I felt a clap on my shoulder. “Juno.”
I recognized the voice without turning around. “Abdul,” I said, already grinning.
“What brings you here?”
I turned to look at my old friend. “Maggie asked me to come. She wanted to get an experienced detective's perspective.”
The coroner looked at me with eyebrows arched behind his superthick glasses. Abdul knew I couldn't be serious. He was well aware of the fact that I'd spent far more of my career strong-arming than I did Sherlocking. “I see,” he said noncommittally.
Abdul scanned the room, his magnified eyes swiveling through his specs. He took it all in: the blood, the block, the bloated body. “Looks familiar.”
“So I hear.”
“Got any wisdom for us, Juno?” It was Ian who was asking, a smug look on his face.
“I'll need some time,” I responded.
“Didn't think so,” he said, and he walked out, brushing into me on his way. There was a time I would have jumped his ass for even coming close to me. Maybe Josephs was right; he was no pussy anymore.
The old coroner hunched his already hunched back over the jellied body of Officer Ramos. “This could get messy,” he stated.
Maggie and I took his cue and stepped out to give Abdul and his staff some space. It wasn't easy to bag a gene-eaten body-like zippering up a human-sized water balloon.
Maggie and I walked past the uniforms gathered outside the cabin, their tough talk predictably anti-offworld. They'd been rattling away the whole time, saying stupid shit like, “If I caught the guy that did this, I'd shoot him first chance I got,” or “I'd douse him with his own gene eaters and see how he likes it.” I knew they were ticked at losing one of their own, but put one of them face to face with the offworld killer, and they'd do one of two things: drop to their knees and beg, or run faster than they'd ever run before-just like I did a couple hours ago.
There was no such thing as a fair fight with an offworlder. Their technology was centuries ahead of ours. True, Lagarto once had the foundation for a tech-rich society but that had been squandered away generations ago. Our economy was founded on Lagartan brandy, a cash crop that funded a flurry of construction during the boom. They put up a top-notch spaceport from which brandy was boosted into space by the freighterful. The freighters docked with Lagarto's orbital station, an engineering marvel in its day. The thing was huge, the size of a city. It could service even the largest of the spaceliners that made the multiyeared hauls to the rest of the Unified Worlds.
At the boom's peak, there was a freighter going up every ten minutes. They should've known how fragile it all was, an economy based on a single product. It went to hell when a lone smuggler managed to sneak a couple saplings back to Earth and published the brandy tree's genetic code. That was all it took for Lagarto to lose its market. All twenty-seven planets had the trees adapted to their own environments and began raising their own fruit and distilling their own brandy. Lagarto went deep into the red, and in order to pay the government's debts, the pols had a fire sale. They sold off the spaceport, the Orbital, and even the rights to mine the belts, which were the only things left that this system still had going for it. The bastard pols embezzled the profits for themselves and left this planet a charity worker's bonanza. We led the Unified Worlds in every category: poverty, illiteracy, starvation, unemployment, disease, infant mortality…
Maggie and I made it back outside. Ian was there, holding a baggie with a vid inside. He was talking to a female officer who, upon seeing Maggie, said, “I found a vid, Detective.”
“Where?” Maggie asked.
“It was on the pier, in the weeds. Maybe somebody dropped it.”
“Have you watched it?”
“No. I brought it to Ian the moment I found it.”
“Good work, Officer…?”
“Kobishi.” She beamed in the dark.
“Good work, Officer Kobishi.”
The young officer saluted and then strode across the deck, heading for the gangway. Based on the salute and the fact that I didn't recognize her, she was a definite newbie, probably at her first ever crime scene.
Holding up the bagged vid, Ian asked, “Anybody got a vid reader?”
I shook my head.
Maggie said, “No. We'll have to ask the med-techs if we can borrow their equipment when they're done documenting the scene.”
“Yeah,” said Ian as he neatly folded the baggie over the vid and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “Call me when they're ready.” He walked away, following the same path taken by Officer Kobishi.
Maggie and I stepped out of the high-traffic area of the deck and found a semidry spot under one of the age-frozen cranes.
“How's Niki?” she said.
“Fine,” I said as a reflexive kick response.
“Will you tell her I'll be by soon? It's probably been a week since I went to see her. These barge murders have me all tied up.”
I told her flat out. “You gotta duck this case.”
“I can't do that. I've been working this for too long.”
“How many have there been?”
“Tonight's the thirteenth. This guy's a serial.”
Even more convinced, I said, “You've got to get out. The killer's an offworlder.”
“So?”
“Don't play stupid, Maggie. You know what can happen if you try to arrest an offworlder.”
She resisted looking at my bobbing hand. “Don't worry about that, Juno. When I find him, I'll bring a whole squad.”
“So what if you do. You can bet that if he's got the money to buy gene eaters, he's got the money to buy the judge, too.”
Maggie looked away out over the water, her face now in total shadow.
I knew she didn't want to hear it, but I kept up the pressure. “And what happens when the press gets a hold of this? You've been lucky so far that nobody gives a shit about a bunch of nameless victims, but that won't last much longer. There's a dead cop for chrissakes. Eventually, somebody's going to leak the fact that an offworlder has killed thirteen people including a cop. The public will throw a fit. They're already pissed about how fucked up this city's gotten over the past year. They'll demand to know what the police are doing about it, and you're going to have to stand there and say you don't know squat. How will that look on your record? Trust me, Maggie, you need to drop this case.”
“I can't, Juno. Ian's gung ho on this one. When it was clear we weren't getting anywhere on it, I told him we should step aside and let some fresh eyes have a look at it, but then he got all territorial about it.”
“So ask for a new partner. You don't like that prick anyway. Get yourself out and let Ian take this one.”
She turned back to me, her face barely lit. “I already asked for a new partner. Lieutenant Rusedski wouldn't hear it.”
“Why not?”
Maggie let out a frustrated sigh. “Rusedski wants Ian to get the squad leader post. I had no idea Ian was even interested until he put in for it right on the deadline. For weeks, I'd been after Rusedski for a letter of recommendation. He kept promising he would do it, but he never delivered. Then Ian submitted his application with a letter of recommendation from Rusedki. That's when it all made sense why Rusedski made Ian and me partners. You see what I mean? Rusedski wanted to put Ian through for that job all along, but he knew that the brass liked me better because of my case-solved percentage…”
There was no need for her to go on. I could see what Rusedski had been doing. By partnering Maggie with Ian, they'd share all their collars. Her successes would be his successes. It was only a matter of time before their case-solved percentages converged. “Still,” I said, “you don't want to be out front on this one. Just drop it. Let Ian be the one to put his ass on the line.”