The Riayet government had sent ships to attempt an evacuation of the dome, but ESI’s engineers also believed that a full-scale evacuation might make the dome even more unstable. Only a handful of dome exits could be used, and then only by a small group of Riayet.
The ESI representative who visited Lucianna Stuart told her that thousands of Riayet would die because of ESI’s errors, and asked her how to contain ESI’s liabilities. Primarily, ESI wanted to keep the incident quiet, so that it could continue its expansion into nonhuman domes.
After learning that, Flint got up and walked into the bathroom. It had hot and cold running water, a perk most apartments did not have. He splashed cold water on his face, mostly to clear his head. His hands were shaking. He didn’t like any of this. He wanted to wake up, discover that he’d had a horrible nightmare in which he had learned that Paloma was someone else. Then he would lie in his bed, relieved, that everything had been a dream.
He dried off with a towel that was labeled real cotton. It felt soft against his skin. He didn’t know what cotton was, but he did know he’d never felt anything like it before. The Moon-made materials he was used to felt scratchy by comparison.
He got himself another glass of water, and returned to the computer, knowing he had to learn more, even though he didn’t want to.
Once it became clear to Lucianna Stuart that the ESI engineers were right—the dome would fail and thousands of Riayet would die—she came up with a plan to save the corporation, its reputation, and its future.
She sent in more engineers. Instead of evacuating as many Riayet as possible, Lucianna Stuart told ESI to send in a hundred of its best engineers, many of whom had worked on the Riayet dome in the first place. They were instructed to do whatever they could to shore up the dome, sustain the atmosphere, and begin repairs.
The corporation knew nothing would work. As Lucianna Stuart—a young, black-haired Paloma without the wrinkles—said in a vid conference, “The company line becomes, ‘We would never send our own people in if we thought the dome was going to collapse.’ “
She had said that with great calm, as if ordering a hundred needless human deaths on top of thousands of Riayet ones meant nothing to her.
Flint froze at the computer.
What right had she to talk with him about ethics? Why had she been so concerned with the rules and regulations of Retrieval Artists, with the smallest detail that could, as she had said when she trained him, save lives?
Was she atoning?
If so, she hadn’t even come close to succeeding. On her plate were the hundred dead engineers and the Riayet who could have been saved.
All to keep alive a corporation that went on to build two other failed domes before getting out of the nonhuman dome business altogether.
Flint had no idea how many other bits of advice she had given over all of her years as an attorney, nor what else he would find in the files.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to continue looking. He had no real death to avenge. Paloma’s death was small justice for all the lives she had cost.
But he didn’t know for certain if her death had come because of this or something else she had done. Maybe something horrible she had done as a Retrieval Artist, something someone might blame on him, since he had bought her business.
He leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and forced himself to continue.
Somewhere in these files was the answer he was looking for.
But now he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it was.
Forty-seven
Nyquist pressed his right index finger against the outer door at Ki Bowles apartment building. The building, and the neighborhood it was in, were a surprise. Nyquist expected a rich and famous reporter to live in nicer surroundings.
Instead, her apartment building was as middle-class as his, with worse security. His finger carried his police identification, but as the door swung open, he reflected that a lot of other buildings required more than the single ID. It was too easy to replicate. Many middle-income apartment complexes had systems that included retinal scans, voice print ID, and confirmation from the local precinct.
This system required none of that.
Nyquist stepped in the building’s foyer. An androgynous voice asked him what his business was. He said that he had to see Ki Bowles over a police matter.
The inner door opened, followed by the elevator doors. He stepped inside, and the elevator took him to Bowles’ floor. He wondered if he should warn her about the poor state of security in this building. If he were a stalker who had fixated on Bowles because of her vid reports, he would have easy access to her.
Her apartment door was well lit. An exterior security system, one that she had purchased, winked around the door frame, obvious and much more effective than the building’s security. He stood a foot away from the door, touched the light that extended outward from it, and heard a different androgynous voice ask him his business.
He repeated himself.
Then the system requested identification. He held up his finger, but the system insisted on a retinal scan. He had to wait another minute as the system confirmed everything.
While he waited, he realized he no longer needed to tell Bowles that her security was lax.
The door opened, and Ki Bowles stood behind it. In person, she was smaller than he expected, and younger. Deep shadows made her eyes seem sunken and the lack of makeup on her face gave her skin a sallow tinge. Apparently, she hadn’t gone for the on-air enhancements—the kind that made vid people look normal on-screen and like mannequins offscreen.
She waited for him to speak—a nice tactic that he usually liked to use.
He introduced himself, and said he was investigating the death of Paloma. He did not apologize for arriving at her apartment so late in the evening.
Bowles’ eyebrows went up. “What does this have to do with me?”
“I understand you spoke to Miles Flint earlier today.”
“Briefly,” she said.
“I’d like to discuss that conversation if we could.” He glanced down the hall at the still-open elevator doors. “Somewhere private.”
She sighed. The security lights went from bright to dim, but the system was still on. He would have to step through it and be analyzed by the system, something he normally didn’t mind. But on this night, after all those decontamination exams, he really didn’t want light to probe him again.
Still, he stepped through. Except for a momentary blip in his links, he felt nothing.
Bowles stepped away from the door. The main room had a lot of furniture that looked curiously unused. She pushed the door closed. A small ʼbot scurried in as if it were going to get fired if it didn’t perform its little duties.
“I saw Miles Flint,” she said. “He told me to leave him alone. I did. I didn’t know that Paloma had died when we spoke.”
“Have you spoken to him since?” Nyquist asked.
“Is he a suspect?” Bowles asked.
“We’re looking for him in connection with something else,” Nyquist said.
“A different crime?” Bowles asked.
Nyquist nodded.
“Are you going to enlighten me?” She asked.
“No. It’ll only clutter up the questions I have to ask you.” Then Nyquist gave her a small smile. “Besides, you’ll just look up the police database the moment I leave.”
She grinned. “How do you know I’m not doing that already?”
He didn’t know. He had no idea how extensive her links were. He hoped she’d pay attention to this conversation instead of the information she downloaded, but he’d have no real way of telling.
“Why were you waiting for Mr. Flint?” Nyquist asked.
To his surprise, Bowles turned away. She snapped her fingers, and the ʼbot vanished for a moment, then reappeared, a steaming mug of tea on its saucer-shaped top.
“To be honest,” Bowles said as she took the tea, “I wasn’t there to see Flint.”
She nodded. She cradled the mug in her hands. The ʼbot scuttled away without offering Nyquist anything. He felt awkward standing in front of the door. She made sure he knew what an unwelcome visitor he was.
“So you wanted to see him, right?” Nyquist asked.
“Actually…” Bowles sighed, then turned, still holding the tea. The mug had to be warm against her hands. “I just went there to think.”
“Terminal 25? You’re telling me you were at Flint’s ship by coincidence.”
Bowles’ lips twisted. She might have been trying to smile, but Nyquist wasn’t really sure. “You do know I was fired today, right, detective?”
“I wondered,” he said. “There’s no formal announcement, but you’re no longer listed in any of InterDome’s databases, except for old vid reports that hadn’t been archived yet.”
She walked into the seating area and perched on the edge of a chair. He followed, even though she hadn’t indicated that he should.
“So you went to see Flint because you were fired?”
“Oh,” she said, “I hadn’t been fired yet. Supposedly, I got fired because I was in Terminal 25. Your links get shut down there. My boss tried to contact me to send me to the Paloma crime scene. When I didn’t answer, he sent me a termination message. He was just waiting for an excuse, and I gave him one. They haven’t liked me at InterDome since I took on Security Chief DeRicci.”
And lost. Nyquist remembered that series of reports. He watched them later, after the crisis ended, and then saw the vindication of DeRicci which had come from the governor-general. He hadn’t thought of those reports at all when he came here. If he had, he might have approached this interview differently. Ki Bowles had a nasty side, one that didn’t seem to mind destroying other lives.
Maybe it was a form of poetic justice that someone had just destroyed hers.
Nyquist didn’t say anything about the DeRicci reports. He didn’t even want to think about them—how angry they’d made him, how he’d wanted to jump to Noelle’s defense, even though he had no more to say than any man would in the first stages of infatuation.
Instead, he focused on the case and made sure he thought of Ki Bowles as nothing more than a source, someone who had information that he didn’t.
“I still don’t understand,” he said. “Why were you near Flint’s ship?”
She sighed, then sipped from the mug of tea. “Because,” she said, “I was thinking of my future.”
He waited. He had a sense that if he pressed, she might stop, and she was just getting to the important part.
She swirled the mug, looking at the liquid as if it could tell her something. “You might think it odd, but I kinda admire Miles Flint.”
Whatever Nyquist had expected her to say, it hadn’t been that.
“Have you ever seen the footage of the day-care incident?” She raised her head and faced Nyquist.
“Day-care incident?” He remembered something about Flint’s past and children, but the specifics never really registered.
“Flint’s daughter was killed in a day-care by one of the workers. Turns out that worker killed other children—shaking them too hard—but it took a second visible death before anyone saw the pattern.” Bowles continued to swirl the mug. The liquid would peek over the edge as if it were contemplating escape, and then disappear again. “That’s what started Flint on his journey from computer tech to Retrieval Artist.”
“Some journey,” Nyquist said.
Apparently, Bowles didn’t hear his sarcasm. “I think it has an ethical base. I think he tried to make things better as a police officer, then realized he couldn’t enforce certain laws. So he became independent. I’ve talked to him. He’s really firm about the way people should behave.”
“Retrieval Artists break the law,” Nyquist said.
“Some laws aren’t just,” Bowles said.
“Do you believe that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know enough about it.”
“So how does this all connect to your visit to Flint’s dock this morning?”
She glanced at him, the look almost coy. “I was thinking about changing my life. How I didn’t like it. I’ve made some compromises that…”
Her voice trailed off, almost as if she realized who she was talking to.
“I almost went to Flint’s office to talk to him. He’s the only person I know who has changed his life so drastically, and for reasons that I’m not really clear about, but which seem noble to me.”
“You think he’s noble?”
Something in Nyquist’s tone must have warned her away from the topic. Her expression changed. It became harsh, her eyes piercing.
He saw the fierce intelligence that had made her one of the Moon’s most famous reporters.
“You think he killed his mentor, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“You want me to confirm that?” she asked. “Let you know that I saw him covered with blood or something?”
“I haven’t asked that,” Nyquist said. “I just want you to tell me what happened.”
“Starting with why I was there.”
He nodded.
“Which makes no sense to you.” Her smile was almost wistful. “It barely makes sense to me. But I was using him as inspiration. Then he showed up. At first, I thought he was a figment of my imagination. But he was too upset. I’d never seen him like this.”
“Like what?”
“As if he were coming apart from the inside out,” she said. “He was barely holding himself together.”
“Figuratively?” Nyquist said.
She nodded. “He was a mess, too. Usually, I never notice how he’s dressed, but today his clothes were askew and covered with Moon dust. He looked like he’d been working doing hard labor or something. He was carrying a bag of something.”
The tech suit. “Then what?”
“He was surprised to see me. He thought I was there to ambush him on a story. I had no idea about the story until later. He ordered me away, and I left.”
“That’s it?” Nyquist asked.
She swirled the mug again. “I was embarrassed. I felt like I’d been caught doing something wrong.”
“Were you doing something wrong?” Nyquist asked.
She sipped, thought for a moment, then took another sip before setting the mug down. “I suppose I was. I should have been accessible. I should have been checking my links and going after stories. I should have been asking you questions this morning about what you found in Paloma’s apartment.”
“Do you regret that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t. I liked Paloma. She was mysterious, in a good way. I always had it in the back of my mind to interview her, maybe get her take on the way the society worked. Maybe I was setting up a news story on the ways that laws could be unjust, I don’t know.”
He studied her for a moment. That was the second time she’d mentioned unjust laws. Was she sending him some kind of message? She didn’t seem to have that kind of guile.
“What did Flint do after he told you to leave?”
“He started to go into his ship,” she said, “then he realized I was still there. He told me to go again, and waited outside until I left. I don’t know what he did after that.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to a coffee shop, downloaded my messages, and realized I’d lost my job.”
“Did you wait for Flint so that you could talk to him?”
Her smile was rueful. “He would never consider talking to me. I’d hurt a friend of his. He thinks I’m some kind of evil incarnate.”
“Are you?” Nyquist asked, mostly because he couldn’t help himself. He had that opinion of her as well, and her candor was surprising him.
“Evil?” She gave a small laugh. “Just careless, I think. And a little stupid. Maybe too arrogant, although that’s taken a hit today.”
Nyquist let
that ride for a moment. When it became clear that Bowles wasn’t going to say anything else, he asked, “Did you see Flint later?”
“I came home,” she said. “They threw me out of InterDome. They sent my stuff here. I’ve been in this lovely apartment—”
And it was her turn to use sarcasm now.
“—since I left the port.”
“Do you think Flint was capable of killing Paloma?” Nyquist asked, mostly because the question was routine. He’d ask any witness that of any suspect.
“No,” Bowles said with incredible firmness. “He’s got a moral streak that’s deeper than any I’ve ever seen. I doubt he could kill anyone.”
Nyquist frowned. He’d never had that sense of Flint. But then, he’d never realized that hard-bitten reporters could have crushes—and not see those crushes for what they were.
“You contact me if you think of anything else,” he said.
She nodded, then let out one of those dry laughs again. “Normally, I’d bargain with you,” she said. “I’d tell you to let me know if the story got more interesting. But I can’t now.”
“What’re you going to do?” he asked, because he was curious.
“I’m not sure yet.” She was clearly lying. She made direct eye contact when she lied, unlike most people, who looked away. She looked away when she revealed herself.
Why lie about her future?
“You know, if you’re still a reporter or hoping to do the story of the century and you use anything from this interview—”
“I’m within my legal rights,” she said. “I’m a participant. We haven’t had any confidential discussions here.”
But the statement seemed rote. Her heart wasn’t in it, and neither was his. She didn’t have more to tell him, and the security vids backed that up.
“Still,” he said.
She laughed, and this time, the sound was sad.
“Don’t worry, detective,” she said. “No one wants to hear what I have to say anymore.”
But the self-pity didn’t seem like a natural fit for her. He reflected on that as he left the apartment. She was doing something, and it had something to do with Flint.
Nyquist just didn’t know what.
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