The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (11 page)

Possible Robot Sighting, and the date,
the time, the officer’s name. Precinct and badge number. All with
an eye to an eventual prosecution.

“
Okay, what am I looking
at?”

“
Shot one. A blind man in
the station. According to a security guard, he was waiting for his
girlfriend.”

“
Okay.”

“
Subject has been
identified as a Mister Scott Nettles. He has no criminal record,
and has never been arrested for any reason.” Parsons read off an
address. “Check that out, eh. That’s about six or eight blocks from
where our hot little robot lady disappeared.”

A further series of shots were all
lined up in a row, stills from cameras along Nettles’ route. Point
A to Point B stuff, the stuff convictions were made of. There was
little doubt about the identification, or the point of origin. It
was a series of sequential pictures, all time and date-stamped. An
apartment building squeezed in between other buildings, sharing
walls with other relatively nondescript buildings. There was a
self-serve laundry on the ground floor, with lofts and commercial
offices above. Upper level windows had gold lettering on the first
two stories above the street level. Those without gold lettering
were either residential or storage, some kind of sweatshop up in
the attic maybe. Nothing they hadn’t seen before.

"Okay."

There was a link to Nettles’ lifetime
file, where his entire record would be laid out, from Point A to
Point B. The most recent entry was from a social worker, who merely
noted that Mister Nettles was still claiming benefits, hadn’t died,
hadn’t missed his monthly employment income reports, which always
read ‘zero,’ and that there were no grounds for review. Mister
Nettles was off the radar for another two to three years, in Gene’s
estimation.

“
Unfortunately, Mister
Nettles doesn’t have a mobile, and he was one of last children to
be born without being chipped.” Parsons’ voice had an ironic
tone.

Nothing they hadn’t seen
before.

“
Ah. Nice.”

“
Okay. Next shot.
Gang-bangers in the hospital.”

“
So, what’s the
significance?”

“
They talk about the
robot, and there’s just more there than I have time to give you
over the phone. Next shot. This is one of the few cameras left in
the park. It’s real heavy gang territory, and cameras don’t last
long in that neighbourhood.”

Gene cursed gently under his
breath.

They had taken the time, spent the
money, found the political will, and wired up the whole blasted
planet it seemed, and yet, life being what it was, they had used
eight-cent cameras for all but the most prestigious
locations.

“
I’m always impressed when
a jury of their fellow citizens convicts someone based on
these…”

There was a snort. Yeah, but people
wanted justice. In recent years, prosecutors and even judges had
banded together, lobbied governments at all levels, and founded any
number of innocence projects and integrity review boards. An
estimated ten to twenty percent of all prisoners had not only been
unlawfully convicted, but were likely innocent of all wrongdoing.
This was according to several exhaustive studies, studies which
hadn’t been discredited in something like the last thirty or forty
years. There had been numerous attempts, of course.

Where there is smoke there is fire,
thought Gene.

Gene watched a man and a woman, a man
with a long white stick, a small backpack, and the woman with two
suitcases, striding down a paved trail lit by cast iron, ornamental
lamp-posts right out of Jack the Ripper’s London, and then into the
inky blackness of the night. The male subject was tall and thin,
wearing a long white trench-coat. He had a ball-cap and white
running shoes, cheap-looking. The woman, their possible robot,
certainly looked very athletic.

All they had was an oblique side-view,
transitioning into a rear view.

“
Hmn.”

Shit.

“
Not much to go on, I
admit. But our perps, sorry, I mean victims, described her as
wearing…”

“
A slinky blue silk
dress….and so was our missing robot, as I remember.” Missus Cartier
had described it as a kimono…slinky, cocktail dress, kimono, it was
all the same thing by a different name.

Gene nodded at Parsons.

“
Anyway, these are our
official suspects, the only ones, in the assault.” The victims had
been, predictably enough, hard to find, but one of them had
answered his phone.

From the pictures, he had confirmed
the suspects, seemingly very sure of it, and in the recorded
conversation, he was streaming curses and profanities.
The gangstas wouldn’t give a hoot about charges and
court, thought MacBride.

All they would want would be names…and
addresses. The gentleman seemed quite perturbed by the polite
notion that the police were working on it and had no further
information.

He had a few things to say about that,
too. He didn’t look too good with the face all puffed up. Even the
gangstas wanted justice.

“
Okay, where could they go
from there?”

He pulled his second screen into
position.

Maps. He zoomed in and linked Parsons
to his desk. Parsons took over and a red dot appeared.

MacBride sat back, blinked a bit, not
really seeing much, and listened.

“
Yes, sir. That’s where it
gets a bit weird. That path goes to the north end of the park. Then
it branches off to east and west in curving, winding trails.
Theoretically, they should have either taken another trail, or they
should have arrived at the street. Any street, sooner or later. The
cameras along there are a bit spotty. However there are one or
two left intact—on the tops of fortified buildings and such where
the gang-bangers can’t get at them.”

“
Okay. No one came out.
What about the other paths?”

“
As near as we can make
out, most of the cameras on Basil Street were operating at the time
of the incident. Nothing there. Some of the other side
streets, not so many good cameras available, but again, you’d think
sooner or later they would have to walk past one that was good. No
such luck, uh, Gene.”

Gene thought about it.

“
Where else could they
have gone?”

“
We’ve swept the park, and
they’re not in it, unless they’re in a hollow tree or maybe we just
saw some winos. But no one we spoke to answered to our
profile.”

“
What does that
leave?”

“
There’s a ravine there,
and a culvert under the highway.” Parsons thought. “If they turned
back and beat it southwards, strictly staying in the brush, sooner
or later they would have to come out on a street. To the south and
west, those are better neighbourhoods. Better lighting, more
cameras. We can say with at least some confidence, that they
probably didn’t do that.”

Parsons went on.

At the south end of the park, there
was a heavy steel grating over the culvert, which went under
Appleby Road. The grate at the north end of the park had been
removed by vandals years before. It was a quick way to get across
the highway. This was typical enough in certain neighbourhoods,
where every avenue was an avenue of retreat for any number of
reasons. Some of those reasons were legitimate, as people simply
evaded violence or crime in their neighbourhoods. The nearest
overpass might lie in another gang’s territory—it was strange, but
when not wearing obvious colours, gangstas rode the bus and the
trams all over town with little conflict. Every town was different.
It was like an informal little agreement they had. Everybody needs
a night off once in a while, he thought.

“
Okay. So we have an
assault, and two people—or one person and a robot, unaccounted
for.”

“
Yes.”

“
And if they disappeared,
we must ask ourselves why.” And if they were the victims of an
attempted robbery, why not report it?

Unless they had something to hide
themselves. And how would they know just which way to get out of
the park without being seen? Something smacked of real planning
there. Some real knowledge. The punks were just a coincidence, and
a lucky break for the police.

“
That’s about the size of
it.”

“
All right. What about
highway cameras?”

“
Not if they went under
it. And the other side is all post-industrial wasteland. Only major
intersections have surveillance, mostly for traffic, people running
red lights and such.”

Automatic robo-tickets, a valuable
source of revenue for the cash-strapped city.

It didn’t actually slow traffic down
very much, the ostensible purpose. There were collisions there
every day at morning and evening drive-time.

“
I see.”

There was a silence. Parsons had done
his job, and if there was nothing there, then there was nothing
there. 

What they needed was a
plan.

“
All right. I’ll have a
couple of our people check out this Scott Nettles.” Nettles lived
in this precinct, as did Betty Blue, their missing robot. “As for
grounds for a warrant, I don’t think we’re quite there
yet.”

When I get a minute.

If they did get inside, they could try
lifting some prints left by Nettles and then they would have
something for comparison. The numbers onscreen showed a
ninety-seven percent probability of identification in Nettles’
case, as the commuter station was relatively well-lit, and had
cameras intact. Their guard had identified Nettles’ PPP, the Public
Profile Pic.

Yet experience showed that even an
identification of one hundred percent probability could be
mistaken. Too many innocent civilians had been cut down by nervous
or over-zealous officers, to place too much credence on the
computer files and their remotely-sensed biometric identification
programming. Good old fashioned fingerprints, up-close retinal
scans and DNA were more reliable, although never really a hundred
percent. Eye-witnesses were notoriously unreliable.

“
Is there anything more we
can do here, ah, Gene.” It really wasn't a question, neither was it
a statement.

“
Don’t know. Can I call
you back? I’d like to study this guard’s statement.”

“
Sure.
Absolutely.”

MacBride got it then. Parsons would
like to get out of the Eighth and into someplace a bit more
civilized. Good people were hard to find these days and it might be
worth a minute of his time.

“
So what’s on the other
side of the highway?”

“
Desolation,
Inspector.”

“
Do you guys go
there?”

This was a good question. Since the
city had started rounding up the homeless and sticking them in
for-profit jails for vagrancy, squatters, shanty-towns, or
unofficial settlements, had sprung up on the outskirts of every
major city. While this annoyed the residents of gated communities,
often right next door, and commuters from the suburbs to no end,
there wasn’t much the big-city police could do about it.

A person with a tent by the side of
the road, or sleeping in an alley, could be rounded up as a
vagrant. Squatting was a civil crime, an injury of property, and
civil and human rights, due process still came into play. An action
needed a person of record, but absentee or overseas landlords were
notoriously lax when a building’s costs sky-rocketed. Tenancy rates
were often low to begin with, people skipping out on unpaid rent,
the cost of evictions, and petty crime and property-vandalism
rampant. Court procedures were still unreformed. Cops could go from
door to door and knock, but without a warrant, asking to see a copy
of the mortgage or lease was strictly a no-no. It was safe to say
it wasn’t usually the highest priority. Proper squatters didn’t
answer the door anyway, they all had peepholes and escape hatches
these days. Buildings that had truly been abandoned were riddled
with squatters, to the extent some of the buildings had been rather
distinctively renovated, using scrounged materials and going by the
unique needs of their inhabitants. Some buildings were linked by
tunnels, and some were even fortified.

“
Yes. In daylight, and
with proper orders and everything.”

“
I see. Okay, I’ll get
back to you. Other than that, good job, Dave. I'm going to call the
makers and see just what the capabilities of that robot girl
actually are.”

“
If that’s her, she’s
tougher than effing whale-shit.”

MacBride grinned from
ear-to-ear.

“
Thank you, Sergeant, for
my first good laugh of the day.”

MacBride and Parsons rang off, Parsons
to go home, long after his shift was officially over.

Looking at his watch, MacBride tapped
his name into the computer.

Parsons was divorced, had two kids,
and would have been considered overdue for promotion in almost any
other precinct. Carrying six and a half-million in personal debt
and with alimony and child support running at about forty-k a
month, a promotion would be very welcome. His motivation was clear
enough.