by Jolie Mason
CHAPTER ONE
*
2102, Christmas Day
Detective Hayden Thursday leaned over the grotesque image of a body frozen in dimensional stasis, and sighed loudly. This was her second crime scene today, and her third murder this week.
"Risen, tell me you have an answer on cause of death this time?" Hayden looked up to glare accusingly at the medical examiner as only a frustrated homicide detective could.
Dr. Charlie Risen didn't like to commit to anything, not without all the proper tests. Educated guesses were against his religion or something. He pushed back his containment visor and matched Hayden glare for glare. "I can give you time of death," he said testily. "Anything else is bullshit."
"Fine," she sighed again. "Give me time of death."
"According to the stasis field read outs, about twenty minutes ago."
Hayden felt that old familiar nausea grind through her stomach. She looked at Risen to see a mirror of her own horrified expression.
"You're telling me this man was alive when officers arrived on scene?"
Risen nodded, then hurried to say, "But, they couldn't have known. That was deliberate torture, I suspect, though I can't test that hypothesis."
Hayden ran a palm over her face, then stood. Her smaller stature didn't even come close to catching up to most of the men and women on the scene. Looking up was a way of life for her, and she did so now, searching the high beams of the construction site for any movement that couldn't be a police probe or an officer on perimeter search.
"So, let's recap. This guy," she looked down at the handsome businessman in the expensive suit who was frozen like an ice statue in a stasis field used generally for handling volatile chemical compounds. The bomb squad had their share of them. The unit was portable, small enough to fit in the back of a patrol vehicle, and it kept things from going boom, until someone at sec law wanted it to go boom.
Hayden looked at her palm comm device, and read his name. "Antony Price worked for Paradigm Industries, the contractor of this project. He was brought here, to the future home of Paradigm North America," she gestured at the crime scene which was a collection of heavy equipment and mounds of mud and dirt.
"Where he was sliced twice in the abdomen and then placed in one of the on site hazardous materials stasis units, so that he could be aware and awake while first responders, who would have priority of securing the scene, would believe him to be past help until it was too late."
Risen moved around the body, which had been suspended but now lay on body bag, to stand side by side with Hayden. "It was a very slow bleed. He was probably already past help, but he likely wouldn't know that. The stasis wouldn't stop the bleed out, but it would have slowed it to an excruciating rate. He could have been here for more than a day. Yesterday was Christmas Eve. The crew was on holiday break. Someone wanted their victim to die this way; slowly, painfully and within yards of the holiday traffic of downtown. Twisted," Risen finished with a measure of horror in his voice.
"God," Hayden said disgustedly. "Okay, just get me the report soon, Risen. I'll do the notify and start profiling my vic. God, this just... I really hate the holidays."
"You'll have a report in a couple days."
Hayden sighed. "Just hurry. I have a very bad feeling about this one."
Risen adjusted his collar against a brisk wintry wind. "I'm not sure how anyone could have a good feeling about this one."
She walked away from the body toward the canvassing officers outside the barrier of the construction site. Chain wire fencing and posted no trespassing signs had done very little to stop their killer, and it wouldn't have kept back the onlookers either.
It was the Metro police officers who did that. She recognized Havel from a distance because of the nose. He had a very large nose, was famous for it in the metro, because he swore he could sniff out a crime. There were those who swore they’d seen him do it. Thursday thought it had a lot to do with his family ties to local crime bosses.
He carried a note device and wore the deep blue uniform of a patrol unit with a south side patch emblazoned on the shoulder. She made her way to him, noticing that the sky was taking on that steely look of bad weather and feeble, underfed snowflakes were beginning to spit down on the small crowd pushing at the energy barrier that kept the crime scene pristine.
"Havel, find anything?"
The officer stepped away from the holo-barrier he and his partner had erected an hour ago that allowed police to come and go as needed.
"Nothing so far, Detective." Havel consulted his tran, a wrist device that used holo tech to project images and allow the user to access information, write reports, take notes, and communicate with the world, as he debriefed her. "Stanislaw is getting the list of employees and people with access. He'll E that to you as soon as he has it."
She looked around at the crowd behind the barrier. Mostly, it looked like just a bunch of neighborhood knockabout. No visible master criminals waited in the fringes that she could see. Of course, she was looking with a cop's eyes, reading body language and eyes. Nothing jumped out.
"We got no witnesses? How is that possible?" She gestured at the crowd.
Havel shook his head. "You tell me. There's a concert in the plaza not two blocks from here. Shopping on all four sides of us. I don't get it, either. It's like your guy's a ghost."
"Guess it takes a ghost around here to make a ghost. Tell me you have something, anything I can actually use."
Gesturing to another tall officer standing just inside the construction mobile center doorway, Havel gave the kind of signal only a partner of years would translate correctly, barely a gesture. The officer went inside and emerged again with a man in a very moneyed suit. He carried a file tran and a briefcase.
She eyeballed the surrounding high rise project in the making and looked at Havel with a sardonic grimace. "Lawyer?"
Havel chuckled. "Lawyer."
"Fuck," she breathed, then walked to meet the two, putting out her hand. "Detective Thursday, Metro Homicide."
"Morning, Detective. My name is Abdul Hamid Rosso. I am council for Bright Construction Group."
Hayden lifted her brows at the man. His dark skin and hair suggested middle eastern ancestry, but the name was something else.
"Rosso? Really?"
The handsome lawyer gave her his best courtroom smile and said, "My father was old school Italian, or so the family has always claimed. He died in the service when I was very young. I doubt they can be sure of anything anymore. Records before the Great War are sparse."
"It's a mouthful for any kid, so to what do I owe the pleasure, Mr. Rosso?"
The man handed her the file tran, and waited while she perused it. She held the transparent film in her hand, where it activated by touch, allowing the text to appear before her.
"Well, this is a pleasant surprise," she said as she scrolled through it, reading carefully. "A promise of complete access and cooperation. And," she flipped the thin page to one attached to it. "A list of employees. This is very forthcoming, Mr. Rosso. It's unusual to see in my line of work."
She glanced up at the lawyer to see him actually give her a legitimate smile of amusement, as opposed to a plastic grin meant to distract.
He said, "The Vale is a very important project to the city and my clients, Detective. We want this person found just as much as you do, possibly more."
"I can understand that, since this can't be good for attracting the right renters to your apartments. Pretty upscale, aren’t they?” She asked the question as she looked up at the skeletal tower above them.
“May I ask you a few questions about the victim, Mr.
Rosso?" she asked him, testing out this promise of cooperation immediately.
"Of course," he answered.
"Did Mr. Price have a reason to be at the construction site yesterday?"
The lawyer shook his head. "None of which I am aware. Mr. Price's involvement in every project stops at the sale. Once the property is acquired, he's on to his next acquisition."
"So, there shouldn't have been a business matter that might have drawn him here so late on Christmas Eve," she repeated to confirm her own understanding, and it helped when questioning a potential witness to rephrase what they just said. Who knew what it could jar loose?
"That's not to say there wasn't something, but, if he had a reason, I couldn't begin to guess. He has a family. Two small children. I... I can't imagine what would have called him away from them on a holiday evening. Not to mention his political ambitions."
"Political ambitions?"
"He just announced he was leaving the company on a leave of absence, possibly for good, if he won his bid for election. Wanted to run for Councilman of the Borough."
"Interesting. Well, thank you for all your help, Mr. Rosso. I have a number for you in this, if I need you again?" She waved the thin file in the air.
He nodded.
Hayden wrapped up her questions once the wind took a more bitter turn. There were no witnesses she could find, either, and the crowd was thinning out as the snow came down harder. She'd go back into the precinct and look over what she had, see if anything stood out.
*
The Fifteenth Precinct housed homicide for the Waldorf Borough in its antiquated halls, and it was base of operations for Thursday and her partner, Detective Randall Ace, known only as Ace to all his friends because he hated his first name with a passion.
Ace was, in fact, his real family name, and no one knew how that had ever come to be, though Ace suspected it had been some type of unsavory ancestor trying to outrun the law, making it more ironic that Ace was himself a veteran crime fighter of more than twenty years.
In the past, he had been a hard drinking, hard living veteran of the Armed Services, however, today he was her partner, her best friend and a reformed man.
Today, he was in fine form, growling like a hungry bear.
"Thursday, this case is shit!"
"Speak up, Ace. They couldn't hear you at the Mayor's office."
"Have you read this?" He tossed a file tran onto his desk in patent disgust.
"Just got in, Ace. What is it? Is that my report?" She pointed at the file tran.
He nodded. "Vic one. My god, Hayden, it's worse than we knew."
Hayden reached for the file to browse the pertinent facts. "Stasis allowed victim maximum exposure to acid as she died. Habeas Corpus, that's sick! What the hell is wrong with this guy? I mean this is beyond despicable. This is weapons grade twisted."
"I don't know," Ace growled in surly unhappiness. "But, we can't wait for him to strike again. He's moving too quickly, making too few mistakes."
Thursday snapped her eyes up to look at her partner. "What do you want to do? We don't have a pattern other than the stasis field, and that's common enough that it's not much of a lead. What connects these two?"
Ace rolled back on his old fashioned wheeled desk chair, which had followed him throughout his career, and looked up at the ceiling. "I don't know. What connects a teacher and a politician?"
"Not much but funding. They didn't know each other. They didn't have acquaintances in common, and they didn't have business interests. Anything socially?"
Ace said no, "And, even if they had... to kill like this?"
Thursday shook her head. "Yeah, doesn't seem like enough somehow? This isn't simple jealousy or anger."
"Detective Thursday!"
The booming voice of the precinct captain, Margery Alexander hit her hears with the musical lilt of a derailing train.
"Captain." She acknowledged the rotund woman in her ill fitting suit; Always a skirt suit, when women officials hardly wore them anymore. The majority of females on the force preferred to look more like their male counterparts in the same job. And, that said all one needed to know about Margery. She was contrary and old fashioned. She was also convinced that Hayden Thursday was the devil.
"Any movement on the serial cases?" she demanded.
"Nothing as yet, Captain, but Ace was just expounding a theory."
The old man glared her way. To the Captain, he said, "We're looking into potential connections between the victims."
Hayden felt the buzz beside her ear that meant she had a call. Gesturing to Ace, she stepped aside and accepted it.
Using local audio only, she listened to Risen's overexcited voice telling her to get down to the morgue.
She hadn't ever seen Risen get excited on a case, so this was odd. Thursday caught Ace's eye and gestured for him to come on. "We have a lead, Captain. Risen wants us downstairs now."
"Risen?" he asked skeptically.
She shrugged. Some instinct made her pause. Maybe it was the case, but Hayden felt a little spooked lately, on edge. She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out her stunner putting it calmly into the small belt holster that was standard issue for all officers, patrol or otherwise. Everyone carried non lethal weapons, but detectives were allowed to sign out lethal weapons or carry their own, as were all the violent crimes departments of the Metro Police.
Better to have it and not need it, right? She thought as she pulled on a jacket to cover the weapon's belt.
She and Ace took two flights of stairs because no one trusted the lift. It had a tendency to go too fast sometimes as it passed the fifth floor. Maintenance couldn't seem to get it working right, and everyone was waiting for it to kill someone.
The transparent walls of the morgue unit revealed every room beyond, so that cameras could document all evidence gathering. Risen's office, beyond the exam room where two bodies occupied two containment tables, was empty at the moment.
Thursday jumped as Risen cleared his throat from behind them. She made a small noise of shock and surprise, and felt the breath jump out of her lungs and run away from the very disturbing environment that was Risen's morgue. God, she hated it down here.
Thursday ordered her body to calm down, but it didn't listen very well as usual. The morgue made her nervous. "Sneaky, Risen," she complained. "When ya gonna stop being so damned sneaky?"
The medical examiner frowned. "I've told you before it's the containment shoes."
"Fine. Fine," she dismissed his explanation for her own; The man was sneaky. And, usually, stingy with facts. "What had you in an almost emotional and uncharacteristic state on the comms?"
Rolling his eyes at the insult to his lack of emotional response that he probably didn't consider an insult at all, he led them both to the outer wall of the exam room just this side of the containment shell, and directed their attention to the results screen above them on a screen attached to the transparent wall.
Hayden read the data with no luck translating it to something she could comprehend.
"Risen, I don't speak scientist. Translate."
Impatiently, the little man waved his hand. "Don't you see?" he demanded. "You're looking at your connection between the victims, all of them."
"Okay, which part?" There were two screens there, and both were mainly numbers and DNA images.
"This part," he said tapping the first screen in his typical grandstanding fashion. "The connection is in the DNA. Your victims were both kinders."
Thursday stopped to stare at the ME. "I didn't hear that right. They were kinders, homegrown babies from Kinder Tech?"
Delighted to have surprised the detectives with this piece of evidence that had him unusually excited, he grinned.
"Absolutely, there are about five hundred, give or take, in existence today, leftovers from the boom period of the cloning technology that gave them life. Some of the most advanced tech of our age, Detectives. It's amazing! You are looking at man made DNA.
> “Kinder Tech has, of course, been taken over by the National Trust, but the archive of its research should still exist, if you can obtain a court order," he said, then reached in his lab coat pocket with a flourish and pulled out a tran. "Which I took the liberty of filing on your behalf."
It was Thursday's turn to be delighted. With a small whoop, she took the tran file and gave the medical examiner an awkward side hug.
"Risen, you just earned yourself a Christmas present."
He blushed, and said, "That isn't necessary. I'm not a believer."
"That's okay," she answered, waving the tran at Ace. "Tonight, I am. Let's go."
Ace cut her that look, the one that said she'd clearly lost her mind. Hayden saw it often. "It's nighttime, Thursday. The Archives won't be open now."
"We can call the manager in," she suggested hopefully.
"You can go home and get some rest like a normal person, Hayden. I know I am."
She made a frustrated sound. "But...,"she waved the file in his face. "Clue!"
Ace sighed. "It will still be there in the morning."
"Yes, but I'm here now."
The two men exchanged long suffering glances, and, ignoring Thursday, they both walked away content that it was finally time to go home and leave this nightmare case behind them. Meanwhile, Thursday was left in annoyed silence staring at a court order she couldn't use for hours when she wanted her answers now.
That left Hayden with no choice but to go home and wait for morning to start solving the case. She detested waiting, not when she had a clue, a place to start.
They were both kinders. That was too unlikely to be coincidence. She’d put money on all her vics being sourced from the same kid farm.
With both sets of parents involved passed on already, she had to focus on the victim. Unfortunately, Amy Lavaliere was a spinster, and Hayden was less than eager to go by and see Price's grieving widow while it was all so fresh. She would leave that to Ace. He was better with the families.
How would she start that conversation with a family member?
Oh, by the by, I know your husband is dead and all, but did you know he was a Kinder Kid? With the stigma involved, it was a good bet that the spouses didn’t even know.