Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome (10 page)

Vann looked at the dead body. “Do we know who he is?”

“No ID,” Trinh said. “We’re working on it.”

Vann looked around, trying to find something. “Where’s Nicholas Bell?” she asked Trinh.

Trinh smiled thinly. “At the precinct,” she said. “The first officer on the scene subdued him and we sent him off before you got here.”

“Who was the officer?” Vann asked.

“Timmons,” Trinh said. “He’s not here.”

“I need his arrest feed,” Vann said.

“I don’t—”

“
Now
, Trinh,” Vann said. “You know my public address. Give it to Timmons.” Trinh turned away, annoyed, but pulled out her phone and spoke into it.

Vann pointed to the uniformed officer in the room. “Anything moved or touched?”

“Not by us,” he said.

Vann nodded. “Shane.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Make a map,” Vann said. “Make it detailed. Mind the glass.”

“On it,” I said. My recording mode was already on. I overlaid a three-dimensional grid on top of it, marking off everything I could see and making it easier to identify where I needed to look behind and under things. I walked the room, carefully, filling in the nooks and crannies. I knelt down when I got to the bed, turning on my headlights to make sure I got all the details. And there were in fact details to note under the bed.

“There’s a glass under here,” I said to Vann. “It’s broken and covered in blood.” I stood up and pointed over to the room’s desk, which featured a set of glasses and a couple of bottles of water. “There are also glass shards on the floor by the desk. Guessing that’s our murder weapon.”

“You done with your map?” Vann said.

“Almost,” I said. I took a few more passes around the room to pick up the spots I’d missed.

“I assume you also made your own map,” Vann said, to Trinh.

“We got the tech on the way,” Trinh said. “And we’ve got the feeds from the officers on the scene.”

“I want all of them,” Vann said. “I’ll send you Shane’s map, too.”

“Fine,” Trinh said, annoyed. “Anything else?”

“That’s it for now,” Vann said.

“Then if you don’t mind stepping away from my crime scene. I have work to do,” Trinh said.

Vann smiled at Trinh and left the room. I followed. “Metro police always like that?” I asked, as we stepped into the elevator.

“No one likes the feds stepping into their turf,” Vann said. “They’re never happy to see us. Most of them are more polite. Trinh has some issues.”

“Issues with us, or issues with you?” I asked.

Vann smiled again. The elevator opened to the lobby.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Vann asked. She was driving manually toward the precinct house and fumbling for a package of cigarettes—real ones this time. It was her car. There was no law against it there.

“I’m immune to secondhand smoke, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said.

“Cute.” She fished out a cigarette and punched in the car lighter to warm it up. I dialed down my sense of smell as she did so. “Access my box on the FBI server and tell me if the arrest feed is there yet,” she said.

“How am I going to do that?” I asked.

“I gave you access yesterday,” Vann said.

“You did?”

“You’re my partner now.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “But what would you have done if you met me and decided I was an untrustworthy asshole?”

Vann shrugged. “My last partner was an untrustworthy asshole. I shared my box with her.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“She got shot,” Vann said.

“Line of duty?” I asked.

“Not really,” Vann said. “She was at the firing range and shot herself in the gut. There’s some debate about whether it was accidental or not. Took disability and retired. I didn’t mind.”

“Well,” I said. “I promise not to shoot myself in the gut.”

“Two body jokes in under a minute,” Vann said. “It’s almost like you’re trying to make a point or something.”

“Just making sure you’re comfortable with me,” I said. “Not everyone knows what to do with a Haden when they meet one.”

“You’re not my first,” she said. The lighter had popped and she fished it out of its socket, lighting her cigarette. “That should be obvious, considering our beat. Have you accessed the arrest feed yet?”

“Hold on.” I popped into the Bureau’s evidence server and pulled up Vann’s box. The file was there, freshly arrived. “It’s here,” I said.

“Run it,” Vann said.

“You want me to port it to the dash?”

“I’m driving.”

“Autodrive is a thing that happens.”

Vann shook her head. “This is a Bureau car,” she said. “Lowest-bidder autodrive is not something you want to trust.”

“Fair point,” I said. I fired up the arrest feed. It was janky and low-res. The Metro police, like the Bureau, probably contracted their tech to the lowest bidder. The view was fps stereo mode, which probably meant the camera was attached to protective eyewear.

The recording started as the cop—Timmons—got off the elevator on the seventh floor, stun gun drawn. At the door of room 714 there was a Watergate security officer, resplendent in a bad-fit mustard yellow uniform. As the feed got closer the security officer’s taser came into view. The security officer looked like he was going to crap himself.

Timmons navigated around the security officer and the image of a man, sitting on the bed, hands up, floated into view. His face and shirt were streaked with blood. The image jerked and Timmons took a long look at the dead man on the blood-soaked carpet. The view jerked back up to the man on the bed, hands still up.

“Is he dead?” asked a voice, which I assumed was Timmons’s.

The man on the bed looked down at the man on the carpet. “Yeah, I think he is,” he said.

“Why the fuck did you kill him?” Timmons asked.

The man on the bed turned back to Timmons. “I don’t think I did,” he said. “Look—”

Then Timmons zapped the man. He jerked and twisted and fell off the bed, collapsing into the carpet, mirroring the dead man.

“Interesting,” I said.

“What?” Vann asked.

“Timmons was barely in the room before he zapped our perp.”

“Bell,” Vann said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Speaking of which, does that name sound familiar to you?”

“Did Bell say anything before he got zapped?” Vann asked, ignoring my question.

“Timmons asked him why he killed that guy,” I said. “Bell said he didn’t think he did.”

Vann frowned at that.

“What?” I asked.

Vann glanced over to me again, and had a look that told me she wasn’t looking at me, but at my PT. “That’s a new model,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sebring-Warner 660XS.”

“Sebring-Warner 600 line isn’t cheap,” Vann said.

“No,” I admitted.

“Lease payments are a little steep on a rookie FBI salary.”

“Is this how we’re going to do this?” I asked.

“I’m just making an observation,” Vann said.

“Fine,” I said. “I assume they told you something about me when they assigned me to you as a partner.”

“They did.”

“And I assume you know about the Haden community because it’s your beat.”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s skip the part where you pretend not to know who I am and who my family is and how I can afford a Sebring-Warner 660,” I said.

Vann smiled and stubbed out her cigarette on the side window and lowered the window to chuck out the butt. “I saw you got grief on the Agora for showing up to work yesterday,” she said.

“Nothing I haven’t gotten before, for other things,” I said. “Nothing I can’t handle. Is this going to be a problem?”

“You being you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why would it be a problem?” Vann asked.

“When I went to the Academy I knew people there thought I was there as an affectation,” I said. “That I was just farting around until my trust fund vested or something.”

“Has it?” Vann asked. “Your trust fund, I mean. Vested.”

“Before I even went to the Academy,” I said.

Vann snickered at this. “No problems,” she said.

“You sure.”

“Yes. And anyway, it’s good that you have a high-end threep,” she said, using the slang term for a Personal Transport. “It means that map of yours is actually going to have a useful resolution. Which works because I don’t trust Trinh to send me anything helpful. The arrest feed was messy and fuzzy, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s bullshit,” Vann said. “Metro eyewear feeds auto-stabilize and record at 4k resolution. Trinh probably told Timmons to shitty it up before sending it. Because she’s an asshole like that.”

“So you’re using me for my superior tech abilities,” I said.

“Yes, I am,” Vann said. “Is
that
going to be a problem?”

“No,” I said. “It’s nice to be appreciated for what I can do.”

“Good,” Vann said, turning into the precinct house parking lot. “Because I’m going to be asking you to do a lot.”

Tor Books by John Scalzi

Note: Within series, books are best read in listed order.

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THE OLD MAN’S WAR SERIES

Humanity has finally made it into interstellar space. But the planets fit to live on are scarce—and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding. And they don’t want young people for fighters.

Old Man’s War
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Short Fiction in the series: “
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STAND-ALONE FICTION

The Android’s Dream
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Agent to the Stars
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entries from the first ten years of the blog—a decade of
Whatever
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METAtropolis
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Redshirts
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The starship ensigns were expendable…until they started comparing notes.

Lock In
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STAND-ALONE SHORT FICTION

“
The President’s Brain is Missing
”

“
The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City: Prologue
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Art copyright (C) 2014 by Richie Pope

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