Red Shadows (6 page)

"Anderson receiving," she said as she hit the transmit button. "Go ahead, Control. Over."

"Duty board indicates you have completed your current assignment," the controller said over the radio. "Are you available for reassignment? Over."

"Affirmative, Control. What have you got for me?"

"Psi Division backup requested at Kitty Genovese Block. The Street Judge investigating a suspected homicide needs a Psi-Judge to perform a psychometric scan of the crime scene. Can you attend? Over."

"Confirmed, Control. Currently headed westbound on Henry Ford Megway. ETA to Kitty Genovese. Seven minutes. Request a more specific location on suspected homicide. Over."

"Acknowledged, Anderson. Homicide location is reported as thirty-second floor, Apartment 56-C. Victim is female, approximately forty years of age. Will advise of further details as they become available. Over."

"Acknowledged, Control." Hitting the accelerator on her Lawmaster, she cut across lanes and headed for the interchange to change direction. "Tell the Judge on the scene I'm on my way. Anderson over and out."

"Murder in Mega-City One! This is Ralph Matts with Channel 109's
I-Witness News
, bringing you an exclusive report as Judges investigate a killing at Kitty Genovese..."

By the time she had reached Kitty Genovese Block the vultures were out in force. Anderson parked her Lawmaster in the block forecourt, and as she made her way to the front entrance of the building she saw a large crowd of rubberneckers already gathering outside. Among them, standing a little way away from the rest, was a Tri-D news reporter, his face set in a practised and insincere smile as he breathlessly delivered the latest on-the-scene update to the viewing millions via a remote camera drone hovering in the air before him. Neither development - not the crowd nor the reporter - particularly surprised her. In a city where unemployment ran at over eighty seven per cent, people tended to take their excitement wherever they could find it. Granted, the murder of a woman at Kitty Genovese Block would be counted as a tragedy to those who had known or loved her, but to most of the couch potato population of Mega-City One, its only purpose was as entertainment.

"Anderson to Control." Walking into the elevator to begin her ascent to the thirty-second floor, Anderson hit the transmit switch on the radio unit on her belt to contact Sector Control.

"Control receiving, Anderson. Over."

"Just a heads-up, Control. Have arrived at Kitty Genovese and I am on my way to the reported location of the suspected homicide. Thought you'd want to know there's a crowd of citizens gathering outside the building, a few hundred so far, with more arriving by the minute. You might want to detail some extra Judges to handle crowd control. If nothing else, they can keep an eye out for dips and tap gangs working the crowd. Over."

"Understood, Anderson. Be advised all Street Judges are currently tied up with other duties. The Public Surveillance Unit is aware of the situation and monitoring it. Appreciate the heads-up though. Over."

"No problem, Control, just following procedure. Anderson over and out."

Signalling with a metallic chime that she had reached her destination, the elevator doors opened before her. Stepping out into the hallway, Anderson saw the majority of the apartment doors lining the block corridor were open as their residents stood watching for the latest twist in the unexpected drama they found unfolding on their doorsteps. "A Psi-Judge." As she walked down the hallway, she caught the occasional whisper.

"Looks like the Judges have called in the big guns."

"Grud, I think that's Judge Anderson."

"I seen her on the Tri-D." As she passed them by, it occurred to her that there was a certain irony at work here. Despite the fact they shared their city with four hundred million other human beings, many of the citizens of Mega-City One lived in self-imposed isolation - rarely venturing forth from their apartments to socialise with their neighbours. Normally, the tenants of a typical housing block would no more think of hanging around on their doorsteps, gossiping to each other, than they would consider going for an unprotected swim in the toxic waters of the Black Atlantic. It seemed that, twenty-second century or not, human nature had remained largely unchanged. Against all expectation, curiosity was still a powerful enough force in their lives to cause these people to forego their customary alienation and break through the city's social barriers.

Curiosity and
murder
.

"Drokk. What is this place, the Grand Central Zoom Station?"

As Anderson approached Apartment 56-C, she saw a harassed-looking Tek-Judge emerge from inside it.

"A Psi-Judge, huh?" He regarded her with a sour expression. "You'd think if they were sending another Judge to trample all over my crime scene, somebody might've mentioned it to me at least. I'm still working the blood evidence on the carpet in the apartment hallway, so be careful of what you tread on." Jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the apartment behind him, the Tek-Judge began a familiar refrain. "The crime scene's in there. I warn you though-"

"If I've eaten anything recently I might want to give it a miss?" Anderson said. After the tetchy way he had greeted her, she found the startled expression on his face priceless. Evidently, she had guessed his next words correctly. "What? You're surprised I took the words right out of your mouth?" Smiling cheerily at his confusion, she pushed her way past him. "Haven't you heard? I'm psychic. I'd have thought the Psi Division uniform would be a dead giveaway on that one."

Leaving the Tek-Judge grimacing in ill humour behind her, Anderson moved into the apartment. Finding blood spray splashed against a wall halfway along the hallway, and a set of bloody footprints and drag marks on the floor leading to the kitchen, she paused to inspect them. Killer must have struck the first blow here, she thought, and then dragged the victim into the kitchen. Satisfied with her reading of the evidence, she followed the line of footprints towards the kitchen.

Inside, she was forced to concede that the Tek-Judge had been right in trying to warn her as to what lay ahead. As crime scenes went, it was a bad one - worse even than the blood-soaked living room she had seen in Frank Assisi Block earlier in the night. Standing in the doorway of the apartment's cramped kitchen, Anderson found she was staring at the mutilated body of a woman lying spread-eagled on her back on the kitchen table. The woman's throat had been cut open and her blouse torn away, the latter revealing a torso peppered with stab wounds, while her ribs were exposed by a long ragged incision that had peeled back the skin, either side of it from her collar bone to her groin. Like the Assisi crime scene, there was blood everywhere. Though to Anderson's mind, the most gruesome sight of all was the large, round piece of red-brown flesh lying incongruously on the draining board of the sink, beside a haphazardly stacked pile of dirty dishes.

"You're looking at the victim's liver." A Med-Judge stood over the dead woman's body, minutely examining the wounds with a mediscanner. Raising his eyes from his work, he followed the direction of Anderson's gaze as she stared at the draining board. "The killer removed it post-mortem, along with a length of her small intestine. There's a mass of blood and tissue clogging the outflow pipe for the waste disposal unit in the sink. Looks like the killer tried to use it to dispose of the intestine. Could be he was planning on getting rid of the rest of the body in the same way, until the unit became clogged and he was forced to abandon the idea. Of course, strictly speaking, deciding exactly what was in the perp's mind is more your area than mine." Turning to face Anderson, the Med-Judge extended his hand and offered it to her. "The name's Noland. You must be the Psi-Judge they assigned to perform a psychometric scan on the crime scene?"

"Anderson." Looking down at his proffered hand, she saw it was covered in blood. "Not to seem squeamish, but do you mind if we don't shake hands? I don't like to get blood on the uniform unless I absolutely have to."

"What? I... No..." Looking to his own hand for a moment, he shrugged and smiled in embarrassment. "Sorry about that, occupational hazard. I'm on permanent attachment to Forensic Pathology. When you spend as much time as I do delving around inside dead people's guts, it gets so you don't notice the blood any more."

"Yeah, I can see how that could happen." She joined him beside the kitchen table. "When you were talking before, you used the word 'he' to refer to the killer. I take it you think our perp was a man?"

"Well, I can't entirely rule out the possibility the killer was a woman," Noland said. "Given the depth of some of these stab wounds though, and the general level of violence." He indicated some of the dead woman's wounds. "Extensive post-mortem mutilations of this kind are rare in female-on-female killings. Then, there's the matter of the throat wound. She was killed by a single slash wound that severed the right carotid artery and jugular, and still had enough force to cut into the spinal vertebrae. It takes a lot of strength and rage to inflict a blow like that. All of which makes it highly likely we're looking at a male perp." Noticing that Anderson was staring down at the woman's face, he turned towards her. "At least it would have been quick. Once the carotid was severed, the loss of blood to the brain would have caused her to lose consciousness within seconds."

"What else can you tell me?" Anderson asked. The woman's eyes were open and vacant, whatever had once moved them to joy or sadness was lost in the finality of death.

"You want to hear it from me?" Noland asked. He nodded down at the victim. "She was the eyewitness, after all. I thought you'd do the psychometric scan on her first, find it all out straight from the source."

"No. Not yet." Anderson shook her head. "When you read a murder victim the psychic impressions can be confusing, even contradictory. It's better if I hear what you've got, and then do the scan. It'll help put any psychic impressions I see into context."

"Okay. You know your job better than I do." Laying the mediscanner down on the table beside the body, Noland pulled a handheld comp-unit from his belt and switched on the display screen.

"All right then," he said as he checked his notes. "The Tek outside has already taken the victim's fingerprints and a DNA sample. Cross-match with the Justice Department database confirms her identity as the apartment's registered tenant, Brenda Gladys Maddens, DOB: 2nd of March 2084. Forty years of age. Unmarried. No known dependents. No convictions. As I said before, she was killed by a single slash wound to the throat - with the other wounds and mutilations inflicted post-mortem after the killer had dragged her body to the kitchen. From the angle of the wounds, the killer was most likely right-handed. Assuming he inflicted the stab wounds on the victim's body with the same knife he used to cut her throat, I'd say we're talking about a blade somewhere between twenty-five to thirty centimetres in length, and maybe five centimetres wide at its broadest point. The wound characteristics indicate it to be single-edged, though the first few centimetres of the back edge behind the point may have been sharpened as well. My best guess would be it's something like a Bowie Knife, though I could be wrong there, so I wouldn't take it as gospel. I'll know more when I've had the chance to perform a full autopsy back at the morgue."

"Seems like you know plenty already," Anderson said. "You found all that out from a preliminary exam, some fingerprints and a DNA swab?"

"Technology takes most of the credit." As he spoke, Noland reached out his hand to place it on the mediscanner lying on the table. "These new 3000 series mediscanners are a pathologist's dream. X-ray, ultrasound, infra-red, magnetic resonance, bio-chem, genetics. They can perform just about every kind of scan and test you can think of, and the internal comp-unit analyses the results." His hand sitting proudly on top of the compact shape of the mediscanner, for an instant he looked like a child with a new toy. Then, remembering the serious business before them, he continued. "Anyway, that's pretty much what I've got so far on our perp. Hope it's of some help."

"Yeah, it should be." Her attention still fixed on the victim's body, Anderson said the dead woman's name aloud. "Brenda. Brenda Gladys Maddens." She took a deep breath, turning to look at the Med-Judge for a moment as she pulled off one of her gloves. "All right then. I guess that about covers everything. You might want to give me a bit of room, Noland. It looks like it's time for the main event."

It was just another night. A quiet night in. Her body curled under a blanket on the sofa and a world of entertainment at her fingertips.

"A world of entertainment": that's what the salesman had called it when he'd sold her the new Tri-D set. Restlessly, she used the remote control to search through the channels. Images appeared before her in staccato bursts as she skipped the commercials and skimmed her way from station to station. Channel 25 was showing an all-night marathon of classic Aeroball games from out of the archives. She hated sports. Channel 38 had a game show featuring contestants dressed as sperm, their costumes complete with wriggling tails, desperately trying to find the secret entrance hidden in a giant plasteen egg that would lead them to the ten-million credit jackpot. She switched again. On Channel 56 she saw a vid-clip compilation showing members of the public caught on camera as they did stupid things: endless shots of people tripping, falling, walking into doors, getting their hands caught in drawers. She didn't find them funny. In the Justice Department-approved crime drama on Channel 73, the heroic Judges of Sector House X had just foiled an organ-legging gang whose sneering leader reminded her of the old man who lived in Apartment 52-B down the hall. "There are four hundred million stories in Mega-City One", the voiceover said as they cut to a commercial; if the last one was anything to go by, Brenda didn't want to see the other three hundred and ninety-five-odd million. Channel 96 was showing
Oldsters Say the Dumbest Things
. Channel 115 had
I'm
A Celebrity - Irrigate My Colon!
On Channel 189 they were repeating old episodes of the dating show
Putting Out For Prizes
.