Ex-Kop (13 page)

“Cut the shit, asshole.” Maggie was full into it now. “The Libre
didn't send you out to that barge. I talked to your reporter friend. She said she never got a call that night.”

“She's lying.” Yuri was sounding whiny.

“Why would she lie?”

“She never showed up. She's just acting like she didn't get the call so she doesn't get in trouble with management. These reporters don't like getting their hair wet.”

Maggie's pacing stopped. “You expect me to believe that?”

“It's the truth,” he said, quiver-voiced.

“I want to know why you were snooping around that barge. I want to know what kind of shit you and my partner are into. I want to know about the offworlder. You're going to tell me, Yuri, or I'll be back here with a warrant.”

“But I didn't
do
anything.”

“Liar!” The sound of shattering glass burst from the sitting room. I seized my opportunity and scrammed out the front.

I arrived at Maggie's first and sat on her front stoop, rain sleeting off the slicker. We Lagartans didn't use these things often, rain gear was for tourists. We'd rather tough it out than look like offworlders. Not that it was that tough. Even during the long stretch of winter, when our polar location hid us from the sun and left us in total darkness for twenty-two hours a day, even then, this place stayed balmy.

Maggie came up the walk wearing a conspiratorial grin. “Did you get anything good?”

“Don't know yet.”

Maggie walked up to the door, which swung open for her DNA. I followed her through, my sopping shoes leaving little pools of water on the tile floor. Maggie snatched up a couple towels, tossed one my way. I stripped off the slicker, this time making sure I carefully slipped the sleeve over my splinting so as not to get knotted up again.

Maggie excused herself, and I settled in her living room, an almost cavernous room with monitor hide furniture and spotless white carpeting. I wondered how much she must pay to keep this carpet mold free. Her family was loaded, descendents of plantation owners who made their fortune on the long since defunct brandy trade.

Maggie stepped in, wearing a fresh set of clothes and bearing a couple glasses of what was sure to be a rare family vintage. I took a deep swig, swishing the brandy in my mouth, savoring the flavor before swallowing it down.

“You scared him pretty good,” I said.

“I wish you could've seen him when I smashed my tea glass. He was shaking, he was so scared.”

“Did he say anything useful?”

“No. He held firm to his story, flimsy as it was.”

“Ian's going to be fuming when he hears.”

“Good.”

I nodded, though I thought it likely that Ian had been expecting Maggie to confront the cameraman. He knew that Maggie had seen him with Yuri and the offworlder. I wouldn't have been surprised if Ian had spent time coaching Yuri, preparing him for Maggie's interrogation.

“Shall we see what we got?”

We made quick business of going through the copied vids, frustrated by the results. Nothing but a series of vids shot for his job, interviews with local pols, footage of social events, countless hours' worth of humdrum garbage. The only thing that showed any promise was the last vid I'd copied, the one titled “Liz—Complete Works,” but all five vid files were protected by an encryption scheme.

Maggie logged into the KOP systems and downloaded the latest encryption crackers and then started them up, checking each cracker's time estimates. “Damn,” she said as she tossed a
holographic timer my way. I reflexively reached for it, surprised when I succeeded in batting it down. Maggie must've had one seriously top-notch system to be smart enough to alter the hologram's trajectory when my hand blocked its path. A cheaper system would've just passed the holo through my hand. I mimed picking up the timer as if it were real, the timer's image moving along with my hands. I looked at the estimated completion date: December
18, 2790
.

In hopes of cutting down the decryption time, Maggie tried offloading some of the processing work from her home system to the KOP databank servers. I held up the holo-timer for her to see, the new date: June
32, 2790
. Not a whole lot better.

“This isn't going to work,” Maggie said. “We're going to need some serious processing power.” To the computer, she said, “Stop processing.”

I watched the timer vanish from my hands. “Any other ideas?”

“Yeah. Let me see what services are offered on the Orbital.”

Maggie got busy researching our options. I called Vlad, who assured me that nobody'd been by to visit Niki. He told me he was going to get sleepy soon and asked if it was okay for him to bring in his cousin Victor for the overnight shift.

“Is he trustworthy?” I asked.

“Like a brother,” he said.

“Fine. Do it.”

I decided not to call Niki. Let her fucking stew.

I sucked down the last drops of my brandy, thinking another sounded good, real good. I set off for the kitchen, hunting for that bottle. Maggie made it easy for me by leaving the bottle on the counter. I poured a full glass, took a couple long swigs, then topped my glass back off. I read the bottle's label:

Damn. This was some good hooch. I decided I'd really take my time with this glass, try to enjoy it.

By the time I made it back into the living room, Maggie had it all worked out. There was an offworld company that could crack the vid files in under thirty hours. Maggie explained that they had a satellite network with a couple thousand sats, each one with far more processing power than it needed to do its job. They made a habit of selling off the excess processing time when they could find a buyer. For a job this big, they said they could dedicate a couple processors from each of the sats to cracking the encryption scheme.

“Sounds good. How much?”

Maggie showed me the numbers.

I was surprised at how low the numbers were. “That's cheaper than I thought it'd be.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I thought it'd be at least twice that.”

Maggie looked at me quizzically until it dawned on her. “The prices are in offworld dollars, Juno.”

“Holy shit.” I tried to do the math, multiply by two hundred and add ten percent … “Holy shit, Maggie. You can't afford that.”

“My mother can.”

I shook my head. Maggie and her mother butted heads all the time. First and foremost on the list was the fact that Mrs. Orzo didn't like her daughter being a cop. “You hate that woman.”

“Not entirely. You have a better idea?”

I stole a look at my watch. It was almost midnight. Time to meet Ian at Roby's. “Yeah,” I said.

R
OBY'S
gladiator-bouncer recognized me and opened the door as I approached. Just inside, a waitress offered me a towel, which I declined. I was liable to break into a nervous sweat at any minute, and my rain-soaked face and hair would do a nice job masking it.

Into the main room, the first thing that hit me was the drumming, slow and methodical. Over the beat, a violin whined in a spooky key. The tables were jam-packed, and people were standing along the walls, all of them watching the stage show that featured a man in a hooded black robe wielding a lase-bladed axe.
Fucking A. There's the murder weapon, right there.
That or one like it. On the chopping block was a lamb, held down by a pair of blood-spattered girls wearing virginal white. The drumming was getting more insistent as the executioner circled the lamb. Every couple steps, he'd stop and wave the axe back and forth over the lamb, letting the laser light from the axe's edge tint the lamb's wool bloodred. I ran my eyes over the audience, the whole lot of them looking like they were about to cream their pants.
What a bunch of crap.
My guess was the “executioner” was really just the local butcher, and the girls were likely his daughters. The way I saw it, the whole family was probably making a fortune dressing up to do their everyday job in front of a bunch of sick-fuck offworlders.

I made for the side room. My stomach felt toxic. That kid, Raj, he'd seen me at the cameraman's. If he'd talked to Yuri
and said he'd seen me, Yuri would've gone to Ian and told him that a cop with a bandaged hand was snooping through his vids. And if that was the case, the gig was up. Ian would know I was screwing him, taking his money and going double-agent on him, reporting everything I knew to Maggie. This time, there would be little reason to believe that Ian would stop at my fingers.

I took the measure of the back room—cops all over the damn place, with a few offworlders mixed in. Horst was there, our mystery offworlder, sitting with Liz at the autopsy table, talking to her over a holo-cadaver. I looked Horst over, his slicked back hair, his porcelain skin, searching for signs of the serial killer within. Liz spotted me and winked. I nodded in her direction then crossed the room, looking for Ian. I found him with Hoshi in a secluded booth. Upon seeing me approach, Ian put up a finger, telling me to give him a minute.

I stopped and looked around, trying to find a spot to wait, and saw Liz get up out of her seat and pull out a chair for me. She was dressed more conservatively tonight, black heels, black hose, black skirt, and a white top. I didn't move. She waved her hand, gesturing for me to come over. I shook my head and cocked it in Ian's direction, letting her know I was waiting. She pointed emphatically at the chair she'd prepared for me, and I suddenly became very compliant.

I weaved through the tables, mentally making note of every cop face I saw. There was Froelich, Kripsen, Deluski, Yang, Wu, Lumbela … I catalogued every one of them, remembering which ones I'd seen here the last time. I reached Liz's table and sat down in the seat she'd prepared for me. I was sitting to Liz's right, across from the offworlder.

He looked at me across the midsection of the bisected holo-cadaver. “Good to see you, Mr. Mozambe,” he said.

I gave him a half smile in response.

“I understand you and Ian have come to an arrangement.”

“That's right.”

“I'm glad to hear it. He says you could be useful.”

I half smiled again, the two half smiles equaling far less than a whole one. He stared at me, waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say. Liz moved uncomfortably in her seat.

What the—?
The holo-cadaver moved. I jumped back, almost falling over in my chair. Horst was laughing, as were the customers at the neighboring tables. The cadaver was pulling the stitches out of its chest. Its eyes were still closed, and it looked plenty dead except its hands were pulling the stitching free in one long strand. I moved from startled to embarrassed to pissed, only stopping on embarrassed for a fraction of a second. I glared at Horst as the people at the nearby tables, having had their fun at my expense, returned to their conversations. Horst was still laughing, loud bellowing laughs that were amplified far beyond anything natural. The corpse pulled its ribs wide like doors to a cupboard and started playing show-and-tell with its organs.

I looked at Liz, who had a be-a-sport expression on her face. I tried out a full smile to show I had recovered, but it probably came out more like a full grimace.

I tried to picture Horst as the barge serial. Seeing him gleefully grinning at me, across this flayed corpse, his skin a full shade paler than the cadaver's, with hair blacker than oil, and eyes blacker still … It wasn't hard to imagine, not at all.

The waitress arrived with a plate of spit-roasted 'guana, and the holo-corpse disappeared. She set the plate in front of Horst on the cold steel table.

“Ah, now that looks delicious,” he said as he waved the steaming scent in toward his nose. He peered at me through the steam and must've caught some steam of a different kind
coming off my face. “You're not upset are you? It was just a joke.” He stabbed his fork into the 'guana's flank and twirled a piece of meat free. He dipped it into the spiced juices and offered it to me.

I shook my head.

He dipped again before putting it in his mouth. “I love Lagartan food. You can't get anything like it in space. You can get the same spices, and you can find iguana meat in the specialty stores, but it's never the same. I'm always raving about the food, but you bring somebody to a Lagartan restaurant up there, and they think you're crazy. Half of them can't stomach the idea of eating reptile. And the half who can are repulsed by the sight of these creatures. They don't look like Earth iguanas, they say. Sure, there are a few adventurous ones who are willing to take a taste, but most of them say it's nothing special. I try to tell them it's different down here. It's so fresh. I bet this iguana was alive only an hour ago. Up there, your meat probably gets frozen and unfrozen two or three times before you ever get to stick a fork in it.”