Sins of the Father

by Mitchel Scanlon

  "A one-hundred-thousand credit bounty," Arkady grunted. "It is only a matter of time before someone tells us his name. When they do, we will take care of it."

  "Again, excellent," Prendergast purred. "In the meantime, just to be on the safe side, I have taken the opportunity to beef up Mr Lowe's security."

  "You want I should send some of my men to act as bodyguards?" Arkady said. "They could cover him at the hospital, during the operation, when he is at his most vulnerable. Say the word, and I can have them with you in fifteen minutes. I assure you, they are most competent."

  "I'm sure they are," Prendergast smiled sarcastically. "However, I'm also sure they all have extensive criminal records. I think it is better if you leave that side of security to me, Arkady. After all, Mr Lowe is a respectable businessman. It wouldn't do for people to think he is the kind of man to associate with gangsters."

  For Freddie Binns, the moment came as he sat in his apartment contemplating lost opportunities.

  He had received some bad news earlier in the evening. In the wake of Jimmy Nayles's death, the decision had been reached by the shadowy organisation he worked for to suspend operations for a couple of days. For Freddie, who had three ex-wives and a gambling habit to support, it had seemed a disaster. If business was shut down, it meant two days without income.

  It was all the fault of whichever jerk decided to kill Jimmy Nayles, he told himself as he sat in the living room flicking through the channels on his Tri-D player. He didn't care why Jimmy Nayles had been murdered, any more than he cared how or when: all that mattered to him was the fact the mob boss's sudden passing had curtailed his various money-making ventures. Between recruiting mutant labour, and fleecing the mutants for every credit he could get from them, Freddie usually made a pretty good living. Now though, he found himself in the midst of an unexpected financial crisis.

  Guess I shouldn't have bet on the Seltics to beat the Saints, he thought as he dejectedly switched from the sports channels to the news. Ten grand on that bunch of losers? What was I thinking?

  His biggest problem was that he had bet ten thousand credits he did not have. Between three sets of alimony payments and some recent reverses while playing cards, he was almost tapped out. Unless he could make up the shortfall in his income and fast, his dealings with his friendly neighbourhood bookie were likely to enter leg-breaking territory very quickly.

  It's a shame I don't know who popped Jimmy Nayles, he thought. Boris the Shark told me the bosses are offering a hundred grand to anybody who call tell 'em what the guy's name is. A hundred grand. A chunk like that, it could solve all my problems.

  It was then, almost as though in answer to his thoughts, he saw a familiar face on the Tri-D. Boosting the volume, he heard the news announcer say it was the picture of a person the Judges wanted for questioning about the murder of Konrad Gruschenko AKA James Nales AKA Jimmy Nayles. The announcer continued to say the fugitive was believed to be dangerous and citizens should keep their distance, but Freddie was no longer listening. He looked at the Tri-D player and saw a picture of Lenny the Mutie floating in the air before him.

  Lenny the Mutie? The Judges thought Lenny the Mutie had popped Jimmy Nayles?

  Freddie could hardly believe it. All this time he had been bemoaning his financial situation while, unknowingly, he had been sitting on a jackpot. He smiled, feeling a thrill run through his heart as he realised he was looking at the opportunity of a lifetime.

  That hundred grand was as good as his already.

  SEVENTEEN

  INNOCENT BLOOD

  For Leonard, the fourth killing he attempted on Daniel's behalf brought with it an unwelcome surprise.

  It began easily enough. They took their usual path through the sewers and the underblock maintenance tunnels beneath the city, before making their way into the vents of the air-conditioning system of the housing block where the bad man lived. Emerging into the living room of an apartment on the twentieth floor, Leonard heard the sound of running water coming from the kitchen and followed it to its source. There, he saw a woman standing with her back to him, humming an absent-minded tune as she rinsed dirty dishes in the sink.

  We've found him, Daniel whispered in his mind. That's one of the bad men. Kill him, Leonard. Kill him now.

  Confused, Leonard hesitated in the doorway as he stared at the woman. There was no one else in the room. It was clear Daniel was talking about the woman at the sink. But how could the boy think she was a man?

  Abruptly, the woman turned away from the sink. Seeing Leonard standing behind her, she dropped the dish in her hand to shatter on the floor. She looked at him in terror, her mouth opening in the beginning of a scream.

  "Kill him, Leonard!" Daniel shouted the words aloud. "He's one of the men who hurt me! Kill him now!"

  Spurred into action, Leonard crossed the distance to the woman in two broad steps and clamped his hands around her throat to stop her from screaming. Still confused, he did not tighten his grip. He hesitated, staring into the women's frightened eyes as Daniel screamed louder.

  "What are you waiting for?" Daniel said. "I told you to kill him! Do it now!"

  "But she's a woman, Daniel," Leonard said. His pulse pounded wildly in his head, keeping time with the pulse he could feel racing in the woman's throat. "Can't you see that? Something's wrong here. You can't ask me to-"

  "Mama!" a child's voice suddenly yelled out behind him.

  Turning, Leonard saw two terrified, crying children standing in the kitchen doorway. They were wearing pyjamas, one of them clutching a stuffed teddy bear to her chest as they both stared at him in wide-eyed horror. Seeing the family resemblance between the children and the woman whose throat he held clutched in his hands, Leonard realised they must have been woken from sleep by the noise and had come to the kitchen to find a monster strangling their mother. Leonard felt a sudden sickening chill run through his body. Looking at the children's faces, he saw a reflection of the face he knew he must have worn when the Judges came to take him from his mother. In a burst of insight unlike any he had ever experienced, he realised Daniel had nearly made him into the kind of creature that people assumed he must be when they saw his face. Monster. Woman-killer. Mother-killer. A thing from nightmares.

  "Kill them!" Daniel shrieked at the top of his lungs. Curiously, the sound was so shrill and piercing it made Leonard's own throat hurt. "There's three of them here now! Three of the bad men! Kill them! Kill them all now!"

  Appalled, Leonard looked from the children to their mother and back again. It was all too much for him to bear. The idea of killing this woman, of leaving her children to lives as bleak and lonely as his own, struck to the very depths of his soul. For the first time, he refused to do what Daniel told him. It was repugnant. Monstrous. He released his grip on the woman's throat. He pushed past the children, stumbling back towards the air-conditioning vent as Daniel screamed vehemently at him. But Leonard was no longer listening. He had to escape the apartment. He needed to put as much distance as possible between himself and the accusing glares of the children. He did the only thing he could.

  Horrified at what Daniel had almost made him do, Leonard ran.

  And, after that, he kept on running.

  The call came in at a little after 21.00.

  Anderson and Lang had been in the mess hall at Sector House 45, taking a meal break after each enduring another ten minute session in the sleep machine to help keep their wits sharp as they continued to work their homicide investigation. Over the last several hours, a dozen of the child victims in the meme-encoder recordings had been identified and located. They and their families had been brought into protective custody at the Sector House. Meanwhile, another two dozen victims had either turned out to be dead or were as yet unidentified.

  Under the watchful eyes of the Psi-Judges, two psych-trained Med-Judges who specialised in dealing with abuse survivors had been seconded to the Sector House to begin the delicate task of questioning the now-adult victims. It had been
a harrowing, disturbing process, but one that Anderson realised was sadly necessary. They were now dealing with two parallel cases: on one hand there was the case of the abuse ring that had operated fifty years ago; on the other, the current murders which seemed somehow tied up with those earlier crimes. The hope was the survivors' testimony would shed light on both cases: allowing the Judges to arrest any of the perps from the fifty-year-old case who were still alive, and bring in the killers of Konrad Gruschenko and the others.

  The call from Control caught her unawares. She had nearly spilled her cup of synthi-caf as her radio suddenly blurted out a breathless message.

  "Control to Anderson! Attempted homicide at John Steinbeck Block! The description and MO of the perp matches those in the Gruschenko, Kapinski and Mayzell homicides! Anderson, please respond!"

  "Anderson here, Control. Did you say 'attempted' homicide? Is there a surviving victim? Over."

  "Affirmative to that, Anderson. First Judges on the scene report the perp escaped no more than five minutes - repeat five minutes - before they arrived. Tactical and Tek resources have been dispatched to the scene to track him. You'd better get over there ASAP. Looks like you just caught a break."

  They were bad men, Daniel said. The boy had stopped yelling the words out loud, but his voice was still shrill enough in Leonard's head to make him wince. And you didn't kill them! You broke your promise!

  Ignoring the boy, Leonard crawled hurriedly through the vents of the building's air-conditioning system. From time-to-time, he heard voices shouting and the noises of machines, the sounds reverberating through the vents around him. The Judges were on his trail: he was sure of it. He couldn't let them catch him. If they did, they would not just deport him back to the Cursed Earth. He was a murderer. They would put him in an iso-cube - a metal box without windows - and leave him to die there. Then, he would never see his mother. Leonard had to escape. He had to.

  You broke your promise, Daniel said. Cross your heart, that's what you told me! Cross your heart, you'd make them die!

  Re-tracing the path he had taken in entering the building, Leonard finally squeezed free of the vents and arrived in the underblock maintenance tunnels. The tunnels were wider than the vents, allowing him to walk upright so long as he crouched his body and kept his head bowed. Wary in case the Judges were close behind him, Leonard ran through the tunnels and headed down toward the sewers.

  Cross your heart, you said, Daniel's voice was angry and insistent. You broke your promise...

  No, Leonard finally answered the boy. I promised I'd kill the bad men, Daniel. But they weren't bad men. They were a woman and her kids.

  Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar! The boy shrieked in childish petulance. You're a liar! Leonard is a big fat li--

  A woman and her kids, Leonard said. They looked at me like I was a monster.

  No! The boy refused to listen to reason. No! They were men! Three men! I saw them with their wrinkled faces and ugly beards! I recognised them! They were one of the men who hurt me!

  "One" of the men? Despite the threat of the Judges, Leonard abruptly stopped running, his mind pulling up short at something Daniel had said. Daniel, there were three of them. How could three people be 'one' of the men who hurt you?

  Thinking for a moment, Leonard experienced another sudden burst of insight. The sensation of it almost made him dizzy.

  Daniel, he said as he turned towards the boy. Tell me exactly what you saw.

  "He was a monster," the woman said. A Med-Judge had given her a sedative to calm her nerves, but she seemed on the brink of hysteria. "He was huge. And that face... Oh drokk... that face..."

  "You said he put his hands around your throat?" Anderson spoke gently as she tried to coax more from the woman. She reminded herself of the information she had been given by a street Judge as she and Lang had arrived at the scene. The street Judge has said the woman's name was Miriam Joyce. "And then, suddenly, he let you go? Is that right, Miriam?"

  "He started to argue with himself," the woman said. Her hand checked gingerly at the bruises on her throat as she relived the experience. "He began talking to himself in two different voices. I know it sounds crazy, but he used two voices like he had two people inside him. One of them was deep; it sounded like it was his real voice. The other was higher pitched. It sounded like the voice of a child... Oh Grud, it was the child part of him that kept telling him to kill me..."

  Losing her composure, she dissolved into tears as the floodgates of delayed emotion suddenly burst open. Uncomfortable at the thought of inflicting more suffering on a woman who was already traumatised, Anderson began to back away. Abruptly, though, the woman reached out and grabbed her hand, her eyes staring up at Anderson through the tears as though she had some vital message she wanted to pass on before she forgot it.

  "I saw him," Miriam Joyce said. "The child, I mean. I saw the monster and then, when he put his hands around my throat, his face changed. Suddenly, he looked like a child. It's impossible, I know. But you have to believe me... I'm not crazy..."

  "No, you're not crazy, Miriam," Anderson soothed her. As the woman's tears began to flow more freely, she hugged her. "It's all right," she told her. "We believe you."

  "It's all wrong," Leonard said afterwards, his voice barely more than a whisper as he entered the sewers while Daniel clung to his shoulders. "You have to accept it, Daniel. Those people weren't who you thought they were. They weren't the bad men. We killed the wrong people."

  In the end it had been so simple. Instead of telling Leonard what he had seen in the apartment, Daniel had shown him. Laying his palm across Leonard's forehead, Daniel had sent pictures directly into his mind. Leonard had seen every aspect of the incident inside the apartment from Daniel's viewpoint, observing the scene through the boy's eyes from beginning to end. In place of the woman by the sink, Daniel had seen a leering old man. In place of her children he had seen two more old men, their features identical to the first. Initially, Leonard could not understand it. How could he and Daniel have been in the same place at the same time and seen totally different things?

  Then, abruptly, an idea had occurred to him.

  "Show me the others," Leonard had said. "Show me the men we killed. The box man, the headset man and Jimmy Nayles: show me what they looked like."

  Again, Daniel had complied. Again, Leonard had seen that each of the men he had killed had looked completely different to Daniel's eyes. Their faces were not the same. Their heights and builds, even their ages, had been different. In each case there was a family resemblance between the men he had killed and the men Daniel had seen, but they were not the same men; Leonard was sure of it.

  "We did a bad thing, Daniel," Leonard said as he waded through the muck of the sewers. "We have innocent blood on our hands. We killed the wrong people."

  Clinging restlessly to his shoulders, Daniel maintained a sulky silence.

  A family resemblance. The thought churned uneasily inside Leonard's head. He felt on the verge of another insight. It was strange: normally it took Leonard weeks to come up with a single idea, never mind three in one day. At times it was as though he had been slowly growing smarter ever since he had met Daniel. As though his close connection to the boy - the same connection that allowed Daniel to whisper and send pictures directly into his head - had caused some of the boy's intelligence to rub off on him. Whatever the cause, Leonard felt a new insight forming within him. The non-existent people Daniel had seen had all resembled the real people who Leonard had killed. Suddenly, the insight came to him with the force of a bullet.

  "Daniel?" he said gently. "You said the bad men hurt you? When did it happen?"

  "A few days ago," the little boy said. Still angry at Leonard, his voice was grumpy.

  "And when did we kill Jimmy Nayles?" Leonard asked him. It was as though the question appeared in his mind of its own volition.

  "A few days ago," Daniel said, shifting uneasily on Leonard's shoulders as though he found the question boring.


  "And when did we first meet?" Leonard asked.

  "A few days ago," Daniel said.

  The insight was right. Suddenly, Leonard had begun to understand everything.

  "Daniel?" Leonard said. "The bad men who hurt you? I think that might have happened a long time ago. A real long time. I think the bad men are all gone now.

  "I think we've been killing their children."

  "One man, two voices," Lang said to Anderson later, once the Med-Judges had taken Miriam Joyce away for medical treatment. "You heard what she said. Two voices arguing with each other, like a split personality. Sounds like a text book case of MPD."

  Despite the fact the witness statement had given support to the theory she had advanced earlier, there was nothing of triumph in Lang's expression. Like Anderson, she seemed dog-tired: two sleep machine sessions in the last twenty-four hours had proved a poor substitute for the real sleep they both desperately needed.

  "It could be," Anderson said. She had just received a report from the street Judges and Teks assigned to track the perp's path through the building. They had come up empty: even with the short lead-time between his escape from the apartment and the arrival of the first Judges on the scene, the perp had managed to vanish like a ghost. "But it doesn't explain the rest of Miriam Joyce's testimony. The way his face changed to the face of a child. I know eyewitness testimony is unreliable, but it ties in with the results of the psi-scans from the previous victims. Maybe we should call in to Control and-"

  "Control to Anderson!" the radio blared on her belt.

  "Speak of the devil," Anderson muttered. She grimaced as she pressed the transmit button on the radio mic, half-expecting news of another murder.

  "Anderson here, Control. What have you got?"

  "An update on the public response to the photo-scan of your perp that was released to the media. Since the image went on air, Justice Department had received one thousand five hundred and seventy-nine calls from individuals claiming that they know the perp. Mostly the usual sponts, weirdos, and crackpots. However, the Watch Commander at Sector House 46 reports that a suspect arrested in one of the Operation Lazarus raids has come forward with what seems like solid info on your perp's name and address."