shoulders. Her face was lit with a smile so sharp that it stabbed straight through my heart. My Niki.
“Why didn't you… come last n-night?” Niki's mechanically timed voice shattered the perfect-Niki illusion. The Niki that stood before me was just a holo, a scanned image of Niki made years ago, long before her “accident.” The offworld telco that stored her image could beam this faux-Niki anywhere on Lagarto.
“I was working a job,” I stated as I imagined the dashing version of me that appeared in Niki's hospital room instead of my actual sleep-deprived and liquor-ravaged self.
She croaked out the words superslow. “What kind of…” I bit my lip as I waited for the next exhale of the respirator. “… of job?”
“Maggie asked me to look into a case of hers. I have to go out to the Zoo this morning so I don't miss visiting hours. After that, I'll be by, okay?”
“Don't b-bother.”
“I'll be there after lunch,” I said, rushing the words out of my mouth before I clicked off. I couldn't stand to listen to her anymore. Her voice always sounded like she was holding her breath as she talked. It sounded wrong, unnatural. I couldn't take the way the respirator's pumping would interrupt her mid-syllable with the hideous sound of air being accordioned into her lungs. The respirator never stopped, in and out, in and out, grating my nerves, grinding them down, in and out. And then there was that tube that ran into the hole in her chest, right there in her chest, they didn't even cover it with bandages, it was just there, out in the open, you could stick your fingers through it, right into her body…
My stomach burned like it was on fire. I downed another shot to douse the flames.
I needed to keep busy. I went to the front door and found the disc Maggie had slipped under the door. I carried it back into the living room and held it up for my home system to read. Everything was here, everything on the Juarez case. Maggie had been thorough. I menued over to the crime scene for starters.
My living room went bloody, and it wasn't my living room anymore. It had become a bedroom. It was furnished in the usual way-bed, end tables, dresser. It was the bed that was the focal point of the butchering. The linens were sliced into blood-drenched rags. Springs and stuffing erupted from charred gashes. The headboard and wall behind it were singed with haphazardly placed burn marks.
I stepped into the holo-bed, my legs disappearing beneath its gory surface. I took a close look at Margarita Juarez's corpse, at the dozens of slices that ran deep into her flesh. The wounds were cooked well-done and squirming with maggots. I looked up at the ceiling where there were patches of bubbled paint covered in a thin mist. The heat that ripped through those gashes was so intense that it flash-fried the flesh and kicked off enough steamed blood to melt the paint on the ceiling.
I moved through her body to the bed's edge and looked down at the body of Hector Juarez where he'd fallen onto the floor. Half his torso was under the bed, where he'd tried to crawl to safety. His legs were sliced and grilled. Bone showed through in a few places like the skewer in a leg kabob.
I moved to the foot of the bed, sliding left and right until the majority of scorch marks pointed at me. This was the spot; this was where she stood. She snuck up to this spot and flicked on her lase-whip. I was certain that the crackle of the whip would've woken them. They would've seen her face in the whip's glow. They died knowing it was their daughter who did this to them.
I menued out of the crime scene and navigated my way into the confession. The death scene disappeared, and my living room was back, but only for a second before it was replaced by a white room, so white that my living room furniture showed through the holographic white walls of the KOP interrogation room. I knew this room well. How many people had I brought into this very room, only to bring them back out bloodied and defeated?
In the middle of the room was a beat-up table. Sitting on opposite sides were Ian and the girl, Adela Juarez, soon-to-be convicted murderer. Her looks were pure Latin. No sign of the mixed blood all Lagartans carry in their veins. There was no kink to her hair, no slope to the eyes. I rotated the scene, looking at her eyes from different angles. I watched the way her eyes focused when she talked. I studied the way they wandered when she listened. She had dark eyes, made darker by the secrets she was keeping behind them. I recognized those eyes. They were Niki's eyes-not in shape, but in essence. They had that same haunted vacancy. Maggie was flat wrong. This girl did it, and she had good reason.
I consciously had to snuff thoughts of Niki before they overwhelmed me again. I selectively skipped ahead, watching the interrogation develop. Ian confronted her with his evidence: her fingerprint-covered lase-whip, her fallen-through lie of an alibi, no sign of a break-in; in fact, all the doors had been locked. Ian worked her smart and professional. He didn't fall for her schoolgirl routine when she tried out the pouty lips, the scrunched-up nose, and the baby talk. Then when she switched to the femme fatale, he didn't go for her smooth talk and subtle flirtation. She even tried out the girl next door with a pearly smile and a bouncy attitude, but Ian still stayed on task. “I know you did it,” he'd say. “There's no point in lying anymore. Just tell me why you did it, Adela? Did they deserve it?”
It took me an hour to surf through the ten hours worth of vid. Ian wore her down using her own hopelessness against her. In the end she broke. She spilled how her parents were forbidding her to see her boyfriend. They couldn't do that. She was seventeen. She could see whoever she wanted. She railed on about how her parents were going to split up, how she and her mother would have to move to another house when she didn't want to move, she shouldn't have to, this was her house, the house she grew up in. They were ruining everything!
Ian wasn't buying it entirely. He worked the abuse angles. How did they punish you when you did something wrong? Have you ever seen your father get angry? How about your mother? Ian moved the conversation in a sexual direction. Did you ever see your parents kiss? Do you think your father was handsome? Adela hung to her story. She was too ashamed to admit what her father did to her. It was all right there, in her eyes, Niki's eyes. Niki never admitted it either.
Ian wrapped it up. Let her keep her secrets. No point in forcing it out of her. He had her sign the papers. No sign of coercion, just straight-up police work.
The rain had calmed to barely a drizzle. The sky was brighter than normal. Still couldn't see the sun, but I could pick out the bright spot behind the clouds. The skiff puttered out from one of Koba's innumerable canals and began motoring across the Koba River. I looked over at one of Koba's bridges stretched over the water to our port side. The bridge's walkway was clogged with merchants pushing carts loaded high with rattan rugs, fern-frond hats, monitor-bone carvings, and countless other varieties of handmade schlock, the whole lot of them heading to the Old Town Square to take advantage of the semi-rain-free weather, all of them hoping to sell an item or two to one of the few tourists on planet.
Coming around the bend, I could see the walls surrounding the Zoo. Mexican scientists were the first to settle Lagarto. They'd come all the way from Earth to study our lizard-dominated ecology. Not since dinosaurs ruled the Earth had there been a planet where reptiles were the highest form of life. They set up what was, at the time, a first-class research facility on the banks of the Koba.
They loaded the facility full of biological specimens-no telling what they could learn from alien biology. After all, Lagarto had one of the most developed ecologies of all the discovered planets. They were going to cure the incurable and unlock the secrets of Darwinian evolution. The scientists dissected every species. They extracted oils from every organ. They injected earth-bacteria, instigated cancers, spliced genes, and created laboratories so full of reptilian mutants as to make Dr. Moreau proud. And in the end, what did they learn? Nada.
I took a hit off my flask, thinking not all was for naught. When they ran out of tequila, they started experimenting with the local fruit…
Scientists flocked to farming when the brandy boom hit. There were fortunes to be made. The research funding dwindled year after year, and then when it was finally axed altogether, the handful of die-hard scientists who were still doing research at the facility opened up all the cages as a sign of protest. Thousands of species of bug and lizard infested the buildings. That's when us Lagartans took to calling it the Zoo.
It sat abandoned for many years, until well after the economic collapse, when crime had begun reaching epidemic levels. The government needed more prison space and rather than build a new prison, they converted the research facility into a jail. People liked the idea of throwing criminals in the Zoo-poisonous lizards and nasty bugs crawling all over.
I slapped a five-hundred on the skiff's pilot, hopped onto the dock, and climbed the long staircase leading up the riverbank. The Zoo lay before me, its ten-meter walls topped with broken glass set in cement with the jagged edges up. On the corners stood tall towers crowned with glassed-in booths for the zookeepers. I remembered that Ian used to work here. After he'd failed the KOP physical on his first try, his father set him up as a guard until the
