city blues 01 - dome city blues by jeff edwards Read Free Book Online Page B

digital module.  All you had to do was plug the Scion into a computer and presto, Maggie in a can.  Sort of the electronic version of immortality.
    She was in there, all right, or at least an incredibly accurate computer approximation of her personality was.  Her memories were in there too, current up to the instant when John had slipped the sensor network over her head.
    Maggie had tried to talk me into making one.  She and John both had.  I’d refused, a decision I had never regretted for a second.  Man is not meant to be factored into logic algorithms.
    The Scion had just been a novelty to John and Maggie, an interesting trinket.  Every once in a while, they would drag the module out and plug it into John’s computer.  They’d talk to it for hours, giggling over it, like children playing with an amusing gadget.  Then they’d unplug it, and it would go back on the shelf.
    It might still be there somewhere, gathering dust at the back of one of John’s closets.  I made a mental note to ask him about it.  If the damned thing was still around, I wanted it erased.
    The past was dead, and nothing that was recorded on a stack of memory chips could change that.
     

CHAPTER 4

    The computer in the den was concealed in the mahogany surface of my desktop.  I plugged Jackal’s data chip into a hidden slot in the right edge of the desk and thumbed the power switch.  A holographic display field unfolded in the air above the desk, the translucent blue rectangle empty except for a slowly flashing cursor.  The keyboard was a hologram as well, projected over a grid of infrared sensors that read the position of my fingers in relation to the imaginary keys.
    I called up a file menu.
    I would put off the actual crime-scene recordings until last.  I’m not usually squeamish, but the fact that the victims were all children, or practically so, added an unpleasant dimension.  I wanted to work myself up to them slowly.
    I started with the text files.  Most of them I just skimmed.  It takes a while to read every report generated during a single murder investigation.  I had files from fourteen murder cases.  Fifteen, if you counted Winter’s suicide.
    The first murder had occurred in 2061 on the thirteenth of August.  The victim: a fourteen-year-old girl named Kathy Lynn Armstrong.
    Twenty-four days later came Miko Otosaki, thirteen years old.
    Sometime after the death of Felicia Stevens, the third victim, an over-educated desk sergeant had started calling the killer Huitzilopochtli , in honor of an Aztec God whose thirst for human sacrifices demanded a regular diet of hearts.
    Since none of the rest of the cops in the station house could pronounce Huitzilopochtli, they’d quickly shortened the killer’s nickname to Aztec.  The media had picked up on the title immediately.
    The last of the killings attributed to Aztec was a thirteen-year-old named Tracy Lee.  Tracy had died on the twenty-ninth of March in 2063: a little over two weeks before Michael had put a bullet through his own brain.
    Fourteen victims stretched out over nineteen months.  The shortest interval between killings had been four days.  The longest had been ninety-eight days.  That made the average about forty-five days.
    I checked my watch.  Aztec hadn’t killed in 133 days, not since Winter’s suicide.
    None of the murdered girls had been penetrated orally, vaginally or anally.  The police had never found a trace of semen or foreign saliva on or near any of the victim’s bodies.
    Christine Clark’s file I examined in detail.  Sonja was right about the date; Christine had been murdered on the eighth of February.  The coroner’s best guess was 3 p.m., plus or minus a half-hour.  LAPD’s AI estimated time of death at 3:07:21 p.m., plus or minus two minutes.
    So if Sonja was telling the truth—if Michael really had been with her that day—then he couldn’t have killed Christine.
    But a check of the physical evidence files put another nail