"All right," I said, barely managing to keep my frustration in check. "I suppose I can console myself with the knowledge I at least get to meet the great Admiral Hunter tonight."
The two women exchanged one of their knowing glances. Their matching frowns didn't bode well for me.
"Great," I sighed. "You're saying I don't get to go to the party, either?"
"I'm afraid not," said Jane. "A strong security presence will just tip off Fritz. We want him to come into the open."
I nodded.
"That makes sense. Can I at least help with the operation from here?"
"Of course," she said brightly. "Then, when it's over, we can have some fun."
Part of me wanted to throw out a pick-up line over that one, but my new diplomatic sensibilities took over, and I kept my mouth shut.
A few moments later, Janet and Jane both glazed over for a moment.
"He's here," they both said in unison.
I glanced at the hollo screen one of them popped up, and saw an external view of the station, which showed Hunter's command carrier pulling up alongside the station. BigMother was as impressive as I'd been led to believe, but instead of docking, it simply stopped a few kilometers away from the station.
"We have to meet Jon and his crew when their shuttle arrives," said Janet. "We'll meet you back here in a while. In the meantime, you can keep an eye on the monitors, and watch Jon arrive on the station."
"Great," I grumbled, folding my arms over my chest. "Face-to-face meetings are overrated anyway."
Jane shot me a grin as they headed out the door. A few minutes later, a shuttle appeared on the hollo, heading from BigMother towards the station, carrying none other than the hero of the Midgard War. It actually gave me a little thrill of anticipation, which surprised me. I would have sworn I was too crusty for something so childish, and yet there it was.
With my companions gone and nothing better to do, I decided I might as well get my report to Flint out of the way. There was no point in making him fret over Jon Hunter's potential murder any longer. Of course, if you listened to Jane and Janet tell it, there was never a reason for anyone to worry in the first place.
"Good news," I drawled, admittedly feeling a bit smug. "The threat to the galaxy's biggest hero has been neutralized. You're welcome. Turns out the killer wasn't even here for him. Her target was Antonio DeLeo after all. She managed to kill him, which, I admit, wasn't ideal, but at least she didn't get away. And on top of that, we figured out how she did it."
I sent the message on that note, just because it would make him wait to find out how she'd done it. I was in a cocky mood.
When the response came back, Flint looked and sounded distracted.
"What happened?" he said tersely.
That was it. I thought for sure his first question would be about the murder weapon. The second should have been who the killer was.
"Suicide by cop," I responded warily. "She tried to escape on her freighter after she killed DeLeo, but Captain Jane headed her off before she could jump. With her escape route cut off, she turned her ship back towards the station to ram it. Jane blew her to kingdom come."
I gave him the lowdown on what we'd discovered about Lindsay Thayer. When he didn't ask, I decided to offer the info about the weapon.
"I'm actually embarrassed I never thought of it before," I said. "She used a microscopically thin razor wire concealed in a necklace. It explains how she could get close enough to the victim without arousing suspicion. All she did have to arouse was his Johnson, and once it was turgid, she could slip off her necklace, loop it around the base and pull the wire taut. Instant guillotine."
I waited another ten minutes for Flint's response. This time, he seemed a little more focused on the conversation.
"So she did kill them during sex. It explains why the victims were all found on their backs, and why there were no signs of struggle. You have the weapon, then?"
"The station commander was kind enough to release it to us, yeah. If the whole thing wasn't so damn creepy, I'd almost want to keep it as a souvenir of my final case. I've had enough of the weird shit for two lifetimes. You can expect my official resignation email within a day or two. I'm sure you'll be glad to be rid of me."
What I didn't tell him was I was really starting to like the new world which had been opened up to me on Hunter's Redoubt. It was completely different from the one I'd known back in Earth Sector. Dangerous, to be sure, and crazy. But it was never boring.
His reply took longer than his earlier ones.
"Good work, Burnside. I admit, I spent the last couple days with my ass chewing my underwear over this whole thing. I'm glad to have it over and done with."
You and me both, I thought.
"I'll send your report up the ladder, and let the brass know they can stop worrying," he said. "Who knows, maybe they'll even consider you for a commendation for this. As much as I hate to say it, Burnside, I respect your abilities, and I'm glad I had the foresight to bring you in on this one."
For crying out loud, he somehow managed to turn me taking the case into something about him. I was looking forward to pitching my badge at him when I got back.
"Let me know when you're heading back," he said, ending the message.
I stretched out in my chair, and watched the monitor as it shifted to the shuttle dock. The airlock door opened on three people. Jon Hunter himself, followed by two young women whom I'd been told were his bodyguards, Majors Amanda and Aleesha Peck.
Jane had given me a cryptic line about them being a lot like her and Janet, and she wasn't wrong. If anything, they were even more identical than my companions of the last three days. It made me even more eager to find out the story behind Jonathon Hunter's human resources department, and its hiring practices.
Hunter was sporting jeans and sneakers, with a candy apple red t-shirt, and a blood red jacket. His black belt didn't really go with the ensemble as well as a brown one would have, but what did I know? No one judging him by his wardrobe would have guessed the kid was worth somewhere above two billion credits.
The women were dressed similarly, wearing matching painted-on jeans and black belts, with skimpy, pale orange tops which highlighted their distracting cleavage and bare midriffs. I've always been bizarrely attracted to women's navels. I liked the weird cases, remember? And these two didn't disappoint.
On the screen, Janet and Jane greeted the three newcomers with long hugs. When I looked closer, I noticed all three of the newcomers were limping, Hunter being the worst, and I could see bruising on all three. Like everyone along the spine, I knew of the assassination attempts on them, but I always took war stories like that with a grain of salt. I knew what was survivable, and what wasn't. Seeing them now, I began to wonder if the reports weren't more accurate than I'd initially believed.
I motioned for audio to join the vid feed, and picked up on a fairly mundane conversation as the cams followed them through the bay. Hunter made it clear to Janet the three were still recovering from their injuries, and they weren't interested in business matters. She protested for a moment, reminding him there were a thousand and one things still to do on the station, but he cut her off with a gesture.
"I'm here to party," he said simply. "That's it. Those orders come directly from the majors here."
The bodyguards grinned wickedly. I wished women smiled at me like that.
"Jon desperately needs to be around some normal people for a while," said Amanda. Or maybe it was Aleesha, I didn't know which was which.
"He's allowed to take a look at what the station needs in the way of services, so he can start reaching out to business people who might want to establish a presence here, but that's it," said the other twin, whichever it was.
"Other than that, I'm going to drink and dance to good music," he said, with a tired grin of his own. "And bugger all else."
I watched them walk into the hotel, and say their goodbyes to Jane and Janet, who headed into the corridors. I figured
they'd arrive back at security within ten minutes, so I decided to wrap up the conversation with Flint.
"Don't get all weepy on me," I said into the recorder. "You're going to have me around for a while yet. I need to finish my due diligence with the file. Track Thayer's movements, put her in the vicinity of the other killings. Check into her past. You know, all the boring t-crossing and i-dotting which makes me such a phenomenal detective. I'll pack it in as soon as I'm done. Shouldn't take me more than a week. Burnside out."
I ended the connection just as Janet and Jane walked through the door, as if on cue, wearing matching grins which gave me hope for the night to come.
I should have known better.
Thirty Nine
As a cop, spying on people is part of my job, but by that point, I was pretty damn sick of it.
It was evening, and we were watching Hunter and his bodyguards eat dinner at Indigo Shift, the best restaurant on the station, not that I would have known, since I'd been trapped in the goddamn security office for almost my entire stay at Hunter's Redoubt.
I had to admit, the kid had style. He wore the impeccably tailored suit like he'd been born in it, but the lack of a tie suggested he didn't care about anyone else's rules. The Pecks, meanwhile, wore matching cocktail shifts which hugged their bodies like a second skin. The plunging necklines revealed enough cleavage to remind me I was a hetero man, and the slits up the leg displayed their sidearms, and told everyone in the vicinity it was okay to look, but if you tried to touch, you'd regret it.
Hunter had three beer bottles in front of him, two empty, one almost, while the twins appeared to have barely touched theirs. Each had ordered what appeared to be a sumptuous meal, which I tried not to look at too closely, jealous as I was over not being able to join them.
"The Pecks are as formidable as I'd heard," I said to my own twin, maybe, companions.
"Are you talking about their dresses?" Jane asked, her eyebrow arched.
I couldn't hold back a chuckle.
"They've got nothing on you two, believe me. No, I meant the way they're scanning the room. First one will do it, then the other, but neither of them let on that's what they're doing. Whoever trained them earned their pay, as I doubt anyone besides an experienced cop or merc would even pick up on it."
"Jon surrounds himself with the best people," Janet said simply. "It's how he's managed to not only survive, but thrive."
"Thrive?" I grinned. "I suppose that's one word for it, but I think the definition might need to be updated if we're going to use it to describe Hunter's situation."
"You really should call him Jon," said Jane. "All his people do. He doesn't stand on ceremony."
I arched my own eyebrow.
"Am I one of Hunter's 'people' now?"
"You could be if you wanted to," she said with a smile.
Before I could respond, a butler droid entered with our meals, and a chilled case of beer. I noticed it was the same high-end brand Hunter was drinking in Indigo Shift, and the same food, which I found oddly touching for some reason. The worker bees got to eat like the boss.
"Are you feeling better about everything that's happened?" asked Jane. "I know it didn't work out the way you expected."
I drained my first beer, set the empty on the table, and opened another.
"Give me enough beer, and I can get over anything," I joked. "But yeah, I'm all right. I got in touch with my captain back at ESPD, and brought him up to speed. Told him we'd put paid to the case, largely thanks to you two. We've still got to bring in Fritz, sure, but the thorn that's been in my brain for the last two years is finally gone."
"What are you going to do next?" asked Janet.
"Retire. I tried it before, but it didn't stick. I'm ready now. I've had my fill of the cop life. As soon as I get back Earth-side, and finish up my investigation into Lindsay Thayer, I'll hand in my badge, and start considering my options."
"Who knows?" said Janet, nodding thoughtfully. "After tonight, maybe you won't even want to bother returning home."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Jane put a hand on mine.
"Nothing," she said. "Besides, we've got other things to think about right now. Like the fact I need to track down Ingrid Blakstov."
"Ingrid?" I almost choked on my beer at the thought she might bring the woman here to inflict her sales pitch on me. "What the hell for?"
She giggled at my reaction, which put me at ease. Dodged that bullet.
"I promised to introduce her to Jon," she said. "She's a huge fan. And when you take away the church talk, she's actually quite, I suppose charming is the word. Interesting, at the very least. I know Jon will want to meet her."
I shook my head.
"If you say so. Better him than me."
"That's exactly what we were thinking," said Janet.
I had no idea what that was supposed to mean, so I drained my beer, and opened another. My goal was to match Hunter, I mean Jon, drink for drink for the rest of the night. I had to find my fun where I could get it.
Jane said goodbye and left, with Janet following soon after, saying she had work which needed doing, but she'd be back soon. The butler droid appeared a few minutes later to take the remains of our meal away, and replace the beers I'd polished off.
Alone again. I popped another beer, and called up my PC. Might as well get started tracking down Lindsay Thayer, the killer who'd been the object of my obsession for the last twenty-four months.
Forty minutes later, my beer had gone warm sitting on the table, untouched.
I had another headache.
Forty
According to everything on record about her, Lindsay Thayer wasn't an alias.
Her photos matched the woman we'd seen on the station, and she really was rated to fly a small freighter on her own. Her Trading Guild record was a bit lacklustre, but by all accounts she was everything she'd appeared to be. She wasn't listed in any directory of either the Bounty Hunter or Mercenary Guilds.
That on its own wasn't enough to give me pause, of course an assassin who wanted to stay under the radar wouldn't be on a directory anywhere. One didn't have to be a registered bounty hunter in order to collect bounties. Jon Hunter was probably the best possible proof of that. And in any case, the people who had hired her didn't put out bounties. They'd hired a contract killer, which was a different beast entirely.
And the cover of a freighter captain who didn't draw any attention, would be perfect for such a killer. They had access throughout the spine, and wouldn't arouse suspicion, given how common they were. Thayer could easily have gotten in and out of all the sectors where the murders had occurred, with no difficulty at all, and it would explain how I ended up so far behind her every time.
There was just one problem. One tiny, little, gigantic, fucking problem.
According to her ship records, Lindsay Thayer had never been in the same system at the same time as the killings.
I scratched absently at my beard scruff as I scanned the paperwork which clearly showed her to be, for example, in the Corporate sector when Heissman was being murdered on the Earth Torus. It was the same for every killing. Of course, ship records could be altered or forged, but I'd found other evidence in the form of public security vid which placed Thayer light years from several of the killings, including James Patterson's.
It was possible she was just exceptionally skilled at hacking, especially given the fact she had somehow managed to override some station systems, and had inserted herself into the vids. Or even she had an accomplice who had pretended to be her, so as to have an alibi if Thayer were ever caught. The accomplice could have been working with her right here on the station, taking out the vid feeds strategically, so she could make it to her ship and get away, before we discovered DeLeo's body, and figured out what was going on.
Too many question, not enough answers.
I searched the station's own records from the incident. Someone had hacked the vid feeds in the small ship dock
ing bay, that was a given. If I could trace that hack, maybe it would give me an idea if someone other than Thayer had been behind it. Now I put some serious thought to it, it seemed virtually impossible she could have lured DeLeo into bed, killed him, escaped his suite and made it to her ship, and still have had time to knock out the cams.
My stomach knotted a bit at the thought of Janet discovering me in mid-hack, but I knew she would want to have this Intel, too. I followed the commands which had led to the cams going offline, and traced them to a remote terminal in one of the uninhabited sections of the station.
My breath caught in my chest as I pinned it down. The hack had been entered less than a hundred yards from where we'd found the bodies of Speck, and whoever had been killed in Fritz's place.
There was no way Thayer could have done it herself, and made it to her ship in the amount of time she had, and this tied the hack to the murders on the station.
Suddenly tracking down the fake Fritz was my top priority.
Turns out I didn't have to bother. When I stood up and pivoted to call Janet, I saw him standing right in front of me in the security office. An instant later, a steel pipe was whistling through the air, aimed squarely at the side of my head.
Forty One
I managed to get my left arm up in time to intercept the blow, but it hurt like a motherfucker, not to mention the horrible cracking sound as the pipe connected with my elbow.
Fake Fritz pressed the advantage as I stumbled backwards, closing the gap between us, and raising the bar over his head like a broadsword, with the obvious plan of bringing it down on the top of my skull. Luckily for me, I got my footing not an instant too soon, and lunged forward, getting my body inside of his arc, and avoiding the blow entirely.
My momentum was enough to rock him backwards, and cause him to stagger, which gave me a moment to take control of the hand holding the pipe. I pivoted to my right, locking his right arm, and pulling on the pipe. But Fritz fought like a tiger, raining blows on my head with his weaker left hand, until I finally had to let go and back off if I was going to stay conscious.
Burnside's Killer_Extended Version Page 17