[Fiction] Old Dogs of War Redux - Peter + Marita

[3278]

Three months ago...
A good-looking man in his mid-thirties stood on a quiet street, the only movement a distant sea of onlookers and the officers and drones holding them behind the crime tape. Dressed fashionably in a modern suit and leather shoes, he inspected the scene with the detached air of someone deep in thought, and periodically took a sip from one of the two coffee cups he held. The officers parted, and an older man, his red hair fading white, dressed in a rumpled shirt and tie, and shoes which had been injection-molded in a factory in Bangladesh, approached, looking characteristically exhausted despite only just having awakened. The younger man nodded to his partner and smiled. "Morning, Sam."

"Morning, Hartfield."

Hartfield handed Sam something that smelled a little like coffee, but which came in an elaborate plasticup with what appeared to be neoprene wherever the drinker's hand might come in contact with it. Sam gave it a cautious taste and his face twisted in revulsion. "What is this?"

With an air of distraction, Hartfield inspected the cup in his partner's hand. As if the question might be a trick of some sort, he ventured, "Uh, coffee?" trying his own as if to make certain.

"Well, it tastes like a candy bar crapped in it," Sam said, but it didn't stop him from taking another, less tentative, drink. "What have we got here?"

"A 697. No identifiable ID, but Dennis Montoya is the RO of the house. 36, male, orc, mundane. No record. Scene's in the back." Hartfield gestured to the house, a two-story traditional in cornflower yellow.

Sam took a moment to look at the neighborhood. A lot of Boston, over the 30 years he'd been a cop here, had turned into rich people's heaven, rental cops on every corner, limosines and drone drivers, high walls and big gates, no crimes except those of passion. The rest had turned into armpit, and some fair amount into asshole. But some people still lived in the places between, and this neighborhood was full of them. Tall trees lined the street, with broad green lawns full of colorful toys separating lawn from sidewalk. The electric and matrix cables were all run underground through conduit, and there was a bright open park on the corner. Middle class Boston.

Hartfield laughed into his coffee cup. "You can't remember, can you?"

"What?" Sam said, looking annoyed.

"697. You know, they just changed the system, and you're getting kind of old--"

Sam stopped him. "Age ain't got nothing to do with it. Eight times, eight times I've put up with this. Crimes ought to just have names. Do they honestly think civvies can't work out '419' when they hear which neighborhood it's in?" They began walking toward the house, where a uniformed officer stood next to a bamboo gate leading to the backyard.

"Sirs," he said, respectfully.

Hartfield nodded. "Hey, Jase."

"Mackey, you the first officer on the scene?" Sam asked.

"Yes, sir. Dispatch reported a 267, suspicious circs, so I rolled. Front door was locked, no answer, so I looked over the fence, and, uh..." Officer Jason Mackey stopped, swallowed, and said, "Well, you'll see, sir," and pointed to the open gate.

"You been back here already, Hartfield?" Sam asked as they walked into the backyard.

"Yeah, I got impatient."

"Some of us don't get up at 0530 and start showering. Some of us have lives. Some of us have wives who need pleasuring in the middle of the night."

"Sam, tell me true, when was the last time Marie woke you up in the middle of the night for sex?"

Sam pointed a crooked finger at his partner. "I'll have you know my Marie and I have a very active and passionate sex life."

"I don't know if you've noticed," Hartfield said quietly, "but she's in a wheelchair."

"That's her legs! She's still got feeling where it counts. She's just too damned lazy to put on her prosthetics, and deathly afraid of implants, not that I blame her, so..." he trailed off as they rounded the house. A large sunporch was built into the rear, enclosed now with nearly invisible screens. Inside were two men, one crouched over a large lump in the middle of the floor, the other swabbing something from the screens. Everywhere, everything was red.

Sam said quietly. "679. Assault, deadly. Magical."

There was a pause as both men surveyed the scene from the distance. Other than the two carefully-working men inside, both of whom appeared more confused than concerned, all was still and quiet. The back lawn itself was immaculate, probably a slow-growing supergreen engineered grass, and at the center was a large pond with ponderous and colorful fish drifting within. A stone path led from the side gate, around the sunporch, and out of sight around the house.

Hartfield cleared his throat. "Officer Daniels," he said, quietly and formally, as he only did when some personal matter was at hand.

Sam looked sidelong at his partner. Matching the other man's tone, he replied, "Yeah, Jon?"

"The first officer already called the Dips. They've assigned the scene to Marita."

A long pause, like water collecting at the tap before it drips. Sounding dangerous, Sam said, "So?"

Hartfield tried to be tolerant, and not let the exasperation leak into his voice. "So, you told me last time I knew she was going to be at a scene to warn you first, and now I'm warning you."

"You don't have to warn me. She's my daughter. Man has a right to know where his little girl's going to be."

Nodding, Hartfield said, "So he can avoid her."

"Damn it!" Sam said, his voice harsh with the effort of remaining quiet. "That ain't it. It's just--"

Their conversation was interupted by the man crouching over what appeared to be a sack of red meat. "Uh, fellas?"

Sam eyed his partner. "This ain't over," he said, and walked toward the scene. Hartfield rolled his eyes; Sam Daniels was a cop of the old school, cut from cloth which refused to shed old stains, or show new ones. He was largely a joy and an education to work with, but his rough edges were as those of obsidian, cutting deeply but not cleanly. Resignment on his face, he followed his partner toward the body.

"What do you have, Doc?" said Sam to the young coroner.

Doctor Shradhavistnu was of Indian descent, but a few generations in the past. He had lost any traces of accent his parents might have taught him, and only paid the barest of services to the faith they presumed to encourage for him. "Hell, Sam, I don't even know where to start."

Hartfield laughed. "You've worked worse scenes than this. Sheldon's? The McCormick explosion?"

The coroner shook his head, "Ah, but that's just it. This wasn't an explosion. This man was pulped. Almost all of his skin's intact, but he has no bones I can find, and this is way more blood than I'd expect to find out of a man this size."

"You got a positive on the DB?" Sam asked, digital notebook suddenly in hand.

Shradhavistnu shook his head. "No, and it's hard to make one under these conditions. I can't get enough roll to make prints, and something's wrong with Mac's DNA machine." He gestured to where the portable sequencer sat, idling. "I'll cut off the skin of the fingers when I get him back and get you some prints, but it's worth saying he's a male orc, like the RO. Wouldn't want to assume, but..."

"Fair enough. Let me know what you find out." Sam stopped. "How you getting him back?"

The doctor smiled a thready little smile. "Jase got certified for the Bay Marine Reserves, so he's got a drybag in his car, for diving. I figured he'd let me borrow it."

"Damn," Hartfield laughed. "Just wash it out. We've got league on Tuesday, and I don't need him chucking all over."

Sam's attention had diverted to Macenzy, the crime scene analyst, who seemed to be doing little more than staring and thinking. "What's the good word, Mac?"

The other man remained silent, his eyes steady behind his thick-framed glasses. He was middle-aged, with short dark hair, clean-shaven but offhandedly dressed, like someone for whom hygeine was only a professional necessity. Finally, the CSI spoke. "Today, the word is NONVIABLE." And sure enough, the analyzer flashed the word, over and over.

"Machine broke?" Hartfield said, looking around Sam at the flashing screen.

In a voice tight with something like irritation, Mac said, "Diagnostics are clear. It patterned me. It patterned Sradha. It won't pattern the vic or the only suspect."

"Suspect?" Sam said. "What suspect?"

Mac pulled a slide from the analyzer: it appeared to be a very thin slice of skin, perhaps a centimeter to a side, irregularly-shaped but nearly triangular. "This one. Clean epethelials, plenty big enough. DNA's shot." He sorted through his kit, which appeared to be a large metal tacklebox and not a case specially-designed for the purpose, and pulled a long, slender rod connected to a thinscreen. "It's definitely skin, and the follicular density tells me it's from a human or maybe an elf. Follicular size suggests human. Anyway. Definitely not our vic."

Hartfield took the slide from the distracted tech and, looking closely at it, said, "Somebody with a sunburn?"

Mac shook his head. "That was my thought, too, but if you look under the hood -" he gestured to a UV light and filtered hood assembly- "you'll see minimal UV exposure." The device in his hand began to tick periodically as he retook the sample from a bemused Hartfield. "Mmm. That's what I thought."

Impatient, Sam prompted him. "What? What you got?"

Mac nodded. "Explains the skin, and this slightly blistered area here. Must be low-gamma, or some kind of m-wave. Anyway, you're looking for a suspect with severe radiation burns."

"Radiation!?" Hartfield jumped back, nearly losing his footing in the impossible-to-avoid blood evidence covering the floor.

Sam snorted. "You're fine." He stopped, looked at Mac, and said, "He's fine, right?"

"He's fine. The radiative levels are minimal. No idea what caused it, though. Atypical response. Oh. Which speaking of reminds me about the blood evidence. Also nonviable, but I get no rads from that."

A very different voice spoke from the side walk. "That is because the evidence is not blood," it said, and all four heads turned toward the sound. A woman stood there, about Hartfield's age but with harder eyes and a haughtiness that oozed from her pores. Her red hair was pulled back in an over-severe tail, and she wore neither makeup nor fashionable clothes; though as a DPI agent, she was exempt from uniform requirements, still she wore a simple blue business suit in the same style as those worn by administrators throughout the Boston bureaucracy. Without a glance at her father, Marita walked up to the crime scene, at the last moment lifting herself from the ground so as not to leave prints in the not-blood-evidence.

Hartfield have a friendly wave, "Heya, Mare. You look nice." She ignored him, as always, his association with her father, though professional only, tainting him in her mind. He didn't care; he liked her as a human being, and he'd never stop treating her like one.

"Not blood." The coroner said flatly. "Is that not what I said, Mr Macenzy? Did I not say, 'Mr Macenzy, you should luminate this, because its volume is too high to be blood, and it is not congealing. 'No,' you said. Why would that be?"

Macenzy Royal, CSI, snapped a look back at him. "It wasn't disagreement. I hadn't reached that point in the process yet." Crime scene analysis tended to attract fastidious personalities, and Mac put most of them to shame.

"Please, allow me to save you the trouble," Marita said, floating to a screen and wiping her finger across the area Mac had taped off for isolation. She placed the finger in her mouth and everyone save Mac recoiled instinctively. Mac only waited patiently, with the look of a dog expecting some revelation from his owner.

"As I thought," she said. "It's cherry pie filling."

[Liniah]

Nice. More, please.