Dominance (Fox Meridian Book 8) Read online

  ‘Mister Zaff was the reporter,’ Belle said, ‘but I thought the preferred term was “maggot.”’

  ‘He’s a sleazeball maggot,’ Marie replied.

  ‘But he seems to be getting his hands on information he shouldn’t be getting,’ Sam said. It was evening, and there was often a viewing of the evening news, with commentary, then. Naomi had returned to the chapter house, or she would likely have been commenting too.

  ‘All he’s done is connect the murders,’ Fox replied. ‘I don’t know why the other channels didn’t do that already.’ She frowned. ‘Still, he’s doing a better job than usual in an area that’s not really his forte. Kit, put Zaff in a side-branch of the murder room and run a profile on him. Let’s see who he’s connected to.’

  ‘Oh… Sorry, Kit,’ Marie said, ‘that’s gonna suck.’

  ‘Thank you for your consideration, Marie,’ Kit replied. ‘But don’t worry, it’s Fox who’ll have to put up with my complaints afterward.’

  Detroit–Chicago Metro, 16th January.

  Detroit had done well out of the immediate aftermath of climate shift, earthquake, and eruption which had marked the 2030s and 40s. It had a lot of disused buildings which could be renovated to house the displaced populations from the south and west. There was a resurgence of industry in the Motor City, even if cars were becoming relatively obsolete in much of the country. And then the industry had switched to fully automated factories and the boom became bust in a matter of a few years.

  Suddenly, all those new people had no jobs. Rapidly built, cheap buildings put up to house the influx fell into disrepair. It either became sprawl or it was torn down and replaced by arcologies for the wealthy. There was, if you took all the districts together, more sprawl in New York than in Detroit, but it was not by a big margin and the Detroit Sprawl was one, big, lawless area.

  You went past about twenty-five kilometres of the southern border of the Detroit Sprawl on the train heading in from the airport toward the centre of the metro. If anything, the place looked worse than the sprawl areas of New York. There seemed to be relatively few buildings still standing. Even from the train, Fox could see armed cyberframes, vertols in the air, and wheeled minitanks on the ground, patrolling the ruins. Of course, Palladium was running patrol frames over the sprawl areas too, but they were not routinely armed.

  Fox looked away and turned her attention inward. ‘What do we have on Sherman Wayden?’

  Kit popped up an image of a fairly young man, handsome and blonde with an arrogant look about him. He looked like what Fox expected from a member of the Blackburn Club. ‘Sherman Grant Wayden,’ Kit began.

  ‘Ouch. That’s not asking him to live up to much.’

  ‘Age twenty-seven. Home educated, but with no recognised higher qualifications. Unlike his father, Sherman has no military experience. His father does not talk about him much to the media, but it’s generally believed that he is being groomed to take over Wayden Executive Services. Aside from general management, Sherman’s current assignment is leading the policing effort in the Fargo Agri-Zone. Apparently, he is doing an adequate job, at the very least, since the zone was audited in December and passed after five days.’

  ‘Huh. Remind me to call Topeka tonight.’

  ‘Of course. Sherman Wayden has had no steady relationships I could find. He has had a number of girlfriends, but none lasted more than a couple of weeks. Most of the names he’s been linked with have been for one or two days.’

  ‘Something of a pattern with these guys. Do you have anything on Burrage’s love life?’

  ‘No regular partner. Mister Burrage does not have the public profile the others have. His LifeWeb activity is scarce, but I did manage to find a couple of links to him from the accounts of other users. From a very small sample, he likes blondes. Mister Deloit was a heavy user of LifeMeet. He would frequently undertake one-night hook-ups five or six times a week, though that was not a constant rate. Mister Killian was engaged to be married, but there were a number of rumours regarding the extracurricular activities of both him and his fiancée. She does not appear to have taken his death too hard. Her LifeWeb page indicated that she had a new boyfriend two weeks after Mister Killian’s death.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fox frowned and looked out of the other windows. The Sprawl was north of the track at this point and there were a lot of lower apartment blocks in view. To the right, you could now see the high-rise skyline of central Detroit, spearing up into the cloudless sky like a bed of nails. ‘We are not talking about people with a great relationship with women. I know it’s weird, but Neiman might be the best of them. He seems to have some kind of stable relationship with Bubbles, even if it’s only because she remembers when his meetings are. Call ahead and make sure there’s a cab waiting at the station. I don’t think I want to be here any longer than I need to be.’

  ~~~

  Wayden Tower was less of a tower and more of a fortress. It had a tower, a buttressed spear which rose out of a pyramidal base, making the thing look like a vast missile ready for launch. Occupying a large plot of land on the western edge of the Hamtramck district, it was a relatively recent build and so outside the main redevelopment area. The design, to Fox’s eye anyway, suggested defensive capability and, as her autocab drove into the transport hub for the building, she noted heavy doors overhead which could be dropped into place quickly to render the building riot-proof. They looked like they would hold out against anything short of a nuclear weapon.

  Used to MarTech facilities, Fox expected the building to note that she had arrived and tell her where to go, but there was nothing aside from an offered graphic showing the layout of the reception level. There were no public facilities in this arcology, not even a mall, but there was a reception desk marked so Fox headed for that.

  It was a large, circular feature set in a lobbylike room with a high vaulted ceiling and access points to the transit hub and the internal elevators. Most of the rest of the entrance level had been given over to Wayden’s Detroit policing efforts.

  Fox transmitted her ID as she stepped up to a free receptionist, and immediately realised that she was dealing with an android. It was not hard to figure out: reception was staffed with androids, or Wayden made a habit of employing identical triplets. The one Fox was standing in front of was a smiling black man with tightly cut, black hair, brown eyes, attractive features, and very white teeth.

  ‘The facial set corresponds to a mark three Rossouw Arms Works Light Combat Android,’ Kit supplied. ‘They were designed for the more diplomatic side of war, dealing with civilians. They are, essentially, soldier replacements.’

  ‘Good morning, Captain Meridian,’ the android said, making it sound like it was. While Fox was really not bothered much by air temperature now, it was just above freezing outside, even if the sky was a pretty shade of blue. ‘How might I be of assistance?’

  ‘I have an appointment with Mister Sherman Wayden, scheduled for eleven thirty,’ Fox told him. Silently she added, ‘If he tells me to have a nice day, I’m going to pull all his circuit boards out and set fire to them.’

  ‘He’s a class three and can’t help it,’ Kit replied.

  ‘Of course,’ said the android, oblivious to his impending doom. ‘Please proceed to elevator bank three and go to floor one nine three. You will be met there and escorted to Mister Wayden’s office.’

  Fox checked her map for the location of the elevators. ‘Right. Thanks.’

  ‘My pleasure, Captain Meridian. Have a nice day.’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ Kit snapped.

  ‘Okay,’ Fox said, turning from the desk and heading for the elevators, ‘but I want his programmer hunted down and beaten with a compilation of clichés.’

  ‘Inventive. The one hundred and ninety-third floor is near but not at the top. I am not sure whether that is interesting or not.’

  ‘Depends what’s above. This thing’s not as tall as the MarTech towers, is it?’

  ‘Eight hundred metres, but t
he broader base gives it comparable useable volume.’

  The elevator ride was fairly quick at least: less than ten seconds to cover almost eight hundred metres. Then the doors opened and Fox found herself looking at a very pretty redhead with blue-green eyes, dressed in a very short tank minidress and heels which had to be Hell to spend the entire day in. Even with the five-inch height enhancement, she was still a good couple of inches shorter than Fox.

  ‘Captain Meridian?’ the woman said, smiling. There was a weird hint of nervousness in her voice and her smile.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m Julienne Abbot, Mister Wayden’s personal assistant.’ That time there was a slightly odd emphasis on ‘personal.’ There was also a hint of a southern accent in her voice, though it was unlikely that she had ever spent any time in the southern states, when those had existed. ‘If you’ll please follow me…’

  ‘Miss Abbot became Sherman Wayden’s PA three years ago,’ Kit said into Fox’s mind. ‘It’s on her LifeWeb page. Interestingly, she dated not infrequently prior to the assignment, and has noted no such activities since about a month into her new job.’

  ‘You’re suggesting Sherm’s banging his secretary?’ Fox asked silently. ‘Probably more regularly than any of the girlfriends you found.’

  ‘I think that is an outlandish outfit to wear in an office, and I think that watching their body language might be interesting.’

  Fox watched as Abbot led the way to one of the corner offices on a floor which seemed to be entirely business space. Presumably the upper management of Wayden Executive Services got offices up here, near to their apartments, whether above or below. Abbot opened the double doors at the end of the corridor and they walked into an antechamber: Abbot’s desk occupied one side of the room while a set of visitor chairs sat around a coffee table on the other. The PA was reaching for the inner door when she faltered and then turned around.

  ‘Uh, Mister Wayden is… still in a conference call to his people in Fargo,’ Abbot said and Fox did not need lie-detection software and all her sensory tricks to know the woman was lying. ‘Please, take a seat. I’m sure he’ll be finished… soon.’ Fox said nothing, but turned to the seats. ‘Can I get you some coffee? Or anything?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Fox replied, sitting down and crossing her legs. She had decided to be a little more formal, since she was outside Palladium’s jurisdiction, so she had gone for a slate-grey pantsuit and grey kitten heels, but that was over a black, plazkin teddy. Her pistol was hidden away in the small of her back, under the jacket; it was not that comfortable for relaxing against, but she could make do.

  That was a good thing, because she was still waiting after twelve minutes. Periodically, Abbot would give Fox a nervous smile and claim that it would be ‘just a few more minutes.’ Fox just smiled back and continued to go through the data Kit, and Palladium, had compiled on Sherman Wayden.

  Since WES was a competitor and they were running the policing contract for the Fargo Agri-Zone among other locations, Palladium had put a little effort into examining the managers of the company. Since Sherman ran the Fargo contract, taking quite a hands-on approach, his name appeared in a lot of reports on the area and Kit had put them all in the package. Crime figures for the zone had dropped quite a lot since WES had taken over policing, a quite amazing amount in fact. Fox’s immediate thought was that they were under-reporting. Palladium’s analysis agreed, but the NAPA audit had shown nothing wrong with the reported statistics.

  WES put their success down to a major crackdown on illegal drugs. There had, they had said, been a significant problem with drugs in the area, but the dealers had been caught and were now doing time in Rikers. There had been a big press conference about it with Sherman standing up front, smiling at the cameras and proclaiming a new era for law and order in Fargo.

  Palladium had been able to find no evidence of a major drug problem in the area prior to WES’s arrival and, in fact, various bloggers had indicated that there had been few illegals in the area. There were conspiracy theories indicating that WES had manufactured the drug problem as an excuse to get rid of various ‘undesirable elements.’ Of course, believing the conspiracy theorists was about as bad as taking WES’s stats on face value.

  Abbot got to her feet. The clock had ticked over to thirteen minutes after the appointed time for the interview. ‘Mister Wayden will see you now, Captain Meridian.’

  Fox got to her feet without any particular haste and smiled at Abbot. The PA was sweating. Beads of it were visible on her face, but Fox’s enhanced olfactory system was picking it up too. The scent of fear, though Fox suspected it was the fear of being badly embarrassed. ‘Thank you, Miss Abbot,’ Fox said. She walked over to the door, opened it, and stepped through.

  ‘You’re late,’ Sherman Wayden said sourly. It was a tactic self-important people seemed to enjoy using when dealing with cops. Fox smiled at the man behind the overly large, chrome-and-black-glass desk. ‘I’m extremely busy. I can’t spare you more than…’ He trailed off as Fox just continued to smile at him as she advanced toward his desk. Without the camera to help him, Wayden was not quite so impressive. Fox could see the signs of bodysculpt work dotted all over his features: sharpened cheekbones and chin, reshaped jawline, work on the nose to take out a bump under the bridge, skin tightening and smoothing, and his eyes were not a natural shade of blue. If he had got his body through genetics and exercise, Fox would have been quite surprised, and his hair had been lightened from a darker blonde. More, the arrogance was there, but it came with a good helping of nervousness. Wayden was sweating too. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, pulling himself upright and frowning at Fox.

  ‘I’m investigating the deaths of Thomas Winsford and Barrymore Ashburton. They were friends of yours, Mister Wayden.’ The man had not suggested she sit, but Fox sat, settling easily onto one of the overstuffed, leather-and-chrome visitors’ chairs and crossing her legs easily. As she did so, she undid the button on her jacket, letting it hang open.

  Wayden’s eyes dropped as though pulled by invisible strings. ‘Y-yes. They were.’ He managed to drag his eyes back up to Fox’s face. ‘I’m horrified by their untimely deaths.’

  ‘Of course. You were also friends with Kent Killian and Steven Deloit.’

  His face reddened. ‘Are you accusing–’

  ‘I’m not accusing anyone of anything,’ Fox interrupted. ‘I’m pointing out that a lot of your friends, friends who all took part in a fact-finding tour of the Fargo Agri-Zone, have been murdered recently. Have you any idea why someone would want to do that?’

  ‘They were all vote brokers.’ There was a flash of something, probably worry, as he spoke, but his response was immediate. Probably, his response was rehearsed. ‘I’d have thought the reason was obvious.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Terrorism. The killers are a terrorist cell. Likely from the Caliphate. They–’

  ‘NIX has no knowledge of a cell operating in the New York area, and there would be no point in them killing someone in Fargo. The MO is personal. These men were killed for revenge. You have no idea why someone would want revenge on them, have you, Mister Wayden?’

  ‘No. These were… good men.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Could you explain the purpose of the trip to Fargo?’

  ‘Thom, Barry, and Steve were there to gather evidence for the metro policing vote. Kent was working with me on getting them what they needed. It was a successful trip.’

  Fox gave him another smile. ‘Yes. And Walker Burrage? What was his job?’

  ‘Walker? The company he represents provides our arms, of course. He was there to show the kind of weaponry we expect to need in a metropolitan setting.’

  ‘And David Neiman?’

  Wayden adopted a wry grin. ‘Okay, so we had a little fun while we were out there. Davy was planning some cop film or something. Not his usual stuff, or there was supposed to be only plot-related sex scenes or something. But he wanted to see real cops at work, so
I said, “sure you can come.” And maybe he brought a couple of his girls out there to… help him with locations and stuff. No harm, no foul. You know?’

  ‘Yes. I know.’ Wayden was relaxing. He thought he had everything covered. ‘Did Mister Winsford… get any of Mister Neiman’s girls to help him with anything?’

  ‘Uh, I… I mean, he may have. I think he probably–’

  ‘And there were no problems?’

  ‘What problems would–’

  ‘So, none of you knew about Mister Winsford’s habit of using illegal drugs during sex?’ Fox watched. There was the fleeting instant of fear and then the rapid submersion of that emotion with affronted anger.

  ‘Those stories on the gossip channels are lies! Thomas Winsford–’

  ‘Regularly employed a professional dominatrix,’ Fox cut in. ‘It was the only way he could get off without using Rockit. The gossip channels haven’t got half the stuff we’ve uncovered about him. But you already knew, Mister Wayden.’

  ‘This interview is over,’ Wayden snapped.

  ‘As you wish.’ Fox got to her feet and buttoned up her jacket. ‘I’ll say to you what I’ve said to your friends. The ones who are still alive, obviously. Make sure your security is up to spec. It’s not certain that someone’s coming after you, but I’d suggest you don’t take chances.’

  ‘My security is excellent.’

  ‘I’m sure. One other thing… My PA has been having a lot of difficulty getting the case files for Kent Killian from Fargo. I’d appreciate it if you could speed that along so that I can find the person who murdered your friends.’

  ‘You’ll have it this afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Fox turned and headed back into the outer office where Abbot was waiting to escort her out. ‘Want to start a sweepstake on when in the afternoon those files arrive?’ Fox asked silently.

  ‘No,’ Kit replied. ‘We’d both be going for sixteen fifty-nine.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re forgetting something. Fargo is on Central Time…’

  New York Metro.