The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  And things she would probably have to investigate now.

  “Do you know her?” DeRicci asked, hoping to catch him off-balance.

  “Her?” He looked confused for a moment. Then he looked at the crate, and his flush grew deeper. “You mean, her?”

  “Yes,” DeRicci said. Just from his reaction she knew his response. He didn’t know the woman. And the idea that she was inside one of his crates upset him more than he wanted to say.

  Which was probably why he was the person talking to DeRicci now.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know her, and I don’t recognize her. We didn’t run any recognition programs on her either. We figured you all would do that.”

  “No one touched her? No one checked her for identification chips?”

  “I’m the one who opened the crate,” he said. “I saw her, I saw that her eyes were open, and then I closed the lid. I leave the identifying to you all.”

  “Do you know all your employees, Mr. Ansel?”

  “By name,” he said.

  “By look,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I have nearly three hundred employees in Armstrong alone.”

  “But you just said you know their names. You know all three hundred employees by name?”

  He smiled absently, which seemed like a rote response. He’d responded to this kind of thing before.

  “I have an eidetic memory,” he said. “If I’ve seen a name, then I remember it.”

  “An eidetic memory for names, but not faces? I’ve never heard of that,” DeRicci said.

  “I haven’t met all of my employees,” he said. “But I go over the pay amounts every week before they get sent to the employees’ accounts. I see the names. I rarely see the faces.”

  “So you wouldn’t know if she worked here,” DeRicci said.

  “Here?” he asked. “Here I would know. I come here every day. If she worked in one of the other warehouses or in transport or in sales, I wouldn’t know that.”

  “Did this crate go somewhere else before coming to this warehouse?” DeRicci asked.

  “No,” Ansel said. “Each crate is assigned a number. That number puts it in a location, and then when the crate fills, it gets swapped out with another. The crate comes to the same warehouse each time, without deviation. And since that system is automated, as I mentioned, I know that it doesn’t go awry.”

  “Can someone stop the crate in transit and add a body?”

  “No,” he said. “I can show you if you want.”

  She shook her head. That would be a good job for her partner, Rayvon Lake. Rayvon still hadn’t arrived, the bastard. DeRicci would have to report him pretty soon. He had gotten very lax about crime scenes, leaving them to her. He left most everything to her, and she hated it.

  He was a lazy detective—twenty years in the position—and he saw her as an upstart who needed to be put in her place.

  She wouldn’t have minded if he did his job. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She would have minded. She hated people who disliked her. But she wouldn’t be considering filing a report on him if he actually did the work he was supposed to do.

  She would get Lake to handle the transport information by telling him she wasn’t smart enough to understand it. It would mean that she’d have to suffer through an explanation later in the case, but maybe by then, she’d either have this thing solved or she’d have a new partner.

  A woman could hope, after all.

  “One of the other detectives will look into the transport process,” DeRicci said. “I’m just trying to cover the basics here, so we start looking in the right place. Can outsiders come into this warehouse?”

  “And get into one of our crates?” Ansel asked. “No. Look.”

  He touched the edge of the lid, and she heard a loud snap.

  “It’s sealed shut now,” he said.

  She didn’t like the sound of that snap.

  “If I were in there,” she asked, “could I breathe through that seal?”

  “Yes,” he said. “For about two days, if need be. But it doesn’t seal shut like that until it leaves the transport and crosses the threshold here at the warehouse. So there’s no way anyone could crawl in here at the warehouse.”

  “All right,” DeRicci said. “So, let me be sure I understand you. The only place that someone could either place a body into a crate or crawl into it on their own is on site.”

  “Yes,” Ansel said. “We try to encourage composting, so we allow bypassers to stuff something into a crate. We search for nonorganic material at the site, and flag the crates with nonorganic material so they can be cleaned.”

  “Clothing is organic?” DeRicci asked.

  “Much of it, yes,” Ansel said. “Synthetics aren’t good hosts for nanoproducts, so most people wear clothing made from recycled organic material.”

  DeRicci’s skin literally crawled. She hadn’t known that. She wasn’t an organic kind of woman. She preferred fake stuff, much to the dismay of her friends.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m going to talk with your people in a minute. I’ll want to know what they know. And I’ll need to see your records on previous incidents.”

  She didn’t check to see if he had sent her anything on her links. She didn’t want downloads to confuse her sense of the crime scene. She liked to make her own opinions, and she did that by being thorough.

  Detectives like Rayvon Lake gathered as much information as possible, multitasking as they walked through a crime scene. She believed they missed most of the important details while doing that, and that led to a lot of side roads and wasted time.

  And, if she could prove it (if she had time to prove it), a lot of false convictions. She had caught Lake twice trying to close a case by accusing an innocent person who was convenient, rather than doing the hard leg work required of a good investigator.

  Ansel fluttered near her for a moment. She inclined her head toward the room where the staff had gathered, knowing she was inviting him to contaminate her witnesses even more, but she had a hunch none of them were going to be useful to the investigation anyway.

  “Before you go,” she said, just in case he didn’t take the hint, “could you unseal this crate for me?”

  “Oh, yes, sorry,” he said, and ran his fingers along the side again. It snapped one more time, then popped up slightly.

  DeRicci thanked him, and pulled back the lid. The crate was deep—up to DeRicci’s ribs—and filled with unidentifiable bits of rotting food. The woman lay on top of them, hands cradled under her cheek, feet tucked together.

  DeRicci couldn’t imagine anyone just curling up here, even at the bidding of someone else. But people did strange things for strange reasons, and she wasn’t going to rule it out.

  She put the lid down and then looked at the warehouse again. She would need the numbers, but she suspected thousands of crates went through Ansel’s facilities around the Moon daily.

  Done properly, it would be a perfect way to dispose of bodies and all kinds of other things that no one wanted to see. She wondered how many others knew about this facility and how it worked.

  She suspected she would have to find out.

  * * *

  Getting the crime scene unit to a warehouse outside of the dome took more work than Ethan Broduer liked to do. Fortunately, he was a deputy coroner, which meant he couldn’t control the crime scene unit. Someone with more seniority had to handle requisitioning the right vehicle from the Police Department yards outside the dome, and making certain the team had the right equipment.

  Broduer came to the warehouse via train. The ride was only five minutes long, but it made him nervous.

  He was born inside the dome, and he hated leaving it for any reason at all, especially for a reason involving work. So much of his work had to do with temperature and conditions, and if the body had been in an airless environment at all, it had an impact on every aspect of his job.

  He was relieved when he arrived at the warehouse and le
arned that the body had never gone outside of an Earth Normal environment. However, he was annoyed to see that he would be working with Noelle DeRicci.

  She was notoriously difficult and demanding, and often asked coroners to redo something or double-check their findings. She’d caught him in several mistakes, which he found embarrassing.

  Then she had had the gall to tell him that he should probably double-check all of his work, considering its shoddy quality.

  She stood next to a crate, the only one of thousands that was open. She was rumpled—she was always rumpled—and her curly black hair looked messier than usual.

  When she saw him approach, she glared at him.

  “Oh, lucky me,” she said.

  Broduer bit back a response. He’d been recording everything since he got off the train inside the warehouse’s private platform, and he didn’t want to show any animosity toward DeRicci on anything that might go to court.

  “Just show me the body and I’ll get to work,” he said.

  She raised her eyebrows at the word “work,” and she didn’t have to add anything to convey her meaning. She didn’t think Broduer worked at all.

  “My biggest priority at the moment is an identification,” DeRicci said.

  And his biggest priority was to do this investigation right. But he didn’t say that. Instead he looked at the dozens of crates spread out before him.

  “Which one am I dealing with?” he asked, pleased that he could sound so calm in the face of her rudeness.

  She placed a hand on the crate behind her. He was pleased to see that she wore gloves. He had worked with her partner Rayvon Lake before, and Lake had to be reminded to follow any kind of procedure.

  But Broduer didn’t see Lake anywhere.

  “Have you had cases involving the waste crates before?” DeRicci asked Broduer.

  “No,” he said, not adding that he tried to pass anything outside the dome onto anyone else, “but I’ve heard about cases involving them. I guess it’s not that uncommon.”

  “Hmm,” she said looking toward a room at the far end of the large warehouse. “And here I thought they were.”

  Broduer was going to argue his point when he realized that DeRicci wasn’t talking to him now. She was arguing with someone she had already spoken to.

  “Can you get me information on that?” DeRicci asked Broduer.

  He hated it when detectives wanted him to do their work for them. “It’s in the records.”

  DeRicci made a low, growly sound, like he had irritated her beyond measure.

  So he decided to tweak her a bit more. “Just search for warehouses and recycling and crates—”

  “I know,” she said. “I was hoping your office already had statistics.”

  “I’m sure we do, Detective,” he said, moving past her, “but you want me to figure out what killed this poor creature, right? Not dig into old cases.”

  “I think the old cases might be relevant,” she said.

  He shrugged. He didn’t care what was or wasn’t relevant to her investigation. His priority was dealing with this body.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and slipped on his favorite pair of gloves. Then he raised the lid on the crate.

  The woman inside was maybe thirty. She had been pretty too, before her eyes had filmed over and her cheeks sunk in.

  She had clearly died in an Earth Normal environment, and she hadn’t left that environment, as advertised. He would have to do some research to figure out if the presence of rotting food had an impact on the body’s decomposition, but that was something to worry about later.

  Then Broduer glanced up. “I’ll have information for you in a while,” he said to DeRicci.

  “Just give me a name,” she said. “We haven’t traced anything.”

  He didn’t want to move the body yet. He didn’t even want to touch it, because he was afraid of disturbing some important evidence.

  The corpse’s hands were tucked under her head, so he couldn’t just run the identification chips everyone had buried in their palms.

  So he used the coroner’s office facial recognition program. It had a record of every single human who lived in Armstrong, and was constantly updated with information from the arrivals and departures sections of the city every single day.

  “Initial results show that her name is Sonja Mycenae. She was born here, and moved off-Moon with her family ten years ago. She returned one month ago to work as a nanny for.…”

  He paused, stunned at the name that turned up.

  “For?” DeRicci pushed.

  Broduer looked up. He could feel the color draining from his face.

  “Luc Deshin,” he said quietly. “She works for Luc Deshin.”

  * * *

  Luc Deshin.

  DeRicci hadn’t expected that name.

  Luc Deshin ran a corporation called Deshin Enterprises, that the police department flagged and monitored continually. Everyone in Armstrong knew that Deshin controlled a huge crime syndicate that trafficked in all sorts of illegal and banned substances. The bulk of Deshin’s business had moved off-Moon, but he had gotten his start as an average street thug, rising, as those kids often do, through murder and targeted assassination into a position of power, using the deaths of others to advance his own career.

  “Luc Deshin needed a nanny?” DeRicci sounded confused.

  “He married a few years ago,” Broduer said, as he bent over the body again. “I guess they had kids.”

  “And didn’t like the nanny.” DeRicci whistled. “Talk about a high stress job.”

  She glanced at that room filled with the employees who found the body. There was a lot of work to be done here, but none of it was as important as catching Deshin by surprise with this investigation.

  If he killed this Sonja Mycenae, then he would be expecting the police’s appearance. But he might not expect them so soon.

  Or maybe he had always used the waste crates to dump his bodies. No one had ever been able to pin a murder on him.

  Perhaps this was why.

  She needed to leave. But before she did, she sent a message to Lake. Only she sent it using the standard police links, not the encoded link any other officer would use with her partner. She wanted it on record that Lake hadn’t shown up yet.

  Rayvon, you need to get here ASAP. There are employees to interview. I’m following a lead, but someone has to supervise the crime scene unit. Someone sent Deputy Coroner Broduer and he doesn’t have supervisory authority.

  She didn’t wait for Lake’s response. Before he said anything, she sent another message to her immediate supervisor, Chief of Detectives Andrea Gumiela, this time through an encoded private link.

  This case has ties to Deshin Enterprises, DeRicci sent. I’m going there now, but we need a good team on this. It’s not some random death. It needs to be done perfectly. Between Broduer and Lake, we’re off to a bad start.

  She didn’t wait for Gumiela to respond either. In fact, after sending that message, DeRicci shut off all but her emergency links.

  She didn’t want Gumiela to tell her to stay on site, and she didn’t want to hear Lake’s invective when he realized she had essentially chastised him in front of the entire department.

  “Make sure no one leaves,” DeRicci said to Broduer.

  He looked up, panicked. “I don’t have the authority.”

  “Pretend,” she snapped, and walked away from him.

  She needed to get to Luc Deshin, and she needed to get to him now.

  * * *

  Luc Deshin grabbed his long-waisted overcoat and headed down the stairs. So a police detective wanted to meet with him. He wished he found such things unusual. But they weren’t.

  The police liked to harass him. Less now than in the past. They’d had a frustrating time pinning anything on him.

  He always found it ironic that the crimes they accused him of were crimes he’d never think of committing, and the crimes he had committed—long ago and far away—were crimes they
had never heard of.

  Now, all of his activities were legal. Just-inside-the-law legal, but legal nonetheless.

  Or so his cadre of lawyers kept telling the local courts, and the local judges—at least the ones he would find himself in front of—always believed his lawyers.

  So, a meeting like this, coming in the middle of the day, was an annoyance, and nothing more.

  He used his trip down the stairs to stay in shape. His office was a penthouse on the top floor of the building he’d built to house Deshin Enterprises years ago. He used to love that office, but he liked it less since he and his wife Gerda brought a baby into their lives.

  He smiled at the thought of Paavo. They had adopted him—sort of. They had drawn up some legal papers and wills that the lawyers assured him would stand any challenge should he and Gerda die suddenly.

  But Deshin and Gerda had decided against an actual adoption given Deshin’s business practices and his reputation in Armstrong. They were worried that some judge would deem them unfit, based on Deshin’s reputation.

  Plus, Paavo was the child of two Disappeareds, making the adoption situation even more difficult. The Earth Alliance’s insistence that local laws prevailed when crimes were committed meant that humans were often subjected to alien laws, laws that made no sense at all. Many humans didn’t like being forced to lose a limb as punishment for chopping down an exotic tree, or giving up a child because they’d broken food laws on a different planet.

  Those who could afford to get new names and new identities did so rather than accept their punishment under Earth Alliance law. Those people Disappeared.

  Paavo’s parents had Disappeared within weeks of his birth, leaving him to face whatever legal threat those aliens could dream up.

  Paavo, alone, at four months.

  Fortunately, Deshin and Gerda had sources inside Armstrong’s family services, which they had done for just this sort of reason. Both Deshin and Gerda had had difficult childhoods—to say the least. They knew what it was like to be unwanted.

  Their initial plan had been to bring several unwanted children into their homes, but after they met Paavo, a brilliant baby with his own special needs, they decided to put that plan on hold. If they could only save Paavo, that would be enough.