Parrino said nothing during the short hop from Bethnal Green to Chelsea. He was sure he had the case closed. Ducard had to be the one who killed Halferne and Galloway. Serah had passed every verbal test he’d given her. Her story, while completely beyond the pale, didn’t contradict any of the facts he had or the theories he’d made. In fact, until Mak’s call, he was ready to file a report and celebrate with a well-deserved drink. Now, he wasn’t sure about any of it.
The longer the silence went, the more tense Serah seemed. He was reasonably certain she wasn’t involved – at least, he believed her when she said she didn’t think she was involved. He didn’t want to alarm her further by telling her he was keeping her close not just for her protection but as bait in the hopes that whoever was running Ducard and Soranus would show themselves in one last attempt to get to her. If not, then finding that mastermind was out of his jurisdiction and better left to Division 4, or more likely, Division 5 – assuming the corporatocracy thought it was a justifiable expenditure to see who wanted to murder a scientist thought dead for more than 20 years anyway.
He set the aircar on the roof of an upscale residential tower, and the two took the lift to the 87th floor. One room toward the end of the hall was marked off with digital indicators tracing lines of the floors, indicating an active crime scene, and instructing civilians to stay back unless accompanied by an officer.
Parrino grabbed Serah gently by the elbow and motioned her inside the apartment. It was possibly one of the nicest he’d ever seen, especially under these circumstances—tastefully decorated, immaculately clean, and amazingly spacious for the metroplex. It was very expensive and very luxurious. He noted fresh-cut flowers in vases placed strategically throughout the room and a terrace outside where more seemed to be growing.
Parrino walked them through the rest of the first floor and then up a narrow flight of stairs to the second – a sharp contrast to what had been seen below. This part of the apartment, obviously not intended to be seen by guests, was more utilitarian. A common area was surrounded by shelves containing various pieces of equipment he could not fathom the purpose of. Trophies, awards, and diplomas in different disciplines were scattered around the room. There were a few unremarkable pieces of art and sculpture he recognized as being from various countries worldwide. They were genuine but not particularly valuable — the kinds of trinkets you would find in a duty-free shop or street market, not collector’s items like the furnishings below. He watched Serah pace around the room, taking in everything as a reporter would. She stopped in the far corner of the room containing various holophotos and began studying them.
Parrino motioned a uniformed officer over and asked to see the case report in progress. He had only moments before facing Mak, who would not be pleased with his decision to bring Serah along. There wasn’t time during the call to explain his working theory about the Halferne murder or what he had learned from Serah. He’d foolishly hoped it would stay wrapped up long enough for him to close out officially. Now, he had to figure out how this scene and its events fit into his theory. He skimmed Mak’s in-progress notes, played a hunch, and made a quick cross-reference of the one detail Mak hadn’t checked yet, silently praying he was wrong.
He wasn’t.
He closed the file and walked over to Serah. The blood had drained from her face. She was holding one of the holophotos in her hands.
“Sergeant?” she said shakily, turning the frame so he could see it. It was a holophoto of her, holding an award of some kind. “This was a year ago, for my piece on the Emir of Persia.” Her voice was weak and shaky.
He tried his best to be understanding. “Come on. I need you in the other room.”
“Whose apartment is this?!” Serah demanded.
“Just come on,” Parrino said quietly, leading her into the next room.
The room was a bedroom, but instead of a bed, a large medical unit took up one wall of the room on which a human form lay covered by a sheet. In the corner, a humaniform drone, or slac, was docked at a charging station. Realtime telemetry displays and historical readouts hung in the air all over the room. Two officers were setting up scanning and recording equipment next to the bed while a familiar holo stood, arms crossed in the corner of the room, studying everything with his unique vision. He grimaced angrily as the two entered. “What the hell is she doing here?”
Parrino held up a hand, “She’s a reporter, Mak, she’s doing her job.”
“Bullshit,” Mak spat. “She’s not even carrying a datapad or recording device.”
“I don’t think that’s necessarily a requirement to be a reporter, Mak.”
“She’s a person of interest in a Division murder case. The one you were ordered off and the one you told me you would let go of.”
“Well, she also cropped up in an assault case I was assigned to, and thanks to her, I thought I’d wrapped both of them up until this.”
Mak snorted, “And if you’re wrong, you’ve shot a Division 4 officer and absconded with his prime suspect.”
“I didn’t abscond with her. I brought her here. Tell me you’re not going to want to question her. Tell me this case isn’t directly related to the Halferne and Galloway murders.” Parrino paused for a moment.
Mak stared at him expressionless, trying to determine if he was bluffing.
“What?” he continued, “You mean you haven’t figured it out yet? Maybe there’s a benefit to breaking procedure and poking your nose around in cases that aren’t yours after all,” Parrino said.
Mak calmed his voice and tried to diffuse the situation. “What are you talking about?”
“Give us the room, please,” Parrino said to the other two officers, who looked at each other and made a hasty exit.
Parrino regarded Serah as if sizing up her mental state. She looked to be on the verge of a breakdown, but he had no choice. It could still be a remote coincidence, but she could confirm it instantly. “I’m sorry you had to see this, but it’s important.” He slowly pulled the sheet back from the corpse, revealing an elderly woman, easily well over a century old. She had a standard data jack plugged into the latest generation of Phrame interfaces. A series of wires and connectors hooked her other machinery all over the room, which had, until recently, been keeping her essential autonomic functions working. Her face was a twisted expression of surprise and horror. A kitchen knife protruded from her larynx.
“We’ve received an automated alarm from the home network along with a copy of the security logs. Someone sliced in a couple of hours ago and programmed her slac over in the corner to do this.” He pointed to the drone sitting on the charging station. “Do you recognize her?” Parrino asked, apparently already knowing the answer before Serah did.
Serah studied the woman for a moment before recognition dawned on her. “Flo!”
That was not the answer he was expecting. Parrino pulled up his hasty background check again and scanned it. “Flo Ridamann, you’re right,” he said, pointing to one entry in a list of aliases. “Real name: Wendi Sparks. AKA: Johnny Sunshine, Crystal Beaucephalis, Sun Chi Kwok, Tora Bennett, Indri Akhtar, and…” He paused, hoping to cushion the blow. “Erik Walker.”
“Erik!?” Serah gasped.
“Of the Neward and Provident News Agency,” Parrino explained to Mak. “I’m guessing he’s her friend who uncovered the identity of Abil Halferne and the only person who knew as much as Miss Wyles here about what was going on.”
Serah, now weeping uncontrollably, nodded in confirmation.
Mak said nothing but studied the rest of the biographical information in silence.
“Sorry I skipped ahead on you, Mak, but if this is our case now, then she is our case now. In fact, it looks like everything has been our case all along. Ducard was working off the books. He falsified the jurisdictional transfer and confirmation. His partner confirmed this much. I’m guessing Nine Stones will have surveillance video of him planting the murder weapon on Miss Wyles to cover up the fact that he killed Halferne and Galloway. We now have the weapon and should be able to pick his DNA off of the ammo cartridge.”
Mak nodded. “All right, so why are you here? Why not take her back to HQ and close everything out.”
This was the part he was dreading. The ask that he hated to make of his partner. “Because, based on that timestamp, the service drone was hacked while Ducard was lying dead on Miss Wyles’ floor, and she was unconscious in bed. There’s someone else out there.”
Mak flinched for the first time.
Parrino continued. “Someone wants this woman dead, and everyone she comes in contact with is being systematically eliminated. We’re way behind here. We don’t have time to wait for jurisdictional nonsense to get cleared up and the case to get assigned back to us officially. We’ve got to get the upper hand fast.”
“That’s all the more reason to get her back to HQ and into protective custody, where she’ll be safe.”
“Protective custody?! We’re talking about someone who can bypass an expert slicer’s home base security, crack Division’s network, and create a fake jurisdictional transfer. How safe do you think she will be at HQ while we sit around and wait for the bureaucrats to make things official? We need to do police work, and I need my partner.”
“David, even if I believed you had all the evidence and had all this figured out, the fact remains you shot and killed a suspect two hours ago. You realize standard procedure is for you to be placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation.”
Parrino was quickly losing his cool. He knew as soon as he did, any chance of getting his partner on his side was gone. “Okay, Mak. One question. Right here, right now, do you think I’m wrong?”
Mak appeared to think about it for a moment. He looked at Parrino, his eyes conveying his steadfast determination. “Your theory seems solid, based on what you’ve given me, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions.”
“And?”
Mak took a deep breath and paused. “… and I believe you may be too involved in this case, and you aren’t thinking straight about the correct course of action at this moment.”
Parrino deflated. “Don’t make me do this, Mak.”
Mak nodded, knowing exactly what Parrino meant. “Nobody’s making you do anything, kid. ‘Cept maybe your hormones. You think you can outwit me? Let’s go, hotshot. You think you can take me on in a fight? May the better cop win.”
Parrino smiled half-heartedly. “Game on, old friend.” He went to the portable control unit and began typing in a series of commands.
Instantly, all of the projected words and images around the room began to scramble. Mak’s holo flickered twice, and he shot a look of disingenuous bile at Parrino as he broke up and vanished. “You sonofa…bbr…plnt… cwp…”
“What did you do!?” Serah asked, wiping tears from her face.
“Forced the unit to run a full diagnostic, then ran a diagnostic on that diagnostic, and a third diagnostic on the previous two, just to see how they were getting along. To preserve data integrity, that cuts off all network access and puts Mak’s construct back in hard storage in his psytron matrix until the system has determined nothing is corrupted. This means we have about ten minutes to figure out what we’re going to do before the best detective I’ve ever worked with goes all transhuman and starts hunting us. And, despite my outward show of bravery, he really is the better cop.”
He grabbed her arm and ushered her out of the room, stopping briefly in front of the two uniformed constables that had vacated the room earlier. “You guys are gonna be here a while, right?”
Both men nodded in unision. “Great, listen my receiver’s out,” Parrino said, tapping his bracer. “Any chance I can borrow one of yours? I need to get this person of interest back to HQ and don’t want to be out of communication.”
The men looked at each other. “Sure, no problem, Sergeant,” the shorter one said, removing his comm unit and handing it to Parrino.
“Thanks so much, Constable …” He checked the man’s badge. “Pierson. I’ll leave it with the quartermaster when we get there. Have a good night, guys.” Without waiting for a response, he led Serah down the stairs and out of the apartment. Once clear, both sprinted for the elevator.
Serah hit the button for the rooftop landing pad. “Nine minutes,” she said, nervously, as Parrino swapped the constable’s comm unit with his on his bracer. Thirty seconds later they were airborne.
Parrino dove for street level and headed towards the center of London. “Okay, we have a working comm, one they’re going to be tracing soon, a car that we need to abandon in less than five minutes, and no idea where we’re going or what we’re doing.”
“Right,” Serah said, trying to put herself into a reporter’s mindset again to regain control of herself. “Well, the last lead we had was Ducard. He said I was the only ally in London, but he was going to find the others. So, they’re not in London. Maybe they could help me, though.”
“Good. Did Halferne ever mention any places in your dreams? Did your dreams ever take place anywhere outside London?”
“No,” she said, thinking, “There was the meadow, that’s a preprogrammed location. Then, the weird pipe room, which turned out to be where he was killed. Then, the Phrame, which is unlikely, or Erik would have found a trace there. Then the last one was on a tube car.”
“Tube car? Where were you going?”
“I don’t know, the car had no real features, I think it was a metaphor. It was all a blur of tunnels in a cityscape.” She thought for a moment, remembering something. “No, wait, I remember now, when I looked out the exit doors, it was daylight and we were somewhere else. A tunneled bridge? Over water!”
“The Thames line?”
“No, there was a lot of water. There were no buildings. I remember the sun was on the horizon over the water.”
“Dover? The levtrain bridge over the channel?”
“Calais,” Serah said.“France?”
“Foucan and Ducard were both French,” Parrino offered.
Serah shook her head, “Yeah, a lot of people are. You should get out of your precinct more. So, we make a bee-line for France? I suppose I could use a romantic getaway.” Parrino wondered if the stress of the current situation brought on the attempt at flirting, or if she simply had the worst possible timing.
He set the car down next to an intersection and began adjusting the car’s autonav. “Maybe you reporters find getting shot at while chasing bad guys romantic, but for me, it’s a pretty boring Tuesday.” He pointed to a transit terminal five meters ahead. “Do us a favor and hail a taxi, human driver, not automated.”
Serah got out, ran to the transit station, and hit the call button. A red air taxi arrived just as Parrino walked over to join her. Behind him, the squad car, now on autonav, lifted off and began flying east. Parrino opened the door to the airtaxi, handed his commlink and a credslip to the driver, and said, “Can you get this to the concierge desk at Waterloo Starport, please?” The driver shot him a quizzical look but quickly saluted and sped off after Parrino flashed his badge.
Serah shot him a quizzical look. “I assume this is part of a plan.”
Parrino gestured to an alley and began walking. “In four minutes, when Mak is back online, London Metro will start their manhunt. My squad car is currently on its way to Victoria Cross Transit Hub. They’ll probably seize control of the squad car, but it will still take several minutes to find out it’s empty. They won’t be able to stop the taxi heading to Waterloo Starport with my comm unit until it gets there in about ten minutes, but with luck, that will halve their forces and give us a window out of here.”
“Great, so where are we going?”
“Croydon.”
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