Dead Man on the Moon (11 page)

"Is your show archived on the net anywhere?"

Noah shook his head. "Police work kept me too busy to maintain an archive. I'm a little nervous, to tell the truth. I haven't done a show in ages."

"What do you do?"

"Sing a little, play some music, do some stand-up, tell stories. It's half improvisation, really. I do whatever the audience seems to want."

Ilene gave him a long look. "Ever play for an audience of one?"

Noah gave her a long look back. "It's been known to happen."

"Good. So there'll be a front-row ticket waiting for me at your first show?"

"Sure," Noah said without thinking. "You're getting me fish and apples."

"You're learning life on Luna," she said, flinging her hair back with a quick motion of her head. It hung about her head like a golden cloud for a moment before falling into place. "It's all about what you can trade."

Despite what he had said to Linus, the afternoon found Noah back at the crime scene with Irish music—real stuff, this time—blaring through his helmet again. He was truly tired of breathing dry, metallic air. He also wasn't alone. Another vac-suited deputy named Gary Newberg had just arrived at the scene when Noah showed up. Rather than be glad for the extra help, however, Gary had greeted Noah with a surly hello over the corn-link, ignored Noah's outstretched hand, and turned to his kit.

Okay,
Noah thought.
Well, not everyone is nice.

The main order of the day was to finish casting the various footprints around the spot where the body had lain. Noah had privately decided the work would yield nothing— whoever had brought the body out here had probably used
a public suit, and they all had the same boot treads. They might get shoe size out of it, but not much else. Still, you had to cover all the bases just in case a wild pitch came your way.

Noah got a square frame from his kit and set it down so that it surrounded one of the suspicious footprints. It was odd not hearing the sound of the frame as it crunched into the sand, though he felt the faint vibration. Noah ran the wand of his scanner over the print to take a three-dimensional image of the print in question. Although the scanner would yield a perfect hologram of the print, computer files could be changed, corrupted, or erased, a fact defense lawyers were quick to leap on. It was always best to have a solid cast for backup.

Noah took a small silvery bag of polymerized ceramic from his kit and twisted it hard as his private music swept into ''My Fair-Haired Lad." He felt something inside burst, and the sack grew quite a lot softer as the liquid ceramic inside mixed with the reagent and became pliable as caulk. Noah tore the sack open and squeezed the squishy contents into the frame. It oozed slowly downward like lazy toothpaste, unfazed by the cold and lack of atmosphere.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gary kneeling over another footprint. He had set the frame down and was getting ready to squeeze a sack of his own. Noah turned down the music.

"Gary," he said, "did you get the holographic image first? I think Linus wants to be—"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm getting to it,"
Gary snarled back.
"Just hold your horses."
But he set aside the sack and reached for the scanner wand clipped to his belt. Noah stared at him for a second, then turned back to his own work with an internal shrug. If Gary wanted to be a jerk, he could be a jerk. Nothing Noah could do about it.

A few minutes later, Noah noticed out of the corner of his eye that Gary was about to walk across the drag mark. "Wait!" he shouted. "Gary, freeze!"

Gary froze, his foot only a few centimeters over the partially obscured drag mark. Noah wanted to snap at him to be more careful, but modulated his tone. No point in getting him even more pissed off.

"Linus wants a cast of the drag mark," Noah said, stretching the truth in order to stay diplomatic. "We can't walk across it yet."

"You don't need to shout,"
Gary snapped, pulling back his foot.
"I thought you'd done it already."

"Why don't you take these solid casts back to your rover," Noah said through gritted teeth, "and I'll do the drag mark right now?"

Gary accepted this idea with bad grace, and Noah set about scanning and casting the drag mark. He also amused himself by imagining what Gary looked like outside the anonymous suit. Acne and moles all over his face, small piggy eyes, a snoutlike nose with hair growing out of it. Sausagelike fingers. Greasy hair. A face that made children cry and women flee in horror. Yeah.

Noah ran the scanner over the drag mark and dismantled ten footprint frames to surround it. Eight bags of polymer later, he had it. The cast was the size of a surfboard. Noah gently freed it from the ground and stood upright.

"Gary, can you—?"

There was no sign of him. Noah loped to the edge of the crater and carefully bounded up the side. Noah's rover was still there, but Gary's was gone, along with all the footprint casts and the remains of Noah's equipment.

Noah blinked. What the hell was going on? Maybe Gary was trying to make nice by taking care of the final cleaning up. Or maybe he was still being a jerk. He could have had said something, after all.

At that moment, his onboard told him Linus was trying to contact him. Noah accepted the call on voice.

"The crime scene is finished," Noah told him. "I'm heading back right—"

"Good, good,"
Linus said.
"Listen, I've got another death."

Noah felt his eyebrows rise. "Related to this one?"

"Doubt it. It happened just last night. Can you field this one? I've got something else going."

"Sure," Noah said, a little surprised.

"Great,"
Linus said.
"You'll want to start by interviewing the victim."

Linus set the box in the exact center of the white scanning table and stood back with a prim smile. Professor Julia Espinoza looked at the container warily.

"There is a head in that box,"' she said in her lilting accent. "I can tell. And I am not touching it."

"Technically speaking, it's
part
of the head," Linus said. "The inside, to be specific."

"The inside meaning the brains or the inside meaning the skull?"

"The second." Linus opened the box and took out the skull. It was brown, shiny, and light, even for lunar gravity. It felt like it was made of balsa wood. Once Karen had finished her tests, she had spent considerable time removing the freeze-dried skin and flesh from the underlying bone, then stabilized the skull by coating it with simple varnish. Still, Karen admonished him, it was as fragile as a porcelain teacup, so Linus had better be careful with it.

"It is disgusting," Espinoza said, making no move to take it from him. "Why can't you just re-create this person's features from a DNA profile?"

"That only gives us limited information," Linus said. "Your features are very much affected by your environment and by personal choices. I mean, our guy here might be a weight lifter or a vid-feed addict, and both would affect his features. Eye color can change over time, and so does hair. I was blond when I was a kid, but you wouldn't know it by—"

"Yes, yes, yes." Espinoza cut him off with a wave. "I am too busy to help you right now. I thought I made that clear on the phone, Chief Pavlik."

Linus gave her a quick glance, creating and prioritizing responses. At times like this, he really wished he worked in a real police department with its own computer people, its own lab workers, and its own full-time investigative staff. A place where he could say, "I need you to do this," and the instant response was, "Right away," with maybe a "sir" tacked on the end for good measure. Instead he was stuck on Luna making do with student helpers who wouldn't get up at a decent hour and wheedling help from cantankerous professors. He made a choice and ran with it.

"Look, Dr. Espinoza," he said, settling on flattery, "I wouldn't trust anyone else with this. This kind of re-creation is more art than science. You're the best there is, and I really need your help. So do the victim and his family. They deserve to know who's responsible."

"And when would I fit this in?" she asked, her brown eyes hard as stone. "It is the beginning of the semester and I have a thousand things to do in my studio. Maybe in a few weeks."

So much for flattery,
Linus thought. The retired Marine sitting on his right shoulder told him that he could get a judicial order forcing her to help, but the cop sitting on his left shoulder reminded him that you got better results from people who cooperated voluntarily.

"How long do you think it would take to finish this project?" Linus asked.

"Who knows?" she shrugged. "I have never done such a thing in my life."

Linus wrestled with his temper and forced it to stay calm. A nugget of information surfaced in his head, and he seized it like a mouse making off with a bit of cheese. "As you like, Dr. Espinoza. Sorry to have bothered you." He set the skull gently inside the box and closed it. "I'll just take this over to IT and see if Hector can handle it."

Her eyes went flat. "Hector Valdez?"

"He owes me a couple favors," Linus lied. "Maybe one of his grad students could do the job. I hear he trains them pretty well."

"Hector is a code monkey," she spat. "A mechanic. He knows nothing of the real potential, of the
art
of computer graphics."

"He's all I've got," Linus said. "But as I said, sorry to have bothered—"

"Leave it on the table," Espinoza said. "I will find time today."

"Oh, I couldn't," Linus said, wondering how far he should push this. "You're so busy. I'm afraid the job would be rushed, and—"

"Do you think I am unable to do this job?" she said, temper flaring. "That Hector could do it better?"

"No, no," Linus said. He set the box on the scanning table like an offering to an angry god. "If you insist. Let me know when it's done." And he vanished out the door before she could respond.

Computer people shouldn't be allowed to date each other,
Linus mused as he exited the building.
Especially the anal-retentive ones. 'Course, if the fallout gives me leverage, who am I to complain?

Back at his own office in Xiao Yen Hall, Linus set to work on paperwork that in no way involved actual paper. His office was bare and utilitarian, despite the fact that he spent
most of his waking hours on the job. A simple desk held nothing but a terminal with both flat-screen and holographic output. The walls were bare except for the usual holographic window. At the moment, it showed a burbling mountain stream with ice rimming the edges. Tiny buds swelled at the ends of bare branches, waved by a chilly-looking breeze. The room itself was never quite warm. Linus liked it that way—bare and cool, as if he might leave at any time. He had once had the departmental budget for carpeting, some plants, and some other basic decorations befitting a Chief of Security, but he'd never gotten around to using the money. Luna City's bureaucracy, like bureaucracies everywhere, had decided that any department that didn't use its full budget every quarter could survive having its budget cut, and Linus had, at the last minute, reapportioned the money to buy lab equipment. It seemed a better buy.

He was nearly finished with the forms when he received notice of an incoming call. His onboard identified Ravi Pandey, and she was asking for visual.

Linus sat up straighter in his chair as a hint of nervousness trilled through him. The normally cool office felt abruptly chilly, its white walls and tile floor like the inside of a refrigerator. Communication etiquette did not require anyone to make or take calls on visual. After all, you might be lounging around the living room in your underwear, scruffy and unshaven. This request for visual, however, was coming from his boss, which carried a little more weight. He accepted the call. The display on his desk switched from a report about his recent meeting with Espinoza to the image of a dark-skinned woman with long black hair and a rounded face. She was just over fifty, and had allowed a few streaks of gray to shoot through her hair. Her loose red blouse was covered with a blue shawl, and she came across as brisk and business-like.

"Linus,"
she said in a low, rich voice.
"I've heard a report about a second murder?"