Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (12 page)

With a snarled oath, Ormond crossed his arms over his broad chest. “No one in this department wants to work with that thing.”

“As I recall, the same problem existed before, until Detective Nolan bravely stepped forward.”

“Maybe you noticed, counselor, but she ain’t here no more.”

“I have noticed. Last time, you were lucky and someone volunteered. Perhaps this time you should take a more aggressive stance.”

“What? Order someone to partner up with it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

Chaney maintained his cool gaze. “Then perhaps Commissioner Dawn should talk to your boss and have him place someone more
progressive
in his or her thinking in your position.”

“Are you threatening me?”

For a moment, I thought I might have to get up to protect Chaney.

“Do you feel threatened, Lieutenant?” Chaney showed only a bemused expression.

“Get out of my office before I throw you out.”

Chaney stayed put. “I’m afraid I can’t leave until I’m certain we’ve reached an accord regarding Detective Drake’s prospects within this department. Considering the hostile environment for Detective Drake, my employers will want to know.”

“You talk about that thing like it’s human.”

“Detective Drake acts in a capacity where he needs to be recognized as an individual entity.”

“It’s a machine.”

“A very advanced machine, and it has been leased to the NAPD to fulfill a specific task. Very cheaply, I might point out.”

“My old man used to tell me that you get what you pay for, and Haas-Bioroid is getting plenty of public exposure out of this unit and the other one playing detective.”

“
Playing
detective?” Chaney touched a 3D pin broadcaster on his jacket. A computer screen holo formed in mid-air. “Maybe you could help me understand these figures. Both Detective Drake and Detective Floyd have a very high percentage of case closures. Is that correct?”

Ormond didn’t reply.

I knew it was true. Floyd and I were both detail-oriented and indefatigable when it came to spending time on a case.

“On four separate occasions, Detective Nolan attributed her survival in a potential lethal encounter to her partner’s quick thinking and bioroid abilities.”

That, too, was true. I had the acknowledgements in my service file.

Chaney blanked the pin broadcaster and stood. He ran a hand over his chest and his whole suit smoothed out in response. “Get with the program, Lieutenant Ormond. The future is here. You
should
feel threatened at this point.”

“Not by you.”

Chaney flashed the lieutenant a thin smile. “Don’t fear me. Fear the corporation I represent. My superiors can change your life here, and your wife’s life at her job.” He deliberately dragged a hand through the 3D image of the lieutenant’s family on his desk, causing them to wobble and shift. “And then there are the children to consider. What kind of futures will they have if they are blacklisted before they even enter the job force?”

Ormond’s face turned white. His nostrils flared. “I’ll find a place for him. Get out of here.”

Chaney went out, still smiling. “We’ll be in touch, Lieutenant. Count on it.”

Ormond shifted his wrath to me. “You, too. Out.”

I went.

*

I sat at my desk and studied the small box of personal things that sat atop it. There wasn’t much. Most of it was holo-images Shelly had given me of her family, and a few of us with collars she’d considered significant. There was a list of ficvids she’d recommended to me to watch:
The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, The Blue Knight, The New Centurions, The Naked City,
and other classics that she had loved and felt had pushed her into a career in law enforcement.

I’d watched them without seeing anything in them that truly presented our job in an appealing manner. I’d discussed that with Shelly and she’d seemed disappointed.

There were a few other things in the box, items Shelly had told me were keepsakes from various cases we had solved. Two ties, both of which Shelly had gotten me at different times for different events we’d been required to attend, lay on top.

The box represented years of our association. The contents didn’t seem to be much in light of all that we had shared.

A passage from
The Maltese Falcon
kept reverberating in my thoughts: “
When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around—bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere.
”

I listened to Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade repeat those lines over and over again in my mind. I lifted my damaged hand and watched as the nanobots reattached the severed fingers. I could already flex them.

And I waited.

*

I sat in my
office
, the one that I kept internally. I didn’t think I was retreating from the detective bullpen, but I wanted something to occupy my thoughts. I could sit idle for days, but I preferred not to.

The office was a simple thing: a wooden desk and a wooden swivel chair. An open window behind me allowed the smell of the sea from the San Francisco harbor into the room. A radiator occupied one wall. A pair of client chairs sat on the other side of the desk.

I had never described the office to Shelly. Now I wished I had. I think she would have gotten a laugh out of it. It was very much the same kind of office Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe or Jake Gittes had worked out of in their respective ficvids.

When I looked out the window, 1930s San Francisco lay spread out before me. The city looked a lot different. The marina was filled with boats and small ships instead of immense cargo handlers. Actual cars remained on the roads.
 

I liked the city and wanted to walk through it, but my construct wasn’t that grand. I wasn’t quite a prisoner of the office, but I couldn’t leave it. I thought, possibly, that was only because I hadn’t incorporated enough of the city’s history into my databanks. I was curious about what it would feel like to walk through the early morning or late evening fog, to hang out in the bars, and to see the neighborhoods.

I turned my focus to Shelly’s death. I had been forbidden to investigate the events surrounding Dawes’s murder, which would include Shelly’s subsequent death, but there were ways around that if I wished to undertake them. As Shelly had told me on numerous occasions, a murder was like taking a bowl of spaghetti noodles and dumping it on the floor. There were a lot of different strands to pull in an investigation. Most investigators stayed with one strand and followed it until it petered out. The trick was to keep pulling strands.

I was already building a list of potential strands, but I couldn’t break the instructions I had received regarding non-involvement. That was…unsettling. I could do this.

Craig Dormoth and his partner, Rich Calaveri, had drawn the assignment. I knew they were good at what they did. I also knew that another pair of eyes and hands could be helpful.

I reached for the old telephone on the corner of the desk. It had an earpiece and a mouthpiece. When I lifted the earpiece, a computer interface formed on the desktop. I had access to the NAPD’s mainframe computer.

Quietly, I downloaded the most recent reports concerning the investigation into Dawes, and the ancillary investigation into Shelly’s death. No one noticed the trickle of information and data that I pulled.

A knock sounded on the office door.

I looked up at the frosted glass that read
DRAKE INVESTIGATIONS
, only backward.

That had never happened before. While I sat there thinking about the appropriate response, the door opened and a woman walked into the room. I recognized her at once as the woman I’d awakened next to in the hotel room, only now she was dressed in a slinky red dress and a pillbox hat that fit the 1930s décor.

I stood. “Who are you?”

“You know me.” She crossed the room and sat in one of the client chairs. She draped her gloves across her thigh as she crossed her legs.

“I don’t know you.”

She ignored me. “You need to get moving. Time is wasting. This is a matter of life or death.” She pursed her deep red lips. “
My
life or death. You’ve already let one woman die, do you really wish to cause the death of another?”

I scanned her face and tried to upload the image to the NAPD facial recognition database. I couldn’t. Every time I tried to send the image, her elegant features turned to liquid sand and slid through my mental fingers.

I gave up trying. “Why are you here?”

“So you can save me. You promised that you would.”

Chapter Ten

“Drake.”

I opened my eyes and saw Ormond standing in front of me. He had his hands on his hips and looked decidedly unhappy. “Yes.”

“Were you asleep?”

“I don’t sleep.”

His brows drew together as he studied me. “Are you all right?”

“I am operating at peak efficiency. Thank you.”

“If you were operating at peak efficiency, your partner wouldn’t be dead.”

I had no rejoinder. I sat and waited. My internal chronometer told me that three hours had passed since the meeting with Chaney. Around us, the other members of the detective squad in the bullpen watched.

“I have your new assignment.”

“Thank you.”

“Come with me. Bring your stuff.”

I stood, took hold of the small box, and followed Ormond through the bullpen, the hallway, and to the elevator. Once we were inside, he pushed the button for the basement and the cage wheezed down to the lower level.

We didn’t speak. We didn’t have to. Ormond knew what he was doing and I had no questions. I knew that whatever assignment he’d thought of for me was—in his mind—punishment. I just wanted something to do.

The image of the woman haunted me. Now that I was back in the real-time world, I found I couldn’t properly recollect her face. Every time I thought of her, it was like there was a gaping hole where she should have been. In real-time, she was an enigma. The experience was illogical and no potential explanation offered itself.

*

When the elevator doors opened, Ormond took the lead again and I followed him to a large room in the north section of the basement.

The room was filled with shelves and shelves of white boxes, all of them containing evidence in unsolved homicides. The records of the deaths were on the mainframe, but the NAPD had to maintain the physical evidence as well.

“Do you know what this place is?” Ormond glared at me.

“Yes, the cold case room.”

“That’s right. This is where cases come that have gone cold and stale.” Ormond waved to the boxes. “Some of these murders are decades old.”

“I understand.” I looked at him levelly and I knew that my lack of emotion bothered him. “Is there any particular case you want me to start with?”

“No.”

“Will I be assigned a partner?”

“No. You’ll be reporting to me.”

“When do you require reports?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Is there a shift you want me to work?”

Ormond cursed and blew out an angry breath. “No. Just work. Do whatever you want. Start wherever you want. There’s nothing down here you can possibly screw up.”

“May I start now?”

“Yes. Just stay away from my office.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

Ormond cursed again and left me there.

I walked to the back of the room and found the small desk that I remembered from my trips with Shelly down to the basement. Every now and again, we had a murder that looked a lot like other homicides so we would compare notes and physical evidence.

Only once had we closed a current case and an old case at the same time. There had been a small celebration because both murders had involved older women who had been defenseless. The murders had taken place six years apart because the doer had been in prison for that time on another, unrelated charge. After we made our case, he wasn’t ever getting out.

I put my things in the desk after confirming that no one else used it. Then I roved the aisles of unsolved cases, looking for one I could occupy myself with.

*

“Her name was Mathilda. We called her Matti. The other name just seemed too grown up for her.” Beverly Harcourt was in her early thirties, a thin, nervous woman whose pain over the loss of her daughter showed in her red eyes and slumped shoulders. She was on medication to alleviate her emotional distress. All the meds did, that I could see, was blunt the trauma and shrink her inside herself. Her black hair was in disarray and she wasn’t wearing makeup.