by Kay Bigelow
When they entered the conference room, there were eight people seated, talking quietly to the people around them. When Leah walked into the room, it grew quiet. Leah looked at the firm’s employees. Most of them looked like they should still be in school, but she knew they’d all graduated from college, and a couple even had advanced degrees. Two of them had experience in another investigative firm and the rest were at their first jobs. They were becoming a cohesive group. No one stood out from the others, no one was vying for special attention, and no one was trying to destroy the cohesiveness of the group.
After explaining that the principals of Black Orchid Investigations—or BOI, as the staff affectionately called the company—would be working on an assignment from Lionel Bensington, she explained that under no circumstances were they to discuss anything about anything they were handling no matter who was doing the asking, including Lionel Bensington. They were going to be given an opportunity to fly on their own. Peony and Cots would keep their eyes on them to ensure they didn’t do anything stupid.
“Does this mean we’ll get a raise?” an anonymous voice asked. There was laughter around the table.
“It does, but first you’ll need to prove to me you’ve earned it.”
There were groans all around.
“Peony and Cots will be meeting with each of you to discuss the case or cases you’ll be responsible for.”
Leah left the room and returned to her office. She sat at her desk, and turned to face the lake. She noted the Mandarin ducks she’d seen during the last three days were back again today. There was a new bird on the water. It looked like a black swan, but it didn’t appear to be as big as the swans she’d seen in photographs. The bird in the lake was more like a mini-swan.
She dragged herself out of her reverie about swans and back to the case at hand. She started adding to her list of things she, Cots, and Peony needed to do. On her list for Cots and Peony was to meet with the staff every afternoon for a week or two to see how they were progressing. She knew Cots and Peony would tell their charges to bring anything of importance to their attention at once.
By early afternoon, Cots had their electronic murder board set up. As he turned it on, he said, “I’ve added something new this time. Each of us will automatically add stuff to this board every time we add something to the mini-boards on our new personal computers. Here, let me show you.”
Cots picked up his personal computer that was about the size of an old-fashioned book or book reader, and as thin as a stack of ten sheets of paper. She had no doubt it was state of the art and more powerful than the most powerful computer the police had.
“So when you add something to the file I’ve downloaded to your computer, the stuff will appear here on the big board.”
He wrote down, “Peony is a pain in the ass today.”
Peony and Leah watched the words appear on the big board under Miscellaneous.
“Hey,” Peony said. “I’m having a bad day. But this is too righteous and my day just got a whole lot better. We can add stuff when we’re nowhere near the big board.”
“I may be paranoid, but I’d like for each of us to be wired, so to speak. Remember how we had to take our big van everywhere we went in New America? No longer. Big vans stand out like sore thumbs here. Now, we’ll be wired, but so subtly no one will know it. I’ll send you the details. Your back will be covered twenty-four seven.”
“Uh, twenty-four seven? Really? Isn’t that just a bit too invasive? I mean, what if we’re being intimate with someone? Will our every moan and whispered endearment appear on the big board?” Peony asked.
Leah knew that Peony and Cots were dating, but lately things seemed to not be going smoothly for them. She didn’t know why and didn’t want to know any of the details of their relationship. She wanted her own private life to be private, so she avoided getting involved in their private affairs even peripherally.
“Ah. I’d not thought that far ahead. I assumed we’d be consumed with the case and working on it around the clock.”
“You may be intending to work on it all the time, but I’d like a little break now and then.”
Leah cleared her throat to get their attention back to business. “You two sort that out.” Being wired twenty-four seven didn’t bother her. She had no personal life. She wasn’t dating and didn’t see dating anywhere near her in the foreseeable future.
Late that afternoon, there was a knock on her office door, and Stacy stuck her head inside. “Boxes have arrived from Mr. Bensington. Shall I bring them in here or put them in the conference room?”
“In here, please,” Leah said.
“Boxes? Plural. What has the man been doing, investigating his own daughter’s murder?” Cots asked as he entered Leah’s office behind the first of the boxes. He paused, and wrote something on his computer. “Let me scan the boxes,” showed up on the murder board. “Bugs?”
Leah nodded at him. He left the office and returned with a scanner that fit into the palm of his hand. As he began moving the scanner over and around the boxes, Peony joined them. Leah pointed to Cots’s message on the murder board. Peony nodded her understanding.
Leah said, “Peony, can you tell me the name of the black bird sitting out on the lake?”
Peony went to the window. “Yeah, that’s a Vinca, named after an ancient God with the body of a woman but the head of a bird. More modernly, she’s called a Mandarin Swan. Wait till you see her take flight. She’s the most beautiful bird on the planet, in my opinion. They were near extinction a few years ago, but they’ve been making a comeback slowly but surely. It’s considered very lucky to have a wild Vinca take up residence near you.”
Leah joined her at the window, wondering how Peony had all that information stored in her head. When a very loud truck drove by on a nearby road with its horn honking, it startled the birds on the lake. They all took flight. As the swan began rising, she flapped her wings and created the most spectacular color show, like a mini-rainbow in flight.
“That was spectacular,” Leah said.
Peony nodded her head. “The swans were named after the ducks because their coloring is similar. Of course, because the swans are larger there is more color. Most of the colors seem to be on the underside of their wings.”
“If you ladies are through admiring the fauna, can we get to work?” Cots asked as he crossed the room to a cabinet. From one of the drawers, he took what looked like a bank bag, but was really a bag for listening devices. The bags prevented bugs from transmitting.
Leah counted nine bugs being dropped into the bug bag. “Isn’t that overkill?” she asked as soon as Cots closed the bag.
“He probably thought we’d check for bugs, but he didn’t know I have this baby in my repertoire,” he said, holding up the black device he’d used to scan the boxes. “He won’t know we found them until tomorrow morning or late tonight. It will be interesting to see how he reacts. Maybe I should take them out and attach them to the cars in the parking lot.”
Leah liked the idea of Bensington’s security guys scrambling to follow nine bugs all on the move and all going in different directions. But common sense ruled the day, and she said instead, “Cots, let’s not toy with the man paying the bills. Let’s see what he’s sent us.”
Leah felt some of the tension falling from her shoulders. She was back in her element now. She had a high-profile case needing to be solved. This is how she’d spent sixteen of her twenty years on the police force. It was familiar, safe, and she knew what to do. Since the three of them had moved to Xing, her life felt unsettled, and even though she loved Xing, there was still something missing. She hoped this case would take her mind off what that missing piece might be.
Chapter Three
As they each chose a box to go through, they settled into a familiar rhythm. Cots was done first. After he updated the board using his personal computer, he slipped quietly out of the room, returning with three mugs of steaming coffee.
Cots stood at the wi
ndow watching the sun set beyond the lake, called Leah’s Lake by her staff.
When Leah and Peony finished their boxes and updates of the murder board, Cots said, “The staff have gone home, and I sent Stacy home as well. Is anyone hungry? Should I order in?”
“Let’s not continue to work tonight. I’ll want to go through my box again tomorrow morning, but I’m going to take a file home with me to study. Let’s see what’s on the murder board.”
Cots drew the curtains across Leah’s window. Leah wondered if he’d seen someone outside. She knew his vision, as well as his hearing, was much keener than any human’s.
When he turned on the murder board, Leah and Peony both muttered, “Wow.”
Cots’s new murder board was a wonder to behold. It had taken all the information each of them had inputted into their own computer and organized it on the big board.
“As you can see, the information is color-coded. Purple for Leah, blue for Peony, and red for me. We can also sort it by date entered and/or where it was entered.”
As Leah sat reading, she knew the board had put the information into the correct category designated by each of them. What they saw on the big board was a cohesive picture of what they knew at that minute, and it didn’t look like much.
“Cots, you’ve outdone yourself this time!” Leah told him. “We would have spent a couple of hours organizing our material tomorrow morning.”
“If you can think of improvements to how it’s organized, et cetera, let me know.”
“I’m assuming the information on the big board will be downloaded onto our personal computers?”
“Look at the mini-board on your computer.”
What was on her personal computer looked like an overview of the big board. When she tapped on a particular entry, it expanded to show everything associated with that entry, including who had put it on the board and when.
“I’m stunned, Cots. When did you do this?”
“I’ve been working on it since we bought the building. Peony played a major role by telling me what we needed to track and how. It’s not as if we were majorly busy.” His smile betrayed a certain humble pride.
“Why wasn’t I informed?”
“We were waiting to roll it out until we got a major case. And here we are,” Peony said.
“As one of us updates the board, the other two will hear a soft ping telling us something’s been added,” Cots said.
“Let’s take a quick look at everything on the big board. If anything triggers a question or needs more detail, make a note of it in the Questions section. Then we’ll call it a day and get some dinner. Tonight from home, we can individually study the board again and add anything we’ve missed. That should give us a good idea of where to start and what we need to know. We’ll compare notes in the morning.”
They spent two hours going over the information on the board, making notes as they went along.
Before leaving the office, Cots secured the murder board. Each of them took a file or two from their assigned box to study later.
They had dinner at their favorite neighborhood restaurant with a menu of several different ethnic delights. They didn’t talk about the case at all. They made it a habit not to discuss their cases in public. When they’d retrofitted the building, Cots made their space secure against eavesdroppers, both human and electronic. Leah’s office had several added bonuses, like hidden safes, a small arsenal of weapons, and a stash of their favorite snacks, including Cots’s all-time favorite homemade snack, something he called Phantic. Leah wasn’t sure what was in it, but after one bite, she knew she didn’t want to know for sure what was in it because it tasted what she imagined rotten fish and moldy bread pudding would taste like if they’d been left out in the sun for two weeks and then mixed together. She also knew she would never eat it again in this lifetime.
When she arrived at her condo, Leah surveyed her domain. She was living alone for the first time in fifteen years. At first, it had been strange to live amongst things she alone had chosen. It didn’t take her long to truly appreciate the benefits of living by herself. The peace and quiet were healing. Quinn, her wife and a real estate mogul, had always turned on the business news the minute she got out of bed in the morning and didn’t turn it off until she turned off the lamp on her nightstand. Leah didn’t own a vidscreen; she got her news fixes at the office. She did, however, own a state-of-the-art music system for the first time. Truthfully, Leah had never felt she had the time to just sit and enjoy music during the last fifteen years, so she’d never felt the need to purchase such a system. Now, though, she frequently sat quietly listening to music or reading with the music on in the background. It was a revived experience for her and one she was sorry she had stopped doing when she and Quinn had moved in together.
As she entered her home, she dropped her bag by the front door and headed for her bedroom. As she was undressing, her butler came into the room and asked, “Do you want a glass of wine now, or with dinner?”
“I’ve already eaten, but I will take a glass of white wine,” she told the gynoid she’d named Rusty.
Rusty was an experimental machine Cots was developing in his so-called spare time. He had given his experiment to her as a housewarming gift. So far, Rusty had executed her duties, including cooking and baking, exceptionally well. Rusty was looking more and more human each time Cots visited. The gynoid had started out as the typical male butler, but Leah had told Cots she didn’t want “a male bucket of rusty bolts” walking into her bedroom when she was naked. Cots protested her describing his new pet project as “rusty bolts,” but began subtly changing it into a more androgynous-looking person. Cots had also wired the entire house so she could talk to Rusty without the robotic standing in front of her. He had left it up to Leah what to call her new butler. She’d started calling it Rusty, more to aggravate Cots than because she liked the name.
It hadn’t taken long for her to grow accustomed to having Rusty in the condo with her. A few months earlier, Rusty had begun wearing clothes. Cots swore Rusty chose the clothes herself, but Leah had her doubts. Rusty had a preference for androgynous clothing—mostly dark slacks and white collarless shirts.
After exiting the shower, Leah found a glass of white wine on the counter. She put her sleep shirt on and added a pair of sweatpants to her ensemble. She took her wineglass and returned to the living room, retrieved her bag from the foyer, and sat down on the couch to remove the files she’d brought home with her.
As she re-read the files, she made notes on the murder board as well as putting personal notes on a pad of paper at her side. When she finished reading the files, she asked, “Rusty what time is it?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
Leah yawned and wondered if the time had elicited her yawn because she didn’t feel particularly tired.
After closing her computer and returning the files to her bag, Leah stood and stretched the kinks out of her back. It was very satisfying to have a new case to begin to unravel.
“Good night, Rusty.”
“Good night, Boss,” Rusty told her. “I’ll clean up.”
“Thanks,” Leah said as she headed to bed. She hoped she would be nightmare-free. After her last case, Leah’s dreams had been filled with blood and dead young women gruesomely killed, or her mind replayed the murder of her wife who died alone on a city sidewalk. The nightmares had abated somewhat since moving to Xing, but she still occasionally woke up in the middle of the night screaming, sweating, and struggling to catch her breath. While she still had the nightmares, they were neither as violent nor as explicit as they had been, and for that she was grateful.
Chapter Four
The next morning, Leah sat in her office ostensibly studying the murder board. In fact, she was studying a photograph Cots had uploaded during the night. The image was of Sarah Bensington’s older sister. According to Cots, Jardain Bensington was the thirty-two-year-old head of the psychiatry department at the prestigious Peseshet Medical Institute
. A note added by Cots explained the Institute was named after the first recorded woman doctor, the Lady Peseshet who lived in a country named Egypt on the now-abandoned planet Earth in 2400 BCE. What Jardain did for a living didn’t intrigue Leah nearly as much as the woman herself. The photo was a candid shot of Jardain, in half profile, laughing at something the woman standing at her side had said. It wasn’t one of those polite smiles that seldom reaches a person’s eyes. Jardain looked like she truly thought whatever the other woman had said was funny. It looked like a full laugh—one that made your eyes water and your cheeks ache. Leah wanted to know what Jardain had found so amusing, and she wanted to hear that laugh for herself.
Jardain was a beautiful woman. Her panther-black hair cascaded to just above her shoulder blades. She had high cheek bones, deep dimples, and almond-shaped green eyes to complete the physical package. Leah wondered if her mother was a member of the planet’s elite Five Families who had been the first to colonize Xing. Peony had told Leah the members of the Five Families all had green eyes the color of spring leaves. Very few others had that color, and if they did, they were assumed to be the result of an illicit liaison. As Leah sat staring at Jardain’s photo, she knew she wanted to get to know her better. She also knew she was physically attracted to the woman, and she hadn’t even met her.
When the three partners met at the office shortly after nine o’clock, they were more knowledgeable than they had been when they’d left the office the previous night.
“Cots, I think you and Peony should begin by researching Sarah. Right now all we know for sure about her is that she was the daughter of a very wealthy man and she was murdered. Strangulation is usually a crime of opportunity and very personal. Do the financials on her, find out who her friends were, who had a reason to want her dead. I don’t think she was killed because she was raped. Peony, I want you to handle the interviews with her friends. I’ll handle the family members. Don’t forget to keep the board updated because something we find may help us. And keep the board current as to your physical location,” Leah said.