Spider Play

by Lee Killough

  A company he mentioned earlier today . . . which explained the triumph. “You think Uwezo might be interested in products from the Lanour station?”

  “Oh, yes. We need to find these Wraiths and learn who hired them.”

  She eyed him. “Even if they’re real and it’s them, are they likely to know . . . or tell us?”

  “My gut says the Wraiths are real. For the rest, we’ll just have to see when we find them.”

  Finding being the first problem. Slighs might know if the Wraiths existed, but hardly admit it to leos, let alone identify any of them. She knew only one sligh who might. Might.

  With a last gulp of coffee, she pushed to her feet. “There’s a sligh named Quicksilver we can try talking to.” As elusive, unfortunately, as his name suggested.

  Her bovi beeped. Com calling. “Contact Lieutenant Vradel.”

  She brought up his office link on her cell. “Yes, sir?”

  Narrowed eyes regarded her from the screen. “Smuggling? Really?”

  “It’s our best guess considering the situation.” She briefed him on the vandalism and the fifteen minutes north of Eleventh . . . though surely Applegate had done so already.

  The eyes remained narrow. “You think the body will substantiate that?”

  She had to admit: “I have no idea.”

  He sighed. “All right. What’s your next move?”

  “We have a possible lead on the jackers.” Closing her ears to Truth’s squeal as she stretched it. “We’ll follow it and see if they can help us identify who hired them.”

  He nodded. “Then go.”

  * * *

  Mama winced, surveying the gaudy holo sign above the bar she directed him to. “Mas Vegas? I remember it as Playtime 24.”

  “Management changed about two years ago.” About the time an assault brought Wim and her here. “The business is the same.” Bargain-rate bar, casino, joy house.

  “The exterior looks the same.”

  “The interior hasn’t changed much, either.”

  The only alteration being the addition of murals to the walls . . . Las Vegas hotels and casinos pictured on three, the fourth filled with a vid of showgirls in feather and spangle finery. Flirting, dancing . . . periodically hiccupping and freezing. Rarely noticed, she suspected. Even now when the lack of patrons — two at the bar and one in a booth staring into the seventh glass on the table before him — left the room blessedly free of drug fumes and provided a clear view of the walls. At the back of the room a holo of the hot new jivaqueme band Porphyry played a song from its current album on a tiny stage. Janna fought an urge to dance to the rhythm sneaking through her bones.

  Five joyeurs from upstairs — two males and three females — ignored it, too, lounging in robes at one of the tables, drinking coffee and tea while playing poker for vending tokens.

  They eyed Janna and Mama as the two approached, but being safely ensconced in a licensed, medically-inspected house, smiled.

  “What can we do for you, leos?” asked one she recognized, who called himself Hyacinth.

  “I’m looking for Quicksilver.”

  Five faces went blank. “Who?”

  The reaction she expected. But in case one of them happened to be a newcomer not yet instructed in how to answer leo questions about a sligh, she leaned close, lowering her voice to keep the bar patrons from hearing. “Quicksilver. The jon who sometimes orates in a gaming room mornings before it opens for gambling.”

  Code word for running a sligh school. Janna knew nothing about Quicksilver’s background — and never asked — but he once said he educated himself by sneaking into college classrooms, haunting public libraries, and reading tirelessly. His inscrutable self-possession made her think of Oriental monks, master of Kung Fu and arcane knowledge. Certainly a master of invisibility. He successfully evaded school raids, a farce conducted from supposed concern over the quality of unlicensed education, but in reality to force sligh students to be photographed, fingerprinted, give DNA samples, and be detained until their parents arrived.

  On arrival, parents faced a demand for ID before being allowed to take the children, and if unable to produce any, were required to develop it.

  It never worked as lawmakers intended. The children’s prints and DNA went on record, but as Jon or Jane Child, the only name the children gave, and their parents never came. Instead, some idented citizen appeared with custodial documentation and walked out with the children.

  The idea of holding children hostage to force identation of their parents disgusted Janna, and like a number of her fellow leos, if she learned of an impending raid, she relayed a warning.

  In return, Quicksilver passed on intel his invisibility let him collect.

  “Quicksilver?” Janna repeated.

  The faces remained blank, the mouths closed. Everyone knew the routine.

  She kept to the script, too. “If you do happen to come across him, will you ask him to contact Detective Brill? It’s important I speak to him about the Wraiths.”

  They exchanged glances, shrugged. “Sure, leo. If we ever meet him.”

  The message sent, she smiled at them and turned toward the bar.

  “You think you were wise mentioning the Wraiths?” Mama asked. “That may be just the reason he needs to avoid you.”

  “It’s always better to be frank with him.”

  From the end of the bar, she crooked a finger at the bartender. “Quicksilver,” she whispered to him.

  “Who?”

  “Have him contact Detective Brill.”

  She left a similar message — without mention of the Wraiths again — in a succession of Oakland bars and cafés, garages, markets, and clothing stores where chop had the school sometimes meeting. Not that she expected to luck out and come across Quicksilver, but slighs worked at all the locations one time or another, so she relied on them passing the word to him.

  As they lifted from in front of the third clothing store, Janna’s bovi beeped. “Linking you to ME Kolb.”

  Kolb! The Chief Medical Examiner himself.

  A second later a body on an autopsy table appeared in front of the visor lenses. Though looking different out of his cold-wrap cocoon and stripped naked, the wounds crossing his legs and making strips of the Y-incision flaps opening his trunk from shoulders to groin identified the body as Chenoweth.

  So, not just a link to Kolb but examination of the body . . . and well after the usual autopsy schedule. More than pulling strings, someone had been yanking them!

  “Com, link Detective—”

  “I’m there, too, Bibi.”

  The car settled back on its parking rollers.

  Her vantage point, looking down on the body from its left side — ribs cut away and chest cavity emptied — at hands in gloves pulled up over the cuffs of an orange protective suit, told her she linked through Kolb’s own bovi, positioned on top of his helmet. Among the green and blue suits of morgue personnel, only he wore orange, believing it promoted energy. The same reason he had the morgue tiled in the same color when he became Chief Medical Examiner.

  A quip Mama made on his first visit down there ran through her head: He made the morgue a pumpkin shell, and there autopsied very well.

  “You’re working late, Doctor.”

  “I was here and this is an interesting case,” Kolb said.

  Always sure to attract him . . . the more unusual and bizarre the case the better.

  Though the link gave her only his voice, she pictured him clearly. A wiry five-ten, his orange suits invariably rumpled, as though he slept in them. Sharp grey eyes. Grey hair that raised in sweaty spikes when he pulled off his helmet. But the head beneath it contained the memory of every corpse he ever examined and an encyclopedic knowledge of death . . . and to the gratification of prosecutors and frustration of defense attorneys, the ability to explain it jargon-free to juries.

  “Lieutenant Vradel said you believe this maltreated individual’s body was used to smuggle contraband from the Lan
our-Tenning space station?”

  “That’s our theory.” She resisted asking if he had found evidence of it, though linking to them must mean he reached some conclusion. But he loved lecturing too much for her to expect it except in his own good time.

  “You do realize the massive difficulty of smuggling from a station. If they are truly intent on security, they won’t let even a corpse leave without being scanned, which will detect any foreign object. A smuggler’s best chance is with a data stick, but it can’t be placed simply in the corpse’s throat or rectum.”

  Mama began, “So where—”

  Janna elbowed him to silence and took a more oblique approach to the question. “Quite a challenge for our smuggler, then. Presumably you have thoughts on the matter.”

  Mama sighed in resignation.

  “I do indeed. Starting with profane ones about the butchery perpetrated on this sad flesh. Inflicted by a long, thin, sharp blade wielded with enough force to penetrate the body through the cold-wrap . . . probably thus.” He reached out with his hands clasped together as though gripping the haft of a knife, stabbed downward, then jerked back toward himself. “They even tore an old St. Christopher medal off his neck and stuffed it in a stab wound over his heart!”

  Moments later he took a breath and the view shimmied, suggesting he shook himself. “My apologies. A corpse is just an empty husk, but it deserves to be treated with dignity, especially as this poor creature suffered enough dying. I agree fully with Dr. Waller’s assessment of the COD, by the way — explosive decompression — though based not on a standard autopsy but observation of the body, a fine-section scan, and endoscopic examination of the lungs. Notice the petechia on the skin and in the eyes? Hemorrhages from rupturing capillaries. And of course his ruptured lungs.”

  He gestured at the lungs and trachea sliced open on the cutting board at the head of the table. “That’s what killed him. As he felt his suit losing air he made the understandable but fatal mistake of trying to hold his breath. Pressure inside, none outside, pop go the alveoli. An excruciatingly painful way to die. If you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, blow your breath out . . . and if you fail to reach an area with air pressure before succumbing to hypoxia, at least you’ll die with less pain. Maybe. The lungs aren’t the only organs affected by decompression.”

  Comforting thought.

  Mama said, “You linked to us, Doctor. Can we assume you’ve discovered how our smuggler met the concealment challenge?”

  Kolb chuckled. “You can. I have. Arrivillga.”

  Across from him, his favorite tech waved gloved fingers over the control panel in the side of the table. A scan copy of the body formed above its original . . . projected from the ceiling. Every stab and slash looking somehow starker than life. As Arrivillga’s fingers continued moving, the skin went transparent, revealing the depth of each wound. Then they, the musculature, and internal organs faded to ghost images . . . leaving the skeleton floating in shadows.

  Abused bones. Three fused lumbar vertebra. Thickened areas of other bones marked the sites of old, healed fractures: right collar bone, left humerus, eight ribs, the wrist end of the left radius and ulna, left femur, left tibia and fibula. The right tibia had two-thirds of its shaft replaced by a dense implant.

  Janna grimaced. “Crap. How many construction accidents has this jon had?”

  “Not construction,” Mama said. “I ran him on my slate while you were leaving messages for Quicksilver. He skied, climbed mountains, played high school football, rode horses on his grandfather’s ranch, entered bull-dogging, bronc and bull riding in local rodeos, and — do you know they still run the bulls in Pamplona? Though apparently he escaped injury there. I also found the source of the pressure on the Nafsingers and Paget. Both his parents are lawyers, with Mommy being a judge. Is the right tibia what you wanted us to see, Doctor?”

  “Yes.” Kolb reached through the image to “touch” it. “According to Chenoweth’s medical history . . .”

  Data encoded in his scib, one level accessible to EMT’s checking for medical conditions and medications possibly affecting emergency care, and the rest available, with the proper authorization code, for medical practitioners like Kolb.

  “. . . at age eighteen, he skied off a cliff in Utah, fracturing tibias and fibulas bilaterally. He comminuted this right one so severely that rather than try putting Humpty Dumpty together again — so to speak — they replaced that section with a 3D printed lattice. The bone has grown nicely through the implant, and the combination has resulted in a section twice as dense as regular bone.”

  “Which our smuggler used?” Janna said.

  “Indeed. Turn the image please.”

  Arrivillga wiggled her fingers. The body rolled onto its left side.

  Kolb pointed at a faint line on the tibia. “See that?”

  “Not very well,” Mama said.

  “Exactly what the smuggler intended. Give us a close-up.”

  The tibia enlarged until it filled most of the space over the body on the table. Now the line looked like a trench.

  Kolb traced it with his finger. “There is no natural or medical reason for this to exist. Your smuggler routed out this groove . . . which we have measured and found its dimensions perfect for accommodating a thin data stick. With the stick inserted, and a couple of threads around it to permit its extraction — we found one of the threads still in place — the groove becomes invisible.”

  “There had to be an incision to reach the bone,” Janna said. “How did their exit scan miss that when your scan showed us the depth of the stab wounds.”

  “There’s very little soft tissue over your shin. Which you’re confirming right now by feeling your own leg, aren’t you?”

  She was — an automatic reaction to his statement — and above her boot felt the bone immediately under the skin.

  “In addition to which, he had surgery on that leg, remember. His scar is minimal but enough to register on a scan and disguise an incision made beside it. Bloodless — Chenoweth being dead — and sealed with the liquid bandage our trace scan identified, it became invisible.”

  Mama sucked air between his teeth. “What percentage of station personnel have similar implants, do you suppose.”

  Kolb’s voice went thoughtful. “We see them here in perhaps . . . fifteen percent of our cases? It’s an easy patch for big holes or extreme comminution, especially in smaller medical facilities. The risks inherent working in space might raise that figure . . . but for the sake of argument, let’s say fifteen percent there, too.”

  “And how many implants involve areas that don’t require an incision deep enough to register on a scan?”

  “Tibia, distal radius or ulna, clavicle on some individuals, skull.” His tone went even more thoughtful. “I like the skull. A lattice replacing a portion of calvarium removed for surgical access to the brain makes it an excellent location. Secure a thin data stick to the surface of the implant under the scalp and I doubt the added thickness would be enough to arouse suspicion.”

  Janna grinned. Good thing Kolb worked their side of the law.

  Mama cut in on the speculation. “We were wondering whether the smuggler just used Chenoweth’s death or arranged for it, but now I’m thinking the latter. He hits the trifecta for a courier: the implant’s opacity, its location, and working construction . . . where accidents can happen. That makes his death too convenient to be coincidental.”

  Janna agreed. “If the smuggler knew about the implant.”

  “The station will have downloaded its personnel’s medical records from their scibs,” Kolb said. “Your smuggler might have access to those . . . or the ability to hack them.”

  Janna frowned. “But why kill Chenoweth? A daredevil like him, why not just pay him to smuggle out the data stick in his leg.”

  Mama said, “Maybe the smuggler didn’t want to bother with a collaborator and risk being given away.”

  “In any case, we need to tell Vradel what
we’ve got. Dr. Kolb, do you have anything else immediately relevant to the case?”

  “Detective Brill, you don’t wish to remain for the rest of the autopsy? You have no driving curiosity about Mr. Chenoweth’s last meal or how explosive decompression affects organs other than the lungs?” Kolb sighed. “Very well. If I discover anything else, I will let you know. In the meantime, you can inform the lieutenant that I’m changing the Manner of Death from Dr. Waller’s ‘Accidental’ to ‘Undetermined’.”

  Mama frowned. “Not ‘Homicide’?”

  “The circumstances are only suspicious. ‘Undetermined’ provides probable cause for further investigation. Be satisfied with that.”

  Janna’s cell beeped.

  “End link.” The morgue disappeared, leaving her looking at the car’s fogged windows and when she answered the cell, the image on her badge on the screen, its default for voice only calls. “Quicksilver?”

  Calling from a vend cell. Living “free” did not mean rejecting useful tech when it came anonymous from a vending machine for a few tokens. Even with vends, he never transmitted an image.

  “What are these Wraiths you want to talk about?” came his cool voice. “What do you think I can tell you?”

  Janna sighed silently. Quicksilver claimed he never lied, but he hedged like a politician. Admitting nothing while probing for what she knew and why she wanted to know more.

  “According to the Toros, Pluto of the Orions laid black and blue on a sligh calling himself Viper, and Viper was later heard threatening to come after Pluto with his gang, the Wraiths. Friday a pair of jons wearing decals of Orion colors and one calling the other Pluto, jacked a hearse.”

  “You think this Viper is responsible? That a sligh would become involved in a felony?”

  “I don’t know. I need to find out.”

  “Am I right in thinking you want me to arrange a meeting with this Viper for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Assuming I know him, why would I do that, leo?” Now his voice had an edge.

  “Because this is more than a jacking.” She became aware Mama had switched on the defroster and pulled down his visor to peer at her over it. “Evidence suggests the jackers were just hired to take the hearse, but whoever hired them is involved in smuggling. You know what that means. The case will go to the Feds, and they’re bound to hear what I did from the Toros.” She pushed urgency into her tone. “You don’t want Feds hunting slighs . . . not with jackass politicians trying to criminalize you.”