Headcase, p.16
Headcase, page 16
‘How do you know it was a mistake?’
‘If they’d wanted to murder him, they would have waited until right before he was supposed to go on leave. Instead, they killed him a week early, which made his absence suspicious. They didn’t even close the lid of the box full of space suits properly. This person was panicking.’
Zara apparently couldn’t think of a hole to poke in that, so she took a sip of her peppermint tea instead.
‘The killer runs through to storage and grabs a Chinese spacesuit. They put it on Cho’s body, then put him in the trunk of their car, drive it to the edge of the field and drag his body to where we found it. They sweep away their tracks in the Martian dirt, but they miss a footprint or two on the field around it.’ I took a victory sip of my coffee. ‘This has nothing to do with China. This is a good old-fashioned Texas manslaughter. It all fits.’
Zara put her elbows on the table, leaning in. ‘It does,’ she said. ‘Except that the whole thing is fucking ridiculous. Here’s your first problem: if the dead guy was Cho, why didn’t Anders recognise him?’
I hesitated. ‘Maybe they didn’t know each other? Or maybe because of the bruising from the decompression?’
‘Okay, how did the killer know that Anders—or whoever found the body—wouldn’t recognise him?’
‘Well, a lot of people work here. The chances are …’
Zara didn’t dignify this with a response.‘Second problem. If the killer was already in the museum, why did they need to ram the window to steal the suit?’
‘Uh—’
‘Third problem. Imagine you’ve accidentally suffocated someone in a hypobaric chamber. You have a car. You presumably also have the victim’s car, and the keys to their house. How would you get rid of the body?’
I opened my mouth to answer, but she quickly cut me off.
‘Okay, imagine I’m the killer, not you,’ she said. ‘How would I get rid of the body?’
‘You’d just ask one of your goons at the Company to do it.’
Zara ignored this. ‘I would put Cho in the trunk of his own car and drive him home. I’d pack some of his stuff into an overnight bag—’
‘The guards at the gate search all the trunks.’
‘On the way into the complex,’ Zara said. ‘Not out. Right?’
I nodded reluctantly. The guards hadn’t searched our car when we left yesterday.
‘Once I had the overnight bag, I’d unlock Cho’s phone with his fingerprint or his face,’ Zara continued. ‘I’d use it and his credit card to book a hotel room somewhere in California. I’d drive him and the bag halfway there, to a deserted spot along the Santa Ana River. I’d use a plastic bottle to pump his lungs full of river water. Then I’d put him in the driver’s seat and send his car over the edge. When he didn’t turn up for work the next day, everyone would assume he was sick. When the police were eventually called, they’d think he’d skipped town. And by the time his body was found, no one would be able to tell that he was dead before he went in the water. His death might seem suspicious, but it wouldn’t lead anyone back to the hypobaric chamber, and definitely not to me.’
She leaned back again and took her own victory sip. It occurred to me that Zara would be a very capable murderer.
‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘Why the hell would the killer decide to disguise Cho’s death as a space accident? An international incident that would lure in the police, the FBI and us?’
I thought hard. ‘Because the killer is an employee here,’ I tried. ‘They have to be—no one else was on campus at the time. Space is their whole thing. This might have been the first idea they had.’
‘The fact that they work here might be the only thing you know about them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also have a personal life,’ Zara pointed out. ‘You don’t think they watch Law & Order? You don’t think they read Agatha Christie? There are a million better ways to cover up an accidental death, and even if the killer was Buzz Aldrin, he’d still think of every single one of them before he thought of framing it as a spacewalk-gone-wrong. Besides, a NASA employee would understand that it’s impossible for an astronaut to fall off a space station and then land on the ground, intact. The killer must have known their colleagues wouldn’t believe this for a second.’
‘We did, though,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘The Company, I mean.’
Zara’s eyes narrowed. ‘So I’m not a rocket scientist. Sue me.’
‘No, I mean, what if the killer wanted us to be involved?’
‘Why?’
‘They couldn’t risk transporting the body anywhere, in case they got pulled over by the cops, or in case the guards recognised that the driver of the car wasn’t the owner. But the killer couldn’t leave the body in the chamber, since they were known to be operating it at the time of death. So they used us. They made the death look like an international incident, knowing that the CIA would arrive to sweep everything under the rug. We erased all the CCTV, cooked up a story about a diabetic coma, and even destroyed the body for them.’
‘That’s even more ridiculous,’ Zara said. ‘You remember that the spy plane actually exists, right?’
I had forgotten that. ‘The YouTube video could be fake.’
Zara’s voice was firm. ‘It’s not. IMINT says the metadata confirms the time, date and location of the recording, and there’s no sign the images or sounds have been doctored. In addition to that, SIGINT has been tracking the communications of everyone who was on board the fishing trawler. Not all of them saw the plane, but all of them confirm that the net got tangled on something.’
I went to chew a fingernail, but it turned out to be made of silicone.
Zara said, ‘Do you think a Chengdu J-20S flew overhead and then crashed into the ocean on the same night that a killer just happened to disguise their dead co-worker as a Chinese pilot?’
I countered: ‘Do you think a dead Chinese pilot fell out of the sky and just so happened to land right next to a museum where a Chinese spacesuit had been stolen?’
We glared at each other for a moment. Then a smile tugged at the edge of Zara’s mouth. She was enjoying this.
So was I. This kind of puzzle was the only thing that took my mind off meat. But I wished I was solving it with Thistle, not Zara. At the thought, my good mood faded, like a light bulb slowly going cold after the power is shut off.
‘Let me look into Rob Cho,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I can prove the body was his. Remember, we’re here to kill the rumour about a Chinese astronaut. If the people here find out that the body in the field was one of their co-workers, that rumour is dead. You have to admit, my theory is more compelling than your Brian Jane diabetic coma story.’
Zara probed the inside of her cheek with her tongue, thinking it over.
‘And if I’m wrong,’ I said,‘you shouldn’t have any trouble proving it. Just show me Cho, alive and well.’
‘Fine.’ Zara cracked her knuckles and stood up. ‘We’ll follow the Rob Cho lead. But I want to be on our way back to Virginia within twenty-four hours. You may have fooled your girlfriend, but not the rest of the FBI. Someone could be pulling apart our cover as we speak.’
I was pretty sure I only needed twenty-four minutes. ‘We’re looking for someone who works here, who knew the victim, who’s big enough to carry the body and has a good reason not to tell the cops what really happened,’ I said. ‘How about we go talk to Sam Garcia?’
CHAPTER 20
I was an instrument, but my eye was moved. Aha, there it is! What am I?
We found Garcia at a wall-mounted terminal on the ground floor of his building running some kind of scan and arguing with a co-worker—the middle-aged woman he’d called Amazing Grace. There were a lot of numbers on the screen, changing too fast for me to read them, and a rectangle of blackness, dotted with stars. A photo, or a video.
‘The latency is the problem,’ Garcia was saying. ‘This thing is geostationary, going at 7000 miles per hour. The frame rate of the telescope isn’t fast enough to catch it.’
‘If it’s geostationary, then it’s not moving at all, relative to us,’ Grace said. ‘That’s what geostationary means. Why would the frame rate matter?’
‘The telescope isn’t on the ground, it’s in Low Earth Orbit.’
Grace gasped. ‘You’re siphoning bandwidth from Hubble to pursue this crackpot theory of yours?’
I cleared my throat. They both whirled around, as though we’d caught them looking at porn. Maybe we had. They seemed to like space a whole lot.
‘Tell me about lab-grown meat,’ I said.
Grace frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Will you give us a minute?’ Garcia asked her.
Grace looked uneasily from me to Zara, and then said, ‘Sure.’
When Grace was gone, Garcia turned to Zara. ‘Who are you?’
‘Cassandra Holcroft. I work with Timothy at ClearHorizon.’
‘She knows,’ I added.
‘Ah.’ Garcia’s face fell. He was affable enough—people probably liked him until they found out he was an ex-con.
‘Apparently lab-grown meat was invented here,’ I said. ‘How does it work? You just plug in the DNA of the animal you want, and out comes a steak?’
I could see that Zara didn’t think now was the time to ask this question. But I wanted to throw Garcia off-balance. Wrong-foot him before we got to the hard questions. And anyway, if he was about to be whisked off to a CIA black site, then I wasn’t sure there would be another chance.
‘Well …’ Garcia blinked a few times, redirecting his brain from what he was doing towards what I was asking. ‘Not exactly. The Advanced Food Tech research team remove some muscle cells from the animal—a cow, a chicken, whatever—and put the cells in a bioreactor. It’s a bit like microbrewing, if you’ve ever done that?’
He looked me up and down and seemed to quickly decide that no, I’d never done that.
‘The bath of nutrients helps the sample grow,’ he continued, ‘into a shape determined by a mould. Then you cook it and eat it. Voilà—space steak. But it can be done on Earth, too. It’s more ethical and environmentally friendly. Meat without the slaughterhouse.’
Zara grimaced. ‘So it’s like eating a tumour.’
‘It’s not unlike that,’ Garcia conceded.
My stomach grumbled. ‘Does it taste like real meat?’
‘It is real meat. So yes, the taste is basically the same.’
‘Could it work with humans?’
‘Yes, it’s perfectly safe for human consumption.’
‘I mean could you grow meat from human cells?’
‘What?’ Garcia looked taken aback. ‘I mean, you could … but why?’
‘Just curious,’ I said.
Zara pointed at the screen. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Oh.’ Garcia waved a big hand at the terminal. ‘Scanning the sky.’
I looked at the patch of darkness. ‘What for?’
‘You know. The, uh …’ He lowered his voice and looked from me to Zara and back again. ‘… the Chinese spacecraft?’
I was surprised that he was running his own investigation, and even more surprised that he was doing it here, where anyone could see. But maybe that was the point. No use acting innocent in private.
‘Why can’t you do that on the computer in your office?’ I asked.
‘Is it not connected to the telescope?’ Zara guessed.
‘The telescope is in orbit. All the computers are connected to it. But …’ Garcia looked around and saw no one else nearby. ‘I’m six foot five. You know how long the mattresses are in Huntsville?’
I did. Six feet, three inches.
‘So I have lumbago.’ Garcia turned back to the screen. ‘Can’t sit down all day.’
The terminal on the wall was indeed a better height for him. But if he really was looking for a top-secret satellite, it was idiocy to do it here, where anyone walking past—like us—might see. Zara looked appalled at his lack of tradecraft.
‘I thought you said this facility was air-gapped, for security.’ I watched his hands as I spoke. They were fidgety, nervous. ‘How can you communicate with a telescope in orbit?’
‘I said nothing touches the internet.’ Garcia glanced at the screen. ‘We can communicate with objects in space. It’s objects on Earth that are a security risk. That’s what we’ve blocked off.’ He tapped at his keyboard. ‘I suspect the vessel is about 22,000 miles above Ecuador. But it might only be the size of a school bus. And if you do some basic trigonometry—’
I wondered if there was such a thing.
‘You’ll realise that while Ecuador is big, the sky above it is much, much bigger. The higher up you go, the bigger it gets. Even with the best telescopes in the world, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. The computer is working on it, but it’s going to take a while.’
‘Was Rob Cho the friend who erased your criminal record?’ I asked.
He hesitated a moment too long. ‘He didn’t erase it,’ he said. ‘He just unflagged my application, like I told you before.’
This fit with what Lilah Parget had told us. ‘When did you last see him?’
‘We had beers after work on Monday night. Why?’
‘Beers on a Monday?’ Zara said.
‘We’d been working hard.’ Garcia didn’t meet her gaze. Today was Thursday, and I thought I could smell alcohol on his breath now, too.
‘He didn’t show up on Tuesday?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I think so. Just in the morning, maybe.’
‘Why did you tell me he was on leave? He wasn’t due to go for another week.’
‘Because that’s what Hazel Cuthbert told me.’ Garcia was beginning to look uneasy. ‘What’s this about?’
‘We think that might have been his body out in the field.’ I could have kept this to myself, but I wanted to see his reaction.
Garcia’s eyes went wide. ‘Rob?’
‘You haven’t seen him since, I take it,’ I said.
‘That can’t be right.’ Garcia shook his head vigorously. ‘No. That was a Chinese astronaut. You said so yourself. That’s why …’ He gestured helplessly at the screen, running pointless calculations.
‘We think someone wanted us to think so.’
‘No, you’re wrong. I’ll prove it.’ Garcia sounded slightly mad now. ‘You’ll see. When the computer finishes, the scan will show the space station. I know it’s there.’
I could feel Zara looking at me, wondering what I thought about this. In truth, I wasn’t sure. Garcia seemed guilty as hell. But he also seemed to genuinely believe there was a secret space station, which the killer wouldn’t, because they would know the body had been planted.
Franklin Anders, the atmospheric composition analyst who found the body, had said there was no space station. He’d immediately dismissed it as impossible. Why did Garcia still believe it?
‘Did Lilah Parget ever write to you?’ I asked.
Garcia’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I know she wrote to the judge,’ I said. ‘And the parole board. Victims sometimes do, requesting harsher sentences. But she actually asked for leniency. She seemed to be on your side.’
Garcia’s nostril twitched, like a fish hook had caught it. His cheeks bulged, jaw clenching. I was suddenly conscious of just how big he was, and how easily he could throw me across the room.
‘On my side,’ he repeated slowly.
‘I just wondered if she wrote to you during your sentence. Or called you, maybe.’
Garcia looked from me to Zara and back again. He seemed angry, though I couldn’t fathom why.
‘What does that,’ he asked, ‘have to do with this?’ He jabbed a finger at the screen, still scanning for a space station that wasn’t there.
I stepped closer, not giving him room to think up a lie. ‘What did she say?’
Garcia bunched his fist, like he was preparing to put it through my face. Then he got a hold of himself, rubbing his forehead with his palm. ‘It’s nothing to do with this,’ he insisted.
‘Tell me anyway.’
‘She said …’ He sighed. ‘She said she was sorry.’
‘About what?’
‘Sorry I had to go to jail,’ he said. ‘Now will you get lost? I’m busy here.’
He turned back to the screen. A chill ran down my spine. Why would Lilah be sorry that her kidnapper had been jailed? What had happened between the two of them, during the brief period she was missing?
‘Last question,’ I said. ‘Did Franklin Anders know Rob Cho?’
Garcia shot me a puzzled look. ‘Sure. Why?’
Anders was the only Space City employee who’d seen the body up close. If the dead man was Cho, why didn’t Anders say so?
‘Just wondering,’ I said. ‘You know where we can find him?’
CHAPTER 21
At what town event does everyone get the same treatment?
The East Houston Children’s Hospital wasn’t far from Space City, and it wasn’t as sad as I’d expected. Adults in superhero costumes roamed the wards, waving foam weapons and talking in gruff voices. Jaunty music bubbled from hidden speakers. Laughter echoed through the corridors. Every surface gleamed. Many American hospitals had a war-zone feel, exhausted nurses running from one bed to another as the backlog of moaning patients grew and grew—but here, everyone seemed to be keeping it together.
Except Franklin Anders. We found him by his daughter’s bedside, reading Charlotte’s Web to her, voice cracking as the pig in the story won some kind of award at the town fair.
His daughter seemed unmoved. I’m not great at estimating the age of children, partly because all the hungry kids I’d grown up with in the group home looked forty. But I guessed this girl was between six and nine. Other than the twin tubes up her nose, she didn’t look sick, just bored, her mouth a flat line, her eyes roaming the panels of the drop ceiling.
Anders recognised me, and stopped mid-sentence. ‘Oh! Blake, right? What are you doing here?’
Zara stepped in. ‘Sorry to bother you—I’m Sandra, a colleague of Timothy’s. We wanted to ask about Rob Cho’s car.’
