by Jean Rabe
No bank records. No school records. Had to be some medical records out there, seeing as she’d had work done—unless it was all street doc stuff. Cadi had mentioned costly vocal enhancers, the surgery for which had kept her off the stage for two weeks. Would finding such records help find the killer?
“No,” Ninn said.
“No, what?” The voice was thin.
“Finding medical records won’t make a difference. This is a hate crime, Mordred. Simple, stupid hate.”
“Seems to be, Keebs.”
“Stop calling me that. It’s offensive.”
“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry, Mordred.” You never sound sorry.
“Sorry, Nininiru. Yes, it does seem to be a hate crime, a string of them.”
“RighteousRight maybe.” Ninn spotted a symbol behind the Chinese restaurant, a stylized ЯɌ in red spray paint, applied so liberally that the letters ran like blood. The elf wondered if the murderer was indeed some RighteousRight fanatic, or someone hired by them, a moralist who thought that by killing the “sexually confused” of the Cross, he’d clean up the area. And in Ella Gance’s case, the killer got an impersonator and an Aborigine with one slash of the knife. The RighteousRight had been making its presence known lately, preaching a return to a wholesome lifestyle free of perversion and cybernetic enhancements, and acquiring more and more converts in the past few years. The fanatics believed the mana storm was God’s punishment for straying from a basic, simple life. Some called them the New Amish.
“RighteousRight most likely. Best answer.” Ninn thought the RighteousRight certainly would have her in its crosshairs. She wholly embraced cybernetic enhancements, bioware, anything to improve on what nature had cheaply dealt her right out of the womb…which wasn’t sufficient in this teched-up world. Don’t like the cards? Get yourself a whole new deck. The RighteousRight thought you should only play the hand fate provided. Some of them even opposed electricity and solar power.
ЯɌ. Scanning everything a second time, she noted four more ЯɌ tags. “Fragging KKK,” she whispered. The group reminded her of old America’s Ku Klux Klan. Pockets of the Klan still existed back in the States, and when she’d lived in Chicago, she’d read about a small town over the border in Wisconsin where they held a rally every summer. Burlington—that was the burg. Those are the freaks, she thought, not the female impersonators, or the cybered-out dwarfs and whatever and whoever else wandered these streets. Not her. Amazing that in this age prejudice could still be as thick as sludge—as thick as the graffiti on the walls.
“Step back,” the thin voice said. “You’re looking too close.”
“What the hell am I looking too close at? You tell me, Mordred. What’s too close?”
“You’re looking just at Miss Gance, where she was geeked. You’re not looking at the entire picture, Keebs. Sorry, Nininiru. Look at everything. Where all of ’em were geeked. And let me get a better look while you’re at it. Let me see for myself.”
She was wearing a padded longcoat, too warm for the weather. But it provided some protection from stray bullets, the rain, and helped hide Mordred and her other weapons. She’d brought him along on this return trip.
A glance at both ends of the alley to make sure no obvious eyes were on her, Ninn pulled a box from a concealed pocket in the coat and unfolded the weapon to its proper form—a Terracotta Arms Mordred model submachine gun that had been blued, the weight lightened, barrel clear as glass—one of a kind. It was enhanced with several vision upgrades, a safe target system, and smartlink, which Mordred chatted away through, his side of the conversation always carried on inside her head. The gun’s software package included advanced AI, and boasted an artificial personality that while she sometimes found annoying, more often she considered it useful.
Ninn had accepted the gun as payment a year back from a Yakuza boss who wanted some snooping done on his “first mate.” After a week in her company, Mordred revealed that his AI was a prototype from a megacorp, something they were developing for a military contract that didn’t work the way it was supposed to. The AI was considered exceptional, but the personality too strong, and before they could switch it out, the weapon—along with several others—had been pinched by a band of runners that inadvertently ran afoul of the Yakuza gang…the new owners of the stolen arms.
From hand to hand to hand, more programs added to its AI, this one weapon eventually became Ninn’s closest friend. She guessed the Yakuza boss had tired of Mordred’s banter, especially the old movie references, and was glad to be rid of it. She’d had the gun smartlinked the old-fashioned way, with induction pads in her right palm and index finger. The gun always seemed to know when she was about to “turn him off,” and sometimes protested. More recent smartlink tech was available, wireless that would make the pads unnecessary. Easier, but hackable, and in her line of work she didn’t want that risk. It was the one old-fashioned piece of tech she liked.
Ninn was usually careful when she brought Mordred out to play, fearing the megacorp still might be looking for its stolen prototype goods, or some banger might take a fancy to the blued foregrip and try to nab it for resale. There were “eyes” everywhere, but alleys in the Cross were an exception to surveillance, great places to buy and sell black market…and apparently fine spots to kill tawdry house singers.
She packed other weapons that she wasn’t so secretive about—namely a Nemesis Arms Praetorian, a used heavy pistol she’d found from a dealer on Darlinghurst. She favored its reinforced recoil operation, which kept the gun reliable during the worst downpour, and the underbarrel blade worked great in close combat. Today it was strapped to her left hip, hidden by the coat. And there were a few additional backups here and there as well.
“Adoni—Ella Gance—was found here. Right here, Mordred. Victim Number Six.”
“Six? Thought the lumpers claim the Cross Slayer has killed five.”
“I’m pretty sure they missed one. We’ll call Ella six.”
“With Six You Get Eggroll.”
“What?”
“Old old old movie.”
“You don’t watch movies because I don’t watch movies.” Not anymore.
“Trivia in my programming, you know that. Extensive encyclopedia of films. Can’t help myself. It just comes out. Doris Day, Brian Keith, George Carlin. You fragging well know I am chock full of old vid information. Nothing after 2025. We’re talking back when films were good. With Six You Get Eggroll was released in 1968 and—”
“You’re full of ancient movies, not old movies. Bone-dust ancient in my opinion. I’d like to find out who the hell programmed you with nonsense, get that ripped out—” But she couldn’t risk it, removing the trivia might damage his more useful qualities. Besides, it was sometimes endearing.
Ninn looked at the door to Cadigal’s, spun to stare in the direction the singer had been running. “Smack in the middle of the alley, Ella died. She’d lost her shoes. Either in a struggle—”
“—or because she kicked them off. Heels would be hard to run in.”
“We’ll assume she was running, probably hollering, no one outside to hear her. Let’s assume she couldn’t get back into Cadigal’s. So she was probably running toward the park. There’s usually always people in the park.”
Mordred hummed his agreement.
“Too much music in the clubs, walls high and thick here, would trap sound. No one heard her.”
Another hum.
Ninn paced the length of the alley to the park, spotted tourists—their pasty skins marking them from colder climes—admiring the fountain, posing, laughing. She felt like somebody was watching her, and not casually, but she couldn’t spot the looker. Ninn turned and walked a block to the alley where a bartender from the Beat Red had been killed two weeks ago.
“Victim Number Five,” she said. He hadn’t been listed in the police report as part of the Cross Slayer investigation; the victim she believed AISE had missed. He wasn’t an
impersonator, a cross-dresser, transgender, or a metahuman, but he was gay and had quite a bit of cyber- and bioware, most of which vagrants had removed before the coroner claimed the body. Because he’d been cut up so badly, an arm missing, cybereyes gouged out, a few internal organs gone, she figured no one had noticed whether he’d been sliced like the other Cross Slayer victims. Ninn considered the hapless, practically dissected victim part of the string. Seemed to fit the pattern, someone the RighteousRight would go after.
“So, Nininiru, who was Number Five?”
“Sanu Grumman, forty-eight, human, worked in the Cross at the Beat Red as a bartender for four and a half years, lived in a one-bedroom on Clement in Rushcutters Bay. Must have known Ella, she worked at the Beat Red three years back.”
“Mmmm. A connection,” Mordred hummed. “The Lithuanian Connection, 2023, Johnny Rydell’s first feature, Imperium Pictures.”
“Maybe a connection.” A block and half later and in another alley where the traffic murmur was muted, Ninn said: “Victims Number Three and Four, three weeks ago. Killer likes alleys.”
“Lots of alleys in the Cross,” Mordred said. “Who were they?”
Ninn relied on her encephalon to pull up the information she’d scanned at AISE. “Marla Duncan, Halfway House choreographer, elf, fiberoptic hair, face sculpting, gill implants, well tanned from her afternoons at one of the nude beaches—good place to use the gills. Zane Tresman, stagehand, human, Marla’s fiancé. Report doesn’t give me anything else on him; I figure he was with her and was therefore collateral. From his picture, looks like he’d had sculpting, too. No obvious cyber or bio.” She reached a spot near the end of the alley. “They were killed right here.” She was two back doors down from Halfway House and near the back door of an all-hours bar where they were likely headed, their coworkers had said.
Ninn swore someone was whispering, looked around and saw no one. Maybe a voice trickling down out of an open window of an upper-floor apartment. Too often she heard whispers. Maybe they weren’t real, figments of her substandard audio receptors or residue from a graypuppy slip. Maybe she ought to try to go clean. She reached into her pocket and put a slip on her tongue. Just one, she promised. Needed to keep her head straight to work. The graypuppy winnowed in, and she accepted the rush. Stood quiet a moment and let the alley walls breathe in time, let the graffiti dance a moment.
An elderly couple herding a quartet of children—probably their grandchildren—passed by the end of the alley. The woman paused and glared at Ninn, shook her head and waggled a finger to indicate she disapproved of the gun, and then kept going.
“So the killer was here on a—”
“Tuesday.”
“If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium,” Mordred said.
“What?”
“Directed by Mel Stuart. Featured Suzanne Pleshette, Ian—”
“Enough.”
“Okay, nothing significant with Tuesday. No pattern to the days. No pattern that I can figure out anyway.” Mordred hummed again. “So the killer was in this alley, waiting for someone to come out who met his criteria. Just like Ella Gance stepping into the alley behind Cadigal’s. Waited until he found something he liked. Like Sanu.”
“Or rather didn’t like.”
“Definite thing for alleys.”
“Darker, less chance of being seen. Haven’t spotted a single surveillance camera in any of these alleys.”
“They don’t put surveillance in the alleys. It’s the Cross,” Mordred said.
“It is that.”
“Next,” he prompted.
Ninn struck off down Bayswater Road, cutting through the colorful throng on the sidewalk—people were out in considerable numbers for lack of rain. She chatted with anyone who would give her a moment, recording it all.
“Notice much RighteousRight activity? Protests? Placards? Rallies?” She asked again and again.
The answers yielded nothing she didn’t already know.
“Don’t like the RighteousRight.”
“RighteousRight? You mean RighteousWrong.”
“Been here and there in the neighborhood, the Double-Rs, flashing their tats.”
“What’s the Righteous Write, some religious magazine?”
“Rock on Double-Rs.”
“Nothing too rude to get them tossed into jail. The RRs’re careful, you know.”
“Cross Slayer might be a RighteousRight ratbag.”
“Spray paint. They love bright paint. Leave twin R marks on the bricks.”
“I’ve cracked a tinny with a Righter before.”
“Arrrrrrrrrrr, matey.”
One notable: “It’s a free country, and the RighteousRight can strut wherever the frag they want. They make some sense, if you think about it. Got a lot going on upstairs. You got a problem with it, Keebler?” Ninn got a close up of that woman, who had a ЯɌ tat on her forearm, and then she and Mordred went on their way.
Ninn stopped at the alley just before Ward Avenue. This was narrower than the others, blacktopped with heavy cracks in it. A service vehicle or garbage truck couldn’t squeeze through.
“Bikes and foot traffic only,” she mused.
“Could use a good coat of duracrete.”
The alley sat right next to a bar that sent a shiver down her back. The place was called One Hundred & Thirty Proof, and there was a RighteousRight flyer taped to the inside of the front window.
“Never been inside there?”
“Hell no, Mordred,” she said. Nor had she really noticed the place before. Her haunts for libations were conveniently closer to her office.
“Dezi Desire met her end somewhere down this alley, right?”
“Yeah. Victim Number Two.” Ninn peered through the bar window. Only a half dozen men inside, all looked human, drinking and eating. She captured their images, saw one of them staring back, and then stepped to the alley. “Yeah Dezi Desire, Hurdy Gertie’s friend.”
Ninn jogged down the alley, noting discarded food wrappers and broken bottles along the buildings. The other alleys had been practically Better Homes clean compared to this. The place reeked, too, despite all the washing from the rain. Probably serving as a dunny for the area’s vagrants, she thought. “Wonder why the hell someone would go down here so late at night.”
“Pretty dark even now if you ask me,” Mordred said. “Dark Places, 2015, Corey Stoll as Old Ben Day.”
“I didn’t ask you.” But the gun was right. The cloud was darkening, the gap closing, and the day’s precious sunlight had become a suggestion. Early on, she’d wondered how Mordred could see, since his sleek mechanical self was eyeless. He’d told her on their third outing that he had sensors that translated images, plus the smartlink connected him so closely he looked out through her eyes. After that, Ninn disconnected the link when she had close company over.
“Four weeks ago,” she said when she found the spot Dezi was slain. “Right here, four weeks ago.”
“Wonder if she was any good.”
“No idea. Dezi Desire,” Ninn said, rattling off what she’d learned from AISE records for Mordred’s benefit. “Twenty-six, human, started singing as an impersonator in the Cross two years ago at Halfway House after going under the knife for a voice modulator and skin tightening, enhanced articulation, all paid for by a patron. Before that worked as a nurse’s assistant in a retirement home. Lived in an upper efficiency off Victoria Street. Ahhhh—”
“What?” Mordred’s thin voice sounded almost eager. “What? What? Spill, Keebs!”
“Dezi—Harold Naughton—must have used this alley as a shortcut to hit Victoria. Dezi’s apartment wouldn’t have been far from here, a block at most.”
“A shortcut that led to the last cut, huh?”
Ninn went on: “A few arrests, shoplifting, bar fights, nothing major…and that was before Halfway House. No significant other except for the patron, belonged to a pagan enclave, volunteered every other Sunday in a soup kitchen. That had been a community service sent
ence that she’d been handed four years back, and kept up with out of the kindness of her heart. Doesn’t appear she and Ella knew each other, but maybe they did because of Hurdy—”
Ninn waited for a trio of teens cutting out the alley door of a youth hostel, playfully jostling each other. The tallest, a boy with a ropy scar on his neck, pulled something out of his pocket and passed it around. Slips. The youngest-looking one declined.
Smart kid, Ninn thought. Stay away from slips. Expensive habit if you buy the good stuff, deadly if you buy too cheap. Even the good stuff screws with your brain after a while, makes you need more and more and more of them. She popped one in her mouth as if to prove her own point. The rush was good. The teens spotted her, and hurried along and out the other end of the alley. Like the one behind Cadigal’s, this alley was coated in graffiti, though not quite as colorful, especially with the sun not hitting it. Eighteen ЯɌ tags here, some of them tough to see, one inside the “o” of Joey loves Tamara, another under a caricature of a hawk that resembled a Chicago Blackhawk logo.
“Chicago,” Ninn purred, her voice thick from the graypuppy. “Chicago. Toddlin’ Town. Big shoulders.”
“Yeah, you keep saying you want to go back there.”
“I miss it.”
“No you don’t,” Mordred argued. “You just miss the memories.”
“I need a drink.”
“What about victim Number One? Aren’t we going to the spot of her demise?”
“After I get a drink.”
“Not in that bar,” the gun cautioned.
“Exactly in that bar.” She folded Mordred back into his box form and stuck him in her coat pocket. “’Sides, I want out of this alley. Got that prickly feeling that someone’s watching me.”
The stranger hid in a crevice between buildings, looking out into the alley, pleased that the elf had not noticed him. The stranger was curious who she was talking to, not seeing anyone else after the youths disappeared. There didn’t seem to be another soul in the alley. Who was she talking to? A ghost? An invisible man?