Anniversary Day (7 page)

But still, it wasn’t a day he enjoyed.

He would just have to get through it.

Like everyone else.

Eleven

“He’s what?” Noelle DeRicci, Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon, sank into the chair behind her desk. The chair, designed to accommodate her form no matter how she was sitting, shifted slightly and she wanted to growl at it.

She wanted to growl at everything.

Even her beautifully designed office, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, its comfortable chairs, its green plants at strategic places, failed to calm her.

Or maybe she expected too much, particularly, when her assistant, Rudra Popova, stood next to the desk, threading her fingers together as if she could pull them out of their sockets.

“Mayor Soseki’s dead, sir.” Popova swallowed hard. Her normally impassive features were drawn. Her long black hair, usually as smooth as water, was mussed, and her eyes were red.

She’d known Arek Soseki. They both had.

DeRicci had known him better. She had countless meetings with him since, as mayor, he was the head of Armstrong Dome. He’d often butted heads with the governor-general of the United Domes. He believed the mayors should have more power regulating DeRicci, even though she worked for the United Domes.

DeRicci couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the word “dead” combined with “Soseki.” Arek was a dynamic man, not the kind who keeled over in early middle age.

“What happened?” DeRicci asked softly. She’d had her external links off, leaving only the emergency links and the contact information for people who worked with her directly.

Popova wiped the bottom of her left eye. A tear. Even the great Popova—the calmest woman on the Moon—had emotions.

DeRicci felt faintly surprised at that.

“They don’t know,” Popova said. “He seemed fine, and then he froze and collapsed. His last physical came out fine. He had no health problems, nothing that would have caused this. They’re wondering if it was murder.”

“Wondering,” DeRicci repeated. “It would be nice to know.”

Because if it was murder, she had an entire set of protocols she had to follow. If it was just a death (
just
a death; what a thought), she had another.

She had to be able to function right now. She didn’t have the luxury of tears.

“I’ll find out if he died of natural causes, sir,” Popova said, wiping at the other eye as if it annoyed her.

DeRicci wondered why Popova was so broken up about the mayor. She’d been through other high-profile deaths before.

“Who is investigating this thing?” DeRicci asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” Popova said.

“I want some answers, Rudra, right now. I want the place where he died blocked off immediately—the wider the perimeter the better. I want one of our investigators down there—the best one we have—and I want someone from the police department, someone good, there as well.”

“Detective Nyquist?” Popova asked.

DeRicci stiffened. Everyone knew she and Nyquist were involved, but she tried to keep that part of her life personal.

“I don’t tell the police department how to run their business,” she said. “Except for this. They better have the best investigator in charge of this thing, and by best, I mean someone who can close cases
and
someone considered incorruptible. If this is murder, then we have to plan not just for an arrest, but for a conviction.”

“And if it’s not murder?” Popova asked softly.

“That’s not a concern at the moment,” DeRicci said, knowing she sounded cold. “We’re going to proceed as if it is. Get some medical examiner down there too. We need answers as fast as we can.”

“Already done, sir,” Popova said.

DeRicci didn’t doubt that. Popova had a great ability to multitask. She had probably been sending messages through her links as DeRicci spoke. Back when DeRicci first got this job and she discovered that Popova was going to be her assistant, it irritated her that Popova could do more than one thing at a time. DeRicci didn’t entirely believe it; she felt like people who multitasked the way Popova did were less competent.

But Popova was more competent because of her work method, and DeRicci now relied on it, even if she didn’t understand it.

“I assume there’s some kind of audio or visual footage,” DeRicci said. “I want that immediately. I want eyes and ears on this case right now.”

Popova nodded, then hovered. Popova never hovered. That was odd, too.

“Thank you, Rudra,” DeRicci said. “Now give me a minute.”

“Yes, sir,” Popova said, and walked out of the room. Just from her tone, DeRicci could tell Popova thought DeRicci was going to take a private moment to mourn.

But she wasn’t. As shocked as she was, she was also calm. She hadn’t really liked Soseki, although she worked with him. She never felt like she knew the man, just the politician.

She sighed, got up, and walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Armstrong, and curving in the distance, the Dome. From this vantage, nothing looked different. But on the ground, she knew, everything was about to change.

She knew how things changed in an instant. She’d been through it more than once. The worst time was four years ago today, when an unknown suicide bomber tried to destroy the Dome. The resulting blast ruined an entire section of the Dome and demolished a whole neighborhood.

She had been the chief investigator on that bombing. She had learned most of what happened—what kind of bomb it was, why it did the kind of damage it had, what it had destroyed. What she hadn’t learned—no one had—was who the bomber was, and why that person had tried to destroy the Dome.

Usually this view reminded her that not everything had an answer—and even without answers, the city went on. The people continued, life moved forward, and everyone could recover from catastrophic events.

She had no idea if Soseki’s death was a catastrophic event.

She would find out—and if it was, she would minimize the damage, just like she was paid to do.

Twelve

Bartholomew Nyquist sat at his desk in First Unit of the Armstrong Police Department’s Detective Division. Somehow he had managed to keep his office through all of his recent ups and downs. People still treated him as if he was fragile—hell, the
brass
still treated him as if he was fragile—and he’d been back on full duty for months now.

He felt different. Who wouldn’t, after being sliced to pieces and nearly killed by a Bixian assassin? Although he had no one to compare the experience with. He was one of the few people to ever survive a Bixian attack, and that, he believed, was because the assassins, who work in pairs, went after the man he was with first.

Not that that detail mattered. The survival mattered—survival because Nyquist fought back and won, not because he was rescued at the right moment. People should treat him like a victor. Instead, they treated him as if he were still in his hospital bed, about to die at any moment.

He sipped the completely stale coffee he’d set on the side of his desk. At least he wasn’t on limited duty anymore. He’d been working cases ever since he got back, and he no longer felt rusty. He felt useful, and embarrassingly grateful to be alive and working.

He had opted against all but the most basic enhancements after the attack. He had gotten rid of the worst of the scars, but he had left a few, not because he was anti-enhancement, as a few folks had accused him of, but because he wanted a visual reminder every time he looked in the mirror, a reminder that he felt different because he was different.

He was calmer now, less prone to anger, a bit more resigned. And willing to deal with his own death, where he never had been before.

The door to his office was only partly open. He had a shade over the window, even though he usually kept the shades up. It was Anniversary Day, and people were giving speeches, holding tributes, and having ceremonies all over the city.

He was supposed to get some plaque or medal or something in the neighborhood where he’d rescued Ursula Palmette, but he had declined. He’d gone the first year and felt horribly embarrassed; he’d just spent the previous day giving depositions in the Alvina Ingelow case, and they had gone badly. She’d had a good attorney. That case dragged on for another year, and Ingelow got lifetime detention in a cushy mental health facility instead of solitary confinement in one of the Moon’s harshest prisons like she deserved.

Part of the reason was him: he hadn’t collected evidence properly for the first (and only) time in his life. Of course he had an excuse, but the excuse didn’t trump hard evidence, which was then contaminated by the bombing. The jury “couldn’t be sure” that Ingelow murdered Sheel. Nor could a different jury “be sure” that Ingelow had caused Palmette’s injuries, although Nyquist knew she had.

He hadn’t witnessed the attack. He had just heard it. And when the building collapsed around them, Ingelow’s attorney argued, things in that horrible kitchen could have caused Palmette’s injuries.

Yeah, things in the kitchen could have caused the injuries—in a universe filled with magic, not science. But the juries wanted certainty—and they usually got it. They rarely had cases where things went so badly awry as they had here.

Besides, Ingelow was clearly nuts. At least the juries had believed, on some level, that she was homicidally nuts, which was why she was detained at all.

Nyquist leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hand over his face. He was staying in his office, finishing the details on half a dozen cases instead of working a new one, because he wanted to avoid Anniversary Day. Yet he was thinking about the damn bombing anyway.

There was no way to escape it. It was as if the entire city had some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Or, as Noelle DeRicci had said to him a few days ago, it was as if the city decided it had been unjustly hurt and wanted to play the victim.

He liked that about DeRicci: She had no more patience with victimhood than he did. He liked survivors, people who overcame their problems, not people who returned to those problems and blamed them each and every day for the tough things that life threw at them.

Which actually brought him back to Palmette. She had filed suit against the department because she couldn’t go back to detective work. She kept failing the psych evaluations.

Nyquist knew how tough those evaluations were; he had gone through them himself not too many months ago. As invasive as the evaluations felt, he understood the need for them. This job was tough, not just in the things a person saw, but in the choices he sometimes had to make. Choices that weren’t really right, but were what passed for justice in this strange town.

He hated some of the things he had to do for his job, but he did them. Because if he didn’t do those things, what good he did manage to do would get wiped away.

Compromise. It used to make him feel dirty. Now he understood how important it was.

Palmette hadn’t had time to learn that. Then she nearly died, and when she recovered, she had to go through two separate trials against the woman who nearly killed her. Palmette hadn’t had time to heal.

Plus, the rules mandated that anyone who failed three psych evaluations in a row had to wait a year to reapply for the job. So she had gotten some desk job that pretended to be investigative at Traffic. The nice thing about the job was that it paid as much as detective work. The tough thing was that it was a desk job.

Nyquist knew that as well because he had looked into those jobs when he was still healing. For months after the attack, it hurt to move, and he wasn’t sure he would ever be limber enough to get back onto the street.

But the doctors kept assuring him that his muscles would be repaired properly and that, with the enhancements, he would feel like a new man.

He did feel physically stronger, but he didn’t feel like a new man. He felt like the guy who had been sliced and diced, the guy who had nearly died, and who had come out of it all with a lot of scars and a new perspective.

A guy who still hated Anniversary Day.

Nyquist got up, grabbed his mug, and went to the small area off the hallway that passed for a kitchen. He poured out the coffee, then started a whole new batch.

It wouldn’t taste any better, but it would be fresher. Besides, it was something to do, something that might refocus him, something that would get him thinking about the future instead of the past.

The past had hurt him and left him scarred. The future still held possibilities.

If only he could figure out what they were.

Thirteen

Detective Savita Romey crouched next to Mayor Soseki’s corpse. How anyone could have mistaken this death for a natural one was beyond her. She knew that his aides didn’t want to cause a panic, but their caution had already slowed down an important part of the investigation.

The man was gray. Steel metal gray, the kind you could see in the Museum of the City of Armstrong on the old ships originally flown to the Moon hundreds of years ago. Uneven gray—darker on his left side, and getting lighter across his face, until there was no gray at all on his right side.

None.

She had no idea what this was, but she’d bet her entire career on the fact that it was intentional.

“I need vids,” she said to one of the on-scene officers. “And we need to canvas. I want to interview everyone who was in the area when this happened.”