Penumbra

by Eric Brown

  She nodded. ‘It’s an antique. It was . . . my father gave it to me when I was young.’

  She could hardly tell him the truth, that she had taken the softscreen from her father’s safe, along with a few hundred rupees, all those years ago.

  The sergeant was frowning. ‘It’s implanted with a primitive homing device. Did your father put it there, to trace it in case it was ever stolen?’

  Rana shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  But her father could not have known about the homing device, or he would have used it to trace her when she ran away from home . . .

  The sergeant looked up. ‘Can I take it back to the lab, Lieutenant? I’d like to examine it more closely. The homing device is embedded very skilfully into the fabric of the screen. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ll issue you with a receipt.’

  ‘You’ll bring it back when you’ve finished with it?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll bring it back in a week, Lieutenant.’ He folded the softscreen into his case and wrote out a receipt.

  ‘The rest of the apartment is clean?’

  He smiled. ‘You’ve no need to worry, Lieutenant. I’ll be back in a few months to run another check.’

  The sergeant packed his case and saluted as he left. Rana closed the door behind him, then made herself a cup of coffee and drank it slowly, sitting by the window and staring across the mist-shrouded Nehru park.

  A week had passed since Rana had reported to Vishwanath about the Man in the Black Suit, and the killer from Madrigal whose computer-generated image was now with every police station in the city. She had expected, in her naivety, to hear about the apprehension of the suspect within days, but there had been no progress at all on the case of the crucifix killer. Vishwanath had counselled confidence, and told her to try another lead. He had praised her initiative so far, but told her that in all likelihood the black suit had been just another one of those lines of enquiry that resulted in a dead end. Homicide work, he said, was full of them.

  Rana had worked on other cases, murders she had had no real involvement in, and therefore could not feel as enthusiastic about. She knew they had to be solved, and she worked hard on them, but they would never have the appeal of her first investigation.

  The chime of an incoming call sounded in her ear. She clicked her jaw to activate the communication. ‘Rao here.’

  ‘This is Lieutenant Nazeem.’ His voice sounded loud in her ear. ‘Vishwanath wants you quick sharp.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The crucifix case you’re working on.’ He emphasised the ‘you’re’, as Vishwanath had reassigned him shortly after Rana’s arrival in the department. ‘Something’s happened.’

  ‘What? Have they caught—’

  But Naz had cut the connection.

  She hurried from the apartment and caught a taxi to the police headquarters. She still had an hour to go before her shift officially started, so to be called early like this must mean that something important had occurred. She tried to control her excitement as she dashed into the building and rode the elevator to the eighth floor.

  She unlocked her desk and retrieved her com-board, then made her way to Vishwanath’s office.

  ‘They’ve caught him?’ she asked when she got there.

  Vishwanath shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. Far from it, Lieutenant. That was forensic. It appears that our man has struck again.’

  Rana felt as if a punch had knocked the wind from her. ‘But I thought we had extra patrols—’

  He nodded. ‘We did. But he didn’t strike where we thought he might.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s the same killer?’

  ‘Forensic seem pretty convinced.’ He picked up his com-board and stood wearily. ‘Shall we go and take a look, Lieutenant?’

  She followed him into the elevator and then out into the underground car-park. They climbed aboard a squad car and accelerated up the ramp and into the street. The morning mists had lifted and sunlight filled the bustling streets with its harsh glare.

  ‘Where did he strike, sir?’

  ‘Somewhere in the Raneesh suburb.’

  Rana accessed the city map on her com-board. ‘Below the left-hand crossbar of the crucifix. Do you know the identity of the victim?’

  ‘One Raja Khan. He’s known to us - he’s a smuggler and extortionist. It would seem that the killer is continuing his moral crusade.’

  Rana watched a food market flash by in a kaleidoscopic blur of reds and greens. She felt suddenly depressed at the thought of another murder, and it came to her that it was not the loss of life that was dispiriting - the dead men were, to a soul, evil-doers after all - but the fact that the killer could so easily get away with his crimes. Every new murder pointed up her department’s, and her own, inefficiency.

  Raneesh suburb was a modern, rich residential area of habitat domes and state-of-the-art polycarbon structures. The squad car halted by one such, a building tastelessly styled on the pyramid foyer of the Louvre. Rana followed Vishwanath past the house and down a tree-shaded footpath.

  The usual activity surrounded the scene of the crime. Officers had erected low-powered laser-cordons to keep away the gaggle of sightseers, curious children and rich citizens out walking their dogs. Crawlers scurried back and forth across the path like oversized beetles. A forensic officer knelt by the corpse, entering data into his com-board.

  Raja Khan had been a big man in his fifties, his size emphasised by his voluminous shalwar kameez. He was lying on his back, arms spread in an accidental gesture of appeasement. The right side of his face had been charcoaled by a laser charge, and cut into his left cheek was the usual bloody cross.

  ‘He died between eight and eight-thirty last night,’ the forensic officer was saying. ‘It’s a quiet area - the body wasn’t discovered until this morning.’

  Rana entered the data into her com-board. She looked up at Vishwanath. ‘All ten murders were committed between eight and nine, sir.’

  ‘So perhaps the killer works regular office hours . . . though a big help that is.’

  ‘There is a very interesting feature,’ the officer went on. ‘The victim has obviously been shot twice, unlike all the other victims. The first shot narrowly missed his forehead - note the burned skin and hair. Then came the coup de gr â ce to the right side of the face.’

  ‘You think he survived the first attack and tried to get away?’

  The officer nodded. ‘Very possibly.’

  ‘So the initial attack might not have happened here,’ Vishwanath mused.

  Rana asked, ‘Do we know Raja Khan’s address?’

  Vishwanath passed his com-board to Rana and she downloaded the information. Khan had an address in an exclusive city centre apartment building.

  ‘Sir, seeing as how the location of this killing doesn’t conform to the crucifix, I was wondering if this was perhaps a preliminary meeting set up by the killer to lure Khan to one of the four locations. But it went wrong. Khan got suspicious and tried to run. So the killer struck then.’

  ‘Where does that leave us, Lieutenant?’

  Rana shrugged. ‘Perhaps the killer lives in the area.’

  ‘It’s a long shot. Contact Naz and have him organise a house-to-house in the district.’

  Rana contacted headquarters and relayed Vishwanath’s order.

  The forensic officer was downloading the data gathered by the crawlers into his com-board. He shook his head. ‘Nothing, sir. Lots of information, but precious little of any use.’ He consulted the screen of his com-board. ‘There’s no correlation between data picked up here and that at the other crime scenes.’

  Vishwanath turned to Rana. ‘I want you to compile the usual list of the dead man’s family, friends and acquaintances. Interview them all - you know the routine.’

  Rana was staring at her com-board, and the crucifix pattern that overlaid the city map. ‘One thing, sir. Perhaps the location of this killing does conform to some kind of crucifix.’


  Vishwanath regarded her down the stern length of his aquiline nose. ‘Do you mean something like the cross of Alsace?’

  Rana shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Then why,’ he said heavily, ‘isn’t the crucifix cut into the victim’s cheeks the cross of Alsace, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Because it isn’t exactly the cross of Alsace. It’s ... I don’t know . . . perhaps something that’s harder to carve.’

  Vishwanath pursed his lips and finally nodded. ‘Ah-cha. It’s worth looking into, Lieutenant.’

  ‘I’ll check it when I get back to HQ, sir.’

  The corpse was lifted into the back of an ambulance, the lasers dismantled and the crowd told to disperse. Rana rode back in the squad car with Vishwanath. He sat in the passenger seat in silence, watching the passing scenes with eagle-eyed intensity.

  Ten minutes later she sat down behind her desk and dealt with the incoming calls. She accessed the messages from duty officers doing the footwork on the Khan murder. They had searched his apartment and come up with a list of addresses. Rana downloaded them and, over the course of the next four hours, got through to over twenty citizens in and around the city. She went through a routine series of questions, establishing each individual’s connection with the dead man, and then made appointments to interview them face to face.

  Raja Khan had had contacts in many walks of life, from characters with criminal records to well-positioned state politicians. It spoke volumes for the probity of elected representatives that they kept company with such low life, but then that was the way of the world. Often during her six weeks in the Homicide Division, Rana had wished she was back in the safer, simpler world of Child Welfare.

  The monsoon deluge began on time just before five, beating on the windows with the percussive music of relief after another sweltering day. The sun was going down when Rana finished speaking with the last of the dead man’s listed acquaintances and sat back. Her next two shifts would be spent interviewing petty criminals and politicians. For the past two weeks she seemed to have done nothing but conduct fruitless interviews with reluctant citizens.

  She remembered the pix of the suspected killer from Madrigal; the day before she had requested further visual enhancement from the computer division. She accessed the file and downloaded a dozen pix of the computer-generated image. These showed different versions of the same man, aged so as to appear in his forties. In one the passage of time had treated the man well: his face was flushed and well-fed; in another he was thin and worn. There were pix of him bald, and with hair in various styles and degrees of grey. Rana printed out copies of each pix and slipped them into the breast pocket of her shirt. She would take them with her when she conducted the interviews tomorrow.

  She consulted her com-board and read through the notes she’d made at the scene of the crime. The more she considered her suggestion about the crucifix, the less viable the idea became. She wondered if she had been merely throwing out off-the-wall ideas in an attempt to impress Vishwanath.

  Nevertheless, she accessed GlobaLink on her com-screen and entered the data bank of symbols and logos. She sketched a representation of a cross of Alsace, with a dozen or so variations, and gave the search command. As she waited, she knew that this would be yet another dead end, another hopeless lead she could forget.

  Thirty seconds later the screen flashed with the message that half a dozen crucifixes resembling the image she had requested were ready to be downloaded.

  Rana touched the command. Instantly, the six crosses appeared on the screen. Five of them resembled the cross of Alsace, to varying degrees. The sixth crucifix was of the regulation Christian type, but with a small circle beneath each arm. Rana sat up, suddenly interested. What if this was the cross the killer had scored on the cheeks of his victims, but he had been unable to carve a representation of the two small circles? Tenuous, she knew, but worth looking into.

  She requested information about the crucifix. Seconds later the screen filled with text. Rana read the article, digested the information, then went through it a second time.

  The crucifix was the symbol of a Martian Christian cult known as the Church of Phobos and Deimos, hence the stylised representations of the moons. The church had been founded almost one hundred and twenty years ago by French settlers on the red planet, when two young girls belonging to a traditional Christian order claimed to have seen the image of Christ on the faces of the orbiting moons. Furthermore, they said that they had been told by God to leave Mars and settle the newly founded colony of Columbus, Sirius III, which like Mars had two small moons. Almost a hundred years ago the Church of Phobos and Deimos had raised sufficient funds to expedite the venture. They had sent their disciples to the various space academies, and in time had the expertise to crew their own colony liner. Ninety years ago the entire church, some five thousand citizens in all, had boarded the starship New Hope and embarked on their God-given quest.

  They had never arrived. The liner was reported missing, presumed destroyed, a month after phase-out from Olympus spaceport. No trace of the ship was ever discovered, either in normal space or in the void. The disappearance of the New Hope and its five thousand passengers remained a mystery to this day.

  Rana sat back, digesting the implications.

  She accessed GlobaLink and requested every last scrap of information concerning the Church of Phobos and Deimos, existing branches, chapters and off-shoots of the church, no matter how small or removed from the original doctrine of belief. A minute later she had a lot of information concerning the church’s dogma, but nothing at all about extant chapters. The church had effectively ceased to exist with the disappearance of the New Hope.

  She sent a message to Vishwanath: ‘I’ve come across something to do with the Christian symbol, but I don’t know how relevant it might be.’

  Seconds later Vishwanath emerged from his office. He pulled a chair up to Rana’s desk and stared at the screen, minutely going through the article about the Church of Phobos and Deimos.

  He shook his head. ‘The very fact of the church’s demise would suggest that there’s no link to the killings.’

  Rana shrugged. ‘What if there were some church members left behind? Their descendants might have secretly carried on the traditions . . .’ She stopped, realising how far-fetched it sounded.

  ‘I don’t know, but we can’t dismiss it out of hand. Check with the victims to see if they had any links with Mars.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Of course, all this is pure speculation, based on the presumption that the location of last night’s murder was a part of this old symbol.’

  Rana felt herself redden. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘But I’ll put an extra patrol out in the area of the other side of the arm, where the second circle would be, just in case.’

  Rana sighed. ‘I don’t seem to be getting anywhere fast, sir.’

  Vishwanath gave a paternal laugh. ‘You’re doing fine, Lieutenant. You can’t expect instant success. Homicide work involves much unrewarded speculation. But speculation has to be worked through and dismissed.’ He smiled. ‘Often the breakthrough comes from the most unlikely of sources. Keep at it, Rana.’

  Rana, now . . . She smiled as she watched him stride back to his office.

  Five minutes later her screen flashed. She accessed the call. The face of a receptionist stared out at her. ‘We have a private outside caller wishing to speak to you, Lieutenant.’

  Rana frowned. She knew few people outside the force who might want to contact her at work. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Put him through.’

  She was surprised to see a street-kid’s frightened face fill the screen.

  ‘Vandita - this is a surprise. Is everything okay?’

  The girl was in a public com-screen kiosk, obviously unaccustomed to using the technology. Rana wondered if this might account for her cowed expression.

  ‘Rana, I need to see you.’

  ‘Vandita? What is it? Is something—’

 
; ‘I need to see you. Please, will you come right away? I’ll be by the bridge.’

  And without further explanation she cut the connection.

  Rana tidied her desk, deactivated the com-screen, and locked away her com-board. She was due to leave in one hour, but Vandita had sounded desperate. She could always come back here and put in the hour when she’d talked to the girl.

  She hurried from the building and took a taxi to the Howrah bridge.

  Vandita was squatting on her heels by the railings, a tiny figure obscured by the passing crowds, when Rana climbed from the taxi. She pushed her way through the press to the girl, who looked up at her with a timid smile.