Many Words

I returned as Amber relayed the word from the information desk:

“…and the brokerage say their client is Heath, McKenzie, and Company, Limited. I’ve sent Harper to bring in Heath; I was of a mind to bring in McKenzie as well, but Lian says he’s our victim. He served as Director of Finance, while Heath is Director-in-Chief. Their company sells engine components to Brenner Propulsion.”

Carpenter whistled. I understood his point. The interstellar travel monopoly almost certainly paid its suppliers very generously. “Surely it can’t have been money troubles?” I said, setting three mugs for the table and keeping the last for myself.

Amber let hers sit. “I doubt if it was,” she said. “Information say that the public books are tidy. All the same, we’ll lean on Heath on that topic when we talk. Andrew, Watson, in the meantime, dig up a list of potentials for me.”

“Any word from the scene?” said Carpenter.

Amber shook her head. “Uniforms are knocking on doors in Sam’s building, but if they haven’t found the killer yet I don’t know that we’ll be able to keep the building sealed until they do.”

“He may have escaped,” Baker suggested.

“And dodged all the cameras, did he?” said Carpenter.

“I think,” I said, “that I lean toward Inspector Baker’s view.” All three detectives looked to me, an experience I have often had and never quite gotten used to. Nonplussed, I nevertheless forged ahead. “Consider: he brought his own weapon, of a sort not registered and tracked. He had already resolved to break the law when he left for the apartment, and he was not concerned about being caught along the way. This is a man—” Carpenter cleared his throat, and I corrected myself “—probably a man who planned his crime. It’s no great stretch to believe he may have planned his escape, too.”

“That’s something,” Carpenter said. “Come along, Watson, let’s have a go at some solid detective work based in the facts of Mr. McKenzie’s life, while the doctor and the leftenant,” he continued, through a smile, “play at head games.”

It was in good fun, I knew. Carpenter had seen my track record, and, gratifyingly, Amber tells me that, in the years since his promotion snatched him away from us, he has made a point of employing criminal psychologists on tough cases.

Carpenter and Baker set up at their desks, while Amber brought her things to the table. “Shall we dig into the life and times of our late Abbot McKenzie, then?”

“I can’t speak to the general case,” I replied, “but it does seem that many of the murder victims I have encountered personally have lived interesting lives.”

Her response was to shove a stack of soft copy in my direction, the inks flowing and taking shape on the pages as her terminal finished the download.

“McKenzie, Abbot Alexander,” I read aloud, summarizing as I skimmed the first page, “aged fifty-three. Educated in the Naval Arm Preparatory School and later the Officer Academy, served in cruisers as a gunnery officer of no great distinction until the invention of the Brenner drive. Left the service, enrolled in the University of Nexus, and emerged in 1224 with a doctorate in theoretical physics.”

“Seven years,” Amber said. “Smart chap.”

“Very well,” Amber said. She had been taking a look around. “Sam, does something about the place strike you as odd?”

Dutifully, I took in the living area. Something was indeed odd, but it was a moment before I could put my finger on it. It wasn’t something present, but something missing: no pictures of family, no notes or reminders, no debris in the kitchen. Even in my apartment, one could find a few hard-copy books and a reading tablet or two, but this one showed no signs of inhabitance by anyone except the Confederacy’s most boring bachelor. I said as much.

Amber said, “That was my thought. Corporate, perhaps?”

It was not unheard of for companies with major offworld concerns to maintain housings for their offworld contacts. “A possibility,” I agreed.

She nodded, and I waited while she proceeded to poke around. I could see nothing that would give me any greater insight into the victim or the killer; it was, then, a relief when Amber decided it was time to move to the station.

That name hardly did it credit. One Port Authority Plaza housed Station Upside, and it easily surpassed my building in height, coming to some hundred and ten stories. That was enough for it to rise over its immediate neighbors, though it was dwarfed in turn by the domescrapers uptown. It housed five digits’ worth of the Port Authority’s finest, both investigators and police, plus detention cells, several morgues, a motor pool, and, because some stereotypes have a greater basis in fact than others, some of the finest pastry carts in the city. There was a Two Port Authority Place, and Amber had worked there before her promotion, but Violent Crimes for Central District was a headline assignment, and so rather than Number Two’s cozy surrounds, we made for Number One’s imposing onyx facade.

Inside, it lost some of its harshness. Violent Crimes was the smallest of Central District’s major divisions, occupying the seventy-first through seventy-third floors. Amber’s Investigative Unit called 72 home. Stepping from the elevator, I could see all the way to the floor-to-ceiling exterior windows (tinted dark, of course; the architect could hardly have his building looking like anything but a single block of obsidian). Left and right along the building core were conference rooms and offices. More of them were placed in little clusters at each corner of the floor. The rest of the space was open, and the desks, lightboards, tables, and partitions that filled it were uniformly wheeled. The theft and retaking of chairs and partitions had some time ago ceased to be an office tradition; it was now something approaching an official sport.

Amber’s Investigative Unit 6 owned enough chairs to populate all eight desks, with a few left over around the table by the three lightboards. Partitions which reached halfway to the high ceiling shut it off almost entirely from the rest of the floor. The lightboards showed details of a few other cases. Baker and Carpenter cleared them, and Amber checked her desk comm for messages. I left my things at the table and went to fetch coffee.

The doors opened, and a uniform pointed us down the hall. I followed a half-step behind Amber. She looked to be deep in thought, so I didn’t disturb her. I could hardly blame her, even after five years. My brand of sleuthing wasn’t, precisely speaking, discredited, but criminal profiling had certainly fallen out of favor as Nexus had grown into a modern data state. The ordinary crime presented such a cornucopia of evidence to the trained eye that psychological methods, by their very nature less absolutely reliable, had grown less important. This presented the Investigative Arm with a problem when faced with more unusual cases, and it was a gap in experience I was more than willing to fill.

Inspector-Sublieutenant Andrew Carpenter met us at the door into the apartment. He was my go-to mental image of the burly Caledonian archetype, red-haired and heavyset. He spoke with a controlled burr and a wide smile. “Dr. Hill. It’s always a pleasure to be working with you.”

He shook my hand with bone-snapping force. “Inspector,” I said. “It does seem that we always meet under the most unfortunate of circumstances.”

He laughed bellowingly and waved us in. “We earn our happy endings,” he said. “If you and the lieutenant will permit me to give you the tour…”

The apartment was nearly a mirrored copy of mine. The entry led into a hallway, the bedroom and bathroom behind doors to the left and the living spaces through broad arches to the right. At the far end—that is, on the outside wall of the building—the living room ended in a sliding glass door, beyond which was the balcony. The door stood open.

Crime scene technicians bustled about under the watchful eye of one of Technician-Lieutenant Lian Li, one of Amber’s subordinates. She had only been attached to Amber’s unit for a few months, so I’d had little time to acquaint myself with her. She waved to Amber, but let Carpenter reveal her findings.

“We found flash residue by the door,” he said. “Lab results aren’t back yet, but Ms. Li thinks we have a shooter just outside the apartment, shooting to the balcony through yon arch.”

“Inspector!” someone called. I turned, as did Amber. Watson Baker was the speaker; he stood by the shrubs in front of my building.

“Let me know of any developments,” Amber said, and Underwood nodded. Amber trotted across the street, and I followed at a brisk walk.

Watson Baker was the junior of the inspectors under Amber’s command, and besides that, he was perhaps the most quintessential example of the stereotypical citizen of Nexus ever to walk the city’s streets. Amber had a Nexus accent in the same way that I did a Basis one: each of us occasionally found the other’s phonetics amusing, and she was happy to replace ‘elevator’ with ‘lift’. Baker had the sort of accent prone to inserting what it would call haitches before ‘w’s; it would scream refinement screaming weren’t crass. The man oozed class. He had been educated by the Naval Arm before electing not to go into the service, which said something about the degree of wealth in the Baker family. Notably, he wore a moustache that put me in mind of a walrus.

He held up an evidence bag containing a pistol. I was unfamiliar with the design, but it was scuffed and dented in a way I took to mean it had fallen from the same window as our unfortunate victim. Amber took the bag and turned it over in her hands. “A cartridge revolver?” she said. “How delightfully old-fashioned.”

Baker’s moustache quivered as he spoke. “A break-top reproduction antique, in fact. Even if it had a serial number,” he said, presumably for my benefit, “it wouldn’t be registered.”

Amber passed it back. “Put the word out that we need an expert. How many of these can there be?” Baker nodded. “Have you heard from Andrew?”

“He went straight to the scene upstairs,” Baker replied. “Seventy-fourth floor.”

Amber brushed aside the questions from concerned residents, and the more persistent questions from the first few reporters to arrive on the scene. We crossed the lobby, and the elevator doors cut off those parties concerned enough to follow us. Amber watched the numbers tick up toward 74. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I hardly have enough to work on,” I replied. “The timing and the weapon speak to premeditation. If that’s so, our suspect willbe an associate of our victim, probably a close friend. Someone who jumps from buildings in a parachute may have other criminal connections, but I would lean toward a more reputable-seeming friend, given the setting. The doorman doesn’t let just anyone in.”

“I would have thought crime of passion,” Amber said.

I lifted my shoulders and let them fall. “They aren’t necessarily exclusive. A man comes to confront a friend who has betrayed him, they exchange words, a shot is fired. We have little besides speculation at the moment. An identity for the victim and the scene of the crime will both tell us more.”