Hoskin looked into the two guests, Jonathan Blaineford and Emilia Jassard. They were rich dilettantes. Jonathan had married into Emelia’s money from a less wealthy family. In short they were mundane. They were supposed to look like victims too. And maybe they were. But there was another option that was more unsettling.
As far as he could see it, there were only two possibilities here. The first was that the killer targeted the family’s friends and packed them full of explosive mites that got past their immune systems. That meant he had taken time to track down the friends, watching them over time. He’d probably built up a relationship with them, so he could get close and deliver the payload. Maybe he’d wormed the certificates and codes out of them for the Building Personality?
The other possibility was that there were definitely multiple killers. That was more unsettling. These two “friends” had smuggled in the mites and killed the whole family themselves. They were suicide bombers.
It still implied the killer building a long relationship with them over time. Even worse it meant he was clever enough to turn them against their friends. Or maybe they hated the Florentine family all along and he just exposed their rage? That meant he was adept at finding vulnerable, angry people and manipulating them, a mark of a true sociopath. If that were true, then who knew how many more people were rallying to the killer’s cause, willing to sacrifice themselves for him?
***
The CII building was on high alert, like every other government building in the city. A three block cordon of concentrically laid out energy gates surrounded it. It was almost impossible to get anywhere near it. Hoskin’s Dynasty Security aircar approached cautiously, fully stealthed. He had to be careful. In times like these people started shooting without thinking. The car’s scans picked up a dense cloud of nano and at least ten heavy assault drones, cloaked.
He hovered at a safe distance outside the CII building, waiting for Daniels. The Grid said he was still there. When he was off duty, Daniels could turn off his public tracker, but Hoskin wondered how often Leptics went off duty? It was one in the morning and he was still working. Hoskin tuned up his system with stims and told the car to wake him if he drifted off.
Hoskin’s scanner was going crazy with alerts from all over the city. Every cop was trying to enforce the curfew and failing. There were too many people defying it. Three cops were in the hospital from scuffles with protestors. At least a hundred protestors were being treated after clashes with the cops and military. Scattered looting was reported in the Edgelands.
There was only one thing that would stop this. Get the killer.
He pinged Quin again. Still no response. He hoped they didn’t find him in a ditch. He started calling hospitals just in case, starting with the ones closest to Quinlin’s apartment, Mercy and Golden Light. It was a long wait. The hospitals were bogged down. But they’d didn’t have Quinlin’s body or any John Does. The rest of the hospitals in town didn’t either. He tagged their notification systems to send him alerts if he checked in. He checked the morgues too. No bodies. For that he was thankful. Wherever you are, I’ll help you, just reach out. Trust me.
The light from the aircar’s holographic dashboard flickered on his face. An alert told him that the memories of Treasury Secretary Salazar had spilled onto the nets and millions had already downloaded them. They showed him embezzling government money with shell corporations, wrecking the life of a rival by planting evidence of child porn, lying in court and having an affair with a staffer. Senators were calling for calm as protestors angrily shouted for extensive investigations into all Senator’s lives. They’d all have something to hide. Who didn’t?
Hoskin flipped through the streams.
“I say we hang them all and start over—”
“Purge the entire Senate. Start fresh—”
“The Senate passed the Emergency Freedom and Security Act, 299 to 2, with 7 abstaining, giving the President sweeping new powers that she says are needed to contain the spiraling violence. Detractors expressed grave concerns over the lack of judicial oversight—”
“I regretfully accept the burden of these new powers. I promise to bring a swift end to the violence—”
A new message from Multiface spiraled into the corner of his eye. A massive attempt to block the messages was underway, with the major newsstreams openly vowing not to air them, but it didn’t matter. Media was too fragmented now. It always got through. He blinked it open.
“The people in power do what they always do. They take more. They look for any excuse, any opportunity, no matter how small, to take away everything you have. As soon as things go wrong, they show their true nature and take more of your rights. But I’ve peeled back their carefully constructed lies and exposed them all for you to see. We will rip out their lies from the roots—”
Hoskin blinked it off. He was no better than the Dynasties he claimed to hate. He incited people and then said ‘see how they act?’ If you keep poking a dog and it bites you, you don’t blame the dog.
He set the newsstreams to mute and low-dim. He looked out the one-way window.
Just then he got an alert that Daniels’ signal had gone offline.
Hoskin sat up and flooded his system with more stims to make sure he was totally awake. He blinked tracking mites into his gun arm. He would need to tag Daniels to keep track of him as soon as he got close enough.
There were two places Daniels could come out, either the doors to the street, or the aircar lot on the roof. Hoskin guessed the roof. His aircar took off and shot straight up.
He waited. A minute passed and then another. Hoskin wondered if he picked wrong? The seconds crawled by. He scanned the roof again and again. The clock in his eye flickered.
He was just about to head back to the front entrance, when Daniels came out and got into a dark green aircar. The car took off and Hoskin followed, keeping his distance. Hoskin’s car had a following algorithm but he flicked it to manual. He’d trust his own instincts.
He let Daniels get a good head start. CII agents were trained to spot a tail, even stealthed ones. Hoskin’s dark car moved with amazing fluidity, like a shadow across midnight. Daniels alternately sped up and slowed down but Hoskin’s car easily kept pace. Hoskin wasn’t sure if Daniels expected a tail or if he was just following procedures. Eventually Daniels doubled back and headed for the Southern Lights district.
As they got closer, rain battered Hoskin’s car. It came on sudden and fierce, driven by the busted microclimes. The rain would make stealth much easier to spot, so Hoskin lengthened the distance between them. Daniels turned a corner and Hoskin almost lost him. The rain slashed in at a hard angle, thundering off the roof.
Luckily Daniels landed. Hoskin caught up to him and docked on a low roof. Most of the buildings were much shorter here. Hoskin got out and hustled to the edge of the rooftop, the rain drenching him almost instantly. It was hard to see. His eyes compensated, clearing up his vision. He got down behind a wall and let off a storm of mites. The mites streamed back video to his eyes, zooming in close. He could see the red lights in some of the windows where the women worked. Most of them were out. A bunch of the windows were shattered and trash lay all over the streets. Hoskin guessed most of the girls were too scared to come to work. When crowds went crazy and cops were occupied, hookers turned into easy targets for rape and assault.
The streets were low lit, the hoverlamps flickering and jumping. The dense, ghostly fog curled and slithered around the rotting buildings.
Daniels got out of his car, the heavy mist swirling around him. He tossed a sonic rain shield into the air and looked around slowly. The streets were empty. Even the bums that usually slept under strips of dead building flesh were gone. A pair of Sentinels raced through the fog and scanned him with a blast of light.
“Stay where you are, do not move, do not move,” said one of the machines. “Curfew is in effect.”
Daniels held up his hands and a badge glowed ove
r his head.
The biomachines seemed satisfied and moved away, disappearing into the mist.
Daniels checked every direction, taking his time. Hoskin’s ultra-high rez mites could see every pore on the man’s flawless skin. His age resetting was practically perfect. Gold script ringed the iris of his designer eyes. His expensive business suit and jacket shrugged off water like seal skin but looked like silk.
Hoskin heard a humming. He looked around and saw two patrol drones like oversized wasps coming hard in his direction. They were moving fast, their dark wings stretched wide. If they saw him, he’d have to ID himself and Daniels might see. They were coming right at him. Hoskin readied his new CSI badge. He hoped it would work. It occurred to him that it might not. Did the drones even know what a CSI was?
He flashed his gun arm to non-lethal and got ready. They were getting closer and closer. He’d take them down if he had to. They came fast and then suddenly changed direction and raced off to the east. He let out a low stream of breath in relief.
He focused back on Daniels. He was at a hooker’s door. A prostitute was peeking out, the door cracked barely open. He talked to her for a minute and then she opened the door a little wider. She was wearing a heavy coat and no makeup. Her hair was half done up with tiny faux jewel butterflies. After a short conversation he went inside with her. Daniels didn’t seem the type, but then again, who did? Hoskin stopped being surprised by people’s secrets years ago.
Hoskin waited until the door closed before he got up on one knee. His arm reassembled itself into a high powered sniper rifle. He steadied it with his other hand, took careful aim and blasted Daniels’ car with a barrage of powerful tracking mites. They hit the car and came online, sending back ACKs.
The car’s immune system attacked them quickly, but after a few minutes the defenders slowed their assault. Most of his bugs survived and would now tell him where Daniels was at all times, at least for a little while. CII cars had several layers of immune system response. Hoskin just hoped the Dynasty tech would give him the edge.
He made his way back to his car and sat down to wait. A half hour later Daniels came out, got in his car and took off. The tracking mites flared up on Hoskin’s holo display. He had to make a call now, keep following Daniels or go see what he’d been doing in there? He was probably just getting his dick wet, but maybe not. Better check it out. Hoskin waited until Daniels got clear and then landed down the street. He stepped out into the wicked fog and knocked on her door.
“Yeah,” she said, opening the door a crack. “God, honey, you getting all wet. You ain’t got no umbrella?”
She’d taken the butterflies out, and her hair was tied back now.
“Mind if I come in?” said Hoskin, showing his CSI badge.
She opened the door all the way at the sight of the badge.
“Yeah sure, I guess. I already told that other cop everything though.”
Hoskin stepped inside and she closed the door. The place was small, but it smelled like cinnamon and butter. She sat down in the front room in a dark red chair. He sat on the couch. She had copper colored hair and a hard face. She lit up a cigarette and blew a stream of bright green smoke that hung in the air.
His eyes scanned her. Kagney Lynn Cartasia, registered prostitute. She’d been onboard for more than a hundred years. That was rare. Most died young or quit and died somewhere else. She’d clearly had a few age resets. Her knuckles looked slightly withered, a sign of low cost surgery.
“So yeah, I knew that girl,” said Kagney Lynn.
Hoskin went with it, since she seemed to think he already knew what she was talking about.
“Tell me about her,” he said.
“I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about her in a long time. You know? I used to work a few doors down from her. Was doing a lot harder stuff back then, Qwik mostly. I sold it to her. She liked it. A real paranoid type, but I was too back then. She always thought someone was trying to break into her head. Hearing signals and stuff. Into real fetish stuff too. Pain and cutting and torture. I never liked that.”
“What happened to her?”
“She got religion. Guy comes round, silver looking guy, don’t remember his name. Long time ago. And then one day she takes her kid and was gone. I liked her, but she creeped me sometimes and that kid of hers was whack job. I mean a whack job makes a whack job. She was over here one time and said they was watching us through the walls and stuff. I says who? And she said the government. I told her, stop with the drugs, and she took a swing at me. And then I was done not long after, moved out, got married. Got married a few more times. And now I’m back here but I’m getting out real soon. I can’t stay here for long.”
“And what about the kid? Something wrong with him?”
“Just a feeling really. You get feelings on this job, you know? Got to or you get yourself killed. And he was always hanging around in the streets, staring in windows and sketching on that little pad. I catch him one time and he’s drawing like dead shit.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like mangled rabbits and shit. I don’t know. Creeped me. I smacked his little head and she got all crazy on me, come out threatening to kill me and I tell her get your little fucker inside and all, this ain’t no place for his little ass, bitch. I swear I thought she might come after me with a knife or something but she never did. We ain’t talk much after that.”
“And her name was—”
“Been a long time. I think she went by India-Indigo, something like that but her real name was Rukhsana. Last name I don’t know. Can’t remember.”
***
Turned out there were three hookers with that name, so it wasn’t totally unique. All of them were dead, no surprise. Hookers had short life spans. The first one died from an overdose. The second one was killed by her boyfriend, who turned the gun on himself after. The third died from a shorted reality projector.
Obviously none of these girls was the killer or a witness. Was she was a relative, a friend or a lover? The only other option was another victim, an early one. The relative was the easiest angle to check, so he went with that. He pulled up the three girls last names. Rukhsana Garanin, Rukhsana Venadrik and Rukhsana Bazin.
Daniels was on the move again. Hoskin had tracked him to the first murder scene, the City of Willows. Daniels came out of the club tower and got into his aircar. Hoskin flooded his system with more stims and started feeling jittery. Daniels headed north. Hoskin pulled up a grid of the murders. The Northern Lights district was about twenty minutes out, and he suspected that’s where Daniels was going now, the spot where Treasury Secretary Salazar went down. Maybe he was tracking a good lead? Maybe he’d beaten Hoskin to the punch and figured this whole thing out?
Hoskin followed Daniels at a safe distance. Daniels wasn’t using any evasion techniques, so he probably thought he was safe. There was no reason to risk getting closer, especially with the trackers still holding strong. He checked their vitals. More than half of them were still alive and streaming.
He pulled up the families of the three girls, their relatives connected to them by a web of soft light. He blinked through them, looking for brothers, husbands, lovers, children.
Hoskin thought about it all. He filtered all the names against names that had worked at the department, as well as other public records law enforcement groups. Unfortunately, there were a lot of records he couldn’t access. Most CII records were secret, even to the powerful Dynasty Security forces. Only two of the relatives worked at the department, the Bazin girl’s brother was a cop. Hoskin had never met him. The second one was Salaris Venadrik, a system tech. That would have been interesting, if hadn’t died twenty-five years ago.
Where had he heard that name before? Venadrik. He thought about it but he couldn’t place it.
Hoskin would talk to Bazin’s brother and work from there. He pulled up the guy’s record. It looked like he’d had a few run-ins and transfers. He’d been investi
gated for bribery and a dozen instances of police brutality, none of which stuck. That needed a closer look.
Daniels was definitely heading for the scene of Salazar’s death. Hoskin fully expected him to visit every murder scene tonight and head right back to work. Hoskin decided to stay with him, no matter what, but it was looking like a long night. He flooded his system with more stims.
***
Hoskin had followed Daniels for two days straight, with no rest. Daniels never stopped working. He never relaxed. He never spent time with friends. He just worked, endlessly, relentlessly.
Now Hoskin was paying the price. He was losing it, nodding off, jumpy, seeing things, but he would not stop until he knew what Daniels knew.
It was late, way past curfew. Heavy drones blanketed the city broadcasting the same message relentlessly:
“Curfew is in effect. All citizens outside their homes are subject to arrest.”
The darkness pressed in on him. He kept seeing things moving out of the corner of his eyes. He rubbed his face. Daniels was still in his sights, his car heading to the Edgelands.
Hoskin kept hearing things too, little fragments of sound and words, a side effect of the stims. It was like a radio somewhere far off, with bits and pieces of it drifting in through the static. He shook it off and kept going, pumping his system to the breaking point. He didn’t care. Hoskin was sure of it now, either Daniels knew who the killer was or he was the killer. No question.
Still no word from Quinlin. The department officially put out an APB. The Grid search didn’t find him. It had Hoskin real nervous, but he figured Quinlin didn’t want to be found. He hoped that was it, because he didn’t know where else to look.
Daniels landed outside a small apartment building in the Edgelands ghetto. A few of Hoskin’s tracking mites were still alive on Daniels’ car, but their signal was spotty. Just a couple blocks down, Hoskin landed and got out feverishly scratching his face, another side effect of too many stims. He heard the static again and it sounded like someone said “fire and ice.”
The Scorpion Game Page 24
