Perhaps if he had left Armstrong, even for a trip to one of the other domed cities, he might have learned that the universe was bigger than the one controlled by his parents. But he never had, always saw himself in their light, and never did find his own reflection. He was lost, almost before he had started.
DeRicci found all of that interesting, but irrelevant. If the brother was a suicide—and she had no real reason to believe otherwise—then the cause of his death was important to him and routine to everyone else. She had investigated dozens of suicides, and almost all of them blamed their families for their inadequacies instead of looking to themselves.
More preliminary reports had come in—short on details, long on speculation, even though she had warned the team against that. She scanned through them, finding nothing that she didn’t already know. Then she looked at the attachments. The crime scene techs had included a security vid from the hallway—apparently they were still trying to get information from the front door and the entry, at least at the time they wrote the report.
The hallway vid, according to the crime scene techs, confirmed the presence of a fourth person somewhere near the time of the killings.
She opened the vid file, commanded the play to go to her wall screen—a secondary screen that wasn’t playing the emergency feed—and leaned back.
The image appeared life-size on her far wall. The hallway looked realistic enough, even though she could see the white paint faintly through the image. Still, it seemed like she could walk down that corridor and get into the elevator at the far end.
The view of the elevator wasn’t that good; she could only see a corner of the door. The hallway, at the beginning of the vid, was empty, and looked nothing like the hallway she had found herself in a few hours ago.
It seemed wider, for one thing, probably because it wasn’t crammed with police and crime-scene technicians. For another, it seemed cleaner and better lit, but that could have been a function of the tape itself.
There was a soft ping as the elevator door slid open, and she saw movement at the very edge of the screen.
The camera wasn’t mobile, or no one was watching it or it hadn’t been set up to focus on movement, because whoever had gotten off stayed at the bottom of her screen.
She got a sense of thinness and height, also saw a dark coat and a black hat. The techs had made notes that ran concurrently along the right side of the image, planning to expand the visuals so that they might extrapolate the visitor’s appearance with computer modeling.
DeRicci let out a small sigh. That meant they never got a good view of the visitor, not from these cameras.
She glanced at the report to see if there were other security vids from this floor, but found nothing. Then she looked back at the person standing in front of the Lahiris’ door.
He had moved from the side of the image to the very center of it. She rewound, watched his progress, and caught only a few details—a blond curl catching the light, a bit of white skin, long lashes hiding bright blue eyes.
She had only known one man with that coloring. Flint. He was blond and unusually white-skinned. Humans had intermingled so much over the centuries that the standard color had darkened, leaving pale people like Flint in the minority.
Only a handful of them lived on the Moon.
There were pockets of pale people elsewhere, some going to faraway planets to preserve their heritage, but they rarely traveled back into what they called the Old Universe. Their cultures had been denounced by the Alliance, and they were rare in this solar system. Even rarer than people like Flint himself.
Her hand had tightened into a fist, sending shooting pains up her arm. She forced herself to relax.
The man got in the center of the camera’s range when his back was to it. She no longer saw the curl, no longer saw the skin. Only broad shoulders that tapered into narrow legs, a head hidden by a black hat, and a long coat that covered most of the rest of the clothing.
The man clearly knew where the camera was, and had done everything in his power to avoid it. Perhaps that was why the techs had run the notes alongside—to prove to DeRicci that they would try to discover his appearance while covering their butts in likely event of failure.
A bell sounded in the distance, and for a moment, she thought it was the elevator on the vid. But it was the Lahiris’ bell. Somehow the man had rung it without revealing his hand.
DeRicci chewed on her lower lip, wishing she could make all of this go away, wishing that it would be as easy to rewind life as it was to rewind the vid.
But it wasn’t, and she watched as Dr. Mimi Lahiri opened the door, her squarish face animated.
DeRicci hated seeing the victims as they had been in life. It made them into people and it made her care too much about them. But she still watched, entranced, as Lahiri spoke.
May I help you?
What an odd thing to say to someone who had come to your door. If she hadn’t known him, she wouldn’t have opened the door. So opening the door suggested that she had known him, and yet her words were those someone would utter to a stranger.
The man’s words were garbled—probably deliberately—and DeRicci couldn’t even get a tone of voice from them. They’d been scrambled by something—something on his person? Or something that simply scrambled the vid’s recording of the incident?
She glanced at the running commentary from the techs. They suspected a disruption in the feed. The voice had sounded different to Mimi Lahiri, probably like a normal voice. The distortion that DeRicci was hearing was part of the vid, not the way that the man spoke.
Lahiri turned, said, Carolyn? as the man shoved his way into the apartment. Lahiri looked at him with a mixture of fear and anger.
Then he kicked the door shut.
DeRicci froze the frame on the closed door.
Obviously the man had claimed he was there for Carolyn. If the man was Flint, as DeRicci suspected, the request and Dr. Lahiri’s response to it made sense. She would let him into the apartment to see a woman he had helped rescue from her past.
But Dr. Lahiri wouldn’t have treated him so coldly, would she? In addition to being something someone said to a person they didn’t know, May I help you? was also a polite way of telling someone that they weren’t wanted.
DeRicci rewound the vid and watched the sequence again. She hadn’t known Dr. Lahiri, so she didn’t know if the woman was reacting the way she would when a friend was at the door or if she treated everyone that way.
And now there were no members of the family left alive to help her sort this out. DeRicci would have to go to friends—if the Lahiris had any—and colleagues to get some of these questions answered.
Something wasn’t right here, and it wasn’t just the suggestions of Flint in all the evidence. If he had decided to target this family, he would have been more careful—wouldn’t he?
Police and former police liked to think they were sophisticated about evidence, but they made mistakes like everyone else. And perhaps the family had provoked him somehow, perhaps they had found out the one thing that would really upset him.
DeRicci shook her head. Even if the person at the door was Flint, there was nothing here that proved he had killed the family.
DeRicci leaned back in her chair and folded her hands together. If she hadn’t been friends with Miles Flint, she would have brought him into the station for interrogation based on this evidence.
She was giving him leeway again.
Her stomach twisted. She hated this case.
But she would do it her way. Before she brought Flint in, she would make certain she had all her evidence together. She didn’t want to set him free on any kind of technicality. She didn’t want to tip her hand.
After all, Retrieval Artists knew how to Disappear—and that was the last thing she wanted Miles Flint to do.
Thirty-four
Flint watched the security vid concurrently with DeRicci. She had no understanding of her computer networks and links, leavi
ng that to the techs, so Flint was free to piggyback onto her system, to watch even as she watched.
He didn’t like what he saw. The killer had stayed at the edge of the camera range, showing that he knew exactly where the building’s security was.
Like he had done inside the apartment, the killer had planted evidence, all of it false. The killer had dark hair, dark skin, and dark eyes. When he had entered the apartment and killed the Lahiris, he had looked like his image on the soldiers-for-hire site.
Somehow, he had tampered with the vid here or had worn some kind of costume to gain entry to the apartment.
Flint studied the hallway security vid. There were a number of problems with it. First, it seemed to start only moments before the elevator opened. Granted, the techs could have sent it to DeRicci that way, but the opening seemed static—the kind of static that came from a fixed image, not from a camera studying the same spot for long periods of time.
Besides, most building security measures had sensors—sound and motion detectors or heat monitors, something that would trigger the on cycle. This vid had been running before the elevator opened, which didn’t seem right.
Flint couldn’t work with this copy of a copy of a copy. He glanced at the screen that monitored DeRicci’s work: she was still reading reports.
So he moved to another screen, used his links, and probed the police files, going into the tech files as deeply as he dared. He used the code generated off the report the techs had sent to DeRicci, hoping to find the real copy of the vid before the backup alarms went off.
He had already deactivated the main alarms; those were easy. The backups, which he’d insisted get installed in the system when he moved up from Traffic, were the ones he didn’t trust.
Because he had seen the killer tamper with the cleaning bots, because he knew some of the tricks built into the man’s systems, Flint knew what to look for.
It took him about ten minutes to find it.
The original had been altered. A chip had been added to the pile that ran the building’s security. Someone had added the chip, and if Flint had time, he would hack into the building’s security system and see if that someone showed up in the twelve hours between diagnostics.
At the moment, he concentrated on the chip itself. It had its own self-sustaining program, and didn’t seem to blend with the other chips. Yet it hadn’t set off the diagnostic’s sensors, probably because it had been designed to lurk.
In spite of himself, he had to admire the ingenuity the killer used. Flint backed up the security vid, watched the original from the beginning, and saw what he was searching for: the slight bounce that indicated the start of a recording.
He froze the bounce, then zeroed in on it, slowing it down to microseconds and watching each tiny frame. The security vid showed the elevator, but with the door already open. Apparently something had triggered the vid—movement or the door itself—and then the new chip cut in.
In a split-second, the elevator door went from open to closed; the altered version of the vid ran, and no one would be the wiser. Unless they knew what they were looking for.
His hands were shaking. The techs had missed this, and would continue to do so if he didn’t do something. He hacked deeper into the system, found one of the tech’s digital signatures, and flagged the bounce—highlighting the open elevator door and then the fact that it was closed, as well as the odd diagnostic.
Then he added a message: Anyone else catch this? Got a clue what it means?
He quickly scrubbed his own prints from the system—at least as best he could, without removing the traces he’d planted in DeRicci’s net—and backed out, hoping that the backup alarms hadn’t gone off while he was doing his good deed for the day.
Then he shut down the links into his office, and studied the security vid one more time. Blond hair, curls, light skin. He touched his own skin. How many people had commented on his coloring over the years? How many had smiled at him and asked if he was from off-world or mentioned how very old-fashioned he looked?
The chances of someone else with the same combination of skin color, hair color and eye color approaching the Lahiris was slim.
Someone was setting Flint up to detract attention from the killer himself.
His palms were damp. He wiped them on his pants legs, then stood. He paced around the small room. The fact that someone brought him in as a decoy bothered him—and not just for the fact that he might be implicated in the crime.
This killer had to know that Flint was working on the case and had to observe Flint enough to know what Flint looked like.
Flint frowned. If the killer had known Carolyn was on Earth, he would have killed her there.
So that meant he had stumbled on her—and Flint—later.
Which actually gave Flint a time line. Because once Carolyn agreed to come back to Armstrong, she didn’t leave Flint’s side. In fact, Flint had guarded her (without her knowledge) while she was deciding what to do.
The killer had to have found them after Flint had contacted Carolyn. The killer had come to Earth looking for her, saw Flint take her away, and followed them back to the Moon.
Flint supposed the killer could have seen her in Armstrong and followed her to the apartment, but that was less likely—how would the killer have known when (or even if) she would return to the Moon?
At some point, the killer had piggybacked on Flint’s work and Tracked Carolyn, waiting for the best moment to assassinate her.
Flint sat back down at his desk, reopened his links, and copied the picture he had of the killer. Then he let the computer compare it to Port records on Earth during the week he’d been there. The killer would have had to go through security and decon—Earth was the strictest of all the planets in this galaxy with its decon procedures: the place had never had a foreign-brought plague. It also kept records of all outsiders entering Earth, and the records were on file for seven years before they went into the back archives.
It was a nifty system and one he once argued for Armstrong’s Port to adopt. Because if someone had the same physical ID and used a different name at different times, it automatically red-flagged the system. Several people got slowed down unnecessarily, but a number of criminals had been caught that way—often on years-old data.
Armstrong’s Port archived its information for only a year, claiming it had too much traffic to keep the information much longer. Armstrong had a point: the Moon was a hub for most of the solar system—particularly for aliens who didn’t want to go all the way to Earth, since Earth had so many other restrictions—on weaponry (you couldn’t carry any), on currency, on the amount of off-worlders let onto the planet for more than a few weeks—and there were fewer ports on the Moon. So the information was concentrated in one place.
Which made it useful for Flint, since he needed information from this year only. First he hacked into the Earth records, picking ports closest to New Orleans, where he had found Carolyn.
He also looked for information on the space station that orbited Earth, where a lot of larger vehicles chose to dock instead of using the older and more dangerous ports or attempting to go through Earth’s atmosphere.
It didn’t take long for him to get a match. The killer, using the name Hank Mosby, had entered via Cape Canaveral two days before Flint had located Carolyn, and had left the same way on the same day that Flint and Carolyn had come to Armstrong.
Apparently, Flint and the killer—Mosby—had been looking for her at the same time. Flint had found her first, and by staying beside her, had protected her.
Her death in her parents’ apartment had probably been the first chance Mosby had gotten to go after her since he arrived on Armstrong.
Flint examined the Port records on Armstrong. Mosby had arrived just after Flint had and had left right after the murders. He had taken a transport back to Earth.
Flint’s breath caught. Had Mosby been going after more than one person on Earth? Or was he hiding out there?
Then
Flint glanced at the records again. Mosby had never brought his own ship to any of the ports. Every single time he’d been on a transport, where the security was even tighter than it was in the ports.
Of course. He could get through because he seemed to have no weapons. And being on the transport meant he didn’t have to go through the extra level of decon and genetic examination that Earth required; transport companies certified their passengers, even though it was common for the companies not to do the double-checks that Earth required.
It was a loophole for Earth’s stringent no-hidden-weapons policy. Earth knew about creating weapons out of the human body and often scanned for it at the ports. But no one had thought to add that into the age-old transport scanning.
An alarm buzzed through his office. Flint tapped his third computer screen and it rose, showing him the source of the buzz.
Someone in police headquarters had discovered his trace in DeRicci’s machine.
He cursed. Right now, things did not look good for him. And no matter how much he counted on DeRicci to believe him, no matter how much goodwill he had established with the department, he would lose it all by having an illegal trace in their system.
DeRicci might arrest him just to teach him a lesson. It might have been one he deserved, but it wasn’t one he wanted to learn.
Since he was made, he downloaded his information and sent it through his private links to his space yacht, the Emmeline. Then he shut down his office system, removing two specialized chips so that no one could start it back up except him.
He was heading to Earth, and he wasn’t sure he was ever coming back.
Thirty-five
Nitara Nicolae pressed against the building, her hands behind her. She tried to disappear. The riot continued around her, but it had lost its momentum. The moment Anatolya Döbryn had escaped in the airlimo, the riot had lost its heart.
Nitara’s breath was coming in short gasps. She hadn’t moved from this spot, not since the crowd started to gather. She had thought herself far enough away from the center of the crowd to stay out of the action—and she had been right, for the most part.
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