Vigilantes

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Goudkins smiled, just a little. “And you want me to do the same thing.”

  “What?” DeRicci asked. Sometimes, when she was tired, it felt like half her brain had gone on vacation.

  “You want me to use Alliance resources without the Alliance finding out,” Goudkins said.

  DeRicci grinned. She hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I guess I do.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  ETHAN BRODEUR’S CORNER of the massive City of Armstrong Coroner’s Office was a crabbed little cave that made Nyquist uncomfortable every time he entered it.

  The décor of the coroner’s office had never been high on anyone’s list, particularly the architects and interior designers who first built the place, but over the decades, the entire office had sunk into neglect. It remained clean and well-lit, but it looked like it belonged to another era.

  At least a decade ago, someone had put posters on the wall. The posters advertised concerts or plays, and theoretically, the images changed as the events changed. But the posters were peeling away from their cheap frames and several of the images were stuck on events that had happened more than a year ago.

  The posters made the entry into the office even less cheerful than it usually was.

  And the smell didn’t help. Even though the coroner’s office maintained the latest environmental systems, there was always a faint tinge of decay here.

  DeRicci said it was psychological: everyone knew what they were coming into a morgue and expected the smell of death. Once Flint had mentioned that he wondered if someone had added a bit of eau de decay into the air filtration system, just to meet the expectations.

  Nyquist doubted that, although he thought about it every single time he came down here. That was the other problem: the coroner’s office itself was below ground. Not that anyone needed windows here, but no one even tried to dress up the walls with a pretend view.

  It felt like a grubby spaceship without the possibility of going somewhere new.

  Brodeur had had his cave as long as Nyquist had known him. DeRicci once said that the women in the Armstrong Police Department found Brodeur attractive, but that had to be thousands of smarmy comments and one or two hair enhancements ago. Nyquist had never heard anyone say that they found Brodeur nice or likeable or dateable.

  Nyquist knew a lot of detectives who, if Brodeur’s name came up in the coroner’s office rotation, would do anything they could to bribe another coroner to take the case. No matter what Gumiela thought of him (was she one of the people attracted to him?), Brodeur was difficult to work with at best.

  Brodeur’s office was dark. A light shown from the work area deep inside. One change this coroner’s office had made shortly after Nyquist was promoted to detective (and he didn’t like to think about how long ago that was) was that each coroner had his own “theater” to do autopsies in. It turned out too many of the coroners claimed the others had left the controls of the theaters set wrong and something failed to record or the temperatures were off or something else had gone wrong.

  When each coroner had his own workspace, he also had control of his job quality. Which was probably what tripped Brodeur up.

  “Ethan?” Nyquist asked. “You wanted to talk to me?”

  He hadn’t tried to link with Brodeur. The less Brodeur seemed to be involved with the investigations, the better, at least as far as Nyquist was concerned.

  Something crashed to Nyquist’s right. He looked over, saw Brodeur standing near a shelf, a pile of tablets scattered on the floor. Nyquist crouched to help Brodeur pick them up.

  “Just leave them,” Brodeur said. “Each one is a case, and I’m supposed to be the only person reviewing them.”

  Nyquist wasn’t sure he believed that, but he let it go. He had too much to worry about to think about what kinds of things Brodeur might be doing wrong in his lair.

  “I caught the Zhu case,” Nyquist said. “Gumiela wants a thorough investigation, and she said I have to talk with you about it.”

  Brodeur looked up at Nyquist. They weren’t that different in height, but enough to make Brodeur seem small. Or maybe Nyquist just thought of him as small.

  Brodeur sighed and wiped his hands on his lab coat. Nyquist couldn’t withhold the wince when he saw that.

  Brodeur didn’t seem to notice.

  “This thing’s a mess,” Brodeur said. “I don’t envy you walking into it. I’ll help however I can.”

  Nyquist felt a bit taken aback. He’d never heard Brodeur say anything like that before.

  “Come with me.” Brodeur led him into the autopsy theater. Nyquist had watched before, but usually from the outside, so that his presence didn’t contaminate the corpse.

  “You’re done with the autopsy?” Nyquist said.

  “Oh, yeah. It’s recorded and filed with the various agencies,” Brodeur said, “but I left the body out so that the investigating detective could look at what’s going on.”

  Nyquist frowned. This wasn’t procedure at all.

  The theater was small. It had four gurneys that could rise from the floor and several more that could slip out of the walls. Human corpses were usually stored elsewhere in the building, until they were cremated or dealt with according to the deceased’s wishes or religion.

  Non-human corpses went to an entirely different wing. When Nyquist met him, Brodeur had been handling non-human deaths. But he’d moved back to human deaths when he received his first—and as far as Nyquist knew, only—promotion.

  At the moment, only one body held the room. The body rested on a single table in the center. Lights shone on the corpse from all directions. It was naked and male, but barely recognizable as human.

  The bruising made Nyquist’s body ache in sympathy. The chest appeared caved in, the face was both swollen and jagged, and one leg seemed shorter than the other.

  Even though the arms were at the body’s side, they didn’t rest properly. One curved upward slightly from the elbow, as if the body were reaching toward the ceiling.

  “What the hell…?” Nyquist asked.

  Brodeur didn’t respond.

  Nyquist took a step closer. The stomach and sides were purple from bruising, the back was black with pooled blood.

  He couldn’t remember what color Zhu’s hair had been, but it didn’t matter now. Now, matted blood had plastered it against the skull, looking like it had been slapped on.

  “Talk to me,” Nyquist said.

  “My equipment isn’t certain what killed him,” Brodeur said. “One program believes it was blunt force trauma to the chest, another thinks it was a heart attack induced by severe pain, and a third program thinks he bled out.”

  Nyquist looked at Brodeur, feeling a bit stunned. Brodeur was angry.

  “What I know is this, he was beaten badly and when the assailants left, they left him for dead. There’s a lot of repairable damage here—if someone had gotten to him with the right equipment within the first twenty minutes.”

  “Meaning what?” Nyquist said.

  “Some idiot lawyer tried to save him with one of those medical programs put out by funeral homes.”

  Nyquist closed his eyes. He remembered when those things had been banned in Armstrong, and he remembered why they had been banned.

  “But that didn’t kill him. At least the kid was trying. Zhu had one of those internal programs that repaired damage and did triage so that he could survive longer, at least until he got medical help. But that program was overcome within the first few minutes of the attack.”

  Nyquist was frowning. He had never heard Brodeur go on like this.

  “What I’m telling you is this,” Brodeur said. “This attack was so savage that it pretty much took care of every single emergency rescue nano program that we’ve all purchased.”

  Nyquist’s frown grew deeper. “But he could have survived if he had gotten immediate help.”

  “Yes. The programs that Zhu had would have stabilized him enough to enabl
e emergency workers to take care of the worst of it before he ever reached a hospital. The problem is that he didn’t receive that kind of care.”

  “Why not?” Nyquist said.

  “That’s what you’re going to figure out,” Brodeur said. “It took three separate calls to emergency services to get an ambulance to show up, and I personally think that the only reason the ambulance did show up was that one of the callers was an attorney creative enough to go around the standard systems.”

  “An S3 attorney?”

  “Yes, a new one,” Brodeur said. “She’s not even a native of the Moon.”

  He waved a hand, as if dismissing that.

  “This whole thing is screwed up and would be screwed up even if it weren’t for this.”

  He pinched his fingers together and a gigantic hologram appeared in front of Nyquist, blocking his view of the body.

  The hologram showed a street in one of the developing sections of Armstrong. The vid had a view of part of the building and the sidewalk. Zhu showed up, and then three attackers, their faces shielded, kicked his feet out from under him.

  They beat him, using hands, feet, and clubs. One man jumped on Zhu’s back, then on his head, then on his buttocks, clearly trying to break his spine. While the man was jumping, the woman kicked every single visible area of Zhu’s body, and the other man stomped on Zhu’s legs.

  No one tried to stop the attack. No one even seemed to notice the attack.

  The three beat him, then beat him again, and finally, when he was unresponsive, they slapped their hands together as if they had achieved a victory, and left the area as if nothing had happened.

  Blood seeped out of Zhu and ran down the sidewalk. It seemed like forever later, but according to the time stamp it was only a few minutes, when a young man burst out the front door, carrying some kind of kit. Another young man and a woman followed.

  Nyquist didn’t recognize them.

  Brodeur flicked his fingers and the image disappeared. “I’m going to give you this. I’m told by the three who tried to rescue Zhu that they recorded everything that happened from the moment they arrived on scene. You have the ambulance attendants who, by the way, did what they could, my arrival, and what I did on site. You also have all the attempted reports to the Armstrong Police Department.”

  “Attempted,” Nyquist said.

  “They were rebuffed by our systems. Apparently, someone had tampered with our system so that any calls from that area would be ignored, and anyone who mentioned Torkild Zhu or S3 would be rerouted elsewhere or flagged as a troublemaker who should be ignored.”

  Nyquist let out a small breath.

  “How soon before the attack had that order come in?” he asked.

  “That’s another thing you get to figure out.” Brodeur waved a hand over Zhu’s body. “We might not like what S3 is doing here, but I have to tell you, Detective, no one deserves to die like that.”

  “Painful?” Nyquist asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brodeur said. “Depends on his programs. At first, yes. He might have passed out. His pain receptors might have shut off. Or he might have felt every single blow. I have no idea. But I would guess that, yes, it was awful.”

  Nyquist stared at the body, nodding. He still had nightmares about that kind of pain. When he’d been attacked by the Bixian assassins, they had cut through his skin, sending terrible, mind-numbing agony through his nervous system. He’d managed to fight them off long enough to get rescued. The man he’d been with hadn’t been that lucky.

  Whenever anyone mentioned pain, Nyquist thought of those moments—as vivid now as they had been when the assassins attacked him.

  “Everything you saw in that footage was police issue,” Brodeur said.

  “I know,” Nyquist said softly.

  “Then you should also know that when it became clear to someone here at the department that a coroner would need to go onsite, I was not in the rotation.”

  Nyquist looked over at him. Brodeur’s cheeks were flushed and his eyes flashed.

  “There were three more coroners who were slated to get the next deaths ahead of me. I did not jump the line, Detective. Someone jumped me to handle this case.”

  Nyquist bit his lower lip. Because the department thought Brodeur incompetent.

  “I know my reputation,” Brodeur said. “I know you people think I’m a screw-up. I know I was brought in to cloud the issues here, so that no one could get charged with this death. So I recorded everything I did, and I asked a friend of mine off-Moon, a respected coroner who has published the definitive book on modern forensics, to supervise me via link. She will testify that I have done the best autopsy she’s seen under the circumstances.”

  Nyquist nodded. He was impressed. He hadn’t expected the self-awareness or the creativity from Brodeur.

  “We’re being manipulated, Detective,” Brodeur said. “This man died horribly. If you’re not offended by that, then I’ll contact Andrea Gumiela myself and get you taken off this case. You need to be outraged, not because Zhu was handling defendants we don’t believe in, but because this man was killed for doing his job, a job we need in a civilized society. We may not like what he was doing, but he didn’t have to be slaughtered for it, and his death swept under the rug as if he were no more important than a bit of dirt.”

  “I agree,” Nyquist said. “I’ll do the best job I can.”

  “Good,” Brodeur said. “I suggest you get an off-Moon shadow, like I did. This case needs to be handled perfectly, and we humans are imperfect creatures.”

  “Yeah,” Nyquist said softly.

  He had underestimated Brodeur. It seemed everyone had.

  He extended his hand.

  “I’ll do everything I can, Ethan,” Nyquist said. “I promise you that.”

  “Good,” Brodeur said, as he shook once before letting go. “Because I’ll hold you to it. I’ve seen enough senseless death lately. I don’t want to see it promulgated by my own colleagues.”

  “I feel the same way,” Nyquist said, looking at that battered body. “Believe me, I feel exactly the same way.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  FLINT WAS BEGINNING to think the Armstrong Comfort Center was misnamed. He certainly didn’t feel calm or comfortable whenever he arrived here.

  This time, he found himself in a waiting room done in pale lime green with darker wood than the blue waiting room had had. The art was some kind of Impressionistic wannabe thing, done with actual oil and brushes. He could see the imprint of the brush tip on the canvas in varying shades of green, and somehow none of it was coalescing into an image for him.

  He wondered if that was on purpose, like those sensory tests done to evaluate someone’s mood.

  His mood wasn’t great. He didn’t even sit in the dark green chairs scattered around the room. He paced, which was what he had done the last time he was here.

  Pacing and comfort—somehow those didn’t go together for him.

  Then the door opened, and Llewynn beckoned him. The man actually looked harried, his hair slightly mussed and his eyes darker than they had been before.

  He had none of that fake comfort about him today.

  Flint followed him through that mazelike corridor, finally ending up at Llewynn’s office. Its cream-and-brown coloring didn’t calm Flint, either. He glanced at the chair across from Llewynn’s captain’s chair and wondered what had gone wrong while his daughter was here to cause this kind of concern.

  “Thanks for coming on such short notice,” Llewynn said as he sat in the captain’s chair.

  Flint had no real choice but to sit in the other chair. He leaned back, letting the chair conform to his body shape, much as he hated chairs like this.

  “You made it sound urgent,” Flint said.

  Llewynn nodded. “Your daughter cut our session short.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Flint said. “I told her she could leave if she wanted to. I didn’t want her to feel trapped here.”

  He
didn’t add that he wanted to her to protect herself as best she could, and if she couldn’t really stop some of Llewynn’s probing questions, then she should simply take control of the interview.

  Sometimes controlling an interview meant terminating it.

  “Look, Mr. Flint, you brought your daughter here because of her deep emotional distress.” Llewynn entwined his fingers together, but this time, his thumbs kept moving. He seemed so upset that he couldn’t stop fidgeting.

  Flint sighed inwardly. He knew why he had brought Talia there, and he didn’t like Llewynn’s need to recap. But Flint was going to wait it out.

  “We both understand that she is not the girl she was six months ago,” Llewynn said, as if he had known her. As if he understood her.

  Flint almost told him to get to the point. But he was going to give the man one more sentence before he interrupted.

  “But after this morning, I’m convinced she’s a danger to others.”

  Flint leaned back in the chair, shocked to his core.

  “To others?” he repeated. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Llewynn said that she was a danger to herself. That was Flint’s greatest fear.

  But to others? How was that possible?

  Llewynn took a deep breath. “I’m not sure how to broach this with you, Mr. Flint, so I’m simply going to be blunt. Right now, your daughter is empathizing with the clones.”

  Flint blinked, unable to make the mental leap. Of course Talia empathized with clones. She was a clone.

  But Llewynn didn’t know that.

  “Which clones?” Flint asked.

  “All clones,” Llewynn said. “Charitably, I’d like to say she doesn’t understand how dangerous they are, but honestly, I think she does understand. She still views clones with sympathy and thinks they’re misunderstood.”

  Flint felt his cheeks heat. He wasn’t sure how to ask what had transpired in this room.

  “And why do you think that makes her dangerous?” he asked.

  “She doesn’t understand that clones are unthinking weapons,” Llewynn said.