them resembling the inside of a computer or mother boards. Also at each work station was a sophisticated microscope; some of the chips in today’s electronics were so small that the microscope was necessary for removing or replacing them on the circuit boards. Lacey would never figure out how people could stand to work in such a secure and strict environment.