Buried Deep

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He shook his head. His hair flopped against his ears, obviously a bad regrowth, probably very cheap.

  “I’m amazed,” Bowles said, and she was. Ezra Farkus was Noelle DeRicci’s ex-husband. Her only ex, in a relatively long life. Granted, DeRicci had married Farkus decades ago and divorced him shortly thereafter, but former intimate partners usually made good—and dishy—interviews. DeRicci had been in the news for more than two years now. Someone else should have found him.

  “I’m not,” Farkus was saying. “Noelle and I weren’t together that long.”

  “But you married,” Bowles said. “That’s public record. Surely someone would have traced it.”

  “Long before she became a cop,” he said. “I thought she was going to be a teacher.”

  Bowles couldn’t imagine the tough-spoken DeRicci around children. “Was that her major in college?”

  “She didn’t have one. Too many interests.” He sighed. “Guess that should have been a sign.”

  “Of?”

  “The fact she couldn’t settle down.” He looked up at Bowles. “Noelle did things her own way.”

  “Even marriage?” Bowles asked.

  “Especially marriage,” he said.

  Bowles discreetly touched the back of her thumb, sending a marker to that section of the interview, so she could find it again. A pithy quote that, she hoped, would capture the essence of the interview itself.

  “You’d better go back to the beginning,” she said. “You met Security Chief DeRicci how?”

  “Security Chief.” He shook his head. “That’s terrifying.”

  He meant for Bowles to pick up on that comment. If she jumped on that now, he would think he could control the entire interview. So she ignored it, although she would pick up on it later if she felt it was worth her time.

  “How did you meet her?” Bowles asked again.

  He blinked, frowned slightly, and then propped himself up on one elbow. He stared behind her so fiercely that Bowles almost looked behind herself.

  Another tray floated by, this one with fruit salads, dessert compotes, and pies. She took one of the salads while she waited for his answer.

  If he didn’t respond in another minute, she’d end the interview—always wondering, of course, how DeRicci managed to live with this jerk, even for a few months.

  “Noelle and I met when we were four.” His voice startled Bowles. She was so convinced he wasn’t going to say anything that she had already started to ignore him. “My parents moved next door to hers.”

  He still didn’t look at her, but he did take a piece of pie from a nearby tray. Bowles walked him through the early years: their childhoods in one of Armstrong’s poorer neighborhoods, the death of DeRicci’s parents, the way his parents took her in despite their poverty, and how his parents had managed to send them both to college, despite their difficult teenage years.

  It sounded almost like DeRicci had married Farkus because she felt she had no choice, or because she had felt gratitude toward his parents. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to leave the warmth of that family, the only real family she had known.

  The marriage collapsed in Moscow Dome. They had gone to Moscow Moon University, about as far from Armstrong as they could get. Apparently, life alone, just the two of them, with no parents, no old neighborhood, took the marriage apart in less time than either could imagine.

  “You were both very young,” Bowles said with as much sympathy as she could muster.

  Finally, his gaze focused on hers. His eyes were naturally watery, his skin etched with the kind of lines that told her he still didn’t have a lot of money.

  “I loved her.” He said it defiantly, as if it were a badge. “I still do.”

  “Have you seen her recently?”

  He shook his head. “We agreed to have no contact.”

  “Was that part of the divorce decree?” Bowles asked.

  He flinched. “So what if it was? We still agreed.”

  “It’s unusual to have that as part of the decree,” Bowles lied.

  He shrugged. “We didn’t have children, and we fought all the time. So the judge asked that we didn’t see each other again, and we agreed.”

  There was more to the story, Bowles was sure of it. She would read the decree herself—divorces were public record—and then she would come back to Farkus if she had more questions.

  “You still love her,” Bowles said, “but you haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  “I see her on the news.” He sat up a little straighter. He hadn’t touched his pie.

  Bowles hadn’t touched the salad either. The ingredients weren’t real fruit. She recognized the sheen of the synthesized stuff along the edge of the watermelon cubes.

  “And that’s enough?” Bowles asked. “Enough to know that you still love her?”

  He raised his chin. “Is that strange?”

  Yes, Bowles wanted to say, but didn’t. This man was strange. Now that she knew how DeRicci had married him, Bowles wasn’t quite as interested, although she still wanted to see that divorce decree.

  “When I contacted you,” Bowles said, ignoring his last comment, “you said that it was about time someone asked you about Noelle. Why is that?”

  “She’s flighty,” he said.

  Bowles had never heard anyone describe DeRicci as flighty. From her observation, DeRicci was anything but flighty. She was solid and unimaginative and a little too serious. Certainly not flighty.

  “Flighty?” Bowles prompted.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She goes from one thing to another, never thinking about what’s behind her, always moving forward. There’s no thought, no analysis, no real caring. None.”

  He was revealing himself in those statements. It was in his tone, half angry, half sad. Bowles decided to guess.

  “One thing to another,” she repeated. “You mean one person to another.”

  His skin flushed instantly, revealing white acne scarring along his chin. Bowles hadn’t seen that outside the slums in Gargarin Dome.

  “Look at her history,” he said. “She even did it with her partners on the police force.”

  DeRicci had had a series of partners. Bowles hadn’t really investigated that yet.

  “But she did it to you too,” Bowles said, keeping her tone compassionate. “That must have hurt.”

  His eyes narrowed. “She said it hurt her worse than it hurt me. She was such a liar!”

  He slapped the table and shouted the last word, startling Bowles. Until that word, he had been soft spoken, almost reserved.

  “Why would an affair hurt her?” Bowles said.

  “I never did understand it,” Farkus said. “You ask her.”

  Bowles took a deep breath. “Guess.”

  He shook his head and pushed away from the table. For the first time, Bowles noticed the muscles in his arms. For an unenhanced male, he looked pretty strong.

  “Look,” he said, lowering his voice again. “She couldn’t protect our home, our family, or our lives together. She certainly can’t protect the Moon. Obviously, the idiots that hired her haven’t checked into her background. Obviously, they think this is just political and she’ll be just fine as a figurehead. But Noelle doesn’t do pomp and ceremony and ritual. She’s no good at being assigned anything.”

  “Not even the role of wife?” Bowles asked.

  “It’s not a role,” he said, now nearly whispering. “It’s a promise. And she couldn’t live up to that either.”

  He took his glass of water and drained it.

  “I still love her,” he said, “but she’s the biggest screwup I’ve ever known. I have no idea why they’re giving her so much power. Unless it’s all a sham and they’re using her to cover up for something.”

  That took Bowles by surprise. She wasn’t even sure she could follow the logic. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you pay attention?” he asked. “Governments hire people like Noelle all the time. Rehabilitated screwups in a preca
rious position, so that if something goes wrong, there’s someone to blame. ‘We didn’t realize she had so many problems in her background,’ they’ll say, and most people will believe them.”

  “But you won’t,” Bowles said.

  “I know they know about Noelle,” he said. “I’ve told them. I’ve sent vids and messages and warnings, and no one has ever responded. They know and they don’t care.”

  Bowles patted the tabletop. “Maybe you should sit back down and tell me what you do know.”

  He almost sat down. Then he stopped, mid-movement, and shook his head. “You’re humoring me, just like they did. You’ll listen to everything I have to say, then you’ll use one quote, like the one about me loving her, and ignore all the bad stuff. You’re part of the problem, lady. I’ve given you enough.”

  He whirled, then left, hurrying out of the enclosed area. Bowles watched him leave.

  He was right; she would only use a quote or two. But he had given her several good ones, ones that would help her make her case against the Moon’s new Security Czar.

  Seventeen

  Aisha Costard’s hotel was not too far from the bombed-out crater that still scarred Armstrong. Flint wondered what Costard had thought of that when she had seen it. She had already come here, terrified from her ordeal with the Disty, and then she had managed to find a hotel that seemed like one of the most unsafe buildings in the city.

  Or maybe he just thought that because he knew a lot of nicer hotels in the same price range, and a lot of better neighborhoods. This had been a lovely neighborhood before the bomb had blown up in its backyard. People had moved out after that, many going to other cities, some even leaving the Moon.

  However, the hotel known as the Domeview had done a banner business in the last year. A lot of the hotels in this area had. Ghoulish tourists had arrived to see the damage; many of them wanted to stay as close to the disaster site as possible.

  Flint didn’t understand it. Although he did know that Costard hadn’t come here for the disaster. Neither had he. He rarely came to this part of town now.

  It made him uncomfortable. Part of that was the smell. The area still had the faint odor of burning plastic. The city acknowledged the smell was a problem. It had gotten into the filters, and no matter how many times the engineers changed them, the smell lingered.

  The hotel was tall and not very wide, built nearly a century ago as one of the luxury hotels in Armstrong. The building’s height had once given it an excellent 180-degree view of the Dome, but as Armstrong grew around it, that view went away.

  Flint pulled open the double-doors, resenting their weight. Once, doing physical labor like that was considered luxurious. Luxury hotels from this period seemed to believe that making guests do things like pull open heavy doors and carry their own luggage was worth the extra price. That fad faded almost as quickly as it started, leaving the Domeview’s doors and a few other places as quirky reminders of that strange moment in the past.

  The air smelled fresher inside. It was certainly cooler. The tile floors shone. A long desk ran along one wall. Automatic check-ins ran along another. A single woman stood behind the main desk. She didn’t look up as Flint entered.

  He went to the automatic screens and punched in Costard’s name. The hotel wouldn’t tell him what room she was in, wouldn’t even really tell him if she was a guest.

  All it invited him to do was leave a message. If she answered, then the screen would tell him how to proceed.

  “Tell her Miles Flint is here,” he said in his normal tone.

  The system asked him to wait. It tried to entertain him with a listing of the hotel’s amenities and the amenities of the other hotels owned by the same corporation. The screen had cycled through the Moon and Earth and had just started on Mars when Costard answered.

  Her face filled the screen.

  “Mr. Flint.” Her voice was cool. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ve done some of the preliminary work, and I need to speak with you.”

  “Come on up,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Meet me down here. We’ll walk back to my office.”

  “Mr. Flint—”

  “Don’t argue, Ms. Costard. The hotel is required by law to monitor the actions of its guests. If you want a private conversation, you have to leave the premises.”

  She sighed, and the screen went dark. For a moment, he wondered if she wasn’t willing to talk with him. Then the system floated a message, telling him that Ms. Costard would join him shortly.

  Flint walked into the middle of the foyer. Five chairs surrounded a round coffee table. The tableau was uninviting: the chairs looked hard and uncomfortable, and it seemed impossible to have a conversation in that space.

  The woman behind the desk looked up at him, as if she was seeing him for the first time. Her gaze met his and held it, her expression cool. He felt unwelcome suddenly, and wondered if the system had tracked his identity and informed her. Retrieval Artists weren’t always well liked, especially in places like this, where keeping the guests comfortable was a top priority.

  The elevator doors shushed open. Costard came out, her hair slightly tangled, deep shadows under her eyes. She wore a long sweater over a pair of dark pants. The outfit looked as haphazardly assembled as she did.

  She approached him, and when she arrived, he put a hand under her arm. Her skin was slightly clammy.

  “Let’s walk,” he said.

  She nodded. The woman from the desk watched them both. Flint was happy to get away from her.

  When they stepped outside, Costard stopped. She wiped a hand over her face. “I have an aircar. We can go to your office.”

  “I prefer not to,” Flint said.

  Her hand dropped. She looked at him as if she didn’t understand him.

  “I don’t want to have this conversation on my records.”

  She touched the chips on the back of her hand. “Surely you’re linked.”

  He nodded. “But I’m going to shut down my networks. I suggest you do too.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  He put his hand on her arm again, and led her away from the building. There were several outdoor cafés a few blocks from here. He would lead her there, and maybe they would sit down when they arrived.

  By then, she might not want to either.

  “I did a lot of preliminary research on your case,” he said, “and I am not going to take it.”

  She wrenched her arm from him. “You brought me out here to tell me that? You wasted three days of my time.”

  “I brought you out here to tell you more than that. Keep walking with me.” He looked all three directions, including up, before crossing the street.

  She hesitated on the curb. He didn’t look back, but he had kept a few of his links on. He was using a camera chip to monitor several directions, making certain no one followed them. One of his other chips pinged for theft networks, the kind that searched for active links and stole information from them.

  After a moment, Costard’s shoulders sank. She hurried to catch up to him. Flint slowed down so that she could.

  They were heading away from the bombed-out area, toward a group of shops and restaurants that catered to the university crowd. The shops claimed to have the latest Earth fashions, while the restaurants advertised cheap food. A few downscale hotels crowded each other in the next block.

  “All you had to do was tell me you don’t want the case,” Costard snapped as she reached his side.

  “No, that’s not all,” he said. “I learned a lot of things the last few days. One of them is that the Disty death rituals are a lot more complicated than you mentioned. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of variations of each law.”

  “Are you telling me that we can pick which one applies?”

  “I’m telling you that finding the children might not be enough. There might be other steps involved.”

  She shoved her hands in the
pockets of her sweater and stared straight ahead, almost as if she hadn’t heard him.

  Students poured out of a nearby building, laughing and holding some sort of fabric he didn’t recognize. He waited until they passed before continuing.

  “I looked up your Disappeared,” he said. “She’s not Lagrima Jørgen.”

  That caught Costard’s attention. She glanced at him, eyes wide. “Who is she, then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “and we may never know. There are layers of identity, and so far as I can tell, they were designed for one shady deal after another.”

  “Shady,” she said. “You mean illegal?”

  He shook his head. “She seemed to be working with a team that knew how to use laws to their own advantage, skirting the edge of the law’s intent in such a way that the action would hold up in court if, indeed, the case was ever taken to court.”

  “Like the M’Kri Tribesmen,” Costard said.

  “Exactly.” Flint crossed another street, this time heading to the paths that wound through the university’s main campus. “And this is the problem. I think, in order to take the attention off of her, she invented that family listed in the court records.”

  “Invented.” Costard breathed the word. She stopped near some oak trees. They were real and very tall, nurtured by the Environmental Department. “She couldn’t have invented them. Her pelvis had parturition scars.”

  Flint stopped too. “What?”

  “A woman’s pelvis actually shows how many times she’s given birth. Jørgen’s pelvis confirms the record. She had two children.”

  He glanced around. No one stood near them. Flint had brought Costard here for a reason: the campus had pockets that had no links at all.

  “Well,” he said, “the family only shows up in the court documents. The other information I found about Lagrima Jørgen doesn’t mention family at all—and it should have.”

  “That’s impossible. She had children.”

  “But we don’t know if she raised them. We don’t even know if they survived childhood,” Flint said.

  A young woman carrying a pile of old documents came out of a nearby building and started down the path.