“Somebody should have shown up on film, but didn’t. Think she can help us out?” Hill spoke to Santino.
“Work a case with you?” Rachel laughed. “No thanks.”
“Look at a tape for us. That’s what you do,” Hill said, glaring at an invisible spot several feet above her head.
“Yup, that’s what your tax dollars buy, me sitting on my butt, watching TV. Go find yourself a housewife who kills her afternoons with her soaps. I’m sure there’s one or two of them left.”
“This would be a big favor to us,” Zockinski said through gritted teeth.
“You know what’s hard to prove, Raul?” Rachel asked her partner.
“Where to draw the line between harassment and teasing?”
“Indeed! Wafer-thin, especially between colleagues.”
“And it’s not like someone who hates you would offer to work with you.”
“So true. It seems I must be a fragile, overly sensitive woman who can’t take a joke.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
“I liked her better when she didn’t talk,” Zockinski said to Santino.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Rachel said, maneuvering around Hill to dump her trash. “Tell you what, gentlemen, spread the word to leave me alone and all’s forgiven.”
Hill stepped away, almost dancing sideways to keep her from touching him. “Just come with us. Fifteen minutes.”
Rachel leaned towards Santino and stage-whispered: “What do you think? Are we about to be left for dead in a ditch?”
“Nah, but this is a beautiful opportunity. It’s not often you get to see an ass-covering unfold,” Santino said. He spread his hands, fingers fanning open. “It’s like taking the time to watch a flower bloom.”
“Almost poetic.”
“Quite.”
Hill left, utterly done with them. Zockinski, who had invested more of himself in this battle, waited for Rachel to buy her daily cookie and walked back to First District Station with them. Near them. Anyone driving by would have assumed, correctly, they just happened to be traveling in the same direction.
They ended up in a small conference room with a video setup. Hill was waiting with arms crossed, leaning against the painted cinderblock in the far corner.
“This gets a little…” Zockinski paused as he searched for the right word. “Dark.”
Santino pulled a chair in front of the monitor. “We assumed. You guys work homicide.”
“Yeah,” Hill said. “It’s almost always boyfriend, husband, ex-husband, or junkie, but this one is bad.”
Zockinski went through his pockets and came out with a mechanical pencil. “We weren’t kidding when we said we couldn’t find someone who should have been on this tape. Okay, so…
He roughed out a diagram on the tabletop. His scratchy gray lines barely stood out against the utilitarian metal. “The bank should have gotten this on three different cameras. There’s the usual one inside of the ATM,” he said, circling the reference point. “There’s one inside the vestibule hallway.” Another circle. “And the last one is outside of the building and is pointed at the door.” One final circle, off to the side and up.
“It’s an old bank, so the vestibule used to be a storage area or something,” Hill said. He still kept himself as far away from Rachel as possible but as he spoke, Zockinski drew lines with his finger across the diagram. “It’s at the end of a little hallway. There’s a window to the street in the hall, but there’re none in the room itself. The camera in the vestibule points at the hall, so anyone coming or going? They’re caught.
“This is the ATM footage,” Hill continued, pointing at the television in the conference room. “It’s the angle with the cleanest version of the attack. You can see a glove and part of his mask before he drops back off-screen, but that’s all we ever see of him.”
Hill picked up the remote and the monitor woke up. A small room with pale walls, pens and deposit slips on a tall slab desk off to the side, a heavily-patterned area rug in the hall to soak up rainy-day liquids. The film quality was excellent. Digital storage was so cheap that security footage had transitioned from still images taken every three seconds to a continuous stream filmed in high resolution.
“Black and white?” Rachel asked. Security systems had evolved ages ago, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a monochrome version. This setup was designed for low light scenarios and whoever had purchased it was either cheap or careless, since almost all bank robberies took place during the day.
“Some banks still use it,” Hill said, and shrugged. He didn’t know why, either. Cops worked with what they were given.
The camera was pointed towards the door. A woman in her late twenties entered the vestibule. She was smiling.
“She looks happy,” Santino said.
“She was about to finish paying off ninety grand in loans. She was checking her balance to make sure the payment would go through.”
“Oh man. Breaks the heart.”
Maria Griffin came towards the camera. Great skin, longish curling hair, some freckles. Certainly not a beauty but still pretty by way of youth and attitude. Nothing about her posture communicated she was aware of another person in the room. Rachel wished she could have read Griffin’s mood (if, for no other reason, to see what color was associated with conquering a mountain of debt), but even if it hadn’t been in black and white, emotions weren’t captured on film.
Then the arm went around her throat, with a fast glimpse of the killer’s gloves and his lower jaw under a ski mask. The edge of a knife appeared and Griffin fell towards the camera, holding her throat. Griffin vanished, followed by a cascade of hair and, at the end, one delicate hand low on the marble wall. The hand slid down, leaving a slow wake of black blood against the white marble.
Hill hit pause and the screen froze. It said something about Zockinski and Hill, how they must have seen this tape a couple dozen times but didn’t play it down with humor.
“The camera in the hall got this from the knees down,” Hill said. “She’s alone, and then there’s another set of feet, and then you can see her on the ground but she’s alone again.”
Santino exhaled heavily. “So what can we help you with?”
“Can the cyborg tell anything from the video?”
“The cyborg can tell a woman was murdered,” Rachel snapped. Santino flashed an irritated red and Rachel sat on her temper. “What exactly are you looking for?”
“It’s just…” Zockinski hesitated, “the room’s empty. We have two clear shots of the door, and everyone who used the ATM before her is accounted for. She’s the only person there, and nobody followed her in. This guy came out of nowhere. She might as well have been killed by a ghost.”
“Is there one of those little access doors for service?” Santino asked, leaning towards the monitor. He was a lifelong fan of the locked room murder mystery, but the reality of that handprint scrubbed the romance from it. “Some of those cover a space big enough to hide a person.”
Zockinski shook his head. “It’s a newer machine. The entire face pops open. Insurance companies want banks to get rid of the ones with service doors because of, well…” He pointed at the monitor, the smeared handprint.
“And there’s no line-of-sight into the room itself?”
“Nope.”
Rachel thought aloud. “Business district… There’s probably dozens of cameras on that street, right?”
Hill nodded. “We got them in the canvas. They all show Griffin going into the bank, and then nothing until she’s found, fourteen minutes later. We went back three hours and everyone going in, went out. We even asked the maintenance guy who restocked the machine around noon, and he said the room was empty when he left.”
“There’s probably a few other cameras on the street you don’t know about, private ones. Nanny cams, mostly, maybe some security systems that wouldn’t show up in your records. I’ll have to be at the bank to find them.”
“C
an’t you do that from here?” Zockinski asked. Rachel didn’t have to check his mood to tell he wanted to kick them to the curb.
“It is just so cute how you people think we’re omniscient,” Rachel said.
THREE
When they had first been paired as partners, Rachel and Santino had seen no other option than to go out and get completely hammered on straight whiskey. Rum, they agreed, was too popular to be interesting, tequila suffered from delusions of grandeur, and vodka had lost its hearty Russian heritage to peer pressure from vanilla and fruit. But whiskey, good old-fashioned whiskey, still had roots running deep in Tennessee and remembered its sole purpose was to help make awkward social situations bearable.
As it happened, they had more in common than whiskey. Professionally, they couldn’t have been more different but they clicked on the important things (him: “Sophia Loren in Houseboat.” her: “Yes, yes, a million times yes!”). They lurched from bar to bar, finally coming to rest on the front stoop of a local bookstore with a handful of Georgetown students. The students were elated to hear she was with OACET, and they traded her opinions on how cyborgs fit into the U.S. Justice System for bottles of warm beer.
Sometime after the students had shuffled home but before the sun came up, Santino admitted to savage jealousy. At the same time Rachel had a tiny chip implanted in her brain, Santino was finishing up his graduate degree at Cal Tech, developing manual solutions for problems she could now solve with a thought. If he had known what was truly possible, he would have banged on their door until they stuck him in the experiment just to shut him up.
She had very nearly told him then, about what had happened to them during those five years from when they received the implant to the day they went public, but he was still a stranger. He wasn’t OACET: he was different, other. Still, with the liquor guiding her, she took a chance. She turned off her implant and sat in the absolute dark. She listened to him talk about his family while the cars rumbled by, and felt comfortable around a normal human being for the first time since she had been one herself.
Anyone else in his position would have lashed out at her, would have taken out their frustrations on the reason they had become a pariah, but Santino had faith. OACET would change the future of law enforcement, he said. He wanted to be part of it, to be one of the first to define how the next generations of technology, law, and society intersected. Even before OACET broke the status quo, Santino had been moving towards that goal. He had left his comfortable Ivory Tower for the Metropolitan Police Department and slogged through four years as a beat cop to get some experience in how things worked, and to gain some perspective towards how things should work. He wrote papers too dense for Rachel to understand and had them published in journals with unpronounceable names. At cocktail parties, the academics peeled Santino off of her arm and rushed him off for questioning; her partner was far more interesting than the MPD’s pet cyborg. Sometimes he got mad enough to throw furniture, but he knew—just knew!—things would work out for them in the end.
Now, on their way to the bank, Rachel wondered if he might have been right. He certainly thought he was right; of all of the colors out there, she hadn’t expected that smug would come across as hot pink.
“Don’t get too excited,” she said.
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“I’m just saying, suppose all of this goes perfectly.”
“Do tell.”
“We get in there, we find the out that Colonel Mustard did it with the candlestick in the library, and the city throws us a parade.”
“With bonuses?”
“Of course. Doubling annually.”
“I love me some exponential bonuses.”
“Even if all that were to happen…” Rachel said as she reclined her seat and leaned back, arms behind her head. “Plus they give us shiny medals with our names on them…”
“He waits for her to get to the punchline…”
“We still have to do passwords when we get back.”
Santino swore and threatened to drive into a passing truck.
When they arrived at the bank, they were directed to a lot cordoned off for the emergency vehicles. They parked beside Zockinski, but he and Hill had already started walking towards the building. Rachel and Santino trailed behind, kid siblings warily dogging contentious older brothers.
When they turned the corner, the street was swarming.
“Why is the bank open?” Rachel asked.
Hill spoke without acknowledging her directly. “The lobby was cleared this morning. They roped off the ATM but the bank didn’t want to lose business.”
And what a day for business it was, with everyone and their sister overdue to talk to a real human being who, by pure coincidence, worked at the scene. You could share neighborhood gossip online but the thrills weren’t as intense. Status updates were poor fare for the ghoul within.
The vestibule was air-conditioned and the chill hit her like a polar blast. Rachel shivered at the smell and wondered if the customers in the bank proper were aware the recirculated air they were breathing was misted in blood. She wanted to reach out and trace the ventilation system back to its source with the hope of bumping into a HEPA filter, but one of the first things she had learned was to never scratch at the thin veneer of sanitation plastered over civilization.
(Poking around her main waterline had changed Rachel’s showering habits forever. She paid an outrageous monthly fee to a company who did something with salt and sand to scour each individual water molecule before it touched her body. A real bargain, in her opinion, considering the black tarrish gunk which lined the interior of the city’s pipes.)
The room was a classic murder scene, with the first layer of gore covered by a second layer of forensics. Based on the brownish pool and the handprint against the wall, Maria Griffin had fallen several feet away from the ATM. It was easy to read how her body had lain: an inept coroner had dragged the victim’s hair through her own still-damp blood when she was removed, leaving an effect across the white marble like brushstrokes through paint.
Zockinski and Hill stood to the side, faces blank, watching them. Santino had put in his time on the force so he wasn’t cherry, but she was an unknown. Rachel was in uncharted mood-territory and had no idea what was going on in their heads (what translated to opalescent yellow-green?); she assumed they were waiting to see what she would do, but she couldn’t tell if they were impressed at her composure or waiting for her to vomit, swoon, or get the vapors.
“Don’t touch anything. An-y-thing,” Hill said.
“I know. Didn’t you check up on me?” Rachel asked, following the blood. The woman had been wearing heels, as large and tiny spots chased each other in a clean pattern until a heavy blotch blurred the tracks. The blood told a story: Griffin had been attacked while she stood at the ATM, had tried to run, had lost her balance…
Hill didn’t answer so she took a moment to glance up at him. “I was a Warrant Officer with Army CID. Did three tours in Afghanistan before this,” she said, pointing to her head. He flashed an unusual shade of teal but didn’t respond.
“Seriously,” Rachel said as she returned her attention to the scene. “I used to be a real person and everything.”
She squatted on her heels, as far away from the blood as the small room would allow.
“You’re supposed to be looking for cameras.” Zockinski was getting angry, his surface hue going red again.
“I am. I did,” she amended. “They were first on the list. But they aren’t the only things out there.”
Or in here, she thought. Her sixth sense swept down and out, moving into the marble to follow the utilities as they carved their way through stone. She poked and prodded from top to bottom, then started laughing when she hit the void.
Clever! She began rolling through different frequencies to test for residue. Agents lacked an olfactory connection so chemicals were generally imperceptible unless they could be detected visually. Same with fingerprints,
although those usually showed up when the source was sweaty or greasy, but she could almost always tell when disposable gloves had been used as those left a powder similar to that on moth wings.
Her tongue tapped at the roof of her mouth, ticking like the Predator on the hunt. She hadn’t realized she had adopted this little mannerism while she flipped through the spectra until Santino had called her on it a few months ago. It was crazy how quickly new habits were formed.
Dust sparkled and she laughed again. Behind her, Zockinski and Hill were shifting like frightened rainbows, but Santino was gradually building in excitement.
Rachel gestured at her partner. Santino crossed the room and knelt beside her. “As a representative of OACET with no authority at the MPD,” she said quietly as his eyes widened, “I’m hands-off from now on.”
“No shit,” he whispered. They had never invoked this policy before; there had never been a reason. If this case went to trial, she’d be treated the same as a psychic hired by the department to give a grieving mother some hope. Her name would appear as a consultant who had assisted the MPD at their request, and the services she had rendered would be swept under the jargon. The Agents were so new that the judicial process hadn’t caught up with their abilities. It was safer to take herself out of an investigation than to risk having the case thrown out in court.
“If I were you,” she said, including Zockinski and Hill in the conversation, “I’d check for prints here and here.” She indicated two separate spots placed a few feet apart on a square marble block set on the lowest tier. “After that, I’d press them both at the same time.”
The homicide detectives didn’t move.
“If you won’t, I will,” Santino offered.
Hill went looking for Forensics, and Rachel whispered to Santino that there would be no prints since the guy had been wearing gloves, so she was mostly covering the bases, but was also sort of jerking Zockinski and Hill around. Santino approved; he preferred to multitask, too.
Forensics taped the surface and found nothing, but their team hung around to watch as Zockinski pushed on the two locations Rachel had indicated. As Zockinski removed his hands, there was a thin click and one side of the block popped out from the wall. Hill hissed through his teeth as a four-inch thick marble slab swung open on well-oiled hinges.
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