Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  Paloma had been rigorous about billing WSX, and the payments were tracked on the bills, as well as in an accounts receivable file. She seemed so concerned about money that Flint wondered if she had financial problems. Had that been why she had taken the work WSX had sent her?

  A Retrieval Artist who was constantly short of money, she had told him time and time again, risked compromising everything he believed in.

  Had she told him this, not as a caution, but out of experience? Had she risked everything? Had she paid a huge price for her lack of financing—or had someone else?

  A shiver ran down his back. He glanced at the timer he had set up along the screen’s edge. It was set for 5:30, so that he could open up the office net before Wagner arrived.

  Flint had thirty minutes until he had to open the system, not long enough to get any answers at all. He found that this search had given him a lot more questions, and he didn’t want that.

  He skipped ahead and saw that Paloma’s later dealings with WSX weren’t as detailed. Her later reports simply expressed whether or not she felt a case was worth following, and the attached bills had not itemized her expenses.

  Had she stopped trusting people in the office or had they worked out a shorthand?

  Flint stood, frustration making him restless. She should have told him what had been going on. He wanted to know, rather than having to dig like this. Had she been ashamed of whatever happened with WSX, or had she felt that the past had no bearing on the present?

  He stretched, reaching toward the ceiling. The muscles in his back ached—he had been sitting in one position too long—and his spine made small crackling noises.

  Maybe everything was exactly as Wagner said it was; maybe they had come to Flint for his connection to Paloma, his newness, and his ties to the police department.

  Flint sat back down. He tried one last thing: he searched for files that mentioned Ignatius Wagner. It took the system a moment to find everything, which Flint found odd.

  He glanced at the clock. Only fifteen minutes before he had to unlock his net and open it so that Wagner could come inside the office.

  Flint cursed silently and wished for more time.

  Then the system stopped searching. It had found thousands of files listing Ignatius Wagner.

  Flint stared at the results. He couldn’t believe those either. Why would Paloma have so much information on Wagner? Was that why she had warned him?

  He opened a few of the files at random, double-checking the system. Every file mentioned Wagner, and as Flint opened more and more of them, he grew cold.

  Paloma had gathered information on Wagner’s life as if Wagner were a client or a Disappeared. She had the time and date he left for school on his very first day, the date of his first kiss, the location of his first job.

  Paloma probably knew more about Ignatius Wagner than his parents did.

  Flint scanned some of the later files, just for informational purposes. Wagner was Claudius Wagner’s youngest son, and hadn’t made partner in the law firm when Paloma wrote her last entry. He had always been contrary, having trouble following WSX policy. As a punishment, his father hadn’t sped Ignatius’s partnership through. Unlike his brother, Ignatius would have to earn his place in the law firm.

  Apparently he had earned his place, because the information Flint had gathered on Ignatius listed him as a partner. But Paloma’s records showed that Ignatius wasn’t happy with the direction WSX was going. There had been some kind of power struggle going on at WSX, and both brothers were involved with it.

  The alarm on Flint’s computer beeped. Five-thirty. Time for him to open the systems.

  He frowned. He was further behind in his research than he had expected to be. But he had no real choice. Now that he had spoken to Paloma, found all these records, and seen some of the gathered information, he wanted to meet with Wagner again.

  Flint moved the files to a private area of his system, knowing he was going to have to find an even better hiding place for all of this information, but that he didn’t have time this afternoon. He would do it after Wagner left.

  Flint sealed the private area, then reopened the system, reestablishing all of the links with the outside. He had a lot of work to do. He might even overhaul everything, put in a completely new system that was strictly his own.

  Fortunately he hadn’t had many cases yet, and he had been careful about the kinds of reports he had written, so there weren’t many of his ghosts in the system.

  He had decided to read just a bit more about Wagner when Flint’s perimeter alarm went off. The security screen rose, revealing an airlimo floating about two meters off the ground, going very slowly, as if it were looking for something.

  Flint glanced at the clock. Five-thirty-five. People like Wagner were seldom early for appointments. Still, Flint let his security system run the airlimo’s identifying numbers, and clear the tinted windows.

  The last thing he wanted to do was assume he knew who was coming to the office when, in fact, he didn’t.

  The airlimo continued to move slowly, searching for an address. It took Flint’s system only an instant to break through the tint and reveal the two people inside the limo.

  Ignatius Wagner and his driver.

  Flint felt his stomach twist.

  The case was about to begin.

  FOURTEEN

  THE MOMENT the organizers left DeRicci alone in the bungalow, she shut off the wall screens. She hated being surrounded by the finish line of the race. Not only did she think the participants foolish, but she also saw the finish line as just a bit too ironic for her tastes.

  Her personal marathon was just beginning, the finish line so far in the future that she wasn’t even sure she knew when or where it was.

  She did keep the race on a small screen on the wall behind her, knowing she could increase the image if she had to. She wanted to keep track of the race’s progress. She also wanted to have a live feed in case something else went wrong.

  DeRicci moved the table to the center of the room, placed chairs on each side as if she were holding a party, and closed the door to the entry.

  Then she established two uniformed officers to act as guards for each entrance. Another uni would shuffle in runners for their interviews. DeRicci was taking the primary interviews, the ones that had the greatest chance of panning out. She would interview the organizers and the maintenance team—anyone with access to the course before and after the race started. She would speak to the runners who went around the body, and she would also interview the person who discovered the body.

  The remaining interviews went to the rest of the force. They would talk to the runners who hit Mile Five after the body had been discovered. If the interviewer heard anything even slightly suspicious, that interview would then become DeRicci’s responsibility.

  Van der Ketting would probably get some interviews as well, but at the moment he was watching the vids of the early part of the race. Since the organizers monitored each patch of ground on the 26.2 mile course, there had to be vids of the area where the body had been found.

  What DeRicci hoped was that the killer didn’t know about monitoring system. She hoped the entire crime had been recorded.

  Some of the investigation she had assigned to the organizers. She had sent Chaiken and Lakferd to count the participants in this race and see if the number that started was one more than the number who finished.

  If DeRicci was lucky, someone else would be missing.

  The third uniformed officer, the one she had bringing the interviewees back and forth, also set up a secure recording system, so that DeRicci’s personal links had a backup. The last thing she wanted was important information to disappear because she hadn’t kept up her link maintenance.

  Someone had brought her coffee, and one of those real pork burgers the organizers had been selling outside the stands. She had eaten about half of it when the uni brought in her first witness.

  The first was the most important, b
ecause he was the best suspect they had. Brady Coburn was Jane Zweig’s business partner, and from the information that DeRicci had managed to gather hastily, the business had faced various difficulties over the years.

  The unis opened the door. Coburn stood just inside it.

  He was a slender man, almost gaunt, with weather-roughened skin and short, dark hair. His eyes were red-rimmed, his mouth downturned. He seemed to have none of the confidence that DeRicci would have expected from someone who ran a business called Extreme Enterprises.

  “Come in,” she said, as if she were inviting him to tea.

  He glanced at the uni who had brought him as if asking the man for permission. DeRicci felt a flicker of irritation—she was in charge, after all—but then she realized that Coburn probably didn’t know that.

  Coburn took two hesitant steps inside, and the uni closed the door behind him. Coburn whirled as though the sound surprised him, and DeRicci saw the athletic grace in his sudden movement. He wore a light T-shirt and a pair of formfitting pants obviously designed to go beneath an environmental suit. The clothing wasn’t even sweat-stained; either he hadn’t tried very hard in the first five miles of the marathon or he was so in shape that he hadn’t worked up a sweat yet.

  Or he might not have run that first five miles at all.

  “Sit down please,” DeRicci said.

  Coburn turned away from the door. His muscles were ropy, unlike the bulky muscles that men who worked out in a dome usually got. He gave her a small smile and walked to the chairs, slipping into one as if his feet couldn’t hold him much longer.

  “I’m Detective DeRicci,” she said. “I’m in charge of this investigation. Your interview will be recorded. At any point, you have the right to ask for counsel. You do understand these facts as I’ve given them to you?”

  “Am I being charged with anything?” His voice was deeper than she would have expected, given his slight frame.

  “Not at the moment,” DeRicci said, “although that could change.”

  He studied her. “You don’t think Jane’s death was an accident.”

  “Do you, Mr. Coburn?” DeRicci asked.

  He pursed his lips, and shook his head slightly, the movement almost involuntary.

  “I’m going to have to ask you again,” DeRicci said, “do you understand the proceeding inside this room as I have explained it to you?”

  He nodded.

  “Aloud, Mr. Coburn.”

  “I thought you were recording everything.” His words were snide, but his tone was not. He seemed to be unusually distant, the way people were in the first stages of grief.

  DeRicci found that interesting. “We are, but it’s always best to have an aural and visual record.”

  He grunted, crossed his arms, and slumped.

  “Mr. Coburn?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I understand, and no, I don’t want an attorney at the moment, but I’m going to reserve my right to hire one if you start badgering me.”

  His moods were mercurial, exactly the way someone who had just started grieving would be. However, grief did not absolve him from being a suspect in Jane Zweig’s death. DeRicci had seen a number of killers become grief-stricken as they realized that what they had done was irreversible.

  She sat down, deciding to play this one gently. “I understand you found the body.”

  He nodded, then seemed to catch himself. “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. Jane was ahead of me, but that wasn’t a surprise. She’s good at simple events, like marathons, and she’s worked out in low gravity forever. So she does well in the Moon Marathon.”

  He hadn’t caught himself using the present tense yet, and DeRicci wasn’t going to point it out to him. But she made a note of it. He had spent time with the body, and Jane Zweig’s death still wasn’t real to him.

  “I was having a good run until I found her.” He shook his head, eyes downcast. “I probably wouldn’t have stopped at all, but I recognized her suit….”

  His lips thinned again, and a small wash of color brushed his temples, as if he were trying to hold back tears. DeRicci hoped the recordings she was making caught things this delicate. They might be important later on.

  He kept his head down. After a moment, DeRicci realized he wasn’t going to continue.

  “Then what, Mr. Coburn?”

  “Hmm?” He looked up. His eyes were redder than they had been a moment before.

  “You recognized her suit, and then what?”

  “I stopped.” He spoke as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. “I bent down to see if she was okay, and I saw her face.”

  Anyone looking at that face would have known she was dead, but DeRicci pressed on, not just trying to get Coburn to state the obvious, but also to find out how much knowledge he had and how much he lacked.

  “What about her face, Mr. Coburn?”

  “Didn’t you see it?” His voice rose. “I thought you were in charge of this investigation. Didn’t they let you see her?”

  “I just want you to tell me what you saw.” DeRicci kept her tone even. She made no quick moves, did nothing to unsettle him further.

  “Oxygen deprivation.” He spat the words. “She died from oxygen deprivation, and that’s just not possible.”

  DeRicci kept herself very still. “We lose runners every few years to oxygen deprivation, Mr. Coburn. It’s one of the risks we all face when we go outside the dome.”

  “You don’t know Jane,” he said. “She’s cautious. She knows the limits of everything. It’s one of her hobbies. She knows how far you can stretch things, how much punishment something will take.”

  “We all make mistakes, Mr. Coburn.”

  He shook his head. “Jane couldn’t make that mistake, not with this suit. Don’t you see? We have the top of the line in everything. She was using the best environmental suit made. Me too. Its systems have redundancies upon redundancies built in. The oxygen can’t fail.”

  “No suit is perfect,” DeRicci said.

  “No, this one has its flaws. Extreme cold, wet. The suit gets brittle after too much use. But her suit was new, and we knew we’d be running in the lunar day when heat was the issue, not cold.”

  “She didn’t die from the extreme temperatures,” DeRicci said. “She died from lack of oxygen.”

  “And that’s what I’m telling you.” He slapped his hand on the table and stood up, spinning away with that effortless grace DeRicci had noticed before. “She couldn’t have.”

  “Why not?” DeRicci didn’t move from her chair. Let him pace this time, let him burn off the restlessness. She was going to be his rock, his strength, his confessor. She would get more out of him this way.

  “Because I always test the oxygen systems of any suit we buy. I’ve seen too many people die like that, or nearly die—”

  DeRicci wondered about the correction. It was interesting.

  “—and I vowed it would never happen again to anyone I knew. Some suits, they have fragile oxygen systems. Step wrong, you can cut off flow. Have too much fluid so that it backs up, and it slops into the oxygen storage. Bad CO2 filters, you name it, I’ve seen it. And these suits, they’re the best in two areas—oxygen flow and fluid manipulation. And that’s all you need in the Moon Marathon. That and temperature regulation, which the suits do reasonably well, particularly in heat.”

  “You tested the suit she wore?” DeRicci asked.

  He shook his head. The movement was dismissive, as if he were growing impatient with this line of questioning. “We ordered from the same batch. The suits came in while I was gone, but mine was fine. I’m sure hers was too.”

  “But you never checked it.”

  “I didn’t have to.” He turned toward DeRicci. His body was agile, his movements so poetic they caught her every time. DeRicci didn’t find him attractive, but she did find him unusual. She had never seen anyone who moved with such ease.

  �
�Why not?” she asked.

  “Have you ever see the oxygen system in these suits?” he snapped. “It’s almost impossible to manipulate. I poked holes in the test suit and they healed. I poisoned the oxygen reserve, and the suit immediately switched to the back-up oxygen—no delay. The entire system changed over immediately so that the wearer wouldn’t breathe in the bad air.”

  His cheeks were flushed, his breath coming unevenly. His anger was too strong. He had been going over these questions in his own mind, worrying about them, wondering if he had missed something important.

  “So,” DeRicci said, “this backup system. Is it why she didn’t have any reserve oxygen bottles as required by the rules?”

  He froze, almost as if he had been following one script and suddenly found himself in the middle of another. It seemed to take him a moment to process the question.

  “Jane had reserve bottles,” he said. “I saw them at the table this morning.”

  “The table?” DeRicci asked.

  “The sign-in table. I waved to her, she waved back, and that was that.”

  “No conversation?” DeRicci asked.

  “Jane and I don’t talk much.” Again with the present tense.

  DeRicci raised her eyebrows. “You’re business partners. I would assume that means you talk a lot.”

  He pulled his chair back and sat down. The movements weren’t as graceful now. It was almost as if he had learned how to behave in a small setting so that he didn’t call attention to himself.

  “Jane handles the business side of Extreme Enterprises. I handle the trips.” His breath caught, and awareness flickered across his face. He blinked twice, hard, as if he had just heard what he had said, and understood what it meant. “Jesus. The business. What the hell are we going to do about the business?”

  “We?” DeRicci asked, deciding to let this train of thought follow its own course. “You have other partners?”

  “No,” he said, and the word almost sounded like a moan. “There’s just me and Jane. But I can’t run things while I’m leading excursions, and I’m heading out on Monday.”