Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (17 page)

I continued my examination of the body and discovered a patch of subcutaneous tissue scarring on the man’s left shoulder. I checked Seward’s notes and discovered that he either hadn’t found it or hadn’t thought it was worth mentioning.

Curious, I magnified the scarring and hit it with a cross spectrum of light. I would have been able to do a better job if I’d had the actual arm to work with, but that would have required going down to the physical morgue, which would have alerted Lieutenant Ormond to my activities.

I didn’t want to do that. Shelly had taught me to circumvent red tape whenever possible. I’d had trouble with that at first, but she’d pointed out that solving a case faster saved lives. My subroutines that guaranteed I’d stay within protocol had made the adjustments. Since I wasn’t certain the killing was over, I had to find answers other investigators were overlooking.
 

Turning to the eyes, I opened the secondary autopsy on them. They exploded into their various components, hanging in the air with the optic nerves trailing beneath. The pupil, cornea, iris, lens, retina, choroid, sclera, and hyaloid canal all separated into floating islands. The vitreous humor, the clear gel that filled the eye structure in humans and other vertebrates, hovered in a spherical pool.

The cyberware glittered and gleamed, resembling a small pile of needles. The mechanical pieces were bio-friendly, not prone to rejection, and provided the extra night vision and magnification Thurman had been given.

The older pieces were all tagged by the United States Army. The newer pieces weren’t tagged, and I suspected the upgrades had been obtained from black market sources. That meant there would be no record of the surgery required for the implantation.

More cyberware occupied Thurman’s left ear and jawbone. Like the eyes, the comm unit installed there had been military at one time, but had since become a hybrid that couldn’t be tracked back to its source.

Whatever Thurman had been doing on Mars had been off the grid. That spoke even more strongly for him being a Martian rebel.

I started a secretary sorting program to go through the media regarding Martian rebellion military strikes since Thurman’s discharge from the United States Army nine years ago. He had spent twelve years in the military. I wondered what had motivated him to make the career move into whatever he had been doing.

I uploaded the morgue data to my own open file, then closed down the program. Thurman’s body reassembled itself, the organs slithering back into their proper places. His brain plopped back into his skull, the skull cap dropped over it, and his face slid back into position. His eyes closed, and once more it looked like he was sleeping.

Feeling vaguely dissatisfied, or at the very least the closest approximation of those feelings that I was capable of emulating given my neural channeling, I quit the VR and returned to real-time.

*

I occupied myself the rest of the afternoon working on cold cases. By 1639, I had solved yet another homicide. I opened a comm link to Detective Hansen.

His answer was short and direct. “Yeah?”

The vid showed Hansen sitting at his desk. He was a lean, grey-haired man with a wrinkled face that looked like it was starting to cave in on itself. Instead of spending money on implants and cosmetic treatments that would have maintained his appearance as a much younger man, he played the horses.

I knew this only because he’d asked me if I knew anything about horses. Since I could access encyclopedias in a split-second, I had told him I knew a lot about horses. He hadn’t been impressed with what I had known. He’d told me that talking to me was worse than scouting tips at the track.

“I have something for you.”

Hansen grinned. “You solved another one?”

“I believe so.” Actually, going through Thurman’s autopsy had tipped me to the break I’d needed on the case I’d been working on, though I hadn’t quite figured out how that had occurred.

“A big one?”

“The victim was Claudine Salvi.”

Hansen’s faded eyebrows rose in surprise. “The OptiPak Tech homicide?”

“Yes.”

“That case is three years old.”

I already knew that. Claudine Salvi had been the second wife of Baldassare Salvi, a developer of image enhancing software. Salvi’s company had secured several United States government military contracts and supplied upgrades to numerous targeting systems. The company was worth billions.

After Baldassare Salvi died of natural causes, the company had been divided between his young wife, their son, and the son and daughter Baldassare Salvi had had with his first wife, also deceased. Claudine Salvi had been given controlling interest in the company: fifty-one percent.

After Baldassare Salvi’s death, a rival corporation, UltraLens, had offered to buy OptiPak outright for a few billion dollars. The sons and daughter had been in favor of the buyout. But Claudine had had her eye on the future and had turned the offers down for two years running.

Until she’d been found dead in the OptiPak offices.

The theory had been that the murder had been an inside job. No one else had been detected. Both sons and the daughter had been on-site at the time of the murder. All of them had means, motive, and opportunity.

Prior to her death, Claudine had fought with her murderer. Tissue had been removed from under her nails. DNA analysis had ruled out her stepson and stepdaughter, and so far hadn’t hit on another match in the system.

“So who did it?” Hansen always took off at 1700 when he was on the day shift.

“Gino Salvi.”

Hansen frowned. “That’s Claudine Salvi’s biological son, right?”

“Yes.”

Hansen shook his head vigorously. “You got your circuits fried, Drake. As her biological son, his DNA would be half hers. We’d have caught that if it had been his DNA up under her fingernails.”

“Was Gino Salvi’s DNA tested?” I knew it wasn’t because I’d checked.

“I don’t know.”

I emailed the file to him, with the list of family members whose DNA had been tested for a match. Gino Salvi wasn’t on the list. “He wasn’t tested.”

“Doesn’t matter. The ME wouldn’t have missed that.” Hansen scrolled through the file. “Says here Doc Woolford was ME. I know for a fact that Woolford is death on DNA. He went from working for us to working as a special witness for the defense.”

“Woolford missed something else, too.” I highlighted another section of the report, one that I’d added. “Claudine Salvi was a chimera twin.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Chimera twins occur when dizygotic fetuses merge.”

“What do you mean ‘merge’?”

“One twin absorbs the other in the womb.”

Hansen grimaced. “Cannibalism before the kids are born?”

“For all intents and purposes. That trait doesn’t continue after the person is born.”

Hansen made a hurry-up gesture. “You got a point in here, right?”

“A chimera twin can have two sets of DNA.”

Hansen leaned in toward the monitor and I knew I had his attention. “Claudine Salvi had two sets of DNA?”

“She did.” I uploaded a picture of her autopsy. She had been a good-looking woman. In the pictures of her, with her makeup on and the plastic surgery she’d had done to correct the blemishes, people hadn’t been able to see the mosaicism skin that had marked her as a chimera. I still didn’t know why Woolford had missed it, unless he hadn’t been familiar with the condition. “Do you see the discolorations on her chest and abdomen?”

Hansen squinted. “Yeah.”

“Evidently those areas weren’t able to be cosmetically adjusted, or maybe they continued to reoccur. Either way, they led me to the chimera theory.”

“You’d have to prove it.”

“I contacted her plastic surgeon and got her file. Both sets of her DNA are on record. After a bout with ovarian cancer, she had some reconstruction done. The DNA from her ovaries doesn’t match her blood type DNA. The second DNA partially matches the tissue found under her nails at the scene.”

“Meaning the killer was biologically related to her.”

“Yes.”

“Do we know the son’s DNA?”

“No. He’s not in the system. He’s never been arrested.”

Hansen smiled. “That’s about to change.”

“You might be able to have the DA file a writ to get a sample of Gino Salvi’s DNA from his organ bank donation. His mother set it up when he was born.”

“I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow.”

“You’re going to wait?”

Hansen shrugged. “It’s seventeen hundred. No way am I going to try to get someone in the DA’s office to find a judge and sign off on a writ this evening. I’ll get it in the morning and go from there.” He smiled. “I don’t care what other people say about you, Drake. You’re a good detective in my book.”

But he didn’t want to partner up with me. I knew that from the discussions I’d heard about from Craig Dormoth. A few of the other detectives had gone out of their way to let me know that not even Hansen, who no one wanted to partner with, wanted me as his partner.

He promised to keep me in the loop, then blanked the connection.

I gathered my coat and closed down my files. I had an appointment with Eugenia Warren that I intended to keep.

Chapter Fourteen

I
got out of the hopper cab on top of the Warren’s apartment building and walked to the rooftop access where a pair of sec guards challenged me from an armored post. I flashed my police ID and told them I was there by appointment to see Mrs. Warren.

After a brief dialogue with the woman, they allowed me to proceed. I took the elevator down, still with a sec guard, and got out on the sixty-fifth floor, where Eugenia Warren lived with her family.

I identified myself at the door and waited. Eugenia opened the door, registered some surprise at what I was, then caught herself and invited me in.

She looked a lot like her brother—tall and blond—only her hair dropped to her shoulders, and she looked like an office professional with her modest makeup and sensible dress.

 
“I apologize, Mrs. Warren. I should have explained about myself. At the time I didn’t think about it.” That was a blatant lie. I could lie when I was on a case. That was part of my programming. If police only told the truth, they’d never get anything done. I’d known she might reject a bioroid investigator, and although I couldn’t tell her I was a human—there were laws and subroutines in place that would block that particular lie—her lack of asking or viewing me on her PAD originally did not preclude the fact that she could have found out I was a bioroid earlier, if she’d wanted to know.

“Nonsense. You’re working on clearing my brother’s name. That’s all that matters.”

“Thank you.”

“And please, call me Eugenia.”

“Of course.”

Her husband and her children were, respectively, in the home office and in their rooms. She introduced me to them briefly. Her husband regarded me with some distaste and only gave lip service to a greeting. Evidently, he wasn’t as concerned about his brother-in-law as his wife was.

The children were self-involved, both deeply enmeshed in 3D social networking sites. The boy was obviously deep into some VR RPG located on another world, and the girl was touring vacation spots with her friends.

Eugenia sat me on the couch in their small living room and brought out her PAD. She brought up the Net and accessed the storage corp she used for her personal files.

She showed me several pictures of her and her brother as children. I made appropriate noises and occasional notes to keep her interest whetted in showing me the pictures, but I wanted to see the military pictures and vids most of all.

She pulled that file to her PAD and opened it. “Be prepared, Detective. Like I said, Brock loved his time in the Army.”

*

For the next hour and a half, we cycled through those pictures. During his tours of duty, Brock Thurman had served in a lot of hot spots around the world. He’d been in the Middle East, Africa, and South America, and he’d fought terrorists, drug lords, and human traffickers. His efforts and the blood he’d shed—he’d been seriously wounded four times—were to no avail in some respects, because all of those things were still going on.
 

Shelly had told me that our own efforts to stop crime were doomed because crime was a business that would continue. All we could do was slow it down. I wondered if that was what Brock Thurman had believed, that he could slow down the disenfranchised state of smaller nations without benefit of corporate protection.

I wondered if maybe his frustration with his inability to make a lasting difference had been what turned him from soldier to whatever he’d been in the end.

I studied Thurman’s uniform, and lack of uniform, in the combat situations he’d sent pictures of to Eugenia. “Your brother was in Special Forces.”

“Yes, he loved serving with those guys.” She smiled wistfully, and I knew she was remembering the young man in the pictures and vids, not the man Shelly had killed in the L’Engle Hotel.