Paloma Read online

  It made him wonder if Paloma had used her storage spaces on the Dove, and that made the urgency rise in him again. He had to get there before Nyquist did, or at least try to get there first.

  But first, Flint had to stop leaving bits of himself everywhere.

  He went into the main cabin, removed his clothes and set them in a special evidence bag. He was glad he had purchased those a few years ago, when he started as a Retrieval Artist, glad he had continued a number of the habits he’d learned as a detective.

  Then he took a quick shower, using the water option because he was in the port and he could hook the Emmeline up to the port’s water system if his own supply grew low. So far, he hadn’t used the water at all since he replenished it after his trip.

  The water was hot, and it scrubbed his skin. He needed the scrubbing. He felt dirty after being in Paloma’s apartment. Odd that he didn’t feel so dirty after being in his own office, filled as it was with Moon dust and debris.

  But the fetid odor of Paloma’s apartment clung to him—or seemed to—and the air itself had felt contaminated. No wonder someone had become frightened of “biochemical goo.” The air felt soiled, and maybe, on some lower, unimportant (at least to the city) level, it was.

  As he got out, he had the drain catch remove every bit of dirt and debris and place it in a small storage container—another of the yacht’s many perks. The system was designed for stays in foreign ports so that the yacht could hook into foreign systems without releasing anything unusual or alien into their own supplies.

  It also prevented DNA from getting into alien hands without going through the usual protocols.

  He programmed the drain catch to keep the little storage box in a secure area, to be released only if he needed it.

  Then he stepped out, used the hot air vents to dry himself, and got dressed, putting on a black shirt, black pants, black shoes. He didn’t notice, until he was nearly dressed, that he’d reverted to an outfit that looked like one he might have worn as a detective.

  He would consider the psychological impact of that later. Right now, he had work to do.

  First, he went to the cockpit and downloaded all the material he’d recorded at the crime scene. Usually downloads happened in a microsecond, but this took longer, partly because he was making secondary and tertiary backups. One he removed and placed in one of the escape pods on the side of the yacht. Just in case someone managed to breach all of the security systems here, take the information he’d removed, and then delete it.

  He knew he was being paranoid, but he had learned, in the past few years, that sometimes his paranoia had helped him survive.

  Then he used the ship’s security cameras to see if Ki Bowles had snuck back into this section of the terminal.

  She hadn’t. She was gone. There wasn’t even a heat signature remaining.

  He shook his head. He wasn’t sure what she wanted, and when he didn’t know, he got nervous.

  But he couldn’t focus on her.

  He had to get to the Dove.

  He took a laser pistol from his stash under the console and stuck it in the waistband of his pants, pulling his shirt so that it fell over the pistol’s shape.

  If someone was looking, they’d see that he was carrying a weapon, but the casual observer wouldn’t notice. Nor would the security system in Terminal 25. It purposely ignored any weapon carried by a licensed Armstrong resident who docked a ship here, a security flaw that Flint had been planning to mention to DeRicci, but somehow hadn’t gotten around to yet.

  Then he headed out the airlock, down the steps, and across Terminal 25 toward the Dove.

  Ten

  Nyquist sat in his office, working the very slow terminal built into his desk. He was trying to access information outside of the department, something he wouldn’t get reimbursed for if he used some of the faster systems throughout the city.

  On his personal links, he subscribed to the most basic services. He didn’t like a lot of information flooding him, and he had always figured he could go elsewhere for more.

  That theory was beginning to annoy him.

  His office was small, barely larger than a closet in his apartment across town. His desk and chair fit into it, plus another chair in case someone wanted to sit and visit (for the record, no one ever had), and a perpetually dying plant that some long-forgotten girlfriend had given him when he’d gotten his own space.

  Unlike the other detectives on the fifth floor of the First Detective Division, he hadn’t covered the remaining wall space or shelf space with personal items. They distracted him. If anything, he would put an occasional memento of the current case within eye view, something that would remind him of the things he had yet to do.

  Right now, the Paloma case was too new for him to gather mementos, and he doubted he would need them. Even though no one had said so yet, this case would be one of those that had to be closed even if there were no suspects.

  He tried to stay away from cases like this, but because he’d been on rotation this time (and because the chief, bless her, hadn’t wanted the rookie team that was, ostensibly, ahead of him in rotation to handle such a touchy case), he’d gotten this one.

  If he had to put something up in his office to make himself think of this case, he’d put up a 3-D image of Paloma’s body. No one should die like that, not for any reason.

  Although he was beginning to get irritated at her. She—or someone with a lot of computer experience—had gone into all of the public records he’d accessed so far, and erased most of the information pertaining to her.

  All that remained were the handful of items a person needed to survive in this society—current address, at least one bank account, and a work history. Apparently, a person didn’t need a last name, because he still hadn’t been able to locate hers. Her work history was also quite vague. It simply listed her as self-employed for more than seventy years, and then after that, retired.

  He was beginning to wish he had never stopped at the office. Noelle DeRicci had wanted to see him for an update. She had told him to come as soon as possible—she might even have said immediately upon leaving the crime scene. He couldn’t remember and he didn’t care about that sort of nicety.

  He had come here first, partly because he wanted more information, but in truth because he wanted to impress her. She had been a good investigator in her day, and her unorthodox ways appealed to him. He was as unorthodox as a man could be inside this department, so unorthodox that he’d had to learn important secrets about his coworkers just to keep from having too many reports written up about him, so he appreciated that trait in others.

  The interesting thing about DeRicci was that she had managed to survive this cutthroat department while being unusual and without using the strong-arm tactics he’d sometimes employed.

  He wished he could ask her how she had done that, but he couldn’t, not yet. He didn’t know her well enough. He might never know her well enough.

  He sighed and punched into two other databases, finding the same information on Paloma. He had never seen a record so thoroughly scrubbed.

  She had to have had a personal life. She had to have had parents and probably some relationships, even if she never formalized them.

  He only knew about Flint because Flint had bought her business—and that was in Flint’s record, not Paloma’s. Flint’s record was a lot more complete: the early death of his parents, his marriage at a young age, the birth and death of his daughter, and the ultimate dissolution of the marriage. His various job changes were well documented in police department files, and so was his tendency, ever since he’d gone to the academy, to work alone.

  Even his meeting with Paloma was documented, since it happened while he was on a case.

  But Nyquist couldn’t find corresponding information on her, and it frustrated him. Older information left ghosts, trails of what had been.

  He wasn’t good enough to find those ghosts, especially when he was in a hurry, especially working on th
is slow equipment they’d requisitioned for detectives who were never going to get promoted, so he’d have to assign the search to someone else.

  Which also frustrated him. Someone else—no matter who that someone was—wouldn’t do as thorough a job as he would. Someone else wouldn’t pursue that last lead, that fragment of a fragment that might actually bring him to the only remaining piece of information.

  Nyquist put his face in his hands. He was running out of time. Soon DeRicci would summon him again, and that would put him at a disadvantage with her.

  So he needed to find someone in tech who had the time to pursue this, someone he trusted, and then he needed to head to DeRicci’s offices and tell her everything he didn’t know.

  Eleven

  The Dove was docked several berths away from the Emmeline, in a part of Terminal 25 reserved for yachts that weren’t flown very often.

  Flint made himself walk calmly toward the Dove. There were so many monitors, so many sensors, that any unusual movement would be recorded. He wanted to hurry, but he didn’t dare.

  Ki Bowles had left, just like she said she would. That surprised him. He had expected her to accost him as he got farther away from the Emmeline. But as he crossed areas that led to other yacht berths, he saw no one else, not even police officers.

  Either Nyquist’s people had already come and gone or they hadn’t arrived in the first place. Flint would wager they hadn’t arrived—he doubted Nyquist knew of the Dove yet. Digging into yacht registrations was hard, and unless Paloma had left some indication of ownership in her apartment, Nyquist wouldn’t even know to look.

  Flint knew, because he’d bought this version of the Dove for Paloma after borrowing, and then destroying, her first yacht. Paloma had flown him around the Moon that first month she owned the new Dove, and declared she couldn’t tell the difference between the new and old (she was politely lying), but to his knowledge, she never took it to Mars or Earth, let alone anywhere farther away.

  She was content, she said, to stay in Armstrong and live a quiet life.

  At the time, he didn’t believe her.

  Now he wondered. What had she known? What had she been afraid of (if anything) ? What had she expected?

  He finally reached her berth, as far down the docks of Terminal 25 as she could be. The Dove had been moved even farther away from the main areas of activity. He half expected to see dust on her exterior.

  She looked a lot like the Emmeline, sleek, black, and birdlike, her nose turned downward to give the ship added speed. But she was smaller and even more luxurious, built for comfort on long trips rather than Flint’s need to make sometimes dangerous journeys with more than one passenger.

  Flint wasn’t sure he’d be able to even get close to the Dove. His rights as an owner of a yacht in Terminal 25 did give him free reign to go where he wanted, but that didn’t mean he could get close enough to touch other yachts.

  He hoped Paloma had kept him on the list of cleared pilots who could fly the Dove. He had never thought to ask.

  When he reached the painted yellow lines that warned away terminal workers and Space Traffic police, he crossed without hesitation.

  Silence surrounded him, and he let out a small sigh of relief. If he hadn’t been on her cleared list, warning sirens and bells would have gone off. Lights would have flashed and a clear barrier would have fallen to protect the Dove from him.

  But none of that happened.

  He was free to board.

  If only he could remember Paloma’s codes.

  He crossed the black floor to the black ship, wondering how much she’d changed things. He had known the codes for the old ship, and the original codes for this one. But he hadn’t been here in more than a year. He had no idea what was different.

  Still, he walked to the main door with confidence. He pulled down the exterior ladder, then climbed to the opening under the wing and placed his hand on the concave handle.

  The door clicked three times, then the lock sprang open. An automated voice said, “Welcome, Miles Flint” as the door eased inward.

  He hadn’t expected that at all.

  He climbed inside. This entry was less involved than his, designed for easy travel, not for protection. The Dove had an airlock with an interior door, but the door was unlocked, at least for him. The required thirty seconds inside the airlock was being counted down on the door’s small diamond window. When the countdown ended, that door, too, sprang open.

  Almost as if Paloma had expected him.

  The hair rose on the back of his neck.

  The main door closed and locked. As he stepped through the airlock into the heart of the Dove, the interior door closed and locked. He jumped, turned, and nearly grabbed that door’s handle, worried that he wouldn’t be able to get out.

  Then he made himself breathe. Even if the ship trapped him, he was still inside the port. He could get someone from terminal management or Space Traffic to free him.

  In a worst-case scenario, he could probably contact Nyquist and beg the man’s indulgence.

  Flint would find a way to free himself before that happened.

  The lights slowly rose around him, bathing the interior hallway in yellow softness. She had remodeled since he last saw the ship: it hadn’t been this bright before. Nor had it had a yellow carpet throughout the interior. It had been plain black, like his, the floors made of the same material as the ship and just as easy to maintain.

  Now there were even seats near the airlock door, as if someone would wait there while other passengers went through the exit procedure. Art—most of it that two-dimensional imagery that Paloma had loved—was bolted to the wall.

  The shape was the same as the corridor into Flint’s ship, but the décor made it seem like an entirely different structure. He felt disoriented, like he had the first time he visited Paloma’s apartment.

  He peered into what was, on his ship, the common area. She had decorated it in soft blues, and then framed the portals so that they looked like a continuation of the art in the corridor. The seats were plush and deep. Only an extra glance at the sides made it clear that the regulation safety equipment had been attached as well.

  He would save her private cabin for later. Since she hadn’t used the ship much, he could only assume that she kept any important information in the cockpit because that was what she had done before.

  Although with all these changes, he could be making a false assumption. He glanced over his shoulder, even though he knew no one else could get in—not easily, anyway. He felt like he was being watched—monitored somehow—but he had a hunch that was the ship itself.

  He would check when he got to the cockpit. He would check on everything.

  He hurried down the corridor. It felt narrower than the main corridor in the Emmeline, partly because of the art. He made himself stop, turn, and record an image of the corridor. In fact, he left one of his recording chips on as he moved through the ship.

  He probably should have done that from the beginning. That way he could show Nyquist exactly what he’d done, that he hadn’t taken anything (at least, at this point, he didn’t plan on it) and that he wasn’t trying to impede the police’s work.

  If anything, he could say he was worried for himself, since he had bought Paloma’s business. He had to find out what was going on, just to make sure he wasn’t next.

  He doubted he was. If any of her former customers wanted her dead, they would have done so long ago. But he supposed the police considered him both potential victim and potential killer.

  He knew Nyquist thought of him as a suspect; he wasn’t sure if Nyquist had realized yet that he might be a possible victim, too.

  Paloma left the cockpit door open, something Flint never did. He walked inside, pressed the door release, and listened to it whoosh closed. Then he locked it, just in case the police had been waiting for a warrant and arrived while he was working.

  The cockpit of the Dove was smaller than the Emmeline’s. The Dove’s didn�
�t have to be as big; the ship didn’t command as many disparate elements as the Emmeline did. No weapons, only a few extra escape pods, no brig, no warning devices. The Dove was, at heart, a pleasure vehicle.

  The Emmeline was, at center, a warship disguised as a yacht.

  He sat down in the Dove’s captain’s chair. He placed his hand on the smooth black console before him and felt a sudden jolt.

  Instantly, his recording chips shut off. His emergency links sent a small tone—the one that let him know they were shutting down—and then the white-noise hum that seemed a part of him vanished.

  The ship had shut off all of his circuitry.

  Paloma had set up the office to do that, using very old technology, and he had had to redesign it. He hadn’t expected anything like that here.

  He removed his hand, looked at it to see if that jolt had done any damage, and was about to stand when light filled the center of the cockpit.

  Maybe he had underestimated her. Maybe Paloma had set up some weaponlike safeguards after all.

  If she had, he was in trouble.

  The light coalesced into a holographic image. Paloma stood in front of him, looking like she had before.

  Before someone had taken her and destroyed her, leaving her like discarded clothing at the base of her living room wall.

  “Miles Flint,” she said with a familiar smile.

  His heart twisted. Her hair was like a nimbus—brighter than it had been in life. Her face was wrinkled—she only went for enhancements that strengthened her; she didn’t care about looks—and her black eyes seemed all-wise.

  It seemed like he could reach forward, touch her, and pull her to him.

  But he knew that he would never have done that. He hadn’t hugged her in all the time that he had known her, and even if he discovered that she were alive now, he wouldn’t be able to do that.

  “You have to answer me, Miles, or this entire recording will vanish without serving its purpose.”