Ex-Kop (5 page)

I was glad Maggie's face was mostly in shadow. It cut down the glare she was sending my way.

“Maybe you just want it to be true,” I said. “That way you can throw some dirt on Ian and take him out of the running.
Listen, if you want that squad leader job so bad, let's skip the goose chasing and take Ian out of it ourselves.”

Maggie came at me all righteous. “I don't work that way, and you know it. I wouldn't be going through this trouble if I didn't think there was a chance that the girl didn't do it. A good chance.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Maggie leaned in close, forcing me to tilt back in order to keep my brandy breath under wraps. “I never really believed she could've done this,” she said. “I interviewed her the morning she found her parents' bodies. I'm telling you, she was genuinely upset. I didn't think there was any way she was faking until Ian found the murder weapon with her prints on it. And then when Ian got her to confess, I went ahead and signed off on it even though I never really believed it. I should've trusted my gut. I mean, think about it. What kind of girl kills her parents? She'd have to be delusional. Don't get me wrong, she's your typical troubled teenager, but she's not crazy. There's just no way she could kill her parents, Juno. Do you see what I'm saying? I know she didn't do it. I just know it.”

I tried to reconcile Maggie's image of the Juarez girl with the one on the news. Where Maggie saw an innocent child, everybody else saw a manipulative little bitch. Maggie was way off on this one. “She confessed, Maggie. Leave it at that.”

“I know she confessed, but I'm telling you, Ian must've forced it out of her.”

I ran my hands over my face to keep from screaming at her. Sometimes she could be such a fucking Pollyanna. She was acting like it was some universal truth that children don't kill their parents. She had no idea that I'd spent most of my childhood fantasizing about different ways to kill my father. I would've done it, too, if a bad batch of shine hadn't beaten me to it. The
SOB died in my mother's arms of methanol poisoning. Far better than he deserved. Even now, after all these years, I could feel my pulse quicken at the thought of my mother with black eyes.

Maggie let out a long exhale. “At least go talk to her, Juno. Get a read on her, then tell me if I'm crazy.”

Frustrated, I said, “Dammit, Maggie, why can't you just accept that she did it?”

“Teenaged girls don't just go off and kill their parents, Juno.”

“The hell they don't!” Niki wasn't much older when she went and did exactly that. I took a deep breath. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe her parents were abusive?”

“Don't you think she would've told us if they were? Why are you being so stubborn about this?”

I wanted to go home and drink myself to sleep. “I can't help you.” I started for the gangway.

Maggie stopped me, her hand clutching my arm. “Why not?”

“I just can't.”

Niki and the Juarez girl began to melt together in my mind, their stories intermingling. Emotions began to cycle through me rapid-fire—guilt, shame, anger, regret.

“I'll pay you,” she said.

Her words barely registered. In my mind, I'd flashed back decades. The sight of Niki's freshly slaughtered parents dominated my senses. I couldn't take this case. I couldn't handle it right now. It cut way too close to home.

Maggie said, “Did you hear me? I'll triple whatever the rags are paying you.”

I put my flask away. I didn't remember getting it out. Then I said, “You'll pay triple?”

I slipped as I stepped off the gangway. My camera went tumbling along with the tripod. I barely avoided the same for myself by grabbing hold of the rail. A circled group of hommy boys
turned toward my commotion and quickly dismissed me, but one of them came over—Josephs. “Looks like you need a hand, Juno. Let me show you out.” He grabbed my elbow, tight.

I jerked my elbow free and snatched my camera out of a puddle. “I know the way.”

“What's your problem, Juno? I'm just trying to help you out.”

“I don't need any help.”

He took hold of my elbow again and put his mug in my face. “Neither do
we
.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Josephs paused before answering. “I'm givin' you a courtesy, old boy. I don't know why that rich bitch of yours thinks you can help solve this case, but you're not a cop anymore, and you don't belong in our business.”

“I don't take orders from you, asshole.”

“Listen to me, Juno. We go back a long ways, so I'm tryin' to be civilized. We know we got a serial on our hands, and we're gonna find him. Last thing we need is for you to start dickin' around in this case, okay?”

“Save the tough-guy routine, Josephs. I turned Maggie down.”

His hand let go of my elbow and moved up to pat my shoulder—back to best pals. “Why didn't you just say so? Shit, Juno, you never change. Give you a choice between walkin' around a fire and walkin' through it, you walk through it every time.”

I reinforced the lie. “Killer's obviously an offworlder.” Holding my shaky right hand up, I said, “I've been burned once already by those bastards. No way I'm going back for seconds. I'm too old for that shit.”

“You still got sense, Juno. I gotta hand it to you, you still got sense.”

Taking a closer look at the group of hommy boys, I saw they had somebody closed inside their circle. “Who's that?”

“A camera guy from the Libre. We caught him snoopin' around, tryin' to get some footage. Ian's givin' him the biz.”

“Was he on the barge?”

“No. He never made it that far. They caught him as soon as he jumped down to the pier. What a dumb shit, thinkin' he could get through. You see all the cops around here?”

The cameraman was getting pinballed now. They were shoving him around the circle, bouncing him left, right … and now he was down. He looked like he was crying, but I couldn't tell for sure because of the rain.

Josephs laughed. “Look at that fat fuck. How much you wanna bet he's pissed himself?”

“Yeah.”

“Seriously, Juno, you wanna put some money on it?”

“How can you tell? It's fucking raining. His pants are soaked.”

“You can feel it. Piss is warmer than rainwater.”

“I'll pass.”

“One thing's for sure,” he said. “This case won't be in the news anytime soon.”

For Maggie's sake, I hoped he was right.

At this point, the camerman had gone fetal. Ian nabbed the poor sap's cam from the ground and popped it open. He slid the vid free and walked over to the pier's edge and then whipped the thing out into the darkness, making sure that what little footage the cameraman might have shot would never air. He came back into the circle and beanballed the guy with his own camera.

I heard Maggie's voice calling from the ship's deck up above. “Ian! They're done! We can watch the vid now!” Maggie must've been going out of her mind waiting to watch the vid Officer Kobishi had found, thinking that the whole beheading
could be captured on it. No way, I thought. Luck like that didn't exist on this planet.

Ian threw one more kick into the camerman's gut and then came strutting for the gangway, pulling the vid from his pocket as he passed Josephs and me. Josephs was right. Ian was no pussy anymore.

M
Y
eyes opened. The clock told me it was morning, but it sure as hell didn't feel like it. I rolled out of bed and navigated through the house with the lights off even though the dawn was still in its dim stages. My hungover head throbbed with every heartbeat, and my stomach was rumbling. I found the medicine chest and pulled the door wide: vodka, gin, whiskey, and brandy. I thought about the call I needed to make and decided to make it a double dose.

When I placed the call, the entire room was instantaneously bathed in the unnatural glow of Niki's holo. I squinted at her image as my eyes adjusted to the piercing light. She looked radiant in more ways than the obvious. She was dressed in a cruel open-shouldered number that hugged all the curves and left plenty of leg for my eyes to soak up. Half her black locks were pinned up, the other half curlicued like shaved chocolate over cinnamon shoulders. Her face was lit with a smile so sharp that it stabbed straight through my heart. My Niki.

“Why didn't you … come last n—night?” Niki's mechanically timed voice shattered the perfect-Niki illusion. The Niki that stood before me was just a holo, a scanned image of Niki made years ago, long before her “accident.” The offworld telco that stored her image could beam this faux-Niki anywhere on Lagarto.

“I was working a job,” I stated as I imagined the dashing version
of me that appeared in Niki's hospital room instead of my actual sleep-deprived and liquor-ravaged self.

She croaked out the words superslow. “What kind of …” I bit my lip as I waited for the next exhale of the respirator. “… of job?”

“Maggie asked me to look into a case of hers. I have to go out to the Zoo this morning so I don't miss visiting hours. After that, I'll be by, okay?”

“Don't b—bother.”

“I'll be there after lunch,” I said, rushing the words out of my mouth before I clicked off. I couldn't stand to listen to her anymore. Her voice always sounded like she was holding her breath as she talked. It sounded wrong, unnatural. I couldn't take the way the respirator's pumping would interrupt her mid-syllable with the hideous sound of air being accordioned into her lungs. The respirator never stopped, in and out, in and out, grating my nerves, grinding them down, in and out. And then there was that tube that ran into the hole in her chest, right there in her chest, they didn't even cover it with bandages, it was just there, out in the open, you could stick your fingers through it, right into her body. …

My stomach burned like it was on fire. I downed another shot to douse the flames.

I needed to keep busy. I went to the front door and found the disc Maggie had slipped under the door. I carried it back into the living room and held it up for my home system to read. Everything was here, everything on the Juarez case. Maggie had been thorough. I menued over to the crime scene for starters.

My living room went bloody, and it wasn't my living room anymore. It had become a bedroom. It was furnished in the usual way—bed, end tables, dresser. It was the bed that was the
focal point of the butchering. The linens were sliced into blood-drenched rags. Springs and stuffing erupted from charred gashes. The headboard and wall behind it were singed with haphazardly placed burn marks.

I stepped into the holo-bed, my legs disappearing beneath its gory surface. I took a close look at Margarita Juarez's corpse, at the dozens of slices that ran deep into her flesh. The wounds were cooked well-done and squirming with maggots. I looked up at the ceiling where there were patches of bubbled paint covered in a thin mist. The heat that ripped through those gashes was so intense that it flash-fried the flesh and kicked off enough steamed blood to melt the paint on the ceiling.

I moved through her body to the bed's edge and looked down at the body of Hector Juarez where he'd fallen onto the floor. Half his torso was under the bed, where he'd tried to crawl to safety. His legs were sliced and grilled. Bone showed through in a few places like the skewer in a leg kabob.

I moved to the foot of the bed, sliding left and right until the majority of scorch marks pointed at me. This was the spot; this was where she stood. She snuck up to this spot and flicked on her lase-whip. I was certain that the crackle of the whip would've woken them. They would've seen her face in the whip's glow. They died knowing it was their daughter who did this to them.

I menued out of the crime scene and navigated my way into the confession. The death scene disappeared, and my living room was back, but only for a second before it was replaced by a white room, so white that my living room furniture showed through the holographic white walls of the KOP interrogation room. I knew this room well. How many people had I brought into this very room, only to bring them back out bloodied and defeated?

In the middle of the room was a beat-up table. Sitting on opposite
sides were Ian and the girl, Adela Juarez, soon-to-be convicted murderer. Her looks were pure Latin. No sign of the mixed blood all Lagartans carry in their veins. There was no kink to her hair, no slope to the eyes. I rotated the scene, looking at her eyes from different angles. I watched the way her eyes focused when she talked. I studied the way they wandered when she listened. She had dark eyes, made darker by the secrets she was keeping behind them. I recognized those eyes. They were Niki's eyes—not in shape, but in essence. They had that same haunted vacancy. Maggie was flat wrong. This girl did it, and she had good reason.

I consciously had to snuff thoughts of Niki before they overwhelmed me again. I selectively skipped ahead, watching the interrogation develop. Ian confronted her with his evidence: her fingerprint-covered lase-whip, her fallen-through lie of an alibi, no sign of a break-in; in fact, all the doors had been locked. Ian worked her smart and professional. He didn't fall for her schoolgirl routine when she tried out the pouty lips, the scrunched-up nose, and the baby talk. Then when she switched to the femme fatale, he didn't go for her smooth talk and subtle flirtation. She even tried out the girl next door with a pearly smile and a bouncy attitude, but Ian still stayed on task. “I know you did it,” he'd say. “There's no point in lying anymore. Just tell me why you did it, Adela? Did they deserve it?”