Head On

by John Scalzi

  Nevertheless her brain was rearranged by the disease. And she had a neural net in her head, a souvenir from her days as an Integrator, one of the fully ambulatory humans who could let a Haden borrow their bodies to do things for which human bodies were desirable, or required.

  “No,” she said, and then held up her cigarette. “But then again I self-medicate.”

  “So if the data shows he had a seizure, what then?” I asked.

  “Then it’s just bad luck for Duane Chapman.”

  “There’ll be an autopsy too. That was covered in the press conference.”

  “Right. Which will likely confirm that it was a random seizure.”

  “That doesn’t explain why Kaufmann freaked out like he did.”

  “He’s probably an idiot, like the lawyer said. Saw one of his players dying on the field, remembered the league was wining and dining potential investors, including your dad—how did that go, incidentally?”

  “Mom said that she and Dad went home. A league flunky was begging him not to leave yet. I think after this they need his credibility more than they did before.”

  “After this, your dad could probably ask to be made commissioner and they’d give him the job and a parade.”

  “I don’t think he’d want the job.”

  “That’s because your dad is smart. So, we go visit Kaufmann, he admits he overreacted and is an idiot, which is sad for him but not actually a crime. And then we’ll be done with our end of things.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Which means you will have dragged me out here, on a Sunday, for nothing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “It was four thirty in the afternoon when I called. I’m not going to feel too bad about that.”

  “I had a late night.”

  “Mom says you might be having too many of those.”

  Vann smiled. “She’s not my mom.” She dropped her cigarette and crushed it out. “Come on. Let’s go talk to Kaufmann.”

  “We’ll be early.”

  “I want to get back to sleeping. If Kaufmann’s not fully dressed he doesn’t have anything I haven’t already seen elsewhere.”

  The door to room 2423 was unlocked. The bolt, which normally would have secured the door, stuck out, keeping the door from closing entirely. Behind the door was the sound of the shower, still running. “I told you we were early,” I said.

  Vann ignored me and knocked on the door, calling Kaufmann’s name, and did both a second time when he didn’t answer. He didn’t answer the second time, either. Vann unholstered her sidearm and prepared to enter the room, then looked at me. “Where’s your weapon?”

  “It’s at home,” I said.

  “You’re working.”

  “I wasn’t,” I reminded her. “Then I was. It wasn’t convenient to go home.”

  She reached down to her ankle and produced a small pistol. She handed it to me.

  “You actually have an ankle holster,” I said to her, after a moment of staring.

  “Yes. Come on.” We entered the room, cautiously.

  There was no one in the main hotel room, which didn’t entirely surprise me, as the shower was running. The bed was rumpled and slept in. On the floor by the bed were various articles of clothing: a shirt, suit jacket, slacks, tie. A wallet and a pair of glasses were on the dresser, by the TV.

  Something was missing from that collection.

  “Chris,” Vann said. I looked up and she pointed into the bathroom.

  What had been missing was a belt. One end of which was knotted around the showerhead, still running, the pipe of which had been pulled out of the wall.

  Just not enough to keep Alex Kaufmann from being strangled on the other end of belt. He was very clearly dead. Vann went in and checked, to be sure.

  “Well, shit,” Vann said, coming back out of the bathroom. She holstered her weapon.

  I looked at her. “We’re not still going with the ‘it’s just bad luck’ theory anymore, are we?”

  Vann looked my threep up and down. “New threep.”

  “Yes.”

  “How is it for recording and mapping?”

  “It’s got all the bells and whistles. I’ve been recording since we entered the room.”

  Vann nodded. “Map it. Map the entire room, including in there.” She pointed into the bathroom. “I want to get as much information as possible before Metro police gets in here and starts fucking up the scene. And then I’m going to need you to do something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Go to Philadelphia.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes,” Vann said. “We need to talk to Duane Chapman’s wife. Before someone from the league convinces her not to talk to us.” She motioned to Kaufmann’s body. “After this, the league’s urge to shut everyone up is going to be very strong.”

  Chapter Four

  I GOT BACK HOME an hour later for my trip to Philly. A welcoming party was waiting for me in the foyer.

  “Tell everything,” the twins said. Or one of them, anyway—Justin and Justine shared a threep and you never quite knew which of them was operating their threep at the time, and after a while you stopped wondering and just thought of their threep as “the twins.” I was told there was a reason the twins shared their threep, and I had been promised early on it would be explained to me, but a year after moving into the house I shared with them and three other Hadens the reason had yet to be revealed. Honestly at this point I sort of enjoyed speculating more than knowing the actual answer.

  “Chris can’t tell everything,” Tony yelled from the front room. “It’s classified.”

  “It’s not classified,” I yelled back. I returned my attention to the twins. “But I probably don’t know anything more than you do about Duane Chapman right now.”

  “There are rumors,” the twins said, backing up to let me into the house.

  “That I don’t doubt.” I walked into the front room, where the threeps of Tony and Tayla Givens, two of my other flatmates, were shooting pool. Elsie Curtis, the final roommate and our most recent addition to the house, was on a work gig in Singapore and kept different hours from the rest of us. We rarely saw her around these days.

  Well, that’s not true. We saw her every single day. Her body was in her room, along with her local threep. We checked in on her a few times a day, changed her various bags, and the one of us who was an actual doctor—that would be Tayla—would make sure there were no outstanding biological issues that needed to be addressed. Elise checked on all of us, too, usually while the rest of us were asleep.

  That was the whole point of the house: six Hadens, living together and looking after each other’s bodies. It was cheaper and friendlier than hiring in-home staff, especially now that Abrams-Kettering had cut off medical subsidies to Hadens. These days every bit helped.

  For the rest of my housemates, that is. My physical body still resided in my parents’ house in Northern Virginia, along with two full-time caretakers. I had been planning to move my body to the communal house at some point, but I was confronted with the optics problem of having two personal caretakers while the rest of my flatmates had none, or dismissing my caretakers and then being responsible for two people I’d known and cared about for years losing their jobs. Jobs they wouldn’t be able to easily replace, because the Abrams-Kettering Bill meant there was less money for Hadens for home care.

  It was easier to maintain the status quo. Cowardly, perhaps. But easier.

  Not that my flatmates minded all that much. One extra pair of eyes and hands paying attention to their bodies, one fewer body for them to take care of on a day-to-day basis. Plus I paid for the biggest room in the house. Really, I was a model housemate.

  “We saw you on the news,” Tayla said. She was lining up a shot on the pool table. “You and your partner being mobbed while you were waiting for an elevator.”

  “And then the two of you finding that NAHL executive dead in his
hotel room,” Tony said.

  “There are rumors,” the twins repeated.

  “I’d rather not add to any of those,” I said.

  “People are saying you wouldn’t be involved if there wasn’t a murder.”

  “That’s not true,” I told the twins. “We’re involved because Duane Chapman died under unusual circumstances.”

  “So did the executive,” Tony pointed out.

  “Murder is an unusual circumstance,” the twins noted.

  “Not that unusual,” Tayla said. She worked at a D.C. emergency room, so she had standing to opine.

  “There’s nothing to say it’s murder,” I said. “In either case. It’s unusual, that’s all. And Chapman’s threep was in D.C. while his body was in Philadelphia. That’s an interstate issue. When it’s an interstate issue, we get called in.”

  “And they didn’t even have to call you in,” Tony said. “You were already there.”

  “Damn it.” Tayla had flubbed her shot. Tony was now lining up his. “At the very least, you’ve had a busy day today,” she said.

  “It’s going to get busier,” I said. “I have to go to Philly. I need to interview Duane Chapman’s wife.”

  “Jesus,” Tayla said. “That’s no fun.”

  “The rumors say they were estranged,” the twins said.

  “Do the rumors say why?” I asked.

  “The usual. Infidelity. Stupidity. Groupies. Stress because he’s Haden and she’s not.”

  “How are you getting to Philly?” Tony asked. He sank his shot.

  “The FBI office there has a visitor’s threep. I’ll use that. Also, Tony, I need to talk to you privately before I go.”

  “I’m busy humiliating Tayla at the moment,” Tony said, and then shanked his shot. His ball clicked against the eight ball, which had been in front of the left side pocket. The eight ball sank into the pocket. “Shit.”

  “You were saying?” Tayla said, to Tony.

  “Chris cursed me,” Tony said, and then looked over to me. “You totally cursed me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I demand compensation.”

  “Well, as it happens, the thing I wanted to talk to you about can probably take care of that.”

  * * *

  The Philadelphia FBI’s guest threep was a late-model Sebring-Warner Galavant, which was mildly surprising to me. The Galavant was a midprice, midspecced model, and since the FBI’s loaner threeps tended to be gotten through civil forfeiture, they were usually either barely functional basic models, gotten from street-level miscreants, or high-end luxury gigs, gotten from miscreants higher up. With the Galavant, either some suburban Haden had gotten tangled up in a questionable enterprise, or the Philly FBI office actually bought a guest threep, and this was what they could get past the bursar.

  The loaner threep was stored in a storage closet. When I accessed it, the first thing I noticed was that it was at 13 percent power. I looked down and saw that the threep had been displaced off its induction plate, shoved over by a pile of boxes.

  “Well, crap,” I said out loud. I shoved the boxes back, and stood full on the plate to see if it was a high-speed charger, and got nothing. I followed the power cord. It was unplugged. I cursed and plugged it in and got back on the plate. It informed me that a full charge would take eight hours.

  The door to the equipment opened and an older gentleman peered in. “Hello?”

  “Do you know if there’s a high-speed induction plate somewhere in this office?” I asked.

  “A what now?” the man asked.

  I suppressed an urge to groan. “Are you an agent here?”

  “No, uh—”

  “Agent Shane.”

  “No, Agent Shane. I’m custodial staff. Nearly everyone else is at home. It’s Sunday evening. I didn’t even know you were here. I just heard noises.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I just thought the rats might have come back.” He held open the door to let me out.

  I exited the storage room into a hallway and called up a map of nearby fast-charge induction plates open to the public. There weren’t any. The FBI office was in a part of Philadelphia’s downtown. The area had lots of federal buildings and museums, but not a lot of places open on a Sunday evening. Looked like I would be trying to coax a charge out of the Bureau car that I’d reserved.

  “I don’t have any notice of a reserved car for you, Agent Shane,” the lobby security officer said to me, when I went down to find out where the cars were.

  “I sent in the request at the same time I requested the threep,” I said.

  “I’m sure you did,” the security officer said. “But unfortunately that request never got to me, so I can’t unlock one of the vehicles for you to use.”

  I posted up my FBI ID on the Galavant’s small chest monitor. “You can check to see I am who I say I am. I mean, beyond the fact that the only way I can access this threep is to use the FBI’s encrypted network.”

  “I believe you,” the security officer said. “But I literally cannot unlock a car for you without an authorization code.”

  “I sort of need a car,” I said. “Not only to get where I’m supposed to go but to charge this threep.”

  “I can call you a cab. Maybe you can charge in there.”

  I resisted the urge to throw a fit, because the lobby security agent wasn’t doing anything wrong. “Please,” I said.

  Five minutes later the cab appeared at the front of the FBI’s building. I went out of the lobby and tapped the passenger-side window. “The cab wouldn’t happen to have an induction plate in it, would it?”

  “A what?” The cabdriver appeared confused.

  “Never mind.” I gave him the address of Duane Chapman’s town house. As we drove along, I shut down every possible threep system I could to conserve energy. This was going to be a long night, but if I didn’t watch my power usage, it would also be a paradoxically short one.

  * * *

  The Chapman town house was thronged by reporters and journalists and also by Hilketa fans, wearing Boston Bays colors. Philadelphia itself didn’t have a Hilketa team yet, although it, like Washington, D.C., was slated for an expansion team. Pittsburgh had the Pitbulls. The fact that Pittsburgh had a Hilketa team before Philly was a source of irritation to many Philadelphians.

  I put my FBI ID on my threep’s chest screen and pushed my way through the mass, making my way up the steps. The door opened before I could knock and a man in nursing scrubs peered out. “Agent Shane?”

  “That’s me.”

  The man nodded. “Come inside, please.”

  “I’m Alton Ortiz,” the man said, once we were inside. He’d held out his hand for me to shake, and I did. “I was one of Duane’s caretakers.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. It’s been a rough day.”

  “I’m sure it has.”

  “I know you’re here to see Marla, but she’s busy at the moment.”

  “Is she talking to the Philadelphia police?”

  “No, she did that earlier. This is a league representative.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. The whole point of talking to her now was to do so before the league tried to hush her up. I made a mental note to contact the Philly police and see who was working the death on their end, to see if our stories matched up. “Is it a lawyer?” I asked Ortiz.

  “I think so? I know he’s here to talk about her survivor benefits.” Ortiz motioned to a front sitting room. “If you like you can sit here and I’ll let her know you’re waiting.”

  “Actually, I’d like to see Mr. Chapman’s room, if that’s all right.”

  Oritz seemed to think about this for a moment, then nodded again. “All right,” he said. “The police have already been through it, though.”

  “I’m sure they have. Don’t worry, I’ll be unobtrusive.”

  Duane Chapman’s room was on the first floor of the town house, where a traditional
dining room might be. This made a bit of sense, as the kitchen area could be used as both a storage and sitting area for caretakers. Along the wall were three threeps, one a standard luxury threep, one designed for heavy-duty recreational use, and a gaudy, vaguely ridiculous-looking thing that I recognized as a “formal” threep, something to wear to galas and events. Near the back of the room sat a now empty creche, a model I didn’t recognize.

  “It’s Labram,” Ortiz said when I asked him about it. “The company makes them specifically for the league. All the players have one.”

  “That’s a very specific endorsement deal,” I said.

  Ortiz shook his head. “It’s not that. Labram creches have special systems and monitors to transmit information and to make sure there’s no cheating going on.”

  “Is there a lot of that in Hilketa?”

  “It’s a professional sport, Agent Shane. Lots of players would give it a shot.”

  I nodded to the empty creche. “What about Chapman?”

  Ortiz smiled and shook his head. “Naw, man. Not Duane. Duane was straight-edge as they come.” He motioned to an IV bag, unhooked now and dangling by the creche. “He only used league-approved supplements and IVs.”

  I walked over and looked at the IV solution bag. Labram was also the brand name on it. “Was Chapman straight-edge outside of his career?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are rumors that he was struggling with sobriety.” I motioned my head to a picture on the wall, a portrait of Marla Chapman. “Because of troubles at home.”

  Ortiz’s face darkened a bit at this. “I don’t think I need to be talking about that,” he said.

  I held up a hand. “I’m not asking because I want to hear the latest gossip. I’m asking because I want to know why your friend died playing a game that shouldn’t have killed him.”

  “I’ll let you talk to Marla about that,” Ortiz said, after a minute. “But I’ll tell you this, Agent Shane. I was with Duane most of the time he was awake and all the time he was on the field, practicing or playing. No one would know better than me if he was doping, professionally or recreationally. I saw nothing like that. That wasn’t his thing.”