Paloma Read online

  Spatter everywhere. Some of the blood lacked the rich red-black color of drying human blood. Some of it was too thin and gooey, some of it not dark enough, the rest a bit too dark.

  The smell, which hadn’t reached him in the stairwell, was foul and familiar. Feces, urine, the coppery stench of blood—all odors of the newly deceased.

  His stomach clenched so tight he wondered if the knots would ever come out.

  The spatter went all the way to the elevator. The carpet, usually a brown that matched the moonscape visible from the elevator, looked like it had been doused with paint. He saw blood squish beneath the feet of some of the techs, rising out of the carpet as if the carpet were made of fluid instead of fiber.

  Nyquist glanced over his shoulder, either to see if Flint was following or to see Flint’s reaction.

  Or both.

  Flint decided not to keep his expression neutral. Sometimes a lack of reaction could be seen as suspicious. He took a deep breath through his mouth and felt a sudden queasiness—not because he couldn’t handle a murder scene; he could. He’d seen dozens of them—but because Paloma had somehow been involved in this mess.

  He didn’t see her yet. He hadn’t seen anyone except the police. He hadn’t even seen a body, although someone had clearly died here.

  Nyquist stepped over a marked area in front of Paloma’s door. The door, usually impossible to see against the panels of the hallway wall, stood open, revealing the white wall and ancient collectibles—all flat 2-D photographs of the Moon, many of them taken from the earliest missions here.

  Only the wall wasn’t white any longer. More spatter, some of it swooping in high arcs, crossing the wall, the photographs, the baseboards.

  Flint was holding his breath. He made himself exhale.

  Nyquist glanced at him again, a questioning glance, asking if Flint was all right. Flint nodded. He could do this. He had once held the battered, bloody, and almost unrecognizable body of his dead baby girl.

  He could handle anything.

  Nyquist rounded the corner into the main part of the living room, and so did Flint. The windows were open here, the moonscape visible for the first time, looking flatter than it did in other parts of the building, as if the windows rendered it two-dimensional. Nothing marred the view—not blood, not fluids—and Flint let his gaze linger there for just a moment before taking in everything else.

  The overturned couch, the toppled armchair, the shattered tables. The hole in the wall leading to the kitchen. The handprint—blood-stained and vivid—on one side of the kitchen’s arch. The battered serving trays still struggling to fly, their contents scattered on the carpet. The overturned mugs, the broken tea container, the crushed scones.

  Belatedly, Flint brushed the back of his hand, so that the cameras embedded in his skin took pictures. He needed a record of this.

  Nyquist looked at him, not the room. Nyquist had seen this all before.

  He was waiting, waiting for Flint to see one thing, the one thing Flint wasn’t looking at but he had noted, just barely, out of the corner of his eye—

  The body, crumpled and broken, huddled up against the moonscape and the brown wall.

  Flint took a steadying breath and turned slightly, making himself look.

  Crumpled was the wrong word. So was broken. Crushed was better. Destroyed. Ruined beyond all repair.

  Her white hair was matted with blood. Her face, normally so lively, looked like a skull with skin stretched over it. Her jaw had been demolished, and teeth were scattered along the floor like pebbles.

  Flint forced himself to remain still, even though he wanted to go to her. To touch her, to make sure it was her.

  Paloma had been so strong. She’d been the foundation of his new life, a sturdy woman who could do anything.

  Even though she had always looked fragile.

  But she was tougher than she looked. She’d once caught him in an armlock that nearly separated his shoulder from its socket. She’d pushed him against wall, bruising his face so badly he’d had to use a repair kit just to go in public.

  She’d taken on aliens and won, the government and won, several corporations and won.

  She had more enemies than anyone he’d ever known.

  And he loved her.

  He hadn’t realized it until now. Loved her as a friend, but more than that. Almost like a parent, someone who was so central to the universe that she couldn’t die, because it wasn’t possible.

  How had that happened? She’d warned him not to have connections, not to make friends, not to have a family. She’d warned him that such things would make him vulnerable.

  They could destroy him and threaten his clients.

  He had agreed with her. One of the reasons he’d become a Retrieval Artist was because his parents were dead, his wife had divorced him, and his daughter had been murdered. He had no friends, not really, no one he was close to—although DeRicci had somehow wormed her way into his life.

  DeRicci and Paloma. His only two personal contacts in years.

  The only two people he really trusted, even though Paloma had told him to trust no one.

  And there she was, her bones so shattered that she looked almost like jelly, her clothes holding her together since her frame could no longer do so.

  His knees were buckling and he started to catch himself on the bottom part of the overturned couch, but Nyquist offered a hand instead. Flint looked at him, not really seeing him. Flint used Nyquist’s arm to steady himself, feeling the blood drain from his face, realizing that he hadn’t breathed since he looked at the body.

  He’d had families of victims have the same reaction. He hadn’t realized it was involuntary.

  “What happened here?” His voice croaked out of him. No part of him seemed to function right.

  He hadn’t done this when his daughter died. Then he’d felt a rage so powerful he nearly destroyed everything around him, everyone around him.

  His wife, who thought they should go through the grieving process together, accused him of taking all the rage for himself, as if the crime had happened to him and no one else.

  He felt no rage here, only a sense of loss so profound it felt like he wasn’t even in the same universe any more.

  “We don’t know what happened.” Nyquist kept a steadying hand on Flint’s arm. “The systems are all shut down. Her links are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  He nodded. “They’ve been removed.”

  Flint turned toward the body, but Nyquist’s hand tightened on his arm.

  “You don’t want to look,” Nyquist said.

  To Flint’s surprise, he didn’t. He didn’t want to know, but he had to know. Knowing, he’d learned when Emmeline died, was sometimes the only thing that got you through.

  “She has a security system here, but it’s keyed to her in some specific ways that we don’t understand. We’ll have techs on-site shortly.”

  “I can do it,” Flint said.

  Nyquist shook his head. “You’re a civilian.”

  “I bought her business,” Flint said. “I know how she sets up systems.”

  Then realized that he probably shouldn’t have said that. He probably shouldn’t say much. Nyquist hadn’t said Flint was a suspect, but he had treated Flint the way suspects sometimes got treated—showing them the crime scene for their reaction, giving them a suit for evidence collection, letting them ramble as they were caught off guard by their emotions.

  “We’ll contact you,” Nyquist said, “if we can’t figure it out.”

  “It looks like a heck of a fight,” Flint said.

  Nyquist nodded. “She didn’t die here.”

  She died in the hallway, Flint suddenly realized, heading toward the elevator. That mass of blood—was it hers? He wouldn’t know without samples, without help from Nyquist, Nyquist who probably—logically—considered Flint a suspect.

  Flint felt his old cop instincts fall into place. They shielded him, divorced him from the emotion that onl
y a moment ago threatened to overwhelm him. He had to remain calm, become logical, be as cold as people always believed he was.

  He made himself study the scene. If she had died in the hallway, then the fight started in the living room. Paloma hadn’t expected it. She had treated this person—human? Alien? Something that could drink and eat human food—as an honored guest. She had brought out those serving trays for Flint, letting them glide toward him, bringing him sweets and her favorite tea, and—

  He whipped his attention back. The scene. He had to study the scene.

  The person had been an honored guest. And then he—what? Attacked? Paloma would have bested anyone in her apartment. She knew where everything was. She had hidden weapons, stun-blocks, equipment she’d never shown him.

  Even those serving trays became weapons. Little whirling dervishes, the kind that could slice a man’s head off if he wasn’t careful.

  Flint folded his hands together so that he wouldn’t touch anything, but he stared. The debris near the wall—the damaged trays, the destroyed food, the spilled tea—that had happened…first?

  But it made no sense. Paloma would have defended herself here, especially from an attack this obvious.

  She had died in the hallway, but her body had been carried here. To stage the scene.

  Was the overturned couch part of that stage? The ruined serving trays? The implied meal?

  Flint bit his lower lip. Nyquist stared at him, watching Flint’s face as if that enabled him to read Flint’s mind.

  The only thing Flint knew for certain was that Paloma had died in the hallway. Not because Nyquist had told him, but because the evidence did. That mass of blood only happened when a person died.

  But everything else was confusing.

  “Can I move closer to her?” Flint asked.

  “You don’t want to.” It was a friendly warning, meaning Flint would see things he didn’t want to see.

  But he didn’t want to look at Paloma. He’d let his cameras do that, let his own internal links keep the images, and he’d study them later, in a place that didn’t smell of blood and death.

  “Can I move closer?” Flint repeated, his voice as cold as he could make it. He wanted Nyquist to know he wouldn’t lose control of his emotions, not any longer, and he wanted Nyquist to sense that he could trust Flint.

  “Just a few steps,” Nyquist said. “This part has been cleared. She hasn’t.”

  The techs weren’t completely done yet. That was good and bad. They wouldn’t have disturbed anything near the body, but the fact that they’d left her for last also meant they felt they had a lot of ground to cover.

  “What’d the neighbors say about this?” Flint asked.

  “On this floor, no one was home,” Nyquist said.

  There was only one other apartment on this floor, a lesser apartment without the dome view. Flint would look it up, see who it belonged to.

  He walked toward the edge of the couch, crouched, and studied the rug. Not even footprints, which was odd, given the amount of blood outside. Something should’ve tracked through that mess, left imprints of its own.

  A person would have had to clean up after himself. Some of the aliens that despised Paloma could have flown from that death location to this site.

  Flint looked up, saw no smear on the wall, then forced himself to look at Paloma again.

  She’d been staged, but not posed. And given the position her body was in, she could very well have been dropped.

  The teeth bothered him. He wished he could pick one up, see if it had roots still attached or if it had been broken off.

  He gave a silent command to his internal links to zoom one of the cameras in as close as it could get, study the teeth, the rug for any trace, see if there was any blood.

  He couldn’t see anything with the naked eye. He’d have to wait until they cleared the crime scene, see if they failed to find some of Paloma’s internal systems.

  The elevator surprised him, too. She shouldn’t have died near it. If she was trying to escape—which boggled him; Paloma was a fighter, not a runner—then she would have gone for the stairs.

  He backtracked the few steps he’d taken, turned, and walked in the steps he’d initially made when he came into the scene. Nyquist watched him, face a mask. But Flint could sense his fascination and his understanding.

  Nyquist knew Flint was working the scene, and, at the moment, Nyquist wasn’t objecting.

  The spatter bothered him. Flint had noted as he entered that not all the blood and fluids were human. What if none of it was Paloma’s, either. Then this scene had been staged to look the opposite of what it was: that the fight had started here, went to the hallway, and then, when Paloma lost, the murderer had carried her back inside—

  “And closed the door?” Flint asked.

  “Hmm?” Nyquist took a step toward him.

  That was when Flint realized he hadn’t asked the full question. “Was the door open or closed?”

  Nyquist sighed. “You don’t need to investigate, Flint. We’ll do a thorough job. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Not as thorough as Flint would do. They didn’t have as much reason to care. “Open or closed?”

  “Closed,” Nyquist said.

  “You didn’t answer about the neighbors.”

  “I did. I told you that the apartment across the hall was empty.”

  “What about below? This should’ve made a hell of a racket.”

  Nyquist pursed his lips.

  “How’d it get called in? You still haven’t told me the sequence, Bartholomew.” Flint used Nyquist’s first name to put them on equal footing.

  Nyquist met Flint’s gaze. “We’re not sure of the sequence.”

  He was lying. The sentence was too confident, too practiced.

  They were holding back something about the events. Something they didn’t want anyone to know.

  “So tell me what you think,” Flint said. “I won’t hold you to it.”

  Nyquist shook his head slightly. “Right now, we’re not discussing anything about the case.”

  Flint frowned. “With me? Or with anyone?”

  “With anyone.”

  Flint walked toward the door, careful to stay in his original tracks. Once a detective, always a detective apparently. He looked at the splatter pattern, and saw it as an investigator.

  Thin on the edge of the wall, almost a spray, most of the drops flowing downward, although some just stuck, which was odd. Blood didn’t stick unless it was already congealing.

  Although he didn’t know about this other stuff, the stuff that clearly wasn’t human blood. Something about the smell—rank, almost cheesy—suggested that it was organic, too, which might have been why he thought it was non-human blood or the alien equivalent of blood.

  But he wasn’t certain now. He wished he could take a sample or be privy to the police reports. But he wouldn’t be able to, not through channels, anyway.

  He might have to create his own channels.

  If he could still do that. He’d been able to hack into the police databases in the past, but he’d become higher profile recently. Those avenues might be closed to him.

  “See anything?” Nyquist asked.

  Flint started. He hadn’t realized he was staring at the wall so intently. Obviously, he wasn’t not completely functional yet, no matter how he was feeling.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Paloma. He had no choice. He had to work this. She would have wanted him to.

  Although that thought stopped him. She might not have wanted him to. She had told him to stay out of relationships and uninvolved with others for a reason.

  She wanted him to remain pure.

  Would this taint him?

  Probably. And he didn’t care. No one could do this to her and get away with it. No one.

  The techs moved outside the door, sending floating ‘bots over the large wet stain in the center of the hallway.

  “You never did tell me who called this in,”
Flint said.

  “The entire building got shut down,” Nyquist said. “We get notified when security systems activate.”

  “Shut down?” Flint asked.

  “Something triggered the automatic sensors.” Nyquist was using that tone again. Something wasn’t unidentified. He knew; he was just choosing not to tell Flint. “We dispatched immediately.”

  “A detective team with a full crime scene unit?” Flint asked.

  “That’s not procedure,” Nyquist said.

  “I know,” Flint said. “But Paloma contacted me down her emergency links. I came here as fast as I could and the investigation was already underway.”

  “You’d said that before,” Nyquist said. “I hadn’t realized the contact was so recent.”

  Flint frowned, and turned slightly without moving his feet. “Why would you assume that? I came here quickly; I used the word emergency. I wouldn’t wait if she was in trouble.”

  “She couldn’t have contacted you,” Nyquist said. “She’s been dead for hours.”

  Flint glanced at the body again. He had shaken his head several times before he realized he had done it, and stopped himself.

  “She sent me a message,” he said. “I got it just before I came here.”

  Then his frown grew deeper. He’d gotten the message in the office. Where the links should have been shut off. He had shut them off when he had gone in, hadn’t he? Or had he been so surprised by the dust and the level of disaster that he hadn’t touched them?

  He almost shook his head again, then stopped. He shut off those links automatically. He had no need for emergency lines because, theoretically, no one needed to contact him.

  She had contacted him through back channels, that was what he had assumed. She had known how to reach him even with the office’s expanded security because she had designed much of it.

  But he had taken out most of her design. It hadn’t been safe.

  Had her message been waiting? Working its way through the system until it reached him—taking hours instead of the speed of thought?

  Nyquist was still watching him, evaluating him, trying to figure him out. Trying to figure out how involved he was.

  Nyquist believed she was dead when Flint got the message. But no one had examined the body. The first reports were preliminary. There was no way to know, not yet.