“I would like to speak to the person who runs security. You’ll make the contact for me?”
“Yes, sir,” Wèi said.
Virji nodded once. After a quick glance at the image, she turned to leave.
No one was telling her about the death on the Falls. No one was informing her that there seemed to be more to this than a simple break-in and a possible mistake.
Rajivk didn’t know if it was his place, but he couldn’t keep quiet.
“Sir,” he said, his voice shaking just a little.
Iannazzi glared at him. Wèi’s lips thinned, not that Rajivk cared what Wèi thought. After all, Wèi had already screwed up his encounter with Virji.
Virji looked at Rajivk as if noticing him for the first time. Of course she was. He had done his best to be invisible until now.
There was a question in her eyes, and he suddenly realized that she wasn’t certain if he had spoken to her or not.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said quietly, “but there’s one more thing you should know.”
She stopped before him and clasped her hands behind her back. “And you are?”
“Rajivk Agwu,” he said.
She waited.
“I, um, work as an engineer on Bristol Iannazzi’s team.”
Virji continued to look at him. Iannazzi raised her chin slightly, as if daring him to make her appear stupid.
“But, um, this has nothing to do with the base, at least, I think it has nothing to do with the base,” he said.
“You have me intrigued, Agwu,” Virji said. But she didn’t add anything else. No question, nothing. And it was intimidating. That silence—he had heard people could use it as a weapon. He’d never been subjected to something like that before.
His heart had started pounding. He felt nervous, even though he didn’t know what this woman could do to him. She was the captain of a ship. She did not have the power to fire him, although she could probably make his life difficult here.
Still, he felt the power that she had. It was a personal power, the kind that controlled an entire room.
And she was certainly doing that. Everyone was watching.
“I—um—walk home near Fiskett Falls,” he said.
She raised her chin slightly, as if he had gotten her attention.
“I found a body in a pool near the Falls earlier today. The YSR-SR—that’s the—”
“Search and Rescue service,” she said. “I have come to this base before.”
And clearly had an interaction with the YSR-SR. Which made him even more nervous for reasons he didn’t understand.
“Um,” he said, “they tentatively identified the body as Glida Kimura’s. That was before we found out about the incident here.”
Virji turned slowly—not toward Iannazzi, but toward Wèi. “And no one was going to tell me of this?”
Wèi’s flush deepened. “I—ah—.” He glared at Rajivk, as if this situation was suddenly Rajivk’s fault. “It clearly wasn’t Glida Kimura, so we felt that it was not important.”
“Really?” Virji said. “Why did you know it wasn’t her?”
“Because she never left this room,” Wèi said.
Rajivk resisted the temptation to close his eyes against Wèi’s stupidity.
“And yet, she’s not in this room, is she?” Virji said.
Rajivk wanted to jump in, to say that the body probably wasn’t Kimura’s, but he didn’t.
Everything felt fraught, and he wasn’t quite sure how to behave.
Virji turned back to Rajivk. Her gaze met his. “You’re certain that the body did not belong to Glida Kimura?”
“I’m not certain of anything,” he said. “I got called away before there was a firm identification, only to find she had locked herself in this storage room. The timing of the security breach—or what we noticed as a breach—”
He didn’t know how to refer to the blast doors, exactly. Or anything else.
“—suggests that it wasn’t her.” There. He had thrown a bone to Wèi.
“But we don’t know that either, do we?” Virji asked. Then she looked past Rajivk, at the image of Glida Kimura. “A dead body near the Falls. A missing runabout. Humph. The past always seems to repeat itself.”
She squared her shoulders, then nodded at Rajivk. He had no idea what she had meant. He knew better than to ask.
“Thank you, Agwu, for your candor. I needed that piece of information before I see the head of security.” Virji took a step toward the door, then stopped and looked at Wèi. “You will set up that meeting within the hour.”
It wasn’t a request.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
She swept out of the room, and everyone relaxed visibly. Everyone except Rajivk. What had she meant about the past? Something more was going on here, something that none of them had the information to.
None of them, except Glida Kimura herself.
TWENTY-NINE
HRANEK WORKED SILENTLY in that stuffy room, going over each inch, examining each bit of carpet, every table and chair leg. Evidence had spattered and moved, DNA coated everything, and he wanted all of it.
Eventually, he no longer noticed the musty smell. The blanket bunched up on the couch had become a pile of fibers, the pillow a DNA feast. He hadn’t even made it to the table yet, where the food containers actually were, but he knew they would tell him something as well.
He had gotten past his early annoyance at being awakened, at coming to a scene with no body at all, at not being contacted about the actual body found near Fiskett Falls. This room was giving up its secrets one by one, and he was enjoying finding them.
He hadn’t done this kind of investigation in nearly two decades, and never had he done one in Sandoveil. Here, the YSR-SR tracked missing people. Sometimes they showed up dead, but they were always presumed to be alive as the search continued.
Sometimes he had to reconstruct what happened to them, but he worked from the body backward, trying to figure out how it got to wherever it had gotten to.
This time, he was working from the blood pool forward. In Ynchi City, they called investigations like this ghost investigations because they involved shadows and ghostly images and things seen out of the corner of the eye.
Often, there, the reconstruction of a death scene occurred because most human beings were not master criminals, but they always tried to be. They hid bodies or destroyed bodies or burned bodies, taking them away from the place of death to some other place, thinking that would fool the death investigator, or the death investigator wouldn’t catch them at all.
But death investigators always caught them. Most people on Nindowne did not know how advanced technology had become. It could shadow a human being, if it knew where the human being had been previous to arriving in this spot. It could recreate events out of splotches of blood and smatterings of DNA.
It could approximate what happened without anyone testifying to what happened.
Testimony was always flawed. Human memories did not work as well as science. Whenever Hranek had a suspicious death, he always used technology to verify the testimony. Technology told him the truth each and every time.
His favorite assistant, Glynis Okilani, had arrived without fanfare. Good investigator that she was, she had contacted him from the intersection half a block away, asking him what he wanted her to do.
He told her to use double evidence-gathering equipment on her shoes as she walked toward the scene. He knew the killer had to go somewhere with the body, and given how quiet Main Street was after dark, he figured the killer wouldn’t really worry about being seen.
Sure, the killer probably had transport, but whether or not the killer had parked that transport close was another matter altogether.
He would work his way backward from the death scene, but he wanted to make certain that Okilani was working her way forward from the building’s exterior.
Until Beck told him where the killer had taken the body—if Beck told him—he would assume
the body went out the front door. He hadn’t seen another exit, and before Beck had departed, he had asked her about one.
She didn’t know either, but she had promised to check. He told her not to interrupt him with that information. He would contact her when he needed it.
This blood pool, this actually harked back to his past in Ynchi City. Homicides had a depressing sameness, no matter how clever the killers thought they were.
He had to focus, however. Because the difference between a homicide in Ynchi City and a homicide in Sandoveil was one of degree and practice. The last time he had dealt with a homicide here had been five years before, and the killing had been a straightforward one. A simple shove off one of the overlooks—a shove witnessed by six people. Yes, it had been a homicide, but it hadn’t really needed much of an investigation.
He had just made it to the blood pool when Okilani told him she had arrived at the side of the building. So far, she said, she hadn’t found any spatter.
He actually hadn’t expected her to.
“Please continue forward,” he said. “Let me know when you reach the exterior door.”
He broke off the communication without a word, and concentrated on the blood pool. Although to call it a pool was a misnomer. It probably had been a pool once.
Now it was a thick stain. He didn’t touch it, not yet, so it might still be damp or even wet in the middle. That depended on how long it had been sitting in the unrecycled air.
The pool covered most of the floor from the edge of the couch to the table. The pool had even edges, which led him to believe that the pool had flowed from a body, rather than dropped downward. The flow was probably fast and relatively uniform from a large point of origin, like a slit neck or a severed blood vessel.
He saw no arterial spray near the ground, although he had seen a mist along one wall. He hadn’t investigated that yet, so he had no idea if it was even tied to the blood pool.
He used the scanlight to measure the size of the blood pool. Then he had his handheld scanlight examine the edges, to see if the pool had receded or expanded in the carpet itself.
The pool had receded—at least from what he could see with the naked eye. A large portion of it near the bathroom door had soaked into the carpet, becoming nearly invisible.
Beck had walked across that, even though it was clear from the placement of her footsteps that she had thought there might be blood or evidence she couldn’t see. Her steps were very far apart, and as close to the wall as they could get.
She had leaned on the ball of one foot as she had peered into the bathroom. He knew that because her footprint had a deep indentation on the front.
He scanned the rest of the pool, looking for something he couldn’t quite find.
Whoever removed the body had to have stepped in the blood pool. Or that person (persons?) had to use some kind of tool to get the body out of the blood pool.
Either way, he should have found evidence of that person in the blood pool or on the carpet leading away from the pool.
He frowned and looked up. Had the body been lying across a chair and bleeding downward? If it had exsanguinated that way, the blood pool itself would have absorbed the splatter left by the drips.
Both extra chairs were too far from the blood pool to have been used in that way. Unless they were moved. But again, the room was not that big, so moving the chairs would have shown up in or around the pool.
He looked at the couch with its bunched pillow and blanket. Perhaps there, on the end nearest the bathroom.
But that made no sense, since the deepest part of the blood pool was in the very center of the room.
He would have to look at that part of the couch, though, when he got there. Sometimes evidence could lie as effectively as a human being. Like any lie, evidentiary lies were easily exposed upon closer examination.
He made a mental note, flagging that possible exception.
“I’m at the door.”
He started, not expecting to hear from Okilani so soon. Then he checked the time. It hadn’t been soon. He had been standing in the same position, moving only his arm, for nearly an hour.
At that thought, his neck and back ached. Pain shot through the muscles in his shoulders. He hadn’t been moving, and he hadn’t been thinking about it. Only with thinking about it did he feel how stiff he had become.
“Have you found anything?” he asked.
He tilted his head from side to side, hearing his neck creak. He did this at every interesting death scene and he always paid for it later.
“Yes,” Okilani said. “I’ve found microscopic blood drops heading south.”
South from that door on the curved street. He had to close his eyes, picture the street’s layout and then pull back, as if he were designing a mental map.
South—away from Main.
Of course. That would be the best solution, the easiest way to hide a vehicle. There were even places to park off some of the side streets.
“Follow the blood trail,” he said. “See where it leads.”
He said that, in part, because he wanted to remain alone in this room.
He moved his shoulders in tight circles, listening to the pop as the muscles loosened. The aches and pains eased enough that he could shove them into the background again as he crouched to look deeper at the blood pool.
Even though the scene looked like it was disorganized, he had a hunch he was dealing with a planner. He would guess, just from the placement of the blood pool and the lack of footprints or any visible way that the body was removed from this site, that the planner was either local or had studied how death investigation was done in Sandoveil.
The killer knew that his office had a small staff, but that he had experience with larger cases. He had not kept that secret. He had done presentations—tasteful ones—at every organization in Sandoveil, from the schools to the obscure social clubs that half the city seemed to join. He particularly loved talking about the cases of the moment—the ones that anyone who followed newstainment originating in Ynchi City would be familiar with. He would explain how he would have handled those cases, had they come to him, or if they were older cases, how he had handled some of them.
He wasn’t a local celebrity—a death investigator failed if he allowed himself to become a celebrity—but he wasn’t unknown either. And he always made it clear that he was a stickler for science and the scientific method.
A muscle in his back spasmed, and he had to stand upright to loosen it.
As he stretched, he realized he had never really discussed death scenes—not at most meetings. He usually talked about corpses, what they could explain or couldn’t explain. He often discussed how important it was to find them at the site of their death, not just because of the trace evidence, but because the body in its final repose revealed so many secrets.
If the body were removed from its final repose, he often said, many secrets would remain lost forever.
He let out a small breath. He liked to say he hated hunches, but that wasn’t entirely true. He hated other people’s hunches. His were often stellar. He’d studied where hunches came from, and among the scientific, hunches were usually the brain working with evidence at such lightning speed that the conscious mind couldn’t keep up.
Whoever killed the person who lost all of this blood had heard his talk. The killer knew that he preferred a body on-site, so the killer must have thought that removing the body would thwart him.
If, indeed, there was a body.
He took a deep breath and made himself take a mental step backward. He didn’t know if the blood belonged to more than one human. He did not know if the blood in the pool was human at all. Nor did he know if the blood had been poured here, perhaps as a misdirect, or perhaps on purpose as some kind of study.
Then his official comm link activated.
He hated being interrupted at a death scene.
He answered without looking at who had the temerity to contact him in the middle of the nig
ht.
“What?” he barked.
“Mushtaq, it’s Marnie.”
It took him a moment to come out of his examination of the death scene and into the present. Marnie. The head of YSR-SR.
“What?” he asked again, letting her know she had disturbed him. She had worked with him for years. She knew he could be prickly. Not that he cared what she thought.
“I’m sending a body your way,” she said.
“The one from Fiskett Falls?” he asked, not hiding his displeasure.
“Yes,” she said. “Who told you about that?”
“You’re supposed to contact me when you find a body,” he said. “Not inform me after you’ve moved it.”
“It was in that pool behind the waterfall. It was hard to reach. I had a team extract it. There was no reason to have you hike to the pool itself.” She didn’t sound distressed at his rudeness. She could be tough as well.
“I would want to see the body as close to the site as possible,” he said. “You should know that.”
“They put it in a body bag on the shelf in the area they call the landing pad just outside the pool. Behind the Falls. We’ve cordoned off the area where we believe the body went into the water—”
“I will determine that,” he said. “So cordon off as much as you can.”
“I know.” She sounded calm. “It’s already done. The body, in its bag, is coming your way.”
He moved his shoulders in circles again. “Have you seen this body?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Has it lost a lot of blood?” he asked, still staring at the blood pool.
“I—I have no idea.” She sounded surprised. “It’s pretty damaged.”
“Of course it is,” he muttered to himself.
“I’m sorry?” she asked.
“What?” he asked, wondering what she was apologizing for.
“You spoke,” she said.
“I did,” he said, not giving her any more. He needed her to leave him alone so he could get more done. Now he had two cases to deal with.
Or not.
If someone had heard his lectures, they would know that water immersion was one great way to get rid of evidence. He hadn’t really discussed it much, but he had mentioned it over the years. He both loved and hated the preponderance of water in the Sandoveil Valley. The water made the deaths more interesting, but many of the deaths were interesting only because determining the exact cause was challenging.
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