Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  “I told you everything I know,” he said.

  “Actually, you didn’t.” If he was going to be snippy, so was she. “I need to know if she was killed inside the dome or Outside.”

  “How am I supposed to tell you that?” He nodded toward someone DeRicci couldn’t see. A towel dominated the screen, then Broduer wiped off his hands.

  “You said she had the bruises to prove she wasn’t wearing that particular environmental suit when she died.”

  “Yes?”

  “Was she wearing any environmental suit at all?”

  He continued wiping, cleaning off his forearms before handing the towel back to the unseen assistant.

  “I mean,” DeRicci said, “what is it about environmental suits that prevents bruising?”

  “That’s not what I meant when I said that.” His thin eyebrows met above his perfect nose. She had intrigued him. “I meant that there were no stains or dents or marks in the suit that matched the bruises that she had. Environmental suits are remarkable things, but they aren’t remarkable enough to prevent bruising—at least not yet.”

  “So if she was wearing another suit, someone removed it, then put on this pink suit before posing the corpse.” She was asking a dumb question because she knew it was the only way to get Broduer to follow her line of thinking. She wanted him to be as precise as possible.

  She wanted to explore all possibilities.

  The door opened. Voices filled the room as van der Ketting came in.

  DeRicci put a finger to her lips.

  Van der Ketting pushed the door closed, and the voices vanished.

  “You know.” Broduer blinked a few times, as if he were putting some details together. “There would be fiber evidence of a maneuver like that. There’s no way that you can get clothing off a corpse without leaving a trace of that clothing. It’s just too much work.”

  “Even if you cut it off?”

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “You can’t switch suits Outside. The depressurization—”

  “Would change the corpse. Yes, I know,” DeRicci said.

  “Then why did you ask me the question?” Broduer said.

  “Because there are places with atmosphere Outside,” DeRicci said, getting tired of playing dumb.

  “The Growing Pits,” Broduer said.

  That was what she wanted him to get to. But she said, “Among other places.”

  “If she had been killed in the Growing Pits, she would have been wearing another suit. Changing her suit there wouldn’t have caused the depressurization, but she wouldn’t have died of oxygen deprivation either.”

  “All someone had to do was shut off the oxygen in one of the green houses,” DeRicci said.

  “In order to do that,” Broduer said slowly, “you’d have to shut off the oxygen, but not the rest of the environmental protocols. You’d have to check, but there’s usually a failsafe in Outside buildings that provide backups. If one thing or the other goes out, then some redundant system kicks in.”

  “Besides,” van der Ketting said, deliberately ignoring DeRicci’s instructions to remain silent, “if someone shut off the oxygen in the Growing Pits long enough to kill a person, it would damage the plants as well. Wouldn’t we have heard about that?”

  “We might not,” DeRicci said.

  Broduer was looking toward van der Ketting’s voice, as if he could see through the screen.

  “Who’s that?”

  “My partner,” DeRicci said.

  Broduer nodded, but he seemed distracted, as if he hadn’t really heard her. He was clearly thinking about the new possibilities—being killed Outside without destroying the entire body.

  He said, “The killer could have removed the other, put on the pink suit, and then brought her to the marathon track.”

  DeRicci nodded. They would have had to travel around the dome, but that was possible. No one would have noticed a vehicle moving Outside, especially if the vehicle stayed a mile or more away.

  “You have no fiber evidence, though,” she said to Broduer.

  “Not to support the other suit theory,” he said. “Although she could have removed her suit while she worked inside the Growing Pits. She had scratches and scrapes that were consistent with the pink suit being put on her after she had died.”

  “No other clothing changes?”

  “None,” he said. “At least that we can tell at the moment. But I’m going to have to review my notes with this new twist in mind.”

  He moved an arm, as if he were going to shut down the link.

  “One more thing,” DeRicci said quickly. “Could she have been killed inside an airlock?”

  “That or a ship is what I’d bet on,” Broduer said. “Some contained environment where it would be pretty easy to shut off the air and leave everything else on—”

  “Don’t they have redundant systems too?” van der Ketting asked.

  “Not all ships do,” DeRicci said, “and no one expects to be in an airlock long enough to have problems. You’re supposed to go in with your suit on, so the redundant systems aren’t necessary. If there’s a problem, you either go out or come back in. The airlock’s there to protect the dome, not to protect the people.”

  “Dying in the airlock or a ship would explain the presence of one suit but not two,” Broduer said. “It would also explain the relatively clean condition of the corpse. You’d think if a woman died in the Growing Pits, she would have knocked plants or dirt on herself. She probably fell to the floor at one point, and she would have gotten covered with dirt.”

  “But airlocks usually have great filtration systems,” DeRicci said.

  “And some of the newer ones are self-cleaning,” Broduer said, “and most ships—at least human-owned vessels, coming into Moon Sector, are kept clean too, so that their own filtration systems don’t clog.”

  “That’s all helpful,” DeRicci said. “I’m finally getting some kind of picture. I’m sure I’ll have more questions for you.”

  “I hope I’ll have answers for you. I’ve pretty much told you what I’ve got.”

  DeRicci nodded. “But you might be able to eliminate more stuff for me, like you just did. Thanks, Ethan.”

  And with that she signed off, then turned to van der Ketting.

  He had set a pile of things down on the table, and was watching her, arms crossed. “What the hell is going on? You canceled the interviews, summon me like I’m some kind of work slave, and won’t tell anyone if you found something or not. The detectives out there are planning a mutiny.”

  “They should be planning dinner,” DeRicci said, “because they’re going to be working late into the night.”

  “This doesn’t sound good,” van der Ketting said.

  “It’s not. Broduer discovered that our victim isn’t Jane Zweig.”

  “Of course it is,” van der Ketting said. “We have the suit, and the singlet, and the images—”

  “Which is what she—or she and her friends—or some cunning killer—wanted us to think,” DeRicci said. “But Broduer ran DNA, and—”

  She stopped herself. DNA. There had been no DNA on record for Jane Zweig, and Broduer had called that unusual. DeRicci had agreed, although she had seen it before. In Disappeareds.

  Zweig had been a Disappeared, even though she hadn’t acted like one.

  “And what?” Van der Ketting sounded annoyed. “Do you think Zweig’s been kidnapped?”

  DeRicci looked at him, feeling stunned. She hadn’t thought of that option either. She had only considered two: that Zweig had killed Mayoux herself or that Zweig had been involved. But there were other options. Zweig might have been kidnapped, just like van der Ketting said, or she might have been killed as well, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Or for her previous crime, whatever it had been.

  “I don’t know what happened,” DeRicci said. “All I know is what Broduer told me, which completely turns our investigation upside down.”

  Va
n der Ketting sank into a nearby chair. “Great. All the work we’ve done means nothing.”

  “It doesn’t mean nothing, but we do have to rethink things. See why I called off the interviews? You and I have to work really fast right now.”

  “Doing what?” van der Ketting asked. “We can’t redo the interviews alone.”

  Maybe he simply lacked imagination. It was rare for someone who lacked imagination to get into the detective unit, but it did happen. Van der Ketting was smart, but he was smart in a once-you-tell-him-what-to-do-he-can-do-it-better-than-everyone-else kinda way.

  “That’s right,” DeRicci said. “We can’t, nor should we. But we have to give these investigators something to go on. We need to review all the footage you have, as well as look at miles five and six from earlier in the race. We also need to see if the cameras were on before the race began, and if they picked up anything.”

  “Oh,” Van der Ketting said. “Then we’d also need confirmation that the woman who picked up the singlet this morning was Jane Zweig—the real Jane Zweig.”

  Which would be hard to do without DNA. DeRicci wondered if Zweig had fingerprints on file. She’d have to check the databases, and maybe even check with Coburn, to see how they secured valuables at Extreme Enterprises. Maybe Zweig’s personal identifiers were on file there.

  “We’ll probably need some visuals of her for that. Maybe something from the airlock or the other points of entry,” van der Ketting was saying. “And this puts a whole new light on the question of where she went for forty-five minutes when she was out of the staging area.”

  DeRicci frowned at him. “Didn’t you say she came through one of the maintenance sheds?”

  “Yeah,” van der Ketting said.

  “There were vehicles near there.” DeRicci frowned. “And vehicle tracks near the body.”

  “You think she moved the body into one of the maintenance sheds, then carried it to a vehicle before the race started, and drove to mile five?” Van der Ketting looked at her in disbelief. “Wouldn’t someone have seen that?”

  “Probably not,” DeRicci said. “Remember how the medical vehicles were hidden from the spectators? I don’t think you could see much from the staging area either. You’ll need to check that as well.”

  “She could have driven out there, parked the vehicle behind the boulder, and left the body in it,” Van der Ketting said. “No one looks behind them.”

  “And that would explain why there were no visuals from mile six,” DeRicci said. “That camera would have caught whatever was behind the boulder.”

  “Do you think she was strong enough to carry the body?” van der Ketting asked.

  “In one-sixth gravity? Yeah, I do,” DeRicci said.

  “Wow.” Van der Ketting rubbed his eyes. “I’m going to have to wake up. I’ve been looking at so much stuff these last few hours some of it is starting to blur.”

  Which they didn’t dare have happen. DeRicci poured a cup of coffee and handed it to him.

  Van der Ketting shook his head. “This stuff never works for me.”

  “The fake stuff maybe. But this marathon has money. Try the real thing.”

  Van der Ketting took a sip, and raised his eyebrows, holding the liquid in his mouth for a moment as he tasted it. After a moment he swallowed. “Wow. Okay.”

  He grabbed a pastry and took a bite.

  “You have to stay alert, too,” DeRicci said. “We’ve got the most work to do.”

  “To double-check our theory,” he said.

  “More to the point,” DeRicci said, “to find out what her connection is with Eve Mayoux, if there is one.”

  “Oh, man. You don’t have anything on that?”

  “Why would I?” DeRicci said. “You saw me talking to Broduer. This is all new to me too.”

  “Crap.” Van der Ketting took another bite of his pastry and chased it down with the rest of the coffee. “This is going to take us hours.”

  “It can’t take us hours,” DeRicci said. “We have to be able to put these people back to work, with the right questions and the right attitude.”

  Van der Ketting shook his head. “I think we’ve already missed that shot. They’re none too happy right now.”

  “They won’t be happy about any of this,” DeRicci said. “But they’d be even angrier if we let them continue to work with the wrong information.”

  Van der Ketting sighed.

  “We need to find out something else as well,” DeRicci said. “We have to find out who holds a grudge against the Moon Marathon. Since Mayoux had been dead for quite a while, her body could have been dumped anywhere. Someone, Zweig if we’re right, chose to dump Mayoux here, so that she would be found in the middle of the marathon, looking like she was a participant.”

  Van der Ketting’s eyes widened. “So that’s what Broduer was talking about.”

  “What?” DeRicci asked.

  “If they’d succeeded in cracking her helmet, we would have had no idea that we were dealing with Eve Mayoux. We’d have no time of death. We’d have nothing, except the singlet, the environmental suit, and the position on the track.”

  DeRicci nodded. It always took him a while to catch up, but he eventually did. “That’s right. We’d assume it was Jane Zweig without even looking for DNA.”

  “And the publicity would have been brutal,” Van der Ketting said. “Someone who runs a business specializing in extreme sports, dying on a relatively easy course from a bizarre accident. By picking a famous target—or a potentially famous target—there’d be more coverage. This could actually shut down the marathon for good.”

  “Which would affect all of Armstrong in one way or another.” A headache built between DeRicci’s eyes. She didn’t want to think about all of these implications. But someone obviously had. Someone had put a lot of time into this murder, and hoped to kill a few other things in the process.

  “We’re not going to be able to do all of this alone,” van der Ketting said. “We have to bring in more people.”

  DeRicci didn’t want to bring in the rest of the detective staff. She didn’t outrank any of them, and even though this was her case, no one would listen to her when she gave them orders. That would simply increase her irritation, make the investigation process inefficient, and lose them time instead of gaining it.

  But she didn’t know how to tell van der Ketting that.

  “I think we can get enough information to get everyone started,” DeRicci said. “You start reviewing those vids. First, I want to see the mile markers before the race began and during the first two runners. Then I want you to look at Swann’s vids again. She said she saw a movement by that boulder, and I seem to remember tire tracks there. Let’s figure out what was there, if we have vid of it, and who it belonged to.”

  “What are you going to do?” van der Ketting asked.

  “I’m going to find the connection between Mayoux and Zweig,” DeRicci said. She was also going to find out, if she could, who Zweig really was and why she had Disappeared. “But first, I’m going to call a friend.”

  Van der Ketting looked at DeRicci as if she were crazy—and maybe he thought she was. Why would anyone call a friend in the middle of an investigation?

  But he would think her even crazier if he knew which friend she was going to call.

  She couldn’t count on anyone in the department to help her and protect her reputation, such as it was.

  The best person to search for a Disappeared was a Retrieval Artist. So it stood to reason that the best person to discover if an existing person was a found Disappeared would also be a Retrieval Artist.

  DeRicci was willing to bet this entire investigation that her old partner, Miles Flint, could find out Jane Zweig’s status a lot faster than DeRicci ever could.

  Paying him would be another issue. DeRicci certainly couldn’t afford a Retrieval Artist’s prices, and the department wouldn’t pay to have someone outside the system do the work.

  But DeRicci figured payment w
orked a variety of ways. She would offer to barter favors—and she was willing to bet Flint would take her up on it.

  She would never know unless she asked.

  “You’re going to have to give me a few minutes alone for my call,” she said to van der Ketting.

  He grimaced. “Where’m I supposed to work?”

  “Clear out the antechamber,” she said. “Ignore the unis and work there.”

  “I have all the fun,” he said, and picked up his handheld. He left everything else on the table. Without saying another word to her, he let himself out the main door.

  DeRicci waited until it latched before going back to the wall unit to call Flint. She would use public links again, in case hers were being monitored.

  She hoped against hope that he was in. Because right now she really needed someone she could trust.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TOKAGAWA INSISTED on setting up his own comparison to see if the virus infecting people in the tent was the Tey virus. Oliviari estimated that Tokagawa’s stubbornness, logical as it was, added five minutes onto their precious lead time.

  She followed him out of the office. A cacophony of coughs and sneezes greeted her. All of the beds in this section of the medical tent were full, some with runners lying prone, others with runners sitting on the side of the bed, holding tissue while the med techs ran diagnostic wands over them.

  The man that Oliviari had helped carry to a nearby bed, the man who died—she never had learned his name, poor creature—was nowhere to be seen. Someone else lay on his narrow cot, back turned to Oliviari, covers pulled all the way up to the neck.

  Oliviari was cold again. She wished she had worn longer sleeves, although she knew it would have done no good. She had the virus now; she was sure of it. Her symptoms just weren’t that bad yet.

  Tey had picked this race on purpose, but Oliviari wasn’t sure why. Oliviari did know that Tey would have factored in several things that Oliviari could not calculate on her own.

  Tey would have known how much the exertion these runners had placed on their bodies affected the rate of the disease. Some of these runners had built up their immune systems, but other runners had probably pushed harder than they had in months. That would bring their immune systems down, make them even more vulnerable to the disease.