Criminal Minds (Fox Meridian Book 4) Page 15

  ‘Baton rounds?’

  ‘Are loaded, but I’ve got some lethal stuff if things turn sticky.’

  ‘Okay. Let me know if you get anything.’ Fox waited for the connection to break and then smiled at the woman beside her. ‘Sorry, my colleague is busy hunting for information out in the Sprawl.’

  ‘On her own?’ Sister Sarah asked.

  ‘She’s an ex-cop, and armed. She’ll be fine where she’s going. Tomorrow we’ll be going deeper and then we’ll be working as a pair.’

  ‘You wouldn’t catch me up there without armed bodyguards.’

  ‘In that outfit, I don’t blame you.’

  Sister Sarah smirked and glanced down at herself. ‘Yes, you have a point. Sister Naomi mentioned you, of course, and we all saw you when… when you were investigating the deaths. This is related?’

  ‘Honestly? I’m not sure. It started out as a fact-gathering exercise. Better profiling on the killer. When I started looking… Let’s just say there are some curious coincidences that I don’t like.’

  ‘Cryptic, but okay. Obviously, I’d be willing to help any way I can, but this girl would have passed through here before my time. I could ask who was doing it before me, see if they remember an Arabella Hive. That’s assuming she took any of our classes. They aren’t mandatory. Father Laramie encourages the teens to do them, but…’

  ‘Pretty much any form of education is optional in the Sprawl, I know.’

  ‘And we get the objectors. Usually religious reasons, but not always. There are some who object to a prostitute teaching kids about sex.’

  ‘I’d have thought you were the most qualified people on the planet.’

  ‘Ah, but we’re morally corrupt. Some object to the idea of sex ed as a whole, either because they think it encourages them to try it out or on general religious grounds.’

  ‘Abstinence, and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Yes, basically. Which is probably why the Sprawls are the only regions in America with increasing populations.’

  ‘And the fewest resources to cope with them… Yeah.’

  ~~~

  There was a baby screaming its tiny lungs out somewhere in the building. The cries echoed down the stairwell, unanswered by any form of guardian. Someone had arranged for the entrance of the old apartment block to be a slalom around piles of crates lashed together to form crude barriers, but the door was off its hinges and there was no one around to see Dillan walking in.

  The information Dillan had got from her toothless informant was that the Hives had lived on the top floor. That was likely prime real estate, assuming the roof was intact: you had to climb the stairs, but it was less likely to be disturbed and you got warning of raids. Arabella’s father had to have been fairly tough to hold rooms up there for any length of time. None of the records indicated how he had died, however. It was not impossible that he had been killed for the space. Figuring that the top was as good a place to start as any, Dillan set off up the stairs.

  Like a lot of Sprawl housing, this block was something of a mix. There were the residents who had managed to take and hold an apartment, but really had no desire for anything beyond a roof over their heads. They took little care of their residence beyond fortifying it; they frequently took less care of themselves. But there were also the people who wanted a home and had pride in what they had achieved, which was something close to the pinnacle of Sprawl life. Their children probably went to the mission; they hoped that, against the odds, they might rise above their birth. It was against the odds: Arabella Hive was one of the very few who had managed the transition.

  Dillan scanned the fourth-floor corridor and nodded, vaguely impressed. The roof, it seemed, was still intact and the people who lived up here seemed determined that their environment should remain clean, or at least tidy. There were still patches of carpet glued to the concrete raft floor, even if most of it had worn away long ago. Someone swept the corridor up here and there were no trash bags lying around.

  And at the end of the nice, clean corridor, a door opened and Dillan found herself looking at a heavily built woman who leaned against the doorframe in such a way that her arm was out of sight. Baseball bat, maybe a gun, set beside the door. Dark brown eyes peered out, assessing, but there was no shift in posture as Dillan closed the distance.

  ‘Face it,’ Dillan said, ‘I’m too clean to be after your space.’

  The woman’s lips twitched. ‘Yeah, give you that one. What’s a cop want here?’

  ‘Ex-cop. The smell probably hasn’t worn off yet. I’m looking for someone. She may be in trouble, as in someone may be trying to kill her.’ Dillan pulled a small display unit from her pocket, clicking up the picture of Hive they were using. ‘Arabella Hive. I heard she used to live in this building.’

  The woman did not bother looking. ‘Did. Lived two doors down. Got out and hasn’t been back, and I don’t blame her.’

  Dillan examined her witness. The skin tone suggested Mexican ancestry, the dark eyes held intelligence, or at least shrewdness, the body was muscled from exercise, the face pretty and fairly young. She was dressed in a cropped T-shirt and track pants which looked like they had been bought somewhere and were not too old. In fact, the top looked brand new… ‘You were friends, back then. Maybe looked out for her and she helped you with classes. You catch stray jobs because she helped you. Loyalty’s great, but she may have someone after her who… She could use some protection and I can get her that.’

  The woman’s lips tightened. ‘Bella was here two nights. That was weeks ago. She said she couldn’t stay. Wouldn’t say what was up, but it seemed like someone was chasing her. And you got your own problem.’ Her eyes flicked up, over Dillan’s shoulder, and down again.

  ‘Okay. Thanks. She comes around again, tell her to contact the Sisters of Corruption. They can reach me.’

  The woman nodded and then backed away, closing the door. Dillan turned and gave the boy moving up behind her a weary look. She figured he was maybe sixteen and he probably lived on one of the lower floors. He had seen her coming up and figured he might be able to score something off the rich woman slumming it out in the Sprawl. The kitchen knife he was holding certainly suggested that.

  ‘Nice jacket,’ the kid said, grinning broadly.

  ‘It is,’ Dillan said. ‘And it’s got a lining that’ll stop a bullet, never mind that knife.’ She reached behind her back and slipped her pistol free of its holster. ‘Your T-shirt, on the other hand, will not stop me from perforating your lungs.’ Still grinning, the boy backed away from her, his hands raised. ‘You’ve got fifteen seconds to be out of sight when I come down. If I see you on the stairs, I’ll blow your kneecaps off.’

  ‘Sure, lady. Sure.’

  ‘Ten,’ Dillan said, raising her pistol.

  ‘You said–’

  ‘Six.’ He broke and ran. ‘Three,’ Dillan called out as he reached the top of the stairs. Sighing, she started after him at a slow walk. The macho ones were easy, usually putting it on to mask their lack of real confidence. But if she had still been in NAPA, she would have bet she could look for him on an arrest record in the next year: he was too dumb to stay out of Rikers.

  ~~~

  ‘So we know she was in the area a few weeks ago,’ Fox said.

  ‘And we know she was scared of something,’ Dillan said, nodding.

  ‘You believe her friend? Hive wasn’t still there?’

  ‘I believe her, but a few weeks in the thick of the Sprawl when you haven’t been there for a while… Someone could’ve put a knife between her ribs by now.’

  Fox turned her head to look out of the autocab’s window as they crossed the Hudson on the roadway which had been put in under the maglev track. Somewhere below them was the disused Holland Tunnel, given up to the vagaries of rising sea levels and storm surges.

  ‘I’ll get some cambots tasked to overfly the area,’ Fox said. ‘Chances are slim, but maybe we’ll get lucky.’

  ‘And we keep lookin
g?’

  ‘And we keep looking. Tomorrow we’ll start working north, but we do that together. We’ll see more than just a kid with a kitchen knife once we get north of Union City.’

  ‘Fox, if she’s gone that far up, we’ll never find her. It’s too big an area.’

  ‘Terri said she had some ideas on narrowing the search parameters. We’ll see what she’s got in the morning.’

  14th October.

  ‘Okay, so I had an idea,’ Terri said, ‘but it was one of those ideas where the person having it wasn’t the best person to implement it, which is why I gave Camille a call.’

  The attractive wife of Garth Eaves smiled at Fox and Dillan over telepresence. ‘This was an interesting challenge,’ she said. ‘Far more interesting than constructing publicity memes.’

  ‘Okay,’ Fox said, ‘I’ll bite. How does memetics come into finding a woman lost in the Sprawl?’

  Both Terri and Camille smiled. They were having a distinctly distributed meeting, but the two were well in-sync. Camille was in Chicago, at home, Terri and Dillan were in the MarTech tower, and Fox was in her home office.

  ‘It’s a question of behaviour prediction,’ Terri explained. ‘Given the data we have on Doctor Hive, we can make predictions on the areas she’s likely to hide in. I’m happy to say that her visit to her old home and the friend who still lives there fits into my psychological profile quite nicely.’

  ‘As does her reluctance to put them in danger by staying longer,’ Camille added. A map of the New York Sprawl region appeared behind her, overlaid with a colour pattern in shades of pink and red. ‘Given that analysis and the data we have on the sociometric structures of the sprawler gangs in the region… Um, they are quite extensive. There have been a number of studies on the gang cultures and affiliations around New York. More than any other metro. Anyway, the probabilities indicate you have four primary search areas.’

  Fox looked over the regions marked in darker red on the map. ‘Why those areas?’ They were all fairly far north.

  ‘It comes down to gang ethics. The people who rule those areas stay bought once you’ve made a deal with them. That and the fact that they will entertain some deal involving money and keeping an outsider safe. Doctor Hive has a slight advantage in coming out of the Sprawl herself, but most of these people aren’t going to think much of her history there.’

  ‘Oh goody,’ Dillan said. ‘Our best shot at finding her is walking into gang territory knowing they’ll be loyal because she’s bought them.’

  ‘I’ll retask the cambots to focus on these areas,’ Fox said. ‘Helen, we’ll go in this afternoon once we’ve got some intel on the movements in the first target, which is going to be… the area around that park in North Bergen.’

  ~~~

  ‘She’s not here,’ Fox said as she walked with Dillan into what had once been the North Hudson Country Park and was now… less park-like.

  ‘You sound pretty sure,’ Dillan said. ‘We haven’t even really started.’

  ‘Wrong culture. We should check out that building on the north side, but I think she’ll want a roof over her head, and this lot prefer their yurts.’

  Dillan looked out across the field with its array of tent-like constructions, every single one of them built of a different haphazard array of scavenged materials. There was a sort of theme about them, a basic design philosophy. One or two poles supported the structures, and all the other materials were somehow slung from there. ‘Is that what you call them?’ Dillan asked.

  ‘Well… “yurt” is kind of evocative. What you’re looking at here is a dustbowl survivalist who got tired of it and came here, and ended up leading a sprawler gang. These are nomads who don’t move out of their park.’

  ‘Doesn’t that kind of invalidate the nomad thing?’

  ‘Probably not an idea to mention to them.’

  ‘Okay… If they’re basically dustbowl thugs with fixed abodes, this is going to be tough.’

  ‘No, actually it makes things a little easier, assuming the guy at the top set them up with the usual culture.’

  They had made it maybe three hundred metres in along the remains of a track of some sort before they were intercepted by five people in scruffy jeans, old band T-shirts, combat boots, and an assortment of jackets which had mostly seen better days. In the lead was a small mountain carrying a six-foot length of metal pipe like a quarterstaff which he twirled absently, and quite easily, bringing it to rest across his shoulders as he came to a stop, feet set shoulder-width apart. He opened his mouth, but Fox got in first.

  ‘We’re here to talk to your leader,’ Fox said, her voice firm and fairly loud.

  ‘We don’t talk to cops,’ the mountain replied.

  Fox ignored him and fixed her gaze on a slight woman standing behind his right shoulder. ‘We’re travelling north and we’d like to rest a while.’

  ‘I said…’ the man started, swinging his staff down from his shoulders.

  ‘That’s enough, Don,’ the woman behind him said. ‘We show hospitality to other travellers, even if they smell of pig.’

  ‘I showered this morning and everything,’ Dillan complained.

  ‘It can take years to wear off,’ Fox said. ‘Sometimes it never does.’

  ~~~

  The leader of the gang reminded Fox a little of Baxter Cable, the leader of a slightly more law-abiding group she had met in the Southern Protectorate. Possibly it was the beard, though this one was not quite as prodigious as Cable’s. There was the same bulky body form, the same intelligence behind the eyes.

  ‘Name’s Bull,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘Drink?’ He turned and started toward a cabinet set against a wall. The ‘yurt’ Bull lived in had been built against the wall of a sports centre that occupied one corner of the park, which gave it more space than the others, but then Bull was the one likely to be entertaining guests, and he was the boss.

  Fox pulled a half-bottle from her bag. ‘Try this. I kind of like my stomach lining where it is.’ Bull turned back and took the bottle, and his slight grin suggested that Fox had been right about the contents of the liquor cabinet. ‘I’m Tara Meridian, this is Helen Dillan.’

  ‘And you’re “travelling north,” right?’

  ‘Working our way up. We’re looking for someone who’s probably in way more trouble than she thinks she is.’

  Bull handed over two glasses. ‘I’m not in the habit of handing out information to anyone who walks in with a bottle of whiskey.’ He moved to an old mattress that had been set down on the floor as a seat and settled onto it.

  ‘Watch the news much, Bull?’ Fox asked. There was a second mattress, or maybe a large cushion from a couch: Fox made use of it, Dillan settling beside her.

  ‘Out here? Barely any internet out here, girl.’

  ‘There’s a guy murdering prostitutes. Slits their throats and then carves them open, pulls out their internal organs, takes one or two for souvenirs. We think he’s probably hunting our witness and she probably doesn’t know it. She’s running, but not from him.’

  ‘I heard about him. Been killing down in the Combine. Two dead.’

  ‘That’s two of nine. That we know about, and he won’t stop unless someone stops him. I figure you’ve got a couple of girls who make extra on the side…’

  Dillan produced her display card and laid it on the threadbare carpet between them. ‘She might help us track this guy down,’ Dillan said. ‘She’s probably going to die if we don’t find her.’

  Bull’s eyes flicked to the card and up again. ‘Some other rumours been going around. Heard from Brooklyn how half a dozen girls’ve gone missing last little while. Now the two south of here.’

  Fox’s eyes narrowed. ‘Brooklyn? We know of one who died over there.’

  ‘People don’t take much notice of the Sprawl. Except when they want something.’

  ‘Of this I am aware.’ Fox indicated the card. ‘You’ve seen her.’

  ‘Stayed a night. Paid for it, but she
said she needed solid walls and even less internet coverage. Seemed like she was scared of anyone getting her image up on the net. Seemed like she was scared of the net. Girl had a demon on her back and I wasn’t too sorry when she moved on.’

  Fox tossed back her drink. ‘Thanks, Bull, you’ve been a help. The bottle’s a gift for your hospitality.’

  ‘Good luck finding her. Better luck finding this bastard who’s cutting up girls.’

  ‘Thanks for that too. I think we’re going to need it.’

  ~~~

  ‘We cross-reference internet coverage with Camille’s probability map, right?’ Dillan said as they walked away from the camp.

  ‘Kit’s compiling the data and working it out now,’ Fox said. ‘Then we’ll need to run some drone flights over the most likely areas to confirm the signal strengths and run visual scans. We’re going to have to wait until tomorrow to go further up.’

  ‘Well… We’ll be fresh for it.’

  ‘It’s another damn day without finding him, Helen. Another day he could be finding Hive and making sure she can’t tell us anything.’

  ‘We could get lucky tomorrow, you know?’

  Fox grimaced. ‘I don’t really believe in luck.’

  ‘Huh. From someone who seems to have had more than her fair share, that seems just a little crazy.’

  ‘No one’s ever accused me of being sane.’

  16th October.

  After a day of fruitless searching, the last thing Fox wanted to be doing at five in the morning was looking at another body. Rutherford did not look best pleased either.

  ‘Looks like the copycat,’ the NAPA detective stated flatly, ‘but he’s getting better.’

  Fox was already hooked into the sensors from the forensics system: Rutherford really did not care what her superiors thought at this point. ‘Hesitancy is reduced. He’s gaining confidence. Little prick. I’m actually a little more worried about what his colleague is up to. Nothing for over a week…’

  ‘Maybe he’s pissed off at the competition. Maybe he’s hunting the copycat. Not, I add, that my captain has officially acknowledged this is a copycat.’