He must have seen that thought run across her face, because he closed his mouth quickly.
“I need you to make sure it’s been checked against something of hers from outside the base,” Virji said.
“Sir?”
She had confused him. Good. Time to treat him the way he seemed to treat everyone else.
“Check the DNA on file,” she said. “Make sure that it is her DNA.”
“You think she knew how to tamper with those systems?” Wèi asked. “I’m not sure I would know how to tamper with those systems.”
And I’m sure you’re the best at everything, Virji thought, but didn’t say. Instead, she said, “Just check. Bring that information to the meeting in an hour.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
She nodded at him, then started to leave.
“Sir,” he said quickly, quietly. “What makes you think she tampered with the DNA?”
Finally, a good question. One worthy of someone running an investigation.
“Because,” Virji said, deciding to offer him a small bone. “I have a hunch she’s done it before.”
THIRTY-TWO
IT DIDN’T TAKE long to find all of the footage of that one person. Bassima was convinced she was looking at a woman, although why she believed that, she still wasn’t certain. She had never seen the person’s face, nor did the person’s body give much of a clue.
The dark clothing the person wore was baggy, so the person’s general shape was obscured. Bassima was beginning to think the person also had some kind of security filter over her (his?) features, so that no matter how she turned, the nearby cameras wouldn’t pick up her face.
Security filters were sophisticated pieces of equipment, not something the average person in Sandoveil had access to. That alone made this person different.
Bassima had gotten rid of all of the other screens, for the moment, anyway. She had stepped away from her desk, taking the consolidated images into the widest spot in the room. It was the area that acted as a de facto snack bar, with a hot water dispenser, and a drop-down table for any food that someone wanted to put out for the group.
Bassima couldn’t remember the last time anyone had used the dispenser or dropped the table down. If anyone wanted food, they got it at one of the many restaurants nearby and bought it to their desks.
So the entire area near the drop-down table was empty. She set up the consolidated images at life-size, but restricted them to the space around the table and made sure the images focused only on the person in dark clothes.
Bassima had already skipped through the consolidated images to make sure that it was worth the effort of moving everything to the open part of the office. She decided that it was.
Now, she stepped back and leaned on the nearest desk. She had created a small keyboard so she could use hand commands rather than vocal commands. Some of the security images had sound, which the programs had also consolidated.
She didn’t want to be talking over something important. She wanted to hear everything.
She dimmed the lights until the lighting in the office matched the lighting on the images. The images came into sharper focus.
Late on the night in question, the car pulled into its parking place. A restaurant down the street still had lights. A band played something with very heavy bass—probably very loudly, since Bassima was picking it up.
She couldn’t see who had driven the car, nor could she get any identifying numbers, although she would make the system try. She called up a small second screen for her notes. She doubted she would remember everything otherwise.
Whoever drove the car sat in it for more than an hour. The music stopped at the restaurant down the street, people exited, some passing the car. None of them looked inside. It wasn’t clear from the outside that anyone was inside the car.
Bassima watched each excruciating minute of this footage. She wanted to make sure she didn’t miss anything—a small gesture, a smile, maybe a word exchanged with the person in the car.
But there was nothing.
Fifteen minutes after the restaurant’s lights went out, a door on the car opened. The person got out. Finally, Bassima got a good view of the shoes.
At this point, the person carried nothing. She closed the door slowly, hand on the side to make sure there was almost no sound. Bassima thought she heard a click, but she wasn’t even certain of that.
After the person moved away from the car, she (he?) stepped into the street and did a slow, 360-degree turn, making certain that no one was around. This time, the security lights hit the person’s face full on, and it still remained in darkness.
Bassima nodded. A security filter, then. Not only was she dealing with a local, but she was dealing with a local who had access to some very rare equipment for the Sandoveil Valley. Security filters were necessary items in some of the major cities, particularly for high-profile individuals.
But there were no high-profile people in Sandoveil—unless they were visiting from elsewhere.
She sighed. The security filter put an outsider back on the table as a suspect in this case.
Her disappointment didn’t last long, though. Because the security filter also increased the likelihood that the person (whoever it was) intended to do harm or something illegal.
Bassima made that note as well, even though she doubted she would forget it.
Then she let the footage continue.
The person walked quickly across the street. There were gaps in the imagery, which the consolidated file played as a small purple blotch. Bassima had requested that, when the program asked what it should do when its subject went in and out of frames.
Bassima had studied enough of those images to realize that the person had deliberately avoided the security cameras that she (he?) knew about. Apparently, the person didn’t know about all of them, however.
The person took ten minutes to walk to Taji’s office.
Lights were on in the office. It was easy to see them on the 3D life-size image. The lights filtered out of flaws in the window shading. Apparently the window’s shading was as old as the building itself.
Maybe the environmental system hadn’t been shut off deliberately. Maybe it had failed.
Bassima let out a sigh.
The person stopped just before reaching the door to the office, and reached up to her (his?) face. Hands cupped the face, and then lowered, thumbs together as if holding something.
The security camera from across the street caught a quick flash of skin. It was impossible to tell exactly what color—not too dark, clearly, or it wouldn’t have shown up in that moment, but not so pale that it reflected the light back.
Bassima stopped the consolidated image, tried to see if anything about that quick flash of profile was familiar.
But the movement was a blur, and the person had turned as she (he?) removed the filter, as if aware of the cameras on the other side of the street.
The person slipped the filter into a pocket, then approached the office door, and waited. Bassima couldn’t tell how the person contacted the occupant inside. There was no movement on the person’s part, no knock, no touch to some kind of bell or warning system. Just a pause, as if the person were either waiting for someone inside to answer or for the system to introduce him (her?).
After several minutes in which the person remained utterly still, the door opened. Bassima caught a glimpse of someone just as tall as the person outside, with dark hair, dressed informally.
But not in yellow and red. Instead, the person inside wore browns and tans.
Bassima watched as the person who answered the door let the visitor inside. Then the door closed tightly.
Bassima ran the image back. She got up, and walked over to the hologram. Two people, both shorter than her, one standing in a doorway, the other in that narrow hall.
This time, Bassima wasn’t looking at the person outside the door, but at the person who answered the door. She asked the system to give her the clearest image of the person�
��s face, only to be told she was dealing with the clearest image.
So Bassima enlarged it, and peered at it as if she were right next to the person, leaning in.
Skin a light brown, hair darker than that, a slightly upturned mouth and a delicate nose. Bassima couldn’t see the eyes, but she had a sense of recognition.
That was Taji. It had to be.
Bassima caught that it had to be and made herself ignore it. One of those assumptions again. The person at the door probably was Taji. The person at the door looked like Taji—maybe, in some superficial ways. But it didn’t have to be Taji. It could be one of Taji’s relatives or a tourist who looked like Taji or someone else who looked nothing like Taji except in Bassima’s fevered imagination.
However, the most likely person to be behind that door was Taji, and Bassima couldn’t ignore that.
She tried to look at other angles and saw nothing. There wasn’t even any reflection in nearby windows or walls.
Bassima stopped searching. She would let the programs do that. Maybe they could even construct a face based on the partial. She would have them try.
For the moment, though, she needed to continue the footage. She started it up again.
The person behind the door stepped back, out of the way, and the visitor walked through the door. Then the door closed, seemingly of its own accord.
After that, nothing happened for two hours. Bassima didn’t watch the footage for two hours. She scanned through it, hoping she would see more. Then she told the consolidated program to search for anomalies. It didn’t seem to find any.
Finally, the lights inside that office went out.
And Bassima didn’t see the person emerge from the building. Not anywhere.
However, an hour after that, the person showed up at the vehicle, carrying red and yellow cloth. Clothing, or something like it. Bunched in a way that the cloth couldn’t be a body.
Bassima stared at that footage. The person had come again from the wrong direction. Which meant that the person had exited in a way that Bassima hadn’t been monitoring.
Bassima sighed, then set up several more screens. She expanded the search range again, taking in the entire downtown. Only now she had a figure for the system to focus on.
That person—the person from the car—was connected to this. The shoes weren’t a coincidence. Neither was the clothing.
What Bassima needed to do was follow that car. She didn’t just need to look for the person carrying a body or something from that office. She needed to find out where the person went after leaving the area, and where the person had been before.
The information was in Sandoveil’s security systems and its records.
She just had to find it.
And she was finally beginning to believe that she would.
THIRTY-THREE
THE BLOOD TOLD an incredible story. Hranek stood up straight, his back aching. He put a hand on his spine and made himself lean backward just a little, listening to the cracks and pops, just like he had heard before.
He should be tired, but he wasn’t—not like he had been when he first arrived. The work intrigued him. The stuffy little room held a wide variety of secrets, and he had found most of them.
But Okilani had found a few as well. She had entered after she finished exploring the path from Main Street, and she had found a very faint blood trail that led into what appeared to be a wall.
It wasn’t. It was a door designed to look like a wall. The door looked like it had been built that way, not added later. It blocked the narrow corridor.
The faint blood trail wasn’t visible to the naked eye. To call what Okilani had followed spatter would be to mislabel it. She had followed microscopic drops that only her equipment could pick up. She figured out how to open that door, and then went through it with no trepidation, ending up nearly a block away, where the trail continued.
It disappeared across the street from the exit, not because the tiny drops had stopped dripping, but because they had gotten scuffed or washed away or picked up by regular shoes—evidence destroyed by day-to-day living.
Still, Hranek had found that all exciting. He had answers. And, apparently, in one part of that passageway that led to the hidden exit, the environmental systems were on so he could actually measure the decay in a controlled environment.
He loved working off specks of blood. He had done so a hundred times over the years, and had refined the technique for doing so at a death scene. Actually, he’d been more overwhelmed by the large blood pool than he had been from the specks.
He had worried that the large pool was not all one person’s blood. But blood didn’t necessarily mingle and mix the way that some liquids did. If he tested the wrong part of the pool, he would miss any secondary (or tertiary) source. If he tested the entire pool, he might waste half of his night.
So he did a quick cursory test, and it seemed that the blood all came from the same source. When he was done, he would have Okilani test different patches of the pool, just to double-check him. This death scene was so odd that he wanted to make sure he got everything right.
His night’s work did get him a lot of information, though. The bulk of the blood (if not all of it) belonged to Taji Kimura. The DNA in the pool—at least the areas that Hranek tested—as well as the tiny specks that Okilani had found was all Kimura’s.
Hranek had also been wrong in his early assumptions, which was why he tested everything. He had thought there had been no spray or splatter when the incident happened. But he discovered through his patient work that the blood had misted when Kimura was fatally injured, but most of the mist had been covered by the pool of blood.
As he methodically searched, he had found mist on the side of the couch, the legs of the table, and in certain places on the carpet. But the mist’s pattern told him a lot. The mist had blown backward (forward?) onto—he assumed—the person who had attacked Kimura.
The mist had gotten on that person’s shoes and clothing, leaving blanks in the impressions on the furniture and floor.
Using those blanks, Hranek had been able to construct part of that person—thin, not too large, with a relatively small shoe size. As Kimura had bled out, that person had walked to and fro inside the room, probably moving things. The blood pool covered most of it, but in odd ways. It filled in the indentations left by the shoes, but Hranek could measure those indentations in the depth of the blood.
That person had left the body in place for some time—the length of which he couldn’t entirely determine, but long enough to make a slight impression in the carpet.
Then that person had picked up the body, wrapped it in something—maybe even a regulation body bag—and carried it from the room, using the hidden exit.
Either the bag hadn’t been closed properly or it had a small leak, enabling those tiny droplets of blood to escape, forming the path that Okilani would follow.
The specks told Hranek that all of this had happened at least forty-eight hours before. The blood pool itself was decaying oddly, and he wondered if the environmental system had been on for a while after death and then shut off. He had no real way to prove that, except to do some on-site tests for decay rate, which he did not have time for.
He would leave Okilani here, though, to conduct some of those experiments. By noon, he would have all the information he could get from this small space.
He hoped it would be enough to put a killer away. Because that ghostly impression in the blood mist had told him that he did have a killer, and that killer had watched Taji Kimura die.
The thought did not anger him. He’d seen too much human death to have a reaction to that death during his investigation. When he reflected later, he might be appalled or upset, but right now, he was intrigued.
Besides, he needed to remain calm since his staff rarely was in this kind of situation. They hadn’t seen enough violent, deliberate death to be able to compartmentalize it.
Part of him was grateful for that, and part of him wish
ed he had a more emotionally experienced team. It would make his job easier. Or rather, it would make this job easier.
He had a few more items to check before he went to the death investigator’s office. He needed to check on that corpse, which, according to Beck, probably belonged to Glida Kimura.
Something had happened to the Kimura family, and it had been sudden and tragic.
Ah, he felt the thread of an emotion there, and he needed to separate it.
He took a deep breath. The room was getting stale. Even though he had been here for hours, the rotting smell registered, which meant that it was growing quite strong.
Then he returned his attention to one errant blood drop. It was on the wall, near the side of the couch and the gap in the mist. This drop wasn’t part of the mist. The drop was tear-shaped, and it had actually hit the wall as a globule, then slid down, slowly congealing and stopping a few feet from the floor.
He leaned forward and carefully used a tiny extractor to kiss the edges of the drop, without moving or ruining the drop itself. The extractor tested on-site, comparing the DNA to the DNA on file from all the residents of Sandoveil.
He didn’t have the latest tourist information in his equipment, nor did he have access to anything from the nearby regions. But this apparently did the trick.
The device registered a DNA match.
Glida Kimura.
He frowned. Beck had told him that the body in Rockwell Pool belonged to Glida Kimura, or so everyone had assumed.
Then a surge of anger ran through him before he could prevent it. That was why he had to identify the bodies. That was why there were systems in place.
The YSR-SR on-site had misidentified that corpse, and it was already interfering with investigations.
His investigation, to be precise. Because his first reaction here was one of shock. How could Glida Kimura be here when her body had been in that pool?
And then he separated the emotion and let his brain kick in.
Glida Kimura could have been here. She could have been injured in the attack on her wife and then taken elsewhere. Just because he hadn’t found traces of a third person didn’t mean one hadn’t been here.
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