The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (19 page)

“
Ah, Dave. Come on in.”
Gene MacBride stood. “I’ll introduce you around a bit later. Most
of the team is out. Which is usually the case.”

Gene gave Acting Detective Sergeant
Parsons a friendly grin. He indicated a chair by Detective
Subiyachi’s desk in the far corner.

“
Grab that one. We’ll find
you a desk shortly.”

The wheels squeaked as Parsons dragged
it over. Gene had been doing some thinking about a desk
for Dave, and it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. This area held
four detectives, and squashing Parsons in there was going to be
problematic. Yet it was better to have him right there, rather than
at the far end of the building in some obscure cubicle that lacked
all the plug-ins and services. If they shoved the outer partition
outwards, it would free up some space, but make the passageway a
little too narrow for comfort. It was his crew and upper management
probably wouldn’t say much, although there were the fire codes to
consider.

MacBride sat down carefully. Lately
his butt had taken on a kind of a red, raw, turkey-skin effect
right in the vicinity of the tailbone. While normally not a vain
man, and it was only slightly painful at times, for some reason he
saw it as a sign of age.

It was incipient armchair warrior
status.

And it bugged him. The notion that he
might go in and explain aforesaid problem to a pharmacist, most
likely an attractive twenty-two year-old female one, might have had
something to do with this minor and yet obsessive mental
irritation.

It was such a small thing. Gene
actually blushed. He could feel it happening. Parsons appeared
aware of how gingerly he lowered himself down. The guy had to look
at something. Dave was looking shy and chewing on the bottom lip.
He watched Gene carefully from below lids lowered slightly over his
baby-blues. It was oddly charming in a forty-something year-old
man. He seemed fit enough, with no big belly flapping down over his
belt, and there was something of the tiger in his stance coming
in.

“
Thank you,
Gene.”

Dave had lavished on the aftershave.
His shoes were shined and he was squeaky clean behind the
ears.

Gene smiled again.

Parsons had pulled up his chair at a
proper distance and on a good angle. Averting his eyes, he looked
at the big screen on Gene’s desk. There wasn’t much there to look
at except his plotting board, a slathering of light rectangles on
his habitual dark background, and a few small notes. They had
several (more like seventeen) murder investigations ongoing. They
were possibly related, going by geographical factors and modus
operandi, and while the perp had been profiled to some degree,
MacBride was wondering about the timeline. There were no conflicts,
and that was good. No one could be in two places at the same time.
It took x amount of time to go from Point A to Point B. There were
no close correlations between phases of the moon, weekends,
statutory or known world-wide religious holidays. School was in for
some incidents and out for some others. This one, if real, was
definitely a slasher. Assuming the crimes were all relate, the
religious angle, the sanctimony, the tendency to
communicate, was missing. The crimes were still being described as
unrelated in the media. They were all girls and young women of a
certain age, the Nordic type. What the hell that meant, he had no
idea. He had no hunches either way. The killings were all linked by
being committed off-camera and without biometric correlations to
anyone proven to be in the immediate areas. Going by known
attributes, there were only so many people in the area at the time,
and all others could be accounted for. All of their stories had
been checked out and verified nine different ways. They were all
clean. It had to be someone else. Someone was being very clever
indeed…maybe. Such a number of unresolved cases carried its own
weight.

It was a pretty puzzle.

But if they were all related, this one
was good.

Really good.

Let Parsons stew for a moment. It
would do him good to be humbled just a bit, and he needn’t overdo
it.

The trouble was that someone must have
done it in each and every one of the cases, or
possibly someone or two or three someones, had done all
of them.

He reached over and closed the
file.

He leaned back in his chair,
exchanging a look with the guy.

MacBride picked up his coffee cup and
had a quick sip. He looked at his watch, an anniversary gift from
his wife Irene. The time to early retirement ticked down, but he
ignored it as best he could.

“
Okay. This is only a
temporary assignment, but you’ve been very helpful so far.” He
cleared his throat. “If we have any success, naturally that would
be good, and, I’ve already put a good word in for you.”

Parsons nodded. Otherwise, he wouldn’t
even be here.

Off in the far distance, the sound of
a kettle whistling rose above the hum of the lights and the whir of
computer cooling fans. Someone coughed. There was the muffled hum
of a few scattered folks working in their cubicles. The phone
in a nearby cubicle beeped persistently, but there was nobody home
and it wasn’t all that loud. Francine’s voice came from behind
the partition as she greeted someone down the way, and then soft
footfalls turned the corner. She whisked into the room with a coat
over one arm and a cardboard cup in the other hand.

“
Ah.” Dropping his feet
abruptly, Gene stood up, and Parsons stood up as well.

She hung up her coat. Gene made
introductions as Francine pulled her heavily-padded work chair out
of her space, which she had arranged in what she called a cockpit.
It was very much like that, with everything adjustable and
ergonomically-designed for long spells in the saddle.

More than anything, crimes were solved
by information, its gathering, its analysis, and its cohesion. Run
it through the machine, tabulate, and if a charge was justified,
one would shortly be forthcoming. After that, it was just a matter
of picking them up.

“
So.” Francine seemed
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning. “We have some new
leads.”

“
Yes,
Francine.”

Parsons nodded, licking his lips
slightly. He had brought his own coffee, a large one from a popular
chain operation, which saved time and dicking around. Gene allowed
him time to struggle with the plastic tab, as Dave eventually tore
it all the way across in a gaping V.

Those things could be a bastard at
times. They could send men to Mars, but they still couldn’t design
a decent drinking tab.

“
First one.”

Gene manipulated his screen, bringing
up another file, with another plotting board. This one was looking
better now with a few entries.

Their new friend pointed at the most
recent one.

“
Yeah.”

Dave Parsons stepped up to the plate,
figuratively speaking.

“
This is an odd-ball. For
some obvious reasons it struck the computer that whoever stole this
car had done it before. But the capability to jack this kind of
security system is pretty rare—this guy’s a real pro, right? There
was even the bonus prize of a shit-load of Filter Kings in the back
end.”

The vehicle belonged to a salesman.
Parsons took a quick sip. He was a sensible guy with a sensible
explanation. One of the problems was that there were a few hundred
suspects, and many of them had been off the radar and
unaccounted-for, some of them for quite some time. They would
mostly be pros, but a few talented amateurs were on that list. The
amateurs were mostly dopers with a little patience and some skills
in the hacking department. There were always people rotating off to
incarceration, and always new people coming up. The newest were
unknown quantities, and often anonymous, without even a handle or a
street-name to go by.

A cargo aboard the vehicle was a
double score, as far as a thief was concerned.

Parson’s touched the rectangle and all
the details, the make, the model, location, time of day, and the
details on the property inside were revealed.

Francine nodded.

“
Ah. They’re expensive as
all hell. Some high-pressure sales tactics, too.”

Their frickin’ robots came to your
door and told you that you had won a free vacuuming job, any three
rooms in the house. This was normally a five-hundred-dollar value,
as inflation had been running a bit high these last few
years.

They did a good job, too. She could
attest to that herself, the only problem was getting them to leave.
It wasn’t easy to push them around, and she’d practically had to
shoot the really forceful one just to get him to shut up.
Intrigued, Francine had looked it up. It was all legal and
everything. All you had to do was not let them in.

All you had to do was stand your
ground, but of course no one wanted appear rude these days as it
engendered all sorts of questions about your
sociability-rating.

Parsons seemed very
intelligent.

“
That’s right. But here’s
the weird part. The car was abandoned, hundreds of kilometres away.
And the vacuum cleaners were still in the back.”

“
Not chopped?” Gene could
see the point well enough. “And nothing missing. Huh.”

That vehicle should have disappeared,
forever, within ten minutes or a quarter of an hour at most, going
by past event profiles. All the little identifying tags, radio and
passive markers, tended to end up in the nearest sewer-drain, or
maybe under a bridge somewhere. The whole process took remarkably
little time. Twenty gang-bangers working together, all of them with
their own tools and some fairly well organized, on-the-job
training. Gangs had no manpower problem these days. With manpower
always a problem, the cops would usually show up to an empty
warehouse somewhere and find the crooks long gone.

The more ordinary thieves, simple
loners or the new, zoot-suited gangstas, wouldn’t steal a car just
to get vacuum cleaners.

They’d smash some glass, grab a few
and run, ripping the boxes apart to get at the stock tracking
devices inside the packaging of everything they made these
days.

Nowadays, buying hot items ‘still in
the box’ was strictly a no-no and everybody knew it.

“
No—and you would think a
guy that could steal a car like that would know better. We’ve
gotten some swabs, and hopefully we can identify him and find
him.”

Francine looked thoughtful.

“
You keep saying
him."

"Yeah--because if it's the robot, it's
her first time. It's also a real leap of behaviour. And yet we know
or believe she's capable of violence, maybe even proactive
violence. I guess that's my thinking there."

Gene and Francine exchanged glances.
They chewed on that one for a while.

“
What’s your main
point?”

“
Assuming a thief. Why
didn’t he take the car to a chop-shop? Why leave a signature?
Whoever did this beat the latest in smart key and
voice-recognition, and then just abandoned it?”

Parsons looked at Francine.

“
Just taking the car took
real skills. Joyrides are almost always in a parent’s car, or one
of the older models.”

There were still a few of those
around, in fact some of the suburban gangs loved to rip off old
muscle cars and trash them. Owners confronted by a ’69 Cuda wrapped
around a telephone pole, or a Hemi with a blown engine, tended to
cry when informed of the car’s fate. The law prevented further
restorations just to get them off the road. In that sense, the
government had finally recognized what was euphemistically called
‘historic climate flux in the Biblical sense,’ as borne out by
stuff every kid was taught to recite by heart in school
nowadays.

“
If he’s still alive.”
Francine thought. “Or she.”

Parsons nodded.

“
There are no bodies
unaccounted-for in the immediate vicinity. But—we might get some
DNA from Nettles. That would be nice. A hair or a fragment of dry
skin would be enough. Also, robots have taggants embedded in the
skin, which follows a limited number of DNA patterns. The lab boys
have found one or two.” In his own opinion, it was not really
enough to be conclusive. What he was saying was that it might not
be the same robot.

Gene’s mouth opened. There were a
limited number of options for robot skin makers. Their repertoire
was nothing like the population at large in terms of sample size,
and there were only a small number of subcontractors. For human
transplant, a genetically-neutral piece of skin was embedded with
the patients own cells. It obviated the need for anti-rejection
drugs, always hard on the system. He’d read all about it, just
trying to get some kind of handle on what the hell they were trying
to achieve. In the past, he’d been fully familiar with all kinds of
human perps. But if robots were all new; criminal robots
were unheard-of.

Up until now.

It made him feel better for some
reason. Higher Authority had asked for Gene. They had their
reasons.