Sven's grin widened. "Yes, I am."
This only seemed to irritate her more. "I think you need to come with me."
Sven just barely managed to stop himself from cheering. This woman was reading his mind. "I'm at your service, ma'am."
"Detective," she snapped. "I'd rather interrogate the fish," she added softly.
The merman heard every word with his acute hearing. "If the lady wants the fish, she gets the fish!" he said triumphantly. "Tell me what else you desire, and it's yours." He crossed to the door of the shop and set the sign to CLOSED. Maybe things were looking up after all.
Nine
After an hour stuck with Sven, Minali was ready to punch through the wall of the interrogation room. Between the man's beaming smile and transparent innuendoes, she wasn't sure whether Sven was an idiot or if he was full of so much sleaze there wasn't room for anything else in his head.
"Tell me again what you were doing in the shop last night," Minali said through gritted teeth.
"What I do best. I coax the fish out of the tank and break its neck before it knows what's happening. Then, it's all about the strokes of the blade. You have to get it just right, on the right angle, to hit the sweet spot. Then, slow and steady…"
She knew he was talking about filleting fish, but that deep, velvety voice, the cheeky look in his eyes and the stroking motions he made with his hands made her hot in all sorts of the wrong ways. No sane person would associate gutting fish with sex, but she was fast reaching the point where she'd never be able to look a fish in the eye again without blushing or thinking of Sven. If that was even his name.
The door to the interview room squeaked open behind her, and Minali turned, grateful for the distraction.
"Ah, what're you doing?" Violet asked, looking from Minali to Sven.
"Taking a statement," Minali replied. "Mr Grun here was in the shop last night at the time of the murder, alone, which makes him an important witness." She didn't need to add that it also made him the prime suspect.
"Murder?" Sven blurted out. "What murder?"
Minali had to give him credit. His surprise looked almost genuine.
Violet paled, but she responded before Minali could. "There was a murder in the Main City last night, and the body was found in Uni Fish Supply this morning by one of your staff. A man named…"
"Theron," Minali supplied.
If anything, Sven only looked more shocked than before. "And he didn't tell me anything about it? Who was it? Where was it? If any blood got into the tanks, I'll have to quarantine all the fish. I can't sell stock that have eaten people." He appeared truly horrified at the idea, almost as though he'd never seen a dead body before, let alone last night, when he freely admitted he'd been hacking up fish corpses.
Once again, it was Violet who replied, "When Theron found the body in the crab tank, he called the Intra. By the time I arrived on site this morning, a Mer named Melpomene had started shifting the crabs out of the tank so we could get a forensic team in there to remove the body. She died some time last night. The body's in the morgue with our best autopsy guy on it, and we hope to get some answers soon." She placed her hands by her sides like she was standing to attention, military style, before nodding deeply in Sven's direction. "Thank you very much for your assistance. We'll be in touch if we have any further information."
Before Minali could protest, Violet opened the door and ushered Sven out.
Minali's anger had enough time to work up a full head of steam by the time Violet returned to the interview room and closed the door behind her.
"What in stars did you just do with my suspect?" Minali demanded. "That man is the most likely person to be our murderer, and you let him go so he can go kill some other poor, unsuspecting woman?"
Violet grimaced. "Please tell me you didn't arrest him."
"You didn't give me the chance to!" Minali exploded.
Violet appeared relieved. "Thank the stars for that. You can't arrest that man unless you have ironclad evidence. Video footage. Witnesses. Possibly a confession from the man himself."
Minali snorted. "The only thing that man will confess to is thinking he's the universe's gift to women."
"They all think that. Comes with being a good looking guy. I take it he's the reason you never made it to the morgue?"
Minali nodded.
Violet took the seat Sven had vacated. "Let me fill you in on what we know so far, then. No visible bruises on the body. Likely cause of death is drowning."
"Do we have the victim's name yet?" Minali asked. Women who'd died at the hands of a violent man didn't deserve to be anonymous. Their names should be remembered, for they were casualties of the war Minali fought every day until she died. A war the Ama Seldova didn't admit existed, though she knew otherwise.
"There's the interesting part. We have a Jane Doe. No implants, no file on the database, nothing. According to Complex records, she doesn't exist." Violet frowned. "No one gets in or out of the Complex without us knowing. No one."
Minali had heard rumours that this wasn't true. For the right price, a person could bribe their way in or out, and maybe even offplanet, too. She recalled a people smuggling case one of the others had been working on a while back which was definitely shipping people out of Lorn for slave labour.
But no one had been smuggled into the Complex, as far as Minali knew. Every arrival was logged and scanned. In order to sneak in, they'd need to know someone inside the Complex.
"Someone must know who she is. Do we know anything about her movements before she died?" Minali asked.
"I have the data guys looking into surveillance footage outside the fish shop. No cameras inside, of course, but plenty out in the square. She can't have just appeared out of nowhere."
And nor had her murderer, Minali added silently to herself. She'd be looking very closely at sleazy Sven, for most criminals rarely stopped at one.
Ten
With his mind full of murder and that tempting detective, Sven wasn't sure how he managed to return home. He exchanged nods of greeting with the other Mer as he headed for his cubicle at the highest point of the underwater domicile. Normally, he'd have spent a few hours in his office in the air, beside his private pool, dealing with the community's problems. Today, he needed a night off to process his thoughts.
Firstly, the detective wasn't Theron's girlfriend. If anything, she was more sex-starved than Sven himself, and that was saying something. Even the slightest innuendo he made provoked a reaction in her, something that wouldn't happen if she was joining regularly with a merman.
He was almost certain she was Human, which surprised him. He'd never looked twice at one before Allie hooked up with that Human man, and then he'd only done so to glare at the man. The detective was different. She drew his gaze the way a siren would with a song. Yet he recognised Mer song a mile away, and she hadn't been singing in the slightest.
Sven found it hard to believe a dead body had been found in the Mer fish shop, but Violet knew better than to lie to a Mer, even a merman like him. She knew who he was, even if the detective didn't.
But a body? He'd been at the shop for most of the night, venting his frustration on the fish for sale. If someone had come into the shop while he was there, he'd have seen them, or at least heard them.
Unless they'd come in while the fish were fighting again. Then he wouldn’t have heard anything over the splashing in the tanks.
"Sven, I need your help."
Sven looked up, surprised to see Theron. "What happened?"
"They threw me out. I'm not allowed to sleep with them, or even share a cubicle any more," Theron said mournfully.
Them. It seemed Melusine and Melpomene had made up, to the exclusion of Theron. That was an interesting development.
"There should be some bachelor bunks down on the bottom level, as well as a bunkroom on the surface. There's always free hammocks there," Sven said. No Mer wanted to sleep in the open air when they could drift in a hammock below the surf
ace, lulled to sleep by the gentle underwater currents.
"Thanks, I think I'll go below," Theron said, turning to swim away.
"Wait." Sven had to know, even if he didn't want to ask. "What did the shop look like this morning? With the dead body and all. Was there a lot of blood?"
Theron shook his head. "No, just the girl floating facedown in the tank. I didn't see her at first, but then I turned the water pumps on and her hair started to move in the current…at first I thought it was one of the girls, come in before me to check the tanks, but she didn't have a tail or gills and she wasn't moving…" He swallowed. "She wasn't one of ours, so I called the Intra. I didn't know what to do."
It was on the tip of Sven's tongue to say that Theron should have called him, as the leader of their little colony and the manager of the shop, but that wasn't true. If the girl wasn't Mer, then she wasn't his problem. There were plenty of other races out there, both Human and Meta, and none of them were his responsibility. Leading their little community was hard enough to manage. He wasn't going to go peacekeeping for the whole Complex. Leave that to people like Allie and the Intra.
"You did the right thing," Sven said instead. Let the Intra, and the hot little detective, find the killer. He'd help her in any way he could, but as a favour. Because he wanted to see her again. He wanted to see the sadness in her eyes disappear. Catching a killer would help do that, surely. And maybe she'd be so grateful for his help that she'd consider spending an evening with him.
Grinning at the thought, he dismissed Theron and lay back in his hammock, dreaming of what the detective might look like naked.
Eleven
Minali peered at the fuzzy surveillance footage again, but she still couldn't work out what she was supposed to see. "Explain it to me," she said finally.
"Can't you see it?" the tech guy – Minali couldn't remember his name, Doug or Dig or Dog or something – demanded. "It's the same in all of them."
"All I see is blurry footage that should be clear," Minali snapped.
"Exactly! Someone's messed with all the cameras along this road, and then across the square to your shop. It's like interference but nothing like I've ever seen before."
Minali turned to Violet. "Is there a Meta who can mess with video cameras?"
Violet shrugged. "Even I don't know half the abilities some Metas have. We've spent centuries fighting each other. We're not about to buddy up and share all our strengths and weaknesses, in case we're the next targets. Sure, there's probably a few Metas who can manipulate light or electricity or the data signals those things send. I mean, I feed off freaking orgasms, and even I don't know how that works. Fuzzying up a few cameras is normal in comparison."
Doug the Dog or whoever he was looked really interested. "If you're hungry, I'll take you out, any time," he said eagerly.
Violet grimaced. "Sorry, dude, I like tits, and you don't have 'em." She stared pointedly at the screen. "But if you help me find my murderer, I might just forget you said that, and not report you for sexual harassment."
A flustered Dog turned back to the surveillance footage. "Um, yeah. Your guy. Well, here's the thing. The footage goes fuzzy at about the same speed as someone walking, so if it's a device or some weird ability, it's on your victim or the killer. The footage outside the shop blurs just before two am."
"Autopsy puts the time of death between two and three," Violet said, nodding.
"So definitely your guy. I checked all the cameras around the square, then traced it back to a bar. This place." Doug tapped and a clear picture came up, showing the front of the bar in question. "The Uni Moon and Sixpence."
"The pub where we all go for Friday night drinks," Minali said slowly. Phil's favourite pub, where he'd picked up his orgy a few night ago.
The Dog's face fell. "No one ever invited me along."
"Me neither," Violet chimed in.
"Maybe it's just the detectives," Minali said.
Violet nodded. "Guess I'd better try it this weekend, then, if we haven't solved the case by then."
Minali silently prayed they'd have their suspect well and truly arrested before the weekend. Not even for work would she be willing to venture into a pub again. Especially not one where she might encounter Phil looking for his next one night stand.
"Do we have any footage of the inside of the bar?" Violet asked.
"Sure, but it's blurry from just after eight. The only clear camera angle at all for the whole six hours is one down the road, that just happens to catch the front door of the bar. I checked the footage from eight to two, and I can't find when your victim entered the place, but I did spot her leaving. Right here, at a quarter to two."
For a moment, Minali glimpsed the girl, before she moved out of sight. It didn't matter how many times she saw such things. It was still surreal to see someone's last moments, knowing they'd be dead in a very short time, while they themselves were blissfully unaware of their fate.
This girl seemed to have an inkling, Minali thought, from the way her worried gaze darted around before she hurried off. Almost as if she was running from someone or something.
"Who came out after she did?" Minali asked, leaning in for a closer look.
"Dunno." Doug tapped at the screen again, and the video resumed playing.
A hulking figure stepped out of the bar, his broad shoulders barely clearing the doorframe. His fair hair looked almost white in the night-time lighting, and Minali found herself willing the man to turn around. Not that she really needed him to. There couldn't be that many men in the Complex who were built like Norse gods and were suspects in this investigation. She could only think of one.
"Sven," Minali said under her breath.
Violet had come to a similar conclusion. "It'd better not be," she said. "Find out where he went, whether he disappeared into the path of blurry footage, or whether he went somewhere else entirely. If it's him, we need to be certain."
An hour later, while Doug the Dog painstakingly hopped from one camera feed to another, Violet's frown refused to budge.
"I'll bring him in for questioning," Minali promised, rising to her feet.
"Just as long as that's all it is, for the moment," Violet said. She pulled out her tablet. "I need to make some calls, and then we both need to pay a visit before this investigation goes any further. I don't like this case one bit."
A clear-cut killer, who all the evidence pointed towards, made this case one of the easiest Minali had ever worked on. What wasn't there to like about that?
Twelve
Sven decided he didn't like this situation one bit, as he watched the surveillance footage in disbelief. From the set lines of the detective's lips, there was no doubt in her mind that the man in the video was him, and no matter how many times he denied ever entering the bar on that night or any other, she didn't believe him. When he admitted he'd never drunk so much as a mouthful of alcohol, let alone stepped into an establishment that sold the stuff, she'd looked absolutely incredulous.
He slumped in his seat. With the notable exception of the week Allie had brought her Human partner to live in their community, this was the worst week of his life. First the situation with Theron, then the dead body turning up in his shop, and now the Intra believing he was the killer. But Sven was the leader of the Mer in the Complex, not some fingerling who hadn't turned his tail for the first time. His people wouldn't have put him in charge if they didn't think he could handle the responsibility.
He banished the sneaking thought that the only reason he'd gotten the job had been because no one else wanted it – the cohabitation experiment with Humans was hardly a desirable assignment. He'd always known it would be difficult. The risk that the Mer would have to step up and assume peacekeeping duties within the Complex had always been high.
Was this an attempt to discredit the Mer in the leadup to insurrection? For the first time in his life, Sven wished he'd paid more attention to politics. If it weren't for Allie, he wouldn't have wasted a moment of his time in le
arning about it, but she'd been there in the peace talks between Metas and Humans at the end of the war, televised across the Seldova system. How could he not watch?
The war had changed her, while the rest of the Mer stayed the same. He'd expected her to be as bitter about the end of the war as she was about her husband's death, but all he'd seen in her eyes was steely resolve. The kind of resolve that had killed thousands, or would see the end of a war. Up close in the Complex, he'd expected to see something different again, but she'd still surprised him. From the first, she was the only person who seemed to be happy she'd moved to the Complex.
If he'd been framed for a murder that could destabilise the colony, she wouldn't be happy. The Intra arresting him would be the least of his worries. He had to deal with this, whatever it took.
Silence had fallen over the interview room, as though the Intra expected him to fill it.
Sven drew himself up, more than equal to the task.
"I take responsibility for all of this," he said steadily. "A Human turning up dead in my shop is a tragedy that should never have happened."
The detective stared at him. "Wait, is that a confession? You're admitting responsibility for the murder?"
Someone who understood politics less than he did. Oh, he liked this detective more than ever. Sven flashed her his most charming smile. "Of course I take responsibility." As a leader should. The shop was merely part of the Mer colony, even if it was in the Main City and not the Aquatic Dome. If he didn't, he may as well step down and let the others choose a replacement for him. Sven wasn't going to give up that easily.
The detective's eyes gleamed with triumph. "Then I will place you – "
"On our list of contacts willing to help the Intra in our investigation into this matter," Violet finished smoothly. "Thank you again, Mr Grun. We will be in touch."
This didn't please the detective at all. Her eyes blazed as she opened her mouth to protest, but Violet kicked her under the table.
"Can I talk to you in my office, please?" the detective said instead, looking daggers at Violet.
Fishtail (The Complex Book 0) Page 3