Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (16 page)

I looked at her. “I don’t mind, Mrs. Harcourt.”

She took a deep breath and stared at her hands. I noticed her wedding ring was missing. “I don’t think any of us survived what happened to Matti, Detective Drake. My husband and I weren’t able to deal with our grief together. We concentrated on assigning blame to each other. Our marriage…didn’t last.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She nodded absently. “We weren’t solid before. What happened to Matti ruined us.”

“I can talk to your husband if you’d like.”

She shook her head. “No, I can do that. We still talk. We still care about each other, we just can’t live together.”

“All right.” I stood. “I have to get back.”

“Of course.”

“Again, I am sorry for your loss.”

She walked me to the door. Then, before I knew what she was going to do, she leaned over and hugged me fiercely. “Thank you for your time, Detective Drake, and for coming to tell me about my daughter.”

“You’re welcome.” I felt awkward in her embrace. I patted her back gingerly, mimicking what I had seen Shelly do under similar circumstances. After a moment, she released me and turned to go back into her flat.

I returned to the elevator. As the doors closed, I remembered again the vision I’d had of the woman in the hotel room. I could almost hear the gunfire blasting around me.

I pushed those “memories”
away and thought about Shelly. I wanted to know who had taken my partner from me.
 

She was dead, and I was supposed to do something about it.

Chapter Thirteen

Ten more days passed. I toiled away in my basement office and managed to close two more cases, both with confessions that Hansen got credit for. Hansen wasn’t going out of his way to be friendly to me, but he was starting to look eager when I contacted him. I was doing “all kinds of good” for his career.

During that time, I followed the nosies on the rags and on 3D. Lily Lockwell remained fixated on Cartman Dawes’s death, tying it in with the Martian rebel problem that was ongoing, Mara Blake still hadn’t been found and the story was losing steam, barely getting any mention, but Reynolds and Mack’s serial killer chase was racking up the attention. There was a pool at several of the casinos regarding the number of bodies that would eventually be found.

I focused on Lockwell. The reporter contended that the three assassins had been hired by anti-Earth Martians. The link to the bombed manufacturing plant was too great to remain unexploited.

If I had been working the case—if Shelly had been working the case—we would have stayed locked on that angle as well. Lockwell wasn’t having much luck turning up leads, though. She might have been a good investigative reporter, but she was limited to the number of rocks she could turn over on Mars. Still, she tried. But I knew the instant another—bigger—story fell within her reach, she would be off. She was already trying to ingratiate herself with Reynolds and Mack.

On that twelfth day of my reassignment to the cold cases division, I found a loophole.

Technically, since the first forty-eight hours had passed, Shelly’s murder investigation had officially started to cool. The case wasn’t cold, but it apparently was cool enough to allow my assignment parameters to follow up on the investigation more vigorously. I had been forbidden to follow up on Dawes’s murder, but one of the men had also killed Shelly.

I had her murder recorded. So did the rooftop seccams. The murder itself was cleared, tied in with Dawes’s assassination. However, the identity of the person or entity that had hired the assassins remained unknown.

I examined the order Ormond had given me to stay out of the Dawes investigation. He had said nothing specifically about Shelly’s murder. I opened the file within my internal PAD. If I was in violation of the letter of the lieutenant’s instruction, the file would not have opened.

I finally had work that was more intriguing to me, and I could do it while I still sifted through the cold case files because I could multitask on a level no human could ever keep up with.

I slipped through the intradepartmental Net and opened up Shelly’s file. The assassins had been identified as disenfranchised Martian colonists. Before that, they had been professional soldiers, not rebels. They had worked for Earth’s government and maintained the peace on Mars.

So, what had turned them against Earth? Or was this assignment purely mercenary, the attack solely focused on Cartman Dawes?
 

The two surviving men weren’t talking. Either they had been paid off extremely well, or they were afraid of their employers. Shelly would have gone with fear. She’d always said that fear was a greater force than finances, just as lust compelled humans to do all manner of things while trying to hang onto someone.

No one had claimed the body of the dead man. The other two were in lockup awaiting trial. No bail would be allowed, given the egregious nature of Dawes’s murder and the death of a police officer.

I opened a review cubicle in the NAPD’s virtual reality crime lab morgue and stepped into it.

*

The department VR was a well-equipped unit. The hardware and software were cutting-edge, donated by corporations that negotiated their mention in high-profile crime cases that utilized VR. A big trial that used VR and captured the attention of viewers around the world was the best advertisement a corp could buy. 3D viewers could see the quality of the VR as the prosecuting and defense attorneys jockeyed for the win in court.

When I arrived in the VR morgue, it looked exactly like the unit I had visited in real-time on so many other cases. Stainless steel doors filled one end of the room, covering vaults that held bodies in cold storage for later autopsies.

The dead man, ex-Special Forces Sergeant Brock Lee Thurman, lay on the table in the middle of the room. He was a tall man—203 centimeters in height—and built strong—106.2 kilograms. His dirty blond hair was cropped close. His eyes were blue and both of them were cybered for infrared and telescopic. That wasn’t uncommon in the military.

I tracked the original cyberware back to the United States Army. The installation had taken place twenty-one years ago. Thurman had been seventeen when he’d enlisted. The augmentations had been done so that he was ready to enter the Army on his eighteenth birthday. He’d been thirty-eight years, two months, and nine days old when he’d died.

The only next of kin listed was a sister, Eugenia Warren. She was a married mother of three, a low-level research assistant at an agricultural firm. She had worked there for six years and had no outstanding warrants. Her husband was a doctor at St. Gregory’s Hospital on the east side of New Angeles. Together, they made a good income.

I took down her name and address, then called her personal PAD.

“Hello.” Eugenia Warren’s voice was soft and she sounded tired. She kept her vid blanked so I couldn’t see her. Many PADs had that as an automatic feature when unknown numbers called in. I had used my personal PAD and hadn’t gone through the NAPD switchboard. Most people didn’t like getting called by the police.

“Mrs. Warren?”

“Yes.”

“I am Detective Drake. I’m with the New Angeles Police Department. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

“Just a moment.”

I waited. As expected, she pinged my PAD through another connection and confirmed my link to the police department. Then she came back on the line.

“Detective Drake, I’ve already talked to the police. I told them that I didn’t know anything about my brother’s business. We hadn’t been in touch much over the last few years.”

“I understand that, Mrs. Warren. I’m actually doing a deeper background on your brother.”

“Why?”

“To build a psychological profile of the kind of man he was.”

“I don’t know why you—”

I decided to give her a bit of hope, and I knew that it would work because families always wanted to think the best of their members. “I want to look into the possibility that your brother was coerced into taking part in the attack on Cartman Dawes.” I deliberately refrained from saying
murder
or
assassination
. Those were negative assessments and Shelly had taught me to keep those light when I was seeking help from a potential contact. I needed to build a bridge that offered a sense of community, the illusion that we were working together.

“You think Brock was forced to do that?”

“It is a possibility, Mrs. Warren.” There were actually many possibilities, but I didn’t point that out. “I want to make an effort to discover whether your brother was innocent.” Brock Thurman had been shot and killed while attempting to kill a police officer. There was no way he would be proven innocent, and even if he was, he would be no less dead.

No, the absolution would be for the living. So many families took on the guilt of their members and struggled to understand things they themselves would not do. I hoped that Eugenia Warren would be one of those.

“Of course.” She took a breath. “What can I do to help?”

“Do you have any of your brother’s personal effects?” I was careful to keep the familial reference in play. That made the discussion less threatening.

“My brother lived on Mars. I didn’t even know he’d returned to Earth until the police contacted me.”

“I understand that, but I was hoping you might have something I could study: pictures, vid, emails that you’ve kept, cards—things like that.”

Eugenia thought for a moment. “When Brock first enlisted, he was really excited about how much he got to travel. I was his older sister. Our parents were both dead. We were all we had.”

I had known that from Thurman’s file.

“Brock used to send me mementos, keepsakes, basically
junk
from the places he went. There were a lot of pictures and vid as well. A few cards.”

“Did you keep any of that?”

“I did. I’ve got it at home.”

“Would it be possible for me to stop by to look at those things?”

“I could send them to you.”

I didn’t want anything from her coming into the NAPD. Her name had already been flagged with the investigation into Cartman Dawes’s murder. “If possible, I would prefer to talk to you when I look at them. I will probably have questions.”

She hesitated, but her interest was in clearing her brother’s name if she could. Humans had a tendency to want to clean house for the dead. That had always fascinated me. Now I was doing the same thing for Shelly, and I found that the unconscious desire was even more intriguing. Of course, I wasn’t human. I attributed my need more to my curiosity than any ethereal social contract between Shelly and me.

“I can meet you tonight.”

“That will be fine, Mrs. Warren.”

She gave me her address, but I already had it.
 

I turned my attention back to the virtual corpse on the stainless steel table.

*

 
When I accessed the medical examiner’s files, Brock Thurman’s body opened out, following the autopsy that had been performed. His chest parted in a Y-incision and the liver, heart, lungs, and other organs lifted out and hovered in the air over his body.

The bullet that had killed him rose from his chest cavity and hovered nearby. Almost immediately, the mushroomed bit of lead cloned itself. The original retained the smashed appearance it had gotten while hammering through Thurman’s chest. The second bullet became perfect in shape so the striations left by the lands and grooves of the barrel of Shelly’s weapon could be easily compared.

I had no doubt about the authenticity of the bullet. I had seen Shelly shoot the man.

Thurman’s scalp split and his face was pulled down, leaving his eyes, sinus cavities, and mouth gaping open while the mass of flesh sat around his neck like a grotesque beard.

An incision, made by a bone saw, cut through his skull cap and it was pulled away to reveal the brain beneath. The optic nerves were severed, along with several other ganglion clusters, and the pink-grey brain floated into the air as well.

Dr. Marcus Seward had been thorough in his autopsy. I accessed the logs for all the organs. He had run a tox screen on the tissues from each, but there were no mind control drugs in Thurman’s system. There were, however, traces of a neuro-stim cocktail often used by professional soldiers to combat stress and mental fatigue.

I surmised, as Dr. Seward had, that Thurman had recently been involved in a prolonged firefight. Given the current nature of the world, there were a number of campaigns where that was possible.

I shifted to the lungs. There I found, as the ME had, trace elements of Martian dust. Despite the terraforming that was going on there, Mars still retained a heavier content of silica-rich basalt and finely grained iron oxide dust. There were also significant traces of chlorine, sulfur, and phosphorus in higher concentrations than normally found on Earth.

Thurman had spent considerable time on Mars.

The relatively clean condition of his kidneys and liver, aided by the fact that water was continually recycled on Mars and cleaner than many places on Earth because it was not so plentiful, also bore this out.