I GO BACK to my room to decompress and review the interview. Tia has automatically transcribed every word and added text, audio and full video copies to the case file.
I play back the audio a couple of times, paying extra attention to the pauses, the words that are strained and where the silences are the longest. Her account doesn’t match up with the briefing Milsom gave me in the car. I need to interview the cleaner later anyway.
I get Tia to call Alex for me and he accepts a voice connection immediately.
“Good morning again,” he says.
“Is now a good time to come over to the Diamond Suite?” I don’t have to ask permission, but I have the feeling things will go more smoothly if Alex feels he’s the rooster there.
“Of course. They did leave that bag in your room, didn’t they?”
A gentle way to remind me to suit up. “Yeah,” I say. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
I double-check that the tamperproof seals are still reading green when I pull them from the pack left for me the night before. “Tia, call Nadia for me.”
Nadia accepts voice connection in 1.5 seconds, as if she has been waiting for my call. “Good morning, SDCI Moreno. How can I help you?” I can hear that smile as she speaks.
“Do you have a gardener here?”
“A groundskeeper, yes. He has an assistant too.”
“Do they use an ax?”
“Yes. They— Oh.” She’s realized why I’m asking. “Would you like me to check if they still have it?”
“That would be great, thanks. If it’s where they expect it to be, don’t touch it or let them touch it. In fact, take one of the constables with you. I’ll send one down to your office now.”
At least she’s levelheaded. I assign the copper who was guarding Selina’s room after reminding him about evidence protocols, and he’s barely able to keep his voice from squeaking.
There’s always a point early in an investigation when it feels like the information that needs to be checked and folded into the case is expanding exponentially. Just that one conversation with Selina has opened up a new facet that creates many more questions than I woke up with this morning: Alejandro’s London trip.
It might be unrelated. It could have everything to do with the murder. I have to turn over every stone at this point, with everything still wide-open and Theo still out there somewhere. Selina said Alejandro behaved differently after the trip and that alone is enough to justify following up on it.
“Tia, put in a request with the MoJ for all of Alejandro’s visa details, including the temporary credit assigned to him at the border. I need all the transactions he made during his trip to London pulled and put in the case file in a new folder called ‘London trip,’ okay?”
Alejandro being unchipped has made this part easier; all unchipped visitors to England are assigned temporary credit for use during their stay to make transactions seamless when they spend any money in the country. Without having a chip to handle it all, they provide a thumbprint instead and the visa system processes it. Of course, it will only provide part of the picture—the person or people he saw there may have paid instead—but it should at least give me a few places and times to narrow down the data combing. Just one transaction will enable me to get a visual on him, and identification software is so good now the MoJ AI will be able to track him across London for me, assuming he didn’t go into any black spots.
There’s the outside chance he had access to illegal credit. There’s an entire criminal subculture that specializes in hiding transaction activity in a cashless society, after all, but I’ll worry about that if something unusual becomes apparent.
I take a moment to mentally run through the morning so far, certain I’ve forgotten something. Travis Gabor comes to mind. “Tia, pull any data on Travis Gabor, will you? I’d like to see his chip activity before it was removed, and the reason why it was taken out.”
“Stefan Gabor has placed a formal legal-request clause on his husband’s data. Would you like me to initiate the request process?”
Gabor doesn’t have any legal right to stop me from reviewing the data; he’s just putting an extra layer of fuckery into the mix so that if I turn anything up that could incriminate him, he has a heads-up. What it does force me to do is justify the search, right from the start, more explicitly than I have to usually. I’m tempted to drop it; I don’t think Travis is involved, but something about the way that rich bastard is trying to make my job harder pisses me off just enough to not let it go.
Besides, it’s not like this case doesn’t already have an army of lawyers swarming over it already. I’d like to see Gabor trying to block three gov-corps at once.
“Yeah, do that. Ping one of the MoJ lawyers who was here last night.”
“The MoJ lawyers will want a justification for—”
“Tell them the justification is that some billionaire twat thinks he can fuck with the MoJ. And if that’s not justification enough for coming up with some legalese bullshit—like they are paid to come up with every day—then they can call me.”
“There are several expletives in your response. Would you like me to present your request verbatim?”
“No. Of course not. Make it all nice and polite, Tia.”
“Done.”
Of course, my conversation with Tia is now sitting in an MoJ data bank, and if things turn nasty with Gabor it could be raked up to paint me as a belligerent bastard with an ax to grind. But it won’t. I’ll just scan the data, let Travis have an extra night in the swanky hotel without any abuse from his husband and then it will all be over.
—
OUTSIDE the Diamond Suite I show the green seal on the paper-suit packet to the duty officer outside and then put it on in front of him. After doing the same with the packet of full bootie-like shoe covers, I pull on a pair of latex gloves last and go inside.
There’s a team of six people at work in the room, all dressed like me, in paper suits, and not one of them is Alex. In a corner farthest away from the place the body was found is a portable bank of testing equipment at hand to extract DNA from any samples and then check them against the National Genome Database.
A woman looks up from the desk and shouts through to the bedroom, “The SDCI is here, boss.” The others in the forensic team take a brief interest in me then, a couple giving me a polite nod and a smile; the rest offer nothing more than a blank stare before returning to whatever still holds their attention.
“Ah.” Alex appears at the doorway to the bedroom. “Come through. I’ll show you what we’re working up in here.”
There are two more from his team in there, both men, both too engrossed to look at me. They’re dedicated, that much is clear, but then so much is riding on this case being wrapped up neatly that their reputation is on the line. They probably won’t see another case that’s this high-profile for years, if ever.
“Only Klein’s hair is in the bed,” Alex says. “The victim didn’t sleep in it, since the sheets were changed the morning before the murder.”
I nod. “I just interviewed her.”
“So you’ll be interested in the cup we found in the bathroom.”
I follow him into the en-suite, telltale signs of forensic examination and dusting all over the mirror, the sink and the marble slab it’s set into.
He points at a porcelain cup that I recognize, the same type as in my room, provided with the tea and coffee facilities. “She drank from it, but his prints are on the cup too. I put it back where we found it so you could see it in situ. From the positioning, I think he made the drink and gave it to her; both of their prints are on the handle and his are more smudged there. Then he carried it into the bathroom and put it here, when it was empty and not too hot to hold on the sides rather than the handle.”
“Chamomile tea?”
He nods. “The tea bag is in the bedroom bin, so he left it in there to steep, as the kettle is in the main room.”
“Any residue?”
Alex grins. “Oh yes. It’s in the machine at the moment, but my money is on a heavy sedative.” He glances away for a second before looking back at me. “The analysis should be done in a few minutes, but I’ll bet you a hundred quid that it’s Zopadril, a sleeping drug widely used in the US.”
“I’d accept, if betting on evidence outcomes didn’t contravene MoJ conduct guidelines.” The grin drops from his face and I smile. “It’s okay—I know you’re only joking. I’m not that uptight.” It’s only partly true; he doesn’t have to watch his own conduct as closely as I have to. “What makes you so confident?”
“We found a bottle in the drawer over there.” He points to the bedside cabinet on the far side of the bed. “Prescribed to him, according to the label.”
I scratch the back of my head. That doesn’t sit right. Alejandro was so anti-drugs—anti-anything that interfered with the natural workings of the brain, be it a physical chip or substances that altered neurochemistry. “Who prescribed it?”
“A doctor at the Chicago airport walk-in clinic. Apparently it’s prescribed to help with jet lag. Thing is, it looks like he didn’t take any for jet lag at all. Only three of them are missing from the bottle and we know he didn’t take them; the capsules were emptied into the tea. We found them in the bin with the tea bag, partials of his prints all over them.”
“He gave her three times the recommended dose? Shit, was he trying to kill her?”
Alex shrugs. “Maybe. She wouldn’t have been able to taste or smell it, so it’s a good choice from that perspective. Anyone with very low blood pressure could have been killed by that dose, but she’s young, fit and healthy. He obviously wanted her out for the count though. Puts her out of the frame, I reckon.”
I nod in agreement. It could also explain the discrepancies in her account. “I’m just waiting for confirmation from a routine blood test taken when she was treated for shock but, by the sound of it, there won’t be any trouble detecting that sort of dose.”
“The question is, I suppose, why he drugged her,” Alex says. “If she’d been sleeping normally, he might still be alive now. But that’s for you to worry about.” The grin returns. “There was something else I wanted to flag. May be nothing, but still, I like to be thorough.”
He leads me back into the main room. “Clare,” he calls over to a black woman in conference with one of her colleagues. “Come and tell the SDCI what you found earlier.”
She comes over quickly, looking surprised to have been picked out. She’s in her forties, I think. It can be hard to tell with hair covered up by these suits. Tia confirms, uninvited, that she’s forty-two. “Morning,” she says to me. “I was going over the desk. There’s hotel stationery in the top drawer for the use of the guests. I had the idea that, in a place like this, they may have a set number of paper sheets and envelopes provided every day, replenished with the cleaning routine.”
I nod, impressed. “Go on.”
“I checked with one of the cleaners and he told me that they always make sure there are five sheets and five envelopes, and a spare ink cartridge for the fountain pen. Well, the cartridge is still in the drawer, but the pen is missing, along with one sheet and one envelope. According to the cleaner, he didn’t have to replenish the supplies in the desk at any point during the victim’s stay here. There were five of each, and the pen, in the desk on the morning before he was killed.”
“Good work,” I say.
Alex smiles warmly at her and I find myself altering my impression of him. He’s still dull, but at least he gives credit where it’s due and is proud of his team. “Thanks, Clare,” he says, and she returns to her colleagues.
“So I take it there’s no sign of the letter or the pen?”
Alex shakes his head. “We tried the blotter to see if there are any impressions left, but with it being a fountain pen, the applied pressure was too weak to leave anything we could detect.”
“Okay. Anything else you want to flag?”
“Not right now. I’ll add everything to the VR file and the AR layer, tagged. We should be wrapped up by about five o’clock this evening.”
As I’m saying my good-bye I get a ping from Constable Riley, the one I sent to assist the hotel manager. I send back a “Will be with you shortly” and leave the suite, peeling off the protective clothing in the corridor outside. The duty officer takes it for me and I thank him, impressed by how attentive these coppers are.
I reply to the ping once I’m back in my room. “What is it, Constable?”
“The groundskeeper’s ax is missing, sir. It’s usually locked away in a shed, but the day of the murder he left it in a log by accident. He said the storm blew up faster than he thought it would and took a gate off one of its hinges, which he had to see to right away, as it was blocking access to the back of the property. He didn’t realize the ax was missing until we checked the shed.”
“Right—”
“I . . . Sorry, sir, I have more information.”
I smile to myself. “Go ahead, Constable.”
“The ax was only bought a month ago, so I took the liberty of calling up the purchase record with the hotel manager. I’ve put a picture and description of the exact, ummm . . . model of ax into the case file.”
“Excellent work,” I say, meaning it.
“Thank you, sir.” He sounds quite breathless. “Anything else you need me to do, sir?”
“I’ll get back to you.” I end the call and ask Tia to put a commendation mark in Constable Riley’s file. “Call Alex, Tia.”
Alex accepts voice contact immediately. “Something come up?”
“Potentially. There are details in the case file of an ax, which is currently missing from the gardener’s shed.”
“Fantastic. I’ll see if it matches these marks in the rug. I’ll get back to you ASAP.”
I sit on the edge of my bed and rest my head in my hands as I think things through. Why drug your own girlfriend? Why handwrite a letter?
The idea of suicide returns and initially I resist it. Then the training kicks in and I pull myself up. The resistance to the idea is too automatic to be objective.
Selina said Alejandro was acting strangely. That when they spoke before she went to bed he seemed sad. He drugged her and didn’t even bother to rinse the cup. No, maybe it wasn’t carelessness; maybe that was deliberate. To show she was incapable of waking while he hanged himself.
“You’re considering case elements,” Tia says, having identified keywords from my thoughts, just patterns of electrical and chemical activity it reads all the time. Normally it’s only filtering for commands and the need for the v-keyboard and the like. Now I’m on a case, the brain activity created by keywords relating to the case are also attended to. “Would you like to enter a summary in the case file?”
Alejandro would never kill himself. No. I can’t think of a reason why he would go against such a fundamental belief. Either way, I don’t even want that word associated with him. “No.”
Of course Milsom pings me at that moment. I stand before I realize it, even though her location reads as “London, MoJ.” I accept the request for voice contact.
“How’s it going?”
“Good.”
“Suspect?”
“One of the people from the Circle, traveling with him.” No doubt she’s already scanned the case file. She wants to hear which details I choose to place emphasis on. “Theodore Buckingham. He checked out in the murder window. The manhunt team is on it. We’ve all but eliminated the girlfriend and I think we’ve identified the weapon used to chop him up; I’m just waiting on a confirmation from the head SOCO.”
“Good. You getting the help you need?”
“Yeah. The local team is very strong, very sharp. I’m impressed, actually.”
“Anything you need from me?”
Some fucking time?
“No, thanks, boss.”
“Tread carefully around the Gabors. One of them is friends with the commissioner.”
“I need to be thorough, ma’am.”
“There’s thorough and then there’s avoidable legal action. Understand?”
“Perfectly, ma’am.”
“I need you to give me an interim summary by lunchtime.”
“That’s less than twelve hours since I had sign-off to investigate!”
“I need to feed the dogs, Carlos. Otherwise they start barking. Just clean up the case log and expand on the critical details—I can see it’s all in there.”
“Understood.”
She ends the call and I sit back down again. Should I have told her what I fear? No. Not yet.
A message pops up from Alex. Just three words. It’s a match!
I get Tia to notify the local force coordinator that I need a murder-weapon hunt. Even though that ax wasn’t used to kill him, it was used to mutilate his body and could be covered in some solid evidence.
It’s almost lunchtime. I find the room-service menu and start salivating at the options.
“I have an update on Travis Gabor’s data,” Tia says, and I put aside any thoughts of steak and dauphinoise potatoes. “The legal team secured access. The chip was removed four days ago on medical grounds. Suspected infection of the synaptic interface.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“It’s very rare. Only one case per five hundred thousand, usually within a week of first insertion.”
“How long had Travis been chipped?”
“Since age sixteen, as per Noropean law.”
“What about the data? Anything come up that’s pertinent to the case?”
“Yes. In the past three months prior to removal of the chip, eighty-six percent of Travis Gabor’s Internet information searches were about the murder victim; a further ten-point-five percent were searches for information related to the Circle. His APA was instructed to notify him of any reports that Alejandro Casales was traveling outside of the United States. In addition, Travis Gabor has made repeated contact with an individual who works in visa control. He was informed when the victim’s visa was approved and also sent details of his travel itinerary. This is illegal activity. Would you like me to inform the data-control department at—”
“No, not now,” I say, amazed at the results. “Did the Gabors book into this hotel after Alejandro made his reservation?”
“Yes.”
Was Travis stalking Alejandro?