Extremes Read online

  “You sure it’s not going out into their system?” he asked.

  “You want to check for me?”

  She had meant the question as an aggressive, rhetorical one, but he stood up and came over, touching the links, examining the portals, and touching parts of the synch in his handheld.

  “I guess we’re fine,” he said, as if he had just accomplished something spectacular.

  She studied him, wondering if it was worth telling him she had already done all of that, plus a few more things.

  Then the screen across from her lit up. The images she had seen on the handheld a moment before were suddenly life-size, the angles constantly moving.

  “What kind of system did they use?” she asked.

  “It’s a blend of several,” he said. “I adjusted it for the correct angles, but I managed to get all of the information. We can change it as much as we want, look at everyone as closely as possible, and then some. I just figured this would be the quickest for right now.”

  DeRicci shoved her thumbs in the waistband of her pants and watched. The runners milled about, mostly with the dome as their backdrop. It actually took DeRicci a few minutes to realize that she saw twice as many runners as she had initially thought. Everything was being reflected in the dome, which was still dark with Dome Night.

  “How early did this thing start?” DeRicci asked.

  “Runners started showing up at six,” he said. “Start time was eight-thirty. This is from about seven. It’s the first time I located Zweig.”

  He pointed to an image on the wall. A woman, not too much taller than DeRicci, stood in front of the organizers table. The woman wore a light pink environmental suit similar to the one that the corpse had worn.

  The suit was as attractive as these things got. It was form-fitting, which was how DeRicci knew for certain she was looking at a woman, and it glowed in the light of a Moon Day.

  “Let’s enlarge that,” DeRicci said.

  Van der Ketting did without complaint; apparently he liked manipulating the technology. Good thing to know. She would make certain he did a lot of it. Normally, she found technology more of a hassle than a help.

  The woman’s image grew until it filled the wall. The helmet had its sun tint on, so the woman’s face wasn’t visible. But DeRicci wasn’t looking for the woman’s face.

  DeRicci was interested in the suit.

  It had dirt in the creases, like suits that got used a lot often did. The dirt was gray, like most of Outside, and it was thick. It coated the pink, dulling it. Even though light reflected off this suit, it didn’t do so as brightly as on the suit DeRicci had seen on the corpse.

  Her breath caught. “You’re positive this is Zweig?”

  “She’s holding the singlet,” van der Ketting said. “She had to present identification to get it.”

  The image swirled in front of DeRicci until the singlet came into view. The numbers matched.

  “Identification Outside, not inside,” DeRicci said. “Why is that?”

  “Oh, they do ID inside as well. Then they double-check the suits to make sure they meet regulation. But to get the singlets, the runners have to go to the organizing table Outside. That way, they can’t pass off the singlet to someone else.”

  DeRicci nodded. The organizers seemed to think of everything. “This is an hour before the race?”

  “An hour and a half.”

  “Does she just wander around?”

  “I lost her for about forty-five minutes,” he said.

  DeRicci nodded, not liking this at all. “Show me when she reappears.”

  Van der Ketting skipped forward, the images appearing fleetingly across the white walls. Portraits of the day already mostly gone: people standing, peering into the distance, trying to put on their singlets. DeRicci got that in single images, almost too short to truly register on her brain.

  Then the images slowed. Zweig emerged from one of the maintenance sheds.

  “How’d she get in there?” DeRicci asked.

  “I already asked,” van der Ketting said. “It’s a secondary dome door. Normally no one can use it, but the marathon has limited permission. They use it for one half hour before the race, when the crush at the regular door is too severe to get everyone through the airlocks on time. No matter how early the runners get told to arrive, a large group of them always comes late.”

  That last sounded like he was parroting one of the organizers. DeRicci was still frowning at the maintenance shed.

  “What’s in there?” she asked.

  “Nothing, so far as I could tell,” van der Ketting said. “They’re supposed to clear it out before the race. That whole tampering thing, you know.”

  DeRicci didn’t respond. Instead, she continued watching. The singlet flapped on Zweig’s chest. She walked up to a man in a reddish gold environmental suit of the same make, and nodded at him. DeRicci wished she could hear the conversations, but they had occurred across private links. The organizers only had emergency links and an announcement link that the runners shared.

  Apparently an announcement came across the main link, because runners started lining up according to their qualifying times.

  “Blow up her image again,” DeRicci said.

  Van der Ketting froze the frame on Zweig as she crossed the pavement. She was very much alone. Somehow, despite the swarm of environmentally suited bodies, Zweig managed to keep herself isolated.

  DeRicci was grateful for it: Zweig’s isolation gave them a clear view. “Can we make this into a hologram?”

  “Not here,” van der Ketting said. “At the station.”

  DeRicci nodded, so that he couldn’t see her disappointment. She got as close to the wall as she could and looked at the boots. In the white light of the sun, they looked gray.

  “Zoom in on the boots,” she said.

  He did.

  “Okay, now rotate the image one hundred and eighty degrees.”

  He did that as well.

  Zweig was walking in the image van der Ketting had zoomed in on. She had lifted one foot so that the sole of that boot was completely visible. The boot’s lightning bolt zigzag was barely visible. Moon dust had gathered in the boot’s ridges, and along the edges.

  Van der Ketting came up beside her. “Wow,” he said. “I have no idea what to make of that.”

  DeRicci studied the sides of the other boot. The dust had collected on the boot in a uniform pattern. A few lines of dust weren’t uniform, and she blamed that on the one-G inside the Dome.

  “These aren’t the same boots,” van der Ketting said, showing that he did know what to make of this after all.

  “This isn’t the same suit either,” DeRicci said. “This one’s been Outside a number of times.”

  She frowned. Coburn had told her that the suits were new. He had also said that they often ordered suits for the tourists that went on their excursions—and that the suits were usually tested by the staff first.

  DeRicci cursed silently. She hadn’t wanted to do follow-up interviews if she could at all avoid it, and she wouldn’t be able to avoid it in this case. She hadn’t asked Coburn how many suits he’d ordered or when they had arrived.

  She had been under the impression, though, that they were new. Which meant that Zweig had worn hers Outside a lot recently.

  “You need to check dome logs,” DeRicci said. “You need to look for Zweig’s name on them.”

  “How far back?”

  DeRicci shrugged. That was one of the pieces of information she didn’t have. “A year to start. Maybe more.”

  “You think that the fact that she was Outside a lot had something to do with her death?”

  Who taught these new detectives anyway? All of her young partners had asked a variation on this question at one time or another, and she was getting to the point where she wanted to slap them.

  “I’m not thinking anything in particular right now,” she said, and that was true. Too many preconceived notions, and the case would diss
olve before her. She’d only see what she wanted to see and would miss the important stuff.

  Van der Ketting was studying the boot too. He ran his finger along the image, as if he could feel the lightning bolt pattern through the wall.

  “How many other people had these suits?” DeRicci asked. She really didn’t want to go through the two hours of the recording by herself, double-checking van der Ketting’s work. She would if she had to, but this would also slow down the investigation, because she couldn’t do much research until she’d finished the interviews.

  “I only saw one,” van der Ketting said, “and that suit was slightly different.”

  “Different how?”

  “It was kind of a goldish red,” van der Ketting said. “I thought it belonged to the guy who found her.”

  So that was who Zweig had been talking to. DeRicci had suspected as much.

  She said, “Get Coburn’s environmental suit. Bag it for evidence. Make sure you get everything, including the boots.”

  Van der Ketting studied her. “I thought I was going to help conduct interviews now.”

  DeRicci shook her head. “There’s too much to do right now. You and I have to split the duties. I’m afraid you’re going to have to spend a lot of time staring at images from the race.”

  Van der Ketting didn’t move for a long moment; then he said, “You done with this one?”

  “Yes.” DeRicci moved away from the wall. On the opposite wall, a runner walked across the finish line. The runner’s arms were down, body hunched. Each movement spoke of extreme exhaustion.

  And the sad part was, none of the medical staff or the organizers moved to help the runner. The runner had—his? her?—moment of triumph all alone and in what appeared to be great pain.

  DeRicci made herself turn away from the race. The wall was white and bare now.

  “What about miles five and six?” she asked. “Did you get the footage from there?”

  “Yeah,” van der Ketting said. “It’s not real helpful, though. Apparently the system is tied into sensors which turn on when a runner approaches.”

  “I guess we’ll have to make do. Show me the segments when Zweig approaches.”

  Van der Ketting used his handheld as a guide and set the program already in the wall unit. Then the barren landscape appeared: the boulder, looking ominous, its closest side hidden in shadow; the trails forking around it; and the edge of the horizon in the distance.

  It took DeRicci a moment to get her bearings. For some reason, she had expected the image to face toward the finish line, with the Earth in full view in the dark sky.

  But the system looked toward the starting line, which of course wasn’t visible because of the short horizon. After what seemed like a long pause, but which couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds, Zweig glided toward the boulder.

  DeRicci could only see the pink helmet bobbing above the boulder at first. Then Zweig took one of the side paths. She loped past wherever the cameras were, and disappeared.

  Then the image cut off. Apparently no one had been following her closely.

  “What about other angles?” DeRicci asked.

  “That’s the only one we got,” van der Ketting said.

  DeRicci bit back her irritation. “Get the rest. I thought you were going to be thorough.”

  “I was thorough,” he said. “They only have one angle out there. Costs again.”

  “This marathon doesn’t need to save costs,” DeRicci said. “They could afford cameras on every centimeter and from all angles. Who told you this hogwash?”

  “Several people, actually,” van der Ketting said. “They all had the same story. They didn’t need much, especially early on. All they wanted was a full-face view of the runner’s approach and nothing more.”

  Full-face view. DeRicci frowned. She hadn’t seen Zweig’s face. “Run that again.”

  Van der Ketting did. As Zweig rounded the boulder, DeRicci had him freeze the image.

  The Earth reflected in Zweig’s visor. Her helmet’s tint was on full. It was impossible to see her face.

  “You’d think if they wanted faces,” van der Ketting said, “they’d tell the runners to turn off the tint.”

  “They don’t dare.” DeRicci felt cold. “The sunlight is unfiltered. Without the tint, the runner would be subject to all sorts of nastiness.”

  Van der Ketting had grown up on the Moon; he should have known that. But he probably wasn’t thinking about it. He seemed to miss a lot of things because he hadn’t thought them through.

  “Then what’s the problem?” van der Ketting said.

  “There’s a couple of problems,” DeRicci said. “She doesn’t look like a woman who’s having breathing troubles.”

  Van der Ketting looked at the frozen image, and his mouth gaped open. “You’re right,” he said. “How could I have missed that?”

  “I don’t know,” DeRicci said, “but it’s a pretty big miss.”

  He turned toward her, the shock that had been on his face a moment before even worse. “Is that why you don’t want me doing interviews?”

  She sighed. It didn’t pay to point out this man’s flaws. “I already told you. We have too much ground to cover to do it together. But if you keep missing things, I’m going to have to review what you’ve done.”

  “So the filter doesn’t bother you.” His tone edged on belligerent.

  “The filter bothers me,” DeRicci said, “although not because I can’t see her face. I would be stunned if I could see her face.”

  “But we saw her face when she was dead. We—” He stopped, looked at DeRicci, and shook his head. “That’s what bothered you, isn’t it? That we could see her face then. Someone wanted us to know who she was and how she died.”

  “You’re not thinking about this as if it’s an Outside case,” DeRicci said, unable to control her impatience any longer. “The scratch in the visor, the open filter. What does that tell you, Leif?”

  She would lead him by the nose if she had to. She would force him to the realization, with all the strength that she had.

  “Someone got interrupted.”

  “Yes.” DeRicci extended the word, exaggerating her usual patient tones. “I already told you that.”

  His lips thinned. He looked at the image still large on the wall.

  “Obviously, you can shut off the filter without opening the helmet,” he said, and that caught DeRicci by surprise. She’d never heard of that feature on an environmental suit, but he was right. The killer had shut off the filter from the outside—the pressure had remained even.

  Van der Ketting was looking at her. “But that’s not what you wanted me to see, was it?”

  DeRicci shook her head. “It’s good, though. It’s exactly the kind of thing you should be thinking. Look for the logic flaws, look for the holes.”

  He was still staring at Zweig’s image. “Why would you shut off a filter?”

  “Why would you scratch the visor?” DeRicci said.

  “He wasn’t trying to scratch the visor,” van der Ketting said. “He was trying to crack it.”

  DeRicci waited.

  Van der Ketting ran his palm over his open mouth. “My god,” he said slowly. “The corpse got found too soon. They didn’t care if we saw her face or not.”

  DeRicci didn’t nod, even though van der Ketting was right. She continued to wait for him to complete the realization.

  “They wanted to make her completely unrecognizable.” His hand still gripped his chin, thumb and forefinger pressing against his jawbone as if he had forgotten to let go. “Why? Why would anyone want that?”

  “In the middle of the marathon,” DeRicci said.

  “Do you think he cleaned her suit?” van der Ketting asked.

  Another thing DeRicci hadn’t thought of. She felt her shoulders relax slightly. Maybe he would be a real partner after all.

  “Depends on how much time he had,” she said, noticing that they were both using the male pronoun. She
would have to put a stop to that soon, but not yet. Not when van der Ketting was finally learning how to think properly.

  “I’m going to have to look that up, aren’t I?” he said, the excitement back in his voice. “See who came next?”

  DeRicci nodded.

  “You’re going to want to interview them, right?”

  “Those are the people who are most important to me, yes,” she said.

  “And the more information you have the better.” This last wasn’t a question. It was muttered, almost as if van der Ketting were making a memo to himself. “I’ll get right on it.”

  He started to walk away.

  “Wait,” DeRicci said. “What about the discovery of the body? Did they have that recorded?”

  “Yeah, and it’s just what we expected.” He paused at the door, then shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe himself. “It’s just what I expected. Want to look at it?”

  “Yes,” DeRicci said.

  Van der Ketting came back and moved the recording ahead again. DeRicci stared at the white wall, waiting for the images to return. She could see faint reflections of the other screen, light and shadow playing across the whiteness here, signifying nothing.

  But she didn’t turn, didn’t look at the other runners coming in. Nor did she watch Gumiela while she waited. It was time to stop thinking about her career and to start thinking about this case.

  This case required her full concentration.

  “Here,” he said, and suddenly the images returned.

  The perspective seemed slightly different. The boulder loomed larger, but didn’t seem as dark. In fact, DeRicci could see the streaks of gold in its stone, glinting in the sun.

  She also couldn’t see the body. She thought for certain the section of the track where the body had fallen had been visible in the previous scene.

  “Is this a different angle?” she asked.

  Van der Ketting shook his head. “They only have one, remember?”

  “It looks different.”

  He studied the image too. “I’m sure they only had one camera out there. But it does look like it was moved. Do you think the killer knew where it was?”