“Well that was productive. Now we just gotta track down a thousand people,” said Quinlin, standing up and stretching. “And where the fuck are the CII records?”
“Daniels is supposed to be on that.”
“That guy’s gonna make a play for this case. I can feel it. He’s gumming up the works. Making us look bad.”
“Probably. I’ll hit him up again, find out where he’s at.”
“All right, I’m gone. I’d ask you to get some damn sleep, but I know you won’t.”
“Then at least you know one thing. I’m gonna look over a few more of these jackets.”
“Man, you need a life. Go home.”
Quinlin tossed his coat over his shoulder and pulled open the door.
“See you in the morning,” said Hoskin.
Two more hours of re-examining all the files they’d isolated told him exactly nothing. He blinked off the mediawall and saved everything to their private smartcores and his backbrain, heavily q-crypted. He left his car at the Farm and took the Tangles home. They let him off about nine blocks from his apartment. He didn’t mind the walk. It let him work ideas out without all the electronic noise.
When he got off the elevator to his floor, he found Sakura was asleep in front of his door.
An empty wine bottle was on its side next to her. On the floor, a bunch of pills had melted to mush in a pool of half-dried wine. A small drawing of a matryoshka doll on a sheet of crinkled paper was soaking in the wine. She was passed out on her side, but he could see bruises on her face and neck, running down into her sleeveless kimono top. The top flowed down into a lacy, layered short skirt of red and black, strewn around her like feathers blown apart by the wind. More bruises on her thighs spiraled down until they disappeared into elaborate high heeled boots that started at her knees, the boots covered in intricate buckles. Her face was mashed against the carpet, her hair wild and scattered.
Hoskin waved a hand over her and did a quick scan. She was alive. He picked her up, carried her inside his apartment, and signaled a cleaning ball to clean up the hallway. He flashed his Apartment Personality, a compressed and streamlined vSelf of himself.
“She’s all right. No internal bleeding. No brain trauma. No stab or projectile wounds. Some burns,” flashed the Apartment.
He put her down gently on the sofa. Hoskin knelt down beside her and touched her face gently.
“Hey,” he said.
Her eyes opened fast and she sat up and looked around confused.
“It’s all right,” said Hoskin. “Hey, look at me. It’s okay.”
Recognition registered in her eyes and she lay back down and closed her eyes. She wasn’t really awake, just acting on deep sleep fight-or-flight instinct.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” she said softly.
“What happened?” he said.
She just shook her head slightly in the pillow, her eyes still tightly shuttered.
“All right, rest. Tell me later,” he said.
She nodded and in seconds was out again. He stood up and looked at her, not understanding yet how she fit into the picture, if at all. He didn’t like that feeling. His father always used to say, “people forget that confusion is the first step of learning,” but it was easy to forget when you were confused.
Maybe the bruises aren’t even real? Maybe just projections? He knew that wasn’t true, even before he flashed the Apartment about it. The Apartment confirmed they were real. It deep scanned her, and he could see the see the burst capillaries just beneath her skin where the blood had seeped into the surrounding tissue. Zoomed in, he could even see that some of the pore projectors were damaged, crushed like a field of broken flowers hit by a windstorm. There was moderate to severe bruising, deep purple and red like the spilled wine, all over her body, mostly in the shape of fists and something long and thick and irregular. A stick? Potentially dangerous, but the scan showed no organ damage or internal bleeding. She had burns on her stomach and back, probably from electric torture. He made the Apartment run the scan again to be sure. Same result.
Probably it was just a boyfriend who beat her, some former John who she was staying with because she had nowhere else to go, no one to trust. Made sense. But it didn’t. He didn’t know why. He looked over her and felt suddenly protective of her, the way you do a wounded bird.
He cleared some papers off the big easy chair across from her and sat down in it. He watched her and got tired, his eyes fogging over and he started to drift. Nobody could get to her here. Nobody could hurt her here. He sunk into sleep, and she disappeared.
Strange dreams attacked Hoskin as soon as he slipped beyond the border of night into unconsciousness. A never-ending wave of birds assaulted the apartment, swarming, slashing. They slammed through the windows and beat themselves to death against the apartment’s energy shields.
Hoskin slashed at them as they poured in from every direction. When he connected he felt a huge thunk and heard the sickening splats as the birds burst under his blows.
And then the dream flipped. He was running all out. Running for a door. He was almost there. He reached out to touch it open and then he felt something beneath his chin. An explosion of white light and the dream shifted again. The birds attacked him. He hit another one.
One of the birds kept ringing. It buzzed around him crazily, the ringing constant. He slashed at it with a handheld axe, but missed and it kept coming, relentlessly. Ringing, ringing. Desperately he hacked at it and then realized it was a ringing in his head, trying to wake him. Slowly and then quickly he came awake and the birds faded and vanished into the dark side of his mind.
It was the Captain calling. She flickered onto his innervision.
“What’s up, Cap?” flashed Hoskin, still groggy, the phantom birds fading.
“I need you to get moving,” flashed the Captain.
“What’s goin’ on?”
“Get down to the Northern Lights district.”
“Red light district? Another murder?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’ll gear up.”
“As fast as you can. Daniels is already down here with a whole team.”
“What the fuck?”
“Probably a power play. They didn’t call us.”
“How did you find out about it?”
“News.”
“Not good. Saw this one comin’. And now he’s gonna push in and fuck the whole thing up. Where’s Quinlin?”
“Not answering.”
“That ain’t like him to not get somewhere first.”
“No, it’s not. But I can’t worry about that now. You’re lead. I need you there now.”
“All right, I’m already gone,” flashed Hoskin and blinked off the link.
The girl was still asleep. He dialed up the Apartment’s defenses and geared up to head to the crime scene. He tagged her with a drenching mist of nano. This time he’d be able to see where she went and he’d know if someone attacked her. She was not walking out and disappearing like a wraith into the dark heart of the city.
***
In the Northern Lights district, Hoskin noticed that every building had a harsh red paint job. In the dark, the buildings looked gray or purple, as if bruised, but under the harsh hoverspots the CIIs had tossed up into the air they looked beet-red.
Hoskin stepped out of his aircar and a wave of incredible dry heat hit him. His throat felt like sandpaper. He licked his lips and pulled up info on the district. It flashed across his eyes. Like the Southern Lights district, the city cut maintenance funding for the area’s microclimate generators a hundred years earlier and the generators had failed. It was an easy place for politicians to cut. Not hard to take away support from people who had no voice when they needed to fund something more popular. Hoskin blinked the area’s history away and looked around.
Unlike the Southern Lights where it rained forever, the Northern Lights microclimes had broken in a dif
ferent way, making it absurdly hot, like a wide open desert at the peak of day. The intense heat baked the streets. Everything seemed in a perpetual stage of permanent meltdown. That’s when he realized the buildings weren’t painted red; the artificial sunlight and radiation had burned them red and they would never heal. They had sunburn on top of sunburn on top of sunburn.
Hoskin spotted a cluster of activity about five blocks down from where he’d landed. His eyes zoomed. Central Investigators were everywhere, all dressed conservatively, most in dark black business togas, their Central Investigation and Intelligence badges hovering just over their heads in silvery holographic light. Beat cops stood around, looking out of place.
He’d landed just behind the press line. CII had set up energy barriers to keep the press back. A few hundred reporters packed in around the barriers. A thousand camera drones buzzed like the dark birds from his dreams. More ominous though was what guarded the barriers: Sentinels.
Fuck’s the military doing here?
The black-armored, synthetic, insectian biomachines moved with a superhuman fluidity, their heads panning, multiple eyes taking everything in. They looked like massive praying mantises, double the size of the average posthuman, with long razored forceps and a centaur-like back section with six legs and four folded wings. Their legs and joints were reinforced with gnarled biomechanical armor that glistened like polished chrome under the hoverspots’ vivid lights. With them at the gates, no reporter dared to try and sneak through.
Hoskin moved swiftly down the street to the action. He’d figure out why the military was there later, but this much was obvious: things had just escalated again.
Most of the windows where the hookers usually stood to display their bodies to potential tricks were shut, their lights off. Nobody was open for business. Some of the girls had spilled out into the streets, trying to get a better look at what had happened.
Hoskin tried Quinlin. No answer. He left him a voice message.
“Where the fuck you at? We got another murder. Get your ass up.”
A young cop was standing around about a block away from the crime scene, and Hoskin tapped him.
“What’s the scenario?” said Hoskin.
“We’ve got two murders: a whore and somebody big. The CIIs won’t let us anywhere near it,” said the kid.
Hoskin left him standing there and went straight for the crime scene.
A Sentinel blocked his path before he could get too close. Hoskin could see the thing’s strange compound eyes, segmented armored face and mandibles.
“Identify yourself,” said the Sentinel, its voice emotionless and icy.
Hoskin held up his hand. His badge flashed red, silver and gold, a brilliant fire on his palm. The Sentinel stepped back and waved him through.
Hoskin pushed past a tall, rail-thin CII who looked like he was made of steam engine parts, and went into the greeting room of the brothel. It was packed with investigators, with barely an inch to move. Forensics spiders crawled the walls. His backbrain told him the place was heavy with mites. Hoskin fired off some of his own nano and blinked up the swarm’s microscopic view. He could see the mites floating everywhere, eating every tiny particle they could find. Most of it was police nano, their tiny IDs and serial numbers glowing fiercely on their shells.
Hoskin zoomed up out of the microscopic world and looked around slowly. There were four CIIs stuffed into the greeting room and three more on the stairs. Hoskin noticed they were all posthuman. The one in the greeting room had a face made of tangled tubes, that unraveled when he flashed with a squat Crime Scene Investigator who looked like he was made from a pile of colored balls. Whenever the short Investigator flashed, the balls lit up in an alternating sequence.
Hoskin flipped through different light spectrums and noticed no blood on the walls of the greeting room, no splatter marks anywhere, nothing disturbed. He flipped back to the standard light spectrum and turned sideways to move down the stairs, past the other CIIs. Already he could smell the dead in the stagnant, dry air. Perspiration poured off him. He turned up his circulatory system to help cool himself off. It was a hack Quinlin had taught him.
He turned the corner and looked into the bedroom. Daniels stood on the opposite side of the room, flanked by two CIIs, a tall blue non-ortho-bodied posthuman with dozens of eyes on his head and another who looked as if he was made from a pile of gnarled sticks. Hoskin didn’t know either of the two CII’s Phyles, if they even had any. They could be one-offs or prototypes from one of the more secret Phyle coalitions.
Daniels looked right at Hoskin but showed no signs of seeing him. He was clearly lost in his innervision, his eyes filled with numbers or data or images. But the CII with the multiple eyes saw Hoskin, twelve eyeballs swiveling to focus on him.
“Hey, who are you?” said the investigator.
“I’m the guy whose crime scene you’re fucking up,” said Hoskin.
Daniels came out of his innervision as if coming out of a trance.
“Good to see you,” said Daniels.
“Is it? What’s your angle on this?”
“My angle?”
“Don’t play with me. You know what I’m talking about. Why weren’t we called in?”
“CII got this call and took it. We’re just following—“
“Stop. Let’s not play games. Why weren’t we called?”
Daniels exhaled wearily.
“Because your squad can’t handle it.”
“And why’s that?”
“It requires a—delicacy—that you lack.”
“When you first got brought in on this by that rich friend of yours, you said you’d stay the hell out of the way, you were just there to observe. This what you call observing?” said Hoskin.
“The situation has changed.”
Hoskin stared at him. Daniels stared back, saying nothing.
“That’s how it is?” said Hoskin.
“That’s how it is. If we want it, we take it,” said Daniels.
“You come in here, you play it calm, just hanging back and waiting. Then we go to take a look at law enforcement and you’re supposed to get the CII jackets for me. But you don’t get ‘em. And then I show up today and we weren’t told about the crime scene. I find that very coincidental and I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“Look, why don’t you get out of here, before you step into something you really can’t handle?” said Daniels. “It’s out of your hands now. This is our case.”
Hoskin glared at him, then turned and walked out without saying a word, but he sure as fuck wasn’t gonna hang around quietly for his turn while they tore up the crime scene.
Twenty minutes later Hoskin returned with three crime scene techs and a team of fifteen other junior officers who couldn’t say no to him without hurting their paychecks. The Sentinels looked confused, but the Hoskin squad all had badges and no other orders had come down to keep the local officers out.
“Everyone stay close. We’re going in. Just push past whoever is there and get inside,” said Hoskin.
Hoskin lead the charge back into the tiny whorehouse. Shouting started right away.
“This is our scene—”
“Fuck you—”
“No fuck you—”
“Get the hell off our—”
“Don’t even try it—”
The front room and the stairs filled to bursting. Daniels came out of the back room.
“What is this?” said Daniels.
Hoskin was at the top of the stairs. CIIs and cops were stuffed so tight into the stairwell that nobody could move.
“You know what this is,” shouted Hoskin, jabbing a finger down at him. “You’re not pushing us out of our own crime scene.”
“Detective, we’ve got this one under control, though I can’t say the same for you,” said Daniels.
“I don’t give a shit what you think you got.”
Hoskin shoved a CII and starte
d down the stairs. Daniels just looked at him calmly.
“HEY HEY HEY,” shouted a booming voice suddenly overhead.
Someone had flashed the Police Chief and the CII Director. Both of their faces appeared in holograms over the crowd. Their images were too big for the tiny space and half their heads got cut off by the low ceiling.
“Everyone shut up,” shouted the CII Director. He was a dark black man with silver array-control tattoos laced into his skin in intricate patterns. “All you morons stand down. Officers Daniels and Hoskin, we’re working together on this so get your shit together. We don’t need any of this fucking nonsense. Now I don’t want to hear any response except ‘yes sir.’”
“No problem, sir,” said Hoskin, looking at Daniels and smiling.
Daniels smiled back.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Absolutely, sir. I never intended to keep Detective Hoskin and his team out of the scene, so I don’t know where the confusion came from.”
***
Hoskin flashed Quinlin two more times. Still nothing. He left another angry message.
“Get your ass down here.”
Hoskin looked at the room. There were two bodies. A fleet of forensics spiders crawled them, making it look like maggots had gotten to them. The woman lay in pieces around the room. It looked like she’d walked into an industrial fan. Parts of her hung everywhere, as if part of the decoration.
In the dark room, between the slashing splatters of blood, Hoskin saw small patches of the deep onyx-colored walls, their soft reflective quality faintly mirroring bits of the grisly scene on their uneven surface. Mechanical dildos hung on the wall in a row, organized from small to large.
The man lay face up, his feet and wrists bound with zip cuffs. He had almost no skin on his face. His exposed muscles looked like butcher shop steaks with slivers of dirty tissue stuck to them. Hoskin snapped a shot with his eyes and flicked the image into his backbrain. His editing daemon went to work on the face, quickly reconstructing it and opening a channel to The Farm’s datacores to run an ID check.
The Scorpion Game Page 18
