brandy-clouded brain lost track at five. My attention shifted to a hollow scooped on one side on the otherwise cubical block, wondering what it could be for.
As if she could read my mind, Maggie answered my unvoiced question. “We think it's for the vic's chin.”
A picture flashed into my mind. The vic on his or her knees, neck stretched across the block, chin resting in the hollow so the throat could lay flush on the wood. The scorch marks were obviously left by a lase-bladed weapon, most of them probably left by practice chops, the most recent left by the actual beheading.
“So am I to assume there's a decapitated body around here somewhere?”
“No. He never leaves the body behind.”
“Why not leave the body to be gene eaten with everything else?”
She said she didn't know with a shake of her head.
“And the scene's always been gene eaten?”
Maggie nodded a grim yes. Grim, because the obvious conclusion was that the killer was an offworlder. Gene eaters didn't come cheap. A Lagartan would have to cough up a couple kilos worth of pesos to buy a batch. If a Lagartan was rich enough and desperate enough, I could see how he might buy a batch, but Maggie said there were others. How many, I didn't know, but it wouldn't take more than two or three batches to break most bank accounts. There was no way the killer was Lagartan. There were cheaper ways to cover up a murder. I should know.
“Any idea who the vics are?” I asked.
“Nope. Not without the bodies. We've tried to match the dates to missing persons reports, but we can't get definitive matches. There're too many missing persons.”
I knew what she meant. Slavers smuggled Lagartans off-planet to work the belts at a steady rate. KOP probably received three or four missing persons reports a week, and that was just Koba. They didn't count the rest of the planet. Go out to the fringe towns where the warlords were in control, and there was no telling how many people went missing. Koba was the only city on the planet with even partially accurate record keeping.
I pointed at a trio of coin-sized bloodless circles on the floor. “How about those?”
“They're from a tripod.”
“He films it?”
“That, or he has an accomplice who does the filming. No way to tell.”
I felt a clap on my shoulder. “Juno.”
I recognized the voice without turning around. “Abdul,” I said, already grinning.
“What brings you here?”
I turned to look at my old friend. “Maggie asked me to come. She wanted to get an experienced detective's perspective.”
The coroner looked at me with eyebrows arched behind his superthick glasses. Abdul knew I couldn't be serious. He was well aware of the fact that I'd spent far more of my career strong-arming than I did Sherlocking. “I see,” he said noncommittally.
Abdul scanned the room, his magnified eyes swiveling through his specs. He took it all in: the blood, the block, the bloated body. “Looks familiar.”
“So I hear.”
“Got any wisdom for us, Juno?” It was Ian who was asking, a smug look on his face.
“I'll need some time,” I responded.
“Didn't think so,” he said, and he walked out, brushing into me on his way. There was a time I would have jumped his ass for even coming close to me. Maybe Josephs was right; he was no pussy anymore.
The old coroner hunched his already hunched back over the jellied body of Officer Ramos. “This could get messy,” he stated.
Maggie and I took his cue and stepped out to give Abdul and his staff some space. It wasn't easy to bag a gene-eaten body-like zippering up a human-sized water balloon.
Maggie and I walked past the uniforms gathered outside the cabin, their tough talk predictably anti-offworld. They'd been rattling away the whole time, saying stupid shit like, “If I caught the guy that did this, I'd shoot him first chance I got,” or “I'd douse him with his own gene eaters and see how he likes it.” I knew they were ticked at losing one of their own, but put one of them face to face with the offworld killer, and they'd do one of two things: drop to their knees and beg, or run faster than they'd ever run before-just like I did a couple hours ago.
There was no such thing as a fair fight with an offworlder. Their technology was centuries ahead of ours. True, Lagarto once had the foundation for a tech-rich society but that had been squandered away generations ago. Our economy was founded on Lagartan brandy, a cash crop that funded a flurry of construction during the boom. They put up a top-notch spaceport from which brandy was boosted into space by the freighterful. The freighters docked with Lagarto's orbital station, an engineering marvel in its day. The thing was huge, the size of a city. It could service even the largest of the spaceliners that made the multiyeared hauls to the rest of the Unified Worlds.
At the boom's peak, there was a freighter going up every ten minutes. They should've known how fragile it all was, an economy based on a single product. It went to hell when a lone smuggler managed to sneak a couple saplings back to Earth and published the brandy tree's genetic code. That was all it took for Lagarto to lose its market. All twenty-seven planets had the trees adapted to their own environments and began raising their own fruit and distilling their own brandy. Lagarto went deep into the red, and in order to pay the government's debts, the pols had a fire sale. They sold off the spaceport, the Orbital, and even the rights to mine the belts, which were the only things left that this system still had going for it. The bastard pols embezzled the profits for themselves and left this planet a charity worker's bonanza. We led the Unified Worlds in every category: poverty, illiteracy, starvation, unemployment, disease, infant mortality…
Maggie and I made it back outside. Ian was there, holding a baggie with a vid inside. He was talking to a female officer who, upon seeing Maggie, said, “I found a vid, Detective.”
“Where?” Maggie asked.
“It was on the pier, in the weeds. Maybe somebody dropped it.”
“Have you watched it?”
“No. I brought it to Ian the moment I found it.”
“Good work, Officer…?”
“Kobishi.” She beamed in the dark.
“Good work, Officer Kobishi.”
The young officer saluted and then strode across the deck, heading for the gangway. Based on the salute and the fact that I didn't recognize her, she was a definite newbie, probably at her first ever crime scene.
Holding up the bagged vid, Ian asked, “Anybody got a vid reader?”
I shook my head.
Maggie said, “No. We'll have to ask the med-techs if we can borrow their equipment when they're done documenting the scene.”
“Yeah,” said Ian as he neatly folded the baggie over the vid and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “Call me when they're ready.” He walked away, following the same path taken by Officer Kobishi.
Maggie and I stepped out of the high-traffic area of the deck and found a semidry spot under one of the age- frozen cranes.
“How's Niki?” she said.
“Fine,” I said as a reflexive kick response.
“Will you tell her I'll be by soon? It's probably been a week since I went to see her. These barge murders have me all tied up.”
I told her flat out. “You gotta duck this case.”
“I can't do that. I've been working this for too long.”
“How many have there been?”
“Tonight's the thirteenth. This guy's a serial.”
Even more convinced, I said, “You've got to get out. The killer's an offworlder.”
“So?”
“Don't play stupid, Maggie. You know what can happen if you try to arrest an offworlder.”
She resisted looking at my bobbing hand. “Don't worry about that, Juno. When I find him, I'll bring a whole squad.”
