The Lowest Heaven (7 page)

Finally, having explored the entire house and found nothing except the four bodies, Sheriff Philips stepped outside and made her call. She went over to her car and sat on the passenger’s side seat with her head in her hands while she waited for the response unit to arrive.

Later, after the scene had been photographed and modeled and the bodies removed, the forensics team began its long and thankless task, gathering the hundred million shreds of DNA – strands of hair, flakes of skin, eyelashes, traces of blood, of sweat, of saliva, of semen, dried mucous, brain matter, fecal matter – that had drifted about the house and grounds to settle in cracks and corners and the quiet, dark spaces. They found DNA from more than five hundred and fifty discrete human beings, an astonishing number of people to have left evidence of themselves in an isolated farmhouse on the edge of the Lakshmi Planum. There were, moreover, no fewer than ninety–eight usable finger– and palm–prints from separate people and fifty–seven different sets of footprints, as well as traces of twelve unique tire–tracks on the driveway. Even using the planet’s central biometric database, the majority of the DNA evidence could not be easily identified.

There were no shotgun casings – the killers must have removed them – and the knife used to slit Hershel Keck’s throat could not be found.

The forensics team did find something, however; something Philips specifically asked them to search for. At six separate locations outside the house, nestled up against the wall, the forensics team found powerful, non–brand, professional–grade dampers – those clever little machines that schools use to block radio and electromagnetic signals from wireless devices, preventing their students from calling or texting or in any way interacting with each other or with the outside world when they should be listening to their lectures. Back in the forensics lab at Riccioli, it was discovered that the six dampers interfaced in such a way as to emit a pale green glow.

III

Ashen light is the name a seventeenth–century astronomer gave the soft, greenish glow he detected emanating from the dark side of Venus. Although a number of astronomers, both amateur and professional had, over the centuries, claimed to observe the ashen light, sightings remained rare enough that it was generally considered a fluke, a phantom of wishful thinking and unrelated, easily explained, phenomena. An early observer argued that the light came from the fires Venusians lit to celebrate the crowing of a new emperor. Once it was determined that Venus was neither habited nor habitable, and, in fact, that its atmospheric composition was so inimical to life as we understand it that it is improbable to the extreme that biological life ever existed there, other hypotheses were proposed to explain the occasional soft green glow of which some few observers caught sight. Perhaps, some suggested, it was caused by carbon dioxide being torn apart into carbon monoxide and oxygen, the process of which splitting emits a faint green light. Or, it was proposed, the greenish light could have been nothing more than the glow of lightning from Venus’ many electrical storms, diffused through carbon dioxide and nitrogen clouds that suffocated the planet pre–activation. Whether the effect was even real remained a topic of heated debate well into the twenty–second century.

When the dynamo was activated and the terraforming project began in earnest, a strange and entirely unexpected effect was noted. Although the planet’s atmosphere, both real and artificial, was configured to resemble the Earth’s, something about the way sunlight refracted off the Overdome meant that, very rarely, on dark, cloudy nights, a faint greenish glow could be seen on the horizon. Papers were written, doctorates were awarded, and academic conferences were convened to discuss and dissect the new ashen light, but the majority of Venusians cared not one whit about official explanations. They were content in the knowledge that Venus’ Overdome, the greatest feat of engineering in all human history, which was otherwise wholly invisible, had this single, rare, beautiful manifestation. That it was something unique to their planet. To them.

The Keck family, Riccioli’s forensics team determined, died several hours after they’d first been tied up. To this day, Alvin Go, the man who lives in the cabin east of the Keck family farm, who couldn’t sleep the night they died, who looked out the window and congratulated himself for having been awake to see the rare glow of the ashen light, says only one thing. “If I’d have known. If I’d have had any idea. Maybe I could have saved them.

“But I thought it was the ashen light.”

For a while, Sloane and Griffith lived well in New Tahiti, having taken a secluded cabin on an atoll well away from the busier tourist resorts. They coexisted peacefully for three and a half weeks, Sloane sunbathing and swimming and wandering the little island, running her fingers across the lush green leaves as she passed through the jungle, whispering the names of the plants to herself. There’s a photo of her from this period, recovered from Griffith’s phone, showing a small woman in a bikini standing thigh–deep in unnaturally blue waters, her face glowing with joy. When the money ran out, Griffith, already bored with island life, proposed they find a mark at one of the resorts – a rich old woman, he suggested, who might be interested in maintaining a healthy and handsome young man for some period. Sexual jealousy was beneath the two of them, he reminded Sloane; the province of middling, lesser people who cared more about possessions than about freedom. Sloane acquiesced more or less gracefully, unwilling to be parted from Griffith. But once they’d returned to Tiare, New Tahiti’s primary island, Griffith found inveigling his way into the good graces of a wealthier older patron more difficult than he’d imagined. It fell to Sloane to take up the casual prostitution that paid for their cramped two–room apartment on the outskirts of town while Griffith slipped around the resorts during the day, creeping into empty rooms to rummage through colorful baggage for money and valuables as the tourists to which the luggage belonged snorkeled, oblivious, off the coast of Tiare.

The first lead came from the dampers, which yielded no fingerprints or DNA evidence, but proved to be the property of three different institutions, all in or around Helios. Over time, too, the forensics team accumulated enough data to indicate that the majority of DNA found at the scene of the crime but not connected to the Keck family or any regular visitors to the farmhouse could be traced to hundreds of people who had, at some point in the recent past, been in Helios. Much of the hair, moreover, had the blunt edges characteristic of recent cutting. Philips’ response unit, with Philips taking lead, went to Helios in early January 2520, to begin the arduous task of visiting Helios’ seven hundred and twelve salons and barber shops to request security footage. They were able to locate the correct salon, an establishment serving commuters on the edge of Helios’ financial district, within ten days. But there the trail went cold. No security cameras had caught anything in the least suspicious, and Sheriff Philips wasn’t sure what gender the Keck family murderers were, much less how many people had been involved in the killings – although she felt reasonably certain there had been two.

Philips had arrived at the conclusion that two people had murdered the family on a hunch: the blanket drawn over Jen’s corpse. The ropes binding the bodies – Jen had also been bound, they discovered, when they pulled the blanket away from her – had been tied with the same type of knot, and three of the murders had been carried out with the same weapon, probably a 12–gauge shotgun. But the act of kindness toward the teenaged girl, and the ragged cut had that severed Hershel’s jugular, suggested to Philips that there were multiple perpetrators.

The second lead came from a call Philips received two weeks after the murder of the Keck family. A middle–aged couple, Alice and Farouk Smith, who’d left their hometown on the southern edge of the Lakshmi Planum three weeks earlier to take a much–anticipated cross–planum vacation, had never come home. Three days after the Kecks were killed, the couple was found stuffed into the handicapped stall of an isolated roadside rest–stop. The husband had had his skull crushed with a heavy, jagged object – likely a stone – and both had been strangled. Time of death was determined to have been somewhere between 2.30 and 4 am on Friday, the ninth of November. Their car and possessions were missing. Ten days after the Kecks were killed, a passenger manifest for an IT/AT transport pinged; the couple had, apparently, taken a transport to Eos on the AT several hours after their deaths.

The team investigating the Smith murders learned that, all told, the killers had made off with their car, their clothes, and a card with a $7000 credit limit. $275 had been spent on the transport to the AT; from there, the trail went cold. The lead detective on the case, Coulter Russell of the IT regional police, was forced to let the case lie fallow.

Three months passed between the night the Keck family was murdered and the morning that Griffith’s mother, Elin Sinkman found a wallet on her property, the grounds outside the Eos Express Inn. Although the wallet itself was empty, it was microchipped; when Mrs. Sinkman dropped it off at the local library and the library personnel ran it through the scanning database, an alert was triggered. Within twelve hours detective Russell had flown down to the AT to take Mrs. Sinkman’s statement. The wallet had, as the alert notified Russell, belonged to one Alice Smith, late of Bastet, Lakshmi Planum, Ishtar Terra; murdered on or about 3.30 am, Friday the ninth of November, 2519, by person or persons unknown. Apparent motive: robbery.

Mrs. Sinkman had a son, Russell learned. By curious coincidence, that son had been the part–time employee of a down–market barber shop implicated in another unsolved case: the murder of Michelle Keck and her family on or about two am, the ninth of November, 2519, by person or persons unknown.

Russell and Philips met on February twenty–second, 2520, at a small bar in Helios, IT. They exchanged notes on their respective cases, discussing the hunches and proposals they had not included in their official case–files. Russell had also generated a detailed report on Griffith Sinkman, and in the course of the investigation into Griffith’s background and movements turned up not only his three–year stint in Garden City, but that he had, at some point after his release, travelled to the IT and begun travelling with a young woman, identity unknown.

When, three days following their first meeting another of Alice Smith’s microchipped belongings set off an alert, this one on the resort island of Tiare, in New Tahiti, Russell and Philips took an emergency transport to the AT. Within seven hours of the alert the two and their combined response team was stepping off the inter–AT transport that moved between Tiare and the mainland. Sheriff Philips had never been to New Tahiti before, nor has she been since, and recalls with perfect clarity the island’s strange atmosphere. “It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen,” she recalls, “warm and sunny and incredibly green. The ocean was so clear you could see the fish swimming in it. But a quarter of the hotels were closed – these huge, beautiful buildings just shut-up walls and chains and barbed wire. All that potential just dying on the vine.”

Russell and Philips traced Griffith to a small apartment on the outskirts of Tiare. Images of his companion, clearly the same woman with whom he’d travelled to the AT the night of the Keck murders, was identified as Sloane Deeds, only suspect in the stabbing death three years earlier of a man named Brackett Jones, a store–owner in a small town on the slopes of the Maxwell Montes.

Russell and Philips tracked the pair down and observed them for two days before making their move. Griffth Sinkman, they learned during those forty–eight hours, was restless, getting up early to wander about the resort–town and spending the better part of every day away from his partner. Sloane Deeds, however, seemed more or less content to spend her days sunbathing on the beach.

They arrested Deeds first, approaching her as she lay napping on a red towel. A team of twelve armed officers surrounded the sleeping woman, Philips taking lead. When Philips said Deeds’ name, the young woman sat up, observed the twelve officers with their guns trained on her, and said “well, okay then.” She gathered up her things and went without a struggle.

Griffith Sinkman proved more problematic to arrest. Russell and his team descended on Sinkman as he was leaving a small diner; Sinkman ran. It took three shots to bring him down; none fatal. He was transported to a local hospital where his condition was stabilized. In the days before Sinkman was well enough to be transported back to the IT, Philips and Russell went through the couple’s meager belongings: some clothing, a piece of jewelry identified as belonging to Jen Keck, and seventeen dollars in cash. A response team sent to the Sinkman family motel outside Eos discovered the charred remains of more clothing, tentatively identified as belonging to Alice and Farouk Smith.

IV

The two were tried separately. Griffith Sinkman pled not guilty by reason of insanity, the prosecution now faced with proving beyond a reasonable doubt not only that he committed the crimes, but that he did so with a full and complete understanding of the difference between right and wrong, an ancient but still robust legal definition of sanity. Sloane Deeds pled guilty to four counts of murder in the first degree. When informed that she would be eligible for the death penalty even if she gave a full confession and implicated Sinkman in her crimes, Deeds shrugged. Although she had given complete and entirely useable evidence of both Sinkman’s sanity and his guilt during her own arraignment, the prosecution at Sinkman’s trial put her on the stand to give her testimony in person, believing that having her describe the murders in front of a jury would be more powerful than merely reading aloud her confession for the record.

The entirety of her testimony was recorded and broadcast in near–delaycast to an audience of four billion.

“It started in 2016, I guess,” she begins. Her voice is flat, steady. “I had just come off the mountain, and was trying to get to Helios. I only had a few bucks, but I figured men are men anywhere, so I could get there somehow.