Red Shadows

by Mitchel Scanlon

  "How did you find the body?" Weller asked as Costigan led them towards the apartment. "Did one of the neighbours call it in?"

  "No. I was responding to a routine suicide call. One of the block residents took a swan-dive off the roof. The block super told me the jumper's girlfriend lived in Apartment 26-C on the twenty-first, so I came up here to notify her about his death. The apartment door was ajar, and when I entered I found her body."

  "You checked the surveillance recordings?" Weller asked him.

  "Nothing to help you there," Costigan replied. "The surveillance cameras inside the block are off-line for maintenance." He noticed the other Judges exchanging significant looks between them. "What? What is it?"

  "Our boy always seems to choose blocks without internal surveillance," Anderson told him. "It's part of his pattern."

  "So he's not dumb, then," Costigan said. "Just crazy."

  "Why do you say that?" Anderson asked, vaguely surprised that the Street Judge's opinion so closely echoed the discussion between her and Noland earlier.

  "He has to be crazy," Costigan answered. As he approached Apartment 26-C, he pushed open the door and stood back to let the others enter before him. "Believe me, once you see what he did to his victim, you'll know exactly what I mean."

  Yoakim went in first, a scanalyser in his hand as he indicated to the Judges behind him which path to take through the apartment to avoid trampling on the physical evidence. Following the Tek-Judge's lead, Anderson stepped carefully over the bloodstains and drag marks on the floor of the apartment hallway. At first sight, it seemed the killer had followed his usual MO: attacking his victim in the hallway, and then dragging her elsewhere to begin the mutilations. This time, instead of the kitchen, the trail led into the living room. She heard Yoakim's voice gasp out an oath in quiet horror as he advanced to the living room and saw what was waiting for them. Moving past him, Anderson gained her first glimpse of the killer's latest atrocity.

  It was a woman, or it had been once. Her body lay on its back on the sofa in the middle of the living room, her blouse ripped away, her mouth still open as though frozen in a silent scream that had stayed with her past her death. As with the body of Velma Sharn, the killer had cut open the victim's torso and removed her inner organs.

  With Velma the perp had carefully severed each organ from its blood vessels and associated viscera, and placed each organ it is own jar. With Melanie Arnworld he had left all of the organs still attached: the heart, lungs, liver, small intenstines. They were splayed out on the floor all around the victim, the unravelled spool of veins and arteries from each organ leading directly back to the hole in her ruined torso like the tentacles of some strange creature from the depths of the seas. Her foot narrowly avoiding stepping on one of the woman's kidneys as she moved towards the body, Anderson found herself once more fighting the urge to vomit. Guess the bastard managed to top himself after all, Anderson thought, swallowing hard to keep the contents of her stomach from rising. I thought the Sharn crime scene was bad, but this one is worse.

  "Cause of death was a single slash wound to the throat, just like the others," Noland said. Picking his way cautiously through the carpet of blood and entrails surrounding the body, he bent forward to peer at the wound in the victim's neck. "From the angle of the cut, he was standing facing her when he struck the fatal blow. Lots of blood on the carpet, most of it fresh. I think he might have dragged her to the sofa while she was still dying, rather than waiting until she was dead like he did with the others. Maybe he was pushed for time. Hmm, I wonder..." Bending closer, he pulled a digi-thermometer from his belt and pressed it into the victim's ear. "The body's still pretty warm." Putting the thermometer away, he lifted one of the dead woman's arms. "Given that, and the lack of rigor mortis, I'd say she's been dead no more than an hour. Assuming it would have taken at least twenty to twenty-five minutes for the killer to perform these mutilations, he could still be in the vicinity. Maybe even still in the building."

  "We could put out an APB," Yoakim said. "Alert all patrolling Judges to be on the lookout for a perp in a black overcoat, who may or not be wearing a delivery uniform underneath it."

  "All right, do it," Anderson told him as she moved closer to the body. "Meanwhile, I'll see if there's any way for us to improve on that description. This is the freshest body we've had yet. Maybe if I scan it now, without waiting for Noland to do his prelim, I'll be able to put a definite face to this bastard once and for all." Without any further ritual or preparation, she pulled off her glove. Then, taking a deep breath as she looked down into the open and staring eyes of the corpse before her, she laid her palm across the dead woman's forehead.

  Contact.

  He was killing her. She could not breathe. She could not scream. She could not cry out. She heard air hissing through the wound in her throat and knew it was her own death rattle. The delivery man was standing over her, the knife making a wet tearing sound as he slid it into her body: pain. His face was covered in blood: blood. He was smiling as he pushed his hands into her stomach: anguish. Even through the fear and terror, the helplessness and the horror, her mind was filled with desperate questions. Where was Lenny? Why had he left her? Why wasn't he here to save her? The world was darkening at the edges. Her vision was fading. Her last sight before her eyes succumbed to darkness was a final image of the delivery man, his hands slick with blood, holding something dripping in front of her face as he leered down at her in triumph. She could not be sure, but she thought it looked like one of her kidneys. Then, discarding it over his shoulder, the delivery man turned to plunge his hands into her body again as the darkness expanded to claim her...

  Abruptly, the contact was broken. There was nothing left to see. The awfulness of the last passing moments of Melanie Arnwold's life had obliterated any further psychic impressions that might otherwise have remained with her body. Removing her palm from the woman's forehead, Anderson instinctively used her hand to close the dead woman's eyelids. As a Psi-Judge, it was as close as she would ever come to performing last rites. If she had been of a religious persuasion, she might have said a prayer. As it was, she paused in aid of a more secular promise.

  I'll find him, she thought. It felt like a vow, although she knew that even if she had spoken the words aloud, Melanie Arnwold was past hearing them. I'll find the man who did this to you and bring him in. I don't care how long it takes, I won't let him get away with this.

  "He was wearing a delivery uniform again," she said at last to the other Judges around her. She looked at Noland. "You were right. She was still alive when he began the mutilations. I couldn't get a look at his face, it was covered in blood." She turned to Judge Costigan. "When you entered the apartment, did you find any evidence that the perp cleaned himself up before he left?"

  "Yeah, 'fraid so," Costigan nodded. "I heard a faucet running in the bathroom. When I checked, I found blood in the bathroom sink and on the towels. The perp must have washed his face."

  "I don't hear any water running now," Weller said.

  "No, you wouldn't," Costigan shrugged. "The sink was overflowing so I turned the faucet off."

  "You did what?" There was a rising tone of anger in Weller's voice. "This is a crime scene. Didn't anybody ever tell you at the Academy about interfering with evidence? If the killer touched the faucet handle, Anderson could have scanned it. She might have picked up psychic impressions from our perp. Now, thanks to you, the only impressions there are probably yours!"

  "I... I thought if I left it running the water might wash evidence away," Costigan's face blanched, becoming paler. "I didn't think..."

  "I'll say you didn't think." Weller was almost shouting, the anger he had hidden inside him all night, spilling out at the nearest available target. "This is a drokking serial killer case. We need every bit of evidence we can get. When I get back to the Sector House, I'm filing a report with your Watch Commander and asking him to put you on a charge."

  "Maybe we should all cool this down a bit."
Holding her hands up as a peacemaker, Anderson stepped between Weller and Costigan to try and defuse the confrontation before it grew worse. "All right, so Costigan made a mistake. Chances are though, he didn't harm the investigation. The perp must have touched plenty of things in this apartment, and yet I don't get a sense of him anywhere. It was the same at all the other crime scenes. It's like he's the invisible man." She paused for an instant, the memory of something that had been in the thoughts of Melanie Arnwold returning to her. "Talking of which, while she was dying, Melanie Arnwold was wondering where someone called Lenny was, as though he should have been there to protect her, but had left the apartment."

  "Lenny?" Costigan said. "Remember the victim's boyfriend? The jumper? His name was Leonard Kaspasian."

  "Sounds like that's our Lenny, then," Anderson said. "Take me to him. I get the feeling I might have more luck scanning him than I will scanning faucet handles." She looked at the other Judges in the apartment. "Noland and Yoakim, I suggest you run the victim's body and the crime scene up here to see what you can find. Weller, it's up to you, but I suggest you come with me. For all we know, our jumper may have seen the killer. "Let's see what Lenny Kaspasian can tell us."

  Falling, he was falling, not flying. His earlier elation had given way to terror. He was screaming. The ground was coming closer. Falling, he was falling to his death. His last thought was a final desperate and despairing question.

  Where were his wings?

  "The killer's psychic," Anderson said. She was kneeling beside the broken body of Lenny Kaspasian on a pedway just behind Elizabeth Short Block. The impact from the two-hundred storey fall had flattened his body, crushing his bones and liquifying his insides, leaving a elongated crater beneath him in the plascrete surface where he had landed. "Grud, I should have seen it before. The killer is a teledominant."

  "A tele-what?" Weller asked. He and Costigan were nearby, though she noticed both Street Judges had decided to stand far enough away from the impact site to prevent their boots from being soiled by any of the blood that had splattered from Lenny's body.

  "A teledominant," Anderson said. "His psychic power allows him to mentally dominate other people and make them believe anything he wants them to." She straightened her legs and stood up, and then turned to face Weller. "In this case, when the killer arrived at Melanie Arnwold's apartment he found Lenny Kaspasian there as well. He decided to get rid of him. He told Lenny - and I quote - 'Bat-gliding is a fun and rewarding hobby'. Next, he told Lenny he was wearing wings and a lo-grav unit, which, as you can see, he wasn't. Then, he told him he should climb up to the roof and take his maiden flight immediately. And Lenny believed it all, every word of it, which is how come he ended up looking like synthi-pancake spread all over the pedway."

  "Hmm, from the sounds of it he was as dumb as drokk, then." Weller looked down at the dead man in derision.

  "No," Anderson shook her head. "Admittedly, I don't get the feeling Lenny was the sharpest tool in the box, but all the brains in the world won't help you resist a teledominant's powers of suggestion. You know how they say a hypnotist can't make you do anything you wouldn't be willing to do normally? A teledominant doesn't have to put up with those kinds of restrictions. He can make you jump off a building, run naked across the megway at rush hour, gouge out your own eyeballs with a spoon, or push your grandmother down the stairs. The only limits are the teledominant's imagination and the victim's will power. And, no offence, but most non-psychics don't have what it takes in that department to resist a teledominant's orders."

  She paused for a short while to think, turning to stare down at Lenny Kaspasian's body, before raising her eyes to the windows of the block next to them. The killer is psychic. She suddenly realised it was what her intuition had been trying to tell her at the Sharn crime scene at Mary Kelly Block. The killer is psychic. With that thought, she felt the pieces of her investigation start to fall into place.

  "You realise this explains everything?" she said to Weller as she turned to him once more. "The different faces I saw on the killer in each psi-scan, the flowers and candy, or the lack of them. And you were right when you said the killer couldn't have been wearing a delivery uniform. Every discrepancy between the physical evidence and what I saw in the scans is explained by the fact that the killer is a teledominant. He shows up at each apartment, tells his victims he's a delivery man, and they believe him because his power compels them to. He doesn't need to be wearing a uniform or carrying anything. If he tells them he's from Synthi-Flora, then that's what they see. The victims' own minds fill in all the blanks for him. That's why one victim sees him as a short man, and another one sees him as being tall. When the killer told them he was a delivery man, each victim's mind automatically called up memories of delivery men they had seen in the past and superimposed those images over their killer's features."

  "So that's why there's no sign of a delivery man in the exterior surveillance footage?" Weller said. "That's what helps make this drokker such a ghost?"

  "Exactly." Excited at having finally reached a breakthrough in the investigation, the words now flowed out of Anderson but breathless bursts. "And, you know what else? This could even have a bearing on the lack of internal surveillance footage inside the blocks. It had occurred to me: how did the killer know the surveillance cameras were offline in some of the blocks? Did he have access to the maintenance logs? Was he casing each block in advance? But if he's a teledominant, for all we know when he finds a place with cameras, he just has a quiet word in the block super's ear and suggests they should be taken offline. If the perp is smart enough, he could even fix it so the super wouldn't remember the conversation afterwards, and we already know that this guy is plenty smart."

  She paused again, casting her mind back to her memories of the psychometric scans she had performed on each victim: Margaret Penrith, Vincent Henk, Eunice Bibbs, Brenda Maddens, Velma Sharn and Melanie Arnwold. There was a common thread running through all their experiences of the killer. A thread that ran true even in the collateral damage death of Lenny Kaspasian, killed as an afterthought - an addendum to the murder of his girlfriend.

  "His voice," Anderson said. "That's how the killer works his mojo. Some teledominants are able to control their victims through telepathic commandment. With our perp, I think his power is tied directly to his voice. I mean, it's a psychic power, so obviously the real source of his ability is his brain, but I think the killer is accustomed to using his voice as the conduit. When he activates his powers, people treat everything he says like it was the word of Grud. He tells his victims to stay still, to lift their chins, and they do exactly what he tells them, even when they see him pull out a knife. That's how he managed to kill three victims with a single slash wound when they were standing facing him. With his powers, he knew they wouldn't struggle."

  "What about the Sharn woman?" Weller asked her. "She fought back. She even bit him."

  "It could be she was an exception," Anderson said. "Maybe she had the will power to resist him. That's what got him so steamed that he pulled out all her organs and put them in jars. After that, he realised that mutilating his victims, so completely, gave him vastly more satisfaction. So, when he killed Melanie Arnwold, he wanted to mutilate her the same way, but the presence of her boyfriend complicated things. He told Lenny to throw himself off the roof, but all the same he knew that was likely to bring the Judges to Melanie's apartment sooner rather than later. He didn't have time to sever the organs from the blood vessels and arrange them in containers like he did with Velma Sharn. So he did the next best thing, doing the best job he could in the time at his disposal."

  "Hmm. Looks like you've got it all figured out," Weller said grudgingly.

  "I wouldn't go that far, but it's a start." Noticing a sour expression come over Weller's face, Anderson realised the Street Judge did not share her excitement. "What is it, Weller? You look like I just offered you a cup of rat piss and told you it was soy-cola. Can't you see this is a real breakthrou
gh?"

  "A breakthrough?" Weller pursed his lips in disapproval. "That's what you'd call it, huh? If this is what passes your standard for a breakthrough, Anderson, I'd say you are pretty easily pleased. Bad enough we're already working a serial case with no real leads to work on. We don't know who the killer is, what he looks like, or even how he goes about choosing his victims. And now, now you say the perp is a dangerous psychic, able to control people's minds and compel them to do whatever he tells them? I hate to have to bring you back to Earth with a bang, but if what you say about him is true, then I'd say it just got about a million times more difficult for us to catch him."

  NINE

  THE BIRTH OF MONSTERS

  It had been a long night, and the monster William Ganz was tired.

  Yawning, he lay down to sleep curled under a blanket on a thin mattress on the floor of his lair. His lair; that was his name for the space he inhabited inside the derelict and fire-ravaged basement of a long deserted con-apt building. He could have called it his home, his room, or even his dwelling. Somehow though, he preferred the word lair. It seemed more fitting. Deep inside himself he recognised something that to the rest of the world was only conjecture. Deep inside, he realised he was a monster. Granted, he was neither clawed nor fanged, nor were his features in any way particularly revolting. But for all that, he knew he was a monster, just as he knew that the status of a monster demanded certain standards of him. A monster could not have an apartment. A monster must have its lair.

  He was tired, so tired. He had needed to work swiftly, cutting her open and pulling the organs from her body with no time to arrange them. Then, he had fled the scene, careful to keep his face lowered, staring down at the ground to make it harder for the cameras outside the block to catch his likeness. The Grey Man had taught him that. The Grey Man had told him to buy clothes made of Stay Kleen. He had promised him the internal surveillance cameras in the blocks where he killed would not be working. He had even given him pointers on killing. "Use a knife," the Grey Man had told him. "Guns are always more trouble than they're worth. They jam. They misfire. With slugthrowers you have to worry about ballistics and shell casings, with lasers it's flash patterns and energy cell failure. Admittedly, guns can have their uses, but for quick and quiet work, the professional knows there is no better tool than a knife." As with everything else since his release from the institution, William had listened to the Grey Man's good advice. Not that he had needed much prompting in that regard. Guns were so impersonal. When it came to the work of killing reds, the knife was better.