by Mel Odom
“It’s a machine.”
“A very advanced machine, and it has been leased to the NAPD to fulfill a specific task. Very cheaply, I might point out.”
“My old man used to tell me that you get what you pay for, and Haas-Bioroid is getting plenty of public exposure out of this unit and the other one playing detective.”
“Playing detective?” Chaney touched a 3D pin broadcaster on his jacket. A computer screen holo formed in mid-air. “Maybe you could help me understand these figures. Both Detective Drake and Detective Floyd have a very high percentage of case closures. Is that correct?”
Ormond didn’t reply.
I knew it was true. Floyd and I were both detail-oriented and indefatigable when it came to spending time on a case.
“On four separate occasions, Detective Nolan attributed her survival in a potential lethal encounter to her partner’s quick thinking and bioroid abilities.”
That, too, was true. I had the acknowledgements in my service file.
Chaney blanked the pin broadcaster and stood. He ran a hand over his chest and his whole suit smoothed out in response. “Get with the program, Lieutenant Ormond. The future is here. You should feel threatened at this point.”
“Not by you.”
Chaney flashed the lieutenant a thin smile. “Don’t fear me. Fear the corporation I represent. My superiors can change your life here, and your wife’s life at her job.” He deliberately dragged a hand through the 3D image of the lieutenant’s family on his desk, causing them to wobble and shift. “And then there are the children to consider. What kind of futures will they have if they are blacklisted before they even enter the job force?”
Ormond’s face turned white. His nostrils flared. “I’ll find a place for him. Get out of here.”
Chaney went out, still smiling. “We’ll be in touch, Lieutenant. Count on it.”
Ormond shifted his wrath to me. “You, too. Out.”
I went.
*
I sat at my desk and studied the small box of personal things that sat atop it. There wasn’t much. Most of it was holo-images Shelly had given me of her family, and a few of us with collars she’d considered significant. There was a list of ficvids she’d recommended to me to watch: The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, The Blue Knight, The New Centurions, The Naked City, and other classics that she had loved and felt had pushed her into a career in law enforcement.
I’d watched them without seeing anything in them that truly presented our job in an appealing manner. I’d discussed that with Shelly and she’d seemed disappointed.
There were a few other things in the box, items Shelly had told me were keepsakes from various cases we had solved. Two ties, both of which Shelly had gotten me at different times for different events we’d been required to attend, lay on top.
The box represented years of our association. The contents didn’t seem to be much in light of all that we had shared.
A passage from The Maltese Falcon kept reverberating in my thoughts: “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around—bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere.”
I listened to Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade repeat those lines over and over again in my mind. I lifted my damaged hand and watched as the nanobots reattached the severed fingers. I could already flex them.
And I waited.
*
I sat in my office, the one that I kept internally. I didn’t think I was retreating from the detective bullpen, but I wanted something to occupy my thoughts. I could sit idle for days, but I preferred not to.
The office was a simple thing: a wooden desk and a wooden swivel chair. An open window behind me allowed the smell of the sea from the San Francisco harbor into the room. A radiator occupied one wall. A pair of client chairs sat on the other side of the desk.
I had never described the office to Shelly. Now I wished I had. I think she would have gotten a laugh out of it. It was very much the same kind of office Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe or Jake Gittes had worked out of in their respective ficvids.
When I looked out the window, 1930s San Francisco lay spread out before me. The city looked a lot different. The marina was filled with boats and small ships instead of immense cargo handlers. Actual cars remained on the roads.
I liked the city and wanted to walk through it, but my construct wasn’t that grand. I wasn’t quite a prisoner of the office, but I couldn’t leave it. I thought, possibly, that was only because I hadn’t incorporated enough of the city’s history into my databanks. I was curious about what it would feel like to walk through the early morning or late evening fog, to hang out in the bars, and to see the neighborhoods.
I turned my focus to Shelly’s death. I had been forbidden to investigate the events surrounding Dawes’s murder, which would include Shelly’s subsequent death, but there were ways around that if I wished to undertake them. As Shelly had told me on numerous occasions, a murder was like taking a bowl of spaghetti noodles and dumping it on the floor. There were a lot of different strands to pull in an investigation. Most investigators stayed with one strand and followed it until it petered out. The trick was to keep pulling strands.
I was already building a list of potential strands, but I couldn’t break the instructions I had received regarding non-involvement. That was…unsettling. I could do this.
Craig Dormoth and his partner, Rich Calaveri, had drawn the assignment. I knew they were good at what they did. I also knew that another pair of eyes and hands could be helpful.
I reached for the old telephone on the corner of the desk. It had an earpiece and a mouthpiece. When I lifted the earpiece, a computer interface formed on the desktop. I had access to the NAPD’s mainframe computer.
Quietly, I downloaded the most recent reports concerning the investigation into Dawes, and the ancillary investigation into Shelly’s death. No one noticed the trickle of information and data that I pulled.
A knock sounded on the office door.
I looked up at the frosted glass that read DRAKE INVESTIGATIONS, only backward.
That had never happened before. While I sat there thinking about the appropriate response, the door opened and a woman walked into the room. I recognized her at once as the woman I’d awakened next to in the hotel room, only now she was dressed in a slinky red dress and a pillbox hat that fit the 1930s décor.
I stood. “Who are you?”
“You know me.” She crossed the room and sat in one of the client chairs. She draped her gloves across her thigh as she crossed her legs.
“I don’t know you.”
She ignored me. “You need to get moving. Time is wasting. This is a matter of life or death.” She pursed her deep red lips. “My life or death. You’ve already let one woman die, do you really wish to cause the death of another?”
I scanned her face and tried to upload the image to the NAPD facial recognition database. I couldn’t. Every time I tried to send the image, her elegant features turned to liquid sand and slid through my mental fingers.
I gave up trying. “Why are you here?”
“So you can save me. You promised that you would.”
Chapter Ten
“Drake.”
I opened my eyes and saw Ormond standing in front of me. He had his hands on his hips and looked decidedly unhappy. “Yes.”
“Were you asleep?”
“I don’t sleep.”
His brows drew together as he studied me. “Are you all right?”
“I am operating at peak efficiency. Thank you.”
“If you were operating at peak efficiency, your partner wouldn’t be dead.”
I had no rejoinder. I sat and waited. My internal chrono
meter told me that three hours had passed since the meeting with Chaney. Around us, the other members of the detective squad in the bullpen watched.
“I have your new assignment.”
“Thank you.”
“Come with me. Bring your stuff.”
I stood, took hold of the small box, and followed Ormond through the bullpen, the hallway, and to the elevator. Once we were inside, he pushed the button for the basement and the cage wheezed down to the lower level.
We didn’t speak. We didn’t have to. Ormond knew what he was doing and I had no questions. I knew that whatever assignment he’d thought of for me was—in his mind—punishment. I just wanted something to do.
The image of the woman haunted me. Now that I was back in the real-time world, I found I couldn’t properly recollect her face. Every time I thought of her, it was like there was a gaping hole where she should have been. In real-time, she was an enigma. The experience was illogical and no potential explanation offered itself.
*
When the elevator doors opened, Ormond took the lead again and I followed him to a large room in the north section of the basement.
The room was filled with shelves and shelves of white boxes, all of them containing evidence in unsolved homicides. The records of the deaths were on the mainframe, but the NAPD had to maintain the physical evidence as well.
“Do you know what this place is?” Ormond glared at me.
“Yes, the cold case room.”
“That’s right. This is where cases come that have gone cold and stale.” Ormond waved to the boxes. “Some of these murders are decades old.”
“I understand.” I looked at him levelly and I knew that my lack of emotion bothered him. “Is there any particular case you want me to start with?”
“No.”
“Will I be assigned a partner?”
“No. You’ll be reporting to me.”
“When do you require reports?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Is there a shift you want me to work?”
Ormond cursed and blew out an angry breath. “No. Just work. Do whatever you want. Start wherever you want. There’s nothing down here you can possibly screw up.”
“May I start now?”
“Yes. Just stay away from my office.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
Ormond cursed again and left me there.
I walked to the back of the room and found the small desk that I remembered from my trips with Shelly down to the basement. Every now and again, we had a murder that looked a lot like other homicides so we would compare notes and physical evidence.
Only once had we closed a current case and an old case at the same time. There had been a small celebration because both murders had involved older women who had been defenseless. The murders had taken place six years apart because the doer had been in prison for that time on another, unrelated charge. After we made our case, he wasn’t ever getting out.
I put my things in the desk after confirming that no one else used it. Then I roved the aisles of unsolved cases, looking for one I could occupy myself with.
*
“Her name was Mathilda. We called her Matti. The other name just seemed too grown up for her.” Beverly Harcourt was in her early thirties, a thin, nervous woman whose pain over the loss of her daughter showed in her red eyes and slumped shoulders. She was on medication to alleviate her emotional distress. All the meds did, that I could see, was blunt the trauma and shrink her inside herself. Her black hair was in disarray and she wasn’t wearing makeup.
She wasn’t actually in the basement with me. I had tapped into a 3D deposition she had given at the time of her daughter’s death five years ago. I couldn’t interact with her, couldn’t ask questions, but Shelly had done a good job with the interview.
I supposed that the fact that the case was one of those Shelly hadn’t been able to solve had drawn me to the murder. I didn’t want to defend that reasoning because I didn’t understand it myself. I think, perhaps, there was a resonance, but it wasn’t anything I could weigh or measure.
“She was on her way home from a friend’s house when she was hit.” Tears fell from Beverly Harcourt’s azure eyes. “Her friend’s house was only a block away. Matti walked that distance all summer long. We just didn’t—I didn’t—think anything of it. Not until one of the neighbors came to tell me about…the accident.”
I halted the interview there and opened the file from the traffic cam. Five years ago, when the hit-and-run had taken place, seccams hadn’t been as populated as they were these days. Worse, neighborhoods like the one Matti Harcourt had lived in weren’t subsidized by corporate funding so the traffic cams wouldn’t all be in place.
The nearest traffic cam was a half-klick distant. Even with the zoom magnification available, I wasn’t able to identify the hopper’s license plate. All I knew was that the vehicle was a sedan—a dusty grey that was standard for many vehicles of that same type—and handled by a person that was clearly not in control of his or her faculties.
The hopper came down from the twilight sky like a fat insect. The vehicle’s safety features kicked in, providing enough lift to keep from destroying the hopper on impact, but not enough to protect the eleven-year-old girl beneath it. Judging from the way Matti Harcourt had never moved to avoid the hopper, she hadn’t known it was coming. She was alive one moment and dead the next.
After landing on the girl, the driver deployed the wheels and quickly drove away. The hopper slewed across the street and slammed into a fence, taking out seven meters of it before regaining control.
I pulled the data dumps of all the neighboring street cams and tried to piece together an overlay that would allow me to track the vehicle. Of course, Shelly and her partner at the time had thought of that and it wasn’t possible.
I pulled up arrests from that night as well, thinking perhaps the hopper pilot had gotten arrested later by a patrol hopper. I checked each sheet thoroughly, searching for the vehicle, a Gwangju Petrel, named for the South Korean seabird.
No one had been arrested. That, too, was something Shelly would have checked. She had trained me.
I also cross-referenced Petrel owners in New Angeles. The car was very popular five years ago and remained so today. Four years’ worth of models looked enough alike to be the one on the traffic cam. There were 11,383 Petrels registered in the megapolis at the time of the hit-and-run. Sixteen of them had been reported in accidents over the next two weeks after Matti Harcourt’s death.
Shelly had cleared all of those accidents. I saw her notes logged into the file. She had actually continued her search over the following two months, thinking perhaps that the person who had driven the hopper also had access to another vehicle and had kept the Petrel hidden.
She had turned up another eleven hoppers in accidents. All of those had checked out as well.
I realized I had to think outside the box. After Shelly had partnered with me, her approach to cases had changed. With the processing load I could manage, I could cover a lot more ground than a human investigator could. When working a case, man hours had to be accountable. A case had to break quickly, otherwise time to work the leads became increasingly limited because other cases came along.
Balancing the old and new cases was hard. Investigations turned cold quickly when leads turned thin. That was why the basement was so full of boxes.
I sat at my new desk. I looked at Mrs. Harcourt, and thought about Matti.
Then, I got up and went to retrieve the box with the physical evidence in it.
*
There wasn’t much in the box. Several pieces of carbosteel from the hit-and-run vehicle took up most of the space. None of those pieces were marked with the hopper’s unique identification number. I hadn’t expected that.
Shelly had also gotten a set of tire imprints. Although she had tracked the tires, I did it again, accessing the tire manufacturer’s database and discovering that the tire tread was
extremely generic.
I considered that. The Petrel was a modestly priced vehicle. The tires were modestly priced. The neighborhood where Matti Harcourt and her family lived was also modest.
I had found a strand that I felt was new and promising.
I pulled up the list of Petrel owners again, but this time I focused on the ones that lived within a two-klick radius of the Harcourt family. My supposition was that the hopper pilot had been on his or her way home when the accident occurred. There was no further arrest because the pilot had made it home.
My list of owners shrank to fourteen. I factored in the assumption that the driver had to own more than one vehicle. That brought me down to three.
The first owner was Karen Taylor, who lived six blocks from the Harcourts. I researched her and discovered that she worked at Jinteki. A further search of her employee records, with proper warrants filed, showed she had been at work the evening of the accident. Furthermore, her hopper had been in the employee parking garage.
The second owner was Byron Cramer, a retired social worker. I called him and explained who I was and asked about his car. As it turned out, his vehicle had been in a garage for repairs on the day Matti Harcourt was struck and killed. A brief check with the garage corroborated that.
The third owner was James Thorne. I didn’t bother contacting him because a crossover report through the NAPD showed that his hopper had been booted by a patrolman for unpaid citations. The police officer had been writing up the tow order at the time Matti had been killed.
I was stymied.
*
Back at the box, I went through the evidence again. This time, I took out the paint chips that had been found at the scene. Closer inspection revealed that the paint consisted of two different layers, the top one the dusty grey, but the other one a light blue.
I checked Shelly’s log. She had noted the two colors as well. She had even run a trace on light blue Petrels. The numbers were a lot less than the dusty grey color, but they were still improbable for two detectives to follow up on with any kind of alacrity.
I wasn’t two detectives. At the speed I operated, I was a hundred. I searched through the databases and began the process of elimination all over again. This time, I searched for a light blue Petrel, thinking that the hopper owner might have repainted the vehicle and not changed the color on the title and registration.