“I guess I’d best clean that up,” she murmured to herself. “Somehow I doubt Lana is going to be back to do it herself, by the sound of things.”
As the trio of investigators moved through the arcade on the slidewalk toward the building that Lana Rounder had called home, a woman sitting at an outdoor café sipping a cappuccino with a male “companion” watched them move past, then started in surprise.
“Wait a second, sweetie,” she told the john. “I need to check on something real quick.”
“What? I haven’t done anything wrong,” the john said, then smirked. “Yet.”
“No, no, it’s not about you. Just wait a minute.”
“Okay, if you insist.”
“I do.”
The woman dropped into the blank-eyed expression of VR immersion.
“Stash! Stash, where are you! Come quick! I think I see him!” she called. Finally Gorecki appeared in the nondescript gray VR room in response to her emergency summons.
“All right, all right, don’t get y’r panties in a wad. Assuming you’re wearing any. I’m here,” he grumbled. “What the hell do you want, Jeannie? I thought I told you not to bother me at work. I don’t like it when my ex bugs me in the middle of something.”
“That cop you’re trying to find! I think I see him! He went right by me at the café!”
“Which one? Carter or Ashton?”
“I don’t know which one’s which! The young, good-looking guy!”
“Ashton. You sure?”
“No! That’s why I’m in full VR! You got his picture, right?”
“Aha. Yeah, lemme dig that out.”
The VR depicted Gorecki patting down his pockets; in reality, he was sifting through image files.
“Oh, here we go.”
He held up a photo; in reality, he pushed the image file to Jeannie, who studied it.
“Yeah! Yeah, that’s him, I’m ninety-nine percent sure! He’s mostly blond now, but the rest of it’s him!”
“Okay. You’re where, now?”
“The Baked Bean Café, in the Golden Street Arcade, over in Imperial Park East.”
“Moving up with your clientele, there, eh?”
“It pays,” Jeannie declared, offended. “Better than it used to, given the guys with no bank balance you used to send me.”
“Right. I bet it does.” Gorecki leered. “I’ll get somebody over there as fast as I can. Maybe we can catch the son of a bitch this time.”
But by the time Gorecki could get one of his hired guns to the location – given that most of them tended to frequent the less-affluent Imperial Park South district – Ashton and his two mentors were long gone.
Much to Jeannie’s chagrin, so was her impatient john.
At Rounder’s home, the investigative trio spread out and explored, periodically bagging and labeling this or that item to test for the presence of virulosin. Finally Ashton stopped, irritated.
“There has got to be an easier way,” he declared. “We’re just guessing, here.”
“What do you suggest, Nick?” Gorski wondered.
“I’m not completely sure yet, but are you two game for me trying something?” he asked.
Demetrius and Gorski looked at each other, then they both shrugged.
“You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, son,” Demetrius, the eldest of the three, said. “If you have a hunch about something, give it a shot.”
“All right. Hang on a few minutes, here,” Ashton said, and his face took on the blank expression of someone in VR.
“Dr. Botha?” Ashton asked, as the forensic physician from the Empress Adannaya III Hospital appeared in the virtual meeting room in avatar form, in response to his VR summons.
“Yes? Wait, you’re the young investigator that Stefan Gorski brought with him to the rapist case, right?” Botha asked, recognizing Ashton.
“That’s me. Officer Nick Ashton, Captain Investigator, IP – I mean, ICPD. I used to be IPD HQ, but I…didn’t like it over there.”
“Good to see you again, and I…understand. I take it, you have a question about something?”
“I do. Were you around as a forensic physician when the Sandman serial killer operated?”
“I sure was. That was a scary time.” Botha’s avatar stopped dead, and stared at Ashton’s avatar in horror. “Oh shit. Don’t tell me, he’s back?”
“That, or it’s a copycat,” Ashton noted. “And given it’s the exact same modus operandi, and we never really figured it out the first time...”
“Randi ka choda,” the doctor cursed in a pithy tone.
“I’m not sure what that means,” Ashton said in a bleakly humorous tone, “but judging by the way it sounds, I think I agree with you.”
Botha let out a wry bark of laughter.
“It would be the rough equivalent of ‘son of a bitch,’” he translated. “What can I do to help?”
“From what my mentors are telling me, apparently the means of death is infection of healthy people by a specialized virulosin,” Ashton explained.
“Yes, that is apparently the case,” Botha confirmed. “I worked on that case, back when the Sandman first appeared – I tended one of the victims, trying desperately to find a way to stop the cascade – and was also involved in the forensics. We found a virulosin in the victims, targeted to Griggs-Andersen Syndrome, where the body’s organs are failing due to – well, you don’t care about that. Suffice it that, if the G.A.S.-targeted virulosin is consumed by a healthy person, it causes the reverse – it makes the organs fail in sequence, in a cascade that is, so far, impossible to stop, and fairly swift but not immediate.”
Ashton pondered that.
“So...once it’s been introduced into the body, the victim is gonna die?”
“Yes. The victim will die. We never found a way to stop it, though I’m sure the research is ongoing.”
“You said consumed. What’s the usual means of introduction
