Maybe it was at the time; he didn’t know shipping laws from nearly a century before. He had no idea if the Port of Armstrong required vehicles to hang onto the information about every place they’d been, every person they’d come into contact with.
He’d looked through the manifold enough to discover when Paloma had bought the ship, then downloaded the information of the ship’s travels from that date on onto his own personal chip. He figured that was a good place to start.
The remaining files that weren’t in the system were also ship related: cargo lists, instructions for each and every upgrade, and old computer records from systems that the ship no longer had.
Some of those systems didn’t want to talk to the one in Van Alen’s office. He downloaded those onto his personal chip as well, hoping that he’d be able to find a system—or enough privacy—to figure out what was on them.
Then he faced the daunting task of figuring out what those numbered files were.
First, he had Van Alen’s system give him a count of the numbered files, and winced when he got the result. Well over a million. And if each file contained other files within it, he could be looking at tens of millions, certainly not something he could finish in a single night, like he had told Van Alen. Probably not something he could finish in a month.
“You look discouraged,” she said.
He resisted the urge to cover the screen. He’d forgotten about his pizza. The piece had congealed on the plate beside his workstation.
“There’s a lot here,” he said.
“Too much? You want an assistant?”
“I can go through it,” he said. Just not in one night.
“I have a good computer team,” she said, and then bit her lower lip. “Although I’m sure you’re better.”
“Not better,” he said. “But we don’t know what’s here. It’s better to keep it confidential.”
“My assistant’s back with your clothes,” Van Alen said. “You want him to bring them in?”
Flint shook his head. “I can get them on a break.”
“They’re going to think we’re doing untoward things in here,” she said.
“I thought you had confidential meetings all the time,” he said.
“Not ones that took all night and required new clothes afterward,” she said.
He smiled. He supposed it did look bad. But that didn’t bother him. He would rather have this look like a tryst than a lawyer protecting her client from justice.
“You know,” he said after a moment, “you were so hung up on that officer-of-the-court thing. If I get charged with this and the charge sticks, you’ll be harboring a fugitive.”
She smiled for the first time in the entire conversation. “My job then is to get you to turn yourself in. No one asks the attorney where the fugitive was, just if she knows how to contact him.”
“Technically, you should turn me in now.”
“Technically,” she said, “I haven’t been informed you’re missing.”
She’d already thought of that angle. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not.
“I’m not sure what Paloma was hiding here,” he said. “I thought it would be obvious. It’s not.”
“Maybe that’s how the HazMat team downloaded it.”
He shook his head. He’d already thought of that.
But he hadn’t considered one thing: maybe the important files were the newest ones. He turned back to the screen.
“Did I give you an idea?” Van Alen asked.
“You did,” he said, letting her think that her mention of the HazMat team was important. He separated the files by date, relieved to see that the HazMat team’s download hadn’t destroyed the origin dates of the files.
He wouldn’t have wanted to go deep in those files, to find out what the dates were. That would have only added more time.
The dates worked. Most were more than forty years old. But about fifty had been accessed in the last five years. And only a few had been opened in the last few months.
“Bingo,” he whispered, and hoped that Van Alen hadn’t heard.
Thirty-seven
Ki Bowles could get lost in information. That was her favorite part of reporting. Not the interviews, not finding the story before anyone else, not even the on-air part. What she loved the most was digging into minutiae and finding gold.
And, she realized, it had been a long time since she’d done anything quite this detailed.
She had missed it.
Since she cleaned up her office, she had made some tea and settled at her desk. She’d actually had to shoo off the remaining ‘bot, which had sent her a message along her links, some prerecorded thing that let her know it was programmed to provide whatever beverage she wanted.
She wanted to make her own beverage, she told the damn thing. She was tired of being out of control of her life.
The shortness of her response had surprised her. But the work, as slight as it was—actually getting the mug, adding the preboiled water from the tap, and putting in a teabag (filled with real tea from India on Earth)—felt good.
It felt productive.
It felt right.
Just like sitting in her office did now, her feet up, the tea mug steaming beside her, as information scrolled across the screen in front of her. Behind her, some vids downloaded, previous reporters from different parts of the Moon covering similar stories.
All on the history of Retrieval Artists.
She’d even found stored lectures by business professors, criminologists, and corporate historians, all of which she planned to watch as she got this story underway.
But first, she went for the accepted knowledge. She went to the most popular encyclopedia site on Armstrong’s net (not wanting to clutter up her mind with any differences throughout the Alliance, or even in other Moon-based cities), and scanned everything they had on Retrieval Artists, from vids to write-ups to reports for children.
She wanted to find how Retrieval Artists as a group got their start, and since they were considered to straddle a legal line, how they were able to stay in business and even flourish.
The encyclopedia wouldn’t answer those questions, but it might give her a beginning.
She dug in even deeper, going through all the files, enjoying the very act of finding information, feeling her brain revive.
She hadn’t realized how much she had come to hate her job.
Nor had she realized, until this very moment, how much she had identified with that job.
Which meant that she had come to hate herself.
Thirty-eight
Flint was beginning to figure out the numbering system. The first seven digits were case numbers. The next four digits referred to the year. The last two digits referred to the head attorney, either the one who initiated the case or the one whose name went out on the bill.
He resisted the urge to glance at Van Alen, who had moved from pizza and iced coffee to a glass of wine and relaxation on her couch. She looked like a woman who had downloaded a drama of some kind and was watching it on her link instead of on a screen.
She seemed relaxed.
He went back to the files. The oldest ones were mostly Paloma’s from her abandoned legal practice. They were filled with minutiae—official letters, billing statements, vids of confidential meetings and/or real-time transcripts of the same meetings. Each file had one hundred or more items in it, all of them tiny, all of them building toward something.
And if the case went to some kind of trial, then the file mushroomed into a well of files, some of them originating at WSX, and others originating elsewhere. Many of the files that originated elsewhere were police files and prosecution notes. Apparently, Paloma had spent most of her time as a criminal defense attorney.
As much as these files fascinated Flint, they seemed too old to mean anything. Although he knew he was prejudging. But he had so little time, maybe even less than the day he’d told Van Alen.
The old Paloma files did help
him in one other way, though. They helped him realize the numbering system. He figured out the case numbers first. Then he stumbled on the last two-digit system by opening a file that didn’t have Paloma’s name on it at all.
Claudius Wagner had started the file, and it ran concurrent with the other old files Flint had found in the system.
This one was also a criminal defense case, and while it was interesting, Flint couldn’t tell how it applied.
It took him another hour to realize that Paloma had taken all of the firm’s files from the five years before she left. Before that, she only had her own. But for that last five year period, she took every single file WSX had generated.
Why? Blackmail?
He couldn’t tell. Not from what he had in front of him. He wondered if it was in the ghost files he’d pulled out of his own computer system before rebuilding it. He’d found, about a year after Paloma had left, that she hadn’t cleaned the system thoroughly. Most of her Retrieval Artist files were still in that computer, just hard to access.
In those days, he’d been more ethical. He’d set those files aside, then scrubbed the machine.
He hadn’t looked at them at all.
He wanted to look at them now.
But he knew returning to the office was a form of suicide. He hadn’t lied when he told Van Alen that he believed he’d be a suspect for some time.
The last thing he wanted was to be a suspect under arrest, which wouldn’t allow him to figure anything out.
He sighed, and did do a quick search of the files, to see if any of them lacked the numerical system. They didn’t.
All of these files were from WSX. All of them.
Had Paloma done her best to wipe these files out of WSX’s systems? If so, had she done a better job than she had in the Retrieval Artist office?
Or had she left those ghosts in the machines she sold to Flint on purpose, so that he could find them?
If she had stolen everything from WSX and wiped their machines, how had they continued functioning?
He hadn’t heard anything about a law firm losing its records, but that wouldn’t be broadcast, not even within the police department. It would mire down dozens of current cases, and call hundreds of others into question.
It would also ruin WSX’s reputation.
He leaned back in his chair and frowned at the screen. But, from what he could see (and granted, he wasn’t seeing everything), none of the dates went past Paloma’s tenure as a lawyer. She went back to WSX as a Tracker, if her words were to be believed, and then became a Retrieval Artist.
Had she brought copies of the files back with her? If so, then why was it so important that she keep these?
Or had she only brought back a few?
Or none at all?
Was this how she got work again with her old firm?
Flint stood, feeling overwhelmed. He wanted to send Paloma a message. It would be so much easier if he could just ask her what this was about.
But he couldn’t.
Had she been disappointed that he hadn’t asked her about the information he’d found on his own computers all that time ago? Or had all of this been some sort of happy accident? Was this even what she had in mind when she made that holographic recording?
He couldn’t tell.
He felt the press of time, and he had no way to figure out what information was important and what information wasn’t.
“Dammit,” he whispered, then caught his breath. He hadn’t expected to say that aloud.
But Van Alen still looked lost in her drama, her wine, and her relaxation. Except for her open and moving eyes, he would have thought her asleep.
He sat back down.
He’d have to approach this two ways: first, he’d look at the newest files; and second, he’d have this less sophisticated system scan all the files for deaths just like Paloma’s, for bombs like the one that went off in the Dove.
He’d find something.
He had to.
Paloma had counted on him, and even now, he didn’t want to let her down.
Thirty-nine
Nyquist stood in Flint’s office, wondering how a man could let a place go to seed like this. The filters were off. Moon dust had seeped through every crevice. The air was full of it, making him cough, taking his already overtaxed lungs and turning them inside out.
If he had a choice, he would leave. But he didn’t. He had to find Flint, and he had to do it soon.
It was obvious Flint wasn’t here, although someone had been here in the last twenty-four hours. The systems were off. The computers were down.
That raised all kinds of suspicions, making him wonder if Flint had let this place go for reasons Nyquist hadn’t figured out yet.
Had Flint known he would become a fugitive? If so, wouldn’t he have planned better? Wouldn’t he have gone to the Emmeline instead of the Lost Seas?
Had this Murray been right all along? Was Flint the wrong man, even though he had been the last one in the Dove?
But Flint had also been the last person Paloma contacted. His arrival at that crime scene might have been staged.
Nyquist stepped deeper into the office. The lights were on reserve, making everything seem blue and fuzzy around the edges. He would have to get techs here to download the computers if there was an arrest warrant on Flint.
Nyquist needed to check that first.
He sent some messages along his links. A few nonurgent ones had stacked up since he stepped inside here. One from the Brownie Bar, reporting that Flint hadn’t been in all day. Another viewed all the security vids from the various university libraries and found no trace of Flint in the last twenty-four hours.
He hadn’t logged on to any public links either, nor had he sent traceable messages along his own.
If he wasn’t at his apartment—and Nyquist had sent a team there too—then he had somehow disappeared.
Nyquist shuddered. Flint wouldn’t do that, would he? He wouldn’t Disappear. He knew the consequences and the costs. He knew how difficult it was.
But it was a logical solution to someone who had just murdered a police-evidence technician. And it was something Flint might have been contemplating since he caused—or discovered—Paloma’s death.
If it turned out that Flint wasn’t at his office, Nyquist would contact the lawyer that had been with him and see what she knew. Some corporate lawyers, who weren’t used to dealing with actual criminals, occasionally gave their clients up.
He could hope for that.
He could hope that this entire evening hadn’t happened, although he wouldn’t do him any good.
Nyquist slipped behind the desk and booted up the system. It creaked on, barely functioning, just like the environmental equipment.
He checked his links again. Still no warrant had been issued.
To hell with them. He had an investigation to run. Who would check the time logs between Flint’s office and the warrant’s issue? Who would care, if Nyquist caught a cop-killing criminal?
Or discovered something else, something that might help solve Paloma’s murder.
Forty
Flint was eating cold pizza and drinking more iced coffee. Apparently, Van Alen had ordered an entire battalion’s worth of iced coffee and had it placed in a nearby refrigeration unit.
He was still trying to decipher the conundrum of the files. The most recently accessed ones had all been Claudius Wagner’s cases—the Wagner that Paloma had been involved with; the one she had had children with.
The one she had left.
The files looked straightforward. But Flint had never gone over legal case files before. He had always started the file as a police officer—registering the complaint, delineating the evidence, making certain each bit of information was recorded in the proper place.
From there, the file went to the district attorney’s office, and with luck, he never heard about it again.
Of course, he hadn’t had much of that luck over the years. He’d had
to testify, had to sit in on conferences where the DA threatened to have him testify, and sometimes he had to come down to the office to explain what he had actually done.
But none of that included expanding the file. The bills; the notations; the letters, written and vid. Some of these files had contracts in various drafts, and a few had wills. All of them seemed to cover more than one incident, and that alone confused Flint more than he wanted to admit.
“They finally did it.”
Van Alen’s voice came to him from far away. Flint blinked, then rubbed his eyes. He sighed and turned around.
She hadn’t left her perch on the couch. Her wine glass was empty, and she looked sleepy.
“Did what?” he asked.
“Issued an official arrest warrant,” she said. “Up until now, you were wanted as a material witness. Now they’re accusing you of the crime.”
“It’s being broadcast?” he asked. If so, that was bad. Then people on the streets would be looking for him. Those with comparison software might even scan his face and compare it to whatever image the police department was broadcasting.
“No,” Van Alen said. “We’ve got about an hour before that happens. I was notified. As a courtesy.”
Flint grabbed that iced coffee. The cup was sweating. He looked at it. It was more like watered coffee now. He wondered how long it had been sitting beside him.
“You were notified.” That took a moment to process. “You’re not my attorney of record.”
She smiled, then slipped her shoes back on. “You’re not normally that slow, Miles. Of course I am. I got you into the Lost Seas. That puts me on record.”
Of course it did. But for a civil action, not a criminal one. But he didn’t have a criminal lawyer, so naturally, the system would contact the only lawyer of record.
“You’re supposed to surrender me,” Flint said.
“If I know where you are,” she said.
“Do you?”
“You’ve seemed far away to me all evening,” she said. “I think I’m going home and sleeping off this wine. Maybe in the morning, I’ll be able to find you. I will, won’t I?”
Paloma Page 23