“I have one more thing,” she said.
He tried not to sigh audibly. “What?”
If anything, he made that single word even more curt. He really wanted to get back to his work here, particularly if he had more work waiting for him at his office.
“It looks like we have a second body,” she said.
That snapped his attention back to the conversation. “It looks like?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
He closed his eyes for just a moment. Sleep had just become a thing of the past.
“I’ll be there shortly,” he said, his reluctance in his voice. He needed to calm down. This scene would wait, although he had no idea how much evidence he would lose to decay. He would need to take readings—
“No,” she said.
He froze. Did she just tell him not to come to a death scene? Was she hampering another investigation? The fact that he hadn’t been present for the first body annoyed him beyond reason. The idea that she would do this again made him angry.
“Tevin Egbe’s team will dive for the body in the morning,” Marne said.
“Dive for it?” Hranek made sure he understood exactly what she was saying. “It’s underwater?”
“He was following your procedure, making sure that evidence hadn’t sunk to the bottom of that pool. He was recording everything, so that you would have it, along with the body. As he used the scanlight, he found indications of a second body. He wanted to dive immediately, but I said there’s no reason. It’s best to do something like that in daylight.”
Even Hranek knew that. He preferred his teams to be safe. He hated dealing with the bodies of his friends. That had happened too much on this job, and it was the thing that discouraged him the most.
Hranek glanced at the time, realized that dawn was at least six hours away. That was six hours in which the water would damage more of the corpse, but that was better than trying to bring it up in near darkness.
Besides, he might be able to finish in this space.
“I’ll be there at dawn, then,” he said.
“There’s no need,” she said.
That anger surged again, and he bit back a harsh retort. He was beginning to think she was deliberately excluding him. Why would she do that? Was he some kind of suspect? Was there something she didn’t want him to know?
He straightened his spine and heard crackles all along his back. Two more bodies—two bodies, he mentally corrected himself. Strange how he was continually thinking that this site had a body in it.
“Marnie,” he said, making himself speak slowly, and consider every word, “I have told you before. I must be there to see the corpse in situ.”
“And I have told you,” she snapped, “that some sites aren’t amenable to you. Unless you’ve learned how to dive…?”
She was deliberately provoking him. He knew that. And yet, yet…he had to answer her. He had to.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“I do,” she said, “and frankly, I think you’re being a ridiculous perfectionist. The body is underwater, and Tevin’s team will film the entire extraction. You won’t be able to see the body in situ, at all. You’ll—”
“My people will have to examine the death scene. That body got there somehow,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “it might have been dropped over the Falls or it might have been tossed off an overlook. You have no way of knowing, at this moment, if the body was carried into that pool behind the waterfall. In fact, that’s least likely, because—”
“Of the barriers, I know,” he said. “And someone could have breached those barriers. You think your security is so great, and there it is not.”
She didn’t respond. For a moment, he thought she had cut off the communication. Then he heard her sigh.
“Come if you want. Dawn. But I would think, with two bodies, you’d want to get started on the first one rather than stand in the cold, watching people disappear under murky water.”
“Noted,” he said, and then he was the one to shut off the communication.
He stood for a moment, letting the anger flow through him. She had a point. He would have a lot to do once the bodies arrived. He had this site as well.
For the first time in years, he actually faced a true challenge—not of extraction or figuring out an unusual type of death. But a challenge that would test him. He would have to work as hard as an Ynchi City death investigator. And he would have to determine which jobs he would hand off to his assistants, or which part of the job he would have to skimp on, just a small bit.
The very idea of skimping made him frown. He would not skimp. And he wasn’t sure his assistants—good as they were—were up to the task.
Yes, he had trained them, but they had never worked anything like this.
All right. The next several hours would be about pace and priorities. He would need to organize himself and his tasks.
The first thing he would do was finish here, because this site was decaying right before his eyes.
His staff, even his middle-of-the-night staff, knew how to receive a body. He would give them instructions on what not to do, given that the body from the Falls might be a homicide victim. He didn’t want anyone to touch the corpse until he arrived.
His staff knew how to do that.
He would finish here, go to the death investigator’s office, and then go to Fiskett Falls to supervise the extraction. In between, he would need food and a bit of sleep.
He had enough time to do it all, if he kept on pace.
Before he returned his attention to the blood pool, he had to get his staff ready to go. That would only take a few minutes.
And then the challenge would begin.
THIRTY
BASSIMA USED SIX holographic screens, all at eye level, to monitor the footage from the area near the car. Behind her, she ran footage on several other screens. Those programs were checking for people moving around the downtown area. The programs would ping her when they found something—which was more often than she would like.
She had a seventh screen to her left, which was compiling all of the images from the six screens into one composite image. At the moment she wasn’t looking at it, but she would if she found something.
For the past hour, she’d been eyeballing the six screens, seeing if she could find anything. The computers knew how to sort the information, but they gave her only what she asked for, and sometimes she wasn’t sure what she wanted.
She wasn’t sure here.
She was about to give up and let the computers look while she searched for something to settle her stomach. She had been sitting for hours now, which wasn’t something she usually did, and the lack of movement made her antsy.
The silence in the office bothered her too. Usually she liked it quiet, but on this night, she was finding the silence eerie—perhaps because she was looking at the quiet streets of her city, realizing just how small this entire place was.
Her stomach wasn’t the only part of her that had become unsettled. She had as well. That notion she had, that she was dealing with a local, had given her emotional whiplash. First she had felt triumph, then uncertainty, and now unease.
She always prided herself on knowing the locals—at least by sight. She had always believed she would know which ones were likely to do something illegal, and she had been certain she would know which ones would do something horrible.
Those shoes made her feel like she hadn’t known anything at all.
And then she would chide herself for being stuck in assumptions—all over again.
She was stuck in some kind of emotional cycle, unable or unwilling to break out of it.
And it was all about her, which also bothered her.
Since the death—and that blood pool—were not about her.
She rubbed her eyes. She was tired, that was all.
She stood, just as one of the screens pinged behind her. She turned. The screen had freeze-framed on someone stan
ding near Taji Kimura’s office. That someone had a pile of clothes under one arm.
Bassima looked at the time stamp on the image. The middle of the night. Why would anyone be carrying clothes? Was this when the fight had occurred that had led to Taji (or someone) sleeping in her office?
Bassima expanded the image. She couldn’t tell who the person was from the back. The person was wearing dark colors and wore a hat that covered half the head.
Bassima changed the image, expanded it to life-size 3D, and realized that whoever she was looking at was small. Someone who barely came up to her shoulders. Small and slight, as most women were. But there were some men that fit that description as well.
Bassima didn’t need a composite to see what the image was holding. The clothes reflected off some light from an overhang from a nearby building. Both bright yellow and bright red caught the light; they didn’t absorb it.
Her heart started pounding again, just like it had done earlier. Before she moved the image around—going forward and backward in time—she crouched and looked at the shoes.
They didn’t catch the light as well, and there wasn’t as much information in the security feeds as she needed to see the entire shoe. But what she did see showed her that the shoes were the same general shape and style as the shoes left at the overhang.
She made herself breathe evenly. She couldn’t think she had caught the person, but at the same time…
Then she took a deep breath and held it, considering. Maybe it was Taji or Glida. One of them bringing clothes to the office after a major blow-out—either to take care of the person who had gone there alone, or to take care of themselves.
But Bassima didn’t remember seeing any red and yellow clothing inside that office. She would have noticed. Wouldn’t she? She had been looking for Taji, after all.
She let out that breath, made herself focus, and then toggled the image very slowly. The person never turned toward the camera that provided the image. Instead, the person found her way (his way?) toward a dark portion of the street and then walked out of the frame.
This time, Bassima could give clear instructions to the various computer systems. She wanted them all to follow that image, to figure out where it went.
She shrank it back down from life-size, making it the size of the composites. The image—the person—was walking in the right direction, toward the car. Bassima found that interesting all by itself.
Then she leaned back and checked the time stamp on the image that had first caught her, the one of the rocking vehicle and the shoes. Ten minutes after this one.
About as much time as it would take to walk.
“Caught you,” she whispered.
She wasn’t entirely sure who she had caught or what catching that person meant.
But, for the first time that evening, she knew she was moving in the right direction.
Where that direction would take her wouldn’t be up to her. But it would provide her with answers—finally.
THIRTY-ONE
VIRJI STEPPED INTO the larger lab. To her left, an anacapa box protected the malfunctioning anacapa from the runabout. Two people worked near it, as if they had no cares at all.
Several other people stood in various places throughout the lab, some working on stationary screens, others using holographic screens, everyone so busy that they didn’t see her at all.
Which was good, because her legs had nearly buckled beneath her. That woman, that image, that half-feral frozen movement, it all looked familiar. Virji had let the information slip, but she doubted anyone in the storage room picked up on it.
They were all concerned with figuring out what happened and with covering their collective asses.
Except that one man—Agwu? At least he had been honest with her.
And his news made her even more uncomfortable.
Virji called up a holographic screen, putting some generic code on it so that she had something to stare at for just a moment, so that no one could see her face or her distress.
This all felt so damn familiar. She’d been through something similar before.
And she hadn’t covered her ass, so she had come extremely close to losing her commission.
She hadn’t realized until much too late that she had let a murderer go free.
She let out a breath, then scrolled the information ahead of her.
Glida Kimura hadn’t been Glida Kimura when she had served on the Ijo. She’d been a difficult recruit, who’d been disciplined numerous times as a teenager, and who’d served some time on the Erreforma, the Fleet ship that acted as a school for troubled Fleet kids. It had taken years to clean Kimura up, years before the Fleet believed she could do anything that even remotely resembled work on a Fleet vessel.
Three other captains on three other ships worked with her, praised her, promoted her.
When Virji got her, she’d already been approved for short piloting stints, usually ship-to-ground missions or keeping a ship in orbit.
And Virji had given her runabouts.
Virji’s stomach ached. She closed her eyes for a moment, but then she saw an image that had haunted her for decades. Young Sloane Everly, standing before her, head bowed, long brown hair pulled back, riotous curls tamed.
Let me at least clean out the runabout, she had said. It’s been a second home to me. Then you can send me wherever you plan to send me.
Sloane Everly, now Glida Kimura.
Virji’s mouth tasted like dust. She had lost all saliva.
I will send someone to supervise you, Virji had said, thinking she was being magnanimous. And then we will discuss your future on board the Ijo.
She remembered stalking out of the room, remembered feeling both angry and self-righteous, knowing that she should remove the damn girl from the Ijo and take away her piloting privileges forever.
But she hadn’t—at least, not quickly enough. Virji’s carelessness would allow Everly to escape, and then disappear, and now reappear here, under a different name, working security of all things, and leaving—again—in a runabout, assigned to the Ijo.
Virji’s stomach twisted painfully.
She had barely survived that incident, particularly when the murders came out.
She wasn’t sure she would survive this one either.
Then she took a deep breath. Not true. What happened in this base had more to do with the base than it did with her. Sloane Everly—or Glida Kimura, or whatever she was called—should never have gotten work here in the first place.
Virji frowned, then tapped the screen, making it opaque to anyone but her. She needed Kimura’s security file, along with her entry interview and her DNA.
Maybe Virji’s guilt on letting a murderer escape once before was coloring her vision now. Maybe Kimura was a woman who had snapped.
But Virji didn’t think so. Over the years, she had learned to be humble, and in her humbleness, she had learned to be observant.
She knew in her bones that Glida Kimura was Sloane Everly. Which then begged the question: How had she gotten work here?
Virji had sent notices throughout the Fleet to arrest Everly on sight. Every base had received those notices, just like every ship had them. They were in the Fleet’s database, along with Everly’s DNA.
Then Virji sucked in a breath.
Everly had been a smart woman. She had taken that first runabout without anyone catching her. The same thing had happened here. The situation had repeated itself.
But what if there was one more missing piece of the puzzle? One piece Virji hadn’t put together until now.
Glida Kimura had worked for security here on the base. Her clearance was limited. And yet she hadn’t been flagged when she had come down here, into the most secure area on the base.
“Son of a bitch,” Virji said out loud. Three people standing near her looked at her in alarm.
She ignored them. She collapsed the screen and walked back to that storage room, pressing open the blast doors.
They w
obbled as they opened. They desperately needed repair.
The team was still working. Only Agwu had moved. He was closer to the group from the base than he was to the security team.
“Wèi,” Virji said in her most commanding voice. “Come here.”
He nodded at her, finished saying something to the dark-eyed woman next to him, and then walked to Virji—not fast, but not deliberately slow either.
“We need to check Kimura’s DNA,” Virji said. “We—”
“We already did,” Wèi said, interrupting her.
Virji gave him her coldest glare. “I’ve been ignoring your insubordination,” she said, mostly because she didn’t have the time for this petty shit, not anymore. “Do I need to go over your head to find someone I can actually work with?”
His skin flushed, darkening it, and making his eyes brighter. The flush actually made him attractive, something she wouldn’t have thought possible an hour ago.
“No, sir,” he said. Somehow he didn’t sound contrite, although he did sound chastened. “Forgive me. Please, continue.”
As if she had been the one in the wrong.
She didn’t like Wèi, and if he continued to treat her this way, she would report him. Right now, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, trust that he was overworked or worried because of this situation, and work with him.
“You’ve set up a meeting with the head of security, yes?” she asked, because she needed to get Wèi back in line.
“Yes,” he said. “One hour from now, his office. I can take you there, sir.”
No chance of that. She didn’t even acknowledge the offer. “Before the meeting, I want you to check Glida Kimura’s DNA.”
He opened his mouth. If he told her again that they had already done so, she would make sure that he didn’t have a job in the morning.
The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016 Page 18
