DeathWeb (Fox Meridian Book 3) (21 page)

‘I’ll talk to her, let you know if she opens up.’

‘Right. I’ll make arrangements and send you access details for the data you want. You want medical records on Sandy?’

‘Let’s see all three of them, though I’m betting Malcolm’s as healthy as a horse.’

~~~

Trudy Shane was tall, slim, and pretty with long, blonde hair and blue eyes. She looked like she should be a hit with the boys, except that she also looked quiet and her bedroom contained more bookshelves than walls. Shelves with actual printed books on them, which suggested a dedication to reading. Well, good, Fox thought, as she settled onto a small desk chair: not every pretty girl should want the attention of boys, but it went against the grain in a place like this.

Trudy sat on the bed, legs crossed in front of her. Her expression suggested that she did not want to be there, but her mother had told her that she should try to help, so… ‘I spoke to Detective Rogers. I told him I didn’t know where Sandy went.’

‘I know. I wouldn’t necessarily expect you to tell me if you did.’

‘Well… Of course I would. I mean, she’s missing and… and her mother’s worried. So am I. I mean, everyone’s worried. Nicky’s sick…’ She trailed off.

‘Nicky?’

‘My brother, Nicholas.’

‘Ah. He liked Sandy?’

‘Uh…’

‘Trudy, I’m not a cop. No one gets in trouble from what I find out. No one gets to hear about it unless I have a good reason to tell them and… I don’t really have a good reason to tell Mal Bateson about anything.’

Trudy’s eyes widened. ‘No one knows about–’ This time the cut-off was sharp and her cheeks coloured. ‘I mean…’

‘More people know than you think, than Sandy thought. A lot of people don’t want to see, but they know. That kind of thing makes my blood boil, but it’s the way things are. It won’t change unless someone stands up to him. I don’t expect you to, but I will if I can find a reason to do it. What happened with your brother?’

‘He’s… He’s had a thing for Sandy for ages. Finally plucked up the courage to ask her out, and she went with him a couple of times. Not, like, sex, you know? The movies. I’d cover for her, say she was with me. I mean, we’d go places and Mister Bateson was okay with that as long as she was back home by ten.’

‘Ten? My parents were fairly strict at your age and I could stay out until eleven.’

‘Yeah… Mister Bateson’s… very strict. Third date they were five minutes late getting back. We made up a quick excuse about missing a bus, but the next morning Sandy had a black eye she was trying to cover up and she told Nicky she couldn’t see him anymore. She wasn’t allowed out at all for three months, but…’

‘Go on, Trudy. Everything helps.’

‘Well, she said she’d met someone. She never said who he was, or where she met him. Seemed to me it was someone at the market though, because she really looked forward to Wednesdays.’

‘Someone at the market? Right. Did you see her the day she vanished?’

‘No. Saw her the day before. She wasn’t feeling too good. Said she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her, but she had fresh bruises. She said… She said she couldn’t take it anymore.’

‘Couldn’t take what?’

Trudy shook her head. ‘The beatings? I thought she was going to kill herself, talked to her for two hours. I said, “It’s Wednesday tomorrow. You’re always happy on Wednesdays.” She just kind of nodded. You don’t think she did? Went and hid somewhere and… and did it?’

‘People don’t kill themselves like that as a rule. I think Sandy’s still alive somewhere and I’m going to find her. And what happens after that… Well, we’ll see.’

‘If you bring her back here, he’ll kill her.’

‘That he won’t do, Trudy. I’ll see to that.’

~~~

With the forensics robots collected and returned to Pythia for data collection, Fox changed her slacks for running shorts and her vaguely sensible, if heeled, shoes for nothing, and went down to the workshop to collect her thoughts and get the evidence analysed.

‘We have the data from Detective Rogers,’ Kit informed her as she walked in to where Pythia’s huge server system was waiting, with Kit’s avatar beside it.

‘All right. Pythia, run the analysis on the forensics. Kit, could you upload into one of Pythia’s processors? I’d like you to go through the camera feeds looking for Sandy and what she was up to. Pythia can join you once the analysis is done, assuming you haven’t finished.’

‘I can do that, Fox,’ Kit replied. ‘Is there some reason you want me to upload rather than breaking off a copy?’

‘Yes. I’m going to go through the medical records and then start on Sandy’s computer. I don’t know what’s on that, but if it’s got half of what I think might be there, I’d prefer it if you were not exposed to it without warning. I know that sounds patronising–’

‘I think it sounds sweet and protective, but I will need to face unpleasant things at some point.’

‘I know, and you already have and you coped well. This is just…
I
don’t want to look at this, Kit, but someone has to and I’m the senior partner here. It falls to me. I’ll tell you what I find and I’ll let you look at it if I think it’s necessary, but this is how it’s going to be.’

Kit gave a nod. ‘Just remember that I am here to talk to if you need it afterwards.’

Fox’s smile was bleak. ‘That I may well do. I’m going to go back in the house. I think lying down might be a good idea for this one.’

~~~

By the middle of the afternoon, Marie was feeling like a human. Not only that, but a human who did not wish for the ground to open up and swallow her. Sam had gone out after lunch for an engagement and Marie had had some proper time to adjust to not having slept with him. With her body a little stiff and feeling sluggish still, she decided that a run would be a remarkably good idea.

It took a while. First was selecting her wardrobe since she needed to fabricate a new running set. She eventually went with one of her favoured ‘serious’ designs. That meant running shorts rather than something tighter, and a good, supportive athletics bra-top, all in neon yellow with pink trim. The bra had ‘OTT’ printed on it, because she felt she had gone over the top in no small fashion that morning so she might as well continue.

While that was working through the fabricator, and Marie gave thanks to Jackson Martins that she could just step through into the utility room to collect the result, Marie selected her inspirational music for the run on LifeBeats and contemplated making a new playlist. She had eighteen running playlists, ‘Running1’ through ‘Running19,’ and she would think about that error later, and a new one was
not
needed, oh no it wasn’t.

‘You’re delaying, Marie,’ she told herself. ‘Get on with it.’

She picked list fifteen, and discovered that sixteen was missing, which explained
that
, and moved on to LifeFit. She had five saved runs, but one of those was in Sioux Falls, the first she had ever saved, and she could not bring herself to delete it just yet even if she was never going back. She flicked between one of two Central Park routes and the Battery, and decided on the latter, and then she walked through and collected her fresh kit.

Adding candy-pink running shoes, she stretched a little in her lounge and then started for the door. ‘Belle, if Sam gets back before I do, I’m out running.’

‘Noted, Marie. Sam’s engagement is due to keep him away until early evening. I shall follow your progress on LifeFit.’

‘My guardian angel,’ Marie replied, flashing a grin.

LifeFit, Marie mused as she jogged to the maglev, was a great little application. There had been a few complaints about security when it first launched, especially in the virtual gym feature which let you VR into an exercise area with other, likeminded, solo fitness enthusiasts. Men, and some women, had joined just to watch women pumping weights in clinging outfits. There had been a little scandal about licensed prostitutes of both sexes picking up clients through the service. The privacy settings had been tightened up and the complaints had gone away, though Marie still thought it felt like a sweaty speed dating system half the time and only used it when she was feeling at her most exhibitionist. The running system had been changed so that live tracking was only available to designated friends, and the app made completed times and routes available
after
you got home.

So, Belle was a registered agent of some sort, Marie was not sure how that worked, but it did, and so she was allowed to follow Marie’s progress as she ran. Marie had added Fox and Sam to the list, though she was fairly sure that neither actually used LifeFit. Actually, Sam kept his profile discreet, but up to date for professional reasons, but Fox
badly
needed to do something about hers. Some people came to LifeWeb, flirted with it a little, and then dropped it, and that seemed to be what Fox had done. She was still listed as living in Topeka! There was nothing on there about her career, no relationship data aside from incoming links. Marie
very
rarely bothered using LifeRight, but she had done so recently to delegate her vote to Fox and LifeWeb did have a lot of activity for Fox in that domain, all of it in the last couple of months and determined from external links rather than because Fox had used LifeRight herself. Marie figured that Kit handled that kind of thing for Fox. Fox was a little like a LifeWeb neutron star: you could mostly tell she existed because of the effect she had on bodies around her. Black hole was being a little extreme since there was something there if you looked closely, but you had to know where to look.

Amused by her analogy, Marie got off the train at the Battery Gardens station and jogged down the slideway to street level. She flicked up her LifeFit window, checked her route, indicated she was starting, and set off at a steady pace to get her muscles worked in. One slow lap up around Castle Clinton and back, and then she would pick up the pace and head all the way up to the Esplanade. She had done this run almost every day when she had been staying in Fox’s apartment.

Thought of that brought her embarrassment over Sam back into sharp clarity. To think she had thought that she had cheated on Fox. To think that Sam
would have
betrayed Fox like that! Had he really said she had a fine body? She shook her head and focused on the beat of her feet and the music piping through her head, and the man who sat on a bench at the side of the path, his eyes following her as she ran, went entirely unnoticed.

Topeka Agri-Zone.

Detective Rogers had added a bonus: Malcolm Bateson had a criminal record and Rogers had dropped the details over for Fox to read. Not that it was anything really major, and it was old. He had been fined over an assault charge when he was nineteen. There were several sealed records noted from before then and a couple of DUIs after. The last of those was five years old. The assault had resulted in a fine instead of prison time because there had been a lack of clarity over exactly who had started the fight. To Fox, it looked like the arresting officers had been quite sure, but the lawyers had sprinkled in enough doubt and the earlier, juvenile, arrests had not been considered. Whatever, Bateson had avoided that kind of trouble thereafter, but then he had married young and got a wife to beat on in private.

Or that was the theory until Fox went through the medical records and found that Bateson’s was not quite as uninteresting as she had thought. He had, over the years, been treated for a broken nose more than once, cracked ribs, a broken arm… All put down to accidents, no doubt, but they could also be explained by fights he had, likely, not come out on top of.

Crystal and Sandy were not lucky people either. Crystal had walked into a few more doors, being treated for a cracked cheekbone twice, a broken arm once. Sandy had had her arm dislocated at the shoulder when she was four, and had suffered a broken wrist when she was eight. At ten, she had ‘fallen down the stairs,’ which was an amazing feat in a single-storey house but no one had checked, and suffered a broken arm, bruised ribs, and concussion. But Fox had to admit that family services were not totally to blame for the misses since the list was not as bad as expected. Bateson had learned to be careful. Soft tissue injuries hurt like Hell and did not need hospital treatment. Maybe the stairs incident had raised a few questions and he had got worried. He had stopped picking fights in public after the assault arrest, so maybe he had started pulling his blows some after he realised he might be found out. He was cleverer than Fox had thought, which was worrying.

By the time Fox had been through those records, the cracking software she had set to work on Sandy’s PC had done its job. The report said that the unit had been voiceprint secured, but that the default admin password had never been changed allowing direct access that way. It was the kind of rookie mistake people made when they did not know much about computers and how to use them, and Fox figured Malcolm kept a careful watch on Sandy’s computer time. Schoolwork only, none of that dirty, perverted internet socialising. Nothing where she might tell someone about him in a place he could not monitor.

With Kit working on Pythia’s server, Fox was reduced to the basic VR interface of her implant, which was tedious. You got used to working with an AI, a proper one, not the braindead baseline OS. Even Fox’s old VA had been able to interpret normal English and do what you wanted instead of what the letter of your sentence said. Kit was an absolute angel at doing the right thing no matter how Fox asked for it. Now she had to give precise commands, or resort to manual input. So it took her a couple of minutes to get her head back around doing things the old way, but soon she was looking through the contents of Sandy’s computer.

There was not as much as she had expected and the reason became clear when she found a note on the machine from Nicky Shane which had clearly been put there by him. He had given her his old portable when he had got an upgrade. The date suggested that Sandy had had it for thirteen months. With no VR implant or access to a wearable of any kind, Sandy had had to use the unit’s voice controls for more or less everything. Oh, you could type on the little touchscreen, but you didn’t unless you wanted to suffer serious RSI. There was a diary of sorts on there, but it was all audio recordings. Lying back on the bed in the room her mother had assigned her, the same room she had had as a child, Fox opened the first of the files.