by Paula Guran
He pivoted, and moved three steps away from her. He was clearly contacting someone on his links, but using private encoded links.
A staff member approached, a woman DeRicci hadn’t seen before. The woman, dressed in a black suit, extended a hand covered with gold rings.
“If you’ll come this way, Detective DeRicci . . . ”
DeRicci shook her head. “Mr. Deshin promised me a chip. I’m staying here until I get it.”
The woman opened her other hand. In it was a chip case the size of a thumbnail. The case was clear, and inside, DeRicci saw another case—blue, with a filament thinner than an eyelash.
“Here is your chip, Detective,” the woman said. “I’ve been instructed to take you—”
“I don’t care,” DeRicci said. “I’ll take the chip, and I’ll wait right here. You have my word that I won’t open either case, and I won’t watch anything until I get the okay.”
The woman’s eyes glazed slightly. Clearly, she was seeing if that was all right.
Then she focused on DeRicci, and bowed her head slightly.
“As you wish, Detective.”
She handed DeRicci the case. It was heavier than it looked. It probably had a lot of protections built in, so that she couldn’t activate anything through the case. Not that she had the technical ability to do any of that, even if she wanted to.
She sighed. She had a fluttery feeling that she had just been outmaneuvered.
Then she made herself watch Deshin. He seemed truly distressed at the news of Sonja Mycenae’s death. If DeRicci had to put money on it, she would say that he hadn’t known she was dead and he hadn’t ordered the death. But he was also well known for his business acumen, his criminal savvy, and his ability to beat a clear case against him. A man didn’t get a reputation like that by being easy to read.
She closed her fist around the chip case, clasped her hands behind her back, and waited, watching Luc Deshin the entire time.
Deshin hadn’t gone far. He wanted to keep an eye on the detective. He’d learned in the past that police officers had a tendency to wander, and observe things they shouldn’t. He had staff in various parts of the lobby to prevent the detective from doing just that.
Through private, encoded links, he had contacted his favorite attorney, Martin Oberholtz. For eight years, Oberholtz had managed the most delicate cases for Deshin—always knowing how far the law could bend before it broke.
Before I tell you what to do, Oberholtz was saying on their link, I want to see the footage.
It’ll take time, Deshin sent.
Ach, Oberholtz sent. I’ll just bill you for it. Send it to me.
I already have, Deshin sent.
I’ll be in contact shortly, Oberholtz sent, and signed off.
Deshin walked to the other side of the lobby. He didn’t want to vanish because he didn’t want the detective to think he was doing something nefarious.
But he was unsettled. That meeting with Sonja had not gone as he expected.
Over the years, Deshin had probably fired two hundred people personally, and his staff had fired even more. And that didn’t count the business relationships he had terminated. Doing unpleasant things didn’t bother him. They usually followed a pattern. But the meeting that morning hadn’t followed a pattern that he recognized.
He had spoken quite calmly to Sonja, telling her that he and Gerda had decided to raise Paavo without help. He hadn’t criticized Sonja at all. In fact, he had promised her a reference if she wanted it, and he had complimented her on the record, saying that her presence had given him and Gerda the confidence to handle Paavo alone.
He hadn’t said that the confidence had come from the fact that Sonja had years of training and she missed the essential ingredient—affection. He had kept everything as neutral and positive as possible, given that he was effectively firing her without firing her.
Midway through his little speech, her eyes widened. He had thought she was going to burst into tears. Instead, she put a shaking hand to her mouth, looking like she had just received news that everything she loved in the world was going to be taken away from her.
He had a moment of confusion—had she actually cared that much about Paavo?—and then he decided it didn’t matter; he and Gerda really did want to raise the boy on their own, without any outside help.
“Mr. Deshin,” Sonja had said when he finished. “Please, I beg you, do not fire me.”
“I’m not firing you, Sonja,” he had said. “I just don’t have a job for you any longer.”
“Please,” she said. “I will work here. I will do anything, the lowest of the low. I will do jobs that are disgusting or frightening, anything, Mr. Deshin. Please. Just don’t make me leave.”
He had never had an employee beg so strenuously to keep her job. It unnerved him. “I don’t have any work for you.”
“Please, Mr. Deshin.” She reached for him and he leaned back. “Please. Don’t make me leave.”
That was when he sent a message along his links to security. This woman was crazy, and no one on his staff had picked up on it. He felt both relieved and appalled. Relieved that she was going nowhere near Paavo again, and appalled that he had left his beloved little son in her care.
The door opened, and then Sonja screamed “No!” at the top of her lungs. She grabbed at Deshin, and one of his security people pulled her away.
She kicked and fought and screamed and cried all the way through the door. It closed behind her, leaving him alone, but he could still hear her yelling all the way to the elevator.
The incident had unsettled him.
It still unsettled him.
And now, just a few hours later, Sonja was dead.
That couldn’t be a coincidence.
It couldn’t be a coincidence at all.
It took nearly fifteen minutes before Luc Deshin returned. DeRicci had watched him pace on the other side of the lobby, his expression grim.
It was still grim when he reached her.
He nodded at the chip in her hand. “My staff tells me that you have a lot of information on that chip. In addition to the meeting in my office, you’ll see Sonja’s arrival and her departure. You’ll also see that she left through that front door. After she disappeared off our external security cameras, no one on my staff saw her again.”
He was being very precise. DeRicci figured his lawyer had told him to do that.
“Thank you,” she said, closing her fingers around the case. “I appreciate the cooperation.”
“You’re welcome,” Deshin said, then walked away.
She watched him go. Something about his mood had darkened since she originally spoke to him. Because of the lawyer? Or something else?
It didn’t matter. She had the information she needed, at least for the moment.
She would deal with Deshin later if she needed to.
Deshin took the stairs back to his office. He needed to think, and he didn’t want to run into any of his staff on the elevator. Besides, exercise kept his head clear.
He had thought Sonja crazy after her reaction in his office. But what if she knew her life was in danger if she left his employ? Then her behavior made sense. He wasn’t going to say that to the detective, nor had he mentioned it to his lawyer. Deshin was going to investigate this himself.
As he reached the top floor, he sent a message to his head of security, Otto Koos: My office. Now.
Deshin went through the doors and stopped, as he always did, looking at the view. He had a three hundred sixty -degree view of the City of Armstrong. Right now, the dome was set at Dome Daylight, mimicking midday sunlight on Earth. He loved the look of Dome Daylight because it put buildings all over the city in such clear light that it made them look like a beautiful painting or a holographic wall image.
He crossed to his desk, and called up the file on Sonja Mycenae, looking for anything untoward, anything his staff might have missed.
He saw nothing.
She had worked for a fa
mily on Earth who had filed monthly reports with the nanny service that had vetted her. The reports were excellent. Sonja had then left the family to come to the Moon, because, apparently, she had been homesick.
He couldn’t find anything in a cursory search of that file which showed any contradictory information.
The door to his office opened, and Koos entered. He was a short man with broad shoulders and a way of walking that made him look like he was itching for a fight.
Deshin had known him since they were boys, and trusted Koos with his life. Koos had saved that life more than once.
“Sonja was murdered after she left us this morning,” Deshin said.
Koos glanced at the door. “So that was why Armstrong PD was here.”
“Yeah,” Deshin said, “and it clarifies her reaction. She knew something bad would happen to her.”
“She was a plant,” Koos said.
“Or something,” Deshin said. “We need to know why. Did anyone follow her after she left?”
“You didn’t order us to,” Koos said, “and I saw no reason to keep track of her. She was crying pretty hard when she walked out, but she never looked back and as far as I could tell, no one was after her.”
“The police are going to trace her movements,” Deshin said. “We need to as well. But what I want to know is this: What did we miss about this woman? I’ve already checked her file. I see nothing unusual.”
“I’ll go over it again,” Koos said.
“Don’t go over it,” Deshin said, feeling a little annoyed. After all, he had just done that, and he didn’t need to be double-checked. “Vet her again, as if we were just about to hire her. See what you come up with.”
“Yes, sir,” Koos said. Normally, he would have left after that, but he didn’t. Instead, he held his position.
Deshin suppressed a sigh. Something else was coming his way. “What?”
“When you dismissed her and she reacted badly,” Koos said, “I increased security around your wife and child. I’m going to increase it again, and I’m going to make sure you’ve got extra protection as well.”
Deshin opened his mouth, but Koos put up one finger, stopping him.
“Don’t argue with me,” Koos said. “Something’s going on here, and I don’t like it.”
Deshin smiled. “I wasn’t going to argue with you, Otto. I was going to thank you. I hadn’t thought to increase security around my family, and it makes sense.”
Koos nodded, as if Deshin’s praise embarrassed him. Then he left the office.
Deshin watched him go. As soon as he was gone, Deshin contacted Gerda on their private links.
Koos might have increased security, but Deshin wanted to make sure everything was all right.
He used to say that families were a weakness, and he never wanted one. Then he met Gerda, and they brought Paavo into their lives.
He realized that families were a weakness, but they were strength as well.
And he was going to make sure his was safe, no matter what it took.
It had taken more work than Broduer expected to get the body back to the coroner’s office. Just to get the stupid crate out of the warehouse, he’d had to sign documentation swearing he wouldn’t use it to make money at the expense of Ansel Management.
“Company policy,” Najib Ansel had said with an insincere smile.
If Broduer hadn’t known better, he would have thought that Ansel was just trying to make things difficult for him.
But things had become difficult for Broduer when DeRicci’s partner, Rayvon Lake, arrived. Lake had been as angry as Broduer had ever seen him, claiming that DeRicci—who was apparently a junior officer to Lake—had been giving him orders.
Lake had shouted at everyone, except Broduer. Broduer had fended a shouting match off by holding up his hands and saying, “I’m not sure what killed this girl, but I don’t like it. It might contaminate everything. We have to get her out of here, now.”
Lake, who was a notorious germophobe (which Broduer found strange in a detective), had gulped and stepped back. Broduer had gotten the crate to the warehouse door before Ansel had come after him with all the documentation crap.
Maybe Ansel had done it just so that he wouldn’t have to talk with Lake. Broduer would have done anything to avoid Lake—and apparently just had.
Broduer smiled to himself, relieved to be back at the coroner’s office. The office was a misnomer—the coroners had their own building, divided into sections to deal with the various kinds of death that happened in Armstrong.
Broduer had tested out of the alien section after two years of trying. He hated working in an environmental suit, like he so often had to. Weirdly (he always thought) humans started in the alien section and had to get a promotion to work on human cadavers. Probably because no one really wanted to see the interior of a Sequev more than once. No human did, anyway.
There were more than a dozen alien coroners, most of whom worked with human supervisors since many alien cultures did not investigate cause of death. Armstrong was a human-run society on a human-run Moon, so human laws applied here, and human laws always needed a cause of death.
Broduer had placed Sonja Mycenae on the autopsy table, carefully positioning her before beginning work, and he’d been startled at how well proportioned she was. Most people had obvious flaws, at least when a coroner was looking at them. One arm a little too long, a roll of fat under the chin, a misshapen ankle.
He hadn’t removed her clothing yet, but as far as he could tell from the work he’d done with her already, nothing was unusual.
Which made her unusual all by herself.
He also couldn’t see any obvious cause of death. He had noted, however, that full rigor mortis had already set in. Which was odd, since the decomposition, according to the exam his nanobots had already started, seemed to have progressed at a rate that put her death at least five hours earlier. By now, under the conditions she’d been stored in, she should have still been pliable—at least her limbs. Rigor began in the eyes, jaw, and neck then spread to the face and through the chest before getting to the limbs. The fingers and toes were always the last to stiffen up.
That made him suspicious, particularly since liver mortis also seemed off.
He would have thought, given how long she had been curled inside that crate, that the blood would have pooled in the side of her body resting on top of the compost heap. But no blood had pooled at all.
He had bots move the autopsy table into one of the more advanced autopsy theaters. He wanted every single device he could find to do the work.
He suspected she’d been killed with some kind of hardening poison. They had become truly popular with assassins in the last two decades, and had just recently been banned from the Moon. Hardening poisons killed quickly by absorbing all the liquid in the body and/or by baking it into place. It was a quick death, but a painful one, and usually the victim’s muscles frozen in place, so she couldn’t even express that pain as it occurred.
He put on a high-grade environmental suit in an excess of caution. Some of the hardening poisons leaked out of the pores and then infected anyone who touched them.
What he had to determine was if Sonja Mycenae had died of one of those, and if her body had been placed in a waste crate not just to hide the corpse, but to infect the food supply in Armstrong. Because the Growing Pits inspections looked at the growing materials—the soil, the water, the light, the atmosphere, and the seeds. The inspectors would also look at the fertilizer, but if it came from a certified organization like Ansel Management, then there would only be a cursory search of materials.
Hardening poisons could thread their way into the DNA of a plant—just a little bit, so that, say, an apple wouldn’t be quite as juicy. A little hardening poison wouldn’t really hurt the fruit of a tree (although that tree might eventually die of what a botanist would consider a wasting disease), but a trace of hardening poison in the human system would have an impact over time. And if the human
continued to eat things with hardening poisons in them, the poisons would build up, until the body couldn’t take it any more.
A person poisoned in that way wouldn’t die like Sonja Mycenae had; instead, the poison would overwhelm the standard nanohealers that everyone had installed, that person would get sick, and organs would slowly fail. Armstrong would have a plague but not necessarily know what caused it.
He double-checked his gloves, then let out a breath. Yes, he knew he was being paranoid. But he thought about these things a lot—the kinds of death that could happen with just a bit of carelessness, like sickness in a dome, poison through the food supply, the wrong mix in the air supply.
He had moved from working with living humans to working with the dead primarily because his imagination was so vivid. Usually working with the dead calmed him. The regular march of unremarkable deaths reminded him that most people would die of natural causes after a hundred and fifty or more years, maybe longer if they took good care of themselves.
Working with the dead usually gave him hope.
But Sonja Mycenae was making him nervous.
And he didn’t like that at all.
Deshin had just finished talking with Gerda when Koos sent him an encoded message:
Need to talk as soon as you can.
Now’s fine, Deshin sent.
He moved away from the windows, where he’d been standing as he made sure Gerda was okay. She actually sounded happy, which she hadn’t since Sonja moved in.
She said she no longer felt like her every move was being judged.
Paavo seemed happier too. He wasn’t crying as much, and he didn’t cling as hard to Gerda. Instead, he played with a mobile from his bouncy chair and watched her cook, cooing most of the time.
Just that one report made Deshin feel like he had made the right choice with Sonja.
Not that he had had a doubt—at least about her—after her reaction that morning. But apparently a tiny doubt had lingered about whether or not he and Gerda needed the help of a nanny. Gerda’s report on Paavo’s calmness eased that. Deshin knew they would have hard times ahead—he wasn’t deluding himself—but he also knew that they had made the right choice to go nanny-free.
