Halting State

way home? Verity’s called a facial over the MacDonald business, and he wants your input.”

Typical, you think, but you swallow it: She’s the skipper, and you’ve got to admit, this business is turning into a real pile of shit. With blood on the carpet and a programmer who went missing right about the time his employer reported a multi-million-euro hit, things are not looking good; the pressure is going to be telling on Liz from Verity, if not the chief. It’s still just a missing person case leg-humping a white-collar fraud, but with the amount of money at stake (and the Sexy! New! Technology! angle), there’s going to be Media Attention landing on your collective ass real soon now, if it hasn’t already, and the chief constable takes a dim view of media whores who don’t deliver. So you drive over to Meadowplace Road and mooch into the conference room with its tatty wallpaper and ancient flickering fluorescent lights, by way of the coffee machine on the second floor.

Liz is sitting at the front of the table with an expression like someone peed in her miso soup. Jimmy the X- Ray Specs and Roger the Ram are gassing about the morning’s breaking and entering, while a whole bunch of heavy SOCOs are nattering over their notes and a couple more sergeants from X Division are trailing you in. One of them you recognize as one of the stand-offish suits who was up at the bunker the other morning. All told you’re out on a limb: You’re not normally involved in this kind of incident meeting, and indeed you’re one of only a couple of uniforms in the bunch. “Alright, folks, let’s get started,” Liz calls, just as the door opens and another suit walks in. “Sir, we were just getting started. Would you like a chair, or…?”

“No, you carry on,” says Chief Superintendent Verity, and you cringe slightly: He’s got a voice like a rat-tail rasp, and rumour says he’s not long for the shop, the lung cancer’s not responding to treatment very well. For him to have dragged himself out to this session suggests that arses are being well and truly kicked all the way up to the top in officer country, if not the Justice Ministry. Trust that bastard Hackman to have friends in Holyrood.

“Alright, everyone. I assume you all know what this is about. We started off with a white-collar crime, a CMA special, last Thursday at Hayek Associates over in Granton. A whole bunch of money went missing. We got the call by mistake—one of their managers panicked and dialled 211 instead of trying to shovel things under the rug, and I think there’s a story in that. But anyway, on Friday we discovered a member of staff wasn’t answering the phone. As of this morning, things get slightly worse insofar as we now have a missing person on our hands, with a bunch of evidence that points to it being murder: His flat’s been done over, there’re signs of a struggle, and I believe Bill has got something to tell us about his movements. Take it away, Bill.”

Bill stands up, shuffling his tablet and a bunch of papers in a conference portfolio. He’s one of the suits from the woodshed the other day: fortysomething, salt-and-pepper moustache, dour puss with lips like he’s bitten a lime expecting nothing better. “Aye, well. The subject, one Nigel MacDonald, has no previous. He came to our attention in the course of the ongoing investigation at Hayek Associates, who employ him as a programmer.” Which is a load of bollocks, if you’re to believe what Wayne and the others are pointedly not saying: It’s like describing a brain surgeon as a first-aider. But the evidence is there in cold figures on their payroll, and the way everyone at Hayek tenses up and goes close-mouthed when you ask how they’re going to fill his boots. “Mr. MacDonald works from home an awful lot, and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since last Wednesday. By which I mean nobody’s seen email or spoken to him on the phone.”

Bill unfolds a fat swatch of paper from his portfolio. “I ran a query through NCIS”—the National Criminal Information System, not yet disentangled from the English one, even after eight years of IT-mediated divorce proceedings—“and then when that came back empty, I asked for a banking trace. That’s empty, too. He hasna spent a cent since Wednesday except for direct debits on his bank account. So I applied to NIR for a transaction log. Mr. MacDonald hasna presented his ID card to an Authorized Agency”—one with a direct line to the National Identity Register—“in more than three years. In fact, he hasna ever been stopped and checked. He did use it to open bank and credit accounts when it was issued, and he used it to apply for the mortgage on his hoose, but aside from that he’s the regular Invisible Man. He doesna drive a car or own a bus pass, so there’s nothing to be done aboot his movements. I havena pulled the street cameras yet, but if we have tae do it, I wouldna bet on his mug showing up.” He stepped down from the podium, an expression of disgust on his face.

“Thank you, Bill,” Liz says drily. “Scene of Crime next. Dr. Tweed?”

The “doctor” isn’t medical; Tweed is a lab monster with a Ph.D. and a perpetual air of mild amusement. Inevitably, he wears a sports jacket in the offending fabric, complete with corduroy elbow patches. And unlike Bill, he feels no need to stand up or parade around the front of the room. “I’m glad you called me for this one, it makes a nice change from the usual ned domestics turned messy.” He fiddles for a moment with his laptop, then you see the entire back wall of the conference room vanish into CopSpace, replaced by a walk-through ludium—the entire scene digitized and uploaded into virtual reality.

“Let’s start here, in the front hall. When the ram team laid the door down, they covered the dust and print evidence from the last people to traverse the hall. When the initial survey was over, Marge and Hal from Fettes Row came in and took an impression in aerogel foam. There’s lots of dust there, and a couple of partials, but the most recent footprints are useless because whoever left them was using disposable polythene overshoes with some kind of vascular lining. Just like Marge and Hal, in fact.”

You sit up and start paying real attention. You had the idea that MacDonald and his friends were a wee bit paranoid, but this is right out of order.

“It’s the same throughout the flat. It’s been turned over by professionals. Mr. MacDonald appears to have had a serious gadget habit, not to mention some apparatus on the roof that I’ll get to shortly, and the hardware is still there. But every last piece of personal memorabilia has been removed. The place is unnaturally clean, except for the kitchen. There’s no food apart from the fridge, for example. No personal items: no photographs, no paintings or posters, no books or magazines or newspapers, no toothpaste or painkillers in the bathroom cabinet, no nail clippers, no toilet paper. Someone took the time to vacuum behind the washing machine. If I didn’t know better, I’d say nobody lived there at all, except for the kitchen. Basically, the crime scene has been thoroughly sanitized by somebody with more than a passing knowledge of forensics.”

You glance sideways to see how the others are taking it. Doubtless this is old news to Liz and explains her headache, but the chief is looking very down in the dumps, and no mistake. And then Dr. Tweed mouses over to the kitchen and clips through the door to the scene beyond.

“This is the kitchen. It’s been sanitized, too, and I’d be very surprised if it’s been used for its notional purpose in the past couple of years. Real kitchens are lovely places, they can tell us a lot. From the type of grease and particulates retained in the extractor hood over the cooker, to the foodstuffs in the refrigerator, and the contents of the bin, they can be a gold mine. A surprising number of burglars help themselves to a snack on their way through, so it always pays to check the rubbish…but anyway. The fridge is, um, see for yourselves.” The door on the virtual refrigerator blinks magically open to reveal a pristine interior. “It’s been cleaned out. This is how we found it. There are no contents; the brown stain on the side is a povidone iodine hospital scrub. Meanwhile, over here we have a patch on the work-top where you’ll see there’s a faint outline—matches a microwave oven. Why the hell anyone would leave the electronics in the living room but take the microwave oven is, well, your guess is as good as mine. But that’s what they did: They scrubbed the fridge out and lifted the microwave. Maybe they’d been using it for toasting RFID tags or something. But the whole thing’s been thoroughly sanitized.”

“Sanitized?” Verity explodes. “Are you telling us you can’t get anything?”

“Yes, I am—at least, so far.” Tweed nods like a dashboard ornament. He starts counting off fingers. “There are no human traces in the place that haven’t been thoroughly cleaned or scrambled. When the LCN results came back, it was a smeared mess—we got a DNA sample alright, one from about three hundred people in parallel.”

“What else doesn’t fit?” asks Liz.

Tweed shrugs. “The bedding has been stripped down. I lifted debris samples on the mattress debris, but that’s been contaminated, too.”

Verity snorted. “How do you contaminate DNA evidence?”

“We work with really tiny samples, so you—the bad guys—just give us too much evidence. Best bet is whoever sanitized the flat spent a couple of hours on the top deck of a bus with a small vacuum cleaner. We all shed skin particles like mad wherever we go. Blast dust from a bus seat cushion all over a crime scene, and it’s like smearing over a fingerprint on a glass by passing it around the entire population of a night-club—all I can lift from it is a horrible mess.”

“Bah.” Verity crosses his arms. “What else?”