“I’m not in pain.”
“I appreciate that you don’t want to be impaired on the job but I’ve put enough people back together in field hospitals from Marshel to Kora to know suppression when I see it. If you clench any more, you’ll break a tooth. Don’t be such a fragging man about it—take the darkness-blighted pills they’re going to give you. If you want something else, let me know. I won’t put it on your records and I’m not going to turf you to Pritchet for walking off the straight-and-narrow—not that either of us is familiar with that road. If you decide to take something . . . off-schedule, don’t choose Wire. Blackness and burn, but that’ll frag you up worse than jumps. Don’t submit yourself to any extreme pressure changes, electric shocks, unusual physical loads, or breathe anything that isn’t normal air for a while. Keep me apprised of everything. Ideally, the system reports back, but if it breaks down, I won’t know what the problem is until you’re on a table—and you had better hope it’s in the OR and not the morgue. Don’t fuck with this—do as I tell you and keep me in the loop.”
Dillal stretched one side of his mouth upward in something not really a smile. “I promise to be a good little patient, Doctor.”
“Liar. If you were the type to do as you’re told, you’d never have ended up here. Just don’t be stupid about it.” She flapped a hand at him in dismissal. “Get the hell out of my lab and take proper care of my work. Or I’ll perform the deintegration while you’re still alive.”
He got up from the edge of the exam table, looking a little pale even under his patchwork spray skin.
“You should get some sleep, too,” the doctor added. “That goes with the ‘taking care of my work’ part of that directive.”
“I have sixteen dead human beings to examine.”
“Take my word for it, Inspector, the dead don’t mind if you cop a nap first.”
“But I will.”
“Get one of the med/legal people to do the postmortems for you.”
“They aren’t always discreet. As you know . . .”
“Oh, the famous evidentiary procedure scandal. Yeah, I see your problem. Good luck with it.” She turned away.
He started out the door with a scowl.
“I’ll come by later and oversee those autopsies, if you like,” the doctor added, not looking back at him.
Dillal turned around, grinding his teeth a moment before he said, “I would be very grateful if you did.”
“Fine. Now get out of here before I decide I need to recalibrate your sense of humility.”
He almost smiled. “Good night, Doctor.”
“Good night, Inspector.”
He ate and slept at home—but only for a few hours before bathing, and dressing in fresh clothes that fit no better than what he’d taken off.
The SO on duty at the GISA headquarters’ front desk called out as he passed. “Hey, you! You need to check in.”
Dillal wheeled around and marched back. He stared into the SO’s face and watched the man blanch and shiver. With exaggerated precision, he turned back his cuff and put his hand down on the desktop, palm up so the ID crystals in his wrist gleamed under the lights.
“Chief Investigating Forensic Ofiçe, Inspector J. P. Dillal.”
The SO blinked and stammered. “Umm . . . I-I didn’t recognize you.” Dillal quirked his right eyebrow. “Sir.”
“I assume you will in future. I’m hard to forget.”
“Sir,” the ofiçe said, scribbling something on a piece of flimsy and handing it over. “Your office isn’t quite finished . . .”
Dillal took the small sheet, barely glancing at it, and said, “I’ll be in the morgue for a few hours. Let us hope my office is at least usable by then, and no longer a storage closet.”
The SO continued to stare, but he nodded and sketched a distracted salute. “Sir. Yes, sir.”
“Thank you.” Dillal turned and continued down the hallways to the Forensic Technology wing.
The lab and morgue were still busy when he entered. A few of the med/legal techs bustled around, finishing up day schedule chores, setting up overnight analysis jobs, and clearing up their paperwork. Two of the techs looked up as he entered, and stopped what they were doing. Their stillness spread like crystal growth across a petri dish until all human activity had become nothing but silent gaping in his direction.
Dillal held his position just inside the doorway. “Good evening,” he said, quietly. “Please forgive my disrupting you. Where are the Paz da Sorte victims?”
For a moment no one stirred, then one of the techs stepped forward, winding through the rest from the back of the room. He was drug-addict thin, with chestnut skin, bleached-white hair, and a resigned demeanor. His motion seemed to release each person he passed from their stupor, so they turned back to their work with a shiver or a blush, and quickly averted eyes. The tech stopped in front of Dillal, looking nervous, his eyes a little too wide and his fists thrust into his lab coat pockets deep enough to pull the material taut over his knobby knuckles. “They’ve been prepped for autopsy. I can show you.”
“Your name?” Dillal asked.
“Jem Starna.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“I do, sir. We all do. We’ve been . . . expecting a CIFO for almost a year.” He made it a word: “Sifo.”
“Where is the department chief?” Dillal asked.
“Oh. I thought you’d know. Dr. Harcourt . . . umm . . . retired a while ago. I’ve been—that is, Dr. Woskyat coordinates the place most of the time and I kind of pick up the slack when she’s not in. But . . . uh . . . I guess, it’s pretty much on you, until there’s an official change.”
Dillal nodded. “Show me the bodies, please, Starna.”
Starna sucked in a breath as if Dillal had poked him with a sharpened probe. “Oh. Yes, sir. Back here.” He pivoted around on one heel, wobbling a bit, and started toward the rear of the lab. He peeked over his shoulder as if making sure Dillal was really there.
He was.
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you? I mean . . . before. When you were . . . umm . . . what your rank was . . .”
“IAD—Investigation: Assistant Detive.”
“Oh. Quite a jump from IAD to Inspector.”
“So I’m told.”
Dillal’s quiet tone hadn’t changed, but Starna clammed up as if he’d been chastised, and led the rest of the way to autopsy prep without another word, his bony shoulders slightly hunched.
The prep room was empty of the living, but fully occupied by the dead. In addition to the victims of the Paz da Sorte murders, there were a few more prosaic med/legal deaths: suicides and accidents that needed looking into, and so long as someone was paying, GISA would look.
Starna led Dillal to a section of the room that had been separated from the rest by a set of long work tables. Sixteen covered gurneys were lined up inside the cordon in two columns of eight, head-to-head with a walkway between, like ancient tombstones. “We have them prepped and laid out, but no one was sure if you would do the post yourself or not, so . . . they haven’t been touched otherwise. Their effects are in the cabinets on the far wall.” He took a sheet of flimsy off the nearest work table. “Let me give you the temporary passcode.”
The inspector nodded at the proffered information, and then gazed at Starna with the slightest tightening of his eyelid. The mechanism in his left eye clicked twice. “Thank you. I’d like to look them over before proceeding any further, but I can do so on my own. No need for anyone to stay and assist me.”
Starna bit his lip and stared down at the inspector’s hands. He nodded, then turned and walked a little stiffly out to the main lab. This time he didn’t look back.
Dillal removed his jacket and folded it over the end of one of the empty tables. Then he returned his attention to the corpses, moving slowly toward them. He put his hands out to each side, just far enough to brush his fingers over the ends of their resting places. His fingernails raised a low hiss from the steel su
rfaces. As he passed each pair of bodies, the information monitors over them lit.
By the time he’d walked to the end of the row, the rest of the morgue was empty and the only light came from the dust-choked windows and the glowing displays that shone down from above. He sat at one of the computer terminals and composed a message, then turned on voice recognition before he returned to the dead.
Dillal lifted each covering and studied the bodies, read and annotated every file: who they were, where they’d lived, where and exactly how they’d fallen on the blood-soaked floors of the jasso. He stood for a long while looking down at the only victim who’d fallen face-up. He closed his eyes tight for a moment before covering the boy, and going to the middle of the rows of bodies.
He stood there, turning back and forth, staring at the monitors above Robesh and Leran—the couple from the back of the gaming room. He went to them in turn, examined their hands closely, dictated further notes of wounds, bruises, and broken fingernails, responded to messages, took additional samples, again and again, until it seemed he could think of nothing more to do.
Then he put the dead to rights, washed up, and attended to Andreus’s medication instructions.
One final look, then he grabbed his jacket and left the room in darkness.
Just a few steps down the corridor he found a door with his name beside it. The plaque was crooked and shabbily made, but he touched it and the lopsided wreck of a smile crept onto half of his face.
He waved his wrist over the scanner; the door gave a reluctant click and opened by a grudging half-centimeter. The lights came up automatically as he walked into the room—stark, but shadowed at the corners—and he slapped the wall unit to turn them off again, letting the light of street lamps and OLED signs from the road outside provide moody illumination through a wide window high in the wall. He closed the door and went to the long desk that ran under the window, haphazardly stacked with equipment. He tapped the computer terminal awake, and entered commands modifying the presets for the lights, the security system, and his access to the network. Then he stood in the flicker of descending darkness, assembling diagrams of the crime scene as one monitor after another lit with fast-multiplying information, images, files, messages . . .
CHAPTER SEVEN
Day 1: Evening
Matheson didn’t remember passing out. After tripping at Public Health, his brain had stopped logging anything. When he got home he still couldn’t fill in the hours he’d lost. He remembered leaving the skimmer . . .
And now he couldn’t find his blasted mobile. “Damn it!” he muttered, scrambling through his discarded clothes and equipment. The flat was only one room, with the shower and toilet behind the free-standing “wet wall,” so there wasn’t much to search. The Peerless was one of the few—no, the only—truly nice thing he’d still owned, and he didn’t own much, now. It’s probably wiped clean and making its way to a shop on the shadier side of Angra Dastrelas to go home in some tourist’s pocket. Panic stabbed him. The Peerless was supposed to be nearly unhackable, but he’d still be in as bad a state as some of the people he’d rousted out of doorways if GISA files were leaked from his device, company promise or no. “Merry hell.”
Still tired and muzzy-headed, he leaned with slumped shoulders into the ledge of his home net console and logged in, intending to beg Equipment for a replacement he could afford, and report his own as lost. On the top of his queue was a priority-flagged message from Dillal—or rather from “CIFO, Insp J. P. Dillal”—with the subject “PIRep & PMDD.” I could pretend I haven’t seen it . . . but he probably knows I have. He grumbled and jabbed the message.
“I have your mobile. Please come to my office to retrieve it. We will discuss the Preliminary Investigation Report when you arrive.”
Matheson typed, “Just returned from health center. When should I report?”
A reply appeared in seconds. “Now.”
He stared at the display, trying to think how to respond. He didn’t exactly live next door to GISA HQ and “now” seemed a bit . . . peremptory.
Another message appeared in a few minutes. “Correction: within the hour. Attend to personal business first.”
Matheson wasn’t sure exactly what Dillal meant by “personal business,” but he decided it included a shower, a clean uniform, and food. He put on his full kit, including baton, shock box, and the jacket he rarely wore on rounds, and headed out.
Both the humidity and the temperature had dropped for once, now that the sun was beyond the western horizon. The conditions were still less comfortable than he—raised in environmentally controlled rooms—liked, but he’d have to get used to it.
He reached the mutant growth of the GISA building—it always looks like some kind of cancer overrunning an ancient church—slightly itchy, and unsatisfactorily fed on noodles purchased from a street vendor and slurped down while standing at the stall. Dillal’s message hadn’t given a room number and the post of CIFO hadn’t, practically speaking, existed before he’d pulled the inspector out of the hospital, so he went in past the main desk.
The SO on Information duty scowled at his question, and wrote on a slip of flimsy. “Everyone’s looking for that room today.”
Matheson raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
“Yeah. Saw the man himself a few hours ago.” The ofiçe shook his head with a look of revulsion. “Not what I was expecting.”
What does that mean? Matheson cocked his head with a frown.
The desk man made a face and gestured to his own eye. “You know . . .” Then he looked again at Matheson’s ID, his expression going sour. “Oh. Yeah, of course you know.” He snorted. “And by the way, you’re off patch duty, or you’d have been late for briefing. Lucky you.”
“Off? Where and when am I supposed to report? What am I supposed to do?”
The man only pushed the slip of flimsy across the desk with one finger as if Matheson carried a contagious disease.
“Oh,” Matheson said. He wasn’t sure what the desk man’s problem with him was, but he surely had one, judging by the slight sneer he now wore. “Yeah,” he added absently, taking the note. He turned away without saying more. The exchange irritated him, and he wondered if it was just his conscience pricking him for being put off, himself, by Dillal’s appearance. It’s disturbing if I think about it. Am I trying not to think about it . . . ? Like pretending that the Dreihleat isn’t a ghetto or that out-system tourists couldn’t get away with murder around here?
The last thought was still buzzing in his head when he reached the inspector’s office. He stopped outside the door and stared at the small name plate on the wall beside it, right below the security panel. It wasn’t engraved, or even object printed, only flat-printed like a temporary tag for a conference room: “Inspector J. P. Dillal, Chief Investigating Forensic Ofiçe.”
Matheson looked around. The corridor was deserted at this time of day, but it certainly wasn’t officer country. It was ForTech, just off the hallway that connected Security Office and Investigation Office. It made sense to put the man who linked investigation with forensics in the Forensic Technology wing, yet it struck him as a slight. The air near the labs and morgue seemed tainted and everyone walked a little faster to get past it. Even for a rush job, the sign beside the inspector’s door was halfhearted.
Matheson sighed and touched the security panel, offering his ID. For a moment, the scanner did nothing—is it broken?—but then it flashed a green light and the door lock clicked. “Come in,” said Dillal’s voice from the tiny speaker.
Matheson pushed the door open and walked through.
Sign- and street light poured through the window into the otherwise unlit room, leaving dancing colors on the walls—reminders that Angra Dastrelas operated all day and night, spinning dreams and crushing lives. Matheson shook himself, trying to shrug off sudden bitterness. Dillal watched him from in front of the work table that ran the width of the wall under the window. The shifting illumination sparked the stubble
of his hair and left colored trails along the edges of the incisions and the uncanny shape of machinery melded to his skull. The prosthetic eye gleamed red in the shadow of his face. Matheson shuddered.
Dillal held Matheson’s mobile up against the light. The colored light limned the edges and made the rest a black blank. “It fell from your pocket loops at Public Health.”
Matheson drew closer through the gloomy office and took the MDD, relieved to have it back. “Thanks for picking it up.”
“How do you feel?” the inspector asked.
“Fine, sir,” Matheson replied, trying to push aside the new disquiet that gnawed at him in Dillal’s presence. He’d been too tired to remember exactly how strange the inspector was, but this was something different . . .
“I doubt that, but it’s good of you to lie.” The inspector’s voice held a slight edge.
“I was told I’m off patch duty. Is that true?”
“Yes. I requested it. You were there when I did so.”
“Was I? I seem to be having trouble . . . What exactly am I doing now, if I’m not a Security Ofiçe pounding a patch with the rest?”
“You work for me. Until this is over, at least. But you’re wasting time. Don’t you have better questions to ask?”
Matheson had one, though it probably wasn’t much better. “Sir, could a tourist have murdered those people at the Paz da Sorte?”
“A system-hopper?” Dillal clarified.
“Yes.”
Dillal looked at him without speaking for a moment. “Why would you consider the possibility?” His voice was still cool, but less sharp, and it relieved a little of the room’s candy-colored surreality.
Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel Page 6
