Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Uh-huh. Painaway on the table beside you. Uniform have pulled in our two suspects, so we need to get moving.’

  ‘Right… Pill, shower, and then we can head out.’ She got out of the bed and started for the shower, ignoring the pills as she struggled to coordinate taking her panties off.

  ‘Dillan?’

  ‘Uh, yeah?’

  ‘Thanks for staying. It did help.’

  ‘Well, I brought Dallas up. Least I could do was get slammed with you. And suffer the consequences.’

  ‘Thanks anyway. I’ll go make coffee.’

  ‘Oh God… You are a goddess!’

  Fox shrugged as she headed into the lounge. Goddess might be a little strong, but she did have good coffee.

  ~~~

  ‘Good night?’ Sandoval asked as he spotted Fox and Dillan walking toward him.

  ‘Good enough,’ Fox replied. She noticed his eyes flicking over Dillan: the man was noting that her outfit had not changed and putting two and two together to make sixty-nine. Fox pretty much always wore the same basic outfit to work, so that was hardly a clue, but he was seeing it as such. ‘What do we have?’

  ‘Two guys who look like they should’ve cut back on the steroids a long time ago.’ He turned, tapping a door control to gain access to the interview suite’s observation room.

  This suite was configured for multiple interviewees: three of the walls consisted of displays showing a blank, white room, though only two of those were occupied. The advantage of modern interview rooms was that the passive EM sensors in all the walls allowed observers to view proceedings from any angle, and in extended visual wavelengths if required.

  Sandoval seemed to be right about the men they had selected from the mail traffic. Both were big, heavily muscled men who were sitting at the interview room tables looking irritated rather than nervous. Increased aggression was a common issue with neosteroid abuse. One of them looked like he had had additional muscle grafted in on top of the steroidal-enhanced growth.

  Fox sucked her teeth. ‘Well, they look strong enough to be our killer. No one goes in alone, and I want uniforms with stun batons ready outside. Those two do not look stable.’

  ~~~

  ‘Mister Greyling,’ Fox began, looking across the desk at the bulked-up thug sitting opposite her.

  ‘Shug,’ the thug responded. ‘Name’s Shug. Last person to call me “Mister Greyling” was… uh, anyway, it’s Shug.’

  Fox watched as messages scrolled through her vision field from Sandoval, in the room with her, and Dillan, who was working the observation room.

  Sandoval: He’s not just on neosteroids.

  Dillan: That’s Titan or one of the derivatives.

  Sandoval: Shit! Careful with this asshole.

  ‘Shug,’ Fox went on, ‘you sent a series of electronic messages to Brianne Adamshi. Two emails, three LifeWeb personal messages, a series of voice messages to her personal account.’

  ‘Yeah. So?’

  ‘You refer to her as a “sell-out.” You suggest that she should provide free music to “her fans what gave her a start with that big fucking moneybag corp” and then you go on to suggest that she will get nowhere without her “real fans.” I’m assuming that you are one of those real fans?’

  ‘I went to see her in clubs when she was nothin’ but a kid makin’ bread-money where she could. I deserved to get… I mean, her fans deserved to get something for stickin’ with her and getting’ her where she was, but she dumped us. Stopped doing gigs unless that fuckin’ corp said she could.’

  Sandoval: Notice that slip?

  ‘It’s standard procedure,’ Sandoval said. ‘ATW needed to protect their investment.’

  ‘What about my investment?’

  Dillan: Definitely views this as personal.

  ‘Did you ever actually talk to her?’ Sandoval asked. ‘I mean, face-to-face.’

  Dillan: His heart rate just spiked.

  ‘I… No.’

  ‘Are you sure, Shug?’ Fox asked, her lips curling into a reassuring smile. ‘Maybe after a gig? Maybe just a quick chat? Maybe you waited for her backstage and spoke to her then. You did mention meeting her once in one of your messages.’

  ‘Oh, uh… yeah. Well, there was once, but there wasn’t much to it.’

  ‘Really, because you said, “I loved you an’ you didn’ even see me,” with three exclamation marks.’

  Dillan: Pulse is rising.

  ‘Sounds like you fancied her and she rejected you,’ Sandoval said.

  Dillan: Shit!

  Shug lurched forward at a speed belying his size and grabbed the front of Sandoval’s jacket, yanking him over the table in one, smooth move. ‘She didn’t reject me, prick! She–’ He stopped with a yelp as Fox’s knuckles smacked into his right ear, and his grip on Sandoval released.

  Fox stood, her chair clattering backwards as she moved around the table toward Shug. Letting out a howl, he pushed his own chair back and started to rise, and that was when Fox kicked him right between the legs. He stopped, eyes bulging, and then collapsed backwards, unbalancing the chair and ending up sprawled on the floor of the interview room clutching his groin. The door of the room opened and two uniformed men with stun batons burst in.

  ‘Put him in a holding cell,’ Fox said. ‘Dillan, put through a request for a full drug scan. I want him checked down to the last molecule.’

  Meridian: He’s not our man though.

  Sandoval: What? After that display?

  Meridian: Dillan’s right, he’s probably on Titan.

  Dillan: So he’s probably not got the smarts or self-control to kill Adamshi the way she was killed.

  Sandoval: Damn. And I think he tore my collar.

  Fox looked at the detective, shaking her head, and he flashed her a quick grin. He was kind of cute, boyish. Of course, boyish was not exactly a characteristic she valued in a fellow cop. She was considering that when another message appeared in-vision. It took her a fraction of a second to realise what it was saying, and then she was heading for the door. ‘Technical have tracked down Bucksbridge. Dillan, saddle up, we’re going hunting.’

  ~~~

  ‘We’ve only got partial camera coverage in this area,’ Dillan said as the three detectives scanned up and down the road in the Perth Amboy industrial district. ‘Local sprawlers like throwing rocks at the fixed ones. We’ve got a bunch of cambots in from the twenty-ninth, but if he’s spotted them, he’ll be hiding.’

  Fox looked around slowly. The area had been residential before the push for urbanisation in the late twenties and early thirties. There had been houses, churches, even if there had also been more industrial sectors to the west. There was still a war memorial nearby, set between the road and the shore. Fox was not sure which war they were memorialising and the monument was not in the best of states, but it was still there and not being obviously used as a campsite by the sprawlers.

  All the buildings here now were late-thirties’ constructs, put up to house the workers who would have worked in the factories which had been put up around the existing industrial areas. It had all been about population, and industrial, density. Hundreds of thousands of people were leaving the drought-stricken southern states and they needed jobs and cheap places to live. Even then the number of jobs was decreasing, and more and more people worked remotely from their homes using communications systems which the newly built worker blocks did not have. Briefly it worked and the migrants found work in local factories before the widespread use of automated fabricators housed in the arcologies and apartment blocks made manned factories almost obsolete.

  ‘I hate coming to sectors like this,’ Sandoval grumbled. ‘Reminds me how much we screwed things up.’

  A message appeared in Fox’s vision field from Dillan. Maybe the guy has a heart after all. Fox suppressed a grin and said, ‘The connection we detected was from one of the buildings on this block. That’s as good as we’re getting because none of the buildings here are wired; it’s all off the m
unicipal wireless hub.’

  ‘You have to hand it to those politicians forty years ago who said the internet was as important to the populace as electricity,’ Dillan commented. ‘Without that law we’d have never got this close.’

  ‘True. Okay…’ She glanced around to where six armoured officers were waiting for them to start. ‘You two take three uniforms and the building on the right; I’ll take the left. Take it floor by floor, and make sure you’ve got the access points covered so he can’t get past you. Maintain constant contact via local net. I want to know where everyone is at all times. Let’s go.’

  Pulling up a display in-vision which showed her a basic schematic map of the area and the locations of the nine cops in it, Fox started for the building she had designated. When it had been built it had been an eight-storey block of apartments, put up quickly from prefabricated segments of steel and polymerised concrete. It had probably had a front door which locked back then, but now it was probably lucky that it still had a door.

  She indicated one of the uniforms. ‘Grodin, you’re on door duty. According to the floor plan this place has one flight of stairs and an elevator. I’m willing to bet the elevator’s out of action so you make sure our guy doesn’t leave here and then you take the stairwell as we move up.’

  ‘On it, sir,’ Grodin replied, taking up position in the doorway.

  ‘Right. Everyone else, we go door to door. He’s suspected of UA involvement, but his sheet suggests he’s small-time. I doubt he’s going to give us trouble, but this is the Sprawl and we don’t know what we’re going to find. So you be careful. Clear?’ A pair of helmets nodded in her direction and she turned, walking deeper into the building.

  ~~~

  ‘Sixth floor checked and clear,’ Dillan said over their connection. ‘We’re getting ahead of you, Boss.’

  ‘You’ve got an extra man,’ Fox replied, grinning as she moved to the next apartment door. ‘Though it looked like Sandoval sat that one out.’

  ‘I took the stairwell duty,’ Sandoval replied, sounding defensive. ‘HQ sent me some data on another case that needed going over, and I figured Watlins could use the exercise.’

  ‘Thanks, sir,’ Watlins said. ‘I so enjoyed meeting the sweaty mouth-breather who couldn’t keep his eyes off my boobs.’

  ‘They’re good boobs, Watlins, even in uniform armour.’

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ Fox cut in as she reached up to knock on the door she had arrived at.

  ‘Sorry, Inspector,’ Watlins said.

  Fox was too busy to reply as the door swung open to reveal a big man, naked from the waist up, bald, and heavily muscled. He glowered down at her with eyes which had pinpricks for pupils. ‘What?’

  ‘NAPA. I’m looking for someone. Donovan Bucksbridge, known as Buckyball.’ She held up a display card with Bucksbridge’s mugshot on it and watched the complete lack of recognition spread across the man’s face.

  ‘Never heard of him. Never seen him.’

  ‘Thanks for your time.’ She waited for him to close the door before moving on. The guy was using, probably Stellar, a stimulant popular with muscle men and noted for causing very contracted pupils, along with mood swings in habitual users. Busting the guy seemed like a waste of time, however: there were probably several dozen more users in the building and it was not her job.

  Arriving at the next door, she reached up and… paused. The icons in her vision field showing the people in the other building had just vanished. ‘Dillan? Sandoval? Report.’ There was no response. ‘Watlins?’ Nothing. Fox turned and started for the stairwell. ‘Grodin, you cover the door to this building. No one leaves. Everyone else, we’re going over to the other building. Move!’

  It seemed to take far too long to go down six floors, across the gap between the two buildings, and then up seven. By the time Fox was on the fifth, she could tell something had happened beyond some kind of weird communications failure; there were people in the corridors, milling about and shouting. She heard someone yell, ‘What happened to the power?’ And that was when she ran into Watlins.

  The girl was in the stairwell, looking confused, with her helmet open. ‘Inspector! I don’t know what happened. Comms, computers, everything went out. My implant’s rebooting.’

  ‘EMP,’ Fox said, gritting her teeth and pulling her pistol from where it was settled against the small of her back. ‘Watch here. Your suit systems should come back up shortly. No one comes up from below. No one leaves.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Fox moved on. Watlins had made it to the sixth-floor landing and the others should have been on the floor above. Pushing through the door, Fox ran straight into Sandoval coming the other way. ‘Sandoval, what’s going on?’ The man had his pistol in his hands and Fox could smell propellant.

  ‘Are your comms working?’ Sandoval replied urgently. ‘Mine are out. I think it was an EMP mine. I never thought a little weasel like that–’

  ‘Sandoval! Where are Dillan and the other officers?’

  ‘Dillan’s down! He shot her. I left the other two watching her, but she needs a medic and my comms are still–’

  Fox did not wait for him to finish. ‘Meridian to dispatch, I need EMTs to my location immediately! Officer down. I repeat, officer down.’ She looked at Sandoval again. ‘Now what the fuck happened?’

  ~~~

  Fox stood at the door of the single-room apartment, her eyes on the body at the far side of it, barely three metres away. From here she could not see the microbots crawling over it, but it was routine procedure at this point and the forensic kit’s computer could handle it.

  Bucksbridge had died quickly; Sandoval had shot him right through the throat, which had to be as much luck as judgement with his standard-issue, ten-millimetre caseless cop pistol. That had had to be bagged and entered into evidence because the EMP had wiped out the weapon’s inbuilt recording system, along with pretty much all the electronic systems in the building. Everything was back up now, but whatever might have been recorded was gone.

  The mine had been attached to the wall beside the door, and it had triggered when Dillan had opened the door to check the room. She had been hit by the blast, disoriented by the explosion and her implanted systems going down, and then Bucksbridge had fired at her. He had used a four-mil personal defence weapon, a lightweight, fully automatic machine pistol which would have ripped her open if it were not for her jacket. Dillan wore a leather motorcycle jacket which was lined with reactive fibres: impacts stiffened it into an effective defence against bullets and knives, but the small rounds had still penetrated and Bucksbridge had coated them in a neurotoxin.

  ‘Fucking UA,’ Fox muttered. The EMTs had stabilised Dillan, but she was still unconscious in the HQ medical facility, and the toxin, known as Lethe-L, was known to interrupt memory formation as well as causing motor function disruption and heart failure. When Dillan woke up, it was unlikely she would remember what had happened. What was Bucksbridge doing with that kind of hardware? The UA were noted for handling all sorts of things which they were not supposed to have, but EMP mines and neurotoxin-loaded rounds in the hands of a bottom-feeder like him?

  Bucksbridge was dead, so he was not going to be saying anything. Sandoval’s story was that he had arrived at the door just as Dillan went down, and he had fired at Bucksbridge. Three rounds, only one of which had hit, punching through his throat and killing him instantly. The other two rounds had embedded themselves in the wall, and there were holes in the corridor wall from the burst Bucksbridge had fired at Dillan. It all fitted together, but it was down to Sandoval’s report since no one else was talking, not even the electronic witnesses. Canard had actually decided to go into HQ to handle the interview personally, so that was where Sandoval was now while Fox handled the crime scene work. The probability was that it would be written up just as Sandoval said it had happened, but it was not getting them closer to the killer.

  Fox looked across at the slumped body. ‘No way were you the one who di
d it. Did you hire someone? Have you got a friend around here with the muscle for this?’ Now that was a thought. She connected through to her home server. ‘Kit, put a request through to get all the local cameras run for other known UA-connected people.’

  ‘That will take considerable time,’ Kit replied, her image appearing in-vision.

  ‘I know, but Bucksbridge was not our killer and UA members don’t come in units of one. He had friends here, maybe somewhere close.’

  ‘I have lodged the request. Fox, your implant is noting a number of biochemical stress indicators.’

  ‘Well, yeah, I’m stressed. Dillan was shot, and what might be our best lead is dead. I’m still not absolutely sure this is one killer.’

  ‘You will do no one any good by becoming over-stressed. Is there anything you can achieve before tomorrow by continuing to work on this?’

  Fox frowned at the air in front of her. Kit was, unfortunately, being far too damn reasonable. ‘I doubt it. Canard is taking care of Sandoval. He’s got my report and I’ll send over the data from these scans. I doubt we’ll get any results from the techs on Bucksbridge’s computer before morning, if then.’

  ‘Then I suggest you take some time to relax this evening.’

  A thought occurred and Fox smiled. ‘I tell you what, I’ll do both. Get me a month’s access to Niflhel. I’ll go in there, see if I can talk to some people about Trent, and relax at the same time.’

  ‘Will you be relaxing against a wall with a lot of panting?’

  ‘Well, I can certainly hope so.’

  ~~~

  Cleopatra spotted Fox almost as soon as she walked into the brothel and hurried her into the back rooms. Glasses of wine were poured and then the virtual queen paused and frowned. ‘Are you allowed to drink on duty?’

  Fox shrugged. ‘No, but I’m not on duty. I’m going to talk to people about Mystral and see if I can get any more background, but I’m not on duty.’

  ‘Good.’ Cleopatra handed over the wine and then sprawled onto one of her loungers with the practised ease of someone who clearly did that a lot. ‘I don’t suppose you can really talk about the case either, but I wanted to ask. Mystral was popular. People have asked where she went. One of our semi-regulars, Jeanie, knew what had happened to her. I know she mentioned it to a couple of people.’