The Administration Series (15 page)

Carey nodded. "My first thought too, but there's a lot to look at in there. If we need more help, which we will . . ."

"Open budget. Tillotson's authorised anything you need."

She grinned. "Now
that's
what I like to hear. We'll get right on to it." She stood up, and Verstraeten rose a lot more eagerly than he'd sat down.

When they had gone, Toreth returned to the main interest of the case. The first thing he read was the information on Jon Teffera. The security file took him an hour; the medical file took almost as long.

A skiing accident was responsible for his condition — the kind of injury of the rich and famous that always gave Toreth a glow of satisfaction. Damage to Teffera's spine and haemorrhaging in his brain had crippled his motor function and repair had proved beyond even the most cutting-edge nerve regeneration, grafting and implants.

After ploughing through details of Teffera's subsequent medical treatment Toreth hit the end point. After six years of near-continuous operations had restored only limited function, Teffera had rejected further attempts to improve his condition and settled down to live his life as best he could.

Despite his underlying conviction that most corporates deserved whatever they got, Toreth found it uncomfortable reading. After his taster in the sim, it was too easy to imagine himself in the same position, his body taken out of his control. The helplessness he'd felt in the sim kept returning as he read. Ironic that, to Teffera, the sim must have been a godsend.

Justice's information about the sim was scanty. Perhaps they hadn't tried, or perhaps corporate influence had defeated them. There was nothing at all noted about LiveCorp's connections to SimTech, or Teffera's personal interest in it.

Of course, if Justice had been inclined to put the whole thing down to natural causes, that would explain the lapse in interest. Certainly the post-mortem had nothing attention-grabbing about it. No sign of injury, toxin, or any other unnatural cause of death. The report was infuriatingly noncommittal, assigning the death to 'respiratory failure', which didn't mean much at all.

When using the sim, Teffera took muscle relaxant drugs; these were mentioned as a possible contributing factor to his death. However, the suggestion was tentative and the old injuries were described as the probable ultimate cause of death. The body had been released back to the family — bad practice, even for Justice. He'd have to hope that Jarvis's corpse would prove more interesting.

Most irritatingly, although the man had enough personal medical monitoring equipment to equip a small hospital, most of it had been deactivated or removed from his body before he went into the sim, due to interference with the sim electronics. The sim itself had noticed his distress, and automatic alarms had called the resident medical staff. Efforts to revive Teffera were only abandoned six hours later, by which time his body was at an exclusive corporate hospital halfway across the city. Any amount of evidence could have been destroyed.

Justice had, Toreth noticed sourly, begun the investigation four whole days later. Pity no one had contacted them at once, as they had in the SimTech death. The thought reminded him of something, and he checked through the Justice files for the name of whoever at SimTech had felt suspicious enough of Jarvis's death to call Justice rather than a medic. A woman called Marian Tanit — the psychologist Warrick had mentioned in passing. He checked the interview lists, and sent Barret-Connor a note to ask Tanit about it when he saw her.

Toreth left I&I not long before nine o'clock. He'd sent Sara home a couple of hours earlier and he hadn't really intended to stay so late so early in the investigation. There would be plenty of opportunity for lost sleep later.

As he walked through the Int-Sec grounds, he considered the reasonably productive first day.

The more he looked at the case, the more complicated he began to suspect it would be. The information from Justice alone — reluctantly delivered late in the afternoon — would take some untangling. Toreth had chased it up personally, after Belqola had proved unequal to the task, and the files were in the usual mess he'd learned to expect from Justice. The warrants to obtain disclosure of corporate information would hopefully arrive tomorrow, triggering another flood of files. He could only hope that Tillotson had meant what he said about freeing up as many resources as necessary.

Since Toreth was off duty, he also considered Warrick. After the night before, he'd expected a different reaction from Warrick when he walked into his office. Toreth's extensive experience predicted defensiveness or embarrassment. He'd found neither — just calm intelligence, a touch of arrogance and genuine distress at the news of the girl's death.

That was telling in itself. Toreth had spoken to plenty of corporate types whose only interest in their employees was in terms of the bottom line. Of course, as corporations went, SimTech was barely a minnow, with more opportunity for the executives to know their junior staff.

Warrick had also been confident. Death had disrupted the high-tech haven, but it hadn't significantly shaken his faith in his employees, his technology, or his own abilities. Was he confident enough to be someone who thought he could get away with murder? Toreth decided on balance that he thought not. His instincts all said 'no', and on a more practical basis, Warrick seemed to have the most to lose from the killings. The commercial disclosure warrants would enable Toreth to be more certain about that.

In the meantime, with careful handling, Warrick could be useful — even necessary. If the sim was responsible for the deaths, Toreth didn't have complete confidence in the ability of the I&I computer experts to find the answer without full SimTech cooperation, to which Warrick was clearly key.

The commercial disclosure warrants appeared early the next morning. Toreth took the time to check they were all in order, because he hated the embarrassment of having warrants bounced by corporate lawyers because someone has misspelled a name.

For once, he found no obvious errors. Time to begin arranging specialists for dispatch to SimTech to take the corporation apart for his entertainment and education. That part he would entrust to Sara.

On his way out to see her, Toreth paused with his office door open a little way, halted there by Belqola's voice, confidentially low. Sara's back was to the door, of course, but he could see Belqola's face in profile, and a glimpse beyond him of a figure with short blond hair — probably Barret-Connor.

"I wondered if he'd said anything," Belqola said. "About my being late yesterday."

"Why on earth would he say anything to me?" Sara asked.

Toreth eased the door open another crack, because he suspected Belqola was about to make a serious tactical mistake vis-a-vis life in Toreth's team.

"Well —" The junior shrugged. "You two are . . . aren't you?"

"Are what?" Sara enquired in frosty tones.

"Together. Seeing each other?"

Her shoulders stiffened. B-C took a step back into plainer view, wincing in anticipation, and caught sight of Toreth. Toreth put his finger to his lips and B-C smiled.

Sara stood up. Twenty centimetres shorter than Belqola, she nevertheless managed to leave no doubt about who was intimidating whom.

"Are you suggesting I'd be so unprofessional as to screw my boss?" she asked, dangerously quiet.

Toreth grinned. God, she had a lovely way of phrasing it. Yes or no were both disastrous, so Belqola won points for hitting on the only possible escape.

"I'm sorry, really, I am." Then he blew it. "You're always going out with him in the evening, that's all, so I assumed —"

"
Assumed
?" Heads were starting to come up around the office. Toreth noticed one or two people making comm calls — alerting absent friends to the show. "You just
assumed
, did you? Maybe I look like the type who has to screw around to get a decent posting?"

"Well, I asked a couple of —"

"So you've been gossiping about me as well?"

Coming from Sara, the accusation would've left anyone who knew her helpless with laughter. Belqola, poor bastard, merely spent a while working on his fish-out-of-water impersonation.

Sara left him to squirm until the moment he started to say something, then she said, "For your information, Junior Para-investigator, I have
never
slept with
anyone
I work for, and I never
will
sleep with anyone I work for. And
if
I did, you'd know without talking behind my back, because I'd resign the next day."

That was a lie, although Toreth wasn't sure if it was an intentional one. He and Sara had fucked, just once — five years previously and a couple of years after she'd begun working for him. It had happened at the end of a long and very drunken night, so drunken that Sara hadn't remembered anything in the morning, or at least had claimed not to. Between bruised pride and the worry that his indispensable admin might put in for a transfer, Toreth had never told her the truth.

He'd always wondered, though, if she did remember. One day, he promised himself, he'd ask her. Just not today — he had far too much to do without Sara resigning on principle.

In the office, Sara was still in full flow, since Belqola kept trying to interrupt with what were either excuses or apologies. From past experience, Toreth knew that she could keep it up indefinitely, or at least until her victim surrendered unconditionally. Entertaining though it was, he did need to get on. He opened the door and coughed.

Sara switched off in mid-rant, and turned to him at once, perfectly composed. "Yes, Toreth?"

"Specialists for SimTech — we've got all the warrants we need. Pick whoever you think is best, run the list past me if you have any questions." He looked over her shoulder. "Belqola, you're in charge of getting it all running smoothly over there."

"Yes, Para." Belqola took the offered escape with obvious gratitude.

When the junior was halfway across the office, Barret-Connor said in a low voice, "Do you want me to go along with him, Para?"

To keep an eye on him, B-C meant. A surprising offer from the reticent junior investigator. "No, thanks. You've got better things to do than hold his hand."

B-C took the hint. "And I'll go do them, Para."

When they were alone — not counting the rest of the attentive office — there was a long silence, with Sara trying and failing to suppress a grin.

Finally, Toreth shook his head, keeping his voice serious. "Belqola is a junior para, you know. You should show some respect."

"Memo me," she said, unrepentant. "He deserved it. Oh, and I was about to call through to you when he slithered over — you've got an appointment this afternoon with the first corpse's brother and sister. At LiveCorp."

Good thing he'd put on a clean jacket this morning. Then something he hadn't done occurred to him. "Hell, I'll have to finish reading the LiveCorp files first. I thought they'd delay a day or two."

Sara shrugged. "They didn't sound eager — more like they were getting it over with. Oh, and they know all about Kelly Jarvis, don't ask me where from. Do you want to have coffee in your office, then?"

"Yes. And keep everyone you can away while I do my homework."

He had barely settled down with the mug and the Teffera files when the preliminary post-mortem report for Kelly Jarvis arrived on his screen. Toreth read it through with growing dismay. On the plus side, it was the same cause of death as for Teffera. On the downside, it was no kind of cause of death at all.

O'Reilly answered the comm in her office, brown curls free of the protective cap.

"'Respiratory failure' is all you can tell me?" he asked.

"I'm afraid so, Para." At least the woman looked embarrassed. "We're still looking, of course, but at the moment all I can tell you is that she stopped breathing."

"No drugs at all?"

"Nothing yet, certainly nothing common or recreational. Something may show up on the detailed screens. And, of course, if it is corporate and if they put enough money into it, it could be something we won't pick up." She shrugged apologetically. "At least not without knowing what it is before we look, as it were. They know what we can screen for."

He cast around for something. "No sign at all of mechanical suffocation?"

On her face, he caught a flicker of the same irritation he felt when Tillotson asked bloody stupid questions that were already answered in a file they'd both read. "Nothing, Para," she said. "I am sorry."

He nodded. "Well, let me know if you find anything else."

Half an hour later, Sara announced a call from the security systems specialist, too urgent to be delayed or a message taken. It proved to be the second piece of bad news about the case, and as disappointing as the autopsy.

Toreth listened to the explanation all the way through and then started the futile search for a solution.

"Aren't there any backups?"

"No, I'm sorry, Para. The fault was in the primary feed from the reception ID scanners. The backup system was recording nothing as well, from noon of the day the girl died."