Duplicate Effort

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  WSX was known for being ruthless.

  His assistant was probably right.

  “Nonsense,” Wagner said. “If we were going to take action against this Bowles woman, we would sue her. In fact, we already have several cases started. At least that was what I ordered. I’m assuming each department stepped up.”

  Various heads nodded around the room. He didn’t feel reassured.

  His stomach ached. There was bile in his throat. He felt ill.

  But he couldn’t excuse himself, not yet. To do so would be to show weakness, and he didn’t dare do that in front of his staff.

  “We’re being set up,” he said.

  “Sir?” His assistant came forward.

  Wagner blinked. He hadn’t realized he had spoken out loud. But he had.

  They were being set up. First by Bowles with that horrible news story. Then by whoever killed her. People had short memories. The media had even shorter memories.

  They would think that Bowles’s death—which might have been just a mugging gone wrong—was tied to WSX.

  What the public would think—what the media would imply—was that instead of going after Bowles legally, making sure she wasn’t inventing the entire thing, WSX went straight to the worst option.

  WSX didn’t sue or take her to court.

  WSX didn’t try to destroy her in the media.

  WSX had her killed.

  Wagner cursed.

  It had suddenly become less important to learn how Bowles had gotten her information and more important to learn how she died.

  Wagner would have to use one of his in-house detectives.

  But that might backfire as well.

  He needed a plan. He didn’t have a plan.

  He was reacting to everyone else’s plan. Everyone else’s questions. Everyone else’s fears.

  People came to lawyers for rationality, for calmness, for cold calculating reasoning.

  At the moment, he wasn’t cold or calculating.

  He was as panicked as his clients usually were.

  He needed to think.

  Wagner turned his back on the screens and headed to his office.

  He needed to regain his rational self.

  He needed to become Justinian Wagner, head of the biggest law firm in the Earth Alliance.

  He needed to figure out exactly who was trying to hurt him, and then he had to hurt them back.

  Thirty

  Flint returned to the booth. He surveyed the room before he sat down, and saw one of the Sequev sneak over to the table Flint had used to contact Nyquist. With one of its eight limbs, the Sequev grabbed the plate of food Flint had left, hiding the plate under its—armpit? Flint didn’t know the exact terminology—as it scurried back across the room.

  Otherwise there wasn’t much movement. The human/Peyti study group seemed to be arguing, and the Peyti/Sequev group was using its own screen to check sources.

  Flint slid into the booth. Talia was staring at their screen, her fingers threaded through her curls.

  “This isn’t what I wanted,” she said, staring at the legal notations in front of her.

  “What is it?” He had to get his head back into this part of the investigation.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Talia said. “It’s really technical.”

  That caught Flint’s attention. Most legal documents, while written in legalese, were relatively easy to understand.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, like, there’s half a dozen injunctions here, and a lot of orders of protection and a few—I don’t know—criminal things? And I can’t tell if they’re for Bowles or against her or what. It seems to contradict itself.”

  Flint’s mouth opened. He hadn’t expected a legal history that extended through dozens of cases.

  “Each case is different,” he said as he turned toward the screen. “She could have had an injunction placed against her at the same time that she had placed an injunction against someone else.”

  “Why?” Talia asked.

  “Don’t know yet,” Flint said. “But I do know that such things are common in messy divorce cases. One party claims that the other is harassing them, the other party issues an injunction to prove that they’re the one being harassed, so the first party does the same for the same reason.”

  “How do you figure out what’s true?” Talia asked.

  “I don’t,” Flint said, “at least not anymore. I had to a few times as a detective. It’s not fun.”

  “Sounds weird,” Talia said. “Weird” appeared to be her word for the day.

  “It’s annoying. Because usually no one is being harassed—except maybe the legal system.”

  He thumbed through the screen listings. For. Against. Plaintiff, Defendant.

  He reset the search parameters, looking for cases where Bowles asked for the injunction.

  “How does this help?” Talia asked.

  “Watch,” Flint said.

  Three cases appeared, along with links to various other related cases.

  In all three, Bowles had asked for an injunction against someone. All three someones had different names, and all three injunctions were issued at different times, but the reasons for the injunctions were the same:

  She was being stalked.

  “Here it is,” he said, pointing to the relevant passages. “Someone was after her, as recently as last year.”

  Orders of protection, injunctions, and some stalking violations, but nothing solid or nothing that seemed solid. Except that one of the cases was scheduled to go to court in six months.

  “Prosecuting a stalker,” he muttered.

  “What?” Talia asked.

  “She pressed charges against someone under the harassment and stalking laws. It was going to trial relatively soon.”

  “You think the stalker got her?” Talia asked.

  “It’s a possibility.” He pressed a side button and got the information on the stalking cases on a small chip that he could insert into his own systems. He put the chip in his pocket.

  Then he switched to another search. He wanted to see why people had issued injunctions against Bowles.

  “Shouldn’t you be following the link on the stalker?” Talia asked.

  “In a minute,” Flint said.

  He was staring at a series of injunctions and as he did, he realized that Talia was right; they were extremely technical. It took him a while to figure out that they were injunctions, not just against Bowles, but against InterDome.

  Someone hadn’t liked an investigation that Bowles had been conducting.

  Several someones in fact.

  He had thought there might be a couple of people who wanted Bowles dead. He just hadn’t expected there to be so many of them.

  And he hadn’t even gone through the nonharassment, nonstalking, noninjunction cases.

  “We need separate screens,” he said to Talia.

  “What for?” She apparently was thinking that he was going off to have another private conversation, leaving her alone again.

  “There’s too much material here, and we haven’t even gotten to the public records. We have to go through all of it.”

  “All of it?” Talia asked. She seemed intrigued now.

  He nodded.

  “You think this stuff is important?”

  “Until just now, Van Alen and I assumed that Bowles’s death had to do with our case. But that’s closing our eyes to all of this.” He shook his head. “The woman had more enemies than anyone outside of politics.”

  Talia let out a small sigh of relief. “Does that mean we’re safe?”

  Flint looked at her, feeling the urge to lie, and realizing that it would do nothing more than make him feel better.

  “It means we have a chance at being safe,” he said. “But let’s make sure before we relax our guard, okay?”

  Talia flopped back against the booth. She tapped her fingers on the table.

  “Okay,” she said, as if this were all his fau
lt.

  Which, he suddenly realized, it was.

  Thirty-one

  The Whitford Security offices were housed in one of the newest sections of the Dome. The Dome had been rebuilt here after a bombing almost three years ago. The building looked new, too, even if it was yet another concrete monstrosity with no windows.

  The building had been locked down for most of the afternoon. Street cops and police security bots ringed the building’s outside. A handful more guarded the parking lot.

  Savita Romey parked her own car on the street in front of the building—if the street could truly be considered in front of the building. Even the building’s doors were hard to see. The concrete exterior had some kind of weird paint or surface covering that made it reflect the colors being filtered through the Dome.

  Since the Dome was still in Dome Daylight, the building itself looked yellow and Moon brown with just a hint of the blackness of space.

  “Front door?” she asked one of the street cops. He handed her a small device that she could press her fist into before he answered. The device confirmed her identity.

  And like a good cop on security detail, he actually looked at the device before he pointed her to a corner of the building.

  She thought she had seen the outline of the door near the end of the sidewalk, but his point was nowhere near that faint outline.

  Still, she followed the man’s gesture, and realized what she’d been seeing as she got closer.

  What she had taken for the door’s outline was really that, an outline etched into the concrete surface. She would wager there were two or three other outlines on other sides of the building.

  She’d heard about the idea, but she’d never seen it in practice. Theoretically, a visible door outline at the end of a sidewalk would distract a perpetrator, and give whoever was inside a chance to either get away from him, or secure the existing doors.

  It wasn’t until she reached the building’s corner that the door revealed itself. Its outline appeared in the concrete, surprising her by covering the corner itself.

  She shoved her fist against the identification node that opened at waist level. Lights revolved around the exterior of the node, a kind of wink-wink acknowledgement that the identification process was working.

  But if it had been working properly, the door would have opened for her by now. What was really going on was that someone inside had seen her identification and had to approve the opening of the door.

  Finally the entire corner moved away from her, revealing blackness inside.

  For the first time since Nyquist had told her that he wasn’t coming with her, she felt uncomfortable. Before she’d been elated that she was working on her own again.

  But now she was going into a strange building with a dark interior, filled with angry security personnel.

  She stopped, turned, and beckoned two of the street cops to join her.

  They looked at each other, clearly surprised.

  She was about to send a message to them on their links, along with a reminder that the detective controlled the scene, when they both ran toward her.

  They were both men, both much larger than she was, although she would have wagered that the man on her left didn’t have half of her strength.

  “Sir?” asked the one on her right, clearly awaiting instructions.

  “It’s Detective Romey,” she said, hating the whole sir designation. “You two are going to back me up. Have someone fill that hole you left in the perimeter.”

  The guy on her right started to head back, obviously to tell someone to take his place, when she caught his arm.

  “Via your link, Officer…?”

  “Zurik,” he said. “And this is Officer Novello.”

  He nodded toward the big guy still standing on Romey’s left.

  “Pleasure,” she said in a dry tone. She hadn’t meant for a full-fledged introduction. “Just follow me, keep an eye out for trouble, and do what I tell you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Zurik said.

  “Detective Romey,” she said again. “Call me sir one more time and I’ll put a notation on your record.”

  “Yes—” He caught himself before the “sir.” She could see him try to substitute “ma’am” or some other honorific before he settled on— “Detective.”

  She nodded once and stepped inside.

  The air smelled faintly of mint, which she knew was supposed to have calming properties. She found that interesting. The place was set up like a fortress and designed to repel an attack, no matter how small.

  The street cops followed her, and the door closed behind them. At that moment, the lights came on full.

  So the darkness was a twofold security design. It put the guest off balance and it prevented anyone standing outside the building from seeing in and noting the layout.

  Paranoid. But smart.

  She passed the first corner, which branched into a hallway that turned left, and was looking for signage when a woman appeared seemingly from nowhere.

  Romey had seen that trick before. There was a filter built into the hallway, and employees stepped through it, giving no hint of their presence—from sound to smell—until they just appeared.

  “Detective Romey.” Like most people, the woman was taller than Romey. She was also thinner, but the kind of thin that came from enhancements and not eating enough, not the kind that came from remaining in shape. “I’m to take you to our vice president in charge of operations.”

  “You’re to take me to a conference room where you’ll assemble the staff,” Romey said.

  “We don’t put our people in the same room,” the woman said.

  “Well, you do now,” Romey said. “Find some place, put them there, and let them know I’ll be coming to talk with them.”

  The woman stared at Romey, obviously confused by the order.

  “Is there a problem?” Romey asked.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “It’s just that we’re told not to do this under any circumstance.”

  “I’m not a circumstance,” Romey said. “I’m the Armstrong Police Department, and I trump any orders given by any boss. If your staff has trouble with that, I can send them all en masse to jail. Would that please you?”

  “Our lawyers—”

  “Are irrelevant,” Romey said. “I’m not going to detain you people. I’m going to question you about Roshdi Whitford’s death. Now, unless he died from some kind of conspiracy involving every member of this company, most of your staff have nothing to worry about from me—unless you make sure they don’t follow my orders.”

  The woman’s eyes opened wide. Romey couldn’t tell if she was communicating to someone higher up on a link or if she was just one of those people whose eyes got wider when she was surprised.

  “I’ll send the order,” she said. “Come with me.”

  She didn’t go through the filter. Instead, she walked to the next corner—this one on the right—and turned down the right-angled hallway.

  Romey turned her head slightly and noted that her street cops were following. Good. She might need them.

  “How many employees do you have?” she asked as they walked.

  “Here or abroad?” the woman asked.

  Abroad. That was a term Romey hadn’t heard outside Earth.

  “In the building,” she said.

  “At present…” This time the woman’s pause was obvious. “…two hundred and fifty-seven.”

  “And how many are employed in Armstrong?”

  “We don’t give out that information,” the woman said.

  “What’s your name?” Romey snapped.

  “Um, Sally Juhl,” the woman said.

  “And your position here?” Romey asked.

  “I’m liaison to the senior staff.”

  “The senior staff,” Romey repeated. “I trust that includes Roshdi Whitford.”

  “No. He has his own assistants.”

  “Is that what a liaison is?” Romey asked. “An assist
ant?”

  “No, I actually serve as a communications and business coordinator for the members of the senior staff. They’re not allowed to hire their own assistants.” She bit her lower lip, as if she’d said too much.

  “Well, Ms. Sally Juhl, Liaison to the Senior Staff, you are now allowed to give out any and all information to me.”

  “I’m so sorry, ma’am,” Juhl said. “I just can’t. Almost everything we do here is proprietary.”

  “We don’t care about your proprietary information. The owner of this company is dead. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

  “He warned us that that might happen,” she said.

  “Excuse me.” Romey grabbed the woman’s arm, stopping her from continuing down the hall. “What did you just say?”

  “He warned us that he might die,” Juhl said.

  “When?” Romey asked.

  “When he hired us. He said this is a cutthroat business. If we join it, we have to be willing to give a hundred-thousand percent. And that included our lives. He said that he was always ready to give his life. That’s what made him good at what he did.”

  “Do you think he died protecting someone?” Romey asked.

  “I don’t know,” Juhl said. “We’re not allowed to know. That’s what the officer who locked us down said. We know that Mr. Whitford is dead, that he died at home, and that we have lost two other employees although we don’t know who they are yet, either.”

  At least the officer who closed the place down had done his job. Romey let Juhl’s arm go.

  “That’s right, isn’t it?” Juhl asked, absently rubbing the place where Romey’s fingers had been. “We’re not supposed to know, right?”

  “The less you know the better I can interview,” Romey said. She turned to Officer Zurik. “Send for some backup. I can’t cover two-hundred-some-odd employees on my own. And get some techs in here, preferably ones who know something about security systems.”

  “Yes…detective.” He nodded, then stepped back, obviously planning to go outside to send the message.

  “In here,” Romey snapped. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Yes, sir. Ma’am. Detective. I’m sorry, sir.”

  Romey narrowed her eyes but didn’t say anything. Instead, she turned toward Juhl.