Authors: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Anniversary Day
A Retrieval Artist Novel
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Copyright © 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Kort
Cover Design copyright © 2011 WMG Publishing
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
First Edition
The Retrieval Artist Series
The Disappeared
Extremes
Consequences
Buried Deep
Paloma
Recovery Man
The Recovery Man’s Bargain: A Short Novel
Duplicate Effort
The Possession of Paavo Deshin: A Short Novel
Coordinated Attacks: A Short Novel (coming soon
Anniversary Day
The Retrieval Artist: A Short Novel
For more information about the series go to:
http://www.kristinekathrynrusch.com
For the Fans.
Your enthusiasm for this series has kept it alive.
Thank you.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my husband Dean Wesley Smith, who wrested the manuscript out of my hands when I got overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of this story. Many, many thanks to Annie Reed for her insightful comments. Thanks to the Sunday Lunch crew for helping me plan my moonscape. Thanks also to Jonathan Kort for his quick and enthusiastic read, and for his wonderful covers. Thanks to Colleen Kuehne for watching my back. Writers never work alone, and you folks helped me more than you know. All mistakes, however, are my own.
The Bombing
(Four Years Ago)
One
Bartholomew Nyquist parked his aircar in one of the hoverlots at the end of the neighborhood. The Dome was dark this morning, even though someone should have started the Dome Daylight program. Maybe they had, deciding that Armstrong was in for a “cloudy” day—terminology he never entirely understood, given that the Moon had no clouds and most people who lived here had been born on the Moon and had never seen a cloud in their entire lives.
He grabbed his laser pistol from the passenger seat. He always kept the pistol on the passenger seat when he was traveling, just in case something happened. He tucked the pistol in his shoulder holster, hidden under his already-rumpled suit coat, and got out of the car.
The neighborhood looked even darker than it should have, sprawled below him like something out of those Dickens Christmas plays his ex-wife loved so much. All it needed was some sooty smoke coming out of chimneys above each house to be authentically dreary.
Oh, his mood was bad. And for that, he could probably only blame himself. He should “buck up”—wasn’t that what Chief of the First Detective Unit, Andrea Gumiela, had told him yesterday?
Buck up, Bartholomew. Everyone gets divorced. And yours was two years ago. The attitude was understandable last year. This year, it’s becoming a problem
.
That after she made him watch the entire complaint vid his now-former partner had filed. Nyquist knew the complaints already, having heard them from previous partners and in his divorce proceeding: surly, impossible to work with, superior. Conversations filled with biting sarcasm—and that was on a good day. On a bad day, he didn’t communicate at all.
And on this day, he didn’t have to. Still on the force, still a homicide detective, and still without a new partner. He would have partner tryouts all week. The brass wanted to keep Nyquist. He had the best closing rate on the force. The problem was that regulations stated he needed a partner. He stated that he didn’t. He worked better alone.
Gumiela knew that, but she followed the rules. Which was why she was his boss instead of the other way around.
Nyquist took the stairs to the sidewalk. He hated these cases in the outer districts of Armstrong. The row houses here rented for less than apartments downtown, but apartments were nicer. A lot of these houses had landlords who only owned one or two properties, and couldn’t afford the upkeep. It showed in dingy walls that hadn’t been upgraded in decades. Moon dust stains still clung to some of the siding, even though Moon dust had been cleared out of this area since the Dome improvements two decades ago.
Not every part of the city was Moon-dust free, particularly Old Armstrong, which had stupid historic regulations that prevented certain kinds of upkeep. But Nyquist knew this neighborhood didn’t have that kind of regulation, and so the lack of upkeep was either a financial or a business decision.
Not that he cared about the upkeep of houses as it pertained to regulations. He cared about it as it pertained to the kind of people living inside—people on the edge of hopelessness, people whose economic future wasn’t quite bleak but could be with just one disaster, one horrible thing gone wrong.
When he reached the street, he peered around the corner, saw two squads, white-and-blue lights turning, crime scene lasers already up. He should’ve parked down here, but he’d needed the walk. Besides, on days like this, he didn’t want to be part of the squad. He liked being on his own, and parking his car away from the scene let him keep his autonomy.
He knew he would need it.
He sighed. He was supposed to contact Dispatch the moment he arrived in the neighborhood and he’d been putting it off. He knew what they would say. A tryout partner would be waiting for him at the scene. Gumiela had already done this to him once. A tryout partner on scene showed the brass whether or not Nyquist and the newbie worked well together.
It also prevented Nyquist from rejecting the new partner outright, based on clothes, appearance, or general lack of verbal defensive ability.
The question was which of those people loitering outside the crime scene was the one he’d be stuck with all day long.
Couldn’t put it off any longer. He sent a ping to Dispatch through his links, hoping they’d only look at his location and not try to contact him.
Instead, a tiny image of this morning’s dispatch—a woman with dark hair and matching dark circles under her eyes—appeared in the lower left corner of his vision. He hated that most of all. Couldn’t they just use audio like everyone else on the Force?
“Detective Nyquist.” It looked like she was speaking aloud as well as sending through the links. For the record? Probably. No one wanted to get in trouble because
he
got in trouble. “You’ll be meeting your new partner at the scene. Her name is Ursula Palmette—”
Newly Minted Detective. I got it
, he sent, deliberately not speaking out loud for any record.
“No, detective, not that newly minted at all. She has worked as a detective for five months.”
What happened to her training partner?
he sent. He stopped only a few meters from the house that seemed to be the center of attention. He didn’t want to go any further while having this conversation.
“Early retirement,” the dispatch said.
For some bad conduct?
Nyquist sent.
“No, sir. Family troubles. His wife is dying and he didn’t want to spend the last year of her life working.”
That surprised him. He felt color touch his cheeks, something that didn’t happen to him often. He was glad it happened before he met Palmette. He didn’t want to step in it at the very beginning of their relationship.
All right
, he sent, not acknowledging his discomfort or the slight reprimand the dispatch had given him.
Anything else I need to know?
“Just that the officers on site say that they’re ready for you, sir.”
He was beginning to seriously dislike this dispatch. Who was she to subtly reprimand him like that?
Instead of challenging her, he just severed the link and walked the remaining few meters to the crime scene. Police line lasers gave the fake grass a reddish tint. An ambulance was parked sideways behind one of the squad cars, lights off.
He found that a curious detail. Either the ambulance wasn’t needed and it could go off elsewhere, or it was needed and it had to stay, in which case its warning lights would be on low.
Two officers stood in front of the crime scene lasers. A tiny woman with a cap of brown hair leaned against one of the squads, holding a steaming cup of something—probably coffee—in her right hand.
As Nyquist approached, she stood.
“Detective Nyquist,” she said. “I’m—”
“Ursula Palmette,” he said, resisting the urge to add “newly minted detective.” “I suppose you have documentation for me?”
She extended her hand. He hated chip-to-chip information transfer, but it was department policy these days. He grabbed her hand in a relatively loose grip, and felt the chip in the center of his palm warm, which was a signal that the information exchange was not only complete but accepted.
In the past, he’d go through a speech—
I’m the lead on this case. You shouldn’t question my authority. I’ll do all the talking
—but she already had had a training officer and she should know this crap. Besides, he’d been told by his previous two partners that his little opening speech was off-putting. He decided not to put Detective Ursula Palmette off. He simply did not have the energy for it.
“What do we know?” he asked.
“Well, sir,” she said, then paused. “It is sir, right? Or do you prefer Detective? Or Bartholomew?”
“I prefer to know why the hell I’m here.” He hated all the protocol with names. He certainly wasn’t going to let her call him Bartholomew, which seemed to be what she was angling for. He didn’t like casual relationships between partners. He preferred formality. She’d figure it out.
She nodded. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, with that fresh-faced, straight-out-of-the-academy look. He preferred his partners to have worked their way to the detective squad, not get fast-tracked through so-called police education.
He didn’t say that, which he would have had he met her in the precinct. Instead, he watched her peel the lid off her drink, which made it steam all the more, sending a smell of cinnamon and milk into the air, turning his stomach. She took a sip before saying anything else, as if the drink fortified her somehow.
“Um,” she said, pressing the lid back on the cup. “We have a body—”
He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Of course they had a body. They were
homicide
detectives. Someone had to die for the street cops to call him in.
“—in the front room of the house. The woman inside called it in. The responding officers say something is a little off in the entire thing.”
“A little off?” Nyquist said.
Palmette shrugged. “Their words. You can talk to them. I was instructed not to do any investigating until you arrived.”
Because he had the high closure rate, and one of his complaints about partners was that they made his job harder, not easier. They asked the wrong questions, contaminated crime scenes all by their little lonesome, and compromised witnesses.
“And yet you know about the body, and the scene being a little off,” he said.
“Because Officer Saxe—,” and she nodded at a young cop with curly red hair and copper skin standing near one of the squads, “—told me the minute I arrived. I told him we had to wait for you, and so he stopped. You want to talk to him now, sir?”
So she was going to stick with “sir.” Fine.
“No,” Nyquist said. “I want to see the interior. Got a suit?”
By that, he meant protective covering for her skin and clothes. Most rookie detectives had to make do with the full-body suits that the cops gave to civilians at crime scenes, but she tapped her arm.
“Already on, sir,” she said.
That was when he noticed that her clothes were just a bit shiny. He took one of his protective suits out of the pocket of his coat. The suit was the size of his thumbnail, until he attached it to the button on his sleeve and tapped it.
Then the damn thing enveloped him. He hated that moment—it felt like walking into a gigantic spider web, which he had done once as a kid on vacation with his parents on Earth—and then the feeling went away.