The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  He nodded. “I had coffee with Dr. Tomason at eight a.m., as usual on Mondays. We didn’t discuss anything of consequence, other than Saturday’s game.” He grimaced.

  “You believe in the new curse?”

  “For abandoning Fenway? No, just a general manager who ought to be sho—” He caught himself, coughed, and continued, “fired. After that I had a short phone call with our CFO, who is in Europe. Dr. Joshi then came and complained to me for half an hour until finally I had to feign a meeting. Nothing of importance, probably not even to him, just rehashes of things he’s been complaining about for ages.”

  “So you and Joshi were both here at eight thirty?” He nodded. “Conveniently,” I added, “that’s when the police estimated time of death for Dr. Grasso, according to what Detective Stevens told me this morning. Many other people around at that time?”

  He looked uneasy, so I cut in. “Look, I figure it’s reasonable to assume that your Dr. Grasso’s death had something to do with his calling us in.”

  Desai grimaced and shook his head. “The police had not told me that, but they have been asking where people were between eight and nine this morning. At that time of day, most of our research employees would have been in the building but unaccounted for. The research staff were participating in our monthly seminar—that is, all of the research groups are brought together in our auditorium on the first floor to present their work to the other researchers. It started at nine.”

  «That would put my attempted deletion, at ten-o-two, some time after he died. The deletion had to have been done from that laboratory, but such a stretch of time seems unlikely. If the deleter was not the killer, why was the death not reported until your arrival? No, I reject that hypothesis.»

  “So, lots of people coming in and having coffee and so on. Nobody really sure where anyone else is or whether they’re in yet. Sounds like a mess.”

  “It is a mess. The police are interviewing everyone who knew Grasso, which is most of the company. And to be frank, many of them disliked the man. It’s a ridiculous approach, scattershot.”

  «I agree.»

  I almost made a shushing noise, but Desai was staring right at me.

  “The police have their methods, of course, but we have ours.” I remembered Rex’s complaint. “This meeting, was it still going around ten a.m.?”

  “Ten? Hmm.” I waited while he seemed to mull that over. He put a hand up to his mouth, and I could see his chin wag and hear those soft little smacking noises older folks make when they subvocalize. Blue lights danced across his left eyeball.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “It let out around eleven, just before the body was discovered.”

  “Who would have been missing from that meeting?”

  “Well, I was busy up here and can prove that. Sometimes the department heads don’t attend. Dr. Tomason always attends; she would have kept an eye on comings and goings.”

  “Did Grasso have trouble with anyone?”

  His eyebrows furrowed, and I could tell he was thinking hard, but I had the feeling it was more about whether to say what was on his mind.

  “Whoever it is, it’ll come out sooner or later.”

  Desai shook his head. “He let one of his researchers go before the theft, a Dr. Clay Hindle.”

  “That’s a start.”

  “No, it isn’t. Dr. Hindle was cleared of involvement in the theft: he left before the device was stolen and our security systems are keyed to the faces of former employees. He has not set foot in the building since.”

  “Anyone else? This guy Grasso seems to pick up enemies like lint.”

  He sighed. “There had been a disciplinary issue with one of his employees, a Jeanne Duvalier. He wanted to terminate her employment. Dr. Tomason arranged her transfer to Dr. Joshi’s department instead. Dr. Grasso thought this was out of spite and considered it a sign of disrespect. It took a lot of ego-stroking to smooth it over, to be frank. For Ms. Duvalier, I suppose it meant a slight reduction in compensation.”

  “Can’t have been much fun, either.”

  Desai’s mouth twitched at the corner. “No.”

  Duvalier had been the name of the young woman who’d come in with Joshi and found me with Grasso’s body. Interesting.

  “Why’d he want to can her?”

  Desai’s eyes flicked away. “Honestly, he probably was exacting some revenge against Dr. Tomason. Ms. Duvalier is the daughter of one of her friends, I gather.”

  “But Tomason protected her. Thwarted him, he might say.”

  A look of pain crossed Desai’s face. “I admit he played politics—”

  “Somebody killed him.”

  He drew himself up in his chair and looked me in the eye. “The police believe he killed himself, Mr. Baldwin. I see no reason to contradict them.”

  “Well, I didn’t get a good look at the body, what with keeping the lights off for, uh, the sake of surprise. So I can’t exactly contradict them, either. Looked like he was shot?”

  Desai nodded. “So the police say. With a rail pistol.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Those could be nasty little devices. They were hard to aim and not very reliable, but lethal and quiet: they used heavy-duty capacitors to accelerate a hefty slug, and so sounded more like a thump than a bang. More than that, I could see why the police hadn’t just closed the case on suicide or not: rail guns don’t leave powder burns or any of the other telltale signs that a normal firearm leaves from point-blank range. Just a noise like someone dropping a book, and a neat hole that looks the same from any distance.

  We sat in silence for a moment. “It’ll help if folks are all right with me poking my nose around.”

  “I will send out a message to that effect.”

  I thought that sounded reasonable. I wouldn’t lay money that Fitzgerald would, but I’d burn that bridge when I came to it.

  «There are too many coincidences. I do not like it.»

  “What are you going on about?”

  Mr. Desai had seen me out of his office without much more information than that, urging me to go have a word with one Maya Tomason, PhD. I thought it was gracious of him to dismiss me outright instead of feign a meeting, but if I hadn’t gotten the hint, it might have come to that. I got Desai’s permission to go through Grasso’s office, and then showed myself the door. Fitzgerald had evidently gone in search of other prey, leaving me to stroll the teal-carpeted corridors by my lonesome and admire the artwork. They were mostly oil paintings with junk stuck in them, little sharp bits of metal and driftwood, all neatly encased in diamond-glass boxes. I don’t know much about art, but the little plaques under the paintings informed me that they had titles like Sunrise on Back Bay and Mt. Monadnock Snow and were original works by people I’d never heard of but whose names I decided I ought to remember for cocktail parties. That way, while I was still ignorant, I was at least ignorant on a higher level than before.

  «Too many coincidences. The theft, primarily, but I am irritated that the police are wrong about the time of death. Our investigation is more difficult if they cannot separate the wheat from the chaff for us. They have resources we do not, but we cannot avail ourselves of them if they are being wasted pursuing blind alleys.»

  A cleaning robot zipped by me, whistling as it passed so I wouldn’t step on it. Despite my unkind feelings toward all technology just then, I refrained from kicking it.

  “Why not just tell them when you think he died and why?”

  «Impossible. I am not prepared to acknowledge that we have accessed Dr. Grasso’s now-empty implant. They would immediately suspect us of altering it.»

  “Have you altered it?”

  «Only to obfuscate the transfer of funds.»

  Just covering up grand theft, that’s all. I made my way back down to the lab where we’d found Grasso. A handful of cops were still there, including Detective Stevens, who I waited for. Desai had politely informed her of our assistance, and while I was not present for the result, I gather that she ha
d not been terribly happy. I was hurt, of course, but one soldiers on.

  “All right, Baldwin, what have you got?”

  “Not a lot,” I admitted. “And I want to state for the record that we are not investigating Dr. Grasso’s death, but rather an earlier theft—”

  “Fine,” she cut in. “Fine! Just remember that the Commonwealth has laws about withholding evidence of a capital crime, got it?”

  I got it.

  “So what do you want, Baldwin?”

  “I was actually hoping you could give me some information on time of death. As near I can tell, he was seen alive around eight, and not since then.”

  “Word gets around fast. Dunno why I bother asking people to keep a lid on anything. Yeah, I’ve got seven of my people canvassing and asking where everyone was between eight and eight thirty.”

  “He seemed pretty well dead by the time I got a good look at him, but I don’t know how the cold changes things.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Cold?”

  “Yeah, it was pretty damn chilly in there when I stopped in—out of professional curiosity, before you ask—though it warmed up fast.”

  She frowned, and gave me that scrutinizing eye of hers. Then she turned away and subvocalized something. I waited and watched her eyes dance as she read the result, then she shook her head.

  “Building logs say the temperature was a uniform eighteen degrees Celsius all morning, which is the number the ME used to put time of death at around eight thirty.”

  “Wait, wait.” I turned and asked Rex, “Am I crazy here?”

  «I am not qualified to judge. But you are not mistaken about the temperature. Your personal logs show an ambient temperature of eighteen Celsius and rising when you entered the room.»

  Stevens waited for me to finish talking to myself. I considered how to relay all that. “My own temperature records show different.”

  “You think someone altered the building logs?” She sighed. “I might believe you, Baldwin, but I can’t accept that as evidence.”

  I already had an answer for that. “Can you pull the temperature records from Dr. Grasso’s implant to cast the tie-breaker?”

  She shook her head. “We can’t. It’s locked up tight. We’re hoping his safe deposit box has a backup password, but if it doesn’t we’re going to need to put a hack job on it, which could take awhile.”

  «Unacceptable. Their floundering has already lost valuable time. Have her take down the following numbers.»

  I repeated them as Rex read them off. Stevens’s eyes grew wider with each digit.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked, incredulous.

  «It is the default backup password for Dr. Grasso’s implant, based on purchase date and model number.»

  I relayed that. She pursed her lips.

  “Has Rex used it?”

  I shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him. I haven’t.”

  The look she gave me bordered on mistrust, which I must say I found hurtful. I waited while she and a tech worked on it.

  «It won’t get her into his most private files—I am not interested at this time in providing root access—but it should be enough to get what she needs. He had changed it, of course, but there is no reason for her to know that I have changed it back for her benefit.»

  I wasn’t allowed into the lab myself; I’d had my shot at it and squandered it arguing in the dark, so I couldn’t complain. Instead, I had to watch from the door, peering around the big official-looking POLICE—DO NOT CROSS hologram they’d set up to ward off anyone who thought this might be a good time to borrow a screwdriver.

  The body was gone, but there was still a pool of blood in the back left—if viewed from the doorway—corner of the room, in the gap between the benches along the wall and an island bench in the middle.

  «Which terminal just activated?» Rex said just as a monitor on the bench came on. It was on the left side of the island, near to where Grasso had been sitting, but not too near. There was a trapezoid of blue tape on the floor in front of it, where I’d seen the rail pistol before.

  I didn’t get a chance to answer: Stevens came back wearing a thoughtful look. “His implant memory is wiped prior to ten-o-four a.m., but everything after that’s intact. We’re double-checking to make sure nobody altered it after the fact.” I thought there was something unfairly accusatory in her tone there. She folded her arms. “But it shows the temperature dip down below ten Celsius and come back up in the hour before he was discovered. Those blowers in there can move a lot of air, it’d be like a blast freezer.”

  I knew the answer, but asked anyway to keep her talking: “So what does that mean?”

  The detective paced back and forth, not really looking at me. I could see faint light play across her eyeball.

  “The ME will have to rule for sure. A big part of her determination of time of death was on algor mortis—body temperature.” Stevens nodded to herself as she talked in a low voice. “But she did say that lividity and rigidity didn’t match up as well as she’d like . . . ” She looked up suddenly and smiled at me. “Thanks, Baldwin. You’ve actually been a help.”

  “My pleasure. Any chance of letting me in there to poke around?”

  “Not a prayer.” I could tell she meant it, but she at least looked like she might have felt a tiny bit bad about it. Maybe. Anyway, the show was over: she shut the door and shooed me away.

  “What was all that about with the computer,” I subbed.

  «The terminal I activated was the one from which I had been deleted. That individual used a utility called ‘secure delete,’ which evidently performed a thorough obliteration of the data.» I knew the one, having advised clients of mine to use it: to use Rex’s favorite word, it confounded attempts to recover data.

  “That terminal’s near where Grasso was shot.”

  «Could Dr. Grasso have used the computer himself?»

  “Not unless he had arms like an orangutan.”

  «I don’t know what that means.»

  “He couldn’t use it.”

  «Then I am satisfied that the person who killed Dr. Grasso is the person who attempted to delete me.»

  “Anything I should know before I talk to this Dr. Tomason? It’s not easy to chat with you in front of people. Is she a suspect?”

  «She is a suspect. Find out what you can about this theft. The device stolen was likely a cranial implant of some special design.»

  “What makes you think that?”

  Rex fell silent for a moment. I looked at the artwork. I smiled and nodded at the folks who walked by wearing badges with their smiling faces on little lanyards around their necks. I wasn’t sure whether the big pale blob was Mount Monadnock or the sky.

  «I prefer to keep my reasons to myself for the moment. But it should suffice for you to point out that Turing Technologies owns thirty-seven patents crucial to the manufacture of cranial implants and to software such as the execrable Jeeves.»

  “That all you want to know?”

  «I need more information. I will want to talk to Armin Fitzgerald about the theft, but I would prefer to negotiate with him from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance.»

  I didn’t mind putting off that particular meeting. I paused outside the solid wood door to Maya Tomason’s office, rehearsing what I was going to say. Mid-suavity, she opened the door.

  “Come in.”

  Dr. Tomason’s office managed to be Spartan but comfortable. She had a corner office like Desai’s, but not as nice a view. Bookshelves lined the other two walls, with more shelves under the windows. Tomason had a standing desk, though she was short enough that I could only tell because she stood at it.

  “You’re the private detective,” she said, and I admitted it. “I don’t approve of hiring you.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am. Mind if I ask why?”

  “The police are quite capable, and where they are lacking, we have Armin. You, on the other hand, are an unknown. In the time it tak
es you to come up to speed, the police will have shut the case on poor Antonio’s suicide.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not investigating Dr. Grasso’s death. Besides, I’m a quick study.”

  “So you say.”

  “I hope you don’t mind if I ask a few questions.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I do or not.”

  “Okay then. What can you tell me about the theft of the cranial implant last year?”

  She turned bright red and rushed past me. I thought she was going to storm out of the room, but instead she slammed the office door.

  “Is it a secret?”

  “Yes! Or, the nature of the stolen item is. Did Antonio tell you that?”

  “I told you, I’m a quick study. I’d be even quicker if I had some cooperation, though.”

  She frowned. “I don’t know what to tell you. I was still working with Michael Joshi in the hardware division at the time, before my promotion. We had a specially built lab for it, from which nothing could get out. The . . . item came in under armed guard. Michael and I examined it and put it into the special testing harness. We ran software tests on it for a week—”

  “Sorry to interrupt, but I thought Grasso was your software guy.”

  She flushed. “He was. But Michael thought it prudent to replicate some of Antonio’s results before proceeding, in case our hardware tests damaged the device. A week later, I came in and found the device missing. We searched everywhere, and the police and FBI were called in.”

  “That must have been awful.”

  Tomason turned away from me and stared out the window. “I’ve never felt so violated. They questioned me, they got a warrant and searched my home, got a movement trace from my implant and examined everywhere I’d been in the previous week.” She pulled her arms around herself, like she was cold. “It’s going to be like that again now, I suppose.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be that bad,” I told her, “but if Rex and I can get to the bottom of it, it’ll be faster. Like ripping off a Band Aid.”

  “What an odd saying,” she said, chewing her lip. “They don’t rip off at all, they fall off when you push the button.”