Reality 36 (23 page)

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah, Flores. Right from the top. He's investigating a connected case over in Euroland. The Sams think it's really important. There's nothing we can do." Mulholland was older, serious, about forty-five in biological looks, probably her actual age – she looked the kind of woman who wouldn't make the time for cosmetic work until she had to. Her hair was uncombed, scraped back into a businesslike ponytail, her face free of make-up, clothes poorly ironed. A real vocation cop, Otto guessed, an up-late-into-the-night, dwelling-on-the-faces-ofthe-dead type. "Isn't that right?"

  Otto nodded.

  "And what is this case, huh? You gonna tell us?" said Flores.

  "I cannot. It is highly sensitive," said Otto regretfully. Pissing off the local cops wasn't going to make his job any easier, but as understanding as he was, Flores was irritating. His shoulder throbbed. Something important had given; he felt it grind as he moved. The pain wasn't helping him keep his cool in the face of this idiot.

  "That's fucking typical!" Flores threw up his arms. "Goddamn fucking machines!" He stalked off, passed through the police flatfield round the house, signalled two uniforms in after him. "Fine, fine, show him round," he shouted over his shoulder. "I'm going to go over the gardens again. Call me when he leaves."

  A barrage of swearing followed, and then the diminutive detective was gone.

  "I'm sorry about detective Flores, Mr Klein."

  "Do not be sorry. It is difficult when someone comes in from outside. I will be out of your way as quickly as possible."

  "Sure, thanks. It's complicated with Flores. He's been in the force since way back when, before AI started giving orders rather than just taking them. He doesn't like it when artificials interfere with his work, he gets huffy."

  Huffy was not a word Otto knew. His near-I gave him a definition in German. If that was huffy, Flores was probably the kind of guy who approached apoplectic if his pizza topping was wrong.

  "I'm Detective Mulholland," she said, which Otto already knew. "I've got to accompany you right the way round here, no snooping about on your own, OK?"

  "Understood," he said

  She smoothed her dry hair. She looked tired. "If you've got any questions, you've just got to shout out. Did you have a good flight?"

  "Yes," he said. "May I see the crime scene now?"

  "My, you're the chatty one, aren't you? Sure, I'll show you round." She walked right through the flatribbon cordon, her badge, like Flores', allowing her passage. She started to indicate that Otto should duck under, hesitated, walked over to the nearest emitter bollard and pressed a button instead. The flatribbon, a beam of light bearing scrolling warnings and carrying a high voltage charge on ionised air molecules, winked out between two of the emitters. "Kind of a big fella, aren't you? They all this big over there?"

  "I am an exception."

  "Well, Mr Exception, walk this way. Are you ex-military or…"

  "Ex-military, Ky-technischeren Spezielkraft Kommando. Cyborg commando."

  "OK." She flashed her badge at a bored-looking uniform by the property's side door. Otto let him scan his AllPass. The officer handed them foot coverings, overcoats and haircovers. After they'd put them on he opened the door without comment, and let the two of them inside.

  "Do I need to wear a mask?" Otto asked.

  "Not unless the smell bothers you. We had air scrubber drones come in and do the atmospheric forensics right after the call came in. We do have professional standards, you know?" She gave an unpractised smile. She was trying to put him at ease, but she wasn't very skilled at it.

  They went in via the kitchen door. The house was big, and full of cops. Small circular drones darted about, aiding a forensics team of five men and a sheathed Four who was doubtless linked to the drones. They flew through the air, dipping down to the floor to scoop up flies killed in the building lockdown, sucked fragments of stone and soil up from the carpet, plucked particles of skin from the curtains. Camera flashes sporadically popped.

  They went through into the dining room. The smell was bad. Two weeks' worth of decay soaked into floorboards lifted a reek into the air, the body's position marked by a tape outline and a large blotch of discoloured wooden flooring. Qifang had not been a big man, but there'd been time, and he'd leaked copiously.

  "This is where we found him." Her gesture took in the stained table, covered in plastic markers, and the mark on the floor. "He'd been dead at least two weeks, we think. It was the start of vacation, when teaching duties end. He was supposed to be doing research, and he kept himself to himself outside of office hours. We had to go off entomological evidence, as you can see – a lot of flies round here, killed by the biologicals pulse we use. Lucilia sericata, most of them. Their pupation rate kind of puts it round the same time as we see that flicker in his Gridsig, you know about that?"

  "Yes."

  "OK. Then, or possibly a little later."

  "What of the three divergent signals that left the States?"

  "Beats me, we've not had anyone cheat the Grid codes since the Three Uncles took over population management. But sure, this guy was one smart cookie, we'll give him that. Then there's his assistant, she disappeared in a hurry. Do you know anything about that?"

  "I cannot discuss it," said Otto. "Sorry. I read about Qifang's home fabricator in the report also. May I see that? It may be important to my investigation."

  "Yeah, sure, this way. Watch the wires." She pointed to lines linking the Four to a boxy unit, itself trailing cables off out of the house through a plastic sphincter lodged in the window. "We have to hardline our sheaths to the police AIs. Some little hacker shit got hold of the cipher for their Gridpipes. Quantum encoding unbreakable? Bullshit. Kids can crack it in their lunchbreak. They do it for fun, then the criminal elements buy it up."

  "It is inconvenient," said Otto, thinking of Tufa.

  "It's a drag, that's for sure. Outsiders seem to think it's all peace and love in CA since the dippies took over, but I tell you, this place is crawling with scum. We've got a major gang war on, massive people-smuggling to the south, every criminal meathead in Latin America has decided to come here since the reds took over and started executing anyone connected to the cartels and drug businesses, and it's not helped by the reds trying to smuggle their spi es in with the genuine refugees. So, even something like this, it's all hardlined. None of it, bar the simplest commands to these drones, is broadcast."

  "It is the safest way," agreed Otto. Qifang's house was large. They passed over a wide hallway where the main entrance to the building was situated. More masked and suited bodies pored over this.

  "It is a pain in my ass, is what it is," she said. "Even the numbers bitch about it. Right, here we are." Under the grand staircase was a small door that Otto had some trouble squeezing through. This led onto a short flight of stairs that brought them down into a basement workshop, harshly lit, with a concrete floor covered with a smooth application of carbon plastic paint. It was a large space, big enough for a couple of workbenches. Tools on pinboards lined three of four walls, while the fourth opened out into a garage where a modest aircar sat, the ramp leading up from the garage to the driveway outside stamped with a hard rhombus of daylight. More officers bustled about the basement. Otto had counted seventeen in all in the house.

  In the corner of the workshop stood an industrial fabrication unit, one of the biggest Otto had seen in a private home, large enough to put out auto components. The service hatch had been taken off without much care, optic cables left spilling out of it. Mulholland shooed an officer out of the way, and pointed within.

  "The central chipset, patterning unit and cache have been removed. Bits of them are on that desk over there." She indicated a pile of shattered components. "We have the chips back at HQ, but they've been thoroughly wrecked. It looks like someone, Qifang I presume, took out anything that could give us a clue and smashed it to bits with a hammer."

  "He made something before he died?"

  "Yes, something he did not want us to know about."

  "You are attempting to reassemble the chip fragments?"

  "Yeah, we're not making much progress. They're useless, if you ask me. I don't think we'll find anything."

  "I'll take a scan of them if I may."

  "Be my guest. Speak to Martez upstairs." She leaned on a bench. "He's logging the evidence. He'll give you access to whatever you need."

  The house was well kept, and Otto was impressed by the way the police were going over it. They weren't always so careful back home; probably Qifang being so famous helped. After the police finished, this place would be crawling with the media, then it really would be trashed. "It is a good team you have. But is it not large for this case?"

  "A suicide, you mean? Maybe, but Qifang was an important man, and there are a lot of eyes watching, most of them not of the human variety, and what the numbers say goes around here. There were a lot of people that were not very happy with Qifang's civil rights movement for the other sapients, lot of religious, lot of extreme dippies. Some of them have the money and the expertise to stage something like this and make it look like suicide. And his assistant, she's a lot younger than Qifang, but some of those mentor/ student relationships can get very messy one way or another."

  "What is your opinion, detective?"

  "You want my opinion? Wow," she said sardonically. "It's a long time since anyone wanted that, but, OK, you can have it." She crossed her arms. "My opinion is that he killed himself. Why? Beats me, maybe we won't find out and maybe we will. Sure, he had cancer, but they might have been able to fix that. In my opinion it doesn't really matter. In my opinion these officers here could be covering something else, say, solving the schoolyard massacre we had two weeks back. Thirty-eight dead kids, because one wetback didn't like the way another looked at him. Or the serial killer offing virtporn addicts in Downey, Lynwood and Compton. By our count he's up to seventy-six victims now. Or any one of the other million active cases we have. This state is gutting itself while the fucking dippies clang their bells, and one dead professor who chose an early exit does not mean much one way or another to me. But that's my opinion, and my opinion doesn't mean anything to the State, the VIA, the Feebs or the machines that run them."

  "It is a difficult job. I understand," he said.

  "Do you understand?" Her expression softened as she lingered on the scars on his face. "Yeah, yeah, maybe I guess you do." She looked round the room, as if searching for something she'd misplaced, then looked back up to him. "Now, is there anything else you need to see here?"

  "No, thank you. I will take the scans of the chip fragments and send them to my partner, maybe he can do something with them."

  "Really?"

  "He is skilled in this area. If he finds anything I will let you know. I also need any information that you may have on Qifang's assistant, Veronique Valdaire."

  "I'd like to speak to her myself. She skipped town, suspicious, but her Gridsig, forensics and so forth suggest she was never within two miles of this place. The night he died we have a bar full of witnesses to testify that she was dancing until the early hours. Whatever she's done, it isn't killing."

  "That does not mean that she is not responsible."

  "No, no, it does not. She vanished in suspicious circumstances two weeks ago, not long after the victim killed himself. She's off the Grid. It's not surprising. If he knew how to fool the system, there is a good chance she knows how to too. The UCLA Six has lodged complaints against her: a couple of illegal searches, theft and an assault."

  "Assault?"

  "She turned it off," she explained. "It put the initial call to us, but the specifics of that information have not been made available to us by the VIA. If you find her before we do. I want to talk to her before the VIA. It's been a nightmare here since the Tolman administration. Federal and out-government agencies at each other's throat in a way that'd make… What was his name, that twentieth-century guy?" She frowned at Otto, looking for an answer, before providing her own. "Hoover, that's it. That'd make him proud. Paranoid nuts everywhere, no cooperation, especially on these section 73s."

  "You don't think she was involved in Qifang's murder?"

  "No." She shook her head. "It's very unlikely. There's not much evidence. Granted that she's smart enough to hide it and herself, but she didn't go to any effort to cover her tracks until the morning she vanished. Besides, her psychs suggests a high degree of loyalty, and I'll go with that every time. She's running all right, but not from this. It'd be better for her if we got to her before the VIA did. What she's done is enough for the VIA to hold her indefinitely, murder or not."

  "What do you think?"

  "Me? I think Qifang killed himself. How Valdaire ties in exactly, I don't know. I expect the VIA to deal with her, bad news for her. I expect the VIA to come to me soon, because despite what they think, we local cops are not schmucks, and if we can't find her, I'll bet they can't find her either." She rubbed her face again. Her skin took a while to crawl back into place, fatigue compromising its elasticity. "Now, Mr Klein, I have a lot to do. If there's nothing more you need to see, I will escort you out."

After Otto had secured scans of the fabber chip fragments and Gridcast them to Richards, he caught a cab over to Richards & Klein's LA office in an unprepossessing mini-arco out near the landward end of Wilshire. His first stop there – he'd gone straight to the crime scene when the Stratoliner landed.

  He interrogated the near-I secretary, to make sure that Richards hadn't been ignoring potentially lucrative cases. If they bored him, he tended not to bother telling Otto, which was one of his more irritating habits, so Otto checked up on the offices' minders every week. There wasn't much, a bauxite freighter heist that he might look into later. He instructed the machine to inform potential clients that they were likely to be unavailable for a month.