Criminal Minds (Fox Meridian Book 4)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘It’s nice to know your boyfriend is as bright as he seems. Forward the data to Captain Ungar with as much explanation as you feel is needed. Shouldn’t need much. “Someone in your prison is accessing a murder discussion forum” should have him turning over rocks pretty quickly.’

  ‘He seemed like a good cop.’

  ‘He was a good cop. Now he’s a good warden. Takes one to run that place. What was the other thing?’

  ‘The request for the case files from NAPA cleared and I’m already integrating the information into the murder room.’

  ‘That was fast.’

  ‘The request was put through at one minute after midnight. The judicial analysis was done by AI soon after. Our case was quite clear-cut and did not require human intervention. Final clearance was granted at eight oh three, by Detective Rutherford. I took a few cycles to consider this turn of events and concluded that Detective Rutherford is quite desperate, but you may have got through to her a little yesterday.’

  ‘Sounds like a reasonable assertion. You have the details on the new homicide?’

  ‘Miss Belladonna Anders, registered prostitute with a regular pitch on Ravine Avenue in the Jersey Housing Combine. She was killed just after midnight yesterday. The perpetrator used a steel blade, fifteen to thirty centimetres in length. Metallurgical analysis of fragments found in the wounds and the wound patterns suggests a hunting knife. Detective Rutherford was not quite correct about lack of trace on the previous victims, however.’

  ‘They got evidence of surgical steel in the wounds before, right?’

  ‘You are, of course, correct. This, combined with the frankly amateur nature of the cutting on Miss Anders’ body, suggests a different person is involved. There are two mutilation murderers in the metro.’

  ‘Swell.’ Fox shut off the water, squeezed water from her hair with her hands, and turned on the air streams. ‘Well, the second one isn’t BentInTwo. We’ll leave him to Ungar. Concentrate on RipperFan. Identifying him could lead us to killer number two.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, but I should point out that I am not hopeful. I believe this identity is kept only for accessing Niflhel.’

  ‘You might get lucky. We’ll go over and look around where Anders was killed, get a feel for it. Then we’ll go see Naomi. This is closer to their house than the others and they’re obvious targets.’

  ~~~

  The Jersey Housing Combine had grown from a need for affordable housing to service the metro in the forties. Grown was the operative word: design had had little or nothing to do with it. It was not the Sprawl, but it was as close as you got while still having an income. Huge, multi-occupancy blocks rose haphazardly into the sky, grey and ugly for the most part, linked together above street level by bridges and slideways. Down on the ground, the old street layout was still there, but if you flew over it, you would be hard-pressed to tell.

  In the south, around what had been Downtown Jersey City, things were a little better. There was adequate transport from the LI-line and the housing was a little higher in quality. To the north, up as far as the disused Lincoln Tunnel, things got worse. As jobs had decreased, some of the far northern buildings had become little more than squats for sprawlers with the muscle to hold a roof against challengers. Belladonna Anders had not plied her trade in the best of locales.

  The alley where she had been killed showed evidence of a few rough sleepers, but none were there now and, Fox guessed, none had been there to see the killing. Even the dumbest murderer knew to avoid obvious witnesses. Anyway, NAPA had taken the death seriously and canvassed anyone they could find in the area, knocked on doors in the buildings around the site. But the alley had no windows overlooking it, and screams were not uncommon where street crime was high: no one had seen or heard anything alarming.

  ‘Most of the people around here don’t get alarmed unless someone stuffs a gun in their face,’ Fox commented silently.

  ‘The authorities seem to have sanitised the area as well as the other scene,’ Kit said.

  ‘With a little more reason. The residents pay less attention to police tape so preserving the scene is fairly pointless. Nothing much to see. We’ll head for the chapter house.’

  ‘Hey, lady, nice jacket. I’ll take it and anything else you got.’ Fox turned to see a six-foot-plus gorilla in badly scuffed denim approaching her from down the alley. Broad daylight, or what passed for it in the canyons of the Combine, and he was trying to mug her. ‘Not a good place to be hanging,’ he added for emphasis.

  Fox raised her right hand, forming a fist and then popping the blade in it in place of a middle finger. ‘Spin on it. And when you’re done, start walking the other way.’

  The ape stopped, his face scrunching into something like distaste though with the scar across his nose it was hard to tell the expression from his normal one. ‘Shit! I ain’t touching no fucking borg.’ He began backing away and Fox watched him until he turned and walked off.

  Pulling her knife back in, Fox asked Kit, ‘Is the cab still waiting?’

  ‘As requested.’

  ‘Right, let’s go see Naomi.’

  ~~~

  ‘Two of them?’ Naomi frowned and stared at the carpet of her lounge.

  ‘And this second one is killing in Jersey, a lot closer to home,’ Fox said. ‘You need to take precautions.’

  ‘We’re safe in here. I’ll make sure anyone going out takes extra care, and we have an outreach programme we can use to spread the word. That’s already being done, but we can add extra warnings.’

  ‘Did you know Belladonna Anders?’

  Naomi looked up, her eyes unfocused for a second. ‘She did her training here. Promising girl, but there are outreach notes indicating she got into drugs. Bliss, mostly, but she’d take Cupie if the pay was right.’

  ‘Assuming she could remember she’d been paid to take it,’ Fox muttered, pushing the cold feeling in her stomach aside.

  ‘A disgusting abuse of biochemistry. Whoever created it should be locked in a box for eternity.’

  ‘You’re not hearing me argue.’

  Naomi was far too good at listening. She frowned. ‘You’ve had it used on you.’

  ‘No,’ Fox replied flatly. ‘I’ve never had Cupie used on me. It was formulated for NIX, as a seduction aid. I had the original version used on me and it’s a lot more subtle. Your memory is vague rather than gone and you come away thinking you just wanted to go crazy in bed. From what I read, Cupie turns you into an animal and you don’t remember a thing for half a day. It can blot out the fact you took it too, which is why it makes a good date-rape drug. Plus, there are the idiots who give someone a second dose to keep it going, and then you can get hyperthermia and death. No, I’ve never had Cupie used on me, but I don’t see the alternative as different.’

  ‘No. They caught the man responsible? I assume it was a man.’

  ‘Was a man, now a corpse. I shot him. He was trying to kill me at the time.’

  Naomi was silent for a second. ‘I’m required to say that I don’t believe in execution as a form of justice. Forgiveness is one of our highest dictums.’

  ‘Neither do I. It’s damn hard to do the right thing sometimes, isn’t it?’

  ‘Exceptionally hard. God chooses to test us in the cruellest of ways at times.’

  ~~~

  The room was cold and the light was thin, a dim glow from a few LED bulbs set behind frosted-over glass. The only sound was the hum of the refrigeration units. The Sisters kept food there, for the most part, though their stock of perishable drugs for the clinic was located in one corner and a section was set aside for Sister Bridget to work in when she did ice sculptures for the brothel.

  The sound, when it came, was like someone cutting through heavy cardboard with a knife and it was followed by punching and tearing. A figure, tall and dark, stepped free of a box and oriented himself carefully. The door, of course, could be opened from the inside for safety reasons, which was ironic under the circumstances. />
  The corridor outside the storage room was no more brightly lit than the fridge and just as empty. It was late and the women in the rooms above would be in bed or preparing for it. He waited, looking up as though he could penetrate the structure and see them. There was work to be done here, so much work, but he could wait a little longer, until he was sure he would be undisturbed. Patience was, as the Sisters would tell you, a virtue.

  ~~~

  Marie put every gram of confidence she had into walking across the stage area to the sofa. She was not entirely sure what Miss Bournville had been thinking when she had made the booking, but ‘thrown in at the deep end’ kept springing to mind. There had been briefing and preparation, with both Miss Bournville and reps from IB-19, and still Marie felt she had never been less prepared for anything.

  Straight Talk was a late-night, adult chat show running on the Athena channel. Athena had been set up to run programmes angled toward a female audience of all persuasions. They ran daytime soaps, dramas, even girl-oriented, lightweight porn on weekend nights. Straight Talk was their serious chat show, running late on a Friday night and presented by Elaine Resnik and Charlene ‘Charlie’ Iberson, who double-teamed the interviews. Iberson was a sort of celebrity lesbian and feminist, noted for being outspoken, and Marie had no idea how she was going to react to M. J.

  Well, it started out well enough. Iberson sat behind the desk the two women shared looking vaguely severe, but then she always did. She liked to be seen as feminine, but tough and kept her bleached hair cut short with the sides shaved back. She was slim and very attractive, but her blue eyes were hard, icy. She crossed her arms. ‘Okay, Elaine, I think we should get the girlie crap out of the way early. Ask our guest about her dress so I can order one behind everyone’s back and still look cool.’

  Resnik was a brunette and more conventionally attractive than her colleague. Her brown eyes were warm and, while Iberson was noted for fairly hard-hitting, often snarky, questions, Resnik was perceptive, quick-witted, and sometimes viciously probing. She smiled. ‘A voice in my ear is telling me to compliment you on your dress, Marie. Where did you get it?’

  The dress in question was a black tank, mid-thigh so not too short, but the sides were made of plazkin with large holes in it creating tantalising glimpses of flesh and, Marie had to admit, she had selected it because she had a suspicion Iberson would find it intriguing. ‘Well, Elaine, I’m not really famous and I was unknown until last week so my wardrobe is a little thin. So I called a friend, Lucille Graves. I modelled some of her designs a couple of months ago for her website and she basically gave me the run of the list since she’s trying to get her business going and I seem to have stumbled into some exposure.’

  ‘That’s a good choice of words,’ Iberson commented.

  ‘And we’ve come to the end of the “girlie crap,”’ Resnik said without missing a beat. ‘Marie Shaftsbury, as you say, a total unknown thrust into the spotlight as possibly the only good thing in the recent IB-Nineteen production M. J. and the Ripper.’

  ‘Definitely the only good thing,’ Iberson said, ‘though… I’ll give the writer some credit for not ruining the character.’

  ‘How did you get involved with the project?’

  ‘Oh, well, my agent, Isabella Bournville, has been putting me forward for a few roles and she thought I was the right fit for this one. M. J. had to have a certain look, which I fit, and there was a physicality to the role which I could handle. Honestly, the project was proposed as an experiment by the producer, Nathan Shark, to see whether audiences would accept more adult programming on IB-Nineteen. They didn’t have a huge budget, so they went with unknowns, but from my point of view it’s great. I’d never normally get a chance at something as meaty as this.’

  ‘Meaty is right,’ Iberson said, ‘in many senses of the word. You don’t think the nudity took away from the character, I assume?’

  ‘No,’ Marie said flatly. ‘Now you can say that the premise was set up to provide opportunities for me to strip off, and the uniform the Sisters wear is, obviously, somewhat risqué, but M. J. is a strong character and sex is part of her nature. She has no qualms about showing off her body, and why should she? Why should anyone under the right circumstances? The stream was age-controlled and there were warnings before it ran so no one should be watching it if they’re going to be offended by breasts or any other body part. And I thought it was well done. Even the sex scene was tasteful.’

  ‘You mentioned the uniform,’ Resnik continued. ‘I understand you spent a week with the Sisters of the Church of Saint Nicholas as preparation for the role.’

  ‘I wanted to get M. J. just right and I got lucky. My friend trained with them and knows the Sister Superior. Sister Naomi allowed me the privilege of attending as a novice. I was one of the Sisters for a week. I did chores, attended lectures, and played cards before bed.’

  ‘You were a prostitute?’

  ‘Oh no, novices aren’t licensed so they can’t work. I’m not sure I could do it, to be honest. It’s okay playing the role, but doing it for real… I don’t think I have the courage.’

  ‘You think it takes courage?’ Iberson asked. ‘Lying on your back and letting some horny ingrate bang away.’

  Marie grinned. Iberson was trying to insult as many people as possible at once with the statement, but Marie had known her statement would get some reaction like that. ‘Especially when the client’s like that. Can you imagine? But no, imagine what it’s like to choose the profession. You’re consigning yourself to being looked down on by just about everyone for providing a service which a lot of people want. Always have, down through the ages. And it’s not just the horny ingrates who want it. M. J. is bisexual and proud of it.’

  ‘What about you?’

  Marie raised an eyebrow. ‘A little personal, but okay. I’ve had relationships with both sexes, but I’m mostly heterosexual. My boyfriend is bi. Personally I think a little variety is good. My ex-girlfriend and I are still friends, and it was… eye-opening.’

  ‘Okay,’ Resnik said, looking like she wanted to shift the subject back on track, ‘how did you come up with the character of M. J. Kelly?’

  ‘The writer came up with the basics, obviously. They let me tweak her a bit… Well, quite a lot. I’d spent time with the Sisters and I could lend some authenticity.’

  ‘That certainly came out in the performance. Rave reviews all around.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Iberson said, smirking, ‘and my favourite review for your co-star was “the only time there was no wood in his performance was the sex scene.”’

  Marie did her best to supress her grin. ‘I assure you there was wood there too. Um, I based M. J. on two people. There’s Sister Naomi. She’s incredible. Sexy, confident, strong-willed, and a great leader. Seriously, you guys should interview her if you want to know about the profession. And there’s my friend, Tara Meridian, who is the top investigator for Palladium Security Solutions. She’s also a strong woman, totally kickass, smart… incredibly smart. Actually, she’s someone else you should get on this show. So M. J. is me, and both of them, mixed up together.’

  ‘I got the impression you really wanted people to like the character,’ Resnik said. ‘It’s a hard one to provoke empathy with. As you said, people look down on sex workers of all types. Do you see yourself as an advocate for the profession?’

  ‘Uh… I never really thought about it, but sure. They deserve better than they get. Every last one of them from the ones working the street right up to the high-pay ones in the arcologies and the big houses out on Long Island. All of them work hard and society sees them as… a dirty secret.’

  ‘And I guess that brings us to something far more serious. It’s been all over the news channels, including our own news scheduling. Someone out there seems to be perpetrating Ripper-like murders on prostitutes. Rumour has it that NAPA is dragging its heels on this one and that the Sisters have asked your friend, Tara Meridian, to investigate. Any comment?’

&n
bsp; ‘I can’t… won’t comment on the case. To be honest, I don’t know that much. I never met the Senior Sister who was killed, but you have to understand that they have a family there. If one of them is murdered, they all feel it. I know from Tara that this kind of case is difficult. A lot of murders can be cleared up when you find the relationship between killer and victim. It’s sad, but a lot of murders are in the family, or between friends or lovers. With a serial killer, there is no relationship. The victims are selected more or less at random and that makes things difficult, but I’m sure NAPA are doing their best, and I’m positive that Tara will find this guy, stop him, and get him locked up in Cold Harbour until the Moon flies out of orbit.’

  9th October.

  Gilly looked up at the ceiling and made a soft growl of frustration, trying her best not to wake anyone else. She did not suffer from insomnia that often, but when she did, it was usually a real pain in the ass. And when it did happen, and tonight was certainly one of those nights, she had to give up and do something else for a bit. It was almost half past midnight and if she could relax her brain enough, she might just get a decent night’s sleep after all. Yoga was her preferred option at those times so, being as quiet as possible, she got out of bed, pulled on leggings and a cropped top, and padded on bare feet out of the dorm.

  She was on her way down the corridor to the stairs at the end, and one of the lecture rooms below where she could exercise in peace, when she saw a door opening. She figured one of the other Sisters could not sleep either and was about to whisper a hello when she saw the man step out.

  He was tall, dark-haired, dressed in black, and she noticed he was smiling. His skin was pale, very pale, which made the blood spattering his face all the clearer. Gilly stopped, blinking, and he saw her and was moving in an instant. She had time to see the silver blades on his fingers as she threw herself backward, as he dashed closer. She started to scream and he was on her. There was a hot, sharp pain in her throat and she grabbed at it as her back hit the floor. The scream died in her throat, blood welling around her fingers. Reflexively, she curled into a tight ball, waiting for the pain to return, and heard running feet, doors opening, other people screaming.