Duplicate Effort

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “We need your name in any case,” the street cop said.

  “Sure,” Flint started. “It’s Miles Flint. I’m still pretty well known at the precinct. You can check with most anyone in the Detective Division. I retired from there about four years ago. My partner was Noelle DeRicci.”

  “She’s the Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon,” Van Alen said.

  Flint wasn’t going to mention that part. He was going to let the street cop find that out on his own.

  “Oh,” the cop said, obviously in awe. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “No need,” Flint said. “I told you. I do know my way around an investigation.”

  The other cops were leading Monteith down the hall. The remaining street cop nodded toward Flint, and thanked Van Alen for calling them. Then he followed his colleagues out of the law firm.

  “What was that all about, Dad?” Talia asked.

  Flint put his hand on her shoulder. She was so tense her muscles felt like wire.

  “It’s related to something I worked on before I met you,” Flint said.

  “What?”

  He shook his head slightly. “I’m afraid it’s confidential.”

  She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Sure it is.”

  “I can vouch for that,” Van Alen said. “Most anything that happens in a law firm is confidential.”

  “Except when some guy comes in here and confesses,” Talia said.

  “Mr. Monteith didn’t confess to anything,” Van Alen said. “He came to inform me that a friend was dead.”

  “So you called the police?” Talia asked.

  “It turns out I was under a legal obligation to do so when I figured out that he had left two crime scenes.”

  “Is leaving a crime illegal?” Talia asked.

  “It is if you don’t report the crimes,” Van Alen said.

  “So he did break the law.”

  “In a minor way,” Van Alen said. “All your father did was convince the man to talk to the police. I hadn’t been able to.”

  “You’d think you could, being a lawyer and all,” Talia said.

  Van Alen smiled and then looked at Flint. “She’s got your sense of irony and outrage.”

  “What does that mean?” Talia asked.

  “It means,” Van Alen said, “that you could grow into someone I could like very much.”

  Then she turned around and headed back into her office.

  “Should we have that meeting?” she asked Flint.

  “I think we are going to have to,” he said. “Everything is different now.”

  Seventeen

  The techs were already inside Bowles’s apartment. Nyquist stopped in the hall and stared at the open door.

  He remembered the first and only time he had come here. He had stopped in front of Bowles’s security system, about to press a fingertip against the identification panel, when the panel insisted on a retinal scan.

  He’d been pleased with that. He figured that Bowles had a security system that was good enough for her needs. Because he’d worried when he entered the building; he’d initially been afraid that there wasn’t enough security in this place for someone of Bowles’s level of fame.

  Now her door stood open. Police line lasers marked an area just outside. Anyone who broke the beam would set off an alarm.

  He put his hand through one of the beams, knowing that with his identification, the alarm would not go off. Then he stepped into the apartment.

  None of the techs were in the living room, although two of Bowles’s personal robots were, hovering as if they were distressed at the invasion of their personal domain.

  The living room actually had a lived-in look: there was a blanket on the couch, over an indentation made by someone sitting there a little too often. An empty mug sat on an end table, and one of the nearby chairs had a handheld crossways on the seat, as if someone had set it down during a moment of distraction.

  He distinctly remembered how uncomfortable the living room had seemed six months ago. Then he had the impression that Bowles never spent any time in it.

  He walked past the hovering bots and down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. He hadn’t been this way before. Bowles had never let him out of the living room. She’d answered his questions—looking uncomfortable at being the subject of the interview instead of the interviewer—and then she had ushered him out the door.

  He felt odd going down the hallway now, as if he were invading her privacy.

  The first room was an office. Handhelds, papers, books, and lots of jewel cases littered the floor, shelves, and desk. Another empty mug sat on the floor beside a sturdy ergonomically correct chair.

  Only one wall remained clear. It had a slight blue tinge and it took him a moment of staring to realize that the wall was designed to be a backdrop to close-in reporting done away from any studio.

  He’d need to make sure the team looked at all the handhelds and the computers in here.

  Then he went down the hall to find a bedroom. It was the neatest room in the apartment, and it smelled musty. A bathroom opened off the back, with neatly folded towels and not a single personal item.

  No one used this room. If he had to guess, he would assume it was a guest room—one that no guest had stayed in, or at least, had not stayed in for a very long time.

  Finally he walked into the bedroom. It smelled of Bowles’s perfume. The scent struck him as forcefully as she had. She still seemed alive in here, in the unmade bed, the three separate outfits resting on the sheets, and the matching shoes neatly placed on the carpet.

  A tech was inside yet another bathroom. Nyquist peered in. It was Leidmann.

  “Her bots didn’t clean up after her, did they?” Nyquist asked.

  To her credit, Leidmann didn’t even jump at the sound of his voice. But she probably had the police line set to notify her whenever anyone else tried to enter.

  “I already checked the programming,” Leidmann said. “They were to clean surfaces and bathrooms and the kitchen. They were to make the bed, unless they had instructions otherwise, and they were to handle general maintenance, including washing her clothing, upgrading her wardrobe, and cooking small meals if she so desired.”

  “So why am I seeing handhelds everywhere and empty mugs beside tables?’

  “Because the programming also specifies that they can’t touch any work in progress. Since they’re bots and not human assistants, they can’t tell if a dirty mug is important to her work, so they just leave it until she tells them otherwise.” Then Leidmann frowned just a little. “Told them otherwise.”

  “It almost seems like she’s here, doesn’t it?” Nyquist asked.

  Leidmann nodded. “She spent a lot of time here.”

  “Or at least, she did after she got fired,” Nyquist said, and told Leidmann what he had observed six months before.

  “Well, this clearly became home base,” Leidmann said. “She used this to stage everything.”

  Nyquist nodded. “What do you make of the bedroom?”

  Leidmann grinned. “Still not married yet, huh, Bartholomew?”

  “I was married once,” he said, almost defensively. “Why?”

  “When a woman lays three outfits across the bed, she can’t decide what to wear.”

  “Yeah,” he said dryly. “That’s obvious.”

  “And what she is going to wear is an unusually important decision, because on this day, she thinks someone will notice.”

  “You’re saying she wore special clothes because she was involved with someone?” he asked.

  Leidmann grinned at him. “You’re a little too literal. I’m saying she believed she was going to have a big day today.”

  He frowned. “Didn’t that piece run yesterday?”

  “Yes, but she was going to face the reaction today.” Leidmann touched the bathroom sink with the edge of a brush. “There’s extra makeup in here, but none on the vanity or in the cracks along the floor like there would be
if she always applied a ton of makeup.”

  “Even with bots cleaning up after her?” he asked.

  “Especially with bots cleaning up. Makeup is the hardest thing to clean. Is that little pile of dust something that the woman is using to paint her face or is it just a pile of dust?”

  “Most women don’t wear makeup,” Nyquist said. “And those that would have once upon a time now use enhancements.”

  “Ki Bowles was in a profession where the personal image constantly changed. She didn’t dare get an enhancement that might outdate itself in a year or less.”

  “If the studio paid for it, she could,” he said.

  “And have some recovery time?” Leidmann shook her head. “You need to do some study of reporters. She didn’t have the time to recover.”

  “It usually only takes a day or two.”

  “A day or two is too long, especially if some story is breaking. She needed to follow trends with a minimum of fuss.”

  “Seems like makeup would be a maximum of fuss,” he said.

  “To us, maybe. But it was part of her job. And she put some on this morning, again, for that big day.” Leidmann touched the edge of the sink with a gloved hand.

  “You feel sorry for her, don’t you?” Nyquist asked.

  “Yeah,” Leidmann said. “I’m not finding any evidence of any other person here.”

  “We knew she lived alone,” he said.

  “But even people who live alone have evidence of the other people in their lives—holos on tables, 2-D images on the wall, rotating images in little frames. Or gifts, something that doesn’t quite fit—a toy, maybe, or a shirt that’s the wrong color. Or messages on the household computer system. I’m not finding anything.”

  “It’s that guest room that got you, isn’t it?”

  Leidmann braced her gloved hands against the edge of the sink and turned toward Nyquist so that she faced him directly. Her mouth turned downward.

  He’d never seen her so disturbed, at least at an empty scene like this one—the one without the body.

  “Why does she have a guest room?” Leidmann asked. “In anticipation of a guest that never came?”

  That would be sad. He’d never seen the use for a guest room. When his mother had come after he went into the hospital, she stayed at his place for a few days. Then, when he was conscious enough to realize she was there, he insisted she get a hotel room—and he paid for it.

  He supposed it was possible that Bowles kept the room for a guest that never came, but she didn’t seem the type. Of course, he didn’t know her all that well. He’d judged her on her media persona and the handful of encounters he’d had with her.

  “Maybe a guest used to come, and stopped,” Nyquist said. “Or several guests. I know almost nothing about her personal life. Does she have family? Was she married?”

  “That’s the whole point,” Leidmann said. “There’s no evidence of parents or siblings or college friends. No evidence of a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a pet. And certainly no evidence of a divorce.”

  “Except an empty apartment she never came home to,” he said softly.

  “Or maybe she was just a hardworking woman who had never made time for a relationship in her life. It’s not that unusual.”

  Nyquist peered at Leidmann. Was she talking about herself?

  “Relationships take time.” He was learning that with DeRicci. She was one of the busiest professionals on the Moon, and he hadn’t been busy at all until just recently. He’d spent a lot of time waiting for her, which irked him. He didn’t want to be the kind of person who waited for anyone.

  “You got techs coming in for the handhelds, right?” Nyquist asked.

  “I got a tech for the household system,” Leidmann said. “But I’m taking the handhelds back to the lab. There’s something about the sheer number of them that has me intrigued.”

  Nyquist flashed on the diagram in Bowles’s studio. “I’d look at them here,” he said. “She may have them in their places for a reason.”

  “Like some kind of trail of information?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” Nyquist said. “I found some other information she’d been working on, and it was in the form of a diagram. We can’t dismiss the idea that she liked patterns, and used them in her work.”

  Leidmann made a sound of disgust. “My teams are spread thin as it is. Two major murders in one day—”

  “Two?” Nyquist asked. “I take it you’re not just meaning the man killed with Bowles?”

  “No,” Leidmann said. “I’m talking high-profile murders. First Ki Bowles and now Roshdi Whitford.”

  Nyquist froze. He hadn’t been monitoring his links since he was called to the crime scene. He’d downloaded the chatter, figuring he would run through it at the end of the day instead of letting it distract him now.

  “Roshdi Whitford of Whitford Security?” he asked.

  Leidmann nodded. Nyquist tapped a chip on the back of his hand. Someone had mentioned Whitford Security to him earlier in the day.

  He searched through his notes. They were cursory—something he usually improved when he returned to the office—but cursory was good enough.

  Edvard Jaeger of the Hunting Club had mentioned that men from Whitford Security had cleared the place in anticipation of Bowles visit. When Nyquist had asked to meet with them, he was told that the men were already gone.

  He’d made a note to contact Whitford Security during the course of the investigation, see if he could get the men’s names, and find out what kind of threat they were anticipating against Bowles.

  But he couldn’t wait now. He needed some information and he needed it fast.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Leidmann, and left the room. He went down the hallway to the living room, realizing as he did so that he hadn’t inspected the kitchen yet.

  It would have to wait.

  First he had to get some questions answered, questions he was going to investigate when he was done here.

  He linked to the coroner’s office first. One of the lower level examiners appeared in front of his vision.

  “Who’s handling the Bowles case?” he asked without preamble.

  “Chief Examiner Brodeur,” she said.

  “Put me through.”

  For a moment, his vision was normal and then Brodeur appeared in front of it. He was wearing a drape over his clothing to catch spatter, and unlike most people when speaking on a visual link, he did not try to clean up.

  He appeared to be leaning on a desk, peering at a screen rather than using his internal links like Nyquist was.

  “I know, I know,” Brodeur said. “You caught the Hunting Club case. We’ll deal with it when you get back here. There’s too much to discuss on a secure link.”

  Meaning he didn’t want to risk leaking information, even on a supposedly secure link. Not that Nyquist blamed him. What it meant, though, was that Gumiela hadn’t yet announced Bowles’s death, which was good for him.

  “I’ve just got one question for you,” Nyquist said.

  “Cause of death should have been obvious,” Brodeur snapped, and Nyquist almost smiled. Once DeRicci had told him how much she hated Brodeur and his preemptory manner, but Nyquist found it amusing.

  “At least let me ask the question first,” Nyquist said.

  Brodeur sighed. “Quickly.”

  “Have you identified the other body yet?”

  “Not entirely,” he said.

  Whatever Nyquist had expected, it wasn’t that. Brodeur was usually very certain of himself. “What does that mean?”

  “It means our second corpse has history under various names.”

  “Which one came up first?” Nyquist asked.

  “Enzio Lamfier.”

  “Which means nothing to me,” Nyquist said. “Is he from Armstrong? Did he just come through the Port? Was he a guest at the Hunting Club?”

  “Those questions are for detectives to answer,” Brodeur said. “But I do know that he has other identitie
s as well. I’m just not able to confirm them as yet. You do know that we have a spate of celebrity bodies today.”

  “Spate?” Nyquist asked. “I thought only two.”

  “Two is plenty,” Brodeur said. “In fact, it’s too many. I have press everywhere, and I haven’t even gotten the Whitford body yet.”

  “Do they know about our first victim?”

  “No one’s asked yet,” Brodeur said.

  “The second one—”

  “Whitford?”

  “No,” Nyquist said. “This Lamfier or whatever his name is. In your initial scan, did you turn up any ties to Whitford Security?”

  Brodeur nodded. “I thought you already knew that part.”

  “What part?” Nyquist asked.

  “Apparently, he was assigned as a bodyguard to our other victim. He might have died trying to save her.”

  “Might have?” Nyquist asked.

  “The wounds aren’t clear, and I’ve been too busy to examine them closely. Besides, I find these shadow identities suspicious, especially for a bodyguard. Now, may I return to my work?”

  “Sure,” Nyquist said, and shut down the link.

  He remained in the living room for a moment, staring at the handhelds without really seeing them. Two people with ties to Whitford Security dead, as well as Bowles. And without stretching things, she could be seen as tied to them as well.

  Obviously, Gumiela hadn’t thought of that or she would have contacted him when Whitford’s body turned up. Nyquist needed to contact her, and then he had to insinuate himself into that investigation.

  “Let me know what you find,” he sent to Leidmann through his links. Then he left Bowles’s apartment and headed back to the precinct, hoping that Gumiela was in a receptive mood.

  Eighteen

  Flint was too nervous to sit in Van Alen’s office. He paced across the cream-colored carpet, skimming his fingers against the backs of the upholstered chairs.

  Van Alen leaned against her desk, watching him.

  “We have to assume that Ki Bowles’s death is linked to the story,” Flint said.