Wèi glanced at Nicoleau, to see if Virji was out of line.
“Bring her in,” Nicoleau said. “We need as much information about what’s going on as possible.”
There was a momentary silence. Apparently Nicoleau had no idea what to do next.
But Virji did.
“Thank you, Mr. Wèi,” she said. “That will be all.”
He looked startled. His gaze shifted from Virji to Nicoleau and then back to Virji.
“Do you want me to get Touré?” Wèi asked, clearly not sure who to address the question to.
“Wait for a few minutes,” Nicoleau said. “Join the others.”
And possibly lose Touré if she was involved in all of this. But they were all so far behind in this investigation that they had probably lost Touré anyway. A few hours wouldn’t matter.
Virji hoped, anyway.
Wèi stood, then glanced at both of them as if he expected them to ask him to stay. When no one spoke, he headed out of the room.
Virji closed the door behind him.
“Can we sit now?” Nicoleau asked.
That restlessness still held her. She wasn’t sure a chair could contain her.
“Do what you like.” She realized, as she said that, that she wouldn’t sit down at all.
He leaned against the table, but faced her, not sitting exactly, but not standing either.
“So what do you have?” he asked.
“A history,” she said. “A long one. With Glida Kimura.”
He frowned at her. She shrugged. There was no easy way to tell him all of this.
“Glida Kimura served on the Ijo decades ago,” Virji said. “She used a different name. Her birth name. Sloane Everly. Her service ended when she stole a runabout and vanished into foldspace.”
Nicoleau drew in a breath. Clearly he hadn’t expected that.
“I did not know until today that she had changed out her DNA profile on the Ijo. I had reported the theft of the runabout—I had reported everything she had done, and there is more—to the proper authorities inside the Fleet. You should not have been able to hire her here, with that profile on file. But it was the wrong information. I checked just before I came here. She changed the DNA in her profile just before she stole the runabout.”
“She stole two runabouts from the Ijo,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around that. Virji barely could either.
“Yes,” Virji said. “Two runabouts separated by decades.”
“The question is why,” Nicoleau said.
“No,” she said. She’d been giving this some thought. “The question is why now? She should have remained on the run.”
“Not with the DNA profiles changed,” he said. “She had no reason to run—”
Virji held up a hand. “You don’t have all the information. You see, we’re pretty certain that Sloane Everly—or Glida Kimura—or whatever she’s calling herself now—is some kind of mass killer.”
THIRTY-NINE
A WAVE OF exhaustion hit her. Bassima rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. She could hear her colleagues laughing as they came into the office, carrying their coffees and teas and pastries and fruit. She didn’t look up from her desk. In fact, she set everything on mute so that she wouldn’t call attention to herself.
None of her daytime colleagues had desks near her, so they wouldn’t notice her unless she actually moved or talked to them. Or rather, they wouldn’t notice her right away. They would sit and talk before they would actually get to work. Eventually, someone would see her and, maybe, talk to her.
They would think she had arrived early rather than having been there all night. She wasn’t sure if any of her colleagues had spent an all-nighter at the office. She had done all-night work before, but never at the desk.
All-night work at the desk actually felt like work. Her back hurt from sitting too long, her eyes were filled with sand, and her head had become fuzzy.
She’d been staring at images too long. She had brought most of the screens down, and the two she still had up were floating inconspicuously near the front of her desk, the backs opaque so that no one could see what she was actually looking at.
She could probably bring those down as well.
She had a lot of information, and she had it stored in several places. It would help Hranek and the YSR-SR, even if it did discourage her a little.
What Bassima had found disturbed her more than she cared to think about.
It appeared that Taji had moved into her office some time ago. She had left it only to get takeout meals or to use a shower at one of the nearby clubs. She carried her clothing in a duffel, and she never seemed to smile.
The last time Bassima had Taji on camera—it seemed—was that middle-of-the-night image answering the office door, the image that Bassima had found in the middle of her long night. It had to be Taji. Bassima had dismissed that thought earlier, but she kept it now.
No one else ever went in or out of that office. Apparently, it hadn’t been open for business for at least a week, maybe longer. Taji had moved in and the business had, for all intents and purposes, stopped.
Something had happened between the two of them—Glida and Taji—and Bassima couldn’t tell what it was from security images of downtown. She had looked for security images near the Kimura home, and found nothing.
The nearest security camera that Bassima could tap was at an intersection off the side road to the house. There she hit her first pay dirt.
That car, bubbled and looking somewhat new despite its years, was headed off the road, which meant it had to have been in the vicinity of the Kimura household, if not at the Kimura household.
Bassima couldn’t see who was in the car, but she trailed it through public security footage. She watched it wend its way through the south side of Sandoveil, then head down the biggest road in the entire community, the one that led to the sector base.
The vehicle parked in one of the employee slots, and a woman got out. She wasn’t carrying anything. After she left the car, she walked down a flight of stairs to the main employee entrance at the base.
An image caught her face.
It was Glida, heading to work.
That one moment had confirmed everything Bassima suspected. She had then stopped following the car and had gone back to the footage of that night.
It had taken a while, but she had finally been able to reconstruct Glida’s actions.
Glida had gone to the office and disappeared inside of it. Then she had come out from an exit a block away, an exit that wasn’t intuitive, that probably only the office renter or owner or someone connected to the person who ran the office knew about.
Glida had gone several blocks out of her way to get to the car. She did not take a direct route at all. On this circuitous route, she was not as successful as she had been in avoiding cameras.
Bassima had gotten several good glimpses of her face. Apparently, Glida had left off the filter as well. Bassima had found that curious, especially since Glida had been so cautious about arriving at the office.
Of course, all Glida had been carrying at this point was clothing. She had brought that to the car and dealt with the clothing from an angle that Bassima couldn’t see.
Glida had spent an unusually long time inside that car, and it rocked oddly.
When she left again, she was wearing the security filter. Bassima had been unable to see Glida’s face anywhere on the way back. And Glida had been equally cautious about her trip back. She took the long way and entered through that same door she had used to exit.
Then she had stayed inside for thirty minutes. When she exited the second time, she had something large and long over her shoulder. She didn’t stagger under the weight of it, though, as Bassima would have expected if she were carrying a body.
She methodically worked her way to the car, head down again, and this time, when she got there, she made sure she wasn’t visible on any camera.
The only way that Bas
sima knew Glida had arrived was the car shook in that same way it had earlier, as if someone were inside it.
Halfway through Glida’s trip to the car, as she carried whatever it was (a body? It looked big enough to be a body, even if it didn’t seem heavy enough), the lights went out in Taji’s office.
If they were on some kind of timer, they would have gone out. But Bassima knew of no way to shut down an environmental system on a timer. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be done.
She just didn’t know how to do it.
“Hey! Look who graced us with her presence!” The male voice echoed throughout the office.
Bassima closed her eyes for a moment, swallowing her irritation.
The voice belonged to Harland Wuhan. He was a good officer and a pain in her ass. He always paid a little too much attention to her, which drove her crazy.
She opened her eyes to find him in the doorway, still behind her screens. He wasn’t bad looking. He was as tall as she was and a little fleshy. Keeping himself in good physical shape seemed to be a bit more than he could manage.
Or maybe he liked food as much as she did.
“Whatcha working on?” he asked.
“Something for Hranek,” she said. “And I have to finish today.”
“In other words, piss off, Wuhan.” He grinned, shoved his hands in his pockets, and headed back to his desk. Halfway there, he stopped. “You know, you could ask for assistance.”
Normally, when he made an offer like that, she said something dismissive. My job, my assignment, no thanks.
But this time, the thought of food had made her stomach growl. “Would you mind picking up some breakfast for me? I’ve been here all night.”
“Oh, hey, Princess,” he started, then stopped and tilted his head. His smile didn’t leave, exactly. But it went from flirtatious to serious. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve been here all night,” she said. “And dinner was a long time ago.”
Someone closer to Wuhan said something. She couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was snide.
He waved his hand in that direction, shutting the person up.
“Sure,” he said. “This is serious stuff, huh? Related to the big YSR-SR presence on the mountain?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” she said.
“You need help?” he asked.
She sighed. He was a good investigator. In fact, he was a better investigator than security officer. He liked being at the desk, focusing on small pieces of information.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Let me think about it.”
“I’ll give you until I come back with your fried okra omelet,” he said.
She started, a bit surprised that he knew she liked that weird specialty from one of the nearby restaurants. “I have an account there,” she said. “You can charge it to that.”
“Nah. You can just buy me lunch sometime,” he said, and disappeared out the door.
She sat still for a moment, surprised at his willingness to help. No one else in the office seemed to think much of it. One of the women in the back corner smiled at her, somewhat wistfully.
Bassima smiled back.
Then she turned her attention back to the screens, thinking about what she knew and what she didn’t.
After that second trip, Glida did not return to that office. The car drove off, and Bassima tracked it through the city just fine. But the car eventually turned off the road, heading toward the mountains—not toward Fiskett Falls, as Bassima would have expected.
But she hadn’t had time to search all the nearby security footage for the vehicle. And there were no actual security cameras on the mountain or near the Falls. So if Glida had taken a different route, one that led her to the Falls on a back road, Bassima wouldn’t see it.
She had the various computers scan through all the footage on both office doors to see if anyone had entered or left in the days between Glida’s visit and Bassima’s discovery of the body.
Bassima’s programs didn’t find anyone going into the building at all, and Taji didn’t leave—not even for food as she had done before.
Bassima didn’t like any of that. She knew, deep down, that Glida had killed Taji that night and carried the body to the car. Then she had taken the body to the Falls and dumped it in the water.
So far, though, Bassima didn’t have enough to prove it.
“Here.” A bag of food, smelling sharply of onions and okra, landed on the desk in front of her.
She looked up. Wuhan was standing behind the screens, holding coffee. He set it down with a flourish.
“Need anything else?” he asked.
She opened the bag, saw silverware and napkins. She took the food out, her stomach growling, and opened the food container. The omelet was golden brown and still steaming, kept fresh by the container itself. Cheese bubbled on top as if the omelet was still being cooked.
She grabbed her fork and took a bite, her entire body relaxing just a little. She had been even hungrier than she realized.
He stood still. She wondered if he had intended the coffee for her, but she didn’t ask.
Instead, she asked, “Do you know if the standard environmental systems around here can be programmed to shut off at a specific time?”
He set the coffee down in front of her, as if it was an award for asking him a question. He was still a major pain in her ass, but one she was rather fond of.
“They can be programmed by the owner of any building to change the environmental conditions at specific times,” he said. “I would assume that also means they can be shut off, particularly if the building wasn’t going to be used.”
“It seems scary to me to allow people to do that,” she said.
“Raised in space, were you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. But her parents were. And she suddenly realized that she might have adopted this attitude from them.
“It’s scary in space. I would think that systems couldn’t be tampered with like that in a contained environment. But here, the oxygen levels remain safe even with the environmental controls shut off, and the gravity remains constant. So you can breathe and you’re not in danger of floating away. You might freeze in the winter, but that would take a long time, and you could probably go somewhere else.”
Then he asked, “Hey, Eleni, do you know if it’s easy to shut down environmental controls on a timer or remotely or something like that?”
Of course he asked Eleni. She had the most technical knowledge of anyone in the security office. Bassima opened the lid on the coffee. It smelled bitter and sweet at the same time. It had the right amount of cream, which would have unnerved her if she didn’t already know that the restaurant kept her usual order on file.
“You have to be listed on the control panel,” Eleni said. Bassima couldn’t see her, but she’d recognize that nasal voice anywhere. “It’s hard to get listed most places unless you own the building. And being listed only lets you program. You can’t control any environmental systems remotely. Too easy to tamper with them that way.”
“Thanks,” Wuhan said, and rocked his chair forward. “See why it’s nice to work in the morning?”
Bassima was halfway through the omelet. She was hungrier than she even realized.
“So, what’s the concern with environmental systems?” he asked.
Bassima shook her head. “Just information to give Hranek.” She picked up her coffee and tilted it at Wuhan as if offering a toast. “I appreciate this.”
He smiled, nodded as if recognizing the dismissal, and then stood.
“My pleasure,” he said, and walked back to his desk.
She watched him until she couldn’t see him around the screens. He was probably trying to make her feel guilty for not sharing the case, but she didn’t feel guilty. Hranek had asked her to deal with the footage and she had.
She only had one other thing to determine: where the car was now. She asked the system to find it for her.
; It took only a few seconds.
An image came up on half a dozen screens of the car, parked in its usual place at the sector base.
Bassima hadn’t expected that. She expected to find the car parked somewhere near the Falls or maybe not even on any grid at all.
And there it was. As if the morning were an average day.
She shoveled the last of the omelet in her mouth, put the screens down, shut off the programs, and grabbed her coffee. She had to tell Hranek this.
Together they would decide what the next steps would be.
Bassima wanted Hranek involved because he could work with sector base security so much better than the Sandoveil Security Office could. He was the death investigator for both, and if she went with him, it would require no documentation, no filing of intent for a joint investigation—nothing like that.
Only smooth movement forward.
Movement that might answer some of the questions she was developing even as she threaded her way through the desks, nodding at her colleagues’ greetings.
How did that car get to the sector base? Did that mean whoever drove it had access to the base? Why would someone kill Glida? Why would Glida kill Taji?
Bassima let herself out the main door and blinked at the morning sunlight. It refreshed her aching eyes.
But she no longer felt tired. Tired was for other people. She felt invigorated by the questions and the discoveries.
She headed for the death investigator’s office, feeling like a solution might be around the corner for both of them.
FORTY
OF COURSE, NOTHING was easy. Why would it be easy? Bristol leaned against one of the consoles.
Sheldenhelm and Pereyra had determined that the runabout did not end up in orbit around Nindowne. In fact, there was no trace of the runabout anywhere in the solar system—at least, anywhere the sector base’s systems could measure.
Bristol suspected that the Ijo might be able to gather more information. She had tried to contact Captain Virji, only to learn that Virji had gone into a meeting with the head of security.
For a moment, Bristol had felt left out. She should have been in that meeting. But then she realized how glad she was to be excluded. She needed to work here. It was much more important.
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