Anniversary Day (12 page)

Jacobs didn’t answer that. She had made up her mind, and he knew from long experience that Jacobs’ mind could snap shut in an instant.

“Besides,” Nyquist added, “she asked for me too. She’s trying to do this right.”

“I don’t think there is any right, Bartholomew.” Jacobs spoke softly.

She looked at him sideways. What he had taken for disapproval was something else. Worry? Fear? He couldn’t quite identify it, but he knew that Jacobs was unsettled.

She beckoned him with one finger. He leaned in and shut off his recording links for just a moment. Then he sent her notification that he wasn’t recording anything.

She nodded, then said softly, so softly that even someone standing nearby couldn’t have heard her, “It shouldn’t have been this easy to kill the mayor. Especially on Anniversary Day. Especially Soseki. He took precautions, like the SkinSoft. He knew attacks could come at any moment.”

Nyquist knew that too. “You think this was planned,” he said.

“I know it was planned,” she said. “It’s the only explanation. Nothing that we have here on Armstrong could have caused him to die like this. Nothing. Whatever it is had to have come in from the outside. And to bring it into this port took planning. The question you have to answer is how many people are involved. Are there aliens involved too? And why would they target Arek Soseki today of all days?”

Nyquist sighed. “I’d already thought about the second two questions,” he said. “I guess I’ll also have to focus on the first.”

You can turn your recordings back on
, she sent him.

He nodded.

“I’ll let you know when I have something,” she said. “But don’t hold your breath. I suspect it’ll take a while.”

He suspected the same thing. And the thought didn’t please him. In fact, it worried him more than he could say.

Twenty

DeRicci paced around her office, studying the carpet as she walked. She had long ago given up on that big screen. It made her nervous, and she couldn’t be nervous. She needed to concentrate, and she needed to remain calm as she held conversations along her links.

She had probably done fifteen circuits of her office already, and she had a lot more to do. She was handling a lot of information, and doing most of it in her head, which would piss off Popova.

Too bad. DeRicci didn’t have time to worry about niceties or legalities. She had to deal with a lot of people, and a lot of problems.

This was the first time in years that she had dealt with a Moonwide emergency. Last time, the bureaucratic system she was a part of got in her way. Now it was crumbling around her.

The governor-general did not have a replacement. Regulations stated that the Elected Council of the United Domes of the Moon would pick a replacement should one be needed. And one would be needed in case the governor-general died or became incapacitated.

Which she was now. DeRicci had just finished talking to the head of Deep Craters Hospital, a man used to handling delicate inquiries. Deep Craters was the best, most expensive private hospital on the Moon, and it had the best facilities off Earth—some claimed better than those on Earth. Everyone who was anyone and had health issues went to Deep Craters.

Even Nyquist, after he was attacked by a Bixian assassin more than a year ago, ended up there. But he ended up there because DeRicci’s old partner, Miles Flint, had picked up the tab, not because Nyquist’s government health insurance allowed it. Someone had made the decision that the governor-general needed the best possible care, not the care that her government health plan dictated.

That worried DeRicci more than anything.

Most of the heads of the domes had checked in, all except for the mayor of Glenn Station. He liked to shut off his links, including his emergency links, just like DeRicci used to when she was a cop, so she had to press upon his staff that this was urgent and life-threatening and he had to contact her immediately.

She was aware that the deep sense of frustration she felt after that encounter was ironic. She finally understood why everyone else in the Armstrong Police Department had been irritated with her all those years ago.

She also reached every single councilor for the United Domes. None of them had been attacked—yet, she stressed—and she encouraged vigilance.

Against what, she wasn’t sure.

But she didn’t like this. She knew this was some kind of coordinated attack, much more subtle than the kind they’d seen four years ago when Armstrong Dome got bombed. More akin to the biological agent that Frieda Tey had tried to unleash inside the Dome five years ago.

The domes were always under attack by some crazy: dome life was delicate, and people knew that. But most attacks were vast plots against the domes themselves, which made the attacks easier to deflect or defeat.

Someone with a brain realized that they could accomplish a sophisticated terror attack by targeting leaders. Communities went into lockdown, panicked, froze, when their leaders got attacked.

When their leaders died.

And things were worse here. Even though Soseki’s deputy mayor, Diane Limón, had already issued a live don’t-worry message to the city, that wasn’t the same as having a healthy living mayor.

No one had reported yet that Soseki’s death was anything other than natural causes, so on that front, the mayor’s staff’s decision to hesitate about the cause of death had been a good thing. But it had hampered the investigators.

And time was of the essence in figuring out who the killer was and what group or groups he was affiliated with.

Because these coordinated attacks were not an accident.

And it wasn’t long before other people—regular people
, media
people—figured that out.

Twenty-one

Normally the restaurant would be a full-blown crime scene, but it had been compromised from the moment the crime happened. Romey made certain that crime scene techs had gone over the table nearest the manager’s office first, gathering what evidence they could. She recorded it all, then when they were done, piled her own information on top of it.

That table became her on-scene command center. She set her own flat screen on top of the table, and expanded the image size. Then she pressed information from one side to another, including the list DeRicci had sent her concerning the banned substances in the City of Armstrong.

Romey had just assigned that to one of the crime scene techs—as in,
check for any of these
—when she got another, coded message from DeRicci.

And the message was enough to make her knees buckle.

The governor-general unconscious at Deep Craters. Mayor of Moscow Dome nearly dead of similar attack. Mayor of Glenn Station unavailable, maybe off links, maybe injured. Critical that we have information about your investigation as soon as you have it. You’ll share that info with your counterpart in Moscow Dome. Might be coordinated attack. Need to stop it now
.

Might
be a coordinated attack? Was DeRicci insane? Did she miss the clues? Or was she trying to be discreet because she sent the message across the links? If so, she wasn’t discreet enough.

“You okay, Savita?” The voice was new, not one Romey had been hearing all day.

She looked up. Bartholomew Nyquist stood on the other side of the table.

She had never been so relieved to see his slightly mismatched face. He had no scars, but in the right light, he looked like he hadn’t been assembled properly. His rumpled clothes didn’t help. Nor did his slouch. He was one of the few people she knew who didn’t care at all about how he looked, no matter where he was or what he was doing.

And she found that oddly comforting right now.

“I’m glad you’re here.” She sounded a bit too relieved. But she felt very alone on this and she knew whose hide this entire mess would come out of if her investigation failed.

With Nyquist on board, it wouldn’t fail.

She had to believe that.

He gave her a small smile—an appropriate smile, given the circumstances they found themselves in, rueful and acknowledging and gentle.

“You need to see this,” she said, and forwarded DeRicci’s message to him.

His eyes widened, then his gaze met hers. He was too much of a professional to comment out loud, but he sent back:
Crap
.

Her sentiments exactly.

He bent over the screen. “What have you got?” he asked.

“Nothing yet,” she said. “Not even a preliminary coroner’s report. People are gathered everywhere and right now, I have uniforms interviewing them.”

He was staring at the list DeRicci had sent over. “And this is?”

“The substances that could have caused the death. Have you seen the body?”

He nodded. He still wasn’t looking up. That list seemed to fascinate him.

“What are you seeing?” she asked.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “But something’s close.”

“We have to move fast,” she said. “I’m not used to that kind of investigation. I want the time to talk to everyone, to put all the information together—”

“We can do that,” he said, “but our first priority is to find out what, exactly, is going on. We know a few things already. Whoever planned this is not a suicide attacker.”

She looked at him, then let out a small sigh. She was letting herself get overwhelmed with what hadn’t been done, instead of what she could do. She nodded, encouraging him to continue.

“And,” he said, “we know that whoever did this could blend in, which unfortunately, is a strength. We also know that he, she, it, whatever the hell it is, has access to some pretty exotic substances.”

She looked at him, still stuck at
blend in
. O’Malley’s was a human enclave. The people who came here were known for their love of politics. They also wanted to keep Armstrong’s city government as alien-free as possible—and by aliens, they didn’t mean humans from other places. They meant nonhumans. They wanted to keep nonhumans off the council and out of the mayor’s office.

“We’re looking for a human being,” she said slowly.

“Most likely,” Nyquist said, “although I’d want to find out who did food prep first. Whoever touched that food or any beverages that Soseki had might have a way in.”

“Or the hands he shook,” Romey said.

“We need to track his last movements,” Nyquist said.

“I already have someone on that,” she said. “And the crime scene techs are looking at everything he consumed. I’ll have that expedited.”

“And everything he touched,” Nyquist said. “Not with his hands. Jacobs tells me he was wearing SkinSoft and he had it on properly.”

“You talked to Jacobs?” Romey felt a twinge of discomfort. Jacobs should have talked to her before anyone else.

“Just before I came in,” he said. “She doesn’t know anything yet, which is why she hasn’t reported to you.”

Romey gave him a sharp look. He had noted her twinge and realized the cause of it. He was good, better than she could ever hope to be. The Chief of Police had made a mistake; Nyquist should have been in charge of this investigation, not Romey.

“The only thing she does know,” he said slowly, as if he was giving her time to process all of this, “is that whatever killed him isn’t something that is familiar to the Armstrong coroner’s office.”

Romey noted how he phrased that. He didn’t say it was unusual for Armstrong. He didn’t even say that it was unusual. Just that it wasn’t known in the Armstrong coroner’s office, which was an entirely different thing.

She let out a small sigh of relief. She hadn’t realized how deep she’d been inside her head until he arrived. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”

“Someone smart,” he said, more to himself than to her. She heard the echo of every failed partnership in that sentence. She’d had a few failed ones herself, but not as many as Nyquist. Some of his failed partnerships were legendary in the department.

“Yes,” she said, “someone smart. Someone who understands investigation.”

“And urgency.” He finally looked up. “You want to coordinate, since you’re in charge, or you want to help me on the substances here?”

“You’re going to track them?”

“I think that’s our best lead,” he said.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll find out how whatever it was got into his system, and who had access.”

“Think you can cover that in an hour?”

He was turning this into a competition, so that they wouldn’t concentrate on the emergency, just on getting the knowledge. And that was brilliant. It took the emotions out of the investigation.

“I’m sure I can,” she said.

His smile was sadder than the previous one. “You’re on.”

And he was right: she was on.

She was the one in charge, the one the spotlight focused on. She was on. Not him, not anyone else. Just her.

And this was one investigation she had better get absolutely right.

Twenty-two

Dmitri Tsepen was drunk, again. Adriana Clief resisted the urge to slap his sagging face. The entire office smelled of beer, which meant he had spilled somewhere and the bots hadn’t found it yet. Or he had shut off the cleaning bots. He did that often, claiming they made too much noise.

Since they were programmed to be noiseless, she quite naturally didn’t believe him. But Dmitri Tsepen had excuses for everything, even though the excuses often didn’t make sense. If she were just a little more naïve, she would wonder how he ever became mayor of Glenn Station.

But she knew.

It was because of her.

She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and studied him. His face was flushed, his head tilted back, his mouth open. He wasn’t quite snoring, but he would be soon. His reddish-blond hair was thinning and he hadn’t opted to enhance it, despite her nags. All his other enhancements were failing as well. The capillaries in his nose had broken, and if his eyes were open, they’d be red and rheumy.