CisLuna_Hard-boiled Police Procedural_Murder Mystery Read online

  The captain thought a moment, pursing her lips and shifting her gaze between Monica and Dr. Jones.

  “Monica, you lost me at sandwiches, but I think you two know enough about what you’re talking about to pull this off.”

  “All due respect, Captain, but am I the only one here who’s read the Bill of Rights?” Dr. Martin asked. “We’re not even sure this guy’s a serial killer. I mean, the victim was, you know, pretty fast and loose with the guys. Couldn’t this just be one of her lovers got jealous?”

  I decided it was time to play my trump card. “Yes, it could be a case of jealous rage—I put that at under five percent probability. But that’s not all. Jessica was not his first victim.”

  I projected the email I’d gotten from him the other night onto the wall.

  “This is from my boss, Carmine Ciccolella. He’s Chief of Police at Vandenberg.”

  Roy—we had a similar serial killer down here before you arrived. Three primary victims over the span of a year and a half ending in July of 2072. Each one blond, attractive, ages from 28 to 31. First two lived alone. Found dead in their apartments, suspended by their feet, and drained of blood in a similar manner to the way you described with your victim. The third primary victim included a collateral death—her husband found dead in his bed. He still had all his blood—no puncture wounds. Bodies discovered by their two kids who were sleeping in the next room. Now sit down for the scary part. The husband was Bob Forsythe and he was the principal investigating officer on the case. None of the victims showed signs of a struggle or forced entry. We never determined primary cause of death. We never identified any suspects. Case moved to inactive status July of 2074. Investigation files attached. Good luck. —Chick

  “Draining a guy’s stomach under false pretenses may not be who we are, but it’s who we need to be.”

  * * *

  Monica and I were sitting at Albert’s Bar when the captain walked in. She waved but took a table off to the side. Monica got up to see if she wanted company. The captain smiled and waved me over. I gathered up Monica’s and my drinks and joined them.

  “I’ve been communicating with Earthside for guidance about this case,” the captain said. “I asked for a judge to try the case when we catch the guy—they said no, I’m the captain, I get to be the judge. Then I asked how I’m to deal with the felon—should we send him or her Earthside to stand trial? They said no, I’m the captain, I have to deal with him up here. I then asked if they had any guidance in that regard. They said only to ensure the felon can never commit any murders again. Oh, and they said one more thing, ‘Do not add to the space debris problem.’”

  “How do you feel about all that?” Monica asked.

  The captain thought a moment. “I got a space station to run and they run better if there are no murderers on them. So I guess my biggest, hell, my only concern is that we get the right person. I don’t want to execute an innocent man.”

  Monica and I looked at each other. “So you don’t care how we get the evidence so long as it’s irrefutable?” she asked.

  “You planning to torture a confession out of him?” the captain asked.

  “Tortured confessions are refutable,” I said.

  The captain drummed her fingers, then took a sip of whatever she was drinking. It was darker than Scotch, probably bourbon. “Tell me something, Stone.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know you’re a cop, but why are you finding it so easy to abandon due process and all? I thought that was drilled into you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what gives?”

  “I guess I’m a special case.”

  If I’d hoped she’d leave it at that, I was wrong.

  “C’mon, spill. What’s your story?”

  I sighed, then took a long sip from my Scotch. “Back when I was in the Army, I was part of their Criminal Investigation Division, CID. Homicide. Pretty good at it too. Most of the time it was just some goof killing somebody in a bar fight or while they were in the middle of a crime. One-offs. I only worked one serial killer—that’d be 2069. He liked to garrote his victims. Always left his apparatus around the victim’s neck—his signature. Anyway, I guess you could say he made it personal for me.”

  “Go on.”

  I downed my Scotch and signaled Joe for another. “I started getting close to cracking the case when I got an anonymous letter saying to back off or there would be consequences. Well, that’s the wrong thing to say to a homicide detective. To this day I wonder if he was counting on that when he sent that letter. Anyway, one day I came home and found my wife and child in the bedroom. My wife—her name was Hanna—was bound, gagged, and garroted. Most of her hair had been cut off. My son—he was two. He was not bound or gagged. Presumably that was so my wife had to watch our baby being murdered in front of her eyes. The bastard left me a note. ‘Told ya so, Stone!’”

  Monica gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.

  The captain looked embarrassed. She put her hand on my arm and shook her head like she wanted to say she was sorry but no words came out.

  I shrugged, “Anyway, that’s my story.”

  “Did you get him?” Monica asked.

  “No. They pulled me off the case—admin leave. Couldn’t say I blamed them. I was, uh, not entirely objective at that point. Had to watch from the sidelines—insult to injury. Eventually, they found the body of a guy they thought was the perpetrator. No positive ID on the body. No idea who that poor fool was. Meanwhile, the real murderer skipped town.”

  “You sound pretty sure about that,” the captain said.

  “For the rest of the time I was in the Army, up until 2072, I would get love notes from him. Always on the anniversary. ‘How’s the wife and kid?’ He always stuck a lock of my wife’s hair in the envelope. He liked blonds.”

  “Do you think this guy might be the same one who murdered your family?” Monica asked.

  I looked down at the table and steepled my eyebrows, then looked up at Monica. “That thought has crossed my mind.”

  Chapter Nine

  I was at Crowne’s door but he wasn’t answering.

  I called Lijuan, “He’s not here and I can’t raise him on his communicator.”

  “Sometimes the supers work in some pretty remote places on the station, no coverage. You want to page him?”

  “Nah, just get me his door code.”

  While she was running that down, I paced outside, wondering if there was going to be a surprise waiting for me when I got that door open. She called back, “6-34-5.”

  “Thanks, hang on while I try it and see if it works.” I did and it didn’t. I closed my eyes a few seconds and tried to count to ten. I only made it to two. That’s as far as I ever get.

  “Okay, get me an engineer. Tell him to bring something that can cut a hole in nanocellulose.”

  I was about to hang up when I had another thought, “Tell him to bring a drill and one of those fiber optic inspection rigs.”

  “Will do, boss.” She had taken to imitating Mak calling me ‘boss’ all the time. Cute. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall, arms across my knees.

  A couple of people passed by in the hour it took the engineer to get here. They both had the same question, “Locked out?”

  “Yeah. Engineer’s on his way.”

  Then they’d smile and move along.

  The engineer was a middle-aged fellow named Dieter. Agreeable enough, but he looked like he could handle himself and had done so a time or two in his past.

  I had Dieter poke a hole in the door with his drill. Then we inserted his fiber optic scope through the hole in case Crowne had rigged up any nasty surprises for trespassers. We spent twenty minutes checking out the room with his fiber optic gear. I was getting a bad feeling. Nobody keeps their room this neat, especially not a super. I figured we were blown and Crowne had skipped out for a new room somewhere. Maybe he left us some nice prints, perhaps something we could get a DNA sequence fro
m.

  “Okay,” I said to Dieter, “let’s crack this safe.”

  He grinned and had the door open in under a minute.

  Inside, the room hadn’t just been wiped. It had been scrubbed, scoured, and sterilized. I couldn’t find so much as a pubic hair in the bed linen.

  “Who the fuck lives in a room and doesn’t leave any prints?”

  Even the toothbrush was useless. The bastard had taken his old one and put a new one in its place, still in the plastic wrapper. The drawers were bare, not a stitch left behind. Laptop gone. Communicator gone. The guy had either moved out or never moved in, but where the devil was he?

  * * *

  A day later, I was back in the war room busying myself with pacing. I’ve never been good at waiting, especially when other people are doing the work.

  We had put up APBs with Simon Crowne’s picture posted on all the news channels on the station. We included a warning not to approach him if he is seen. We advised anyone who does see Crowne to contact me immediately. Then I kicked back in the war room and waited while everyone else was out rattling Einstein’s rooms and corridors. Frustrating.

  I paced around the war room some more. I did pushups. I practiced throwing my blade at a target I had rigged up on the wall away from the door. My basic drill was to detach my knife from the clip on my belt, flip it open, and throw it at the target letting the handle slip through my grip. The knife doesn’t flip end-over-end that way. It’s the fastest most accurate way to let the air out of a perp out to about five meters. Without my .357, throwing my knife was the only long range option I had. I had my thumb sap, but hey, nobody throws a sap. I wished I had two blades.

  The target was a thick sheet of nanocellulose, the tough-as-nails shit they used to make everything on this station. The blade went in a good four centimeters pinning the plate to the wall. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the damned thing out. It was in there good, plus it was up high and awkward to reach. I must have been more frustrated than I realized.

  I tried doing some hand-stand pushups. I used to be pretty good at them when I was younger. After about five of them, I sat back down at the table and stared at my communicator, willing it to buzz, light up, anything. For something that was supposed to be so damn smart, it picked a fine time to dummy up on me.

  I went back to trying to get my blade out of the target. I was standing on a chair and had just managed to get my fingers under the bottom edge of the nanocellulose target when Mak walked in and startled me. I jerked around as the target came loose and the chair toppled all at the same time. I was lucky I didn’t skewer myself on the pointy end sticking out through the back of the target.

  “We found a possible hideout, boss. You okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Let’s go.”

  “What about your knife?”

  I looked down at the nano-target, but didn’t say anything.

  “The machine shop is on the way to the hideout. We can stop by there and they can pull your blade out without breaking it.”

  “Thanks.”

  Chapter Ten

  It was a hideout all right. Obviously, it had been lived in, but by whom? I decided to start with the floor boards this time, hoping the change of procedure would change my luck. My head was down between the joists when I felt something pat me on the butt. I jerked my head out banging it on the floor board in the process.

  It was Lijuan.

  “What’s up?” I asked, rubbing my head.

  “There’s been another murder, boss. You need to come.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. They just said to get you.”

  “Okay, where is it?”

  “Deck 2, B Wing.”

  “Those are crew rooms, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anybody there?”

  “Monica. She’s got the whole wing locked down. Nobody gets in or out.”

  “Any security folks there?”

  “Don’t need ’em. Monica’s tromping up and down the hall with her mad-bitch-from-hell face on. Everybody’s too scared to even come out of their rooms to pee.”

  * * *

  Monica was waiting by the victim’s door when I got there. She already had on her bunny suit and slippers and offered me a set. She did not look happy.

  “Who is it this time?” I asked as I was getting into my suit and pulling on the slippers.

  She didn’t answer. She just opened the door and held it open for me. As I walked into the room, it was a familiar MO—blond, female, nude, suspended upside-down from the ceiling. Her back was toward me. I walked around to her front, taking care not to touch her body in the cramped confines of the room, hoping it would be someone I didn’t know.

  It was Patty.

  Chapter Eleven

  Autopsy Room

  Dr. Martin was doing the autopsy again. I worried that working on people he knew from the station was taking a toll on him, but he soldiered on the way doctors have done for centuries.

  He spoke into his microphone. “Victim’s Name: Patricia Eisenhower. Caucasian female. Age 35. 158 cm. Weight 48 kg. Hmm… that’s 4 kg less than her last recorded weight.”

  He mopped his brow with a towel and tossed it back onto the stainless-steel table by his side. “Again, that would be consistent with a complete loss of blood.”

  He walked around the corpse and spread the legs with Monica’s assistance. “Victim’s genital and anal regions are completely shaved. No evidence of foreign pubic hair.”

  Then he probed the vaginal and anal cavities with a long cotton swab. Each time they came out dripping with semen. He clipped off the ends of his swabs into separate test tubes and stoppered the ends, taking care to label each one with Patty’s name, the orifice he got them from, and the date and time of the sample extraction. He turned his head toward the microphone. “Victim has copious amounts of semen in the vaginal and anal cavities.”

  That’s when I left. I knew the rest of the story and didn’t need to hear it again.

  * * *

  Mak and Lijuan were alone in the war room, puzzling over their computers. I put my index finger over my lips to silence them and motioned them to come outside.

  Out in the hall, I whispered, “I think this bastard may have bugged our war room. Mak, can you figure out how to sweep the room for bugs?”

  He thought a moment, then said, “Sure, boss.”

  “Better sweep my room and Monica’s lab as well.”

  I turned my attention to Lijuan, “I’m also worried that our text communications are being compromised. Can you determine if there are any eavesdropping viruses on the network?”

  She smiled, relieved that I hadn’t left her out. “Sure, boss!”

  “Oh and Lijuan, you better find another way to snoop around the network besides your own computer—it’s probably dirty.”

  * * *

  I’ll say one thing for Patricia Eisenhower, she was a popular girl. At least with one guy.

  I found dark hairs on her pillow, dark pubic hairs lower down under the bed linen, prints all over the glasses, prints on the medicine cabinet mirror.

  I looked at the dark hairs in the evidence bags. I knew whose they were without even testing them.

  * * *

  Juan entered the interrogation room flanked by two security men. His hands were cuffed with nano-ties. After they deposited him in his chair, they backed off to a discreet distance.

  He did not wait for me to start the questioning. “Mr. Stone, I didn’t do this!”

  “Mr. Rodriguez, we have a lot of evidence to the contrary. We can place you in the victim’s room the night she was killed. We have evidence to show you two were intimate.” I showed him the evidence bags with the test tubes of semen on cotton swabs. “Very intimate.”

  “That don’t mean I killed her! Why would I do such a thing?”

  “A good Earthside prosecutor would have an easy time establishing a jealousy motive. ‘Ms. Eisenhower was a regular sex partner wi
th Mr. Jones.’ It wouldn’t be hard to make that stick.”

  “Speakin’ of prosecutors, don’t I get a lawyer?”

  “You would if we were Earthside, but as the captain has pointed out to me numerous times, ‘We ain’t Earthside and this ain’t no democracy!’”

  “What’s she gonna do to me?”

  “If she becomes convinced you did it, I believe she will execute you.”

  “Execute me? How?”

  “I don’t know how, Mr. Rodriguez, but she is a very creative woman.”

  “Help me out, man. How close is she to thinking I did it?”

  “We haven’t presented her with the evidence in the Eisenhower death, but I would guess your intimate proximity to both victims is not going to play well with her.”

  “Ah shit, man. Look, I may have had sex with those women, but I didn’t do it. I loved them. Both of them. I wanted to have more sex with them. I didn’t mind sharing them with Rosie. Hell, there’s plenty to go around for everybody!”

  “That, my friend, along with the fact that we can’t seem to find the other suspect, is probably the only thing keeping you alive right now.”

  We placed Juan in a makeshift brig, a ‘luxury’ cabin with a full bathroom and a kitchenette. I had the engineers attach two hasps on the door onto which we placed two high-security mechanical padlocks. I toyed with assigning a guard, then decided there was a limit to the paranoia I would permit myself on this case.

  Chapter Twelve

  Captain’s Office

  “Captain, if Mr. Rodriguez is the killer, he can’t hurt anybody while he is in custody.”

  She stared at me unblinking for about ten seconds. “Tell me again why you think he did it.”

  “I don’t think he did it. But the evidence to indict includes putting him at the scene of the crime in close temporal proximity both times.”

  “English please.”

  “He was there at roughly the same time as the murder. That doesn’t mean he was there at exactly the same time, but close.”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “He has a history of intimacy with each victim, and in Patty’s case it was the same night. So, if you couple that with a possible jealousy motive—Rosie Jones—you can make a case that he murdered them to get back at Rosie. A sexual turf war, so to speak.”