Anniversary Day (11 page)

She sighed and leaned back in her chair. She wasn’t going to do the next part by visual link. That would simply be too irritating. Because now she had to inform the governor-general they had a situation, and then the governor-general would probably tell her to inform some other group, and DeRicci would spend the rest of her day talking about ways to “handle the crisis” instead of handling the crisis herself.

She’d already handled a bit of it, by having Popova send a message to the governor-general’s office that DeRicci was well aware of the death and was investigating to see if it was a United Domes matter.

Now that she knew it was, she was going to have to go into full crisis management mode.

Sir?
Popova sent via the office internal link.
We have another situation
.

What?
DeRicci sent.

“Better to show you.” Popova had opened the door. Apparently she had been walking toward it as she contacted DeRicci—or the news had been so severe that she had leaped out of her chair and sprinted to the door.

She didn’t even wait for DeRicci to tell her to go ahead. Instead, she raised that damn screen back up and it was already running.

Eight different 2-D images ran along the edges. A small holoimage dominated the middle.

They all showed Keir Julian, mayor of Moscow Dome, being hustled inside a building by his security people. He was stumbling and looked wild, but DeRicci couldn’t tell, through the cacophony of voices, what actually happened.

So she muted everything except the holoimage in the middle.

The redheaded reporter looked like she was standing above the floor. She also was so tiny that it seemed like DeRicci could pick her up and throw her through a window as easily as she could throw a coffee cup.

“…attempt on his life,” the reporter was saying. “Moscovitius University Hospital reports that his condition is stable at this time…”

Hospitals were always supposed to say that about heads of state.

DeRicci muted the redhead too, although her image continued to hover as the redhead pointed to various images behind her desk. Images within images within images. If DeRicci wasn’t careful, they would give her a headache—as if that, and not the day itself, would cause the headache.

“What have we got?” DeRicci asked.

“Nothing,” Popova said, her voice a little shaky. She still hadn’t recovered from the Soseki announcement. “No one from Moscow Dome has contacted us.”

“Get them to,” DeRicci said.

“Sir, Moscow Dome is as far from here as you can get—”

“I know,” DeRicci growled. She was familiar with the Moon’s geography. And she understood the implications. “Get busy, Rudra. We need investigators there too. Send one now, maybe with an advisor from Armstrong PD.”

“Any suggestions, sir?”

DeRicci was tempted to recommend Nyquist just to get him out of her hair. But she didn’t. She wanted him here.

“No,” she said. “That’s not my job. Someone good. Now get busy.”

“Yes, sir,” Popova said and left the room, with one hand pressed against the side of her face as if she could talk through the chips on her palm.

DeRicci might have to replace Popova for the day. The woman was too shaken to do a good job, and she usually took on the job of half a dozen people without a blink.

But DeRicci didn’t have the time to think about that at the moment. She issued an emergency warning to all heads of state here on the Moon, informing them of the dual attack and cautioning that they might be in danger. Then she wiped the screen in front of her clean of imagery and requested a visual conference with the governor-general.

Some low-level assistant appeared in a cramped low-level office.

“I need the governor-general,
now
,” DeRicci said.

“Yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir,” the assistant said. He looked like he was about twelve. “I can’t get her for you, sir.”

“You will, or you will find me someone who can,” DeRicci snapped.

“I’m sorry, sir, it’s not that I won’t. It’s that I can’t. She’s just been taken to Deep Craters Hospital, and I’m not sure she’s going to survive.”

Nineteen

Nyquist took his own car and didn’t use the siren function at all. Still, as he drove to O’Malley’s, he heard six different sirens. Dispatch hadn’t been kidding when she said Anniversary Day had more than its share of trouble.

He parked a block away from O’Malley’s—after showing identification to get into the perimeter. Emergency vehicles were everywhere, along with vehicles left by the patrons who couldn’t leave the stores and restaurants in the area.

O’Malley’s wasn’t in the best section of Armstrong. The restaurant bordered the Port, which made it a great place for political meetings. People—diplomats, money managers—could come in secretly, take one of the back routes into O’Malley’s, have a meeting, and leave without anyone, especially the press, being any wiser. Soseki loved O’Malley’s, which always made Soseki a bit suspicious to Nyquist.

Not that Nyquist loved politicians. Or rather, not that he loved people who went into politics voluntarily.

More and more, Noelle DeRicci’s job had become about politics, and he had strong feelings for her.

He let out a small sigh as he got out of his car. He couldn’t even use the “love” word inside his own head. Strong feelings was accurate. Love—well, he didn’t really know what that was. He assumed what he felt was love.

The neighborhood had a dingy feel. The buildings weren’t dirty like they were in outlying areas of Armstrong, but they were old, and for the most part, not kept up. A neighborhood revival had started, although it was haphazard—a few stores next to O’Malley’s that catered to the slummy rich, a couple of coffee places for people who needed legal stimulants, and that was about it. The rest of the neighborhood had the usual sex shops, which were legal but frowned upon; the Hookah Place, which catered more to the Gdetry, an alien group that had fallen in love with smoking opium; and storefronts whose businesses changed almost daily. He’d made more than his share of arrests down here, usually in the storefronts, which often sold everything from illegal weapons to aliens to human children.

The formal crime scene was set up around O’Malley’s front entrance. He wondered if they had established a scene around the back as well, then remembered that Romey was in charge. Of course they had established a matching scene around back, and probably around the lesser known exits as well.

A crowd of people had gathered around the crime scene lasers. All of the people looked official—uniforms mixed with crime scene techs mixed with lower level detectives. A few uniforms stood outside nearby buildings, arms crossed, apparently keeping customers inside.

He removed one of the protective suits from the pocket of his coat, attached the disk to a button, and tapped it. The damn thing enveloped him, making him feel momentarily sticky. No matter how many times he did that, he still hated it.

As he pushed his way through, touching his hand to every single identification post floating around the scene, he noted the coroner’s van parked right next to the scene. As he got closer, he saw well-shod feet extended along the sidewalk, attached to legs whose socks had fallen slightly, revealing unnaturally colored skin.

Soseki?

Nyquist braced himself, then put his hand into the nearest laser beam. The crime scene laser sent him a message:
Crime scene under investigation. Please watch for markers, Detective Nyquist. Make certain you walk only in the prescribed areas
.

As if he didn’t know that. As if he hadn’t been the one to argue for more markers on a scene after many of his former partners trampled the areas around the corpses, ruining them.

But there was no talking back to automated messages, no matter how much he wanted to.

The markers were spread around the feet which were, as he suspected, attached to Arek Soseki’s body. Only Soseki didn’t look like himself. He looked like an artist’s cast for a statue made out of pure silver. Although what mayor would want to be cast in a prone position, a look of puzzlement on his great stone face?

Nyquist had never really liked Soseki, but no one deserved to end up like this. Nyquist sighed and stepped on the prescribed marker. He recognized the coroner from her hair. An orangy gold which was, someone had told him, the color of the flower marigold. He was always a bit startled by it. Except for her hair, Marigold Jacobs was a very serious woman. He was glad she was here instead of Ethan Brodeur or anyone else from his office. The coroners in this city ranged from brilliant (Jacobs) to venal (Brodeur), with matching degrees of experience.

“Hey, Marigold,” Nyquist said softly. “Finding anything useful yet?”

He didn’t ask if she had found anything interesting. He suspected she found the corpse very interesting. Nyquist certainly did. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a human turn that particular color.

“No, I haven’t,” Jacobs said, “and you’d think I’d’ve found something by now.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Fifteen minutes, tops,” she said. “But whatever hit him hit him fast. He was shaking hands one minute and dead the next. And before you ask, he had SkinSoft on, and he was wearing it properly. Nothing that we’re familiar with should have gotten through his hands.”

“You’re thinking he was poisoned,” Nyquist said.

“I’m thinking something altered his body chemistry. We tend to call that a poisoning, although I don’t know if the term is accurate at the moment.” She sighed. “I’m going to have to take him back and do everything from toxicology to a full autopsy.”

“You’re going to cut him open?” Nyquist asked. Almost no one did that kind of autopsy anymore. With bots and cameras and nanoprobes, it usually wasn’t necessary.

“I’m thinking about it,” she said. “Mostly because I’m not sure what I’ll find. His skin on the dark gray side is so hard it doesn’t feel like skin anymore.”

“May I?” Nyquist asked and crouched.

She put out a hand, stopping him from touching anything. “Have you suited up?”

Having her ask the question didn’t irritate him. It pleased him. If more coroners were that cautious, he would have closed a few more cases that his former partners had screwed up.

“Yes, I’m suited up,” he said.

She moved her hand. He touched the arm of Soseki’s coat. Even though Jacobs had told him what to expect, Nyquist was still startled by how firm the arm felt. Less like an arm and more like that statue cast he had thought of when he first looked at the body.

“If I were to slam my fist against his arm,” Nyquist said, “would it shatter?”

“Don’t do that,” she said, not looking at him. The entire time they talked, she was taking samples, making notes, moving bits of fabric.

“You know me better than that, Marigold,” he said.

“Sorry. Caution. No one but you seems to know proper crime scene procedure.” She moved some bags of samples into the case she always carried with her. “And I suspect the corpse would shatter, at least on the left side. That’s something else I’ll test when I get him back to the morgue. We are going to have to treat this body carefully.”

“I take it you’ve ruled out a contagion?” Nyquist asked.

“I haven’t ruled out anything,” she said. “But considering that no one else is showing symptoms and this crime scene has existed for hours, I’m guessing there isn’t one. If there is, it’s slow moving.”

“Shouldn’t we take precautions just in case?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said, and rocked back against her heels. Now she did look at him. Her eyes were a light brown, which he suspected matched her actual hair color, not that awful yellow she always sported. “Of course we should have taken precautions. The minute he keeled over. Someone should have roped off the area, called in the Hazmat team, sealed off everything, and kept people in quarantine. But no one did that. No one reported the damn thing for nearly an hour. So if it is a contagion, we’d better hope the Dome filters take care of it, because it had plenty of time to get ahead of us.”

Nyquist smiled at her, unperturbed by her tone. “You don’t think it is a contagion or you would have taken action anyway.”

Her eyes twinkled just for a moment. Anyone who didn’t know her would not have seen that.

“You know me too well, Bartholomew,” she said quietly. “I wish you were leading this case.”

“Savita Romey is a good woman,” he said.

“Not as experienced as you,” Jacobs said.

“But just as thorough.”

Jacobs shrugged one shoulder, a noncommittal response.

“She’s the one who asked for you.” Nyquist didn’t know that for certain, but he had a hunch. He would have made sure that he had Marigold Jacobs on a case this politically sensitive. There was no room for error here, especially since some earlier errors were made.

“That’s very kind of her,” Jacobs said, then bent back over the corpse.

“You’re not blaming her for the delay, are you?” Nyquist asked.

“This crime scene was chaos when I got here,” Jacobs said, the disapproval clear in her tone.

“I checked the logs as I drove. She was brought in long after the first report. I doubt she’d been here more than fifteen minutes before you,” Nyquist said.