The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  I knew stalling when I heard it. “Well, it’ll be just like that. Off the record, do you have your own guesses about who took it?”

  She looked me in the eye. “It was plainly an outside party.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There are good reasons to believe outside people wanted it, and foreign governments are entirely capable of accomplishing the task. Besides, if one of us had taken it, why is that person still here? Why not sell it and retire to Tahiti?”

  “Tahiti? How much can one computer be worth?”

  Her expression of disbelief spoke for itself. So, valuable.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that someone here did take it. Even though that’s just wildly unlikely. Maybe there was just too much heat to sell it. Who would it be?”

  She gave me a dirty look, but didn’t refuse outright to answer. Finally, she shrugged and made a face. “Perhaps it was Antonio. Why else would he commit suicide?”

  “Assuming he did, it doesn’t get us anywhere. Let’s rule him out for a minute. Who else?”

  “It would have to be Michael, then.”

  “Michael Joshi? How come?”

  “He was the last person to use the device, and he left early the day before. He was so protective of it, all our assistants were forbidden to touch it. He’d have prevented me using it if he could. As it was, I barely even got to turn it on.” She lifted her chin. “But the police showed that he could not possibly have stolen it from that lab. They proved it even to Armin’s standards.”

  «Move on to something else.»

  “All right, thank you. Now, about this morning.”

  She winced. “Yes, I arrived just after eight—”

  “Actually, I was more interested in the seminar.”

  I enjoyed the look of surprise that crossed her face. “The seminar? Why? What about it?”

  “A couple things. Was anyone missing?”

  “Well, several people are not here today at all.” She listed a couple names, people the police later ruled out. “And Dr. Grasso . . . well, he was not there.”

  There was a knock on the door, and it opened before Dr. Tomason could respond. Jeanne Duvalier stepped in, the young woman who had found me with Grasso’s corpse. This time, she froze upon seeing me.

  “Hello again,” I started, but Tomason cut me off.

  “Jeanne, dear, could you come back later?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind talking—”

  “Later, Jeanne.” Tomason’s tone could have gone a few rounds with some boxers I’ve known. Duvalier left.

  “You were saying, Mr. Baldwin?”

  “Yeah. About the seminar. Did anyone leave early, or step outside, say around ten?”

  She looked puzzled for a moment, and then she glanced over my shoulder and an odd look crossed her face. If pressed, I’d have called it panic. Whatever it was, she mastered it quickly. “Yes, Mr. Baldwin. I did.”

  “When? Mind saying why?” I studied her face, but she’d shut herself down fast.

  “Around ten, and I do mind saying, as a matter of fact.”

  “I bet that the police are going to be asking this same question.”

  I could tell she was curious, but in the end she didn’t take the bait. “Then let them ask it.”

  “You sure nobody else stepped out? Dr. Joshi? Ms. Duvalier?”

  She stiffened, and shook her head instead of replying. We stood in silence for a little while until Rex started giving me grief.

  “Did you see anyone else leave?”

  I know a lie when I hear one, and her “no” didn’t fool me for a second. But it sounded final, so I moved on.

  “This guy Grasso,” I said, “what was he like?”

  “Antonio was a highly intelligent individual, and a gifted software engineer.”

  “See, that’s interesting.” Her left eyebrow went up. “When I ask about a pleasant person, someone’ll lead off with, ‘nice guy’ or ‘I liked him.’ Heck, even a jerk might get a ‘he was quiet,’ or ‘he wasn’t so bad.’ But when I hear first thing off the bat how smart a guy is, I start to think he wasn’t well-liked.”

  She fiddled with some knickknacks on her desk. “That is interesting.”

  “Was he happy here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, which struck me as unlikely. She looked me in the eye, which was fair warning to expect a whopper. “I expect he was perfectly happy here. Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Pardon me for saying, but you’re not being very cooperative, Doc.”

  “Then let me be blunt, Mr. Baldwin. I do not agree with your having been hired, and so far you have not asked any intelligent questions. I don’t even know why I’m still here. I can’t concentrate, and the police can reach me at home just as easily . . . ”

  “All right then, what would be an intelligent question?”

  She looked up with a gleam in her eye. “How about, who knew that Antonio kept a rail pistol in his lab?”

  “I’m impressed, that’s a pretty good question. That was the murder weapon?”

  “Or suicide, Mr. Baldwin. I’m under the impression that it’s hard to tell for sure with a rail gun slug, but the police seem to think so. And I’ll answer the intelligent question: very few people knew it. Even his direct employees, like Ms. Duvalier was for a time, did not know it.”

  I noted her dropping Jeanne Duvalier’s name like that, casual-like.

  «The gun registration is eighteen months old. I have a purchase record.»

  I nodded slowly. “So what,” I asked aloud, “happened eighteen months ago that made him buy the piece?”

  She stared at me, then furrowed her eyebrows. Her eyes seemed to be searching her desk. “That would have been just after we contracted to receive the device. He claimed that he was doing research into firing authorization.”

  “What’s that?”

  She gave me an exasperated look. I’m not above feigning dumb, but in this case I really didn’t know. “The military use it in case their weapons fall into the wrong hands. Each gun is registered to a soldier’s artificial agent. If it’s not mounted as a peripheral, it won’t shoot.”

  “How do they know the pistol’s his?”

  “The police had me identify it.”

  “How did you do that? Did it have any special modifications?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It looked like any other rail pistol, but there’s an electronics compartment in the, er, the handle—”

  “The grip.”

  “The grip. I helped him install the circuitry. The police say that it is the only such weapon in the building, and that it had been fired. It would not have been able to fire without his implant’s connection, and that supports their belief that he committed suicide.”

  She was speaking quickly and with some assurance; she was on solid ground. I decided to knock her off it.

  “Sure,” I said, “But let’s say for a minute that he didn’t kill himself. When Ms. Duvalier left the seminar, she had time—”

  “She didn’t leave,” Tomason said with some vehemence. “I told you that.”

  I started to apologize and claim confusion, but she’d had enough of the likes of me. She was angry and flustered, and finally I was obliged to make an exit. Getting thrown out of someone’s office always felt like progress; I just wished I knew in what direction.

  I ducked out of the building before my meeting with Armin Fitzgerald, and came back armed. He met me in his lair—a darkened basement office lined with monitors and blinking status lights. A coffee machine like a jet engine hunkered in the back corner of the room next to a little sink. Fitzgerald had his feet propped up on the desk when I came in, and he didn’t move a muscle. He just watched me walk in and place the brown paper bag on his big black desk.

  From inside that bag I extracted my armament: a two pound bag of Ethiopia Yirgacheffe wet-process coffee, freshly roasted to a Full City. Fitzgerald’s eyebrows went up.

  “No
t much as bribes go,” he said.

  “That’s because it’s not a bribe,” I said. Rex had checked up on Fitzgerald’s coffee order and discovered that with all the hub and bub, Fitzgerald had run low. This was the exact specification that he ordered most often. “It’s a peace offering. I figured you could use it, and this is one of my personal favorites.”

  In fact, I couldn’t tell most coffees from a cup of thin mud, but that was not for the likes of Armin Fitzgerald to know. He didn’t grab for the bag immediately.

  “Funny thing, Baldwin. I did a little digging, and I don’t see much about this Rex guy anywhere.”

  I’d seen this one coming, of course. “Well, sure. He prefers it that way, see—as long as he gets his fee, he doesn’t care who gets the credit. Usually it’s the police, but he’s generous with hard-working private folks, too.”

  “ ‘Hard-working private folks,’ huh?” He rolled his eyes, but he also took his feet off the desk and snatched up the bag of coffee. “Laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think?”

  “It’s the truth, thick or thin. But it might also have something to do with Rex not wanting to have to testify in court.”

  “Ah. That sounds more like it.” But it also sounded like I might have made nice with the security man, who went back into the corner and set off an anvil chorus from the machine. “You want a cup?”

  Three-thirty in the afternoon was a bit late for caffeine, so I didn’t really, but I figured I shouldn’t be discourteous. “If you’re already making some.”

  He didn’t say a word for five whole minutes, he just focused on his machine. I had a look over the various monitors. I saw floor plans for the building, lists of people, spiderweb-like network maps, all sorts of things. One of the monitors near the back of the room just had a bunch of documents open: photos of a cranial implant like mine, a bunch of text, some photos of a lab and a floor plan.

  «This is preposterous. Why aren’t you asking any questions?»

  “I recognize when someone wants to talk and when he doesn’t. Wait.”

  «It is nearly the end of the workday. You’re just afraid to talk to him.»

  “That is not true. We are waiting until he’s in the right frame of mind.”

  Fitzgerald came away from the machine with two dainty white cups of coffee on saucers. He put them both on the desk and waved me to sit.

  «You are spewing bunkum. Ask him about the stolen device. We must inspect Dr. Grasso’s office after this, and it’s getting late.»

  I waited, enduring Rex’s increasingly irritated protests, while Fitzgerald and I sipped coffee. It was good, I guess. There wasn’t cream or sugar in it, but it was all right. At last, Fitzgerald slurped the last of it, and set the cup and saucer down.

  “Very good coffee, Baldwin.”

  “I’m glad you liked it.”

  He smiled broadly. “Now get out.”

  «Damn it all, Andy!»

  I tilted my head—not quite a nod or a bow, but enough to show I recognized his right to throw me out. I stood and made for the door.

  “Hang on, hang on.” I turned around and Fitzgerald beckoned me to come back. “All right, you win. What do you want to know?”

  «Finally! Ask him about the stolen device.»

  I asked him about the stolen device. It didn’t improve his mood any, but he drew my attention to the monitor I’d noticed earlier. As it turned out, the “device” was a specialty implant. The FBI had raided a spy cell and had unearthed a half dozen implants that were head and shoulders above anything sold in this country, designed to masquerade as regular cranial implants. Ahmed Desai had scored a coup in getting the government to agree to loan one of them to Turing Technologies, whereupon it had instantly become a giant pain in one Armin Fitzgerald’s ass.

  They’d built a clean room software lab for it, and put Grasso in charge to see what the fancy software could do. Fitzgerald had worked on that lab; it was specially instrumented so nothing could get out of it. Grasso sat on it for six months or so, lording it over everyone. He even went so far as to buy a rail pistol, ostensibly for research, but he’d intimated to Fitzgerald that he feared for his life from foreign spies wanting their implant back. After six months, the device was to be the domain of the hardware folks. But the hardware people—Tomason and Joshi—wanted all kinds of specialty equipment. Installing it all would have been a security nightmare.

  “So that’s why the second lab?”

  Fitzgerald nodded. “Got it. We built a second lab down the hall, a real doozy. My own design—once that implant was in there, nothing was getting in or out except people in special lab coats, who were scanned each way. All the walls were reinforced, and the air ducts were covered with a fine mesh. The device was brought over from the first lab under armed guard. A week later—poof. Gone.”

  “How?”

  “Nobody knows except the thief. The FBI came in, and they had nothing but good words for my design, but none of us could figure out how it had gotten out of there.”

  “Who reported the theft?”

  “Dr. Joshi. He came in that morning, found it missing, and called for me. He didn’t leave until I got there, and he was thoroughly searched. By me, and then by the police.”

  “All right. Who was the last person in the lab?”

  An odd look crossed his face, and he looked away from me. “I was, with Dr. Tomason. The night before. Someone had left a timer on; it went off and triggered the noise alarm. We investigated, and the device was still there in its little testing harness.”

  «Is it possible the device never left the second lab?» I relayed the question.

  He wagged a finger at me. “I thought of that. We searched the lab, and did a full inventory. We even tested all the components we found. It had definitely been taken out of the room.”

  The details of the investigation were, well, they were dull. But he was nothing if not thorough: they disassembled the lab. They investigated everyone who had access to the room or its surrounds, including the guards. They even investigated Dr. Grasso, who didn’t have access to the second room at all. They interviewed contacts, relations—a whole team of FBI agents with help from the Department of Defense and local cops can cover a lot of ground in a four-month investigation.

  “So that’s it? They just dropped it after four months?”

  “Yup. They came to Mr. Desai and said they were going to assume that the spies’ government arranged for recovery.”

  “That’s crazy. Turn everyone’s lives upside down, then shrug it off as a cold case?”

  He waved a finger in my face. “I haven’t shrugged it off. I’ve been thinking.”

  “Get anywhere?”

  I shouldn’t have said that. He looked sullen at the thought. I moved on to another topic.

  “So Grasso bought a pistol. Was he shot with his own gun?”

  “Yessir. Which proves that he killed himself. I’ve got scanners at all the entrances to the building, and nothing like a pistol has come in or out except those belonging to the police. And nobody could fire Grasso’s gun except Grasso himself, thanks to that implant doohickey.”

  I made a note of it.

  “Look, it’s been nice chatting with you, Baldwin, but I’ve got work to do. The police have kept me busy all day; I’m going to have to stay late as it is. Thanks for the coffee.”

  I took my cue and made for the stairs.

  «What the devil was all that misery with the silence?»

  I probably could have explained it, eventually. It may even have been to my eventual benefit to teach him a lesson about how people like to be treated. But I couldn’t quite put those thoughts into words. I finally came up with, “If I’d pestered him before he’d finished, or balked when he kicked me out, I wouldn’t have gotten a word out of him.”

  «Why not? How could you have known that?»

  “The same way I knew Tomason was lying and that Desai wouldn’t respect us unless I argued with him. Reading people is part of being a
detective.”

  «Very well, then. Satisfactory.»

  Grasso’s third floor office was bigger than my first apartment. It had been, at some point, tasteful: big Afghan rugs, oak bookcases, a large sepia-tone globe in a hardwood and silver mount, and a huge oak desk facing the door. The desk looked like an antique—it had scars across its back and sides and it looked like there had been water damage at some point but had been very nicely restored. A smaller desk sat off to the side, with an ancient desktop computer sporting an old flat screen and a mouse and keyboard.

  The effect of all this was ruined by the enormous stacks of papers and books everywhere. I could barely see the top of the desk. The papers were mostly stapled together in stacks of a dozen or so, and had impressive-looking titles like, A Method of Efficiently Addressing the Byzantine Generals’ Problem in Multi-Component Artificial Agents. All the books had slips of paper sticking out of them, usually a couple dozen with torn edges.

  “All right,” I subbed, “where’s the needle in this particular haystack?”

  «Has anyone searched this office?»

  “The police, probably.”

  «Have they? Or are you guessing?»

  I looked around. I wasn’t sure they had, actually. All the stacks cluttered the place up, but I felt like there was still a kind of logic to it. Besides, a good search doesn’t leave a mess, because that makes it easier to miss something. If I’d had my toolkit, I’d have swept for residual heat, since even gloved hands warm up the stuff they touch, and I’ve got a pretty good feel for what ought to be warm or cold in an empty room. I had a case a few years ago where that saved a client’s life: a cleverly hidden booby trap was still just a little too warm from where his former business partner had kept it under his coat.

  Or, I could’ve used a laser sweep and processed the reflections for dust polarization, to see what’d been disturbed or where something had been removed. I’ve heard a rumor that you could even use it to pick out sound waves from a recent conversation, but I think that’s probably hooey. That was a nifty little tool, but it had been confiscated with the others when I’d been arrested.