Android: Rebel (The Identity Trilogy)

by Mel Odom

  “It looks as though Mara Blake was looking out for the people who helped her design the neural channeling techniques she invented.”

  “Yes,” Floyd replied. “She appears to be quite generous. However, as you can see, there is no mention of John Rath.”

  I searched the list again with the same results.

  Floyd focused on me. “You said that Simon Blake was killed by chimera mercenaries.”

  “A rogue group, yes.”

  “Who deemed those people as rogue?”

  I considered that for a moment. “I did.”

  “Because, based on your point of view—which was Simon Blake’s point of view at the time—those people could only have been rogue.”

  “Yes.”

  “I propose that you turn around Simon Blake’s recollection of those events. Cast him in the role of the rogue.”

  I did, and I didn’t like where my thoughts led me.

  “It could well have been that Simon Blake betrayed John Rath. That betrayal could well be what got him killed.”

  “Because Mara Blake rescinded her agreement toward Rath’s fifteen percent of MirrorMorph’s stocks?”

  “That would provide motive to kill Simon Blake at the time. If Rath was cheated of those stocks, the mercenaries he was working with would have likewise been cheated.”

  “Perhaps Mara awarded those shares to Rath under another name.” Although I was not programmed to be stubborn, tenaciousness was recognized as a valuable skill set for a detective to possess. Becoming tenacious in this case was easy. I liked Simon Blake and did not think him capable of treacherous subterfuge.

  “Seeing Simon Blake as the good guy in all of this is a little narcissistic, don’t you think?” Shelly raised a challenging eyebrow at me.

  I did not deign to reply.

  Floyd elevated the holo of MirrorMorph’s financials. “I do not find a fifteen percent share anywhere in these files.”

  “Rath could have wanted the portion broken up, listed under a combination of names to protect himself. He always covered his tracks.” I studied the breakdown, doing the math in split seconds. “Here, here, here, and here.” I touched the financials, highlighting the four names I’d found in a soft yellow glow. “These shares add up to fifteen percent. What can you tell me about those names?”

  For a moment, Floyd held still and I knew he was accessing files at the NAPD. Then he began speaking. “Sabrina Knight, forty-four, investments counselor at Red Gull Investments. She owns and operates a small firm here in New Angeles.”

  “Look at her portfolio. Where are her interests?”

  “She’s diversified, has holdings on Earth, the Moon, and Mars.”

  “Any ties to Rath?”

  “None that I see.” Floyd paused. The holo projecting from his palm flickered. “Wait a moment. One of the holding companies she has access to through other proxies is owned by Friedrich Garry Investments, an underwriter for the chimera mercenary group.”

  “Rath’s mercenary group was underwritten by outside corps?” That was unexpected. According to Simon Blake’s memories, the mercenary group was financially stable. No one owned them.

  “Friedrich Garry Investments didn’t own the chimera group. They were a clearing house for corp cred that Rath used to fund his operations. Give me a moment.”

  Trapped outside the NAPD files, I could only watch and wait as Floyd sorted through massive databanks. As he provided names and links, I chased them through media sources myself, but I knew the information I had access to was less than what he had. I also knew that even with the NAPD resources at his disposal, Floyd was limited on what he could discover. Corps and intelligent men had ways of hiding things they did not want known.

  A few moments later, Floyd produced another holo, this one of the four names I had indicated he should search. I downloaded the file and searched through it. Floyd had done a good job. Following the digital trail he had flagged was simple, though I knew the search had not been.

  “It is done.” Floyd studied the same document. “All of those people eventually track back to Friedrich Garry Investments, and all of them reflect the fifteen percent MirrorMorph, Inc. is paying to the chimera group.”

  I looked at the final accounts that the cred ended up in. All of them were owned under an umbrella corporation called SolGenX, a privately held business invested in solar energy development on Mars.

  “Who owns SolGenX?” I didn’t have access to that information on the sources I had available to me.

  “I am still searching for that answer. The identity of that person, or persons, appears to be buried.”

  Identities of corporate owners was often withheld and protected to keep them from becoming victims. Often CEOs were hired to present a public face to encourage investments and product trust. They also became targets. Many times those “CEOs” were smokescreens to draw enemy fire, sacrificial lambs left to be slaughtered by kidnappers and terrorists and opposing corps.

  “This is going to take some time, and our window here is closing. Perhaps you would like to see how the investigation into Jonas Salter’s murder is progressing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me take you to the crime scene.”

  The NAPD bullpen faded around me and I was swept away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It wasn’t really the NAPD virtual crime scene lab, where the events of an investigation were rebuilt and replayed for detectives. I had been inside that several times with Shelly.

  This was a different area in cyberspace that Floyd had prepared for me. We stood in an underground mag-lev utility closet on the Moon. The reproduction of the site was so good that my body automatically recalibrated to the Moon-norm gravity, which caused me problems for a moment while lying in the drawer in Bradbury colony because the input there was different. I made the adjustment and pulled up a secondary set of parameters that I used in the crime scene lab.

  Jonas Salter sprawled across the floor. In the Moon’s micro-gravity, the arterial spray from his slashed carotid arteries had gone much farther than it would have on Mars or on Earth. Blood glistened on the walls, the ceiling, and the floor like it had just been shed. The iron tang of blood registered on my olfactory receptors.

  An uncomfortable feeling passed through me, something that didn’t often happen when I looked upon the dead. Victims registered with me as potential evidence. Their gender, age, and social standing didn’t matter to me other than as markers that would potentially lead to their killers.

  Things had been different with Shelly. I had felt decidedly uncomfortable at her death. My programming had insisted that I put things to rights to return her to the world. I knew that was not possible, yet the feeling remained.

  I felt an echo of that now, but I recognized it was not any attachment on my part to Jonas Salter that vibrated through me. That feeling came from that piece of me that was Simon Blake. Simon had, for a time, been close to this man.

  Another man, beefy and broad with greying brown hair, brown eyes, and a thick jawline, stood in the utility closet with us. He wore a suit and regarded me with a flat gaze. I recognized Sergeant Louis Blaine at once.

  “Hello, Drake.” His deep voice echoed inside the utility closet.

  “Hello, Detective Blaine.” He offered his hand and I cautiously took it, expecting to feel a trapper utility program snap around my online presence so I could be traced and dampened so I couldn’t return to my physical body.

  “Louis is fine.” Blaine released my hand and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Floyd. “I tripped across Floyd and invited myself in to the murder investigation of this guy after I found out we were both looking at the same thing.” He nudged Jonas Salter’s virtual body with a scuffed shoe.

  “My apologies,” Floyd said. “I should have warned you. Detective Blaine and I have been collaborating in this matter.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Blaine knew the question was more for him than for Floyd. “I owe you one for
the Cartman Dawes investigation. You got me out of that warehouse alive.”

  That was true. If not for me, Blaine would have died.

  “Plus, I don’t like how the frame against you fits. There was nothing between you and this guy.” Blaine returned his attention to the dead body. “If you were going to snap and flatline somebody, you would kill a cop.”

  “I would never—”

  Blaine held up a big hand. “I’m not saying you would. I’m just pointing out that you’re around cops more than you are anyone else. I’ve never seen a murder yet that didn’t have some kind of trigger. You would kill a cop. I’ve been tempted a time or two myself.” He favored me with a big-toothed grin. “But this? This doesn’t sound like you at all.”

  “Thank you.”

  Blaine’s presence there bothered me because, according to him, he had conspired with Simon Blake to interfere with the murder investigation of Rachel Giacomin, who had worked with Mara Blake at one point. She had also supposedly been Simon’s lover, and she had tried to kill Simon before she had turned up dead.

  Blaine had framed Dwight Taylor for Giacomin’s death. Taylor had later turned out to be an ex-mercenary who had worked for John Rath. He’d also been one of the men who had tried to save Simon Blake after Simon had been ambushed in a hopper. For a moment I was in that underground garage holding Taylor as he lay dying, shot by other chimera mercenaries while trying to elude me. He’d stared at me, blood tricking from the corner of his mouth. “You’re dead. I saw you die.”

  I hadn’t known what he had meant then, but I did later when I realized my neural channeling had come from Simon Blake. My face had started to reform then, and I was taking on Simon’s features.

  So who was Dwight Taylor? A murderer? Or a man who had tried to save the life of Simon Blake?

  There were no easy answers to any of this. Not even Jonas Salter was who he said he was. When I had first met him as Drake, he had been living as Dylan Templeton, the designer of one of the most popular fantasy online games on the Net. It hadn’t been until later that I had recalled he had worked with Mara and Simon on the neural channeling designs.

  There were too many faces involved, and so many names. Keeping them straight was hard work. But I knew that all I had to do was work my way back to the person who had set everything into place. I focused on that.

  “Drake?” Blaine stared at me expectantly.

  I realized then that he had asked me a question. “I’m sorry. I was being inattentive.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  “I think perhaps the lag time is causing problems.” That was a fabrication, but I was allowed to tell those to people who were innocent if no one was hurt.

  Blaine grunted and nodded. “As I was saying, the crime scene techs turned up evidence of you being on the scene.” He pointed and two patches of blue liquid highlighted.

  One of the patches was on Salter’s left shoulder, the other was partially obscured by his body.

  “This is your cooling system fluid. Serology identified it as yours from the radioactive markers it contained.”

  All bioroids had radioactive markers in their cooling system. The radioactive markers were an anti-theft precaution, but they worked admirably well in crime scene identification as well.

  “The techs matched it against samples kept on file at the NAPD.”

  “I didn’t know such files were kept.”

  “They are.” Blaine shifted his attention back to me. “If you didn’t know the NAPD kept those files, that means you didn’t donate them.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then there’s only one place the NAPD could have gotten them. Haas-Bioroid.”

  I acknowledged that with a nod, and I considered the ramifications of that. Having me identified as a killer bioroid wouldn’t be beneficial to Haas-Bioroid.

  Or would it?

  I accessed a datastream and checked the stock quotes. Haas-Bioroid stock was currently on the rise in spite of the charges that had been levied against me. The accusation against me had lifted their public profile again. In fact, rumors that Haas-Bioroid had created killer bioroids was on the rise again.

  That urban myth had been around since the first higher-functioning bioroid had walked out of the corporation and taken its place in society. In all the years that bioroids had been operational, there had never been a single incident of the murder of a human by a bioroid.

  The fact that I was wanted for murder was proof that the idea would not go away.

  “Have you matched your radioactive markers against your cooling fluid?” Blaine asked.

  “No. That had not occurred to me.” Nor had I possessed any equipment to do such a comparison while onboard Khloe. “The markers found at the crime scene match what Haas-Bioroid has on file?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re your markers, Drake.” Blaine ran a hand over his stubbled jaw. “The file that Haas-Bioroid has could have been switched by someone working in-house, or samples of your markers could have been stolen from Haas-Bioroid and planted at the murder scene.”

  “There’s nothing to indicate either of those scenarios was acted on,” I replied.

  “You didn’t kill this man, Drake.” Shelly suddenly stood in the utility closet with us. “That’s proof enough that one of those things happened.”

  Blaine’s eyes widened in surprise and the pulse in his carotid artery jumped. “Nolan?”

  “Hello, Blaine.” Shelly stood at my side.

  Blaine shifted his attention to Floyd. “What is this?”

  “Apparently Drake has created an alternative persona within his system,” Floyd answered.

  Blaine shook his head. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Neither have I. But as you can see, she is here.”

  “Drake was framed,” Shelly stated. “If you’re going to be involved in this, you need to accept that and move on.” As usual at a crime scene, Shelly had a no-nonsense attitude. Although Blaine was senior to her in experience, she didn’t bow to that. “Floyd said there was other evidence to suggest you had a lead on Jonas Salter’s murderer.”

  “Yeah.” Blaine walked over to the west wall. “Part of the security makeup on the underground is heat sensors. They log changes in ambient heat. Construction teams use them to find hairline fractures in the tube tunnels. All the vibrations through the underground causes problems every now and again.” He tapped a small device no bigger than his thumb and vaguely ovoid that was mounted on the wall. “This closet has a heat sensor. Not all of them do. They’re sensitive enough to register changes in body heat.”

  I understood what Blaine was getting at immediately. “The human body’s average ambient temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The ambient temperature in tube tunnels is 68 degrees. You can tell when Salter’s body was brought into this place by how long it took him to reach the temperature he was at when he was found.”

  Blaine smiled and touched his nose. “Bingo. After Floyd brought me into his confidence, I started poking around. I did some background fact-finding on the Mujeeb Heat Sensor. This one’s high quality. They’re made in Bangladesh and are about the best on the market.”

  Shelly folded her arms. “Get to it, Blaine. We don’t have time for the full puppet show.”

  Blaine grimaced irritably. “Wow, you’ve got her cold, don’t you, Drake?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “The thing is, I considered this sensor because I had another case where a Mujeeb helped me pinpoint the time of death on a victim. The vic had been shot and left for dead, but didn’t actually die right away. One of the vic’s friends found her and left her to die, and the sec door recorded the first visit and the second hours later, when that person said he’d found my vic dead. If she’d received medical treatment, she would have lived. Based on the info I pulled from the Mujeeb, I made a second-degree murder case against the friend and an attempted murder case against the shooter. Took two bad people off the street
in one case.”

  I wasn’t familiar with the case, but I made a note to look it up.

  “What I did here is some high-end math,” Blaine continued. “Given the space in this room and the heat signature that showed up, I calculated the amount of flesh and blood that would have had to come into this place to cause the heat spike that showed in the records.” He grinned. “That calculation told me that either a 213 kilo man entered this room, or Jonas Salter had company when he got dropped off.” He punched an area above Salter’s corpse.

  A window appeared and showed the legend of the medical examiner’s office.

  “When the medical examiner’s people picked up the body, Jonas Salter massed out at 95 kilos, plus a little more for the liquid volume he lost.” Blaine looked at me. “That leaves 118 kilos unaccounted for. You mass out at more than that, and your ambient temperature runs several degrees lower than that.”

  “Except for my hands and my face.” Since I worked with the public, those areas were programmed to heat up to 98.6 Fahrenheit. For those times when the human touch was needed.

  “Yeah, I factored that in too. That amount is negligible. The bottom line is that someone else—someone human—was inside this utility closet with Salter.”

  “Have you told anyone about this?” Shelly asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Blaine faced her and squared up. “Think about it, Detective. I’ve got a theory. Having another human in this room doesn’t take Drake out of the picture. The case could be made, and given how tight this frame job is, I’m guessing that it would be made that there might simply be another body the NAPD hasn’t turned up yet. Or that Drake had an accomplice. Until I can put someone inside this room, irrefutably, I can’t go anywhere with this. Doors will shut down. Files will be lost. I’m not exactly a sterling representative of the NAPD these days.”

  I knew Blaine was right. Shelly knew it too. I saw her frustrated frown. I turned back to Blaine. “Thank you for your efforts.”