Amortals Read online

  "You compared the sounds against every captured audio communications in the city?"

  "Just until we found a match."

  Paul made a gesture, and a wallscreen behind me leaped to life. Querer and I turned to see a live thrid appear. A DC squad hovercar sat parked in front of a run-down storefront that faced out onto one of the cramped pedestrian malls that snaked through every level of the city. The edges of the storefront glowed yellow on the wallscreen, indicating to any who might see it through lens implants that the place was a crime scene. The police had shot yellow tape across the windows at several odd angles to provide untethered citizens the same warning.

  A dead neon sign in one of the storefront's two windows offered the services of "Madame Fate. Fortunes Told. Futures Seen." A virtual sign overlaid the other window, flashing the logo of the real estate agency charged with selling the place. I concentrated on an icon in the corner of the sign, and the place's listing information leaped into my vision. The building had been foreclosed on three years ago and had been on the market since.

  "That's Georgetown," I said

  Paul gave me a grim nod of approval.

  "After we found it, our team went in to collect every bit of evidence we could find, but as I've mentioned, the pickings were slim. Someone let loose a bleach bomb in the place sometime in the past week, and then set a homovorous robot to scour every surface with a UV laser spread to zap away even the germs left behind. Did a good job too and consumed itself completely for fuel in the process.

  "Olfactory scans picked up little out of the ordinary for the neighborhood: fuel fumes, cigarette smoke, urine, scents from roaming food vendors. However, we did detect a concentration of certain gastric gases in the room. They indicate that the killer dined on chicken vindaloo sometime within the previous twenty-four hours."

  "I like vindaloo," I said. "You sure that wasn't me?"

  Paul shook his head. "The autopsy turned up absolutely nothing in your digestive system."

  "Killed on an empty stomach," Querer said. "How cruel."

  I ignored her. I asked Paul the question I always hated most. I didn't want to do it, but there was no point in putting it off any longer.

  "Can I see the body?"

  Paul, who had seen more of death than any mortal I knew, blanched. "You don't have to do that, Dooley." His voice was barely more than a whisper. He cleared his throat. "My team has gone over it from scalp to plantar fascia."

  "No," I said slowly. "I really think I do."

  I needed to do this for a whole host of reasons, one of which – I admitted to myself – was to crank up my sense of righteous outrage at the way I'd been treated. I had to screw it all the way up to the sticking place to make sure my need to follow through on this would never falter. It would be too easy to let this terrify me into letting someone else handle it, and that was something I could not bear.

  Paul nodded his resignation rather than trying to argue the point with me. He beckoned us to follow him, then led us down a wide set of stairs that terminated in a pair of institutional-green double doors. The room beyond them was even chillier, but I was too numb at that point to really feel it.

  Querer shivered, and I could see her breath when she spoke. "I can do this for you, Dooley."

  I didn't look at her.

  "Really. I insist."

  I ignored her and turned to Paul. He stood before us against a wall lined floor to ceiling and wall to wall with the fronts of massive drawers. He had his hand on one. The glowing label on it read, "Dooley, Ronan."

  I really didn't want to see this. It's hard enough to see another human being turned into bullet-tenderized meat, much less yourself. But I'd already watched the thrid. How much worse could it be?

  I swallowed hard and shoved all my emotions away, locking them down tight. Then I nodded, and Paul waved his hand in front of the drawer. It slid out silently on blue-glowing hover rails smoother than ice.

  Paul hesitated as he put his hand on the pristine white shroud covering the corpse lying in the extracted drawer. Without turning toward me for further approval, he steeled himself and drew it back.

  Querer failed to stifle a gasp. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to look.

  The remains lay in a convex tray. The mortuary technicians had wiped away most of the blood so they could examine the various wounds, but when it came to my head, there just wasn't that much intact. The skull had been shattered in so many different directions that it reminded me of a cheap vase I'd knocked over as a child. I'd tried to glue it back together before my parents came home, but I'd never been able to puzzle out how the pieces were supposed to go back together.

  My face was gone, turned into a ground-up mess. I spotted an eyelid, an ear, and what looked like most of my jaw.

  The rest of me was in better shape, but not by much. My skin had that frigid pallor of the dead. I felt grateful that the refrigeration in the room kept me from having to endure the stench of any rot. That, I was sure, would have kicked me right over the edge.

  I nodded at Paul, and he drew the shroud back over the corpse again. At a tap on the front of the drawer, it slid back into the pitch-black hole from which it came.

  I heard Querer sniffle behind me. Just once.

  I had to clear my throat before I could speak. "Any idea how long I was in the killer's custody before the murder?"

  Paul clucked his tongue at me. "You hadn't checked in with the Service – at all, much less gone in for a backup – for over a week, so it could have been anytime in that period. Impossible to say for sure."

  "What were you supposed to be doing?" Querer asked me, her voice steady and strong.

  I'd checked over the logs that Adamson had sent me, plus whatever I'd been able to wheedle out of Patrón virtually while failing to fall asleep in the Lincoln Bedroom last night. I'd been on an undercover mission of my own instigation. Given my record and length of service, Patrón had trusted me to follow my instincts and see where they led me.

  Nobody had expected they would take me to the morgue.

  "From what I can tell, I was poking around the Kalis," I said. They were the Indian equivalent of the Mafia, straight out of Mumbai, and they ran most of the organized crime on the East Coast. I'd clashed with them dozens of times in my many lives, but never come near putting them down for good. Like the Hindu goddess they named themselves after, they had many independent arms, and I'd never been able to get a clear shot at the head.

  "I'd long suspected them of laundering rupees, rubles, and yuan for the Indian government by filtering it through their operations here in the US. That gave them the added benefit of helping to destabilize our currency by shoving billions of dollars worth of forged funds through our underground economy. The trail ran all the way up to Sharma Patil."

  Paul let out a low whistle. "The Indian ambassador? Seriously? He's untouchable, and not in the sense of his caste. You'd need rock-solid proof to frag him."

  "Right," I said. "Which is what I might have been after. Maybe I finally got too close."

  Querer shuddered. "If so, that's one hell of a 'back off' message he sent you."

  "But we can't prove any of that," said Paul. "The only thing we have to corroborate that is the bit of curry gas your killer left behind."

  I nodded. "That may not be enough for a court of law, but it's good enough for me."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The hovercar slipped through the morning sky and carried us out over the Potomac. It came to a gap in the buildings covering the river and dove down to the Francis Scott Key Bridge. From there, we jogged a bit to the left and slipped onto the covered portion of 35th Street NW. We hung a quick left on Prospect and came to a rest behind a DC squad car.

  When I exited our hovercar, it was like I'd emerged into an entirely different world from where I'd woken up that morning. Georgetown had fallen on hard times about fifty years back, and the university had started selling off bits of real estate to survive. Today, it existed almost entirely onlin
e, uniting teachers and students from around the world in virtual thrideo classrooms, but the neighborhood it had inhabited for centuries still bore its name.

  The sun never shone here. Organic-glow lightstrips illuminated the streets, all the way up to the blackened ceiling of the tunnel arching overhead. Most people roamed the streets on foot here, but I still saw bicycles, pedicabs, scooters, and even the occasional car, the kind that still rolled on wheels. Many of those sat up on blocks, stripped of any working mechanicals but still serving as housing for whichever squatters were bold enough to claim them and tough enough to hold them.

  Trash had been tucked into just about every corner, fold, or crevice of the street that didn't see enough traffic to flatten it or shove it out of the way. Disabled or dying or just drunk beggars sat on every street corner, obeying some kind of unseen territorial system that kept them from infringing on each other's turf. Large plasticard box-homes dotted the sidewalks and peeked out of the alleys, some of them bearing curtains of plastic sheeting over their fronts to give their occupants a bit of precious, hard-won privacy.

  Graffiti covered just about every surface. Some of the walls had been treated with chemicals that ate any other paint applied to them, but many of those had simply been covered with layers of paper or plywood that took the spray paint just fine. The preponderance of tags written in Devangari script marked this region for the Kalis.

  Half the people I saw on the street wore flu masks, hoping to put some kind of barrier between themselves and whatever lethal gunk was doing the rounds this year. The rest either couldn't afford the masks or just didn't care.

  The mortal life expectancy in the US had dropped steadily over the years. A huge chunk of the population didn't make it past forty. Once the rich were able to start over with a new body when they needed it, research into hard-to-cure, fatal diseases like cancer or NAIDS dropped to nothing. Health care in general stalled out. Students stopped going to medical school. The few who did and graduated were hard to find, and if you managed it, you could count on never being able to afford the bill. If you couldn't buy rebirthing insurance, you weren't going to be able to manage health insurance either. Most mortals were stuck with over-the-counter care at their local pharmacy or – if they were lucky – local clinic. Contracting any disease with symptoms more complicated than the pharmacist could handle usually meant a lingering death or euthanasia, often self-administered.

  Bullets were always cheap.

  I brought the optical frisk layer into my vision. It analyzed anyone I looked at for telltale visual signs of weaponry. Of the thirty-odd people I could see on the street at the moment, about half were carrying a pistol of some sort. Another third had a knife worth calling a weapon.

  The criminal history layer showed several priors among the people with nanoserver implants. One had an outstanding warrant for disturbing the peace, but I didn't have the time to pick him up for such a minor infraction. Some of the others, probably most of them, likely had priors too, but I'd have to bring up the facial or gait recognition layers first to figure out who they were. I had other things on my mind.

  Madame Fate's stood relatively clean of any vandalism. While there may not have been enough superstition in the area to keep the fortune teller in business, there seemed to be plenty to persuade the local artists to give it a wide berth.

  I nodded at the top of a stairwell across the street. "Recognize that?" I asked Querer.

  "I don't think I've ever been here before," she said. "I've spent most of my time in the cybercrimes division, attached to a terminal."

  "Nothing like actual footwork to help solve a crime," I said as I trotted across Prospect and looked down the stairs. The cement steps snaked down at a steep angle until they reached M street nearly fifty feet below. More glowstrips marked the way down.

  "Notice anything funny about this?" I asked.

  Querer furrowed her brow for a moment before she realized what was wrong. "There's nobody on it."

  "Right. With all the vagrants around here, you'd expect someone to set up shop on one of the landings, at least, but the stairs are empty from top to bottom."

  "Why?"

  "These are the stairs from The Exorcist. The ones the priest throws himself down when he kills himself to get rid of the demon trying to possess him."

  Querer stared at me. "In which version?"

  "All of the American ones, starting with the original. It became a tradition."

  She looked at me with uncertain eyes. "And why are you showing me this?"

  "Because despite all our advances, no matter how far we've come, we're still superstitious primitives in our hearts. There's no good reason for one of those vagrants to not set up shop here, but they'd rather fight over other parts of the street than dare to call these stairs home."

  I took one look back down the stairs. A fall down them might kill a demon. It could surely kill a man. Maybe there was more to them being empty than simple superstition.

  I moseyed back across the street, dodging a trio of pedicabs racing to the west. As I went, I electronically flashed the cop in the squad car my ID, and he activated the speaker system outside his bulletproof window as we reached it.

  "Hell of a place to die," he said to me with no trace of irony.

  "Where's your partner?" I asked.

  "Keeping watch inside. We're just waiting for you. The CSI team's already been over the place. Once you've had your look-see, our work here is done."

  "I won't be long."

  The cop shrugged. He clearly didn't think there was anything here for us to find, but he had his orders and meant to obey at least their letter if not their spirit. "Take your time."

  Querer followed me up to the yellow crime scene tape crisscrossing the front of the building. I put my hands between two strips and pulled them apart, making an opening for her to climb through. I entered right after her.

  The lights in the foyer automatically flickered to life as we came inside. A cop with a silver name tag that read "Smithee" stepped out of the back room to greet us. I scanned his ID out of habit, and it came up "Lee Chen." He looked far more like a Chen.

  "Right back through here, sir," he said, stepping to one side to allow us to pass him in the hallway.

  "What's with the name tag, Chen?" I asked.

  The cop blushed. "Just a bit of a joke, sir."

  "I don't find it funny," I said. I held out my hand for the tag.

  Chen hesitated a moment. I wasn't his commander. He didn't have to go along with me. But he did. I tucked the tag into my jacket pocket.

  "Thank you," I said. I jerked my head back toward the street. "Can you step outside? I'd prefer to handle this alone."

  "Of course," he said, snapping off a casual salute before making his way outside.

  Once he was gone, Querer grabbed my arm. "What's with giving the blues a hard time?"

  "Beat cops wear false tags so they can abuse the people who live around here with no fear that it'll come back to haunt them."

  "But anyone could scan him and see that it was wrong," she said.

  "Sure, anyone with an active tether. Most people around here can't afford that. Something goes wrong, they try to report a cop who doesn't actually exist."

  Querer screwed up her face into a skeptic's scowl. "That doesn't sound like much of an alibi."

  "It's not," I said. "But when it's the word of an untethered vagrant against that of a cop, it's enough."

  "And how does you busting his balls about it help stop that? Are you going to report him?"

  I grunted. "For what? His boss wouldn't give a damn."

  "Then why bother? He's just going to grab another name tag from his partner and do the same thing tomorrow."

  "It made me feel better. Sometimes that's all you get." I opened the door into the back room. "For me, that's enough."

  I walked into the room and recognized it instantly from my snuff thrideo. The gray cinderblock walls and the cement floor stood splashed with my darkened, d
ried blood. The plastic chair was still bolted to the floor, and someone had laserflashed an outline around where my body had been found.

  The room smelled like a laundry, the scent of bleach overpowering everything but for a pungent overlay of death. It made my eyes want to water.

  "How long were you here before they found you?" Querer's voice was as hushed as if we were in a church.