Taking the Highway

by M. H. Mead

  With one smooth movement, Delandra caught her hair into a ponytail. “We’ve already had a preliminary look.”

  Danny raised his eyebrows. “And?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Imagine that,” Andre said. “A corpse in the disincorporated.”

  The Jeffs groaned. Danny’s eyebrows hooded his eyes. “Do you have to do that every time?”

  “It’s funny every time.”

  “It wasn’t funny once.”

  Andre nodded, hands in pockets. Danny found everything in the world hilarious except his job. He neither bitched nor bragged about being a cop. Danny and the job were one single thing. He was a homicide cop the same way he was male, or Italian, or fifty. It was simply a biological fact, a part of him too obvious to be commented on. Some people found Danny’s no-nonsense attitude off-putting, but to Andre it was a source of enormous comfort. Danny’s resemblance to a bad-tempered bulldog made him the kind of man who might resent tall, handsome, easily-promoted young detectives. Instead, he’d made a point of choosing Andre as his squad partner and bringing him home for dinner once a month.

  Andre followed Danny as he inspected the quadrangle of holo cameras set in and around the overgrown island in the center of the cul-de-sac, where Delandra and the Jeffs had disappeared into a gap in the long grasses. The drying stalks hissed in a gust of wind. Outdoor crime scene. An automatic pain in the ass with all of nature working against the evidence.

  He tapped Danny’s shoulder. “By the way, you owe me about three hundred bucks.”

  “I’m sure the captain would love to sign for that.”

  “Forget the money. How about a ride home tonight?”

  Danny laughed and stared at Andre’s lapel. “You need to give that fourth crap a rest.”

  Andre glanced at his lapel, noticed the official fourthing ID that still hung there, and shrugged. “I’m on flex,” he said.

  “Flex still means available, Sergeant.”

  “I’m available.” He didn’t say more. Didn’t have to. They’d had this conversation too many times. He held a hand under his nose. “God, the zone stinks. So, who called this in?”

  “Couple of kids.”

  “Around here?”

  “I’m sure they were on their way home from Little League.” Danny adjusted a camera that didn’t need adjusting. “I have techs on the trace, but it’s one of those prepaids the school drug dealers use.”

  “Lots of other people use them too.”

  “Vocal stress puts the median age at eleven and a half. You want to hear it?” Danny touched his datapad without waiting for an answer.

  Andre heard the smooth, “Nine-one-one,” and then the squeal of a frightened but excited kid, “There’s a dead guy on Pinest! He’s in the grass and all blood and his eyes open!” There was the mumble of another nearby voice, no words, just an insistent tone, then the first kid again. “Shut up, man! We didn’t do nothing and I don’t want a body laying here all dead and stuff.”

  Can’t argue with that, Andre thought. “Can tech enhance the second voice?”

  “That’s the voice after they enhanced it. On the original there was just a pause then the first kid answering.”

  “Sounds like he lives here somewhere.” Andre looked at the dark houses.

  “I have three units working the neighborhood with their comms listening for a voice match, but zoners watch the vee, they know that trick.” Danny shrugged. “It was a slow day so overwatch tasked a satellite in this area within twelve minutes of the call—”

  “Why so long?”

  “Had to figure out ‘Pinest’ meant Pinecrest and they only got it because the techs nailed the cell tower. Anyway, from space we could see this guy face down in the grass and thermal had him at room temp.”

  “Not even a room.”

  “Yeah. That one is funny every time. Anyway, I had the area sealed in another fifteen and then I sat waiting for you for an extra thirty-three minutes.”

  Andre spread his hands. “Delandra isn’t done yet, you know. I’d have been standing right where I am anyway until—”

  “About now.” Delandra rose and picked her way through the grass. Three other trails cut through the chest-high growth, all of them well away from Delandra’s path.

  “Stand clear,” a Jeff said. He triggered the holocams which first gridded then flashed the area between them. He checked the results on his datapad, readjusted the angles, and took two more sets before he was satisfied.

  Delandra waved the detectives in. “Everything is tagged and marked. He’s all yours.”

  They gloved, then moved in along the same path Delandra had taken and squatted beside the body. The raw smell of late-summer grass now hung heavy with the reek of death. A young black man, mid-twenties, hair cut in a tidy fade, lay face down, his head turned to the side. Inky eyes seemed to stare at Andre, and he moved lower to check out the clothing. The suit was standard business single-vent, but the shoes gave Andre a start. Seagull loafers, the exact style and shade that he wore himself—shoes that had cost him a month of fourthing income. Andre’s were freshly-polished while the victim’s were scuffed and scratched. He’d been dragged.

  Andre retrieved a wallet from the back pocket and flipped through it. What was a young, well-dressed man doing in the zone with a pair of holes through him? Drugs? This guy wouldn’t be the first urbanite looking for glaze in the zone, but dealers liked to keep repeat customers, not shoot them. So why him? And why here?

  “Nice suit,” Danny said. He pointed to the holes in the jacket. “Except for the exit wounds. Thirty-eight, do you think?”

  “Forget it,” sang a Jeff. “No shell casings, and you won’t find the slugs—”

  “Because he was killed elsewhere and dumped here,” Danny finished.

  The Jeff deflated. “Right.”

  “And if he has a phone or a pad, nobody knows about it.”

  Delandra gestured to the crumbling ruins around them. “Welcome to the oh-zone.”

  Andre frowned at the driver’s license and multicard he’d found in the wallet. The photo matched and their corpse now had a name, but nothing else. Citizens of No Fixed Address were becoming more and more common, but unlike indigents, who would get rolled for the dregs of their wine bottles, NFAs were less likely to be the victim of a crime. They were almost always middle class, stable, and clean. “His name is Matthew Davis Shepler,” Andre told Danny. “And guess what?”

  “He’s a mime.”

  “Nope, Matthew Davis Shepler was NFA.”

  “Not a zoner?”

  They both shook their heads. Zoners usually wrote down something on their ID. Besides, Shepler was too well-dressed.

  Danny leaned over the body. “No Fixed Address fucks us hard. No neighbors to talk to, no roommates, and even if we find his phone, there’s no way he’d enable GPS. Well, good thing he’s dead, otherwise, getting any kind of breach-of-privacy warrant would be a bitch. Del-Kel? Turning.”

  “Flip him,” she called. Danny tucked the right arm and they turned the corpse, then stood aside so the holocams could zap him again.

  A circle of plastic, not quite the size of a drink coaster, was attached to Shepler’s lapel, its holographic seal floating above the center. A fourthing badge.

  “Oh, shit.” Not again.

  “Huh.” Danny glanced at Andre’s badge. “Anyone you know?”

  “No.” The smell from Shepler seemed to roll over Andre. He stepped off the center island and away from the tall grass, waving away the droning insects that trailed him. He paced the weedy pavement in a tight circle.

  He opened his datapad and flipped through his notes. Less than a week ago, a fourth named Arthur Yalna had jumped off the edge of an overpark into the traffic emerging from the tunnel beneath. There had been no witnesses, and they were still waiting for the final report from forensics, but it had been tagged a probable suicide. Now, Andre wasn’t so sure. They hadn’t found any money on Yalna and Shepler’s wallet had be
en empty. Fourths made soft targets if someone was looking for cash.

  He accessed the forensics files, wondering if that department could possibly work any slower. Yalna’s file was only a preliminary report, some of the notes unreadable stylus scribbles. It had been years since Andre had sifted through any kind of major data dump, but he needed everything he could find on Yalna and couldn’t wait for forensics to tie it up with a neat bow. What if the fourth hadn’t jumped? What if he’d been pushed?

  Danny marched forward and planted himself in front of Andre. He grabbed the datapad out of Andre’s hands and scanned the page he’d been reading, then tapped the screen with an impatient finger. “It’s a big city. There are a lot of fourths. This doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yeah, but look at this. Hemorrhaging around the chest and armpits, groin and upper thighs. It occurred before Yalna met the front bumper of that semi.”

  Danny scanned through the reports. “Since a Peterbilt can’t grab a man by the back of his well-tailored suit and throw him over a chest-high retaining wall . . .”

  “Yalna had some help with his flying lesson.” Andre glanced back at the overgrown island. From here, all he could see was Shepler’s shoes. “It looks like our caseload went up by one. Two, if you count this Shepler.”

  “I’m not counting anybody.” Danny stripped his gloves and tucked them in a pocket. “The only reason I’m even looking at Shepler is because he had the good sense to be killed somewhere else. Otherwise, I’m filing and forgetting, calling it zone-on-zone violence.”

  “You’d do that? Just to avoid taking on another case?”

  “I could, but I won’t.” Danny glanced over his shoulder, where Delandra stood conferring with the Jeffs. He gripped Andre’s shoulder and moved him out of earshot. “But you gotta promise me something. You treat this like any other case. You didn’t know Yalna. You didn’t know Shepler. Am I right? Please tell me I’m right.”

  “You’re right.” He felt like a chunk of ice had hit his midsection, passing through and leaving nothing but cold, hollow dread.

  “So. Not your brothers.” Danny folded his arms over his stomach. “Two guys, happen to be fourths.”

  “What if there are more?” Andre tried to keep the urgency out of his voice. “All that untraceable cash. If no one puts it together that fourths make good hunting, the fourths stay unaware longer.” He tapped at his pad. “I’m going to run an all-district search. Maybe these aren’t the only two.”

  ANDRE TOSSED HIS DATAPAD onto the scratched surface of the conference table. He’d already connected his pad to the network five times, but the waveguide kept bouncing him. He leaned back in the squeaky chair, stared at the flickering fluorescents above him, and remembered why he hated coming to the Downriver suburbs. Few of his cases from the city spilled over this far, for which he was exceedingly grateful. Downriver, with its additional pressure from Toledo and other poorer points south, spent almost its entire budget on manpower, leaving none for facilities.

  He checked the time. Was Sergeant Gao going to keep their appointment or not? He’d give her five more minutes. He reconnected with the network and looked at her profile picture again. Okay, maybe ten. After all, a request-to-acquire was a delicate thing. Andre hoped to bypass a lot of interdepartmental bullshit by making a personal visit, but if he left in a huff, he could forget about Gao ever giving him her cases.

  Sergeant Gao ambled through the door a moment later, neither hurried nor ruffled. She wore a blue blazer and pants, a white blouse and flat shoes. Give her a necktie, Andre thought, and she could pass for a fourth. Her long, dark hair was bundled neatly at her neck and her ID was clipped under an American flag lapel pin.

  Andre stood. “I almost gave up on you.”

  “Busy. You know, Monday?” She held out a hand. “Detective Sergeant Sofia Gao.”

  “Detective Sergeant Andre LaCroix.” He shook, watching her evaluate him from the top of his combed hair to the tips of his polished loafers. He waited, daring her to find something amiss.

  “Have you been working here long?” he asked. Easy icebreaker. Fourthing talk.

  Sofia pulled out her own datapad and frowned at it. “About a year.”

  More like eight months, Andre thought, but did not say it. They were technically the same rank, though he’d held his for three years longer. “I’m surprised they don’t have you on that new Triad thing coming up from Ohio,” he said instead.

  Sofia looked up in surprise. “They would, if I spoke Chinese.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’m fluent in swear words. Other than that, I can barely say ‘happy new year’ to my grandmother.”

  Andre glanced at her lapel pin. “Hmmm. Very American.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Is it?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. My Dad’s one generation from Paris and my mother would move back to Quebec tomorrow if they were still part of Canada.”

  She gave him a look with a scalpel edge. “My family has lived here for a hundred years.”

  “Well, baseball and apple pie,” he said. “Let’s roast a turkey.”

  Sofia gave her head a pointed downward tilt, glaring just below his belt, as if she’d rather roast something else at the moment. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “I believe the word is charming. You’re supposed to like me and want to work with me.”

  “I can work with you even if I hate you.”

  “True.” Andre walked around the table, testing every chair, looking for the least-broken one. He found the one he wanted at the opposite end and plopped into it. “But it won’t be as much fun.”

  “Or it could be even more fun.” Sofia gazed at him across the giant expanse of wood, her eyes showing their first glimpse of humor. She pulled out her datapad and poked the screen a few times. This was work, not social, so ignoring him in favor of the datapad wasn’t rude. Still, the transition to business was so abrupt he wondered if he’d only imagined the tiny smile he’d seen.

  She held up the pad. “These cases you want, I suppose you found them in the open file database?”

  He reconnected his datapad to the police network, scrambling to keep up with her.

  “Uh, yeah. That’s what it’s there for.”

  “You go ahead and keep telling yourself that,” she mumbled.

  “If we can’t share information—”

  “The open file database does not exist to help us cooperate, okay? The OFD exists to make the politicians look good. They put check marks next to each closed case. Tick, tick, tick. Making Detroit safe for press releases everywhere.”

  “Oh . . . kay.” Andre traced a jagged scar in the tabletop with one finger. “But I’ve thwarted the mayor’s evil plan. I’ve used the OFD to actually find out something.”

  “You’re trying to link two of my bodies to two of yours.”

  Just one of yours and one of mine would be sufficient. He forced his eyes away from Sofia’s and consulted his datapad again. “Right. I sent you the file numbers I wanted. Take a look at mine.”

  She frowned at the small screen and aimed her datapad at the wall, projecting the image onto it. All four files lined up for comparison, her own cases broken down with neat bullet points and hyperlinks, not a single missing form or blank space. His own were hastily scrawled, forms half done, arrows and strikethroughs and words spilling outside the gridlines.

  Sofia pursed her lips and paced in front of the wall, scanning the forms, occasionally pointing either hand at two different files, as if trying to connect them. She shook her head and sat at the head of the conference table, her datapad in front of her. “I see four murders here. What I don’t see is any reason why they should all belong to you.”

  Andre stood and held up one finger. Damn waveguide had kicked him out again. Sofia didn’t seem to be having a problem with hers.

  “One?” she asked. “As in, ‘hold on one second?’ or ‘these are all one case?’“

  “Both.” Andr
e circled the table and stood behind Sofia’s chair. He leaned over her shoulder and commanded her datapad to pull up the murdered men’s badges from the Minimum Passenger Requirement Act riders registry. He stepped back when it was done, exhaling regretfully. Sofia’s hair smelled of citrus, and under it, something spicier.

  He read off the names. “Arthur Yalna, Homer Carcassi, Douglas Ming, and just this morning, we found Matthew Davis Shepler. All murdered within the last three weeks and they all worked as fourths. That is why I need them all.”

  Sofia swiveled in her chair. “Why should I give my cases to you?”

  Andre found himself so distracted by the way her lips puckered when she said the word you that he almost missed what she said next.

  “And how did you know they were paid riders?” She gestured wildly at the wall. “Of course, it’s right there, but how did you know? Neither of mine were wearing fourthing badges at the time of their deaths.” She fumbled with the datapad until she got her own case files back. “That’s just . . .”

  “Incredible police work?” Andre tried. “Great intuitive thinking?”

  “Nobody makes a leap like that. I don’t care how long you’ve been a cop.”

  Andre pulled his fourthing badge out of his pocket, and attached it to his lapel. He waited, eyebrows raised.

  “Oh. So this is personal.”

  Andre shrugged. “You’re going to think it, no matter what I say.”

  “Which doesn’t answer my question. Why kill fourths?”

  “I bet Ugly Ben will have a theory. So will Marcia-in-the-Morning and Naked Jay.”

  Sofia shot out her hand as if to chop him in half. “No. The news spinners can not have this. No way.”

  “Give me your cases and they won’t.”

  “You could just as easily turn your cases over to me.”

  Andre gave a mock bow. “We’ve danced this number once before, my lady, but if you’d care to take another waltz around the floor, I do believe they’re playing my song.”

  Sofia made a hmph sound in her throat. “Typical fourth.”

  “Meaning what? Persuasive? Enchanting?”