Spider Play

by Lee Killough

The cam recorded around the clock, Olinger said, but she set their viewing start at nine, when the spa opened. Then left them to it while she worked at the computer on her desk.

  They started playback at real-time speed, looking for the blue jacket and its shoulder stripes. The hearse had circled behind E-world almost half an hour before. Wherever Lou and Snowy waited for the spa to open, it had to feel long and cold, and surely they exchanged that as soon as possible for the warmth of the spa.

  “There,” Mama said.

  The blue jacket with shoulder stripes, entering at nine oh seven. When he pulled off his cap at the reception desk, they had a good view of his face. After freezing the image, Mama captured it on his cell.

  “There’s their monitor.” He tapped a cuff on Lou’s wrist, similar to the guides that navigated shoppers though megamalls and civilians through Headquarters downtown.

  Resuming play, they waited for his partner to appear.

  But the next customer, arriving five minutes later, was a Caucasian female for a salon appointment, and the next, at nine twenty, were three more females chattering away to one another — two looking Hispanic, one Afam — also for salon appointments. Five more customers arrived for the spa between ten and noon, also all female. The handful of male customers throughout the entire day — none with ebony complexions and beards — had only salon appointments that lasted no more than an hour each.

  When the recording reached closing time, Janna sat back and stretched. “It looks like Snowy sat out the day elsewhere. But we can at least learn Lou’s name.” She started to turn toward Olinger.

  Mama put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think so.”

  He backscanned to Lou leaving at four thirty . . . paused . . . backscanned a bit more to Lou checking out. “He’s paying with a card.”

  Janna lowered her voice. “False identity?” Which could not be managed with a scib scan — if his country of origin did scibs.

  They watched the scanner record his thumb print and retinal pattern. Then Mama began searching the half hour before and after Lou’s exit.

  “What are you looking for now?”

  “Lou’s partner.”

  What? “He never came in.”

  “I think we just didn’t recognize— Ah . . . remember her?” He froze the recording at four forty-three on an Afam female . . . tall, willowy, hair a black velvet cap, skin a rich chocolate . . . and took her picture with his cell.

  Janna replayed the recording in her head. “She came in early on with two Hispanic fems. Bushy hair, then. A salon appointment.”

  “Later she transferred to the spa. I remember the salon cape crossing the reception area.”

  He returned the recording to nine thirty then fast forwarded until a figure shrouded in pale green appeared at ten twenty-nine. He froze the image. Above the cape, the fem’s shorn hair enhanced the elegant shape of her head.

  Janna frowned at him. “You think she’s Snowy?”

  “Our pair surely knows Traffic would track the hearse to this block, and even coming in separately, two unfamiliar jons are going to be remembered on a day when leos are asking questions and checking business surveillance. But . . . a male and female arriving separately, not as noticeable, especially if she hung around outside until managing to come in with another fem. Notice she has a wrist unit, too . . . and pays also with a card.”

  Except Snowy could not pass here as female. Then Janna’s brain gave her a head slap. Of course. “She wore a male disguise to start with.”

  Mama nodded. “To cover all possibilities, I’m thinking. Two jons clubbing together is unremarkable, and the disguise is simple enough — no need to darken more than the face and hands, slick down her hair, and put on the fake mustache and beard — but if seduction looks necessary, she sheds the disguise and goes into action looking completely different from Snowy.”

  “This is earlier than I’d have expected them to leave.”

  “There probably hadn’t been any police activity for a good while.”

  “But it makes a long wait until they finally drove the hearse to the cemetery.”

  “Boring, maybe. As long as they had a heater, the van would be comfortable enough until they needed to start vandalizing the hearse. I wonder what accounts they’re debiting.” He turned to Olinger. “Will you print the charge entries for customers checking out between four fifteen and five on Friday?”

  Olinger frowned.

  “We’re only interested in the spa customers. If you can separate them from salon customers.”

  Olinger eyed them a moment longer. “Did the cam give you what you’re looking for?”

  “Maybe. We need the customer entries to be certain.”

  She tapped on her computer, and a minute later brought them a sheet from her printer.

  It bore two names, Lowell Hamilton and Mala Rios. The spa charges for both debited from the Maritime Bank of Houston.

  “Does that give you what you need?” Olinger asked.

  “I think so,” Mama said. “Thank you very much.”

  Leaving the warmth of the building, the weather felt colder than ever. Janna jumped into the car and huddled in her jacket while Mama switched on the heat. “I didn’t expect accounts in this country.” She grimaced. “Today would have to be Sunday. We can’t contact the bank until tomorrow.”

  About the time the Feds swooped in.

  “We can still learn something about it. Look up their website. See if there’s anything suggesting why this pair has accounts there. Meanwhile. . .” He pulled out his cell and when a face appeared on the screen, grinned. “Maestro Musa!”

  Musa Reyal, their favorite tech in Cyber. The best, in Janna’s opinion. A cyber mage broad as a wall and nearly seven feet tall.

  “What’s your schedule like?”

  “Up to my eyebrows,” came the wary reply. “I suppose you have a priority request?”

  “Not at all. I’m sending you two faces that need identification, but they can just go in the queue. We think they’re foreign, so when you get to them, run the facial recognition against international databases.”

  “Will do.”

  Mama revved the fans to lift the car, and turned north out of the parking lot.

  Janna looked up from opening her slate. “Where are we going?”

  “Billard.”

  “Why?”

  “To see when our smugglers left, where they headed, and what ID they used.”

  Janna bent back over her slate while Mama wound through Oakland toward the airport. Maritime Bank of Houston proved to have an extensive site extolling a long list of services. She began scrolling through them . . . not sure if any answered Mama’s question about the accounts. Until one service leaped out at her.

  “Ah-hah! Companies employing foreign nationals working temporarily in this country can arrange for them to draw on one of the corporate accounts while here. Tomorrow. . .” Given time before the Feds arrived. “. . .we can learn which of those Lou and Snowy drew on.”

  Mama grimaced. “Which I’m betting will be a subsidiary of another company . . . or a holding company.”

  “We’ll put Musa tracking it.”

  “Except everything he does is on record and official. Let me contact a friend of mine and see what he can find out.”

  Janna straightened, narrowing her eyes at him. “A hacker?”

  His expression went righteous. “Certainly not. He’s in corporate law. But he does like tracking corporate links.”

  So, probably a hacker.

  They turned up Strait for Billard . . . houses to the left, snow-covered farm field on the right. The terminal sprawled beyond hangars for private planes and small and mid-size corporate jets.

  To her delight, two turtles rested on their air-cushion landing gear on the tarmac. Waiting for passengers and cargo to Kansas City, Omaha, Wichita, or one of the myriad of little towns across the state that enjoyed air service thanks to the airships’ zero runway need and economical operating cost.
She loved the turtles, and not just because her father helped design a few models. The sleek turtle shape of the carbon-fiber hulls, upper half darkened by the photovoltaic layer collecting solar energy to power the craft, made her want to pet them. She loved riding in them, gliding in near silence across landscape less than a thousand feet below, where it looked like a toy world of perfect miniatures.

  Janna gave herself several moments to admire them, then followed Mama into the terminal.

  While Mama persuaded his not-a-hacker friend to take a look at the Maritime Bank of Houston, she went through security footage. Finding their smugglers almost immediately. Lowell Hamilton and Mala Rios, looking just as they had at the spa, took the first flight of the day, the six o’clock turtle to Kansas City International.

  “Where they no doubt boarded a jet to a true international hub and connecting flight out of the country,” Janna said.

  “Probably on tickets they already had in different names.”

  “So . . . smugglers long gone with the data, destination unknown, identities so far unknown. Was there any real point to this trip?”

  Deadpan, Mama said, “You got to drool over some turtles.”

  She cleared her slate screen and sent it scrolling back into its spindle. “We’ll count this as a coffee break and go back to work.”

  * * *

  They spent the rest of the morning tracking down and interviewing their assault victim’s wife, fiancée, and girlfriends. One of the latter, a cosmetician, had the skill to dermal-dye, while the fiancée worked in a pharmacy where she could have easily used the store’s 3D printer to produce the John Henry used on Twissman.

  They all gasped in transparently false shock at such treatment of their husband/fiancé/boyfriend, barely hid their scorn and relief on being informed of Twissman’s inability to identify his assailants, then trotted out alibis for the night before. Reasonable alibis, though relying on corroboration by witnesses, not scib evidence.

  One of the girlfriends, a TA in Washburn University’s anthropology department, concluded their interviews, after which they adjourned to The Lunch Box in nearby Washburn View Mall for coffee and big bowls of chili.

  “Check Zanzibar’s records and we’ll find one of the five bought drinks,” Janna said.

  “More likely they bought credit however many weeks ago they started planning this.”

  Acquisition of the cat suits did indicate planning.

  Janna crumbled crackers into her chili. “So we run their bank records looking for cat suit purchase or rental.”

  “There won’t be any. Two years ago Washburn put on a production of a musical from last century called Cats that’s still popular with amateur theater groups and touring repertoire companies. As a TA, Ms. Hyke has contacts, friends of friends, for arranging to borrow some of the costumes.”

  And they did take the autocab to the university. “If they changed clothes in her office, the cat suits might still be there. I’ll get a warrant.”

  “Don’t bother. There’s probably four to six TA’s sharing the office. If the cat suits did come from the dramatics department, she’s probably already returned them. Just in case a fellow TA came in to spend Sunday working on lesson plans.”

  “So let’s go see who’s in the dramatics department today and—”

  “Or,” Mama interrupted, “since the only lasting result of the assault is the tattoo — which will force Twissman to henceforth rump romp in the dark so his fem du jour can’t read it — and he claims he can’t identify his assailants, we can just write it up that way and call it karma.”

  She frowned. “Let them get away with it?”

  Mama’s phone pinged. He grinned at the face on the screen. “Musa, maestro . . . what do you have for us?”

  “The results on your FR’s. Their names are Denis Bekker and Aliss Matiba, forty-two and thirty-eight, respectively. South African and Kenyan, respectively.”

  “Where did you find them?”

  “Civilian databases.”

  “Did you learn anything else?”

  “You have their names. The rest is up to you.”

  Janna heard the frown in his tone and raised her voice enough for him to hear. “Almega. Thank you, Musa.” She fished out her slate. “I’ll take her. You take him.”

  A frustrating half hour turned up little more data on Matiba than Musa gave them. She had no criminal record, since Musa found her in a civilian database, and apparently did not use social media. Janna found her only internet presence on the impressive website of her employer of record, Anasa Safaris in Nairobi, which along with her picture and title of Safari Planner gave her ancestry as Masai and touted fifteen years of arranging safaris for satisfied Anasa clients.

  “Anasa is Swahili for luxury,” Mama said.

  “No shit. Their strictly camera safaris cost platinum card. For that you spend your days in the national park or reserve of your choice — Tsavo, Ambroseli, Maasai Mara — observing and photographing wildlife from safely inside or, more daringly, atop so-called savannah limos. Then you ‘camp out’ for the night in a clear, temperature-controlled dome, safe from insects and prowling wildlife . . . sleeping in pavilion tents and dining on gourmet meals served with the finest of wines on tables laid with white linen and fine china and sterling service. All arranged for you by one of the company’s skilled Planners, like Matiba. Do you think she really works for them?”

  “I’m sure she does between assignments. It’s a perfect cover. She isn’t important enough for periodic absences to seem suspicious and unlikely to make anyone think smuggler/industrial spy when she’s asking whether you’re more interested in seeing wildebeest migrations or a lake of flamingos. Dekker doesn’t look like an industrial spy, either. He works as a data entry clerk for land agents Glauber and ten Brink in Johannesburg.” Mama eyed the screen of his own slate. “It would be interesting to see who actually owns Anasa, and Glauber and ten Brink.”

  “See what your not-a-hacker friend can find out.”

  Mama tapped a number into his cell . . . angling the screen away from Janna. “Mal . . . having fun?”

  “Oh, yeah,” came the friend’s voice. “I just love spending the weekend trolling the internet.” But an undertone of relish belied the sarcasm. “I don’t have much for you yet. The Houston account belongs to Wofford Ceramics, which is less a company than a distributor for Exline, Limited, in England, maker of fine china and laboratory glassware . . . which, in turn, is owned by a company in Germany, L.L.K., which manufactures ceramic engines for construction equipment. Indications are it’s owned by yet another corporation . . . which I haven’t identified yet since I don’t speak German and it’s a slog working through legal language with the translator on the computer.”

  “I have two more company names that might be easier to work with and give me the same answer as unraveling the ultimate owner of the Houston bank account.”

  Janna’s cell beeped. Lieutenant Singh’s face appeared on the screen, looking grim. “I need you and Maxwell back here ASAP.”

  A list of possible offenses raced through Janna’s head. “What’s happened?”

  “Director Paget wants to see the two of you.”

  Cold shot through Janna. Only something big brought the director in weekends. In an icy rush her thoughts leaped to Mama’s call to the Lanour station. Damn him!

  “What’s your ETA?”

  “Fifteen minutes. Head for the office,” she told Mama.

  His brows went up.

  “Paget wants to see us.”

  * * *

  Mama made it to the garage in eleven minutes. Racing up atrium stairs brought them, panting, to the squad room in a hair over the fifteen Janna quoted Singh. After another minute to catch their breath, they stepped close enough for the door to slide open.

  At least Morello was also off today, Janna reflected, seeing his empty desk.

  Small comfort. Two teams at their desks stared at them as a still-grim Singh headed their way from w
here she had obviously been waiting by the door of her office.

  “They’re here,” she said into her cell. “We’re on our way.”

  “What’s this about?” Mama asked while they rode the elevator up to the Command end of the tenth floor.

  Singh’s mouth thinned. “He wasn’t in a chatty mood, just said get you in here for a talk about the hearse case.”

  Janna bet he had another call from Fontana.

  At the Command section, Singh waved her badge past the entry door, admitting them to a reception area surrounded by the offices of the division and unit commanders, deputy director, and director. Light showed through translucent panels in several doors, while on the far side of the reception area, the doors of Paget’s outer and inner offices both stood open, framing a conference table and window beyond.

  In the office, Paget’s desk sat off to the left, in front of a wood-paneled wall displaying an array of badges, shoulder patches, old handcuffs, manacles, night sticks, and pictures of old police cars and uniforms. One wall without a window held certificates, award plaques, and photos of Paget with various notables and his family . . . including his former governor father-in-law Hadley Jubelt. A large vid screen dominated the wall behind the conference table.

  Paget looked distinguished as ever, despite casual slacks, a bulky turtleneck sweater, and silver hair less sleek than usual from being under a winter cap. He wore a bland expression, though his brows twitched on taking in Mama’s sweater as he waved them to the visitor chairs.

  “Detective Maxwell, Director Fontana on the Lanour station tells me you called him last night. Why?”

  Janna kept her expression as bland as Paget’s and braced herself to back Mama up.

  Brows up as though surprised, Mama said, “We knew he was anxious about the body stolen along with the hearse. I wanted to let him know we’d found it.”

  “Which he tells me he already knew, having been informed by Nafsingers after Lieutenant Vradel called them.”

  Mama’s expression turned innocent. “I didn’t know that.”

  “And you called him not during your watch but late in the evening.”