The Preserve

by Ariel S. Winter

  “Big family,” Kir said.

  “Let’s hope someone’s home.”

  When they reached the front door, a blue LED light flashed on a small camera mounted at eye level. Laughton switched his own body cam on, looked square into the house security camera’s lens, and waited for the door to open. He heard a child shout, “I’ll get it,” while another shrieked, the sound coming closer, but before either could respond, the door was opened by a petite Asian woman. She had straight black hair pulled into a loose ponytail draped over one shoulder. Her blue-and-white sweaterdress revealed the subtle bump of early pregnancy. The smaller of the two children Laughton had heard elected to hide behind his mother, and the woman held the older one close, her arm over his shoulder, hand on his chest. A third child appeared in the entryway behind her, and then ran off. The children’s eyes were not as narrow as their mother’s. Their father must have not been of Asian descent.

  “Miss Enright?” Laughton said, displaying his badge.

  lower eyelid droop, corner of lips flick down for a fraction of a second, then neutral—concealed sadness

  “Come in,” she said, resigned.

  Laughton stepped into the house, his partner behind him. It smelled of some kind of artificial citrus cleaner. He noticed that several of the floor tiles in the foyer were cracked. Miss Enright led them up a half flight of stairs into the kitchen, which had a vaulted ceiling and glass windows that revealed a small backyard. There was a baby in a high chair wearing a bib with green mush forming a clown’s smile around her mouth. Miss Enright sat down at a chair facing the baby, and picked up a plastic spoon. The older of the children who had come to the door decided that the detectives weren’t about to be interesting, and he ran down another set of stairs, yelling a battle cry. The toddler stood with one hand on his mother’s lap, and watched Laughton with large, distrustful eyes as the chief of police took another of the seats at the table. Kir walked around the table, looking out a window into the backyard.

  “It’s about Carl,” Miss Enright said, keeping her eyes on the baby as she offered her another dollop of green on the spoon.

  “Yes,” Laughton said.

  “I didn’t know him well,” she said. Her manner was regretful more than sad. “I certainly have no idea who might have hurt him.”

  Hurt, not kill. “You met him at the Liberty Fertility Clinic?” Laughton said.

  “Yes,” she said, still feeding the baby.

  “How’d that work?” Kir said, still standing, looking out the window.

  Nancy glanced at the robot, and resettled her weight in the chair with a slight rock back and forth. “You fill out a form, and they pair you up. As long as there’s some attraction, you… mate.”

  “Do you see a lot of men at the clinic?” Laughton said.

  “I’ve seen others, but not in a long time, not since Carl and I met.”

  “Why Carl?” Kir said.

  Laughton realized that he and Kir had fallen into their old routine, alternating questions, keeping the interviewee off balance. It felt good.

  “He just had energy,” Miss Enright said, still talking to the baby instead of settling on either of the policemen; preventing Laughton from seeing her face. “Just everything about him, the fast way he talked, and the exuberance with which he moved. It was apparent before you even said hello to him. He brought that enthusiasm to bed.”

  “Why didn’t you come forward when you heard he’d died?” Laughton said.

  “I didn’t think I knew anything helpful, and my husband doesn’t know that I do conjugal visits at the clinic. He can get jealous.”

  “Most men would.”

  “I’m committed to repopulation, and part of the success of the project is a diverse genetic makeup. That means more than having babies just the two of us.”

  “So, if your husband wanted to go to the clinic?” Kir said.

  She bit the inside of her lower lip, and nodded. “I’d allow it.”

  Laughton pointed at the children with his chin. “Any of these children Carl’s?”

  “I’ve known Carl maybe seven months,” she said.

  Right, stupid question, Laughton thought. “Is the one you’re carrying Carl’s?”

  She shrugged as though it really didn’t matter. “Maybe.”

  “Would your husband have a reason to think the baby wasn’t his? You said he could get jealous,” Kir said.

  “My husband and I still have plenty of sex, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I guess that sort of is what we were asking,” Laughton said.

  She looked from Laughton to Kir, but then quickly away from the robot, raising her shoulders defensively. Kir was making her nervous. “Look, Bobby doesn’t know about the conjugal visits,” she said, addressing Laughton in particular. “He certainly doesn’t know I had a regular partner, and besides, Bobby couldn’t hurt anybody.”

  Of course, that’s what people always believed, Laughton thought. He looked at Kir, who was watching him, waiting for a signal. The robot knew Miss Enright was emotional, but wasn’t quite certain what the emotion was. Laughton tugged at the front of his shirt to convey that she was angry, a stylized gesture that had its origin in American Sign Language, but mutated into something that could seem natural. Kir, however, interpreted Laughton’s cue as a sign to push harder, instead of changing the subject, which is what Laughton wanted.

  “Where is your husband now?” Kir said.

  Her flash of anger had her near tears of sadness now. She appealed to Laughton with her eyes. “It wasn’t Bobby.”

  “Okay,” Laughton said, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “Okay. We just need to check all possibilities.”

  She looked back at the baby, who hit the spoon out of her hand. “Are you all finished? Are you all finished?” She picked up a cloth from the table, and wiped off the baby’s face.

  “Can you tell us anything?” Laughton said. “Anything he might have said, any calls he might have made in front of you, anything could be helpful, even if it doesn’t seem like it would be.”

  She shook her head as she stood to take the baby out of the high chair. “No. Nothing. I’ve been trying to think.”

  Laughton didn’t say anything, and Kir knew not to either. Sometimes keeping silent was the easiest way to get someone to talk. It forced her to fill up the silence.

  “He’d get texts all of the time, but he said it was some game he played online.”

  Laughton wondered if they’d located Smythe’s phone yet.

  She put the baby down on the floor and the child just sat. The toddler squatted so that his face was an inch away from his sister’s. She grabbed her brother’s nose. Miss Enright sat back down, and looked at Laughton. “We’d talk sometimes. Just about nothing. I think we both tried to keep our personal lives secret, but it becomes hard when you see someone once or twice a week.”

  “See” them, Laughton thought.

  Miss Enright’s eyes tilted to the side and went out of focus. She was trying to recall anything, making a real effort. “He talked about robots a lot. He called them M-E-T-A-L-S,” she spelled for the benefit of the children. “I think he hated them, really hated them.” She checked to see how that information was landing on Kir, but the robot’s face was impassive, impossible to read.

  “What’d he say?” Laughton said to draw her attention back to him. The tag team hadn’t been working—she was too disconcerted by Kir’s presence—so the robot had let Laughton have full control.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her eyes darted to Kir again.

  Just then there was some kind of crash in the living room downstairs. “Is everything all right!” Miss Enright called.

  “Yes!” a child replied.

  “I’ll go check,” Kir said, heading down the stairs before Miss Enright could react.

  Laughton saw the tension at her temples. She didn’t like the idea of Kir alone with any of her kids. Laughton wondered if that had been Kir’s in
tention, or if his partner had just thought that getting out of the room would free up the conversation. Or maybe both.

  Laughton tried to draw her back in. “You were saying Carl hated robots…”

  Her head was cocked, listening for any sound coming from the living room.

  “Miss Enright?”

  She blinked, and shook her head. “Um, stuff about how they’re not really alive, that they’re like a, I don’t know, a toaster or something, just something that’s supposed to be a tool, and who are they to push around their masters, stuff like that.” Her eyes darted to the stairs by which Kir had left the kitchen.

  “Did you agree?”

  “I don’t know.” She noticed that the toddler at her feet was patting the baby on the head, and the baby was not happy. She tapped the back of the toddler’s hand. “Stop that.” Then back to Laughton, “I try not to think like that, hate. We know what we did because of hate, humans. I’d just let Carl rant if he needed to. He was lonely.”

  “You think he might have gotten jealous of your husband? Maybe went to talk to him?”

  “No.” She shook her head, certain. “Carl saw what we were doing as a way to strike at the robots. He was committed to the cause. I knew he lived way out in the middle of nowhere, and I don’t think he was looking to change that.”

  So Carl had believed in the Liberty Fertility Center’s mission. He hadn’t just been looking to get laid.

  Miss Enright leaned forward. “Is he all right in there? Do I have to worry?”

  Laughton followed her gaze to the doorway, then looked back at her worry. “He’s fine.”

  “I just thought… How come he’s here?”

  She meant, how was there a robot on the preserve? “Carl’s death is a big deal.”

  She sat back, but her eyes didn’t leave the doorway, as though she could will everything to be all right from her seat.

  “Did you know Carl was a cyborg?” Laughton said.

  Miss Enright sat up straight in her chair in genuine surprise, her cheeks flushed, distracted from her vigilance. She hadn’t known. “No. Which… ?” It wasn’t a polite question.

  “An arm and a leg,” Laughton answered.

  Her eyes went out of focus. She was remembering, trying to think if she had missed any indication.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “I… No, no,” she said; she wasn’t a bigot. “That must— Carl would always say they’d taken too much from him. I thought he just meant the way they’ve taken from all of us, that we’re stuffed on the preserve here, but maybe…”

  Laughton nodded as Kir reappeared, and Miss Enright visibly relaxed some. It made sense. Robot destroys Carl’s arm and leg. Carl wants revenge on all of robot-kind, writes a killer program, and then someone killed him for it. But not to get rid of it, to use it? If they both wanted to use it, why kill him?

  “He ever talk about his partner?” Laughton said.

  “No.”

  “Did he ever say anything about having met someone that could help him, getting even with the robots?” Kir said.

  She shook her head. “Just that the robots couldn’t live without him. He took pleasure in that, how they needed his work. How pathetic he thought they were.”

  Just one of those hackers who saw the sims trade as another way to lord human superiority over the robots, that they needed something from him, that he could control them. Definitely would further suggest a tie between this case and Kir’s; whoever wrote a deadly sim was probably a human supremacist.

  Laughton waited a moment again to see if she would add anything. This all gave them a sense of who Smythe was, what kind of man, and it meshed with the picture he’d formed in his mind. But it wasn’t giving him anything to go on. After it was clear she wouldn’t talk, he held up his phone. “I want you to call us if you think of anything else.”

  Miss Enright stood up, and crossed to the counter to retrieve her phone. She held it out, and they tapped them together to exchange information. She got shy then, looking at the children, using them as an excuse not to meet his eye, or Kir’s. “I’ll show you out,” she said after an awkward silence, and took a step forward. Laughton turned to let her pass him and she led the way down to the front door, less concerned about leaving the children alone than with Kir.

  At the door, without meeting their eyes, she said, “Please don’t talk to Bobby.”

  She was ashamed, not afraid of her husband’s reaction. All of that trouble to get the subpoena, and he’d gotten nothing. “We’ll try,” Laughton said.

  Her shoulders relaxed. “Thank you.” She was truly grateful.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said, but with little more feeling than if he had held a door open for her.

  Outside, Laughton said, “Not much.”

  “The kids are nice,” Kir said.

  “Hmph,” Laughton grunted, not amused. He pulled open the driver’s-side door to his truck and stepped up inside.

  Kir got in on the other side. “It was a mistake for me to come,” the robot said. “I freaked her out.”

  Laughton tapped the screen of the GPS, turning it on, but his hand hovered there as he tried to decide where they should go next. “Nah, I should have thought of that. It’s not going to be like it was. The people who moved here, they want to get away from you bastards.”

  “That’s why I need you,” he said.

  “No kidding. That’s why you always needed me. But I’m not moving to Washington, so don’t even start that again.”

  The old argument filled the truck for a moment. Their ability to communicate with each other had been legendary—Laughton’s skill at reading micro-expressions, and Kir’s at reading Laughton, not just the basic hand signals they’d developed, but actually reading Laughton’s face based on thousands of hours of footage, gave them an enormous edge. Working separately was almost like working with half a brain, but Laughton’s days weren’t supposed to be handling anything more complicated than drunken bravado, and Kir’s weren’t supposed to be filled with many humans.

  “So you want to check out the husband?” Kir said.

  “We probably should, just to cross it off,” he said, opening the police database on the car’s touch screen, “but the thing with cutting the arm and leg open doesn’t scan. When I told her Smythe was a cyborg, she was shocked. I doubt her husband would have known.” He tried Bobby Enright, then Robert Enright without luck. His phone buzzed, and he looked. It was from Kir. File photo of Robert Enright. He looked at his ex-partner. “Don’t you see I’m doing it here?”

  “I just got it first.”

  Laughton felt a surge of exasperation that he had to make a conscious effort to control. It sent a new wave of tingles across his left cheek. He put his fingertips to his temples. He opened the file Kir had forwarded. “I don’t recognize the guy, and this doesn’t have anything other than this address.”

  “Should we wait?”

  “I’ll put Dunrich on it.” He tapped “Work” on the GPS, and the truck started backing out of the driveway. “Might as well go back to the station. See if anything’s come in.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Kir said.

  Didn’t sound like much of anything.

  Dunrich stood as Laughton and Kir entered the station. Laughton mentally rolled his eyes. Dunrich was fine on day-to-day things, but so far this case had revealed his limitations, and the chief didn’t want to deal with more incompetence just then.

  “Chief,” the junior officer said, stepping around his desk, laptop computer in hand. “I found the hacker from TV.”

  Laughton stopped short and looked at his junior officer, incredulous. “How?”

  Dunrich was at his side now, showing the chief a social media page for someone calling himself Crisper, no last name. Or maybe it was no first name. The profile picture showed a man from the neck down to his midbelly wearing a black T-shirt with white writing in an old command-prompt font that read “Alignm
ent Lawful.” All that could be gleaned from that was that the bit of skin visible at the neckline was white.

  Dunrich kept stealing looks at Kir as the chief took in the page. “I called the station to see if Kara Letts would reveal her source,” he explained.

  “You got Kara Letts on the phone?” The chief was still shocked.

  “I might have threatened to get a warrant,” he said, glancing at Kir again, then down in embarrassment.

  Laughton realized he should introduce them. “This is my old partner, Kir. Kir, Officer Dunrich.”

  “Hi,” Dunrich said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kir said.

  Laughton steered them back to the case. “You threatened the warrant, and she told you…”

  “No,” Dunrich said, refocused, excited to show off. “She cited a whole bunch of court cases or something saying she didn’t have to reveal her sources, but she slipped in the middle and said, ‘I wouldn’t tell you if I could,’ so that made me think she didn’t even know who her source was. So I thought, how could he have gotten in touch, and I started going back through Letts’s social media accounts looking for someone contacting her with information, and this one jumped out. He made first contact this morning, the shirt’s some old computer game reference, and he asked to be given rights to private message her.”

  Laughton raised his eyebrows. “That’s amazing,” he said, nodding.

  Dunrich grinned, all his orbital muscles crinkling, looking almost like he wanted to laugh, he was so proud.

  “See if you can get him to respond,” Laughton said.

  “I sent a message and a friend request,” Dunrich said. “I said I was looking into the murder. I figure he was willing to talk to the press about it, he might just like the attention.”

  That’s not how Laughton would have played it, but they’d have to wait and see now. “Good work.”

  “Right.” Dunrich started for his desk, then turned back. “Oh, call came for you, Chief.”