The Colossus Collection : A Space Opera Adventure (Books 1-7 + Bonus Material)

by Nicole Grotepas

  “Same kind of stuff. But built entirely better.”

  “Can we ask what that means?” Meg said. “Isn’t it all the same? Ones and zeroes with a pretty face stuck on?”

  “Look, Fogg just took all my codes and reskinned everything. Then he sold it for more money. At first it cost less, then he raised his prices. He didn’t design anything. He was an eggplant-colored piranha and I hated him.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Meg scrawling into her black notebook. Uses racist terms. Not necessarily something that would implicate someone in murder—we all used them. Eggplant just rolled off the tongue. But still. I should probably make sure I stopped saying it. Especially now that Daxan was on our team. I didn’t really have anything against Yasaon—it was hard to not like them. They weren’t quite the same level of smug as the Centaus and their stately inability to grasp the pettiness of humans.

  My communicator rang. “Excuse me,” I said, rising and ducking away to answer it. “Miko?”

  “Hey Gabe,” she said in greeting. And then dove straight into business. “We found a few leads going through customer service-related emails. A lot of them are from other moons. But one of them is from a gentleman who’s here, at the same convention where you are. And he was kind of threatening. So Daxan and I are checking it out.”

  “Great. Keep me updated.”

  “Yep,” Miko hung up and I returned to my chair.

  “Everything ok?” Meg asked looking up at me.

  I nodded, then asked Pierre, “Did you know Lennox? Personally? Had you ever met in real life?”

  “How could I? I live on Joopa. Meeting Lennox wasn’t worth the flight. Or the cost.”

  I grinned. “But this convention is?”

  “This convention is the biggest of its kind. The contacts and networking and coverage for my brand are worth it. Let me put it this way: the earning potential from an event like this is almost too high to estimate. Meeting Lennox would net me nothing.”

  Meg cleared her throat and stood up. “Well, Mr. Brock, thank you for your time. You’re busy and we’re busy and you have fans that want to speak with you. So you know, you’re a suspect in a murder case. Please don’t leave Kota until we’ve cleared you to go.”

  “What? I can’t stay here. I have a job to return to,” he protested, rising.

  “And you can’t—” Meg began, looking at him with a bemused expression, “conduct that business from here? It’s online. I should think—”

  “Yes . . . yes,” he said, looking irritated.

  “Good,” I said. “Then stay here. We don’t want to have to arrest you because it seems like you might flee our moon.”

  8

  Outside the hotel, I filled Meg in on the communicator call from Miko. Then we coordinated meeting her and Daxan. I knew Miko hoped she’d be able to do his interview alone, but I was already there and I needed to get a feel for this suspect. The case was slippery and something about it threatened to get away from me. Our suspect list was short and so far I had no read on motive for either. Both seemed too flimsy to stick. Jealousy. And money. Age-old tales but neither suspect had given me a sufficiently strong indication that they were angry enough to punch a hole in a man’s skull.

  We found Miko at a ramen shop. She was standing outside with Daxan as the city darkened. Ixion’s reflected light was always bright enough that a more complete darkness only came every two weeks, but after the brilliance of day, it was a relief.

  “He’s inside. Eating dinner with a group of Holo-R gamers. He knows we’re here,” Miko said.

  “Looks nervous, if you ask me,” Daxan volunteered, running a hand through his silver hair.

  “Good. Thanks for tracking him down,” I said. Daxan’s rank was even lower than Miko’s. I usually kept him doing the grunt work, at the same time hoping he’d push to holster more responsibility. So far he seemed happy with the status quo.

  “We can’t all interview him. That’ll make him too nervous,” Meg observed.

  “Right. Well, I’m not sitting the sidelines on this one. Meg, you and Miko fight it out. Whoever wins, come inside.” I pushed the door open, then asked over my shoulder, “Which one?”

  “Black guy at the table next to the window. Harry. He’s wearing a Marines shirt,” Daxan explained.

  I went up to the table and introduced myself. “Can we talk somewhere more private?” I asked. The people at his table looked up at me with eyes that ran the gamut from suspicious and annoyed to scared and surprised. “This should only take a few minutes.”

  Harry followed me out onto the street where Meg was waiting. “You?” I teased. “You won?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Harry Akhtar, you already met our junior detectives. This is Detective Wolfe, and I’m Detective Gabriel Bach, lead detective on a case we’re investigating,” I said, flipping to an empty page in my notebook.

  Harry lowered his head, then lifted his gaze and glanced between Meg and I. “Apologies, sir. What’s this about?”

  “We’ll get to that. But first, can you tell me where you were yesterday morning around 9:30?”

  “I was here, sir. At the convention,” he said, swallowing.

  “Were you with anyone? Are there people who can corroborate that?” Meg asked.

  “Yes. I was with some friends from the Holo-R world. Utopia. That’s where we met and we all came here to do the convention.”

  “Does the name Lennox Fogg ring any bells?”

  “Yes sir, it does. But something tells me you know it does or you wouldn’t be here. What’s happened? Is this about the emails?” The ex-soldier looked nervous and licked his lips. “I mean, Fogg, well he, he just sold me some in-game items that I felt didn’t live up to his promises. I asked for my money back and never heard from him.”

  “And you asked him—how many times?”

  “Four or five, I think.”

  “Or maybe ten?”

  He shrugged and laughed nervously. “OK, ten. Is that against the law? If it is, I didn’t know. Fogg never responded. What should I have done? Let it go?”

  “Well he was found dead,” I said, carefully watching him for a reaction. Harry didn’t flinch. “So, as you might guess. Ten emails, six of them full of threats, looks rather . . . bad.”

  “Fuck. Dead. Really? It wasn’t me. I’d never kill someone over a little dispute like that. Did you read the emails? I mean you, personally, sir?” Harry asked, looking between me and Meg.

  “I read the threats,” I said, though I hadn’t. But I knew what the threats were. Graphic. Brutal.

  “I’m combat wounded, sir. Fogg took my money and when his product didn’t deliver, he wouldn’t give me a refund. I’ve been pissed about it. But murder?” He cringed. “No, no sir. Not to the point of murder. Look at my military record. I’ve killed people. Could I do that again? No way. I play Utopia to get away from what I did in the Acallaris System conflict. It’s better than real life. In Utopia my body is whole again. I can forget the shit I went through.”

  Meg stepped in. “Alright Harry, last thing. You’re a suspect. So please don’t leave Kota until we’ve cleared you.”

  “Of course sir, wouldn’t think of it. I’ll wait for your word,” he said, turning to go back into the ramen shop.

  “Enjoy your dinner,” I said.

  We walked away, weaving through the crowds of convention-goers.

  “Think he did it?” I asked Meg.

  “Who knows,” she said. “He seemed angry enough. And an obedient soldier, like I’d expect. But still angry.”

  “Anger. Money. Jealousy. Which will it be?”

  “This one, if it was Harry, would be both money and anger.”

  “That complicates it.”

  9

  “So Pierre Brock’s alibi checks out,” Miko said, dropping a stack of papers on the desk. “Daxan and I just questioned people who had checked into his panel and several of them remember him being on stage—they remember that chin, and
his smirk. I don’t think he won the audience over.”

  “It’s an unforgettable chin,” I said, not looking up from my notes from the interview with the ex-girlfriend.

  I heard someone laugh, probably Daxan, because Meg had left to pick up our daughter Lucy from school. She’d pointed out some holes in the interview. Not many, just two. A perusal of the details now and I saw those holes that Meg had caught. They would require following up on. So I would need to go back.

  Daxan spoke up. “But a few people do have notes with quotes they liked.”

  “How many?” I asked, putting Brock’s photo up on the suspect chart. His face was tilted down, tucking that chin into his neck, his eyes looking out from the top half like he was annoyed.

  Miko shrugged. “Three, I think.”

  “Did anyone mention him leaving during the panel?”

  “I didn’t ask. They would have mentioned it if he had, right?”

  I shrugged. “Probably. It doesn’t hurt to ask for specific details like that, though.” And if she didn’t ask, that was something we’d want to know. One of us would have to track down the audience members now to find that out. I stood up and went to the board. “I need to follow up with the ex-girlfriend once more. I’m going to have her come in. We also need to check with audience members from that panel to ask if they recall Brock leaving. The question will jog their memory. Remember? Witnesses leave shit out.”

  Miko nodded like she was annoyed.

  The murder—blow to the back of the head, and likely with an object that came from the victim’s apartment—was beginning to strike me as a crime of opportunity as much as the expression of rage. It wasn’t one of outright revenge and it wasn’t very premeditated. Otherwise the weapon would have been thought out. The blow that killed would have been more likely to come from a gun or a knife, demonstrating that it was planned. I’d seen enough working homicide to know that when someone wants to kill, their method of killing reflected the emotional reasons for it. Revenge—they wanted to maim. To damage the person who had wronged them in a way that destroyed some part of the person. Killers that did it regularly often had instruments of killing at their disposal. Guns. Knives. A blow to the back of the head suggested that it wasn’t thought out. It said to me, I came by to do something, not sure what, the victim was unprotected, I grabbed something in the room and hit him, because I’m mad. Bam. Victim falls, dies. Clean up, take the evidence, run. Hide.

  Those were hunches. And they came from analyzing the evidence that was left behind, which wasn’t a whole lot. But my job required me to think it through, to put myself inside the scene enough to attempt to feel what the killer was feeling. And that’s how the murder scene of Lennox Fogg was developing in my mind.

  My ideas were turning, and led me to believe that Fogg’s killer was quite unlikely to be the ex-soldier. Harry Akhtar was right about one thing: as a former soldier in the Acallaris System conflict, Akhtar would have been familiar enough with killing to do it in a way that guaranteed completion.

  “I’m leaning away from Akhtar. He was a soldier. He knew how to kill. A blow to the head doesn’t always mean death. It seems like a crime of opportunity. A burst of passion at the last minute.”

  “So you think the weapon was pulled from the vicitim’s home?” Miko asked.

  “I do. And that’s why I want you and Daxan to go search the trash receptacles near the victim’s buildings, quickly too, before they get removed. We also need to check any security footage again.”

  Miko frowned. She didn’t love to look through the trash. It was one of the unfortunate parts of the job.

  “I’ll let you two decide how to do it,” I said. Daxan seemed to be deliberately avoiding looking at me or Miko.

  “I’ll take one of the beat guys with me to check the trash around the area. I think we uploaded the security camera footage from the area already. Daxan, you stay here and check it.”

  Daxan nodded. “Can do.” I got the sense that was what he’d prefer anyway.

  10

  “Heading back to the ex-girlfriend,” I said into my communicator. Meg was on the other end. I could hear our daughter chattering away happily in the background. She’d just gotten out of school. One of us usually waited outside the school to walk her home. She was old enough to walk alone, but Meg and I knew human nature too well. We gave her enough space to figure the world out, but not too much. Seeing the dark side of life in the city day in and day out had chipped away at our blissful ignorance. That is to say, neither of us were able to bury our heads in the sand and didn’t want our girl to be a casualty of complete idiocy.

  Lucy was our responsibility and we shared it, even though Meg and I couldn’t live together, we could do what was best for Lucy.

  “To fill in those questions?” Meg asked, referring to the holes that she’d poked in the testimony.

  “Right.”

  “You’re getting a sense of who it was, aren’t you? I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Yes,” I said, getting off the gondola and heading to the elevator down to the city street.

  “Let me get there in my own head real quick.”

  “Go for it,” I said, grinning. In the background I heard Lucy ask if she could eat something.

  Meg answered in the affirmative, then went silent. “It wasn’t the ex-soldier. He would have used something more efficient. A gun. A knife.”

  “My thoughts, yes.”

  “So it was either the ex-girlfriend or the coder, because both of them would have done it as an opportunity-killing.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “The weapon should turn up somewhere near the condo-tower or the convention center. Or, depending on how your interview goes with the ex-girlfriend, near her flat.”

  “Yes. She’s meeting me at a place called Bolt Kasé and Espresso. She doesn’t want me to show up at her flat.”

  “Why? That’s suspicious,” Meg said.

  “I know. Seems to be something about her current boyfriend not knowing she went to the victim’s condo.”

  “But Gabe, are you getting a blind spot on this case? It could have been the boyfriend.”

  I’d made it down to the street and a block closer to the girl’s flat. I scanned the street and saw the sign for Bolt. I crossed over behind a bike taxi and a quietly moving convertible vehicle.

  “That had occurred to me. The only reason I’m not convinced of that is because the victim was logged into the Holo-R game. It had to be one of the players.”

  “But you haven’t interviewed him. He may have been logged in.”

  She was right. And it bothered me to have not considered that. That was something I could clear up in this interview: did Trixie’s boyfriend play the Holo-R game?

  “If the victim wasn’t a Yasoan, I’d wonder if he was the father and not the boyfriend.”

  “I’d wondered the same thing. Which may be why I hadn’t considered that the ex-girlfriend was protecting her current boyfriend.”

  I opened the door to the cafe and went in. Trixie was inside already, sipping a glass of water at a table. A jacket was draped over the back of her chair. I finished up my call with Meg and approached the ex-girlfriend as I pulled my notebook out of my pocket.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” I said, sitting down across from her.

  “Thanks for calling first, Detective Bach.”

  “I don’t want to waste your time, so I’ll get right down to it.”

  “OK,” she said blinking and shifting. She reached a hand down and touched her pregnant belly like it was bothering her.

  “Is everything ok?” I asked.

  “Yes, just a contraction.”

  “You’re in labor?”

  “No, false contraction. I’ve been having them a lot lately. Especially when I get stressed.”

  “You’re stressed?”

  “No, interviews with a detective are my idea of a great date.”

  Point taken. “So previously you
’d mentioned that you went to Lennox’s condo to return some items that belonged to him.”

  She nodded.

  “What were they? And why didn’t you leave them at his apartment?”

  She glanced around the cafe, then shifted in her seat and touched her belly again. “Ok, so that’s not entirely accurate.”

  I sat back, not surprised to hear that a suspect had kept something from me. “Why don’t you tell me what is, then?”

  She sighed and slumped in her seat. “Lennox had asked me to come by. He wanted to show off how well he’d been doing with his business. I didn’t want to go. I told him I was with someone new and that I was about to have his baby. Lennox asked if I was happy with the guy. And I said, ‘not precisely.’”

  “Not precisely?” I repeated, lifting an eyebrow. Around us the conversations buzzed in the air. The sound of a grinder chewing beans filled the cafe. People laughed. Though I didn’t want the soon-to-be-new mother to be the killer, I was also prepared to bring justice to light. It was one thing to kill a violent human or Constie in self-defense. Quite another to off a defenseless Yasoan.

  “No,” she sighed.

  “Why aren’t you?” I asked, studying her face. I noticed that her eyes were puffy. That could have simply been from being pregnant and unable to sleep well. Or it could be stress.

  “Nash isn’t exactly the sweetest to me all the time.”

  “‘The sweetest.’ What does that mean?”

  “He has a bit of a temper. He doesn’t like it that there were other guys before him and he never wants me to mention them. He’s the real reason I stopped playing Utopia. ‘Live in the real world, Trix.’ He knew that I dated a guy I met in there before I met him. But he doesn’t know I went to Lennox’s that day to see if maybe Lennox would want me back.” She lifted her chin and stared out the window over my shoulder, as though she was seeing something hopeful in the distance. “I was hoping that even though I’m pregnant with Nash’s baby, that Lennox would ask me to move in with him.”

  I felt the ire rising in me. A swirling cloud of protective instinct for a pregnant woman. I studied her again, scanning her body for signs. Today she wore a short sleeve shirt. From the extra photograph I’d taken of her from our last interview, I knew that she’d been wearing a long sleeve jacket because that day, there’d been an eclipse, and they get cold. There were fading bruises on her upper arms, with a yellowish tint. Suddenly the puffy eyes seemed more likely to be a result of living on edge and unable to sleep.