Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) (17 page)

‘Yeah,’ Dillan added, sounding similarly resigned, ‘welcome to New York Metro where your neighbour can have her brains blown out with an explosive bullet, but you didn’t hear a thing.’

‘No one even suggested they’d heard someone dropping something, or a party popper going off. And I don’t think the soundproofing in that place is that good.’

Fox nodded. ‘I wasn’t really expecting much, but… Well, Kit, let’s have the list of possible stalkers.’

Smiling, Kit turned and threw, with gestures, a list of names up onto the window display area. ‘I have seventeen identities who have sent messages to Miss Adamshi which I classified as potentially threatening. Several of these are, however, from people who live in remote locations. I have left them on the list for now and I am attempting to verify that they have not been in this area within the last twenty-four hours.’

‘Okay, put those aside for now. What do we have left?’

A lot of names faded into the background. ‘These six people live close enough to this precinct area that they could have attended Miss Adamshi’s concerts previously, and are obviously well within travel range of her apartment block. I accessed some material on typical behaviour for the obsessive and dangerous fan, and I have been attempting to analyse the progression of messages from each individual. I would appreciate your input, however.’

‘Okay, we’ll start at the top and work down.’

‘Ah, the top one is actually a special case. This identity, ‘Buckyball,’ back-traces to a man named Donovan Bucksbridge. He sent one mail to Miss Adamshi suggesting that she was “typical of the sell-outs who gave up their souls to corporations who cared nothing for…” I would imagine you’ve all heard this kind of thing before. His name is flagged on a NAPA watch list. It is thought that he may be involved with United Anarchy.’

Fox looked up at the photographs Kit was displaying, clearly taken from an arrest record. Bucksbridge looked like an overfed rat with a beer gut, a hooked nose, and small, dark eyes. ‘He’s got a record as well?’

‘Minor stuff. Receiving stolen goods, small-scale hacking attempts.’

‘He doesn’t fit the profile, but get a watch out for him. If we can locate him, we’ll pick him up and grill him.’

‘You sure
that’s
worth the effort?’ Sandoval asked, looking at the screen with disgust. ‘I mean, he doesn’t look like he’s worth the hassle of bringing him in for questioning.’

Fox shrugged. ‘At this point we’re short on leads and the captain isn’t going to let three of us work on this for long. We go with everything we can find until something shakes out. Kit, let’s have the first batch of messages from the others.’

~~~

‘So what’s the story with you and Sandoval?’ Fox asked as she poured two glasses of wine.

They had been at it for hours, going over the text of the messages and trying to determine whether any of the people sending them represented a significant threat. They had decided that two were worth interviewing, at which point Sandoval had made a comment about needing to see one of his informants and rushed off leaving Fox and Dillan alone. Alone aside from Kit anyway.

Dillan seemed to relax a little with the big man gone, which was what had prompted the question. ‘Oh… We were…’ Dillan stopped and apparently rethought her words, her mouth scrunching up as she considered. ‘Dating is the wrong word. We engaged in various intimate activities for a couple of weeks last year. Though “intimate” isn’t quite right either. I’m not sure he does intimacy. The sex was good though and I needed the stress relief. I was working the Doran case then. Sandoval took my mind off it.’

‘You took down Doran. Yeah, I remember that one. Serial. Didn’t he go for insanity when you finally caught him?’

‘Claimed a demon had possessed him and forced him to kill. He’s in psycho lock-up. They decided he
was
insane and I don’t think he was faking it for the easy sentence. That guy shouldn’t have been out in society.’

‘Testing doesn’t catch all the nuts. You seem a little more uptight around Sandoval than your description of the relationship suggests.’ Fox handed the other woman her wine and sat down, settling back against the couch and doing her best to relax. Her back was stiff from sitting there glaring at personality profiles and emails.

‘I…’ Dillan shrugged. ‘I don’t know exactly but something about him just didn’t sit right after knowing him for a couple of weeks. Almost three. Eighteen days I think we were meeting up after our shifts and… It’s not like I ever heard or saw anything, y’know? I just…’ Another shrug.

‘He’s ex-private security, right?’

‘Wayden Executive Services. He said he was based in the old Texas area, handling corporate security for a couple of sites down there. Then there was the Dallas thing… uh…’ Dillan looked across at her hostess, colour showing in her cheeks. ‘I guess you know about that.’

‘Yeah. I’m aware of the incident.’

‘That, uh, had to be Hell. I mean, you succeeded against pretty bad odds, but…’

‘Mmm, yeah… I don’t really think of it as a successful mission. I lost four friends and a lover, and three other people who were under my command–’

‘From what I heard, sir, they
weren’t
under your command. You were forced to take a last-minute change of procedure, they pushed a new commanding officer on you and he fucked up. That’s why you resigned from the UNTPP.’

Fox took a pull on her glass of wine. ‘Marshall lasted about ten minutes. I never really worked out what the Hell was going on with him. He looked… surprised when he got shot. To this day I’m not sure whether he was incompetent or corrupt. He led us right into an ambush. Six died there, including Marshall and Pieter. I’d been seeing Pieter for about three months at that point. He was hit in the throat, died instantly. I was too busy surviving to worry about mourning him.’

‘Shit.’ The word came out as a breath more than a real word, but Fox heard it.

‘Yeah… I lost another one before we could stop the bleeding. The rest… We were outnumbered, but we were better than them. I should’ve been able to save more of them.’

‘You got out, with Teresa Martins, and none of them did. And they didn’t get what they wanted.’

‘Huh, no. That was partially because Jackson’s security protocols locked down their entire computer and communications system as soon as the site’s AI detected the problem. NIX and NAPA both told Jackson that the only way he was getting his daughter out alive was to unlock the data. They assured him that the UA cell responsible would be rounded up before they could get away. He said that
nothing
would persuade him to allow UA to get their hands on what was being researched in Dallas.’

Dillan’s face looked the way Fox expected it to. Anyone who heard the story first hand, without the filters that had been put in by the MarTech PR people, looked shocked, or horrified. ‘He was willing to let his daughter die–’

‘Terri agreed with him, but she also had faith in him getting her out somehow. He turned to the UNTPP and they sent me in.’ Fox gritted her teeth. She had never managed to get over the anger and talking about it always brought it out. ‘And I killed every last one of those rat-motherfuckers.’ Her jaw relaxed as the anger seeped away, because they
were
all dead and she could not go back and kill them again, even if she wanted to. ‘Jackson and Terri keep giving me “products to test.” When I came to in the hospital, Jackson was there and he asked me what he could do to repay me for getting his daughter back. I asked him for a gun that doesn’t jam, so he built me a working Gauss pistol. Electromagnetic feed and launch systems, all computer controlled. It’s like a tiny version of the rail guns they use on spaceships and tanks, but with a far higher rate of fire. And it doesn’t jam.’

‘It still hurts then?’

‘Yeah, it still hurts. So now you have to keep me company while I get drunk.’

Dillan barked out a laugh. ‘Oh really?’

‘Yeah, really. Besides, in the morning it’s a shorter trip into HQ for the interviews.’

‘True.’ The younger detective tipped her glass to Fox. ‘Okay, here’s to getting drunk and forgetting.’

Fox raised her own glass and drank, but she said nothing. Some things refused to be forgotten: all you could do was submerge them for a while.

25
^th
January.

Fox slid the shower cubicle’s door open and looked out at the bleary-eyed form of Dillan sitting up in bed. The strawberry-blonde rubbed at her eyes and licked her lips, and appeared to be trying to work out where she was. Fox grinned and headed for the drawer where she kept a supply of new bodysuits.

‘Hey,’ Dillan said after a second. She was wearing only a pair of plazkin boy-shorts and had not thought to cover herself yet, which probably meant she was still half-asleep or had no issue with another woman seeing her breasts. ‘Um… Did we…?’

Fox laughed. ‘No. You were way too far gone after the sixth glass. Getting you out of your clothes was not easy, let me tell you.’

‘Oh, right. That explains the headache and the pants, I guess.’

‘Uh-huh. Painaway on the table beside you. Uniform have pulled in our two suspects, so we need to get moving.’

‘Right… Pill, shower, and then we can head out.’ She got out of the bed and started for the shower, ignoring the pills as she struggled to coordinate taking her panties off.

‘Dillan?’

‘Uh, yeah?’

‘Thanks for staying. It did help.’

‘Well, I brought Dallas up. Least I could do was get slammed with you. And suffer the consequences.’

‘Thanks anyway. I’ll go make coffee.’

‘Oh God… You are a goddess!’

Fox shrugged as she headed into the lounge. Goddess might be a little strong, but she did have good coffee.

~~~

‘Good night?’ Sandoval asked as he spotted Fox and Dillan walking toward him.

‘Good enough,’ Fox replied. She noticed his eyes flicking over Dillan: the man was noting that her outfit had not changed and putting two and two together to make sixty-nine. Fox pretty much always wore the same basic outfit to work, so that was hardly a clue, but he was seeing it as such. ‘What do we have?’

‘Two guys who look like they should’ve cut back on the steroids a
long
time ago.’ He turned, tapping a door control to gain access to the interview suite’s observation room.

This suite was configured for multiple interviewees: three of the walls consisted of displays showing a blank, white room, though only two of those were occupied. The advantage of modern interview rooms was that the passive EM sensors in all the walls allowed observers to view proceedings from any angle, and in extended visual wavelengths if required.

Sandoval seemed to be right about the men they had selected from the mail traffic. Both were big, heavily muscled men who were sitting at the interview room tables looking irritated rather than nervous. Increased aggression was a common issue with neosteroid abuse. One of them looked like he had had additional muscle grafted in on top of the steroidal-enhanced growth.

Fox sucked her teeth. ‘Well, they look strong enough to be our killer. No one goes in alone, and I want uniforms with stun batons ready outside. Those two do
not
look stable.’

~~~

‘Mister Greyling,’ Fox began, looking across the desk at the bulked-up thug sitting opposite her.

‘Shug,’ the thug responded. ‘Name’s Shug. Last person to call me “Mister Greyling” was… uh, anyway, it’s Shug.’

Fox watched as messages scrolled through her vision field from Sandoval, in the room with her, and Dillan, who was working the observation room.

Sandoval: He’s not just on neosteroids.

Dillan: That’s Titan or one of the derivatives.

Sandoval: Shit! Careful with this asshole.

‘Shug,’ Fox went on, ‘you sent a series of electronic messages to Brianne Adamshi. Two emails, three LifeWeb personal messages, a series of voice messages to her personal account.’

‘Yeah. So?’

‘You refer to her as a “sell-out.” You suggest that she should provide free music to “her fans what gave her a start with that big fucking moneybag corp” and then you go on to suggest that she will get nowhere without her “real fans.” I’m assuming that you are one of those real fans?’

‘I went to see her in clubs when she was nothin’ but a kid makin’ bread-money where she could. I deserved to get… I mean, her fans deserved to get something for stickin’ with her and getting’ her where she was, but she dumped us. Stopped doing gigs unless that fuckin’ corp said she could.’

Sandoval: Notice that slip?

‘It’s standard procedure,’ Sandoval said. ‘ATW needed to protect their investment.’

‘What about
my
investment?’

Dillan: Definitely views this as personal.

‘Did you ever actually talk to her?’ Sandoval asked. ‘I mean, face-to-face.’

Dillan: His heart rate just spiked
.

‘I… No.’

‘Are you sure, Shug?’ Fox asked, her lips curling into a reassuring smile. ‘Maybe after a gig? Maybe just a quick chat? Maybe you waited for her backstage and spoke to her then. You did mention meeting her once in one of your messages.’

‘Oh, uh… yeah. Well, there was once, but there wasn’t much to it.’

‘Really, because you said, “I loved you an’ you didn’ even see me,” with three exclamation marks.’

Dillan: Pulse is rising.

‘Sounds like you fancied her and she rejected you,’ Sandoval said.

Dillan: Shit!

Shug lurched forward at a speed belying his size and grabbed the front of Sandoval’s jacket, yanking him over the table in one, smooth move. ‘She didn’t reject me, prick! She–’ He stopped with a yelp as Fox’s knuckles smacked into his right ear, and his grip on Sandoval released.

Fox stood, her chair clattering backwards as she moved around the table toward Shug. Letting out a howl, he pushed his own chair back and started to rise, and that was when Fox kicked him right between the legs. He stopped, eyes bulging, and then collapsed backwards, unbalancing the chair and ending up sprawled on the floor of the interview room clutching his groin. The door of the room opened and two uniformed men with stun batons burst in.