I left Janet with Riviera. They’d been talking for nearly three hours without pause and the interview showed no signs of ending soon. I couldn’t remember him speaking so much at one time, but it seemed once she’d tapped the vein of his experience he couldn’t shut up. I took the pipe to Yang Six, spending the time putting together a Pol-net alert about the two potentially linked homicides and warning of possible copy-cats. I knew it would probably earn a sharp rebuke from Sherry once it flashed on her terminal, I was stepping pretty heavily on the toes of CAOS Defence after all, but my Demon instinct told me this case was far from over. Amongst many flaws, an inability to tolerate unfinished business had always been my biggest.
Leyla and Timor were holed up in the upstairs store room of a defunct Immersion arcade. The recently launched MEC Immersion headband had, after some unfortunate initial publicity, finally made affordable, wearable immersion gear a reality, meaning all the hardcore gamers and porn-addicts could now safely waste their lives in the privacy of their own homes. A growing number of boarded up arcades was the most visible consequence, along with increased rates of obesity and sedentary lifestyle-related illnesses.
“All quiet, Boss,” Timor said as I peered at his camera screen, the lens trained on the laundry opposite. It was titled the Santa Isabella Cleaning Emporium, Vintage Clothing a Speciality. Modern fabrics don’t need a great deal of cleaning, but a lot of the splice groups tended to favour more archaic garments. Vampirism in particular had seen an upsurge in the lace and leather trade.
“Word went out just over four hours ago,” Timor went on.
“How many informants?” I asked.
“Just one. My best, and most discreet.”
“Wonder who he’ll send,” Leyla said, sitting with her back to the wall as she checked her carbine.
Would’ve been Nina Laredo in the old days, I knew. If he really wanted to make sure. But Nina was dead thanks to me, and if she was still around I doubted even Janet could have gotten anything out of her. I just had to hope her replacement was of a more flexible mindset.
“Got anything to eat?” I asked.
I sat in the corner eating boil-in-the-box noodles and going through the responses to my Pol-net alert, which consisted of the usual ads from private security firms and a lengthy message from a sheriff’s deputy in Idaho Territory insisting the two attacks were the work of ‘The International Jew-Nazi Cabal.’ Nice to know some things don’t change. Phaedra Diallo had also sent through the preliminary forensic report on the massacre along with a list of victims. The perp had been named as one Randall Schiffler, age twenty-two. No registered employment but initial checks showed a healthy balance in his financial accounts. He’d arrived on Salacia Hab only three days before, let out a mid-range apartment at what I would have considered an exorbitant rent and purchased a top of the range Nike speargun from a sporting goods store. The speargun had an innovative magnetically driven firing mechanism and a magazine capacity of twenty darts. Schiffler had managed to kill thirteen people before Phaedra put a bullet through his forehead from fifty yards. For a first kill made under extreme pressure it was an impressive shot. Preliminary research showed no link between Schiffler and any of the victims and he had no criminal record. The only tangible link to Rybak’s murder was the phrase.
Lacking other leads I mentally reviewed Janet’s story and began a search for ex-employees of Haunai Genetics, coming up empty which was weird. Also, the company’s registration details appeared to have been purged of personnel data. A quick open source check was similarly fruitless, which was even weirder. I thought for a moment before uttering a soft curse, pulling Vargold’s smart from my pocket and calling the only number in the ID file. He answered within ten seconds.
“Inspector. Good to hear from you.”
“Your offer still good?”
“Of course.”
“Haunai Genetics, registered in Korea over three decades ago. I need to find any former employees, particularly the research staff. All my checks are negative. I thought, given your links to the Downside corporate sector…”
“Leave it with me. You’ll have details on every employee within twenty-four hours.”
“Thank you.”
“I suppose asking how this links to Craig is pointless.”
“To be honest, I’m not sure it does, yet anyway. There was something else, a mass shooting on Salacia Hab this morning. Maybe you saw it on the feeds.”
“I did. You think there may be a connection?”
“I think what happened to your friend could be part of something way bigger. Or we’re looking at the mother of all coincidences.”
I noticed Timor shift, eyes snapping to the camera screen and head cocked as he listened to something in his ear-piece.
“Gotta go, Mr Vargold,” I said. “Thanks for the help.”
I shut down the smart and moved to Timor’s side. “Surveillance team has someone approaching the premises,” he said, then grunted a disappointed sigh. “Pizza guy, again.”
I called up the feed from the surveillance team’s main camera, seeing a skinny figure slouching along the neighbouring street with two pizza boxes. “Same guy as the last time,” Timor said. “Bet it’s the same toppings too. Fuentes really needs to reconsider his life choices.”
“He showed up twice in less than seven hours?” I asked.
“Laundry owner says Fuentes is kind’ve a compulsive eater, ‘specially when he’s nervous.”
“Gold One to Gold Three,” I said, addressing the surveillance team leader. “Intercept. Check those boxes. Extreme caution advised.”
“Acknowledged.”
I watched as the pizza guy came to a startled halt on the smart screen, eyes widening in shock at the sudden appearance of four Demons with weapons drawn. He dropped to his knees in response to a barked command and set the boxes down. One of the surveillance team moved closer and ran a pheromone sensor over the boxes. “No traces,” came the report, quickly supplemented by, “Anchovies and salami. Yum yum.”
“X-ray,” I ordered. “And shit-can the humour.”
The same Demon carefully set both boxes side by side then scanned them with a pen-sized x-ray unit. “Negative. No mechanicals or metals.”
“Let him through,” I said. “All he has to do is make the delivery. Five hundred in green if keeps his nerve. Don’t want Fuentes getting antsy.”
“Roger that.”
There was a short delay before the pizza guy appeared, making for the laundry at a faster pace than I’d have liked, though his slouch was still in place. He rang the buzzer and managed not to fidget during the thirty seconds it took a somewhat agitated older man to answer the door. “That’s the owner,” Leyla told me. “Wanted to bolt, but we threatened to get the commerce board to pull his shop-licence for harbouring a known criminal.”
The door closed and the pizza guy began to slouch away. I was about to return to my corner for more research when I noticed the pizza guy’s step was even faster than it had been on approaching the door. I reached for the camera, zooming in on a pale and sweaty face, eyes wide and plainly terrified.
“Shit!”
I ran for the door, barking orders at Leyla. “Call the laundry! Tell the owner he has to vacate now! And tell Surveillance to grab that pizza fucker!”
I dragged the arcade door open and sprinted outside. I was twenty yards short of the laundry door when the windows blew out. The blast picked me up and threw me against the boards on the arcade windows, glass shredding the sleeve of my raincoat as I instinctively shielded face and eyes. I felt blood coursing down my arm as I sagged onto the pavement, looking up to see the laundry in flames, the roof gone and smoke billowing in the rain as the level’s fire suppressant system came online. One glance at the shambles visible through the laundry’s glassless windows told me it was way too late for Fuentes and the owner.
Promise me he’ll make it to trial, Janet had said and I’d promised. So I knew I’d shortly have another reason to hate Mr Mac, because when this was done he’d have made me into a liar as well as a murderer.