Sins of the Father

by Mitchel Scanlon

  "Finally, before you go, a note of caution." Switching off the briefing screen and laying down the remote, Hunter's face adopted a sombre cast. "Be aware that some of the perps are likely to be ex-Sov Bloc citizens like Gruschenko. In which case, we're talking about career criminals with extensive experience of the Sov Bloc justice system; which, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, is a hell of a lot harsher than our own. That means they don't scare easily. In all likelihood, therefore, we can expect them to resist arrest. I want it clear: I'm not telling anyone here to shoot first and ask questions later. But, that said, be ready to go in hard, fast and heavy. Remember, when you're taking down a perp, it's not just your own life that's on the line, but also the lives of your fellow Judges. You know the drill. Stay sharp. Stay alert. But, most of all, stay alive."

  Hunter fell silent once more, taking a long look at the Judges before him as he gave time for his words to sink in.

  "All right," he said at last. "You all know what's expected of you. There's crime out there. Let's get to work."

  As the Watch Commander signalled an end to the briefing, the Judges in the room rose and began to separate off into individual tac-teams to be sub-briefed by their supervisors. Watching them as she remained seated in the front row of chairs with Lang beside her, Anderson found herself feeling a sense of vague unease at the course of recent developments.

  Somehow, the case she had been assigned to a few short hours ago had mutated from an initially baffling homicide into a complex organised crime case involving four different sectors and seven separate divisions. In the room around her there were street Judges, Med-Judges, Teks, members of the Public Surveillance Unit and Accounts Division; never mind Psi Division operatives in the shape of Lang and Anderson herself. There was even a member of the Special Judicial Squad, present as an uninvited observer, sitting at the back of the room. It was not that Anderson was too proud to accept help: the discovery of the victim's secret life had caused the case to spiral off into so many different avenues of investigation that she realised it was beyond her powers to deal with them all. In part, her unease came from an innate distrust of the workings of bureaucracy. The Justice Department was remarkably efficient for an organisation of its size, but she was all too aware of the danger that the murder of Konrad Gruschenko, AKA James Nales, might slip through the cracks in the system as the focus of the investigation shifted from the victim to his criminal empire.

  There was a larger problem, however; albeit one that was altogether more practical in nature. In Anderson's experience, there was more than a grain of truth in the old adage about too many cooks spoiling the synthi-broth. Having so many other Judges wandering through the case in their size elevens would be as likely to be a hindrance to her investigation as it would a help.

  It must be an age thing, she thought abruptly. I'm starting to think like a grumpy old woman, scared the Tri-D repairman is going to leave muddy footprints all over her carpets. Then again, maybe it's true what they say about Psi-Judges: we don't play well with others.

  "Looks like they're gearing up for World War Four," Lang said from beside her, indicating a group of Judges armed with breach shields, stumm gas grenades, and Widowmaker spit gun/stump gun combinations. "The Watch Commander wasn't lying when he talked about going in hard and heavy."

  "Believe me, it's for the best," Anderson commented. "Hunter was right when he talked about how harsh the Sov justice system is. Ex-Sov criminals tend to hate Judges with a passion - and they aren't too bothered when it comes to distinguishing between Mega-City Judges and our Sov counterparts. Plus, they tend to be heavily armed, which only makes matters worse. Probably at least half of these dawn raids will turn into firefights."

  "In that case, shouldn't we be arming up ourselves?" Lang asked. "We should at least get helmets and respirators, if there's going to be stumm gas flying about."

  "We won't need them," Anderson replied. "We're not going out on the raids. Remember, our role in all this is to find out who killed Konrad Gruschenko - we can leave it to the others to dismantle his criminal operations. Once the raids have been completed and they start bringing prisoners back to the Sector House, we can telepathically interrogate the hard cases - the ones who won't crack under other methods. Then, maybe, we'll be able to get a lead on Gruschenko's killer."

  "And in the meantime?" Lang seemed impatient, as though having expected to be part of the raids she now found herself with an excess of energy in need of channelling. "It's going to take at least an hour before they start bringing the first of the perps in. What do we do until then?"

  "We do the grunt work," Anderson said. "We put calls into MAC and get it to trawl through the records to see if there are other cases that match our killer's MO. We ask PSU to pull the surveillance logs for Franz Kafka and find out whether our killers cased the building in the weeks before the crime. We get the Teks analysing Gruschenko's computer to check whether there's anything in his files to suggest who his enemies might have been. Then, we follow up on any leads that arise. It's old-fashioned police procedure, like they did in the day before somebody decided to recruit psychics like us to Justice Department. Grud, who knows, maybe by the time this investigation finishes we'll have more sympathy for street Judges, Teks, and all the others who have to crack cases without having psychic powers to guide them."

  She smiled at Lang, trying to put the other woman at her ease, only to see the smile met with a glacial look. Despite Anderson's best efforts to break the ice between them, Lang had refused to warm to her.

  "If that's the way you want to play it, I'll follow your lead," Lang said. "Though, you ask me, we've got the powers - we should use them."

  "To do what exactly?" Anderson spread her hands, turning up her palms in a friendly and expansive gesture, but the look Lang returned was still cold. "We've scanned the victim's body. Ordinarily, I'd say our next step would be to perform a psychometric scan on Gruschenko's apartment. In this case though, it looks like Gruschenko's paranoia extended even to his choice of sleeping arrangements. Apparently, the records of his bank accounts indicate he maintained a dozen different apartments and hotel rooms at any one time. What's more, the Teks told me they've found evidence he also leased another two dozen apartments under a variety of aliases. Most of the leases only run a month, so it looks like Gruschenko let the leases lapse on one set of apartments, then rented a couple of dozen more each and every month. As close as anyone can figure it, it seems he made sure he slept in a new place every night. Presumably, he lived that way to make it harder for people to track him. The point is, though, it makes these apartments useless for our purposes. Even if we scanned them all, Gruschenko probably didn't stay in any of them long enough to leave significant psychic traces behind. The guy changed homes like other people change their socks."

  "So we're stymied, then?" Lang shifted in her chair in discomfort. "We don't have any real leads, and there's nothing we can do with our powers to change it?"

  "I wouldn't quite say stymied." Anderson shrugged. "Admittedly, there's no better feeling than when you use your powers and they let you solve a case in a matter of seconds. Sometimes though, you have to do things differently. Like I said, it's time we did some old-fashioned police work. Remember, we're not totally in the dark here. The psi-scan of Gruschenko's body, Hemmings's witness statement, and forensic evidence from the crime scene have already given us several things to go on - even if the different accounts do seem to contradict each other at times. We know we're looking for two killers. We know one of them is a boy and the other is probably a mutant. Then, there's the message they left: 'Your sins will find you out'. You don't go carving words into a dead man's torso unless the message is important somehow."

  "Your sins will find you out," Anderson repeated the message again, saying the words out loud as she felt a tingling warmth at the back of her scalp. She knew the sensation of old. It meant her unconscious was trying to tell her something. "I get the feeling that's the key to this whole case. If we can
only find out why the killers wrote it on Gruschenko's body, I think maybe the entire case will break wide open." She paused, waiting to see if whatever was in her unconscious could push itself to the surface. But she drew a blank. "Either way, we better get started. I get the feeling it's only a matter of time before our perps kill again."

  "You do?" Lang said. "Why?"

  "It's just a feeling," Anderson said. "Call it intuition, or a plain dumb hunch, but this whole thing - strangling the victim, then cutting a message into his body - it has the whiff of unfinished business about it. After all, why strangle Gruschenko at all? They had a knife with them. Why didn't they just stab him and be done with it? No, strangling someone is more intimate. It allows you to watch the victim's death; to feel every moment of his suffering as he struggles for breath. It's crime born of passion: in this case, extreme hatred. And the message - your sins will find you out. It suggests they were punishing Gruschenko for something. At the same time, though, it reads as a warning. Almost as though the perps were telling someone else they would be coming for them." She shrugged again. "I don't know. It's hard to say exactly what's going on here. But, whatever it is, I'm certain it won't end with Gruschenko."

  They were alone now in the briefing room. The other Judges had left, no doubt headed for the Sector House's vehicle garage and hangar bay to mount up on Pat Wagons, H-Wagons and Lawmasters in preparations for the coming raids. In their place, there was silence as Anderson and Lang both contemplated the case before them.

  For all she had attempted to reassure Lang that there were still avenues in the case they could work on, Anderson knew she was clutching at straws. It could be that the kind of grunt work she had talked about would turn up some new and vital leads. Equally, she was aware it could all turn out to be busy work; a waste of their time. Experience had taught her, though, that you never gave up on a case. You kept working at it, if necessary by taking a scattergun approach and pursuing areas of investigation almost at random. There was another truism she had long had plenty of time for: if you throw enough mud at a wall, some of it will stick. In this case, if they tried to approach the Gruschenko homicide from a series of different angles, there was always the possibility they might chance on some facet or nuance of the evidence that would lead them right to the killers. True, it was a long shot, but in the absence of anything more solid to go on, it currently looked like their best bet.

  At the same time, there was another aspect to the case that concerned Anderson. She had been assigned to work alongside Lang and judge her emotional state. If they abandoned the investigation and tried to chalk Gruschenko's death off as an unsolved, there was every likelihood that Psi-Judge Vinley would immediately ask Anderson for her assessment of Lang. Right now, the idea made her uncomfortable. From what she had seen so far, it was clear to Anderson that Lang was wound tight; maybe more tight than it was healthy for a Psi-Judge to be. Still, she dreaded the thought of what might happen if she told Vinley that. She had to give Lang every opportunity to prove she could handle the pressure, and to show the things that were said about her were wrong. Perhaps it was that she felt lingering guilt over the fact she had had to lie to Lang earlier about the precise reasons she had been assigned to the case, or simply a matter that they were both Psi-Judges. Whatever the reason, Anderson had already decided she would give the rookie every chance to prove herself. The dictates of her conscience would not let it be any other way.

  "So, I'll get on the line with MAC, then?" Lang was the first to break the silence. "I'll ask for an analysis to be run on the killer's MO, like you said before."

  "Good," Anderson said. "In the meantime, I'll talk to PSU about that surveillance analysis." She paused, as a new thought occurred to her. "Tell you what: when you contact MAC, ask the Teks if they can also input the details of our suspects and see if there have been any earlier sightings of them. We're talking about a boy and giant, after all. They can't have entirely escaped noticed. A duo like that is strange enough to stand out even in the Big Meg. I mean, I know this city is renowned for its weirdness.

  "But, even in Mega-City One, there is such a thing as being even weirder than normal."

  NINE

  THE PAST, SET ASIDE AND LOCKED AWAY, PENDING

  It was morning. The beginning of a brand new day.

  A great believer in routine, Joseph Kapinski awoke in the same manner he had on every morning for the last ten years. The clock beside his bed nudged him musically from sleep at six-thirty sharp, the pre-programmed sound of its alarm taking the form of a tuneful symphony of gently chiming bells. Relieved to find he had passed through the night intact, he immediately pressed his right forefinger three times against the synthi-wood surface of his nightstand.

  "Touch wood," Joseph muttered softly to himself, as was his habit.

  In accordance with his other habits, as he rose from bed he touched his left foot to the floor first. He put on his slippers, then he took the dressing gown hanging neatly beside his bed and wrapped it around him, showing great care to make sure the bows by which he tied the belt were of equal length. Yawning, he eased past the sealed plasteen boxes and packing crates stacked all around his bed and made for the kitchen. He passed more boxes on the way. They were piled, floor-to-ceiling, either side of the hallway, leaving only a small corridor between them to allow him passage.

  Squeezing his way into the kitchen, likewise full to the brim with boxes, he went to the counter where the materials of his breakfast were already laid out and ready. A bowl of plasti-flakes, a spoon and a cold ready-made cup of synthi-caf which he had prepared the night before. Finding the spoon was lying unaccountably askew in its place beside the bowl, he frowned for an instant, and pressed his forefinger three times against the counter. Next, picking up the spoon, he went to the nearest open box and placed the offending utensil inside it.

  "Least said, soonest mended," he muttered. It was another one of his little habits.

  Closing the top of the box so the spoon was no longer in sight, Joseph turned to the cutlery drawer and pulled it open, checking the condition of each of the spoons inside in turn until he found one to please him. Then, laying the spoon down on the counter so it was perfectly lined up by the side of the bowl, he retrieved his cup of synthi-caf and placed it inside the microwave oven. Setting the timer for precisely thirty-eight seconds at high power, he turned the device on and watched for a moment as the cup began to turn inside the machine. While the beverage re-heated he tried to fetch a carton of synthi-milk from inside his refrigerator, only to find to his alarm there were so many boxes piled by the side of it that it was difficult to open the door.

  Briefly, a feeling of panic swept over him. He felt his chest tighten, the pulse at his temple pounding as hard and fast as his heart. Shaking, he took deep breaths and turned his mind to calming thoughts. Closing his eyes, he envisioned himself lying still and motionless in a serene white room, and used the techniques his therapists had taught him.

  This room is my mind, he told himself. There is nothing to harm me here. There is nothing to be feared once I am inside it. When I am in the white room, I am always safe.

  The spasm passed. His panic subsided. His pulse and his heart rate slowed, and returned to normal. His equilibrium restored, Joseph opened his eyes again and cautiously moved one of the boxes slightly to one side to allow him to open the refrigerator door. Taking the carton of synthi-milk from inside it, he quickly poured some over his plasti-flakes, mindful not to spill or drip any on the countertop. Next, replacing the carton in the refrigerator, he closed the door and moved the box back in place, spending several minutes shifting it fractionally back and forth until he was absolutely sure it was in exactly the same place as it had started. Pronouncing himself satisfied at last, he turned back to his breakfast, only to find himself confronted by sudden disaster.

  He had spent so long re-positioning the box, his cup of synthi-caf had cooled and his plasti-flakes had gone soggy. His breakfast was ruined.

  Sighin
g, he scraped the contents of the bowl into his kitchen dispose-all and poured the synthi-caf down after it. Cleaning the bowl, spoon and cup as the grinder in the dispose-all pulverised the remains of his abortive breakfast, Joseph picked up a towel to pat them dry and packed them away in another box. Then, he turned to the kitchen cupboards, the contents inside all shrink-wrapped and labelled, and set about making his breakfast again.

  Abruptly, as he opened the door to the cupboard where he kept the plasti-flakes, he heard a small voice inside him, reminding him of the vow he had made only the night before. Last night, like every other night it seemed in as long as he could remember, before lying down to sleep he had promised himself the next day would be different. Come morning, he had told himself, he would begin to clear away the detritus that cluttered his life. He would go through the hundreds of boxes and crates that clustered in ceiling-high stacks throughout his apartment, he would sort through them and choose only those things inside that were of value, then he would throw the rest away. It was the same vow he made each and every night. Now, in the cold light of day, he reached the same decision he did every morning.

  Tomorrow. He would leave it all until tomorrow.

  Admittedly he had been promising himself the same thing for years, but this time he told himself he meant it. Tomorrow, he would clear the boxes away. Tomorrow, he would feel stronger. Tomorrow, he would overcome the tyranny of his fears and start his life afresh. Convinced that tomorrow, finally, his resolve would stand firm, he redoubled his efforts towards making breakfast. Tomorrow, he reassured himself, the thought like a prayer deep within his heart. Tomorrow, he would begin his life again, writing a new chapter in the book of his existence.