by Mel Odom
I slipped the holstered Synap pistol from my belt, slid it into my desk drawer, and sat. Haas-Bioroid had given me back suitable clothing and my service weapon.
“What do you mean? As I understand it, the investigation requires the effort of every police officer in the department.”
Royo thrust his chin over to a pair of desks in the back corner of the room. “I mean the two golden boys caught the squeal on this one. They’re working lead.”
The two “golden boys” were Reaves and Crider. Both of them were highly decorated and experienced. Garrett Reaves was in his forties, a solidly built African-American by way of the Moon. Word around the department was that Reaves had been born with a built-in lie detector. He could always suss out when a suspect was lying to him.
Scarlet Crider was a few years younger, but no less hardened and practiced. She was a woman of surprisingly few words and had a keen, incisive mind. She wore her blond hair short and spiky, no longer than a fingertip in length. I thought that Shelly would have liked her, though they would never have been friends. Shelly had children and a soft side that Crider would have eviscerated.
“Do they have a suspect?” Around me, the bullpen was in full swing. Normally Royo and I didn’t come in till midnight and worked till 0800. Since Gordon Holder’s murder had been televised live on media channels, overtime had been cleared for the department. Every effort was being made to show that the NAPD was on the job and the investigation was paramount.
“It’s a dog and pony show.” Shelly perched on the edge of my desk and stared out at the other detectives. “They’re just amped up for the nosies. In a couple days, things will quiet back down to a dull roar.”
I knew that was true. Investigations ran hot for the first couple days, then they rapidly started cooling. Only media attention or a breakthrough could heat them back up again. Even the nosies knew that when a case cooled down it was no longer worth calling attention to it. Everyone needed for an investigation to continue advancing.
“No, they don’t have a suspect.” Royo leaned back in his chair and stretched out. He let loose with a massive yawn and I knew his overtime on the case wasn’t just restricted to time served at the NAPD. A detective couldn’t help taking work home with him or her. The necessity of an investigation breaking early drove most investigators mercilessly. “They’re on terrorist shakedown the same as us. Only they’re drawing the more visible fringe element.”
I perused NBN and tracked Reaves and Crider’s activities while I’d been at Haas-Bioroid. Nosies had tracked the pair of homicide detectives on their quest to find whatever Martian terrorists were behind Holder’s assassination. Reaves and Crider blocked interview attempts again and again, but they did it in a manner that guaranteed even more public awareness.
Part of that ploy was an attempt to draw out whoever had been responsible for the explosion. The other part was to draw out the nosies, giving them key personnel to interview so the rest of us could work. As Shelly had noted, this was a well-rehearsed production in police work.
Most of the detectives in the department would rather have been filming vid for the media.
In addition, the interviews with the media also guaranteed a large number of crank calls from people claiming to have information about the explosion or who claimed credit for killing Holder. Those were the bottom of the barrel assignments, and Royo and I were working them.
Royo keyed up his PAD and typed quickly. A moment later, a long list of names and addresses scrolled into my PAD.
I searched through the list. “What’s this?”
“PAD, email, and social connections list that the uniforms handling incoming comm thought were worth another look.” Royo cursed beneath his breath. “I’ve been at this solid since the homicide. That’s your half of our list.”
“Didn’t you get the address I sent you regarding the crate I saw the thieves take off with?” I had sent that image over to Royo as soon as I had come back online at Haas-Bioroid.
“I did. Captain Karanjai wasn’t interested. He was very firm about that. Skorpios Defense Systems and Argus, Inc.’s lawyers were very clear about that. They drafted a few court orders and referendums to add exclamation points to that.”
I checked through the online files and discovered that was true. The attorneys had been exceptionally thorough.
“We’re here to find out who killed Gordon Holder, not to investigate corp assets.”
“Has Skorpios revealed what was in those crates the thieves took?” I had checked through the case notes but there had been no mention of the nature of the stolen property.
“No. Their position regarding those crates is that they’re inconsequential. They want us to stay focused on who killed Holder.”
“The thieves didn’t accidentally stumble across those crates at a fortuitous time.”
Irritated, Royo frowned at me. “Even those of us who don’t have a computer for a brain had that one figured out.”
I ignored his sarcasm and concentrated on the investigation and the curiosity that underscored my nature. “Did you follow up on the partial identification I provided on the crate?”
“No. I was told to leave that alone. In no uncertain terms. I left it alone. Not all of us consider having this job to be a hobby, Drake. Everyone that works here depends on staying employed. Trust me, when we find the terrorists that exploded that tube car, we’ll find the people that took that cargo. If we get really lucky, we’ll seize the cargo as well.” Royo stood and picked his coffee cup up from his desk. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go see about getting more caffeine in my system. I don’t have the advantage of running off whatever it is you run off of. In the meantime, get your notes together on the Jovanovic investigation. Since you’re back, we’ll follow up on that this afternoon. See if anybody remembers seeing anything about that murder today.”
“Of course. I’ll be ready when you are.”
Royo cursed in disgust and headed off to the break room.
“That man’s a jerk.” Shelly watched Royo go.
I said nothing and began preparing the file as requested. Royo was my partner, just as Shelly had been. I wasn’t going to speak ill of him. Not even to Shelly.
* * *
Dorde Jovanovic had, on the surface, been a low-end import/export dealer, trading mostly in tourist curios that filled some of the shops. Primarily they were esoteric pieces from Earth, bits and pieces of various cultures that the mine workers sometimes bought in an effort to hang onto history that had been handed down to them through generations of family. The Moon landscape tended to be the same no matter where you traveled. But those trinkets, as one of Jovanovic’s shop workers had told me, allowed buyers to dream of Amazon jungles, the Old West, Egypt, and other places.
Five weeks ago, someone had caught Jovanovic in the cargo tunnel that ran to the back of his shop and nearly taken his head off with a sword or a very long knife. The coroner had assured Royo and me that whoever had done it had possessed considerable strength or been in a frenzied state.
Royo and I hadn’t been the first detectives on the case. We’d been handed the investigation five days into it when the primary detectives hadn’t zeroed in on a person of interest. They’d been pulled and placed in charge of a case with a higher priority. Royo had blamed me for the “scutwork” we’d inherited. On the surface, based on past performance, this investigation was going to slowly grind to a halt and be placed in the unsolved files.
I looked forward to the work despite that probable inevitability. Prior to the Jovanovic case, I’d been assigned to reviewing cold cases. That work had appealed to me, but I had known that it provided diminished returns. Cold cases on the Moon were extremely cold by Earth standards. The Moon tended to be a world in transition because so many corps rolled people into and out of the various work forces in months-long shifts. The cargo runs back and forth to Earth and Mars increased that volatility.
Working a cold case on Mars would have been even har
der. It was easier to hide there, easier to get fake identification, and records weren’t always kept up to date. Terrorist attacks and colonial uprisings had destroyed whole databases at times. Mars was still, in many ways, a wild frontier.
Royo and I took the tube-lev to the district where Jovanovic’s antiques shop was. We didn’t talk. Royo occupied himself with talking to a woman he was currently involved with, struggling to mollify her with his absence due to the increased workload. From the tension in his voice as I listened to his side of the conversation, he wasn’t having much success.
I concentrated on tracing the information I’d spotted on the crate. The media was still circulating the vid of the six men that had descended into the compromised tube tunnel. The nosies had also gotten footage of my confrontation with those men, and I suspected that someone in the NAPD had gotten paid off for providing it. That practice was fairly common.
I’d seen images of me getting crushed by the shuttle dozens of times from three different angles. I had no recollection of the event beyond the initial impact. Getting to see the scattered pieces of my chassis wasn’t disturbing, but it didn’t provide information either.
Reporters had used my damage as both a case for having bioroids working at the NAPD and for dismissing the idea once and for all. The naysayers pointed to the expense of my repairs—which was something Haas-Bioroid underwrote, not the NAPD and certainly not the public—and my inability to use lethal force or to get out of the way of the attack. A human, an ex-NAPD officer had gone on the record as saying, would have been more effective in the situation.
Other reporters pointed out that while the flesh-and-blood component of the NAPD had been trapped behind the protective transplas wall, I had been able to take action. They stated that if I had had a bioroid partner, events in the tunnel that day would have ended much differently.
That attempt at stirring up bioroid controversy—always an attention-getter on slow news days—pretty much failed because it was overshadowed by Gordon Holder’s death. Skorpios Defense Systems was a lucrative corp and employed a number of employees at its manufacturing plants on the Moon. The corp was also painted as a target for Martian terrorists because Skorpios supplied a steady stream of weapons and trained private security officers for the colonies.
The paranoia over the strained relationship between Earth and Mars was creeping up to a fever pitch. The NAPD had gotten caught in the middle of the spotlight.
I focused on the information I had gotten from the crate. The attempt I made to learn anything about it was instantly stymied at the Skorpios Defense Systems corp offices. I shifted gears and started looking through cargo shippers located on the Moon. Most products moved through licensed handlers.
When I tracked the manifest numbers I had seen through those unions, I immediately came to a dead end. None of the licensed handlers had placed those crates onto the tube car.
My curiosity rose.
Shelly, sitting in the tube car seat beside me, smiled. “If Skorpios didn’t go through licensed channels, they had to go through the scabs.”
The scabs were non-union transport companies. Several of those entities were owned by the various corps, though that could rarely be shown through any kind of corp paperwork. They worked off the books, appearing and disappearing as necessary, usually whenever an enquiry got too close.
“So if Skorpios didn’t go through a legit cargo handler, you have to wonder why they went through one of those fly-by-night agencies.”
I was wondering that very much by the time we reached the tube station.
Chapter Twelve
In the beginning, an investigation started out very small. An investigator stayed focused on the victim’s immediate world. The detective worked from the inside out. Royo and I had started with Jovanovic’s family, his wife and two daughters. The wife had been staying with her mother on Earth at the time of the murder, and that had been easy to verify.
However, the fact remained that spouses often hired someone to murder their husband or wife. I had gone over Jovanovic’s financials and discovered that his wife had been left economically secure, but losing her husband would eventually hurt her in the long run. And she had seemed genuinely distraught over her husband’s murder.
Both of the daughters were in the family business. The older one managed a small shop on Mars, in Bradbury colony. Although it appeared she could keep the business solvent, she did not have her father’s contacts and probably would lose some of the clientele.
The younger daughter had worked directly for her father. According to interviews Royo and I had conducted, Melissa Jovanovic hadn’t always gotten along with her father. There had been several disagreements over her selection of potential mates.
Potentially satisfied that none of the family members had committed the murder, Royo and I had spread out the investigation to include the people Jovanovic had worked with on a daily basis, then we’d gone beyond that to more casual business contacts. We had found nothing to indicate that the murderer we sought was among them.
We had been reduced to canvassing the neighborhood. Back on Earth, the job would have seemed even more impossible than what we currently faced because there would have been more neighboring businesses and residences. As it was, Royo and I were stretched thin to talk to everyone around the murder scene.
We were lucky. Most of the people that worked and lived around Jovanovic were committed to keeping their neighborhood safe. Royo had told me early in our partnership that people on the Moon tended to be more helpful to police than people on Earth. He attributed that enhanced sense of civic responsibility to the restricted air supply. People didn’t want to take chances on losing that. Violence tended to spread out across an area, so the majority of the populace wanted criminals apprehended. They didn’t want to live in constant fear of someone who might do something to destroy the integrity of the air supply systems.
Of course, that attitude changed among people who were supplementing their incomes with criminal dealings.
Three hours after knocking doors and talking to anyone who was at home, Royo called an end to the investigation for the day. He logged our hours on his PAD while he ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant only a couple blocks from Jovanovic’s import/export business.
We didn’t talk much. We never did, unless Royo had something he wanted to say. Since we hadn’t broken any new ground on the investigation, and he was worn out, he ate mechanically and read the sports section in a newsrag.
I didn’t eat and since we weren’t discussing this case or any others, my time was potentially wasted. However, I had access to the Net and I made use of it.
One of the reasons Royo and I spent his lunches together was so we could protect each other. Outside of an armored hopper, which police officers on the Moon didn’t need since we had the tube-lev lines, a police officer in the public eye was extremely vulnerable. That was one of the reasons the police department was lobbying to put bioroids on as beat cops. Basically, for all intents and purposes, I had eyes in the back of my head. Royo did not.
While my partner ate and read, I tried to track down the partial crate manifest number I had spotted after the explosion that had claimed Gordon Holder’s life. I remained curious about the events. It was possible that a gang of boosters—professional thieves specializing in cargo heists—had happened along at an opportune time to seize the crates. They could have been working another job, then bolted to see what they could seize from the exploded tube car. That seemed risky, though. There could have been nothing on the tube car and they would have been implicated in Holder’s murder.
I didn’t believe that those men had simply stumbled onto the site because the odds of that being the case were astronomical.
No one at the PD had been able to get a line on the booster team. I ran through the snitch list and discovered that Reaves and Crider had been generous with the informant’s fund. Most of the confidential informants the PD had working for them were already canvassing the n
eighborhoods for any word of the cargo that had been stolen after the assassination.
However, no one had followed up on the partial cargo manifest number I had reported. I did that now, skimming through dozens of real estate property owners that managed storage warehouses. I assumed that if Skorpios Defense Systems had warehoused the cargo, they would not have minded sharing that information with the PD.
They had minded, though.
And that led me to wonder if the cargo belonged to Skorpios or to Gordon Holder. While I was watching over my partner, searching through warehouse records, and considering the true objective of the kidnapping, I wrote a quick financials subroutine to ferret back through Gordon Holder’s personal information.
* * *
After Royo finished with his meal, we turned our attention to following up on the Holder investigation regarding the terrorist angle. It was now after 1700, Royo’s meal hadn’t exactly been at lunchtime, and the bars would be filling up with shift workers from manufacturing plants that shut down because the solar batteries would be offline and none of the corporations would want to supplement the power supplies when solar energy was free.
Royo was in a sour mood as we walked out of the restaurant.
I tried to initiate a conversation with him. “Did your meal not agree with you?”
Royo scowled. “The meal was fine.”
“Then something else is wrong?”
“It’s this stupid assignment.” Royo cursed. “You know that we’re not going to find anyone involved in Holder’s murder while we’re crashing bars and pursuing terrorists.”
“The possibility does exist.” I took no personal interest in the outcome. I had an assignment. I would do that.
“Yeah. I bet that positive attitude keeps you warm at night.”
I almost told him that my body heat was self-regulating and that I had no discernible attitude before I recognized his declaration as sarcasm. I said nothing more and simply fell into step with him as we headed for the nearest tube station.
