The girl was a genuine blonde, he could tell. The roots always gave it away. And whatever psycho had scalped her had left some roots. At least her head was still on her neck, because there wasn’t much left of her limbs. Alik studied the wall behind her, which was now a sick mural of thick blood splatter with gobs of flesh embedded in the blast craters. While the victim was standing, someone had used a bulled-up shotgun to take her down. His educated guess was that they blew her arms off first, then followed up with her lower legs. The scalping was last. She might have been alive for it, but blood loss and shock would have rendered her unconscious by that time. Thankfully.
“Je-zus fuck.” Alik turned back to Detective Salovitz.
The cop’s face was the color of a dead fish, but Alik preferred that to looking at the murdered blonde.
“I warned you,” Salovitz said. “The others aren’t much better.”
“She’s the only one in here, right?” Alik had arrived thirty minutes after the NYPD had crashed into the apartment, following all sorts of alarms—neighboring apartments and home security sensors screaming out that gunfire had been detected. He didn’t care about that; he’d been asked to check out a specific digital problem originating in the apartment. However, the multiple homicides gave him a legitimate reason to observe and assist the NYPD. His cover, not that anyone would have the balls to query it, was to provide cross-jurisdictional authority, which was highly credible given the nature of the homeowner’s apartment.
“Yeah,” Salovitz agreed. “The rest are all over the place.”
Alik took a proper look around the room. It was a big space, with a classy art-deco layout; walking into it was a time-step back into the 1920s. The ostentatious genuine period furniture was all arranged to make you look in one direction. That was understandable; he was on the seventeenth floor of a typical Central Park West block. One wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, providing a billionaire’s view out across the park, all snug under its thick, fluffy snow blanket. He went over to check it out. The glass was programmable, allowing it to flow open onto the narrow balcony outside.
When he looked through, he could see footprints in the snow. “Come take a look at this,” he called to Salovitz.
Salovitz pressed his face against the glass, leaving faint mist streamers on the cold surface below his nostrils. “So?”
“Footprints. Three, maybe four, sets.”
“Yeah. Nobody went over, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’d have found the body on the street when we came in.”
Alik bit back on a sigh. He liked Salovitz, he really did. The detective had seen enough of life’s dark side to know how things worked, the dirty political wiring underneath the city that powered things along so smoothly. Every time Alik turned up on a case, no matter how cruddy the given reason, Salovitz knew not to question it. But there were times when Alik thought Salovitz must have gotten his badge on the back of some positive discrimination bullshit for terminal dumbasses. “Look again. Tell me which way those footprints are heading.”
Salovitz glanced back out again. Then, “Holy crap!”
The footprints, which Alik had shown him, started at the stone balustrade and came toward the glass. One-way traffic.
“They came in from next door,” Alik said. “Pulled some pretty fine techno-acrobat shit to zipwire across from the neighboring balcony.”
“Okay,” Salovitz said. “I’ll get the precinct’s G7Turing to run checks on next door, ownership and access.”
“Good. Have forensics prioritize the balcony. Those prints are filling with snow, and Christ knows how it screws residual traces.”
“Sure.”
He went out to find his partner, Detective Bietzk. Alik turned to Nikolai Kristjánsson, a member of the forensics team, who was busy directing a line of microdrones that resembled snails. A dozen of them were sliding slowly over the carpet around the corpse, their molecular sensors mapping the particles they encountered.
Alik told his altme, Shango, to open a secure link to Kristjánsson. “Have you analyzed the bust yet?”
The way Kristjánsson’s gaze slid away from him reminded Alik of ancient high school jock/nerd confrontations—all very secret agent tradecraft, which Kristjánsson probably got off on. “Not yet. They’ve got me scooping residuals to see who was here.”
“I’m no expert, but maybe someone with a fuck-off shotgun? Get that equipment back to your lab and give me a report.”
“It’s not easy—”
“Do it.” Even from an angle, Alik could see Kristjánsson scowl. His official job was with the mayor’s Manhattan Forensic Agency, but friends of Alik’s Washington friends also had him on a retainer, which was why he’d been assigned to the case. Those same people had made it very clear to Alik that the attempted digital mischief was of immense importance. To them, the murders were an irrelevance. Glancing down at the blonde again, as the sheet was drawn back over her, Alik wasn’t so sure.