Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The party section, located up front, was reserved for large groups of people who planned to spend the evening eating marijuana-laced brownies and laughing. By the end of the night, the people in the party section usually ordered (and ate) more food than most restaurants served in two days. The party section kept the Brownie Bar in expensive ingredients.

  Casual users filled the main section of the restaurant. They often sat in groups of two or three, and had quiet conversations, and a brownie or two, before having a full dinner. The Brownie Bar tried to keep the atmosphere there low-key, figuring most people wanted a relaxant before a quiet meal.

  But Flint wasn’t there for the dining experience or the marijuana. He wanted the public-access ports. In the section he preferred, the Brownie Bar had placed screens on the tables, so that regular customers and hard-core users could come in during their workday, get some work done, and enjoy a brownie or a good meal.

  This section was walled off from the others so that the raucous laughter from the party section didn’t filter in, nor did the conversation from the main section.

  Flint had started coming to the Brownie Bar when the city slapped it with expensive fines for the pipes the Brownie Bar originally allowed in one of its private rooms. Most domed communities had stringent laws against anything that polluted the air, including various kinds of cigarette smoking and pipe usage.

  Flint had grown to love the Brownie Bar after the air got clear. He had his favorite table in the back, and the wait-staff—they still hired actual people here—knew not to give him the complimentary tray of brownies to start his meal and not to peer over his shoulder while he worked.

  In return, he tipped well and made certain that at least once a week he ordered a large meal to make up for his long table use.

  This afternoon, the bar was quieter than usual. Just Flint, with his turkey soup and his home-brewed ale, and a young woman who sat across the room from him, slowly working her way through a plate of brownies, staring at the screen in front of her, and crying softly.

  Flint had asked the waitstaff if there was anything he needed to do, but they had shaken their heads. Apparently she came in as often as he did, ate an entire plate of brownies, cried for a while, and left. She’d been doing so for nearly a decade. It was, they guessed, her form of release.

  He bent over his screen, bought time with a credit account he’d never used before (and wouldn’t use again), and got to work. Even though he normally didn’t wear gloves here, he had put on a pair this afternoon. If the police came to trace what he had done, he didn’t want to leave any part of himself—except maybe the image of him on the Brownie Bar’s security system.

  Even that he could thwart, though. He didn’t need to deny being here. Instead, he rerouted his access code through several of the access terminals, until the system believed he had logged on from the crying woman’s table.

  Some systems were remarkably easy to hack. The Brownie Bar’s was one, which was why he loved to work here. He sometimes just came in to update his skills, try things he hadn’t tried before, so that he wouldn’t lose his abilities to alter programming in most systems that existed around Armstrong.

  He worked for only a few minutes to get into the police department’s systems, and took even less time to find the detective files.

  He used to work for the department, and he had had access to the system then. He had left himself several back doors, and after his last major case with the police, he had also given himself a few fake identities with some security protocols so that he could get the day’s passwords and use those to enter any police-encoded system.

  Fortunately, the Lahiris’ system hadn’t been encoded when he downloaded off of it. He would have to stop at another public terminal before going back to his office to see if anyone had tried to trace his actions in the Lahiri system. If he found evidence of that, he would wipe it out, making absolutely certain no one could trace the actions back to him.

  He decided to tap into DeRicci’s files. From there, he would be able to tap into everything the Detective Division did. That might be useful. It would also give him access to the crime scene division and the medical examiner’s offices. He wouldn’t have to contact DeRicci about anything.

  As he did this, he left himself a few other back doors, creating more entities. If he left these other entities floating in the department computer, using their own software so that his tampering wouldn’t show up as spyware or as ghosts in the system, he would always be able to access files if he needed to.

  Slowly, he was learning how to think ahead.

  He paused and ate some of the turkey soup. It was rich as always—the broth had flavor that he rarely encountered in Armstrong restaurants, and the turkey had texture instead of that soft, almost tofulike pseudomeat that passed for poultry in most of Armstrong.

  He savored each bite, then set the bowl down again and continued his work. It wouldn’t take him long to finish, but he had to do so in a way that he could access the departmental files from anywhere, not just the Brownie Bar.

  Fortunately, he’d never told DeRicci the extent of his skills as a hacker. She had known that he was better than most. She just never learned that he was once one of the best in Armstrong.

  Now he hoped she’d never learn it.

  He paused again and finished the soup. He felt almost dirty, doing this, as if he were betraying every friend he had made.

  He was certainly betraying DeRicci. But he couldn’t work with her—and he couldn’t stop the investigation, not without hurting himself.

  Twenty

  DeRicci had a headache, and she wasn’t going to spring for some automatic endorphins. She deserved this headache, and it was only going to get worse.

  She shouldn’t have seen Flint. She had known that when she drove over, but the feeling grew worse during the meeting. And then, when he had refused to work with her, the feeling had grown even stronger.

  These impulses were the reason that DeRicci hadn’t been promoted for nearly two decades, the reason that the only promotion she’d ever received came after some political heroism that could be revoked as easily as it was achieved.

  She felt some sort of loyalty toward Flint that he didn’t feel toward her. Or, worse, she had a death wish of her own, a desire to screw up this case so that she’d be back on the street, forgetting all about the desk and the nice apartment and the even nicer salary.

  All those thoughts went through her head as she stood outside the Medical Examiner’s office, talking to Armstrong’s chief coroner and one of the senior techs. Gumiela had ordered an express on this case, so the DNA of the third victim had been run at the scene, then rerun here three separate times. Information that sometimes took days because of verification and reverification this time took hours.

  And the news wasn’t good.

  The body belonged to Carolyn Lahiri, a woman who was thought to have Disappeared three decades ago. DeRicci hated that news. First the link to Flint, and now an actual returned Disappeared.

  Flint had taken the Lahiris’ case, he had found their daughter, and now they had all ended up dead. No matter what happened, he was mixed up in it.

  And DeRicci had given him a heads-up. Her prime suspect, and she had all but told him to flee the city.

  “A Disappeared’s going to cause all sorts of problems in this case,” the coroner was saying. DeRicci had to force herself to listen. She didn’t like Ethan Brodeur, even though she’d worked with him countless times. Her dislike wasn’t rational—he was good at his job, and he’d helped her with innumerable cases.

  But she found everything about him irritating, from his baritone voice, which he modulated even lower than normal in an attempt to sound sexy, to his enhanced hair, so thick that it looked like he was growing enough for eight people.

  He smiled too much, too. No man who cut up dead people for a living should smile that much.

  “I’m sure I can get the computer guys to make sure the records are accurate,
” the main tech, Barbara Passolini, said. She was too thin and looked sickly—the kind of person who never took enhancements because she had seen too many of them go wrong in her job. In fact, DeRicci could remember when Passolini had all of her enhancements removed. She had been on a campaign to make everyone in the department enhancement-free.

  “You haven’t worked a lot of Disappeareds, have you?” Brodeur asked.

  “Usually they don’t end up as homicides.” Passolini glanced around the hallway. The three of them had decided to meet there to prevent too many leaks in this case. They had also decided not to use their main links for fear of being tapped.

  “Actually,” DeRicci said, “a lot of Disappeareds end up as homicides. I get them all the time.”

  Brodeur and Passolini looked at her as if they had forgotten she was there. She shrugged.

  “I send them to you, Ethan, and you verify that they’re vengeance killings or core deaths or all the other sanctioned murders that go on around here. It just takes a while to find out who they are and why they died.”

  Brodeur sighed. “We always assume with an alien killing, especially by the Disty or the HD, that it’s legal and work our way from there. We don’t make that assumption with human-on-human deaths.”

  “We don’t know that this is a human-on-human death,” DeRicci said. “We don’t know much of anything yet.”

  “She is right about that,” Passolini said, as if DeRicci being right was an unusual event. “We have a lot of trace and no time to process it. That apartment was oddly cleaned, as if the Lahiris had a cleaning service that quit the moment of the murders.”

  DeRicci frowned at that. She started to say something, but Brodeur interrupted her.

  “We have a Disappeared and we have her parents. We have a weapon on the scene, and wounds—at least in the Disappeared—that could have been made by that weapon.”

  “But you haven’t confirmed that yet, right?” DeRicci asked. “There hasn’t been time to verify if that weapon caused the murders.”

  “It seems likely,” Brodeur said.

  DeRicci gave him a cool smile. “I’ll figure out what’s likely and what’s not. You just tell me the facts as you discover them. We work better that way.”

  “Touchy,” Brodeur said, but he didn’t disagree. He knew better than to get involved in her part of the job.

  “Well,” Passolini said, facing DeRicci, “You have to tell me where to start. This case has so many angles that I could pursue all of them and never have free time again.”

  “We have two obvious anomalies and they’re wrapped up in the same corpse.” DeRicci had to work to keep her tone level. Passolini should understand this. But techs never really did get their heads out of the details. Usually DeRicci liked that.

  She had a hunch she wouldn’t in this case.

  “First,” DeRicci said, “we have the problem of the corpse herself. If Carolyn Lahiri is a Disappeared, what’s she doing back in her hometown? How long has she been here, and why is she visiting Mom and Dad, where she’s easy to find?”

  “I thought of that,” Passolini muttered.

  “Second,” DeRicci said, not believing Passolini, “her face is gone. The other faces are intact. Killers usually use the same MO. This one shot two people in the stomach and one in the face—the one who had been hiding her identity. I want to know if the killer was sending some kind of message.”

  “Good luck,” Passolini muttered.

  DeRicci ignored that as Brodeur whistled softly. “So you think she was killed by an outsider?”

  “I don’t think anything at the moment,” DeRicci said.

  “You were the one who discovered the gun,” Passolini said. “I figured you already know she was a suicide.”

  “I don’t know anything,” DeRicci said. “I just make a few guesses. And judging from the layout of the bodies, I made an educated guess. If I had known that the third body belonged to a Disappeared, I might have made a different guess.”

  “Do you think she’s a suicide?” Passolini asked Brodeur.

  “I haven’t done much more than run her DNA,” he said. “You just brought her here. I’m going to need a lot of time with this body. I want to do her autopsy right. Gumiela has made it pretty clear that this is a do-not-screw-up case.”

  Which was good and bad. It meant that some parts of the case would end quicker than others, but it also meant that most of the case would take longer as people checked and rechecked their work.

  “I’m going to need to know several things as quickly as you can get them to me,” DeRicci said. “First, I want to know if that body was moved.”

  “Aside from the trip here, you mean,” Brodeur said.

  DeRicci nodded. “You had techs on-site. I want to know if Carolyn Lahiri was shot there or shot somewhere else.”

  “You don’t care about the parents?” Brodeur asked.

  “I don’t know about them either, but they died in a similar method, and if you had gone inside that apartment, you would have realized that someone had died there. There was splatter all over the walls. The question is, of course, who does it belong to—all three corpses or two or maybe even just one?”

  “We’ll find that out soon enough,” Passolini said. “We test the spatter first in cases like this.”

  “Then,” DeRicci said, “I’m going to need to know if that weapon killed her, and if she used it herself.”

  “Provided, of course, that she wasn’t moved,” Brodeur said with a smile.

  DeRicci didn’t smile back. “I’m also going to need to know if there’s anything alien in the trace. If she lived off-world, then maybe she was killed by someone who lived off-world. I want to know who or what that someone is.”

  Passolini nodded.

  “I’ll check body chemistry then,” Brodeur said. “Certain chemicals get into the bloodstream and into the skin that don’t exist here. They might tell us where she’s been living.”

  “We’ll do all that as a matter of course,” Passolini said. “But I don’t think you understand, Detective, how messy this case is.”

  DeRicci hated it when people told her she didn’t understand something. “Politically? I have a clue.”

  “No,” Passolini said. “Scientifically. We have a judge, a doctor, and a Disappeared. The Disappeared presents problems you’ve already listed. But the doctor could bring home a lot of trace if she’s not careful, and since she lived and worked in a port city, she saw a lot of people just off the boat, so to speak. That place can be full of more false evidence than you realize.”

  “Wonderful,” DeRicci muttered.

  “Then we have a whole different issue with the judge. He was on the Multicultural Tribunal. My great-aunt served on one of the Tribunals. These judges work with aliens all the time, and they have to travel for their cases. Depending on what circuit he was in, he might have had to go from planet to planet to hear appeals and cases.”

  “I’m assuming he was based here,” DeRicci said. “It should only take a moment to check.”

  “Well, so far, no one’s taken that moment, and we need to know,” Passolini said. “Because if he was based somewhere else, then we have even more odd trace in that apartment.”

  “So you’re telling me that the scientific evidence in this case might lie?” DeRicci asked.

  “It’s going to be tough separating the good evidence from the bad,” Passolini said. “Building a case for court, if that’s what you end up doing, might be difficult.”

  “Let’s just hope it’s a suicide, then,” Brodeur said.

  DeRicci glared at him. “You want a daughter who has been estranged from her parents for I don’t know how many years to come home and shoot them for no apparent reason? You want that to be what happened?”

  “You want it to be some outsider we haven’t caught yet?” Brodeur asked. “One we might never catch if the trace is so iffy that we can’t read it?”

  DeRicci let out a sigh.

  “Best case,
” Passolini said, speaking directly to Brodeur, “is that these people were killed by the daughter’s enemies, the ones that made her Disappear. Then we probably have a legal death and—”

  “And two murders,” DeRicci said. “If that’s the case, then the parents didn’t deserve to die. Or they would have Disappeared too. It’s not like they weren’t prominent people. They were visible. They would have been targets if they were implicated in her crime.”

  “You don’t think this has anything to do with her Disappearance?” Brodeur asked.

  DeRicci let out a sigh. Her headache was getting worse, and Brodeur’s inane questions weren’t helping. “I don’t make assumptions when I start a case, and you both have to stop doing so now. If this evidence is as messy as you say it is, Barbara, then we have a lot more work than usual. And since Gumiela wants this case to be letter-perfect, we have even more work. The worst thing we can do is go into this with our eyes closed and our minds made up.”

  The other two were silent for a moment. Then Passolini said quietly, “We’re not beginners, Noelle. We know what we’re doing.”

  “Let’s hope so,” DeRicci said. “Because all of our careers rest on what we do in the next few days. And I, for one, don’t want to be demoted.”

  At least not for the mistakes of others. The mistakes she had already made in this case were another matter. If she got demoted because of Flint, she would accept it.

  She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Maybe she would take the endorphins after all.

  “You going to be all right, Noelle?” Brodeur asked.

  “This is going to be a son of a bitch,” she said. “Once the press get hold of this, we lose what little control we already have.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry much about the press,” Passolini said.

  DeRicci frowned at her. “Why not? Did Gumiela scare them off?”

  “That’s not in character,” Brodeur said. “If anyone loves the media more than Andrea Gumiela, I have yet to meet her.”

  “The death of a doctor and a judge would be major news normally,” Passolini said, “but not today. Haven’t you had your links on?”