by Mel Odom
Even though no vid was shot on an exec floor, motion sensor arrays set up in the rooms provided a backup plan: as long as the guest was inside the room based on e-card usage at the door, the sensor arrays pinged for movement every fifteen minutes.
If there was no movement during a fifteen-minute cycle—basically a still-life sequence, like sleeping—the sensor array would trigger a bio radar that would ping the room. The ping would demand a biorhythm reading on a guest to make certain there hadn’t been an incidence of injury.
Humans still suffered heart attacks or other life-threatening problems, but that was something their PADs were supposed to handle. When a person’s vital signs dropped, PADs could be set to instantly call for medical assistance to their location. The service was expensive and not everyone had it. Someone like Richard Smith could have easily afforded it.
Shelly pointed to the device on the dead man’s hip. “Did you ping his PAD?”
Latimer nodded. “First thing.”
I did the same and sorted through the easily accessible data open to me.
“Did it show an emergency medical service?”
“Yes, but it was turned off two days ago.”
“Get a name off the PAD?”
“No. The information’s heavily encrypted.”
Shelly glanced at me, just a brief look.
I nodded, letting her know that everything Latimer had stated was true.
Shelly shifted her attention to the red holodisc. It was about the same size as a casino poker chip but four times as thick. The micro-circuitry inside was capable of pulsing a series of 3D images or a single, deeply detailed image.
Latimer scratched his chin and looked irritated as he followed Shelly’s gaze. “That’s where things get more interesting.”
Chapter Five
“The murderers tried to cover their tracks.”
Latimer squatted by the holodisc, reached out with a metal pointer, and tapped the activation button.
Immediately, a rainbow prism of light pulsed from the holodisc and stood 1.83 meters tall. A buxom young woman took 3D shape. Tall and statuesque, the blond female stood there completely naked for a moment, then she began a series of gyrations that drew the attention of the two sec men watching the door.
Latimer stood. “I think the killer or killers tried to use the 3D to fool the motion sensor sweep, hoping to buy themselves more time.”
“Did it work?” Shelly stared at the nude figure.
“I don’t know. I’ve heard that sometimes it does. Some of these things have complicated foolie coding that pings on several levels for humans and cyberware.”
This was the first instance of someone trying to fool the sec measures I’d seen. I was intrigued.
Latimer rolled his head on his neck, an obvious indication of tension. “The thing is, this holodisc is corrupted. Fails out about a minute into the routine.”
Almost immediately, the image of the woman pixilated and shorted out. The holodisc returned to its inert state.
Shelly nodded. “So when the holodisc failed out, still-life sec pinged for vitals fifteen minutes later and didn’t find them?”
“That’s what I believe happened.”
“And you called the NAPD immediately?”
“Yes.”
I knew he was lying. Hotel sec always tried to cover up their own messes first. That was standard operating procedure. First rule: don’t let the hotel be embarrassed. Second rule: don’t let the guests be embarrassed.
I checked the time. It was 0326. We’d gotten the squeal at 0238. I allowed Latimer five minutes for the “discovery” of the body and fifteen minutes for the time between when the disc shorted out and when still-life sec pinged the room, pushing the probable time of death back to 0218. We were an hour and eight minutes behind the murderers.
Shelly tapped the holodisc again and triggered the release of the 3D vid. “Either this unit was damaged during the struggle, or the guys that left it behind didn’t know it was faulty.” She looked at me. “Tracing the serial number on it will probably be useless.”
“We’ll do it anyway.” I knelt down and passed my hand only a centimeter above the holodisc. I “read” the e-info on the unit easily, then sent a trace through the licensing databanks.
One of the sec men at the door stepped inside and called for Latimer. “Got a forspec out here. Name is Carmody. Says he’s with Sagan Forensics, Inc.”
Shelly addressed Latimer. “He’s one of ours.”
Latimer nodded. “Send him in.”
*
August Carmody was a lean human in his greying years. He wore the white cleansuit all forspec people wore to crime scenes, and always had a smile and a pleasant word for everyone he worked with. Under his clear hood, his white hair was neatly combed.
“Hello, Shelly, Drake.” He shook hands with each of us. Carmody loved mechanical things and AI programming, so he liked me quite a lot. He often probed me, mentally as well as physically. Shelly didn’t allow that to go on as a general rule because she believed I should be somehow affronted by the man’s interest.
“The ME hasn’t been here, August, so we have to stay clear of the body.” Shelly waved a hand toward the rest of the suite. “Everything else is fair game, though. Sorry you had to find us already in the room. L’Engle security…” She shrugged.
Carmody, however, nodded happily. “Not a problem.”
The forspec cleansuit was voluminous and had dozens of pockets. Carmody knelt near the dead man and began pulling out his crawlers. He didn’t use the CLB—Crime Lab in a Box—that was standard issue for NAPD forspecs. As a contracted special services provider, he used his own tech. NAPD didn’t have the rights to use the tech Carmody had.
Watching the crawlers work always intrigued me. They were small robots, no longer than a man’s finger, and some of them smaller than that. They possessed wheels as well as legs and resembled insects. As soon as Carmody placed them on the ground, they shivered and hooked up into a hive mind orientation. Then, they spread out and began mapping the room.
Using the information they gathered, they’d be able to upload measurements, textures, weather conditions, and more into a 3D replication of the crime scene at a later date. The data allowed investigating detectives to build an exact copy of the crime scene they could walk through in special 3D rooms at the NAPD.
The golden rule of evidence collection was: get it all the first time. There was no way to come back to a crime scene later and get data. Locard’s Exchange Principle stated that anyone entering a crime scene brought some new thing to that scene, and that anyone leaving the crime scene carried something away. The theory was developed by Edmond Locard, a French forensic scientist in the 1920s, and it was still true.
Evidence was important, and the chain of custody had to be maintained. The crawlers bagged and tagged carpet fibers, hairs, and chemicals they found that were incongruent to the environment. Carmody would then analyze everything they found and send his findings directly to the NAPD.
“Drake.”
I looked over at Shelly. “Yes.”
“Let’s get that search going through the hotel sec vids.”
“Sure.” I left the group and went over to stand against one of the walls so I would be out of the way of Carmody’s crawlers. I then accessed the hotel’s mainframe through my internal PAD and went deep into the files.
*
As a bioroid, I could take in a lot more information than either a human or a clone. My receptors ran wide open all the time. When I was interacting with the physical world, I was limited by my body and the laws of physics. But on the Net, I was almost limitless.
I cycled through the data quickly, submerging myself in the last two days’ worth of activities at the hotel. As Latimer had said, there were no recordings of activities on the floors with the exec suites. However, Shelly and I had sifted through investigations like this before.
First, I sorted out the people that had ascended to the exec
floors. That immediately gave me a smaller group to work with. I separated the people in that group further by splitting them into two separate pools: those still at the hotel and those now gone.
I initiated a search protocol for those now gone after the time of the murder through travel agencies, the Beanstalk, the airport, the trains, and the hopper grid. The search program began verifying the whereabouts of those people at the time of Richard Smith’s murder while I turned my attention elsewhere.
I focused on the group of guests still at the hotel, thirty-three people in all. Many I eliminated quickly because I verified that they were in their rooms or elsewhere within the hotel at the time of the murder. That left me with four people that were on the exec levels at the time of the murder. Those we would have to contact.
Then, I went through the service personnel, food handlers, masseuses, personal trainers, stylists, and all the other hotel employees, as well as the subcontractors. I checked their whereabouts with the e-cards they carried. An employee e-card had a panic button built into it that would immediately connect them with hotel security. None of them had been used.
Gradually, the list of guests that had left the hotel was eliminated. All were accounted for.
I also noticed an anomaly. As an investigator, you looked for those. Sometimes, they only created distractions and false leads, but many times, they were the things that broke the case wide open.
My search had turned up three faces I couldn’t account for. I isolated the best images of the men and filed them in my hot suspect folder. Those images I emailed directly to Shelly’s PAD. I also started them through another facial recognition program.
I kept working.
According to the hotel’s tracking program, the three men were ductwork cleaners that normally serviced the hotel. I pulled up the hotel’s account records and discovered that the duct cleaning service had rescheduled two days ago, shortly after Richard Smith’s arrival at the hotel, and that they’d been rescheduled for seventeen days from now.
I flagged the emails between the service and the hotel manager, then sent those to Shelly as well.
After a quick search through the Net, I located the address for the duct cleaner. Given that their work usually took place after hours, I thought there was a good possibility that someone would be there to answer the comm.
I stepped back into real-time for a moment and launched a comm sequence on my PAD. The connection was made within three seconds.
“Quality Duct Cleaning, how may I help you?” The man’s voice was flat and bored. I heard a ficvid playing in the background.
“I am Detective Drake with the New Angeles Police Department.”
“Go to vid.”
I did, opening up my PAD’s video component, which popped out of my ear and settled in front of me. Almost immediately, the image of the small man at the other end of the link appeared on my screen. He wore a grey Quality Duct Cleaning coverall. His was balding and his dark hair was in disarray.
He regarded me suspiciously. “You’re not human.”
“No.”
“Is someone human in charge?”
Shelly didn’t like it when I dodged the prejudice. She’d told me that handing people like this off to her wasn’t holding up my end of our partnership.
“Mr. Gerber, I see that you manage the division in this part of the city.” I spoke calmly, without rancor. “I am the investigating detective on this part of the background check. If I don’t get answers regarding your corporation’s relationship with the L’Engle Hotel, I’m going to issue a citation against you and file a grievance with your corporation, which might also result in a fine levied against them for interfering with a police investigation.”
Mr. Gerber didn’t require much time to think that over. “We’re not at the L’Engle tonight. That job isn’t for a couple more weeks. Let me check the schedule.”
I waited.
He looked back at the screen and shook his head. “Like I said, we don’t have that job for two more weeks.”
“Three men with corporate IDs and licenses were here at the L’Engle tonight.”
“Can’t be our guys.”
I read the names of the three men.
Gerber’s eyes tightened and he frowned. “Those men are part of our crew. But they’re not at the L’Engle. They’re at the Akers Office Building.”
“Have you checked on them?”
“No. Let me do that.” Gerber tapped keys on his PAD. “My GPS shows they’re at Akers.”
I knew they hadn’t left the building. “Are you using bio-GPS readings or their e-cards?”
“Bio. A guy can leave his e-card anywhere. You want to know where he really is, you trace the e-ID you put inside of him.”
That was what the NAPD did, too.
“Trace the e-cards.”
Gerber did, then he shook his head. “According to the GPS, those three e-cards are at the L’Engle.”
I triggered an alert to Dispatch to send a patrol hopper to the Akers building to check on the cleaning crew. I was certain I knew what they would find. I didn’t mention this to Gerber. I had another task I wanted him involved with before he got distracted.
“I need the files on those men.”
“Of course. I’ll send them now.” He busied himself with his PAD.
As soon as the files arrived, I checked them. Ernest Powell, Ryan Biltmore, and Tony Chavez were all employees with good records at Quality.
None of them belonged to the faces I’d turned up using their names. I pushed into the hotel’s service records check for Quality and confirmed that the hotel manager had checked out the IDs of the three “Quality” workers. Copies of their digital IDs were on file. The faces were of the three men I’d turned up.
I let the other programs cycle on their own and concentrated on the three faces I’d found. I ran them through all of the exits, checking for their departure. I found none.
Widening my search, I accessed the street cams and went through the files. Prior to the murder, I logged their arrival through the hotel’s maintenance doors. That was the checkpoint they’d come through.
I ran through the street cam vids twice, but only because I knew Shelly would ask me to do it twice. The three men hadn’t exited through doorways, windows, or the hopper pad.
I logged out of the hotel mainframe.
The murderers were still in the building.
*
When I stepped back into real-time in the hotel room, Dr. Marcus Seward had arrived from the medical examiner’s office. He was a genial man, short and portly, and very easy-going. Unfortunately, he related better to corpses than he did with me. He did, however, get along well with Shelly.
I walked up to join Shelly while Seward ran a diagnostic on Richard Smith. Seward wore a simple black suit and carried a black medical doctor’s bag that was a personal affectation. He might practice on the dead, but he always stayed ready to help the living.
Seward consulted the readings on the small, hand-held diagnostic device he held over the dead man’s chest and then his stomach. “You said his name is Smith?”
Shelly nodded. “That’s the name he gave the hotel.”
“Well, he gave his transplant surgeon a different name.”
“He’s had transplants?”
“Yeah.” Seward put the device into his black bag. “High-end stuff. Cloned heart and kidneys, partial liver.”
Transplants were medically recorded and tagged in the event of an emergency involving those organs needing a consultation with the transplant doctor. Records could be delivered automatically to an emergency room surgeon. As a result, IDs could be readily established.
“What’s his name?”
Seward looked at me, then quickly away. “Cartman Dawes.”
“Okay.” Shelly punched the information into her PAD even though she knew I’d already logged it.
“I take it you don’t recognize the name.” Seward seemed surprised.
“Sh
ould I?”
By the time the ME answered, I’d already looked Dawes up on the Net. In that moment, I knew our case was going to be bigger than we’d initially thought.
“Cartman Dawes is the CEO of IdentiKit.”
Shelly knew IdentiKit. “The cloning enterprise?”
“Yes.”
IdentiKit was quickly becoming one of the major players on the android scene. In some respects, they were starting to offer some of the best clones on the market. When they’d first gotten into the game, they had specialized in clones made from celebrity look-a-likes. They’d gotten dragged into court time after time, but they had beaten each case because they’d had model releases from people who “happened” to look like celebrities.
That was a low-volume trade, though, compared to the market share they’d wanted. They’d made some in-roads with domestic help models and nannies, though there had been more than a few cases where IdentiKit clones were involved in divorces. Conjecture had it that the corporation hadn’t strayed far from its sex trade roots and other fantasies were being fulfilled.
“This doesn’t make any sense.” Shelly stared at the dead man. “Guys like this, they don’t travel without bodyguards.” She looked around the room, then at me. “So where are the bodyguards?”
I didn’t have an answer for her.
“Check the hotel roster again. See if anyone registered in any of the other rooms works for a private protective service.”
I started the search, but I knew I was solid in my identification. None of the current residents were bodyguards.
Latimer took out a piece of gum and popped it into his mouth. “This guy doesn’t have any bodyguards here. They’d have put in an appearance by now.” He smiled grimly. “And they’d have known they were out of work. Once Dawes’s heart flatlined, their severance checks would have been cut.”
I finally caught Shelly’s eye. “We need to talk.”
“Sure.” She followed me to a spot away from Latimer, Seward, and the dead man. “What’s up?”
“The men who killed Dawes are still in the building.”