EMPIRE: Imperial Police

by Stephanie Osborn

  “Why didn’t she call for help in VR?”

  “She was probably surprised by his attack, and once it started happening, she was just reacting, trying to get away.” He shrugged. “That’s how most people tend to react in a threat emergency sitch. They only make the emergency call after they have a chance to think.”

  “Damn, son, you’re gonna be a hell of a detective,” Gorski said with a grin. “Now, do you know how to take those samples?”

  “Not yet, sir. I mean, we did them in the forensics labs at the academy, and I’ve watched you do a few things, but in the field, my own self? No. This is my first opportunity to actually do it.”

  “Then let me talk you through it...”

  In short order, the in situ imagery was taken, several latent prints found and lifted, the coffee mugs were bagged, samples of the coffee taken, blood samples were taken of both pools and each spatter grouping, and several dark hairs – that did not match the victim’s medium auburn hair – were bagged as well. One of the beat cops who had been guarding the door was promptly dispatched with the evidence to the ICPD forensics lab for analysis, along with a control sample from the victim’s hairbrush in the bathroom, in order to separate out the victim’s DNA from her assailant’s.

  “And now we need to put out the hospital inquiry,” Gorski noted. “Nick, come with me into VR – we’ll use channel 842 – and I’ll show you how that’s done...”

  They contacted all of the hospitals within easy walking distance of the crime scene; since there had been no reports of a bloody, battered man wandering around the Imperial Park area, let alone walking oddly, the two investigators surmised that he likely went straight to medical help, and didn’t go far to get it.

  On the third contact, they hit paydirt.

  Dirk Leeds had been admitted to the Empress Adannaya III Hospital two hours before their inquiry. He was diagnosed with a badly broken nose, a three-inch gash in his scalp, severe claw marks to chest and one side of the face, and at least one ruptured testicle, as well as possible urethral damage. He was in emergency surgery at that time, as doctors attempted to repair the genital damage.

  “Well, that explains a lot,” Gorski said, crossing his eyes. “And we don’t need to rush, because I don’t think he’ll be going anywhere any time soon.”

  “You mean aside from the surgery?”

  “Yeah. He gave the ER docs some sort of drivel about a dog attack while he was biking, but they didn’t believe him. And I confirmed it for ‘em. So they’re gonna hold him until we come and tell ‘em what to do with him. He’s goin’ nowhere.”

  “No. But his victim won’t, either. Assuming she lives, or comes out of the coma. And even if she wakes up, she might not…” Ashton paused, sighed, then asked, “How bad was she, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure, Nick. We can go talk to Dr. Aadi Botha – he’s the forensic physician over at the Empress Adannaya III Hospital – and ensure our prisoner is cuffed to his bed until he’s released into our custody, then go see about her, if you want to. Her boyfriend, I have it to understand, headed out shortly after we started processing their apartment, going back to the hospital. He just wanted to meet us and ensure we had what we needed, first.”

  “That...sounds like a good idea, sir. It’s a good plan.”

  “If you like, Nick, when no other team members are around, you can call me Stefan. You show some real promise, and I want to mentor you…which means I want you to be comfortable around me, and not feel constrained. I’m here for any questions you have, or if you’re unsure about something… and that means in your personal life, too, by the way.”

  “Oh! Thank you si– uh, Stefan. I appreciate that,” Nick said with a smile.

  “Are you sure you won’t be upset if the victim doesn’t make it?”

  “No, sir, um, Stefan, I’m not. I think it’ll probably take my mood down a few tens of notches, at least.” He shook his head, his face falling despite himself. “I haven’t even met her yet, but I really hope she comes out okay. But I know she could have brain damage, even if she survives…” He sighed. “Damn.”

  “Ah. Then you’re human, and not a psychopath, like some of those jerks over at IPD Headquarters. Good. You just passed my last test. We’ll do fine together, you and me.”

  It didn’t take long to arrange for Dirk Leeds to be restrained, and a police presence placed over him, at the Empress Adannaya III Hospital. He wouldn’t be going anywhere except to jail and then to trial. And the hospital forensic physician had already sent over DNA samples to the ICPD Forensics Lab for comparison to the samples taken at the crime scene and from the victim. Before Gorski and Ashton could reach the Empress Kolbesdeka Hospital, where the victim was being treated, Forensics was calling them with a confirmed match on all three sample sources.

  When they arrived, the victim, Sheila Mackay, was still unconscious, though Owen Jackson, her significant other, said the doctors had more hope of a good outcome than they had had when she was admitted; she was beginning to respond to stimulus, and it was hoped she might wake soon. The two investigators stood in the ICU room with Jackson, as the battered woman lay in the bed nearby.

  “That’s good,” Ashton said in response to the improved prognosis.

  “Yes, it is,” Gorski agreed. “And we have some good news for you, Mr. Jackson.”

  “Oh? Don’t tell me you know who did it.”

  “We do, and he is under custody at a different hospital. He had to have emergency surgery to try to repair what your lady, there, did to him.”

  “What?! What did she do to him?”

  “She kicked him right in the pocket rocket, hard enough to bust his balls!” Ashton said with a wide grin.

  “And the rocket,” Gorski added with a smirk.

  “Good enough for him! Who the hell was it?”

  “Guy named Dirk Leeds,” Gorski said. “You know him?”

  “You’re kidding.” Jackson gaped. “That’s her coworker. They were, like, best friends. When I first got to know Sheila – we’ve only been together a few months, but I think it’s gonna be permanent, ‘cause I’m crazy about her – well, I thought those two were an item until she explained.”

  “Evidently he thought so, too, I guess,” Ashton noted. “Anyway, when the doctors finally release him after surgery–”

  “Surgery?! You guys weren’t kidding that she busted his balls!”

  “Nope,” Ashton averred.

  “I had it to understand from the attending physician that he wouldn’t be trying anything like this again,” Gorski added. “I don’t know that the repair is going to be completely successful, based on what the surgeon of record told me…off the record. He took a really hard hit to the groin. They’re having to do some reconstruction, the damage was so bad. Penis and at least one testicle. And that wasn’t the only damage he took. Severely broken nose, scalp laceration, claw marks to face and chest…”

  “Damn.” Jackson winced. “Sounds like Sheila gave as good as she got.”

  “Yup, just about. Once he’s released from the hospital,” Ashton tag-teamed his new mentor, “which may take a while given all that, we can assure you both that he’ll be going straight into custody, and based on the evidence we secured, is likely to be going away for a while.”

  “...Good,” Jackson said with a sigh. “That’s...a relief.”

  “Iiiithnnsooootooo,” the woman in the bed breathed.

  All three men glanced around, startled.

  “Did she just try to talk?” Ashton wondered.

  “Sure sounded like it to me,” Gorski said, eyebrows shooting up. “Nick, go grab the doctor! Mr. Jackson, try to talk to her!”

  Ashton sprinted to the door, yelling, “We need a doctor! She’s trying to wake up!” as Jackson bent over the bed.

  “Honey? It’s Owen. I’m right here. Sheila, baby, can you hear me?” Jackson asked.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “What did you just say?” he asked, as several doctors ran in. They im
mediately began checking her vitals.

  “Said...I th’nk so, too.” Her eyelids fluttered, then parted slightly. “Dey go’ ‘im, righ’?” she slurred. “Go’ Dirk?”

  “And there’s our witness confirmation. Yes, ma’am, we have him,” Gorski confirmed. “You’re safe now.”

  “Thank...you.” She offered them a weak smile, as her eyes slid closed again.

  Gorski gestured at Ashton, who had returned to his side, instructing him to respond to the woman.

  “You’re very welcome, ma’am,” Ashton said, adding a gentle, understanding smile at a deeply relieved Jackson. “We were glad to do it.”

  Then he looked back at Gorski and smiled again.

  Gorski grinned and patted him on the back.

  “Way to go, kiddo,” he murmured. “You just finished your very first real case as a proper investigator, all successful-like.”

  Ashton beamed.

  This kind of case load went on for more than a year, and with that level of practice, Ashton was getting good at it. More, he was moving up in rank and status; his unofficial rank had transitioned fairly quickly, and as promised, from Investigator to Sergeant Investigator, and he was nearing a promotion to Lieutenant Investigator.

  Finally the Deputy Chief of Investigations, Colonel Peterson, called him into her office.

  “Have a seat, Nick,” she told him, gesturing at the visitor chair across from her desk. “it’s time we made some decisions, you and I.”

  Ashton drew a deep breath.

  “Transfer, or go back,” he said then.

  “Yes, which also means going back as someone who has ostensibly ‘learned’ under a past master of the gamesmanship in the Imperial Police, at least at Headquarters,” she confirmed. “And it means stepping back into that rat hole and being one of the rats.” She eyed him closely. “And you don’t strike me as a rat.”

  “No ma’am. I’m not,” Ashton averred. “I’m not goin’ back to that snake pit, rest assured on that.”

  “But there’s one other option you have.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “You could really transfer off-planet. Go to another sector in Sintaran space. For the most part, it’s only the headquarters here on Sintar that’s corrupt, because of how close it is, physically and organizationally, to the Council. Hell’s bells, the upper echelons tend to be friends with the Council members. But the other sectors’ departments tend to be pretty straight. And Lee and I could help you decide where you’d fit best. Hell, you could always go back to your home planet, for that matter.” She shrugged. “You wouldn’t have Stefan for a mentor, except long-distance, but from what I’ve been hearing, you might not need him now, except for that. And even that, only on some particularly hairy case.”

  Ashton paused, gnawing his lower lip, in deep thought; he hadn’t considered that – any of that. And to be honest, going back home to work held a certain appeal; his parents were gone, but there was other family still there. The problem was, Flanders generally had a very quiet sort of population; even in Norwich, there hadn’t been very much crime. Which was good, but he didn’t want to sit around and twiddle his thumbs, either. Which, in turn, gave him another question.

  “What’s the most active police sector in the Empire?”

  “Oh,” Peterson said, somewhat startled by the question. “That would have to be Sintar, specifically Imperial City, hands down. Partly because of the corruption, and partly just because it’s the power center. I think power is kind of like gravity; it tends to attract all the people who want it, or the money that usually comes with it, and don’t care how they get it.”

  “Hmph. Makes sense.”

  “Yeah. Why did you want to know?”

  “Because I don’t want to sit around and do nothing but grow dust bunnies in a quiet sector, on a quiet planet,” he explained. “And that includes my home planet. I don’t want to stagnate, I want to be someplace where I can actually do some good. So…”

  “So…?”

  “So let’s do it, I guess,” he decided. “After all, Imp City is still part of the Empire-wide police organization, and I want to be of some use, here. Which means,” he looked to her for confirmation, “I need to formalize this whole situation, so you can actually give me those ranks?”

  “Exactly,” Peterson said with a wide smile. “I was very much hoping you’d say that. Yes, we’ll get this formalized and you placed directly into our system, rather than on the periphery.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask – how did you do all that without getting somebody into trouble, in the first place?”

  Peterson drew a deep breath.

  “You aren’t the first good-guy cop the ICPD has had to ‘help’ out of that rats’ nest, Nick,” she said with a sigh. “It doesn’t happen real often, because they’re generally pretty good at picking guys outta the Academy who have their particular corrupt leanings, but once in a great while they go for brains instead of bribery and the like. Lee and I think that’s what they did with you. Sometimes they’re able to get the brains to go along, and sometimes they don’t. That’s when Lee or one of a handful of others over at the Headquarters building pings us. Or, well, Lee used to ping us.”

  “So you have a system within the system?”

  “Sort of, yes. Everybody in a position of authority at Imp City Police knows about it. And they know when someone is inducted into it. You’re the latest, and doing well; we haven’t had another inductee since Lee left, though…which says he was right about them putting a toadie in his old position. And that bodes badly for the rookies. But we can’t keep you in the special system indefinitely; it wasn’t designed for that. So we need to either make you fully one of us, or move you out, one way or another.”

  “Aha. Well, let’s move in, then.”

  “Consider it done,” Peterson said, and grinned.

  Several months later, Ashton was promoted to Lieutenant Investigator; Peterson had placed him on a fast track from the very beginning of his tenure with the Imperial City Police. By this time, Peter Rassmussen and Roger Armbrand were getting close to being promoted to Captain Investigator, and several of the others had moved into Sergeant Investigator, as well. Four new investigators had also joined the team – John Smith, Hugo Weaver, Callista Ames, and Alan Compton.

  “But we’re still one big team,” Peter had told Nick, and Roger agreed.

  “Yeah, what Pete said. Even when we’re all detectives, I can’t see us doing anything but working together, like we do now.”

  “Besides,” Pete added, “we might be able to help some of the others bump up their ranks, while we’re at it. Kind of like what Gorski’s doing with you.”

  Nick Ashton now settled more permanently into his work at the Imperial City Police, learning more and more and becoming ever more skilled in detection, especially with Stefan Gorski as his mentor. In a large city like that, murders were not uncommon, and burglaries and thefts reasonably frequent, so he had plenty of opportunities to hone those skills.

  And as he gained seniority in “the Team,” as he’d taken to thinking of it, his pay went up, his wardrobe improved in quality, and he let his hair grow more than a bit on the sides while trimming the top much closer. The blond highlights had proliferated to augment the difference, and now gave him a golden blond look, especially with the tan he tried to maintain year-round. He even grew out his beard into the stubble-length currently fashionable, and which he’d gotten Colonel Peterson’s permission to do, in order to look as different as possible from the rookie officer who had started at Imperial Police Headquarters. He kept in shape in the department’s gym, and as his body continued to mature, it filled out in musculature.

  Some three years into his work at ICPD, few people would have recognized the lanky young, uniformed cop who worked the streets of Imperial City for IPD as this serious, well-built, talented investigator.

  Unfortunately, “few” was not “none.”

  Teamwork and Leadership

&n
bsp; Ray “Droppoint” Murphy was a petty thief and pickpocket who operated in Imperial City in the arcades nearest the Palace. Not that he was apt to get wallets or cash; those hadn’t existed – at least on Sintar – in hundreds of years, having been replaced by virtual reality transactions long ago. Oh, some of the more rural planets in the Empire still had people who only carried actual coin, but they rarely showed up on Sintar, let alone in Imperial City. A few credits in coin was as much as most people on Sintar carried.

  But that didn’t mean there weren’t other trinkets in pockets and on wrists and around throats – jewelry, inlaid pocket knives, and other such valuable items were easy to acquire for a skilled pickpocket like Droppoint. And he had been on a spree in recent weeks in the arcades; when one of the wealthier matrons lost a valuable bauble, matters had come to a head.

  It was time, the ICPD decided, to put an end to it. But Gorski and Demetrius were already out on minor cases, having taken Rassmussen and Armbrand along to help them get a leg up on their upcoming promotions to Detective; Taylor and Amundsen were still on the other side of Sintar, stuck in a kind of courtroom hell.

  So Ashton was given the job of scouting out the specific locations Droppoint was hitting, then setting up an operation to catch him.

  The first thing he did was to go into VR and use the city planning records to set up a three-dimensional map of the arcade that Droppoint frequented the most, then he had the computer take all of the complaints and reports of pickpocketing and try to locate them within the map. Most of the time, the best that could be done was to highlight an area, or a store; Droppoint was very skilled, and most of his victims didn’t know they’d been robbed for some little time after he stole from them.

  Still, it began to give Ashton a good feel for the areas of the arcade that Droppoint preferred to hit. When he then added in the times of the robberies, and animated them, he started to see the ebb and flow of the pickpocket’s movements.