by Brian Parker
“Hey, Detective,” Drake’s voice rumbled out of the office where he was going through files.
I glanced up from the collection of weapons I was putting tags on. Across the dingy surgical ward of Terri Solomon’s chop shop, I could see Sergeant Drake sitting on a low stool, hunched over an old-fashioned file cabinet. He didn’t look up at me, so I yelled back.
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Your boy Ortega purchased one of those handgun pneumatic pistols that the old lady had up front.”
The old lady in question, Terri Solomon, was dead. She’d been killed a couple of hours ago when she ambushed the SWAT team and initiated the explosion that wiped out Easytown SWAT’s Charlie Team.
“He did, huh?” I wasn’t surprised. I’d already begun to think Ortega had more to do with Henderson’s death than simply being his employer.
“Yes, sir. He picked up one of those things a month ago.”
I was impressed with Solomon’s record-keeping skills. She couldn’t risk putting the information into a computer, so everything was meticulously recorded on paper and filed away for future reference—or blackmail.
That sales document was the piece of evidence I needed to take to Judge Hennessey. I was certain the person who killed Henderson was an acquaintance. Now that I knew Ortega had access to the same type of weapon that killed the thumper club doorman, he was firmly on a very short list of suspects.
“We can use that document to justify a search of his home,” I said aloud.
“That’s just what I was thinking,” Drake replied as he set aside that document specifically by itself.
I went back to tagging the weapons for transport back to the evidence locker. The DA would build a case against the two cyborg bodyguards that we’d arrested during the raid. Turns out, both of them matched the description of the cyborgs who’d shot up the Liquid Genesis, which meant it was also highly likely that the weapons used came from this shop.
Sometimes luck was the big break we needed in a case.
“Detective Forrest, can you come here a moment?” Ben Roberts, the precinct’s forensic photographer, asked.
“What is it, Ben?”
He pointed to a large, framed garment of some type hanging on the wall behind the counter where he photographed the very dead Terri Solomon. Three .45 rounds to the face from an H&K MP713 tended to do that.
“Yeah, what am I looking at?” I asked in confusion. It was a red, oversized long-sleeved shirt with a bunch of random color spirals all over it. It sort of reminded me of an outfit from Sub-Saharan Africa, but they weren’t quite the same.
“You probably don’t know this about my wife, but she’s an immigrant. Her grandparents came to New Orleans from Tajikistan. Her father was some white guy who took off after getting her mom pregnant in high school.”
I waited for him to get to the point. We had a lot of work to do if we were going to search the premises of the other three chop shops we’d raided today.
“Anyways,” he continued, sensing that I didn’t need the full backstory. “Her family still gets dressed up in traditional garb twice a year to celebrate some holidays.” He pointed at the framed shirt again and said, “That’s a traditional Tajik or Uzbek embroidered silk tunic dress. They’re very difficult to make and are only given away to special friends outside of the community.”
“So someone in the Tajik community gave Solomon, a Caucasian woman, that shirt as a special gift…” I trailed off. “Ben, do you happen to know the name Farouk Karimov?”
He shook his head. “Not in the sense that you’re asking. I’ve heard the name the last few days in the department, which is why I wanted to point out that tunic dress to you, but as far as I know, he doesn’t participate in Tajik community events. There are more than ten thousand Tajik descendants right here in New Orleans, though, so it’s entirely possible that I simply never met the guy.”
“Thanks, Ben. Your keen eye helped to add another nail in Karimov’s coffin. I have a suspect who said he worked for Karimov who got cybernetic enhancements from this shop. I think he may be more involved in this cyborg bullshit than we’d originally thought.”
“Yeah, no problem, Detective. Just trying to help out. The less work I have, the better off the city is.”
“Ain’t that right?” I chuckled.
FIFTEEN: THURSDAY
The rest of Wednesday was spent in a blur of scene processing after the raids on the other chop shops. Thankfully, there weren’t any more large gunfights like what had happened at Solomon’s Flowers, although, one officer did get a bullet to the gut at the warehouse we hit on Third Boulevard. A SWAT sniper redecorated the cheap steel walls with the perp’s brain matter.
After that, it was smooth sailing.
The cybernetic enhancement business was alive and well in Easytown. All four of the sites had operating rooms, computer hookups and spare mechanical parts lying around; not to mention the barrel of discarded human parts we discovered in the third chop shop we hit in a residential neighborhood.
I stretched my aching back and rubbed my calf gently. It was healing, but not quick enough for my tastes. I needed it to be fully-healed, otherwise I was a liability to others—and myself.
After an initial cup of coffee where I stared out the window of my apartment at the first truly sunny day I could remember in a long time, I had Andi bring up the Corrigan collection. He’d claimed to have killed seventy-six people, but there were more than two hundred videos in the collection of files we’d seized from his home.
The first video began with Corrigan torturing a dog. It was from his point-of-view, so he probably had a camera on his forehead or chest like all the daredevils wore, so I couldn’t be sure how old he was. Given the much thinner forearms and higher-pitched voice, I guessed he was a kid, maybe a teenager, when he started his love affair with murder.
I’d seen enough of the first video to realize that he was disturbed, so I advanced to the next one chronologically. It was again from his point of view, and showed him engaged in a fist fight with three other kids. The thinnest of the three ran toward him and Corrigan sidestepped his attack, wrapping an arm around his neck and twisting violently. Then the largest of the teens reached him. There was a flurry of movement; I couldn’t see what was happening, but I thought Corrigan was wrapped up in some type of bear hug. Then, the ganger fell away and Corrigan’s foot rose up, stomping down repeatedly on the big one’s head. Fists drew back out of frame and shot into view rapidly as he made short work of his final opponent.
Corrigan grabbed the final kid in a bear hug of his own, squeezing until I heard bones snap. Then, he whispered, “I love you,” and bit off the kid’s bottom lip.
Someone grabbed him from behind, pulling him along saying the cops were coming as Corrigan screamed about wanting to show ‘Brad’ how much he loved him. He lifted the unconscious form over his head and dropped him onto his knee as he knelt, probably breaking the kid’s spine. Then the video was jostled and glitch as he ran from the cops.
I advanced to the next video, which was another animal torture. I went to the next one, and then the next.
Three hours later, I was left feeling numb and disheartened. I’d seen hundreds, possibly thousands, of murders in person and on video over the years, but never so many at one time and the techniques used so varied—and that was with Andi fast-forwarding through entire sections. His count of seventy-six humans was correct, but he’d neglected to include the multiple rapes of both men and women, extended torture sessions, and mutilation of various creatures in his figures, which is why there were so many videos.
Branch Corrigan had been a sick individual. He’d done things to some of his victims that I hadn’t even heard of before. I was glad he was dead.
With Andi’s help, I spent the next two hours cross-referencing faces of his victims with unsolved murders across the district. Of the known victims, we were able to verify that the bodies of fifty-three of them had been discovered and were listed as u
nsolved. Another two of Corrigan’s victims had been found and an innocent person had been tried and convicted for murder. Police weren’t perfect and neither was the judicial system. Unfortunately, in those two cases, everyone was wrong and those men were serving life sentences at Sabatier Island.
The sickness in my stomach from earlier eased slightly with the knowledge that we’d be able to finally give all those families definitive answers about what happened to their loved ones. Closure wouldn’t relieve their pain, but it was all that I could offer them. It was something.
The others in the videos were John and Jane Doe’s. No facial recognition matches on missing persons or bodies that had been discovered. Either Corrigan had a very good dumping spot where nobody had found more than twenty bodies, or he’d done something else with them. Given the level of evil I’d witnessed throughout a lifetime of depravity, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he disposed of the bodies by eating them.
Which reminded me, I hadn’t eaten anything all morning and I had a meeting to go to in about an hour.
“Andi, I need some food before I go meet with Voodoo.”
“I’ll order street tacos and have them delivered.”
“Thanks. I feel like I need to wash a few years of filth off of me.” Watching all those videos made me feel dirty, inside and out. A shower would do something about the exterior feelings; but only time would cleanse my mind.
Drake went to search Ortega’s house on the warrant we had rushed through the court while I went to the Easytown Dockyards to talk to Tommy Voodoo about the activities of his employee, Farouk Karimov. Besides the ineffectual search of his tiny apartment, nobody had seen the guy and I wanted to talk to him. His name had come up in connection with Henderson, Ortega, Corrigan, and the city’s synthaine problem. The guy got around.
The lobby of the Marie Leveau Shipping Company was exactly as I’d remembered it from the last time I was here. The two receptionists still sat at their twin desks immediately in front of the entryway, switching between answering phone calls and typing reports with an ease that boggled my non-office worker mind.
Betty, the brunette, was a refurbished sex droid. Voodoo had given her an AI upgrade and sat her ass here in this chair. She’d almost shot me in the back one time with zero emotions or thoughts beyond the fact that she was told to keep people from passing an imaginary line on the floor. She was a real hoot.
Anastasia, on the other hand, was blonde, stunningly beautiful, and one hundred percent human—well, one hundred percent cloned from a human, with all of the original’s flaws and imperfections removed. Other women may come and go in Tommy Voodoo’s life, but Anastasia had wrapped him around her little finger. I felt like I owed her a huge debt of gratitude since she’d been instrumental in getting him to cooperate with me when he was scared that doing so would cost him his life when Biologiqué International was kidnapping people, cloning them, and then murdering the victims.
“Betty. Anastasia,” I said when I walked in. “You girls behaving?”
“That depends on your definition of behaving, Detective Forrest,” Betty responded. I’d noticed that, interestingly, the droid usually spoke first and seemed to be the de facto respondent for questions aimed at both of them. I wondered if it had to do with her robotic brain being able to process multiple tasks at once, whereas Anastasia’s human brain needed to focus more to complete her work.
“Mr. Ladeaux is a lucky man,” I chuckled.
“He is prosperous with numerous successful business ventures, Detective. The old saying goes that quantity has a quality all of its own.”
I blinked in surprise. Betty’s AI was able to learn, and then more or less correctly correlate axioms into conversation. As far as I knew, that was something that even Paxton Himura hadn’t done.
“Wow, Betty. Your AI is advancing rapidly.”
“Thank you, Detective. Performing the mundane duties of this position allows me the time to scour the cybersphere, interacting with millions of people online. I am learning from them.”
“Kinda scary, isn’t it?” Anastasia muttered.
“A little,” I admitted. “With an unlimited ability to process data and the capacity to learn from every human and computer on the planet, she could become either a force for good or a force for evil.”
“With as much hate as people spew at one another in the cybersphere, I don’t think I want to know what she’s learning,” the clone stated.
“Mr. Ladeaux has given me enough leeway to learn from the world around me, in all of its forms. Even with the ability to learn and adapt my programming to meet emerging requirements, I am not able to violate the First Law of Robotics, so you have nothing to fear.”
I glanced at Anastasia and then back to Betty. “I’m sorry. I don’t know the laws of robotics.”
“There are three, originally formulated by one of the fathers of the science fiction literary genre, Isaac Asimov. The First Law of Robotics states that a robotic entity may not harm a human. So, while Anastasia is a clone, I could not physically assault her since she is human.”
“Hmpf,” I grunted. “Sounds like a load of crap to me. I’ve been plenty beat up by robots.”
“Yes, I have read the police files, they—”
“You what?”
“I read the police files of your robotic killer case. The robots in question weren’t acting on their own, they were being controlled by Harold Wilson. Even when he was no longer directly controlling them, he’d reprogrammed the droids.”
“So if you learn all of this stuff from the cybersphere, and then somebody reprograms you, you still wouldn’t be able to kill?”
“If I were to retain my knowledge of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, then I would not be able to harm a human. However, if they wipe them from my memory, then I may be capable of harming a human. Does this make sense?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It does. Take the police drones, for example. They are programmed with a massive set of instructions and reactionary protocols, but they’re not connected to the cybersphere. They’re connected back to MainFrame, for reporting and specialized control situations, but they mostly operate on their own. I think.”
To be honest, no one really knew how much control MainFrame had over the drones on their routine interactions with citizens, so the drones may have been operating on their own. Obviously, the programmers didn’t give two shits about Betty’s laws of robotics.
“So, how did you read private police reports?” I asked, bringing up the question I’d originally intended to ask.
“Most police reports are not protected, Detective,” Betty stated. “You simply need to know where to look. If they are stored in a publicly-accessible medium, then I am within my legal rights to access the documents.”
“You don’t have rights, Betty. You’re a droid. Droids are not afforded any of the protections given under the law.”
“You are correct. I was simply making a statement that anyone, whether they are droid or human, can access files on the police internal network. They are not particularly well guarded.” She seemed to pout, then began typing again.
Without looking up, Betty stated, “I have read the Internal Affairs file on you, Detective Forrest. You may want to consider a rebuttal.”
“Wait. What report?” I asked in confusion, reaching for my phone. “Andi, is the IA report available?”
“I am not aware that it is. Let me check once again.” She paused and then said, “Yes, Zach. The report released four minutes ago. I only scan every thirty minutes to save bandwidth. Give me a moment to read the report.”
She only took about five seconds to read the documents before her voice emitted from my headphone. “The report filed against you by the NOPD IA Division is fairly damning.”
“Shit. Excuse me, ladies,” I said. “I’m going to go have a seat in the waiting area. Can you please just let Mr. Ladeaux know that I’m here for our appointment?”
“He’s already been notified,” B
etty stated.
“Of course he has,” I muttered as I went to the uncomfortable, clear plastic chairs that the lobby boasted. “Andi, I need the charge sheet sent to my phone, now.”
“There’s not a formal charge sheet, Zach. You are not being arrested. Internal Affairs utilizes a recapitulation of findings; which is simply a one-page summary of the report.”
“Okay, fine goddammit. I don’t care what they call it. I need that sent to me so I can review it now.”
“Understood. I just sent it.”
I opened the file she sent me and skimmed through the opening remarks until I came to the findings. “Those sonsabitches,” I muttered.
“Problem, Detective Forrest?” a familiar, weak voice asked.
I glanced up, putting away my phone as I did so. “Nothing I can’t handle, Mr. Ladeaux. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”
“You’re always welcome here. I hope you know that by now.”
I walked beside him as he led the way down the hallway. Once again, he took me into the duplicate office, not the real thing that he used when he was scared for his life during the clone crisis. I asked him about it.
“Oh, this office is just slightly bigger and I spend more time in here than in the other one. Plus…” He pressed his finger against his computer screen and a portion of the wall faded away, becoming translucent. Through the shelves of sports memorabilia, I could see the Dockyards as workers scurried around unloading ships and moving cargo.
“Nice view.”
“Thank you. The other office is truly in the center of the building, so a true view like this isn’t possible. I can always tell a difference between the real thing and a vidscreen.”
He cleared his throat, indicating that it was time to get down to business.
“Right,” I replied. “I’m investigating the city’s cyborgs. We’ve taken down several chop shops that are responsible for creating them.”