by Matt Doyle
I pick up my elderly tablet and hold the power button until it starts to join me in the waking word. “Good…morning, Cassandra,” it says, failing again to connect to the network at the speed it used to when I bought it. I tap the voice command button and it asks, “How may I be of assistance?”
“Local web search,” I say, speaking slowly. “Search term, Edward Redwood. Timeframe, last two weeks. Sort newest first.”
After an excruciating seven seconds, the screen flickers and I get my first run of results. The articles are pretty short, with the most recent ones reciting the official decision by the investigating officer, Corporal Devereux. That it was assigned to a corporal rather than a specialist division speaks volumes about how seriously the police took the case. What that means is there weren’t any immediate signs that it was anything other than what they said it was: an accidental OD.
The local PD get progressively more corrupt the higher you go, but the lower ranks are still the good guys here. Mostly. The reports say that Eddie’s body contained traces of Flash7, enough to suggest he took a three hundred milligram dose. The level’s high, but the drug isn’t unusual. So far, so ordinary.
The next chunk of reports deal with the discovery of the body. There’s nothing really there that Lori hasn’t told me in her files. I note that all the reports use the same photo of the body, all of which are copyrighted to…Lori Redwood. She must be a freelance photographer. Either she drew the short straw in having to photo the scene for the press, or she wanted to do it herself rather than let someone else in to something so close to home.
The other hits relate to a different Eddie Redwood, a botanist who was touring through town to demonstrate some sort of synthetic solar-powered earth.
Okay then, let’s change tack. Time to see if I can figure out where I know his name from. I’m pretty sure that it’s from an old case file, but I couldn’t say which one. I swipe the internet away and tap the voice command button again.
“How may I be of assistance?” the tablet asks.
“Document content search, target, case files. Search term Edward Redwood or Eddie Redwood.”
A big green circle starts spinning on the screen, and I chuck the tablet onto the table and head back to the kitchen. Cup of coffee number two, milky this time, comes with some stale bread and jam. By the time I’ve finished the drink, the circle is still swirling merrily around, and the completion percentage has barely hit 20 percent. I sigh and swipe down the top bar, then tap the local system icon.
Within moments, a voice cuts through the room speakers. “Synch to local system complete. Please state your desired settings.”
“Single room audio. Tracking mode target, Cassandra Tam.”
A beep, then, “Settings active.”
I nod in thanks, knowing full well that my internal system isn’t even close to being an AI, and take myself off to the bathroom.
Three
MY SHOWER IS an old-style cubicle with a manual control system that cost far more to install than it was worth. Hey, it’s my apartment; I can do what I want with the place. My shower is like my blinds; it’s a personal preference born from specific necessities. In this case, that necessity stems from my distrust for a computer to get the right temperature. It’s the same reason I disabled the automatic feature on the central heating and air con, and why I have a near-antique kettle that needs repairing every three to four months. The way I see it, tech is good for some things, like saving me from having to search through hundreds of case files manually, or providing a decent equaliser during confrontations, but when it comes to temperatures? Nuh-uh. Computers don’t even use cooling fans since stuff went solid-state, so what the hell do they know about comfortable temperatures?
I close my eyes and point my face straight up into the stream of water, letting the warm spray wash away the last traces of sleep and plaster my hair to my back, darkening the strands from mousy auburn to black. My father was the son of the son of the son of an immigrant, and the first of his line to marry outside what my grandfather referred to as our culture. Genetics being what they are, the result of this is that my skin tone, like my hair, is my father’s, but lightened slightly by my mother’s Canadian heritage.
If a God truly designed me, he must have liked to mix and match like that, ’cause he kept it going until he was done. My father’s untoned and slightly bulkier-than-I’d-like mass lays awkwardly on my mother’s delicate hips and tidy breasts. His slightly crooked teeth and Chow-Yun Fat smile sits behind her full lips. His strength plays off her flexibility of movement. His masculine hands and feet, her naturally shiny nails.
I always found it ironic that everything that I inherited from my mother had a softening effect on my appearance, when my father was by far the softer of the two in terms of personality. I loved them both for that. My father’s quiet determination was something to be admired, and my mother’s constant stream of foul-mouthed tirades made her seem hilarious to me and friends back when I was in school. We were a mixed-up little family that somehow worked, and I sat there in the middle, “a perfect representation of the balance between us.” Or that’s what my father called me anyway. Looking back on it and how we all were, it makes me glad that I grew up in Vancouver, where the people judged you less for how you looked and more for what you could do. Or most did, anyway.
But that life is gone now, and that’s my fault.
“Search complete,” the room speakers say.
I turn my head away from the shower spray and reply, “Summarise hit numbers.”
“Search term, Edward Redwood. Zero complete matches, one partial match. Search term, Eddie Redwood. Zero complete matches, one partial match.”
“Are both partial matches the same?”
“Checking…complete. Confirmed, individual partial match applies to both searches.”
I flick the dial back around to zero, and the shower cuts out abruptly, the warm hiss immediately replaced with the light put-put of the water dripping off my back while I reach around the steamed-up door and clamber for a towel.
“Summarise file details.”
“Client: Tobias Martin. File category: Financial Irregularities. Subcategory: Theft.”
I step out of the shower and start heading towards the bedroom, rubbing my hair ferociously with the towel. Tobias Martin. That was about six months ago. “Summarise partial hit.”
“Audio transcript two, lines two hundred and ninety-seven to two hundred and ninety-eight. Shall I search for the audio file?”
I only record interviews if there’s going to be a lot to discuss that either I or the police may need to refer to later. The audio file will likely be pretty large, though, and leaving my tablet to scan it for the right lines is just asking for another hour of doing nothing. Tempting, but no.
“No, just read it.”
“Tobias Martin states, ‘There’s Lori Redwood, she’s like our Alpha, but it wouldn’t be her.’ End of match.”
That’s right, he was a Tech Shifter, second F. Money was mysteriously leaving his account in small but regular drips, and he couldn’t figure out where it had gone or who had authorised the transfers because of some convoluted proxy system.
“Alpha, huh,” I mumble. I drop the towel over my head like a hood and split two of the blinds with my middle and index fingers. The view outside says that it’s gonna be a hot day, so I decide to quit scrubbing and let the sun do most of the work for me. I remember the Tobias Martin case well enough to know that I don’t need to look into Lori in any great detail. Despite Tobias’s assertions, I would have likely checked out any public records on her, but I wouldn’t save those unless it looked like she was likely to be involved. I have a vague recollection of seeing a photo of her wearing pretty much the same outfit as she had when she came visiting, which means that the familiarity with the name was just a coincidence helped by a half-remembered photo.
Shame, that. That’s one potential lead down.
Four
FOR LEGAL
PURPOSES, I’m registered as a private investigator. The law of the land means that’s enough to get me certain dispensations for my work, providing I follow procedure and fill out reams of digital paperwork before I go doing anything stupid. Sometimes, I don’t bother.
You see, for the most part, I keep my nose clean and do things by the book. When I started up in this place, I made damn sure that I did everything the right way, rather than the way that gets quick results, and that let me get my foot in the door with the local PD. A couple of cases along, and I was known well enough that I was trusted by the ones who do their jobs because it’s their job, if not the ones who only do the jobs that push them up the pay scale. There was a good reason to do things this way. My father taught me that if you want to get by as a PI, then you don’t need friends in high places, you just need them in high enough places. You get that, and certain things can be filed retroactively if you get the right results.
The six-foot slab of moustache and middle-aged spread that is Captain Andrew Hoover cocks his head at me as he walks by, and brings himself to a stop at the desk where I’m scribbling some rough notes on a stupidly cumbersome web-based warrant application form with an oversensitive e-pen.
“White shirt, black tie and trousers, well-polished shoes…I’m half expecting to see you in a trench coat and a fedora one of these days.”
“And hide all this from the world?” I grumble unenthusiastically, waving my pen hand roughly in the direction of my body. “Sounds too much like a crime to me.”
Hoover laughs. “Someone’s grouchy this morning. Must be a fun one you’ve gotten lumbered with.”
“If only. You know of the Eddie Redwood case?”
Hoover slides a chair up and drops himself into it. He rests his elbow on the table and strokes his moustache like a pet. “Addict, right? OD’d on stimulants?”
“His sister doesn’t think so. She said that you guys weren’t interested in reopening the case for her, so she came to me instead. And who’s Corporal Devereux, by the way?”
“New kid, transferred in from your end of town.”
“Hollywood North, eh?” I reply, intentionally exaggerating the light Canadian lilt that still lingers in my voice.
“Yeah. He’s a coupla years younger than you, though, not long out of the academy, so I doubt you know him. I’ll introduce you next time he’s around Wouldn’t want him trying to block you on anything unnecessarily.”
“Appreciated. So, do you think he missed anything, or am I chasing my tail here?”
Hoover crosses his arms behind his head and relaxes into a smile. “Keep barking, little doggy. I can’t go into specifics, obviously, but no. It seemed pretty open and shut to me, I’m afraid, so you’re gonna be running in circles for a while with this one.”
“Great,” I grunt.
“So who’re the warrants for? Sanders said you asked for three of ’em.”
“I’m leaving them blank for now. I’m gonna try stirring up an Addict Nest, see if I can get the names of some dealers. If I can prove that Eddie bought the stuff, that should be enough to close this off. If any of them don’t play ball, I’ll slap the warrant on them.”
“You got a Nest in mind?”
“Nope. Sanders reckons he can find one for me before I’m done, though.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Hoover replies, getting to his feet. “Just make sure you put the names on the form and send them off before you start hitting people this time.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, smiling to myself about the memory of a deserving prick who suddenly found himself with a bloody mouth.
Five
WAY BACK, NEW Hopeland used to be a tourist city. By that, people meant that the number of tourists entering the place every year was higher than the number of permanent residents. Built over part of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert at the dawn of our current tech-enlightened age, it was the first new city built with a focus on utilising and progressing modern tech in everyday living. These days, near everywhere comes with the stuff built into every home as standard, but back then, it was an oddity right out of cheap sci-fi novels. Combine that with the optimistic name chosen to represent how forward thinking the country was becoming with this stuff, and you had a marketer’s dream. Once the place was up and running, people flocked here for years.
These days, there’s still a lot of people passing through, but those that visit tend to stay a lot longer. It’s less a city for short-term visits now, and more a good place to go when you’re running. Now that the rest of the country’s converted to similar styles, it no longer gets the same attention from the rest of the world. It’s small compared to the tech-enhanced metropoles of the day, but there are still plenty of big businesses here that are always looking to hire, and no one tends to ask too many questions. Unless you draw attention to yourself.
The three people behind the dented door in front of me have been drawing a lot of attention to themselves. Virtual Junkie Professionals work shifts that run nonstop and can last as long as three weeks. In return for their time, they get a helluva lot of support from their bosses. The chairs are well-built and comfy, the virtual-touch-sensitive gloves are cleaned heavily before every shift, and the workers are kept hydrated and sustained via drips while they work in their semiconscious state. The pay ain’t bad either, or so I hear.
Addicts like Jim and Barbara Holland and their cousin Mark Farlow don’t have the same type of lifestyle. They tend to use refurbed or homebrew equipment, jack themselves up on stimulants that increase feeling in the virtual world, and don’t use drips. Instead of long-term shifts doing something useful, they usually run in groups and hang out in run-down little places like this, sharing one virtual profile that they take it in turns to use, one or two days at a time. With the way the headgear works, that leaves shared users with two choices: break the programming after each run so that it will accept the next person’s retinal scan, or use an old-style model with the retinal scan disabled.
In truth, though, Addicts are useful. Pros are usually more than happy to help with any sort of investigation, but they’re wrapped in so much red tape that it can take weeks before you can even begin to question them. Addicts take a little more convincing to cooperate, but once you crack them, they work quickly, if for no other reason than to get you out of their hair.
I give the door a quick rap with my knuckles, and when that doesn’t get a response, I follow up with a series of hard kicks.
Finally, someone slaps the door from the other side and a jittery voice asks, “You got the password?”
“No, but I’ve got a warrant.”
“Ah, fuck, man,” the voice moans, and a series of locks start to click open one by one. The door slides heavily to the side, and an overly skinny man in a dirty vest top stumbles into the gap. He looks me up and down with his sunken eyes and says, “Let’s see it, then.”
“See what?”
“The warrant, man, the warrant,” he groans, and his left arm starts to twitch, swinging up and slapping his right just above the elbow. The movement makes it look like he’s swatting at some invisible fly. The way he smells, he could very well be attracting real ones.
I shove past him and step into the apartment. “I never said the warrant was for you,” I tell him, and head down the hallway and into an open-plan room disappointingly similar to my own, but marginally less clean. In what was probably designed to be a living room, there’s nothing but a large homemade log-in chair that looks like an eggshell cut top to bottom. Deep in the seat, an emaciated woman that I’m assuming is Barbara Holland shivers and smiles dreamily from under her headset.
Over in the kitchen at the other side of the room, another man sits at a small table, idly rolling an empty syringe from side to side. Unlike the guy at the door, he looks a little healthier, and is wearing a clean T-shirt and a pair of shorts. I’m guessing he’s either the only one of the three with a job, or he just hasn’t been using as long as they have.
“Hey! Hey, you
can’t be in here, man,” the first man shouts, creeping his way into the room behind me and using the wall to keep himself upright.
The man at the table glances towards the other guy, then spots me. His head tilts slowly, looking me up and down. He smiles widely and says, “Tits an’ tie. Nice.”
“Sure they are,” I reply. “Play ball, and I’ll let you touch the tie.”
“You listening to me, man,” the first guy says, stumbling forward and gripping my shoulder as tightly as he can. “I said you can’t be in here. Not without a warrant.”
“This is a nice shirt,” I reply. “I’d rather you didn’t get it dirty.”
“Come on, Jimmy boy,” the man at the table laughs. “Be nice. We don’t get many guests.” He nods at me, and says, “Come, sit down.”
I swat Jim Holland’s hand away from my shoulder and stroll across the room, taking the only free chair. “Mark Farlow, I assume.”
“The one an’ only,” he replies. “An’ you are?”
“Cassandra Tam, PI.”
“Ooh, a detective,” he slurs, his tongue flicking sleazily over his dry, cracked lips. “An’ what can we do for you, hmm?”
“I’m looking for some information. Do you know about the Eddie Redwood case?”
Mark raises his eyebrows curiously, but his eyelids droop slightly, betraying his tiredness. “Just another brother down. Shit like that happens when you fly solo, Detective. That’s why we run as a three. Family lookin’ out for family an’ all that. I never met Eddie myself, wouldn’t know him from any other faceless guy out there, but chances are, the police already called it for what it was.”
“My client doesn’t think so.”
“An’ you believe them?”
“No.”
“Then why come here, interruptin’ our fun, hmm?”
I cross my arms and fix Mark with a solid stare. “’Cause a paying client is a paying client. Either I prove the police were right, or I find something they missed. Either way, I give my client closure and get my money.”