Part 8 (1/2)
DeRicci couldn't bring herself to sit down at her new desk. Some interior designer had thought that transparent furniture would go with the window-covered walls and the clear ceiling. The chairs had lines around the frames-faint white lines, so a person didn't sit on a chair that wasn't there-and so did the desk. The tables had no such outlines, and were only visible because of the items placed on top of them.
The architect-or maybe it was the interior designer- had ordered that greenery be the other feature of this place, and not just fake greenery like there had been in her detective's office, but real plants that required some real plant person to come in every day, mist them, water them, and feed them as if they were children.
As soon as DeRicci felt like she had freedom of movement, she would order those plants out of here. She wasn't sure that freedom of movement would ever come. Right now, each breath she took was scrutinized, each tremble of a finger looked at as if she were signaling an order to one of her minions.
She didn't really have minions yet. She hadn't hired them. The only people on her staff were the security team a.s.signed to guard her, and the skeleton staff that any government office had. Right now, they were all being paid by the City of Armstrong. No one had worked out the logistics of having the United Domes pay for any of this.
That, the governor-general had a.s.sured DeRicci, would happen in the next biennium-whatever the h.e.l.l that was.
A big office, no real staff, and only a vague mission. At the moment, DeRicci wasn't even sure how to begin doing her job, let alone what kind of job she was supposed to do. She'd asked, of course, and everyone had given her the same answer: It's your job to make the Moon more secure. It's your job to make the Moon more secure.
But she didn't have a budget or any way to enforce the changes she made. She didn't even have a plan.
And everyone outside of the government treated her like she had just become the Moon's military dictator. All that popularity she had worked up after the marathon and her work on the commission had vanished like it had never been.
Of course, Ki Bowles wasn't helping. Those horrible news pieces, talking about all of DeRicci's past screwups without discussing anything positive she'd done, made it sound like she had bungled her way into this job.
Maybe she had. She certainly couldn't remember anything she had done right. Only the demotions and the reprimands and the anger she had carried in her very bones when she worked for the police department.
Then she used to think if only she could run the department for one day, she would make such a difference. She She would understand all the problems the street officers and detectives had. She would know how to treat everyone well. would understand all the problems the street officers and detectives had. She would know how to treat everyone well.
Now she just shook her head at her own naivete. Here she was in charge of a fake kingdom, almost afraid to make a move for fear that someone somewhere would make a valid objection.
Right now, her new department had bad press, no real design, and no power.
And she was so politically inexperienced, she had no idea how to put any of this right.
13.
Flint wasn't trying to save her life. He was just trying to find out if she was telling the truth. He made Costard pay the retainer directly into one of his accounts, explained the rules and procedures to her, and sent her on her way. She left him the name of the hotel she was staying at, and he promised to contact her in no less than forty-eight hours.
He had a lot of research to do during that time.
Some of the research was easy. He started with Costard herself, going deeper than the cursory information he had received when he had gotten her facial recognition through his network. Everything she had done was in some database or another. Her parents were well-known archeology professors who had traveled the Earth, looking at artifacts. They had died on a dig in a region known as the Middle East, after some sort of accident had caused the remains of an ancient stone building to collapse around them.
Costard was their only child. She had accompanied them on their travels when she was young, but as she got older, they had left her behind in various schools. She had worked her way to the top of all of her cla.s.ses, and had shown great promise in several fields.
When her parents died, she had been working on a master's in history. She had dropped that and had started all over again, focusing on physical anthropology, a field related to her parents' expertise, but not in that area. Over time, she had specialized in forensic anthropology, essentially working with bones recently found to figure out how the person who had once worn those bones had died.
Flint wondered if she ever thought about the irony of her work: that she dealt with people who had often been long buried-hidden by dirt or debris or ancient stone buildings. People like her parents, who, because of some misfortune, had ended life early and painfully, their bodies hidden by the ground itself.
If she had thought of it, he found no record of it in her writings or the interviews she had done. Costard was pa.s.sionate about her work and had become well-known, one of the true experts in her field.
Only her field was Earth-centric. There was little call for forensic anthropologists outside of the nurturing, oxygen-rich, humid environment of the mother planet. The more artificial the environment, the easier it was for medical examiners, doctors, and coroners to find the secrets of the dead.
Flint learned, in his study of Costard, that the dead who kept their flesh had fewer secrets than the dead who had lost theirs. He had found it a ghoulish job, one that seemed almost irrelevant. He hadn't talked with her about it; he wasn't sure he really wanted to know what it was about the work that truly inspired her.
Like most forensic anthropologists, she spent a few years at the Smithsonian Inst.i.tute, doing work in their labs, and that was where she discovered an apt.i.tude for solving murders. Current death, Current death, she called it in one of the many profiles he saw. Current death instead of carbon dating bones thousands of years old. she called it in one of the many profiles he saw. Current death instead of carbon dating bones thousands of years old.
This way, she had said in an interview, she had said in an interview, I can make an actual difference. I can let families know what happened to their loved ones. If the case is truly current, I can help put criminals in jail. I can make an actual difference. I can let families know what happened to their loved ones. If the case is truly current, I can help put criminals in jail.
And she did. She became well-known throughout Earthly police circles for her unerring expertise and her willingness to throw herself into a job.
Perhaps that was what led her to Mars in the first place, that willingness to get overinvolved. She hadn't done her research, just like she had said. Her problems on Mars weren't human problems; they were Disty problems, problems she rarely encountered in her work on Earth.
Flint could have spent days developing a profile of Costard, but the deeper he dug, the more consistent she seemed. After the death of her parents, everything she had done seemed to follow a straight-line pattern. Each decision was logical, moving from one point to another.
Even her decision to remain alone and uninvolved outside of her work made sense to him.
But of course it would. He had made the same decision after Emmeline died.
When he came to that realization-that he and Costard had their reaction to familial death in common-he had stood up from his desk and paced the office, trying to evaluate his own stance on this case. If he felt a thread, a common tie to Costard, could he keep his objectivity?
And did it really matter?
After all, her involvement in this case wasn't personal. She hadn't killed Lagrima Jrgen. Costard hadn't been old enough to be a part of this case, even if she had some ties to the Jrgen family.
Finally, Flint calmed himself enough to return to his desk. There he set aside the work he had done on Costard-he had done enough to get a sense of her-and turned to the most troublesome part of the preliminaries: Disty death rituals.
When he looked them up in the alien database he'd kept from his police academy days, he nearly stopped work at that moment. The Disty had ten thousand known death customs, and several thousand more variations.
Death frightened them and appalled them, although unlike some other alien groups, the Disty did kill when they had to.
But their society had strong structures and taboos about death, so strong that the Alliance found no way to negotiate with the Disty over these issues. Eventually, the Alliance had decided to accept the Disty into the fold with warnings to anyone who did business with them: Avoid the Disty death traditions. That seemed to be the most sensitive side of their society.
Flint leaned back in his chair and threaded his hands behind his head. The cursory glance told him that Costard had not been making up the Disty paranoia. She had walked into the middle of the most troublesome part of Disty culture without a clue about its impact on her.
He had done the same as a police officer. He had never realized that his work with corpses who died by Disty vengeance killings had made him unclean to other Disty. Of course, they hadn't known that he had gone near victims of vengeance killings. If they had known, they would have insisted on other investigators, or worse, that he be punished for violating Disty law as agreed to under a variety of Alliance contracts.
Costard hadn't lied about the Disty death rituals. In fact, the deeper Flint dug into them, the more he realized how cursory her understandings were. The purification ritual without family members was gruesome no matter which variation the Disty performed; Costard definitely would not survive it, but she would live long enough to regret ever seeing Jrgen's remains.
Flint felt a flash of empathy: Living in this modern universe was like living in a war zone without knowing the combatants or the rules. The laws that governed the Alliance and its many peripheral allies were so complex that any venture off familiar turf brought with it dangers that initially seemed innocuous.
It wasn't hard to see how Costard had gotten into this situation.
Flint had to make sure he didn't make similar mistakes.
14.
Scott-Olson sat down in the reddish-brown sand. She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her cheek on her knees.
She was exhausted. She had worked for five hours straight, uncovering three mummies, all in the area where Batson had first led her. Limbs still peeked through the surface in all directions. If she had to guess, she figured there were a least a hundred corpses here, all buried at the same time.
Batson had brought her water but no food. Like most normal people-the kind who didn't spend their days around corpses-Batson figured she would be too nauseated to eat while she worked.