Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (13 page)

She wasn’t actually in the basement with me. I had tapped into a 3D deposition she had given at the time of her daughter’s death five years ago. I couldn’t interact with her, couldn’t ask questions, but Shelly had done a good job with the interview.

I supposed that the fact that the case was one of those Shelly hadn’t been able to solve had drawn me to the murder. I didn’t want to defend that reasoning because I didn’t understand it myself. I think, perhaps, there was a resonance, but it wasn’t anything I could weigh or measure.

“She was on her way home from a friend’s house when she was hit.” Tears fell from Beverly Harcourt’s azure eyes. “Her friend’s house was only a block away. Matti walked that distance all summer long. We just didn’t—
I
didn’t—think anything of it. Not until one of the neighbors came to tell me about…the accident.”

I halted the interview there and opened the file from the traffic cam. Five years ago, when the hit-and-run had taken place, seccams hadn’t been as populated as they were these days. Worse, neighborhoods like the one Matti Harcourt had lived in weren’t subsidized by corporate funding so the traffic cams wouldn’t all be in place.

The nearest traffic cam was a half-klick distant. Even with the zoom magnification available, I wasn’t able to identify the hopper’s license plate. All I knew was that the vehicle was a sedan—a dusty grey that was standard for many vehicles of that same type—and handled by a person that was clearly not in control of his or her faculties.

The hopper came down from the twilight sky like a fat insect. The vehicle’s safety features kicked in, providing enough lift to keep from destroying the hopper on impact, but not enough to protect the eleven-year-old girl beneath it. Judging from the way Matti Harcourt had never moved to avoid the hopper, she hadn’t known it was coming. She was alive one moment and dead the next.

After landing on the girl, the driver deployed the wheels and quickly drove away. The hopper slewed across the street and slammed into a fence, taking out seven meters of it before regaining control.

I pulled the data dumps of all the neighboring street cams and tried to piece together an overlay that would allow me to track the vehicle. Of course, Shelly and her partner at the time had thought of that and it wasn’t possible.

I pulled up arrests from that night as well, thinking perhaps the hopper pilot had gotten arrested later by a patrol hopper. I checked each sheet thoroughly, searching for the vehicle, a Gwangju Petrel, named for the South Korean seabird.

No one had been arrested. That, too, was something Shelly would have checked. She had trained me.

I also cross-referenced Petrel owners in New Angeles. The car was very popular five years ago and remained so today. Four years’ worth of models looked enough alike to be the one on the traffic cam. There were 11,383 Petrels registered in the megapolis at the time of the hit-and-run. Sixteen of them had been reported in accidents over the next two weeks after Matti Harcourt’s death.

Shelly had cleared all of those accidents. I saw her notes logged into the file. She had actually continued her search over the following two months, thinking perhaps that the person who had driven the hopper also had access to another vehicle and had kept the Petrel hidden.

She had turned up another eleven hoppers in accidents. All of those had checked out as well.

I realized I had to think outside the box. After Shelly had partnered with me, her approach to cases had changed. With the processing load I could manage, I could cover a lot more ground than a human investigator could. When working a case, man hours had to be accountable. A case had to break quickly, otherwise time to work the leads became increasingly limited because other cases came along.

Balancing the old and new cases was hard. Investigations turned cold quickly when leads turned thin. That was why the basement was so full of boxes.

I sat at my new desk. I looked at Mrs. Harcourt, and thought about Matti.

Then, I got up and went to retrieve the box with the physical evidence in it.

*

There wasn’t much in the box. Several pieces of carbosteel from the hit-and-run vehicle took up most of the space. None of those pieces were marked with the hopper’s unique identification number. I hadn’t expected that.

Shelly had also gotten a set of tire imprints. Although she had tracked the tires, I did it again, accessing the tire manufacturer’s database and discovering that the tire tread was extremely generic.

I considered that. The Petrel was a modestly priced vehicle. The tires were modestly priced. The neighborhood where Matti Harcourt and her family lived was also modest.

I had found a strand that I felt was new and promising.

I pulled up the list of Petrel owners again, but this time I focused on the ones that lived within a two-klick radius of the Harcourt family. My supposition was that the hopper pilot had been on his or her way home when the accident occurred. There was no further arrest because the pilot had made it home.

My list of owners shrank to fourteen. I factored in the assumption that the driver had to own more than one vehicle. That brought me down to three.

The first owner was Karen Taylor, who lived six blocks from the Harcourts. I researched her and discovered that she worked at Jinteki. A further search of her employee records, with proper warrants filed, showed she had been at work the evening of the accident. Furthermore, her hopper had been in the employee parking garage.

The second owner was Byron Cramer, a retired social worker. I called him and explained who I was and asked about his car. As it turned out, his vehicle had been in a garage for repairs on the day Matti Harcourt was struck and killed. A brief check with the garage corroborated that.

The third owner was James Thorne. I didn’t bother contacting him because a crossover report through the NAPD showed that his hopper had been booted by a patrolman for unpaid citations. The police officer had been writing up the tow order at the time Matti had been killed.

I was stymied.

*

Back at the box, I went through the evidence again. This time, I took out the paint chips that had been found at the scene. Closer inspection revealed that the paint consisted of two different layers, the top one the dusty grey, but the other one a light blue.

I checked Shelly’s log. She had noted the two colors as well. She had even run a trace on light blue Petrels. The numbers were a lot less than the dusty grey color, but they were still improbable for two detectives to follow up on with any kind of alacrity.

I wasn’t two detectives. At the speed I operated, I was a hundred. I searched through the databases and began the process of elimination all over again. This time, I searched for a light blue Petrel, thinking that the hopper owner might have repainted the vehicle and not changed the color on the title and registration.

At the same time, I researched the light blue paint at the Gwangju corp and found it had been proven defective. Vehicles painted that color for two successive years had been recalled for repainting in dove grey.

I added that to my search parameters.

Within fifteen minutes of processing, I had only one hit: an eight-year-old Gwangju Petrel owned by Steven Carmichael. Mr. Carmichael owned the hopper at the time of the accident, and he had lived seven blocks away. He’d also owned an older model Cruiser.

I checked for ownership of the car and discovered that it had last been registered the year of Matti Harcourt’s death. Thinking that Mr. Carmichael had been in another accident, I searched accident reports for the hopper’s Vehicle Identification Number and cross-referenced that with Mr. Carmichael’s name.

There was no report of any such wreck, but Steven Carmichael had problems with drugs and alcohol. He’d last been popped on a Driving Under the Influence charge seven months ago. His driver’s license had subsequently been taken away for a year.

I noted his address, which was different than it had been, and in a much worse neighborhood. According to Mr. Carmichael’s court records, he was currently employed as a clerk at a shoe store not far from his apartment. It was close enough to walk to.

I renewed my efforts to find the hopper. I needed physical evidence to tie Steven Carmichael to the hit-and-run.

There were only so many ways for something as large as a hopper to disappear. One way was to sell it, but then it didn’t truly disappear. It was merely masked as someone else’s property, but the VIN remained the same.

Vehicle Registration had no record of the hopper’s VIN ever hitting the system again.

Another way was to take it to a chop shop where the VIN could be altered and the vehicle could be shunted off to Mexico or Canada. A thorough examination of Steven Carmichael’s background showed no affinity with chop shop gangs.

It was possible that Mr. Carmichael could have left the hopper out to be stolen, but that left too many things up to chance. The vehicle could still be tied back to him. There had been no reports of theft the evening Matti Harcourt had been killed.

No, he had gotten rid of it himself.

And there was only one way left that I knew could be arranged. I opened up an address book on my PAD for the Greater and Outer New Angeles areas and emailed every salvage yard I could find.

Salvage yards sometimes took in stolen property. Most of the time, they couldn’t verify the ownership of car parts unless they were marked and put into the recovery system. For thieves that moved quickly or made strikes while owners were out of town, a few days could sometimes pass.

A complete hopper was a different matter.

Thirty-seven minutes passed before I got a hit on Steven Carmichael’s missing hopper.

Chapter Eleven

“Yeah, I remember that guy.” Jake Conlee, in his forties and lean as a rake, studied the 3D image of Steven Carmichael that I showed him. Conlee wore stained navy coveralls with his name sewn in red thread over his right breast.

Steven Carmichael was in his fifties now, a taciturn man in the 3D with large ears and a small mouth. His hair was bronze and didn’t go well with his sallow complexion.

I blanked the 3D. “Can you tell me why you remember him?”

Conlee ran a scarred fist over his stubbled chin. “Well, it’s like you said: he came in to sell that hopper. I told him I didn’t buy hoppers, that he should go to a dealership, but he wasn’t having any of that. He told me he just wanted junk price for it.”

“Was there anything wrong with the vehicle?”

Conlee motioned me back to a small office where he had an antiquated computer set up on a stained desk littered with car parts. “Sorry. Place is a mess.”

“I don’t mind.”

Conlee sat at the desk and powered up the computer. “I keep good records. You have to in this business. The police check on things. The tax people.”

“I understand.” I waited patiently as he looked for the file.

“Here it is. Steven Carmichael.” Conlee turned the monitor so that I could see it.

The digital image showed Mr. Carmichael standing in front of the dove grey hopper out in the salvage yard.

“He let you take the image?”

“I insisted. Didn’t give him a choice. The last thing I needed was him filing some kind of claim that I’d somehow conned him out of that hopper.”

I noted the date on the file. “This was taken two years ago?”

Conlee checked as well. “Yeah.”

That meant Carmichael had held onto the hopper for three years before getting rid of it. I went back through the timeline I’d made for him and realized that was when he’d lost his job at Solomon Pharmaceuticals. Carmichael had been a warehouse manager. He’d been fired for tardiness, and there had been an investigation into disappearing product. He’d been forced to move into the apartment he’d lived in before the one he currently lived in.

The house Carmichael had lived in at the time had had a garage. The probability that he’d hidden the hopper there was almost definite. He’d only moved it because he’d had to. In that time, he’d come up with the salvage yard as a possible solution.

I looked at Conlee. “What happened to the hopper?”

“As soon as I gave him a fair price for it to be junked out for scrap metal, this guy walked back to the vehicle, took a two-liter bottle of alcohol—vodka, I think, because it was clear—and poured it all over the interior.” Jake Conlee shook his head. “By then, I knew I was dealing with an insane person. I didn’t know what to do. Carmichael flicked a lighter to life and tossed it into the hopper. Then he just walked away.”

I nodded. “Did you put the fire out?”

“Sure. Had to. Otherwise it might have spread.”

“What kind of shape was the hopper in?”

Conlee grimaced and wiped at his face. “It was toast, Detective. A burnt-out shell. It hadn’t been junk when he’d driven it in here, but it was junk when he left it.”

He pulled up another image from the Carmichael file and showed me the torched hopper. Not much remained of the interior and smoke stained the transplas.

“What did you do with the car?”

“After I was sure it was through burning, I used the exosuit to stack it with the other wrecks that would be sold as scrap metal.”