Inescapable (18 page)

‘Of course they
are,’ Fox replied. ‘How did he subdue her? Pythia, make sure we run
a full chemical analysis on her blood.’ Pythia’s forensic units had
their swarms very busy on Hopethorne’s bedroom, but they were also
providing Fox with a detailed, multispectral visual of the
environment, including the body. ‘No bruising to indicate she was
manhandled. She wouldn’t have sat still for being tied down like
this… Unless she knew the guy. Kit, we need a cross-reference on
Hopethorne and the other two victims.’

‘Persons they
may all have known?’

‘Yeah, though
I’m willing to bet we find drugs in her system.’ Her gaze shifted
up to Hopethorne’s face and the pair of steak knives which had been
rammed into her eyes. ‘The method of death is interesting too.
Helen said that Remus had her eyes poked out.’

‘He… did not
want them looking at him,’ Kit suggested.

‘Maybe. Eyes
are very symbolic. The windows to the soul. Practically, driving a
weapon through the eye is a quick way to the brain, but both eyes
seems more like it’s part of the pattern. He’s symbolically
blinding them, as you suggested, but is it to stop them seeing him,
or maybe to stop them seeing anything else ever again?’

‘I will
initiate a file for processing a psychological profile,’ Kit
stated.

‘Great. Send a
private message to Helen Dillan asking her to come to my apartment
in the morning. Uh, later in the morning. I want her take on this
once we have all the forensics in.’ Fox lifted her eyes again, this
time to the wall above the head of the bed. Some of the heavy, red
lipstick that still covered Hopethorne’s lips had been used to
write a message on the rose-pink paint. ‘No Escape.’ It was that
which had alerted Kit to the probable link. ‘Yeah, but no escape
for whom?’

~~~

‘Ivers is going to be
so pissed off,’ Dillan said as she unzipped her jacket.

‘Yeah,
probably,’ Fox replied. ‘So, before you take that jacket off, think
about it and decide if you want any part in–’

‘Bitch stole my
case,’ Dillan snapped. ‘Hell! She
retroactively
stole my
cases. You’re within your rights to call in expert witnesses and
consultants, and she can go spin on it.’ The detective purposefully
finished yanking down the zip and then slipped the heavy leather
off her shoulders, handing it to the spider-like robot waiting to
receive it. Somehow, Fox felt the little cropped T-shirt with the
purple and green butterfly design under it did not quite fit
Dillan’s persona, but there it was.

‘Okay, I’d like
to take you through what we got from the scene this morning. I’ve
had four hours’ sleep so far, so give me a break if I’m a bit slow.
Kit’s going to do most of the talking.’

‘And supply a
lot of coffee,’ Kit added.

‘Did you get
doughnuts this time?’ Dillan asked.

‘Kitchen
counter,’ Fox replied, ‘but you might want to wait until you’ve
seen the crime scene visuals.’

‘That… is a
very good point. Okay’ – she paused to pull in a deep breath
through her nose and let it out – ‘let’s do this.’

There was space
in Fox’s uncluttered apartment to project the bed and the immediate
area around it directly into their live environment. Dillan winced
once as the initial view hit her visual cortex, but then she set
her jaw and began to examine the details. Fox stood back, letting
Dillan work. The spider frame returned, handing her up a mug of
coffee, but she said nothing, not wishing to disturb Dillan’s
thoughts.

‘There are
obvious differences, but a lot of similarity,’ Dillan said after a
few minutes. ‘I think the differences are even a similarity now I
say it aloud. He uses what he can find, for the most part. The
first scene Ivers showed me he used the ice pick to scratch his
message. He got that from the scene. Here he’s used lipstick, hers,
and I assume the knives came from her kitchen.’

‘There were
similar ones in a drawer,’ Fox responded, and then pointed to the
little spiderbot which was holding up a mug.

‘Thanks. So it
all seems like it’s spur of the moment. He suddenly decides to rape
and murder someone.’

‘The first
time, yes, but he’s planned this one, at least partially. Kit…’

‘Blood analysis
detected breakdown products from a narcotic,’ Kit supplied. ‘Trade
name Zanvidax-paracyl-B.’

‘I know that
stuff,’ Dillan said. ‘They used to use it in riot-suppression
grenades. It’s a little
too
effective. A few too many cases
of people suffocating or injuring themselves when it took
effect.’

‘Yes. It is
still used in some personal protection aerosols, and can be
deployed under certain conditions by trained NAPA or military
personnel.’

‘So he got
himself something to put them under while he tied them down.’

‘Yes, and the
cord used to do the tying did not come from any location in the
apartment.’

‘So he’s
planning it, to some extent anyway. Okay, thanks, I think I’ve seen
enough of that for a while. We can go through the details without
the visuals.’ Dillan let out a breath as the images vanished from
the viron. ‘And I want a doughnut.’ She started for the kitchen,
continuing as she did so. ‘He’s worked out he needs to act fast if
he’s going to use the gas. Zanvidax only guarantees a few minutes
of unconsciousness. He needs to have his bondage equipment ready as
soon as he hits them.’

‘But he wants
them awake for the main event,’ Fox said. ‘If he didn’t care, he
could have used something longer-lasting.’

‘Rapists
usually care. What’s the point in raping someone who doesn’t know
it? Especially if you’re going to kill them. It’s about control,
superiority, dominance, humiliation.’

‘True. So he’s
selected his drug to give him time to get them secured, and then he
wakes them up and it takes him plenty of time to work his way up to
killing them.’

Dillan frowned.
‘How long?’

‘That is not
entirely clear,’ Kit supplied, ‘but she was assaulted more than
once. Pythia estimates three to six hours from the pattern of
abrasion on the limbs and back, and from analysis of the
apartment’s communication logs. Miss Hopethorne was a prolific user
of telepresence when at home, and she was quiet from just after
eighteen hundred until the time of her death at twenty-two
fifty-six.’

‘Remus took him
maybe ninety minutes. She was raped once. It seemed like he knocked
her out, stripped and tied her, got her to wake up and then raped
her, and then he was panicking for a while before he killed her.
Now it’s five hours of repeated… shit.’

‘He’s
definitely escalating,’ Fox said. ‘He’s getting more confident,
taking his time. The first one was impulse, pure impulse. Now he’s
thinking it through, planning it out, and then taking his time with
his victims.’

‘Ivers,’ Dillan
said. ‘She caught the first scene. If he made mistakes, he made
them there and she’s got the most important information locked away
in her files.’

‘Maybe,’ Fox
conceded, ‘but she’s basing her investigation on a continuation of
Doran’s killings, no matter how stupid that is. Kit, what do you
have on the previous cases?’

‘Wait, previous
cases? Before Doran?’

‘I received
information indicating that Peter Doran might not be the first
murderer to fit this pattern, Detective,’ Kit said. ‘I have been
researching the earlier cases, as suggested by a conspiracy meme
which has picked up a reasonable population in the last year or
so.’

‘A conspiracy
meme? You’re kidding, right?’

‘Hear her out,’
Fox said, moving around to sit on the sofa. ‘She said she’d got
something interesting and I think that’s worth listening to.’

‘Okay.’ Dillan
circled the sofa and settled down with a doughnut in one hand and
her coffee in the other. ‘What do you have?’

‘It starts with
the murder of Hector Rossi,’ Kit began, and worked her way through
the same information she had given Fox before. ‘With help from
Palladium, I have been able to verify the circumstances of almost
all of the homicides the internet is attributing to this “demon
killer.” Some do not, on close inspection, fit the pattern.’

‘And the
linking theme is the message?’ Dillan asked.

‘That does link
all the crimes in some shape or form. I was able to add another to
the pattern myself. A shopkeeper in Toronto went on a spree,
gunning down shoppers in the arcology mall where he worked. Reports
indicate that he was laughing and shouting “you can’t escape me,”
in French, as he worked his way through the area. That was on
February third of this year.’

‘Three or four
months after Doran, about two months before the first of the new
ones.’

‘That kind of
spacing fits with the other verified attacks. The meme suggests
that the variation is due to the time it takes for the “demon” to
turn its victim evil.’

‘There’s that
thing about demons again. You can’t be telling me you believe in
demons, Kit?’

‘I believe…
that I have discovered another connection which makes the demon
idea more relevant. All the people affected by this phenomenon had
LANVisor-Six implants.’

‘All of them?’
Fox asked. ‘A Brazilian farmer had one?’

‘
That
was what convinced me,’ Kit replied, beaming. ‘It took me some
effort to track down that information. Wearable interfaces are far
more common down there. Few people have implants and fewer still
would have something like a LANVisor-Six. The man’s wife entered
him into a contest and the top prize was an implant computer. The
local village’s news blogger featured it because he was the first
man in the area to have such a device fitted.’

‘Huh. I bet
they won’t get many more takers. You’re
sure
about
this?’

‘I am… I cannot
give a one hundred per cent assurance, Fox. I have not been able to
determine that all of the killers had the LANVisor implant, but I
was able to track down a significant number and they all did. On
pure mathematics, I can give an eighty per cent probability, but it
takes only one to disprove the theory.’

Fox nodded,
biting at her upper lip as she considered. ‘Contact Jackson, see if
he can fit us in for a consultation. I want to know if what we’re
talking about is even possible.’

‘Us?’ Dillan
almost squeaked.

‘Yeah, you’re
in on this too. Jackson doesn’t bite or anything.’

‘But he’s the
high director big-wig type of one of the most powerful companies in
the world!’

‘So? I’m the
CIO of his security company and you don’t seem to have trouble
talking to me.’

~~~

‘Well,’ Jackson Martins
said, ‘it’s not really possible for an implant to force someone to
commit murder.’

‘A lot of
conspiracy memes would say you’re wrong, Jackson,’ Fox said. She
was doing the talking because Kit had lost her nerve in the face of
her creator’s father and Dillan was busy gawking at the view from
the solarium.

‘And generally
they would be wrong. There are some specifically designed devices
which can subsume control of someone’s body, but they are
distinctly different from a standard implant device and my
understanding is that Peter Doran’s implant was thoroughly checked.
Modifications to allow him to be puppeted would have been
uncovered.’

Fox pursed her
lips while Kit looked crestfallen. ‘So, you’re saying there’s
nothing to it?’

‘I am not
saying that at all. I’m saying that this “demon” is not directly
forcing people to commit murder. There is another popular meme type
associated with computer and virtual interface implants.’

‘Brainwashing,’
Kit said, suddenly getting back in the conversation.

‘Precisely,
Kit. The commonest of the memes involves a virus which causes an
implanted AI to go rogue. With the ability to manipulate its
owner’s sensory environment at will, it’s a relatively trivial
matter, uh, for a given value of “trivial,” for the corrupted AI to
brainwash the human into… Well, transformation into a serial killer
is, perhaps, the commonest myth. You understand that there are
no
verified cases of this ever happening.’

‘What would it
need
to make it work?’ Fox asked.

‘The main
difficulty would be in gaining unrestricted access to the implant.
There are other things which would help, like a target human
predisposed to the kind of activity the brainwashing is meant to
generate, but an outside agent getting full control of an implant
is, or should be, impossible. There are very specific limitations
built into the firmware of the device which are designed to block
that access from anything which is loaded in from outside.’

‘Most virus
downloads fail on that,’ Kit stated. ‘They are marked on entering
memory and they can actually downgrade the access of the primary AI
if they attempt to execute in that space.’ The kitsune looked at
Jackson. ‘There have been instances of a virus bypassing that kind
of control.’

‘Agreed,’
Jackson replied, ‘but those were in laboratory conditions using a
multilayer payload. The complexity of the kind of hack we are
talking about would mean an exceptionally large initial load and,
in practice, implants monitor for that kind of unexpectedly large
download and isolate them.’

‘So this would
require a compromised system. A vulnerability in the LANVisor-Six
could account for the ability of this “demon” to affect people
and
give a reason for the link between them.’

Jackson was
silent, but Dillan got over her desire to stare out the window.
‘This would be great, but is there such a vulnerability, and if
not, what do we think anyone’s going to think when MarTech suggests
there is?’

‘You are quite
correct, Detective Dillan,’ Jackson replied. ‘There are no known
vulnerabilities in the LANVisor series. It will be suspected that I
am making trouble for a competitor if I take this to NAPA.’