Sins of the Father (8 page)

I can see why they say you should only use a TRI in an emergency, she thought. If we went back to using them all the time, it wouldn't be long before the Big Meg was being policed by sleep-deprived zombies. She smiled inwardly. Though, given some of the stone-faced Judges I've worked with over the years, you have to wonder.

The elevator doors opened, its smooth electronic voice telling her to "have a nice day" as she stepped from inside it. There was a Tek-Judge waiting for her in the hallway, wearing a scanalyser eyepiece clipped to the side of his helmet. Glancing down at his uniform, she saw his name was Tolsen.

"Anderson?" the Tek-Judge extended a hand in welcome. "Control said you were on your way. They've assigned the street Judge who was working the case back to normal rotation. I'm supposed to get you up to speed, then it's up to you how you want to proceed with it. The body's this way."

Gesturing for her to follow him, the Tek-Judge led her to one of the offices off the hallway. As they stepped through the doorway, Anderson read the name on the ersatz brass plaque mounted on the outside of the office door. Nales & Associates, Import and Export.

"The victim has been identified as James Nales, the company CEO," Tolsen said to her. "He was working late in his office. We found balance sheets on the screen of the computer at his desk. Looks like he was going through the accounts."

The body lay on the floor in the outer office. It was covered in an opaque plasteen sheet, with a couple of Judge-auxiliaries hovering around it like bored mourners at a funeral that had run on longer than expected.

"Has the body been examined by a Med-Judge yet?" she asked Tolsen.

"The Med-Judge has been and gone," he said. "He got called away on another case, but asked me to tell you his findings. Pending a full autopsy, he's ruled the cause of death as asphyxia resulting from manual strangulation. We were supposed to be shipping the body back to the Sector House morgue for the post mortem, but I figured you'd want to see it first."

He nodded towards one of the auxiliaries, who pulled back the sheet. Looking down, Anderson found she was staring at the body of a thickset man somewhere in his late thirties. He might have once been almost handsome, but death had made him less appealing. His neck was covered in broad ugly bruises. His eyes were red with internal haemorrhages and protruded from their sockets like blisters that were ready to pop. His tongue lolled from his mouth, distended and purple. It was the condition of the dead man's chest, though, that most immediately drew her attention. His shirt-front had been torn open, revealing a grisly sight. The killer had left a gruesome message carved bloodily into the naked flesh of the victim's torso. She saw six ragged shaking words, snaking down from under the victim's collarbone to just above his groin.

It read: Your sins will find you out.

Whether it was intended as a message to the victim, or to the Judges, Anderson could not be sure. Experience told her that postmortem mutilation of a victim's body was never a good sign. It smacked of ritual, setting the crime apart from the usual humdrum of murder. It was difficult to tell at this early stage, but she was keenly aware she might well be present at what could later turn out to be the early stages of a serial killing case. She did not like the look of what she could see before her.

Then again, she had not liked the look of the entire case from the very beginning...

"You want me to spy on another Psi-Judge?" Anderson said in disbelief.

She was sitting in the office of Senior Psi-Judge Vinley. Upon her arrival at Omar House after the Cooley baby rescue, she had been told Vinley needed to see her to discuss an urgent matter. A low-level pre-cog, Vinley's psychic powers were rumoured to be so negligible he had been permanently seconded to bureaucratic duties, including overseeing the organisation of duty rosters and the allocation of Psi Division resources. Responsibilities, she soon learned, which had led directly to the reason for their meeting.

It was the nature of the new assignment he had for her that had led to her outburst.

"You always did have a tendency to the melodramatic, Anderson," Vinley told her. He was a small dour man with an uneven complexion, his characteristic air of perpetual glumness scarcely alleviated by the bright thatch of flaming red hair on top of his head. He grimaced. "It's a straightforward enough matter, really. Questions have been raised about a Psi-Judge's performance, and we simply want you to ride shotgun and supervise the investigation she's currently working on. To hear you talking, you'd think I'd just asked you to para-drop into East-Meg Two and take out the entire Diktatorat."

"You also asked me to report back to you on her emotional state. That makes it a lot more than a 'straightforward matter'."

"Really?" Vinley raised a scarlet eyebrow towards her. "I would have thought it was very simple. We're Psi-Judges, Anderson: we have a duty to the citizens of the Mega-City One-"

"Spare me the recruiting speeches, Vinley," Anderson cut him off. "I already gave at the office."

"Droll. I take it that's an example of your famous sense of humour." He smiled at her, mirthlessly. "But to continue what I was saying: we have a duty to the citizens of Mega-City One and to the command structure of the Justice Department we both serve. This isn't a democracy, Anderson. We're Judges. We follow orders. That applies as much to me as it does to you. To be honest, given a choice, I would have picked another Psi-Judge for this assignment. But it wasn't my decision. And the Psi-Chief said he trusted you to get the job done right."

"Shenker? He authorised this?"

"That's correct." For an instant, Vinley's expression became almost smug. "As I was telling you, questions have been raised about the performance and emotional state of a Psi-Judge. That makes it a serious matter. It could be the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. It could be you'll be back here in a few hours to tell me we don't have anything to worry about. Believe me, if that turns out to be the case, I'll be ecstatic. In the meantime though, so long as a single iota of doubt remains, we have to investigate."

"No, you mean I have to investigate," Anderson said, not without a trace of bitterness. If the order came from Psi-Chief Shenker, she had no way out of it. Still, it rankled that she was effectively being told to spy on a fellow Psi-Judge. "I don't see you jumping up and asking to join the party."

"Those weren't my orders," Vinley shrugged in indifference. "If it helps, try to look upon it the same way you would if you were assigned to assess the performance of a Psi-Cadet during a routine training exercise. Think of yourself as a mentor, not as a spy. Either way, the job has to be done. This is Psi Division. If we think there's the potential for a bad apple in our ranks, we don't have the luxury of handing the matter over to the Special Judicial Squad the way the other divisions do. The SJS just aren't equipped to handle a situation like this. Remember, the worst-case scenario here is that we're dealing with a Psi-Judge who is emotionally unstable. A Judge like that is a danger both to herself and others. She could even go rogue. And I'm sure I don't have to tell you just how much damage a rogue psychic can do."

There was a pause while Vinley waited for her to respond. Brooding in her chair, Anderson felt an acute sense of discomfort. The worst thing about it was she knew Vinley was right.

Any rogue psychic was bad news, but the idea of a Psi-Judge going rogue was so appalling it almost did not bear thinking about. It was not just a matter of the damage a psychic could do with her own powers. There was also the fact that psychics were uniquely vulnerable to psychic possession. The psi-flux and its attendant dimensions were full of all manner of hostile inhuman entities that liked nothing better than to grab a compliant human host and spend time in the material plane, having fun. Unfortunately, the fun in question generally involved inflicting as much suffering on mankind as possible. Anderson only had to think back over the recent history of the city to be reminded of the murderous results of such incidents.

Take the Necropolis Event, for example. Fourteen years ago, a group of preternatural entities had used a captured Psi-Judge to create a psychic bridge between their own realm and Earth. Next, they had taken control of the minds of most of Mega-City One's Judges and set them to work murdering the citizens they were sworn to protect. By the time Anderson and others had defeated the entities, the final death toll had been in the millions. If there was the remotest possibility of a Psi-Judge going rogue, then she could see why Psi-Chief Shenker had ordered that an assessment should be made immediately.

Yet, still, it felt wrong to her. She had been through Psi-School and the Academy of Law. Barring a brief period of sabbatical, she had served as a Psi-Judge her entire adult life. Psi Division was the closest thing she had to a family. Her fellow Psi-Judges were more than just colleagues. She counted a number of them as friends and confidantes, but her broader feelings toward the division went beyond such simple boundaries. Whenever she was introduced to a Psi-Judge she had never met before, she instantly felt an invisible bond of shared experience between them - a bond that existed even in her dealings with a sullen-faced jobsworth like Vinley. In the end, she was Psi Division right down to the core.

Now, they wanted her to turn informer. They wanted her to forego the normal bounds of trust and loyalty, to monitor another Psi-Judge, and turn her in if she found her unfit for duty. The entire situation rubbed Anderson the wrong way, but in the end she realised she would do what they asked. However Vinley chose to phrase it, it was not simply a matter of following orders, or abiding by the chain of command. She thought of her dead friend, Corey. An empath, Corey had committed suicide when the pressures of being a Psi-Judge had grown too much for her. For years afterwards, guilt had weighed heavily on Anderson's shoulders. If-onlys and might-have-beens had plagued her mind. She and Corey had been so close: how could she have missed the telltale signs of stress and burnout? How was it she hadn't been able to see Corey's intentions in time to save her? They were questions without easy answers, but they added a new perspective to the decision before her.

Yeah, I'll do it, she thought. I'll do it for Corey.

"All right, you sold me," she said to Vinley at last.

Even as she spoke, she noticed that Vinley had already called up the service record of the Psi-Judge in question on his desk computer and had turned the display screen around for Anderson to see it. Apparently, he had anticipated her answer and was ready to give her a full briefing.

It looked like he was a better pre-cog than anyone had credited.

"The killer is a giant," Tolsen said. The sheet had been placed back on the body, and now the Tek-Judge had begun to brief her on the facts established by the physical evidence.

"A giant?" Anderson smiled at him. "At least that should make him easier to find. Are we talking about the 'fee-fi-fo-fum' kind, or a friendly one like the green guy who advertises canned synthi-veg in the Tri-D commercials?"

"I mean he suffers from gigantism, Anderson," Tolsen regarded her closely as though he wasn't quite sure whether she was being facetious. "We were able to calculate his stride-length from the soft impressions of his footprints on the office carpet. That, and the size of the handspan indicated by the bruise patterns on the victim's neck, would put the perp standing at somewhere between two-point-three and two-point-five metres in height."

"Two and a half metres tall? So he stands out in a crowd. What else?"

"He's strong. Phenomenally so. He snapped two spinal vertebrae in the victim's neck while he was strangling him. Then, there's the matter of the elevator. This is a high-security building. You noticed you need authorisation to go anywhere above the one hundred and ninetieth floor in the elevator?"

"I did. So the perp used the stairwells?"

"No," Tolsen shook his head. "We checked the footage from the surveillance cams inside all the stairwells and came up empty. Instead, I found evidence he had been in the elevator shaft. The walls of the shaft are lined with five-millimetre-thick plastisteel panels and coated with teflon-plus to reduce friction. Somebody has pulled several of the panels apart, bending the edges back so as to increase the gap between them. It looks like the perp rode the elevator up to one-ninety, then made handholds for himself so he could climb up the last ten floors inside the shaft."

"He bent solid plastisteel?" Anderson whistled quietly. "That makes him pretty damn strong. You sure we're not looking for a robot or an alien?"

"As sure as I can be." Opening one of the pouches on his utility belt, Tolsen produced two transparent plasteen evidence baggies and handed them to her. Inside each one she saw a few long strands of hair. "We found two samples of hair - one on the wall of the elevator shaft, and the other on the victim's body. You know about hair DNA?"

"I take it that's a trick question," Anderson said. "Hair isn't made of living cells. It doesn't have DNA."

"That's right," the Tek-Judge nodded. "If you want to get DNA from a hair sample, it has to have skin tags - little pieces of tissue that stay attached after the hair is pulled off or falls out. Unfortunately, neither of these samples has them. However, after analysing the colour and follicle dimensions, I can tell you it's human and that there's a ninety-nine-point-nine per cent probability both samples came from the same person. Unless somebody else has been crawling around the elevator shafts recently, that means it came from your perp."

"So he's a brunette and he wears his hair long?" She passed the baggies back to Tolsen. "What about his strength, then? You thinking he's a mutant?"

"That would be my best guess," Tolsen agreed as he placed the baggies back in their pouch. "Of course it could be he's a cyborg, or that he's taking some kind of adrenal stimulant to boost his strength. But, combined with the fact of his gigantism, I'd say some kind of genetic mutation was the most likely culprit. Either way, he can tear plastisteel apart with his bare hands. When you catch up with this guy - assuming he is a guy - I wouldn't take any chances."