“And if I were that stupid, I would deserve the treatment I get at the department,” she snapped. “I think I could solve that myself.”
Then she looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected the words to come out of her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said.
He smiled. It was nice to know she would never change.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I should know better than to tell you your job.”
She gave him a small smile. “It’s just been hell here.”
“I gathered from the media reports.”
“Not just here. At the unit. Everywhere. I do fine, then I say something like that to the wrong person. I should have quit when you did, Miles.”
“You said you couldn’t do anything else.”
She sighed. “I probably couldn’t.”
“So,” he said, knowing she couldn’t go into this on public links either. “The body is identifiable, just not the identity you suspected.”
“Right,” she said.
“And you got a strange hit on Zweig. No DNA on record. Fingerprints? Anything else?”
“I’m going to check,” DeRicci said. “But I’m really under major pressure here and I’ve got a year’s worth of work that a team of us have to get done sometime tonight. I figured farming this out to you might be quicker and more efficient.”
“And it’s just between us, right?”
“Us and whoever might be listening on this link,” she said.
He smiled. “No one’s listening from this end.”
“The whole Moon could be on this side,” she said. “Can you do this for me?”
“I can,” he said. “And I will check, but I have to tell you, I think I already know the information you want.”
“What is it?”
“I think your Jane Zweig might be Frieda Tey.”
DeRicci frowned. “Frieda Tey? Why is that name familiar?”
“The scientist who killed two hundred people in a domed colony experiment about ten years ago?”
“Her?” DeRicci’s voice rose. “That’s why you were asking about the flu?”
Flint nodded.
“God, you don’t think that’s possible, do you?”
“Someone does. I have a lot of evidence that points me in the same direction,” Flint said. “Then you contact me about the same woman.”
DeRicci’s frown deepened. “This is too weird to be a coincidence.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll be talking to my client about it as soon as I can.”
“There’s some kind of bigger plan that I can’t see yet,” DeRicci said. “That much is for certain.”
Flint nodded. “Let’s just hope we’re not following the script.”
“Look,” DeRicci said. “I’ll contact Broduer again, and ask him if he sees any evidence of the flu in the body.”
“Tell him to look for the Tey virus,” Flint said.
“That’s conveniently named,” DeRicci said. “I’ll do it. If it’s there, I’ll get back to you. Otherwise, you get in touch with me.”
“I’m not sure how I can if your links are closed,” Flint said.
She made a face. “I’m not turning them back on. It’s a mess here.”
He could only imagine. He wondered when they had learned that the body wasn’t that of Jane Zweig. Had DeRicci already gotten into the main part of her investigation? Probably, and she was probably going to be blamed for the identity mixup.
“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll check for messages from you every hour. You let me know how to find you.”
Flint smiled at her. “I always leave my links on.”
“You’re much more sociable than I am,” she said, and signed off.
Flint’s smile faded. He wished that were true, that he was more sociable. But he wasn’t, and he was feeling even less sociable now.
DeRicci was right. It wasn’t a coincidence that he was working on a case involving Jane Zweig on the very day she died.
If Jane Zweig truly was Frieda Tey, as Rabinowitz believed, then that lead to a whole new group of implications about the misidentified body. Was Zweig trying something new? Had she infected Rabinowitz herself? Or was she already gone, the unknown woman dead in her place?
Flint also needed to find out if the other women Rabinowitz had visited were ill. Flint needed to know the source of the contamination—if, indeed, Rabinowitz had Tey’s virus, which was what Wagner believed.
And then there was Wagner, and whatever game he was playing. Flint would have to find that out as well.
DeRicci said she had a lot of work that had be done quickly, and so, now, did Flint.
He pushed the button so that his screen recessed, and then he started the work a Retrieval Artist was known for—tracing a Disappeared.
TWENTY-NINE
DERICCI LEANED AGAINST THE WALL, Flint’s image long gone. She missed him. She never had to worry about him failing to think creatively. Perhaps that had been the problem with Flint the detective. He had thought creatively—too creatively—and he found ways out of problems that no one else could.
Ways that weren’t always legal.
He would find out if Zweig was a Disappeared or if the lack of DNA identification was simply a fluke. He would find out, and he would find out quickly.
She shut down the wall unit, glanced at the race still playing on the other wall, and wondered if it would ever end. This group of runners seemed even more tired than the last group as they crossed the finish line. No arms raised, no final leap, no obvious sense of accomplishment.
Just like her work. She stumbled from one predesigned path to another—and occasionally, like today, found out she was on the wrong path altogether—and when she finished each race, she moved to the next without a thought of victory. Only a sense that she had put one more thing behind her.
She was burning out. She wasn’t going through the motions yet—her own sense of justice wouldn’t let her do that—but she always wished she were somewhere else. Although not in an environmental suit out on that course. That was the last place she would go for fun.
Then she frowned. Environmental suit. Coburn had said they got a shipment in, and that he and Zweig were testing them, but his suit was different from hers. Obviously Mayoux’s suit matched the suit Zweig wore, but how many of those did Extreme Enterprises get in? If there were only two pink suits, who would know that? And who would have ordered them so that they were small enough to fit Zweig and Mayoux?
DeRicci hurried to the door. She pulled it open. The crowd had gone away—apparently van der Ketting had taken care of them, sent them off to dinner as she suggested or just got them out of the bungalow.
Van der Ketting was sitting on a plastic chair, hunched over his handheld, his body protecting the screen so that no one else could see it. He didn’t look up as she pulled the door open, but his muscles tensed.
He had seen her, but he didn’t want to acknowledge her. How very childish of him.
The uni who had been helping her gave her a small grin. “Everything okay, detective?”
She nodded, and as she did so, marveled that even a gesture could be a lie. Nothing was okay.
“Can you get Brady Coburn for me again?” she asked. “I have some follow-up questions.”
Now van der Ketting looked up. “We’re ready to start the interviews again?”
DeRicci shook her head. “Just that one.”
And maybe not even that one if she didn’t do some work first. She turned to the uni.
“Take your time getting him. I don’t need him right away.”
The uni dipped his head, acknowledging her. “It’ll take me a little time to find him anyway. We let everyone move around a bit; they were feeling cramped in that warehouse space.”
She wasn’t sure what warehouse space he was referring to. “They all got food and a place to rest, right?”
“They had the option of food and a place to sit down.” The uni’s eyes widened. “That
’s what I thought you’d asked for first. They’re not going to be staying the night here, are they?”
Wouldn’t that be a mess? She sighed. “I hope not.”
Then she nodded at van der Ketting. He continued to work over the handheld, pretending he didn’t see her.
Getting rid of the other detectives must have been difficult; he was obviously going to make her pay for it.
“Leif,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He looked up and let her see the resentment on his face before grabbing the handheld and standing. She held the door for him, and as he walked past, he said, “Who was the friend?”
“What?” She closed the door.
Van der Ketting was standing in the middle of the room. “Who was the friend you had to call?”
“Someone who can help us out,” DeRicci said, not willing to say any more. “What did you find out?”
“Not a lot.” Van der Ketting’s cheeks reddened. “I spent a lot of time on personnel matters.”
“Thank you for that,” she said, although she didn’t feel grateful at the moment. “Sit down. Let’s get to work.”
He returned to the spot he’d carved out for himself at the head of the table. His supplies remained there, just where he had left him. DeRicci hadn’t touched anything except the coffee, the pastries, and the wall unit since he’d left.
She sat down in the chair next to his and pulled her own handheld from her pocket. It had been a long time since she’d used it; she’d done most of her work at the office or at home, and here she’d been using the public links.
“Have you investigated Extreme Enterprises at all?” she asked van der Ketting.
“I’m still working on the vids,” he said.
“What have you got?”
“A few curious things.” He kept his head down as he spoke, his hands busy with the small machine. “No footage of miles five and six for the early runners. The footage shows up after Zweig disappears off camera.”
“So the body could have been there all along.”
He nodded. “But I do have footage from the night before, as the techs tested everything. No body there and no tracks.”
DeRicci felt her heart leap. Their theory had more validity now. Zweig had stashed the body in the maintenance building, and had retrieved it just before the race. Then she drove it to mile five, and left it behind the boulder.
She probably drove the vehicle back along the same trail she had gone out on. No one had noticed, or if they had, they had probably thought she was with the marathon. Her pink suit looked white from a distance, just like most marathon volunteers’.
“And,” he said, “I really can’t locate Zweig for those forty-five minutes. She seems to have vanished.”
“What about the vehicles? Did any leave while everyone was in the staging area?”
“Not that I’ve found so far,” van der Ketting said. “But I didn’t have much time to work.”
The resentment had reappeared in his tone. He felt she was taking more time from him.
She probably was.
“Let me know if you find anything,” she said, and turned to her own handheld.
First, she tapped into the police systems, so that she had a traceable identification. She needed to back all of this up, in case she had to take someone to trial. The judge would want to know how DeRicci came by all of her information.
First she sent for a warrant for Extreme Enterprises, citing the problems with the corpse, the suit, and Zweig’s possible involvement. DeRicci also stressed a need for urgency, because she would be interviewing one of the company’s owners within the hour, not to mention all of the people she was holding here while she searched for information.
If that didn’t get a judge off his duff, nothing would.
Then she set that search aside, tagging her handheld to notify her the moment the warrant came in.
While she waited, she started a background search into Mayoux and Zweig, looking for points of comparison.
Zweig had come to Armstrong from Earth by way of several extreme events all over the galaxy. Mayoux had been born in Armstrong, and had stayed there, except for her years of higher education at Glenn Station University. Her parents were dead, and she had one brother, also deceased.
DeRicci could find no evidence of friends or lovers in Mayoux’s file. For all DeRicci could tell, Mayoux had lived alone since she returned from the university twenty years before. She had made two trips off of the Moon in all of those years, apparently alone, and she hadn’t left at all in the last nine years.
All in all, she was about as different from Zweig as a person could get.
DeRicci sighed and rubbed her eyes. There had to be a way in which their paths crossed. How did a master gardener whose main idea of exercise seemed to be walking to work end up dead, masquerading for a woman whose entire life was about athletic feats so extreme that most people would think them crazy?
There was precious little on file for Zweig—at least in the personal categories. She was unmarried, but the media played up hints of affair after affair, even mentioning the relationship with Coburn and its rather uncomfortable aftermath.
DeRicci stopped and read the articles on that. He hadn’t been completely honest, not that that surprised her. The breakup with Zweig had been a difficult one. Coburn had tried to split up the business as well, but Zweig had fought him in court.
She claimed that Extreme Enterprises needed both of them, that either it stayed in business as a partnership or it dissolved entirely. DeRicci wondered why Coburn didn’t dissolve it, and start up the same business under a different name—he was obviously the talented one, the one the travelers trusted—and then she found out.
Zweig had already thought of that. One of the terms of her suit was that if the business dissolved, both she and Coburn would be enjoined against starting another extreme sports business. She wouldn’t have any trouble finding work, or so Coburn claimed. He said she put in that clause simply to prevent him from gaining the business he had originally started.
Nasty, expensive, and personally bloody, that was what friends called the suit. Finally it got settled, terms not disclosed. But Extreme Enterprises stayed in business, and Coburn rarely came back to Armstrong, just as he had said.
But he was here for the Moon Marathon, for the first time ever. And while he was here, Zweig supposedly died. She certainly was missing—
“Damn,” DeRicci said. She hadn’t thought of everything after all. With this switch of victims midway through, she was getting confused as to what had been done before they knew the victim was Mayoux.
“What now?” Van der Ketting looked up. His eyes were bloodshot. He’d been staring at the screen for too long.
“When I had you check singlet numbers, you checked to see if someone could duplicate them, right?” DeRicci asked, praying she had asked for this, praying he had thought of it.
“Yeah,” he said. “They could have if they were marathon staff, but that was people pretty specific. Each singlet is different with each marathon.”
DeRicci turned her handheld over and over in her fingers. She knew they had to look at the marathon staff; she just hadn’t been ready to do so.
“So,” van der Ketting was saying, “duplication would be pretty difficult.”
DeRicci shook her head. If only Flint were here. He would have traced this on his own rather than have her do his thinking for him.
“Duplication sounds real easy,” DeRicci said. “I’m sure they came up with the design weeks ago. Hell, I could have gotten it with a friendly, ‘Let me see what we’re wearing this year,’ lead-in. I’m sure someone else could have too.”
Van der Ketting’s cheeks turned a dull red.
“And check for that dang pink environmental suit,” DeRicci said, deciding to be as specific as possible. “If there were two out there, maybe there were three or four.”
“How about if I check the airlock entrances all over the dome to see if Zweig
entered or exited from one of them?” Van der Ketting asked.
“Good thinking. Damn.” DeRicci shook her head. “Someone has been so far ahead of us on all of this that I feel like we’re not even playing the same game.”
“Yeah,” van der Ketting said. “Me too.”
DeRicci looked at him. She had forgotten how frustrating it was to be a rookie detective. He had risen to a place of authority before, when he was a uni, and now he was a beginner again. And his investigative skills, while good for a rookie, weren’t great for a detective.
“How about I bring in at least one more detective?” he asked. “We can use another pair of eyes.”
“No,” DeRicci said. “Get the uni outside to do it—what’s his name, anyway? He’s been really helpful.”
“Marcus?”
DeRicci shrugged. “That the one I sent to get Coburn?”
“Yeah,” van der Ketting said.
“Then Marcus. Marcus what?”
“Marcus Landres.”
“Thanks.” At least now she could call him by his name. She had felt embarrassed about it before. “He should have been back by now with Coburn.”
“You told him to take his time.”
“I did, didn’t I?” DeRicci bent back over her handheld. She still hadn’t gotten that warrant. She wondered if she should wait to see Coburn before it came in, or trust him to give her the answers she was looking for.
Van der Ketting stood up. He set his handheld on the table and walked to the door. DeRicci stifled the urge to grab the handheld and check everything herself.
She was becoming obsessed with this investigation. That happened to her sometimes, and it never ended well for her. She always solved the case, but at some great personal cost.
She didn’t know how many personal costs she could continue to take.
After a moment, she looked back at her own handheld. She was frustrated by the lack of in-depth information about Zweig, and didn’t want to go into the media accounts, searching each one for a tidbit that might be wrong.
So she did something she hadn’t done before with Mayoux. She had figured that Mayoux’s life was too quiet for a media search to be profitable, but she tried one now. After all, if they’d met over a lawsuit—since Zweig seemed like the litigious kind—or in a squabble about apartment rents, it might show up in both accounts.
Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel Page 25
