by Lee Killough
She sucked in a breath. “It’s a trap system.”
Offering a seemingly nominal barrier to entry, but preventing anyone who took advantage of that from leaving . . . holding them until law enforcement arrived.
Anger sparked in her. The gate would have locked behind them, leaving them to face questions by a Sherwood patrol unit responding to the alarm forwarded from the security company . . . and maybe more later from the opies. They still might end up at the Office of Professional Standards. “Did the gate have surveillance?” Maybe not a clear view of them in the frankencab, but certainly one of the uniquely identifiable vehicle.
“I didn’t see a cam, but that’s why we got the hell out . . . in case entering the code without the disarming sequence triggered a hidden one.” He took a breath. “If anything, we ought to be a blur, maybe farther obscured by the headlights’ glare.”
She crossed her fingers and hoped.
The car hovered, idling. Mama touched the temple of his glasses, throat moving in sub vocalization. Talking to Com.
“Why—” No need to finish the question. “Crap. You asked for a link to Sherwood traffic. You’re waiting for the watchcar. You still want in there.”
He edged the car forward enough to see around the curve. “There’s a Metrans stand on Camden if you want to leave.”
Conscience rather than the icy trudge to the cabs kept her in the car. Leaving amounted to abandoning Mama, her partner no matter how much she wanted to beat his head against the steering wheel.
“What do you want there?”
“A look at his security. Ah . . . there they come.”
A watchcar turned up the street and pulled in at Markakis’s gate. Running silent, but the glow of city lights off the cloud cover revealed its distinctive white-over-black and the light rail on top.
Mama sent the car floating forward until setting down on the street short of the drive, where he swung out and strolled toward the watchcar. “You, too, Bibi.”
The leos — both male— climbed out of their vehicle . . . bulky in their winter jackets. The small amount of face that showed between their visors and fleece collars settled into suspicious lines as they eyed the frankencab.
“Sir—” the driver began in the tone used for demanding to know identities and business here.
Mama held up his badge. “Morning. Detectives Maxwell and Brill, CAPR. What’s Patrol doing here?”
Of course . . . ask first. Offense made the best defense.
“We got a call from XC-cure that someone tried an unauthorized gate entry. Is that piece of junk what CAPR’s driving these days?”
Mama smiled. “It’s my personal vehicle and not what it seems. Check it out.”
The pair — name tags reading Boggs and Waddill — did so. While they walked around the car, touching the “peeling” paint and “cracks” in the airfoil skirt, Mama nudged Janna between him and them.
From behind her, he said, “Twister Sportster chassis, race-tuned drive.”
They turned back around, shaking their heads. “That’s brainbent,” Boggs, the driver, said. “The Twister chassis and race drive sound almega, but why do . . . that?” He pointed at the body.
“To watch the faces of someone who’s spent gold-card on a Lambo or Leland cat as I blast by them on the Interstate fast lane.”
The patrol team grinned.
Then Waddill came back to business. “We’re here because of a possible security breach. Why are you?”
“Part of a current case involves vehicles belonging to Polo Markakis, but he’s in Africa driving in the Kalahari Safari Rally. Brill reached him a few minutes ago. You tell them, Bibi.”
What was he doing back there?
From the corner of her eye she glimpsed the code reader in his hand again. Of course. Damn him.
Pulling her jacket higher up her neck screened him fractionally more. “Markakis says seeing his vehicles on the street has to be a mistake, because he hasn’t given anyone his codes or permission to use his vehicles.”
Mama said, “Can XC-cure tell if anyone got in?”
“No,” Boggs said. “The surveillance the breach set off has a blurred image of a vehicle leaving cam range but it’s possible someone on foot went through. We need to have someone open the gate for us.”
“I can do it,” Mama said.
What? Janna’s gut knotted.
“Markakis gave us the gate code to check the property.”
She turned to find him tapping in the code. He winked at her as the gate rolled aside.
Waddill said, “Someone needs to stay and watch for anyone trying to leave.”
Stay in the warm car. Which Janna doubted would be either Mama or her.
Correct. Mama headed for the gate. “I think it’s between you two.”
Boggs dug out a vending token. “Call it.”
“Heads.”
It came up tails. Boggs patted his partner’s shoulder.
Waddill gave him a middle finger salute and followed Janna and Mama. “Are you sure we’re not going to be locked in?”
“We won’t be.”
Some fifteen feet up the drive, Mama halted and waited for the gate to close. It did so almost soundlessly this time, instead of the clang she remembered from before. Then he walked back toward it. After a few steps, the gate rolled aside again.
“Okay,” Waddill said.
They waited for the gate to close once more, then resumed heading for the house. On the way, Waddill swung the beam of his flashlight to the right and left of the drive. The light found only an unbroken layer of snow.
Near the house, the drive split, swinging right to a five-door garage separated from the house by a long, transparent-walled breezeway, and circling left in front of the house — a wide, low structure that looked like a slab of glass.
“I’ll have a look around the garage,” Mama said.
Janna followed Waddill to the house, along a walk also cleared by solar pavers. Exterior lights blazed on at their approach, turning the glass copper-colored. By pressing her face to the glass, gloved hands around her eyes — if Markakis had adjustable-polarization he left it on transparent — Janna saw a slice and dice style interior. A single space at the moment but the furniture arranged to let wall panels pull out and divide the area into smaller sections. The furniture itself caught her eye. Not the leather couches and sling chairs but a sofa table of glass on top of a bronzed internal combustion car engine, another table from part of an airplane wing — perhaps an aileron — two end tables of stacked wheel rims. One wall looked like a maze of plumbing, except angles held shelves with trophies on them and photos hung between. It all looked tidy. Even the hard-framed slates for magazines strewn on the car-engine table looked artistically arranged. Ready to be recorded for a gossip channel segment on At Home With Race Car Driver Polo Markakis.
While she peered inside, Waddill had waded on around the house, hunched in his jacket. He came back laughing. “Yeah, we should.”
“Should what?” she asked . . . though that sounded like a remark addressed not to her but Boggs, via their linked bovis.
“Markakis has a mini-racer track out back. My partner says this summer we need to come by when he’s using it, claiming there’s a noise complaint from his neighbors. Maybe talk him into giving us a turn.”
“It’s almega fun.” She drove mini-racers several times during her racing idyl summer with Talavera. The first time she had driven a wheeled vehicle other than her Stratford electrocycle. “What about the house?”
“Nothing suspicious that I can see through the windows. Windows and doors secure. The only tracks in the snow are animals’ and mine. It looks like whoever tried the gate didn’t come on through.”
Mama came from the garage. “All secure over there . . . no indication anyone has been in. We’ll text Markakis and let him know.”
“Then I think we’re finished here.” Waddill stamped snow off his boots and headed back down the drive.
On the street they left before the watchcar, giving the Patrol team a goodbye salute.
Blessedly, the frankencab still retained some warmth. Janna pulled off her gloves and rubbed circulation back into her fingers while waiting for more heat from the vents. “I hope you didn’t try going into the garage.”
“I didn’t have enough time.”
“But you tried?” Son of a bitch.
He sighed. “Rack back. I only analyzed his security. It puts banks to shame. Markakis didn’t spare the digidough. There are no windows and the breezeway sides are armor-class polycarbonate. Every door, including the one from the breezeway into the garage, has four levels of coding. The first level’s is long as a VIN number and ends in the sequence asking for a disarm code. I’m assuming the other levels are similar.”
Wow. “So short of using a plasma torch or explosives, no one gets in without the codes.”
“Or a lock fob. I don’t see Markakis spending ten minutes entering code every time he wants in the garage.”
Janna frowned. “So despite what he claims, you think he gave his fob to someone?”
“Under hypnosis he could have given the fob to the good doctor for duping.”
“And we’re no closer to knowing what Lou and Snowy look like or their real names.”
Mama grunted. “Unless we get to the spa before the Feds take over.”
“Which we can’t do tonight. Right?” she said, and when Mama frowned, added: “Right, Mama?”
He sighed. “Right.”
“So please drop me off at home.”
They made the drive in a silence that worried her. Surely he could not be thinking of something brainbent like waking the spa’s manager. Then she remembered that he had walked out on a fight with his cohab.
“Are you going to be able to go home?”
He hesitated, then grimaced. “I don’t know. I heard something break as I left.”
Like her upstairs neighbors this evening.
He cleared his throat. “Would you mind if I dossed on your couch tonight?”
“There’s no need to use the couch. Take Sid’s bed.”
Chapter Five
Sunday
Having Mama as an overnight guest gave her a warm ride to work in the morning instead of waiting at the bus stop or a frigid walk through the pre-dawn dark to the neighborhood Metrans stand. Very welcome today, with the scattering of flakes threatening more snow.
And Mama had to wear the same eyesore sweater instead of a new one.
At least the weather reduced the amount of Saturday night mayhem. The list of night watch cases read by Lieutenant Petra Singh, their commander when Vradel was off, had just three homicides — one already closed by the night watch — one rape, and a handful of assaults.
The international news quarter of the vid screen distracted her at the appearance of the name Port Hawking — where her brother worked — on the crawl line. The colony announced an expansion of six hundred additional personnel this summer. Agroponics Ltd. is taking applications now for individuals with agricultural expertise.
Her attention came back to Singh as the lieutenant assigned the night’s open cases. “Brill and Maxwell, take the Twissman assault. He’s at Charter. Incoherent last night, according to Carter and Bahari, who caught the case. Maybe he’ll be more help today.”
Janna expected Mama to protest that they were still working the hearse case. Or, when they reached the garage, to claim the driver’s seat and head for Oakland and California Dreamin’.
Instead, he climbed in the Monitor’s shotgun seat. “You drive while I pull up the report on Twissman.”
“What about the spa?”
He tsked and opened his slate. “Bibi, Bibi . . . first things first.”
What?
“The spa doesn’t open until noon.”
She shot a fist sideways into his shoulder. “That’s why you’re so conscientious, because we need to kill time?”
He ignored both the hit and her comment. “Donald Twissman, twenty-eight. Checked into the Nightingale Court, room 125, at eleven thirty last night. At two fifteen this morning the night manager knocked on the door when the couple next door complained the bed banging against the wall was keeping them awake.”
Janna snorted. “I didn’t know anyone checked into the Nightingale to sleep.”
“They did wait until after two to complain. Receiving no response to her knock, the manager entered and found Twissman tied to the bed naked, gagged, and with a giant erection. It and his scrotum dermal-dyed a mottled, diseased-looking yellow and green and . . .” Mama winced. “. . . Organic Waste tattooed on his penis.”
The tattoo accounted for the wince. “A sex game gone bad?”
“I’m thinking payback. Surveillance shows him arriving in an autocab with five other individuals. All heavily bundled but female in Carter and Bahari’s opinion. The same five individuals left forty minutes later in the same autocab . . . which Carter and Bahari tracked to a Metrans stand by Washburn.”
From which point they could have gone to ground at the university, caught a bus, or walked to houses and apartments around the university. Keeping the cab waiting indicated they had not planned to stay long. “Payback for what?”
“Good question.” Mama swiped at the slate screen. “There’ve been no restraining orders on him, no accusations of rape or stalking. Let’s see what the victim has to say.”
At the hospital, Janna found herself wishing Twissmen were still gagged. According to his medical record, he had been found in time to relieve the erection before treatment left him with permanent erectile dysfunction. Still, he spent the first ten minutes of their interview whining about the doctors doing nothing about the tattoo or shortening the estimated four to five months before the dermal-dye faded. When they finally focused him on the assault, he claimed ignorance about why anyone would want to do this to him. Were the fems he met at Zanzibar that mad because he passed out in the motel room even before he got his pants off? Nor could he describe his assailants. The five wore cat masks along with cat-patterned skin suits, calling themselves Simba, Katza, Bast, Mau, and Chat, alley cats hunting the perfect tom . . . which they decided was him. They had all been eager for a long night’s ride. Which he could have given them without the massive dose of John Henry the ER doc said must have been in that drink at the motel. He never needed drugs to be a steel-drivin’ man, not even to take on five fems. Just ask any fem he had been with. Speaking of which, could they call these five numbers for him?
He rattled them off, explaining they were for his wife, fiancée, and girlfriends. In the ER he had asked that someone in the hospital call but they must not have because no one had come or called back. He needed to space out their visits, though, to keep them from learning about each other.
After a long look at Mama across the bed, in which Janna wondered how — even carrying his brain, such as it was, between his legs — Twissman had no idea who the alley cats were, she said, “They won’t learn about each other here.”
Twissman sighed in relief.
“I take it you’re not planning a group marriage,” Mama said.
Twissman snorted. “Why would I chain myself? I need freedom to explore . . . and next month, when the marriage contract expires, I’ll have it almega perfectomundo.”
Leaving the room, Janna rolled her eyes. “Organic waste indeed.” She sighed. “But we’d better ask the fems their whereabouts last night.”
Mama shrugged. “They’ll have alibis. Let’s head for the spa.”
“You said it doesn’t open until noon.”
“Maybe the manager comes in early.”
Letting Mama drive, she reaped the interview recording to Data from her bovi and filed the report itself via her slate.
Halfway through writing it, she heard Mama’s phone ping. Moments later the car changed direction — west, away from the spa — and accelerated.
She looked up. “What is it?”
“Text from Lia. She�
�s dumping my stuff outside.”
A light ahead turned red, then immediately returned to green.
Janna went back to her report. With Code Green clearing their way across town, she was still working on it when they pulled up in front of a triplex townhouse.
Two bulging duffels and three black recycle bags sat out in the snow.
Mama sighed. “At least she packed . . . more or less.”
Not just threw everything out . . . or set fire to it, as had happened in several cases Janna remembered from her Patrol days.
They loaded up the rear seat and took everything to her place for the time being, then headed back for Oakland. There she e-mailed the report from the parking lot of California Dreamin’. One other vehicle sat out front. Sunlight peeping through the clouds suggested they might skip more snow today after all.
The doors remained closed at their approach, nor did waving at the surveillance cam bring a response. Janna called the spa. A recorded message came on, giving the spa hours and inviting the caller to leave a message.
Before Janna finished leaving one, Maire Olinger cut in. “Detective. To what do I owe this visit?”
“We need to check Friday’s surveillance for clients who used the day spa.”
Olinger’s brows shot up. “You think whoever took that hearse came here afterward? I can assure you, no gangers did. If I didn’t see them, Tish would have signaled me.”
“We still need to see the recording.”
She frowned, sighed, came to let them in, and led the way back to her office.
A vid screen on the screen wall ran a gossip channel interview with one of Crosswhen’s vocalists. His accent caught Janna’s ear. After a century, bands remained an important British export.
Olinger set a surveillance screen beside it for playback . . . showing the reception area.
“You don’t monitor the spa itself?” Mama asked.
“For our clients’ privacy, no . . . only when someone hits a panic button.”
“Reception cam it is, then,” Janna said.
Located above and behind the reception desk, it covered the front doors and most of the reception area.