by Mel Odom
“Meaning the killer was biologically related to her.”
“Yes.”
“Do we know the son’s DNA?”
“No. He’s not in the system. He’s never been arrested.”
Hansen smiled. “That’s about to change.”
“You might be able to have the DA file a writ to get a sample of Gino Salvi’s DNA from his organ bank donation. His mother set it up when he was born.”
“I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow.”
“You’re going to wait?”
Hansen shrugged. “It’s seventeen hundred. No way am I going to try to get someone in the DA’s office to find a judge and sign off on a writ this evening. I’ll get it in the morning and go from there.” He smiled. “I don’t care what other people say about you, Drake. You’re a good detective in my book.”
But he didn’t want to partner up with me. I knew that from the discussions I’d heard about from Craig Dormoth. A few of the other detectives had gone out of their way to let me know that not even Hansen, who no one wanted to partner with, wanted me as his partner.
He promised to keep me in the loop, then blanked the connection.
I gathered my coat and closed down my files. I had an appointment with Eugenia Warren that I intended to keep.
Chapter Fourteen
I got out of the hopper cab on top of the Warren’s apartment building and walked to the rooftop access where a pair of sec guards challenged me from an armored post. I flashed my police ID and told them I was there by appointment to see Mrs. Warren.
After a brief dialogue with the woman, they allowed me to proceed. I took the elevator down, still with a sec guard, and got out on the sixty-fifth floor, where Eugenia Warren lived with her family.
I identified myself at the door and waited. Eugenia opened the door, registered some surprise at what I was, then caught herself and invited me in.
She looked a lot like her brother—tall and blond—only her hair dropped to her shoulders, and she looked like an office professional with her modest makeup and sensible dress.
“I apologize, Mrs. Warren. I should have explained about myself. At the time I didn’t think about it.” That was a blatant lie. I could lie when I was on a case. That was part of my programming. If police only told the truth, they’d never get anything done. I’d known she might reject a bioroid investigator, and although I couldn’t tell her I was a human—there were laws and subroutines in place that would block that particular lie—her lack of asking or viewing me on her PAD originally did not preclude the fact that she could have found out I was a bioroid earlier, if she’d wanted to know.
“Nonsense. You’re working on clearing my brother’s name. That’s all that matters.”
“Thank you.”
“And please, call me Eugenia.”
“Of course.”
Her husband and her children were, respectively, in the home office and in their rooms. She introduced me to them briefly. Her husband regarded me with some distaste and only gave lip service to a greeting. Evidently, he wasn’t as concerned about his brother-in-law as his wife was.
The children were self-involved, both deeply enmeshed in 3D social networking sites. The boy was obviously deep into some VR RPG located on another world, and the girl was touring vacation spots with her friends.
Eugenia sat me on the couch in their small living room and brought out her PAD. She brought up the Net and accessed the storage corp she used for her personal files.
She showed me several pictures of her and her brother as children. I made appropriate noises and occasional notes to keep her interest whetted in showing me the pictures, but I wanted to see the military pictures and vids most of all.
She pulled that file to her PAD and opened it. “Be prepared, Detective. Like I said, Brock loved his time in the Army.”
*
For the next hour and a half, we cycled through those pictures. During his tours of duty, Brock Thurman had served in a lot of hot spots around the world. He’d been in the Middle East, Africa, and South America, and he’d fought terrorists, drug lords, and human traffickers. His efforts and the blood he’d shed—he’d been seriously wounded four times—were to no avail in some respects, because all of those things were still going on.
Shelly had told me that our own efforts to stop crime were doomed because crime was a business that would continue. All we could do was slow it down. I wondered if that was what Brock Thurman had believed, that he could slow down the disenfranchised state of smaller nations without benefit of corporate protection.
I wondered if maybe his frustration with his inability to make a lasting difference had been what turned him from soldier to whatever he’d been in the end.
I studied Thurman’s uniform, and lack of uniform, in the combat situations he’d sent pictures of to Eugenia. “Your brother was in Special Forces.”
“Yes, he loved serving with those guys.” She smiled wistfully, and I knew she was remembering the young man in the pictures and vids, not the man Shelly had killed in the L’Engle Hotel.
“Why did he like Special Forces?”
She considered that for a moment. “He always said he appreciated knowing he had a chance to make a difference.”
“Did he feel like he made a difference?”
“In the beginning, he did. But later?” She shook her head. “I think Brock just simply saw too many things after awhile.”
I kept flipping through the pictures, finally reaching the ones that had been taken on Mars. Brock Thurman had changed. He was no longer the bright-eyed hero. His blue eyes were haunted and his carriage was more wary.
“Brock was involved in the war on Mars?”
“For two years, during the hardest part of the ground fighting.” Eugenia wrapped her arms around herself. “He told me once, during leave when he got to come home after a serious injury, that he lost a lot of friends over there. He said he didn’t know what he was fighting for anymore.”
“That happens to soldiers sometimes.” I said that before I knew I was going to.
Eugenia gave me a wan smile. “You sound like you’ve been there.”
I shook my head. “No. But I’ve talked to a lot of veterans during my investigations with the NAPD.” I didn’t tell her that a lot of them were homeless, or men who had become bounty hunters or leg breakers for various criminal enterprises.
One of the pictures of Thurman on Mars caught my attention. I poked my fingers into the 3D projection streaming from her PAD. Pushing my fingers apart, I magnified the image and looked more closely at Thurman’s arm.
It was a tattoo, and it was exactly where the subcutaneous scarring had been on Thurman’s corpse. The tattoo on Thurman’s arm was of a fantastic creature that had the body of a lion, the head of a goat jutting up from its back, and a tail that was a snake with distended jaws.
I indicated the tattoo. “Do you know what that is?”
Eugenia looked at the image for only a moment. “It’s a chimera—a creature from Greek mythology.”
“Yes, its father was supposed to be Typhon and its mother Echidna.” I didn’t belabor the point, but I further knew that Typhon was supposed to be the father of all monsters and the final son of Gaia, fathered by Tartarus. Echidna, his wife, was the mother of all monsters, a half-woman, half-snake being. Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra, whom Hercules slew, were the Chimera’s siblings.
I knew all that, but I didn’t know what the image was doing on Thurman’s arm. I also wondered if somehow I had intuited what that image was from the scarring I’d seen on the dead man’s arm. Something had clued me in to Claudine Salvi being a chimera twin.
“Do you know why your brother wore that tattoo?”
“My son asked him about it once. Brock said it was just a symbol of the unit he was with, something they’d all gotten to mark them as a group.”
I continued cycling through her pictures, but I also pulled up pictures of other men that wore the chimera tattoo. Eugenia k
new only one of them somewhat.
“These are all people Brock served with. The ‘unit.’ That was how he referred to them—like they were all one thing.” Eugenia touched the image of one of the men.
He was tall and fierce, with bronzed skin, black hair, and arctic grey eyes. He appeared to be in his late thirties. An old scar trailed across his right cheek almost to his ear. He hadn’t chosen to have the wound completely eradicated by laser surgery, and I knew that was a choice. I wondered at the kind of man that would wear such a scar. I had the odd impression that it was a message to the world, but I didn’t know what that message was.
“This was the unit leader. His name was John or Sean or Don. Something like that.”
I studied the face and thought the man looked vaguely familiar, like I had seen him somewhere before, I just couldn’t remember where. It was the same odd sensation I’d had with Cartman Dawes.
“Your brother never wrote to you about these men?”
Eugenia shook her head. “No. There were only occasional stories—generally when Brock had too much to drink.” She sighed. “His memories of the wars he’d been through troubled him, Detective Drake. Even though he came back to me every now and again, his mind wasn’t far from those struggles.”
“Did he ever mention Cartman Dawes?”
“Not to my recollection, no.”
“And you have no idea what your brother was doing in the city?”
She shook her head wearily. “Until I was contacted by the police and told that Brock had been killed, I hadn’t even known he was in the city.”
“Had he come into the city without your knowledge before?”
“If he did, I didn’t know about it.” She gazed wistfully at her brother’s pictures. “We got separated after he went into the military. When he came home, even after the first time, he just wasn’t the boy I remembered.”
I asked her if I could make copies of the pictures and vids, then did so when I had her permission. I thanked her for her time and took my leave.
*
Up on the rooftop, while I waited for a hopper cab, I uploaded the images of Brock Thurman’s unit to the databank and ran facial recognition on them.
The military kept a tight lock on their files, and they weren’t inclined to share their information with outsiders. Part of that was because they didn’t want their soldiers vulnerable to outside predations, and part of that was because so many soldiers went to work in the private sector. Information about a soldier could lead to information about a corp’s sec team. The corps didn’t want that information out there. Since the military worked with many of the corps and were often funded by them as well, the military listened to the corps.
I only got a hit on one of the men, and him only because he’d been killed on Mars six years ago. His name was Vance Haywood. He’d been a lieutenant in the U. S. Army till he’d turned mercenary. Once he’d gone into private sec, he’d turned into a ghost. His digital trail vanished for seven years, until he turned up dead six years ago.
Haywood’s death wasn’t a matter of public record. His body had been turned in at the Bradbury Colony on Mars. Family hadn’t been interested in shipping his ashes back home. They’d been scattered through space in a military burial. All that remained of the man was a spotty service record that had been expunged of sensitive information and a few pictures Eugenia had received from her brother.
While I stood waiting for the taxi, thinking that perhaps it was time to check out a hopper from the NAPD since I was no longer partnered and seemed to be working independently, I got a comm ping. The connection was a public PAD at the L’Engle Hotel.
That was curious.
“Detective Drake.”
“Hello, Detective Drake. I am Jonathan.”
I could tell by the near mechanically perfect pitch of the voice that I was talking to a low-end bioroid. That kind of voice came standard on service bioroids.
“I don’t know you.”
“No. I am sorry. You were not given enough information. I am Jonathan 8PR6NI.”
I pulled up Jonathan’s information through public property records. Bioroids were kept in their own database and were not afforded the same privacy as humans.
Jonathan 8PR6NI’s specialty was cleaning. He could operate floor cleaners, waxers, and paint equipment, and he knew some rudimentary carpentry to make small repairs. He had also been tasked with a subroutine software package that enabled him to repair small machinery, replace windows, and make limited electrical maintenance. He was currently scheduled for an upgrade that would include restaurant equipment.
Purchasing upgrade packages was cheaper than buying more bioroids, and bioroids could work twenty-four hours a day.
At present, Jonathan was under lease to the L’Engle Hotel and had been there for four years. I found that intriguing.
“Yes, Jonathan. I am now in possession of your Haas-Bioroid property records. How may I help you?”
“I do not need any help.”
“Then why did you call me?”
“I am unsettled.”
“What is unsettling you?”
“The recent death of the guest known as Cartman Dawes.”
I searched the darkening sky for the hopper taxi. “I am aware of Dawes’s death.”
“I know. I saw you the night you and your partner arrived at the hotel.”
The problem with low-end bioroids was that they tended to dwell on their function and had to be led into conversations. They were designed to be less intuitive. In the past, more intuitive bioroids had became distracted in their jobs: they had changed parameters of tasks, or elected not to do them because the performance of those tasks didn’t seem important. Many businesses and corporations preferred simple employees that couldn’t do subjective thinking.
I was curious as to what would trigger a bioroid on that operating level to contact me.
“What troubles you about the death?”
“I am concerned that it might happen again. I understand that Dawes cannot be killed more than once, but I am afraid that someone else will be killed.”
“Who?”
“That I do not know, and that troubles me further.”
“Perhaps we could meet and discuss this.”
“I would like that. I am troubled.”
“When can I meet you?”
“Are you free now?”
“I am, but I cannot leave the hotel.”
“I’ll come to you in only a few minutes.” I waved to the hopper taxi now in a holding pattern above the apartment building.
“Thank you.”
I blanked the connection and walked toward the descending hopper. When I got in the back, the driver gave me a second look and I knew he was about to protest about taking a bioroid fare. I produced my police ID and he turned back around without complaint, asking me where I wanted to go.
I told him, then sat back in the seat as we hopped.
Chapter Fifteen
“Welcome to the L’Engle Hotel, a most elegant place to stay while in New Angeles.” Jonathan met me at the entrance. He stood beside the liveried bioroid doorman. “Please, let us know if at any time we may make your stay more pleasant.”
The doorman never missed a beat, and repeated the same information as if Jonathan hadn’t said anything.
Jonathan was a simple construct. His human features were generic and bland. Instead of synthskin hands as I had, he had hands that could be removed and replaced with other hands that were tools. He wore a leather smock over his L’Engle Hotel coverall and extra hands in the shape of power tools hung from his belt.
“Hello, Jonathan. Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“Of course.”
Jonathan stood there and the doorman watched us with bland attentiveness.
“Was there a task you were performing before I arrived?” I didn’t want to stand out front where we would draw attention.
“I am repairing one of the grills in the kitchen.”
“Of course. Multitasking is much better.” He turned and walked back into the hotel.
I followed.
*
The kitchen bustled with activity as we passed through. I recognized many of the stations from cooking channels that I had seen on 3D. Shelly had always been looking for new recipes to try out for her family. She hadn’t had time to watch the vidcasts, but she’d talked about them. So I had watched them and written a small program that would help me find the ones most suited to the things she liked to cook, the time she had allowed for meal preparation, and the availability, as well as the perishability, of ingredients.
She’d once told me that I had taught her things that her mother and the courses she had taken had not. My success ratio in finding meals that her family enjoyed had risen significantly over the past year. I was currently at eighty-two percent.
I would never be able to improve that ratio.
Jonathan took me to a back room where a grill sat in pieces on the floor. He removed one of his fingered hands and attached one that looked like a power drill. The device ran off the same internal battery that powered Jonathan. He shifted pieces and made replacements from nearby boxes while we spoke.
I stood against the wall where I could watch the door. I didn’t want anyone listening to our conversation. “What troubles you about the Dawes murder?”
“I think it might happen again.”
“Why?”
“Because I overhead part of our guest’s conversation with a visitor while he was here. I did not mean to. I would never pry.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.” That would go against his programming.
Jonathan paused in his labor and the high-pitched drill stilled for a moment as he looked at me oddly.
I realized then that I had treated him like a human, reassuring him instead of merely taking him on face value. That had crept into my programming from prolonged dealings with humans and human subtext, which was not as easy to read as software design in a bioroid or computer.
