Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) (11 page)

According to Kit’s directions, IB-19 had their offices and production facilities on the 65
^th
floor. Roberts and Dolan had apartments near the top. Paretski, Shark, and Daker lived in other buildings, but had accepted requests to meet with Fox in the company’s offices. According to Kit, they were shooting an episode of the show today anyway so Paretski was on site.

The IB-19 office was a mass of v-tagged adverts for their programming which Fox had tuned out before she had taken the three steps from the main door to the reception desk. Her VA transmitted her ID to the receptionist, a stunningly attractive blonde whose smile barely flickered as she noted who was now standing in front of her.

‘Inspector Meridian. We were told to expect you. Mister Roberts is terribly upset over the loss of Miss Trent. We all are.’

Well, the fake regretful smile was impressive, but still fake. ‘I’m sure. Is Mister Roberts available? I’d like to start with him. I also understand that Miss Paretski is shooting today? If someone could arrange for me to see her when she’s available, that would reduce the disruption, I think.’

The blonde smiled. ‘Of course. I’ll make arrangements. Mister Roberts is in his office. Third door on the right.’ She pointed to Fox’s left where a corridor led deeper into the suite.

Nodding, Fox followed the directions and was walking into Alan Roberts’s office a second later. The work he had had done to keep himself looking young was not working for him. The bleak smile he offered up as she stepped into the room just appeared wrong on a face belonging to someone not really old enough to have seen much pain. He was, according to records, older than he looked. His hair was jet black and cut immaculately. His blue eyes had a hard edge, but there was enough softness about him to suggest genuine grief or moderately impressive acting ability. His face was all carved, elegant lines, too sculpted to be natural.

‘Mister Roberts,’ Fox said, before he could speak. ‘I’m Inspector Meridian. I’m sorry for your loss.’

Roberts nodded his head slowly and indicated a seat opposite him. ‘Thank you, Inspector. Julianne was one of our best writers. She will be a considerable loss to the show and the station. And… she was my friend.’

‘Friends and no more?’

‘I believe that friendship is the greater part of any relationship. It is true that we were no longer lovers, but we parted amicably. I was… less happy about it than she was, at first. It took a short while for me to see that she was right, that we had grown stale.’

‘That’s when you took up with Miss Paretski?’

His eyes tightened. ‘Not immediately, but not long after.’

Fox gave a nod. ‘You understand that I’m required to ask these questions, Mister Roberts. Your ex-partner was murdered, quite brutally and quite personally.’

‘And, of course, I’m a suspect.’

‘One among several. I don’t have evidence sufficient to link anyone with the crime here, and I would hope that you would want Miss Trent’s killer brought to justice.’

‘Of course.’

‘Miss Paretski has been heard suggesting that Miss Trent’s involvement with Mystery and Mayhem is due to the relationship you started with Miss Paretski.’

‘That, Inspector, is because Madeleine does not understand Julianne. She never did. Julianne wanted to try something new, to branch out. Not too far out, you understand, but she wished to push into more… adult-targeted programming.’

Fox smiled. ‘More breasts in showers?’

Roberts returned the smile. ‘Taking Madeleine’s comments seriously… Well, when you’ve met her you’ll understand that she is more talk than action.’

Continuing to smile, Fox decided not to point out that hiring a killer did not require much action. ‘I will need to know your whereabouts for the morning of the eighteenth, between six and ten.’

‘In bed until midday, or thereabouts. My apartment records should verify that. I have no secrets from the police, Inspector. Please feel free to access any security details you wish.’

‘That’s very helpful, Mister Roberts.’ She put an immediate request through her VA to have HQ grab and analyse the records, tagging it with Roberts’s permission statement. She knew records like that could be doctored or faked, but it was a start. ‘Your cooperation is noted. Can you think of anyone who might wish to harm Miss Trent?’

‘I haven’t been personally involved in her life for a few months, but no one I know would wish to harm her. Even this business with Mystery and Mayhem… She was still doing good work for us. Yes, we were losing some viewing share to them, but we were in no trouble with the advertisers. We’re still getting good replay value through on-demand, and our analysts are seeing good memetic take-up. And Julianne was a likeable woman. She was letting herself go a little…’ He frowned.

‘Mister Roberts, if there’s
anything
which may shed light on her death…’

He waved a hand dismissively, but what he said was, ‘It’s probably nothing, but she mentioned an online club several times. Uh… I’m sorry, I never recorded the name. It began with an “N.” The way she spoke about it… I don’t believe it was illegal, but I think it had a dark aspect to it. Perhaps she met someone there.’

Fox got to her feet. ‘Thank you for your time, Mister Roberts. I’ll look into this club.’ She was, in fact, already putting a request through to get Trent’s online tracking data passed to Kit for analysis.

‘Anything I can do to help, Inspector,’ Roberts replied, smiling, as she headed for the door.

~~~

Madeleine Paretski was, indeed, not a woman Fox would have classified as violent. She had the look, especially in her publicity stills, but the will was missing or submerged under a vast ocean of high self-opinion.

Fox found her in a dressing room which seemed oversized considering that her costume was a grey skinsuit with motion-tracking markers all over it so there was not much dressing to be done. In stills, her eyes looked bluer than they really were: the real ones were more grey than blue. Her hair was a bright, golden blonde, cut short this season. Fox took in the musculature around the arms and thighs, highlighted by the figure-skimming suit, and decided almost immediately that she was looking at grafted, cosmetic enhancement. It looked the part, and even gave a little extra strength, but it could cause problems if stressed and it never quite looked like natural muscle. The sculpted jawline and cheekbones were either a really good cosmetic job or natural.

‘Yes, I may have got a little steamed that she was writing that low-grade, cheap, spoof-porn rip-off, and I may have suggested she was doing it to get back at me for Alan…’ Paretski paused, smiling brightly and showing teeth which looked like they had been polished by the people who did NASA’s telescope mirrors. It seemed like it was meant to be a dramatic pause, but it also seemed to go on a beat too long. ‘It’s all part of the show, dear.’

Fox did not especially like being called ‘dear’ by someone she did not know. ‘The “show?”’

‘Yes, a little off-screen drama to get the gossip channels buzzing. It’s the main reason I took Alan for a spin, though he turned out to be more fun than I thought… Keep the viewers interested during hiatus, and make sure they know we’re still there. And the social channels are always willing to spread something when it’s a little malicious.’

‘I see.’

‘Julianne didn’t mind. She was busy losing all her free time in Niflhel.’

‘That was the online club she was involved with?’ Fox captured the name, got an immediate hit on something which looked right from her VA, and sent that on to Kit to help with her search.

‘Club, underground hangout, niche memespace for counterculture freaks, whatever you wish to call it, that’s where she’d been spending a lot of her time.
I
think she got into it before she broke up with Alan and it’s the reason for this… “need for a change” she suddenly developed.’

‘I see. I’ll need to establish where you were between six and ten yesterday.’

‘Asleep until nine, darling. I was out in the afternoon. Niles Wendover was throwing a small get-together on his yacht.’

‘I assume you’d have no objection to me checking your location against building biomonitor records?’

Paretski smiled. ‘Be my guest, but I’ve done enough of these shows to know there are ways around that.’

Fox returned the smile. All right, so this one was not quite the airhead she liked people to think of her as. Of course, that made it a tiny bit more likely that she was the killer, but Fox was still not putting her high on the suspect list.

~~~

Walter Dolan was, like many men in his line of work, older than he looked. To be fair, a lot of men in a lot of lines of work looked younger than their years, but those in media activities were prone to pushing it more than others. Solid jawline, tight muscles, jet-black carefully groomed hair, startlingly blue eyes… and Fox was fairly sure that little of that was natural. Still, he was looking good for a man of sixty-six.

He was dismissive of any threat
Murder on My Mind
might be posing his show, however. ‘It’s new and people are inclined to try out something new. Watch the ratings come the end of season. That’s when you can see where it’s going, and I’m expecting to see our share go back up.’

‘If it doesn’t?’

‘We’ll lose some revenue. We’ll consider the future of the show.’ He gave a shrug. ‘But we’ve seen off competition before, Inspector. Competition with bigger tits than Elaine Ross.’

Fox gave him a faint smile. ‘I understand you’re moving up in the company?’

Dolan narrowed an eye at her, his lips turning up at the corners. ‘And you’re thinking that I may lose that if that two-bit operation in Boston swings the public their way? The rumour is that Shark’s been brought in as my replacement, and for once the rumour’s true, but a little behind. It’s a done deal, Inspector. We’re announcing it next week. This is commercially sensitive, you understand. Janine Moss, our fictional programming director, is retiring in six months and we’re shuffling up. All decided weeks ago. Besides, Julianne’s death is more damaging to
Murder is My Business
than the other show is.’

‘She was a good writer?’

‘That depends on who you ask or what your opinion is of the shows we do. In my opinion, yes, she was, but she didn’t really get to display her talents as well as she might have here. No, I don’t think Mystery and Mayhem are any better. You want to see her writing at its best then you should dig up a novel she wrote a few years back.’

‘I’ll look that up. I’ll need to verify your whereabouts yesterday morning between six and ten.’

‘My wife and the building logs can tell you I was in my apartment all day. I don’t lie in on a Sunday as some do, but I did not get out of bed before ten either.’ His grin was the kind of knowing grin that said ‘I want you to know I still have sex with my wife,’ which Fox considered to be very nice for him, but she did not care.

‘Thank you, Mister Dolan. I just have Mister Shark and Mister Daker to talk to now.’

‘Good luck with that,’ he said in reply, but she was not entirely sure why.

~~~

They were kind of like a double act, but not exactly funny. Fox found Daker and Shark in the production control room, which seemed to be a centralised location for handling all the filming going on in the facility. Screens showed Paretski and a few other actors walking through a typical, TV cop crime scene analysis, but there were more screens showing other scenes being worked on in different rooms. There were people here monitoring it all, but most of the work seemed to be being handled by AIs.

Daker and Shark were only interested in Paretski’s performance, however. They watched her on a couple of screens off to one side of the fairly large room, out of the way of the technicians. One screen showed the scene as it really was, grey walls, no scenery, and all the actors dressed in skintight, grey suits, while the other one filled in the virtual set. Pretty much the entire production was filled in using computers, even the costumes, though there did seem to be something missing that Fox could not immediately put her finger on.

‘Nate and I did a lot of the same media courses before we came here,’ Daker said, explaining their relationship. ‘He wanted to go more into the management side, but he’s got a good eye for producing the actual product as well as running all the admin. When they said they were looking for a new producer, I suggested Nate.’

‘So you’ve known each other since long before you joined IB-Nineteen?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Shark replied. ‘There are a few of the old crowd still floating in both our circles. We had a pretty good time back then.’

‘Still do,’ Daker added, ‘but we do suffer from “responsibility” now. Nate more than me.’ The writer gave the producer a grin. ‘Producers are always more in the public eye than writers. We’re just about invisible.’

Shark gave a shrug. ‘Compared to the on-stream talent, we’re all invisible.’

Fox decided to indulge herself. ‘You changed your name, Mister Shark. Presumably to make yourself more visible?’

Daker cringed. ‘Don’t. He’ll do the–’

‘Well,’ Shark said, showing off a lot of very bright teeth, ‘I figured “Shark” had more bite.’

‘–the “more bite” joke,’ Daker went on, wincing this time.

‘Perhaps he needs a better scriptwriter,’ Fox suggested. She could see neither of them killing someone; they behaved more like a pair of students buddying up for a night on the town. Daker was probably the wingman. Then again… ‘Now that Miss Trent is out of the picture, you’ll be doing more work on
Murder is My Business
, Mister Daker?’

‘Well, yeah… I guess that’s true.’ Daker in particular did not fit Fox’s view of her perpetrator. He was slim, quite attractive, but not excessively so; she doubted he had bothered having work done and she could detect a little puffiness around the eyes which a cosmetician would have ironed out without thinking about it. His hair was neat but not especially stylish, a cap of dark brown without highlights or embellishments, and he had unremarkable, brown eyes. He looked, she thought, like a nice guy, but mostly he did not have the muscle she expected to see in her killer. ‘I’m not sure that’s such a great thing, to be honest. I’d prefer my own project to get my teeth into. Roberts isn’t going to let me, or us, change the formula on
Murder
much, or at all.’