Two white forensics department vans were parked at the far end of the garage. Various sensor patches the size of paving slabs had been stuck to the floor around the walls and thick cables snaked around everywhere, winding back to the open access panels on both vans. Several GeneralPurposebots were moving the sensors around, clustering them in one corner while three forensics officers supervised.
“We found them first thing this morning,” Hoshe said as they climbed into the back of the squad leader’s van. The inside was cramped, a narrow corridor between two equipment benches, the air hot from all the humming electrical circuits. He was more than familiar with all the units. The additional forensics teams Myo had promised from the Serious Crime Directorate had never materialized. In view of what amounted to her withdrawal from the case, Hoshe’s commander had reluctantly agreed to allocate him two of the city’s forensics squads. Hoshe himself had undergone the appropriate skill memory implementation so he could operate the equipment and interpret the results, helping his pitifully small team throughout all the dreary months that had followed. They had worked through the list of sites where construction work had been going on forty years ago, a laborious and terribly tedious task. Sick days and short hours among the team members had been on a steady upward curve from the first week onward. There had been times, especially in the last few weeks, when only the GPbots had turned up at the start of the day’s shift.
Hoshe had been receiving an increasing amount of pressure from both the team and his commander to wrap things up. But he’d kept doggedly to the list, examining the sites one after the other while soothing and cajoling the team and pleading for just a little more time from the police department. Reflective deep scanning had revealed a great many interesting things buried beneath the city, but no bodies. Until this morning.
Paula peered closely at the small high-rez holographic portal with its 3D grid of gentle pink luminescence; right at the center were swirls of darker red, like knots in wood.
“Even allowing for decomposition you can see the shapes quite clearly,” Hoshe said, his finger tracing around denser swirls. “This is a head here, look, and these are arms and legs. Both bodies are inside some kind of box-shape container; there’s a distinct air cavity around each of them.”
“I’ll take your word for it. This looks like a Rorschach test to me.”
Hoshe avoided a smile. “One is slightly smaller than the other; which corresponds to a male/female pairing. But that’s the end of the good news. They’re deep; ten meters down below this level. The developer didn’t cut corners when this condo was built, unfortunately; all the foundations correspond to City Hall regulations.”
“Thank you, Hoshe.”
“We don’t know it’s them yet. We’ll get a slightly better resolution when the sensors have been realigned, but that’s not going to give us a positive ID. Only DNA will do that.”
“It’s them. You know it is.”
“Yeah, well. It’s going to be a bitch to get them out. We’ll have to excavate all the way around, probably need force fields to reinforce the foundation when we chop the block out. The residents will need to be moved out while we do that. Then we’ll need to break the concrete up very carefully.”
“Don’t worry, the Directorate has experienced extraction teams. I’ll have them here before lunch.”
“You said that about the forensics teams.”
She shifted around in the cramped space, and gave him an unnerving look of appraisal. “I know, and I apologize again. I’ve never quite let anybody down like that before. It won’t happen again.”
Hoshe knew he was blushing. Her apology was like some intimate confession. He tapped a knuckle on the portal to distract her. “Are you sure this will get a conviction? I’ll bet you a whole Earth dollar their memorycell inserts have been destroyed; there’ll be no memory of the killer we can ever access.”
“Trust me, Hoshe. We can nail him now. All I need is a judge to issue a warrant.”
It was a hell of a row that broke out in the living room. Loud enough for Morton to hear it from his bedroom, which made him stop what he was doing, which pissed him off no end. His e-butler told him who was invading his penthouse, so he was tying the belt on his dressing gown as he strode out.
Chief Inspector Myo was arguing with his human butler, while Detective Hoshe Finn interjected with angry threats. It was a credit to the butler’s training and character that he didn’t appear in any way flustered by the unwelcome guests and their authority. His loyalty lay solely with his employer; nothing was going to shift that.
“Let’s all take a breath and calm down,” Morton said. He combed his wild hair with his hand, trying to slick it back down. “What seems to be the problem here? Chief Investigator?”
“No problem.” She held out a small memory crystal disk. “I have a warrant for your arrest.”
“On what charge?”
