Anniversary Day (2 page)

“Okay,” he said as he blocked the crime scene laser with his palm. Another chip on his palm made sure that none of the warning sirens went off. He stepped onto the fake grass and waited for Palmette to join him. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Two

The front door was open, just like it was supposed to be, with one more officer stationed outside. He nodded at Nyquist as Nyquist went inside.

The interior was very dark, even though the lights were on. They didn’t seem to have enough power to penetrate the house’s gloom. The place smelled funky too—not just the smell of death, which, while Nyquist wasn’t used to it, was at least something he expected at a crime scene.

No, this place smelled of greasy cooked food, coffee, and garbage. The front room was square and somewhat useless, standard in a row house like this one, where it seemed like the architect couldn’t decide whether this room was an entry or a living area, so he decided to turn it into both.

Usually tenants turned the front room into one or the other. As Nyquist’s eyes adjusted, he realized that the people who lived here had gone with the original architect’s vision and kept it as both. Two faux-leather chairs leaned against the wall separating this room from the next (probably a kitchen). A table covered with dirty dishes, clothes, and some decorative rocks squeezed between the two chairs.

On the left side of the door was a mat for shoes, which were scattered haphazardly. Some kind of plastic runner made a trail between the door and the kitchen, leading him to a supposition.

Whoever lived here had lived on Earth. Or somewhere Earthlike, somewhere with weather that changed daily, got on the shoes, and had to be accommodated when a person came inside.

Soft voices murmured farther into the house. Palmette brushed up against him. He could feel her impatience. She wanted to get inside and look at the body.

She didn’t realize that the body was the king of the chessboard—the reason for the investigation, but not the center of the investigation. Everything else was much more important, and if Nyquist didn’t look at the details now, he would run the risk of missing even more in the future.

The walls were unadorned except for a series of coat hooks above the shoes, and a public access terminal on the wall beside the chairs. The terminal’s screen was dark and covered with some kind of slime—probably that grease he was smelling—indicating that it hadn’t been used in years.

Which meant that the people who lived in this house had their own way of connecting to the nets. They were probably linked, and unless there was a public viewing screen in another room, they seemed to prefer to entertain themselves rather than share entertainment.

Palmette stepped beside him, apparently trying to go in, but he blocked her with his arm.

“What are we doing?” she asked.

“Working,” he said. If she couldn’t figure it out, that was her problem. Hopefully, it wouldn’t become his.

The body lay in a little nook beside the door, on the opposite side of the room from the shoes, and just in front of the chairs. That small section of wall had a window, which Nyquist knew from being outside, but the window wasn’t just blocked off. It was covered with some kind of blackout material, so that no one could see in or out. So that it seemed like a part of the wall, instead of something that looked out upon the street.

Strange. He wondered if the other windows were blocked off. It would explain the smell. The house had its own air circulation system—all houses in Armstrong did—but they were enhanced by the circulation system in the Dome. Open windows allowed an air exchange that kept everything fresher. Besides, the Dome had stronger filters, so the air coming in was cleaner than the air going out.

He went a little farther in, staying on the runner. “Stand beside me,” he said to Palmette. “Don’t get on the carpet yet.”

“Did we put this mat down?” she asked, revealing just how new she was.

“No,” he said and crouched.

The body belonged to a man, folded in a near-fetal position. Blood pooled beneath the torso and the face—aside from spatter—was undamaged. Hands and arms cradled around the abdomen. Impossible to tell how tall he was, but Nyquist got a sense of athletic solidity. The muscles in the legs, visible through the tailored pants, seemed pronounced. The hands had a muscularity to them as well, one that extended up the wrist. That, combined with broad shoulders, made Nyquist think that this man was probably tall as well.

Nyquist couldn’t tell if the athletic ability was real or enhanced, and it probably didn’t matter. What mattered was that this man appeared strong, and somehow someone had brought him down.

The man’s hair was short with tight, black curls against his well-shaped skull. His eyes and mouth were open. He looked to be mid-thirties.

The corpse had a smell all its own. Loosened muscles usually meant loose bowels, but this stench was greater than that. Nyquist extended a hand, silently warning Palmette to stay back, then he stood and took two steps forward.

The carpet squished beneath his feet. More blood lost than what was obvious. Nyquist nodded to himself.

He went a little farther and crouched again. Hands clasped around the belly, not to cover a single laser wound, but to keep the insides from escaping. Something had gutted him—some kind of blade, probably—and had pierced his intestines in more than one place.

That explained the smell.

The man’s hands were covered in black fluids. If this was his only wound, it had taken him some time to die. And he had been in agony.

Nyquist stood.

“Can I see now?” Palmette asked.

“If you want,” he said, and squelched across the carpet to the front door. He scraped the lower part of his protective gear off, handed it to the officer to bag for a crime scene tech, and got out another suit for a second lower layer of protective gear.

Then he went back inside, ignoring Palmette, who crouched near the body, her feet exactly where his had been. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. At least she followed some rules. If she followed most, she might actually be a possible for a long-term partner.

He forgot all about her, though, as he stepped into the next room. It was a kitchen. The walls were legitimately grease-stained, like he expected from the smell. He had no idea how much work—or grease—it took to cover walls like that. Someone had to shut off the walls’ self-cleaning feature or completely overwhelm it.

At the moment, he voted for overwhelm. Dishes stacked everywhere and all of them filthy. He had no idea how anyone could even live here, let alone cook here.

No one stood in the kitchen, not that there was a lot of room. It was more of a galley kitchen than a full kitchen. Someone—long ago—had changed this row house’s standard design and cut the kitchen in half; an odd choice, he thought.

He stepped through the next door and found out why. A full formal dining room stood here and surprisingly, this room was clean. Stairs curved up the side of the room and disappeared into bedrooms above.

A woman sat at the head of the table, her eyes wide as she looked at him. He got a sense of nervous containment, as if she would jump toward him at any moment. Another woman—this one an officer—sat in a close chair, her hands wrapped around a coffee mug that was still full.

Smart woman. She hadn’t had anything to drink from the mug, even though it had clearly been offered to her.

“I’m Bartholomew Nyquist,” he said softly to the woman at the head of the table. “I’m the detective they sent over to talk to you.”

Normally, he would have introduced himself as the detective in charge of the scene or the crime or the death, but he had a sense that would be the wrong thing to say here.

The woman, whose skin had an odd blotchiness, bit her lower lip.

“This is Alvina Ingelow,” the officer said. “She lives here.”

“Thank you, Officer,” he said in his most gentle tone, not for her sake, but for the woman’s. “Give us a few minutes alone, if you don’t mind.”

The officer nodded and stood. She looked like she wanted to say more, but she didn’t.

Instead, he added, “If you don’t mind waiting outside. I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.”

Meaning he, not Palmette, would talk to her. He hoped the officer understood that. He didn’t want her to talk to anyone other than him. She probably had some early arrival information that he couldn’t get any other way, and he wanted to be the first to hear it.

He touched a chip on each hand, recording the conversation. But he didn’t tell Alvina Ingelow he was doing that. He didn’t want to scare her. He’d let her know in a while. He’d used this technique before, and while it was dicey legally, the information he got from these interviews usually remained part of the court case.

“I know you told the officer what happened,” he said, and the woman nodded—a bit too eagerly, he thought. “But I want you to tell me. Take your time. I know this is hard.”

She shot him a grateful look. The sympathy was calming her. Good, because he thought she was wrapped just a bit too tightly, even for someone who had just discovered a body in her home.

“I was coming home,” she said. “I opened the door, and there he was.”

Nyquist nodded, but didn’t say anything. He had promised her time, so he wasn’t going to derail her with questions. Not yet.

“I sent for help through the links, and then your people came. And the ambulance. They sent an ambulance.” As if she were surprised by that. He would have to listen to the link contact. He wondered if she had said the man was injured.

Nyquist waited for a good minute, his gaze steady on hers. Her eyes were as odd as she was. The pupils seemed to vibrate ever so slightly. He wondered if that was a trick of the light, an enhancement of some kind that he wasn’t familiar with, an effect of a link, or some kind of drug interaction.

But he didn’t ask that either. He’d learned long ago to take investigations slowly, to absorb the information as it came to him, to study the people surrounding the deceased and to make suppositions, but not to assume they were facts.

When she didn’t say anything more, he realized that was her story. Remarkable in its brevity and lack of emotion.

So he would have to ask questions after all. The trick now was to ask the right questions to draw out her story, not to direct it.

“You said you were coming home.” He was careful to repeat her language. “From where?”

“Work,” she said, folding her hands in front of him. The movement caught his eye. “I got the night shift.”

Her hands were remarkably clean. They were probably the cleanest thing in this entire house, except for her dress, which was also clean, if a bit rumpled.

“Where do you work, exactly?” he asked.

She waved one of those very clean hands. “Near the Port. I’m a cocktail waitress.”

No business near the Port employed actual cocktail waitresses. All of the bars there used robotic servers, especially late at night. Some places did employ women under the job description cocktail waitress, but they didn’t wait on anyone and they certainly didn’t serve cocktails.

She was either a stripper or a sex worker. Neither profession was illegal, but neither was that socially acceptable either. He wanted to lean back and look at her body, but he didn’t. He hadn’t gotten the sense that she was enhanced the way strippers usually were. If she was a professional sex worker, her enhancements might not be visible.

He tried not to shudder in distaste.

“When does your shift end?” He didn’t ask where she was employed. He would circle back to that in a moment. He wanted her to focus on what happened here, not on her discomfort at her own job.

“Six,” she whispered.

The whisper caught him by surprise. She said it almost as if it were forbidden information.

“And you came right home?”

She bit her lower lip again.

“Did you walk?” That was the only way to explain the time discrepancy. He had been told that uniforms arrived at eight. If she’d found the body and called, it couldn’t have been any later than six-thirty if she had come directly home.

She shook her head once.

“Car,” she said, almost as softly as that whisper.

He nodded. Something else to circle back to. “And when you came in, he was here.”

“Yes,” she said.

“And who is he?”

“He thinks he’s my boyfriend,” she said with so much venom that Nyquist resisted the urge to lean back. “But he’s not.”

Nyquist let out a small breath. So many directions to take here, and given her emotion, only one was a good direction.

He tried not to look at those really clean hands. He wanted her to stand, so that he could see the rest of her, but this wasn’t the moment to ask.

Or was it?

“Did you make some fresh coffee for the officer?” he asked. “Because I would love a cup.”

She smiled at him. The smile warmed her face, made her seem young—almost childlike—as if his request pleased her somehow.

“Sure,” she said, and stood up.

She was taller than he expected. She smoothed her dress—which was more of a long shirt—over her legs. They were covered in black tights. She wore heels so high that she tottered as she went into that galley kitchen.

He didn’t stand, but he did turn slightly in his chair so that his back wasn’t to her. He slid the chair silently sideways so that he could see her move in the kitchen.

Her figure wasn’t spectacular, the way a stripper’s would be. So she was most likely a sex worker. He would have to ask, or have Palmette do it, very delicately. This woman was on an edge, one he didn’t like.

I opened the door and there he was
.

He thinks he’s my boyfriend. But he’s not
.

Dishes rattled in the kitchen. Nyquist could see her moving plates around to find a mug. He allowed himself a shudder this time and hoped she wouldn’t take it as an insult when he didn’t actually drink the coffee he had asked for.

As he waited, he sent a silent message through his links to Dispatch:
Need to hear the emergency call for this residence ASAP. Through private links only, please. And need a timestamp
.