Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) Page 7

  ‘Well, someone’s going to have to show a lot of promise before I take them home with me,’ he said. Making his living from sex disinclined him to consider it recreationally, which was why Fox had never suggested it.

  Fox settled her back against the bar, curved her spine, pushed out her chest, and watched several men and a couple of women lick their lips. ‘Yeah. On the plus side, it could be amusing to fuck with the dopies for a while.’

  ‘You’re an evil woman, Fox Meridian.’ He turned and stretched so that his arm muscles flexed… Fox was sure she heard someone whimper even over the music.

  ‘I bow to your superior evil,’ Fox replied.

  Part Three: Murder Is My Business

  New York Metro, 18th January 2060.

  The hangover had almost been worth it, the messages Kit had carefully prioritised and stored had been dealt with over breakfast, and then she had got the report through from the forensic techs saying that the mysterious data stick contained even more mysterious data. It was a single, encrypted data file; very high-end, military encryption had been used to conceal the contents. Most of the rest of the day had been spent trying to get authorisation to have it decrypted.

  So on Sunday morning, Fox was really hoping for a lie-in and the buzz for attention from her VA resulted in a groan which became a bitten off scream of exasperation when she noticed the time. ‘Oh-eight-hundred! Fuck, this better be… All right, answer it, no visual.’

  ‘Identity verified against personal implant,’ a dull, impersonal voice said into her head. ‘Inspector Meridian, attend potential crime scene at apartment sixty dash ninety-two, your location. Possible unattended termination; patrol and EMT dispatched but not arrived. Please confirm.’

  Fox let the statement from the dispatch agent at HQ sink in for a second before replying. ‘Inspector Meridian confirming assignment. ETA… five minutes. Inform the patrol to wait before gaining entry.’

  ‘Confirmed.’

  The connection broke and Fox pushed herself up from the bed. ‘Damn. Kit, run the shower, cold.’ Gathering herself, she pushed and rolled and then dragged herself over to the shower which was built into a glassed-in cubicle at the side of the bedroom. Cold water hit her as soon as she stepped in, flushing away most of the rest of the fuzz in her head.

  ‘I should have a cup of coffee ready for you to gulp down by the time you are dressed,’ Kit informed her.

  ‘Off,’ Fox said, unable to take any more. She turned and found the fox-girl standing behind her, dry despite the shower jets since she was not really there. ‘Air jets, please. And thanks for getting the coffee ready, but you standing in the shower with me is creepy.’

  Kit opened her mouth, and then closed it and vanished. ‘Perhaps that was not entirely advisable, no. I shall employ audio only in future.’

  Fox grinned, letting the hot air jets dry her skin for almost long enough before she left the shower and grabbed for a fresh suit. Jeans, jacket, socks and trainers went over that, and then she was out of the bedroom and taking a half-mug of coffee from the small robot which handled her household chores. Kit was right: half a mug she could bolt before leaving.

  ‘Hopefully this is going to be a simple unattended death,’ Fox said as Kit waited for her beside the door. ‘I’ll be back in an hour or so to grab some food. We might even save them.’ She put her empty mug down and headed for the door, grabbing her kit as she went and pushing it ahead of her. Luggable was the best description of the portable kits; they were near enough fourteen kilos of equipment, and they came with a telescopic handle and wheels for when there was flat ground to move them over.

  ‘Good luck,’ Kit said as Fox rolled out on a call which was too close to home.

  Apartment 60-092 was not right at the top, but it was on one of the higher-rent floors nearer the top of the tower. Fox, and Sam, earned enough to rent one of the larger apartments in the middle tier, but the upper floors were generally considered more prestigious. Whoever was dead, they were likely to be well off. Not Jackson Martins well off, but still in a fairly well-paid job of some sort, possibly with connections… She instructed her VA to put through a request for data on the occupant as she got into the elevator and began the ascent.

  There was a patrol officer outside the door when she got to the apartment, clad in the standard, sealed, blue and white body armour and helmet of NAPA officers. The helmet concealed his face, but he turned at the sight of her and his voice came from a speaker under his chin. ‘EMT wouldn’t wait. Said we were still inside potential recovery timescales.’

  Fox nodded. ‘That’s fine, didn’t expect anything else.’ She popped open a section of her kit and pulled out one of the crime scene suits she kept in there. This was a fairly loose, all-over suit with a built-in filter mask and visor. With the suit on and the mask in place she was as sealed as the patrol officer, and she knew the emergency medical technician would be wearing a white version of the police armour so that was going to be fine.

  The apartment door opened and the tech, a woman, stepped out, pausing briefly before taking another couple of steps and then reaching for the release catch on her helmet. The upper and front part, what amounted to the visor, hinged up and back to reveal a young face with an expression of mild shock on it. ‘Uh… all yours. I… Uh, there’s no chance of recovery and, uh, I think you’ve got a homicide.’

  Fox continued pulling her suit up her legs, keeping it matter-of-fact and business-like, keeping the tech’s mind on the details and not the whole. ‘Initial impressions?’

  ‘Uh… A woman. She’s lying in the front room. Her… uh… her head’s gone. I don’t know what’d do that to someone. I’ve never… never seen anything like that.’

  ‘Right. You’ve verified death?’

  ‘It was pretty obvious. And with that much brain damage she’s gone.’

  ‘Did you touch anything else?’

  The girl swallowed. ‘Didn’t even touch her.’

  ‘Good. I doubt we’ll need further information from you, but we know where to find you. Go get a coffee or something. There’s a pretty good shop down on the entrance level.’ She turned to the patrol officer. ‘Contact dispatch, get an ME assigned and ready for body collection, and I want a tech with a large-area analysis swarm down here. Then you wait here. No one gets in here without my permission. Call through as soon as the tech arrives.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sealing her suit, Fox activated her kit and watched as the multispectral sensor head lifted up to record her entry. ‘Okay then… Inspector Tara Meridian entering apartment sixty dash ninety-two at zero-eight-twelve, January eighteenth twenty-sixty. Suspected homicide.’ The door slid open and she pushed her box of tricks ahead of her.

  Unlike her own apartment, the front door did not open straight onto the lounge. There was a short length of corridor with a single door leading off to the right. Fox checked it, finding a closet and no signs of violence. The inner door at the end opened and she paused, letting the scene from the cameras and her own eyes sink in before she continued. Then she extended the sensor head into the room ahead of her and began a ladar sweep, contemplating what she was seeing while the beam flicked out to scan the room.

  The victim was a woman. Her VA chimed in with identity data and she got a name, Julianne Marie Trent. She put through the request for a full profile. Miss Trent was unmarried, Fox had that data already, but the visuals suggested she was quite happy with that; she had an attractive face, but it was aging, and she had put on weight around the hips and thighs and had never bothered to have that fixed. Clearly she had the money for the cosmetic treatment so that was a personal decision. Trent was lying on the floor, not exactly posed, but clearly meant to be found quickly and easily by anyone entering the room. She had more furniture than Fox did, which gave more opportunity for the body to be concealed, but there she was in full view, the wrap she was wearing splayed open. Fox made sure the sexual assault tests were included in the forensic swarm’s tasks, but somehow she
was not expecting there to be any.

  The cause of death seemed obvious but would need to be verified. Trent’s right eye was gone. The back of her skull had been blown open. It could have been a large-calibre bullet, a hollow point one, but Fox was betting on finding explosives residue: there was just too much damage. Readouts from the ladar began coming in and confirmed some of what she suspected: there were combustion products from a nitroamine explosive and the kind of plasticiser used in caseless ammunition. Someone had, in all probability, fired a handgun in the room.

  A thought zoomed the sensor pod’s camera in on the victim’s face and switched the display to false-colour. Subcutaneous bruising around the jaw, burns across the forehead, nose, and right cheek, concentrating around the right eye… What was left of the right eye anyway; the bullet had punched through quite effectively, but it had been close range. She pulled up the ladar scan data and ran a measurement on the entry wound: ten millimetres seemed about right. So someone had held her down, hand pressed around her jaw, over her mouth, and then they had pointed a pistol at her, right in the eye from no more than a few centimetres, and fired. Julianne Trent had seen death coming from very close range. She would have fought if she was able, and the bruising on her jaw suggested she needed holding down. Whoever had killed her was strong, probably big.

  The ladar and terahertz scans of the room complete, Fox slid her kit into the room and stepped around it to examine the body more closely. The arrangement of limbs suggested a struggle, but then Trent had been half-naked and being attacked by… Fox decided she was probably dealing with a male perpetrator, simply because she could not see it as a female. She would keep the possibility open, but a male seemed more likely. She was sure the statistics would bear that out, but statistics were damned for a reason.

  ‘Why would someone shoot you in the eye, Julianne?’ Fox asked aloud. ‘They really wanted to be sure you were dead too. Military ordnance, close-range execution. Who did you piss off?’

  Well, looking was unlikely to get her much. She checked the swarm program and set the microbots loose on the scene while she took the scanner head through to the bedroom and bathroom to get scans of those areas. Her own swarm would go over the body and its immediate area, and that was going to take a couple of hours. Hopefully the tech would arrive soon and they would bring more microbots to go over the whole apartment.

  The bathroom was clean and tidy. There was water in the bottom of the shower. The bed was ruffled, not yet made, but there was no sign of a struggle there. Trent had not been attacked until she walked out into the lounge. Had she disturbed someone? A burglar? Fox walked back to the lounge door and looked out. And really the only sign that anything had happened was the ruined body on the floor, the pool of blood soaking into carpet that looked like it had cost real money to fabricate. Not a burglary.

  ‘Another hit? With explosive ammo?’ she mused aloud, mostly to hear herself say the words. It was not a micromissile this time, however. This had been up-close, personal, a face-to-face killing, and yet it was controlled, efficient, and impersonal.

  ‘Inspector?’ The officer on the door’s voice came through over network comms, interrupting her train of thought.

  ‘Go.’

  ‘Tech’s here. Want me to send him in?’

  ‘Who did they send?’

  ‘It’s me, Fox,’ another voice said, sounding grumpy. ‘It’s Andy Holland. Let me in so I can get this over with.’

  ‘Andy… right. Let him through. I’m going to need a full forensic sweep of the apartment. All of it. I’ve got the body in process already.’

  She heard the door opening and then she saw the armoured form of Andy Holland entering with a large, multiswarm hive unit behind him. He stopped in his tracks, the automated transport almost running into him, but he was not, as she had suspected, surprised by the body. ‘You seen the v-tag,’ he asked, nodding at the long wall opposite him.

  Fox shook her head. ‘You know I turn that stuff off most of the–’ She stopped as her VA resolved the tags in the room and rendered the imagery, and the room changed to show far darker colours than she had expected, a more modern visual style with a lot of soft edges and dull neon highlights. There was also a neon, glowing message written across the back wall in dull, blood red: Murder is my business!

  ‘Looks like business was kind of cut-throat,’ Holland said, shaking his head as he set about programming the microbot sweep.

  ~~~

  ‘Julianne Trent was a writer,’ Kit said as Fox stuffed her face with what her personal agent considered to be an entirely inadequate nutritional intake of coffee and microwaved cheeseburger. ‘She freelanced for a number of internet broadcast stations, but is most famous for her work on IB-Nineteen’s Murder is My Business.’

  Fox grimaced. ‘Infamous might be a better term. A cop show where the lead detective is this beautiful, charismatic, ex-special ops femme fatale-type who gets psychic hunches? Who comes up with this shit?’

  Kit considered her owner’s personality carefully before answering; Fox was certainly attractive, had been in the Army performing special antiterrorist operations, and did have a degree of charisma, though it was hard to believe it watching her jam cheeseburger into her mouth… ‘Apparently Miss Trent comes up with some of it,’ Kit said. ‘Or she did until someone terminated her existence. Fox, I may be of greater assistance to you under these circumstances if I were allowed to look at the police reports as well as public records.’

  ‘Maybe, but NAPA policy says I can only use authorised software for data analysis. You’re not on the approved list.’

  ‘I am executing on a MarTech Technologies Series Seventy-Two server and have been designed with ISO twenty-seven thousand compliance in mind. I can be certified for use with confidential information with minimal effort on your part.’

  Fox paused in her chewing. Then she swallowed. ‘Okay… Get me whatever I need to review and sign, and tell me what you’ve got currently about Trent.’

  ‘I will forward the documents to your VA. Miss Trent was forty-eight. She ended a cohabitation arrangement three years ago and has had no regular partner since.’

  ‘What was her partner’s name?’

  ‘Alan Roberts. He is one of the producers on Murder is My Business. Accounts of the break-up suggest an amicable separation and they have continued to work together. Trent is responsible for around ten of the scripts in a typical production season. She has written scripts for other police procedural shows, but generally on a one-off basis. Recently she became more heavily involved with a new show for a channel called Mystery and Mayhem.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it. Aren’t they in competition with IB-Nineteen?’

  ‘The two channels share a common demographic, though IB-Nineteen has a larger proportion of female subscribers. Mystery and Mayhem’s scheduling includes more male-targeted, action-based programming, and adult material.’

  ‘Late night softcore?’

  ‘And some less soft. They have a licence for age-tagged transmission.’

  ‘So she was working on a series for her station’s main competitor… What was it?’

  ‘Murder on My Mind,’ Kit replied, her lips curling upward, ‘a series about an attractive, charismatic detective who is an expert martial artist with the ability to visualise crime scenes through meditation. She also enjoys taking long, steamy showers after visiting a murder scene, according to the reviews I accessed.’

  Fox wiped at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. ‘Well, we have that in common. I probably don’t have a camera playing over my voluptuous curves while doing it.’

  ‘It’s almost as though you’d seen some of the episodes.’

  ‘I didn’t know AIs as young as you could develop sarcasm.’

  ‘I am an exceptional artificial intelligence.’

  Fox got to her feet and took the remains of her lunch to the kitchen for recycling. ‘Okay, so Trent was developing a show for a new channel which is clearly in direct competitio
n with her old show. That’s… weak motive. I guess I’m trawling IB stations.’

  ‘IB-Nineteen is based in Manhattan,’ Kit supplied. ‘I’m afraid Mystery and Mayhem has offices in Boston.’

  Fox sighed. ‘Well, I’ll go see the local ones first and put through a request for the travel budget if I need it. I hate paperwork, you know?’

  ‘I was aware. Don’t forget to look at the documents I sent you.’

  Giving her agent’s avatar a glower, Fox started for the door.

  ~~~

  ‘A hit to stop her writing for a rival IB channel?’ Canard sounded, rightly, sceptical.

  Fox shrugged. ‘All I have to work with for now, but I only picked up the case a couple of hours ago. I’d be interviewing her co-workers anyway.’

  Her captain grunted. ‘I’ll authorise the travel to Boston if it’s needed. What about the other thing?’

  ‘Encrypted data on a memory stick.’ She lifted the small, black object in its evidence bag, turning it over in her long fingers. ‘Techs say it’s high-grade encryption. Only fingerprints on it are the victim’s. That in itself suggests he was NIX.’

  ‘Yes… I received an offer of help to decrypt it following your request going through. From Fort Meade.’

  Fox winced. ‘Yeah, that figures. Probably came from Cyber Command, but it’ll be NIX that wants it. They’re watching the case.’

  ‘If it’s military encryption, how else are you going to find out what’s on it?’

  He wanted to give NIX the stick, Fox figured. To a politically minded man like Canard, sucking up to the country’s intelligence organisation probably seemed like a good move. She knew them better. ‘Outside, local consultant,’ she replied. ‘Already associated with the case, and he’ll do it pro bono. Actually, I think he’ll want to know what’s on here as much as I do and his security clearance is as high as mine.’ She happened to know she had higher clearance than Canard.