Read Rule 34 Online

Authors: Charles Stross

Rule 34 (32 page)

BOOK: Rule 34
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Right now he’s a bit of a mess: not quite a blubbery mass, but obviously very upset. And he’s beginning to push you for details. “I don’t understand. What has happened to my cousin? Why are you here? Who did it?
What
did they do? Have you arrested anyone?”
“I don’t know,” you tell him, honestly enough. It’s not as if you can give him information that might compromise an ongoing investigation, but even if that was not the case, the scene upstairs is more than slightly mad. “Listen, I’m going to check with my colleagues. I don’t want to say anything until I know what I’m allowed to say, but I’ll be right back. Drink your tea—I won’t be five minutes.”
You rise and step out into the hall, pull the door closed, and nod at the PC on duty, who steps sideways to cover the door.
You go upstairs. Kemal is standing on the landing outside the bathroom—
why
is it the fucking bathroom again?—airboarding notes. He shakes his head when he sees you. “You’ve seen it. What do you think?” you ask him.
Behind his Eurocop-standard specs, Kemal’s eyes are tired. “Was the Blair murder scene like this?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Haven’t examined this one yet.” But you’ve got a good idea what to expect. Otherwise, why the IM asking you to ask Mr. Hussein about domestic appliances?
You knock on the bathroom door, ignoring the yellow warning icons buzzing around it like angry hornets. “Hello inside?”
The door doesn’t open, but a chat window drops front and centre.
SGT MADDOX, SOC: WHATSUP?
“Sitrep,” you call.
You hear a muffled voice: “Just a mo.” Then a huge and grisly multimedia dump with about six gigabytes of metadata hanging off it drops across your view like a luminous crime-fighting jellyfish. In the middle there’s a doorway-framed view of the bathroom. You zoom on it: It’s live; someone’s had the good taste to hang a webcam from the hook on the back of the door, so you’ve got the equivalent of X-ray specs.
Your view is partially obstructed by Maddox and her co-workers, who are dancing the dance of the forensic bunnymen within a much smaller stage than that afforded by the bad-taste palace of the late Michael Blair—but the focus of their attention is broadly similar. No dead Warsaw Pact dictator’s colonic irrigation machine here, just a vacant-eyed skinny guy slumped half-out of the bath . . . but what in James Dyson’s name is the vacuum bot doing?
You don’t have one of the things—your wee flat’s too small to need it—but you get the picture: It’s supposed to bumble around the house sucking on the rugs and scaring the cat, periodically retreating to its wall wart to recharge and hork up a cricket-ball-sized sphere of compacted fluff and household dirt. This is an upmarket jobbie, with two sets of wheels so it can walk up stairs and a couple of extension hoses so it can stick its knobbly nose into crevices where the sun don’t shine. It features an especially big battery—which is currently one hundred–per cent discharged, having shorted out through the bathwater in which the very dead Tariq is marinating.
There’s a big evidence bag laid out beside the robot. And you don’t need to be a technical genius to figure that cracking this case hinges on fingering whoever fitted a live wire down its snout and programmed it to go drinkies while Tariq was in the tub.
If someone’s tampering with domestic appliances with murder in mind, the blogosphere is going to have a cow and a half. But that’s the least of your worries right now.
You turn to Kemal. “You got that?” you ask redundantly.
“Was the other case like this?” he repeats.
“A bit.” Shit, who are you trying to kid? You surrender to the inevitable and place the call. “Chief Inspector?”
Dodgy Dickie grunts. “What’s up?”
“I’m afraid we’ve definitely got another one.” You’re registered on scene here, so you can add him to the access list. “Moderately bent business man in Bruntsfield, dead in the bathtub where his vacuum cleaner decided to electrocute him. I’ve got his cousin downstairs—former client of mine, not currently under suspicion—sweating bullets and trying not to incriminate the deceased. The MO is a dead ringer for Babylon.” That the deceased was in the loop on repairing broken appliances—see also: back-street fabbers—you leave for later. It’s certainly a suggestive avenue for enquiries.
Mac’s initial response is unprintable. Then, “Hold the fort, I’ll be reet round. This client of yours—dinna let him leave.” He hangs up immediately, and his contact status, hanging in the corner of your vision, changes to mobile.
Dickie is showing worrying signs of succumbing to hands-on mode, the besetting cognitive error of any senior officer confronted by too much data—the illusion that if they just take hands-on control in the field, they can make everything come up roses. It leads to brigadiers focussing on a single infantry squad, and chief inspectors interviewing suspects instead of concentrating on running the hundred-headed murder team. (And, of course, if you try to point this out to him . . . just don’t go there.)
You hot-shoe it downstairs and back to the living room, which is becoming hard to get to—the hall is filling up with uniforms, stomping on each other’s German-Army-surplus paratroop boots and trying to make themselves useful. You really want an opportunity to get Kemal alone and pump him, or failing that, to get Mr. Hussein to spill the beans on his cousin (assuming there are any beans to spill). But once Dickie arrives . . .
“Anwar.”
He’s sitting in the armchair, shoulders slumped beneath the weight of an invisible storm-cloud. And he looks
guilty
, which will never do.
“In a few minutes, my boss on this investigation is going to arrive. He’ll want to ask you a few questions.”
Dickie is very old-school, inclined to go off like a shaped charge in the direction of the first plausible suspect who comes to his attention. This is not unreasonable: 90 per cent of the time, it’s the right thing to do in an investigation, because 90 per cent of the time, the first plausible suspect is the right one. But you will eat your warrant card if Anwar is smart enough to arrange a scene like the one in the bathroom upstairs—much less to have orchestrated Mikey Blair’s demise.
In the absence of a better target, Dickie’s nostrils will start twitching in exactly the wrong direction, and he’ll get all distracted and focussed on the nearest Saughton graduate because it’s easier than acknowledging how non-linear this investigation is going. And you don’t want him to do that because, despite the ongoing bad blood between you, you are horribly aware that there’s a repeat killer at large, and it would really suck if Dickie got hung up on Anwar, leaving the killer free to strike again.
“I am not officially cautioning you, and you are not under arrest, my friend. But it would be
really helpful
if you could tell me anything you know about any criminal activities your cousin was engaged in.”
The slumped shoulders rise infinitesimally, then fall again.
Oh, it’s like that, is it?
You take your glasses off and, very deliberately, slide them into your pocket. “Anwar.” You pause. (What you’re about to say
might
break your career, if it comes out in the wash. If you’ve got any career left to break, that is.) “This is a murder investigation. Intelligence goes
in
, it doesn’t come
out
. As long as you don’t cough to any arrestable offences, we have no reason to lay a finger on you. And I can guarantee that anything you say that isn’t a confession about an arrestable offence won’t reach your probation officer’s ears if that’s what you’re worried about. Maintaining security on a murder investigation is much more important to us than telling your social worker whether you’ve been saying your prayers before bed. So I’m going to ask you again: Do you know anything that
we
should know, to help us find your cousin’s killer?”
You put your glasses back on. And while your head’s bowed, and you’re looking elsewhere, Anwar opens up.
 
Two hours later you’re missing your lunch break for the sake of clogging up the meatspace incident room, laying it on the line for the peanut gallery.
“Here’s our Anwar Hussein. On probation, done time for identity theft and fraud—not very smart. He’s a foot-soldier, not a general: retired foot-soldier at that, or so he says. He gets a call from his wife, who got it from the first bystander, Mrs. Begum, to go visit Mrs. Begum and her son, the victim. He arrived on the scene after our first responder and Sergeant MacBride. Because he’s on release, we have his probationware record, and I can confirm that he’s been nowhere near the scene of crime for two days. Subject to confirmation by municipal CCTV, but it really doesn’t look like he did it.
“
However.
Our Anwar is a bit of a wide boy, and his first reaction was to clam up. I was eventually able to determine that he’s got a guilty conscience over some work the victim had asked him to do. There might be an issue of possible violation of probation terms here, but Mr. Hussein is eager to assure us that he hadn’t actually got round to doing anything illegal as yet.”
There is much rolling of eyes from the peanut gallery at this point, which you deliver with ironic lack of emphasis—
I didn’a
mean
to put me hand through tha winda an’ take tha wallet, it just sort of
happened—so you feel the need to clear your throat. “He coughed to it voluntarily, and more to the point, he handed over the material which he claims his cousin Tariq gave him to work on, along with the device. It’s downstairs in Forensics being imaged right now. If he hasn’t touched it, then it may give us some insight into the murderer’s motivation.”
Assuming there
is
a murderer,
something in the back of your mind nudges. Because if you were wrong about there being no such thing as an artificial intelligence, things could get
really
embarrassing, couldn’t they?
DCI MacLeish—for he is back from the Hussein residence—gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What sort of business was Mr. Hussein involved in, do you know?”
You stare right back at him: “I arrested him three years ago in the course of an ongoing investigation into an identity-fraud ring. He coughed to a variety of charges, including spear phishing, ownership of stolen authentication credentials, unauthorized access to personal account details, and Internet-banking fraud. Came to court, entered a guilty plea, two years in Saughton, cut on appeal to one plus one.
Interestingly
, Anwar was the only body we bagged on that case; I’m certain he wasn’t working alone, but you know how these Internet cases are.” You tap your forehead.
Dickie’s eyebrows waggle, then he nods deeply, satisfied. (There is stuff you can say and stuff you can’t say on the record—and
everything
that’s said anywhere in a police station is recorded under rules of evidence these days—but waggling eyebrows and forehead tapping don’t show up in the automatic speech-to-text transcripts. What you just sent via monkeyspace, bypassing CopSpace entirely, is that you know stuff but you don’t want to contaminate the investigation by introducing hearsay or out-of-band intelligence. And Dickie, for once, agrees with you: He doesn’t want you screwing up his investigation either.)
“Three victims so far,” he rumbles. “Inspector Aslan, you have some input?”
Kemal is fidgeting with his glasses. “We have two more,” he says diffidently. “One in Sofia, one in Trieste. That’s all in the past hour. Bringing the running total to eleven.”
Dickie looks simultaneously aghast and almost, in an odd way, hopeful: It’s a clusterfuck, but it’s not
his
clusterfuck, he’s merely holding up a small corner, a few fragments of fatal fuckuppery. “Evidence.”
A uniform at the back sticks up her hand. “Got one on the Crolla case,” she offers.
“Go ahead.”
“The warrant trawl of the national network monitoring database flagged up some chat-room transcripts. They match input from an avatar associated with an IP address allocated to Vivian Crolla’s broadband connection. Assuming it’s her, she had an, um, vivid fantasy life.”
Ears prick up all round: Nothing gets your attention in a briefing like a drop of special sauce on the great and the good. (Hot sauce, even.)
“A number of enquiries about, uh, bondage practices involving plastic wrap and mattresses full of bank-notes.” Bless her, the freshfaced constable is looking even more rosy-cheeked than usual. “The aforementioned user posted a number of scenarios and, uh, there are some downloads, too. Stories centred on being immobilized and restrained while fully clothed, in proximity to large amounts of money. We’re currently trying to track down some chat-room contacts . . .”
BOOK: Rule 34
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