“Well?” DeRicci had learned that she could do haughty better than almost anyone. She didn’t like it, but it had its uses. Like right now, to get Popova out of her office.
“The media needs a statement,” Popova said, with more than a touch of annoyance.
“Tell them we’ll have the staff roster for them by the end of the month.” DeRicci hoped that she wasn’t lying. With a talent pool that covered the entire Moon, she would have thought that the applicants would have been at least competent.
“No.” Popova’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “They want a statement about the vengeance killing.”
Obviously, this was something DeRicci should have known about. She was tempted to pretend that she was on top of everything, but when she had been an underling, she had always thought bosses who pretended they knew more than they did were especially stupid.
“What vengeance killing?” DeRicci asked. Then she held up a hand. “And I don’t want to hear chapter and verse. I want to know why the media is calling me instead of the police.”
“Because the victim is a well-known criminal with so many warnings attached to her identification that she should never have been allowed into Armstrong in the first place. The media wants to know how we could let such a threat into the Dome.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” DeRicci said. “Hasn’t anyone figured out that we have no enforcement powers? We have no powers at all. We’re a figurehead agency until we finish our damn position papers and get all the mayors, all the city councils, and the entire government of the United Domes of the Moon to sign off on all of this stuff. Tell them that.”
Popova slipped inside the room and pushed the door closed. “No, sir.”
DeRicci raised her eyebrows. “No sir?”
Popova flushed, but she didn’t back down. “I want this department to work. I think it’s necessary. If I give that response to the entire Moon-based media, I’m undermining everything we’re trying to do here.”
DeRicci sighed and shook her head slightly. “What kind of criminal was this person? Was she just some poor sap who crossed the Disty or was she a threat to every Dome she entered? And for that matter, was she Disty herself? Because they can bring their vengeance killings here. It’s perfectly legal, and has been for as long as the Disty have been part of the Alliance.”
“She was human,” said Popova. “And I think it’s time you study the issue. Shall I announce a press conference in an hour?”
“No,” DeRicci said, mostly because she didn’t want Popova making her decisions for her. “I’ll look over the case and then decide whether or not I want to speak to the press.”
“As you wish,” Popova said with complete disapproval, and let herself out of the room.
Of course, she hadn’t said a word about the case number or the people involved. She hadn’t volunteered to forward a file, and she hadn’t even tried to help DeRicci understand what was going on.
Not that DeRicci would ask—at least, not after that little encounter.
DeRicci sighed and turned on the main wall screen, going to InterDome’s continuous news feed. If the media wanted DeRicci to make a comment, the vengeance killing had to be recent.
There had to be some kind of twist besides the victim’s criminal history with the Disty—something so important that the story had route to Moon Security.
DeRicci didn’t like the implications. And she didn’t even know the facts.
Twenty-four
She had never seen anything like it.
Sharyn Scott-Olson sat in front of the domed windows on the top floor of the Stanshut Government Office Building and watched the street below. She was surrounded by most of her coworkers, police officers she’d never seen, and a slew of government employees.
The Disty were fleeing the Dome.
All of the human taxis were booked, as well as the carts that wound their way through the Disty section. Entire Disty families packed their belongings in those carts and scurried alongside them, heading out of Sahara Dome in a panic.
Video, playing on the wall screen next to the window, showed the disaster at Sahara Dome’s train station. Thousands of Disty crowded the platform, pushing, shoving, a few trying to climb on the side of the trains, only to be pulled off by human guards.
The Disty police weren’t even trying to help. Rumor had it that the Disty officials had been the first ones out of the Dome.
The port was even worse. A split image showed the exterior of the port—filming inside it had been forbidden by the Disty—as hundreds of Disty shoved against the doors, trying to fit inside. Some of them fell and disappeared under the crowd.
Mercifully, the sound on the screen was off, so the screams and hums that the Disty made when they were panicked didn’t add to the live sounds coming from below.
All the humans in this building could do was watch. They couldn’t leave—the Disty covered the entire street, from building to building—and doors wouldn’t open. Even if they did, no human in their right mind would go down there. No human would dare get caught on the street.
The Disty’s panic made them incautious. Their desire to get out of Sahara Dome made them ignore the threat of pain and death that a stampede could cause.
Scott-Olson let out a breath. She hadn’t realized just how frightened she was until now. The worst case scenario that she and Batson had discussed was coming true.
She supposed the site was the safest area in the Dome right now. The Disty were obviously terrified of the mass grave, terrified of the implications and the contamination. They wouldn’t get near any humans, not even the ones trying to keep this flight from becoming something worse.
At least they weren’t looting the area or burning down the homes. All the Disty were doing was trying to get out of here as quickly as they could.
“Where do you suppose they’re going?” someone asked quietly behind her.
“Dunno,” someone else said. “Probably anywhere that’ll take them.”
“Will other places take them?” Scott-Olson asked. “They’ve been living here, in the shadow of that grave. Aren’t they contaminated?”
No one answered her. No one knew. This was a part of Disty culture that no human had delved into too deeply.
She leaned forward just a little, watching the tiny creatures run toward any escape they could find, some holding hands, others carrying children on their shoulders, even more clutching a handful of possessions against their concave chests.
Scott-Olson couldn’t fathom that kind of fear—at least, not of something tangible. Dead bodies were dead bodies, nothing more. A part of life that had to be dealt with.
Not something to be feared.
She had lived in Sahara Dome for a very long time. She had thought she understood the Disty.
But, as she watched them trample each other in their attempts to escape the now-tainted Dome, she realized she hadn’t understood them at all.
Twenty-five
Flint was in the basement cafeteria at Dome University’s law school when he finally found information on Lagrima Jørgen.
The law school’s cafeteria was busy year-round. It was also open all the time. Some law students seemed to live here; they were in the cafeteria every time Flint showed up to use a screen.
Although he’d heard that Dome University’s Armstrong branch had one of the most diverse law schools in this solar system, he saw little evidence of it here. Part of the reason was that the cafeteria catered to human tastes. Coffee was free, as were sugary desserts. The food itself cost little more than a few credits, and wasn’t even worth that.
But a student could survive for weeks on coffee and pastries made with Moon flour—and many of them did. The only aliens who seemed to come in here, aside from study partners, were the Peyti, who seemed to like the pastries (despite having to move their breathing masks to eat them), and the Sequevs, eight-legged aliens the size of a small dog.
Three Sequevs sat in the cafeteria this night, using the tabl
e as both chair and study area. The food had been pushed to the center, and the nearest Sequev reached out with its fourth limb, picked up a pastry, and brought the food to its mouth, while its multifaceted eyes studied the screen before it.
The other two Sequevs were whispering in English—something that had unnerved Flint the first time he heard it, since the Sequevs sounded like small children when they spoke. He had since learned to ignore them.
Still, he sat as far from their table as he possibly could.
A single Peyti sat near him, using its long fingers to turn the pages of an antique book. Its breathing mask was squarely in place, but its skin looked a little too gray all the same. The poor Peyti had trouble with the oxygen atmosphere, but wanted all the perks that came from being in the center of the Earth Alliance. When he had been in the police department, Flint had worked on cases with the Peyti, but he hadn’t enjoyed it. They were too logical and legalistic for him.
The remaining six people in the cafeteria were human. Two men sat side-by-side in a booth, flirting as they studied the screen before them. A woman sat by herself. The remaining humans sat at a group table, quizzing each other for an upcoming exam.
Their questions sounded incredibly easy compared with the legal issues that Flint had encountered over the years. He didn’t come to the cafeteria as often as he would like, simply because he was tempted to approach group studies and ask them to ponder issues that still vexed him, years after the fact.
Instead, he kept to his private booth near the serving trays. The screen here had an extra backlight, and it didn’t require vocal access. He could punch in one of the stolen identifications and work for hours without anyone noticing him.
Occasionally, he would open the order menu on his screen and have a tray deliver something to him. Those he charged to a blanket university account that he had set up in the system long ago. He paid it anonymously every month, and no one seemed to notice.
This afternoon, he had ordered one of the pastries and some soy milk. He didn’t plan on touching either—the pastries tasted like dried glue, and the soy milk had an oily texture that just wasn’t natural—but he knew that ordering kept him off the cafeteria’s recycling radar.
Flint had visited most of his favorite public network systems in the past few days, trying to track down Lagrima Jørgen without setting off any red flags. He hadn’t found her or any semblance of her.
He hadn’t even found an image of her, which he thought odd.
So, when he came to the law school, he decided to focus on the Multicultural Tribunal Case, and see if he could find information about the various parties. He’d already done a lot of work on the M’Kri Tribesmen, so he started with BiMela Corporation—and that was where he had his luck.
BiMela Corporation bought the mineral rights from Arrber Corporation, whom Jørgen supposedly had worked for. Flint already knew that Arrber was probably a dummy organization. That seemed clear from the way they fought the suit. He would dig deeper there too, but that would take some time. People who excelled in corporate misdeeds knew how to cover their tracks.
BiMela was legitimate and had existed for fifty years before the case found its way to the Multicultural Tribunal. Flint scanned stock reports and earnings ratios, articles that examined the company’s financial holdings, and a few in-depth financial pieces about the heads of the corporation.
As far as he could tell, BiMela had been absorbed into another, larger, corporate entity fifteen years ago, and had effectively ceased to exist. While the mineral rights on M’Kri had proven profitable, the loss of reputation from the case had put BiMela on an unsteady financial footing, which they were never able to recover from. Finally, new leadership had negotiated a deal with the larger corporation to take over BiMela.
At first, Flint had thought this another dead end. BiMela seemed legitimate, and once the Multicultural Tribunal case ended, the corporation had no interest in Lagrima Jørgen or her dummy corporation. He found no evidence of any communication between Arrber and BiMela, or between BiMela and Jørgen, in the two years between the end of the case and her death.
But the deeper he dug into BiMela, the more questionable business deals he found. All of the deals were with different corporations, and all of them had resolved in BiMela’s favor before any court cases. The only case that ever went to court was the one with the M’Kri Tribesmen, and from public records, it was clear that the only reason it went to court was because the Tribesmen wouldn’t settle.
Theoretically, corporate financial records had to be made public every quarter, so that stockholders could peruse the documents and make certain everything was in order. So many rules and regulations fell on these sorts of corporations that only the publicly traded ones followed these guidelines.
BiMela’s reports were sketchy, and no one seemed to notice. Flint had been going through them year by year, when he finally realized he should try something else.
He looked up the merger of BiMela and the new corporation, Fortion Corporation. Because that merger went through Alliance channels, the financial records of both companies were detailed and in exquisite order.
Flint read BiMela’s financial history as if it were a book.
He almost got kicked off the table. A student behind him protested, as the system reviewed the student’s recent eating and ordering habits. Flint had gotten so engrossed that he hadn’t noticed his pastry plate was missing, along with his soy milk. After a certain amount of time, the trays just cleared the old food.
He placed an order for a freshly made ham sandwich, and replaced the soy milk with the cafeteria’s very bad coffee.
Then he returned to his reading.
What he learned as he went through was that fifty years before the merger, BiMela had had serious financial troubles. At that time, a new entity—a subcorporation, a group, he couldn’t quite tell—had been formed.
Called Gale Research and Development, this arm of BiMela seemed to finance other, smaller corporations—farming out research and development money to “more creative organizations that will enhance BiMela’s bottom line.”
It took Flint nearly three hours to find that one of the smaller corporations which received funding was Arrber Corporation. And Arrber Corporation’s funding started about the same time Lagrima Jørgen’s name appeared in the system—long before BiMela Corporation bought the mineral rights to the M’Kri Tribesmen’s land from Arrber.
A tray came by with Flint’s coffee and sandwich. He took both, leaned back in his chair, and thought. This discovery, which was a footnote to a footnote to a footnote in a report made years after the case closed, could overturn the entire case.
Or so it seemed to his non-legal brain.
Because BiMela already owned those rights, if the financial documents were to be believed. Arrber was a subsidiary of BiMela, and as such had no need to sell anything to the parent company.
Arrber received funding through the end of the lawsuit, and then vanished off the books.
Flint sipped the coffee, ignoring its bitter, burnt flavor. If Arrber were a fake subsidiary, set up for a mineral-rights scam, how many other companies in the Gale Research and Development list were also fake?
He set the coffee down and started a new search, knowing it would take a while. First, though, he transferred all of BiMela’s financial documents to one of his chips. He would store this information on his own system. It would take a lot of time to work through it, time he didn’t want to spend at public terminals.
But he did look up each company. Only a few still existed. He examined those if they predated Lagrima Jørgen’s death. Two did, but he found no Lagrima working for them, and no Jørgen either. It would take quite a while to see if a woman fitting her description had once worked for the company, but he would do it if he had to.
He just hoped he wouldn’t have to.
Twenty-six
DeRicci stood in the doorway of the small office. The stench of blood, feces, and rotting corpse made
her stomach turn. She was noticeably out of practice at visiting crime scenes.
A body lay in the middle of the windowless room, legs and arms splayed, stomach carved open, and internal organs draping the room as if someone had decided this was a new form of decoration. The room’s three chairs had been pushed against the wall.
The rookies who had found the scene hadn’t been able to deal with it. They had gotten sick, outside, fortunately. The detective who had the case, a Bartholomew Nyquist, hung back as if the sight offended him.
DeRicci had seen too many Disty vengeance killings to find this one offensive. It stank worse than some, but not as bad as others. At least the body had been discovered fairly quickly. That was a small blessing.
DeRicci backed out of the doorway into the street. She hoped she hadn’t gone in far enough for the stench to stick to her clothing. Nyquist closed the door behind her. She was grateful. That smell would travel otherwise.
The rookies stood on either side of her car, watching the roads. Several more officers guarded the perimeter, keeping the media and the gawkers back.
DeRicci had to come down here and see for herself what all the fuss was about. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find.
The owners of the building—a disappearance company—hadn’t been allowed inside even though they were protesting, claiming they had a right to see what had been done to their office. They had been the ones who had gone to the media, complaining that their lives might be in danger from the Disty, and they couldn’t even dig into their records to find out.
DeRicci agreed with Nyquist’s decision to keep the owners out. She doubted this killing had much to do with the disappearance company. From everything she had seen, this vengeance killing was legal and justified.
The victim, Aisha Costard, had countless outstanding Disty warrants. She had gone to Mars, gotten herself involved in some kind of highly offensive murder, and then had come to the Moon.
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