State of Decay (23 page)

“It would take forty minutes to get here.”

You’re assuming the killer worked alone
, the voice said.
You’re assuming there is only one killer. Maybe he made the same assumption.

Could that be? Could the reason Harold Craig hadn’t called the police after witnessing the crime at Valle’s apartment be because he didn’t have time? Because he was attacked shortly afterward himself?

The time of death will tell us that
, I said to myself.

The fumes were making me light- headed. For all I knew, the bleach had combined with some other chemical down there and had created some kind of toxic gas. Why did he come down into the one place he had to have known there was no way out of?

They struggled in the kitchen, and he came down into the basement. The killer overtook him again at the workbench and they struggled. There was a wound on the side of Craig’s wrist that looked like it was from an impact, like it had been smashed against something. . . .

“A gun,” I said.

“What?”

“He kept a gun down here; that’s why he came down here.”

He managed to get it too. The killer closed the distance and grabbed him. He smashed his wrist against the workbench, forcing him to drop it. Had he gotten a shot off?

Yes. That’s what the bleach was for. It hadn’t just fallen over; the killer dumped it out. He did that to compromise any sample of his blood that might be collected.

“He shot him.”

Using the ALS light, I adjusted the beam’s spectrum and scanned the area around the body, then over near the workbench. There was nothing on the walls or ceiling, and nothing on the surface of the bench. The bullet, if there was one, must have gotten lodged inside its target.

“Come on,” Shanks said. “Let’s get forensics in here.”

“Hold on.”

Kneeling down and shining the light up under the bench, I could see a spatter there. He had been hit. I scraped off a small sample.

“Come on, before we both pass out.”

If he had any kind of record, it would identify him. Even if he didn’t, we’d have his entire genome. After six crime scenes and not one hair, not one speck of saliva or sweat, not one thing that could be used as a reliable identification, he left behind the most damning thing he possibly could have.

The room spun for a second, and I grabbed the leg of the workbench until it passed.

“Faye, CSI will take care of this. Come on.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re not. Call it in.”

Was my inner voice taunting me now?

How?
I asked, but the voice wouldn’t say. It didn’t pipe up again.

I called it in.

I still hadn’t told him specifically about Zoe, and he was getting impatient. It had been hours since I’d dropped the evidence off with her, and I hadn’t heard back yet.

Things were tense out there and getting worse. Rumors of more terrorist attacks were flooding the airwaves, and the FBI circuits were jammed with false tips, confessions, and more bomb threats. The police and the Guard had their hands full trying to keep order and enforce the curfew. The first revivor soldiers were due to hit the streets in the next few hours.

It’s a mistake, deploying those revivors
, I told Noakes.

After sifting through Heinlein’s data on Zhang’s Syndrome, I was able to come to two conclusions. The first was that the condition was not as much of a footnote as MacReady indicated it was. The second was that although Olav Sodder may have been the one who first became aware of it with Samuel Fawkes as his protégé, it was Fawkes who had the obsession with it, far more so than his mentor ever had. Most of the data I’d received had been gathered by Fawkes.

With pages of information scattered in the background, I watched one of hundreds of archived sessions Fawkes conducted with the revivor for whom the condition was named, Ning Zhang. Zhang, in life, had been a second-tier citizen who worked in sanitation, specializing in substructure plumbing. Zhang had also been a convicted criminal.

He was a short male revivor, lean but stocky, with Asian features. His eyes were flat white and his skin, even after reanimation, leaned toward dark. In the footage he was seated at a table with a series of what looked like index cards in neat stacks in front of him. His face had no expression as Samuel Fawkes approached him.

In contrast to Zhang, Fawkes was thin and very pale. There was dense stubble on his face, and he wore his thick black hair fairly long. He’d removed his tie and rolled up his sleeves. He looked tired, but his eyes were sharp as he regarded the revivor.

“Stack zero,” he said. Zhang looked to the leftmost stack of cards. He reached over and slid them closer with one hand.

“Event series N through R,” Fawkes continued. “Each card relates information regarding documented events. Some of the events are compiled from information on record, cited by you, prior to reanimation. Some of the events are compiled from information obtained from interviews after reanimation.”

“Why?” Zhang asked, still looking down at the stack of cards.

“Each event is reduced to the salient, documented facts. Review each event and—”

“We did this.”

Fawkes ran one hand over his face, then rubbed the bridge of his prominent nose.

“Are you refusing to cooperate?”

“No. I will do whatever I’m told.”

“And if your first commander removes your ghrelin inhibitor and commands you to eat human flesh?”

“Then I will.”

“Would you have done so in life?”

“No.”

“Would you have found it repulsive?”

“I believe so.”

“The event on the card in your hand, is it accurate?”

“No. Are you trying to trick me?”

“We know the event is accurate. You were convicted of murdering that woman—this is a verifiable event. You’re claiming now that your confession was a lie?”

“I was not lying.”

“So you did, in fact, stab Noelle Hyde with a kitchen knife?”

“I did not.”

“You confessed. All the polygraph sensors and computer models validated your confession.”

“I was not lying.”

“Then you’re lying now.”

“No.”

“They can’t both be the truth. The event occurred once, in one way. Not two.”

“In both cases, I was asked to tell the truth. In both cases, I related the information without alteration.”

“So you feel now the information you believed in life was false?”

“I don’t know. I gain nothing by denying it now.”

“You either did or did not commit that crime. Events happen only in one way,” Fawkes insisted.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he snapped. “Reanimation doesn’t open the mind to parallel experiences and somehow replace perceptions of events with alternate possibilities.”

“Are you sure?”

“You killed her. Something corrupted those memories.”

“If it did,” Zhang said with the certainty of one who didn’t care one way or the other, “then I will never have any way of knowing which ones. By extension, neither will you.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

I paused the footage and dug up what information there was on the Zhang trial. It looked cut-and-dried. For whatever reasons, Ning Zhang had followed Noelle Hyde one night, pulled her into an alley, and stabbed her repeatedly. Her body was never found, but Zhang’s prints were on the knife, and traces of her blood were found on his clothes. Witnesses were produced who saw him approach her that night. Eventually he confessed. Less than a month later, he was killed in a prison altercation and picked up by Heinlein. Even as a revivor, though, he could not or would not say where the body ended up.

That was true on one level, but people often had strange reasons for lying, especially to themselves. Had his mind somehow purged the information? Had he convinced himself, somehow, of his own innocence at the end, and carried it with him into death?

The problem probably existed long before, but in the early days, revivor brains were so simplistic that no one had noticed. The problem surfaced more as time went by and the records contained the same kind of experiments for almost fifty other revivors, but his obsession had started with Zhang.

It could have been a scientist’s curiosity or even an obsession, but having sat through and conducted as many interrogations as I had, it looked to me like Fawkes was digging for something. The isolation, the repetition, and just the way he held himself, the way he kept at it—it was standard stuff whether Fawkes even knew it or not. He was trying to extract information. He was pretty good at it too.

Regardless, he never figured it out. The experiment eventually ended. The revivor was shipped off across the ocean, where its ghrelin inhibitor was eventually removed, despite being in violation of international law. In the resulting state of perpetual hunger, Zhang most likely committed atrocities far worse than he ever had in life.

A red warning light flashed at the apex of my line of sight. I snapped open my eyes.

I sprinted to the stairwell and down to the ground floor, heading for the lobby. On the security feed, I could see the car as it tore around the corner, tires smoking. It fishtailed and then began picking up momentum, heading right for the front doors. Was he planning on ramming the place?

Weaving through the suits in the main corridor, I picked up speed, moving toward the guard station.

“Out of the way!” I shouted, drawing my gun as I hurried toward the entryway. I was about a hundred yards down the hall when through the glass doors I saw people on the sidewalk scatter as the car screeched to a halt, bucking up over the curb.

“Out of the way!”

Cross. MacReady had dropped that name back at Heinlein.

Outside, the car door opened and a middle-aged man lurched out, his face red and his eyes wild. He tripped on the curb and went facedown on the sidewalk just as the rear window of the car exploded and a loud report boomed down the street.

People on the street outside began fleeing from the car as two more shots went off and one of the tires blew out. The man picked himself up off the ground and looked around.

On the security feed, I looked but I couldn’t see which vehicle, if any, had been following him.

“Stay down!” I shouted, waving the man down as I approached the doors, but he had already committed to making a run for it. He got as far as the steps when he was struck in the side and went down on the concrete.

Two armored guards appeared and barreled through the door just ahead of me, each carrying an assault rifle. They immediately took aim down the street, but didn’t fire, as if they were trying to get a bead on the shooter.

Another shot went off and struck the man in the shoulder blade as he lay on the steps. The two guards began firing controlled bursts.

Suppressing fire. They still don’t see the shooter.

I pushed through the doors and grabbed the wounded man, dragging him back by his suit jacket. Another bullet slammed off the bulletproof glass as I got him through the doors.

“Help him . . .” the man muttered. He was alive anyway.

“Take it easy, sir,” I told him. “Help is coming, understand?”

“Help him. . . .”

The guards outside were scanning the street again, but the gunfire had stopped. I abandoned the man for a moment, pushing the glass door open and using it as a shield so I could see out onto the street with my own eyes.

“You see anything?” one guard asked the other.

“Negative.”

The street was clogged with cars that had either been abandoned or had passengers cowering inside. Several windshields were pocked with gunshots, and the blacktop was littered with glass. Smoke drifted from beneath the hood of one of the vehicles.

“Hold your fire,” I said, looking down the street.

Where had the shooter come from? He might have been pursuing in any one of the abandoned cars, but those shots had come from street level.

Several car doors still hung open. I could hear some people sobbing faintly, and far-off traffic, but that was all. Where had he . . . ?