by Jeff Edwards
She was in there, all right, or at least an incredibly accurate computer approximation of her personality was. Her memories were in there too, current up to the instant when John had slipped the sensor network over her head.
Maggie had tried to talk me into making one. She and John both had. I’d refused, a decision I had never regretted for a second. Man is not meant to be factored into logic algorithms.
The Scion had just been a novelty to John and Maggie, an interesting trinket. Every once in a while, they would drag the module out and plug it into John’s computer. They’d talk to it for hours, giggling over it, like children playing with an amusing gadget. Then they’d unplug it, and it would go back on the shelf.
It might still be there somewhere, gathering dust at the back of one of John’s closets. I made a mental note to ask him about it. If the damned thing was still around, I wanted it erased.
The past was dead, and nothing that was recorded on a stack of memory chips could change that.
CHAPTER 4
The computer in the den was concealed in the mahogany surface of my desktop. I plugged Jackal’s data chip into a hidden slot in the right edge of the desk and thumbed the power switch. A holographic display field unfolded in the air above the desk, the translucent blue rectangle empty except for a slowly flashing cursor. The keyboard was a hologram as well, projected over a grid of infrared sensors that read the position of my fingers in relation to the imaginary keys.
I called up a file menu.
I would put off the actual crime-scene recordings until last. I’m not usually squeamish, but the fact that the victims were all children, or practically so, added an unpleasant dimension. I wanted to work myself up to them slowly.
I started with the text files. Most of them I just skimmed. It takes a while to read every report generated during a single murder investigation. I had files from fourteen murder cases. Fifteen, if you counted Winter’s suicide.
The first murder had occurred in 2061 on the thirteenth of August. The victim: a fourteen-year-old girl named Kathy Lynn Armstrong.
Twenty-four days later came Miko Otosaki, thirteen years old.
Sometime after the death of Felicia Stevens, the third victim, an over-educated desk sergeant had started calling the killer Huitzilopochtli, in honor of an Aztec God whose thirst for human sacrifices demanded a regular diet of hearts.
Since none of the rest of the cops in the station house could pronounce Huitzilopochtli, they’d quickly shortened the killer’s nickname to Aztec. The media had picked up on the title immediately.
The last of the killings attributed to Aztec was a thirteen-year-old named Tracy Lee. Tracy had died on the twenty-ninth of March in 2063: a little over two weeks before Michael had put a bullet through his own brain.
Fourteen victims stretched out over nineteen months. The shortest interval between killings had been four days. The longest had been ninety-eight days. That made the average about forty-five days.
I checked my watch. Aztec hadn’t killed in 133 days, not since Winter’s suicide.
None of the murdered girls had been penetrated orally, vaginally or anally. The police had never found a trace of semen or foreign saliva on or near any of the victim’s bodies.
Christine Clark’s file I examined in detail. Sonja was right about the date; Christine had been murdered on the eighth of February. The coroner’s best guess was 3 p.m., plus or minus a half-hour. LAPD’s AI estimated time of death at 3:07:21 p.m., plus or minus two minutes.
So if Sonja was telling the truth—if Michael really had been with her that day—then he couldn’t have killed Christine.
But a check of the physical evidence files put another nail in Winter’s coffin. The LA coroner had positively identified the knife found on Winter’s corpse as the weapon used in all fourteen Aztec slayings.
I backed out of the LAPD files and logged onto the other file.
The second data pull consisted of one file: twenty-four hours of data recorded by a household AI.
Ten minutes of random sampling told me what I wanted to know. Still, the data could have been edited. I had the desktop computer run the entire file at a compression ratio of 3600 to 1, verifying each DataNet time code recorded. In twenty-four seconds I had my answer: there were exactly 86,400 seconds worth of sequential time codes. None were missing and there were no extras. That didn’t totally eliminate the possibility that the file had been edited, but it made it damned unlikely.
One thing was clear: on the eighth of February, 2063, an adult male answering to the name of Mike had spent the better part of nine hours in Sonja Winter’s apartment.
Until I could prove that he was Michael Winter, I decided to call him Mr. X.
Since Sonja Winter’s apartment wasn’t equipped with video cameras, there was no identifiable footage of Mr. X.
The man appearing in the security system’s IR imagers could have been anyone of the proper height and weight. A person’s heat patterns are as individual as fingerprints, but Michael Winter had probably never been thermally mapped. Since thermal mapping only works on warm living tissue, it was too late to map Michael now. Without a reference map on file, there was no basis for comparison. Those heat patterns might have belonged to Michael Winter. Then again, they might not have.
So, scratch visual, and scratch infrared. What did that leave? Audio.
There were three voices in the recording, two female and one male. One of the female voices I recognized as Sonja’s. The other female voice was easily attributed to Harmony, Sonja’s AI. The male voice belonged to Mr. X.
I captured three random samples of Mr. X’s voice and compared them to the police file copy of Michael Winter’s suicide recording. The voiceprints matched. The voice in Sonja’s apartment on the day of Christine Clark’s murder belonged to Michael Winter.
The court wouldn’t buy it, of course. The District Attorney would rationalize it away.
No two voiceprints are ever perfectly identical. The DA would call in a half dozen voiceprint experts, all prepared to testify that the minuscule variations between two samples made absolute positive identification impossible. The voice in Ms. Winter’s apartment might belong to Michael Winter. Then again, maybe not.
Or, the DA might be willing to concede the possibility that Michael had an alibi for the murder of Christine Clark. Which didn’t alter the fact that Michael had confessed to the other thirteen killings.
LAPD and the District Attorney’s Office had a solution that made them happy. Fourteen murders were solved and the killer was dealt with. They certainly weren’t going to call a press conference to announce that fourteen murder cases were being reopened and a killer was still running rampant.
According to the case files, before his suicide, Michael hadn’t been a suspect. In fact, the police hadn’t even been aware of his existence. His confession had taken them by surprise. Coming—as it had—complete with the murder weapon and a suspect who knew intimate details of the crime, the whole package must have seemed a Godsend to the police. All of which felt just a little too convenient.
I was a long way from being convinced that Michael Winter hadn’t killed Christine Clark, but—for the sake of argument—what if he hadn’t? What would it mean?
By Sonja’s extension of logic, if he was innocent of one murder, then he hadn’t killed any of them.
I wasn’t ready to make a leap that large. He might very well have killed one or more of the others. I didn’t know yet.
Damn. So much for the easy way out. I wanted the bastard to be obviously guilty. Then I could walk away from this whole mess with a clean conscience.
But there was a glimmer of a possibility that Michael Winter was innocent. If so, he had paid the price for someone else’s crimes. And his sister would go on paying for years.
I stood up and reached for a cigarette. My pack was empty. I crumpled it up and tossed it into the recycling bin on my way to the kitchen.
I rummaged through the kitchen drawers.
No smokes.
“House, where are my cigarettes?”
“There are two packs of cigarettes in the top drawer of the nightstand in your bedroom. There is a partial pack in the right pocket of your tan jacket in the hall closet. There are three full cases and one partial case in the storeroom. There are...”
“Okay, okay. I’ve got it.” I walked into the bedroom and grabbed one of the packs from the nightstand.
I peeled the foil wrapper off the top of the pack. A neat little disclaimer paragraph printed on the foil reminded me to keep my cancer immunizations up to date, so that I could continue to enjoy the flavor of a good cigarette without serious risk to my health. I opened the pack and lit one. I knew it was going to be a long night, so I asked House to make some coffee.
A few minutes later, I returned to the den with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. I sat back down at the computer and started reviewing the crime scene reports.
Half a pack of cigarettes and two pots of coffee later, something caught my eye. It was an inventory of items found in the hotel room where Michael had killed himself. Except for the gun (I had been right, it was a Glock) and the Japanese kitchen knife, there was nothing unusual in the items found on the body. Six key chips on a shark tooth key ring, a packet of breath mints, a spray can of solar block and a wallet containing five wallet-sized trids, two credit chips, an address chip, two condoms, and 205 Euro-marks in cash.
The police had found no cigarettes on the body, or anywhere in the hotel room. So what had given me the idea that Winter was a smoker? I was certain that Sonja hadn’t mentioned it, but somewhere I had picked up the impression that the man had smoked.
I loaded the recording of Winter’s suicide, fast-forwarding until I came to the part I was looking for. I froze the picture just as Winter was reaching into the right pocket of his jacket for the knife. I advanced the recording, one frame at a time. There. The front of the jacket was bloused open, revealing a stretch of expensive white European shirt. There was something in the left breast pocket of the shirt; something the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes.
I punched a few keys, dragging a green wire-frame box around a portion of the image. Another keystroke enlarged the boxed image until the holographic projection floating over my computer consisted entirely of the man’s pocket and a little of his shirt front.
The object in the pocket was a brightly colored box. I keyed a command for digital enhancement into the computer. The resolution of the image increased slowly. By the time the machine beeped to signal maximum enhancement, I could read the brand name off the pack: Ernte 23. German cigarettes. I saved the enhanced image under a separate file name, and backed out of the recording.
It took me a few minutes of searching to find what I was looking for: the report by the cops who had discovered Michael’s body.
According to the report, at 12:10 a.m., LAPD Tactical had received a report of gunshots from the Velvet Clam Hotel. Two uniformed officers were dispatched to check it out. They arrived on scene in about ten minutes. Witnesses pointed them to room 216. They knocked on the door and got no answer. They were about to kick the door in when the night manager showed up with a pass chip. Officers Reba Brock and Victor Matawicz entered the scene of the crime at 12:22 a.m. Their report said that they exited the room, touching nothing, and guarded the scene while they waited for a homicide team.
The night manager’s statement backed them up. The door was locked when they arrived, and no one touched anything in the room from the time the door was unlocked until the homicide team was on scene.
I ran the sequence of events through my head, trying to get things to click. At about eight minutes after midnight on the fifteenth of April, Michael Winter shot himself in the head. The video camera continued to record for four minutes after he was dead. Ten minutes later, or fourteen minutes after the gunshot, two uniformed cops arrived to secure the scene.
Where had the cigarettes gone? In the ten minutes from the end of the video recording to the arrival of the police, someone had removed that package of cigarettes from Michael Winter’s left breast shirt pocket.
It could have been Brock or Matawicz, but why would they chance it? Why would one or both of them risk ending their careers and possible felony charges for a pack of cigarettes? Besides, the night manager, William C. Holtzclaw, stated that neither officer had touched anything in the room.
By the time the homicide team arrived, it would be impossible for anyone to snag something out of the pocket of the corpse without being seen by a dozen people.
The conclusion was unmistakable; in the ten minutes from the end of that video recording to the entrance of Officers Brock and Matawicz, someone else had been in that hotel room.
I decided to carry my thinking one step farther. According to the clock, it was a little after midnight. Too bad. I punched up Sonja Winter’s number.
She answered on the third ring. Her face wasn’t puffy and her hair was perfect. She hadn’t been asleep. Somehow I found that annoying.
“Ms. Winter, was your brother a smoker?”
She shook her head.
“Never? Are you certain?”
“I’m positive. Michael hated cigarette smoke. He thought it was disgusting.” Her tone told me that she agreed with him.
“Thank you.” I reached to terminate the connection.
“Wait.” She looked puzzled. “Why is that important? Have you discovered something?”
“Nothing concrete. Just a notion I’m kicking around.”
“Does this mean you’re on the case?”
“It does not mean that I’m on the case. It means I’m giving your request fair consideration, as promised. Goodnight Ms. Winter, or rather, good morning.”
“Good morning.” The look of puzzlement on her face deepened as I terminated the call.
The autopsy report on Michael Winter confirmed it. Except for some evidence of scarring from childhood asthma, his lungs had been clean. He was a non-smoker.
Who would break into a hotel room and rifle a corpse’s pockets to steal a pack of cigarettes? Or had they broken into the room at all? Someone might have already been in the room, outside of the camera’s field of view. In the bathroom, perhaps.
I exited the autopsy file and stood up and stretched. It was time. I had been putting it off for long enough; I had to look at the crime scene footage.
I found my simulator gear in the top of the hall closet: a pair of Nakamichi wraparound data-shades molded from iridescent high-impact plastic, and two gray Kevlar data-gloves, each studded with tiny octagonal sensors. A long thread of ribbon cable with a three-way splitter on one end connected the gloves to the data-shades. The free end of the cable was wound several times around the entire package. I pulled the bundle down, began unwinding the cable, and walked back into the den.
Technically, it was an arcade setup, designed for kid’s games, but the graphics resolution was excellent and the audio was state-of-the-art, a VRX bone-conduction rig with active noise reduction.
The connector on the end of the cable looked clean. I blew it out anyway, inspected it for bent pins, and plugged it into the interface port in the edge of the desk, next to the slot that held Jackal’s data chip.
I pulled on the gloves and slipped the shades over my eyes. It took me a few seconds to adjust the audio conduction pads against the bones behind my ears. I spent another few seconds getting the focus just right on the test pattern that appeared in the eyepieces, making unnecessarily minute adjustments. I was stalling, and I knew it.
I punched the phantom space bar, and the test pattern disappeared, replaced in the eyepieces of the shades with the computer’s menu display. Green three-dimensional representations of the data-gloves floated in the foreground, superimposed over the menu.
I curled the fingers of my left hand in that peculiar fashion that means browse. The iconic representation of my hand repeated the gesture in instant synchronization, and a highlighted selection bar
scrolled down through the file menu. I stopped when the highlighted selection read:
► CLARK, CHRISTINE, L: CRIME-SCENE: 08FEB63/5:21p.m. ◄
Five twenty-one. The footage had been shot roughly two hours after her death, probably very shortly after the homicide team had arrived on scene.
I took a breath to steel myself, and pointed the index finger of my right hand at the highlighted entry. The sim recording blossomed in front of my eyes.
I found myself in a smallish room, powder blue wallpaper flocked with Victorian carousel horses and royal blue ribbons and bows. Pinned to the walls were at least a dozen holo-posters of what I took to be young rockers and vid stars.
The furniture was small and delicate, burnished blonde wood cut with intricate curves and inlays. The dresser and bureau tops were lined with porcelain dolls in frilly dresses. It was the bedroom of a little girl who was almost ready to be not so little anymore. Now she would never get the chance.
A block of bright yellow text covered the lower right hand corner of my vision: temperature readouts, humidity, the time, the orientation of my point of view to true north. When I turned my head, the color of the data readouts changed so that they always contrasted with the background.
I reached out with my virtual hand and picked up one of the dolls from the top of the bureau. When I moved the doll, the computer drew a yellow wireframe outline around the part of the image where the doll had been. It was the computer’s way of reminding me that the picture inside the wireframe wasn’t part of the actual recording. The camera had never actually seen the wall behind the doll, so the computer’s imaging software was taking its best guess, based on what it had seen of the rest of the wall. A flashing red disclaimer appeared at the bottom of the text readout, reminding me that the images inside the highlighted areas were extrapolations and were not admissible as evidence.