"You're too late," Scranton said. "Anderson said she wanted to get started ASAP, so I sent her down to the holding pens to see Chief Sykes. I knew you wouldn't mind," he added, his tone indicating he knew precisely the opposite was true. "Scranton out."
The screen went black, leaving Hass fuming. He stood and made for the door, pausing only to glance at his reflection in the screen of the comms-terminal. As ever, the sight of himself in the forbidding colours and skull-headed insignia of the SJS uniform served to stiffen his resolve.
I'm SJS, he thought. The Special Judicial Squad. We judge the Judges. We can break anyone, even a legend like Anderson. It occurred to him that perhaps the fact that another Judge had been assigned to his case was not such a bad thing after all. There might even be an advantage to it. The case was a career-breaker. It had been that way from the very beginning. Now though, if there was a career to be broken, it would no longer necessarily have to be his.
FOUR
A MESSAGE IN BLOOD
"All right," said Anderson. "Tell me how it happened. From the beginning."
"It's all in the report," Chief Warder Sykes said. They were standing outside the open door of Holding Cube Two-Thirteen where Leland Barclay died. "Everything that happened. You can be sure we didn't leave anything out."
"Humour me," Anderson said, smiling to try to put the man at his ease. "I just want to find out what happened."
"You're the psychic, Anderson, why don't you tell us?" The chief warder was stone-faced.
A hard case, thought Anderson. And he doesn't like having strangers on his turf.
"It doesn't work that way," she told him. "First, I need you to go through the sequence of events for me so I can get them straight." She nodded towards the holding cube. "Then, I'll go in there and try to scan the room. But for the scan to be of any use to us, I need to have some kind of idea of the context."
Grimacing, Sykes looked at her as though considering a decision. "There was a power cut affecting the entire Sector House," he said. "The Teks say an EM surge caused it, though they also say they can't tell where it came from. It knocked out the surveillance cameras, door locks, and everything else down here. The emergency lights came on, but after about a minute they went out too. Then, we heard screaming from Cube Two-Thirteen. Leland Barclay, sentenced to eighteen years for an ARV. We used crowbars to force the cube door open, but it was too late. Barclay was dead. Burned to death in his cell, just like the others."
"This wasn't the first killing?" Anderson asked.
"That's right," Sykes said. "There have been five others over the last two weeks. Every time the pattern's the same. The power cuts, then screams and finally, a toasted perp in one of the holding cubes. SJS sent one of their men in after the second death. Hass, his name is, but he hasn't found anything wrong down here. I run a tight ship."
"Nothing wrong except the fact six men are dead," Anderson thought aloud, and as soon as she had she realised she had made a mistake.
"You think I don't know that?" Sykes growled. "I'm a twenty-five year man, Anderson. You think I don't know Justice Department are looking for somebody to blame? But I told you: I run a tight ship. I followed procedure on this all the way. So did my men. Whatever in the name of Grud is going on down here, we didn't have anything to do with it."
"Nobody's saying you did, chief," Anderson tried to be soothing. "The way I see it, we both want the same things. We want to find out the truth about what's been going on. Right?"
"Right." Sykes's tone was grudging.
"All the same, I get the feeling there's something you haven't told me," she said, looking from Sykes to the faces of the men around her long enough to see them shift uneasily beneath her gaze. "You don't have to be psychic to know there's something else."
"It's all in the report, Anderson." Sykes paused with a look of discomfort. "When we broke into the cube there was something written on the wall. The word 'Judged', written in blood. Then..." he paused again, his discomfort seeming to grow. "We all saw it, Anderson. All of us. We saw the word 'Judged' written on that cube wall as clear as I can see you now. Then, some time between the discovery of the body and the arrival of the Tek-Judges' forensics team, the word disappeared."
"Disappeared? You mean someone erased it?"
"That's exactly what I don't mean." The chief warder's tone was forceful. "Forensics couldn't find any trace of blood on the wall, or for that matter any sign of writing. It was like the word had never been there, but it was, Anderson. Or it had been. We all saw it. Same as the other times."
"The same?" Anderson said, glancing at the faces of the rest of the warders and seeing agreement there. "You mean with all the other killings, you saw this same word written there each time?"
"That's right," Sykes said. "Exactly the same. And every time it had disappeared by the time the forensics boys came to do their analysis."
Digesting all she had heard, Anderson became aware that Sykes and his men were looking at her intently. Their faces were expectant; it was as though they were waiting for her to conjure an answer out of thin air like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. She was accustomed to such looks; for a Psi-Judge it went with the territory. Centuries might have passed since people with her abilities were routinely burned at the stake, but there was no diminishing the aura of mystery surrounding psychic powers in the minds of non-psychics. From experience, she knew that mystery was a sword that could cut two ways. On one hand, it caused people to shy away from her, afraid of what she might see of their true faces beneath the masks they wore to confront the world. On the other, when they needed help they would turn to her with all the desperate faith of religious believers expecting miracles. And when you couldn't give them their miracles, sometimes the believers could turn ugly.
"Thanks," she said. "I figure that should give me enough to go on. If I need anything else, or I learn anything of use, I'll call you."
Disappointed, the Judges began to drift away to return to their duties. All except Chief Warder Sykes. Arms crossed, face set in a determined line, he stood staring at Anderson. Waiting.
"No offence, chief," Anderson said, "but the last thing I need is an audience watching me when I go in to scan the cube, even an audience of one. It can interfere with the process."
"You will tell me what comes out of the scan," Sykes said. It was a demand, not a question.
"You'll be the first to know if I make any progress, chief," Anderson said. Strictly speaking, a chief warder had no right to demand anything of a Psi-Judge, but she could see no reason to make an issue of it. "You needn't have any worries on that account."
"All right then." Sykes seemed satisfied. "If you have any news, I'll be in the Custody Command Room."
A hard case all right, Anderson thought, watching the chief warder leave. Tough. Sure of himself. Follows the regs to the letter, I bet. I can't see him being the killer. Enough foreplay, guess I'd better get to work.
She entered the cube. The smell was the first thing that struck her. The odour of burnt human flesh; after you smelt it once you could never forget it. She noticed dark marks on the walls. Smoke residue, she thought. And those yellow-brown streaks are bits of fat that spat sizzling from the man as he burned. A horrible way to die. There was a chalk outline drawn on the bunk where the body had been found, small holes left in the blanket where sample pieces had been cut out and sent for analysis, fingerprint powder dusted on the cube's fixtures and fittings - the residues of a dozen different forensics procedures. Apparently, the Tek-Judges had turned up little in the way of evidence that might crack the case. Now, it was her turn.
Moving to the centre of the limited floor space of the cube, she stood facing the bunk where Leland Barclay had died. Finding the stench of burned flesh in the air to be a distraction, she unclipped one of the pouches on her belt and pulled a small plasteen tub from it. "Rub-U-Want Unguent", the label read. "For Relieving Tired and Aching Muscles. Now with Synthi-Menthol Freshness!" Applying a generous helping of the gel from the t
ube to her top lip, she breathed in deeply, letting the cloying menthol scent clear her nostrils of the more gruesome odours of the cube. Then, replacing the unguent tube back into the pouch once more, she closed her eyes.
Get ready, Cass, she thought. A man burned to death here. This is going to be a bad one.
She breathed in deeply once more, letting the air ease in and out of her with the rise and fall of her lungs. Slowly, easily, like a tide washing gently against the shore, in and out. She let her breathing find its own rhythm as she opened herself to the psi-flux, all the while knowing she stood on the brink of experiencing every pain and horror Leland Barclay had felt as he died. She did not turn away from it. There was no protection for psi scanning a murder scene - it was all or nothing. She had to be ready to endure everything the victim had endured: there was no way to hold back the tide once it was unleashed. But she was ready. She had done this before. At times it seemed as though she had felt the pain of this entire city. She was a Psi-Judge and it was part of her job.
Breathing. Slowly. In and out. Rhythm. Her heart a metronome. Her mind an unblinking, all-seeing eye. She went to the place beyond rational thought, where the conscious and unconscious met. She opened herself fully to the psi-flux, lowering her defences, and waited for the pain to begin as the first tidal wave of sensation flowed through her. She waited and felt...
Nothing.
She felt nothing. No pain, no agony, no fear or terror. There was nothing there at all; it was as though the cube was no more than the collection of the physical objects inside it. Four walls. A floor. A ceiling. A bunk. A sink. A shower. A toilet. There was no sign of the other world. The psi-world. No psychic signatures. No imprints. No emotion. No thoughts. No evidence that any living thing had ever stepped inside it.
She felt nothing.
It was as though she was surrounded on every side by a blank space. As though she stood in the middle of a black hole in the middle of the psi-flux. Like she had abruptly been rendered blind and deaf, the senses she had relied upon her entire life were suddenly gone.
She felt nothing. And, with it, a new understanding grew cold and chill inside her heart.
Something was terribly wrong here.
"So you're telling us you found nothing?" Sector Chief Franklin said from his chair, his expression betraying his disappointment.
It was three quarters of an hour later, and Judge Hass had been busy. Emerging from the holding pens after conferring with Chief Warder Sykes, Anderson was summoned to an impromptu meeting in the SJS man's office to discuss her progress. Given the imperious nature of the summons, and the fact she harboured little in the way of kind feeling toward SJS, she had been tempted to send a message back telling Hass to go drokk himself. In the end it was a question of protocol. Strictly speaking, she had come to Sector House 12 to assist in Hass's investigation; the fact she was sure he would try and stonewall her in the usual SJS fashion was neither here nor there. Besides, Hass had made it clear Sector Chief Franklin and the Deputy Sector Chief Grimes would be attending the meeting.
Anderson might not have been a particularly political animal - few Psi-Judges were - but even she knew better than to snub the Sector House command structure within an hour of her arrival. Still, political animal or not, her presence at the meeting had since given her more insights than she ever could have wished into local Sector House politics.
"Not altogether the result we might have hoped for, then," Deputy Chief Grimes ventured his opinion from the chair beside Franklin. It was clear the two of them had a frosty relationship: every word from the Deputy Chief's mouth seemed full of subtle antagonism towards his superior. Pushed aside for promotion most probably, Anderson thought, sensing spite and agitation beneath Grimes's calm exterior. Psi Division said Franklin is due to be replaced as Sector Chief by Meryl Coolidge over at Sector One-Sixty. Grimes was probably hoping he'd get the job himself.
"Still, he shouldn't let ourselves become too disappointed," Grimes continued, nodding smoothly towards Franklin and making a show of patronising the older man as though he thought he was half-senile already. "Judge Anderson's investigation is barely an hour old, after all. They say justice wasn't built in a day."
"Indeed," Hass said, holding his hands splayed with fingertips touching in front of him. "Though, of course, methods of psychic investigation are notoriously unreliable. Not that I mean to impugn Judge Anderson's efforts in any way, you understand. Her reputation speaks for itself." His smile was of a cold, dead thing, dripping with venom.
He's typical SJS, all right, Anderson thought. Where do they find these guys? Under a rock? Or is there some secret cloning machine at SJS headquarters that turns them out by the dozen?
"The Dark Judges Incursions, the Apocalypse War, the Necropolis Event," Hass said, the smile fixed to his face. "Time and again, Judge Anderson has acted above and beyond the call of duty to protect Mega-City One. It would not perhaps be too much of an exaggeration to say, on occasion, she has performed miracles on our behalf. Of course, the problem with miracles is that in the end we begin to expect them every time. We forget, Psi-Judge or not, that for all her not-inconsiderable gifts even Judge Anderson is only human."
Hass paused as though waiting for her comeback, until apparently convinced she had ceded the floor to him indefinitely, he began again.
"And besides, another Psi-Judge has already scanned one of the previous crime scenes with no greater degree of success," he said, a hint of triumph in the smile now. "After the third murder I called in Psi-Judge Manley to ascertain whether there was any sign of pyrokine activity at the scene. He found none, confirming my thesis that the burnings were achieved by some form of technological means that has yet to be detected. You see there is clearly-"
"Uh-huh," Anderson interrupted him. "I'd love nothing better than to hear your theories, Hass, but we seem to have had some kind of communications breakdown about what I found when I scanned the crime scene."
"You said you found nothing," Chief Franklin leaned forward eagerly.
"That's right," Anderson said. "I found nothing. No psychic impressions, no residual memories, no lingering pain, fear, horror, or any other emotion. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. It's like the entire cube was a blank slate, and that's something that shouldn't happen."
"Really? I think you are being too hard on yourself, Anderson," Hass interjected as smooth and oily as a snake as he tried to steer the conversation back to the course he had originally set. "As I said, you are only human-"
"Oops. There's that communications breakdown again," Anderson smiled at him, chiding herself inwardly for the glee she felt at the way Hass seemed to develop a slight facial tic every time she interrupted him. "Let me put it to you this way: you have some perp sitting at home somewhere trying to make himself a bomb. He mixes the ingredients wrong and the whole thing goes boom. When you get to the crime scene, what do you expect to find?"
"I fail to see the point of this." Hass shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
"Humour me, Hass," Anderson told him. "Trust me, you'll get the point, soon enough."
"Very well." Hass pursed his lips in annoyance. "It would depend, of course, on the precise size of the explosion and the environment in which it happened. Generally, I would expect to see explosive debris, a bomb crater, human remains-"
"Exactly," Anderson said, noticing the SJS man's tic was growing more pronounced. "But the one thing you wouldn't expect to see is an empty room with no sign there had ever been an explosion there at all."
"I'm not sure I see what you're getting at," Franklin said, all three of them looking at her now.
"What I mean is, when things happen in the physical world you see evidence that they've happened. It's the same with the psychic world. As living creatures we leave a psychic imprint on our surroundings. We can't help it. When a man dies violently, burning to death alone in a confined space with no one to help him, that imprint should be all the stronger. So strong that, for months afterwards, any psy
chic going into the room would feel like it was happening to him - like he was drowning in the dead man's pain. But not in this case. Somehow, the cube where Leland Barclay died was devoid of any impression. It felt like no one had even ever been in the room, much less that a man had died there only a couple of hours earlier. The entire room felt blank, and believe me when I tell you there's no way that should even be possible."
She let her words sink in. She could see realisation dawning on the faces of Grimes and Franklin, even as Hass's expression stayed stubbornly tight.
"That's not all," she said. "After I tried to scan Barclay's cube, I had Chief Sykes take me to the cubes where the other perps died and it was the same in every one. All I could detect were the psychic impressions of the other perps who had been inside the cubes since the deaths. There was nothing left of the men who had died inside the cubes. Somehow, six men burned to death in screaming agony without it leaving any psychic impression whatsoever on their surroundings. You can take it from me that's just plain spooky."
"Spooky?" Hass's tone was barbed. "This is a murder investigation, Anderson, not some damned Tri-D ghost story. You'll be telling us next you give credence to Sykes and his claims of bloody messages appearing and disappearing on walls."
"I take it you don't?" she said.
"Of course not," Hass snorted, the subtle sniping of moments earlier now giving way to cold fury. "The whole thing is absurd. Messages in blood that leave no forensic trace behind? It's nothing more than a case of mass hysteria. Frankly, the fact that you would bring it up at all shows remarkably poor judge-"
The lights went off. Plunged into darkness, they heard the sound of a distant gunshot and screaming coming from somewhere outside. Running to the door with the others close behind her, Anderson opened it to see bedlam in the corridor. In the dim blue glow of the Sector House's emergency lights she saw a group of Judges desperately trying to disarm a middle-aged Judge, while nearby part of the corridor's walls had caught fire.
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