Future Americas

by John Helfers

  The dead women were all in apartments on this floor. The doors were open and the crime scene lasers covered the entrance. I used my ID card to allow me through. If anyone else tried without an ID card, they’d get burned lightly as a warning and their DNA would be removed and sent to headquarters on a special emergency download.

  We’d caught a lot perpetrators that way, all of them coming back to the crime scene for something they forgot.

  The first apartment was a two-story loft. The main floor opened into a kitchen that then expanded into a giant living room with floor-to-ceiling windows. Nothing had been disturbed down here so far as I could see. The carpet-covered stairs that curved up toward the loft bedroom bore the marks of shoes, but those marks probably came from the crime scene techs.

  Still, I walked beside the prints, careful not to touch them. So did DeAndre. When I reached the top of the stairs, I stopped.

  The bedroom had the same view as the living room, and the windows were really a continuation of the windows from the floor below. Only here they were covered with gray privacy shades that allowed us to look out but prevented others from seeing in.

  The dead woman was on a settee, sprawled just like Steffie was, wearing a black negligee that also revealed more than it covered. Her arms were in the same position as Steffie’s, and so were her slippers.

  I hadn’t seen her before.

  I walked as close to her as I could. I scanned carefully, but found no fine mist of spray on the wall or the settee or the carpet. I even had DeAndre look. He couldn’t see anything either.

  The other two women had died and were posed in the same way. Their apartments had similar layouts, and they were on the closest piece of furniture they had to a fainting couch—in one case a love seat and in the other part of a sofa sectional.

  The only thing that differed were their negligees— one wore a filmy red and the other wore a slightly ornate lavender net. Their bodies were positioned similarly and so were their slippers. And none of these crime scenes had that film of blood either, which was leading me to believe more and more that the killer had made some kind of mistake.

  The chief had finished in Steffie’s room by the time I was done examining the escorts. He sent in the rest of his team to remove the bodies and check one final time for evidence he understood.

  I was actually beginning to feel sorry for him. He was beginning to realize how much of a crutch the technology had become for him—and how unsuited he and his team were to this investigation.

  To his credit, it didn’t anger him that the dinosaur who had been fighting him had suddenly become useful again. He actually gave me free rein to conduct the investigation as only I knew how.

  So I went to the operating theater.

  Steffie had set up an entire medical unit on the fifth floor of the building. She had a licensed pharmacy, with state of the art security so that no one would break in. There were six examination rooms, five private rooms for patients that had to stay overnight, and an intensive care area should something go wrong. She had hired a dozen nurses to staff the place twenty-four seven. Three doctors split shifts, and she kept one surgeon on call.

  Another part of the medical wing was set aside for research, and I would investigate that later. But first I wanted to see the operating theater.

  This was the part of Steffie’s empire I’d been to the most. In the early days, I had to serve papers back when the facility was unlicensed and they sent me in to shut her down. Then when it became licensed, I would occasionally have to talk to her patients— sometimes warning them that there was an angry mob outside and they should use a different exit—and sometimes having to handcuff them and take them downtown for an unrelated crime.

  Over the years, Steffie and I had come to a dozen different arrangements, all of which resulted in her people staying as far from trouble as possible and me staying as pure as possible.

  Long after I stopped doing most beat cop work, I did some when Steffie was involved. Because everyone in the department knew that I could talk her into things that no one else could.

  I sighed. I would miss Steffie. I would miss her more than I wanted to admit.

  The operating theater dominated the back side of the building. The theater was truly one of those operating rooms that had an upper deck so that people could observe the procedures below.

  I sent DeAndre up there to eyeball the viewer’s gallery. I wanted to look at the theater by myself.

  I let myself past the crime scene lasers. The doors swung open and the theater’s lights came on.

  The place smelled of shit and vomit mingled with the familiar scent of disinfectant. I stepped out of the theater, grabbed a mask from the sealed box that the medical personnel kept beside the door, and put it on. Then I slipped on some surgical gloves.

  Even though I knew I’d find a body, I didn’t like the odor. I wasn’t about to take any chances.

  Then I stepped back into the theater and blinked for a moment in the harsh light.

  The place was a shambles. The gurneys were overturned, and the normally well ordered medical supplies covered the floor. All of the computers were on, as well as the robotic equipment. Some of the equipment had been damaged. More than one precision arm moved back and forth as if it were on a circuit that wouldn’t quit.

  In the middle of the destruction, one single male body lay on its stomach, hands clutching one of the robotic surgeons, face pressed against a control panel.

  The floor was covered in every imaginable bodily fluid. The man’s clothes were coated. It looked like all the liquid in his body had done its best to flee all at the same time.

  ‘‘Jesus,’’ I said into the mask, my voice muffled.

  I heard a bang from above me, and then DeAndre said, ‘‘I can hear you up here.’’

  He startled me. ‘‘The sound’s on up there?’’

  ‘‘Yeah.’’

  ‘‘Can you see how to turn it off?’’

  ‘‘It’s not obvious,’’ he said.

  ‘‘You think it was like that when this guy died?’’

  ‘‘Crime scene’s not supposed to change anything.’’

  And they always followed the rules. I sighed again. ‘‘You see this mess?’’

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ DeAndre said. ‘‘And it scares the piss out of me.’’

  I almost said it scared the piss out of the victim, too, but I didn’t. DeAndre lacked one cop attribute that I valued—he didn’t have a dark sense of humor. I wasn’t sure he had a sense of humor at all.

  ‘‘You don’t think some kind of virus got out, do you?’’ he asked.

  ‘‘And then went to the apartments, stabbed the women, and posed them?’’ I asked. ‘‘I doubt it.’’

  That was greeted with silence.

  ‘‘I meant,’’ DeAndre said after a while, ‘‘since the crime sensors are down, maybe the medical ones are, too.’’

  ‘‘I have a hunch the ME would have thought of that,’’ I said. I trusted Callan. He’d joined the dead squad after 9/11—oh, so long ago—and got the heavy duty medical terrorist training. The kind that assumed biological agents like anthrax and sarin gas would kill us long before any nuclear bomb did.

  All of those notions seem quaint now, but they hadn’t then. And they’d built a lot of caution into us old-timers as well as no small amount of fear.

  I’d seen pictures of things like this. This was how guys died when they were poisoned or when a biologic that was lodged in their bodies finally came of age.

  Even without any medical examiner’s
notes, I knew one other thing: this man had died quickly, and in great pain. And through it all, he had tried to save himself with the equipment at hand.

  And no one here had tried to help him, even though the microphones were on. The viewing area was open to me, and the theater was open to DeAndre.

  I wondered if what happened in here could be heard in the nurse’s wing as well.

  I would test it in a moment. But first, I made some mental notes. I wasn’t about to walk around the scene—too many contaminents—but I was going to get a team in here to pick up every bit of fecal matter, every drop of blood, and I was going to see if that showed what the man died of.

  Then I was going to use a very old law—the Patriot Act—to claim access to the medical records here should anyone try to fight me. Without Steffie, I doubted anyone would—although I wasn’t sure of that either. Some doctor or researcher might want to keep whatever he was doing quiet.

  Especially if it got this result.

  I backed out of the theater slowly, and waited until the doors closed and the lasers came back on before removing my mask and gloves. I bagged them in a medical waste bag, not because I was going to throw them out, but because I was taking them to the crime lab to force some of those so-called scientists to actually do some analysis.

  If there was some contaminant in that room, I wanted to know what it was, especially if it got on my masks or gloves.

  Then I examined the sound system in the anteroom. You couldn’t listen to the theater from here. If someone had been listening to the poor guy die, they would have had to do it from the observation deck.

  This part of the crime scene disturbed me a lot more than the posed women. Those seemed planned.

  This seemed random and accidental.

  And yet, no one appeared to be in the medical wing, even though Steffie staffed it around the clock. There were no patients, no nurses, not even any beeping monitors.

  Clearly, something had happened throughout Steffie’s empire.

  The question was where it started. Once we figured out the target of the attack, we might be able to figure out who did it, and—if we were really lucky—why.

  The other components of Steffie’s empire—the parking garage beneath the building, the ballroom, bar, and restaurant on the top floor—were empty as well. Even the big spenders’ wing was open and unguarded.

  Steffie never usually left the place empty. At least one employee manned the phones during her off hours, and guards, prep cooks, and medical personnel were also awake and working.

  Steffie herself never seemed to sleep. Each time I visited, she greeted me personally. No matter the time of the day or night, she never seemed as if I had awakened her from a sound sleep.

  Nor had I ever seen her in lingerie before.

  All the way back to the precinct, I’d thought about what message the killer had tried to send—that the women were interchangeable? That they weren’t quite real, with their multicolored negligees and their slippers? That their value was only in the way they looked?

  I needed to know how he got in, and how he got out. I needed to know why no one was at work that night, and why the building was empty.

  I also needed to know who the man in the operating theater was.

  So, of course, the chief had a different task for me altogether. It seemed I was right; the killer had missed that little bit of spray. The paint behind it had one activated camera, and it had been behind a droplet of blood—if something that small could be called a droplet—and so there was very little to be seen, at least after the spray hit the wall.

  The camera was located too low to get many images of the room in the short time it had been activated. But it did manage to catch one clear image: a hand that had dropped down beside it. A hand in great detail, from the calluses along the palm to the ridges and whorls of the fingerprints.

  In the time it took me to examine Steffie’s empire and get back to the precinct, those ridges and whorls had coalesced into a name. Barund Coe, a young man who had clearly been in the building well before the killings took place, but who might have seen something or managed to avoid something.

  The chief gave me an address and a directive to investigate like a proper detective.

  I bit my tongue. A proper detective looked at all the evidence and determined its importance. Witnesses were notoriously unreliable—and that was if they’d actually been present when the crime occurred.

  I would wager, if young Barund Coe wasn’t our victim in the operating theater, that he hadn’t been present and therefore hadn’t seen anything of value.

  But the chief was pleased to have evidence he understood and I knew I had to placate him so that I would be able to investigate the rest of the crime on my own.

  I figured it would be an easy fifteen-minute detour on the route to a long and satisfying investigation.

  I figured wrong.

  Barund Coe lived on the sixth floor of an ancient apartment building in North Portland. Unlike other parts of the city, North Portland hadn’t gone through any revitalization in the sixty-five years I’d been wearing a badge. The neighborhoods hung on like a kid clinging to a rock in the middle of a fast-moving current. Somehow they managed to survive, but they were never glamorous or trendy or even very nice.

  Coe’s building hadn’t even been nice when it was built in the 1930s. The brick was thin and crumbly, the mortar between the cracks nonexistent. The front door to the building had been replaced so many times that it was impossible to tell what the actual front door had really looked like.

  The building had never had an elevator, and in the hundred-plus years of the place’s existence, no one had bothered to replace a single stair. So the stairs sagged in the middle and the railing that I would normally have used to brace myself was so rickety I preferred to put my hand on the grease-coated wall.

  The sixth-floor hallway smelled of clove weed—a modern version of marijuana that somehow gave a mellow high but supposedly removed the paranoia. Coe’s door was open a crack, and through that crack, I could see him sitting on his couch, his legs extended and his head bobbing to some kind of music player he had probably stuck in his ear.

  DeAndre knocked—we still had to do that—and then he announced, but Coe didn’t notice. He was lost in his reefer and his music and as I had that realization, my stomach tightened.

  This wasn’t going to go as smoothly as I had hoped.

  I pushed the door open with my elbow, keeping one hand on my gun, the other holding out my badge. I was talking as I came in—all reassuring words: we understand you witnessed a crime; we only need a few minutes of your time; we just want to talk.

  I doubt Coe heard any of that. Instead, he looked up with his red-rimmed eyes and screamed. Then he bolted off the couch and dove out of the window onto a fire escape that should have been removed twenty years before.

  His feet clanged down the metal steps. I cursed and followed him, DeAndre yelling behind me to stop or I would hurt myself.

  I’d chased perps a thousand times down fire escapes, across rooftops, through streets, and though I occasionally hurt myself, I always got my man.

  I knew how to clang down fire escapes. The replaced knees, hips, and ankles actually had some lift. Age had trimmed me down better than any shot could. I was as thin as the eighty-seven-year-olds I remembered from my own childhood—just not as bent or easily broken. I probably moved faster now than I did when I was forty.

  The metal wobbled so badly as Coe and I hurried down it that DeAndre was afraid to get on it. He shouted as much from above, and then disappeared inside the window, probably to take the other steps down and confront Coe below.

  Coe jumped from the bottom of the fire escape to the rooftop built over the large part of the building’s first floor. He sprinted across th
at open wide space and disappeared down the side.

  I cursed, following as fast as I could, getting to the edge in time to see him jump from a four-foot ledge into the alley.

  I took some construction stairs to the ledge, watched Coe disappear around a bend in the alley, and knew I no longer had the time to go easy. A metal security door banged open behind me, and DeAndre appeared, sprinting across the rooftop just like I had.

  I jumped from the ledge to the alley below—

  And that was when I landed badly, skinning my elbow, and knocking the wind out of myself. I saw red-and-orange lights without even closing my eyes, and knew I had to breathe. I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to for a few seconds, and those seconds would feel like an eternity.

  An eternity in which I waved DeAndre on with my good arm and listened to him take down the suspect at the far end of the alley.

  While I lay on my back in the piss-scented concrete, cradling my skinned elbow, and hoping that none of the germs I’d scraped up would turn into anything lethal.

  Reflecting. Worrying.

  Forcing myself up, realizing that the elbow wasn’t broken, watching as DeAndre brought the perp toward us, and realizing then that I had happened onto something—an idea, a memory, a thought that I should have paid attention to and couldn’t quite remember.

  But I would.

  That was the other thing that came with age—a certain tolerant patience with the mind’s processes. I knew as I watched Coe jitter his way toward me, hands behind him, and DeAndre admonishing him, that we had come to a turning point in the investigation.

  I just wasn’t quite sure what it was.

  It wasn’t Coe.

  He had been in the building two nights before Steffie died. His girlfriend had paid for VD reversal for both of them, but he hated hospitals and doctors and didn’t want to wait. Instead, he wondered if there was something to steal down the hallways.