Jason LaPier - Unexpected Rain

“Welcome to Gretel, officers,” said one of the Blue Haven officers as he directed some others to help the ModPol team with their gear. “I’m Officer Nate Jenkins.” He nodded to each of them in turn. Runstom could never get used to the pale, almost translucent skin of the B-foureans, which was compounded by their low-gravity height that had the effect of making them always seem to be looming from above. He nodded back, then made a show of looking at the indicator lights on the wall just outside the maintenance door that led into the block. “Pressure’s back on in 23-D,” Jenkins continued. “They just gotta stabilize and then you can go on in. Med techs’ll be goin’ in with ya. Check for survivors.”

“What are the chances of someone surviving?” McManus asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Well, the air here on B-4 is pretty thin,” said one of the emergency medical technicians, a middle-aged man with long, but well-groomed, white hair. “The artificial atmo in the dome would have rushed out pretty quick with the top blown like that. So you’ve got a pretty good chance of immediate asphyxiation for anyone who didn’t get a lungful of air when it happened. Then there’s the drop in pressure, so we might see some decompression sickness – you know, the bends – and maybe some embolism.” He looked at each of the blank faces of the ModPol officers. “You know, pressure drops … boiling point drops … body fluids start to bubble,” he said, pushing down on an invisible scale with his hands. “The bubbles can block off arteries and keep oxygen from getting to the brain.”

“Yeah, not to mention stuff flyin’ around like a fuckin’ tornado,” chimed in one of the Life Support operators, the last word dissolving into a cavernous yawn. Runstom tried to give the cluster of operators an inconspicuous once-over look. They all looked tired and they huddled together in an almost defensive formation, like a pack of wild animals. They whispered to each other and snickered quietly in between yawns and grumblings.

“Yeah, there’s that,” one of the other med techs said, a skinny woman who looked too young to be attending a crime scene. “We’ll probably see a lot of lacerations, blunt force trauma, that kind of thing.”

“People inside housing units probably had a better chance,” the first med tech said. “Especially if they were in a small, closed room. Anyone who is alive, we gotta get to pretty quick, in case they’re suffering from hypoxia.”

McManus leaned into Horowitz. “Do I wanna know what that means?” he asked in a low voice. She didn’t look at him, just shook her head slowly. “Hey, pal,” he said loudly, addressing the pale-skinned Officer Jenkins. “What’s the layout of this place?”

“Well, let me show you,” Jenkins said with an unnerving smile. He took a step toward one of the monitors on the wall and pointed. The screen was mostly black, save a few thick, green lines forming a tic-tac-toe grid. Inside each of the squares were lighter lines, grids within the grid. “Block 23-D is a typical sub-dome block.” He pointed at one of the smaller squares inside the bottom, left-most square of the main grid. “Four small residential units form a square, their backyards coming together, separated by fences.” He traced a couple of the light-green lines and said, “Around each side of these squares is a narrow avenue.”

Jenkins leaned back from the monitor and made broad motions with his finger, saying, “Nine of these squares themselves form the block, three rows of three. In the middle square, there’s a supply store and a little community garden.”

“Bing. Block 23-D,” said an extremely calm, disembodied female voice. “Pressure stable. Oxygen level stable.” A bunch of the indicator lights that Runstom was pretending to look at turned a welcoming green.

“Ah, there we go,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got atmo. The other systems like the vital-scanners are still off-line. But it’s safe for you folks to go in.”

Runstom was still thinking about the operators. “These guys all just woke up. Where’s the LifSupOp on duty for this block?”

McManus glared at him, but Horowitz said, “Hey yeah. That’s a good question.”

“Ah, uh.” Jenkins pointed a finger in no particular direction. “Your uh, detective. Detective Brute?”

“Detective Brutus,” McManus said.

“Right, Brutus. He told us to take the Op on duty over to the BHPD station and put him in holding until someone can interrogate him.”

“You mean question ,” Horowitz said. She turned to dip her head slightly and look Officer Nate Jenkins in his gray eyes. “You took him in for questioning .”

“Oh, no.” Officer Jenkins smiled broadly. “We arrested him.”

“He’s a suspect,” one of the other Blue Haven officers said with a touch of pride in his voice. He went back to doing an impersonation of a statue.

“That’s right,” Jenkins confirmed, cheerfully. “Our only suspect.” He nodded once, as if the book were closed on this case and looked around at everyone for a moment, then at the wall with all the green lights on it. “Well, as I said – you folks are all set to go into 23-D now. We’ll be here if you need anything.”

Horowitz smirked at him. “Thanks for your help,” she said overly cheerfully, beaming an obnoxious smile and wide eyes at the B-fourean. Jenkins, apparently unaccustomed to sarcasm, or more likely, unwilling to acknowledge it, simply nodded and smiled.

Runstom was about to ask the B-foureans another question when McManus suddenly slapped him on the back and shoved a CamCap into his gut. “Stanley. You get to be Porter.”

Runstom clutched the headgear. “It’s Stanford,” he muttered, and carefully placed the unwieldy helmet with the camera attachment on his head. A jacket accompanied the CamCap, coiled wires connecting the camera to bulky sonic and magnetic sensors, a transmission antenna, and multiple battery packs. Runstom shrugged into the jacket and felt twenty kilos heavier.

It was customary for ModPol detectives to attend an initial crime-scene investigation remotely. Runstom was pretty low in the pecking order in his precinct and seemed to get stuck wearing the Remote Detective Unit more often than anyone else, except for maybe Halsey. He was generally pretty annoyed by it, but this time he couldn’t help but to feel even more annoyed that Brutus and Porter weren’t present in the flesh. This was a goddamn mass homicide, not vandalism or petty theft.

Once they got inside, it was a real mess. Debris lay strewn everywhere. Little single- and double-seated hover-cars hung about at awkward angles, their frames split or badly bent. Shards of unidentifiable plastic and metal stuck out of the artificial turf of the yards like crooked, multicolored fangs. A tree-like air scrubber lay precariously across two rooftops, the surface of its metallic branches gleaming dully in the low light, its plastic root system splaying out into the sky over the avenue. The ModPol officers congregated in the Southeast corner of the block, near the maintenance access door, med techs in tow.

Horowitz was staring back at the entrance. “Those motherfuckers are useless, you know that?” she said to no one in particular.

“B-4 cops act like their job is public relations,” McManus agreed immediately. “Like criminal justice’s got nothing to do with it.”

“They act more like fucking waiters than cops,” Horowitz said.

Runstom kept his mouth shut, but he had to agree. The pale-skinned B-fourean officers were trained to be the face of the dome government. The crime rate was so low, particularly in the sub-domes, that the cops really were there for PR more than anything else. Smile and make people feel welcome and protected, that’s what they were good at. Runstom wondered if he was feeling thankful for the local force’s incompetence. The truth of it was, if domer cops were any good at doing actual police-work, he’d always be stuck back at the outpost, perpetually orbiting a slow circle around Barnard’s Star, watching HV and reading about other people’s cases. He kept his somewhat inappropriate glass-half-full optimism to himself.