I double-checked hotel procedure. Each room had its own phone system, accessed simply by saying “I want to place a call” out loud in any of a number of languages. Or Dow might have said, “I want room service,” or something of the sort, and the room would have patched the call through, and recorded it in case of a dispute later.
There’d been no room phone call from number twelve last evening.
Which meant Dow had used his own vid, and might even have called from someplace else, like the bar. It was possible. Some people are so used to using their own personal electronics that they don’t think of the services provided by a hotel.
Dow couldn’t have called from the bar, though, and then been able to get back to his room, get undressed, slip into bed, and get himself murdered before Maria showed up with his sheets.
For that matter, why get into bed if the maid was coming up with sheets? Had he planned on seducing her?
The real kicker, though, was that we were assuming Dow had been killed between 2317 and 2330. Maria had seen no one in the hall when she went to deliver the sheets.
And the emergency door log showed that no one had used it during that time.
So how the hell had the murderer got in, lugging a heavy mining laser?
And then…how had he gotten out afterward without Maria seeing him?
Interesting. I began typing on my virtual keyboard, this time calling up a list of hotel seccams. Unfortunately, there were none in the hallways or in the rooms. Had there been, it would have been simple to see who’d gone in and out of Room Twelve that night, and when.
A few years ago, though, PriRights, a citizens’ privacy rights group, had sued and won over the question of cameras in private areas. It was okay to have cameras in public areas—like a city street, or the hotel lobby or restaurant, but not inside private hotel rooms, and not in the hallway outside. Some people, the suit had argued, might not like a public record of them going inside a hotel room with someone else.
But I could access a camera on the ceiling of the High Frontier’s lobby. Beginning at the time in question, I stared at the lobby through a camera that just showed half of the lower edge of the ramp leading up to Dow’s floor, starting at 2315:00. Lots of people wandered in and out of the scene—people leaving the restaurant, someone coming up to the front desk—but no one entering the partly obscured ramp at the top-left of the picture.
At 2328:04, Maria Delgado walked out of an elevator door with an armful of sheets, turned to her right, and vanished up the ramp. No one had come out of the ramp in the time I’d been watching.
There was something else bothering me now, too. If Dow had used his own phone to make what was essentially a call from outside of the hotel’s internal phone network, his voice hadn’t been recorded. I had no way to prove that the person who’d made that call was Roger Mayhurst Dow, and that set the alarm bells ringing in my head.
So far, we had a time-of-death pegged at between 2317 and 2332—the time Maria called her supervisor. But if we didn’t know that the call at 2317 was Dow…
I logged into the security camera system, and wound things back to 1800, five and a half hours before Maria found Dow’s body.
It was going to be a long afternoon. I used the room’s system to call room service, to have lunch sent in. While I was waiting, I put some samples into the portable analysis unit in the evidence kit, and started it cranking. The process would take half an hour.
Room service wasn’t bad, as hotel food goes. Baked gog—not fried, because of the low gravity—and hydroponically grown mashed potatoes, gravy, and g-beans, the big ones the size of your fist, where two are enough for a meal. Coffee, strong and black. Ms. Robards herself delivered the tray.
“Is there anything else you’d like, sir?”
“You can tell me about Ms. Delgado.”
“What about her?”
“Is she a good worker? A good employee?”
“Oh, yes. A little flighty. She’s so young…”
“But truthful?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Ever given to exaggeration?”
“Well, she lied to me once on a towel count.”
“Lied?”
A shrug. “Perhaps she was mistaken. But sometimes guests take towels with the hotel logo, as…as a kind of souvenir. We charge them for anything that turns up missing afterward. Once, she told me the towel count was correct, but it wasn’t. It was one short.”
“As you say, possibly a mistake on her part.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the towel count for Room Twelve?”
“I…beg your pardon?”
“Has someone counted the towels in Room Twelve?”
“We haven’t been allowed in to clean the room!”
“Ah, of course. Tell me, were there any other calls from Room Twelve that night?”
She shook her head. “No, sir.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
She nodded and let herself out.
I was pretty sure Maria had been telling the truth to begin with, and the camera record bore her out. But it was good to have verification from someone who worked with her.
By the time I mopped up the last of the gravy, my chem results were done. I ran through the results on my PAD.
The blood was O positive, verifying my quick-test results.
One of the wet spots on the bottom sheet and mattress was semen—again, type O positive. It was contaminated with blood, as I’d expected, but the test unit was smart enough to pull the two substances apart and analyze them separately.
The other two wet spots—hmm. Now that was interesting. Water, glycerin, propylene glycol, polyquaternium-15, methylparaben, propylparaben, and dimethyl silicon dichloride…again with some blood contamination, but with enough of the liquid available that I could get a solid read-out.
I had to go on-Net to check to be sure. After a bit of hunting, I came up with the answer. What I had here was the ingredient list for any of several brands of commercial lubricating gels…all except for that last, the dimethyl silicon dichloride. I had to do a bit more searching on the Net to track down that one, and finally found out that lube plus dimethyl silicon dichloride was what was used in gynoids to reduce friction when it came to moving parts.
I thought about that bioroid print on the bed frame, then checked the photos I’d taken when I sampled those wet spots. This was confirmation that Dow had had company last night—a sex-service bioroid.
But when? And was the bioroid the murderer?
So I began watching five and a half hours of lobby surveillance camera footage. I sped it up times two, but no more than that. I didn’t want to miss anything. I could have routed it through to my PAD secretary, of course; though not a true AI, he was bright enough to handle routine surveillance, to flag me if he saw something within an easily defined parameter like “any person going into that hallway.”
But deep down, I don’t entirely trust machines. It’s weird, I know, seeing as how much I have to rely on them in my work. But I need the human touch.
And I knew I could trust myself.
So I began at 1800 and watched that sliver of a hallway entrance, making notes each time someone walked in or out. I saw Dow coming in from the direction of the restaurant at 1925:13. He was alone.
Several people entered the hallway, several different people came out. I recorded their faces and the times. Probably they were innocent hotel guests, but I would have to follow up on all of them. One of them might be the murderer.
At 2015:56, I spotted the bioroid going in.
I froze the image and zoomed in, backing her up so that I could see her come in from the lobby’s front door, walk to the front desk, talk to the clerk, then turn and walk into Dow’s hallway. I recognized the type—shoulder-length blond hair, full lips, and upper-body sexual characteristics out to here, giving her a somewhat top-heavy appearance. She was wearing a bright-red, skin-tight sheath that accentuated those characteristics by only com
ing up to here, barely concealing them, though her throat, back, and shoulders were discretely covered. She was an Eve model, one of the more popular pleasure androids out of Eliza’s Toybox.
I made a note to check with the front desk. They weren’t allowed to give out room numbers or names of guests, so what had she asked them? Directions to Room Twelve, perhaps?
I kept watching. More people going in, more coming out. I recorded each face and time.
At 2042:27 I saw something else that made me sit up and take notice. A small, bald, slight-looking man with a nervous expression entered the lobby. He was carrying a suitcase two times too big for him—the thing must have massed forty kilos. Sure, it weighed a fraction of that in .04Gs, but it would still have had forty kilos’ worth of inertia, and this guy handled it like it was nothing—like he was used to hauling around heavy gear in low-G.
He was wearing a Melange Mining jumpsuit, the gray-green variety reserved for clones, and I could clearly make out the barcode on the side of his neck.
I froze-frame the image, zoomed in tight, and pulled a screenshot of the clone’s neck. I didn’t even have to print it out. I could feed the barcode directly into a Net search algorithm that downloaded that individual clone’s data in less than a second.
HENRY 103, MARK.
SERIAL NUMBER: 103-465-237-870(C)
RESIDENCE: HEINLEIN, FREETOWN, BLOCK 1013, CUBE 134 GREEN.
OWNER: JINTEKI.
EMPLOYER: MELANGE MINING CORPORATION.
OCCUPATION: T90 STRIP-MINER OPERATOR, CLASS 1(C).
HEIGHT: 152 CM.
WEIGHT: 68 KG.
HAIR: BROWN.
EYES: BROWN.
SEX: MALE (C).
AGE: 12.
PREVIOUS ARRESTS: THREE.
THREAT: LOW.
I followed up on the arrests. The human miners working with Henry didn’t like him, it seemed. He’d been accused of assault and arrested three times, but the case each time had been dismissed. I scanned down through the data, but found nothing unusual or alarming. Mark Henry had been granted leave yesterday morning by his block supervisor in Freetown, and caught a ferry Beanstalk-bound out of Kaguya. He’d arrived at the Challenger Planetoid at 2010 hours last night with one piece of luggage, and proceeded immediately to the High Frontier.
Dawn was looking for someone associated with one of the big mining companies. I seemed to have found one. I was very interested in what he might have been carrying inside that suitcase.
I waited, watching. At 2122:25, Mark Henry came back down the ramp, walked hurriedly past the front desk and back toward the terminal. The look on his face was…peculiar. Again I wished I could read clone expressions. It looked like a combination of blind fury and severe indigestion.
He did not have the suitcase with him.
Twelve minutes later—at 2134:17—the lovely-in-red Miss Eve Bioroid reappeared, walking down the ramp and out through the lobby. She had that amazing killer walk that only a good gynoid or a real woman can manage.
Which left me with a lot of questions. Had Eve gone to Room Twelve? Hotel records would not admit it if she had, not unless she’d been a hotel guest.
Had Mark Henry gone to Room Twelve? Same problem.
What had happened to his luggage?
And when those two had emerged from the corridor into the lobby once more…had Roger Dow been alive?
Chapter Seven
Day 3
I slept like the proverbial log.
Usually, I have trouble sleeping in microgravity, especially in zero-G. I tend to have dreams about the War. But under .04Gs—with me weighing all of 3.2 kilos—even a solid plascrete floor doesn’t feel all that hard, and the traveling of two days before, and the fact that I hadn’t had much sleep in the last forty-eight hours, had left me pretty tired.
By the time I woke up, my crime lab in a box had come up with a book-length report for me on all of the samples that I’d fed it the night before. An official request to Salvavidas, the New Angeles health insurance company used by Humanity Labor, had gotten me both a complete blood type series and a DNA readout for Dow. That told me, without any possible doubt, that the body in Room Twelve had been his.
Yeah, I’m the suspicious type. Goes with the territory. I’d needed to be sure that someone wasn’t pulling a switch on me, killing someone else and making Dow disappear. In this day of genetic typing, that sort of thing is next to impossible to pull off, but I’d still needed to rule out the possibility. I still needed to check the Challenger facility morgue, too…a little chore I definitely was not looking forward to.
I also had a set of Dow’s finger- and handprints for comparison. Most of the prints in that room were his. Big surprise. He hadn’t been trying to hide his presence.
And, yes, the prints by the toilet were Maria Delgado’s, no question.
There was a list of twenty-three latent prints, only four of which were complete, that didn’t match either Delgado or Dow. Those might belong to other members of the Housekeeping staff, they could belong to the last person to use that room before Dow, they could belong to idiot elevator mercs who’d entered the room without a cleansuit or gloves…
…or one or more could belong to the killer. I zapped them all back to the NAPD print department.
There was just the one print belonging to a bioroid, and I needed to follow up on that. The only bioroid entering that hallway last night had been the Eve model I’d seen on the lobby security camera.
And bioroids are strong. She could easily have handled the mining laser, probably even done it one-handed.
The various DNA and amino tests didn’t tell me anything new. The semen on the bed had been Dow’s. No surprises there, not if Eve had been in his bed last evening.
The glycerin lube was confirmed—with a 93% probability that it had come from a bioroid. There were commercial lubes on the market with dimethyl silicon dichloride in their make-up, products available in bottles or tubes, but those were more popular in Europe, less likely to show up in New Angeles.
Those blond hairs from the pillows were human, but gene-tinkered for inorganic transplant. The bioroid, again.
And then there was the oil.
I’d sampled a number of spots by the door and near the mining laser, places where the killer might have stood when he opened fire. The analyzer had come back with a long list of chemicals and a probable breakdown of sources: packing gel and machine silube.
Not the kind of gel or lubricant I was likely to find inside a bioroid. The packing gel was a fairly common silicon-based glycerin used for storing weapons and certain devices such as mining lasers. The silube was similar to a light machine oil, but consisting of silicone and carbon buckyballs, a low-friction compound used in mechanical systems to prevent seizing or jamming. Again, a mining laser might have the stuff coating moving parts, like the trigger assembly and the power switch. There’d been traces all over the mining laser, and some isolated patches on the carpet.
Looking at a Computer Assisted Drawing of the crime scene, I decided that the murderer had dropped the laser when he was finished with it, that it had hit the floor and bounced at least twice. A Huong-Zhen regolith beam tunneler, Mark V, Mod 2, according to the online operating specs, massed 35.5 kilograms, but in that room it had weighed less than a kilo and a half. Yeah, it would have bounced.
There were no useful biological traces on the laser, though, damn it. The elevator mercs had been too thorough.
I did have one pleasant surprise from that quarter, however. Results from the yellow jackets’ evidence sweep had come back. It all appeared to be in order and properly labeled and referenced—no screw-ups there, thank God—and it included some important information.
The blood on the bed and floor was Dow’s: confirmed.
A tissue sample taken from the body was Dow’s; I would confirm that later in the morgue.
And a tissue sample had been found on the laser.
On the laser!
I read furthe
r.
Most of the mass in the Mark V tunneler is in the battery, a bulky, heavy box that snaps in at the rear and actually becomes the device’s butt-stock. You attach the battery by placing the bottom of the connector block on the receiver rim, then swinging the battery up and in until it clicks solidly home. If you’re not careful, you can catch your hand between block and receiver, and it can give you a nasty pinch.
Apparently, that was exactly what had happened here. The rent-a-cops had swabbed up a tiny sliver of skin caught between the battery and the body of the laser, enough to give a complete genetic profile.
I couldn’t identify the individual without matching the profile to someone’s DNA readout, but the analysis had been able to tell a couple of things right off the starting block.
Whoever had left that bit of skin behind was male.
And whoever it had been was a clone.
Lots of humans are G-mod, of course, with genetic modifications ranging from improved intelligence to increased strength to strangely colored hair or patterns on the skin. G-mods are different from cyberware add-ons, of course, which involves adding parts rather than growing them. Nowadays, the line between cyberware and genetic bioware is damned thin. Originally, G-mods had to be applied in utero, but for the past fifty years it’s been possible for anyone to walk into a gene clinic and inhale or swallow nanobiotic agents that would begin making changes to the basic human genome. As cells divided and reproduced normally, they would pass on the new genetic information; in a couple of months of treatments, you could have purple skin or cat’s eyes or strength enough to bench press 200 kilos in a one-G field.
Clones were extreme examples of this.
For clones, though, Jinteki and a few others took a single cell and tweaked it into being a zygote. Within certain fairly broad limits, they could rewrite the genetic code in that cell to make much more serious alterations than skin color. The clone was given strength, yes—and a skeletal structure to match. Human G-mods with enhanced strength had to be careful not to snap their bones.
Android: Free Fall Page 9
