“I assumed it was her. How did it go?”
Two metal platforms extended on either side of the MX 60. They led to an elevator.
Erik shrugged. “It was all right, but I don’t think I’ll be seeing her again.” The two detectives opened their doors.
Jia didn’t talk until they were walking toward the open elevator. “Why? I thought you said she was pretty hot. Did she end up being too much of a fangirl?”
“Nope. She barely pays attention to the news. She knew who I was, but she didn’t seem to care that much.”
“Isn’t that a plus?”
Jia and Erik stepped into the elevator. The magnetic grapples lifted the back of the MX 60 to angle the car as the doors closed.
“The problem is the reason she doesn’t pay much attention to the news,” Erik replied.
She eyed him, arms folding across her chest. “Care to elaborate?”
Erik sighed. “You and I don’t always agree on things.”
Jia nodded, unsure where he was going with that statement. “True enough. I know you think I’m naïve and too restrained, and I’m not going to dispute that I still find you excessive at times, but I think we complement each other.”
He agreed. “Not denying that.”
The elevator chimed and rose.
“Then I don’t understand,” Jia admitted.
“It’s about challenging me,” Erik clarified. “I would rather have someone smart enough to challenge my worldview and my date…” He sighed. “I’m not saying she was an idiot, but there’s intelligence, and then there is using one’s intelligence. It’s like she purposely doesn’t want to engage the world.”
Jia considered what her partner had explained. For a moment, it sounded like he was saying he wanted to date her. She shunted that thought to the abyss. He was using her as a contrast in his explanation, nothing more. That had to be it.
She cleared her throat, trying to inject as much casualness as she could into her response. “Is that the same as the difference between someone who can’t read and someone who can, but chooses not to?”
Erik thought about it. “Yeah, exactly.”
“So,” Jia continued, “you want someone smart who is willing to use their intelligence.”
“Of course.” Erik sounded surprised. “Why would someone be that way? Give me a reason.”
“You might be surprised,” Jia answered. “Someone could have a fragile ego. In that case, someone intelligent would challenge them. Lots of people, men and women, don’t like the challenge.”
“Okay, that’s one,” Erik thought a moment. “Bet you can’t name another. Plenty of men like the challenge, like me.”
“An intelligent partner might have her own goals, and those goals might take her in a different direction,” Jia suggested.
“A man who can’t handle a woman with ambition shouldn’t call himself a man,” Erik countered.
Jia furrowed her brow, concentrating hard to come up with something else. “Maybe a man worries an intelligent partner will think she can find someone better.”
Erik scoffed. “Again, if a man’s that weak, he deserves to be left.”
“You make valid points,” Jia offered, a bright smile on her face. Her partner didn’t want a bimbo. Always nice to know…for the next woman she set him up with.
The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open on a long, sterile white corridor. The harsh illumination reminded Jia of the station and the hallway leading to the interrogation rooms. That set her on edge.
“He’s supposed to meet us in room 8764, according to the info the captain sent us,” Jia recalled. She frowned slightly as she surveyed the barren corridor. They continued heading down the empty hall. There were plenty of sealed doors with numbers, but no door descriptions or names on them, not even access panels.
Her paranoia flared again, but there was no point in voicing it until someone made a move. She had both her weapons, and Erik had his pistol and his arm. Their captain knew exactly where they were going. They also had Emma as backup.
Anyone trying to kill them would be in for a rough time and heavy casualties unless they gassed them.
Several minutes passed, along with as many intersections. It felt like they had crossed the entire tower level by the time they arrived at Room 8764. Like all the others, there were only simple black letters above the thick door and no obvious access panel.
“What now?” Jia asked, looking at the outside of the door. “Do we use the contact number?”
The door slid open to reveal Louis Chen. He leaned out the open doorway and glanced both ways, then waved them forward. “Please come in, Detectives.”
Jia and Erik entered. Dozens of shelves holding small white unmarked metal boxes filled Room 8764. There were no chairs, no other doors, no hint of it being an office. Jia rubbed her arms to fight the chill filling the room.
“Where are we?” Jia asked. She injected more suspicion into her voice than she felt, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if optical camouflage-using assassins leapt out from between the shelves.
Dr. Chen looked around, confused by the question. “It’s a sample storage room,” he explained.
“How the hell do you find anything in here?” Erik asked. He frowned and leaned closer to one of the boxes. “Nothing’s marked. I get you’ve probably tagged the stuff, but doesn’t it help to have at least something on it when you’re in here?”
“It’s company policy that all samples be processed and stored by bots,” Dr. Chen replied. “I find it distracting.” He let out a wistful sigh. “All advances are slowed by petty men with petty rules. Alas.”
Jia took note of the comment. That kind of thinking could easily lead to corruption. History was filled with the rest of humanity suffering because of the arrogance of amoral, brilliant people.
“Why are we talking in a giant refrigerator?” she asked. No reason to dance around the obvious question.
Dr. Chen’s furtive glances again summoned fantasies of advanced assassins. “I picked it randomly because I didn’t know if someone was monitoring my office. My life is in danger, and I don’t know why or who. I’d rather not end up dead because of habit or laziness.”
“Not a crazy thought,” Erik commented.
“You think someone at the company is targeting you?” Jia asked.
Dr. Chen shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not impossible. A few weeks ago, I started receiving threats via messages to my PNIU, including death threats, from anonymous accounts. They didn’t specify why they wanted me dead, only noted, ‘My time had come for my sins.’ I went to Security about it, and they told me there was little that could be done because they were…I forget. I think he called them ‘fire accounts?’”
“Burner accounts,” Jia suggested. She took a deep breath, worry quickening her pulse. If the Leem King had inspired people, he might have also taught them the value of good information security when committing crimes. A corporate researcher could easily reach the top of some fanatic’s fake human list. The Leem King’s arrest and sentencing, including him reading the required public statement, had diminished his popularity, but all it took was one zealous follower to cause trouble.
And then the cycle would continue.
“Yes, burner accounts.” Dr. Chen reached up and gripped the edge of a shelf, his fingers tightening until they turned pale. “They told me not to worry about them. They say they are nothing important. Many researchers get such threats, and they insisted that ninety-five percent of them amount to nothing.”
Erik pulled back his duster and patted his pistol. “One in twenty odds isn’t something I’d be willing to risk my life on.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Chen spat, his face red. “I’ve given my life to this company. My research is responsible for keeping them near the top, and they want me to keep quiet because they’re concerned about bad PR. They suggested I simply stay in the tower for a few weeks; I have to be a prisoner because they are lazy.” He pulled his hand away fr
om the shelf and curled it into a fist. “I deserve more. I deserve better, so I made sure the police would get involved.” He grinned smugly. “What can they do if the council directly asks for an investigation? And now that you two are involved, if they attempt to brush you off, it’ll look like they are covering something up. Everyone knows your reputation.”
Jia frowned. “Setting aside statistics, have you considered that they might have reason to believe it’s not a serious threat? It would be stupid of them to let one of their people be assassinated.”
Dr. Chen scoffed and cut through the air with his hand, almost knocking a box off the shelf. “Scandals affect investor confidence. A dead researcher can be replaced. That’s what they think, but they don’t realize how brilliant I am. Those people in management are soulless, useless fools. They’re more replaceable than I am.”
“Nobody’s ever accused you of having low self-esteem, have they?” Erik asked.
“There’s no point in denying one’s brilliance,” Dr. Chen insisted. “What? You’re going to walk away? You don’t believe me.”
“Nope. Not until we know there’s no threat. Cops don’t respond to investors.”
“I see.” Some of the displeasure left Dr. Chen’s face. “Good.”
“Let’s assume for now that company security is just incompetent or complacent,” Jia suggested. “We’ll interface with them as necessary, but we’ll approach this as an independent investigation. As such, we’ll need a list of suspects to begin.”
He nodded. “That sounds logical.”
“Who dislikes you the most?” Jia asked.
Dr. Chen tilted his head, a thoughtful expression on his face. “That would probably be my ex-wife. We divorced a year ago. She claimed I was cold and unloving.”
“I wonder how she could ever come to that conclusion,” Erik joked, but the scientist didn’t seem to pick up on the sarcasm.
“She always was short-sighted. I think she was just threatened by my intelligence.”
Jia almost laughed at the near synchronicity with her earlier conversation but kept a straight face. “Do you think she might be sending the messages?”
“I doubt it.” Dr. Chen shook his head. “She’s hardly the sort to have the skills to harass me without it leading back to her. I suppose she could have hired someone, but it seems rather fanciful.”
“Jealous colleagues?” Erik inquired. “Scientific rivals?”
“I’ve won industry awards,” Dr. Chen replied proudly. “But so have many of my colleagues. I’ll never deny my brilliance, but my field contains many impressive researchers, and all of us share one thing in common—we don’t have time for foolish games. I think that’s even less likely than my ex-wife.”
Jia’s forehead wrinkled as she dove deeper into the possibilities. “Has anyone left the company recently? Been fired? Maybe someone who might blame you?”
Dr. Chen shrugged, exasperation on his face. “Maybe? I don’t know. This is a huge company, and thousands of employees work in this building alone. It’s not like I waste time paying attention to that sort of thing. I have far more important things to do.”
“Yeah, you’re too busy saving the world,” Erik asked.
“If not that, then advancing human knowledge, which is the same thing,” Dr. Chen agreed.
After a few minutes with the man, Jia was beginning to see why someone might want to kill him. “What about your research staff? Presumably, you pay a little more attention to their comings and goings.”
The first hint of uncertainty broke through the scientist’s arrogant façade. “I…am very focused on my scientific endeavors. I’m not sure about the answer to your question, but if it’s not one of my main researchers, it’d be unlikely they’d care enough to kill me. Wouldn’t you say?”
Erik let out a rueful chuckle. “You’d be surprised by what people are willing to kill for.”
Chapter Sixteen
Erik didn’t understand why someone would want to live in a tower apartment that gave the illusion of having no walls.
Heights didn’t bother him. He’d performed more than a few orbital and sub-orbital drops during his time in the military, but sitting in a place with no sense of separation from the outside world hundreds of stories above the Earth was disorienting. At least internally. From the outside, it looked like any other apartment in a luxury tower, and he’d not realized how insane it would be once he was inside.
Sometimes he felt like he might fit in better on some alien world than he did on Earth.
The thought kept running through his head as Dr. Chen’s ex-wife Laya led Erik and Jia from the more reasonable enclosed foyer to her faux-exposed living room. The holographic walls didn’t even provide a hint of separation like floor-to-ceilings windows, and concealed speakers allowed in the outside noise. If there had been wind, he could have easily been fooled into thinking he was directly exposed to the outside.
They’d contacted her about an interview, and she’d blown them off until the next day.
A few tasked drones kept an eye on her without the need for a warrant, but she didn’t try to run. That could be a sign of resignation as much as arrogance. The most obvious suspect was often the culprit, but that wasn’t a certainty, as many of their investigations had proven already.
Annoyance and curiosity overcame self-control as Erik blurted, “Doesn’t this get annoying?” He gestured to flitters forming a thick lattice of air lanes near the tower. “It’s like having a huge hole in your apartment.”
Laya didn’t respond immediately as she sat on the couch. Despite being in her forties, she looked younger than Jia thanks to a de-aging treatment and a tight black party dress and choker. Most people waited a little longer for the procedure, especially since it could only be performed once because of Telomeric Decay Syndrome.
Erik couldn’t discern if she had a problem with stubborn gray hair like he did. She’d dyed all her hair light-blue.
“Neo-Anti-Atomism,” the woman finally declared, weary boredom in her voice.
Erik frowned. “I know what all those words mean by themselves, but together, they might as well be Zitark. What are you talking about?”
“It’s an architectural movement,” Jia explained, barely concealed distrust on her face directed toward Laya. “It’s supposed to be about bringing unity through the elimination of the private and the public. That kind of thing. It was all the rage about fifteen years back until most people decided they liked their privacy after all.”
Erik chuckled. “On the frontier, people are still too busy making sure the basics work before they can worry about weird homes. You’d think being the wealthiest planet in a huge confederation would make people satisfied, but they still find reasons to be upset. That’s human nature for you.”
Laya scoffed. “You sound like Louis. I wanted a home like this for years, but he always failed to see the point. That man is the living embodiment of selfish arrogance. There were two things I swore I’d do once I left him: get my de-aging using his money and buy a place like this. As your partner observed, this isn’t about being trendy. It’s about better interfacing with society.”
“Sure, sure. Whatever you say. I’m not here to judge you. I’m a good cop, but I’m a terrible interior decorator. Let’s get down to the business of why we came.”
She glanced at both of them, feigned disinterest that was barely marred by her eyes raising. “Yes, let’s.”
Erik and Jia exchanged quick glances before settling into chairs.
“Would you describe the divorce as acrimonious?” Jia asked. “We have information from Dr. Chen, but we’d really like to hear your perspective on it.”
“Acrimonious?” Laya laughed. “Acrimonious is far too pleasant a word to use.”
“What word would you use?” asked Erik.
“Hateful, bitter, and spiteful are a good start,” Laya suggested. She eyed Erik like she was starving and he was a juicy steak. “I gave that man ten years of my life, but it
was pointless since he was cheating on me.”
That was a good motive for harassment.
“Cheating on you?” Erik began. “With who?”
Dr. Chen hadn’t mentioned anyone else. If there was another woman he’d kicked to the curb, she might be an obvious suspect. The scientist might be brilliant, but that didn’t mean he could screw women over and get away with it.
“Not a woman,” Laya clarified.
“I asked who, not which woman,” Erik replied. “Man or woman, if he was having an affair, that means we’ve got other people we need to check into, and he didn’t mention it, so he might be hiding something.”
“An affair?” Laya snorted. “He’d have to care enough about something other than his ridiculous research for more than five minutes to have an affair. I’m not saying he was cheating on me with someone else. I’m saying he only cared about his job.” She gave an overdramatic eye roll.
Jia frowned. “You were upset that he was career-oriented?”
“Don’t be so literal. It’s not that I wanted him to neglect his work, but being hardworking turned into overworking. He didn’t care about me or anyone, and despite giving him so many years and so many chances, that bastard still screwed me in the divorce settlement with the help of his corp lawyer buddies.” Laya sniffed disdainfully. “I’ve had to make due on a pittance. I wasted so many years for nothing on a man because I thought he had potential.”
“I can see you’re one step away from living in a Shadow Zone alley,” deadpanned Jia.
“I deserved more.” Laya huffed. “I earned more for all my time and effort. I put up with that bastard for years, and I helped him establish social connections in the company to improve his position. He wouldn’t be where he is today without my help.”
“You’re saying you helped him with his research?”
“His research?” Laya threw her head back and laughed. “Getting ahead in a corporation isn’t like getting ahead in your police department. Doing your job is secondary to the politics of advancement. He lacked any natural talent with that, but I made up for it. I advised him. He would still be someone’s assistant if it weren’t for me, and then he tossed me aside because he said I was too distracting.” She stood and turned to face the flitters in the sky. “No gratitude. No acknowledgment that I made him the man he is today. You came here to interview me, so I’ll be honest. I hate that man, and I always will, if only because I was too stupid to leave first.”
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