Black Man / Thirteen

They found Toni Montes sprawled on the dining room floor not far from the section of wall where her blood and brains were splashed. She’d rolled when she fell and landed on her side, head turned, displaying the soggy mess of the exit wound. Her limbs were a seemingly boneless tangle, her feet bare. The faintly shimmering white corpse outline seemed to isolate her from the surroundings of her home, as if preparatory to snipping her out of the picture. As they approached, supplementary data scrolled up over the body in neat holographic boxes. Tissue trauma, time of death. Probable causes of secondary injuries. Age, sex, race. Genetic salients.

“I hate that shit,” said Sevgi, for something to say. “Fucking convenience culture, it just gets in the way of what you’re trying to see.”

“You can probably disable it.”

“Yeah.” She made no move to summon Cranston. “Back when I started on the force, NYPD ran trials on this option where you could get the corpse to talk to you.”

“Jesus, whose fucked-up idea was that?” But it was said absently. Marsalis knelt by the body, brow creased.

“I don’t know. Some datageek with too much time on his hands, looking for a creative edge. Rationale was, it was to prevent desensitizing. Supposed to bring back to you the fact that this was once a living, breathing human being.”

“Right.” He took one of the dead woman’s hands, which had fallen cupped loosely upward, and lifted it gently. He seemed to be stroking her fingers.

Sevgi crouched beside him. “Well, they already had the models where you could get the victim to reverse from moment of death, back up, and then walk through the probable sequence of events. Guess it wasn’t that much of a stretch.”

He turned to look at her, face suddenly close. “Can we do that here?”

“You want to?”

Another shrug. “We’ve got time to kill, haven’t we?”

“All right. Cranston?”

The ’face shaded undramatically into being across the room from them, like a pre-mille

“What can I do for you?”

Sevgi got up and gestured. “Can you run the crime event model for us? Last few minutes only.”

“No problem. You’ll need to come through to the front room; that’s where it seems to have started. I’ll engage the system now. Do you want sound?”

Sevgi, who’d watched a lot of this sort of thing, shook her head.

“No, just the motions.”

“Then if you’ll follow me.”

U

A pace away from her, the system penciled in the perpetrator.

It was a black outline of a man, a figure with the smooth, characterless features and standardized body mass of an anatomical sketch, all done in shiny jet. But it breathed, and it swayed slightly, and it sprang at Toni Montes and hit her with a savage, looping backfist. The image of the woman flew silently backward, tripped, and fell on the couch. One espadrille came off, flipped ludicrously high, and landed on the other side of the room. The black figure went after Montes, seized her by the throat, and punched her in the face. She flopped and slumped. The other espadrille came off. She pushed herself away along the couch, stumbled toward upright while the black figure stood and watched with robot calm. When Montes got to her feet, it stepped in again and punched her high in the chest. She flew back into the drapes, rolled, staggered upright. She flailed with nails, got a backhand for her trouble that knocked her fully across the room. The edge of the opened door to the hall caught her in the back. This time she went down and stayed down.

The black figure stalked after her.

“At this point,” said the ’face, “the model estimates the killer force-marched Montes into the other room, threw her back against the wall, and shot her through the head. Reasons for the change of tactic are still under consideration. It may be that he was concerned the killing would be seen through the window to the street.”

The black figure bent over Montes and hauled her to her feet by the hair. It pinioned her arm into the small of her back and shoved her, struggling, toward the co

“Would you like to relocate to view the final sequence?”

Sevgi glanced at Marsalis. He shook his head. “No. Turn it off.”

Montes and her black cutout killer blurred and vanished. Marsalis walked through the space where they’d been, leaving Sevgi in the front room. When she followed, she found him knelt once more by the corpse, apparently reading the scroll-ups.

“See something you like?” It was an old homicide joke, crime scene black humor. It was out of her mouth before she realized she’d said it.

He looked up and seemed to be sca

She blinked at him. “Prior record of what?”

“Her prior record.” He indicated the sprawled corpse. “Montes.”

“Marsalis, she was a fucking housewife.” Angry, she realized, with herself and the ease with which she’d slid back into crime scene macabre. She brought her voice down. “This is a suburban mother of two who sold real estate part-time. What record are you talking about?”

He hesitated. Got up and stared around the room again, as if he couldn’t work out how Montes had come to be living with this décor.

“Marsalis?”

He faced her. “If this woman was a real estate saleswoman, I’m a fucking bonobo. You want to get some air?”

She cranked an eyebrow. “In a virtuality?”

“Figure of speech. There’s got to be a briefing level somewhere in this format. How about we go there?”

The briefing level was cut-rate, a mesa top that you got to from anywhere in the construct by reciting a key code Cranston provided them with. The system switched without any transition you could feel to a viewpoint high up over the desert and the spread of datahomes on the plain below. Over time, it appeared various AFPD detectives had imported their own custom touches, and now the mesa top was littered with favorite armchairs in clashing upholstery, a couple of tatami mats, a hammock strung on two thick steel hooks embedded, startlingly, in floating patches of brickwork, another slung more conventionally between two full-size palm trees, a pool table, and, for some inexplicable reason, a tipped-over antique motorcycle with an ax buried in its fuel tank.

It was very quiet up there, just the wind catching on edges of rock in the cliff face below. Quiet enough that you thought if you listened carefully, you might be able to hear the faint static hiss of the base datasystems turning over. Carl stared down at the adobe structures for a while, not listening for anything, thinking it over. The datahomes seemed very distant, and he supposed that was appropriate. There was nothing here he needed to interest himself in more than superficially. He wondered how much to bother telling Ertekin, how much cooperation he needed to fake to keep her cop instincts cooled.

“Look,” he said finally. “That fight they’ve modeled down there is bullshit. Montes wasn’t a victim, she fought this guy all the way. She knew how to fight. That’s why the slippers came off. She didn’t lose them in the battering, she kicked them off so she could fight better.”