city blues 01 - dome city blues (8 page)

I peeled the foil wrapper off the top of the pack.  A neat little disclaimer paragraph printed on the foil reminded me to keep my cancer immunizations up to date, so that I could continue to enjoy the flavor of a good cigarette without serious risk to my health.  I opened the pack and lit one.  I knew it was going to be a long night, so I asked House to make some coffee.

A few minutes later, I returned to the den with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.  I sat back down at the computer and started reviewing the crime scene reports.

Half a pack of cigarettes and two pots of coffee later, something caught my eye.  It was an inventory of items found in the hotel room where Michael had killed himself.  Except for the gun (I had been right, it was a Glock) and the Japanese kitchen knife, there was nothing unusual in the items found on the body.  Six key chips on a shark tooth key ring, a packet of breath mints, a spray can of solar block and a wallet containing five wallet-sized trids, two credit chips, an address chip, two condoms, and 205 Euro-marks in cash.

The police had found no cigarettes on the body, or anywhere in the hotel room.  So what had given me the idea that Winter was a smoker?  I was certain that Sonja hadn’t mentioned it, but somewhere I had picked up the impression that the man had smoked.

I loaded the recording of Winter’s suicide, fast-forwarding until I came to the part I was looking for.  I froze the picture just as Winter was reaching into the right pocket of his jacket for the knife.  I advanced the recording, one frame at a time. 
There
.  The front of the jacket was bloused open, revealing a stretch of expensive white European shirt.  There was something in the left breast pocket of the shirt; something the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes.

I punched a few keys, dragging a green wire-frame box around a portion of the image.  Another keystroke enlarged the boxed image until the holographic projection floating over my computer consisted entirely of the man’s pocket and a little of his shirt front.

The object in the pocket was a brightly colored box.  I keyed a command for digital enhancement into the computer.  The resolution of the image increased slowly.  By the time the machine beeped to signal maximum enhancement, I could read the brand name off the pack:
Ernte 23
.  German cigarettes.  I saved the enhanced image under a separate file name, and backed out of the recording.

It took me a few minutes of searching to find what I was looking for: the report by the cops who had discovered Michael’s body.

According to the report, at 12:10 a.m., LAPD Tactical had received a report of gunshots from the Velvet Clam Hotel.  Two uniformed officers were dispatched to check it out.  They arrived on scene in about ten minutes.  Witnesses pointed them to room 216.  They knocked on the door and got no answer.  They were about to kick the door in when the night manager showed up with a pass chip.  Officers Reba Brock and Victor Matawicz entered the scene of the crime at 12:22 a.m.  Their report said that they exited the room, touching nothing, and guarded the scene while they waited for a homicide team.

The night manager’s statement backed them up.  The door was locked when they arrived, and no one touched anything in the room from the time the door was unlocked until the homicide team was on scene.

I ran the sequence of events through my head, trying to get things to click.  At about eight minutes after midnight on the fifteenth of April, Michael Winter shot himself in the head.  The video camera continued to record for four minutes after he was dead.  Ten minutes later, or fourteen minutes after the gunshot, two uniformed cops arrived to secure the scene.

Where had the cigarettes gone?  In the ten minutes from the end of the video recording to the arrival of the police, someone had removed that package of cigarettes from Michael Winter’s left breast shirt pocket.

It could have been Brock or Matawicz, but why would they chance it?  Why would one or both of them risk ending their careers and possible felony charges for a pack of cigarettes?  Besides, the night manager, William C. Holtzclaw, stated that neither officer had touched anything in the room.

By the time the homicide team arrived, it would be impossible for anyone to snag something out of the pocket of the corpse without being seen by a dozen people.

The conclusion was unmistakable; in the ten minutes from the end of that video recording to the entrance of Officers Brock and Matawicz, someone else had been in that hotel room.

I decided to carry my thinking one step farther.  According to the clock, it was a little after midnight.  Too bad.  I punched up Sonja Winter’s number.

She answered on the third ring.  Her face wasn’t puffy and her hair was perfect.  She hadn’t been asleep.  Somehow I found that annoying.

“Ms. Winter, was your brother a smoker?”

She shook her head.

“Never?  Are you certain?”

“I’m positive.  Michael hated cigarette smoke.  He thought it was disgusting.”  Her tone told me that she agreed with him.

“Thank you.”  I reached to terminate the connection.

“Wait.”  She looked puzzled.  “Why is that important?  Have you discovered something?”

“Nothing concrete.  Just a notion I’m kicking around.”

“Does this mean you’re on the case?”

“It does not mean that I’m on the case.  It means I’m giving your request fair consideration, as promised.  Goodnight Ms. Winter, or rather, good morning.”

“Good morning.”  The look of puzzlement on her face deepened as I terminated the call.

The autopsy report on Michael Winter confirmed it.  Except for some evidence of scarring from childhood asthma, his lungs had been clean.  He was a non-smoker.

Who would break into a hotel room and rifle a corpse’s pockets to steal a pack of cigarettes?  Or had they broken into the room at all?  Someone might have already been in the room, outside of the camera’s field of view.  In the bathroom, perhaps.

I exited the autopsy file and stood up and stretched.  It was time.  I had been putting it off for long enough; I had to look at the crime scene footage.

I found my simulator gear in the top of the hall closet: a pair of Nakamichi wraparound data-shades molded from iridescent high-impact plastic, and two gray Kevlar data-gloves, each studded with tiny octagonal sensors.  A long thread of ribbon cable with a three-way splitter on one end connected the gloves to the data-shades.  The free end of the cable was wound several times around the entire package.  I pulled the bundle down, began unwinding the cable, and walked back into the den.

Technically, it was an arcade setup, designed for kid’s games, but the graphics resolution was excellent and the audio was state-of-the-art, a VRX bone-conduction rig with active noise reduction.

The connector on the end of the cable looked clean.  I blew it out anyway, inspected it for bent pins, and plugged it into the interface port in the edge of the desk, next to the slot that held Jackal’s data chip.

I pulled on the gloves and slipped the shades over my eyes.  It took me a few seconds to adjust the audio conduction pads against the bones behind my ears.  I spent another few seconds getting the focus just right on the test pattern that appeared in the eyepieces, making unnecessarily minute adjustments.  I was stalling, and I knew it.

I punched the phantom space bar, and the test pattern disappeared, replaced in the eyepieces of the shades with the computer’s menu display.  Green three-dimensional representations of the data-gloves floated in the foreground, superimposed over the menu.

I curled the fingers of my left hand in that peculiar fashion that means
browse
.  The iconic representation of my hand repeated the gesture in instant synchronization, and a highlighted selection bar scrolled down through the file menu.  I stopped when the highlighted selection read:

► CLARK, CHRISTINE, L: CRIME-SCENE: 08FEB63/5:21p.m. ◄

Five twenty-one.  The footage had been shot roughly two hours after her death, probably very shortly after the homicide team had arrived on scene.

I took a breath to steel myself, and pointed the index finger of my right hand at the highlighted entry. The sim recording blossomed in front of my eyes.

I found myself in a smallish room, powder blue wallpaper flocked with Victorian carousel horses and royal blue ribbons and bows.  Pinned to the walls were at least a dozen holo-posters of what I took to be young rockers and vid stars.

The furniture was small and delicate, burnished blonde wood cut with intricate curves and inlays.  The dresser and bureau tops were lined with porcelain dolls in frilly dresses.  It was the bedroom of a little girl who was almost ready to be not so little anymore.  Now she would never get the chance.

A block of bright yellow text covered the lower right hand corner of my vision: temperature readouts, humidity, the time, the orientation of my point of view to true north.  When I turned my head, the color of the data readouts changed so that they always contrasted with the background.

I reached out with my virtual hand and picked up one of the dolls from the top of the bureau.  When I moved the doll, the computer drew a yellow wireframe outline around the part of the image where the doll had been.  It was the computer’s way of reminding me that the picture inside the wireframe wasn’t part of the actual recording.  The camera had never actually seen the wall behind the doll, so the computer’s imaging software was taking its best guess, based on what it had seen of the rest of the wall.  A flashing red disclaimer appeared at the bottom of the text readout, reminding me that the images inside the highlighted areas were extrapolations and were not admissible as evidence.

I turned the doll around.  The backside looked real and natural, but the computer flagged it with a wireframe as well.  Another best guess.  I put the doll back on the bureau.

I turned my head again.  My field of view passed over the mirror on the vanity.  I could see the reflection of the panoramic sim camera and its tripod standing in the center of the room like one of the three-legged alien machines from H. G. Wells’
War of the Worlds
.

Past the reflection of the camera, on the other side of the room, I could see the reflection of a four-poster canopy bed.  The pastel blue canopy and the wall above the headboard were flecked with dark spots.

I decided to get it over with.  I turned my head quickly, and took in the other half of the bedroom.  The blood that peppered the canopy and wall was just the beginning.  The bed sheets and pillows were doused with great gouts of blood, turning glossy black as it dried.  Christine lay sprawled on her back in the middle of the black slick.

The size of the data readout doubled as the computer began to throw in potentially relevant information on the body: skin temperature (based on surface thermographics), height, width, and estimated weight, coordinates and attitude as measured from three fixed points on the walls and ceiling.

She was dressed in a tight green sweater jersey and white French-cut plastic pants that were probably supposed to make her look grown up.  The blood had beaded up on the slick plastic of the pants, still oddly red and liquid in contrast to the dark pool drying on the fabric of her sheets and sweater.

The hole in her chest was larger than my fist, the edges ragged, reddish-black and wet looking.  The killer had cut directly through her sweater.

Enough blood had sprayed her face and matted her mousy brown hair to make it difficult to make out her features, but the look in her still-open eyes burned itself into my brain.

I spent twenty more minutes in Christine’s virtual bedroom.  Then I checked out the crime-scenes of three more of the killings at random.

The MO was identical, variations on a theme.

I pulled off the data-shades at a little after two in the morning and shut down the computer.  I was tired of looking at files and recordings.  I wanted to ask some questions of my own.

My brain must have been on autopilot.  Halfway out the door, I caught myself strapping on the shoulder rig for my 12mm Blackhart.  Surprising how old habits could still sneak up on me.