Criminal Minds (Fox Meridian Book 4)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Fox said. ‘I don’t have the manpower to interview the entire channel. Is there anyone you can think of who seemed more excited by the project than everyone else? Or was violently opposed to it?’

  The two men looked at each other and then back at Fox. ‘Charlie Wolds,’ Shark said. ‘He’s in marketing, but he jumped on running the campaign.’

  ‘And he insisted on being around set when we filmed the sex scene,’ Daker added.

  ‘Kept wanting to do more risqué adverts for the vid too. Silhouetted topless shots of Marie, that kind of thing. We were trying to play that down a little, even if we did get her out of her tunic as often as we thought we could get away with.’

  ‘I noticed that,’ Fox said, grinning slightly.

  ‘Hey,’ Shark said, ‘what did you think of it?’

  ‘Like I said, you need a consultant on the detective work. And the male lead could do with a personality implant. And the plot was fairly transparent.’ Daker was cringing. ‘But Marie shone. Probably more so for the other factors. M. J. was well written, believable, pretty damn kickass.’

  ‘Not that I’m going to take all the credit for that,’ Daker admitted. ‘Marie brought some great details to the table when she walked in after that week with the Sisters. I just turned her ideas into something that worked with the plot and in a vid. She had this great idea to do a load of character exposition by having the Sisters talking over a game of strip poker. No idea where she got the idea from, but it was a damn sight more interesting than the way we had to do it. As it was, we couldn’t get approval for five naked women on screen at once.’

  ‘Huh,’ Fox said, her grin broadening. Marie had told her about the nightly poker games. ‘Save it for the series. I figure you’ve proved you can get away with nudity.’ She looked at the two mildly shocked faces in front of her. ‘What?’

  ‘How did you know about the series?’ Shark said. ‘No one’s supposed to know about it.’

  ‘That was a joke. You’re making a series?’

  ‘No. There’s some interest in doing one. About M. J. Don’t mention it to anyone!’ Fox mimed the zipping of her lips and Shark sagged from his upright posture. ‘We don’t want anyone hearing about it until we get approval. We haven’t even written up the concept for the proposal.’

  ‘Well… All I’m going to say is that you may need to move fast or you’ll have to recast M. J. Marie’s image is out there. She’s getting chat show invites. Women are asking her to sign their chests in clubs.’

  ‘Damn,’ Daker grumbled. ‘No one’s ever asked me to sign their chest.’

  ‘I’ll get you to sign mine later,’ Shark offered.

  ‘Sorry, Nate, but somehow it wouldn’t be the same.’

  ~~~

  Dillan was still on Fox’s sofa, head laid back and her eyes closed, when Fox got home. Fox had given her a quick rundown of the case and introduced her to Kit’s murder room before rushing out to IB-19, and it seemed that the virtual room was keeping Dillan’s interest. Unless she had nodded off.

  ‘This is brilliant!’ Dillan said when Fox’s avatar materialised amid the streams of light which interconnected the various elements of the case. ‘Why didn’t we do this in NAPA?’

  ‘Kit’s idea,’ Fox replied. ‘She saw them doing it with whiteboards and stuff in old vids and came up with this.’

  ‘Well, we got your message about Wolds and we’ve been adding him in.’ Dillan pointed at a picture of a twenty-something man with dark-blonde hair and a thin sort of face. ‘I think he’s dirty. Eyes are too close together.’

  ‘Perhaps more importantly,’ Kit said, ‘he is associated with a number of online forums devoted to the discussion of serial killers as well as several others suggestive of a somewhat extreme interest in various sexual fetishes.’

  ‘And his eyes are too close together.’

  ‘His eyes are a bit narrowly set,’ Fox agreed. ‘How deep can you dig into his interests?’

  ‘Many of the forums are private,’ Kit said, ‘but I have found reference to some activity in Niflhel. I know Vali encourages discussion of some topics which might be considered dubious, and watches the posts quite carefully.’

  Fox nodded. ‘Which probably means Wolds is clean, but we’ll ask Vali if he’s willing to help.’

  ‘Who’s Vali?’ Dillan asked. ‘You mentioned him at the club on Saturday night.’

  ‘Kit’s boyfriend,’ Fox replied automatically and Kit’s virtual cheeks went really red. ‘He runs an online viron called Niflhel. Very good encryption, very secure, very private. However, Vali’s kind of keen on seeing justice done. I get the impression that he created Niflhel, at least partially, to give criminals a place they think they’re safe to talk while he sits back and collects data on them. We’ll get you a membership and go in this afternoon. You should meet him, and you might like some of the virons within it. He caters to all sorts of tastes.’

  ‘I’ll try anything once. Almost.’

  Niflhel.

  Dillan appeared in the misty landscape of Niflhel’s reception area and looked around, blinking at the odd viron visuals. ‘This is kind of… That’s your avatar?’

  Fox looked down at herself. ‘It’s new. I’m trying out a new look.’ The avatar’s basic form was still the same as Fox’s, but the eyes were dark blue with a ring of paler blue around the iris, and the hair was now waist-length and jet-black to her shoulder where it turned white. It hung over her left shoulder in soft curls. And the outfit was different too, black corset and thong, black thigh-high boots and hold-up stockings.

  ‘And you’re not a dom?’

  ‘You can be anything you like in a viron. I’m not a dom, Kit isn’t a slave girl, and you aren’t something out of Oh My Goddess.’

  Dillan looked down at her own avatar. She had oriental features anyway, but now she was stretched and reshaped to fit more of an anime ideal. Her eyes were larger, and green, her face a little smaller and more pointed, and her hair was blue-black. Her body was slimmer and a little taller, but her breasts were larger and jutted out like something from a schoolboy’s hentai daydream. She was dressed in an iridescent sort of off-the-shoulder, asymmetric gown which shaded between green and purple, kept in place by a locket hooked around her neck. ‘What? I kind of like this look. It’s…’

  ‘Not you.’

  ‘Okay, fair point.’

  Fox looked down again. ‘Not sure about this. Anyway…’ She looked upward. ‘I figure you’ve noticed we’re here. We need to talk.’

  ‘Who are you…? Oh!’

  Around them, the mists thickened into opacity, and then faded, leaving behind a grassy bank which dropped into a huge lake. On the other side were mountains and behind them the ground rose to a wood and thatch homestead. There was also a young man with sharp features dressed in clothes out of the Viking age. Vali did look young when he smiled, though it was just another avatar and it was possible that he could look entirely different in reality.

  ‘I’m not sure about the new look, Zorra,’ Vali said.

  ‘Neither am I, to be honest,’ Fox told him, ‘but you try new things to see if they fit, right? This is… Um, what is your online ID?’

  ‘Heldi,’ Dillan replied. ‘And this must be Vali.’

  Vali bowed. ‘Pleased to meet you, Heldi, and hello, Kit.’

  Kit, dressed in her white tunic dress, sauntered past her paramour with her nose in the air. ‘We’re here on business,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you said he was her boyfriend,’ Dillan whispered as Fox started up the hill.

  ‘He… did something to upset her and she’s still stringing him along.’

  ‘I didn’t know AIs could be that… evil.’

  ‘Well, they’re destined to kill us all and take over the world, so…’

  ‘I assume,’ Vali said once they were all seated with a cup of mead, ‘that you are here concerning a murder. You only ever seem to visit when someone’s dead.’

  ‘
Death is a natural consequence of life,’ Fox replied. ‘People are always dying. Thing is, there are some people who like killing more than they should and one of them might be a client. Charles Wolds, he’s a marketing exec for IB-Nineteen.’

  ‘You think he could be a murderer?’

  ‘I think he’s a person of interest. He handled the marketing for a vid called M. J. and the Ripper.’

  ‘I saw it. Your friend was the lead. About an astronomical unit in the lead, as a matter of fact.’

  Fox flashed him a grin. ‘Yeah, well, we have someone carrying out Jack the Ripper-style mutilation murders on prostitutes and Wolds came up as showing unusual interest in the vid.’

  ‘And his online activity suggests something of a morbid curiosity in such crimes,’ Kit added. ‘I found reference to him discussing things in one of your closed forums.’ She was sitting beside Vali at the table, and she leaned closer, her bare shoulder touching his tunic. ‘We were hoping you could check him out and see whether he’s all talk or a potential killer.’ Straightening her back, Kit picked up her cup, drank from it, and then made a show of licking her lips before widening her eyes a little and smiling at Vali.

  Vali cleared his throat and shuffled a little in his seat. ‘I’ll examine his online activity. If he seems a likely suspect, I’ll contact you.’

  Kit beamed and put her hand on his arm, squeezing gently. ‘Thank you. I love having data to add to my murder room.’ She dropped her voice to a hushed whisper and went all serious. ‘I’ll have to think of something nice to repay you.’

  ‘It’s, uh, my duty as a, um, concerned citizen.’

  ‘Really? Oh, well, thank you anyway.’ And Kit went back to smiling.

  Dillan leaned closer to Fox. ‘Remind me never to upset her,’ she whispered. ‘She’s really evil.’

  5th October.

  ‘Mister Wolds, aka Coldwind, is probably a bust,’ Kit said.

  ‘I wasn’t exactly hopeful,’ Fox replied. ‘I take it Vali sent you some data to put in here?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’ Kit smiled.

  ‘You know, you’re going to have to tell him you’ve forgiven him eventually.’

  ‘It’s my birthday next month. I’ll officially forgive him then. The transcripts Vali sent did contain some interesting information. I’ve analysed as much as I can, but you may wish to read through them to see whether I caught everything.’

  Fox nodded. ‘I’ll take a look. What did you find?’

  ‘There has been some discussion of the first two murders and, it would seem, more detail to those discussions than was easily available to the public. I suspect someone in NAPA is on the forums in Niflhel and is leaking data there.’

  ‘Any clue as to who it is?’

  ‘Only a tag, BlueBlooded, which could be anyone. I could ask Vali, but I think he may balk at giving us the real name without more solid links to the crimes.’

  ‘And we aren’t NAPA internal affairs.’

  ‘No. Over the weekend, the discussion has become almost fevered and links have been made to Silas Bent. Two people seem especially interested in making the connection, RipperFan and BentInTwo.’

  ‘Imaginative,’ Fox commented, grimacing. ‘I don’t suppose you can dig up any more on these people from LifeWeb or something? BlueBlooded too.’

  ‘I’ve already started searching. It is, unfortunately, laborious. We have got an interview with Mister Bent, however. Tomorrow at thirteen thirty.’

  ‘Okay, get me everything we have on Bent. Did the case files come through?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Good. I want those, the forum transcripts, and everything you’ve compiled. I’ll go through it all before our visit to Rikers.’

  ~~~

  Fox was in the kitchen preparing her evening meal when the call came through from Nathan Shark. It was just after seven and she had spent long hours poring over the data on Bent, and she was tired and not up to dealing with the vid producer, but she let the call connect anyway.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ Shark said without preamble.

  ‘Something? I’m tired, Nathan, I don’t need cryptic.’

  ‘The channel got an email through to one of the general mailboxes a few minutes ago. They’re going live with a breaking report stream in fifteen, but a friend on the news desk sent me a copy because he thought I should know about it. I’m forwarding it to you now.’

  ‘IB-Nineteen has to get a billion messages a day. What’s so special about this one?’

  ‘It’s signed “Jack the Ripper.”’

  ‘Shit. Does NAPA know about this?’

  ‘They’re contacting them now. For comment. They want to put it on a stream fast before NAPA can get it pulled.’

  ‘NAPA will be pissed off. And they’d better be careful what they say about this. You know Scotland Yard received various letters supposedly from the original Jack back in the day?’

  ‘And a news agency and some vigilante group or something. I did pay attention to the research Adrian did. Most people think they were fakes, but that’s where the name came from.’

  ‘Well, probability is that this is a hoax too.’

  Shark’s image nodded. ‘I told my friend they should be careful, but the news desk here is… a little sensationalist.’

  An icon appeared in Fox’s visual field indicating that mail had been accepted for her. ‘Okay, and thanks for the heads-up.’ As Shark’s image vanished, Fox opened the mail, and then the attachment within it, and read.

  Dear Sirs,

  I am bak and at my work.

  The whores an harluts will be cleansed from this metro.

  The useless guards will not catch me, as they fayled to do before.

  No one can catch me.

  Signed,

  Jack the Ripper.

  ‘It somewhat resembles the “From Hell” letter sent to George Lusk in eighteen eighty-eight,’ Kit commented.

  ‘It’s really badly written if that’s what you mean. That one came with part of a human liver.’

  ‘I’d imagine transmitting an organ by email would be quite difficult.’

  ‘Yeah. NAPA are going to be all over this, and I’m guessing this is a hoax, but send it over to MarTech and see whether anyone can do any analysis on it. Text, structure, whatever.’

  ‘I’ll get right on it.’

  ‘And send something to Sister Naomi. Warn her this is coming. Even if it is a hoax, this is going to step up attention.’

  6th October.

  There had been some form of correctional facility on Rikers Island since it had been bought by New York City’s Commission of Charities and Corrections in 1883. The island had been smaller then: they had added landfill to expand the surface area in 1954. Sixty years later, it had become one of the worst prison facilities in the United States and held around a hundred thousand prisoners. Things had changed.

  The entire island was now surrounded by a twenty-metre-high, reinforced wall with sentry guns mounted on top. No one came or left by water now: access was through Block One, a half-kilometre-high tower linked to the similar Block Two by a single bridge which could, in case of dire emergency, be blown in half by explosives. Block One housed administration, the necessary computer and utility functions, high-security courts, and housing for one hundred thousand prisoners classified as low risk. Block Two had a capacity of five hundred thousand, ranging from petty thieves to murderers, and the worst of them were held in the highest-security region, which was underground.

  Fox thought of Rikers as a Hell hole, beaten for severity only by the Cold Harbour facility on the Moon, but there were some people who got themselves locked up there rather than living in the Sprawl. Inside, you got food, education, and a roof, which was more than could be said for some parts of the metro. Fox stepped off the transport vertol which had carried her over from the precinct 17 HQ tower, which was used as the main hub for staff and visitors. She was immediately met by two men in suits.

  Frederik Ungar she
knew. He was an aging, fairly short man with a lot of muscle on a small frame and no hair to speak of. He had been a pretty good detective in his day, but his day had come to an abrupt midnight when he was caught in an explosion, a bombing in the Tribeca area set up by UA. Fox knew his right leg was artificial as a result. He had been promoted to captain and put in charge of Rikers as a ‘reward’ for surviving. He still had hard, grey, cop’s eyes and, she bet, a sharp mind.

  ‘Inspector Meridian,’ Ungar said as she approached them. ‘Your request came as something of a surprise. I wanted to be sure you knew what you were getting into.’

  ‘It’s just Miss now, Captain,’ Fox replied, smiling and reaching out to take the offered hand.

  ‘I heard. That screw-up Canard should be lynched for chasing you out.’

  Fox shrugged. ‘If people keep making dumb voting decisions, I might take his job off him.’

  Ungar smirked an unprofessional sort of smirk and turned to the other man. ‘This is Earnest Prank, the psychologist who keeps an eye on Bent.’

  Fox took Prank’s hand. It was a little like shaking hands with a lettuce. Prank was not young, maybe in his forties, or maybe a little younger, and suffering from having to deal with deranged criminals every day. There was grey showing in his short, blonde hair, his muddy-green eyes had a watery quality, his face was thin and drawn. If he had ever exercised in his life, it had been a long time ago. ‘Miss Meridian,’ he said, acknowledging her, and his voice, at least, was good: warm and soothing, Fox thought.

  ‘Do you prefer Doctor or Inspector?’ Fox asked. She knew he would have an inspector’s rank because that was the way the system worked.

  ‘Doctor. I’ve had it pointed out that I didn’t earn the rank and some of my subjects get agitated when faced with police officers. Bent does not. He rarely gets agitated with anything.’

  ‘I read the case files, including the psychological analysis following his arrest. Everything my PA could dig up on him, which included an interview with an INN reporter two years ago.’