Criminal Minds (Fox Meridian Book 4) Read online

  ‘Like I said, anything I can do to help get this guy.’

  Boston Metro.

  Fox slid back into reality, which was hot, wet, and bubbly. ‘You think this new software will get us anything?’ she asked.

  Terri took a sip of wine before answering. ‘Yes. But it is still learning so we need to consider that when we look at the results. I’m not sure sitting in a hot tub with you after that remark of yours doesn’t qualify as further teasing.’

  ‘Aren’t we past that? You’ve got Helen to keep you busy. Speaking of whom…’

  ‘You’re not going to–’

  ‘Hi, Helen,’ Fox said, smiling at the virtual image which had appeared beside the tub.

  ‘Hi, Fox. Hi, Terri,’ Dillan replied, smiling back. From the complete lack of surprise, it was apparent that Fox had screened the virtual image Dillan was getting at the other end. ‘You getting anywhere your end?’

  ‘Things here are a little more interesting than I thought. We met the former project supervisor and he was lying about a few things. We’ve got another interview tomorrow, so we’ll see if that gets us anywhere.’

  ‘Odd. What’s he got to lie about?’

  ‘Good question. What about the body in Jersey?’

  ‘It was the second guy. He’s got better since the first kill, but he still isn’t near the proficiency of the one who got into the chapter house. Rutherford’s getting desperate. And they still haven’t assigned her anyone else to assist. We’ll get the reports tomorrow and I’ll work with Kit here to get it into the murder room.’

  ‘Right. I’ll look it over tomorrow. We should be back in the afternoon. Terri, you getting anything from those papers?’

  ‘Oh… Well, nothing positive. Or is that negative? Whatever, the methodology explanation follows protocol. Each of the AIs had its own server. Each had its own viron on its own server, in fact, and there was no network connection to those machines. Which is another point, actually. The setup in each case mimicked the original environment the killer was from. That means “Jack” would have had no clue about computers.’

  ‘You’re looking at one of them escaping?’ Dillan asked.

  ‘Overman, the supervisor, lied about creating a clone of Jack the Ripper,’ Fox explained, ‘but it sounds like the thing wouldn’t have survived outside its home viron even if it somehow managed to escape a physically locked-down server. So maybe… Maybe we’re looking for a human. Someone on the project who was influenced by the AI?’ She frowned. ‘That sounds weak too. Maybe we’ll get something tomorrow. Oh, we’re getting Sister Gilly to work with Terri’s sketch artist AI tomorrow. You might get a picture to go in the murder room at some point.’

  ‘It’d be nice to have some idea of who we’re looking for.’

  ‘Yeah, but don’t get your hopes up. She got a quick look at him, and then he was trying to rip her throat out. That kind of thing is liable to distort your memory of the event.’

  ‘Yeah, but something would be better than “a guy in a black coat and hat.” I mean, that probably only covers some forty-nine per cent of the population. Assuming they have a hat.’

  ‘Pff!’ Terri said, waving a hand. ‘I don’t know why you have so much trouble with these cases. You just need to search every house in New York for a hat and there’s your man!’ Fox splashed water at her and Terri let out a squeak followed by giggles.

  Dillan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you guys in a hot tub?’

  12th October.

  ‘Fox, I have obtained the NAPA site reports for the three Criminal Minds personnel who died recently.’

  Fox washed the last of the soap from her hair and cut the water. ‘Had time to scan it?’ she asked Kit. The air blowers cut in as the water died.

  ‘The most immediate point of concern is that Lissette Carpenter and Doctor Ruth Iverson appear to have died during virtual reality sessions.’

  ‘Any notes indicating predisposition to heart conditions?’

  ‘The autopsy reports indicate no such predisposition in either case.’

  Fox turned in the dryer air streams, silent for a second. ‘To reiterate, you’re saying that two women recently released from the same project, with no biological tendency for sudden cardiac arrest, died of heart failure under similar circumstances.’

  ‘That would be correct. Justine Nimer jumped from a seventh-storey window rather than having a heart attack. She owned a pistol, bought for personal defence after the project was closed down. The file notes that she had fired several rounds into random walls before blowing out the window and jumping. She had not left her apartment for three days prior to that.’

  ‘No evidence of anyone else in the apartment?’

  ‘NAPA were unable to find any. Since the death was unusual, they ran forensics on the apartment, putting the death down to suicide when they could not uncover evidence of another participant.’

  Fox cut the blowers and stepped out of the shower cubicle. Kit’s avatar was standing outside, waiting for her. ‘Anyone look at her internet usage in those three days?’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘I think I really want to talk to Doctor Hive. Is there a missing persons file open on her?’

  ‘Doctor Hive has no living relatives. No one has declared her missing.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fox pulled a fresh bodysuit up her legs and considered her actions for a second, but there was really only one logical one to take. ‘Put in a missing persons report for Doctor Arabella Hive. Indicate that we believe her life may be in danger.’

  ‘Do you think NAPA will accept that?’ Kit asked.

  ‘I bet you can make all the coincidences sound pretty convincing,’ Fox replied, grinning. ‘I’m convinced.’

  ~~~

  The house was located in central Boston, an area that remained relatively unchanged through the periods of rebuilding which had rushed through the metro areas over the past thirty years. Fox stepped out of the autocab she had taken into the city with Terri, and considered the environment. Redbrick buildings, all built to the same style, which Fox thought a little odd: each frontage had a raised doorway on the middle of three floors with a staircase leading up to it, and on either side was a sort of bay window construction, almost a pair of turrets rising up from the lowered ground floor to the pitched roof. The place looked kind of expensive.

  ‘For a university researcher, this one seems to have money,’ Fox commented.

  ‘Rich family,’ Terri supplied.

  ‘Indeed,’ Kit said, appearing on the sidewalk beside them. ‘The Mortenson family represents old Boston wealth, going back to last century anyway. Doctor Barry Mortenson has not increased the family fortunes, however, sticking to a more academic environment. His expertise lies in machine psychology.’

  ‘He’s fairly good too, if lacking in much ability to communicate that. His papers are… not exactly well-written.’

  ‘Let’s go see whether he’s better in person,’ Fox suggested.

  First impressions struck again: Barry Mortenson did not look pleased to see them, or like a man who handled interpersonal communication well. He looked to be in his late thirties, no indications of aging aside from the eyes. Mortenson had sharp, intelligent, grey eyes, but they had aged about ten years more than the rest of him.

  ‘Yes?’ Mortenson snapped.

  ‘I’m Teresa Martins,’ Terri said, ‘and this is Tara Meridian. We called.’

  ‘I know who both of you are. What do you want?’

  He was not backing off to let them in so Terri kept going. ‘We wanted to discuss the Criminal Minds project.’

  ‘I don’t discuss that.’ Mortenson started to close the door, frowning when it stopped abruptly.

  ‘One thing, Doctor Mortenson,’ Fox said, smiling her brightest smile while she wedged the door with a boot. ‘Did you have anything to do with the production of the AI which followed the Whitechapel murderer?’

  Fox watched the muscles in Mortenson’s jaw clench, the shifting of his eyes away
from hers, the slight wrinkling of his nose. ‘We never built a Ripper AI.’

  ‘Oh. I just thought that, since you were responsible for the Bent AI, you might–’

  ‘We never built a Ripper AI.’

  Fox moved her foot. ‘Thank you, Doctor. You’ve told me everything I needed to know.’ The door almost slammed on her nose. ‘Such a nice man.’

  ‘You did put your foot in his door,’ Terri pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but he was lying as well. Plus, he called it “Ripper,” which sounds like one of their code names. I said “Whitechapel murderer.”’

  ‘Okay…’ Terri turned, starting back down the steps. ‘But did you notice his eyes when he mentioned it?’

  ‘I noticed them avoiding mine.’

  ‘He was scared, Fox. That man was terrified.’

  ‘Okay, what of?’

  ‘Ah,’ Terri said, ‘I’m just the psychologist. I give you the data; you need figure out the whys.’

  Airborne, Southbound over the Atlantic.

  Fox set the autopilot and pushed her chair back. ‘Okay, let’s see it.’ An image appeared in the air and both she and Terri looked at it: the face of Jack the Ripper.

  ‘It’s possible that the software needs more work,’ Terri said.

  They were looking at a man with oddly angular features wearing what could only be described as a beatifically malign grin. There was a long straight nose, sharp cheekbones, and a quite pointed chin. The eyes were blue, the skin pale, and he had sharp black eyebrows. But the smile was something else. It had the same sort of paternal, slightly bland quality you saw on elderly doctors or maybe priests, but it was somehow too wide and it combined with the bright, blue eyes to present a sort of malicious glee. It was worse if you considered that the owner of that face had just disembowelled three women and was contemplating the next.

  ‘Well… Gilly is bound to have cast him in something of a demonic light in her memory,’ Fox said.

  ‘Yes, but the system should take that into account.’ Terri’s eyes shifted to another set of displays: diagnostic reports from the session with Gilly. ‘Huh, did too. It still thinks this is accurate. I’ll go over the diagnostics in detail and see where it went wrong. I mean that doesn’t look…’

  ‘Human? Kit, start running facial recognition against this with every source we have. It’s what we’ve got, so let’s use it.’

  Terri frowned. ‘But if it’s… corrupted, for want of a better word, how much use is it going to be?’

  ‘Possibly none, but if it turns out to be accurate and we ignored it…’

  ‘We always do the dotting and crossing,’ Kit said, appearing between the two flight chairs, ‘even when it seems entirely useless. It’s one of the things Fox taught me about police work. Besides, I already have a hit.’

  ‘You… do?’

  ‘Unfortunately it is not a useful one.’ The avatar flicked out a new image to sit beside the composite: that of a smiling, middle-aged man with a far more pleasant smile, but there were obvious similarities between the two images. ‘This is–’

  ‘Alex Sanderson,’ Terri said, and then she blushed a little. ‘Momma used to love Kildare: Space Surgeon. I remember sitting on her lap and watching with her, but… Kit, he’s dead. The show shut down in… twenty fifty-five when he died.’

  ‘And that would be why it’s not useful,’ Fox said. ‘Did he have children?’

  ‘A daughter,’ Kit supplied. ‘She is a robotics engineer living in Chicago. The match came from her LifeWeb timeline which has a number of images of her father on it.’

  ‘LifeWeb does have some very efficient facial matching algorithms,’ Terri said.

  ‘Indeed. The other reason this is less than useful is that the match only has a seventy-six per cent confidence, but I considered it worth bringing up given that our template is a reconstruction. And we don’t like strange coincidences.’

  Fox grinned. ‘My protégé. Are you showing off for Terri?’

  Kit gave them a sweet little smile. ‘Yes. My self-awareness algorithms suggest an eighty-two per cent probability that I am, but it’s still an odd coincidence.’

  ‘Sure is. Why would our killer resemble a dead actor who played a doctor last decade?’

  ‘You’re on the whys again, Fox,’ Terri said. ‘You and your protégé are going to have to sort that one out.’

  New York Metro.

  ‘I don’t get to sit in a hot tub with Fox, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘I’ve known her longer.’ Terri replied. ‘Anyway, you’ve slept with her twice.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dillan said, ‘slept being the operative part. She gets me drunk and then doesn’t have her wicked way with me.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware you wanted me to,’ Fox said, ‘and I don’t have a wicked way. I have a sublimely pleasurable way, and could we get back to the subject in hand? Where are we with finding Arabella Hive?’

  ‘NAPA in Boston have responded. No evidence of Hive in the metro after March this year. No online activity at all. All attempts to contact her go straight to messaging, emails are never opened, her bank account hasn’t been touched, and her implant is apparently not communicating with any network.’

  ‘She could be dead too,’ Terri suggested.

  Fox nodded. ‘Yes, but we assume she isn’t until we find her body. Mortenson was scared, Hive was scared enough to run. That suggests she knows something and she might be more willing to talk than Mortenson and Overman.’

  ‘If you can find her.’

  ‘If we can find her, yeah.’

  ‘Well,’ Dillan said, sounding a little reluctant, ‘I had one thought.’

  ‘I’m quite sure you’ve had thousands,’ Terri said.

  ‘Uh-huh, but a lot of them have been about hot tubs recently. However, I also noticed that Doctor Hive is something of a “success against the odds” story. She was born in the New York Sprawl. Her records start properly around the age of five when she started going to a mission in the north Jersey Housing Combine area for classes. She was picked up by an outreach programme for talented sprawlers when she was fourteen, but she spent her formative years in the Sprawl north of the JHC. Now, if I wanted to get really lost…’

  Fox could understand her friend’s reluctance to mention it. ‘Trawling through the Sprawl to find a woman who doesn’t want to be found… We’ll start in the morning.’

  ‘MarTech runs some of those outreach programmes,’ Terri said. ‘I’ll go over our records and see whether we have anything on her.’

  ‘Anything to narrow the search. This is going to be so much fun…’

  13th October.

  The Angelique Street Mission was a four-storey building someone had put up in the thirties or forties in the hopes of pulling rent from workers flocking into the metro from other regions. That had failed and the building had been bought up by a Christian group seeking to help the unemployed and dispossessed living to the north. And that had pretty much failed until a few groups like MarTech and the Sisters of Corruption had stepped in to provide equipment and money.

  Fox spotted a couple of novice uniforms from the Sisters as she walked through the halls, which was a little surprising. ‘You work with the Church of Saint Nicholas, Father?’

  ‘Not an entirely popular decision,’ Father Laramie said, ‘but one which works exceptionally well. And the diocese can’t complain because the Sisters actively discourage people here from… joining the profession. Well, can’t complain, but do.’

  ‘Not really their style.’

  ‘No, but try telling the bishop that. The official line is that we teach abstinence outside marriage, but the people we minister to rarely have much else to entertain them. So we have Sister Sarah here twice a week running sex education classes. Contraception and respect, primarily. We also have a few others who spend half a day a week here doing general duties, helping out. We have people from MarTech here to help with the education programmes as well.’

  ‘Teresa mentioned tha
t. Education is one of Jackson’s big causes.’

  Laramie smiled. He was not old, moderately good-looking, if a little tired around the eyes. He had a kind of weary cheeriness too, like a man trying to put a very brave face on a tiring job which gave him little back. ‘On first-name basis with the celebrity benefactors, Miss Meridian?’

  ‘Father, you just made my day,’ Fox told him, grinning brightly.

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yeah, you are the first person I’ve come across in ages who doesn’t know what my relationship is with Jackson and Teresa Martins. And it’s entirely unimportant. What’s important is that I find a woman who graduated from one of your education programmes. Doctor Arabella Hive. It was twelve years ago, but–’

  ‘Before my time. In fact, there are no staff going back that far. We tend to have something of a high turnover rate. I’ve been here for six years and I expect them to have to ordain me and ship me to a small parish church soon. Somewhere rural where my nerves can recover. I don’t see why you think someone who got out of this place would come back.’

  ‘Someone scared enough might, and I think Doctor Hive is in fear of her life. Do you mind if I ask around?’

  ‘No, of course not. But I think you may be wasting your time. Sprawlers don’t tend to like authority figures, so they probably won’t talk to you. And when I get out of here, I doubt I’d consider coming back, even if someone held a gun to my head.’

  ~~~

  ‘Anything?’ Fox asked.

  Dillan’s image shifted in a slight shrug. ‘Maybe something. I found an old guy who remembers the family. He says they used to squat in a building up near Saint Rocco’s.’

  ‘Genuine?’

  ‘Aren’t we monosyllabic? I think so. Paid him two candy bars, though how he’s going to eat them with no teeth I’m not sure.’

  ‘He’ll trade them. Some of the street girls will give you a BJ for a candy bar. Keeps their kids happy.’

  Dillan’s eyebrows rose. ‘I did not wish to know that.’

  Fox grinned in reply. ‘That area’s fairly safe. You okay checking it out on your own?’

  ‘Think so. I’ve got this one-gun-army that Jackson built for you and I know how to use it.’