The Shadow Fixer Read online

  “Not that I can think of.” Johanna shrugged. “My wife Arielle is a programmer. She’s good, but not exactly a phenom companies would literally kill to keep or poach.”

  Hmm. The old lady mentioned a racket. Could the same thing have driven this spirit mad?

  Kirsten nodded, adding to her notes. “Strange question. Have you heard any strange noises lately?”

  “Only the ghost voices today.”

  “Ghost voices?” asked Dorian.

  Kirsten repeated his question.

  “The guy who tried to kill me making all sorts of roars and grunts.”

  “Oh. Nothing else, like a maddening constant racket or noise?”

  Johanna and Tamsen shook their heads.

  “Well, maybe if you count the music my daughter listens to.”

  Tamsen shot her mother a ‘really?’ smirk.

  Kirsten chuckled, taking it as a joke. “Okay, so no reason you can think of for a spirit to want revenge on you.”

  “None I can think of.” Johanna fussed at her daughter’s hair.

  “All right. I understand. The ghost who attacked you felt fairly old, at least forty years or more as a spirit. Highly doubtful he came here for revenge.”

  Johanna managed a weak smile. “Not unless my parents handed me a gun when I was a newborn.”

  “We’re basically done for now. I don’t have any more questions for you. If you need anything or have any questions for me, please reach out to Division 0 and I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can.” Kirsten stood. “For what it’s worth, the spirit who attacked you is gone for good.”

  “What about the repair man?” asked Tamsen. “Is he gonna haunt us?”

  Kirsten tilted her hand back and forth. “It’s possible. Some spirits are drawn to hang around the place where they died. But he’s not a bad guy. He’ll also be too weak to really do anything anyone could notice for years. If he decides to hang out here.”

  Tamsen nodded.

  Johanna blushed.

  If you feel watched during intimate moments, call it in and I’ll come back, said Kirsten telepathically.

  The woman seemed to relax. “All right. Do ghosts watch people all the time? And, umm, did you read my mind?”

  “No.” Kirsten smiled. The look on your face said it all. And yeah, it’s pretty common for spirits to be around watching people. This city has a lot of ghosts, but very few wander away from their homes.

  “All right.” Johanna wobbled up to her feet and shook Kirsten’s hand. “Thank you for what you did for my daughter and me.”

  Tamsen stared gratefully over the pillow she cling-hugged, too choked up to speak.

  “You’re welcome.” Kirsten shook Johanna’s hand, smiled at Tamsen, and let herself out.

  She paused at the edge of the porch, noting a small group of neighbors watching from across the street, no doubt curious at the spectacle of several emergency vehicles at the house. One older woman appeared distinctly unhappy. It struck Kirsten as suspicious enough to peer at the elder’s surface thoughts. She considered complaining to the NPF about parking their vehicles on the lawn, as it violated homeowners’ organization policy.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me… Are people really that petty?” Sighing, she shook her head and walked to the patrol craft. “So why would a cybered-up enforcer be here?”

  Dorian appeared beside her. “Corporate assassins don’t usually take contracts after they’re dead.”

  “I’m thinking about Mr. Mendoza. Looked like an assassination. This felt like one, too. Except, there’s no reason for him to attack Mrs. Beck and her daughter.”

  “That we know of. And… interesting theory.” He pursed his lips. “Was this guy the same one who attacked Mendoza?”

  She got into the car and pulled the door shut, waiting for him to appear in the other seat. “Different spirit. This guy was a lot stronger.”

  “Any theories yet?”

  “Still working on it.” She powered the car up. “We should probably get out of here before the homeowners’ organization rep complains.”

  “Let her. Bet if she does, Division 5 will have an A3V parked on her front lawn in twenty minutes.”

  Snickering, Kirsten lifted off and plotted a Navcon point for the PAC.

  14

  Phantom Motives

  After a shower and a trip to the quartermaster for a new uniform, Kirsten sat at her desk, staring up at the ceiling. She dreaded starting anything, fearing as soon as she got thirty seconds into any sort of research, report-filing, or investigation, another alarm call would come in.

  For a few glorious minutes, she sat in total calm.

  Frazzled… but calm.

  She leaned forward in her seat and fired off a request to Captain Eze, asking him if he could do anything to get Division 2 to commit more resources into finding Plasmahawk. Tamsen Beck being locked in a shower tube for nine hours infuriated her far more than the ransomware affecting her personally.

  “Dorian? Did the Mendoza case feel like an assassination to you?”

  “Hmm. An unknown spirit entered the Ancora Medical facility, targeted Elan Mendoza, and left without attempting to do anything else. I can see how you’re thinking it might be an assassination considering all the crazy spirits we’ve been seeing lately.”

  She spun in her chair to face him. “Exactly. If it had been another ghost coming unhinged, they would’ve been going after everyone or trying to do as much damage as possible. The Mendoza ghost appeared calm, the exact opposite of manic or rampaging. I hate to say it, but the big guy at the Beck’s house also didn’t feel like he’d been driven out of his mind.”

  “If the spirit did target Mendoza on purpose, they would’ve had to wait for him to be vulnerable in a medical tank.”

  “Not necessarily. The tank might’ve only provided a conveniently easy way to do it.”

  Dorian tapped a finger to his chin. “Did you consider this spirit might have wanted to kill only one person and just happened to pick him randomly from everyone who happened to be in a tank at the moment?”

  “Yeah. I’ve considered it. Still, I can’t shake the feeling the ghost went after Mendoza on purpose.”

  “A cop with a hunch.” Dorian laughed.

  “Well, I am psychic.” She laced her fingers behind her head, smiling.

  “Didn’t realize you were clairvoyant.”

  “I’m not.” She stretched her legs out, a minor twinge of pain stabbing her where the knife had been. “But spirit stuff is different. The ghost at the Beck house looked like an assassin. I checked Johanna and Arielle’s records for anything suspicious. Nothing there even close to turning either of them into a target. They work for a video game company. I can’t explain why the ghost attacked them specifically—but he didn’t feel like the others, going randomly nuts. It’s bothering me.”

  Dorian twirled a light pen around his fingers. “All right, well… let’s look at this under the theory the ghost who attacked Elan Mendoza killed him specifically.”

  Kirsten spun back to her desk and logged into the terminal, digging through Elan Mendoza’s files. By some miracle, the surge of haunts took a break. Forty minutes later, she’d exhausted all available online paths to investigate his background. The man didn’t appear to be anyone overly important in a political or business sense. He worked as a director-level manager at Naturahealth Pharmaceuticals, part of their client services group. Such a position wouldn’t have given him access to any valuable company secrets, nor made him the sort of employee some corporations would rather assassinate than allow to work for a competitor.

  Scouring his company records failed to suggest any connection to deaths where a vengeful spirit might have come after him. Sure, Naturahealth had its fair share of lawsuits when its products hurt or killed people, but Elan Mendoza didn’t design drugs or medical devices. He managed a group of mid-level managers who oversaw the team responsible for maintaining account relationships with doctors and hospitals who pu
rchased Naturahealth products.

  Nothing in his work records came close to suggesting a motive for anyone wanting him dead.

  She moved on to his personal files. A six-year-ago divorce brought up the possibility the ex-wife had a grudge. The woman lived far to the north, almost at the outskirts of the city’s official footprint, beyond the end of the city plates. It looked like a wonderful place to live, on natural ground surrounded by snowy pine forest … if not for the constant worry dangers from the Badlands would wander by. Everyone who lived there, including children, tended to carry guns all the time.

  “Call me crazy, but the risk of being randomly mauled by a canid mutant in my backyard is not worth having a private home on actual ground.” She fidgeted.

  “Agreed,” said Dorian. “And where did that come from?”

  “Mendoza’s ex-wife. She lives way up north. I don’t see any contact between them for at least four years. Don’t see her randomly hiring a psychic medium to convince a ghost to kill him.”

  “It sounds so silly when you say it that way.”

  She laughed. “It does… Hmm. Did he have any secrets?”

  “No idea.”

  “Not asking you. Just asking.” She chuckled while activating an AI deep dive of his NetMini activity.

  Nicole and Corporal Forrester entered from the right, both covered in pink, blue, and green slime studded in multicolored dots.

  Morelli snickered.

  Kurosawa and Montez, the two other I-Ops people in this squad room, also laughed.

  “What happened to you two?” asked Montez.

  Nicole held up a middle finger, marching across the room to the hallway on the left, heading for the showers.

  “Telekinetic tantrum at Flavor Rainbow,” said Forrester. “Ten-year-old brat had a meltdown and lost his damn mind. Didn’t realize he was telekinetic, so when shit started going crazy, it scared him, too, making it worse. Ice cream, smoothies, and sprinkles flying everywhere. Samir’s going to be cleaning our PC for the next two hours.”

  Kirsten chuckled.

  Nicole and Forrester vanished into the corridor on the left.

  I should take Ev and his friends to one of those places for ice cream sometime.

  “Analysis complete,” said a nondescript male voice from the terminal.

  Kirsten leaned forward, opening the results. Elan Mendoza’s NetMini activity didn’t trip many red flags for potential illegality except for one orange entry: The Cat House. He’d never called the place, though he did spend a rather significant amount of time there, third most time in the same place after home and the Naturahealth office.

  “What the heck is The Cat House?” muttered Kirsten.

  Morelli cracked up.

  “It’s an older term for brothel,” said Dorian.

  She sighed at Morelli, then tapped the link in the log of Mendoza’s NetMini locations. “Not a cat house. The Cat House. And good grief, another cat themed place?”

  Dorian chuckled. “I told you, they’re everywhere.”

  The Cat House had a file in the Division 2 system associated with numerous investigations into organized crime. This, of course, made Kirsten think about the Syndicate. She disliked the way the NPF handled them, something of a tentative truce. While it did—mostly—stop the Syndicate from attacking police officers, it also permitted them to get away with various crimes. She didn’t think a literal war between the Syndicate and the National Police Force could possibly end in any way other than the annihilation of the criminals. Though, any such war would undoubtedly drag many civilians into the chaos.

  According to the official report, The Cat House operated as a casino-slash-bar as well as a brothel. Prostitution, in general, didn’t bother Kirsten as much as the association between the Syndicate and prostitution. Selling sex had been technically legal for centuries. Much like low-grade recreational chems, the police didn’t bother to enforce the laws against it unless they had some other motive. ‘Other motives’ often took the form of pressuring informants, retaliation for grudges, or in some cases, pulling minors off the street protectively. A person still had to be over eighteen to work as a prostitute. Some shadier places tried pulling an end run around the law by sending their sex workers to Reinventions, genetic surgery shaving a few years off so they looked sixteen or occasionally even younger. Kirsten shuddered at the thought. However, a person surgically de-aged below eighteen legally counted as a minor again.

  Some people often got mistaken for being under eighteen even without fakery—case in point: Kirsten. This muddied the waters and created enough doubt for scumbags to slip through the cracks. The mere thought of it made Kirsten want to storm in the place and mind-read everyone to verify age. Having an association with the Syndicate worried her the worst rumors might be true. In some dark corners of the GlobeNet, people whispered the girls working in Syndicate brothels didn’t do so of their own free will. Some even threw the word ‘slave’ around. However, if anything like that happened, it probably went on in colony settlements, or Mars. Not Earth—at least not in West City.

  Elan Mendoza being a fan of The Cat House definitely piqued her suspicion. It meant he possibly had dealings with the Syndicate, and anyone who had frequent contact with them stood a higher than normal chance of ending up on the wrong side of an assassin.

  “Maybe he made an enemy there?” Dorian leaned close to read the screen. “It’s a casino. If Mendoza ended up owing money, they might have coerced him into killing someone to break even. There’s a motive for revenge.”

  Kirsten leaned back in her chair, rubbing her forehead. “The ghost of someone Mendoza killed couldn’t possibly have gotten strong enough to kill him already. He started frequenting this place six years ago.”

  “Right after the divorce, most likely.” Dorian wiggled his finger at the terminal. Another window popped up with the official GlobeNet site of The Cat House.

  “Ack!” Kirsten reached to close it but hesitated when he held a hand in her way. “What are you doing? They’re going to think I’m a pervert.”

  Morelli, Kurosawa, and Montez all looked at her.

  “You are conducting an investigation”—Dorian smiled—“and have a perfectly legitimate reason to investigate the place.”

  She sighed. “Dorian’s controlling my terminal. Not me.”

  The Cat House GlobeNet 2D site depicted a pair of nude women with cat ears and tails perching on pink cushions on either side of the page content. She didn’t even want to imagine what their in-net presence looked like, for anyone using a senshelmet or M3 head jack. Kirsten rolled her eyes. From the look of it, most of the people who worked there sported feline body modification. They also advertised themselves as a ‘cat lounge,’ meaning actual cats roamed all over the place—available for adoption. She decided not to go any further into the site and closed it. Except for being only a bar (and not a casino/brothel) ‘That Place With Cats by the Place’ hadn’t been as original as the owner thought after all.

  “It’s a bit of an outside shot, but I suppose it’s possible Mendoza got on the Syndicate’s bad side.” Dorian folded his arms.

  “Are you suggesting they somehow hired a ghost assassin?” Kirsten stared up at him in disbelief. “Why would a spirit still work for them? Not like they need money.”

  Dorian shifted his jaw side to side. “No, not the Syndicate. They have plenty of resources to eliminate people in-house. Maybe the spirit used to be an assassin who died thinking he owed them something, so he’s stuck being unable to transcend until he settles the debt? The guy on the sushi boat seemed to come to his senses when you smacked him once. This dude kept trying to kill you after multiple hits. Makes me think he wasn’t being driven mad by some outside force.”

  “Sure… a Syndicate assassin isn’t going to transcend, at least not to anywhere nice.”

  “Hmm. True.” Dorian paced. “Though, you’re assuming they know this. Death doesn’t come with a user’s manual. Being stuck here with unfinished business c
an become all consuming. A spirit might not even be able to think about anything else or the consequences.”

  She grumbled.

  Dorian returned to his desk. “Also, maybe the ghostly presence at the hospital had been a fluke and the Syndicate took him out via hacker. Could be, the ghost merely sensed someone about to die and went there to watch.”

  “Now you’re messing with me. You and I both know how it felt in there. Plus, D2 couldn’t find any evidence of a hack.”

  “Div 2 couldn’t. Have you asked Nine to check it? Syndicate has some serious hardware. They might’ve been able to get in undetected.” He smiled. “Of course, ‘hacker’ is quite likely going to be the official explanation for when Command decides not to believe you about a murderous ghost working as a Syndicate assassin.”

  She groaned and bonked her head on the desk. “Do you think it’s just another spirit going nuts? Something is driving them wild and amping them up.”

  “Possibly.”

  Kirsten stood. “I’m pretty sure this is desperation pretending to be thoroughness, but I’m going to go check the place out.”

  “You realize, you’re going to come home with three cats.”

  “I am not.” She sighed at the ceiling.

  “True. You collect children, not cats.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him.

  “Every time you find a kid in need, you want to bring them home. This time next year, you’ll have Rafael sharing a bunk bed with Evan. Adoptable cats are going to give you the look and you’ll start collecting them like you do kids.”

  She bit her lip, guilty for having been tempted to take Rafael in, too. “Stop. I have my son, and I don’t ‘collect kids.’”

  “Only teasing.” Dorian patted her on the shoulder. “Your heart is too big for this world. It kills you to see kids having a life as bleak as the early part of yours. Nothing to be ashamed of.”