The Administration Series (34 page)

"Not at all."

"In that case, I tried it several times, a long time ago. I never got the hang of it."

Another few slow steps took him behind Warrick's chair. He leaned on the back.

"It's easy," he said, lowering his voice to not quite a professional tone, but definitely with an edge of threat. Or promise.

"Is it?" Warrick didn't look round, didn't move at all.

"Oh, yes. You need to learn how to relax, that's all. To accept. To be taken. To be used. I bet you could do it with one hand tied . . . with
both
hands tied behind your back." His mouth now only a few inches from Warrick's ear. "With some training and a sufficient incentive."

"Mm. Which you think you could, ah, supply?" Warrick was struggling to keep his voice level.

"I'm sure I could." Despite the risk of the partly open door, he couldn't resist lowering his head the last short distance to nip at Warrick's throat. Warrick shivered, marble crumbling like clay.

When Warrick spoke again, his voice was a whisper. "Tonight?"

"No." Toreth stood up. "Far too much to do. I'll call you, maybe."

Outside the door, he ran into Belqola, looking eager to be useful. "We've got all the staff accounted for and interviews scheduled, Para."

Toreth left the SimTech staff interviews to his team. He returned to I&I and read the reports as they came in.

Some of the staff alibied each other, although this time the directors did not. Asher Linton was confirmed by AERC security to have been in the building. Marcus had been at home with his wife — being a good boy, obviously. Most of the rest of the staff had also been at home at the time of death — quarter to nine — or in other places that excluded them from being at the river. Times were listed for checking with movement records, credit usage and security recordings; alibis, weak, strong or nonexistent, were noted for corroboration.

Toreth studied a map of the city, watching as the system traced routes for him, highlighting those of the staff whose alibis left them a large enough window to have been at the murder scene. The place itself wasn't too far from the edge of campus; quiet and unobserved, it would've made a convincing enough place for a suicide but for the intervention of the luckless Tracker.

Most of the staff who came up as possibles had alibis for Kelly's death, and of the ones remaining, none had any special connection to Teffera or Nissim. Frustratingly, by the time the last of the interviews came in, there was no clear SimTech suspect. That left a team of commercial sabs as the strongest possibility.

Toreth hated chasing professionals — I&I tended to come up against the expensive ones, which meant the good ones.

Only one point argued against pros. Yang had left his house at eight-fifteen, captured on security camera leaving the building and heading in the direction of the river. He'd been alone, but walking quickly, like someone late for a meeting. That suggested he had an appointment — hopefully, the man wouldn't be stupid enough to meet someone he didn't know in such an isolated spot.

Still, Toreth couldn't assume that, so he had to consider professionals. That meant more names to pull up, of known and suspected contractors. More whereabouts to discover, credit reports and movements to analyse and names to eliminate. It also meant a lot of very long days. Saturday tomorrow, but he'd no doubt be working through the weekend.

Long days and, probably, bad nights.

With a sigh, Toreth called Sara and asked her to arrange to have something delivered to his office for dinner. I&I security didn't like random takeaway food delivery staff arriving at reception but, frankly, screw them.

On Monday, Toreth had hoped to get away from work early, meaning before seven o'clock. With ten minutes to go, a call came through.

"Para-investigator Toreth?"

To his surprise, it was Officer Lee, looking tired but cheerful.

"What can I do for you?" he asked, knowing that the early getaway was doomed.

"I have another body for you, Para. I think you might like to come and have a look at it."

For a moment, Toreth considered sending Mistry instead, or even Belqola. He'd had only the one nightmare last night, and he didn't fancy another visit to the morgue so soon. On the other hand, Lee looked to have good news and he could do with some of that.

"I'll be right over."

To his irritation, Kirkby was waiting for them in the morgue. Toreth didn't bother to respond to his greeting, which earned him a dark look from the pathologist.

The preservation unit slid open, and Toreth looked at the body. A man in his late thirties, unkempt, bearded, and vaguely familiar.

"Who is he?"

"One of the indigs from Friday night," Lee said. "We released them a few hours ago. They'd been gone for about two hours when the indig medical service got another call. Only this one was there when the medics arrived — I expect the others didn't fancy our hospitality again. He was already dead; the body lay only a few hundred metres from where the first one was found. The medics called me in because I'd flagged all the indigents' files."

There were no obvious marks on the body and, thank fuck, no sign it had been anywhere near the river. "Any idea what killed him?"

Kirkby's smile lit up. "We certainly do, sir. An engineered biotoxin, delivered by a cell-type specific immunotargetting system."

Toreth blinked. "A what?"

"Genetically engineered poison, and a sophisticated one, according to the lab. A full report is being prepared, but in summary it attacks the breathing control centres in the brain in a very specific fashion. Death would take somewhere between one to twenty minutes, depending on the dose. And it had, um —" He consulted the screen. "A post-mortem self-catalysing destructive element. Probably a conformational change triggered by pH changes in the cerebrospinal fluid due to carbon dioxide acidosis — the lab is still working out the detail. That means it cleared from the system very quickly once he stopped breathing — we were lucky to catch it."

The summary didn't help much, but the last sentence caught Toreth's attention. "Why did you look?"

"Because of the injector." This time Kirkby's smile looked almost natural. "Otherwise we'd have bedded him down for the night, processed him in the morning, and found nothing."

"Injector?" Toreth queried.

Lee nodded. "A disposable injector with a three-quarter-empty drug ampoule was found in the nearest recycling unit; luckily, the unit was out of order. A sterile wrapper by the body caught my attention and made me look for the injector, because a wrapper's unusual for the quality of drugs indigs take. Fingerprints from the indigs all over the wrapper and injector. I had an immediate pharm work-up on the contents of the ampoule."

Toreth seriously considered kissing her. Or Kirkby. Or maybe both of them and the corpse as well.

"How much of the toxin did you find in him?" he asked the pathologist.

"None — as I said, the stuff starts to degrade as soon as it's finished its job. The lab managed to get some diagnostic breakdown products from the body."

"I have tissue samples from Yang over at I&I," Toreth said urgently. "And from three more bodies, all dead for days or weeks. Is there
any
chance of showing that the toxin killed them?"

Kirkby considered. "Maybe. I could have a word with Pala — she's the senior immunologist — in the morning. She might have some ideas."

"Do it. Not in the morning. Now. Get her back in here — charge her a taxi to I&I. O'Reilly from I&I Forensic Pathology will be getting in touch with her."

Kirkby looked at Lee, who nodded slightly.

"Yes
sir
," he said, and hurried off back towards the reception desk.

Lee said, "I've got all the files ready to send over to I&I, sir. And I've put out a detaining order for the rest of the indigs. My guess is that the injector came from the previous scene. The indigs hid it before we arrived, then picked it up after we let them out; they probably assumed Tracker bought it from whoever shot him. One of them dropped it into the recycling unit when they realised it had killed this one."

"Sounds likely enough. Pull them back in and send me the interviews." Time to get back to I&I and start trying to locate a creator for the drug. "Thanks for everything — you did a good job. I'll let your boss know how helpful you've been."

She grimaced slightly as she closed the unit. "Thank you, sir."

"Don't fancy a commendation from a para?" he asked Lee as she walked him to the exit.

"No offence intended, sir, but it's not the best thing to have on your file."

Career ambition over all, even in a dump like Justice. On the other hand, someone with Lee's obvious ability ought to shine here. "Were you at Justice before the reorganisation?"

"Yes — for four years."

He didn't remember her from the year he'd worked at Justice before Interrogation became part of I&I, but it had been a big place. "Didn't apply to be an I&I investigator?"

"I didn't think I'd enjoy it, back then."

"And now?"

Lee shook her head. "Sometimes I think it was the biggest mistake of my life." She looked at her watch. "Usually when I'm working overtime without any chance of getting paid for it."

And as a favour to an outsider at that. "You could apply for a transfer. We take people from Justice, if they're good enough." She'd be a hundred percent improvement over bloody Belqola. "I could put a word in for you — I'd be glad to have you on my team."

"Thanks. But no thanks." They reached the foyer, and she stopped in the centre of the quiet space. Two guards stood by the door, with two others behind the desk. All four watched them.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Ninety-nine percent of the cases we see here are routine. No idealists, just ordinary criminals. Then every so often we stumble across part of something big and dangerous. Like this — restricted biotech, corporate connections, politics, and God only knows what else. And when that happens, people like you breeze through those doors and take the case away before we really know what's going on." She smiled. "
That's
when I know I made the right choice."

Toreth was so deeply asleep that it took several minutes for the insistent chiming of the comm to awaken him. Even through a thick haze of sleep he felt certain that he'd set it to take messages, so he knew who it was. Moving on autopilot, he reached out and fumbled for the earpiece.

"Sara?" he croaked.

"Where were you?" Warrick's voice demanded.

"W — " Was this a bad dream? "Where the fuck do you think? Asleep. What the hell do you want?"

"Come over to SimTech." He sounded disgustingly awake.

Toreth finally pried his eyes open and looked at the clock; it took him a moment to focus, and then another to believe what he was seeing. Tuesday the thirteenth of November looked right, but the time — Jesus fucking Christ. "No. It's three o'clock in the fucking morning. What is it?"

"Get up, get dressed, get over here."

The comm went dead. Toreth closed his eyes and buried his head in the pillow. Every bone in his body protested the idea of leaving the loving embrace of the sheets. Then he forced himself out of bed and started hunting for clothes. Warrick would only call back if he didn't show up.

As he stood on the street in the biting wind, waiting for the taxi, he decided he really hated this fucking case.

At the AERC, the security guard let him in without asking for an ID and told him Doctor Warrick was in his office.

Toreth voice-activated lights in the corridors as he went; the building echoed emptily and he felt a stab of apprehension. There had been five murders already. If he hadn't been half asleep in the taxi on the way over, he might have thought more about it. Had it really been Warrick's voice over the comm?

Had Yang received a similar summons?

Wishing he'd detoured to I&I and checked out a gun, Toreth hesitated outside the office, and then opened the door. No one there. He stepped inside cautiously and moved over to the desk. All three screens were active, showing pages of complex-looking coding. On the other hand, most code looked complex to him, especially right now.