Head On_A Novel of the Near Future

by John Scalzi

  And if the rumors were true in this case, the challenges might have been too much for this particular marriage.

  Ortiz came back into the room. “Marla will see you now,” he said. I followed him into the kitchen, bumping into the league rep as I entered, and whom Ortiz escorted out of the house. He didn’t seem entirely happy as he exited. But then, seated at the kitchen table, Marla Chapman didn’t seem entirely happy with him. She looked over to me, and the “not entirely happy” theme continued.

  “Mrs. Chapman, I’m Agent Chris Shane of the FBI’s Haden affairs division,” I said.

  “I know who you are,” Chapman said, and looked away. She held a small glass in her hand and fiddled with it, running a distracted finger around the rim. “Duane used to be a fan of yours.” She motioned to an unoccupied chair at the table for me to sit in.

  I sat. “I’m very sorry about your husband’s death.”

  “Thank you.” Chapman’s voice was distant and guarded.

  I motioned back to where the league representative had gone. “I hope everything is okay with you and the league.”

  Chapman glanced over to the door and smirked. “Oh, that prick,” she said. “It was fine. He was just trying to bribe me.”

  “How so?”

  “With my survivor benefits.”

  “Was he threatening to withhold them?”

  “He can’t. That much I know. But he’s offering me extra to stay quiet. A settlement.”

  “The league can’t keep you from talking to us,” I said.

  “Not you.” Chapman pointed in the direction of the front door. “Them. The press camped out on my stoop.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because in public the league would rather have Duane be a tragic figure than the cheating son of a bitch he was.” Chapman looked at me and, while obviously attractive, was haggard and drawn. “Agent Shane, may I ask you a question?”

  “Yes.”

  “A personal question.”

  “All right. I’ll answer it if I can.”

  “When is it you can say a Haden is a cheating son of a bitch?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not following the question,” I said.

  Chapman motioned to my threep. “Well, look at you,” she said. “You’re walking around in a machine. If you’re in a machine, and you’re fooling around with someone else, are you really fooling around? Is it sex? Actual sex?”

  She took a hand and gestured toward the room where her husband’s creche resided. “What I want to know is whether you think I should be allowed to be angry with my dead husband for screwing around on me, or if I should just be a grieving widow because sex doesn’t count if you’re in a machine for it.”

  I stared for a minute. “Mrs. Chapman—”

  “Marla.”

  “—I don’t think I’m qualified to judge your relationship with your husband.”

  “Sure you are. You’re a Haden. So was my husband. He was one since he was three years old. We met in college. I dated a guy in a threep. You wouldn’t believe the crap I got for that, by the way. At Thanksgiving the first year I dated Duane, I had a cousin ask me what it was like to date a walking vibrator.”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say anything. I punched the crap out of him, though.”

  I smiled inwardly at this. “That seems fair,” I said.

  “I always said I was in love with Duane for who he was, and the fact he was in a threep didn’t matter.” Chapman fiddled with her glass some more. “And then he joined the league and the others started happening. He would deny it, and there was no way to prove it, was there?” She motioned to me. “You go off into the Agora or can port yourself into a different threep if you want. You could say you were sleeping or playing a game or whatever and none of us would ever know. At least not until you fuck up and the landlord of the apartment you’re renting for your adventures calls your business line to tell you that the neighbors are complaining about the noise, and your wife takes the call instead of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So am I. But I’d still like you to answer the question.”

  I thought about it for a minute. Then I said, “You had certain expectations and understandings with your husband, Mrs. Chapman. About intimacy. About who you both spent your time with and how that time was spent. If your husband went against that, then he was unfaithful to you. Whether it counts as ‘sex’ is immaterial to that.”

  “So you would say he was a cheating son of a bitch.”

  “Yes,” I said. “If he was doing that, he was a cheating son of a bitch.”

  “Thank you,” Chapman said, and drained her glass. “Now. What are your questions for me?”

  “Were you here today when your husband had his attack?”

  “No. On game days we have too many people in the house. Alton, his caregiver. You met him.” I nodded. “Whoever the league sends over to monitor Duane and Alton so they don’t try to cheat, or whatever. Duane’s pals from the neighborhood, who watch the game in the living room on our one-hundred-inch screen. They get a kick out of being able to yell at Duane whenever he screws up a play. There are usually five or six of them. So, no. I go out to shop or have lunch or see a movie with friends and come back when the game is done and everyone’s cleared out.”

  “So today—”

  “So today I went to see a movie with my friend Karen and I turned off my phone.” A pause here while Chapman fiddled with her empty glass and her eyes welled with tears that almost but did not spill over. She looked away, blinked, and then looked at me again. “And then when I turned my phone back on I learned that Duane was dead.”

  “Before you left the house, did you say anything to your husband?”

  “Just that I was going to see a movie.”

  “So no arguments.”

  “No. Well,” Chapman amended, “not today. We’ve argued before. A lot, recently.”

  “About that apartment.”

  “No, not that. I’m sorry, I should have been more clear. Duane didn’t know I knew about his extracurricular activities there. I just found out about it this last week. I didn’t want him to know I knew. I was going to make it a surprise element of the divorce proceedings.”

  “Mrs. Chapman,” I said, “maybe you should have a lawyer present right now.”

  “Why?” Chapman said. “I didn’t kill him, Agent Shane. I wasn’t even here when he died. And you can believe me when I say that I wanted him alive. I wanted to drag him through divorce hell. I don’t need a lawyer.”

  I changed the subject. “Did Duane have any addictions?”

  “Aside from sex? No. He never drank or did any drugs, even in college. He was aiming for the league even then. He said he didn’t want to blunt his edge.”

  “What about sharpening his edge, then?”

  “You mean performance-enhancing drugs?” Chapman shook her head. “He never did any of that either. The league checked out everything Duane put into his body through a feeding tube or IV. They checked what came out, too. That creche of his monitored everything. Alton had to ship the first bags of urine and feces after a game to the league for testing. And not just Duane had to do this. It’s every one of their players. Duane wouldn’t risk it. He knew he wasn’t a star.”

  “It’s the players who aren’t the stars who might take the risk,” I said. “They know how quickly they can be out of the league.”

  Chapman shook her head again. “You don’t know Duane. He wouldn’t. The league has a special nutritional supplement that they used—every player got it, except for the stars who had their own supplement deals. But even they had to get their supplement formula approved. It’s the only extra thing Duane ever put into his body.”

  “What’s in the supplement?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Vitamins, electrolytes. Duane always said it was basically Haden Gatorade. Why are you asking?”

  “You husband died in a very public fashi
on. I’m sorry to put it this way, but we need to make absolutely sure it was accidental, not something else.”

  Chapman nodded and motioned toward the room her husband’s body had been in. “Everything Duane put into his body is in there,” she said. “And if you talk to Alton again, he’ll be able to give you a schedule of what got put in when.”

  “Thank you, I will,” I said. “I’m also interested in that apartment you spoke of.”

  “What about it?”

  “If it’s something he kept from you, there might be things in there he didn’t want you to see.”

  “You mean, aside from the people he was screwing?” Chapman asked.

  “Yes, aside from them,” I said.

  Chapman shrugged. “So go look.”

  “We’d need to get a warrant,” I said. “From a judge here in town.”

  “You don’t need a warrant,” Chapman said. “I can give you permission to go inside.”

  “If he kept its existence from you, it might be leased through a third party.”

  Chapman laughed at this. “You would think that, wouldn’t you? But I told you, when I got the call from the landlord, it came on the business line. We have a pass-through corporation for endorsements and investments. Duane and I co-owned it. He rented that apartment through the corporation. I’m on the goddamned lease.”

  Chapter Five

  “I thought you said your cab had a charge plate,” I said to the new driver, as I got into the cab.

  “I have a charger back here,” he said.

  “It’s a charge port for a phone,” I said.

  “Right, a charger,” he agreed.

  I sighed and gave him an address, on Natrona Street in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. He punched it in and let the autodrive take over, and then stared into his phone. I glanced into my power level at the moment. I was down into single digits now. Great. I put up a map to see if there were any public charging stations between me and Duane Chapman’s secret apartment and found two, both in closed shops. Philadelphia was not impressing me.

  An interior window popped up with a New York number I didn’t immediately recognize. I debated about answering it but curiosity got the better of me.

  “I’m Laurie Wilkerson from The New York Times,” the person on the other end of the line said. “I was hoping I could talk to you about the investigation of the deaths of Duane Chapman and Alex Kaufmann.”

  “How did you get this phone number?” I asked.

  “Are the two deaths linked somehow?” Wilkerson asked.

  “No comment,” I said, and hung up and immediately switched my phone settings to “passive,” which would log calls and texts rather than take them except from a specific list of contacts. I looked at the call log, which was suddenly filling up with texts and call requests, then closed it and pinged Vann. “My number has apparently just been leaked to the press,” I said to her.

  “No fucking kidding,” she said. “My phone has been a mess for the last ten minutes. You were lucky you called when you did. I was about to turn my phone off.”

  “What happened?”

  “Things are nuts over here,” she said to me. “This has blown up into a national scandal. Apparently our dear director has had to jump in with a quote.” Vann was not fond of Gibbs Ablemare, the current director of the FBI. “It was no less stupid than anything else he’s said in the last year and a half. He said he’s giving the Chapman investigation the highest priority.”

  “Does that mean we’re off the case?” I asked.

  Vann snorted. “It means we better not screw it up, or we’ll be looking for new jobs. For one of us, that will be a problem. How are things on your end?”

  I caught Vann up on my end. “Plus I’m almost out of power on this threep and there’s nowhere to charge.”

  “Charge in your cab.”

  “The cabs of Philadelphia are strangely Haden-unfriendly. Not to mention the rest of the town.”

  “Well, you’re going to the secret love nest of a Haden. I’m guessing there will be charging opportunities there.”

  “I think that might be inappropriate,” I said.

  “More inappropriate than powering down in the middle of an investigation?”

  “You have a point.”

  “It’s wireless induction. You can just say you didn’t know you were standing on a plate.”

  I ignored this. “Do we have anything new on the investigations?”

  “Kaufmann’s been cut down and is at the medical examiner’s here. They’re going to get to him sometime tomorrow. I didn’t get much of a sense of urgency from them about it. They think it’s a straightforward suicide.”

  “I mean, so do we?”

  “Right, but they don’t have the director of the FBI breathing down their necks because he just said on national TV he’s making it a priority.”

  “Fair point.”

  “Damn right it is. At least the Philly ME is more on the ball. They already have someone examining Chapman’s body and will have a preliminary report for us tomorrow.”

  “So I’ll need to come back.”

  “I’ll be there too. I’ll want to take this report in person.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have the FBI director breathing down our necks now.”

  “I’m sensing a theme in your conversation.”

  “I don’t know why.” Vann’s sarcasm was unmistakable. “Also, I’ve had Chapman’s game threep impounded. The Bays’ tech director said there was nothing wrong with it but I want to be sure. Does your flatmate know anything about threeps?”

  “Tony?” I said. “Sure. He’s done contract coding for at least a few of the big Personal Transport companies.”

  “Add an examination of the threep to his to-do list.”

  “What is he looking for?”

  “For starters, anything that would amp up Chapman’s pain sensitivity.”

  “That’s going to take a while. Threeps are complicated and both their hardware and software are usually proprietary.”

  “Are you saying we’ll need a warrant to look at it?” Vann asked.

  “No, just that there’s going to be a lot of backward engineering involved.”

  “We’ll get in touch with the manufacturer and see if they want to play nice.”

  “They’re going to be worried about liability,” I said.

  “Then we’ll make them worry about impeding a federal investigation.”

  “That’s friendly,” I joked.

  “FBI director,” Vann began.

  “Breathing down our necks,” I finished. “Yeah, no. I get it.”

  “I figured you would. Wrap up what you’re doing and get back soon. I’ve got us scheduled bright and early in the imaging room. You, me, your flatmate Tony.”

  I checked my internal map. “We’re almost there. I have to let the landlord let me in. I’ll look around and map it out, and note anything useful or notable for collection tomorrow, when we come back to town.”

  “Seems simple enough,” Vann said.

  “Don’t jinx it,” I said.

  We turned onto Diamond, which connected to Natrona, and saw a building on fire.

  “Hey,” my driver said. He pointed out the windshield to the burning town house. “Isn’t that your destination?”

  The building was definitely my destination, definitely on fire, and the crowd that had gathered was yelling at someone.

  “I am not fucking going back into that thing,” a man, short and lumpy, was saying. “I barely got out myself.”

  “It’s your building,” one of the crowd said. “You’re the landlord.”

  “I’m not the landlord, I’m the manager.”

  “So you’re going to let her die?!?”

  “The fire department is coming!”

  “They’re not going to get here on time!” someone else yelled.

  “They’re on York Avenue, for chrissakes,” the manager said.

  “They closed that c
ompany down two years ago, you asshole!”

  “I’m not going in!”

  “I’ll go in,” I said, loudly.

  Everyone turned to look at me. “I’m an FBI agent,” I said.

  The manager pointed at me. “Let the Fed go in!”

  “Who’s still in there?” I asked

  “The old lady on the third floor,” a kid said to me.

  I turned to the manager, who nodded. “Shaniqa Miller,” he said. “Everybody else is out but her.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Yeah,” the manager said. “I’m ground floor, the Waverlys are on first”—he pointed to a couple sobbing at the curb, a small curly dog licking one of their faces in an attempt to comfort its owner—“and Shaniqa’s on third.”

  “What about the second floor?”

  “That guy’s dead,” someone in the crowd said.

  “Not from the fire!” the manager yelled back.

  I held out my hand. “Keys.”

  The manager handed over a key ring with several keys on it, color-coded. “Third floor is the red keys.”

  “How long has the fire been going?”

  “Like five minutes,” the manager said. “Out of fucking nowhere.”

  I looked at the building. The entryway doors were blown out with glass everywhere. Smoke poured out the door and out of the windows.

  “This is a bad idea,” I said to myself, and jumped through the shattered doors.

  I turned off my senses of smell and pain but could still feel the heat as I climbed the stairs. The first-floor apartment was wide-open and in flames. The second-floor apartment—Chapman’s—had its door closed. If Shaniqa Miller’s apartment had its door closed, I had a decision to make—opening it could create a column of oxygen rushing through the stairwell, feeding the fire. In a rush to save Miller, I might end up killing her instead.

  The problem was moot when I reached the third-floor landing. Miller was on the landing, unconscious, her door ajar behind her. I’d guessed she had tried to make it down the stairs and was overcome by smoke before she’d even gotten to the first stair. Either that or had a heart attack or something else equally grim.