There was nothing there, as far as he could tell.
Just the lights of the city remained to shine back at him, along with Morley and Jordan’s headset lamps, reflected on the mirrored sides of the building across the way.
“Did they find any bodies below?” Nick said, glancing back at Morley.
The senior detective shook his head.
“Not that I’ve heard. You smell anything, Tanaka? Like maybe parts of someone? Anyone who could still be up here?”
The detective glanced to his left, frowning at what looked like an old-style copy machine sticking out of part of the wall.
It hung there, silent, dripping black fluid.
To Nick, it looked strangely like some kind of farm animal, dripping blood.
“…Maybe part of Silverton or one of the thieves stuck in a wall, like the rest of this stuff?” Morley added after a beat.
Nick shook his head, managing to not roll his eyes with an effort.
“The other smells are pretty much overpowering everything else right now,” he said, peering out again over the missing floor. “I doubt I can smell much more than you can right now, boss. Pretty much everything smells like smoke and chemicals… and burnt plastic.”
Morley nodded as he continued to shine his headlamp around, looking at the wide-open pit where most of the building’s eighty-eighth floor had been.
“Okay, then,” he said, noncommittal. “Just keep trying.”
Nick focused his eyes on the same crater.
Leaning out further over the opening, he looked down towards the lower floors.
Tilting his head as his eyes caught a familiar shape, he frowned.
“Wait,” he said. “I think I see something.”
He didn’t think.
Gauging the distance in a heartbeat with his vampire eyes, he made a snap decision.
“I’m going to check it out,” he said, glancing at Morley. “Wait here.”
Morley frowned. “What? No. Don’t do that—”
But Nick had already stepped forward, letting himself fall through the however-many missing stories to what must be the eighty-fifth? Eighty-fourth floor?
Anyway, the floor that started up again at the end of the crater.
He heard a startled cry from Jordan as he disappeared through the opening.
Nick barely had time to recognize the sound before he landed in a crouch on a solid-feeling floor, one completely covered in debris and a hell of a lot more of that white powder.
Chemically-laced water dripped down on his head, neck and collar, wetting his coat and shirt like sticky and smelly rain, dripping down inside his clothes.
He glanced around, shivering, that time using his nose to find what he thought he’d spotted from the floor above.
Between his eyes and his sense of smell, he found it in seconds.
The glint of the old-fashioned watch, which is what first caught his eye from that upper floor, was still strapped around its previous owner’s wrist.
“Found an arm,” Nick called up.
Seeing a flickering of lights, he glanced up and saw Morley and Jordan peering over the edge of the broken floor, their headsets making him blink, and eventually throw up a hand to shield his eyes.
“Don’t get too fucking close,” Nick growled.
He switched to his headset, opening the channel to both of them.
“Watch the edge,” he said. “You’re too close, both of you… I told you to stay away from the edge there.”
“You’re out of your mind, Midnight,” Jordan said.
Nick ignored that.
“Why don’t the two of you take the elevator down here?” he suggested.
He looked around, making a more concerted effort to count floors.
“Eighty-fifth floor,” he said after a pause. “So three floors down. The structure seems intact down here. And there’s a body. Part of one, at least. Something for us to, you know, do actual detecting on.”
Jordan laughed.
Nick could practically see Morley roll his eyes.
Still, the senior detective’s voice was almost amused when he answered.
“On our way.”
Chapter 3
Definitely Murder
Nick frowned down at the pieces of body on the floor, watching the CSI squints as they took blood and tissue samples, snapping photos of nearby debris.
Nick hadn’t been able to tell them much.
He found the arm.
A few minutes later, mostly using his nose, he found a foot.
He also found a chunk of flesh wrapped around part of a steel girder. They now thought that chunk of skin and muscle might have come from someone else.
To say there was an excess of scene contaminants—contaminants likely to confuse any attempts to detail the circumstances of the original crime, at least using physical evidence alone—was a laughable understatement.
Nick could tell them the victim’s sex, and his rough age.
Both things could more or less be surmised from the visual appearance of the arm and foot, so he wasn’t sure if he’d given them much, even telling them that.
He could tell them his rough physical condition prior to death, that he was human, the fact that he was a drinker, the fact that he liked to smoke mook, that quasi-hallucinogen all the kids were into these days… and that he’d had a manicure recently.
Those details might have saved them an hour or so in the lab, but he wasn’t sure how relevant any of his observations were, in terms of solving the case.
He couldn’t tell them much beyond that.
He really couldn’t tell them much that was useful, in other words.
They’d already ID’d the arm, and likely the foot, since his implant was still functioning, and, miraculously, that implant was embedded in the same arm Nick found.
It was Silverton.
As for what killed him?
Nick glanced around at the burnt-out floor of the building.
That was going to take more than a severed arm, a severed foot, and his nose to figure out.
Morley, Jordan and all the squints seemed to agree that Silverton had already been dead when the bomb went off. For Morley and Jordan, it was because of what they’d been told by building security about the contents of the surveillance footage.
For the squints, presumably their reasoning was more nuanced, and had to do with the two pieces of Silverton Nick found.
He was still standing there when Jordan walked up, smacking him lightly on the shoulder.
“Midnight.” He motioned with his head for Nick to follow him back in the direction of the elevators. “They got the tapes. The warrant just went through.”
Nick didn’t hesitate.
Turning away from the mess on the floor and the dozen or so techs in yellow jumpsuits sorting through it all, some with NYPD, some I.S.F., some Home-Sec, and probably F.B.I., he followed the other detective down the corridor. He noticed Jordan was holding a new cup of coffee in his hand.
It had been over an hour, so it had to be new.
No way the cup Nick brought him would have lasted this long.
They were keeping that rookie uniform cop busy.
“Have you looked at it yet?” Nick said, as he followed Jordan into the first elevator car.
The human bent down, punching the key for the lobby floor and shaking his head.
“No. Morley’s waiting for us in the security station now.”
Nick frowned. “I thought it was a private system? Silverton’s?”
“It is. Well… it was. The building has backups of everything. Silverton had it routed through the building’s main security system, along with his own cloud service… presumably in case anything happened that he’d need them to know about. They got a breach warning a few minutes before the explosion.”
“They didn’t call the fucking cops?” Nick frowned.
“They did.” Jordan gave him a look. “One black and white showed up, but he’d only just ve
rified the alarm was legit and called for backup when the explosion went off. I guess the guy called for private-sec backup too, but they hadn’t had time to respond, either.”
Nick grunted.
“Yeah,” Jordan said, rolling his eyes for both of them. “So much for all that fancy private security. Although I guess the imaging was worth something… even if it didn’t save him.”
Nick frowned.
He had his doubts Silverton’s ghost would care, but maybe he was wrong.
They reached the ground floor even more quickly than Nick remembered them going up. It seemed like he’d barely had time to lean his weight on the mirrored back wall when the doors dinged in front of him, then opened soundlessly on their tracks.
He followed Jordan out.
That time, they hung a left, away from the main doors of the building and towards the entrance at the opposite end, the one that faced the cluster of buildings making up the bulk of the business park. Before they reached the glass wall and the several sets of revolving doors, Jordan hung another left.
Nick followed him down a narrow corridor past some main building toilets and towards a gray door marked “Staff Only.”
Jordan walked straight up to it and knocked.
He downed the last of his second cup of coffee while he waited for someone to answer.
The door buzzed and clicked a few seconds later, popping open enough that Jordan could grab hold of the handle and swing it outward.
He led Nick into a room that was more or less wall-to-wall screens covered in moving images. So much was happening in those images, in real time, in replay, scrolling back and forth between the two, Nick fought to orient himself for the first few seconds he stood there.
Three-dimensional replays, many of which bordered on virtual-real but for a faint transparency, moved soundlessly in front of flatter, two-dimensional screens.
Because of the sheer number of those three-dimensional depictions, it took Nick a few seconds more to pinpoint the exact number of actual people in the room.
In the end, he accomplished it partly via his sense of smell.
Slowly—well, slow for a vampire—his mind and eyes compartmentalized, bringing it all into focus.
He noticed only then how dark the room was, but for the flickering screens and holograms. No other illumination appeared to be present, which he supposed made sense, given the way human eyes functioned.
The techs could focus on the screens easier if the room was dark.
By then, Nick felt a lot of those eyes on him.
The people stationed in front of those multiple consoles looked over when Jordan and Nick walked into the room, staring at both of them.
Nick had counted six of them by then.
All but one was surprisingly young.
More than half were female.
Both things surprised him at first, and forced him to realize he still carried around an outdated mental image of security guards as overweight, middle-aged, male humans who would chat him up about how they were studying for the entrance exams for the force, back when he was a human cop.
It was bizarre how long some biases stuck in his mind.
These days, a lot of security teams now were made up of tech-punks, like his young, early-twenties human friend, Kit.
Two women about Kit’s age looked him and Jordan over briefly, then turned back to their consoles, their expressions indifferent.
A third woman, maybe a decade older, stared at Nick’s eyes.
Since he’d more or less come from the fights, he wasn’t wearing the human-blending contacts he normally wore while conducting police work.
Obviously, she’d noticed his clear, crystal-like irises.
Even more obviously, she knew what they meant.
Nick was still avoiding returning her stare when Morley looked up.
He’d been peering down at one of the screens in the darkest corner of the room, behind a number of the life-like, three-dimensional projections, so while Nick smelled him in here, he hadn’t actually seen him right away with his eyes.
Like Jordan, Morley gripped a heat-retaining mug in one hand.
Morley’s was one he’d brought from home, though, not one of the returnable ones used by the local coffee shops.
Nick knew that in part because it didn’t have the round, brand ID for the particular coffee chain on the side in blinking neon.
Also, he’d seen Morley lugging that particular, ugly-ass mug around before, which had the retro symbol for the New York Yankees on one side in blue and white, surrounded by semi-organic designs of a rippling American flag and exploding fireworks.
Morley motioned with his jaw for them to join him.
Nick glanced around at the flickering, moving, multi-dimensional images as he followed Jordan across the dark space.
He’d already noticed most of the screens and projections showed imaging of the same two people—a heavy-set male with a wrestler’s build, and a small, wiry woman with metallic, silver hair done in tight dreadlocks.
The multiple images showed them at different angles and in different parts of the building, including inside the elevators, walking down a business suite corridor, in the building’s lobby, and outside, on the building’s landscaped grounds.
Most of the images showed those two people in a pale green, glass-enclosed, hyper-modern corner office, however.
It had to be Silverton’s office.
Which meant those images likely came from Silverton’s private security system.
The rest must come from main building security.
Watching the different screens, Nick guessed the techs were using Silverton’s private-sec footage to do a facial-, body- and gait-rec search on all footage picked up by standard surveillance within the relevant timeframe.
He reached Morley’s side.
Jordan was already standing there, peering down at the same monitor. He hit a pressure point on the mug he carried and the thing collapsed down to a disc the size of an old quarter, if about three times as thick.
Nick watched him shove it in a back pocket, then nod to Morley.
“Anything on who these two were?”
Morley grunted, giving Nick a look before returning his gaze to Jordan. He motioned at the screen over which all three of them now stood.
“I haven’t looked at the complete footage from the office yet… but I’ve seen most of the highlights reel. I figured you two could look at the rest.”
“Do they have an ID?” Jordan repeated.
Morley nodded, once.
“We’ve got a preliminary on the two perps. Janice and Tig Gorman. Married couple. Pros. They mostly do jobs for hire. Murder is unusual for them, but they’ve been up for assault and carrying illegal weapons in the past—”
“So it definitely was murder then?” Nick said.
Morley glanced past Jordan at him, his mouth pursed, his dark eyes puzzled.
Nick frowned back, looking between them. “I just mean… you confirmed he died before the explosion? Silverton? Not in the blast itself?”
Morley’s puzzlement lifted.
“Yes.” The detective’s lips pursed. “From the recordings we got, Silverton was already dead when the bomb went off. He pulled a weapon on the woman when they first entered his office. She saw him… and hit back, hard. He was dead before he touched the floor.”
Glancing down at the flat, 2D screen below him, he added,
“From their reactions, they went in knowing they might have to kill him. It was at least within the job parameters they’d been given.”
“What makes you say that?” Jordan said.
Morley shrugged, glancing at him.
“Well, they didn’t seem overly upset by the death. They barely blinked. The woman was on the floor next to the body in seconds, gathering bio-data and sample matter from Silverton. Took all his fingerprints. Scanned his organs. Scanned his brain. His retinas. Presumably she wanted to capture everything while the body was as recently-dead
as possible.”
“Where was the husband?” Nick said.
Morley pointed at the back wall of the office.
Nick squinted at what looked like a section of the window at first, but on closer inspection, revealed itself as an augmented-reality enhanced section of wall, just behind Silverton’s desk.
“They must have had that part of the job divided out in advance,” Morley explained. “While she went to work over the body, the husband walked directly to the back wall. Focused on breaking into the safe.”
Morley waved at the tech seated in the chair over the same 2D screen.
When the young woman sitting there with the shaved head looked back, Morley motioned back towards the screen.
“Show them,” he said.
The tech nodded. Without speaking a word, she swiveled back around and hit a few keys with metal finger-extensions.
Morley stepped back so Jordan and Nick could watch over her shoulders.
Nick found himself staring at what must be a composite of multiple camera angles patchworked together. That, or Silverton employed a fleet of miniature drones the Gormans’ anti-security measures hadn’t picked up for some reason.
However the techs got the image, it panned around like one continuous shot, three-dimensional, with a level of detail that made it look disturbingly real—what they called “vurt-real,” since it lacked the transparency of most of the images displayed around the rest of the darkened security station.
The overall effect was unsettling, like actually being in the room with them, an invisible third man in their two-person crew.
The heavyset male human stood by the desk, going through materials in a bizarrely old-fashioned looking safe built into the otherwise-transparent wall.
From the gadgets on the desk and the hand-held the male human appeared to be using, the safe’s locking mechanism was more modern than retro, but a lot of what he pulled out of the opening looked strangely old-fashioned, too.
Dead tree paper.
A lot of dead tree paper.
Some of those inked bundles looked like old-fashioned stocks and paper versions of deeds, as well as what looked to Nick like hand-signed contracts.
Since all of those business transactions happened in virtual now too, and weren’t signed with hand-written names, but with DNA and retinal scans, it was disorienting seeing something from so far back in Nick’s past.
The Prescient: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 3) Page 5