by Jeff Edwards
He pulled something out of the right pocket of his jacket: one of those Japanese kitchen knives like they advertise on the vid, the kind that cut polycarbon and still slice tomatoes.
Tilting the knife back and forth, he watched the light run up and down the blade. Narrow bands of reflected silver strobed across his face.
“I cut Kathy Armstrong’s heart out with this,” he whispered. “Her soul made the most beautiful sound when I set it free.”
I heard a squeak behind me. Ms. Winter’s face was pale, sickly. Her eyes glistened as tears welled up. But she never cried. Her brother’s ghastly recital was tearing her apart, but she never quite let herself cry.
Obviously, she had seen the recording before, so the contents weren’t a surprise, but that couldn’t have done much to deaden the pain.
I took a last drag off the cigarette and stubbed the butt out in an ashtray.
Kathy Armstrong wasn’t the only name that Michael mentioned. Miko Otosaki... Felicia Stevens... Annette Yvonne Laughlin... Charlene Velis... Amy Lynn Crawford... Linda Joan Brazawski... The list continued. All teenage girls, thirteen to fifteen years old. All dead. All butchered by a maniac who carved open the chests of his adolescent victims and ripped out their hearts.
Virginia Mayland... Carmen Rodrigez... Paula Chapel... Jennifer Beth Whitney... Marlene Bayer... Christine Clark... Tracy Lee...
Fourteen girls. Michael Winter described the death of each in grisly detail, complete with dates and addresses. If half his claims were true, he was a one-man slaughterhouse.
When his recitation wound to a close, he sat in front of the camera. His breathing was ragged, his face flushed. “I am finished now,” he whispered. “Not because I fear capture; I do not. You could never catch me. I have seen the bridge. I have crossed the bridge. I have touched the face of God.”
His hand slid into the left pocket of his jacket. “He is calling me now. I can hear him. He is close...”
The left hand reappeared, wrapped around the butt of a large-caliber automatic pistol; it looked like a Glock.
“He is touching me now... I can feel his angels dancing in the spaces between my atoms.” The left hand brought the gun up level with his head, the muzzle touching his scalp just forward of his left temple. “My work is done...” His finger tightened visibly on the trigger. “I am finished...”
The slug slammed his head to the side. A large chunk of the right side of his skull blew off in a cloud of pink mist.
I swallowed a rush of bile as I watched his head come apart. His body fell to the bed, a marionette with its strings cut. The gathering pool of blood showed hardly at all on the dark red sheets. A gobbet of flesh clung to the mirrored wall for a second and then began a leisurely slide toward the floor, trailing a red smear.
The scene remained unchanged for about four more minutes before the chip ran out. The last time code read12:12 a.m./15APR2063.
I pointed the remote at the holo-deck and pressed the off button. The image above the unit vanished as the deck powered down.
I lit another cigarette and drew the smoke deep into my lungs. “Let’s cover the obvious first. Are you certain that the man in the recording is... was your brother?”
A nod. “The police compared DNA structure, dental work, and retinal patterns. The body in that hotel room was definitely Michael.”
“Okay. Do the times, dates and circumstances of his confession agree with the police files?”
Another nod.
I swirled the last of my cold coffee around the bottom of my cup. “Is there any physical evidence, other than the recorded confession, to link your brother to any of the murders?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “When the police found Michael’s body and saw the recording, they closed the case. The files are sealed; I don’t know why.”
“Did Michael have an alibi for any of the crimes?”
“Nothing that would stand up in court.”
I sighed. “Okay, Ms. Winter, I’m confused here. Just what is it that you want me to do?”
Her gaze locked with mine. “Find out the truth. Prove that my brother was innocent. Find the real killer.”
I suddenly understood why all the PI’s thought she was crazy. But, I had promised to hear her out.
“You said you were going to explain,” I said. “I assume that you have some reason for thinking that your brother was innocent.”
“Michael was with me on the eighth of February.”
I searched my memory. “Christine Clark?” Michael Winter had confessed to killing Christine on the afternoon of February eighth.
“Maybe he got the dates mixed up,” I said. “Maybe he did Christine Clark on February ninth, or seventh.”
“Uh-uh, I checked the news sites. They all quote the police as saying that Christine Clark died on the eighth at about 3 p.m. Michael had breakfast in my apartment at about 9 o’clock in the morning, and we spent the day together. He didn’t leave until just before six that evening, when I had an appointment with a client.”
The look in her eye dared me to react to her use of the word client.
I tried to blow a smoke ring. The modified air currents pulled it apart and snatched it into a vent on the ceiling. “Are you sure about your dates? The day you spent with Michael could have been the eighteenth, or the twenty-eighth. Remember, we’re talking six months ago.”
“It was a Saturday,” she said. “I do a lot of business on Saturdays. Mike usually worked Saturdays too. When he called and asked me to spend the day with him, I had to reschedule several appointments. There are notations in my date book. It was most definitely the eighth of February. Harmony remembers it as the eighth too.”
“Harmony?”
“The Artificial Intelligence that runs my apartment.”
“Is Harmony tapped into DataNet? If she is, there should be a time signature stamped over any footage shot by your apartment’s security cameras. Your brother may have an airtight alibi locked up in your AI’s data core. For one of the murders, at least.”
“No good,” she said.
“You’re not on the net?”
“I’m on the net all right, but my apartment doesn’t have any video cameras. My clients tend to be rather jealous of their privacy. All of Harmony’s interior sensors are either infrared or Doppler sonar. Good enough to chase burglars or keep house by, but not good enough for an ID that would stand up in court.”
I sucked a lung full of smoke and put out the cigarette. A crumb of tobacco stuck to the tip of my tongue. I bit the crumb in half with my front teeth and blotted the pieces off the end of my tongue with a finger. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say that your brother was at your apartment during Christine Clark’s murder. He still could have killed one of the others. Or all of them.”
“You’re looking at it from the wrong angle, Mr. Stalin. If my brother confessed, in vivid detail, to one murder that he didn’t commit—maybe he didn’t commit any of them.”
My stomach rumbled. It was starting to forgive me for exposing it to Michael Winter’s suicide. It was starting to think about breakfast.
I stood up and wandered over to one of my favorite pieces, a tall, asymmetrical piece of twisted black grating that I called Broken Concrete by Moonlight. “Why is it so important to clear your brother’s name? Is there an inheritance, or are you just interested in justice with a capitol J?”
She answered from the couch. “I admit that I have an ulterior motive.”
I waited. My stomach growled again.
“Michael was a software engineer,” she said, “a good one. He specialized in high-speed data compression and retrieval. Several of the big companies tried to seduce him into a contract, but he wanted to stay independent. He wasn’t getting rich, but he was living pretty well.
“About four years ago, he started having these fainting spells. I finally convinced him to see a doctor. It turned out to be a brain tumor, and the tests showed that it was malignant. He needed a major operatio
n and he didn’t have nearly enough money. I had a few marks stashed away, but nothing like the kind of cash he needed. A big Eurocorp called Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik ended up fronting Mike the money. He had to indenture himself to them for ten years. He was pretty screwed up physically, and I guess the company execs were afraid that he would die before they got their investment out of him. I had to co-sign his indenture. If Michael died or skipped out, I’d have to work off the remainder of his contract.
That’s the bottom line. If I can prove that Michael was murdered, his life insurance will pay off his indenture. If the official cause of death remains suicide, I end up working off the indenture in GWI’s Leisure Department. Since their girls get paid bottom-scale, it will probably take me about fifteen years.”
I scratched my jaw and thought about trying to crack my neck. “So all I have to do is prove that your brother didn’t commit the fourteen murders that he confessed to, find out who did commit the murders, and figure out how someone murdered Michael while making it look like a suicide. Sounds simple enough.”
I walked toward the kitchen. “You want some breakfast?”
She got up to follow me. “Breakfast? It’s after one o’clock.”
“I had a late night.”
She pulled a small stack of pictures out of her purse and handed it to me.
Most of them were trids, but a few were old two-dimensional photographs. I thumbed through them quickly. “What are these?” I asked.
“Just some pictures of Mike.”
“I already know what your brother looked like, Ms. Winter; I saw the vid.”
“That video is a fake. I don’t know how it was done, or who did it, but my brother did not do those things.” She pointed to the stack of pics. “The real Michael Winter is in there, Mr. Stalin. I just wanted you to know a little bit about him.”
She stood with her arms crossed. The look on her face said she expected me to disagree.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll look at your pictures.”
She exhaled and uncrossed her arms. “Will you take the case?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You will?”
I started rummaging through the kitchen cabinets, looking for my favorite skillet. House knew where it was, but I wasn’t about to ask him.
“I’m retired, Ms. Winter. Your story intrigues me, but I really am out of the business. I promise to give your request honest consideration, but if I decide against taking the case, you’ll have to accept my decision. Agreed?”
She extended her hand. I shook it. Her grip was firm. Her hand was warm, fingers long, nails unpainted. “Agreed.”
CHAPTER 3
The next evening, I left the Zone and rode the westbound Lev to Dome 15, West Hollywood.
Nexus Dreams was a specialty bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, catering to jackers, wannabe’s, and techno-groupies.
The club’s holo-facade was a live video feed of the street outside the front doors, pumped through a processor and rendered in simple polygon graphics. The result was a cartoonish video-mirror of the street scene in which all people and objects within about fifteen meters of the bar appeared as computer icons.
I watched my own icon grow larger as I approached the front of the club. My head appeared as a truncated pyramid, my body as two rectangular boxes (a short one for my pelvis, and a taller one for my trunk) and my arms and legs were jointed cylinders.
I walked past my polygon doppelganger, and into the club. The decor inside was intended to suggest a jacker’s-eye view of the DataNet: matte black floor, walls, and ceiling divided into neat one-meter squares by low intensity florescent blue lasers. The tables and stools were transparent acryliflex, edge-lit in bright primary colors. Slash-rock pounded out of hidden speakers, an abrasive, atonal barrage masquerading as music.
At twenty after nine, the club was packed: a shoulder-to-shoulder swarm of human beings that seemed to writhe and pulsate in time to the arrhythmic beat of the music.
I fought my way to the bar and wedged myself into a narrow opening between a muscle-boy with florescent tattoos on his face and an androgynous albino dressed in black wet-look osmotic-neoprene. The albino’s fingernails were black acrylic, long and pointed like tiny obsidian daggers. His/her features and complexion were flawless testimonials to the possibilities of elective surgery.
When I finally got the bartender’s attention, I tried to order a Cutty on the rocks, and received a blank stare in return. I looked at the neon-colored drinks everyone else was having and decided that a beer was my safest bet.
The beer came in a purple octagonal squeeze-tube with raised Chinese characters on the label. I squirted some into my mouth; it tasted like cold aftershave.
I scanned the room. I was looking for Zeus, a data-jacker who had hung out here once-upon-a-time, back when Stalin and Stalin Investigations had still been a going concern. We’d hired Zeus several times, when our need for computer-skullduggery had overreached Maggie’s talents.
Zeus’s real name was Orville Beckley, a fact that he went to great lengths to conceal. I’d found that out as a result of a bet that Orville had made (and ultimately lost) with Maggie. He’d boasted of having erased every trace of his real name from the net. True to his prediction, Maggie hadn’t been able to catch even a sniff of his birth records in the net. But he hadn’t reckoned with Maggie’s tenacity. She’d gone on to teach him three simple facts:
#1 Hospitals are bureaucracies.
#2 Bureaucracies are paranoid.
#3 Paranoid bureaucrats keep duplicate records of everything... in hardcopy... in file cabinets.
I could still remember the look of stunned disbelief on Zeus’s face when Maggie had whispered the Orville word in his ear, the certain knowledge that his secret was not dead after all. The memory brought me a smile.
I looked around again. As far as I could tell, Zeus wasn’t in the bar, but I did catch sight of a face I recognized. I threaded my way through the crowd until I came to her table. Her handle was Jackal; I didn’t know her real name.
She wore a baggy maroon jumpsuit with a couple of hundred pins and badges stuck to it. I remembered her as thin. Now she looked anorexic.
Her hair was a thick black mop that ended suddenly just above the tops of her ears. It looked as though someone had dropped a bowl on her head and shaved off everything that stuck out. Her eyebrows were shaven as well. As she craned her neck, I saw two, no, three gold alloy data jacks set flush into the back of her head. One jack held a program chip. A thin fiber-optic cable ran from the second jack to a box clipped to her belt. The box was about two-thirds the size of a pack of cigarettes, molded from charcoal gray plastic, covered with flickering LEDs. The third jack was empty.
She looked up at me, a bare glimmer of recognition in her eyes. She knew she had seen me before; she just couldn’t remember where. She reached into the right breast pocket of her jumpsuit and pulled out a small handful of data chips. She selected one and plugged it into the empty jack.
Her eyes closed for a second. When they opened, her expression was totally changed. She gestured toward a stool. “Stalin, right? Long time.”
I took the offered seat and faked a sip of the almost-beer. “Yeah, it has been a while. You still calling yourself Jackal?”
“THE one, THE only,” she said.
She took a swallow from her tall green drink. “Are you looking for Zeus?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Have you seen him?”
Jackal shook her head. “Not in a couple of months. The last I heard, he snooped Ishikawa Audio for some pretty fancy technical specs. If he fenced them through the Cayman Islands, like he usually does, he’s probably off spending his bankroll in the skin-bars in Bangkok. We probably won’t see him for at least another six or eight weeks.”
I nodded, and studied Jackal’s face. As near as I could figure, she must have been about twenty-eight. She looked forty.
Jackal returned my stare. “Are you looking for Zeus for social p
urposes, or are you here on business?”
We had to lean close to hear each other over the crowd and the music.
“Business, actually,” I half-shouted.
“What have you got? Maybe I can hook you up.”
I thought about it for a second. I didn’t really know her. I’d seen her hanging around with Zeus from time to time, but I had no idea whether or not she was any good.
She obviously had the skull modifications, and she knew how to talk-the-talk. But, when it came time to ride the data grid through somebody else’s security software, could she slip in and out without a trace? Or would she leave a trail of bread crumbs through the net that some AI could follow? Or, worse yet, tangle with a neuro-guard subroutine that would reach through the interface and fry her brain?
My gut instinct told me that she could cut it.
I leaned close to her ear. “I’ve got two jobs, if you’re interested. The first is a protected database. Are you up to that?”
“Depends. Whose?”
“LAPD. Homicide Division. I need a complete data pull on a closed murder investigation. The files are sealed.”
Jackal rummaged through her pocket full of chips and selected one. She popped a chip out of one of her jacks, and plugged the new chip into the empty slot.
“The Boys in Blue have good security,” she said. They just upgraded their AI about four months ago. Not cutting-edge, but real good stuff.”
Her eyes went vacant for a second as the chip continued to download arcane technical data into her brain. “I can crack that base,” she said. “Not easy, but I can do it.” She looked back at me and smiled. “Also not cheap.”
I nodded. “I didn’t think it would be.”
She pushed her drink around the table top leaving a smear of condensation on the clear surface. “You mentioned a second job.”
“A personal database,” I said. “It probably has fairly standard consumer-grade protection. Shouldn’t be too difficult to penetrate.”
