by S J Hunter
“We’re late, McGregor,” she said, after granting Brian an apologetic glance. “It seems that someone with a key, maybe even Josephson’s key, came by and evaded security and removed all of the doctor’s research notes. Not a freak of a memopad left behind.
“The office manager told me that only the doctors have the keys and codes, and they all have a unique key and code for their own lab space. My Masterkey didn’t work. After I got the warrant I had to get an Enforcement locksmith to get in.
Client lists, appointments, and licensed protocols were all supposed to be made readily available to LLE upon request. The facility got their license under that understanding. Research notes were more problematic. If they were in a licensed facility then not even LLE had a right to confiscate them unless, as in the present case, there was reason to believe they could be connected to a crime. The connection here was slim. Technically, as an LLE detective, Livvy wouldn’t need a warrant in this situation, but it was a good idea, in case Josephson reappeared and started making an issue of it. Researchers doing proprietary work that might lead to a licensed enhancement protocol could get testy. To Josephson, getting testy would probably mean a drawn-out legal battle.
What was noteworthy here was that all of Josephson’s notes were missing.
Chris turned back to Brian. “True? No one else has the codes? How about cleaning staff? Security?”
“We don’t have security personnel, it all done with locks and codes, and all the cleaning is done during the day. We aren’t any more paranoid about security than anyone else, but that’s just the way it’s done. The doctors set their own hours, and if they need a tech, they arrange to have them come in. Like I said, we used to take turns putting up with Josephson’s tantrums until I took them all on me. The system is set up so that the doctors can change their codes daily, if they want.”
Chris stood up and turned to Livvy. “You’ve got the client list and appointments for the last two years?”
Livvy held up a D-card. “Five years. He was more of a researcher than a clinician so there aren’t that many.”
“Then let’s go,” he said, and turned to shake Brian’s hand. “Thanks. Like I said, you’ve been very helpful.”
Picking up on another cue, Livvy reached over and shook Brian’s hand as well, saying, “Yes, thanks.”
Before getting back into the car, Livvy said, “I promised not to mention it to any of her coworkers, but the receptionist who took the call from Josephson last Friday admitted that she made a mistake. She was supposed to have cancelled his appointments for this week as well, and had to admit it when his client threw her fit yesterday. The other receptionist knows about it, and said they’d gotten busy so it had slipped by. I think they’d admit it to the office manager, but they’re all a little afraid of him. Josephson. The mistake was fortuitous. Without it, we wouldn’t even know he’s missing.
“Do you think they’ll call if they hear from him?”
“Oh, I think so,” Chris said. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”
When they were both settled back in the car, Chris sat in silence for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision.
“It’s probably time for me to answer your questions from earlier today, but we need privacy and I might want to refer to some of my files if you have any additional questions. Do you mind coming to my place?”
“McGregor, I thought you’d never ask,” Livvy said, and had the pleasure of watching him do a double take before she added, “It’s after 5 and if we had any lunch it’s slipped my memory. Do you have anything on hand besides dog food?”
Chp. 8 Mission Goal (Wednesday Night)
“Sorry for the mess,” Chris said, lifting some notes from one of the chairs at the eating end of his table. When he finished that, he went to the scrubber and checked – not clean. There was one clean plate in the cupboard; use of that one was usually the signal to run the scrubber. He grabbed it and some flatwear to set before his guest and noticed that she was watching him with amusement. He went back to the kitchen area to wash and dry another plate and two glasses.
“Hey, don’t mind me,” Livvy said. “I’m still living in a hotel room, on room service.”
They had picked up a pizza and a case of beer.
“I don’t use a glass,” Livvy added.
Livvy opened the box and helped herself to a slice as Chris abandoned the glasses and headed back with his plate.
“Pepperoni. I always forget how good it tastes,” she said.
It was 7 pm and Chris’ Arlington efficiency was on the 11th floor, so the foot traffic was negligible and the street traffic undetectable. Louie, gnawing on a dental chewie over near the door, provided the only sound as Livvy and Chris ate for a while in near silence. After a few minutes Livvy couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Have you lived here long?” she asked between bites.
“Almost sixty years,” Chris said.
“It’s… “
“It’s a place to sleep and to work. A quick commute. And the rent is reasonable,” Chris said.
“I’m thinking of a place in Alexandria, near Old Town,” Livvy said.
“There’s a nice area south of King Street.”
“Thanks. Next week I’ll start there,” she said. “You play much?” She nodded towards the acoustic guitar in the corner.
“A little. Never for anyone else.”
“Somehow, I would have guessed that,” she finally said, putting down her pizza. “Look, McGregor, I suspect that, like me, no matter how long you live you will never again have time enough for small talk. I’ll also hazard that I’m as used to eating alone and working while I eat as you are. I’m not going to enjoy this pizza half as much as I should if we try to avoid it now.
“What didn’t you want to talk about in the office?”
Chris finished chewing his mouthful of pizza, swallowed, and took a swig of beer before replying. “I need to hear something first. Cards on the table. Why LLE? Homicide has more status and probably gets more challenging. Tactical can get more exciting.” He moved his longnecked bottle around in the small circle of condensation on the table, but he kept his eyes on her.
“I thought we covered this already. In the car. After Marcy Caster’s,” Livvy said, working at cutting a manageable bite with her fork.
“Humor me,” Chris said.
Livvy put the fork down and looked at him levelly. “You read about my family and you’ve picked up on my inconspicuous vanity…”
Chris stopped moving his beer around but his expression didn’t change.
“…and you’ve decided you can’t trust me?”
“No. That is, I do,” Chris said with a flicker of surprise, but he continued to regard her levelly. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here like this. That’s not what this is about.”
“Then what?”
“A lot of people look at the violations, unless you’re talking about something like the Right of Maturity Law, as victimless crimes.”
“Or the Pheromone cases you mentioned, or substandard hotlabs, or all kinds of things that can hurt people. Like I said, I thought we covered this the first day we met, after Marcy.”
“Maybe. Did you get bored?’’
Livvy looked down at her congealing pizza and sighed. “When I was young and my friends and I argued I used to give a long soliloquy about the philosophy behind the Laws. Longevity and enhancement technologies are… the ultimate divisive issues. You can’t imagine how often I have heard the arguments, usually from decent, well-meaning people. People who happen to be well-off enough that the consequences wouldn’t touch them. They’d smile and nod and pretend to listen. Not really wanting to think about it much because they wouldn’t want to risk having to change their minds.
“I’ll never be able to work in Longevity in San Francisco, which means I can probably never go home again. I’d know too many of the perps,” she said on a note that made it plain the thought had just occurred to her.
She loo
ked up at Chris. “You know, Mozart was only 35 when he died.”
Chris raised his eyebrows.
“Maybe we need fleeting youth and intimations of mortality to be really creative. Maybe we’ve lost the best part of ourselves. But you said it: genies never get stuffed back into their bottles. They just don’t. So this is what we’ve got. If I can do anything to prevent it, though, we are not going to evolve into a two-tiered society with dynasties of molebiol-engineered superbeings in towers. Enhancements have to be regulated and Longevity has to have a limit. It has to cost more than mere money, and what else is there that compares to biological immortality?”
“Children,” Livvy answered herself with Chris remained silent.
“It’s the big compromise, and the only one that could work. Give everyone plugged into Longevity a 200 year allotment and a fifty year reduction in allotment for every child. Three children and you’re almost back to a natural life. It’s as fair as we can make it. I’ve never been able to think of anything else that would work.” There was a long pause. Livvy finally smiled.
“You have got to be one hell of an interrogator,” she finally said. “So now you’re asking me to get personal. Why and how LLE…? All right. The public, the whole public, not just naturals or those plugged into Longevity, need to trust us to enforce the Laws fairly, or it’s open season on others from both camps and the Laws won’t save us,” Livvy said, flushing. “So much for civilization as we currently know it. And I find I can live with the one we have.
“I came here because it’s where it all began, some of it with you, McGregor. And as far as how I got here… I asked my father to call the DC Commissioner. That was so much fun, by the way, that in another fifty years I may even do it again. Or maybe not.”
During Livvy’s extended response Louie got up and walked slowly over to the table, then lay down on the floor in the angle between Livvy and Chris.
“Okay. Well, I hope it’s worth it. Don’t glare at me, Hutchins. You weren’t alive for the Allotment Riots, and the history as taught doesn’t convey the… hopelessness. I just wanted to make sure that if I’m going to ask you to risk your life you’re doing it for something you really believe in.”
“I kind of do that every day already,” Livvy said, pointedly touching her wounded arm and struggling to look aggrieved. “Risk my life, that is,” she added, in case Chris missed the gesture.
Chris gave a slight smile. “Regardless, that really is a scratch compared to what you risk if you continue working this case with me.”
“Tell me, seriously,” Livvy asked, curious. “What is it about Josephson, beside what happened fifty years ago? It can’t be another case of the same sickening abuse.”
“You see? We should have eaten first. Keep eating your pizza. It’s not the end of the world, and it’s probably not even another Sara Torkelson. it’s just the start of a private little war,” Chris said. “LLE has them all the time. Eat.”
Livvy half-heartedly picked up her fork and Chris started his story.
“Josephson was last seen Thursday. His research notes all disappeared sometime between then and when we showed up, with no one at the clinic the wiser.”
“Which means he is seriously gone, won’t be back for a while, and probably had help,” Livvy said.
“You got it. Also, he’s financially flush, able to finance his research into, we can safely say, less lucrative fields, and still able to afford a lavish lifestyle. I had Forensics check out all of his finances yesterday and you should see his home. He’s rich.”
“McGregor, he’s a doctor.”
“I know, but he doesn’t have that many clients, nor is it coming from family or investments. Forensics says he’s been receiving automatic, regular deposits of large sums for as far back they’ve been able to retrieve so far.”
“So he has a rich patron. Someone is financing his research at the licensed lab, hoping for some big new enhancement payoff, or at worst maybe a hotlab, someplace he’s doing illegal resets?” Livvy asked.
“A hotlab, most definitely, and it would be an expensive one. Unfortunately that’s not that unusual. It has to be someone very secretive, though, because none of Josephson’s coworkers even hinted at such an arrangement.”
“Maybe they’re too afraid of him. You think his patron called him away suddenly?” Livvy asked. She reached down and rubbed Louie’s ears.
“I don’t know yet, but it looks like it, doesn’t it? Josephson’s sudden unreliability at the clinic, which triggered LLE alarms, had to have been unplanned. I think Josephson, the arrogant son of a bitch, screwed up. If he’d made the effort to be more patient in communicating with his staff instead of doing his usual toss off… if he’d canceled appointments further ahead or made a reasonable excuse about an emergency, we might not be here. But he followed his high-handed pattern in dealing with others and ignored the implications of an careless exit.”
“So someone calls Josephson away, somewhat abruptly, and then they realize he was sloppy and we’re investigating and they don’t want Josephson found, especially if it leads to them, so they try to have us killed at Isabella’s? Yesterday, how did they even know we’d started working on Josephson’s disappearance? We’d just gotten our assignment. I don’t doubt it; Maas was in that tree before we got there. But how?” Livvy asked.
“Josephson, or more probably his patron, anticipated the fallout from his mistake,” Chris said. “Or someone at the clinic or in LLE clued them in. I can’t think of any other possibility.”
“We’ve come back to the patron, someone with a lot of money to throw around. Someone with enough at stake that they don’t care that what they’re doing may actually escalate the situation. Someone even more proactive than LLE. Who?” Livvy asked.
“You’ve heard of John Bedford?”
“The trillionaire recluse?” Livvy asked. “You think he’s Josephson’s patron?”
Chris took a long swallow of beer but didn’t bother to answer.
“I doubt I would recognize him if I saw him,’ Livvy said thoughtfully. “But I think he has a reputation as one of those men that where he walks, the ground flinches. Powerful, and not nice with it.”
Chris nodded. “I’ve never seen him either. I’ve just seen shadowed glimpses of him in the news once or twice. Candid shots that his bodyguards made an effort to block, most recently in ’04, when his son Joshua died in a fire.”
“How did you make the connection, though? A chirp in the ear from the fairies? Usually being a reclusive trillionaire isn’t enough to attract suspicion,” Livvy said.
“Now that is a long story,” Chris said.
“Give me the long version and don’t dumb it down, please,” Livvy said. “If I’m going to work LLE – which is my intention with or without you – I need some LLE Research 101.”
Chris hesitated for the first time. “Karen met Bedford when she was lobbying for the Laws; Bedford was lobbying on the other side, for laissez-faire. I’ll never forget what she said about him. ‘He epitomizes the worst. He’s only had twelve years of Longevity and already he’s addicted, convinced of his own entitlement. He has almost no fellow feeling with the rest of humanity. We have to protect ourselves from him, and protect ourselves from becoming like him. He will never, never accept his own mortality.’”
Chris gave Livvy a moment to try to comprehend an ego so strong that although Bedford experienced childhood knowing that he would die, any acceptance of that fate was now alien to him.
“But,” Livvy said hesitantly, “where’s the connection to Josephson? I don’t doubt Karen’s assessment, or that Bedford’s bound to get involved with hotlabs, but…”
“Josephson and Bedford know each other.”
“Bedford is a client of Josephson’s? That’s clear, then.”
“No. At least, not currently. Bedford wouldn’t risk that kind of association. In fact, the only proof I can find that they ever even met is from appointment records from a reset clinic that burned
down in ’51. The Greater Potomac Reset Institute. The appointment records show that Bedford saw Josephson quarterly for two years. Then the Institute burned down, and there’s been no record of any contact since, at least that I’ve been able to find. The fire was indistinguishable from any other reset clinic fire, but no religious group or Naturals Only group ever claimed credit for it.”
“An unexplained fire. Hardly unique. McGregor, if you want me to stay awake while we take a tour through some ancient history,” Livvy said, “would it be okay if we took Louie for a walk at the same time? Some fresh air would be nice.” She gave him a beatific smile.
Chris hesitated briefly, then said, “Sure.” He stood up but then sat back down.
“Are you up for this?” he asked. “It’s going to get complicated, and the rest can wait.”
Livvy made a face and stood up, which drew him back to his feet. “McGregor, just give me the information. I take it you actively searched for this connection, because you thought Josephson and Bedford are well mated, and then you looked for evidence that they were hiding their relationship. You have a very suspicious mind, which is maybe why you’re a lot older than you look. I want everything you have, including how you got here. I may get a headache, but I’ll process it. I just need some fresh air, and to think for a minute.”
They were out of the building and half way down the block before either of them said something more.
“This is nice,” Livvy said. They’d passed under a streetlamp and she took the opportunity to look up at the stars before they reached the next one. Mature oaks and maples lined the sidewalk and shaded the park and playground across the street. They headed in that direction.
Louie waited at the street corner, but after they had crossed together, Chris said, “Go ahead, boy, ” and Louie headed out at a gallop, stopping occasionally to sniff when his interest was captured. Chris led Livvy far enough into the park that they could stand under one of the trees, out of the illumination of the streetlamp and the quarter moon.
“It’s just that… I don’t get where all this is going. Are you setting us up to raid Bedford’s properties to look for hotlabs on the basis of Josephson’s disappearance? I know he’s powerful. Is that it? I thought LLE was invincible, and if you had suspicions, you could go in without worrying about providing probable cause, no matter who owned the lab.”
