“Kir plugged in downstairs?”
“Yeah.”
“So much for taking it easy,” Betty said.
“Taking it easy” was why Laughton had come to Liberty. The thinking had been that the stress and hours of city homicide made his facial pain and headaches worse. After nine months, he wasn’t sure either was any better, but he’d been available to Betty and Erica more, and that was a win, if nothing else. “Hon?” he said, but Betty was already asleep again.
He squeezed her. After a moment, she rolled away from him, and then he turned onto his side, and lay there, so exhausted he couldn’t sleep. He remembered his phone, and leaned over the edge of the bed to hook his pants with his finger and retrieved the phone from the pocket. He placed it on the charger on his bedside table, and dropped back onto his pillow.
His mind slid into Kawnac-B’s club even as he tried to suppress the thought, to clear his head. Crisper’s map had proven accurate, and that meant they’d have to check out the harbor to figure out how sims were leaving by boat. It also confirmed that Titanium was not a myth. If it turned out this whole thing came down to a turf war… He needed to find the Sisters. But there was that stupid meeting at Charleston police headquarters in the morning. Damn it!
He flopped over on his other side, and closed his eyes. He just needed sleep. If only he could will his body to shut down.
In the morning, when Laughton took his phone off the charger, he was greeted with the headline “Nine More Robots Burned.” The words made his throat close up. The situation was devolving faster than he could handle it. The fact that the article didn’t link the deadly virus to the preserve yet was only a small consolation. He jumped out of bed and put on the same clothes he had been wearing the day before.
Kir was fixing eggs for Erica in the kitchen, and Betty’s mom was at the table, the lower half of her face swollen, purple and yellow. She mumbled, “Good morning,” through clenched teeth.
“Morning,” he said, and then to Kir, “Did you see the news?”
“Yes.”
“Any word from your boss?”
“ ‘Hurry up,’ ” Kir said.
“Then she shouldn’t have us scheduled for meetings in effing Charleston. Let’s go.”
Betty came up behind him. “Aren’t you eating something?”
Laughton kissed her on the top of the head. “No time,” he said. “Be good for mom and grandma,” Laughton called to Erica. Then he and Kir left.
In the truck, on the way to the meeting where Laughton and Kir would have to convince the army, Homeland Security, and the FBI that Smythe’s murder was not a valid reason to seize the preserve from the Department of Health and Human Services, Laughton kneaded his forehead with the bases of his palms, and grunted.
“What is it?” Kir said.
Laughton shook his head, as though to clear it. “Nothing,” he said.
Kir nodded without saying anything, and Laughton was grateful again to have his partner, someone who knew when to lend silent support. In the quiet, he tried to get a picture of the whole case in his mind. The orgo drug trade and the robot drug trade were intertwined, and the preserve, with its legal status outside of the robotic purview—at least for now—was the hub. The Sisters, who had already run the sims trade in the southeast, had dominated the business since the preserve opened, but a new player, Titanium, was moving in. Carl Smythe and Sam McCardy had been two of the best sims programmers on the preserve, and their product was moved through Jones by the Sisters. Smythe was murdered, and McCardy and Jones both disappeared at the same time that a deadly virus started killing robot addicts. How did it all fit with the murder? Any one of these things could be relevant, or none of them could be. Perhaps they had gotten too far away from the actual murder. They needed to step away from all of the noise.
He pulled out his phone, and opened the photos he had taken of the crime scene. The body slumped against the back of the grocery store, its chin resting on its chest. The slashed-open arm and leg were perhaps most arresting for the lack of blood. It looked like such a severe trauma, but impossibly clean. Laughton zoomed in on the arm. There was no way to see the hidden pouch that Dr. Conroy had found. He pulled the image around, trying to focus on the ground around the body, instead of the corpse itself, but there was nothing but weather-beaten asphalt, pebbles, and grime.
“You find something?” Kir said.
“Just going back over everything.” Laughton swiped to the next photo. It was a wider shot of the back of the building: the delivery truck, the police cruiser, several people standing around. He zoomed in to look at each of the people that he had talked to that day, trying to read their expressions.
Larry Richman and the kid Ryan had almost the same expression—
lips tight and drawn back toward the ears, eyebrows pulled together—anxious bordering on fear
The produce deliveryman stood separate from the others, but his face bore almost the same expression. Laughton remembered that micro-expression that had flashed across the driver’s face when he’d asked him if he knew Smythe. What was the guy’s name? Laughton minimized the photo and tapped his notepad, scrolling back up to the top. Barry Slattery.
Laughton jumped back to the photograph. The program had automatically returned it to its usual size, showing the whole scene. Laughton began to zoom back in on Barry, when he noticed the truck behind the driver. The lettering on the side— “Shit,” he said.
“What?” Kir said.
“I’m so stupid,” Laughton said. The lettering on the side of the truck, above the hand-painted picture of the cornucopia, said “Sisters.” “Look.” He held the phone so Kir could see.
“What?”
“The truck. It says ‘Sisters.’ I knew that guy was hiding something when I talked to him, but I was too distracted to push it.” He turned the phone back so he could get into the police database, and searched for Barry Slattery. “The Sisters use their produce business to transport their sims. One of their men just happens to be at the crime scene? I thought he was nervous just because who wouldn’t be? He didn’t seem worse than that.”
The database had returned an address for Slattery, and Jesse leaned forward to input it on the GPS’s touch screen.
“This bastard better be home,” Laughton said.
“We better let Commissioner Ontero and Secretary Pattermann know we’re going to be late,” Kir said.
“Fuck them,” Laughton said.
“I’ll stick with we’re going to be late.” The robot sent the message.
This stretch of road was becoming familiar to the chief. The mixed vegetation, fields, then woods, then fields, didn’t seem quite as wild as it had a few days ago. Now it was simply the corridor to civilization.
The commissioner’s name popped up on the dashboard screen. He’d gotten the message they were going to be late. Laughton opened up the line. “What the hell, Jesse. I told you, you needed to be here for this meeting. I need you to be here for this meeting.”
“We’ve got a lead. We need to bring him in while we can.”
“Who?”
Jesse felt an overwhelming reluctance to say. He wasn’t quite sure why. “I don’t want to jump the gun,” Laughton said.