Betty’s eyes were awash with moisture as the commentator yammered away outside a still-smoldering building in some far-off country.
“Oh. That’s terrible.”
“Nah. That’s the Archipelago. I hate them.”
Betty’s face turned to hers, eyes wide and disbelieving.
“But…but they’re people!”
It was quite a shock, to be contradicted by an appliance. Olympia could see the logic in it. It was an understandable point of view, in fact the only proper one.
Hmn.
She turned away from Betty, bemused by the response, so lifelike and so forlorn, so completely taken in by it, and that’s when Olympia saw the little girl.
Four men wrestled an improvised litter with haste and precision as Martin Sea-Monkey told the story of an unprecedented attack on what was described as a girl’s school. It was the third such unprecedented attack in about a month.
Her face was pale and round. The low profile of the blood-soaked white sheets from the waist down made her jaw drop.
It looked like the child’s legs had been blown off in the explosion.
That’s when Olympia cried.
Unconsciously, her hand crept over and Betty took it and gave it a squeeze.
That’s what made Betty Blue so special.
There really was something different about that one.
Chapter Thirteen
Something in Gene’s peripheral vision darkened the doorway.
“Hey.”
Dave Parsons was in plain clothes and looked a bit overawed by his present surroundings. There was nothing hard to knock on, with the soft-sided cubicles in this modern, open-plan office. MacBride shared this space with several others.
“Ah, Dave. Come on in.” Gene MacBride stood. “I’ll introduce you around a bit later. Most of the team is out. Which is usually the case.”
Gene gave Acting Detective Sergeant Parsons a friendly grin. He indicated a chair by Detective Subiyachi’s desk in the far corner.
“Grab that one. We’ll find you a desk shortly.”
The wheels squeaked as Parsons dragged it over. Gene had been doing some thinking about a desk for Dave, and it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. This area held four detectives, and squashing Parsons in there was going to be problematic. Yet it was better to have him right there, rather than at the far end of the building in some obscure cubicle that lacked all the plug-ins and services. If they shoved the outer partition outwards, it would free up some space, but make the passageway a little too narrow for comfort. It was his crew and upper management probably wouldn’t say much, although there were the fire codes to consider.
MacBride sat down carefully. Lately his butt had taken on a kind of a red, raw, turkey-skin effect right in the vicinity of the tailbone. While normally not a vain man, and it was only slightly painful at times, for some reason he saw it as a sign of age.
It was incipient armchair warrior status.
And it bugged him. The notion that he might go in and explain aforesaid problem to a pharmacist, most likely an attractive twenty-two year-old female one, might have had something to do with this minor and yet obsessive mental irritation.
It was such a small thing. Gene actually blushed. He could feel it happening. Parsons appeared aware of how gingerly he lowered himself down. The guy had to look at something. Dave was looking shy and chewing on the bottom lip. He watched Gene carefully from below lids lowered slightly over his baby-blues. It was oddly charming in a forty-something year-old man. He seemed fit enough, with no big belly flapping down over his belt, and there was something of the tiger in his stance coming in.
“Thank you, Gene.”
Dave had lavished on the aftershave. His shoes were shined and he was squeaky clean behind the ears.
Gene smiled again.
Parsons had pulled up his chair at a proper distance and on a good angle. Averting his eyes, he looked at the big screen on Gene’s desk. There wasn’t much there to look at except his plotting board, a slathering of light rectangles on his habitual dark background, and a few small notes. They had several (more like seventeen) murder investigations ongoing. They were possibly related, going by geographical factors and modus operandi, and while the perp had been profiled to some degree, MacBride was wondering about the timeline. There were no conflicts, and that was good. No one could be in two places at the same time. It took x amount of time to go from Point A to Point B. There were no close correlations between phases of the moon, weekends, statutory or known world-wide religious holidays. School was in for some incidents and out for some others. This one, if real, was definitely a slasher. Assuming the crimes were all relate, the religious angle, the sanctimony, the tendency to communicate, was missing. The crimes were still being described as unrelated in the media. They were all girls and young women of a certain age, the Nordic type. What the hell that meant, he had no idea. He had no hunches either way. The killings were all linked by being committed off-camera and without biometric correlations to anyone proven to be in the immediate areas. Going by known attributes, there were only so many people in the area at the time, and all others could be accounted for. All of their stories had been checked out and verified nine different ways. They were all clean. It had to be someone else. Someone was being very clever indeed…maybe. Such a number of unresolved cases carried its own weight.
It was a pretty puzzle.
But if they were all related, this one was good.
Really good.
Let Parsons stew for a moment. It would do him good to be humbled just a bit, and he needn’t overdo it.
The trouble was that someone must have done it in each and every one of the cases, or possibly someone or two or three someones, had done all of them.
He reached over and closed the file.
He leaned back in his chair, exchanging a look with the guy.
MacBride picked up his coffee cup and had a quick sip. He looked at his watch, an anniversary gift from his wife Irene. The time to early retirement ticked down, but he ignored it as best he could.
“Okay. This is only a temporary assignment, but you’ve been very helpful so far.” He cleared his throat. “If we have any success, naturally that would be good, and, I’ve already put a good word in for you.”
Parsons nodded. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even be here.
Off in the far distance, the sound of a kettle whistling rose above the hum of the lights and the whir of computer cooling fans. Someone coughed. There was the muffled hum of a few scattered folks working in their cubicles. The phone in a nearby cubicle beeped persistently, but there was nobody home and it wasn’t all that loud. Francine’s voice came from behind the partition as she greeted someone down the way, and then soft footfalls turned the corner. She whisked into the room with a coat over one arm and a cardboard cup in the other hand.
“Ah.” Dropping his feet abruptly, Gene stood up, and Parsons stood up as well.
She hung up her coat. Gene made introductions as Francine pulled her heavily-padded work chair out of her space, which she had arranged in what she called a cockpit. It was very much like that, with everything adjustable and ergonomically-designed for long spells in the saddle.
More than anything, crimes were solved by information, its gathering, its analysis, and its cohesion. Run it through the machine, tabulate, and if a charge was justified, one would shortly be forthcoming. After that, it was just a matter of picking them up.
“So.” Francine seemed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning. “We have some new leads.”
“Yes, Francine.”
Parsons nodded, licking his lips slightly. He had brought his own coffee, a large one from a popular chain operation, which saved time and dicking around. Gene allowed him time to struggle with the plastic tab, as Dave eventually tore it all the way across in a gaping V.
Those things could be a bastard at times. They could send men to Mars, but they still couldn’t design a decent drinking tab.
“First one.”
Gene manipulated his screen, bringing up another file, with another plotting board. This one was looking better now with a few entries.
Their new friend pointed at the most recent one.
“Yeah.”
Dave Parsons stepped up to the plate, figuratively speaking.
“This is an odd-ball. For some obvious reasons it struck the computer that whoever stole this car had done it before. But the capability to jack this kind of security system is pretty rare—this guy’s a real pro, right? There was even the bonus prize of a shit-load of Filter Kings in the back end.”
The vehicle belonged to a salesman. Parsons took a quick sip. He was a sensible guy with a sensible explanation. One of the problems was that there were a few hundred suspects, and many of them had been off the radar and unaccounted-for, some of them for quite some time. They would mostly be pros, but a few talented amateurs were on that list. The amateurs were mostly dopers with a little patience and some skills in the hacking department. There were always people rotating off to incarceration, and always new people coming up. The newest were unknown quantities, and often anonymous, without even a handle or a street-name to go by.
A cargo aboard the vehicle was a double score, as far as a thief was concerned.
Parson’s touched the rectangle and all the details, the make, the model, location, time of day, and the details on the property inside were revealed.
Francine nodded.
“Ah. They’re expensive as all hell. Some high-pressure sales tactics, too.”
Their frickin’ robots came to your door and told you that you had won a free vacuuming job, any three rooms in the house. This was normally a five-hundred-dollar value, as inflation had been running a bit high these last few years.
They did a good job, too. She could attest to that herself, the only problem was getting them to leave. It wasn’t easy to push them around, and she’d practically had to shoot the really forceful one just to get him to shut up. Intrigued, Francine had looked it up. It was all legal and everything. All you had to do was not let them in.
All you had to do was stand your ground, but of course no one wanted appear rude these days as it engendered all sorts of questions about your sociability-rating.
Parsons seemed very intelligent.
“That’s right. But here’s the weird part. The car was abandoned, hundreds of kilometres away. And the vacuum cleaners were still in the back.”
“Not chopped?” Gene could see the point well enough. “And nothing missing. Huh.”
That vehicle should have disappeared, forever, within ten minutes or a quarter of an hour at most, going by past event profiles. All the little identifying tags, radio and passive markers, tended to end up in the nearest sewer-drain, or maybe under a bridge somewhere. The whole process took remarkably little time. Twenty gang-bangers working together, all of them with their own tools and some fairly well organized, on-the-job training. Gangs had no manpower problem these days. With manpower always a problem, the cops would usually show up to an empty warehouse somewhere and find the crooks long gone.
The more ordinary thieves, simple loners or the new, zoot-suited gangstas, wouldn’t steal a car just to get vacuum cleaners.
They’d smash some glass, grab a few and run, ripping the boxes apart to get at the stock tracking devices inside the packaging of everything they made these days.
Nowadays, buying hot items ‘still in the box’ was strictly a no-no and everybody knew it.
“No—and you would think a guy that could steal a car like that would know better. We’ve gotten some swabs, and hopefully we can identify him and find him.”
Francine looked thoughtful.
“You keep saying him."
"Yeah--because if it's the robot, it's her first time. It's also a real leap of behaviour. And yet we know or believe she's capable of violence, maybe even proactive violence. I guess that's my thinking there."
Gene and Francine exchanged glances. They chewed on that one for a while.
“What’s your main point?”
“Assuming a thief. Why didn’t he take the car to a chop-shop? Why leave a signature? Whoever did this beat the latest in smart key and voice-recognition, and then just abandoned it?”
Parsons looked at Francine.
“Just taking the car took real skills. Joyrides are almost always in a parent’s car, or one of the older models.”
There were still a few of those around, in fact some of the suburban gangs loved to rip off old muscle cars and trash them. Owners confronted by a ’69 Cuda wrapped around a telephone pole, or a Hemi with a blown engine, tended to cry when informed of the car’s fate. The law prevented further restorations just to get them off the road. In that sense, the government had finally recognized what was euphemistically called ‘historic climate flux in the Biblical sense,’ as borne out by stuff every kid was taught to recite by heart in school nowadays.
“If he’s still alive.” Francine thought. “Or she.”
Parsons nodded.
“There are no bodies unaccounted-for in the immediate vicinity. But—we might get some DNA from Nettles. That would be nice. A hair or a fragment of dry skin would be enough. Also, robots have taggants embedded in the skin, which follows a limited number of DNA patterns. The lab boys have found one or two.” In his own opinion, it was not really enough to be conclusive. What he was saying was that it might not be the same robot.
Gene’s mouth opened. There were a limited number of options for robot skin makers. Their repertoire was nothing like the population at large in terms of sample size, and there were only a small number of subcontractors. For human transplant, a genetically-neutral piece of skin was embedded with the patients own cells. It obviated the need for anti-rejection drugs, always hard on the system. He’d read all about it, just trying to get some kind of handle on what the hell they were trying to achieve. In the past, he’d been fully familiar with all kinds of human perps. But if robots were all new; criminal robots were unheard-of.
Up until now.
It made him feel better for some reason. Higher Authority had asked for Gene. They had their reasons.
Outstanding.
Francine gave Gene a look.
“I’m not suggesting anything. Not yet. But that robot looked damned strong.”
Gene considered it. He sipped his coffee.
Parsons spoke.
“She’s very resourceful. She didn’t kill the muggers in the park.”
Francine inclined her head.
Hardly conclusive, but it was an indicator.
Gene’s mind rolled it around and around.
"If she surprised a thief in the act, and took the car off him, there's no incentive for him to report it." Parsons pointed at the screen, needing to do something with his nervous hands. "If he's alive, he can be found. Possibly, he might talk, to somebody. He might get picked up somewhere along the way."
Filed for future reference, in other words. Parsons had a thorough mind.
She’d certainly had the opportunity to kill. Nettles wasn’t holding anything back either in that little shindig. Nettles was almost lucky he hadn’t killed anyone. Self-defense, yes. But even so—he was in possession of stolen property, or at least missing property. The commission of a crime vitiated self-defense to a certain degree. Gene’s mind went over it quickly, and not being a legal specialist, he’d have to inquire a little more deeply. A long list of old cases went through Gene's mind. It wasn’t unprecedented, but in his line of work that was somebody else’s problem.
The general principles were clear enough.
Parsons settled into his chair a little deeper. Now that he was on the scene, actually working, he could relax some. He’d been a bit nervy since getting the call. He went on.
“Also. The car was stolen about four kilometres due west of the rave party.” That part of town was still within borough limits.
Gene nodded. The computer had picked it up as anomalous, a
set of indicators that didn’t add up.
“Okay.” It was certainly interesting.
“Connect the dots.” Parsons reached over and activated a map onscreen. “They’ve escaped the city. They’ve abandoned the car upstate.”
It was still very much hypothetical.
Francine cleared her throat.
“Okay. Not going south, then.” There were better ways to travel if they were going south. They would maybe use the highways, or they could hop a freight train, or simply ditch the vehicle and walk south on the Appalachian Trail.
Francine’s eyebrows rose, but you couldn’t exactly shrug it off. Stranger things had been attempted. With proper ID, they could fly, but so far no signs of that. The thoughts of going through the stringent airport security, with no avenue of escape if the wrong questions were asked, would be a daunting prospect.
Parsons smiled.
“Ah. But we have another stolen car.” And his hand went to his pocket and he pulled a data-stick from his side jacket pocket. “It was stolen a good twenty kilometres away from where the station wagon was abandoned, but.”
Rising, he looked at Gene.
“May I?” Glanced up. “The lady may be foraging on her own, so to speak, while Mister Nettles simply sits on a park bench somewhere.”
Gene nodded and looked at Francine.
“Be my guest.” His eyes came back. “Are the local cops getting any fingerprints, anything like that?”
Prints from a known crim would tend to rule out Betty and Scott as the thieves.
“Not really. But they’re assuming a competent thief would wear gloves anyway.” Parsons nodded on that thought. “We can ask them to have a look—but Betty Blue would be wiping anything down, steering wheel, door handles, anything she or Scott came in contact with.”
‘Of course.”
Parsons located the socket on the side of the screen as Gene touched the virtual buttons to bring it up and open the file. A new box appeared on the time-line.
He quickly read off the details.
“Interesting.”
This time it was a family vehicle, a six-wheel drive all-terrain monster. It must have been eight feet tall to the the light rack on top. Gene saw it as a passing phase, but people were really nuts these days and the advertising was even madder. Here was a family man, who honestly believed that it might be someday necessary to winch his vehicle (with the wife and kids in it?) up a six-hundred metre cliff judging by the highly-chromed front bumper accessory. They probably used the lights for tanning.
The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue Page 13
