“It’s not procedure to leave one person in the room with the bodies,” Ionia—who had to be the partner—said. She was standing beside DeRicci, one of those thin, intense women who wore her intelligence like a shield.
DeRicci had a few tricks of her own. “You are?”
“Detective Ionia Vasco,” she said with just enough crispness that DeRicci half expected a salute.
“Cabrera’s partner.”
“Yes, sir.”
DeRicci nodded. “Well, Detective Vasco, I’m Assistant Chief DeRicci, and I’m your partner’s new partner. You’ve been demoted, for this case only, to gofer. It’s not a fun position and it’s not one I would have chosen for you, so if you have any complaints, bring them up with Chief Gumiela. Until then, you don’t get to lecture me on crime-scene behavior. Is that clear?”
Vasco drew herself up so that she stood even straighter. DeRicci didn’t think the human back could be so straight without some kind of artificial aid.
“Yes, sir,” Vasco said.
“Good.” DeRicci looked at the crime scene again. No one else moved. “I ordered everyone to leave. Must I take badge numbers?”
This time Vasco sighed. She nodded to the rest of the team, and they filed out.
DeRicci closed her eyes for a moment, shut down all but her emergency links (she’d been forbidden from ever shutting down her emergency links again—apparently she’d done it too much in the past), and then took a few deep breaths to calm herself.
Then she opened her eyes and really looked at the scene before her.
Expensive, comfortable room, which she hadn’t expected. She had always thought the two things were mutually exclusive. The art on the walls was Earth-based, showing a preference for centuries-old Japanese prints. DeRicci wouldn’t have recognized them if it weren’t for a smuggling case she’d had years ago, which had taught her more about Earth-based art than she ever wanted to know.
Most of the prints were reproductions—valuable in their own right—but a series across the wall to the left of the window appeared to be original. The perp hadn’t touched the art. Maybe he hadn’t known how valuable it was, or maybe it hadn’t interested him.
But, DeRicci had learned, each detail at a crime scene could be important. She wouldn’t know which detail solved the case until she was deep inside it.
She pressed a chip on the back of her hand, starting her own vid of the crime scene. She was going to make a contemporaneous log of her observations, partly so that she wouldn’t have to remember what she thought was important, and partly so that she’d have a report for Gumiela long before returning to the office.
The spatter rose above the art on the far wall. The windows were covered with light spray, and the spray arched against the ceiling. The couch and the reading chair below the nearest window had indentations on them, apparently from someone’s weight, but those indentations were covered with spatter.
And the spatter contained more than blood. In at least one area, she saw gray debris—brain matter—and something white that was probably bone.
She hadn’t examined the bodies yet—they were always last because they trumped everything else in the room—so she didn’t know which, if any of them, had a gaping exit wound.
The tabletops had several items on them. A few bronze sculptures, which also seemed Earth-based but not Japanese. American Indian, unless she missed her guess—and she very well might, considering how cursory her knowledge was. There were also boxes, some of them nesting boxes, and most curiously of all, books.
The books were thick and heavy, their paper edges yellow with age. DeRicci peered around the corner, looking down a long narrow hallway that led to the rest of the apartment. Sure enough, the hallway was lined with bookshelves. The books themselves looked like nothing DeRicci had ever seen before. They were all thick, with the same color cover and gold lettering on the spine. They seemed to be some kind of matched set.
She turned her attention back to the main room. Four books, one on each of the four tables, and no obvious screens. Not holo matrices, or security screens or even group vid screens. It was as if this room hadn’t been touched by modern technology.
The thought made her uneasy, although she wasn’t sure why. She’d heard of people who lived like this, and she’d seen vid tours of retro homes whose inhabitants had reverted to primitive precomputer styles, but she’d never actually seen one before.
She’d have to search later to see if her assumption was right. She also knew that a lot of people bought faux retro furniture with screens built in but hidden. It might tell her a lot about these victims just to see if they chose to be truly retro or only pretended to be.
DeRicci closed her eyes again, only this time not to reset, but to concentrate on her other senses. The smells she’d noted when she first entered the apartment—blood, feces, decay—were still here, still present, but not as powerful because she had grown used to them. She sniffed, hoping to sense other odors, ones that weren’t as expected or as obvious.
She caught a hint of something acrid, like smoke or burned food, and the scent of singed hair. She took a deep breath and tried to filter the smells out. Her link could do that—she’d been given some very expensive equipment with her promotion—but she preferred not to use it. She wanted to get the information herself.
Acrid smoke, singed hair, and perfume—faint, but only in the context of the other overpowering smells. The perfume had a heady, musky odor, one that seemed embedded in the room. She suspected if she went deeper into the apartment, that perfume scent would return to its dominant status.
The apartment was amazingly quiet. Two windows across from her overlooked the street, and yet there was no traffic noise, no conversation. Of course, this street had more regulations than most—she’d figured that out before she’d even parked—but still, she should have heard sirens or horns or the other everyday sounds of Armstrong, amplified by being this far up. Sound bounced against the Dome.
Yet there was nothing. She couldn’t even hear the conversation Cabrera’s team had to be having outside the apartment, and she would wager that they hadn’t closed the door all the way. Maybe that was why they had all seemed so surprised when she entered.
The apartment was soundproofed.
How very odd. She had encountered soundproofing only a few times outside of the docks, and it surprised her every time. Why live in a city if you wanted to block out all of its noises? She had never understood that part of human nature.
The apartment had no real sounds of its own either. The silence was so intense that she could hear the raggedness of her own breathing. She held her breath and listened, hearing nothing more than a slight hum and the ever-so-faint thud-thud of her own heart.
DeRicci opened her eyes and finally looked down at the corpses. They had fallen in interesting and unexpected ways. None of them were near the furniture, which meant that they were standing in the center of the room at the time of death.
The man was closest to DeRicci. He was older. He only had one wound—in the center of his torso, leaving him with a hole instead of a chest. His hands had been flung back. They were open, palms up, the fingers curled, and they rested next to his face.
His eyes were open and clouded over, suggesting—like the smell—that the bodies had been discovered a long time after death.
One of the women had fallen near him. She was also older, her features seemingly unenhanced. She had landed on her side, her arm extended, her feet bent unnaturally backward. Her wound was also in her torso, large and open, revealing a few intact ribs.
One of her feet had landed in the third corpse’s hair. That hair was some kind of brownish silver, and shiny, seemingly untouched by blood, even though DeRicci knew that couldn’t have happened. She just couldn’t see the spatter from where she stood.
The hair belonged to a woman—DeRicci could tell that by the corpse’s relatively untouched body, her clothing, and her legs, but certainly not by her face.
&n
bsp; Her face was gone.
The wound seemed bigger than the wounds on the other two, which led DeRicci to believe it might be an exit wound. She couldn’t tell, not without examining the corpses up close. Before she did that, she would call Cabrera and his pompous little team back into the room, so that they could see her do hands-on analysis of the bodies.
First DeRicci turned her links back on and downloaded the information Gumiela had given her.
The apartment belonged to Judge Caleb Lahiri and his wife, Dr. Mimi Lahiri. Their only son, Calbert Lahiri, had committed suicide more than a year before. They had a daughter, Carolyn Lahiri, who had recently been pardoned by the government of Etae for war crimes. She was listed as Disappeared.
The corpses, Gumiela surmised, belonged to the Lahiris, although no one knew who the third corpse was. Even before she downloaded the visuals on the Lahiris, DeRicci already knew that they were the elderly couple before her.
The person without the face was the one whose identity she didn’t know. Had someone wanted to keep it that way? Surely that person would understand that DNA would provide the answers.
DeRicci stared at all three of them for a long moment. The bodies hadn’t been moved, and they weren’t in any ritual death positions, like she might find with a Disty Vengeance killing or a Guine Death Ritual.
Sometimes she could tell what had happened at a scene just from body position—a parent’s body cradling a child’s, or one corpse covered with the blood of another.
But there was so much blood here—all of it pooling and coagulating—that she couldn’t tell what belonged to whom. And the wounds were so broad and vicious that spatter wouldn’t help in these instances either, not until the Medical Examiner did the proper testing.
She couldn’t even tell from body position who had died first. None of the three corpses had fallen against the others. They didn’t touch one another, and nothing on the floor had splattered upward, coating one corpse and not another. It would take tests and studies and computer models of splatter patterns to figure out who had died first and why the others hadn’t tried to stop the killer.
DeRicci frowned. Perhaps the answer was here after all. Killers didn’t usually change methods of operation in the middle of a crime scene, not without sending some kind of message.
She wasn’t sure what it meant that two of the corpses had been shot in the torso and one had been shot in the face. She had assumed, at first, that the victim had been shot in the face to avoid identification, but the only way that could have truly happened would be if the entire body were removed.
She slipped her hand in her pocket to grab a bag for her shoes—she wasn’t wearing the kind that coated automatically—and then she realized that she hadn’t carried any of those bags. Either she would have to go out front and get some from the team, or she’d have to quit right here.
But she wasn’t ready to quit. So she backed away from the crime scene, then turned in the narrow entry—which had no spatter as far as she could tell—and leaned out the main door.
“Shoe bags?” she asked one of the nearby techs.
The woman started as if DeRicci had surprised her. So even the area around the door was soundproofed. That was interesting. The killer would have had to know that, just as he (she? it?) would have had to know how to get around the doorman downstairs.
The tech frowned at DeRicci as if she hadn’t understood the question. DeRicci extended her hand.
“Shoe bags,” she repeated.
The tech’s frown deepened. Then she nodded once, and reached into her kit. She removed two very old, very crumpled bags.
DeRicci hoped they would do.
She bent down, wrapped them around her shoes, hit the “fit” chip at the edge of the bags, and watched them mold to her. Then she nodded and headed back inside.
The smell of feces and old blood hit her again, but this time she recognized the perfume scent beneath it. Little trickles of light came from the lights recessed into the ceiling, but no dust motes filtered through.
This place was startlingly clean, except in the living area, where the victims had died. DeRicci made a note to check the cleaning system; she wondered what it had picked up in the time that the bodies had been left alone.
Then she stepped back into the main room. The light was slightly different here—a bit came through the windows, that almost too-bright light that simulated Earth’s midday. She walked around the area where she had stood before and headed toward the side of the faceless body—she wanted to get as close to it as possible.
Uncarpeted floors were usually slick and even though this one appeared to be made of real wood, it was no different. DeRicci picked her way across it, trying not to step in spatter and trace, but knowing she probably was. She did not touch the furniture to keep her balance; instead, she moved very slowly.
The slickness actually pleased her—it fit into a theory she was just beginning to develop.
She stopped as close as she could to the faceless corpse without stepping into what she was beginning to think of as the Sacred Circle. The furniture had been set up so that each piece faced another, leaving an opening in the center, the place where the Lahiris and the woman had died.
DeRicci crouched between two of the chairs, and then, carefully, peered beneath them.
More spatter, which did not surprise her; and little else, which did. There was something that had cleaned this apartment—be it a person (which might make sense, given this neighborhood’s emphasis on old-fashioned living), a robotic cleaner, or automatic cleaning programs built into each surface.
There were problems with all three systems, but none of them should have failed on this catastrophic a level. Since the Lahiris and their guest had been dead for a few days, the cleaning system—all except a human one—should have gotten rid of the spatter and the rest of the mess.
Or, in the case of the most sophisticated systems, called the police to deal with the crime scene.
Yet this system seemed to have cleaned up the dust and avoided the corpses in the center of the room. The cleaning pattern made no sense to DeRicci at all.
From her crouched position, she peered as best she could under the rest of the furniture. Each piece had curved legs which raised the furniture a few inches off the floor. She could see shapes, mostly, or the flat floor, although one or two pieces were simply dark underneath.
What she couldn’t see—at least from this vantage—was a weapon. She had thought there was a good possibility one would be on the floor somewhere.
Because she might have been wrong when she initially arrived. The third corpse might not be the victim of another killer. The third corpse could easily be a suicide.
She’d seen that before—people shot in the torso or abdomen, and then the killer, shooting herself. Usually the shooter pointed the gun at some part of the face—inside the mouth, against the temple—and often, given the strength of most weapons available in Armstrong, blew the face (or the head) right off.
DeRicci’s legs had started to ache. She was no longer used to remaining in this position for a long time.
Still, she remained crouched. The unknown corpse’s hair sprawled away from her as if it had a life of its own. Her face was gone, and she had fallen backward, her legs curled slightly as they no longer had to support her weight.
Her hands were flung outward. Any weapon held in them would have slipped across the floor.
Unless she dropped the weapon as she fell. Unless she had landed on top of it.
DeRicci stood. Her thighs ached.
Time to bring in that second investigator. Time to bring in the entire team.
She had to start moving furniture and corpses.
If there was a weapon in this room, a weapon that had fallen near the unknown woman’s body, then DeRicci’s first theory of the crime became the working theory.
She felt a surge of excitement and willed it away.
The investigation had begun.
Eight
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Four days after Carolyn Lahiri left with her parents, Flint came back from lunch to find a strange woman outside his office.
She was sitting on the makeshift sidewalk, her legs extended across the dirt-covered permaplastic, her back against the door. His alarms hadn’t gone off, so she hadn’t tried the knob, but he suspected that his security system was flashing all sorts of warnings inside.
Flint studied her from half a block away. She didn’t appear to be aware that he was watching her. She had a hat pulled down over her face, her hands folded across her stomach.
If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was sleeping.
He could use the back entrance, search through the last few hours’ recordings, plus the perimeter alarms, and see who she was. But he suspected that she wanted him to go around, wanted to see how he got inside without using the front door. He wasn’t going to give her that advantage, particularly when he could get the same information with a bit of patience once he let himself in through the front.
He headed down the street, feeling a bit logy, wishing he hadn’t eaten both halves of the sandwich that he’d bought at the neighborhood grocery.
From several meters away, he deactivated the door’s main locks and set the security system on standby. He didn’t want the woman to see how he did that either. The system changed silently, so she wouldn’t know what he had done.
She didn’t move as everything changed behind her, so nothing in her links told her about the change—at least, nothing that she let on to.
He stopped a meter away from her. “Can I help you?”
She didn’t move. For one brief moment, he wondered if she was dead. He resisted the urge to go closer, to push her with his foot.
“Miss,” he said, “are you okay?”
This time, apparently, he spoke loudly enough for her to hear him. Or to figure out that she should pretend to be awake. She slid her hat back with a single pointed finger.
Her face was familiar, angular with dusky skin and up-tilted, almond shaped eyes. Her nose was broad and delicately tattooed with faint snakelike lines. The overall effect was funky and attractive.
Consequences Page 6
