Sins of the Father (17 page)

"Affirmative to that, Control." Exchanging a significant look with Lang, Anderson boosted the volume of her radio so the other Psi-Judge would be able to hear it clearly. "What have you got for us?"

"A homicide at Sigmund Freud Block. According to the first Judges on the scene, the victim was strangled and a message was found carved into his torso. The words were: 'Your sins will find you out'. That sound like it matches your case?"

"Word for word, Control. You said 'Judges on the scene'? Am I to take it this is an ongoing investigation, not a cold case from the files?"

"Affirmative to that Anderson. Like I said, I just received the update from MAC - otherwise, I would have let you know about the crime earlier. The homicide was called in forty minutes ago by one of the victim's neighbours.

"Looks like, whoever your killer is, he's been a busy boy."

ELEVEN

MEMENTO MORI

Anderson had seen a lot of crime scenes over the years, but for pure Mega-City weirdness few could compare to the scene awaiting her inside the apartment at Sigmund Freud. As she stepped through the doorway with Lang behind her, she saw the apartment's hallway was stacked floor-to-ceiling with row after row of crates and boxes. A cramped passageway had been left down the centre of the hall in-between the stacks to allow access to the rest of the apartment, but the overhanging piles of boxes either side had encroached on even this slender space. As she advanced along it she was forced to walk sideways, holding her breath at times as she attempted to squeeze through the narrow gaps.

"Looks like the victim was moving house," she heard Lang say behind her. "With all this stuff, it would have had to be to someplace bigger."

"No, I don't think he was moving anywhere," Anderson told her. Pausing, she ran a finger along the surface of one of the boxes and held it up for Lang to see it. "From the amount of dust on some of these, they've been here a long time." Picking a box at random, she pulled open the lid and glanced at the contents. She saw a broken plate, a selection of vid-slugs, some playing cards and a half-eaten Gooey Bar - all sealed, labelled, and vacuum-packed in plasteen shrink-wrap. Picking up the Gooey Bar to show it to Lang, she pointed at the label. "According to this, he wrapped this Gooey Bar eight years ago. Maybe the victim was some kind of collector."

"In that case, can't say I think much for his taste in collectibles." Following Anderson's example, Lang had opened another of the boxes. She lifted out a transparent bag filled with used tissues. "What kind of freak collects his own snot?"

"Probably a psych-case," Anderson said. Noticing another box was filled with specimen jars she inspected the contents, only to recoil with a wince of disgust. "Trust me, you're lucky you only found the tissues. Turns out that snot wasn't the only solid waste this guy collected."

"Anderson?" She heard a man's voice call to her down the hallway.

Turning, Anderson saw a street Judge had appeared at the end of the hall and was now beckoning them towards him. As she came closer, she saw the name on his badge read "Farnham".

"Control said you were coming," he told her. "And you must be Lang?" He nodded to the other Psi-Judge. "I take it you noticed the dÈcor?" He indicated the boxes.

"Yeah."

"The entire apartment's like this," Farnham said. "You'll have to watch your step - some of these stacks aren't put together too good and it doesn't take much to topple them. This whole place is one big Health and Safety violation. If the tenant wasn't dead, he'd be looking at cube time." He shook his head in disbelief. "I tell you, fifteen years on the streets and you think you've seen everything. But this guy was something else. It's like he was the ultimate pack rat. The guy never threw anything away. You realise he was even hoarding his own shit in jars? There's boxes full of the stuff."

"I noticed," Anderson said. "Where's the body?"

"This way," Farnham beckoned them towards a doorway off the hallway. "It's in the living room."

Like the hallway, the living room was packed with boxes. Following Farnham into the room, Anderson estimated there must be thousands of them, arranged in vast walls and towers of plasteen and synthi-board that choked every available centimetre of space. The only areas free of boxes were a narrow passageway left for access and two small islands of freedom around the sofa and the Tri-D player. Turning a corner with Farnham in the lead, Anderson saw that several of the stacks had collapsed in untidy disarray, leaving a mound of boxes at one end of the living room like the rubble from the fallen ramparts of a conquered city. A body lay on top of it, attended by a pair of weary Tek-Judges collecting forensic data. Registering the newcomers' arrival, the Teks glanced briefly at Anderson and the others before resuming their work.

The body was that of a middle-aged man wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. From the outset it was clear this was the work of the same perps who had killed Konrad Gruschenko. The victim's eyes were red and swollen with internal haemorrhages; there were wide bruises around his throat; his tongue lolled from his mouth, distended and purple. Most pertinently, Anderson could see the man's pyjamas and dressing gown had been ripped open, revealing the same bloody message carved into the bony flesh of his torso.

Your sins will find you out.

"Fingerprints and DNA confirm the victim's name as Joseph Alvez Kapinski," Farnham said, pulling a comp-unit from his belt to check his facts. "Date of birth: 3/4/2071. Fifty-five years of age. Unemployed. No criminal convictions. According to the records, he's been receiving psychotherapy for the last twenty years. Diagnosed as suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, aggravated by acute collection mania."

"Guess that explains the boxes," Anderson said. "What else can you tell us about him?"

"Not much. Seems Kapinski didn't get out a lot. Neighbours say he kept himself to himself. Credit card records indicate he had his groceries delivered to him here from the block mart. Paid his bills and taxes over the Megaweb. The guy was pretty much a shut-in. I put a call in to his shrink to see if he could give me any more background, but I haven't heard back from him yet." He glanced at his wristwatch. "It's still outside office hours. That probably explains it."

"When the shrink does get in touch, can you forward any info he gives you?" Anderson asked. "We're currently working on the theory there's a personal angle to these killings. It could be that something in Kapinski's background may help us close in on the killers."

"I thought the other victim was a mob boss?" Farnham said. "Leastways, that's what Control said."

"He was," Lang joined the conversation. "But Anderson thinks the murder wasn't business-related."

"It's a hunch." Seeing the street Judge looking at both her and Lang in turn as though trying to read whether there was a disagreement between them, Anderson shrugged. "So far, we haven't got much else to go on. Speaking of which, what have you in terms of physical evidence? I take it a Med-Judge has examined the body."

"Yeah." Farnham's eyes returned to the display screen of his comp-unit as he scrolled through his notes. "Preliminary examination of the body indicates the cause of death was asphyxia resulting from manual strangulation. The wounds on the victim's chest - the words carved there, I mean - were inflicted postmortem. The Med-Judge found a microscopic metal fragment in one of the wound tracks: probably a piece of the knife that chipped off when the blade hit a rib. He gave it to the Teks for analysis, and they say it's high-carbon steel. Apparently, that means the weapon used to inflict the cuts was either a museum piece or it was hand-forged from a lump of iron ore the old-fashioned way. Nobody uses steel for knife blades anymore. These days it's all plasti-steel, tungsten alloys, or hardened ceramics."

"Any guesses about what kind of knife it was?" Anderson asked.

"No." The street Judge shook his head. "The fragment was too small to be able to tell us anything more. Still, if you can find the knife, the Teks will be able to match the fragment to the blade. Apparently, it's as good as fingerprints."

"Trust me, if we find these perps we won't need to inspect the knife to identify them," Anderson said. "They'd tend to stand out in a crowd."

"Yeah, I heard," Farnham said. "Control said your profile of the perps indicates one is a kid and the other is a giant. That's one hell of a tag-team, even for this city." Turning away, the street Judge began to pick his way carefully through the fallen boxes and drew the Psi-Judges' attention to the living room wall. "Anyway, I figure there's something else here you'll want to see."

Squatting down by the wall Farnham carefully lifted one of the boxes aside, revealing a hole at the base of the wall where the grille cover of an air-conditioning vent had been torn open.

"Looks like this is how your perps gained entrance to the apartment," he said. "The Teks sent a remote surveillance-drone into the vents to try and pick up their trail. Seems the perps got in to the underblock maintenance tunnels via the sewers, then followed the tunnels up into the air-conditioning system."

"That fits," Anderson said. On the ride over from Sector House 45 she had received a forensics report from Tek-Judge Tolsen on the Gruschenko homicide. Downloading the file into her Lawmaster's computer, she had instructed her bike to use its audio-system to read her the edited highlights as she and Lang made their way to Sigmund Freud. "They used a similar approach when they killed the previous victim."

"Well, that about covers all the evidence that's been collected so far," Farnham said. Rising to stand once more, he turned back to face the two Psi-Judges. "There'll be more to tell you when the Teks have completed the forensics. But, given the state of this place..." He gestured to the towers of boxes all around them. "It's going to take a while."

"Understood," Anderson said as she removed one of her gloves. "All right, then. I'd appreciate it if you and the Teks could give us some time alone with the body. We're going to do a psi-scan of the victim."

She turned towards Lang and gave her a disarming smile.

"So, do you want me to go first? Or do we flip a coin?"

He could not breathe. His heart beat madly in his chest in terror. Looking at the face of his killer, he felt vague, dull surprise to see a child staring back at him. The boy's eyes seemed to burn with fire. He saw his lips move, mouthing angry words, but the rush of blood pounding through his head drowned out the sound. The world began to darken. In a last moment of terrified reckoning, he realised he had been wrong.

There would be no more tomorrows.

"Did you see what I did?" Anderson said, afterwards. It was a few minutes later, and she and Lang had both completed separate psychic scans of the dead man's body. She felt a chill sadness run through her heart: the familiar emotion of loss that always came when she read the last memories of someone who had died a violent death. "It was exactly the same as last time. It's like the victim perceived his killers as one collective being. The killer was as tall and as strong as the giant, but when the victim looked at him he saw the face of the child. And then, there were the child's eyes. There was something in them. Hatred. Vengeance. Anger. I don't know what exactly, but whatever it was it was like the kid's eyes were on fire with it."

"I saw it," Lang whispered hoarsely. Her eyes were downcast and her cheeks were pale with nausea. The psi-scan seemed to have taken a great deal out of her. Watching as Lang put her hand gingerly to her own throat as though searching for non-existent bruises, Anderson was struck again by how young the other Psi-Judge seemed. Experiencing another person's death was hard enough at the best of times, but it only made it worse when you were a rookie virtually straight out of Psi-School.

Clearing her throat, Lang sighed and for a moment held her silence.

"Is it always like this?" she said, finally. "When you do a scan like this, do you always feel this sense of..." She paused as she considered her words. "I suppose, you'd call it sorrow. Do you always feel it? Or do you get used to it after a while?"

"You never get used to it," Anderson answered her. "Grud, I wish I could tell you that things get better. I wish I could say you develop a tough skin over time and it makes it all easier. But we're psychics. It doesn't work that way. When you perform a psi-scan on a murder victim, you directly experience everything they went through at the point of their death. You feel every instant of their pain, their suffering, their fear and their horror. Worst of all, you realise the finality of it all. When one person murders another one, it takes away all the victim is, all they ever were, and all they might ever be. It's like the entire universe has lost something bright and special. Something unique. You feel it even when you scan a body like Konrad Gruschenko's. And when you scan someone like this guy? It only makes it worse."

"It felt like he was an innocent in all this," Lang said quietly. "When I scanned Gruschenko, I just knew he was a violent man - it was like I could sense it in every fibre of his... I don't know, his soul maybe. But, with Kapinski, there was nothing to indicate that he brought his death on himself." Lang paused once more, her expression growing yet more downcast. "I called him a 'freak' before. I feel guilty about it now. It felt like he was damaged somehow. Like he tried hard to live a normal life, but something inside him always stopped him. He wanted so desperately to be able to sort his life out. And now, he never will."

"No more tomorrows," Anderson said, echoing her thoughts.

"So? How did it go?" Hearing the sound of Farnham's voice behind her, Anderson saw the street Judge had re-entered the room while the two Tek-Judges hung back in the living room doorway. Glancing at Lang beside her, it was clear the sudden interruption had brought an end to their mutual period of mournful reflection. Turning away for a moment, when Lang turned back to face the world the hard edge of her features had been restored.

"Could have been better," Lang said. "We're certain Kapinski was murdered by the same perps who killed Gruschenko. But we don't seem any further along in trying to find them."