DeathWeb (Fox Meridian Book 3)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘We have the data from Detective Rogers,’ Kit informed her as she walked in to where Pythia’s huge server system was waiting, with Kit’s avatar beside it.

  ‘All right. Pythia, run the analysis on the forensics. Kit, could you upload into one of Pythia’s processors? I’d like you to go through the camera feeds looking for Sandy and what she was up to. Pythia can join you once the analysis is done, assuming you haven’t finished.’

  ‘I can do that, Fox,’ Kit replied. ‘Is there some reason you want me to upload rather than breaking off a copy?’

  ‘Yes. I’m going to go through the medical records and then start on Sandy’s computer. I don’t know what’s on that, but if it’s got half of what I think might be there, I’d prefer it if you were not exposed to it without warning. I know that sounds patronising–’

  ‘I think it sounds sweet and protective, but I will need to face unpleasant things at some point.’

  ‘I know, and you already have and you coped well. This is just… I don’t want to look at this, Kit, but someone has to and I’m the senior partner here. It falls to me. I’ll tell you what I find and I’ll let you look at it if I think it’s necessary, but this is how it’s going to be.’

  Kit gave a nod. ‘Just remember that I am here to talk to if you need it afterwards.’

  Fox’s smile was bleak. ‘That I may well do. I’m going to go back in the house. I think lying down might be a good idea for this one.’

  ~~~

  By the middle of the afternoon, Marie was feeling like a human. Not only that, but a human who did not wish for the ground to open up and swallow her. Sam had gone out after lunch for an engagement and Marie had had some proper time to adjust to not having slept with him. With her body a little stiff and feeling sluggish still, she decided that a run would be a remarkably good idea.

  It took a while. First was selecting her wardrobe since she needed to fabricate a new running set. She eventually went with one of her favoured ‘serious’ designs. That meant running shorts rather than something tighter, and a good, supportive athletics bra-top, all in neon yellow with pink trim. The bra had ‘OTT’ printed on it, because she felt she had gone over the top in no small fashion that morning so she might as well continue.

  While that was working through the fabricator, and Marie gave thanks to Jackson Martins that she could just step through into the utility room to collect the result, Marie selected her inspirational music for the run on LifeBeats and contemplated making a new playlist. She had eighteen running playlists, ‘Running1’ through ‘Running19,’ and she would think about that error later, and a new one was not needed, oh no it wasn’t.

  ‘You’re delaying, Marie,’ she told herself. ‘Get on with it.’

  She picked list fifteen, and discovered that sixteen was missing, which explained that, and moved on to LifeFit. She had five saved runs, but one of those was in Sioux Falls, the first she had ever saved, and she could not bring herself to delete it just yet even if she was never going back. She flicked between one of two Central Park routes and the Battery, and decided on the latter, and then she walked through and collected her fresh kit.

  Adding candy-pink running shoes, she stretched a little in her lounge and then started for the door. ‘Belle, if Sam gets back before I do, I’m out running.’

  ‘Noted, Marie. Sam’s engagement is due to keep him away until early evening. I shall follow your progress on LifeFit.’

  ‘My guardian angel,’ Marie replied, flashing a grin.

  LifeFit, Marie mused as she jogged to the maglev, was a great little application. There had been a few complaints about security when it first launched, especially in the virtual gym feature which let you VR into an exercise area with other, likeminded, solo fitness enthusiasts. Men, and some women, had joined just to watch women pumping weights in clinging outfits. There had been a little scandal about licensed prostitutes of both sexes picking up clients through the service. The privacy settings had been tightened up and the complaints had gone away, though Marie still thought it felt like a sweaty speed dating system half the time and only used it when she was feeling at her most exhibitionist. The running system had been changed so that live tracking was only available to designated friends, and the app made completed times and routes available after you got home.

  So, Belle was a registered agent of some sort, Marie was not sure how that worked, but it did, and so she was allowed to follow Marie’s progress as she ran. Marie had added Fox and Sam to the list, though she was fairly sure that neither actually used LifeFit. Actually, Sam kept his profile discreet, but up to date for professional reasons, but Fox badly needed to do something about hers. Some people came to LifeWeb, flirted with it a little, and then dropped it, and that seemed to be what Fox had done. She was still listed as living in Topeka! There was nothing on there about her career, no relationship data aside from incoming links. Marie very rarely bothered using LifeRight, but she had done so recently to delegate her vote to Fox and LifeWeb did have a lot of activity for Fox in that domain, all of it in the last couple of months and determined from external links rather than because Fox had used LifeRight herself. Marie figured that Kit handled that kind of thing for Fox. Fox was a little like a LifeWeb neutron star: you could mostly tell she existed because of the effect she had on bodies around her. Black hole was being a little extreme since there was something there if you looked closely, but you had to know where to look.

  Amused by her analogy, Marie got off the train at the Battery Gardens station and jogged down the slideway to street level. She flicked up her LifeFit window, checked her route, indicated she was starting, and set off at a steady pace to get her muscles worked in. One slow lap up around Castle Clinton and back, and then she would pick up the pace and head all the way up to the Esplanade. She had done this run almost every day when she had been staying in Fox’s apartment.

  Thought of that brought her embarrassment over Sam back into sharp clarity. To think she had thought that she had cheated on Fox. To think that Sam would have betrayed Fox like that! Had he really said she had a fine body? She shook her head and focused on the beat of her feet and the music piping through her head, and the man who sat on a bench at the side of the path, his eyes following her as she ran, went entirely unnoticed.

  Topeka Agri-Zone.

  Detective Rogers had added a bonus: Malcolm Bateson had a criminal record and Rogers had dropped the details over for Fox to read. Not that it was anything really major, and it was old. He had been fined over an assault charge when he was nineteen. There were several sealed records noted from before then and a couple of DUIs after. The last of those was five years old. The assault had resulted in a fine instead of prison time because there had been a lack of clarity over exactly who had started the fight. To Fox, it looked like the arresting officers had been quite sure, but the lawyers had sprinkled in enough doubt and the earlier, juvenile, arrests had not been considered. Whatever, Bateson had avoided that kind of trouble thereafter, but then he had married young and got a wife to beat on in private.

  Or that was the theory until Fox went through the medical records and found that Bateson’s was not quite as uninteresting as she had thought. He had, over the years, been treated for a broken nose more than once, cracked ribs, a broken arm… All put down to accidents, no doubt, but they could also be explained by fights he had, likely, not come out on top of.

  Crystal and Sandy were not lucky people either. Crystal had walked into a few more doors, being treated for a cracked cheekbone twice, a broken arm once. Sandy had had her arm dislocated at the shoulder when she was four, and had suffered a broken wrist when she was eight. At ten, she had ‘fallen down the stairs,’ which was an amazing feat in a single-storey house but no one had checked, and suffered a broken arm, bruised ribs, and concussion. But Fox had to admit that family services were not totally to blame for the misses since the list was not as bad as expected. Bateson had learned to be careful. Soft tissue injuries hurt like Hell and did no
t need hospital treatment. Maybe the stairs incident had raised a few questions and he had got worried. He had stopped picking fights in public after the assault arrest, so maybe he had started pulling his blows some after he realised he might be found out. He was cleverer than Fox had thought, which was worrying.

  By the time Fox had been through those records, the cracking software she had set to work on Sandy’s PC had done its job. The report said that the unit had been voiceprint secured, but that the default admin password had never been changed allowing direct access that way. It was the kind of rookie mistake people made when they did not know much about computers and how to use them, and Fox figured Malcolm kept a careful watch on Sandy’s computer time. Schoolwork only, none of that dirty, perverted internet socialising. Nothing where she might tell someone about him in a place he could not monitor.

  With Kit working on Pythia’s server, Fox was reduced to the basic VR interface of her implant, which was tedious. You got used to working with an AI, a proper one, not the braindead baseline OS. Even Fox’s old VA had been able to interpret normal English and do what you wanted instead of what the letter of your sentence said. Kit was an absolute angel at doing the right thing no matter how Fox asked for it. Now she had to give precise commands, or resort to manual input. So it took her a couple of minutes to get her head back around doing things the old way, but soon she was looking through the contents of Sandy’s computer.

  There was not as much as she had expected and the reason became clear when she found a note on the machine from Nicky Shane which had clearly been put there by him. He had given her his old portable when he had got an upgrade. The date suggested that Sandy had had it for thirteen months. With no VR implant or access to a wearable of any kind, Sandy had had to use the unit’s voice controls for more or less everything. Oh, you could type on the little touchscreen, but you didn’t unless you wanted to suffer serious RSI. There was a diary of sorts on there, but it was all audio recordings. Lying back on the bed in the room her mother had assigned her, the same room she had had as a child, Fox opened the first of the files.

  ‘Hi, I’m Sandy Bateson and this is my first ever personal computer which Nicky has kindly given me. You didn’t leave anything on here that’s private did you?’ Sandy had a light, easy voice and there was no hint of tension in it. She sounded happy, but then it seemed like she was recording the entry after just having received the unit.

  ‘I reset the whole thing, cleaned the memory.’ A boy’s voice: Fox assumed that was Nicky. He sounded happy too.

  ‘Nicky’s good with computers.’ And that was Trudy. The three of them together for Sandy’s first foray into personal computers.

  ‘Oh,’ Nicky added, ‘and I shut down all the sound output and the wireless links, like you asked. It won’t make a sound unless you want it to.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Sandy went on. ‘Okay, well, this is just to say “hi, computer,” and I’m going to be using you to keep a diary. I’ve never had a diary before so I’ve no idea what I’ll put in here. Happy things. I’ll put all my happy things in here so I can keep them forever.’

  That lasted all the way to the second file. ‘Dear Diary… Shit.’ The voice was low and there was a slight sibilance which suggested the recording was being done with Sandy’s lips more or less on the microphone. ‘He came home pissed and wanted to know why I wasn’t in bed. It was nine thirty. So now I’m going to have to stay in or cover up the shiner I’ll have by morning. Shit.’

  Fox lay on her bed, surrounded by things which she had left behind when she had gone off to join the Army, and imagined Sandy lying in her own bed. The girl’s bedroom was a girl’s bedroom, at first glance. There had been dolls and a couple of books on shelves. A wardrobe of favoured clothes she preferred to have handy and not recycle. There was a vanity unit, and there the image broke down because there was a hairbrush, but no cosmetics, none at all. A seventeen-year-old girl without even a lipstick pen or some eye shadow? Trudy, the dedicated reader, had had some basic make-up in her room. Fox had had a kit her mother had bought her for Christmas which she had barely ever used, but it had been quite complete and she had even asked her mother to run her through the delicacies of kohl pencils and lip liners. Sandy had nothing.

  So there was Sandy, lying in her bed… She would sleep in something. Fox had slept naked in summer from the age of fourteen when she had declared to her mildly shocked parents that it was ‘far too hot’ for her favoured, blue nightdress. When he had got his mouth closed, Jonathan had told her not to run around the house naked and that had been that. Sandy would be wearing something. Panties and a T-shirt. Body armour which would not be enough. She lay there, huddled up under her girly, flowery duvet with the light of the screen obscured and her mouth pressed to the microphone, recording her diary entry and fearing her father might find her. The rip under the bed, Fox realised, was positioned so that someone lying on it could reach under without setting foot on the floor to get to the computer.

  That was borne out by the sporadic nature of the entries. Some weeks there were none, some two or three, never more than that. Fox made it through a couple of months, a litany of torment, mental and physical, before she found what she had dreaded.

  ‘Dear… Shit, it hurts. Dear Diary, sometimes I think you’re the only friend I’ve got. Trudy’s great. And Nicky… But I can tell you anything and I can’t… can’t tell them. He went out with Crystal. Some stupid party. I know he hates them. They came back and I could hear them arguing. Him arguing. Mom knows better than to fight back, but he hit her anyway. I really hoped he’d just go to bed, but he…’ There was a muffled groan. ‘I feel sick. I don’t know how I can keep letting him… He came in and… I try to get wet for him, like he told me, but all I can smell is him and booze and it hurts so much…’ The recording continued, but there were just muffled sounds for maybe thirty seconds. Crying, Fox decided. She had learned how to keep her crying silent, probably at a young age. ‘I wish I was dead.’

  Fox got off the bed and paced across her room. She had never been one for physical books and she had taken the personal things she felt were important when she walked away from this place. What was left was her childhood. A teddy bear named Woodrow Patch, because her father had given him an eyepatch when one eye had dropped out. He had been just Woodrow before that. A doll in a ridiculous, flouncy dress, with huge, lacy underskirts, which Fox had never named and had thought was childish even when her mother had given it to her for Christmas at the age of eight. There was still a poster on the wall of a band Fox had liked in her late teens when she had been into deathdub.

  By the time Fox was Sandy’s age, the room had had a sound system and a computer. A VR visor would have been sitting on the computer, ready for use, and, when she had been in the room, her wearable unit would be sitting on the desk beside it. There had been more posters, a pile of memory sticks, lots of clothes. You could not see the childish stuff for all the teenage clutter. Sandy’s room belonged to a ten-year-old. And in it, her father had been raping her.

  Having broken the self-imposed taboo on talking about it, Sandy was more forthcoming about her father’s nocturnal activities. She knew that her mother knew it was happening. She always called her mother Crystal, never ‘my mother’ or ‘Mom.’ She did not blame Crystal for what her father did and, in one candid moment, admitted that she could not blame her for not stopping him. Crystal was as afraid of Malcolm as Sandy was, maybe more so. Sandy knew what that fear was like, described the terror that crawled into her gut whenever she heard footsteps outside her room, the heavy, icy-cold weight that sank in and made her mouth dry and tears spring into her eyes.

  Then there was a change. The recording came from a Wednesday in early April. ‘Dear Diary, I think I met someone today. I know it’s stupid, after what happened with Nicky, but this guy… He’s different. I won’t say much just in case he finds this. I’m going to be so careful about this one. And there’s no chance of being late home, because he’s not here at night.
’

  That went on through April, and there was no mention of what her father was doing to her. It was as though, finally, Sandy had something nice to record and it was pushing away her daily horror. By May, things were getting more serious. ‘I think I’m in love,’ Sandy recorded and the sound of her voice, even at a whisper, made Fox’s heart leap for her.

  And then things went bad again. ‘Dear Diary, I got another shiner from him today. He told me there was someone he wanted me to meet. A man. He said… He said this man was very important and could help the family, and that I had to meet this guy and… be a good girl for him. I didn’t want to. At least after he punched me in the eye he had to call it off. I heard him talking to someone, saying I was bleeding and it would have to wait. I can’t wait anymore.’

  The next entry was on the following Wednesday. ‘It’s set. Next week.’ That was it, nothing more. Fox checked the date. The Wednesday after the recording would be the twenty-third of June. That was the day she had been called out to Lauren Coolidge’s body, and the day Sandy Bateson had vanished.

  There was one more entry, on the twenty-second. Fox started the playback and listened to Sandy’s happy, expectant voice. ‘Dear Diary, tomorrow I’m going. Drew’s going to help me and I’m going to be gone from this hellhole forever. I’m a little sorry for Crystal because she’s going to catch Hell for it, but…’ There was a pause, not even breathing, and then, ‘Shit! Not now…’

  There were noises which Fox was not sure about until she heard another voice. ‘Is my good girl asleep?’ Sandy had hidden the PC quickly, too quickly to turn it off. Malcolm’s voice was audible, but muffled. ‘I know she’s not.’

  ‘Please, D-daddy, not… not tonight.’

  ‘Now then, Sandy, be a good girl for your daddy…’

  Fox made herself listen to it all. Every gut-wrenching, heart-tearing second of it. Her mind filled in the images as she heard the sounds. Tearing fabric as he ripped her panties off her, the creak of the bed springs and the wail of pain and fear quickly bitten off, the grunting and the final longer grunt of release, the creak as he got off the bed.