Cold Comfort Chapter 3
Chapter 3
The Proving Ground
Quintus 39, 221 2:53 p.m. LST
Regan
“Got another missing, Regan,” said Dillan, casually tossing a data cube to him.
Regan caught it and looked skeptically at the cube. Missings, as a rule, tended to be frustrating low-priority cases. Unless they involved young juveniles or doddering elders, there was little to get excited over. Like many large communities, Port Oslo had a sizeable shiftless population.
But Dillan was smiling, so apparently this new case was a good thing. “Get this, the guy claimed he’d been stalked the day before.”
Regan raised his eyebrows and let the cube roll in his hand. It was black with a sticker labeled Jaime Dominguez. Two sides had doors that the machine would slide back before lasering the info into the holographic matrix inside.
“Who’s lead, you or me?” asked Regan.
“You kidding? Me, of course.” Dillan swung a chair around and straddled it. “I took the info from the guy’s mates, and downloaded the video. Check it out?”
Regan perked up with the word video. “Really,” he drawled. None of the other missing persons back files had anything as concrete as video to go on. Regan slipped the cube into the drive.
“He didn’t show up to work today,” continued Dillan. “And he wasn’t in any of the hospitals. I checked the code log on the uniforms last night, they didn’t make any deliveries to the morgue. Anyway, doesn’t it look like a possible homicide to you?”
“We’ll see.” Regan double clicked the icon labeled TRX2R5 Model 6 VidPhone Recorder.
The clip started playing. A young man, late teens, early twenties by the look, obviously foreign from the skin tone looked nervously into camera. “The guy who took my journal, he’s after me.” Jaime Dominguez was saying. His voice had the classic tinny sound of a cheap grade recorder. This was bad in that it meant that the background noise was probably edited for space reasons. Regan noticed that the victim seemed to be rain dampened and out of breath,.
“Think he’s going to kill me. Please if you hear this, pick up the phone. I’m not kidding.”
There was about a seconds pause, Dominguez’s head twitched, but didn’t quite turn around. If some background noise had bothered him, it didn’t register on the tape.
Static began forming at the top edge of the picture, rapidly moving downwards.
“Please don’t wa... “
Snow filled most of the screen obscuring Jaime Dominguez’s face. “What‘s--?” asked Regan. Something moved briefly in the background before the static completely obscured the picture. It happened too fast for Regan to see.
“...meone pick...” And the sound degenerated completely. A moment later the clip ended. The time and date were stamped in red at the bottom of the degraded picture. Apparently this had happened at 00:05 LST that morning.
It was almost too fresh. Perhaps the guy got drunk later in the night, after pulling a good stunt on his buddies, then missed his check in time.
Now what was that just before the end? Regan frame by framed back to just before the static overwhelmed the image. There! In the back!
“Looks like a shoe,” murmured Dillan, squinting and leaning in.
Regan selected the image enhance from the menu. There was only so much data you could squeeze from a cheap digitally compressed image, but one could always hope. He outlined the far left edge, half way to the bottom and zoomed. It was definitely a shoe. “Tassel?” It was more a question than a statement.
“Dress shoe of some sort,” agreed Dillan. “Is that the best you can tease out of this thing?”
The computer was smart as far as such things went, but it wasn’t psychic. “Definitely dress shoe.”
“What made the image fritz, you think?”
“Did anyone see the guy who stole Dominguez’s journal?” asked Regan, ignoring Dillan’s question.
“A couple of the mates say they saw someone watching them down at the docks. I’m pretty sure I got that in the statements file.”
Regan spent a couple of minutes going over the statements. There were five, all fairly short. Last night Jaime had gone out to meet his stalker and had almost literally disappeared the moment he’d left the restaurant. No one had seen him since. The missing journal piqued Regan’s interest.
“Let’s get the surveillance tapes from the dock. Can you call the ship and see if they have any internal surveillance?”
Dillan nodded and spun around to make the call. With a few swift touches to the screen he accessed the seeker program. He waited while the police mainframe and the Dock Security computers recognized each other and compared notes. In seconds a smaller window showed up on the screen and listed cameras, positions and time options.
“The Maria Ana has one external,” reported Dillan, “Sending to your terminal.” A series of clip icons appeared on Regan’s desktop, each labeled with a different 2 hour period.
With a few strokes Regan sent an echo to Dillan’s computer. “Share and share alike. ‘M not doing this by myself.”
Even scanning fast, it took hours of almost unremitting staring to find anything unusual. From past experience, Regan and Dillan knew that while the computer claimed it could edit out the times when no one was in the picture, it wasn’t reliable.
About an hour after the crew had finished unloading static filled the Maria Ana’s outside security cam. Fifteen minutes later it glitched again. Freeze framing revealed a glimpse of pant cuff and a shoe.
Regan and Dillan quickly accessed the same time frame on each of the Dock cameras. All of them had that same picture loss, for longer or shorter periods of time. In one they saw just the edge of a shoe coming into the screen. In another, they saw the top of someone's head.
“How bizarre,” murmured Dillan. “How do you think he does that? Make the camera go all crazy like that. Some kind of jamming device?”
“Never seen that before in my life,” admitted Regan. “That doesn’t mean you can’t buy it in a catalog.”
“So now do you see what I mean? Doesn’t it look like a potential homicide?”
“Why are we getting it?” Usually, the Lords and Ladies took all the Homicides. They were the true detectives, with years (and sometimes decades) of experience. Dillan and Regan hadn’t earned the right to be numbered among them. Their graduation was only barely published and as of yet they had done nothing to earn recognition.
“No corpse. No corpse, they won’t touch it. It’s still officially a missing person. Now once we actually find the body, that might be a different matter. I’ve heard cases getting snatched mid stream. So our job, my bro, is to find the killer, nail the evidence, and get the body last.”
“How much time do we have before the Maria Ana leaves?”
Dillan hissed between his teeth. “Not long. They leave tomorrow at noon. We don’t have enough to keep ‘em. Shall we go now?”
Regan looked out the window at the sky. The sun was getting pretty low, it was already an hour past when he and Dillan could officially call their shift over. “How ‘bout this: we check out the phone booth Dominguez was using in the hope that the perp actually touched it, and we can make his fingerprints out from all the other millions of people who’ve touched that phone booth in the last year. We catch some quick eats and then visit the Maria Ana.”
Dillan shrugged. “Suppose... Oh. One thing.” He spun back around in his chair to face his own desk. Regan watched him call up the police call logs again. No body code. “We could always get unlucky,” he muttered. “Just in case it does show up down there while we are gone, I’m going to send the sweet lads and lasses of the morgue our case’s picture.” Dillan froze a frame of the phone recording and forwarded it to the morgues box. “Now we can go.”
The phone was actually only blocks away from the police office. The uniforms secured the area. To Regan’s relief no one was actually using the phone. The grocer told them that he hadn’t seen anyone use it that day, then ignored his customers to watch them make their examinations.
Regan wished that he’d thought to check the phone sooner. The light was getting pretty bad, and it had been raining hard on and off most of the day. While the phone was partially covered by the grocers large blue and white canopy and had it’s own micro roof, the lowest part of the supports were wet and the sidewalk was drenched.
Regan examined the outside of the phone. There were some very fine brown specks on it, that looked at first like it might be rust. Regan knew better. He took out his minicomputer and used the camera attachment. He scanned the entire outside of the phone. There were some more fine specks on the inside of the micro roof. Regan took a set of labels from his kit and stuck them around the phone, recorded them, then used swabs to collect samples.
Just under the phone, Regan found the mother lode. There was a scratched section of metal and a couple of brown streaks containing partial prints. Regan recorded them and then, in case the data got corrupted some how, he took out a piece of sticky plastic and lifted them. There were a lot of smears on the supports but no other good prints.
The last discovery was in the sidewalk itself. The tile was not very porous, but the grouting between was. Dillan had sampled a fairly thick sludgy layer of blood in the cracks between the tile and a thinner layer along the edge of the gutter leading to the storm drain.
“Man,” commented Dillan, sadly. Regan nodded. He remembered the young man’s lean and tanned face. Damn shame.
“I’m thinking this might be a potential psychopath,” said Dillan, as they collected their take-out. “Could be a serial killer. There is no reason for anyone to kill Dominguez. He just got to this rock three days ago.” Dillan looked skeptically at the oil dotted brown bags. “You know this stuff will kill us.”
Regan made a rude sound, and grabbed his egg roll.
“What do you think the Detectives would say, about the psychopath that is.” Dillan asked wistfully.
“That one missing body doesn’t make for a serial killer.”
“Well, then do you think there is another reason why Mr. Fancy Shoes might have killed Dominguez?”
Regan shook his head. “We got to find out if he had any secrets.”
“Too bad someone stole his journal.”
The crew of the Maria Ana was adamant.
“Jaime was clean,” insisted Miguel Luna. “He didn’t do anything. If he had a fault it was that he worked too hard and made the rest of us look bad.”
Regan sighed softly. He had hoped for gambling, or drugs, or even debt, something to follow up on. Unless by some fantastic luck the bloody prints on the phone turned out to be the perps, they were running out of leads.
“Do you think he’s dead?” asked Miguel. There was a forlorn note to voice. “I mean, there’s a chance he was just kidnapped right?”
Regan took a deep breath. Keeping his face implacable, he said, “We don’t know.”
Miguel looked at his feet. “We were awfully nasty to him about the stalker. I wish...” he let it trail off.
“Next time you will be a bit more generous with your mates.”
“Yeah.” Miguel met his eyes. “Maybe he’s just so pissed at us for being nasty that he just left.”
Regan didn’t have the heart to contradict the hope.
The Proving Ground
Quintus 39, 221 2:53 p.m. LST
Regan
“Got another missing, Regan,” said Dillan, casually tossing a data cube to him.
Regan caught it and looked skeptically at the cube. Missings, as a rule, tended to be frustrating low-priority cases. Unless they involved young juveniles or doddering elders, there was little to get excited over. Like many large communities, Port Oslo had a sizeable shiftless population.
But Dillan was smiling, so apparently this new case was a good thing. “Get this, the guy claimed he’d been stalked the day before.”
Regan raised his eyebrows and let the cube roll in his hand. It was black with a sticker labeled Jaime Dominguez. Two sides had doors that the machine would slide back before lasering the info into the holographic matrix inside.
“Who’s lead, you or me?” asked Regan.
“You kidding? Me, of course.” Dillan swung a chair around and straddled it. “I took the info from the guy’s mates, and downloaded the video. Check it out?”
Regan perked up with the word video. “Really,” he drawled. None of the other missing persons back files had anything as concrete as video to go on. Regan slipped the cube into the drive.
“He didn’t show up to work today,” continued Dillan. “And he wasn’t in any of the hospitals. I checked the code log on the uniforms last night, they didn’t make any deliveries to the morgue. Anyway, doesn’t it look like a possible homicide to you?”
“We’ll see.” Regan double clicked the icon labeled TRX2R5 Model 6 VidPhone Recorder.
The clip started playing. A young man, late teens, early twenties by the look, obviously foreign from the skin tone looked nervously into camera. “The guy who took my journal, he’s after me.” Jaime Dominguez was saying. His voice had the classic tinny sound of a cheap grade recorder. This was bad in that it meant that the background noise was probably edited for space reasons. Regan noticed that the victim seemed to be rain dampened and out of breath,.
“Think he’s going to kill me. Please if you hear this, pick up the phone. I’m not kidding.”
There was about a seconds pause, Dominguez’s head twitched, but didn’t quite turn around. If some background noise had bothered him, it didn’t register on the tape.
Static began forming at the top edge of the picture, rapidly moving downwards.
“Please don’t wa... “
Snow filled most of the screen obscuring Jaime Dominguez’s face. “What‘s--?” asked Regan. Something moved briefly in the background before the static completely obscured the picture. It happened too fast for Regan to see.
“...meone pick...” And the sound degenerated completely. A moment later the clip ended. The time and date were stamped in red at the bottom of the degraded picture. Apparently this had happened at 00:05 LST that morning.
It was almost too fresh. Perhaps the guy got drunk later in the night, after pulling a good stunt on his buddies, then missed his check in time.
Now what was that just before the end? Regan frame by framed back to just before the static overwhelmed the image. There! In the back!
“Looks like a shoe,” murmured Dillan, squinting and leaning in.
Regan selected the image enhance from the menu. There was only so much data you could squeeze from a cheap digitally compressed image, but one could always hope. He outlined the far left edge, half way to the bottom and zoomed. It was definitely a shoe. “Tassel?” It was more a question than a statement.
“Dress shoe of some sort,” agreed Dillan. “Is that the best you can tease out of this thing?”
The computer was smart as far as such things went, but it wasn’t psychic. “Definitely dress shoe.”
“What made the image fritz, you think?”
“Did anyone see the guy who stole Dominguez’s journal?” asked Regan, ignoring Dillan’s question.
“A couple of the mates say they saw someone watching them down at the docks. I’m pretty sure I got that in the statements file.”
Regan spent a couple of minutes going over the statements. There were five, all fairly short. Last night Jaime had gone out to meet his stalker and had almost literally disappeared the moment he’d left the restaurant. No one had seen him since. The missing journal piqued Regan’s interest.
“Let’s get the surveillance tapes from the dock. Can you call the ship and see if they have any internal surveillance?”
Dillan nodded and spun around to make the call. With a few swift touches to the screen he accessed the seeker program. He waited while the police mainframe and the Dock Security computers recognized each other and compared notes. In seconds a smaller window showed up on the screen and listed cameras, positions and time options.
“The Maria Ana has one external,” reported Dillan, “Sending to your terminal.” A series of clip icons appeared on Regan’s desktop, each labeled with a different 2 hour period.
With a few strokes Regan sent an echo to Dillan’s computer. “Share and share alike. ‘M not doing this by myself.”
Even scanning fast, it took hours of almost unremitting staring to find anything unusual. From past experience, Regan and Dillan knew that while the computer claimed it could edit out the times when no one was in the picture, it wasn’t reliable.
About an hour after the crew had finished unloading static filled the Maria Ana’s outside security cam. Fifteen minutes later it glitched again. Freeze framing revealed a glimpse of pant cuff and a shoe.
Regan and Dillan quickly accessed the same time frame on each of the Dock cameras. All of them had that same picture loss, for longer or shorter periods of time. In one they saw just the edge of a shoe coming into the screen. In another, they saw the top of someone's head.
“How bizarre,” murmured Dillan. “How do you think he does that? Make the camera go all crazy like that. Some kind of jamming device?”
“Never seen that before in my life,” admitted Regan. “That doesn’t mean you can’t buy it in a catalog.”
“So now do you see what I mean? Doesn’t it look like a potential homicide?”
“Why are we getting it?” Usually, the Lords and Ladies took all the Homicides. They were the true detectives, with years (and sometimes decades) of experience. Dillan and Regan hadn’t earned the right to be numbered among them. Their graduation was only barely published and as of yet they had done nothing to earn recognition.
“No corpse. No corpse, they won’t touch it. It’s still officially a missing person. Now once we actually find the body, that might be a different matter. I’ve heard cases getting snatched mid stream. So our job, my bro, is to find the killer, nail the evidence, and get the body last.”
“How much time do we have before the Maria Ana leaves?”
Dillan hissed between his teeth. “Not long. They leave tomorrow at noon. We don’t have enough to keep ‘em. Shall we go now?”
Regan looked out the window at the sky. The sun was getting pretty low, it was already an hour past when he and Dillan could officially call their shift over. “How ‘bout this: we check out the phone booth Dominguez was using in the hope that the perp actually touched it, and we can make his fingerprints out from all the other millions of people who’ve touched that phone booth in the last year. We catch some quick eats and then visit the Maria Ana.”
Dillan shrugged. “Suppose... Oh. One thing.” He spun back around in his chair to face his own desk. Regan watched him call up the police call logs again. No body code. “We could always get unlucky,” he muttered. “Just in case it does show up down there while we are gone, I’m going to send the sweet lads and lasses of the morgue our case’s picture.” Dillan froze a frame of the phone recording and forwarded it to the morgues box. “Now we can go.”
The phone was actually only blocks away from the police office. The uniforms secured the area. To Regan’s relief no one was actually using the phone. The grocer told them that he hadn’t seen anyone use it that day, then ignored his customers to watch them make their examinations.
Regan wished that he’d thought to check the phone sooner. The light was getting pretty bad, and it had been raining hard on and off most of the day. While the phone was partially covered by the grocers large blue and white canopy and had it’s own micro roof, the lowest part of the supports were wet and the sidewalk was drenched.
Regan examined the outside of the phone. There were some very fine brown specks on it, that looked at first like it might be rust. Regan knew better. He took out his minicomputer and used the camera attachment. He scanned the entire outside of the phone. There were some more fine specks on the inside of the micro roof. Regan took a set of labels from his kit and stuck them around the phone, recorded them, then used swabs to collect samples.
Just under the phone, Regan found the mother lode. There was a scratched section of metal and a couple of brown streaks containing partial prints. Regan recorded them and then, in case the data got corrupted some how, he took out a piece of sticky plastic and lifted them. There were a lot of smears on the supports but no other good prints.
The last discovery was in the sidewalk itself. The tile was not very porous, but the grouting between was. Dillan had sampled a fairly thick sludgy layer of blood in the cracks between the tile and a thinner layer along the edge of the gutter leading to the storm drain.
“Man,” commented Dillan, sadly. Regan nodded. He remembered the young man’s lean and tanned face. Damn shame.
“I’m thinking this might be a potential psychopath,” said Dillan, as they collected their take-out. “Could be a serial killer. There is no reason for anyone to kill Dominguez. He just got to this rock three days ago.” Dillan looked skeptically at the oil dotted brown bags. “You know this stuff will kill us.”
Regan made a rude sound, and grabbed his egg roll.
“What do you think the Detectives would say, about the psychopath that is.” Dillan asked wistfully.
“That one missing body doesn’t make for a serial killer.”
“Well, then do you think there is another reason why Mr. Fancy Shoes might have killed Dominguez?”
Regan shook his head. “We got to find out if he had any secrets.”
“Too bad someone stole his journal.”
The crew of the Maria Ana was adamant.
“Jaime was clean,” insisted Miguel Luna. “He didn’t do anything. If he had a fault it was that he worked too hard and made the rest of us look bad.”
Regan sighed softly. He had hoped for gambling, or drugs, or even debt, something to follow up on. Unless by some fantastic luck the bloody prints on the phone turned out to be the perps, they were running out of leads.
“Do you think he’s dead?” asked Miguel. There was a forlorn note to voice. “I mean, there’s a chance he was just kidnapped right?”
Regan took a deep breath. Keeping his face implacable, he said, “We don’t know.”
Miguel looked at his feet. “We were awfully nasty to him about the stalker. I wish...” he let it trail off.
“Next time you will be a bit more generous with your mates.”
“Yeah.” Miguel met his eyes. “Maybe he’s just so pissed at us for being nasty that he just left.”
Regan didn’t have the heart to contradict the hope.