Dangerously Placed (7 page)

‘Thank you,' said Ki, graciously inclining her head.

The next half-hour was a strange mixture of the fascinating and the just-plain-gross, as Evan and Ki showed me around the lab. Sure, it was kind of interesting to know that each sample could be tracked using its own radio frequency identification label, but when the discussion turned to all the different colours of mucus Evan had seen over the years, I began to wish Ki wasn't
quite
such a dedicated work experience student.

‘I'm not sure I get the attraction of all this pathology stuff,' I told Ki, when Evan finally left us alone in his office.

‘Pathology is a search for the truth, Alex. What could be more central to our nature as humans than the quest for knowledge?'

‘Good point,' I said, although personally I could think of a few things. The quest for the perfect guy, for one. I wondered what Dale was doing with his afternoon off.

‘And that's where these little snippets come in,' continued Ki, checking to see that no one was outside the office door and then stealthily drawing several sheets of paper from behind the monitor of Evan's computer.

‘What are these?' I took the set of papers, which looked like a report of some kind. I scanned the first page:
Cerebral ischemia caused by occlusion of carotid arteries … indications consistent with homicide …

‘Wait, is this …?' I looked at the corner of the page, and there it was: a case number and a name – Grody, Pierce Brian.

‘Yes.' Ki nodded. ‘It's your former boss's autopsy report.'

‘Ki!' I stared at her. ‘How did you get hold of this?'

She looked around again, lowering her voice.

‘I told you Evan had promised to let me work at the morgue, didn't I? Well, this morning I had my chance to go there.'

‘You
saw
him? Grody's body, I mean?' My eyes felt like they were about to pop out of my head. ‘I know you've got them eating out of your hand here, but this is …'

‘No, I didn't see him. A work experience student at a homicide victim's autopsy?' Ki looked amused. ‘Even
my
influence has its limits, Alex. But they did allow me to tour the morgue, and to view a sample file that showed what kind of information is involved in an autopsy report. Fortunately for me, the young man they assigned to show me the report hadn't seen me observing a thoracic incision without any sign of squeamishness earlier in the tour, so he was completely fooled by my simulation of sudden light-headedness at the sight of the photos in the report. And while he was out obtaining a glass of water for me, I was able to access Grody's report and print it out.'

‘
You
pulled the fake fainting act? How gullible was this guy?'

‘He was most chivalrous,' said Ki, with a subtle smile that I took to mean she'd quite liked the poor stooge. ‘Now, don't you want to know what the report says about Grody's death?'

‘If you can interpret all this, please do.'

‘Essentially,' Ki explained, ‘it says that Grody was strangled. It seems that the murderer attempted to choke him with one of the power cords attached to his own Virk Suit, but finished by strangling him with their bare hands, suggesting that Grody was able to free himself from the initial attack.'

I shuddered.

‘I guess the murderer must have been pretty strong if they were able to overpower him barehanded.'

‘Not necessarily.' Ki flicked to the back of the report. ‘There's an evaluation by one of the senior criminal forensics experts at the end, and she points out that since Grody's Virk Suit was still sealed when the body was found, he was in a compromised position in terms of defending himself. He would have been unable to see realspace and unable to move with complete freedom, making the murderer's task that much easier. In fact, she postulates that the position of the bruising on the victim's throat may actually suggest someone slightly shorter than Grody, with reasonably long, slender fingers.'

A surge of hope flowed through me.

‘But I'm
much
shorter than he was, and I don't have long fingers! That would get me off the suspect list, wouldn't it?'

Ki's face remained serious.

‘I'm afraid that kind of thing is more an educated guess than hard evidence, Alex.' She patted my shoulder consolingly. ‘However, it could help your investigation of the Simulcorp employees. Does that description match anyone you know?'

I snorted.

‘Only about half the people in the office! Isn't there any other evidence, like hair or blood or something? If it's just height and possible hand-size we're going
on, it could be loads of people: Inge, Budi, Dale …' I counted them on my fingers. ‘Viktor, Sohalia, Elena, Ricky, that guy from Data Analysis whose name I can't remember …'

‘I'm afraid the autopsy report doesn't cover any evidence that isn't on the body. There might have been DNA traces at the scene, but the Virk Suit covers the whole body so effectively, there was nothing to be found on Grody's remains.' Ki frowned. ‘However, while I agree that your list of matching people is rather long, we must remember that there's one crucial factor that could cut it down dramatically. Could any of them have been physically close enough to get to Grody's Virk Room yesterday afternoon?'

I slumped into Evan's chair.

‘I didn't really manage to find out. I heard that the records of who was logged in where had been disabled, which is making it harder for the police to check.'

To my surprise, Ki looked pleased.

‘Then you're no longer the only likely suspect! There are several Virk Rooms in the city, aren't there?'

I nodded.

‘Five or six, I think.'

‘Well, then – if the login records don't show who was in those rooms, there could have been other people just as close to Grody as you.'

‘That's true. But I'm assuming if someone had been really far away from where they were supposed to be when the police escorted them from their Virk Room,
they'd have been arrested by now. Most of the people in that list I just gave you would have been in other countries, so we can probably rule them out. We can definitely rule out Inge. While I was being interviewed, I heard these two officers laughing about a call they'd just got from Germany; apparently the German police wanted to
strongly
assure the Australian police that Inge's location in Stuttgart had been confirmed. It seems she … wasn't thrilled, shall we say, with how much time they spent questioning her.'

‘I see,' said Ki dryly, and I was sure she did. ‘So most of your colleagues were a considerable distance away … except Dale.'

I looked up sharply.

‘Yes. But his Virk Room is miles away, up in Woorenong.'

‘If the login records aren't there, though, he could have been in any Virk Room earlier on.'

I swallowed, suddenly remembering my lunch break the day before.

‘I … thought I saw him,' I said slowly. ‘At lunch, when I was looking out at Beach Road, there was a guy walking past and I thought he looked like Dale.'

‘Really?' Ki leant towards me. ‘And yet I would have said it was impossible for him to get to Beach Road and back up to the northern suburbs in a forty-five-minute lunch break. Were you with him all of the time between seeing Grody alive and dead?'

‘No.' My stomach seemed to be squeezing itself into
a knot. ‘He wasn't with me for most of the time the party was going on. But there were so many people there …'

Ki arched an eyebrow.

‘I know,' I groaned. ‘It sounds really bad. But what motive would he have? He barely knew Grody, just like me. And …' I put a hand up to my face, feeling again the gentleness of Dale's fingers brushing my cheek. ‘I can't believe he could do it, Ki. I really can't. He might be a bit competitive, but that's all. He's … he's a nice guy.'

‘The human psyche is far more mysterious than one generally imagines, Alex.' Ki sat down next to me. ‘I'm not saying that this one suspicious circumstance makes him a murderer, but you have to leave your attraction to him behind and allow yourself to be objective. Watch him. Find out what you can, and be cautious about your own safety. All right?'

I nodded, feeling strangely traitorous to have made Dale a suspect in Ki's eyes. But she was right – I had to watch him. If only to clear his name, as well as mine.

‘Well, girls, what say we go and look at some unusual phlegm samples?' cried Evan, striding into the room.

‘Sounds fascinating,' replied Ki, deftly slipping the autopsy report behind her back as she stood up.

‘I think I see what you meant about this place showing you new sides of yourself,' I muttered, following her out of the office. ‘I had no idea you were so … stealthy.'

Ki's lips twitched.

‘I must confess,' she murmured back, ‘that while I'm enjoying pathology, I'm beginning to wonder whether covert intelligence-gathering might not suit me better.'

I smiled. I could totally see Ki as a spy.

I got up early on Thursday to see if Ki's inside information could help me identify anyone apart from Dale as a suspect. I obviously couldn't just ask around at Virk about who lived where without seeming suspicious – even looking people up on the personnel files would probably make me look more like a prying weirdo than a model student. So instead I opted for doing it the old-fashioned way: looking my co-workers up on the net.

It wasn't hard to find most of them: their names, coupled with the magic word ‘Simulcorp', were enough to bring up plenty of mentions. After all, you didn't get to be at Virk by being shy and retiring. But my search didn't come up with much that was helpful. Maru from the Legal Department and Frankie from CGI were Australian, but both lived in Perth – much too
far away to have sneaked back to their Virk Room and been checked by the police after visiting Grody at AU-2. Sohalia used AU-9, but that was over two hundred kilometres away. It seemed that all the other Australian Virk Rooms were used by people in other divisions, and all the remaining staff from Marketing were known to live overseas. The only exception was Elena, who didn't show up in my search. But then, she was a manager, not a high-profile executive, so maybe that wasn't all that surprising. So much for my attempt to widen the range of suspects; all I'd really done was return to the idea that Dale and I were the main possibilities.

So I went to AU-3, logged into Virk and watched Dale. As you can imagine, it wasn't exactly a chore. In fact, by the middle of the morning, I was beginning to wonder if I had some kind of hormonal imbalance or something. I mean, here I was, conducting secret surveillance on a guy who could be a murderer, and half the time all I could think was,
Man, he looks hot in those pants!

Unlike Kiyoko, however, it seemed that my skill in covert intelligence-gathering was on the lame side. As soon as he managed to escape from Inge's explanations of demographic charting, Dale came straight over to our cubicle, sat down close to me and murmured, ‘What is it, Alex? You've been watching me all morning.'

Damn.

‘Oh, well, I was just wondering when you'd have time to work on the Impression proposal. Budi told me it had been approved.'

‘I'm free now. But are you sure that's what you wanted to talk to me about?'

‘What do you mean?' I turned to open the Proposals folder on our computer so Dale wouldn't see my face.

‘Well …' Dale moved closer, and I could actually feel his soft breath on my neck, as if he were really beside me. ‘I guess I thought you might want to talk about yesterday. When Budi interrupted our … conversation.'

It was a good thing I'd turned away, or Dale would have been able to feel
my
breath, and I was practically hyperventilating.

‘No, I …'

The Impression proposal file popped up on screen. Under the title were the words:
Approved – P Grody
.

I'd thought Inge or one of the other staff had approved our work for formal planning. But no – Grody must have relented. Even though I knew he'd probably done it just to get us out of his devil-red hair, somehow the fact that he'd bothered to read our proposal in that last hour or so before he died brought a lump to my throat.

‘No,' I repeated, and this time my voice was firm. I turned to Dale. ‘I
have
been meaning to ask you about the party, though. The one we had to celebrate Grody's Avatar Robotics deal. Did you get to meet anyone interesting? I hardly saw you.'

I watched his face carefully, but all I could see was disappointment – no sudden flash of guilt, no jolt of
fear that I had discovered his guilty secret. My heart leapt.

‘I was stuck talking to Frankie from CGI pretty much the whole time. Do you have any idea how long it takes them to do each layer of graphics in those Southern Power commercials Inge showed us? Well, I could tell you
exactly
how long, after that conversation. And trust me, there are a lot more layers than you think!'

Trust him. I was beginning to realise that's what I'd been doing all along. That was the real reason I'd been thinking about his fine form in tight trousers instead of considering whether he could be a murderer – I'd never really considered it a possibility. And boy, was I relieved to know that all I'd have to do to confirm my belief was check his alibi with Frankie. I took a deep breath.

‘About yesterday,' I began. ‘I thought it was … a shame.'

‘A shame?' Dale's perfect brow wrinkled.

‘That Budi interrupted us,' I said, over the crazy subwoofer thumping of my heart.

Dale's eyes lit up.

‘Me too,' he said, reaching for my hand.

‘Alex, Dale! How are you getting on?'

Elena was peering over the cubicle wall.

‘I think we're getting on very, very well,' said Dale, with a smile that nearly fried my Virk Suit.

‘Oh, I'm so glad!' Elena squeezed her hands together, looking down at us with the compassion of a wartime nurse. ‘You poor dears – it must have been so hard on
you, having to come to work after such a
terrible
tragedy. And yet here you are, bravely soldiering on!' Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘I'm so proud of you both!'

‘Uh … thanks,' I said.

‘Now, I came to see if there was anything I could do to help either of you. Do you have any questions?'

‘I can't think of any,' said Dale.

‘Neither can …' I paused. ‘Oh, wait, we did have something we wanted to get an opinion on.'

Dale's deep blue eyes sought mine, but I resisted the temptation to get rid of Elena straight away. She'd already interrupted us, and she seemed the ideal person to ask about the Impression project.
Besides
, I told myself,
we're here to work
. It was becoming a bit of a mantra for me.

‘I'd be delighted to help!' breathed Elena.

‘Well, we've got this idea for a kind of virtual-jeans-trying-on system,' I explained. Elena smiled. ‘I know – it doesn't sound very catchy, but we're working on a name, like JeanScan or something. Anyway, we were wondering about what people look for when they go jeans shopping. Not what style, I mean – that's up to Impression, not us – but … well, when you try a pair of jeans on, are you only interested in the way they look, or is the way they feel important? Because with this system, the scanners would tell you what size you'd be, so it's not like you'd need to check whether they were too tight or anything, but I wondered if …' I stopped. Elena was looking confused.

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘I'm not explaining this well. Does it sound too crazy?'

‘No, no, not at all! It's just that I don't remember ever having tried on a pair of jeans before.'

Dale shot me a look of surprise.

‘Oh!' I blinked.

‘I'm so sorry that I can't help you!' Elena looked crushed now.

‘No, it's fine! There are plenty of people we can ask,' I assured her. ‘I should've realised not everybody's into jeans.' I suddenly remembered that I hadn't found out where Elena lived in my search that morning. Well, here was my chance to ask. ‘I mean, there must be lots of countries where jeans aren't particularly popular. Where do you come from, Elena?'

‘Bogotá. It's the capital city of Colombia.'

‘Wow! What's it like there?' asked Dale.

‘The part where I live is very beautiful, with open plazas and trees on the street.' Elena looked pleased to have been asked. ‘It's not far from the Museo del Oro, the Gold Museum, where tourists come to see all the pre-Hispanic gold artefacts.'

‘It sounds lovely. Makes me want to come and visit you in realspace!' I smiled. ‘How's the weather there right now – any good for tourists?'

Elena's face went blank.

‘I … don't know,' she said slowly, after a moment.

‘Oh.' What was going on here? ‘Well … that's okay.' I looked at Dale, willing him to say something and get
me out of this awkward spot, but Elena was already turning away.

‘I'm sorry, Alex, Dale – I should get back to work,' she muttered, frowning. ‘I think –'

Crash!

I stood up, staring at the main entrance, where the golden door had been thrust open by two tall, blue figures.

‘The police!' breathed Elena.

The officers, a woman and a man, strode into the room, scanning the faces staring out at them from cubicles and couch. And then they were looking at me.

‘There she is!' said the female officer, and as they ran towards me, I tried to call out to tell them that there'd been a mistake, that I wasn't the murderer.

I couldn't make a sound.

‘Elena Sofia Mariposa, you are under arrest,' said the first officer, and grabbed Elena by the arm. ‘You are not obliged to say or do anything.'

‘Elena?' I gaped at her, unable to believe it.

‘Anything you say or do may be recorded and given as evidence. Do you understand that?'

‘Yes,' whispered Elena, but she looked as though she didn't understand anything any more. Her dark, shocked eyes held mine as they marched her away.

When I logged back in after lunch, I found Budi and a police officer I hadn't seen before waiting for me at the door.

‘Alex, this is Senior Constable Rivers,' said Budi. ‘He'd like to ask you some questions about Elena, if that's okay. I'll stay with you while he interviews you – unless you'd prefer to have one of the other staff members sit with you?'

‘No … I mean, I'm happy for you to be the one with me,' I said.

We squeezed into Budi's cubicle and sat down.

‘I just need to know a little bit about what you've seen around the office here, Alex,' said Rivers, giving me a reassuring smile. He was a short man, with dark hair and a curiously flat nose. I wondered if he'd broken it in the line of duty, or whether it was just that his Virk Suit mask was on too tight. ‘Firstly: do you recall spending any time with Ms Mariposa – Elena – on Tuesday?'

I thought hard. So much had happened that day.

‘Yes,' I said after a moment. ‘She came to check on me and Dale, the other work experience student, late that morning. It might have been eleven or eleven-thirty.'

‘But you didn't see her in the afternoon?'

I shook my head.

Budi gave a sigh. The Senior Constable looked at him.

‘Sorry,' Budi said quickly. I could see little creases around his eyes. He looked worried.

‘And how would you describe Ms Mariposa's behaviour, over the time you've known her?' continued Rivers.

‘Well, she's very … caring,' I said. ‘She's always checking how we're going and things like that.'

‘So you wouldn't describe her as an angry person – or very worried, perhaps?'

‘No!' I paused. ‘I mean, I suppose she worries a bit about everyone being happy, maybe. And …'

‘Yes?' Rivers leant forward in his seat.

‘Well …' I gulped, stealing a glance at Budi, but his eyes were fixed on the cubicle wall. ‘The first time I met her, she was coming out of Mr Grody's office. And she was crying.'

The Senior Constable raised an eyebrow.

‘Really?'

‘She said …' Suddenly I felt horrible saying this. How incriminating would it look? Extremely, if I was any judge. But the damage was already done. ‘She said Mr Grody had told her she was useless, and that he might fire her.'

Rivers's second eyebrow came up to meet its partner. He scribbled something on a sheet of virtual paper in front of him.

‘But she wasn't mad at him or anything,' I went on, knowing I sounded like an idiot. ‘I never heard her say anything bad about him. Or anyone, actually.'

‘I'll bear that in mind,' said Rivers, but I knew he was just being kind to me. ‘And is there anything else
you can think of that might be useful to us? Anything at all?'

I stared down at my hands.

‘I don't want to frighten you, Alex,' said Rivers gently after a moment, ‘but I do need you to remember something: your name is still on the suspect list. Now, none of us think you had anything to do with Mr Grody's death … but the more information we have, the sooner we can clear all this up and officially take you off that list.'

I took a deep breath.

‘This morning,' I said, ‘I asked Elena what the weather was like where she lived, in Colombia. And she didn't know.'

There was a short silence. Rivers noted down my words on his paper.

‘All right. I think that's everything we need for now. Thank you very much for your help, Alex.' He nodded at Budi, and got up.

‘Budi? What's happened to Elena?' I asked, as Rivers stepped into Kamil's cubicle and sat down to interview him. ‘Have they taken her away?'

Budi shook his head.

‘They're questioning her in the Conference Room. They let Maru from the Legal Department go in for a while – Elena said she didn't have a lawyer – and he said the police can't find her in realspace.'