And when it was over, he was dead.
Thirteen
The next victim took me to Washington, four systems further on, and the capital of the American sector. The killer was sticking to the spine now apparently, having bypassed the Canadian sector completely, and the first entrance into the British sector.
Here I found something which shouldn't have shocked anyone. A dickless politician.
Trevor Howard was a fat old blowhard, who never passed up an opportunity to make his opinion known. A rare bachelor among the political set, he wasn't known for spending time with women or men, and many of the people I talked to said, in all seriousness, the only love of Trevor Howard's life was Trevor Howard himself.
Nevertheless, there he was, lying on his bed, with no member, and no blood, just like all the others.
This time there was a glimmer of hope in the form of vid footage of Howard leaving a fundraiser in the company of a young woman, the day before the murder. It got my blood pumping for about forty-eight hours, until the local PD and I determined it was just his long-time aide, who'd given him a lift to his apartment, and gone home to her own family.
My obligatory dive into Howard's life was typical of politics, in it being drawn-out, pointless, and left me feeling like I needed a shower. His position as chair of a certain procurement committee, gave him a type of special influence only government insiders really understood. With his vote, he could decide whether certain agendas moved forward, or ended up in the shit-can. For the most part, the people I talked to said Howard liked to act as if he was running with the big dogs, when in reality all it would have taken for everyone to forget his name, was to lose his position on that one committee. If the cause of death had come to light, the media would have had a field day with it, but as it was, his murder was only in the news cycle for a few days, before being dropped for the latest scandal du jour.
But ultimately, no one, male or female, said anything about Howard being a misogynist, or abusive towards others. He was an asshole, no doubt about it, but in more of a general sense. And yet someone had decided to hurt him, in one of the worst ways I could imagine.
I was starting to question everything about my decision to come out of retirement, as I headed off to the next murder scene on Apricot.
I'd half considered the next killing would be on London, since it was on the spine, and having done an American politician, why not a Brit one as well, but no. I was already on my way through the system, being the only British Sector system I’d be seeing, and with no call to stop, I saw the sights, and kept on going.
Apricot was three systems into the Sci-Fi sector, and the only privately owned system I knew about. Well, not so much knew, as found out as soon as I jumped in. Flint had contacted SFPD, but I heard nothing from them.
It was here I caught up with what the media were calling the Midgard War. News had been passing me by for a long time now. Local news stations all had predominantly local stuff, and I was after all an Earth beat cop. I received emails of all the important Earth news, and paid little attention to anything else, other than the local coverage on my victims.
It was somewhat of a shock to find I'd been passing by the war area, and heading directly towards the other side of it. The Americans had held the Midgard forces at their border, but the Sci-Fi sector had fallen back all the way to Avon, before being able to retake their space. The Australian sector had managed to keep the Midgard fleets out.
For the first time, I heard the name Jonathon Hunter. From what I could gather, he was some sort of teenage military savant-genius, who rose from an ordinary pilot to an Admiral in only weeks. High up military in four sectors were crediting him as the hero of the war, when local commanders had failed. Not surprising really. There hadn’t been a serious war in a hundred years, and the military everywhere was a fraction of what it'd been when the Germans had finally been defeated. Even I knew that.
Hot on the heels of the war news, was the British Coup, and once again Jonathon Hunter had saved the day. The thing which interested me though, was the difference in the reporting as the stories went down the spine. The further away the story came from, the more skeptism and credulity was in them.
If nothing else, it took my mind off the job for a while.
I was sick to death of following up on killings, poking around after local PDs had done their thing. Cops were starting to talk behind their hands when I was around, and I could only imagine what they were saying. It's that Burnside guy again, chasing his dick.
When I finally landed on Apricot, I'd been two steps behind my killer for the better part of two years. I needed a win so bad I could taste it, and not just because Flint was breathing down my neck, even from this far away. Part of my coming out of retirement was to prove to myself I still had the touch, and yet here I was, on the verge of being fired from my final case. The last thing I wanted was to be forced out, and sent off into the sunset with the biggest failure of my career hanging over my head.
And then, when things looked their worst, I finally found what I'd been looking for.
On Apricot, of all places.
Thirteen
Investigating the murder of Patton Joyner was actually easier than the ones which came before it, mainly because of John Slice.
Slice was CEO of the Apricot Mapping Service, which was the major economic driver for Apricot, as well as the owner itself. He was a sharp cookie, and when Joyner's penis-free corpse was discovered, it didn't take long for him to find out the guy was just the latest in a string of murders, and I was the one assigned to the case. He obviously had connections.
Slice had contacted me personally while I was still several systems away, and apparently almost as soon as Flint's email had been received by SFPD. As I found out shortly after, Slice had actually been behind me, as had the General who headed up the SFPD, as they'd been at some celebration on London for the end of the war, and been there for the coup. I was surprised to find he was a retired Group Captain from the British Fleet. It made me wonder why he lived in the Sci-Fi sector.
It took some trawling through the overnight logs before I found I'd been passed not by a small ship I expected Slice to be flying, but by Jon Hunter's giant red triangle carrier, with escorts, and at a speed I didn’t know was even possible. Hence even though I’d had a head start, Slice was home more than a day ahead of me.
He'd arrived back to find there'd been a murder, and already knowing I was coming, had contacted me immediately about Joyner, which was the first time I hadn't been alerted to a murder by either local police, or Captain Flint. Slice offered any help he could give, so I looked him up as soon as the Calypso arrived. He set up a meeting planet-side at Joyner's home, where his body had been found.
"Detective," he said, as he met me at the door. "John Slice. Thanks for coming." He glanced at the top of my head for a moment. "I like the hat."
I shook his offered hand, and nodded.
"Thank you for getting on top of this so quickly. This is the closest I've been behind the killer in almost two years."
He led me into the house. It was small, and nowhere near the standard of the other victims. Patton Joyner was definitely not a man of means, unless he kept it very well-hidden. I walked into the bedroom, and saw the now-familiar sight of a body drained of blood, lying on the bed. He'd been about thirty, regular build, bland face, the kind of guy you'd pass by on the street, and not look at twice.
"Joyner was a technician for AMS," said Slice. "Mid-level employee, nice enough fellow. I don't know why anyone would want to kill him, especially not in this way."
"Apricot's population is pretty small, isn't it?" I asked.
"About fifty thousand. It's a real community, where most people either know each other, or know of each other. Which is why I can't imagine anyone from here being capable of something like this. That's the reason I was so eager to get you here."
"Don't worry. Even if the killer were from Apricot, which I highly doubt, she hasn't been here
for a long time. She's been up and down the spine, killing people for the better part of two years."
"She? You're sure of that?"
I sighed.
"I'm not sure of anything to do with this killer, but that's the working theory. A profiler for ESPD believes it's a female serial killer, for obvious reasons, in spite of how few of them there have ever been. I haven't really come across anything yet which either proves or disproves it."
I did my routine examination of the scene, not expecting to find anything out of the ordinary, and I didn't. Same MO as the others, no blood, no signs of struggle. I was starting to feel like my life was a VR simulation playing on a continuous loop.
"Joyner wasn't wealthy?" I asked, knowing the answer.
"I own pretty much everything here," he said. "People on Apricot make a good living, but no, the majority aren't rich."
I nodded.
"This question is going to sound dumb, too, but I have to ask it. Any criminal ties you knew of?"
Slice frowned, and scratched the beard on his chin.
"Nothing happens on Apricot I don't know about," he said. "Unless he was extremely good at hiding it, Patton Joyner wasn't involved in anything below board. Why do you ask?"
"Unfortunately, there are precious few links between the other victims. One is they all had money, the amount varied widely, but all of them were what you'd call well-to-do. And several of them, not all of them, but enough, were assholes in one way or another."
"Apricot isn't lawless or wild," he said with obvious pride. "I run a tight ship, as they say. And at the risk of bring blunt, Detective, I want the head of Joyner's killer on a platter as soon as possible. People need to know this kind of thing doesn't happen here."
"I'll do everything I can, Mr. Slice. You can count on that."
Everything I can didn't turn out to be a hell of a lot, but I still managed to catch the break I'd been waiting for.
Fourteen
It didn't take long to exhaust the resources I could have used to track anyone via vid. Slice made some techs available to me, and they managed to find a feed showing Joyner leaving a bar with a young woman on the evening he was killed, but there was nothing particular about her. Average height, average build, shoulder-length ash blonde hair. They talked for a while, but were soon out of the range of the camera. They weren't holding hands, or showing any obvious affection. I may have just gotten vid of my killer, or I may have simply seen two people talking.
"That looked a little like Debbie Hastings," said one of the techs, a woman named Tricia. "I could message her, see if it really was her."
I agreed, and a few minutes later, we learned Debbie Hastings knew who Joyner was, but she hadn't seen him in months, and they definitely weren't together at a bar.
"And you trust her?" I asked Tricia.
"Of course. I've known her for years."
I nodded, and thanked her, then went back to the vid. I would have bet my hat the killer had seen Debbie, and took her look as a model for a disguise to blend in. Anyone seeing her from a distance would likely just assume it was Debbie. Even if someone came close enough to see it wasn't her, the killer could say something like 'Oh, I get that all the time! Tell Debbie I said hi', and no-one would be the wiser.
The angle of the shot wasn't great, but it was enough to remind me of the description Calvin Bleecker had given me of the woman he'd seen with Erasmus Livingstone before his murder. Average height, trim build, decent rack. This one had shorter hair which was a different color, but, like all accessories, was easy to change.
I had actual vid of my killer, at least, I thought I did. Again, without any confirmation, I couldn't know for sure. I wouldn't know for sure until I'd done my usual follow-up investigation, which didn't fill me with a lot of hope. I'd logged thousands of kilometres on my shoes over the past two years, and I still felt like I was at square one.
But before I started, I asked to meet with John Slice again.
"I appreciate you coming to me first," said Slice.
He had a map of the spine up on a hollo screen in his office, which I assumed was normal, since he owned a mapping services company. Hollo screen didn’t do it justice. It was the first time I’d seen one covering the entire wall, and showing all of human space. Even for the size of the office, it was small scale. Red dots showed all over the place, and I assumed they were ships of his. He did after all make a living updating the ship maps, and trying to find jump points into new systems.
"Professional courtesy demanded it," I said. "You've been a great help, and I didn't want to start interrogating people without your okay."
"Thank you. Like I said, this is a community, and people are already nervous enough as it is, knowing someone has been killed."
He was right, of course. Slice had kept the details of the murder out of the public arena, but people were still looking over their shoulders. I'm sure it's been the same in any small community for centuries. You get used to a feeling of security, and when it gets ripped away, you get paranoid.
"I'll try to keep my investigation low-key," I said. "I can actually be pretty nondescript when I leave my hat and coat in my ship."
"I'm sure." He pointed to the hollo of the spine map. "But maybe I can help you before you even start."
"How do you mean?"
He gestured, and suddenly the map changed to dim certain systems, and illuminate others. It took me a few moments to figure out what he was doing.
"I took the liberty of mapping out your killer's murder scenes," he said, giving me a sheepish look. "What can I say? It's my thing. And when I did, I started to notice something which may be significant. Or it may not, I suppose. I'm hoping you can help me with it."
I studied the glowing systems, Egypt, where it had all started, then Beijing, Honshu, Granada, Earth, Frankfurt, Poland, Cuba, Vegas, Washington. Now Apricot, of course. I'd been to every one of them, on the ground, right in the thick of things, but it occurred to me at that moment, I'd never bothered to look at my investigation on a macro scale. The big picture, as they say.
"Do you see what I see?" he asked. "The pattern?"
Now that it was laid out in front of me, I did see it, but I wasn't sure what it meant. Slice saved me the trouble of asking, by telling me what he was thinking.
"Look there," he said, pointing to Frankfurt. "Up to that point, you can see there was no real rhyme or reason to the murder scenes. They bounced around from place to place. But Frankfurt was the last murder to take place in a system that branched off the main spine. You see?"
I did. After that, the next five followed a direct line, with no deviation. The killer had avoided branch line systems, and had started following a straight line which eventually led to Midnight, Bad Wolf and Nexus 618, which was the end of the line, in the Australian sector.
"It's almost as if she'd had a broken compass at the beginning, got it working, and found the true direction," I said, more to myself than to Slice.
"That's exactly what I was thinking," he said. "The spine isn't a straight line, but it does have a central progression of systems. And it certainly looks as if your killer is now following that progression."
"Shit," I breathed. "I've been so focused on trying to figure out how she was choosing victims that it never occurred to me to follow how she was choosing murder sites."
"It's safe to assume your killer has a good ship, judging by the locations and dates of the murders. Of course, I'm sure you'd assumed as much."
I had, in fact. It was possible that the killer had used a single ship to reach each system, then relied on public transportation to get to the murder scenes. I'd done some investigation into arrival and departure logs, of course, but with the sheer volume of trading ships alone, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack, when all you knew was which planet the haystack had been on.
But now, with this theory…
"You're saying we could possibly predict the next system."
Slice nodded.
&nbs
p; "If the killer stays to the pattern, the next murder will happen on one of four systems, Argon, Avon, Atlantis, or Cobol."
"Or Midnight," I said.
"I highly doubt that," he said with a grin. "No one in their right mind would try anything in Jonathon Hunter's space."
At that point, of course, I'd never met Hunter. All I knew about him was what most of the rest of the galaxy knew. He'd showed up out of nowhere to become the hero of the Midgard War, and was already something of a legend. At least, that's how it seemed to those of us from the Earth Torus, who always got our information third-hand from the media. In any case, he'd been building a reputation over the last few months, while I'd been tracking my killer towards him.
Slice looked at me squarely.
"Midnight has nothing in it. Just a sun. Not even a random rock anywhere. The only thing there is Jon's Battlestation, Hunter's Redoubt. No-one sane will try to kill anyone there."
"I've heard a lot about Hunter in the last few days," I said. "A lot of it sounds like legend-building. Like what the newspapermen of the 19th century did with the Wild West. They made cowboys out to be heroes, and almost superhuman, but the reality was they were nothing special."
Like I said, I didn't know better back then. But Slice did.
"That's not the case with Jon," he said. "Believe me. I've been taking orders from him since the battle of Avon. He's not as good as people say he is. He's better!"
I wasn't going to argue with him, but there was no way of knowing if the killer was aware of messing with Hunter being a bad idea. But I was beginning to see a strategy on what my next move should be.
"I initially came here to ask for your permission to investigate one murder," I said. "But thanks to your help, I think I'm going to end up leaving here with a shot at preventing the next one."
"That's what I was thinking, too," he said. "There's nothing you can do for Patton Joyner, but you could possibly save another victim's life. I'd suggest heading for Atlantis, since it's in the middle. There's never been less than two systems apart, so Argon is very unlikely, and Avon only slightly less unlikely. It may not be the next target, but you'll be within a day of the other systems if it isn't."
Burnside's Killer: Extended Version (The Hunter Legacy Book 6) Page 5
