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CHAPTER 3

The first order of business was figuring out what Cassandra Carmichael was doing before she disappeared. I couldn’t yet rule out the possibility that she had been intimidated into fleeing off-world, kidnapped, or even murdered. Things like that do happen in Delta City, no matter how much the media and the Chamber of Commerce try to deny it. I was tactful in how I relayed all this to my client, of course. The poor woman was under enough stress without me giving her the idea that it was hopeless. Besides, I wasn’t convinced that it was hopeless, at least not yet. I didn’t have enough information to even take a guess.

It seemed to me that the best place to start was Cassandra’s apartment. Dagny Blake had tried and failed to get the building super to let her in, but in my business you develop a talent for getting where you aren’t necessarily supposed to be. I don’t usually involve my clients in my work, but in this case, I figured that having her along might be useful, especially in going through her sister’s things. She was eager to help. For a lot of people, just having something to do can help them work through a difficult situation. It gives them something to focus on so they don’t wallow in their own anxiety.

Dagny lived in a huge residential building on the South Side called Starlight Tower. The 150-story apartment complex was over a hundred years old and had definitely seen better days. The South Side used to be the nice part of town, years back. These days it’s the sort of place where it’s best if you go armed. Hell, even SecFor patrol in pairs there, and usually heavily armed.

The parking garage below the building was a cavernous hole bored into the ground, six levels deep, with enough space for thousands of cars. Finding a place to park was easy; the garage was barely half full. A lot of the people who lived in places like Starlight Tower couldn’t necessarily afford a vehicle of their own and, truth be told, you didn’t really need one to get around most parts of the city.

The apartments in Starlight Tower were arranged in a box shape around a huge open space in the middle. At street level there was a big indoor plaza, with a bustling market full of cheap places to eat and discount retail merchants. Above that, for another 149 floors, there was nothing except the occasional walkway bridging the gap across the center of the structure. At the very top there was a big square of gray daylight, visible through a dirty skylight half the size of a football field. Spend too much time staring up and the view might give you vertigo.

I found a working elevator, made my way up to the forty-fourth floor, and walked around to Dagny’s apartment. The door slid open immediately after I hit the ringer.

“You have any trouble finding the place?” Dagny asked, stepping out of her apartment. Her clothes weren’t nearly as eye-catching as they had been the day before. Instead of a slinky little dress she wore tight black pants, what looked like combat boots with wedge heels, a blue blouse with a stand-up collar, and a black leather jacket. Her hair was tied back and if she was wearing makeup it wasn’t much. She had a small sling bag hanging over her right shoulder.

“The building or your apartment?”

“Either, I guess.”

“No trouble at all,” I said.

“You didn’t have to come all the way up here,” she said as we made our way to the elevator. “It would have been enough to send me a message. I could have met you down in the parking garage.”

“I guess I’m old-fashioned,” I said as the elevator doors opened. I paused for a moment and let Dagny go in first. “The way I was raised, if you’re picking someone up you meet them at the door.”

Dagny smiled slyly. “This is not a date, Mr. Novak.”

I grinned back at her. “Of course not, Ms. Blake, I would never be so unprofessional. I’m just a creature of habit.” The elevator we were in didn’t go directly to the garage, for security purposes. We had to get out, cross the ground-floor plaza, and use an entirely different set of elevators to take us down to the underground parking garage.

The doors opened to the first sublevel of the garage where I had left my car. “I hate this place,” Dagny said as we stepped out of the elevator. “Building security doesn’t come down here very often. There are supposed to be cameras but they get destroyed as fast as they can replace them.”

“You don’t park down here?” On heightened alert, I scanned my surroundings as we walked to my car. I really needed to get the auto-navigation fixed.

“Oh, I don’t have a car,” she confessed. “I walk down the street to the monorail station when I need to get across town. It’s only a couple blocks. Sometimes I take an auto-taxi.”

It seemed like Dagny was struggling financially. That was none of my business, but it did make me ask myself once again how she’d come up with the money to hire me. My first instinct was to pry a little bit, see if I could get her to tell me, but I wondered if maybe it would be better if I didn’t know.

Turning a corner in the massive garage, I spotted a group of young men coming toward us. There were five of them and they looked like a bunch of hoods. As a matter of fact, with their shabby clothes, luminescent tattoos, and wild hairstyles, they didn’t look too different from the street rats that used to try and push us around on my old block, when I was a kid. Some things never change.

They were all wearing respirator masks, too. They’re not uncommon in Delta City. Most immigrants from off-world wear them until they can be fully inoculated against Kellerman’s Syndrome, and inoculation is only about ninety percent effective at the best of times. It doesn’t take much exposure to the spores from the native slime molds to get sick, and despite the best efforts of the city sanitation department, the purple goop can be found all over the city. Many people take precautions, especially if they live or work near or below street level. You can wear a mask and nobody will look twice at you. As a bonus, it can help conceal your identity from facial recognition software.

They approached, wolf-whistling and cat-calling at Dagny, and my muscles tensed. Maybe they were just a bunch of all-talk punks, maybe they’d pull a gun, you could never tell. The one who seemed like the leader of the group circled around us, looking my client up and down like a piece of meat. “Daaamn, girl, you fine,” he said, his voice distorted by the mask. He was tall and wiry. His skin was so pale he looked sickly, made all the more noticeable by the glowing tattoos on his arms and neck. “What are you doing with this fucking pile?” he asked, gesturing at me. “You should come party with us.”

The punk and his friends had spread out a little to where they were between us and my car. I kept my cool but my heart was pounding. They were positioning themselves to jump us at close range. The posturing and shit-talking was just a distraction technique. Experience told me things were about to go sideways. One of the thugs, a heavyset fellow with a bald head and a thick neck, took a step toward me. His right hand was in the pocket of the bright red jacket he wore.

“That’s close enough, friend,” I said levelly, pulling my own piece out from under my jacket. The mook froze in place, his eyes wide, as he looked down the barrel of my .44-caliber revolver. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Dagny had pulled a gun herself and had it pointed at the mouthy punk who had been sizing her up. “I suggest you boys step aside so we can be on our way.”

The thugs, hands raised, slowly backed off. “We were just fucking with you,” the mouthy one said, but he kept backing up. I kept my weapon leveled at them as Dagny and I backed away. I lowered it, but kept it in my hand, as we turned and headed for my car. The punks watched us for a bit but soon wandered off.

Once we were safely in my car, behind locked doors and armored glass, I carefully re-holstered my gun. Dagny did the same, sticking the small pistol she had pulled back into her jacket pocket. “That was intense,” she said, staring straight ahead. Her hands were shaking a little bit, probably from the adrenaline dump.

“This is why I wear this every day,” I said, tapping the armor vest under my jacket. “You did good back there. Kept your head in what could have been a life-and-death situation.”

She looked over at me and forced herself to smile. “I’m no shrinking violet. I’m not one of your uptown clients, some jealous housewife wondering if her executive husband is seeing another woman on the side.” She gestured at the poorly lit parking garage beyond the window. “This is the world I live in.”

“Fair enough,” I said with a nod. “I’m not surprised you can handle yourself. I’m not too surprised that you’re carrying that piece, either.”

“Oh? Why is that, Mr. Novak?”

“Easy.”

“What?”

“Please, call me Easy. Mr. Novak is my father. My mother was the only one who ever called me Ezekiel. Everyone else called me E-Z, hence the nickname.”

“Okay then, Easy it is. You can call me Dagny, by the way. I’m no stranger to this sort of stuff, unfortunately. It comes with the territory if you live around here. Also, you didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?”

“I asked you why you weren’t surprised that I’m carrying a gun.”

“Oh, right. I could tell from the moment you walked into my office that you weren’t one of my ‘uptown clients,’ as you put it, or some jealous housewife. The fancy clothes were a good distraction but I could tell from the way you carried yourself, and from that scar on your face, that you’ve lived a more interesting life than all that.”

“‘Interesting’ is certainly one way to put it,” Dagny said. “Speaking of guns, what’s the deal with that cannon you’re packing?”

“Oh this?” I asked, tapping the butt of the gun under my right arm. “It’s a cannon, alright, a Sam Houston Mark-Four-pattern Combat Dragoon, .44LRM caliber.” The design came from the Republic of Texas back on Earth. It’s a seven-shot revolver with a quick-change cylinder for fast reloads. Push the lever with your thumb and the old cylinder is ejected upward. Slap a new one in and you’re ready to go. It has a bright flashlight and laser sight in the housing under the barrel and, on top, a small holographic sight for quick and precise aiming. It doesn’t hold a lot of rounds but it sure packs a wallop. Even the clankers take notice when you pull one of these out—a couple .44 armor-piercing, high-explosive slugs will put down even the most amped-up cyborg. “Me and this gun go way back. It was given to me when I got home from the war.”

She raised an eyebrow at that. “You served?”

“I did. Third Mechanized Infantry Brigade, Commonwealth Defense Force, Combined Joint Task Force 19, Terran Confederate Expeditionary Forces. I fought on Harvest and was there for the invasion of 220 Colfax-B.” I paused for a moment. “This gun belonged to my squad leader, Staff Sergeant Victor Redgrave. He, ah, bequeathed it to me years ago. I’ve carried it everywhere since.”

“Oh. Oh, I see,” Dagny said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up anything like that.”

“Ah, it’s alright,” I said with a smile. “It’s been a long time since I’ve told anyone about it, is all.”

“We should get out of here,” she said after a moment. “Those goons might get some friends and come back.”

“Sounds good to me.” I started my car’s quiet electric motor and pulled out of the parking space.


The drive across town was uneventful and mostly quiet. Dagny scrolled on her handheld and didn’t say much for most of the drive. Her sister Cassandra’s apartment was closer to my place than hers, over on the East Side. Apparently the missing sibling was doing alright for herself, which no surprise given where she worked. She had an apartment in Residential Tower 61, which was only a few miles from where I lived.

RT61 was nearly identical in layout to my building, from the subterranean parking garage to the street-level marketplace to the twelfth-floor monorail station. The main difference was that this building was much nicer than mine, the apartments were bigger, and it cost more to live there. Where RT77 was a bland monolith of tan ceramicrete with some brown accents, RT61 was painted bright red and white. The interior color scheme was similarly colorful but the building superintendent’s office was in the same place on the ground floor.

“What are you going to do?” Dagny asked. “I already tried talking to them and they wouldn’t let me into her apartment.”

“I know, but sometimes flashing my credentials opens doors for me. If this doesn’t work we’ll come up with a different plan. That’s what the bag is for,” I said, indicating the small pack I had slung over my shoulder. “Just follow my lead when we get in there. What was her apartment number?”

“Eighty-eight-dash-oh-ninety-one. Apartment ninety-one on the eighty-eighth floor.”

“Got it.”

The superintendent’s office was somewhere behind a heavy security door. Just like in my building, there was a small, sparsely decorated waiting room with bland music playing softly over a speaker. Set in one wall was the service counter. Behind a thick pane of armored glass, a bored-looking attendant sat in a chair and played with his handheld. He set it down when we approached but didn’t stand up.

“Can I help you?” he asked, pushing a button that activated a two-way speaker so we could hear him through the glass.

I leaned down so that my mouth was closer to the speaker embedded in the glass. “We need access to apartment eighty-eight-oh-ninety-one. I’m a detective conducting a missing person investigation.”

“You SecFor? I need to see your warrant.”

“No,” I said, pulling out my credentials. “Private investigator. That apartment belongs to one Cassandra Carmichael, correct?”

The attendant looked at his computer screen for a moment and tapped a few keys. “I, uh, I’m not supposed to disclose that. I can’t let you in, either.”

“Listen, friend, this is serious. Cassandra Carmichael has gone missing. This woman here is her sister. We just need to see if we can figure out what happened to her. You can escort us if you want, we’re not going to ransack the place or steal anything. Can’t you help us?” I held up my credentials. Below the identification plate, partially tucked into a pocket, was $250 in crisp blue-and-silver bills.

“I . . . uh . . . can I get you to put your ID into the tray, please? I need to verify that it’s legit.”

“Sure thing.” Doing as he asked, I closed my credential wallet and placed it in the tray. It slid through to the attendant, who picked it up and looked up at me. “I just need to check this real quick. I’ll be right back.” He stepped away from the counter and was out of sight.

“What did you do?” Dagny asked in a loud whisper.

“I’ll explain outside.”

Before she could press the issue the attendant returned. He placed my credential wallet and a plastic key into the tray and slid them through. “Everything checks out,” he said, sitting back down in his chair. “This key will get you into apartment eighty-eight-oh-ninety-one. It’s only coded for the next hour so this is a onetime thing. There are security cameras monitoring the hallway.”

I nodded at the young man. “You know who I am. I assure you, this is all on the up and up. Thank you for your help.” I paused. “Say, has anyone else been in there recently?”

“Not that I know of,” the kid said. “I’m only here a couple days a week.” He looked at his computer screen, his right hand on the scroller. “Nothing’s been logged. We don’t keep track of when residents enter or leave their apartments—privacy laws and all that. But none of our people have entered the apartment in months. We haven’t even had a maintenance robot go in. Huh. That’s weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“The security camera covering that section of the corridor isn’t working. What the hell? How come nobody logged this? The diagnostics should have caught it and sent out a service request automatically.”

“You didn’t notice that a camera wasn’t working until just now?”

“Mister, there are a thousand cameras in this building and I’ve only got two eyes. If the system doesn’t catch it, it might take us a while to realize there’s a fault. Besides, we have armed security on the premises at all times. The cameras are just there for evidence purposes.”

“Are the rent and utilities for the apartment still current? Has anything been shut off for nonpayment?”

The kid looked at his screen for a moment. “Uh . . . no. Her lease payment for the next quarter just cleared two days ago. Everything has been paid on time.”

“Interesting. Thanks for your help. We won’t be too long.” I looked at Dagny. “Come on, let’s go see what we can find out.”

To my satisfaction, the key worked as the superintendent said it would. When you try to bribe your way into places there’s always the chance that they’ll take your money and not uphold their end of the bargain. You’ve got to learn to read people, to get a good feel for who will be good to his word and who will screw you over. Being too trusting means you’ll end up paying the Stupid Tax and have nothing to show for it.

The apartment was dark when we walked in. The lights in the front room automatically came on and two things became obvious: First, it was clear that Cassandra hadn’t been home in some time. There was a domestic cleaning robot parked at a power station in one corner, but nothing in the apartment looked like it had been recently used.

Second, the place had been searched already. Every cabinet, drawer, and closet had been opened, their contents spilled onto the floor.

“Oh my God,” Dagny said.

“Looks like someone beat us to it,” I said.

“But the door was still locked.”

“Electronic residential door locks aren’t hard to beat if you have the right tools and know-how. The disabled camera, the clean entry . . . this wasn’t some street thug like those boys back in your parking garage.”

She shook her head slowly. “Oh, Cassie, what did you get yourself into?”

“I know this is tough. Normally I wouldn’t have a client along on an investigation like this, but you know her best. Besides, I’m pretty sure that fellow downstairs wouldn’t have let me in without you here, even with the two-fifty I slipped him.”

She nodded her head. “I know. I guess I’m just afraid that I’ll get my hopes up only to have them dashed later. I’ve been telling myself all along she’s probably dead. I know what the statistics say about someone who’s been missing for as long as she has. Now we find this?”

“Well . . . look, Dagny, I can’t promise you that your sister is okay. What I can promise is that I’ll be straight with you during this investigation. I won’t get your hopes up if I don’t think there’s any reason to. This?” I motioned toward the ransacked apartment before us. “This doesn’t mean your sister is dead. This doesn’t even mean that they have your sister. If you have somebody you can make them talk. You can get them to tell you where to find whatever it is you’re looking for. This mess tells me that whoever was here was trying to find something and he was in a hurry. If they’d done a really clean job we’d never even be able to tell that they were here.”

“The attendant downstairs said that her lease was paid up a couple days ago. Do you think that means anything? Who do you think did this?”

“Not necessarily. It could just be automatically debiting her account. As for who, I don’t know. Maybe someone looked here before they got to your sister. Maybe they came here because they couldn’t find her. For all we know, this could be the work of a third party. Right now, let’s just focus on why we came here. Do you know if she had a safe installed?”

“I never saw one, but, you know, I didn’t ask.”

“What about a virtual domestic assistant?”

“Yeah, a pretty nice one called Bosley. It usually activates when someone comes in.”

“Whoever broke in probably disabled it. What about her computer? Did she have a desktop system or a portable? Do you know her login?”

“She used a retinal scanner. Her computer was a portable, one of those ruggedized ones like the military uses. She was always careful with it.”

“Well, odds are, if it was left here at all it was probably taken in the break-in, but have a look around anyway. Check for hidden safes. Look under carpets, behind mirrors, anything like that. I’m going to take a look at that cleaning robot and the VDA system. Maybe there will be some information left on them that we can use.”

We split up then, with Dagny heading to her sister’s bedroom as I walked over to the cleaning robot. It was a Mrs. Tidy model with an elongated, trapezoidal body, done up in their trademark pink-and-powder-blue color scheme. Its two tentacle-like arms, with vacuuming and dusting attachments, hung limply at its sides. The front screen, on which it projected its “face” when operational, was dark. I pulled the robot out of its charging dock so that I could see the back side. Sure enough, the back panel had been pried open. The drives were gone. I was willing to bet that the apartment VDA would be in the same condition.

“Easy! I found her safe!” Dagny said, coming back out of the bedroom. “It’s been opened.” She led me into the bedroom and pointed to the wall. “Right here.”

“Yeah, this is it,” I said, moving in to get a good look at the safe. “Damn it.” It had been hidden behind an ornate mirror mounted on the wall. The mirror, an old-fashioned glass model with a frame made of what appeared to be real wood, had been taken off the wall and set on the floor. The safe was embedded in the wall, set into it a few inches so as to make getting a pry bar in there difficult. It wasn’t very big, a foot wide by six inches tall, just large enough for a few valuables or documents. The door was open. Whatever had been in there was long gone.

I rapped on the door with my knuckles. “Titanium composite. This is a good safe.” I examined the door. It had been drilled out in several places, allowing direct access to the internal electronics. “This is the work of a professional. They knew just how to attack the safe.”

“Is it really that easy to break into a safe like this?”

“Yes and no. A residential security locker like this will keep out junkies with pry bars or even power tools. A professional thief with the knowledge and the proper tools, though? He’s mainly limited by how much time he has and how much noise he can make.”

“Do you think Ascension is behind this?”

I shook my head. “There’s no way to know for sure. I could guess, but it would only be a guess.”

“Well, that’s that, I guess,” Dagny said, dejectedly.

“We’re not at a dead end yet,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “Can I see that key she gave you?”

Dagny handed it to me. “The safe is already open.”

“It is,” I said, taking out a small flashlight so I could get a better look at the safe, “but right now we’re only assuming that this is what the key goes to.”

“What? What else would it be for?”

“That I don’t know,” I said. I peeled back the manufacturer’s sticker on the safe door, the one that covered and sealed the keyhole. “Safes like this use biometrics to unlock them. It looks like this one has a retinal scanner. The physical key is just a backup.” The key that Cassandra gave Dagny was not the right size or shape. I stepped back and handed the key over to my client. “This key doesn’t go to this safe. It won’t even fit in the keyhole.”

“What do we do now? We still have no idea what this goes to.”

“Think back to the last time you saw your sister, when she slipped the key into your pocket. Did she say anything, anything at all, that might be a clue as to what the key is for?”

“I already told you, no. She just told me she’d message me later, but she didn’t.”

“You didn’t receive any messages that night?”

“Not from her, no.”

“From anybody.”

“From anybody . . .” She trailed off as she realized what I was getting at. “You think she may have contacted me from a different number?”

“It seems reasonable if she was paranoid that she was being watched or followed. Check your old messages, see if there’s anything that might be from her.”

“I auto-block calls from unknown numbers, and I filter out messages from unknown senders,” Dagny said, scrolling through her handheld. “There are a lot of people I’d rather not hear from. I don’t think I ever told Cassie that. Let me see.”

She read old messages on her handheld for a few moments. “Anything?” I asked.

“Oh my God,” she said, looking up at me. “I’m such an idiot. It was right here the whole time! It’s from a hidden number.”

“What does it say?”

“Not much. It just says, Dagny this is Cassie and has an address and a number.”

“Mind if I take a look?” She handed me her handheld. “Thank you.” I brought my handheld up in my other hand. Tapping the screen with my thumb, I typed in the address from the vague message into my handheld’s map program. “This address is for a local branch of the First Colonial Bank and Trust.”

“She wants me to go to a bank? You think the key is for a safe deposit box?”

“I’d put money on it. I’d also bet that this number, two-four-nine-five, is the box number.”

“I’m sorry to have wasted your time coming here. I should have checked.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” I said. “You didn’t know. Come on, let’s take one last look around this place then head out.”

About an hour later, my client and I were at the First Colonial Bank. A disinterested bank manager scanned the key to verify that it was to one of his branch’s safe deposit boxes, then let us into the secure vault that contained them. He stood by the entrance and stayed quiet as we used the key in box 2495.

“It worked!” Dagny said in an excited whisper.

“Sure did,” I said, pulling the sliding drawer out of the box. There was nothing in the safe deposit box but a portable data stick, one of the plastic ones a couple inches long.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“Seems that way,” I said, pocketing the drive. “Let’s head out. When we get back to the office, I’ll give it to Lily to look at.”

“Can’t you just use your handheld?”

I lowered my voice. “Not in front of prying eyes,” I said, nodding toward the bank manager. “Besides, there’s no telling what’s on this. Maybe it’s got malware or a tracking program on it. Safest thing is to let Lily run it on our off-line computer.”

“Wow. I never would have even thought of that.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been doing this a few years. Come on, we should get out of here.”

“Yeah,” Dagny said, looking around the bank vault one last time. “Let’s go.”


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Framed