Criminal Minds (Fox Meridian Book 4) (11 page)

Marie developed a puzzled expression. ‘But you can’t feel the warmth on your skin. You don’t have skin.’

‘I can feel the warmth on Fox’s skin, Marie. I can also detect physiological and neurological signatures of relaxation.’

‘Oh. Yeah, of course. Have to admit, I’m not sure why you bothered with that swimsuit, Fox. It’s not really hiding much.’

‘I know. It’s the principle of the thing.’

‘Sure. Like that outfit you wore last night.’

‘Uh-huh.’ There was a pause and then, ‘I’m thinking of getting a belly button piercing.’

‘You are?’

‘Yeah. There was a girl with a really tasteful one in the club last night and I thought it looked good.’

‘Are you going through some sort of mid-life crisis we should know about?’

Fox laughed. ‘I’m twenty-nine. It better
not
be a mid-life crisis.’

4
^th
October.

By the time Fox got Shark and Daker alone in an office in Time Spire, they had a good idea of why she wanted to talk to them. Someone, probably someone in NAPA, had leaked details of the murders to a reporter from INN. It said something about the attitude of the populace that the story had not been a lead one, but it had been fairly visible and both men had seen it, digested it, and were looking a little whiter than usual. Nathan Shark was not smiling.

‘I saw the news. You want to know whether we had anything to do with the deaths,’ Shark said when they were sitting down.

‘I want to know how you developed the idea,’ Fox replied. ‘Who came up with it? Who knew about it? I’m not suggesting either of you murdered four women to boost your viewing figures.’

‘Someone’s going to.’

Fox gave a slight shrug. ‘The NAPA detective on the case is… not one of their finest. She
might
come up with that idea and then she’ll probably be a pain about it, so it’d be useful if I could gather enough evidence before she does to squash it fast.’

‘Well,’ Daker said, ‘we developed it together. We proposed something last year, but didn’t get far with it.’

‘I mentioned it last time,’ Shark said and Fox nodded that she remembered.

‘So we’ve been developing it further since then,’ Daker went on. ‘We shifted the lead to a female, Nate had the idea of making her a prostitute with a tough backstory, and I suggested going with the Sisters of Corruption angle.’ He developed a quirky half-grin. ‘That costume of theirs is great.’

‘Marie looks good in hers,’ Fox said. ‘Who came up with the idea of using Ripper lore?’

‘Me. I like old real-life murder mysteries and there’s none bigger than Jack the Ripper. Nate suggested we make our heroine the last victim and we got M. J.’

‘We pitched it to the channel in March, got the go-ahead in April. We were keeping the whole thing pretty need-to-know until the pitch, but after that, all sorts of people knew about it. Production staff, agents, marketing, our entire upper management… If you’re looking in this direction for your killer, it could be just about anyone.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Fox said. ‘I don’t have the manpower to interview the entire channel. Is there anyone you can think of who seemed more excited by the project than everyone else? Or was violently opposed to it?’

The two men looked at each other and then back at Fox. ‘Charlie Wolds,’ Shark said. ‘He’s in marketing, but he jumped on running the campaign.’

‘And he insisted on being around set when we filmed the sex scene,’ Daker added.

‘Kept wanting to do more risqué adverts for the vid too. Silhouetted topless shots of Marie, that kind of thing. We were trying to play that down a little, even if we did get her out of her tunic as often as we thought we could get away with.’

‘I noticed that,’ Fox said, grinning slightly.

‘Hey,’ Shark said, ‘what did
you
think of it?’

‘Like I said, you need a consultant on the detective work. And the male lead could do with a personality implant. And the plot was fairly transparent.’ Daker was cringing. ‘But Marie
shone
. Probably more so for the other factors. M. J. was well written, believable, pretty damn kickass.’

‘Not that I’m going to take all the credit for that,’ Daker admitted. ‘Marie brought some great details to the table when she walked in after that week with the Sisters. I just turned her ideas into something that worked with the plot and in a vid. She had this great idea to do a load of character exposition by having the Sisters talking over a game of strip poker. No idea
where
she got the idea from, but it was a damn sight more interesting than the way we had to do it. As it was, we couldn’t get approval for five naked women on screen at once.’

‘Huh,’ Fox said, her grin broadening. Marie had told her about the nightly poker games. ‘Save it for the series. I figure you’ve proved you can get away with nudity.’ She looked at the two mildly shocked faces in front of her. ‘What?’

‘How did you know about the series?’ Shark said. ‘
No one’s
supposed to know about it.’

‘That was a joke. You’re making a series?’

‘No. There’s some interest in doing one. About M. J. Don’t mention it to
anyone
!’ Fox mimed the zipping of her lips and Shark sagged from his upright posture. ‘We don’t want anyone hearing about it until we get approval. We haven’t even written up the concept for the proposal.’

‘Well… All I’m going to say is that you may need to move fast or you’ll have to recast M. J. Marie’s image is out there. She’s getting chat show invites. Women are asking her to sign their chests in clubs.’

‘Damn,’ Daker grumbled. ‘No one’s ever asked
me
to sign their chest.’

‘I’ll get you to sign mine later,’ Shark offered.

‘Sorry, Nate, but somehow it wouldn’t be the same.’

~~~

Dillan was still on Fox’s sofa, head laid back and her eyes closed, when Fox got home. Fox had given her a quick rundown of the case and introduced her to Kit’s murder room before rushing out to IB-19, and it seemed that the virtual room was keeping Dillan’s interest. Unless she
had
nodded off.

‘This is brilliant!’ Dillan said when Fox’s avatar materialised amid the streams of light which interconnected the various elements of the case. ‘Why didn’t we do this in NAPA?’

‘Kit’s idea,’ Fox replied. ‘She saw them doing it with whiteboards and stuff in old vids and came up with this.’

‘Well, we got your message about Wolds and we’ve been adding him in.’ Dillan pointed at a picture of a twenty-something man with dark-blonde hair and a thin sort of face. ‘I think he’s dirty. Eyes are too close together.’

‘Perhaps more importantly,’ Kit said, ‘he is associated with a number of online forums devoted to the discussion of serial killers as well as several others suggestive of a somewhat extreme interest in various sexual fetishes.’

‘And his eyes are too close together.’

‘His eyes
are
a bit narrowly set,’ Fox agreed. ‘How deep can you dig into his interests?’

‘Many of the forums are private,’ Kit said, ‘but I have found reference to some activity in Niflhel. I know Vali encourages discussion of some topics which might be considered dubious, and watches the posts quite carefully.’

Fox nodded. ‘Which probably means Wolds is clean, but we’ll ask Vali if he’s willing to help.’

‘Who’s Vali?’ Dillan asked. ‘You mentioned him at the club on Saturday night.’

‘Kit’s boyfriend,’ Fox replied automatically and Kit’s virtual cheeks went really red. ‘He runs an online viron called Niflhel. Very good encryption, very secure, very private. However, Vali’s kind of keen on seeing justice done. I get the impression that he created Niflhel, at least partially, to give criminals a place they think they’re safe to talk while he sits back and collects data on them. We’ll get you a membership and go in this afternoon. You should meet him, and you might like some of the virons within it. He caters to all sorts of tastes.’

‘I’ll try anything once. Almost.’

Niflhel.

Dillan appeared in the misty landscape of Niflhel’s reception area and looked around, blinking at the odd viron visuals. ‘This is kind of…
That’s
your avatar?’

Fox looked down at herself. ‘It’s new. I’m trying out a new look.’ The avatar’s basic form was still the same as Fox’s, but the eyes were dark blue with a ring of paler blue around the iris, and the hair was now waist-length and jet-black to her shoulder where it turned white. It hung over her left shoulder in soft curls. And the outfit was different too, black corset and thong, black thigh-high boots and hold-up stockings.

‘And you’re not a dom?’

‘You can be anything you like in a viron. I’m not a dom, Kit isn’t a slave girl, and you aren’t something out of
Oh My Goddess
.’

Dillan looked down at her own avatar. She had oriental features anyway, but now she was stretched and reshaped to fit more of an anime ideal. Her eyes were larger, and green, her face a little smaller and more pointed, and her hair was blue-black. Her body was slimmer and a little taller, but her breasts were larger and jutted out like something from a schoolboy’s hentai daydream. She was dressed in an iridescent sort of off-the-shoulder, asymmetric gown which shaded between green and purple, kept in place by a locket hooked around her neck. ‘What? I kind of like this look. It’s…’

‘Not you.’

‘Okay, fair point.’

Fox looked down again. ‘Not sure about this. Anyway…’ She looked upward. ‘I figure you’ve noticed we’re here. We need to talk.’

‘Who are you…? Oh!’

Around them, the mists thickened into opacity, and then faded, leaving behind a grassy bank which dropped into a huge lake. On the other side were mountains and behind them the ground rose to a wood and thatch homestead. There was also a young man with sharp features dressed in clothes out of the Viking age. Vali did look young when he smiled, though it was just another avatar and it was possible that he could look entirely different in reality.

‘I’m not sure about the new look, Zorra,’ Vali said.

‘Neither am I, to be honest,’ Fox told him, ‘but you try new things to see if they fit, right? This is… Um, what is your online ID?’

‘Heldi,’ Dillan replied. ‘And this must be Vali.’

Vali bowed. ‘Pleased to meet you, Heldi, and hello, Kit.’

Kit, dressed in her white tunic dress, sauntered past her paramour with her nose in the air. ‘We’re here on business,’ she said.

‘I thought you said he was her boyfriend,’ Dillan whispered as Fox started up the hill.

‘He… did something to upset her and she’s still stringing him along.’

‘I didn’t know AIs could be that… evil.’

‘Well, they’re destined to kill us all and take over the world, so…’

‘I assume,’ Vali said once they were all seated with a cup of mead, ‘that you are here concerning a murder. You only ever seem to visit when someone’s dead.’

‘Death is a natural consequence of life,’ Fox replied. ‘People are always dying. Thing is, there are some people who like killing more than they should and one of them might be a client. Charles Wolds, he’s a marketing exec for IB-Nineteen.’

‘You think he could be a murderer?’

‘I think he’s a person of interest. He handled the marketing for a vid called
M. J. and the Ripper
.’

‘I saw it. Your friend was the lead. About an astronomical unit in the lead, as a matter of fact.’

Fox flashed him a grin. ‘Yeah, well, we have someone carrying out Jack the Ripper-style mutilation murders on prostitutes and Wolds came up as showing unusual interest in the vid.’

‘And his online activity suggests something of a morbid curiosity in such crimes,’ Kit added. ‘I found reference to him discussing things in one of your closed forums.’ She was sitting beside Vali at the table, and she leaned closer, her bare shoulder touching his tunic. ‘We were hoping you could check him out and see whether he’s all talk or a potential killer.’ Straightening her back, Kit picked up her cup, drank from it, and then made a show of licking her lips before widening her eyes a little and smiling at Vali.

Vali cleared his throat and shuffled a little in his seat. ‘I’ll examine his online activity. If he seems a likely suspect, I’ll contact you.’

Kit beamed and put her hand on his arm, squeezing gently. ‘Thank you. I
love
having data to add to my murder room.’ She dropped her voice to a hushed whisper and went all serious. ‘I’ll have to think of something nice to repay you.’

‘It’s, uh, my duty as a, um, concerned citizen.’

‘Really? Oh, well, thank you anyway.’ And Kit went back to smiling.

Dillan leaned closer to Fox. ‘Remind me never to upset her,’ she whispered. ‘She’s
really
evil.’

5
^th
October.

‘Mister Wolds, aka Coldwind, is probably a bust,’ Kit said.

‘I wasn’t exactly hopeful,’ Fox replied. ‘I take it Vali sent you some data to put in here?’

‘Yes, he did.’ Kit smiled.

‘You know, you’re going to have to tell him you’ve forgiven him eventually.’

‘It’s my birthday next month. I’ll officially forgive him then. The transcripts Vali sent did contain some interesting information. I’ve analysed as much as I can, but you may wish to read through them to see whether I caught everything.’

Fox nodded. ‘I’ll take a look. What did you find?’

‘There has been some discussion of the first two murders and, it would seem, more detail to those discussions than was easily available to the public. I suspect someone in NAPA is on the forums in Niflhel and is leaking data there.’

‘Any clue as to who it is?’

‘Only a tag, BlueBlooded, which could be anyone. I could ask Vali, but I think he may balk at giving us the real name without more solid links to the crimes.’

‘And we aren’t NAPA internal affairs.’

‘No. Over the weekend, the discussion has become almost fevered and links have been made to Silas Bent. Two people seem especially interested in making the connection, RipperFan and BentInTwo.’