“Just that, soon. I promise, but I’ve got a couple of plates spinning.”
“Frazier, don’t do this. Tell me what’s going on. I can help.” She splashed water at his face.
“I promise, I will when the time’s right. Be patient.”
“You’re very lucky to have me, you know.” She kissed him quickly on the lips. There was a hint of red wine.
“Where’ve you been anyway?”
“Crap day at the office. Cheered myself up with some shopping.”
“Shopping?”
“That thing that makes nice clothes appear in your wardrobe.”
“I don’t need any more clothes.”
“You might think you don’t, but if you’re to run your business empire, you need to look the part—smarten yourself up.”
She stood, and went to the door, hovered by it for a moment. “When you’re done in there, I’ll be waiting for you in here. I’ll help you de-stress.”
Alone again, Frazier smiled and counted himself lucky that he had such an amazing woman in his life.
His HALO buzzed. He’d taken it off whilst bathing and clambered out of the bath to answer it; the water was getting cold anyway. Grabbing a towel, he slung it around his waist and rolled a haphazard knot that threatened to come undone at any moment.
“Paul? Is everything OK?”
“Yeah, Boss.” Somebody screamed in the background.
“You caught up with Sean?”
“Yeah, he’s still denying he’s taken his own cut. What do you want me to do with him?”
And this, Frazier thought, was part of the stress problem. Emilia had been right about monkeys and zoos and fundamentally why the hell was he paying Paul to run the distribution side of his business if he was going to ring the boss every time he needed a decision making?
Frazier sighed, loud enough for Paul to hear. “Teach him a lesson. He can still deal with a missing finger. Ask him which is his favourite then remove it—oh, and Paul… ”
“Yes, Boss.”
“Keep me on the line whilst you take care of it.”
The line went dead, but a moment later Frazier heard Paul asking Sean which of his fingers he wanted cut. The fool couldn’t even get that simple part right. It didn’t really matter though. The result would be the same, still it showed a disturbing lack of attention to detail.
Sean the dealer lost his finger with a lot of screaming.
Frazier killed the line then towelled himself dry.
His HALO beeped, and he checked the messages. Not Paul, but Indira.
I’ve got the package.
Excellent. He replied with a curt OK, then finished drying himself. Things would move quickly now. They had to before the police worked out what was going on.
Realising that he’d gotten hard, he dropped the towel and headed for the bedroom where he was prepared to explain to Emilia that he wasn’t ready to slow anything down just yet.
Saturday, 25 May 2115
6:04 AM
Edward unwrapped his bacon sandwich, nibbled at the edge of the roll, and stopped at the end of the alley waiting for Chloe to come out of the shop with the coffees. Six o’clock was far too early to be up and about and now that he was starting to wake he realised that the last thing he wanted to do was eat; he’d already heard what state the victim was in.
A drone flitzed past, maintaining a low position about ten feet off the ground. This was one of the newer inner city models, and would fit comfortably in the palm of a hand. Pen-sized spotlights and cameras spun around its circumference like a bunch of agitated fireflies. These blasted things had become so commonplace that most people had learnt to ignore them. To Edward though, they were a constant source of annoyance implying the police weren’t able to function effectively without additional help. It was neither here nor there that they did indeed serve a useful purpose; crime rates had dropped steadily since their introduction, but they were only effective if there were enough men on the street to do something practical with the intelligence gathered.
This drone passed a second time. The designation of this area as a major crime scene would have set it on high alert and Edward watched as it began to monitor the passers by and the small crowd that had gathered beyond the police tape. A few people tried looking away from the device, only for it to target them and shine lights in their faces, recording, tracking, monitoring.
He heard her before he saw her. Chloe was politely excusing herself through the crowd of gawkers, a cup of coffee in each hand. A uniform recognised her and lifted the police tape high enough for her to duck under. She passed one of the coffees to her superior.
“Thanks. Fancy any breakfast?” he said while gesturing at the roll in his hand.
“Lost your appetite?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
Chloe brushed the hair away from her face and took a sip of her coffee. “What were you thinking? Bringing breakfast into a crime scene?” Her tone was playful and affectionate. She knew how to keep on the good side of her boss. It was practically impossible to be anything other than polite and kind in return.
“I was hungry. I’m the scene of crime officer. I can do what I like.”
Edward placed his coffee on the garden wall of the terrace they were standing in front of. The lights were off but Edward knew the owners were watching from the front bedroom window. Edward’s stomach rumbled but he carefully wrapped the sandwich roll back up in its foil and squashed it unceremoniously into his jacket pocket. The coffee wasn’t coffee at all. Substitute. Manufactured in one of the food factories in Ormskirk. The drink was hot and full of artificial sweetener though, and he had to admit as far as it went, it wasn’t bad at all. His stomach rumbled but he ignored the sensation, hoped that no one else could hear and pulled out a datapad from another pocket. With a couple of taps on the device he was able to see a selection of the intel the crowd drone was gathering. Photos of gawkers were being processed and matched against criminal records and the results so far weren’t promising. Two men in the crowd were suspected of associating with Volunteer groups but that in itself wasn’t quite enough to pull them in. Besides, his department’s exact policy on these vigilante groups seemed to change on a weekly basis.
“Anything?” Chloe asked.
He passed the pad to her. Chloe glanced at it, then the coffee cup in her hand before placing her cup on the garden wall behind her.
“Usual mix,” Edward suggested, “You’d think they’d have better things to do than stand and watch us.”
“What? Like sleep you mean?” Chloe flicked through the intel but nothing stuck her as interesting enough to alert her boss to. She passed the pad back and retrieved her coffee.
One of the forensics team walked out of the alley, recognised them, and called them over.
“Oswald, how’s it going,” Burnfield said.
“It’s not a pretty sight,” he replied, taking them both to the second line of police tape marking the boundary of the crime scene. The man in charge of preserving evidence thrust a pair of slip on plastic shoes at the pair of them before shining a retinal scanner at each of them, logging their arrival.
Oswald was right, of course. But then, Edward had never arrived at a murder scene that wasn’t grisly.
The inspector liked to absorb the sights and smells of the scene around him; try to put himself in the position of the killer, letting his instinct hone his focus.
Firstly, there was the rain of course. It had stopped some time in the night but there’d been enough of it to leave puddles across the broken tarmac of the alley floor and limit opportunities for evidence collection. Slight trails of excess rainwater were still running at the edge of the alley, flushing along hairs and fibres into and out of the crime scene. Footprints and fingerprints would be difficult if not impossible to retrieve.
A forensics drone was running the twelve metres or so from the entrance of the alley to a doorway into one of the terraced house’s back yards. Edward and Chloe fo
llowed Oswald into the yard.
“The weather’s proved problematic,” he said.
“Yes,” Edward replied, “but I know you won’t let that stop you.”
“Careful, he’s just through here.” Oswald stepped through the doorway into the back yard and the detectives followed.
A second forensics drone was focusing on the dead man propped up by the wall: the hovering device clicking and flashing as it gathered whatever evidence it could. Oswald batted a hand towards the drone and it backed off, flying higher and scanning the scene from above. “Damn nuisance,” he muttered under his breath.
Edward let his eyes be drawn to the dead man and the moment he saw the black hollows staring emptily up at him, he knew he’d made the right decision about his bacon roll. The man was in his mid to late twenties. His soaking clothes, now pink with the blood that had come from the injury, were casual but nondescript. He wore black boots, solid but old with thinned down soles from a lot of walking. Edward tried to ignore the wedding band on his finger knowing that he’d soon be having a painful conversation with the man’s spouse.
But all of this detail was insignificant next to the brutality of the man’s injury. He tried to distance himself from the sight but if he was going to solve this crime, he knew he had to let the details wash over him, absorb the detail. Edward bent in to take a closer look.
“There are scratches all around the sockets. Whoever did this didn’t take much care about it.”
“Look at his fingernails,” Chloe said, getting in close.
Edward saw dark shadows under the victim’s nails, and a pinkish discolouration up his fingers and across his hands.
“Could have transferred in a struggle?”
Oswald chipped in. “I think he did it to himself. There’s plenty of tissue under his fingernails.”
“What the hell are we talking about? How could he have done it to himself”
“I don’t know,” Oswald replied.
Edward shone his HALO light across the ground trying to find signs of the missing organs. “Where are the eyes? Have you bagged them already?”
“No, we haven’t been able to find them.”
“You think an animal might have taken them? A stray cat perhaps?”
Oswald shrugged. “Possibly.”
“There is always the other possibility,” Chloe said softly.
“That someone else was here,” Edward replied. “I want the eyes found,” he said tersely. “Bring more people down here if you have to.”
The notion that someone else had been here with the victim had been nagging at Edward since he first saw the body. His mind raced over previous cases, cataloguing and looking for patterns that might be something or nothing. Damaging victim’s eyes in murder cases wasn’t uncommon. Ever since remnant keepers started revealing testimony from the dead, they’d seen a rise in the destruction of incriminating evidence. Of course, with their forensic technology it didn’t mean that people didn’t get caught, but it made it a whole lot harder to piece together events.
“This isn’t right,” Chloe ventured.
“It never is,” Oswald replied.
“I wasn’t talking about death in general.” She turned and looked up at the sky, her hands brushing through her hair, straightening and tightening. “Assuming the eyes have been taken and aren’t just lost, why bother? Why didn’t they just destroy his eyes? Why have they bothered to remove them? We need to focus on how they coerced the victim to remove his own eyes. What kind of threat were they using?”
“No kind of threat. You couldn’t make someone do that. It would have been agonising,” said Oswald. “I’m surprised he didn’t pass out with the pain and shock of it all.”
“Perhaps he did,” Edward suggested. “Have we identified the victim yet?”
Oswald pulled a datapad from his pocket. “Booth Maguire.”
“And?” Edward prompted.
But Oswald shook his head. “Nothing else. He had his ID card in his jacket pocket but besides his name and address, we don’t have anything else on him.”
“He’s not in our records?”
“No. He doesn’t have any medical records, bank details, or employment history.”
Edward sipped from his coffee then pressed his lips together. Ideas were jumbling all over each other in an effort to be sorted and categorised. “Problem with our files?” he asked eventually.
“Possibly. I’ll add what we have to our report but to be honest it might be one for your data guys to look into.”
Chloe sighed. “Cutbacks,” she said simply.
Oswald smiled thinly. “On every side.”
Edward shrugged his shoulders. “We’re all in the same boat. Chloe, when we get back to the station, it’s your priority to run me up a profile of this man. Find out who he’s been meeting with, who he’s pissed off recently. We need to get a team round to his house as well. Next of kin?”
Oswald shook his head. “We haven’t got that far.”
“Find out, Chloe.”
“Yes, Boss.”
“And what about the people who live here? What did they see?” Edward gestured up at the windows of the house whose backyard they were standing in.
“It’s an old gent. He thought he heard cats fighting but he’d taken meds to numb his arthritis and went back to sleep.”
“The neighbours?”
Oswald shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Edward addressed Chloe. “I want interviews recorded with the rest of this street. Uniform can handle it but I want it on my desk by lunchtime. Request access to the security network, see if there were any drones in the area that might have captured anything.”
The detective turned to leave the yard, but as he did, his gaze found the victim’s face, and he couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of the two bloodied empty eye sockets glaring up at his accusingly.
9:01 AM
Jack spent the night at his brother’s house. Ethan had been surprised to see him, being that it had been weeks since they’d met in person. The night had been an uncomfortable one spent on the sofa after a long argument with Ethan which boiled down to Ethan thinking Jack a lazy slob for not going back to work already. His brother was one of the few people who’d never handled Jack any differently since his registration as a telepath. Perhaps it was because Ethan knew the limitations of Jack’s abilities; perhaps it was more that he didn’t care what Jack thought of him.
As he showered, Jack couldn’t believe how he’d attacked his neighbour yesterday. Yes, Jimmy was a pain in the arise, but Jack could have killed him.
Maybe that hadn’t been his intention, but that wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d wound up dead instead of suffering a case of injured pride and a headache. The police hadn’t tried to contact him about the attack; neither had his neighbour’s unsavoury friends gotten hold of him yet. Perhaps he could rest easy about it, let the moment go.
There had been little talk over breakfast.
“Be safe now,” Ethan had said as Jack left the house that morning. He’d suggested Jack should leave his belongings and come back that night. Jack declined. Much as it was nice to spend the night without loud music blaring, he didn’t want another night of conversation with Ethan. Going to see Adam was a step in the right direction and as far as Ethan was concerned that was almost as good as going back to work.
A black car pulled up outside Ethan’s house. Adam wasn’t taking any chances with another no show from Jack and the car was one of OsMiTech’s.
Jack didn’t mention to Ethan that he was planning to tell Adam he wanted out.
He’d had no choice in signing up for OsMiTech after passing the MESPER test. The Registration Act made it clear that you either joined up or you were diminished. He’d believed two things: that being a telepath made you special, and that the money from the job would bring him happiness. He was wrong on both fronts. Being a telepath had singled him out as a freak, not as someone worthy of respect or fame. And w
hilst the money had enabled him to buy his house and avoid the habitat blocks, it hadn’t brought him happiness. Instead, it led to more concerns about the future and keep him trapped in OsMiTech’s grip.
The driver didn’t say a word; a humourless woman with a dour expression, she kept her eyes to the road and didn’t respond to Jack’s attempts at polite conversation.
The first time he’d been to OsMiTech had been for his eye surgery. He’d argued with Keeley on that day as well. She’d demanded to go with him. He wanted no one there; wasn’t even sure if the people at OsMiTech would allow it. They didn’t but Anna had made sure Keeley was looked after whilst Jack went in for his surgery. That was the first time he’d met Anna, his original handler. She’d been a good considerate guide to his new life at OsMiTech and as a remnant keeper, but he’d made a terrible mistake in trusting her and that had ultimately led to Keeley being murdered.
The car approached the compound and the steel gates clanked opened. His driver drove through onto the road that led up to the man-made island with the giant crescent shaped building that was OsMiTech headquarters. It had been a few months since his last visit and already the butterflies in his stomach had started, a growing unease faced with the prospect of so many telepaths in one place.
But, whatever he felt about the inside, from the outside it was awe-inspiring. The Marine Lake had at one time been the country’s largest artificial lake and this sweeping crescent in plastisteel and glass, its points on the ground, melted up from the water leaving a giant hole in the centre where the inverse curve of the moon met the empty air. You could see the sky and the horizon right through the centre of the building.
He instructed his driver to let him out on the access road and after giving him a withering look, she relented and stopped the car. His door was locked and he waited patiently for his driver to open it from outside.
“Thanks,” he said. “Much appreciated.”
“Pleasure.”
She got back in the car and drove off.
The air was cool but the sky clear of clouds. Jack shivered in his jacket and took a step towards the building. Several cars passed him on his walk up the central access road. He glanced over the railings of the path he was walking beside and glanced down into the water of the Marine Lake. He wondered whether anything lived in there but the surface appeared black and opaque, barely like water at all.
The Remnant Vault (Tombs Rising Book 2) Page 5