Anniversary Day (21 page)

There was less risk if Piaja went in right now. The others hadn’t arrived yet. If a bomb went off, it would only harm Piaja and the suspect. If the suspect killed himself, Piaja would have to live with that. If the suspect killed Piaja, then it would be news and little more. Unlike Julie, Piaja didn’t have family. No one would mourn him. His colleagues might miss him, but no one else.

He took another step forward.

“Isti, please. Don’t,” Julie said, her grip on his arm tightening.

“Make sure people leave the building in case there’s a bomb,” he said to her. Then he shook off her arm and pushed open the door.

The interior smelled of coffee, mixed bread and fresh baked goods. Piaja had expected to smell blood and vomit. He had expected dead employees, probably behind that counter. But it didn’t smell like anyone had died in here, and no one was moaning in pain.

Piaja kept his gaze on the damn suspect.

The suspect’s smile grew. Piaja’s stomach churned. He hated doing what the creeps wanted. But here he was.

“So,” he said, as he stood inside the door, “where are the employees?”

The suspect raised his eyebrows. “I’ve just seen a servo-tray.”

His voice was deeper than Piaja expected, richer, almost musical. Piaja had thought the voice would be nasal and harsh, not something liquid and mellifluous.

“Lie to me and I leave,” Piaja said.

The suspect’s smile faded. He didn’t like losing control. He nodded toward the counter. Exactly what Piaja thought. The only place he couldn’t see from the window, except for the bathrooms.

Piaja sent,
You guys getting this? How come you didn’t let me know about the employees?

We’re not getting any readings of anyone in that coffee shop except you and the suspect,
someone from headquarters sent back.

Piaja’s stomach clenched harder. He stood on his toes, peered, saw one gray arm leaning against the wall, hand up and open, defenseless. No readings because the employees had died just like Soseki had.

Piaja looked at the suspect. His smile was back. And in the seconds it took Piaja to look at the employees, the suspect had pulled a laser pistol.

Piaja started to back through the door, but the suspect shot beside him, the laser bouncing off the clear window and barely missing Piaja. Piaja’s heart was racing.

“I thought you were going to talk to me,” he said as he groped for the door.

“You do realize I’m going to kill you, too,” the suspect said.

A confession. Confessions were always nice. They made cases easier. But they made moments like this harder.

“So that’s why you brought me here?” Piaja asked, pleased that his voice didn’t shake. “To tell me that you’re going to kill me?”

The suspect shrugged.

“Then there’s no point in continuing this discussion, is there?” Piaja asked and pushed on the door. It didn’t budge. Something had sealed it.

What the hell’s with the door?
he sent.

The suspect has control of part of the system
, headquarters sent.

He’s in your system?

There was no answer, probably because the shop’s security had given the suspect a backdoor into police headquarters.

The suspect laughed softly. Then he shot at Piaja again, deliberately missing on the other side. The laser skittered along the floor, burning Piaja’s right shoe.

Piaja brought up his own weapon. “Stop this,” he said.

“We both know you’re not going to shoot me,” the suspect said.

“You might know that,” Piaja said. “I don’t.”

“You want to talk to me,” the suspect said. “You want my information.”

“Not so much anymore,” Piaja said. “You lied twice already in this conversation.”

“Not really,” the suspect said. “I told you that all I’ve seen is a servo-tray. That’s true for the last hour or so.”

“You said you had something to tell me,” Piaja said.

“So I do,” the suspect said. “And the nice thing about it is that I can tell you and then I can kill you and I get the best of both worlds. Because your people are watching this.”

Piaja’s mouth was dry. His grip on his laser pistol tightened, but he kept the weapon low. If he raised it just a bit, he could hit the bastard in the leg, and then the threat to Piaja would be gone.

“So tell me,” Piaja said.

The suspect raised his eyebrows, paused, and said, “These killings today. They’re just the beginning.”

“What do you mean?” Piaja asked.

But the suspect didn’t answer. Instead, he shot at Piaja and this time he hit Piaja’s right foot square on. The pain seared through Piaja’s system, and before he could think, he raised his own pistol, and took the shot he had planned.

The shot hit the suspect in the knee, but the laser didn’t flare red the way it was supposed to. Instead it expanded, moving up along the suspect’s body, spread out along the suspect’s stomach and then localized at his heart.

Piaja could see the man’s heart for just a second, and then it burst—the way a heart did when hit with a too-strong laser blast. But Piaja’s weapon was designed to injure, not kill. He’d never seen the use for a kill shot.

Yet the suspect tumbled backwards, his chest smoking, his blood everywhere.

“No,” Piaja said. He figured the guy might suicide. He figured he could stop it. He’d figured on a bomb, even. But he hadn’t planned for this.

He lifted his right foot, the pain so tremendous that his eyes had filled with tears. Behind him the door opened.

Too late, of course. It had all happened too late.

Thirty-six

Romey arrived after the back-ups, after the other squads, after the ambulance, for crap’s sake.

After the deed was done.

The entire street was full of people, most of them in uniform. They all crowded around the damn coffee shop as if they could do something, as if they could make some kind of difference.

She shoved her way through them, saw some civilians in the mix, wondered if they’d been tested for any kind of residue or one of those sneaky needles that killed Soseki. Probably not.

She avoided the civilians, and got to the door, already knowing what she would find. She would find Piaja all apologetic, his partner a bit belligerent, and a dead suspect, whom she wanted alive.

But before she got close, ads assaulted her. Ads for marvelous coffee, all made by hand. She had to shut off the commercial part of her links, figuring someone else could deal with the ads, the untended commercialization, the strange surreal nature of an active business that had just become an historically notorious crime scene.

Ahead of her, the street cops formed a small cone around the door. And standing near that was a broad-shouldered uniformed officer, one foot raised. The air stank of blood and burned flesh.

“Step aside,” she said as she pushed her way through. She reached the front of the cone, and her gaze met the uniformed officer’s. That had to be Piaja.

She’d checked his file as she hurried toward the scene. Sixteen years as a street cop, turned down all promotions that might include a desk or might get him off the street. He was one of those lifers who preferred the hazardous day-to-day work in some of the most crime-infested areas of Armstrong.

Like so many long-time street cops, he was probably an adrenaline junkie, the kind of man who preferred that moment of terror when he opened the wrong door or stumbled on a crime in progress.

That probably explained why he went inside, risking getting blown up, risking death, certainly getting injured in the process.

She thought it ironic that a street cop—once called foot patrolmen on Earth way back when—had gotten shot in the foot.

But she didn’t mention that. She also didn’t mention medical attention. She figured he knew he needed it.

She also figured he was waiting for her.

“You disobeyed my orders,” she said as she approached.

He was leaning against the door. The lean was subtle, almost unnoticeable, just a brush of his spine against the door jam, enough to give support but not enough to collapse into it.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but I didn’t.”

“I told you I wanted him alive.”

“I know, sir,” he said. “I don’t think that would have happened no matter what I did.”

“You don’t deny that you killed him?’

“Why should I?” he said. “Everyone was watching through security feeds and links. But I will say this: I didn’t kill him intentionally.”

“If you had stayed out—”

“If I had stayed out,” he said, “we wouldn’t have gotten him talking. He didn’t say much, but he said enough.”

“And he still would have died.” This from the woman next to Piaja. Romey recognized her from one of the cop gyms that Romey sometimes frequented. She was one of the many Hus on the squad, one of those who preferred her first name—Janet, Janeen, Julie. That was it. Julie. She actually encouraged people to call her Officer Julie.

She was tiny, barely coming up to her partner’s shoulder, but she had muscles upon muscles visible on her arms and along her torso. Romey knew, because she’d seen Julie Hu naked inside that locker room, that those muscles were the real thing, not enhancements.

“You’re convinced he would have died, Officer?” Romey asked, unwilling to break protocol by using a first name even though it was what the officer wanted.

“I am.” She kept one hand on her partner’s arm. “I was watching him. You can look too. He had a hand on that laser pistol the whole time.”

“Which means nothing,” Romey said.

“He was going to kill himself,” she said. “Watch how he died. He didn’t have to bring the pistol up at all. He could have shot himself in the foot and whatever the hell he was wearing would have guided the shot to his heart.”

Romey looked at Piaja. His head was down. He wasn’t confirming or denying, but she recognized the posture. Whether or not the partner was right, Piaja blamed himself—and always would.

“What did you learn, Officer Piaja, when you went inside?”

He looked over at her, a momentary look of surprise on his face. He expected her to chastise him further, and she just might after she reviewed the events. But she didn’t have time now. Right now, there were still other clones to find, more work to do, and a large task to finish.

The presence of the clones themselves told her that these men weren’t the ones in charge of the operation. Someone else was.

“What did I learn?” he asked. “Obviously you don’t mean that as a personal question.”

He said that last bit softly, as if he was speaking more to himself. And that single sentence confirmed her hunch, that he would continue to blame himself for the rest of his career.

“I learned that he was a cold bastard,” Piaja said. “He didn’t care that he had killed three people in the space of an afternoon.”

“Three?” Romey asked.

“There are two employees behind the serving counter,” Piaja said. “Unless I miss my guess, they died the same way that the mayor did.”

She nodded. “What else?”

“He wanted me inside,” Piaja said. “He wanted me to kill him.”

“That’s obvious,” she said.

“Maybe it seems that way now,” Piaja said, “but he seemed more eager to talk than he was to die.”

“So he had a message,” she said. “What was it?”

“That this was just the beginning,” Piaja said. “This was, in his opinion, something small to get our attention. Something larger is going to happen.”

Romey caught her breath. What could be larger than killing all of the leaders on the Moon? Killing all of the leaders of the Earth Alliance?

“You can listen to him, of course,” Piaja said, “but his exact words were, ‘These killings today. They’re just the beginning.’”

“He said killings?” she asked. “You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir. ‘These killings.’”

She sighed, not liking it at all. So the suspect—the killer—wanted them to know about the others, wanted them to know everything was linked, and wanted them to worry.

About what? Just a general fear? Or something worse?

She couldn’t thank Piaja. She still wasn’t sure if he had done the right thing. But she had a hunch he made a good call.

She nodded at him, then turned to the other officers. “I don’t need you all standing around here. There’s more work to be done. Let the crime scene unit in here, get this man to an ambulance, and get back to work.”

Surprisingly, they all moved away from her, almost as if they had been waiting for her to give them permission to leave.