by Jeff Edwards
A hand shook me gently. “David.”
I cracked one eye. The lighting in the den was low. I closed the eye again.
An unseen hand ran gently down the side of my cheek.
“Mmm...”
“Come on, David. You need to get off this couch and crawl into bed.”
I struggled to a sitting position, ran my fingers through my hair and yawned so hard that my ears rang afterward. “What time is it?”
“After seven.”
“Jesus, why did you let me sleep?”
“You needed it. Besides, I enjoyed watching you.”
“I’ve got work to do.” I stood up.
She stood up with me and gave me a gentle shove in the direction of the hall. “You’re going to bed.”
“Uh-uh.”
She crossed her arms and cocked her head to the side. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but I...”
“Anything you can do after seven o’clock, you can do after nine. You need at least a couple of more hours. House, wake David up at nine o’clock.”
“David?” House sounded doubtful. He wanted to be polite to my guest, but he wasn’t prepared to take her orders unless I confirmed them.
I sighed. “Yeah. A couple of hours won’t hurt. Wake me up at nine.”
Sonja smiled. “Want me to rub your back? You could probably use it after that couch.”
I stretched. “No, I’m okay.”
Her eyes flashed. “That offer means exactly what it says. A back rub. I was not offering anything more horizontal.”
I nodded sleepily. “A back rub sounds great.”
“You go climb into bed and I’ll be right in.”
I muttered an unintelligible acknowledgment and shuffled toward my bedroom.
I was in bed with the sheets pulled up to my waist when she appeared in the doorway and knocked on the frame.
“Come in.”
She set a glass on my night table and sat on the bed next to me. “House told me where to find it. Cutty on the rocks, right?”
I reached for it, took a sip.
She took the glass from my fingers. “Roll over.”
I did, keeping the sheet pulled over my butt. When I was settled comfortably on my stomach, she handed me the drink.
John and I had caroused a few massage parlors in our Army days. The girls all seemed to operate from the same script. Cursory, unskilled kneading of a few muscles and a lot of ‘accidental’ contact with some of my more obvious erogenous zones. When the expected erection appeared, the masseuse inevitably offered to correct the problem for a small tip.
Sonja hadn’t read that script. She dug her fingers far enough into my muscles to elicit little grunts of pain. I stiffened, raised my head off the pillow.
She shoved my head back down. “Lie down. I knew you needed this. You’re way too tense.”
I tried to lay still, but her probing fingers seemed determined to find every little pocket of pain hidden in my muscles. Gradually I became aware that she was good, I mean really good. The occasional painful twinge notwithstanding, she knew exactly how to soothe the kinks out of my tired muscles.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it. It was totally non-sexual and somehow, intensely sensitive and personal.
Occasionally I would stir just enough to sneak a sip of scotch. After a while I gave up even that and let myself drift toward sleep.
I was almost totally under when I felt her weight shift. She stood up. Her voice was almost a whisper. “I’m leaving now, David. Goodnight.”
I spoke softly, eyes closed, trying not to interrupt my own gentle transition to the dream state. “You can stay here if you want. I have a spare bed...”
She sighed softly. “I can’t. I have... a client. Rest now. Call me tomorrow, please?”
I listened to the sound of her leaving and pretended to be asleep. After a while, I was.
CHAPTER 8
“David, wake up.”
Both eyes came open easily. I felt rested and refreshed. “House, run a shower and start a pot of coffee. I’m going out and I’ll probably be gone all night.”
“Very well, David. Would you like me to download the morning news feed?”
That stopped me. Morning? I felt the first stirrings of suspicion. “What time is it, House?”
“The time is nine-oh-one a.m.”
“It’s after nine in the morning?”
“Yes, David.”
I felt a rise of annoyance. “House, I told you to wake me up at nine p.m.”
House remained quietly unperturbed. “You did not specify a.m. or p.m. Just before she left, Ms. Winter assured me that you intended to sleep all night. Is there a problem, David? Have I made an error?”
I climbed out of bed and threw the sheet on the floor. “No, House. You didn’t screw up, but someone did.”
I showered, and dressed at a leisurely pace. My schedule was shot in the ass. Most of the people I wanted to talk to were night crawlers. They wouldn’t be out and about for hours.
Despite the lack of hurry, I wasn’t relaxed. I was nurturing a little spark of annoyance, trying to fan it into genuine anger, and frustrated by the knowledge that it wasn’t working.
I broke out the Blackhart and the cleaning kit. I fieldstripped it over the kitchen table. When it was down to base level components, I lit a cigarette and called Sonja.
I knew the second she answered that I’d finally caught her asleep.
I jammed a brush through the barrel of the Blackhart and blew smoke out the side of my mouth. “I’m glad to see I’m not the only one sleeping the day away.”
She smiled sleepily. “Morning...”
“Morning my ass, it’s practically afternoon. Why did you lie to my AI?”
She stretched and yawned lazily. “You needed the sleep.”
Even with my carefully pitched scene, I had to concentrate to keep the edge in my voice. “There’s a killer out there somewhere. Sleeping isn’t going to catch him.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “In the shape you were in last night, you were definitely no match for him. Now, you’re pissed off and overly dramatic, but your mind is alert.”
“Goddamn it! That wasn’t your decision to make.”
“Did you ask my permission to raid my personal database? Or did you use your best judgment and do what you thought was best for me?”
To my credit, I didn’t actually stammer. “I’m a detective,” I said. “I get paid to snoop. It’s what I do.”
“I’m a call girl,” she said. “I get paid to make people feel good. It’s what I do. You were feeling like shit. I fixed it.”
She moved in for the kill, still smiling. “Besides, two days ago, you swore most solemnly that you were not a detective. How did you become so fanatically dedicated to your profession so quickly?”
She was grinning.
I ground out the butt of the cigarette and grinned back at her. “I surrender,” I said. “You win.”
“I don’t want to win,” she said. “I want breakfast. You cook.”
“I’ve already eaten.”
She faked a pout. “You don’t have to eat; just cook. I’ll handle the eating part.”
“I offered to cook you breakfast the other day. You turned me down.”
“It was the middle of the afternoon. Anyway, I didn’t know that you could cook, then.”
“Your mistake,” I said. “You have scorned my breakfast once. You won’t get a second chance.”
She wrinkled her nose, stuck her tongue out at me and hung up.
I laughed and started reassembling the automatic.
I slipped on my shoulder rig and shoved the Blackhart into the holster. On the way out the door, I realized that the call hadn’t gone even remotely according to plan. I laughed again and pulled a windbreaker over the Blackhart.
I walked to the barricade and caught a hovercab to Dome 11.
Nearly half of the dome was
dedicated to corporate enclaves.
The Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik enclosure was a carefully landscaped park. At least thirty acres of meticulously manicured grass were spread like a lush green blanket over a half-dozen gently rolling hills. Evergreen trees were sprinkled here and there with a carefully calculated randomness. The air had a sweet headiness about it that was rich with natural unfiltered oxygen from the trees and grass. It smelled like the forest eco-modules in Dome 7, only more so.
At the center of the park-lawn stood the Gebhardt-Wulkan building, a towering pyramid of gold-tinted glass that reached nearly to the underside of the dome. The outer skin of the twenty-five bottom floors was photo-active, making the lower half of the building an enormous electronic video screen. I’d seen that kind of thing before: animated billboards around town, crawling with commercial vid clips for everything from Italian sports cars to Asian herbal tea. The technology was superior to holographic facades because it was unaffected by daylight. It was also a lot more expensive.
Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik wasn’t using its giant photo-active surface to sell sports cars. Instead, each side of the pyramid was plugged into a live video-feed from the opposite face, showing what you would have seen had the building not been there. The effect was stunning; the lower half of the building was invisible, or nearly so. If I really tried hard to focus on it, minute distortion of scale made it possible to spot the edges of the building, but I really had to work at it. As soon as I stopped concentrating, my eyes would glide over the minor discontinuities in the image, and the building would vanish again.
The fact that the upper twenty-five floors were not invisible made the image even more powerful. The visible half of the pyramid appeared to hang in the naked air.
Just looking at it gave me a touch of vertigo. Intellectually, I knew how the trick was done, but on a gut-level, my instincts insisted that it was impossible. A tiny part of me held its breath and waited for gravity to pluck the golden pyramid out of the sky and hurl it to the ground.
The entrances to the pyramid were marked by a pair of triangular archways, made of the same gold-mirrored glass that covered the upper floors. People moving into the building appeared to vanish as they passed through the archways, while those leaving the building apparently materialized out of thin air.
There were several smaller buildings in the enclave, all hidden from casual sight by strategically positioned hills and trees, to avoid marring the park-like scene that showcased the pyramid.
According to Sonja, Michael had worked in 6-B, one of the outbuildings. I had the cabbie drop me off out front.
Building 6-B turned out to be one of those single story prefabs assembled from cubical modules like a child’s building blocks.
It was a low security building, so I didn’t have a lot of trouble swapping a few crisp €m20 bills for a guest pass.
I wandered up and down a dozen identical modular hallways until I found a door labeled, “DATA PROTOCOL RESEARCH.” Under the engraved plastic label, someone had taped a hand-lettered sign reading, “HOME OF THE DATA SQUASHERS.”
I shouldered the door open and stepped into a large room full of computer work stations, matrix generators, holovid projectors, and racks of memory modules, all connected by about fifty kilometers of optical cable.
Eleven programmers were working at computer terminals, six women and five men. Each of them wore an elastic headband set with neural sensors. Slender loops of ribbon cable linked their headsets to matrix generators. None of them reacted to my presence; they were all jacked into the DataNet. They were operating on another plane of reality, one in which I didn’t even exist.
Except for the movement of fingers on keyboards, they were practically motionless, giving the scene a sense of lethargy. I knew that it was a false impression. Behind their vacant eyes, their minds were blurring through logic matrixes at speeds I couldn’t even imagine, shooting down corridors of shifting data, making thousands of decisions a minute.
I wove my way through a maze of equipment and cabling until I found a man and a woman huddled around another computer workstation in a back corner.
The man was thin, balding and fortyish. He waved a length of hardcopy around and jammed a finger at it.
“You’re crazy,” he half-shouted. “If you try to tokenize the seed variable, you’re going to end up with a whole series of cascading encryption errors.”
The woman shook her head. “You’re not listening to me, Frank. We can’t tokenize the entire data stream and leave the seed variable unencrypted. We’d never be able to retrieve. We have to tokenize the seed. All we have to...”
Frank shook the printout. “You’re the one who’s not listening. You can’t pull an encrypted variable out of a five-deep compression wafer and decode it in real-time. You can’t do it!”
The woman snatched the printout and stomped in my direction.
I turned sideways to let her squeeze past.
Frank looked up at me. “Who the hell are you?”
I stepped forward, grabbed his empty hand and shook it vigorously. “Bertram Tyler,” I said. “True Crime Video. We’re thinking about shooting a piece on Michael Winter, the Aztec Killer. I understand you used to work with him?”
“True Crime?” Frank snatched his hand away. “If I didn’t talk to the legitimate media, what makes you think I’m going to spill my guts to the tabloids?”
I smiled my best snake-oil smile. “Because the legitimate media doesn’t make it worth your while. If we decide to shoot this piece... Well, let’s just say that we know how to reward our sources.”
Frank turned toward his workbench. “Whatever you’re offering, I guarantee you don’t pay enough to make it worth losing my job.”
“We can quote you off-camera as a confidential inside source,” I said. “Mind you, it doesn’t pay as much, but the money still isn’t bad. Or...” I snapped my fingers a couple of times.
“Or what?”
“We could do an on-camera interview, one of those things where we electronically disguise your voice, and distort the picture to hide your face.”
I nodded quickly, as if I was warming to the idea. “People love that sort of thing. Brave Citizen Takes on the System to Bring you the Truth!”
“Takes on the System?” Frank didn’t look crazy about that idea.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s all hype. It pushes the ratings up. There wouldn’t be any real risk at all. When our camera boys get done monkeying around with the signal, your own mother won’t recognize you.”
Frank rubbed his left earlobe between thumb and forefinger. “What would I have to do?”
“That depends on whether or not there’s even a story in this,” I said. “First, we kick around a few easy questions, and see if we have anything to work with here.”
Frank nodded cautiously.
“Let’s start with the basics,” I said. “How long did you know Michael Winter?”
“A little over two years, I guess.”
“From the time he came to work here until the night he committed suicide?”
“Yeah.”
“How would you characterize the quality of his work?”
Frank sneered. “His work? His work was a joke. Winter was supposed to be some shit-hot code jockey, but you sure couldn’t prove it by me.”
Frank’s voice got a little louder as he warmed up to the idea of criticizing his former co-worker. “Winter was unreliable. Some days he wouldn’t even bother to show up, and I’d have to cover for him. I carried my workload and his too. I’ll characterize the quality of Winter’s work… It sucked. Everybody knows that Winter was hired because...”
“Because what?”
Frank looked away. “Never mind.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “I can’t get a camera crew in here for ‘never mind.’ Why was Michael Winter hired?”
Frank lowered his voice. “Because of Rieger. The Board of Contract Indenture would have turned Winter
’s application down cold if it weren’t for Rieger.”
“Why? What was wrong with Winter?”
“He had some kind of brain rot. A tumor or something. The Board wanted no part of that shit. Rieger stepped in and personally approved the contract.”
“Who is this Rieger, and why did he approve Michael Winter’s indenture?”
“Kurt Rieger. He’s the head of Information Systems Research. He approved the indenture to get at Winter’s sister.”
“Sister?”
“Yeah. I’ve never seen her, but she’s supposed to be some kind of hot.”
“What does that have to do with Kurt Rieger?”
Frank coughed nervously. “The word on the work-floor is: Rieger tried to hire Winter’s sister a couple of years ago. She turned him down. I guess she’s some kind of call girl, but apparently she’s choosy about her customers. Anyway, Rieger wants her. If she ends up indentured to Leisure Division, he plans to requisition her for his personal use. She better hope that doesn’t happen.”
“Why?”
Frank looked around. “I thought you were doing a shoot on Aztec. What do you care about Winter’s sister? I knew the man, the killer. When are you going to ask me about that?”
I pulled out a cigarette. “Mind if I smoke?”
He shook his head, so I lit up. “Who might have wanted to kill Michael Winter?”
“He killed himself.”
“Humor me,” I said. “Who had a motive for killing Michael Winter?”
Frank looked thoughtful and shrugged. “Nobody that I know of. Maybe the parents of one of those little girls he killed.”
“Okay, let’s table that for now. I’m going to ask you for a gut reaction. Do you believe that Michael Winter was a killer? Do you truly believe that he was capable of butchering little girls?”
Frank shook his head slowly. “No. He pissed me off, and his work wasn’t what it should have been, but Mike was a good boy. I know that he must have killed those girls. He did confess, didn’t he? But I sure have trouble seeing him as a killer.”
There was a wistful, faraway look in Frank’s eyes.
I took a hit off my cigarette. “Did you ever see Michael smoke?”
