Organo-Topia (13 page)

Maris froze the image. Ilsa.

He peered closely at the face to make sure, the crèche sister having similar features. He spread two fingers across the screen, expanding the image to include only her face. “Bio-metric,” he murmured on his trake.

“Analyzing,” said an indifferent voice on his coke.

The vid cycled to capture further features, the face remaining in the square.

“Analysis complete,” the voice said. Ilsa Janson, Ofem I5548J6259, cultured on 12 January, 3224, current indenture balance of Ls 52,649, current status unemployed, last employer Plavinas Incubation, whereabouts unknown.

Maris set the vid in motion. Ilsa knelt beside the Omale ovum collector and put her index and middle fingers to his carotid. Then she looked both ways along the corridor, put her back to the secucam and pulled an injectopen from her pocket.

What she did with the injectopen, he couldn't see, the view blocked by her body. It appeared she used it on the Omale and then slid it into the back pocket of her uniform. Moments later, she was joined by a fellow EMS.

He dug into the datacubes, trying to find another secuvid of the corridor from a different point of view. As he emptied the bin, his search yielding nothing, he realized that the windows were growing light.

If I'm lucky, he thought, I can catch Urzula before she grows today's claws. Maris copied the secuvid he'd found and loaded the rest back into the bin.

“Just leave it, Detective,” the clerk said. “I'll take care of it.”

“Thanks for the coffee.” He waved and departed.

Stim crackled the nerve ends of awareness. Sharp lines of dawn etched a tangled Escher across the sky. Dewy air settled to plascrete sidewalks, leaving a tinge of guilty moisture. The occasional whine of magnacar bewailed the approaching day of ball-breaking work. The steps up to the precinct doors admonished his long absence.

The last time he'd come here, Lieutenant Balodis had sent him into an interrogation room with a Coalition Colonel out to detain him, four beefs along to make sure he cooperated.

His office looked little different, a few things out of place but the majority of the chaos intact. More disconcerting was the amount of time since he'd been here. He couldn't believe the Coalition hadn't turned the place over, looking for evidence from his active investigations.

Why wouldn't they ransack his office?

He grabbed the razor and toothbrush he kept in a drawer, stepped to the head for a quick once over, returned the items to his desk, and was out the door before Lieutenant Balodis arrived.

Outside, he hailed a magnacar for the coroner's office.

Urzula Ezergailis, Coroner, looked up as he stepped off the lift into the foyer.

“What are you doing here already?” he asked.

“Waiting for you,” she said.

“Laconic as a she-bear,” Maris replied. “Listen, Fuzzy, I got secuvid showing a suspect administering an injectopen full of something into the Muceniek victim. You still got the meat?”

The eyebrow climbed the forehead, and the lip curled up off the canine.

For a moment, he was certain he was breakfast.

“Let's take a look.” She let him through the door and led him toward the meat locker. “Got into a bit of trouble with the Coalition, I hear. They let you out for good behavior?”

“Bad mouthing,” he quipped. It didn't surprise him they weren't after him. It'd been an extrajudicial detainment, without charges, without trial, without sentence.

“You're so good at that, I'm surprised they detained you at all.”

“Praise from the master of denigration. Going soft in your senescence?”

“I'll be doddering around here with catheter and colostomy long after you're insensate on a senility ward. Here we are.” Urzula stepped to a column of drawers and opened the bottom-most. Twenty more columns of drawers, Maris counted before giving up, usually full.

The slab slid outward, licks of mist dissipating. Motors whined as the slab rose to waist height. She pulled back the sheet. The waxy face of ovum collector Karlen Araj admonished Maris for not having found the killer. Blue cloudy eyes stared at the sterile ceiling, focused on finding that final resting place. The arms at the sides swore the corpse would remain forever at attention.

“Abdomen, is my guess,” Maris said.

The Coroner swung a glowb down from the ceiling. The cold flesh glowed as if phosphorescent. A tiny red spot just above the navel appeared under her examination.

“Missed that, first time around.” She brought her gaze up to him. “I'll be at this for a couple hours. Been up all night, haven't you? There's an empty slab over there you can nap on, or I can set up a cot in my office.”

“I'd probably be mistaken for a corpse, so I'd better take the cot.”

“Good idea. Who's the suspect?”

“Ilsa Janson.”

Urzula blinked at him. “Your girlfriend? You don't jerk around, Maris.”

“I go imbecile all the way, don't I?”

“Unless you were targeted.”

The statement hung between them, the frost of its utterance throwing up a cloud of suspicion.

“Yeah,” he said, no longer able to dismiss the thought. Denial peeled away like onion, and at the heart of his self-deception lurked the dark truth: Ilsa didn't love him, never had.

“Go see Jana for that cot. Get some sleep.”

He did as she bade him, his brain becoming sludge, and fell asleep instantly.

Shaking woke him, and he sat up.

“Got something,” Urzula said, settling into her chair. “Traces of nanochine inside the puncture site.”

He wiped the sleep from his eyes and nodded. “Enough suspicion to detain her. Forward those results to the Lieutenant with the secuvid, would you? I've got two more sites to investigate.”

“Certainly. Where to from here?”

“You can't tell Balodis if you don't know, right?” They exchanged a grin, and he pushed himself to his feet. Six hours in a chair at evidence had left him sore and bruised.

“Watch your back, Maris.”

“Thanks, honey bear.”

At the curb in front of the Coroner's building, he hopped into a magnacar and settled in for a rush-hour ride, twenty minutes to go a distance that should have taken five.

The posh, nine-story, high-rise apartment looked different without an orange crime scene partition in front of it. His gaze went instantly to the top, where Ofem Liene Ozolin had begun her fatal descent.

The motionless ascent on the anti-grav assisted lift took him to the roof in moments.

What am I going to find here? he wondered, stepping out onto the tarred-rock roof, the trail long since old and cold.

The wind buffeted him, as it must have the specialized Ofem, geno-modded with vesicles in mouth and vagina. Fem-oriented, she'd paid off her and her lover's indenture, had married, and had lived an ostentatious life, having sex with men to collect their sperm, a lucrative if tortured occupation.

He stepped toward the spot she'd fallen from, where they'd found puddles of proto. Urzula's examination had revealed a nanochine infection in the soles of the feet, but only the soles.

Soles.

Nanochines had eaten Eduard Sarfas from the soles up.

Maris glanced around the roof and saw a single secucam mounted near the door. As if on cue, it swung toward him.

Moments later, building security showed up. “What are you doing up here?”

“Police.” Maris flipped out his badge.

“Oh,” she said doubtfully. “Anything I can help with?”

“How long do you keep secuvids?”

“A couple years.”

“I want the ones from the night our bird thought she could fly.”

“Certainly. This way, please.” She gestured him to follow and took him to a surveillance room in the basement, banks of vidscreens across one wall, one large monitor in the center.

He found the feed from the roof. “No, not that one,” he said, remembering the shoes in the ninth-floor foyer. “The penthouse door.”

The security guard nodded, and the center monitor changed, the vid cycling rapidly backward.

A stunning young woman approached the door, slipped off her shoes beside it, and stepped on the mat in front of it to put her eye to the retinascan.

“Fast forward to the arrival of the police.”

The vid raced forward. The mat disappeared.

“There,” he said. “Now backward, and slowly.”

The vid showed a figure returning the mat to its place, a slight form dressed in fedora and trenchcoat. “Now forward, please.”

A few minutes after the stunning Ozolin entered the penthouse, the figure in trenchcoat stepped from the lift and removed the doormat. A thin, straight nose above luscious lips lurked below the fedora.

“Go backward about two hours at high speed.”

The scene reeled backward, unchanged for awhile before Ozolin's approach. Then a shadow crossed the scene. Slowed down, it showed the figure in fedora and trenchcoat spraying something on the doormat.

“Can I ask a favor?” At her nod, he said, “Send all the building secuvids for that twenty-four hour period to Lieutenant Balodis.”

Maris thanked her and made his way from the building. The upper stories invited him to glance at them once more before he got into the magnacar.

The spirit of Liene Ozolin lingered long beyond her departure.

Maris knocked on the door of Professor Bernhard Vitol's little suburban cottage sitting on its small plot of land. Quaint cottages in a variety of styles and colors polka-dotted the prosaic landscape, none of them palatial, all on tiny squares of earth, five one-hundredths of an acre. How much land does a person need? he wondered.

In the end, he knew, just six jerking feet.

After a minute without a response to his knock, Maris loped around back.

“You jerkin' puddle of sperm!” He caught up with the Bremale hustling toward a neighbor's porch, the man so obese he couldn't have got far anyway. “You're current on your donations and don't have any warrants. What's the matter?”

“Unhand me, Satan! You'll not take me to hell like all the others.” Vitol recoiled from Peterson like a priest from evil, sweat waterfalling off his bright-pink face, breath roaring like a foundry bellows. “You're a jerkin' plague! I heard what happened to Juris!”

Maris blinked at Bernhard and shook his head. “What the jerk?! He was murdered, Vitol. What do you want, protective custody? A goddamn nanoshield?”

“Just leave me alone. Don't come near me. Everyone you know is dead.”

He decided he wasn't getting the Professor's cooperation, no matter what he did. “You're under arrest for obstructing an investigation. Hands to the back of your head.”

“Try me and fry me, would you?” Bernhard turned and raised his arms.

“I'd be happy to put you out of my misery. Just answer my jerkin' questions.” Maris accessorized him with glasma bracelets, but he couldn't do much for the sweat rings and stale stench of unbathed lard. There wasn't a cleansall at the station large enough for the Professor's girth. Booking's gonna love me, he thought.

The magnatransport arrived in minutes, the same make and model they'd tried to send him to Patarei Prison in. The uniforms weren't happy. “What the jerk, Detective? How we gonna get him to booking? We won't be able to breathe!”

Maris shrugged at them. “Hose him down in the parking lot.” He summoned a magnacar and took it to the station, went around back where they were just unloading the corpulent Bremale.

The holding tank was a constant cacophony, but somehow, it got louder when Vitol was added to the mix. Vitol clung to the bars, the other detainees plastered to the walls as far away as they could go. Unwashed body seeped throughout the building.

“I thought I smelled you, Peterson,” Lieutenant Balodis said when Maris walked into her office.

“My nose is filing for workers' compensation,” he said, pointing at his ugly mug. “Why can't I just take a nutcracker to his testicles? Fat as he is, you'd think he'd be prohibited from reproducing.” He shook his head and splashed himself into the chair across from her.

“Judge says it ain't enough to arrest your jerkin' girlfriend,” Balodis said. “Close, but not enough. She won't bite.”

“That's what I was goin' to see Vitol about, but then he clammed up on me. I can't quite tie up the loose ends. How'd Ilsa manage to start a one-woman sterilization campaign?”

“Always wanting someone to do your job for you, Maris,” the Lieutenant said. “You're the laziest asshole I've ever known.”

“Save the praise for my job review. How'd she know about Ozolin and Araj, especially so soon after a collection?”

“Don't they take their collections to the fertility clinic?”

“That's it!” He sprang from the chair and hurled himself into her arms. “Get me a warrant, would you?”

“Keep your hams off me, and it's a deal.”

In moments, he was out the door and hailing a magnacar.

The Telsai Fertility Clinic stood halfway between the precinct and the coroner's office. Five stories of frameless glasma stared blindly at surrounding buildings, concealing its purpose. Magnacars pulled into the driveway with dizzying monotony, bringing a constant stream of full receptacles, taking away Ohumes emptied of their ovum and sperm.

Inside, modernity clashed with sterility. White suits bustled between white walls toward white doors to white rooms, escorting Ohumes to and fro. Cryo-carts trundled past, spilling cold steam to spotless floors. Here, Karlen Araj had shat himself to death. Here, Liene Ozolin had deposited her collection before greasing the pavement at home. He found the sterility of fertility disconcerting, the environs clashing with the fecundity they propagated.

Director of Clinic Security, Dagnija Krumins, stared at him from across a pristine desk. “Yeah, I know her. Ilsa used to pick up the shipments for Plavinas Incubation. An atrocity, what happened out there. Why are you asking?”

“She have access to your files?”

“Of course not.” Krumins bristled, porcupining in her chair, stiffening in defensiveness. “Completely confidential, our files. Completely! We abide by all Coalition confidentiality protocols.”

The same ones that governed the research of Professor Bernhard Vitol, Maris was sure, fertility rates and projections kept so deeply under wraps they were being smothered. “And your secuvids go back how far?”

“Seven years, per Reproductive Enforcement Division regulations. Detective, what you're suggesting is outrageous. There isn't a way for a non-employee to access our files. It didn't happen.”

“Then an employee did.” He neuramailed the warrant Lieutenant Balodis had obtained for him to Director Krumins. “Your donation file system is now evidence. Any alteration between now and its transfer will result in charges of tampering with evidence. Further, all trakes, cokes, corns, and neuramails by staff on and off company time going back one year are now evidence as well.”

The woman across from him went white as her clinic. The slick click of a blasma pistol slid off the safety, her barrel aimed at him.

Another safety snicked open behind him and a hot barrel pressed against his temple. A hand emptied his holster of blasma pistol.

“Game over, Maris,” Ilsa said, her voice in his ear.