Head On

by John Scalzi

  “When he died,” Vann said.

  “When death was likely inevitable, yes.”

  “So you’re saying Chapman died from too much pain,” I said.

  “Well, no,” Tony said. “We know he was in pain because at the press conference last night we were told that.” He waved at the ribbon, now still. “These data don’t explicitly show any sort of pain, but strongly imply it. But these data are incomplete. Especially the ‘brain activity’ data, which measure a sort of generalized brain state, not any system or section of the brain in particular.”

  “It’s for show,” Vann said.

  “Basically,” Tony agreed. “It gives the league something to sell. It lets you see something was going on with Chapman’s brain. But nothing specific enough to say anything with accuracy.”

  “Except to say he was in pain.”

  “Except to say that this data supports everyone’s assertion that he was in pain,” Tony amended. “And anyway, pain is a symptom. Technically, I’d say Chapman died of the cardiac arrest. A heart attack. You’d have to check with the Philadelphia medical examiner for confirmation of that.”

  “In your opinion, has this data feed been tampered with?” Vann asked.

  “No, or if it has the person who tampered with it is really good at what they do,” Tony said. “That’s a preliminary assessment, based on a couple hours’ examination. I’ll run more detailed tests on it later. But even if it was tampered with, it’s been tampered with to show pretty much what we already knew: Chapman died not long after his threep was taken off the field. So if it was tampered with, the question is, why?”

  “This brings us back to our original theory that Kaufmann pulled the feed just out of sheer panic,” I said.

  Vann shook her head. “We never stopped thinking it was panic. The question we don’t know is, why he panicked about it. And why he killed himself over it.”

  “If he did.”

  “He did,” Vann said, and tilted her head up at the ribbon of data. “If in every other moment of his life he was a smug, cocksure bastard, and everyone I talked to last night said he was, then it’s something here that made him do a hard turn.”

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  “We hold that thought and you show us what you got in Philly.”

  I nodded and ported my information over to Diaz, who wiped Tony’s data and brought up Chapman’s burning apartment. Smoke, fire, and particulate matter was frozen in the air.

  “Whoa,” Tony said.

  “I know,” I said. “I was there.”

  “What did you find?” Vann asked.

  “Nothing, I thought. It just looked like a basic groupie den.”

  “And you know what a groupie den looks like, how?”

  “You recall I was famous for a while, yes? This isn’t entirely new to me.”

  Vann cocked her head at me. “Did … you have a groupie den, Chris?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I am, but I’m maybe five percent actually curious.”

  “I’d go as high as ten percent,” Tony said. Diaz looked quietly uncomfortable.

  “You are both terrible people, and also, no,” I said. “And anyway, that’s what I thought it was, until someone else showed up and activated one of the threeps.”

  “Which one?” Vann asked. I pointed to one of the ones with the grooves in it. She peered at it. “I don’t recognize that model.”

  “I don’t recognize any of the models,” I said.

  “That looks like a Van Diemen,” Tony said, pointing to the threep with a penis.

  Vann blinked. “And you know this how?”

  “Obviously because I’ve been in close proximity to one.”

  “Go on,” Vann said.

  “You want to know my sexual history?”

  “No.” Vann made a swatting motion. “I mean, tell us more about this company.”

  “Not much to it,” Tony said. “There’s a market for these, the big guys don’t want to officially touch them, so Van Diemen licenses their tech and makes modifications. Makes models with both sexes.”

  “And that?” Vann pointed to the one with ridges.

  Tony shrugged. “I’ve never seen one of those. But it looks like it’s basically for the same purpose.”

  Vann looked over to me. “Chris,” she said.

  “Already on it,” I replied. I had pulled up a screen on the company. “They’re based out of Baltimore.”

  “What happened to those threeps in Chapman’s apartment?” Vann asked.

  “They got burned up. I had the Philly police impound the remains.”

  “We’ll bring the one that moved with us tomorrow and hit Van Diemen on the way back from Philly,” Vann said. “Do you have anything else?”

  “I have Chapman’s town house footage, with his room.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  I sent it over to Diaz, who popped it up. We all looked at the room.

  “Yes, that’s a room,” Vann said, finally.

  “That was kind of my thought as well,” I said.

  “Anyone else?” Vann asked Tony and Diaz.

  “Actually,” Tony said.

  “Yes?”

  “Can you zoom in on the IV bag?”

  Vann nodded to Diaz, who zoomed in on the bag. She glanced over to me. I shrugged.

  Tony pointed at the bag. “That’s not right.”

  “What’s not right about it?” Vann asked.

  “It’s the wrong brand,” Tony said.

  Vann frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “The IV is full of supplements that the league allows the players to have during the game, to keep them alert and whatnot. Right? Well, the top Hilketa players have endorsement deals for their IV supplements. The ones that don’t use the league-endorsed supplements. That’s Tigertone. But the bag says Labram on it. Chapman didn’t have an endorsement deal with Labram.”

  “Okay, and, so?” Vann said. “Maybe Chapman just wanted a change.”

  Tony shook his head. “That’s not how endorsements work. The NAHL could get sued for Chapman not using Tigertone during a game. And Chapman could be fined by the Bays for it, unless he had his own endorsement deal. He didn’t.”

  Vann nodded. “So you’re wondering why the switch.”

  “And what’s in the bag,” I added. Then I paused and turned to Diaz. “Bring up Chapman’s secret apartment again, please.”

  Diaz did. “Bring up the front room full size,” I asked. He did.

  “What are you looking for?” Vann asked.

  “That,” I said, and pointed to a box in the corner of the room, near one of the threeps, partially obscured by static smoke. “It says ‘Labram’ on it.”

  “That could be anything.”

  I nodded. “It could be anything, but it’s specifically something.” I pointed to a shipping code on the top of the box. “We can follow up on that. And while we’re at it—” I asked for Diaz to go back to Chapman’s town house, and zoomed in again on the IV bag. “Each bag has its own serial number. It will tell us when it was produced and what batch it was part of. If we know that much, we might know whether it was shipped to Chapman directly or if he got it from someone else.”

  Vann frowned. “You think it might have something to do with his death.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But if Tony’s right and it’s not supposed to be there, then we should probably try to figure out why it is. We don’t know why Chapman’s body freaked out during the game, and we can’t take any explanation for granted. We have to find out about what was going on with his body, and what was going on with his threep. So we get that bag and test it. Then we need to get a medical report from the Philadelphia medical examiner. Then we need to talk to the people in charge of the threeps at the Boston Bays.”

  “You talked to Chapman’s caregiver?”

  “Alton Ortiz. Yes.”

  “And he didn’t say anything about the IV being different.
”

  “No.”

  “Maybe we should ask him again.”

  “We can do that, along with checking with the Philly ME. In the meantime we should get someone from our Philly branch over to Chapman’s town house to collect that bag as evidence.”

  Vann smiled slightly at this. “Let me do that. I don’t think they want to do anything nice for you yet.”

  “Fair point.”

  “We also need to go back to Strawberry Mansion and talk to some of the people in the building. Find out what was going on in that love nest of Chapman’s, and why the building burned up.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Now, what do we do about Kaufmann?”

  “Oh, him,” Vann said, and then looked at me. “I don’t know, Chris. What do we do?”

  This was not Vann actually being confused about what to do next. This was Vann the senior partner, quizzing her junior partner, me, about the job. This was how our working relationship had started, a year earlier, and how it had continued. I suspected that we could be working together for a decade and I would still get the quiz.

  “Get the warrants or clearance from the league, and get the medical examiner here in D.C. and the forensics teams to expedite their examinations.”

  “And what about what connects Kaufmann with Chapman?”

  “You got me,” I said. “And anyway my day’s already scheduled out.”

  Vann smirked. Then she turned to Diaz. “Bring up the hotel room again.” Kaufmann’s hotel room zoomed into view. “I think we missed something,” she said, to me.

  I looked at the room again, studying it. “I got nothing,” I said, after a couple of minutes.

  “This is where your being a Haden is giving you a blind spot.” Vann pointed to the bed. “The bed’s a mess.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “Pull up your security feed,” Vann said, to Diaz. He pulled it up and put it into its own virtual screen again, and once more put it on fast-forward. “Here’s Kaufmann coming into the room. It’s about forty-five minutes before we arrive.”

  “So he took a nap,” I said.

  “Not a lot of time. And he’d had a stressful day.”

  “All the more reason for a nap.”

  “From how everyone described him, he doesn’t strike me as the napping type.”

  “His room might not have been made up from the morning,” Tony said.

  “Does that hotel security feed of yours go back further?” Vann asked Diaz.

  “I’ve got about six hours of it,” he said.

  “Run it back and see if the room got serviced.”

  Diaz zoomed the feed back until the service cart appeared and the staff, in reverse, went into the rooms and back out of them again. In short order the cart was in front of Kaufmann’s door and the staff member inside. “That answers that,” Vann said.

  “It’s not exactly conclusive,” I suggested. “Your hunch about his personality type notwithstanding, maybe Kaufmann really liked his catnaps.”

  Vann ignored this. “Has the room been released yet?”

  “To the hotel? I don’t know.”

  “Find out. If it’s not, get a forensics team back over there. If it has been, get a forensics team back over there anyway. And get the hotel to keep their staff out of the room next to Kaufmann’s, too, until we our people can look at it.”

  “Why?”

  Vann pointed to the visual of the room. “Look again,” she said.

  I suppressed the urge to gripe and looked again. This time, after a minute, I saw it.

  “The interior door,” I said.

  “The interior door,” Vann agreed. “Which opens up into the next room, if someone wants to rent both and make a suite out of them. Or, maybe, if someone wants to take an adjoining room to be able to get from one room to the other without making a public scene about it.”

  “Still thin,” I said.

  “Probably.” Vann smiled, without much joy. She looked like she was up against her time limit for needing some nicotine. “But let’s be sure. And let’s get a name on that room. If we’re lucky, maybe they won’t have checked out yet. Let’s get that done before we head to Philly.”

  “And by ‘let’s get that done’ you mean ‘you do it,’ don’t you.”

  “Yes,” Vann said. “Yes I do.”

  “Then you drive to Philly. And back.”

  “I was going to do that anyway. Because while we’re driving, I have something else I want you to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Talk to your parents.”

  Chapter Seven

  THE AGENCY VEHICLE we usually drove around in was in the shop. Vann went to get another out of the motor pool. I didn’t want to wait with her while she argued with the staff there over which car she got. She would get cranky and the motor pool would get cranky back and I would end up like the kid who felt sad that Mommy and Daddy were fighting. I told her to pick me up in front of the main entrance, and headed out of doors to enjoy a typically muggy Washington day. Around me people were already visibly sweating. I turned down my heat sensitivity and felt mildly smug about being a Haden.

  And then stopped feeling smug when a small pack of reporters fell on me, shouting questions about the case. My threep had been recognized.

  “I don’t have any comments,” I said, holding up my hands.

  “Come on, Chris,” one of the reporters said. I scanned his face and the database came up with Dave Miller, who wrote about Hilketa for the Post. “Your press people aren’t being very helpful.”

  “Maybe that’s because it’s an ongoing case and we don’t like talking about those,” I suggested.

  “If it’s an ongoing case then it suggests that there’s something going on besides a natural death, right?”

  I cocked my head at Miller. “That’s a nice leading question,” I said. “Are you going to ask me when I stopped beating my partner next?”

  “You’re confirming you have a partner?” Miller asked, cracking a smile as he got the allusion.

  “What about Commissioner Kaufmann?” asked another reporter, this one popping up as Cary Wise, from the Hilketa News.

  “Well, see, that would also be an ongoing investigation, wouldn’t it?” I said. “And what do we know about ongoing investigations?”

  “You could tell us off the record,” Wise said.

  Everyone in the small press scrum groaned and looked at Wise. “What?” Wise said, looking around.

  “You’re new at this, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “No,” Wise said, defensively.

  “Now you’ve just guaranteed Chris will never say anything to anyone on or off the record, moron,” said another journalist.

  “Ding,” I said, and then pointed to the various security cameras around us. “Here’s a pro tip: Don’t ask an FBI agent to go off the record, in public, in front of microphones and video cameras, in front of the actual FBI building.”

  “When will the FBI have a statement?” This question from Leona Garza, from WTTG.

  “Ask our press folks.”

  “We did. They didn’t say anything.”

  “Maybe ask them to speak off the record,” I said.

  “What about the protesters yesterday?” Wise asked.

  “What protesters?”

  “The ones protesting the Hilketa game yesterday,” Wise said. “Are they being investigated in conjunction with yesterday’s events?”

  I paused for a second. “That’s a fairly random question,” I finally said.

  “They’re not just random protesters,” Wise said. “They’ve got some serious funding.”

  “Uh-huh, okay,” Miller interjected, and then positioned himself in front of me and Wise. “If you can’t tell us about the investigation, Chris, can you at least tell us about saving that woman from a fire last night in Philly?”

  There was a honk. Vann had pulled up in our car.

  “My ride’s here,” I said, and walked through the miniscrum, waving. Miller
protested not getting an answer. I kept waving until I got into the car.

  “You’re popular,” Vann said, as I got in.

  “It’s not me, it’s our case.” I buckled up and then looked at the car. “This is nice. Nicer than our usual car.”

  “Yeah, well,” Vann said. She pulled away from the curb. “They tried to give me that goddamned Fiesta. I was going to shoot somebody.”

  “It’s just a car,” I said.

  “Spoken like someone who doesn’t have to worry about their spine being compressed for three hours on the way to Philly. And three hours back.”

  “We can get someone from the Philly Bureau to cover for us,” I said. “Handle the little chat with the director there by video.”

  “Nice try getting out of that,” Vann said, smirking. “And anyway, I know the person covering Haden affairs there. Rachel Ramsey.”

  “And?”

  “We’re going to Philly.”

  “I’ve been your partner for a year and in all that time I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever heard you say anything nice about anyone else in law enforcement,” I said.

  Vann fished a cigarette pack out of her suit jacket pocket. “I don’t hate you.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “I’m going to smoke on the way.”

  “You know they hate it when you do that. I get yelled at by the motor-pool people because they think yelling at me will change your mind about doing it. I tell them it won’t. They yell at me anyway.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s why they tried to give you the Fiesta. What happened to your electronic cigarette?”

  “It broke.”

  “Get a new one.”

  “They’re expensive.”

  “And cigarettes are cheap at twelve bucks a pack? I question your budgeting skills.”

  “Did the press get anything from you?” Vann asked, changing the subject.

  “No,” I said. “I can handle a scrum, and this was a small one. Although one of them asked a weird question. It was a reporter from some outlet called the Hilketa News. You heard of it?”

  “Not really.”

  “There were protesters at the game saying that Hilketa is discriminatory. Wise—the Hilketa News reporter—implied they weren’t just cranky dudes. That they’re organized and funded by someone.”