Red Shadows (24 page)

"Seven people?" Anderson asked. "You mean six, don't you? Unless there's been a new victim nobody told me about."

"Yeah, well that's where things get kind of spooky," the tone of the dispatcher's voice seemed to grow uncomfortable. "I don't know quite how to tell you this, Anderson, but a seventh person whose parent was in the HelixCorp trial died a few hours ago as the victim of a Judge-involved shooting: a woman by the name of Marjorie Kulack."

"Marjorie Kulack?" Anderson was aghast. "Holy Grud. You make it sound like you think I've been doing the killer's work for him."

"Nobody's saying that, Anderson, but you were the one who put forward the theory that the perp is a teledominant. Sector Chief Collins thinks it might be an idea if you come in to the Sector House until we can arrange to have another Psi-Judge perform a telepathic probe, just to be on the safe side."

"The safe side?" As they continued to ride through Trinity Heights, Anderson glanced at Dietz beside her. If the Street Judge could hear her conversation with Control, he gave no sign of it. "Are you telling me I've been relieved of duty?"

"No, not at all." From the sound of his voice, the level of the dispatcher's discomfort was rising. "It's just that Sector Chief Collins has requested that you-"

"The sector chief can make as many requests as he likes," Anderson cut him off. "You seem to forget I don't work for him. I'm Psi Division. That means that unless I hear from either the Chief Judge or Psi Division Chief Shenker ordering me to report for a psi-probe, I will continue to keep following leads on the case I'm working. With that in mind, you said the victims all had a parent who took part in this medical trial. How many people are there in HelixHealth's records that fit the same criteria and were born in the year 2084?"

"Uh... Whose parent took part in the same test?" Apparently caught unawares by the sudden shift in the conversation, the dispatcher paused. "Twenty... No, wait... If we take out the seven who were killed, that leaves thirteen."

"I want you to track those thirteen people down and have them put in protective custody," Anderson told him. "No automated vid-phone messages. No whingeing about lack of manpower. I want those people protected by Judges, now
.
Then, when they're all in custody, I want them transferred to Psi Division Headquarters and taken down to Psi-Lab for testing."

"Psi-Lab? You think these people are psychics?"

"Could be. Marjorie Kulack certainly was. Call it an intuitive leap, but it seems to me that could be what this is all about. We've got six murder victims, a rogue psychic who first manifests her powers at the age of forty, and a pharmaceuticals company - all linked by medical tests forty-one years ago. Add in the fact that all the murder victims were also forty years of age. I'm guessing that when you talked about these people's parents, you actually mean their mothers."

"Uh... Yeah... I..." There was a pause again as the dispatcher checked his records. "Grud on a greenie, you're right! Hold on... The tests were forty-one years ago, and the victims were all forty years old? Are you telling me that you think HelixCorp experimented on their mothers when they were pregnant? But why?"

"Think about it," Anderson told him. "Psychics are a valuable resource with all kinds of military and commercial applications, and yet the percentage of people in the population who possess psychic powers is tiny. Imagine if you could find a way of actually breeding psychics from scratch. We're talking about a process that would be worth billions, even trillions of credits."

"Grud," the dispatcher whistled softly.

"Of course, I could be wrong about this," Anderson continued. "Maybe it's only a coincidence that Marjorie Kulack's mother was part of the same test as all the other victims. Maybe it's only a coincidence that Marjorie herself grew up to be psychic. Maybe I've been on the job too long and I'm starting to see conspiracies everywhere. The only way we're going to find out is if we test those thirteen people and see if they have psychic potential. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to shake the tree at HelixCorp and see what falls out. Tell Tek Division to see what else they can find that relates to these medical tests in the company records, have Accounts Division go through their financial records with a fine tooth comb, and schedule crime swoops on all the senior company officers. Also, have the company CEO Douglas Mortimer brought in for interrogation. I already gave him a surface telepathic probe and he seems clean. Still, it won't hurt to double check."

"You realise that we're talking about a major MegaCorp here? If you're wrong about this-"

"If I'm wrong about this, then the Justice Department's Private Sector Liaison Committee can line up with Sector Chief Collins and everybody else who wants to haul me over the coals. If I'm right, then nobody's going to care if a few feathers got ruffled along the way."

"All right, don't say I didn't warn you tho-" The dispatcher stopped abruptly. Then, his voice returned, more excited. "Anderson! We've just received an update from MAC regarding a query from Judge Loudon on your behalf. You asked for an analysis of correlations between the word 'block' and the Trinity Heights neighbourhood?"

"Yeah, that's right. Have you got something for me?"

"MAC came up with two different sets of correlations," the dispatcher told her. "First, it compared the word as spelt 'B-L-O-C-K' to Trinity Heights and found forty-seven possible locations with that word in their address. But there's a second spelling that's pronounced the same way: 'B-L-O-C-H' meaning the name 'Bloch'. And there's only one address in Trinity Heights with that version of the word in its address - Robert Bloch Con-apts, named after a twentieth century writer."

SEVENTEEN

IN THE LAIR OF MONSTERS

"It looks deserted," Dietz said after they had parked their lawmasters outside Robert Bloch Con-apts. At first sight, the building seemed like so many others in Trinity Heights: crumbling and derelict, with storey after storey of empty windows staring out from its fire-blackened walls.

"It would do," Anderson told him. "That's what makes it perfect for our perp. there're no neighbours, aside maybe for the occasional dog-vulture, and no surveillance cameras. The roentgen count in this place keeps people away. The perp can come and go as he pleases, with nobody watching him. There's nobody to get suspicious that he goes out all night and comes back with dried blood in his hair. Like I say, it's perfect. He even told Weller the name, probably not realising that Weller would think he said 'block'."

"So how do you want to play it?" Dietz asked her as he checked the magazine in his Lawgiver. "Do we split up and search different floors, or do you want us to search each floor together?"

"Neither," Anderson said. Turning to her lawmaster, she opened the rear stowage pod and took out a flashlight. "You stay out here, I go in alone. The perp's a teledominant, he can make people do anything he tells them. As a Psi-Judge I'm best equipped to deal with him. No offence, but that's just the way it is. Keep your eyes open, stay sharp and tight. If you see anyone hanging around who isn't a Judge, hit them with a stun-shot and ask questions later. And one more thing..." Switching on the flashlight, she began to move towards the building.

"Seeing as I'm probably heading into a trap, if you haven't heard from me in twenty minutes you might want to get Control to contact Psi Division and ask them to send a new Psi-Judge."

All right, so you got what you wanted, Cass, Anderson thought to herself as she moved slowly through the building's ground floor foyer. You're hunting a psychic serial killer in a burnt-out building and you were crazy enough to come in here without backup. Plus, without a working elevator, you're going to have to walk up about thirty flights of stairs to search this place top-to-bottom. Still, all things considered, it could be worse.

At least it isn't raining.

If the Robert Bloch Con-Apts had seemed a foreboding sight from the outside, inside it was even worse. Swinging the beam of her flashlight around as she advanced with her Lawgiver in her hand, Anderson picked her way carefully across the soot-stained and debris-strewn floor. Here and there, she heard the creak of plasteen floorboards indicating the footing beneath her was insecure. Mindful of the dangers of the floor collapsing, she stayed close to the walls in the hope that the floor there would be stronger. All the same, it was slow work simply crossing from one end of the foyer to the other. She soon realised that searching the entire building could take hours.

Got to look at this from another angle, she thought. If I'm a killer, where's the likeliest spot for me to hide in his place? There's no electricity in the building. If he wanted heat and light, he'd have to build a fire. But he'd want to keep it hidden - in a derelict ghost town like this the light of the flames could be seen for miles. Plus, the floors are bad. All of which suggests there's only one place he could be.

The basement.

"I want you to keep on walking," William whispered to the Judge outside. "Then, when you've walked five hundred steps, I want you to take your gun and put it in your mouth. After that, I want you to pull the trigger. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," Judge Dietz said. When William had appeared suddenly behind him, the Judge had tried to bring his Lawgiver to bear to shoot him, but William's words were faster than any gun.

"Good. You have a silencer for your gun?"

"Yes." Despite the coolness of the night, the Judge's face was sweating.

"Then, put the silencer on before you put the gun in your mouth. We don't want Judge Anderson to hear the shot, do we? She might come running to investigate." William turned to look towards his lair and smiled. "Right now, she is exactly where I want her."

It's no good, Anderson thought, as she stood beside a rubble-choked stairwell. If the creep lives in the basement, he doesn't use this way to get down there.

She had been searching for fifteen minutes, trying to find a way down into the basement. So far, her efforts had been thwarted. She had checked the building's two emergency stairwells and found them impassably blocked by fallen debris. The only other access to the basement seemed to be via the elevators. And, given the state of the building, it was safe to assume that the elevators were out of order.

Anderson had a thought. Granted, the electromagnetic pulse of the warhead would have destroyed whatever parts of the building's electrical system might otherwise have survived the firestorm, but so long as the elevator shafts themselves were intact, the perp could use them to climb back-and-forth to the basement. Retracing her steps to the foyer, still mindful not to put her feet on any of the weaker floorboards, she made her way to the nearest elevator and saw something that immediately raised her suspicions. The elevator doors had fallen from their mountings, but one of them was wedged in the shaft in a fashion that did not seem accidental. Investigating more closely, she found a rope tied to the underside of the door that led down into the darkness of the shaft. The rope was knotted at regular intervals to make climbing easier.

Looks like this is his point of access all right, she thought. Moving gingerly to the edge of the shaft, she shone her flashlight down it. At the bottom of the shaft she could see the outline of a smashed elevator carriage that had presumably fallen when its cable had snapped. Although I'm not sure I like the idea of climbing down there when the perp could be waiting for me.

"Drop the pistol," said a voice behind her.

Turning her head slightly to the side, from the corner of her eyes she saw a man in a black overcoat standing a couple of metres behind her in the foyer. His hands were empty. She turned to face him, raising the Lawgiver and pointing it at him.

"Drop the pistol," the man said again, more forcefully. Every time he spoke she could feel ripples moving around her as though the currents of the psi-flux had been stirred by the sound of his voice, only for those same ripples to break against the walls of her psychic defences.

"You're wasting your time," she told him, pointedly pulling back on the hammer of her gun to underline her words. "That won't work on me. Put your hands in the air. You're under arrest for the murders of Judge Edward Weller and seven citizens."

"Seven?" The perp tilted his head to the side, his lips moving silently as he made a mental calculation. "That would mean you're counting Lenny then? It's funny, I never really thought of him as one of mine. I didn't kill Lenny. I just made him fly. Oh, and I killed two Judges by the way, not just one. You didn't know that? Her name was Wilkins, I think. No, not Wilkins, Wilkerson. She had blonde hair and when I was killing her I was thinking of you. Then, there were the others: the doctor, the patient in the institution, my father, but of course, I didn't kill those last three in Mega-City One." He smiled liked a child expecting praise for his cleverness. "Do they count?"

"They all count," Anderson told him. "I said, put your hands in the air. Do it now, slowly."

"No, you're wrong there," the killer said, his hands still staying resolutely by his sides. "Only the reds count. That's why I do it. I like killing reds." His smile became broader. "Like you. You're red. In fact, you're the reddest person I've ever seen."

"Ten seconds," Anderson said. "That's how long I'm giving you to raise your hands unless you want to get hit with a stun-shot. Ten... Nine... Eight..."

"You say that like you think you're in control, Judge." The smile grew broader still, confident, self-assured. "You're not in control. This is my lair, my home. I've only been here a few days, but already I know every nook and cranny, every entrance, every exit, every floorboard."

Raising his hands slowly, the perp's body seemed to sway gently to one side as though he had altered his balance. Hearing an alarming creak from the floor beneath her, Anderson realised what he was doing. The perp had shifted his weight from one foot to another, putting extra weight on a damaged floorboard that he had known was there all along. The floor gave way beneath them with a sudden jolt, throwing off Anderson's aim as she fired a stun-shot. The shot went wide over the perp's shoulder, while the floor collapsed beneath them, pitching them both headlong into the basement. The world spun on its axis. Anderson's last sight was of the perp's smiling face.