CisLuna_Hard-boiled Police Procedural_Murder Mystery Read online

  “Great, problem’s gonna solve itself, right?”

  “Not great. Even though I’m gonna milk the first-murder-in-space angle for all it’s worth, they’re gonna say ‘no.’”

  “No? How come?”

  I let myself vent a little, “Cause they never give me anything I ask for. Cause they’re way down there. Cause we’re way up here. Hell, I don’t know. They’re bureaucrats! But trust me. Nothing is going to happen from their end until we have another murder, maybe two. So, we’re probably going to lose the race. Did I mention serial killers leave very few clues? I can promise you this guy left some, but we weren’t smart enough or equipped enough to pick ‘em up. So, we have to spend our time between now and the next victim getting smarter and arranging to pick up on clues he figures we won’t think of. Now,” I leaned across the table toward her. “Will… you… help… me?”

  She paused briefly. “Yes.”

  Captain’s Office

  Next Morning

  “Did you know Jessica Maloney?” I asked.

  “Not really. She was my flight surgeon,” the captain said. “I’m flight crew. We try to avoid flight surgeons. Hadn’t seen her in almost a year.”

  The captain’s office was three meters’ square, pretty large as rooms go on a space station. The desk—did I mention it was faux-wood? The desk faced people entering the room. Behind it was a panel of monitors showing various parts of the station plus a bunch of arcane digital readouts.

  Captain Samantha ‘Sam’ King was a former pilot on the Space Only Shuttle SOS Grouper back in 2070. She was a compact, muscular, honey-colored brown woman who shaved her head to a no-nonsense sheen leaving a faint salt and pepper hue at the temples. Monica and Dr. Martin had managed to squeeze in with me as I briefed the captain.

  She sat at her desk head tilted away from us, as she reviewed the report on her screen. She was trying to be stoic, but every now and then I could detect a faint wince as she got to a gory part. “You think the killer is a vampire?” she asked when she was done.

  “Renfield’s Syndrome,” I said. “Vampire emulator.”

  “You’ve seen them before?”

  “Not first hand. Just searching the criminal databases. Emulators like this one are rare, and they’re almost always serial killers.”

  “Why almost?”

  “Sometimes the perpetrators are captured after their first kill. So, nobody really knows what their intentions might have been after that.”

  “Okay, let’s assume you’re right—a serial killing vampire emulator. What do you need me to do? Bear in mind, this station is not just up here for good looks—we still have a mission to perform.”

  “I’ve requested a full ten-person investigative team from Earth. I expect to be told no. When that happens, I’d like it if you’d do a little ranting and raving.”

  “Okay, so let’s say you get turned down and my ranting and raving are not as effective as you’d like. What then?”

  “Then I’ll need to draft maybe ten or fifteen of your people—full time—to help with data analysis. For example, there’s hours of video data that can best be evaluated with the human brain.”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “Dr. Carvalho and her lab—full time.”

  “Hey, wait a minute—you never said anything about full time! We’ve got experiments underway that need regular attention!”

  “Find a way to do them in your spare time, Monica,” the captain said. “This takes priority.”

  Monica nodded. “Ohhh-kay.”

  The way Monica dragged out the pronunciation of ‘okay,’ I worried I might have lost an ally.

  “What else?” the captain asked, turning back to me.

  “A war room? Some place we can lock up. Big enough to house about ten people and their work stations. Maybe a mini-war room attached where we can do interviews?”

  “Got it. Next?”

  “We need super tight control on who exits and boards the station—we need to quarantine ourselves, so to speak. And we need to keep everything we know and are doing under close hold, need-to-know only. We can’t have the press tipping our hand to the killer, nor do we need the press spreading panic among the rest of the crew.”

  “Speaking of the crew, what should I tell them?”

  “Tell them there’s been a murder. Tell them we request everyone’s full cooperation while the investigation is under way.”

  “Are we vulnerable, Mr. Stone?”

  I hesitated. “Yes.” I let the word hang there. Everyone just sort of stared at everyone else.

  “Is there any way we can mitigate that vulnerability, Mr. Stone?”

  “Yeah, now that you mention it. Put the whole station on a 7x24 buddy system. Nobody goes anywhere without his buddy—not even to the bathroom.”

  “That’s not going to be easy,” the captain said.

  “What’s easier? Suffering the inconvenience of a buddy system, or writing another letter home to somebody’s next of kin?”

  “What I meant was now I’ll have to break it to the whole crew that we have a serial killer on the loose.”

  “I take your point. Maybe hold off on having everybody buddy-up in their rooms.”

  Chapter Five

  After visiting the captain, I went back to my quarters to think and chill. The first thing that occurred to me was that doubling up in these tiny rooms would not be possible. Maybe if you did hot-sheeting like in the Navy on a watch-by-watch basis. I decided against it. Not only would it amount to a major inconvenience to everyone, there was little to be gained in security.

  The crew up here was not military. SpaceCorp flight people were something in between military and civilian. Funny lot. They had rank, mostly among the astronauts, but referred to each other by their first names. Except the captain. Everybody called her Captain and she called everyone by their rank or title. Unless it was somebody like Monica—then it was first names both ways. Also funny, even among those who went by first names only, there was never any confusion about who was in charge, a kind of personality-meritocracy thing.

  I logged into my email and found only a single letter, a response to my investigative support request. Technically, a ‘request taken under advisement’ is not the same as a ‘no.’ So, it looks like I’m stuck doing my own forensics. Might as well try to find that war room the Captain said I could have.

  * * *

  The Captain was as good as her word. When I showed up at the war room there were six shining faces smiling at me, computers tucked under their arms.

  The war room was bigger than I expected. It looked about 4x5 meters with eight cubicles around the perimeter and a long table down the center.

  “This place looks like it was pretty busy. How’d you manage to evict everybody?”

  The shining faces stopped smiling and looked at the floor.

  “We’re the evictees,” an Indian chap said. He stepped forward offering his hand. “My name is Mak Subramanian. I’m the shift leader for the ones you see in this room.”

  Mak, hmm… Being a New Yorker, ‘Mak’ should be easy to remember even if he didn’t look Irish.

  “We’ve been ‘repurposed’ as Captain King told us.”

  “I count six of you,” I said.

  “There are three more, but they’re between shifts right now.”

  I made an attempt at levity. “I trust you all have alibis?”

  That got them looking at each other.

  “Alibis for what, Inspector?”

  “You don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing?”

  “No, Inspector. Just that we are to do your bidding until further notice.”

  “And we are to keep absolutely silent about it,” an Asian woman said.

  “Can you tell us what has happened, Inspector?” Mak asked.

  “Inspectors are British. I’m a detective but you can just call me Roy. As to your question, there’s been a murder, and I need your help to investigate it. You’ll be examining hours
of security files, going over personnel records, coming up with witness lists, doing preliminary interviews with witnesses. I’m the only one here with forensics training, at least for now, so I’ll be the one examining the victim’s room for evidence. Dr. Carvalho and her lab will be sifting through that evidence to see if it means anything. Questions so far?”

  “Who was murdered… uh, Roy?” Mak asked.

  “Flight Surgeon Jessica Maloney.”

  * * *

  I started with the victim’s room, instead of interviewing the dozens of crew she knew or associated with. Room evidence might go stale on me. On the other hand, witnesses might go stale too. Like so many things in life, it was a crap shoot.

  I started with a small vacuum cleaner that I borrowed from housekeeping. I got a set of clean filter bags and labeled each one for where I would use it—bedding, sink counter, floor, etc. Hopefully, I might catch some clothing fibers or hairs that did not belong to the victim. Autopsy final report showed there had been no evidence of sexual entry either vaginal or anal. Hmm… Weren’t Renfield perps sexually motivated? Have to research that. Maybe this goof was just in it for the blood.

  Next step was to go over every surface that could hold a print with my print scanner. I already had the victim’s prints in its memory, so if she had any visitors—welcome or otherwise—the scanner’s comparator would surface them in a few seconds.

  Bingo! Got a partial on a wine glass by the beverage cabinet. Odd, this goblet was the only stemware in the room. There were six regular tumblers in the dish rack by the sink. I taped a tag to the bottom of the glass and carefully dropped it in an evidence bag. Maybe Monica’s lab could produce some foreign DNA from the partial. They’d only need a couple of skin or saliva cells, then Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR could replicate the constituent DNA into a zillion copies of itself in a few hours.

  That done, I went through the victim’s personal effects. Her closet held the usual assortment of fitted coveralls in different colors. Everybody on the station wore them—I was the only oddball in jeans, track shoes, and a military style khaki shirt under a leather flight jacket. On Earth I used the flight jacket to cover my shoulder holster where I parked the snub-nosed .357 magnum that I liberated from the Army after The Dissolution. Up here there were no firearms of any kind allowed, but the jacket was still a comfort in the cool air of the station. I did manage to sneak my 23-cm Latama stiletto and my leather thumb sap through security. The Latama was a beauty that I’d won in a crap game in the Bowery when I was in high school. The blade tip was broken off but I managed to machine a new blade in metal shop along with some other wear-prone parts while I was at it. But if I was going to be here for a while, I’d better get some coveralls of my own. What I was wearing was going to start getting ripe soon. I felt under my jacket where the shoulder holster would have been. I missed my .357.

  Jessica’s dresser drawers had the usual assortment of underthings plus a few sweaters and scoop-necked t-shirts with clever doctor jokes on them. Hmm… Drop dead gorgeous yet she still feels the need to draw attention to herself. Small box of jewelry in the top drawer containing mostly earrings and a couple of chain necklaces. One locket with nothing inside. No false bottom in the box. I put her computer and communicator in evidence bags after I scanned the keyboard and case for prints. I’d let my geek squad back at the war room sort through unlocking the memory banks and figuring out if there was anything useful in them—that kind of task can be a real energy vampire… god, did I say that?

  Lastly, I did a structural check of the room—floor panels, air vents, behind mirrors, under the mattress, pulling out drawers, and checking door latches and behind electrical switches and sockets. Nothing under the floor panels. Air vent screws seemed in good repair, but I took them out anyway. I used the peek-a-boo attachment on my scanner to look down the vent shafts. Nothing, and that was wrong. Air vent shafts always have a layer of gummed up dust. This one was pretty bare for about a meter in either direction. Odd. Maybe air on the station was super filtered and didn’t have any dust floating around in it. Monica might know about that, running her clean rooms and all.

  No evidence of tampering on the door latch. The door was not very heavy duty, good for privacy and not much else. Just like an ordinary interior door down on Earth except it was made of nanocellulose and it was airtight when closed. Latch was electric with a four-button keypad. Not high security. But this one also had a wifi button antenna that allowed it to be opened without the code. Probably for maintenance. People set the code to whatever and then checked out of the room without resetting it to all zeroes. Who did the maintenance around here anyway? Electrical switch covers and outlet covers were free of prints and showed no tampering.

  I gathered up my bag of goodies and headed off to find Monica’s lab.

  Chapter Six

  I found Monica in her lab drooping over her afternoon coffee. Maybe it was morning for her. Hard to tell up here with no sunrise and everybody working oddball shifts.

  “Got any more of that stuff?” I asked.

  She pointed to the pot on the counter. There were cups in the glass-faced cupboard above the pot. The stuff wasn’t half bad. I put the evidence bag with the glass in front of her.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked.

  “I already scanned it for prints—got a partial. I’m wondering if you can pull off any cells for DNA?”

  She held the bag up and spun the glass around. “We can try. Anything else?”

  I pulled the vacuum filter bags out of my pack. “These came from various places around the victim’s room. Can you examine the contents for fibers, hairs, cells, or whatever? We’ll need photos of anything you get with a light microscope. If anything turns up, we’ll need to compare it with other samples we gather around the station.”

  “So you’ll want us to rig up a comparator microscope?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “That’s it for now. I’m off to the war room to school my amateur sleuths in the dark art of forensics.”

  * * *

  There were only three of my nine people on duty in the war room when I walked in. “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  A short heavyset Asian woman I hadn’t met before came forward.

  “I’m Lijuan. Three people are off shift. The other three are at breakfast.”

  Her voice was husky. She held her hand out for me to shake. I took it, warm and fleshy. “Lijuan… beauty and grace?”

  “You know Chinese?”

  “Grew up near Chinatown.”

  “Ah, you are from San Francisco?”

  “Manhattan, across from Roosevelt Park. Used to stop in at a pretty good dim sum shop on the way home from school.”

  I put the evidence bags with the victim’s computer and communicator on the table. “Anybody here knows how to get these open—see what’s in memory? By the way, what exactly did you guys do for a living before I showed up?”

  “This is a CAD facility. We were designing engine mount structures for the Mars ship.”

  “Mars ship?”

  “Yes, SIS Pascal Lee. It is supposed to depart in 2100.”

  “Mars, huh? Well, we don’t want to hold that up. Any other progress?” I asked.

  “You mean with the video hallway scans and people the victim associated with?”

  “Yeah. Start with the video.”

  “We have a two-hour gap in the coverage at the time of the murder. We are guessing that’s too coincidental for a random malfunction, so we are checking to see if there is a virus in the system.”

  “What about coverage in the days leading up to the murder?”

  “We’ve gone back two months. There are several two-hour gaps—always when the victim is off shift. Where we have complete footage, it’s mostly people who live on this wing. They come and go at shift change. The victim had a number of visits from one male visitor over the last two months.”

  “Good work.
Got an ID?”

  Lijuan looked at her notepad computer. She used a stylus and wrote in cursive. Maybe the computer knew what she was saying but I didn’t.

  “We think it is probably Juan Rodriguez. Shuttle pilot.”

  “Okay, what about other known associates?”

  “Here are her listed patients—there are 341 of them. And another list of her co-workers—14 of them.”

  “Rodriguez a patient?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Get him in here. He’ll be our first interrogation.”

  “He’s flying the circuit right now. Won’t be back for a month.”

  “The circuit?”

  “The space stations here at EML1 orbit about the Lagrange Point in a Lissajous orbit. It’s shaped like a big potato chip about 50 thousand km in diameter. Each station takes about two weeks to complete the orbit. Shuttles fly a one-month circuit visiting each station to drop off passengers and cargo.”

  “When did Rodriguez leave?” I asked.

  “The day before you got here.”

  “So he would have been here the night of the murder?”

  “It appears so.”

  “Is there any way to put him in her room the night of the murder?”

  “Not without the missing video.”

  “Would he have been working a shift?”

  “Shuttle pilots don’t work shifts like the rest of us. They get flights, they fly. The rest of the time they’re off duty and they do as they please.”

  “Try interviewing the other pilots. Maybe they knew where he was. Can you get me some names?”

  “Sure.”

  I left to find the Captain. Step one, I needed a search warrant for Rodriguez’ room. Step two, I needed to apprehend him for questioning. Step three… for some reason I never make it to three.

  * * *

  “We don’t do search warrants up here, Detective.”