by Mel Odom
Technically, since the first forty-eight hours had passed, Shelly’s murder investigation had officially started to cool. The case wasn’t cold, but it apparently was cool enough to allow my assignment parameters to follow up on the investigation more vigorously. I had been forbidden to follow up on Dawes’s murder, but one of the men had also killed Shelly.
I had her murder recorded. So did the rooftop seccams. The murder itself was cleared, tied in with Dawes’s assassination. However, the identity of the person or entity that had hired the assassins remained unknown.
I examined the order Ormond had given me to stay out of the Dawes investigation. He had said nothing specifically about Shelly’s murder. I opened the file within my internal PAD. If I was in violation of the letter of the lieutenant’s instruction, the file would not have opened.
I finally had work that was more intriguing to me, and I could do it while I still sifted through the cold case files because I could multitask on a level no human could ever keep up with.
I slipped through the intradepartmental Net and opened up Shelly’s file. The assassins had been identified as disenfranchised Martian colonists. Before that, they had been professional soldiers, not rebels. They had worked for Earth’s government and maintained the peace on Mars.
So, what had turned them against Earth? Or was this assignment purely mercenary, the attack solely focused on Cartman Dawes?
The two surviving men weren’t talking. Either they had been paid off extremely well, or they were afraid of their employers. Shelly would have gone with fear. She’d always said that fear was a greater force than finances, just as lust compelled humans to do all manner of things while trying to hang onto someone.
No one had claimed the body of the dead man. The other two were in lockup awaiting trial. No bail would be allowed, given the egregious nature of Dawes’s murder and the death of a police officer.
I opened a review cubicle in the NAPD’s virtual reality crime lab morgue and stepped into it.
*
The department VR was a well-equipped unit. The hardware and software were cutting-edge, donated by corporations that negotiated their mention in high-profile crime cases that utilized VR. A big trial that used VR and captured the attention of viewers around the world was the best advertisement a corp could buy. 3D viewers could see the quality of the VR as the prosecuting and defense attorneys jockeyed for the win in court.
When I arrived in the VR morgue, it looked exactly like the unit I had visited in real-time on so many other cases. Stainless steel doors filled one end of the room, covering vaults that held bodies in cold storage for later autopsies.
The dead man, ex-Special Forces Sergeant Brock Lee Thurman, lay on the table in the middle of the room. He was a tall man—203 centimeters in height—and built strong—106.2 kilograms. His dirty blond hair was cropped close. His eyes were blue and both of them were cybered for infrared and telescopic. That wasn’t uncommon in the military.
I tracked the original cyberware back to the United States Army. The installation had taken place twenty-one years ago. Thurman had been seventeen when he’d enlisted. The augmentations had been done so that he was ready to enter the Army on his eighteenth birthday. He’d been thirty-eight years, two months, and nine days old when he’d died.
The only next of kin listed was a sister, Eugenia Warren. She was a married mother of three, a low-level research assistant at an agricultural firm. She had worked there for six years and had no outstanding warrants. Her husband was a doctor at St. Gregory’s Hospital on the east side of New Angeles. Together, they made a good income.
I took down her name and address, then called her personal PAD.
“Hello.” Eugenia Warren’s voice was soft and she sounded tired. She kept her vid blanked so I couldn’t see her. Many PADs had that as an automatic feature when unknown numbers called in. I had used my personal PAD and hadn’t gone through the NAPD switchboard. Most people didn’t like getting called by the police.
“Mrs. Warren?”
“Yes.”
“I am Detective Drake. I’m with the New Angeles Police Department. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
“Just a moment.”
I waited. As expected, she pinged my PAD through another connection and confirmed my link to the police department. Then she came back on the line.
“Detective Drake, I’ve already talked to the police. I told them that I didn’t know anything about my brother’s business. We hadn’t been in touch much over the last few years.”
“I understand that, Mrs. Warren. I’m actually doing a deeper background on your brother.”
“Why?”
“To build a psychological profile of the kind of man he was.”
“I don’t know why you—”
I decided to give her a bit of hope, and I knew that it would work because families always wanted to think the best of their members. “I want to look into the possibility that your brother was coerced into taking part in the attack on Cartman Dawes.” I deliberately refrained from saying murder or assassination. Those were negative assessments and Shelly had taught me to keep those light when I was seeking help from a potential contact. I needed to build a bridge that offered a sense of community, the illusion that we were working together.
“You think Brock was forced to do that?”
“It is a possibility, Mrs. Warren.” There were actually many possibilities, but I didn’t point that out. “I want to make an effort to discover whether your brother was innocent.” Brock Thurman had been shot and killed while attempting to kill a police officer. There was no way he would be proven innocent, and even if he was, he would be no less dead.
No, the absolution would be for the living. So many families took on the guilt of their members and struggled to understand things they themselves would not do. I hoped that Eugenia Warren would be one of those.
“Of course.” She took a breath. “What can I do to help?”
“Do you have any of your brother’s personal effects?” I was careful to keep the familial reference in play. That made the discussion less threatening.
“My brother lived on Mars. I didn’t even know he’d returned to Earth until the police contacted me.”
“I understand that, but I was hoping you might have something I could study: pictures, vid, emails that you’ve kept, cards—things like that.”
Eugenia thought for a moment. “When Brock first enlisted, he was really excited about how much he got to travel. I was his older sister. Our parents were both dead. We were all we had.”
I had known that from Thurman’s file.
“Brock used to send me mementos, keepsakes, basically junk from the places he went. There were a lot of pictures and vid as well. A few cards.”
“Did you keep any of that?”
“I did. I’ve got it at home.”
“Would it be possible for me to stop by to look at those things?”
“I could send them to you.”
I didn’t want anything from her coming into the NAPD. Her name had already been flagged with the investigation into Cartman Dawes’s murder. “If possible, I would prefer to talk to you when I look at them. I will probably have questions.”
She hesitated, but her interest was in clearing her brother’s name if she could. Humans had a tendency to want to clean house for the dead. That had always fascinated me. Now I was doing the same thing for Shelly, and I found that the unconscious desire was even more intriguing. Of course, I wasn’t human. I attributed my need more to my curiosity than any ethereal social contract between Shelly and me.
“I can meet you tonight.”
“That will be fine, Mrs. Warren.”
She gave me her address, but I already had it.
I turned my attention back to the virtual corpse on the stainless steel table.
*
When I accessed the medical examiner’s files, Brock Thurman’s body opened out, following the autopsy that had b
een performed. His chest parted in a Y-incision and the liver, heart, lungs, and other organs lifted out and hovered in the air over his body.
The bullet that had killed him rose from his chest cavity and hovered nearby. Almost immediately, the mushroomed bit of lead cloned itself. The original retained the smashed appearance it had gotten while hammering through Thurman’s chest. The second bullet became perfect in shape so the striations left by the lands and grooves of the barrel of Shelly’s weapon could be easily compared.
I had no doubt about the authenticity of the bullet. I had seen Shelly shoot the man.
Thurman’s scalp split and his face was pulled down, leaving his eyes, sinus cavities, and mouth gaping open while the mass of flesh sat around his neck like a grotesque beard.
An incision, made by a bone saw, cut through his skull cap and it was pulled away to reveal the brain beneath. The optic nerves were severed, along with several other ganglion clusters, and the pink-grey brain floated into the air as well.
Dr. Marcus Seward had been thorough in his autopsy. I accessed the logs for all the organs. He had run a tox screen on the tissues from each, but there were no mind control drugs in Thurman’s system. There were, however, traces of a neuro-stim cocktail often used by professional soldiers to combat stress and mental fatigue.
I surmised, as Dr. Seward had, that Thurman had recently been involved in a prolonged firefight. Given the current nature of the world, there were a number of campaigns where that was possible.
I shifted to the lungs. There I found, as the ME had, trace elements of Martian dust. Despite the terraforming that was going on there, Mars still retained a heavier content of silica-rich basalt and finely grained iron oxide dust. There were also significant traces of chlorine, sulfur, and phosphorus in higher concentrations than normally found on Earth.
Thurman had spent considerable time on Mars.
The relatively clean condition of his kidneys and liver, aided by the fact that water was continually recycled on Mars and cleaner than many places on Earth because it was not so plentiful, also bore this out.
I continued my examination of the body and discovered a patch of subcutaneous tissue scarring on the man’s left shoulder. I checked Seward’s notes and discovered that he either hadn’t found it or hadn’t thought it was worth mentioning.
Curious, I magnified the scarring and hit it with a cross spectrum of light. I would have been able to do a better job if I’d had the actual arm to work with, but that would have required going down to the physical morgue, which would have alerted Lieutenant Ormond to my activities.
I didn’t want to do that. Shelly had taught me to circumvent red tape whenever possible. I’d had trouble with that at first, but she’d pointed out that solving a case faster saved lives. My subroutines that guaranteed I’d stay within protocol had made the adjustments. Since I wasn’t certain the killing was over, I had to find answers other investigators were overlooking.
Turning to the eyes, I opened the secondary autopsy on them. They exploded into their various components, hanging in the air with the optic nerves trailing beneath. The pupil, cornea, iris, lens, retina, choroid, sclera, and hyaloid canal all separated into floating islands. The vitreous humor, the clear gel that filled the eye structure in humans and other vertebrates, hovered in a spherical pool.
The cyberware glittered and gleamed, resembling a small pile of needles. The mechanical pieces were bio-friendly, not prone to rejection, and provided the extra night vision and magnification Thurman had been given.
The older pieces were all tagged by the United States Army. The newer pieces weren’t tagged, and I suspected the upgrades had been obtained from black market sources. That meant there would be no record of the surgery required for the implantation.
More cyberware occupied Thurman’s left ear and jawbone. Like the eyes, the comm unit installed there had been military at one time, but had since become a hybrid that couldn’t be tracked back to its source.
Whatever Thurman had been doing on Mars had been off the grid. That spoke even more strongly for him being a Martian rebel.
I started a secretary sorting program to go through the media regarding Martian rebellion military strikes since Thurman’s discharge from the United States Army nine years ago. He had spent twelve years in the military. I wondered what had motivated him to make the career move into whatever he had been doing.
I uploaded the morgue data to my own open file, then closed down the program. Thurman’s body reassembled itself, the organs slithering back into their proper places. His brain plopped back into his skull, the skull cap dropped over it, and his face slid back into position. His eyes closed, and once more it looked like he was sleeping.
Feeling vaguely dissatisfied, or at the very least the closest approximation of those feelings that I was capable of emulating given my neural channeling, I quit the VR and returned to real-time.
*
I occupied myself the rest of the afternoon working on cold cases. By 1639, I had solved yet another homicide. I opened a comm link to Detective Hansen.
His answer was short and direct. “Yeah?”
The vid showed Hansen sitting at his desk. He was a lean, grey-haired man with a wrinkled face that looked like it was starting to cave in on itself. Instead of spending money on implants and cosmetic treatments that would have maintained his appearance as a much younger man, he played the horses.
I knew this only because he’d asked me if I knew anything about horses. Since I could access encyclopedias in a split-second, I had told him I knew a lot about horses. He hadn’t been impressed with what I had known. He’d told me that talking to me was worse than scouting tips at the track.
“I have something for you.”
Hansen grinned. “You solved another one?”
“I believe so.” Actually, going through Thurman’s autopsy had tipped me to the break I’d needed on the case I’d been working on, though I hadn’t quite figured out how that had occurred.
“A big one?”
“The victim was Claudine Salvi.”
Hansen’s faded eyebrows rose in surprise. “The OptiPak Tech homicide?”
“Yes.”
“That case is three years old.”
I already knew that. Claudine Salvi had been the second wife of Baldassare Salvi, a developer of image enhancing software. Salvi’s company had secured several United States government military contracts and supplied upgrades to numerous targeting systems. The company was worth billions.
After Baldassare Salvi died of natural causes, the company had been divided between his young wife, their son, and the son and daughter Baldassare Salvi had had with his first wife, also deceased. Claudine Salvi had been given controlling interest in the company: fifty-one percent.
After Baldassare Salvi’s death, a rival corporation, UltraLens, had offered to buy OptiPak outright for a few billion dollars. The sons and daughter had been in favor of the buyout. But Claudine had had her eye on the future and had turned the offers down for two years running.
Until she’d been found dead in the OptiPak offices.
The theory had been that the murder had been an inside job. No one else had been detected. Both sons and the daughter had been on-site at the time of the murder. All of them had means, motive, and opportunity.
Prior to her death, Claudine had fought with her murderer. Tissue had been removed from under her nails. DNA analysis had ruled out her stepson and stepdaughter, and so far hadn’t hit on another match in the system.
“So who did it?” Hansen always took off at 1700 when he was on the day shift.
“Gino Salvi.”
Hansen frowned. “That’s Claudine Salvi’s biological son, right?”
“Yes.”
Hansen shook his head vigorously. “You got your circuits fried, Drake. As her biological son, his DNA would be half hers. We’d have caught that if it had been his DNA up under her fingernails.”
“Was Gino Salvi’s DNA tested?�
�� I knew it wasn’t because I’d checked.
“I don’t know.”
I emailed the file to him, with the list of family members whose DNA had been tested for a match. Gino Salvi wasn’t on the list. “He wasn’t tested.”
“Doesn’t matter. The ME wouldn’t have missed that.” Hansen scrolled through the file. “Says here Doc Woolford was ME. I know for a fact that Woolford is death on DNA. He went from working for us to working as a special witness for the defense.”
“Woolford missed something else, too.” I highlighted another section of the report, one that I’d added. “Claudine Salvi was a chimera twin.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Chimera twins occur when dizygotic fetuses merge.”
“What do you mean ‘merge’?”
“One twin absorbs the other in the womb.”
Hansen grimaced. “Cannibalism before the kids are born?”
“For all intents and purposes. That trait doesn’t continue after the person is born.”
Hansen made a hurry-up gesture. “You got a point in here, right?”
“A chimera twin can have two sets of DNA.”
Hansen leaned in toward the monitor and I knew I had his attention. “Claudine Salvi had two sets of DNA?”
“She did.” I uploaded a picture of her autopsy. She had been a good-looking woman. In the pictures of her, with her makeup on and the plastic surgery she’d had done to correct the blemishes, people hadn’t been able to see the mosaicism skin that had marked her as a chimera. I still didn’t know why Woolford had missed it, unless he hadn’t been familiar with the condition. “Do you see the discolorations on her chest and abdomen?”
Hansen squinted. “Yeah.”
“Evidently those areas weren’t able to be cosmetically adjusted, or maybe they continued to reoccur. Either way, they led me to the chimera theory.”
“You’d have to prove it.”
“I contacted her plastic surgeon and got her file. Both sets of her DNA are on record. After a bout with ovarian cancer, she had some reconstruction done. The DNA from her ovaries doesn’t match her blood type DNA. The second DNA partially matches the tissue found under her nails at the scene.”