Memorable Murder

by Vanessa Muir

  “What?”

  “It’s a joke, Spade. Lighten up.”

  “I’ll lighten up when we’ve caught the man who did this,” she replied. She placed the used gloves in the trash receptacle within her standard issue suitcase, then reached up and unbuttoned her collar. “I’m heading back to SSG Central. Why don’t you take the evening off, Eli?”

  “And leave you alone with the case work? Boss Ink will have my ass if I do that.”

  Fucking Boss Ink. He was in charge of her division at SSG — he was the one who’d attached Eli to her unit in the first place.

  “Relax, kid, I’m just going to go over the footage again. You feel like watching the vic have her eye gouged out a couple more times?” Charlie asked and smiled up at him.

  Eli’s lips thinned. “Fine,” he said. “I’m not getting paid overtime anyway.”

  “More’s the pity.” She dug around in her bag for the car remote, then brought it out and clicked the button. Lights flashed on the other side of the street and illuminated a hulking figure on the sidewalk.

  They both froze and stared. “What was that?” Eli whispered.

  “Maybe it’s Boss Ink checking in on us,” she replied.

  “Funny, ha ha. It’s probably the killer.” Eli unhooked his gun and worked his fingers around it. He eased it out of its holster.

  “Careful. You’ll shoot yourself with that.”

  “I’ve used one before,” he snapped.

  She didn’t bother contradicting him. She’d read his entire file on the sly the minute she’d received information that he’d become her “partner’” for the foreseeable future. The man had mediocre scores at the firing range and hadn’t any experience in the field.

  Charlie checked the empty street — no vehicles — then marched across it. She drew her flashlight out of her pocket, clicked it on, and illuminated the figure.

  A woman. A streeter, to be precise. The lady huddled in a big fur coat which barely covered her naked ass. She wore ripped stockings, and enough makeup to disguise whatever face hid beneath it.

  “What choo want?” she spat, wild-eyed.

  “Oh, it’s just a streeter. Thank god,” Eli said.

  “You all right?” Charlie asked the woman.

  “What’s it matter to you?” The streeter drew back and dabbed at the end of her nose. A hint of powder there, probably narcotics. Narcotics. MemXor.

  Charlie hummed under her breath. It was a nervous habit she’d picked up when she’d lived with her father. Before she’d ultimately disappointed him by going into security rather than memory research.

  “What’s your name, honey?” she asked, and leaned against the front of her car. She directed the flashlight so it lit up the asphalt, rather than the streeter’s face.

  “Mary,” she said.

  “What does it matter what her name is?” Eli whispered. “She’s just —”

  “Mary, did you see anything weird going on today? Did you work this sector?” Charlie asked. Streeting wasn’t illegal. The state turned a blind eye, probably because they’d employed a couple of the women and men themselves. Sex sold almost as well as high-quality MemXor.

  “I always work this sector. Corden Prime Pi is my sector. Mine alone. Don’t you think of stepping into my turf,” Mary said and waggled her finger. “You don’t got the tits for it.”

  “I’m shattered,” Charlie replied and placed a hand over her heart.

  “It’s all right. Your ass ain’t too bad.”

  “Mary, thank you,” she said. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you. But I’m going to have to ask you again, did you see anything strange today? Specifically at that Mem Store facility?” She jerked the flashlight in the building’s direction, though the white and blue front was lit up already. Circular, smooth lines, meant to be a comforting paradise.

  An island in a sea of buildings and lights and smog.

  “Nothin’ I’ll talk to shieldie about,” she spat.

  “This is a waste of time,” Eli muttered. “I’m leaving.”

  “Bye.” Charlie didn’t turn to look at him. “Mary, I’m investigating the murder of an innocent woman. If there’s any information you can share with me, anything at all, I —”

  Mary launched a glob of spit at her shoes, and Charlie dodged out of the way. The saliva struck the asphalt. Mary didn’t hang around for the fallout. She gathered her crusty coat and dissolved into the night, a pale wraith on the wind.

  “Told you,” Eli said. “Waste of time. Streeters like that are just an accident waiting to happen.”

  “Are you still here?” Charlie shoved off from the front of her car and moved around to the driver’s side. “I thought you’d be out drinking with your office buddies by now.”

  “Stay away from the streeters,” Eli said. “Boss Ink won’t like it if he hears you’re using filthy sources for your investigation.”

  “Ah, I’m sure he’ll be fine with it.” The one thing she couldn’t stand was a bigot. “I’m working with you, after all.”

  “Nice.”

  She yanked open her door and slipped into the interior, inhaling the scent of discarded cigarettes and coffee. Most of that scent had gathered before she’d been given this car.

  Charlie started the engine and drove off, leaving Eli in her taillights, and the Mem Store facility in her rearview mirror.

  4

  Late at night, the office in Central took on a weird atmosphere. She’d felt it every night she stayed after work, and that meant daily. The computers would shut down at around 6 pm, apart from those SSG stragglers who stayed behind.

  By 8 pm most of the others had filed out, shoulders sagging beneath their lurid yellow shoulder stripes. The clean-up crew arrived at 9 pm and knew not to bother her by now. After that, it was icy quiet, disturbed only by the occasional howl of the wind, or the patter of rain against the windows.

  Her Perspex cubicle looked out on the forever that was Central Corden Prime. The office building across from the SSG HQ was lit up no matter the hour, and advertisements for Mem Store and MemXor streamed across the windows in bright bands.

  All of it worked together to create an illusion of calm and quiet, but the undertone was there.

  Nights brought a chill down her spine. The sensation that someone watched from the shadows behind her, but when Charlie turned there was nothing but row upon row of empty cubicles and silent computers.

  “Get your shit together,” she whispered and focused on the surveillance footage again.

  She’d gone over it piece by piece. She’d witnessed the blunt force trauma, the stabbing, the eye and thumb removal over and over again.

  She’d initially formulated a connection with Natalya. The woman had seemed kind, even through the lens of a camera. HD quality of course. But as time wore on, she’d turned her focus to the man instead.

  The killer had a limp and favored his right side. He’d almost lost control of the situation — Natalya had fought back, albeit weakly. He’d trembled after he’d finished the deed, but he’d honed in on his target without hesitation.

  “Premeditated. But why?” In her experience, armed thieves didn’t kill unless absolutely necessary. They didn’t want to draw more attention to themselves.

  But this guy, no, he wasn’t a standard thief. And he’d wanted those drugs for a real reason, not resale. Eli was wrong about that.

  An email pinged through at her terminal, and she opened it up.

  Attention Charlotte Spade,

  The requested information is released to you under the understanding that it will not travel further than you and your assistants at Stormshield Services Group. This is highly sensitive information limited to the employees of Mem Store and operatives of the State.

  The researcher scheduled to retrieve the shipment of expired product was Researcher Droggo Boersma.

  Regards,

  Julian

  Mem Store Lead Researcher and Administrator

  Charlie tuned out the res
t of his title. Operatives of the state were nothing if they didn’t brag about their meaningless job positions. Mem Store Lead Researcher and Head Cock Waggler of the Third Degree.

  But this did interest her. She had a name for her next interviewee. Perhaps, the researcher could give them some insight as to why he’d been late for his appointment, and why a random man would’ve stolen expired product.

  There was something there.

  She dragged her tablet, a thin glass plate, toward herself and unlocked the screen, then typed out a few notes.

  Droggo was late. Expired product? Why expired? What’s the difference?

  Unless the expired drugs caused an effect they didn’t know about.

  A chair creaked behind her, and Charlie whipped around and searched the cubicles. Empty. Another figment of her overactive imagination. Nothing to worry about.

  Charlie scanned again, just in case, lingering on the vacant leather-backed seats, then shook her head at herself and turned back to her notes. She typed again.

  Murder weapon was a chisel. Medical implement? Who had access to medical implements in the surrounds?

  She could pull up a long list of surgeons, dentists, folks who might’ve had access to one, but it wouldn’t get her far. She’d have better luck picking up a phone and dialing a random number, then asking them whether they’d committed a murder lately.

  Plenty of doctors had gone underground after the State had implemented strict regulations on medical practices. The murderer could’ve been one of them, or worked for one of them, or might’ve found a surgeon’s stash.

  It was all up in the air. But the drugs intrigued her.

  They were the motivation for the murder. The man hadn’t been purposeless, which meant she’d missed something with MemXor. Perhaps, they all had.

  Another noise sounded behind Charlie. Footsteps this time.

  She packed up her tablet, switched off her terminal, and high-tailed it out of there, invisible fingers clawing at her back.

  5

  The Mem Store Research Facility sat on hallowed ground, the site of the final battle between the old masters and the new state. Together with Councilor Gregor, the creator of the memory removal equipment, Absalon Shamood, used the technology he’d created to suck the plans of spies from their heads.

  Back then, the process hadn’t been streamlined. MemXor hadn’t existed to aid those who dared move against the rebellion and its finest. Rumors about what had become of the spies still circulated today but were weighed down by fear, retarded by the knowledge that Shamood’s original intent had been to damage rather than to build.

  And then the new order had come, and the state had reworked the angle.

  Charlie stood in the glass elevator and stared at her reflection, marred only by the opaque advert which scrolled across the panes.

  Mem Store Presents to You — The Only Way to Preserve Your Past and Your Future! The Mem Remover 8000.

  The twinkling elevator music accompanied the words.

  “You okay?” Eli nudged her.

  “Quit asking me that,” Charlie said. “I could be in the middle of a mental breakdown, and it wouldn’t matter. We have a job to do.” And a woman’s death to avenge.

  “Fine. No need to be so damn touchy. I was just trying to be nice.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “You don’t have to be such a bitch all the time, Charlie,” Eli said. “No one at SSG likes you because of this.”

  “I’m flattered you did a social survey on my behalf.” She hadn’t entered SSG to kiss ass and win a popularity contest. Her father’s insistence that Mem Store and the State were the best thing since sliced bread had brought out the rebellious side in her.

  If you won’t accept me, then I’ll do something that will piss you off. She’d been 18 at the time, barely out of school. She’d joined Stormshield to do the right thing, to help keep the State in line, and partly to piss him off.

  The elevator dinged, the crappy music cut off, and the glass doors slid apart, soundlessly. They entered a white tiled hall, accented by blue, glowing signs.

  Primary Memory Research. Read one. Hippocampal Dysfunction. Read another. The names flicked past in a blur.

  “There,” Eli said. “Dorky guy on the right.”

  The man in the lab coat swept fingers through his shoulder-length, shining hair. He tossed it back, in a flip to rival a runway model, then sauntered forward. “You must be the people from SSG,” he said.

  “What gave us away?” Charlie asked and patted the bright yellow badge on her breast pocket. “You’re Researcher Boersma?”

  “Droggo,” he said, “come with me. It’s, uh, it’s more private in here.” He pressed his thumb to a keypad, and another glass door slid open.

  Eli and Charlie exchanged a glance. The thumb thing had gotten old quickly.

  They followed Droggo into what appeared to be his office or work space. It held a desk, as well as a centrifuge, pipettes, test tubes, and a yellow hazard bin in the corner. He adjusted the plastic splash glass on his desk, then took a seat and gestured for them to do the same.

  Charlie settled on the edge of the chrome chair. Eli lounged as if he’d gotten home after a long day pushing papers.

  “We’re investigating the murder of one of your colleagues,” Charlie started.

  “Yes, I’m aware. Poor Natalya,” Droggo said and gave a doleful shake of the head. “Such a horrible way to die.”

  “You’re aware of the details?”

  “Only that she was killed violently,” Droggo replied.

  “You were meant to fetch a batch of expired drugs from the facility in question. You didn’t arrive. Why?” Charlie asked.

  Droggo blinked. “I — uh, I was delayed. I planned on calling, but something came up.”

  “What came up?”

  “Important research. I couldn’t get away. I’m in line to advance to Shamood’s research team, and if I mess up on one of the lesser projects here, I’ll be bumped back places. I can’t afford to —”

  “Did you call Natalya?”

  “I tried to,” Droggo said, and brought his slim phone out of his pocket. A single plate of glass, lit by numbers and images. New technology. Charlie couldn’t get used to these things. “Here, see? There’s the call log. She didn’t pick up. I called late, I’ll admit, but I — it was too late.”

  “The suspect stole the expired product from the facility,” Charlie said. “Do you have any idea why that might be?”

  Droggo rolled back in his seat, placed the phone on the desk. “But that’s impossible. The drugs would’ve been secured. Natalya wasn’t sloppy. I worked with her on a few projects before she was relocated to facility duty. She wouldn’t leave drugs unsecured.”

  “They were secured at the time of the theft,” Eli put in.

  “But that would mean —” Droggo’s complexion went icy pale. “I — no, I don’t know why.”

  “Any information you can give us about MemXor and how it works would be valuable,” Charlie said. Anything to make sense of the crime. If they were for personal use, it would mean the man had been to the facility prior, yet she hadn’t found record of him in the logs on site.

  Granted, she still had hours of security footage to trawl through.

  “It’s a stabilization drug,” Droggo said.

  “Yeah, tell us something we don’t know,” Eli replied.

  “He means, we need information about MemXor which is more detailed. Things the public wouldn’t necessarily be privy to.” Charlie tapped the pressure pad at her temple and started a recording of the researcher.

  “MemXor was created to stop the degeneration of brain cells during the memory removal process. Removing or copying a certain memory, long or short term, can cause rapid degeneration of the hippocampus.”

  “The hippowhatus?” Eli asked.

  “It’s a portion of the brain responsible for memory, movement, mood, and many other functions. Degrade the hippocampus, and you degrad
e those functions.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, the person who experienced the procedure might become… unstable. Thus, the stabilization drugs. MemXor is brilliant, it prevents the breakdown of neurotransmitters in the brain.”

  “You lost me,” Eli said.

  “It stops the little messengers in the brain from acting up, thus helping the hippocampus communicate with itself and the rest of the brain’s hemispheres,” Droggo said.

  “It has no side-effects?”

  “Minor and very rare, mood swings and so on.” The researcher dismissed it with a wave. “In isolated cases.”

  “Would the efficacy of the drug decrease if the product is expired?”

  “Interestingly, no. MemXor would still strengthen the neurotransmitters and allow their recycling.”

  “What’s the catch?” Charlie asked.

  “It’s a hybrid drug. In order to make it viable, Mem Store attached another drug on its end, one that combats negative physical side-effects in users.”

  “All right?”

  “That drug, RelaxIn, is the one which has an expiration date. It, uh, when it expires, there won’t be any relief from an adverse reaction to the MemXor component. Folks might potentially lose control of their behavioral functioning or — look, it’s not too serious. Minor setbacks, we call them in the scientific community.”

  Charlie pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’d call having an eyeball ripped out a minor setback, would you?”

  “Spade.” Eli’s voice took on the Boss Ink quality. As if he was in charge of the investigation.

  Droggo’s lips quivered, white around the edges.

  “Is there any reason someone would want expired product rather than the regular kind? Any at all?”

  “No. Not unless they wanted people to become unstable. Or they didn’t realize what they’d picked up,” Droggo whispered.

  “Thank you for your time,” Charlie replied. “I think we have all we need for now.” She lurched out of the chair, a sense of triumph brewing in her gut. They were closer to the answer.

  Now, she needed to pinpoint the perpetrator.