Genrenauts: Season One

by Michael R. Underwood

  “What about Tatiana?”

  “We’ll start with her. But I won’t leave any stone unturned on this. We can’t be sloppy.”

  “What about the prop bag?”

  “Small potatoes. Forget the training day; this is the real priority.” He felt anger creep into his voice. Don’t take it out on her. He softened. “What were you doing with the phone?”

  “I was looking up Yipe! reviews of Lake Effect—try to get a sense of whether there were any disgruntled customers, someone likely to snap. You’d be surprised at how detailed and personal the negative reviews get on there, and I figured in Crime World, they’d be a great place to look for suspects.”

  Smart thinking, newbie, he thought. “Well done. Mallery has her algorithms for Romance World, and we have our sources, but in this region, it’s still pretty old-school unless we’re talking CSI tech.”

  King reached for the bottle again, then stopped himself.

  Couldn’t get too deep into archetype, not yet. He needed to be synced up with the genre to close the case, but not so wrapped up in the tropes—or booze, for that matter—that he lost control.

  This time around, it looked like their time constraint was the storm rather than the one-week window, but working the case this hard meant there was the chance of going too far in. Responsibility to the team came before the mission. Dead Genrenauts fix no stories. Losing another team member here…

  King shook the thought off and pulled over another file.

  Keep it together, King, he heard in Nancy’s voice. She had always been a rudder, and now that he was back in her orbit, she could do so again. Even though she’d long before changed what course she was plotting.

  “Nothing’s fitting. They’re all too tall or too short. Easley’s our best bet.”

  * * *

  Leah opened Tatiana Easley’s file. It was thick, a half-inch of paperwork about priors and numerous Polaroids over the years. Well, maybe not Polaroids, but whatever company was printing the 8.5x11 photos these days in Crime World.

  A mug shot showed a thin woman with hooded eyes and stringy hair. Tatiana Easley was a Chicago native, references to a thick juvenile file closed when she hit eighteen. Five-eleven, multiple arrests for burglary, and an eighteen-month stint upstate after a bust of a Salvatore family money-laundering ring.

  “Looks like the right kind of loser.”

  “And we’ve got a last known address—three blocks from Lake Effect. She could have gotten there and back without being noticed.”

  “So, we don’t want to dig further on anyone else?”

  “We need to move the story forward. I’m betting we get at least one red herring, then an escalation at the hospital, and then maybe we can find the real killer. But if we don’t run down these story beats fast…”

  “That reminds me of something,” Leah said. “Are we sure this is a one-and-done episodic plot? The way the breach formed, the comedy troupe’s theft, the oddness with the layered case. What if this is like a HBO or BBC-style serial mystery? Or what if that’s happened with Nancy? A case so big, you can’t solve it in one episode’s worth of time?”

  King folded his arms. “The serial cases tend to come with their own feeling. There’s no killer’s note here, but with the Mob angle, there is the potential for an arc plot—bring in the small fish, work your way up. And when we were in the precinct, the filter was off; it was more gritty. I don’t think that’s the case here, but it’s a fine insight, thinking about format and structure. We’re going to work this like it’s episodic; that fits this precinct, and the restaurant and food wars angle tells me that we’re still on track. With Nancy…you could be right. Sure didn’t present itself that way, but I did miss the end of the story. Maybe I thought it was a two-parter and it was more a TV movie, that middle ground between them.”

  “Who works the serial cases, then? Different team?”

  “The LA office, mostly. They get around the time limitations by rotating through the team, splitting up the story threads, beating the slow story on its own terms. But that’s not us. We need to move fast.”

  “Got it.” Leah stood, reaching more for her coat. Her toes had barely warmed, and if they were going to come back there sometime soon, she was going to have to start packing power bars or something in her coat. They hadn’t eaten since the cafe.

  She rubbed her hands for warmth. And maybe bring some of those hand-warmers her great aunt sent her every Christmas.

  “Any chance of grabbing food on the way? Maybe something to soak up that whiskey?” she asked, trying to help.

  “It’s rum. I’m fine. I’ll eat once we bring Easley in for questioning. We’ll need an officer present for that.”

  “And we’ll be able to bring her in without a badge?”

  “That would be vigilantism. Highly frowned upon.” King smiled. She knew that smile. That was a Bad Cop smile.

  “Is this a plausible deniability thing where I don’t want to know what you’re doing?” Leah looked around the mostly empty room. One officer in the corner plugged away at her computer, and the janitor had passed by a few minutes before. Everyone else was at the hospital.

  “On Earth, it would be. Here, you need to know the tricks of the trade.” King tapped a pocket. “I nicked a badge years ago and had our props department make me a copy. It won’t hold up to a lawyer or paperwork, but it looks plenty real in person.”

  “Fair enough. Why don’t we skip transport entirely and just walk this time?” Leah asked. Her fingers and toes ached at the thought.

  “Agreed.” King looked sideways at the bottle, picked it up.

  “Really?” she asked, immediately wishing she hadn’t.

  But instead of slipping the bottle in his coat, he stuffed it back in the detective’s drawer. “And don’t worry; I’ll replace it later.”

  “Don’t take that as a reason to need to finish it.”

  “When we get these bastards, there will be plenty of reason to finish the bottle.”

  “I’m down with that. Shall we go visit Ms. Easley, then?”

  “After you, newbie.”

  Leah steeled herself for another walk in the snow. Considering that it was still late spring in back on Earth Prime, this was not easy. It usually took her a good week to get used to winter, even after spending the first eighteen years of her life in Minnesota.

  She bundled up tight, raised all of her collars as high as possible, and the wind still felt like a scythe through her bones when she stepped outside.

  King trudged ahead, his gait somewhere between a determined walk and jogging.

  This better work, she thought. Before we get frostbite. Or worse.

  * * *

  Mallery and Shirin tracked the comedians for several hours. They went to respective homes, all within several miles of the theater. With the blizzard, staying put wasn’t a surprise, but it didn’t give them much of anything else to work with, since the theater camera hadn’t shown anything but an empty room for hours.

  Roman had peeled off to make a run by the hospital per King’s orders.

  This case had escalated in a big way. Less pressure on Mallery to nail the callbacks, but it did mean that King and Leah were in real danger, and the unpredictability gave Mallery goose bumps. And not the happy kind. It’d be just like a story universe to kill off a potential love interest just as Something was about to happen. The insidious bullshit of Bury Your Gays. Especially given the last year of TV.

  None of that kind of thinking, she told herself. That didn’t help anyone.

  She had to focus on what was in front of her.

  Poor Shirin caught the blunt of her nervousness. She’d talked the woman’s ear off for an hour, trying to burn off the nerves. Instead of being in the thick of it, she was running the B plot. The world had pulled a bait-and-switch on them, and it was hard to not wonder why.

  “You ever heard of a breach spreading laterally like this? And that quickly? Or is this a double event?”

  �
��Hard to say.” Shirin continued to work the screens, several linked monitors analyzing dimensional storm data that Preeti had gotten through, others keeping track of the comedians. “This year has been one exception after another. It’s getting hard to see where the new status quo lies, if there even is one. On the team and off.” Shirin punctuated the last bit with a subtly raised eyebrow.

  I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that, Mallery thought, and plowed right ahead. “With this blizzard, I don’t know if we’re going to get anything useful out of the chuckleheads. Maybe I should escalate somehow, press the issue with someone and see what shakes out.”

  “We don’t need any more variables at this point, I imagine. Maybe this thread dies down and we focus on the other one. If we’re supposed to be prepping for emergency evac, that doesn’t sound like the time to be running new plays, does it?”

  “No, but I’m feeling pretty wheel-spinny here.” She gestured to the screens and their still-unmoving readings.

  “Not back two months, and she’s already climbing the walls. They can’t all be love stories. I’ve got everything under control here if you want to work on your material or pack us up or take a walk around the block. Or call Leah.”

  Again with the knowing suggestions.

  “A walk sounds good. I could use some fresh air.”

  “Don’t wait for too long. Frostbite and all. We need you with all your faculties.” Shirin wiggled her fingers and smiled.

  Mallery bundled up and got all the way to the corner before the cold started cutting her to the bone.

  She thought good thoughts for Leah and King out in this cold, running around after murderers. On the one hand, it’d be good to get out of this blizzard as soon as possible, but on the other, she’d been enjoying working with Leah on a more even footing.

  On the last mission, she’d been leading Leah around, having her play second fiddle as part of Mallery’s grand romantic opera. That kind of power imbalance was a garbage way to start a relationship. Just ask most anyone who ever shacked up with a professor. Start with one person uphill like that, and it was real damned hard to level things out. Authority and experience become power and expectation, and then came the questionable consent and worse.

  The wind picked up again, and Mallery scurried back inside, teeth already chattering.

  She looked back out into the cold and mouthed another prayer for her teammates to come back safe. And not just the one she was thinking about dating.

  * * *

  Leah could barely feel her toes by the time they got to the five-story apartment building, but it was marginally warmer inside and substantially less windy (though not without a draft, thanks to the poorly-seated window frames in the stairwell).

  King gave instructions in a low voice. “Here’s how this works. You watch my back while I talk to Easley. Keep an eye out for anyone who might be watching us, and make sure if she tries to break past me, you trip her up so she doesn’t get away.”

  The team lead tromped up the stairs, tracking slush on top of slush, the carpeting on the stairs already stained nearly black, the original tan barely showing at the edges. “And if she goes out the back, I want you to head back down these stairs and try to head her off at the street. You’ve got the holdout pistol, but don’t use it except in self-defense. Use the baton if she’s getting away and you’re in reach.”

  “She’s got almost a foot on me, most of it legs. Seems like catching her is not a likely thing.”

  “I’m just running down the eventualities so you don’t get caught flat-footed. If you’re chasing her, think laterally. Be the wacky detective, not the cop. Got it?”

  “Got it.” They reached the fourth floor and King changed his gait, feet falling soft.

  Leah stood a half-step back from King and widened her stance, ready to move in any direction.

  Adventure, excitement, hypothermia. All of this and more await you in the Genrenauts! Fortunately, it also came with a sweet salary and benefits package, and, when they weren’t wrapping themselves in self-destructive genre tropes, a pretty cool set of colleagues, including one of the very few bosses she’d actually hang out and drink a beer with.

  King pounded three times on the door, then waited.

  Leah leaned back and forth rather than fiddle with her hands. One hand waited above the extending baton (super-illegal on Earth Prime, but effective in close-quarters combat), the other inches from the mace in her coat pocket.

  The door opened a crack, revealing a woman with dyed-red hair and pale features. A chain lock held the door closed, exposing just enough to show the woman looking King up and down with a big dollop of suspicion.

  “What do you want?”

  “Tatiana Easley?

  “What. Do. You. Want?”

  “I’m Detective King, CPD. This is my associate Ms. Tang. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I didn’t do nothing. Go away.”

  King’s voice was bored, with a tinge of exasperation, nicely inflected. “Ms. Easley, the terms of your parole clearly state that you are to cooperate with police.”

  “Told you I didn’t do nothing. What do you want to know?”

  “Where were you from two to five AM, day before yesterday?”

  “Sleeping. I went out drinking, came back here with friends, and we woke up after noon,” Tatiana said.

  “Did you know this man?” King asked, holding up a picture of Dwayne Smith. Pre-dying, thankfully.

  “Don’t know. I see a lot of people. He’s what? In trouble, or already dead?”

  “The latter, I’m afraid. Can we step inside to talk?” King asked.

  “No. I don’t got to invite you in.”

  “Then we can talk in the precinct, if you’d like.”

  “I don’t know this guy, I didn’t do anything. You shoot straight on what I have to do to honor my parole, and I’ll do it. Otherwise, buzz off.”

  “We need to verify that you were here the entirety of the time period during which Mr. Smith might have been killed.”

  Leah watched the hall, turning her head to look for observers. For the moment, at least, it seemed like Tatiana’s neighbors were happy to leave well enough alone.

  “And what reason you got to suspect me?” she asked.

  “Aside from your track record of armed robbery or your association with the Salvatore family, which has a generations-old bone to pick with the family that owns Lake Effect?”

  Tatiana’s tone changed. “Wait, Smith—the chef? That guy was harmless. Why would someone want to rub him out? He made a mean steak frites. I ate at Lake Effect when I ran with the Salvatores. And since I got out, too. The chef doesn’t hold it against me.”

  Why would they do that if they were rivals? A keep-your-enemies-closer thing, maybe. Mobsters worked the neighborhood and family angles hard, after all.

  “That’s what we hear, ma’am. And if you want to see his killer brought to justice and the heat off your back, all the better. Come with us to the precinct to answer a few other questions, and then we’ll send you on your way. And the Salvatores will doubtless hear that you helped get them off our radar.”

  “Fuck the Salvatores. They left me out to dry.” Tatiana looked down at King’s pad. “I’ll give you your names.”

  “It’ll be best if you come with us, ma’am.”

  As Tatiana adjusted, Leah saw behind her into the apartment.

  Most importantly, she saw a canvas bag beside a couch, with an inflated dinosaur sticking out of the mouth of the bag.

  She whispered to King. “Bag behind her. That dinosaur was on the list of stuff in the comedy troupe’s bag.”

  Tatiana pointed a finger. “You got something to say, say it to me.”

  King nodded inside. “Ms. Easley, can you tell me where you got that bag and the inflated dinosaur?”

  Tatiana looked behind her, blinked, and cocked her head.

  “Dammit.”

  “You’ll want to come with us. And bring that
bag.”

  “I don’t know where that came from. Must have been a friend. We was up late, you know? Sometimes he crashes with me.”

  “We have reason to suspect that is stolen property. Bring it.”

  “You got twenty-four hours to hold me before you charge me with something. I got work to do. Here I am, trying to go straight, keep my head down, all that good-citizen crap, and you pull this crap.”

  “This crap is about a robbery. Bring the bag.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know the drill.” The woman closed the door, released the chain lock, then opened again. “Let me get my coat. It’s cold as shriveled balls out there.”

  “That’s got to be the bag, right?” Leah asked as they waited.

  “Or a red herring. Good eye regardless. We’ll need to run down all of these leads. First, back to the precinct. You call in one of the comedians to verify the bag; I’ll start interrogating Easley. Smart money says that the captain and company are back by the time we get there, and then we’ll grind files for a while until we get a better lead. If we’re really lucky, Nancy will have caught the killer and we’ll be able to just stand by in the ship until we get the all-clear.”

  “How long does Preeti think the window will be?”

  “Not certain. I’d bet on less than an hour. Which means we stay close to the precinct and therefore the warehouse.”

  They’d landed in one of the Genrenauts’ many empty warehouses rented to allow their ships to land and then go into camouflage mode. On this world, the ship was disguised as a massive pile of crates under a tarp. The warehouse was close to the FOB, or as close as they could get. Even here, the warehouse districts weren’t terribly close to the upscale apartments.

  Tatiana emerged in a giant fur coat, handing the bag to King. She locked up her apartment and said, “This better not take long.” Leah went first, then Tatiana, with King taking up the rear, keeping an eye on the suspect.

  Leah kept very upright to minimize the chances of slipping on the stairs and breaking her everything tumbling down the narrow stairs.

  This time, they took a cab, one of the two-row hatchback deals. Tatiana sat in the front seat next to the driver, demanding her space.