“Daley and Smethers. Yeah. Are they on duty now?”
“They’re gone. Back to Earth.”
“Something I said?”
I saw the shadow of a smile tug at the corner of Guerrero’s mouth. “It wasn’t you. You weren’t the only one stressed out by what was in Room Twelve. And then Smethers had to go outside and bring in Robert Vargas.” He shook his head. “Not pretty.”
“No.”
“You call us ‘elevator mercs’ and ‘rent-a-cops.’” He sounded bitter. “I suppose there’s something to be said for that. We don’t have your training. We are professionals. But most of the day-to-day routine is helping little old ladies find the right tube-lev car to Farside, or breaking up a drunken brawl at the Castle Club or the Earthview. We don’t usually have to wade through blood and pick up loose body parts to do our job.”
“Tell you the truth, it’s the same for us,” I told him. It was time to do some major pride swallowing. “I had no business going off like that.”
He seemed mollified. “We’re just doing our jobs here, Mr. Harrison. The best we know how.”
“I know. And right now you can help me do mine.”
“How?”
“I need to check out that mining laser. I want some dedicated time on your target range—no one there but you and me. And I want to order a gog from wherever you keep them up here.”
“A gog?” He looked puzzled. “What do you—”
“I know you’ve got them, Mr. Guerrero. I had some from room service at the High Frontier a few days ago.”
“A gog. Alive or dead?”
“Doesn’t really matter.”
“The High Frontier ships them up from Brazil frozen. I could see if they have some available.”
“Do it. If it’s frozen, I want it thawed. I need to perform a little experiment. And you can help me record it.”
Gogs—genetically altered hogs—are artificial life forms based on the genome of Sus domesticus, the domestic pig. They’re big critters, bigger than a human, so fat you think they should roll rather than pick their way around on those stubby little legs. And they have a head just big enough to accommodate the snout and its gaping, toothless mouth. No eyes, no ears, and just about enough brain to find a food trough, it was one of several genetic answers to the little problem of keeping Earth’s teeming billions fed.
It took a few hours, but eventually a freshly thawed gog carcass was delivered to the SEA Security Center. In the meantime, Guerrero had set up the Center’s firing range to my specifications.
Anyone who’s learned to fire a weapon in a gravitational field under one-G is going to find all of his training and reflexes pretty much useless when he gets into microgravity. Pistols—except for a few specialized weapons developed for the military—are bored in such a way that the round emerges from the muzzle rising in order to compensate for the pull of gravity. The instant a round leaves a gun’s barrel on Earth, it starts to drop toward the ground with an acceleration of ten meters per second squared. At close range, the engineering doesn’t matter. At longer range—say thirty meters for a pistol—the round is going to strike consistently high in microgravity. There were rifle and pistol ranges at all of the NAPD satellite stations on the Moon, and the SEA had this one at the Challenger facility as well. They were handy places to get the feel of your service weapon in low-gravity.
Mostly I needed a bare and empty room with solid walls that could absorb a burst from a 100-kilowatt laser and not vent atmosphere.
A rent-a-cop showed up at the range with the gog carcass on a pull-pallet. I helped Guerrero maneuver it downrange and get the hulk off of the frictionless pallet and standing on end. It looked something like a massive, pink potato, the head and legs removed, standing almost two meters tall and massing something like 300 kilograms. Some gogs massed over half a ton, but the small- and medium-sized animals were easier to ship.
In the Challenger facility—those parts of it not inside the rotating Carousel, at least—300 kilograms weighed only twelve kilos, and it would fall very slowly, less than half of a meter in the first second.
I stood on the firing line five meters away, holding the tunneler laser, which had been delivered from the evidence locker in an airtight carrying case. I was wearing a clean suit; though the forensics people had been over the device, looking at it with microscopic attention to detail, I wanted to keep any useful evidence useful if there was any possible way to do so. I had my PAD set up so that it could record the entire scene, and a second camera set up behind and to one side of the target. I wanted to catch this from all angles, and in ultra-high-def.
Five meters was about the distance from the door of Room Twelve to the bed. I switched on the power, then nodded to Guerrero. “When you let go,” I told him,” get the hell back on this side of the line as fast as you can.”
“Right.”
We both wore protective goggles under our clean suit helmets. “Okay,” I said for the benefit of the recorders. “Testing the 100-kilowatt mining laser on a 300-kilogram gog carcass, range five meters, in three…two…one…now!”
Guerrero let the balanced carcass go, and it slowly began falling over. He pushed off and sailed across the intervening distance in a single long, low bound, catching himself on a reloading table.
I felt the laser humming with power, and the ready light was bright green. I aimed from the hip—there was no way I could aim the bulky device properly—and pressed the firing button when the top of the carcass was halfway to the floor.
Despite what you might see in the sensies, a laser beam is invisible. Having a brilliant, semi-solid beam of light stabbing from the weapon is pure zurullo del Hollywood. What you do get are sparkles in the air—bits of drifting dust caught by the beam, or air molecules ionized by the high-energy bolt—plus a hell of a show downrange.
Harsh, white light flared off the far wall of the firing range and I adjusted my aim, sweeping left and up. The beam hit the falling meat and cooked its way through. I could see the skin on the carcass crinkle and blacken, saw blisters rise, then explode, saw smoke boiling off the surface as the meat charred.
The two-meter carcass split into two uneven chunks. Ribs turned black and popped in the heat, and a mess of internal organs spilled into the air.
There wasn’t a lot of blood. I found out later that they drained the carcasses of blood before shipping them up-Stalk, and I wish I’d known that ahead of time because I’d also wanted to see the effect of a laser on liquid blood inside laser-zapped meat.
The pieces were falling slowly enough that I had time to swing the laser back through for a second slice…and then for a third before releasing the trigger switch. The upper end of the carcass fell free and skittered across the floor in the low gravity. I took a couple steps forward, picturing in my mind’s eye what might have been the scene in Room Twelve that night, and fired a second time, carving through a chunk of partially cooked meat and an exposed bit of white vertebrae.
Carefully, I switched off the laser’s power, then disconnected the battery. “Clear,” I said.
“Jesús,” Guerrero said with quiet reverence. “And this is how it was done?”
“No,” I told him. “It wasn’t.”
After putting the laser and the battery pack back in its case, I removed my helmet and goggles. I picked up my PAD and returned to the carcass, now lying in five pieces on the floor. The pieces were still smoking, and the whole room smelled like burnt bacon. I used the camera to record every piece, paying special attention to the severed ends where the laser had burned its way through skin, muscle, bone, and internal organs. A strong suspicion I’d had a few days ago, in the morgue at the Challenger Medical Facility was now a certainty. Roger Dow had been carved up by a mining laser, certainly, but that probably wasn’t what killed him. Probably.
The beam had cooked the flesh, yes, and I’d seen evidence of that on Dow’s body. But it hadn’t sliced cleanly through bone. Wherever the laser beam had touched bone in
the gog, that bone had blackened and frequently exploded as the marrow inside heated suddenly and explosively. I didn’t see any ends cut so smooth that the bone actually looked polished.
“Sorry for the mess,” I told Guerrero. “You can have someone take this back to the High Frontier kitchen. Maybe I’ll have it for dinner tonight.”
I picked up a club from the security department. It wasn’t as good or as complete as our NAPD-issue, and didn’t have any of the usual analysis equipment, but it had bags and bottles and sterile swabs and a mini-vacuum, enough for what I needed to do. I used my PAD to call up Tom Fuchida at the High Frontier Hotel, and set up an appointment.
I’d planned on going to lunch first, but found I wasn’t hungry. The stink of burnt meat and stomach contents was triggering unpleasant memories of Room Twelve.
Tom Fuchida, the High Frontier’s manager, was waiting for me in the hotel lobby.
“Welcome back, Captain Harrison,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“You can open some hotel records for me,” I told him. “I want to know who was in Room Sixteen the night of the murder.”
“Sixteen?” He looked startled. “I’ll have to check.”
He pulled out his PAD and linked through to the hotel’s files. “Okay…from the twenty-first through the twenty-fourth, Room Sixteen was occupied by a couple: Harold Espinoza and Cindy Carter.”
“I don’t suppose you have photographs of them? DNA samples? Fingerprints?”
“Of course not, sir!”
Of course not. In China they take fingerprints of each guest when they check in. DNA samples, too, sometimes. I didn’t want to see that kind of erosion of civil liberties in the United States, but, damn it, it would have made my job easier.
“Has anyone else checked into that room?”
He consulted his files. “A Señor Montoya was there from the evening of the twenty-fifth through the twenty-sixth. And a Señor Duarte and a friend checked in on the twenty-eighth…and, ah! They are still here.”
Damn. It would have been easier if no one had been in the room. It had been cleaned at least twice since Mark Henry was there, the sheets had been changed three or four times, and people staying there would have both mucked up any physical evidence, and left plenty more evidence of their own.
“I’d like to take some samples from that room,” I said. What the hell? A check might turn up something useful. I might at the very least pick up enough clone DNA to back up Henry’s story that he’d been in there.
What I was really hoping for was a bit of DNA from the mysterious “Mr. Green” and his accomplice. Presumably Espinoza and Carter were Green and someone else.
And I had a good idea who they were behind those pseudonyms.
“But the room is occupied,” Fuchida told me.
“Then I’ll ask you to talk to Mr. Duarte and his friend and ask them to step out of the room for a few minutes.”
It turned out that Duarte wasn’t in his room at the time anyway. DynaTech Orbital Manufactories and Armitage Software were co-hosting a seminar of some sort at the High Frontier Business Center, and his PAD said he and his secretary were there. Fuchida let me in with my evidence kit and watched from the open doorway while I went to work.
I recorded various latent prints, but I was pretty sure they would prove to be those of the room’s more recent guests. When I was done, I packed up my gear and samples. “One more thing, Mr. Fuchida.”
“Yes?”
“What time did Espinoza and Carter check out?”
He tapped something into his PAD. “They checked out…that would be at 1040 on the twenty-fourth.”
“Excellent. And I’d like a room. I’m going to be staying here one more night.”
“Of course. I’ll talk to the front desk.”
Later, down a level in Room Fifty-Six, I unfolded the large screen for my PAD and again tapped into the High Frontier’s security cam records. I wound back to the morning of the twenty-fourth, the first morning after the night of the murder.
And I began watching people coming out of the hallway that led to Room Twelve.
At 1036, a lone woman carrying a small overnight satchel walked out of the hallway entrance and passed beneath the camera on her way to the front desk. She had very long and curly blond hair, all the way to below her waist, and her face was partly covered by the cascade. Hair that long on the Beanstalk was unusual. In low gravity, it tended to billow and weave, and it got in the way. It was almost as though she was calling attention to herself.
I made a note of it, and kept looking.
Another woman came out of that hallway at 1038. Conservative black leather and a backpack, short brown hair. I didn’t recognize her.
Right behind her was a man—bearded, dark-haired, short, wearing a white turtleneck. He was carrying a large, extra-long suitcase.
The suitcase.
I brought up the original surveillance images and compared them side by side on the screen. I was as certain as I could be that it was the same missing suitcase.
It didn’t look like Frank Hodgkins, though, even with the beard and the shaggy dark hair.
I couldn’t be absolutely sure, of course. The camera angle was looking down on the guy from up by the ceiling, and I couldn’t see his face full-on. But this guy couldn’t have been much over 150, 160 centimeters.
I went back and studied both women carefully, trying to get a visual match with Thea Coleman. I couldn’t do it. Again, the camera angle wasn’t good, and the first woman’s blond mane obscured her face from above. The second woman, the one with the backpack, had a heavier build than Coleman. I was pretty sure it wasn’t her either.
I called up a different security camera, this one from the main desk in the lobby.
The blond didn’t approach the front desk, but walked through the lobby and straight out the front doors, and all I could see was her back. The short guy, however, came to the desk, set the suitcase down, and used his implanted credaccount chip to pay for the room. Then he picked up the suitcase, turned, and walked out the main lobby door.
Damn. I’d been ready to bet that year’s salary that Espinoza and Carter were Hodgkins and Coleman.
I pulled several photos and vid stills of Frank Hodgkins up on my PAD, fed them to my secretary, and gave it a search order—this time admitting that the time saved by the AI’s search would be worth it, rather than doing it myself. Yeah, I don’t entirely trust the machines, but all I was really looking for was a flag I could check myself. My PAD began running through security cam vids of the High Frontier lobby at high speed.
An hour later, I had him. Frank Hodgkins had entered the hallway at just before 1900 on the twenty-third, and left it two days later, on the twenty-fifth, at 0820.
That gave me a fairly solid case, something to start with, anyway. There was a strong possibility, I thought, that Espinoza and Carter were Hodgkins and Coleman, and also that Espinoza was Henry’s “Mr. Green.” We also had a new player in the drama—a very short, bearded man who’d carried the suitcase out of the hotel.
The blond, just possibly, could have been Coleman. The short guy, though…
Okay, think.
They hadn’t left the planetoid, of course. Not then. These images were from seven days ago, on the twenty-fourth. If the blond was Thea Coleman in a wig, then she wouldn’t have left the Challenger facility, as it appeared, but simply would have taken the tube-lev back across the planetoid. She’d been at the Humanity Labor office the next day when Lily tried to interview her and failed, and again two days after that, when I’d gone to see her.
Then, possibly on the twenty-seventh or the twenty-eighth, she’d left. Up-Stalk? Down? I did a search of Beanstalk travel records.
Here it was. Frank Hodgkins and Thea Coleman left the terminal on the twenty-eighth, heading down-Stalk.
I called Commissioner Dawn.
“Whatcha got, Harrison?” She looked tired on the folding PAD screen, with bags under her eyes. I guessed
she hadn’t been sleeping much lately.
“A solid lead on the murderer,” I told her. “Murderers, I should say. Two of them. I’d like you to put out an APB for Frank Hodgkins and Thea Coleman, both employees of Humanity Labor. Coleman is Humanity Labor’s Operations Manager. Hodgkins works for their Security Department.”
“Done,” she said.
“It may not stop with them.”
“Meaning?”
“My best guess is that they were trying to implicate a clone in the murder, Mark Henry 103, and a bioroid, Eve 5VA3TC. The news—a bloody murder—was calculated to set off more anti-clone riots.”
“Fragging great…”
“Well, it didn’t work the way they planned, and the news hasn’t gone out. Not yet, anyway. I think someone higher up in Humanity Labor is sitting on the story until he’s certain that this isn’t going to backfire in the organization’s face. I also think Coleman and Hodgkins are small fry. For a conspiracy this big, we’re going to have to look higher.”
“How high?”
“At the very least, I suggest we question Thomas Vaughn. That’s the head of HL’s PR department.”
“Okay. What about the clone and the bioroid?”
“In custody. Ray Flint will be bringing both of them down-Stalk in a day or two. But I don’t think they’re guilty.”
“You know, Harrison, that’s for the courts to decide.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed. “Both of them are obviously involved, right? I’ve been following your notes as you post them through your PAD. The bioroid was having sex with the victim…and might have let the murderer into the room. The clone brought the mining laser to the hotel, and assembled it in a nearby room.”
“Yeah. They were both being manipulated by someone, though—set up to look like they were the killers.”
“Not good enough, Harrison. I’ve already had to release ‘Noise’ Reilly. Up until now, he was our top suspect, just because he could have reprogrammed a bioroid or tapped into the security network. But we don’t have any evidence he’s involved, so we had to let him go. If we can’t find the ones behind this plot, we’re going to have to take what we can get. When this news hits the streets, and it will, trust me, the public will be screaming for the murderers’ heads. Your girlfriend has been calling me for two days, asking for permission to go with her story. She says if she doesn’t, Associated or NetNews or one of the others is still going to broadcast the story all the way to Mars. If we don’t have the big boys in custody, if we can’t establish a solid evidence trail…we’ll have to give them what we have.”
Android: Free Fall Page 20
