by Mel Odom
Chapter Six
Excitement filled Shelly. Her pupils widened. Her nostrils flared. Her respiration deepened. The pulse at the hollow of her throat picked up speed. I logged all those things because I watched over her.
“Do you know where the killers are?”
“Perhaps. They disguised themselves as ductwork cleaners.” I quickly filled her in on what I’d discovered. By that time, we were in motion, striding through the door.
Toomis and Carter started to follow us.
Shelly held up a hand and shot a quick look at them. “Stay.”
Both sec guards turned and looked at Latimer. Latimer hesitated a moment, then nodded. Scowling and muttering curses, both men remained in their positions.
Shelly turned her attention back to me. “Where are they?”
“My guess would be the ductwork. May I lead?”
Shelly nodded.
I stepped ahead of her and led the way to the maintenance room in the middle of the floor to one side of the elevators. The door was locked, but I pulsed an override sequence through the chip in my hand and the lock popped open.
The room was dark and smelled sharply of bleach, soaps, and deodorizers. Shelly coughed for a moment, then started breathing shallowly. She had a touch of asthma and strong chemical smells sometimes set it off.
“I think they’d hoped to be out of the building in the next three hours before the body was discovered.” I closed and locked the door behind us, giving it a new combination, then turned on a light and searched the room.
Wire racks packed with supplies filled most of the room. Fat, disc-shaped sweeping and mopping robots occupied shelves on a wall. Cases of light tubes sat on another shelf, sharing space with other small items that would occasionally need replacing in a room.
“They’re scheduled to be here another three hours?”
I located a duct panel on the ceiling and stretched up to hook my fingers in it. “Yes. The service time is always pre-set.”
“Leaving early would send up red flags. Their e-cards would have to be scanned.”
“Exactly.” I peered up into the darkness filling the duct. The opening was easily large enough to allow Shelly and me passage. “They hadn’t counted on the holodisc failing out.”
Shelly nodded. “We got lucky.”
Luck was just a matter of probability. The probability of the holodisc failing out was, admittedly, low, but it did happen.
“What about the elevator shafts?” Shelly’s mind worked quickly to explore variables and angles. She was a very good strategist, and she had a tendency to think outside the box, which broadened my own interpretation of probabilities related to a case.
“The L’Engle has seccams in the elevator shafts.”
“So, the only blind spot in the hotel is the ductwork?”
“Not the only blind spot, but I believe it is the most likely place for the men to hide. With a full police investigation going on, they know they aren’t going to be able to walk out of here without being scanned at the door.”
“But at the service entrance, they’re just going to have their corp e-cards scanned.”
“Yes.”
Shelly took a deep breath and let it out. “Good catch, partner.”
“The determination was merely a process of elimination.”
“Maybe. But I don’t know anyone else’s partner that would have made the connection so quickly.” Shelly clapped me on the shoulder. Then, she frowned at the opening. “I have told you how much I hate small, dark places, right?”
“Every time we encounter one.” I caught hold of the duct lip and pulled myself up. Once I was inside, I reached back down for Shelly. Cursing, she leaped up and caught my hand, and I hauled her into the duct with me.
*
The duct measured 1.2 meters in height and 1.2 meters in width. There wasn’t enough room to stand straight. Shelly followed me unhappily. In addition to not liking enclosed spaces, she also hated not being able to see. She’d decided not to use a light and to depend on my enhanced vision capabilities because a light would have given us away.
Dispatch rang my PAD and I automatically linked Shelly. “Detective Drake.”
“I have Patrol Unit 2246 on-line for you, Detective. They are at the location you requested them to investigate.”
“Patch them through.”
“Detective Drake?” The voice was that of a young woman.
I pulled up her info from the NAPD out of habit, identifying her by her voice records. She was Patrolwoman Chelsea Vance, relatively new to the NAPD.
“Yes, Patrolwoman Vance.”
“We’re at the twenty and we found all three of your Quality ductwork guys.”
“I see.” Her voice was tight, edgy, and I knew immediately that the news wouldn’t be good.
“They’re all dead. Looks like an execution in here. Somebody put them on their knees and shot them each through the head.”
“Thank you, Patrolwoman. Please secure the scene for Detective Nolan and myself. We’ll file for ownership of the scene. You’re the first responder?”
“Yes, sir. Do you know when you’ll be here?”
Patrolmen weren’t happy about finding bodies. As first responder, they had to stay at the scene, take the names of everyone present—whoever might arrive and any that might leave—and keep the crime scene secure until relieved of that duty. That meant they didn’t know when they got to go home, and the end of a shift didn’t matter.
“Not at this moment. As soon as I have an estimate of that time, I shall apprise you.” Her service record showed that she had handled a crime scene as a first responder twice before. I sent an email to her sergeant to let him know he had a new officer at a crime scene. I couldn’t jump chain of command to get him there, but from Sergeant Singer’s record, he was a man that would take an interest in his people.
“Great.” Vance didn’t sound like she was happy about the situation, so I assumed she was being sarcastic. I could understand sarcasm, but I found it impossible to emulate.
“Thank you for your efforts, Patrolwoman Vance.”
I was talking to dead air. She was already gone.
“So the guys we’re after killed the cleaning crew first and stole their identities.” Shelly sounded hopeful. “That gives us two crime scenes, two places to catch them. They can’t cover everything they’ve done. I like the odds.”
“Yes.”
“This also means these guys are good at what they do. They’re in possession of a lot of hard-to-get information. I don’t think Dawes’s little vacation at the L’Engle was something he planned.”
“Why?” I kept going forward. I’d downloaded the ductwork schematic from the hotel records and carried a map of the routes in my mind.
“Dawes is a CEO. A business type. He’d have been here for business or pleasure. He didn’t have any guests that we know of, either for business or pleasure. So that means he was here for one reason only.”
I considered that, paring down the options. “He was running, as you thought in the beginning.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know who he was running from.”
“These three men.”
Shelly shook her head. “No, the guys who killed Dawes were professional assassins. Someone told them Dawes was here. Either they were also told how to get into the hotel through the ductwork service or they figured it out on their own. They moved quickly and killed just as quickly.” She paused. “We need these guys alive, and we have to hope they know the identity of whoever hired them.”
I held her up at a juncture of passageways.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s a step here.”
“What kind of step?”
I gazed down into the depths. My night vision only penetrated a couple floors into the darkness. According to the schematic I had access to, the duct dropped ninety-nine floors to the central heat and air units in the basement levels below the street.
“Stay here a m
oment.” I stepped across the opening, then reached back for Shelly’s hand to aid her.
“How far down does that go?”
“You don’t want to know.” Once I had her on the other side, we continued on.
“Run a background check on Dawes.”
I didn’t bother to tell her that I already had, and that what I was finding was intriguing.
*
Cartman Eugene Dawes, CEO of IdentiKit, was sixty-three years old and lived primarily in New York City, but had houses and holdings around the world, on the Moon, and a new house on Mars. In the beginning, he had been employed at Parallel Flesh, Inc., one of Jinteki’s early competitors, as a DNA designer.
Once Jinteki started encroaching on PFI’s revenue stream by getting more and more government contracts, Dawes had apparently seen the inevitable hostile takeover coming. He’d gotten out of his contract with PFI and started a cottage industry developing specialized clones. He’d been successful in his endeavors.
As I crawled through the ductwork, I felt certain I had seen the man before, and it wasn’t due to the composite face I’d made earlier. The fact that my software had failed to identify Dawes, a well-known face, from the composite, bothered me a little. The fact that I recognized the face bothered me more, though, because no record of any meeting existed within my memories since I had awakened in Haas-Bioroid seven years ago.
“What kind of legal trouble has Dawes been in?” Shelly kept her voice lowered so it wouldn’t carry.
“He has a few traffic citations, a few fines levied against him for failing to hit contractual deadlines for the government, but nothing criminal.”
“What about industrial spying? Copyright infringement?”
“All of those were civil matters.”
“How many?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“How many went against Dawes?”
“Only five.”
Shelly sounded happy. “Then we already have five suspects. Those settlements are rarely enough to offset the losses most corporations suffer by the time cease and desist orders are issued from the courts.”
“At least five. Sometimes corporations aren’t the only ones hurt by intellectual property theft. Occasionally, corporations assign some percentage of profits to developers or committee heads that oversee a project.”
“You’re an awfully suspicious guy, Drake.”
I heard the smile in her voice and didn’t turn around to confirm its presence. I knew her. “That suspicion is part of my operating parameter.”
“Of course it is. What else has happened to Dawes lately?”
I paused at another intersection, plotted the eventual connections back to Dawes’s hotel suite, and chose a path that would take us to the greatest confluence of those routes for anyone choosing to drop to the lower levels. That had seemed the most advantageous destination.
“There was an incident on Mars four months ago.” I went to the right.
“What happened?”
“IdentiKit was building a cloning branch on the planet.”
“Was?”
“The manufacturing plant was bombed. Funding to rebuild the plant hasn’t been secured.”
“Who destroyed the plant? Terrorists or competitors?”
On Mars, the corporate competition was stiffer and often more violent. The colonies were fragmented and frequently underwritten by specific business interests; economics propelled decision making—as well as bomb placement—rather than politics. Politics only weighed in when a situation or a region was under control. With the terraforming yet to be done on the planet, Mars wasn’t there politically yet, and wouldn’t be for years.
Mars was increasingly political, though. There were several factions on Mars that promoted a laissez-faire approach regarding Earth interference and influence. The idea of free trade came from a seventeenth century French finance minister named Jean-Baptiste Colbert, but I doubted Shelly wanted to know that, so I didn’t tell her.
“Anti-Earth terrorists.” I viewed the 3D inside my head as I traveled through the duct. The fires raged and twisted through the building’s wreckage. A lot of vid had been shot of the destruction, but I couldn’t tell how much of it was enhanced and how much was fabricated. Knowing what I did of the media, at least some of both had been done.
“How many people were killed?”
So many times investigations boiled down to numbers. One death equaled X number of man hours that would be put into the effort to figure out who the killer was. That number was also affected by the social and economic presence of the victim, and whether the public at large had a justified reason to feel threatened by the continued operation of the killer or killers.
“Thirty-seven.”
“Any high-profile targets?”
I ran through the list. “No.”
Shelly’s voice turned sour. “Then in a few months, the dead will be forgotten.” She didn’t like the fact that all investigations weren’t pursued with equal vigor.
I understood the reasoning behind the sliding man hours, though. Unless a victim rated enough merit for continued public interest, people forgot. Along with forgetting about the murdered person, they also forgot leads, conversations, and numerous other things investigators needed to close a case.
I didn’t point that out. Shelly hated it when I did.
A moment later, I reached the confluence of ductwork tunnels. I stopped and studied the maze before me.
“What’s going on?” Shelly closed in behind me. Her breath ghosted across my shoulder and I was suddenly reminded of the woman in the hotel. The memory was disconcerting and splintered my concentration for a moment—something that never happened.
Cartman Dawes’s face floated in front of me. He looked younger and more robust. In my “memory”—which couldn’t be an actual memory—he was angry and spoke in strident tones, though I oddly couldn’t remember the words he was saying.
For a moment, I was lost in my recollections as I searched for when this meeting might have taken place.
Shelly nudged my shoulder. “Drake?”
“Yes?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
I ran a quick diagnostic. “Nothing. I am performing at peak levels. Is there a particular facet of me that concerns you?”
“You’re being quiet.”
“I am often quiet.”
“Not when we’re looking for doers.”
“Doers” is cop slang for perpetrators that are definitely guilty. “I am often quiet when—”
Shelly interrupted me. “No. You’re distracted.”
“I am incapable of distraction.”
“You’re distracted now.”
I’d learned not to argue with her over indefinable subjects. The more esoteric a matter was, the more I merely listened.
“I apologize.”
I had also learned to apologize for things that were beyond my control. Shelly’s husband had taught me that. It was one of the best pieces of advice he had ever given me. He’d told me it would make my partnership with Shelly easier, and it had.
“Don’t apologize. Focus.”
I did. I looked at the ductwork. My infrared vision had picked up a trail that I felt certain the murderers had left.
“There is a trail.” I studied the faintly orange smudges that led through the ducts.
“What trail?”
“The doers were in contact with the carbosteel of the ductwork. Even that brief contact left heat signatures.” As I spoke, some of the orange smudges grew fainter. “We must hurry.” I plunged ahead at greater speed.
Chapter Seven
At the next juncture, the duct intersection had a six-way path. The intersection was a primary maintenance channel, so rungs stood out against the sides of the vertical ductwork.
The orange smudges marked the rungs, but they were fading fast.
“They went up.”
“The hopper pad is that way.” Shelly nudged in against my shoulder
.
I put out a hand to stop her from toppling when she got too close to the edge. In the darkness, she couldn’t see the drop, and her hand reached out over empty space. She pulled back and balanced herself easily enough, but I was there.
“I guess there’s a drop?” Her voice sounded tight.
“Yes.”
“Great.”
I didn’t understand what was great about it. The fact that there were rungs leading below was only common sense. I saw no reason to comment on her assessment and chose not to.
“A long drop?”
“It goes to the bottom.”
She sipped her breath. “I guess the objective here is not to fall.”
“That would be optimum.” The saying was one of hers, and I had learned to use it sometimes when she was tense. I didn’t always use it appropriately.
“I think I liked you better when you didn’t have a sense of humor, Drake.”
I knew she wasn’t serious. But, I also knew I didn’t have a sense of humor. I was not an entertainment bioroid, nor did I have a positive reinforcement subroutine that included humor. I was programmed to put her at ease, but I often felt that programming was substandard when it came to Shelly.
“So let’s go up. And not fall.”
I reached out, caught one of the rungs, and pulled myself into the vertical shaft. Then I reached back, took Shelly’s hand, and guided her onto the rungs. Though she trusted me, I felt resistance in her and moved accordingly.
We went up.
Although Dawes’s room was housed on the top floor of the L’Engle, there was another floor above it. The top floor was reserved as space for emergency fire suppression equipment and water reservoirs. Tall buildings that used a lot of water, like a hotel, required the presence of water reservoirs to increase water pressure. Gravity was the greatest aid in creating a positive water pressure—at least on Earth.
The extra floor also provided an excellent hiding place for three fugitives.
The ductwork opening came to a landing. I eased up, able to see through the darkness with my infrared vision.
When I stepped out into the room, I freed my Synap pistol and flipped the safety off.
