“So, what’s stopping us?” Chloe sounded adversarial, ready to bite. “God knows we don’t have the resources to deal with our case load as it is. The last thing we need is vigilante action from one of the people we’re trying to help.”
Edward had done plenty of thinking about the problem overnight. It didn’t make much sense to him why a grieving widower would try and infiltrate a meeting as dangerous as the Anti-Telepath League. With a man like Growden leading the group, anything could have happened, and most likely would have if Crewe and Beckett hadn’t been there. In the end, he could only draw one conclusion.
“He’s grieving. He’s doing what he thinks best.”
Chloe gave him a look to suggest that her superior might well be losing his mind. “I’ve rescheduled his follow-up interview for tomorrow,” she said.
“Do you think Jack Winston killed his wife?” he asked Chloe, as he wandered over to the operations board.
“He’s already demonstrated he likes keeping secrets.”
“Everybody keeps something from us,” he said wryly.
Chloe nodded and a faint smile appeared. “I don’t trust him. It’s so convenient.”
“What’s convenient?”
“Only the whole ‘intruder in my house’ business,” she replied. “And there was that business with Moira not being able to read him.”
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a case where we’ve used one of our teeps to read an OsMiTech teep.”
Chloe hesitated. “In my last assignment, I did. And it didn’t work like that. Winston was blocking her. I don’t care that he says he wasn’t. I’ve watched the recording back half a dozen times.”
“Do you think he’s lying about killing his wife?” Edward asked.
Chloe shrugged her shoulders. “In all honesty, Boss, I don’t know.” A pause. “Yes, possibly.”
“We need more than that, though.”
“Do you think he did it?” she asked back at him.
Edward had been pushing this thought around his head in the early hours. The main reason he’d had such a terrible night’s sleep. The story as told to them seemed absurd, but if it was an incredible lie then it was incredible in its audacity.
“Is the Winston case in the simulacrum engine yet?”
Chloe pulled out a stool from the edge of the operations table and sat down. Her fingers sped across the keyboard that lit up at her touch. A scrolling display appeared to hover in the air before her.
“Yes,” she said finally. “Do you want to go in?”
Edward nodded. “Yes. Let’s go back to the scene of the crime.”
*
The simulacrum engine dazzled Edward with its brilliance every time he had cause to use it. To him, this was one of those fantastic applications of technology that truly felt life changing. It was, however, a technology that few could afford to implement outside of government departments or organisations like the police. Rumour had it that OsMiTech itself had one of the largest simulacrum engines on the planet. Not that anyone but the elite at OsMiTech would ever get to see it, though.
Edward and Chloe walked over to the right of the operations centre and entered a large empty room about ten metres along each wall. The lights came on as they stepped inside. The walls were criss-crossed with silver lines like robotic veins against a dark skin. Thousands of tiny balls had been built into the floor that would soon help the pair of them move around the simulacrum. Chloe had brought a datapad with her and she pressed a sequence of buttons on the device. The world changed around them. Light coalesced into lines and artificial constructs creating a perfect replica of Jack Winston’s house. They were surrounded by walls of light; flying drones and projectors in the ceiling and walls were making this impossible sight a reality. Edward loved the audacity of their technology that allowed them to step right back into a crime scene without having to leave the operations room. It never stopped being amazing.
They both stood in the hallway. The open kitchen doorway lay ahead of them. To their backs was the front door and to their left, a staircase led up to the bedrooms and the study that Winston used as his office.
Edward walked to the kitchen and stepped onto the tiles, the engine’s software moving the images at the same pace so it appeared he was walking through a real structure. Chloe kept pace. A body lay on the tiles, a dark pool of blood had spilled from the man’s neck and bloomed outwards. This was the watcher sent by OsMiTech to deliver the memory box and eyes to Jack Winston. He should have been the box’s protector as well, but that hadn’t turned out so well for him.
“What do we know about him?” Edward asked as he knelt to examine the body. He spoke in a flat, monotone voice and sighed as he was taken back two days to the scene of the crime. Such a waste of life. Despite already going over the personnel file from OsMiTech, he wanted to hear somebody else tell him about the victim.
“John Dorsey, fifty-four. Been at OsMiTech for the last four years. He’s been a watcher for two. No record. Never had any incidents that would make him a target.”
“Have you found anything else in his personnel file?”
“Nothing that would make me think he was the target. It seems he got assigned to the wrong job.” Chloe sounded strained.
“The wrong job… Has his family come up with anything helpful?”
“No. His wife can’t talk without bursting into tears, but she’s not volunteered anything that would make us change our view.”
Edward looked at the burnt out remains of the watcher’s eyes. Destroyed by an eye-burner. A common enough tool now amongst criminals who sought to keep their dead witnesses quiet. There was no possibility of getting a remnant recall from those.
Chloe went to stand by the patio doors. “There was no evidence of anyone breaking in. The patio doors weren’t forced, and neither was the front door. The windows were all sealed.”
“The watcher let him in perhaps. Witnesses?” Edward asked.
“We’ve done door to door. No one saw anyone suspicious.”
“Were there many people in at that time of day?”
“Oh yes, both of his immediate neighbours were home. The house behind his has a cleaner. She saw nobody suspicious.”
Edward stood alongside his colleague by the doors and drank in the view. A walled garden with overgrown hedges and shrubs along the perimeter. At the bottom of the garden, three well-established beech trees blocked most of the view from the houses behind. Edward could make out the top edge of the bedroom windows and the roof but nothing else. “No one would have seen someone come in through this way. What about the front? Who came in through the front door?”
“The neighbours opposite were out. No one else saw anybody.”
“They have a Butler system installed don’t they?”
Chloe nodded and glanced up at the access point on the kitchen wall. The screen was blank as it had been when the police had arrived.
“The Butler system suffered a failure at one forty-five p.m. It was still disabled when we arrived.”
“What was the problem?”
“We called a service engineer out. He said that a faulty sensor forced the system into recovery mode, but it failed to restore.”
“Does that sound plausible?”
“He’s no reason to lie. I don’t know enough about them to be honest. It’s not like I’ll ever be able to afford one.”
Edward hated that the one thing in the house that could have corroborated Winston’s story was unable to do so. “What would it take to interfere with one of these sensors?”
“Sabotage?”
“Possibly. I don’t like it, Chloe. It’s all terribly convenient isn’t it?”
“Not for Winston.”
“That depends on whether he’s guilty or not.” Edward turned back into the room, avoiding looking at John Dorsey’s corpse. “Did forensics find any evidence that this third person was in the house?”
“Plenty of evidence that other people have been in the house. Fibr
es and skin samples; fingerprints that aren’t the Winston’s, but nothing we can pinpoint down to an intruder like Winston described.”
“What about the security drones? Have we got anything back from the network yet?”
Chloe shook her head. “We’ve asked for flight records, and access to surveillance logs but no word as yet.”
“Let’s check out Mrs Winston.”
Chloe swiped her datapad and the ground floor fell away from them, the next floor dropping into place around them. For a moment, the ceiling passed down through them, and then they were standing in a small square of landing overlooking the stairwell. Edward had half a bannister cutting him in half so stepped to the side, not liking the illusion to be spoilt.
Edward walked around to the bookcase in the reading alcove. Hundreds of books lined the bookshelves, worn spines with fine hairline cracks crossing the titles. “He’s a man with expensive tastes.”
Chloe stood by him and tilted her head to the side reading the titles. “It’s been years since I’ve read a tree book.” Her hand moved along the shelves as if finding one to pull out, then realising what she was doing, she straightened.
“I’ve got some if you’d like to borrow them.”
A brief smile fluttered across her face and her eyes lit like jewels. “Thank you.”
Together, they turned to face the closed study door. As Edward approached, he reached out a hand and held it against the image of the door handle. The simulacrum engine understood the command, and the door shimmered and swung open.
Inside the study, Edward couldn’t help but be impressed. “I had no idea life as a remnant keeper paid so well. I’d always just assumed the big dogs got the cash.”
He stepped closer to the dark shape of Keeley Winston’s replica, lying prone on the floor, her throat cut.
“OK,” he said, “Tell me what we know. What can we verify?”
“We received a call from Jack Winston at three minutes past two on Friday afternoon. He claimed that his wife had been murdered and was lying in his study.”
Edward nodded. They stood shoulder to shoulder. The forensic drone had done a good job of scanning the place. Despite a few fuzzy areas in the corners that most people wouldn’t notice unless they were looking for them, the simulacrum was a detailed model of the house he’d been working through two days ago. The only thing that was missing was the smell. Edward stared down at the floor and the dead body of Mrs Winston at the centre of a crimson pool of her blood.
Edward cleared his throat and looked away from the uncomfortably solid-looking body. “OsMiTech monitoring protocols were active. All communications from Winston’s house were being monitored due to him working on a case. The call was routed to me as the highest ranking Telepath Crime Unit officer on duty in the area. I told him to stay where he was and that we’d get to him as soon as possible. He said nothing about anyone else being in the house.”
Chloe picked up the recount. “We got here within ten minutes. Winston was in the bathroom, distressed and claiming that an intruder had killed his wife. He was covered in his wife’s blood and Mrs Winston was found dead in the office.”
“He had plenty of blood on him. He could have been lying in it,” Edward mused.
“More likely the blood got on him when he slashed her throat.”
“Blood splatter patterns don’t suggest that. OK, let’s say that’s inconclusive. What else do we have? Where was the murder weapon?”
“In the hallway.” Chloe moved to the doorway, stepping around Keeley’s body, avoiding the illusory blood, afraid to contaminate the ersatz scene. “Here.” She pointed at the knife on the floor. Blood on its blade and handle. “It matches the set of knives from a block in the kitchen.”
“And what did our forensics conclude? Did they find a third person’s biodata on the weapon?” Edward already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear somebody else say it back to him.
“No,” she replied, “The biodata belonged to Winston and his wife.”
“So nothing there to suggest an intruder.”
“An intruder would have taken precautions. Especially if they were aiming to frame Winston.”
Edward nodded. He couldn’t accept that a man in a happy relationship would kill his wife in such a brutal way. He wanted to believe Jack but to do his job, he needed to stay open-minded. “If we follow Winston’s story, then an intruder broke in, grabbed a knife and killed the watcher, before going upstairs and killing his wife. For whatever reason, he chose not to kill Winston when he had the chance, instead going back downstairs. As far as stories go, it’s colourful.”
Chloe was checking out the furniture and desk that was littered with paperwork. “He landed on his feet. When the registration act came in, he was working as a labourer at Smettles, like his dad. He used to live in a habitat block.”
“This must have come as a nice surprise to him then.”
“Still, he has to put dead people’s eyes in his head. That can’t be very nice. How much would they have to pay you to do that?”
Edward didn’t think it would be that much more than they were paying him now but, he kept his mouth shut.
“They’re a secretive bunch, the remnant keepers,” Edward said. “What did the neighbours think of a telepath living next door?”
“The neighbour on this side—” she pointed to the wall behind her, “—had tinfoil on the walls. He said it was just a precaution. But, none of them suspected he was a keeper. I don’t think he’s going to want to live back here to be honest.”
That was a typical reaction. Ever since the law had been passed that made it compulsory for eyes to be stored at OsMiTech for possible retrievable, there’d been unrest and disgust. He remembered the protests that had brought London to a standstill when the law came into effect. Edward would have stood alongside them if it wouldn’t have cost him his job. Why on Earth should the government be allowed to keep body parts without permission? Thinking of all the cutbacks they’d suffered recently, to say that law and order was a priority for them didn’t ring true. But, he supposed that with the army at the Government’s beck and call, they already had an effective way to keep people under control.
“Do we know the details of the case he was working on?” Edward asked.
“No. I’ve put a request through to OsMiTech and they’re considering it,” Chloe replied.
“So, we’re not going to find out. Fine. We’ll just have to get Winston to tell us when we have our next chat.” Edward ran his fingers through his hair, exasperated. “It’s not adding up Chloe. If Jack Winston killed his wife, then where is the memory box? If there was an intruder, then they took the memory box; how did they know he had it, and why in god’s hell would they want it?”
“OK. So, what if our killer has access to information at OsMiTech? That’s the only way they would have found out where the memory box was going to.”
“But why would they want it?” he said.
“We’re only going to know that when we find out whose eyes were in that box.”
Edward racked his brains trying to think of similar cases but drew a blank. He turned and walked straight through the wall of Winston’s office. The light patterns broke up around him, and the illusion collapsed as he opened the door to the simulacrum room. Chloe caught up with him at the operations desk. Edward took a swig from his bottle of water and turned to face her, his expression energised, eyebrows raised, eyes sparkling. “I want you to collect Winston, bring him back here. I want him surprised. I don’t want him to have any opportunity to prepare himself.”
“Why what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to scan him of course. I’ll get hold of someone. Borrow them from another district if I have to. Only this time it will be someone with more experience than our Moira.”
Chloe looked at him with a stony expression. Her lips quivered as she composed her thoughts. “What about Moira? What are we going to tell her?”
“I don’t care what you t
ell her. Winston was too strong a blocker for her.”
“He said he wasn’t blocking.”
“Bullshit. He knew what he was doing. This time he’s not going to get any notice.”
Chloe didn’t speak. She looked at her datapad, pretending to look at something important.
Edward spoke for her. “It’s not in the rule book, I know.”
“Only it is in the rule book, Sir. In that section that says you’re not allowed to do that. Scanning someone without their permission is still a criminal offence. You’ll need a warrant.”
“And I’m not going to have one. But, I’m going to arrange it anyway.”
He walked away. “I want him here before lunch.”
10:00 AM
Anna pulled into a parking bay some distance from the entrance to the habitat block and Jack repressed a shudder. With over two million people living inside District 41, it was impossible for everyone to get the accommodation he’d enjoyed with Keeley, but did anyone deserve this?
Habitat Block G6 was a soaring edifice built on the coast at Southport. Concrete, glass, and plastisteel were the order of the day with these constructions, printed from the ground up by behemoth printing machines that fed on raw materials and produced sturdy living zones. Designed by computer, these structures were functional, secure, and ugly as hell.
Honey Brown, a registered telepath of five years, could afford to move away from the habitat block. OsMiTech rules meant that she would be paid to the same level as Jack, and if he could afford to live in a nice house away from all this deprivation, then she would be able to. The fact that she hadn’t said a lot about her character. She’d lived here for the best part of fifty years and would not move out just because of a pay rise.
The wind blew the salty air from over the sea wall. People milled along the pavements and the retail outlets that lined the perimeter of the parking area. Lost people.
“You OK?” Anna called, “you’re looking pale.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve been here. We were planning on visiting the promenade next week.”
“Oh, right,” she replied as she locked the car. “Never been a massive fan of the seaside myself.”
The Remnant Keeper (Tombs Rising Book 1) Page 11
