Next on her personal agenda for the evening was to take a car and visit Inspector MacGruder while he was still in the hospital. It wasn’t the first thing on her list, but she felt, especially after her discussion with Chief Bennett about her taking over his job later in the year, that it was a good idea to take an opportunity to improve her relations with MacGruder. If she vacated the position, he would be one of the candidates for promotion to Detective Chief Inspector, along with Inspectors Washington and Alvarez.
MacGruder’s ward door was ajar when Alana arrived. She stepped inside cautiously, knowing that she was probably not atop MacGruder’s visitation wish list. She found the inspector sitting upright in bed, wearing a pair of eyeglasses and reading from a hand-held notepad. Alana said, “Evening, Maggie. How’s the leg?”
MacGruder glanced at her over the rims of his spectacles, and then set his notepad down beside him, “It still hurts like a bitch. How’s my case coming along?”
“We think we caught all of the people running the chop-shop, and we have a prime suspect in the kidnappings, but there’s still a lot to do. Security Division has their fingers in it, and they’re rounding up most of our suspects and doing who knows what to them.”
MacGruder looked up at the ceiling and exhaled forcefully, pursing his lips afterwards, “Did Rhys tell you about his visit?”
Alana could sense that there was more to MacGruder’s question than was evident on the surface, but she didn’t feel inclined to ask what had happened between Maggie and Ben. She said, “I know that he came by, but that’s all. I want to apologize for not dropping by sooner myself, but the kidnapping case turned into a task force. Half the precinct is working on it, and both forensics departments are bringing in help to dent the workload. Speaking thereof, did they give you any idea of when you’ll be back on duty?”
MacGruder looked down at his leg, covered as it was by a sheet, “I’m supposed to go home tomorrow and stay off the leg until Monday, when I start physical therapy. I’ll be hobbling around in one of those walker exoskeleton things like old people use for a couple weeks. My sick days are going to go fast, so I’ll have to go on temp disability, half-salary, until it heals.”
Alana changed the subject, “Why did you rush into that raid on Sunday?”
MacGruder smiled through gritted teeth as he shifted his good leg in bed, “Same reason you did the same thing on July fourth at the dockyards. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I know that you feel like you can just run into any situation because you know that if your leg gets hit, you can just get a replacement. I can’t do that. Not yet anyway. Did you need anything else?”
Alana took the hint that her presence wasn’t desired, “No. Look, I know it’s going to sound odd coming from me, but I do wish you were on the team. Get well.”
MacGruder picked up his e-book and resumed his reading, saying rather insincerely, “Thanks for stopping by.”
Alana returned to her car and instructed it to drive to the Camarillo hospital where Gabriel Stone was still under care. She arrived just as the sun was setting, which was after normal visiting hours, so she had to enter through the emergency room and wind her way through the medical maze until she reached his bed. He was out of the Intensive Care Unit and in what the nurse who directed her called ‘Less Intensive Care.’ It turned out to be a special ward for patients who were stable, but still in poor condition. The ward was different, with no walls separating it from the nursing station, only curtains, which were, in most cases, pulled back so that the staff could see the patients.
To her surprise, Alana found Bob Smith sitting in the room with Gabriel. He was typing away at thin air, using a virtual keyboard that only he could see. The practice was uncommon for non-cyborgs because it was difficult for a living person to hold their arms in position to type without some kind of wrist support. Alana asked as she stepped into the ward, “I wasn’t expecting to see you until sometime tomorrow.”
Smith was focused on his virtual interface and did not look at Alana when he replied, “I’m looking to see if there are any charitable organizations that might help keep Mister Stone on life support for a little while longer, just in case he comes out of his coma. I’m not having much luck though. It’s a tragic consequence of our cybernetic existence that the insurance and costs are so expensive that Americans don’t give much to charity anymore. With very few exceptions, philanthropists have become a thing of legend. The old saying used to be, ‘You can’t take it with you.’ Now that you can take it with you, no one gives it away. How are you holding up?”
“I’m not having the crisis of conscience I should be having, but I’m tired. After I talked with the Security Division agent who has Gabriel’s save file, I thought about when my parents died—both killed when their house burned down. I was working on a defense corruption case at the Pentagon when it happened, about five years before Zumpco invented resurrection. I remember how I felt then. The emotional strain was almost more than I could bear. I was drained—enervated is the perfect word. I had to be taken off that prosecution team because I couldn’t deal with my job and their deaths. There was just so much I had to do. During the burial ceremony, when their caskets were being lowered, I passed out. They told me afterwards that I almost fell face-forward into my mother’s grave, but my uncle grabbed my shoulder at the last moment and held me back. What I remember most about it—what I was thinking this morning—is that I can’t feel that way anymore. I just can’t.”
Smith asked, “Did you have any siblings?”
Alana moved to Smith’s side and turned to look over Gabriel Stone’s body as it lay on the bed, connected to a battery of machines and monitors via a host of cables. She shook her head, “No. I was the only child. My mother had problems during my birth and had a hysterectomy. I used to joke that when I was born, they broke the mold.”
“Have you changed your mind about pulling the plug in the morning?”
Alana said, “I talked with my boss at length today about my career options. He’s going to retire, and he said he’s put my name forward as his replacement. If that happened, I could probably afford to either keep Gabriel hooked up for a little while, or replenish my savings if I...”
Smith stopped typing and waited for Alana to continue.
“It’s far from certain that I’ll get the promotion, unlikely even.”
Smith asked, “Do you feel that it’s cyber-discrimination? I might be able to help with that.”
“No. It’s more like—what’s the word for when someone sleeps their way to the top? It’s not, ‘nepotism,’ is it?”
“No, but I’ve sometimes heard it called the Petered Principle. There was another thing I thought about for you to consider. It’s too late to start doing this before you’ll have to make the final decision, but have you considered using social media to ask for help? A lot of people do that, trying to solicit small contributions from sympathetic donors. Your story has a lot of appeal. Public servant, police officer, whose son was a priest who was shot by a criminal. You might be able to lessen the blow, at least. If you do, I’ll add a thousand credits in seed money, less my fees for this week.”
Alana said, “I think I’ve always been a competent detective, but I’ve been about oh-and-a-hundred when it’s come to making good decisions about personal matters. When do I have to make the final call?”
“When the administrative staff comes on duty at eight o’clock tomorrow morning is when they’ll act, but they’ll have to get his doctor to make a final attempt at reviving him, and if that fails, they’ll have to go through some hoops which should delay them until at least noon. If I were you, I’d talk to the doctor after he makes his last try. He’ll probably have a better idea of the prognosis.”
Alana asked, “Can they do a brain scan while he’s like this? Save him?”
Smith shook his head, “Not without his permission.”
“Didn’t you say I’m his next of kin? Doesn’t that give me the authority to order that?”
“No. People can’t be saved without their expressed permission. The Supreme Court decided it was a privacy issue. Landmark case of Whitehead versus Whitehead. In some ways, it was similar reasoning to the old Roe versus Wade decision about reproductive rights.”
Alana said, “I know that Gabriel’s father was dead-set against resurrection on religious grounds. Given that he raised Gabriel to assume his role, I have to give weight to the possibility that he was never saved because he didn’t want to be. His church used to have a sign out front that asked, ‘Are you really saved?”
“That was Aaron Stone, the cyber-terrorist, right?”
“To you and me, that epithet would certainly be apropos, but I don’t think he saw himself that way.”
The noise of the equipment in the room and the intercom outside summoning doctors and nurses hither and yon came to dominate the room for a long time before Smith stood and stepped toward the exit. He said, “You can expect a call from the doctor first thing in the morning, right after he’s made his final determination. If he can’t reach you, he has standing orders to terminate care. Call me if you decide to pick up his tab.”
Alana nodded, and Smith took his leave. It occurred to Alana that she never questioned Smith’s motives the times he had helped her. She had almost always second-guessed the stated motives of anyone who offered to do anything for her without compensation, most recently, Edward Jenkins. Had her career shaped her personality that way, or was she always like that, even before she even considered law school? Even now, as she looked over Gabriel Stone, his only motions being the breathing caused by the ventilator jammed down his throat, she had to wonder why he had risked his life by calling her to warn her about the kidnapping gang. Perhaps he simply did so because he thought it was the right thing to do, believing naively that he had hidden the trail that betrayed his identity as an informant? His father had helped orchestrate an attack on the Zumpco cybernetic support network, damaging or destroying the save profiles of millions of retirees. Doubtless, some, if not many, of the kidnap victims did not have the chance to make a fresh backup. Had their brains been shipped out of the country to some unscrupulous entity, those affected would have been permanently dead. Hundreds of cyborgs could have been murdered simply because of bad timing. Then again, the entire caper would have been unlikely to succeed if not for the confusion sown in the monitoring process by Aaron. Perhaps Gabriel realized that when Kaloyanov offered to sell him hundreds of intact android and gynoid chassis, and was seeking to atone for his father’s actions? It was all speculation, of course, but if Gabriel died in the morning, Alana would never know the true reasons her ‘son’ sacrificed himself for the benefit of the very people his father sought to eliminate. Even if she was able to obtain Gabriel’s save profile from Derringer, it was made before the fateful decision to rat out the kidnappers. He would not remember doing so. Her curiosity alone was enough to inform her decision regarding Gabriel. She said, “Vira, call Robert Smith.”
By the time she had worked out the legal details for rolling Gabriel’s life support over to her account, the sun had long since fallen below the horizon. The hour drive gave her ample opportunity to refocus on her case, and she pondered the possibility that if hacking was involved, the same person might have been behind both cases. She made a short, mental list of items she wanted to review once she had access to a better workspace than the virtual desktop her operating system allowed her to create inside her mind. By the time she made it across town to the station, it was already after midnight. Brett and Rhys had both departed, leaving a short list of bullet points for her to ponder ahead of their full report in the morning briefing.
Victoria Chu was staying in Louis Chu’s townhome. She had spent the previous evening playing an online immersion video game, and although the précis did not say which game it was, Alana presumed it was the same one that was mentioned on Louis’ social media sites. She had gained a substantial amount of weight since her dossier photo was taken, almost enough to render her unrecognizable except that she still kept her hair long and straight.
Louis Chu did not make any appearances during the course of the evening, and he was proving impossible to locate. If he was using a telephone, it was one that was not traced to him. The best confirmation they had gathered to implicate Chu as a suspect was that the previous Sunday morning, the day after Greg Veedock had possibly killed Phil Robertson, Chu had transferred the balance in his bank accounts into his sister’s account, a sum approximating one-hundred-thousand credits. Alana was struck that even after thirty-five years as a policewoman, her savings totaled only slightly more than that, and she considered herself frugal.
That was the extent of their report, but they had only been investigating for one evening. Even with the Internet and special police access to help them, the volume of data they may have encountered could have been as mountainous as the Himalayas.
On her return trip from Camarillo, Alana had remembered a minor point from her early analysis of the Greg Veedock murder, before she turned the investigation over to Brett; that being the temporary disappearance of Veedock’s transponder track while he was in the basement of East Los Angeles Stadium. It occurred to her that if Veedock was too deep below ground for the satellite network to track him, then the hypothesis that he could have been hacked was suddenly on earthquake-prone ground. This left her with two explanations that made sense to her. Either a puppeteer had rigged a way to broadcast a strong signal, or Edward Jenkins once again became a primary suspect.
Alana first turned her attention to Jenkins, reviewing the security camera footage that captured him entering and leaving the clubhouse. She checked the timing again, and although she really wanted to find a simple explanation, there were none. Based on what Brian Comerford in forensics had told them, Jenkins was simply not in the clubhouse long enough to commit the crime, and Brian’s team had not discovered any devices which could have been planted. Given that Alana had specifically instructed them to search for robots and other electronics, and the lack of any being discovered, Alana moved on to the second hypothesis.
She placed a videophone call to the security station at the stadium and asked them to upload any footage they had of the first-base side of the stadium, at field level or closer to the dugout. The home team was away, and only a skeleton crew was on duty, so a junior officer was the only help she could find. Eventually, Alana walked the young man through the process of locating the security camera footage, but she was stymied. The private security cameras only focused on the crowd if there was a request from one of the other officers. Their primary job was to monitor the access points. She was able to sequester a large amount of video data, much more than she would be able to digest before the morning meeting, so she added it to her daily agenda.
Alana was preparing to sleep sitting up in her office chair, as she had done often since she was assigned to head the task force looking into the cyborg kidnappings, when she suddenly had an extremely painful epiphany. While it was possible that the gate security monitors might have recorded something important, if Alana wanted to see close-ups of the crowd inside the stadium, she had just alienated the person most able to help her find that footage, Edward Jenkins.
Thursday, 13 July, 10:01
Alana stood before the electronic whiteboard in the situation room as she had on previous days. Today, a series of windows displayed camera footage from surveillance assets deployed in and around Louis Chu’s Glendale townhome. Among the videos was a thermogram that showed a warm body lying motionless in one of the bedrooms, presumably Victoria Chu. Victoria had not left the home ever since they had started watching. She had remained up late, lying in the same bed, hooked up to a virtual reality headset and immersed within a video game. It was difficult to tell the difference between when she was unconscious and when she was playing, except that she was a side-sleeper. When online, she lay flat on her back.
Alana was surprisingly upbeat when she opened the daily briefing, “Good
morning, everyone! Thanks to some solid detective work last night, I’m going to go out on a limb and declare that we have a prime suspect, one mister Louis Chu. The exact reasons will be bulleted in your daily summary. What’s more, I think that our suspect may have been connected to Inspector Crabtree’s case. Because of that, he will be joining our task force until we either have eliminated Chu from our investigation or incarcerated him. Unfortunately, we’re still understaffed, so I’m going to have to reshuffle some assignments today to cover all our bases, so to speak.”
Crabtree closed his eyes and shook his head at the baseball pun, but it was also because they felt as if they were burning from where he had remained up too late while working the previous evening.
Alana continued, “Before I do that, I wanted to let everyone know that DI MacGruder is supposed to be returning home today, and Chief Bennett will be taking up a collection to help him out while he’s on temporary disability. Drop by his office if you want to contribute. Also, at fourteen-hundred hours, a special service for the SWAT team officers we lost when this case began will be held in the courtyard. I’ll be there to represent the team. I know how much work we have to do, so attendance is voluntary.”
Chief Bennett stood and addressed the audience, “I’ll also be taking up a collection for the family of the trooper who wasn’t saved. Same rules. Just drop by my office if you want to contribute.” He sat down, as the room was deathly silent, with more than one bowed head among the listeners.
Alana said, “First up, I need someone to review a ton of security camera footage from the evening that Phil Robertson was killed. What I want to know is whether or not Louis Chu appears in any of the videos. Brett, since this is your part of the case, I’m assigning this task to you. You’d be well-served to use the facial recognition software to help single him out. You can expect that he’ll be wearing a hat to hide from the cameras, so keep the match threshold at around fifty percent. Start looking from the moment they open the gates to fans, around fourteen-thirty hours on the afternoon of the event.”
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