Lev Rosen - Depth

On deck were a bunch of uniformed officers, taking smoke or coffee breaks, chatting and laughing, but the moment they caught sight of Simone, they went quiet. They knew her, of course. She’d been dragged there enough with her dad, first when he was a cop, and then when he was in trouble with the cops. Simone could feel the heat of their silence. Kluren was a popular chief among her men and had made her dislike of the Pierce family very public. Simone was in enemy territory and they wanted her to know it.

The day Peter had applied to the Police Academy, he’d come over and told Simone. Simone hugged him and, when he left, went to the application server and started filling it out. Her dad came home when she was up to the psychological profile section. He leaned over her shoulder, smelling of cigarettes and gin, and looked at what she was doing. Then he slammed the touchdesk off so forcefully the screen cracked.

“You don’t need to do that crap,” he said. “Police are all about rules. That’s where corruption comes from. If you have an officer so tied up with regulations he can’t move, he’s going to ease free of them. You work for me. You’re a private eye. We don’t worry about rules, we worry about finding the truth. That’s what police work should be. Trust me, you’ll be better off this way.” He laid his hand on her head and looked down into her eyes and smiled. “You’ll be better than me,” he said. She smiled back. She hadn’t really wanted to be a police officer anyway.

Peter opened the door on deck and took her into Teddy. More cops were there working, but they all paused to stare at Simone, like a wall of razor blades and ice. Simone wondered how it was Peter hadn’t become like these men, or turned bad like her dad said they all did eventually.

“C’mon,” Peter said, resting his hand on her shoulder. She pulled back slightly, like she was sighing, removing herself from his touch. Peter led her down two flights and across the length of the ship into Tara Kluren’s office. Kluren wore her hair like a helmet, her pantsuits too loose and her face in a perpetual scowl, at least whenever Simone was around. Her dad and Kluren had come up through the force together, were even partners briefly, and she’d hated him, too. Maybe it was a bad joke gone wrong, or competition between them. Simone’s dad had never told her, and he’d died before she could ask.

Kluren had offered Simone a job on the force once, right after her dad died. Simone was never sure why. Kluren had never seemed to even notice her before then. Simone had said no, or not said anything, and then a few months later, working one of her first solo cases, she crossed paths with the force, and Kluren threw her in the brig for a night. She never offered Simone a job again. Or even a friendly nod. Her hatred of Simone’s father had been passed down to Simone like a delicate heirloom.

When Peter led her into the office, Kluren was smiling like a water snake. Her suit that day was pale—maybe gray, maybe tan, maybe just dirty white, like the color of her hair. The irises of her eyes were gold, the telltale sign of augmented-reality contact lenses. Those weren’t usually seen in the city. On the mainland, and in other civilized nations, they were popular; people could use them for networking, to avoid getting lost, for gaming, for restaurant reviews, whatever. But in New York, the maps changed faster than satellites could keep up, and restaurants were boats that, even moored, could drift in the night. Nothing really stayed put, so overlays were usually confusingly off by a few feet, or completely wrong, unless people wanted to put up small signaling devices on their buildings and boats letting everyone know exactly what sort of place it was. Not surprisingly, no one did.

But Kluren’s contacts weren’t for social networking or restaurant reviews. They were the obscenely expensive, Israeli-made ForenSpecs; they provided an augmented reality that could pick out fingerprints and blood splatter; they could read names off IRID signals and display those names hovering in space over the people they belonged to. They could read facial expressions and body language to determine if someone was lying. They were incredibly advanced and seldom used except by military interrogators and investigators. And they made Kluren seem a little inhuman, her dark eyes punctuated by gold, metallic circles. Simone always tried to make herself stiff around Kluren, unreadable, but she wasn’t sure if she ever succeeded.

“So you’re the one who stopped by to check out the leaking body,” she said, leaning back in her chair. She put her feet up and looked Simone up and down. “Unlucky, that body. Should have sunk right to the bottom with the hole it had in it, but it must have drifted a bit, snagged on the corner of a roof under the water, just twenty feet down. The nets brought him up. Real unlucky.”

“Maybe so,” Simone said, “but not for me. I didn’t kill your guy.”

“ Your guy,” Kluren corrected. “Something to do with a case?”

“His wife thought he was cheating.”

“And paid you to shoot him?”

“Only photos.”

“Wife got a name?”

“Linnea St. Michel. The corpse is Henry.”

“Mmmm,” Kluren took her feet off the desk and put her hand to her chin, trying to figure out a way to pin it on Simone. “Your caliber bullet hole.”

“And a lot of people’s.”

“True. But I like you for this. You’ve got killer’s eyes. Your dad’s eyes.”

Simone said nothing but stared at Kluren. She knew who her dad was, and he’d never killed anyone, except in self-defense. Shot them in the leg to keep them from running, maybe put a hole in their hand when they were holding a gun. But nothing worse than that. Kluren was just trying to get a rise out of her. She realized she was curling the fingers on her right hand and stopped.

“Tell you what,” Kluren said, standing. “No need to arrest you now. I’m going to send Weiss here back to your office, and you’re going to give him everything to do with this investigation. Photos, recordings, notes, everything. Then, we’ll look it over. If we can pin it on you, we will, and you’ll be sunk for a good, long time. If not… I’ll be disappointed, but this little moment is making me happy enough I should be okay for a couple years—provided I never see you again. Which means you’re staying out of this. Got it?”

Simone continued to stare.

“Like talking to a MouthFoamer,” Kluren said. “Weiss, take her home. Get everything. If I find out later you missed something, you’ll be on hull-scrubbing duty for the next few years. Anything you want to confess to, Pierce? I’ll go easy on you if you confess now. Later, I won’t be so nice.” Kluren glared, waiting, but Simone kept her mouth shut. “She has two IRIDs on her. One of them must be fake. Confiscate it, issue her the usual fine.”

Simone stared a bit longer, wishing she’d fixed her IRID-blocking wallet. The fine wasn’t a cheap one. Hopefully someone would end up paying her. Then she took out the fake IRID and handed it to Peter, who handed it to Kluren, who by now had grown bored with them and was looking at some papers on her desk.

“I heard the murder,” Simone said. Kluren looked back up. Pleasure danced on her lips.

“You heard the murder,” she repeated, smiling again.

“I bugged Henry, followed him, he went into an empty building on the outskirts of town, waited for someone, but I couldn’t see who. I heard a shot, ran to the scene, but the body and killer were gone.”

“Run real slow, did you?”

“I had to stand far off so they couldn’t see me.” She didn’t mention her slip. Kluren would enjoy it too much.

“So you hear gunfire but don’t call the police?”