The Iron Swamp (23 page)

Of course he does.

"What does he want?" I said, trying not to sound nervous.

"Don't know. Probably has something to do with what happened in the foyer yesterday."

My ankle had swelled during the night from where Lisbold had dropped me, barely fitting in my shoe. I limped to Figuel's old office and knocked on the door.

"Come in," came a voice from the other side. "You're late."

I said nothing, staring at the other man in the room.

"Nidess, this is Sikes, your new partner."

Sikes got up from the small chair. "Wayland Sikes, pleased to meet you. You can call me Wally." He smiled as we shook. "I'll do my best to last longer than your previous partners." His baby face looked as if stubble was a thing of the future, and a few zits still poked through the surface, making him look adolescent at best. His grip was firm, and he seemed confident, but he was an odd choice for such an investigation. The obvious reason was that Sikes was a man Hayson could trust.

"He's my nephew," Hayson said.

I nodded. Of course he was. "I trust it was the President who deemed Lisbold so unsatisfactory so quickly?"

Hayson grimaced. "I heard about your little dispute yesterday, and this morning I get a call from the President's office telling me to fire him; some nonsense about his performance at the palace."

I nodded as if I'd whispered the order in Clazran's ear.

"Sikes isn't a full detective yet," he continued, "so he is more of an assistant than a partner, and he is too junior to make an individual report, but he was top of his class, so with your instruction I'm sure he could make a valued contribution to solving this case. How far have you gotten with it?"

"I have a list of ten or so suspects."

He nodded then waved me away. "Get out both of you."

I had a message from Becky asking where I was, so I sent one back telling her to meet me in the basement.

"Come on," Sikes said. "I'll show you to your new desk."

"My new..." It was almost funny. Lisbold was gone, and I had a new desk. Hayson was scared. He was trying to keep me happy after Lisbold's disappearance demonstrated I was a threat. If it weren't for Pressen's reappearance I might have smiled.

The desk was twice the size of my old one, and had a brand new network screen, almost as wide as I was tall. Just in front of it sat a little poem on a bit of paper.

Nidess was a very small man,

He came up with a small person's plan.

He'd arrest little girls,

And put them in cells,

And then we'd all know his cock span.

I threw my head back and laughed, causing a few of the nearer officers to jump. Other than the fact that
girls
and
cells
clearly didn't rhyme, I quite liked it. I sat down at my new desk in high spirits, pretty sure I was on the verge of cracking the case.

Chapter 14

18/10/2256 FC

I was never solving the case. Almost a month had passed, and the only thing I was still sure of was that I'd made a mistake. I was also pretty sure the killer was smarter than me. If it was Benrick then he was a genius, and the method he used was beyond my comprehension. For all the possibilities I had at this stage, Kenrey and the guard might have murdered each other, and the only man who could tell me otherwise, Jacob Hobb, had gone missing.

In the stress of it all, I'd stopped sleeping. Pressen kept me awake as much as Kenrey. When the lights went out, their faces seemed to materialize like swamp mist out of thin air. Hobb, Sariah, Rake, Lisbold, all of them were staring at me, forcing me to stay awake or they would slit my throat as I slept.

The press had all but stopped bothering me. In the aftermath of the riots and the military intervention, local, national, and international news cared about little other than the mech problem. Not even Pressen had contacted me since I found him waiting for me outside my apartment. Though in his case, I did not mistake it for loss of interest. If there was one thing that could revive the
Simon Nidess hero
story, it was the demonstration that I was also a traitor.

Four weeks, and I'd found no viable countermeasure. My mind always turned to killing him, and then I spent the next few hours moralizing over it, when the truth was that even if he died I could not control the story. Pressen had found something too juicy for his publishers to drop just because the lead investigator was killed, and his death would only make the story more appealing. I would have to destroy every last remnant of it without him finding out.

I was lost at sea on a raft of rotting bark. Every time I fixed a hole two more appeared. If my goal in life was the accumulation of dis poetry about myself, then I was a success. It was almost flattering that someone found me so interesting. I'd even kept some of my favorites.

The Commissioner was feeling quite lazy;
In no mood for jailing the daisies.
He said let the girls go,
And Our Man said, "No!"
And Hayson is going quite crazy.

Lisbold was an ugly-ass ape,
And Our Man he thought was a jape.
He picked him right up,
Then got burned with a cup,
As his brain was the size of a grape.

When Our Man is going to dinner,
And admittedly he's looking no thinner,
The President calls,
And they dine in his walls,
And that's how we know he's a winner.

On the upside, I had taken revenge on the man who broke my action figures. I sent him the bill along with the video from the camera that was supposed to catch Rake and Lisbold. Initially, he whined that he couldn't afford to replace them on his basement salary. I told him if he wanted to keep on earning it he had until the end of the week.

The money arrived in my account the next day.

This minor victory was not enough to raise my spirits about the case which was frustrating me at every turn. Signey had told me that Kenrey and probably the guard were injected with a paralyzing agent called vansetomia that allowed the killer to slit both their throats without taking injury. Most likely Kathryn helped distract them in this regard, allowing the killer to inject them. Signey had found the needle entry hole in Kenrey's back, and it would make sense if a similar tactic had been used on the guard. Despite all of this, and knowing where Kathryn was through Mrs. Jason, I couldn't do anything about it.

I couldn't bring her down to the station without drawing attention to her being a child prostitute, and nor could I ask her questions elsewhere without the permission of her new pimp. At least if Rake were to murder the new one, it would serve some function by allowing me to ask Kathryn some questions.

The only good thing about my current situation was that since I managed to rule out all of my suspects as possible murderers, Becky was no longer on a short list of people likely to have committed the crime. Therefore, I'd stopped paying her out of my own pocket, and she was now officially my assistant. I could relax with her, as I sensed she did with me. Our relationship was becoming the closest approximation to friendship I'd ever had. But there was also unease. On her part she seemed almost reverent towards me, and did not always state her views when they would have been welcome. On my part, I still did not trust her, simply because I did not know how. There was always the niggling suspicion that every toothy smile and bat of her hazel eyes was a lie.

It was on this happy reflection, still with the last spoon full of hot pearial in my mouth, that I saw at the top of my messages that Hobb had been found dead. There were reports he'd been missing since the interviews, but no one seemed exactly sure. Lesgech had said the day after the interviews was the last day he came in. I thought perhaps he had run away, and much of my focus had been on tracking his movement, but apparently he had never left the compound.

I got in my slider and made my way to the scene.

*

In the compound gardens I might have understood, surrounded by beautiful plants and fountains, but I found him in a cupboard lent against the wall sitting on a pile of shoes; a sick animal crawled somewhere private to die.

"Been there for weeks," Fache said. "They don't start smelling like that for a while."

Hobb smelled as if someone had sliced open a bag of food waste. Even after so long, the skin shined beneath a single extinct tear track. His eyes were dry and rotted, but somehow he still looked afraid, a little bottle of pills poking out of a shoe in front of his legs.

"Why has it taken them so long to find him?" I said.

Fache slapped on a pair of lab gloves and passed one to me. "They found him because of the smell. That cupboard hasn't been used in cycles."

The bottle of pills could have been placed there after he died, but I didn't think so. It didn't look like a murder. It looked like a distraught man out of options.

Hobb clearly knew something about Kenrey's death, but he had neither the brains to plan the operation nor the time to commit it. Someone had told him the plan, and I could think of only one reason why they would do that. He had to be a part of it.

My mind flashed back to Hobb's collection of the dirty sheets from Kenrey's room. He could not have carried the killer in because the security footage showed the bin was empty when the guard looked inside. This took place sometime before the explosion, but what if Kenrey was already long dead? What if on the way out, concealed beneath the dirty sheet, was a person, and Hobb carried them past the guards in a laundry bin? It meant the murder could have happened almost an hour before I thought it did.

After the clicking and blinding flashes of light subsided, and Hobb's body had been captured from every possible angle, three men in masks pulled him out of the cupboard and sat him on a tarpaulin mat. For a click he stayed in the position he had been in for weeks as if some remaining life force kept him bent, but then he slumped backward, rigor mortis having long since subsided.

"Check his pockets," Fache said. "No sign of his tablet?"

"Not in his pockets, sir," said a man in a white coat riffling through Hobb's clothes.

In the light Hobb looked worse. Most of his flesh was tinted blue, as if he had been left out in the cold too long. Sporadic patches of brownish rot spread across his skin like a rash. His eyes weren't human anymore, just empty holes in his skull, blackened and shriveled. Almost immediately, I had to turn away.

"Not here, sir," confirmed a white coat.

"Check the cupboard," I said with my back to him.

Fache walked round to face me as if I was rooted to the floor. "What do you think?"

"Disgusting."

He laughed. "I wasn't asking if you wanted to sleep with him. What you think about the implications for the case?"

I fought down the urge to vomit. "He didn't do it. Couldn't have."

"Found a note, sir," said one of the men digging through the pile of shoes. Another man had taken the jackets that hung over Hobb's head and was looking through those.

Fache opened up the folded sheet of paper. "It's a suicide note.
I'm sorry for what I did to Kenrey
."

"It's a lie," I said, before Fache could ask me if I was still sure. "Hobb could never have fit through Kenrey's window, and therefore couldn't have committed the crime."

"What window?" Fache said. "I thought there was a great big hole in the wall! Pretty sure he could fit through that."

"That hole was created after the murder to frame Peti for a crime he could not otherwise have committed." If I was right about Hobb bringing the killer out in the bin, then they didn't even use it for an exit route. They were already long gone by the time of the explosion.

"You can't know that," he said. "Perhaps he thought of something you haven't."

I sighed, choosing not to take insult. "It's possible, but that would involve a mentally retarded individual coming up with a complicated plan then carrying it out flawlessly."

"Look," he said, taking me to one side out of earshot of his men, "the longer this case goes on the more exposed we become. Lisbold's already gone, and we don't all have your friends in high places. There are people gunning for me in my department, and I need this over. This guy killing himself so soon after you interviewed him and leaving a note to say he did it tells me this
is
our man."

"I don't think so," I said. "Where's his tablet? Even the mentally challenged have tablets, so why is he using
paper
to write his suicide note? It doesn't make any sense."

No one used paper to write suicide notes. They were easily lost, stolen, altered, and most importantly, unless the reader was intimately familiar with the dead person's
handwriting
, the note could not be identified as their own. In Fache's favor, the ineptitude of the scrawling looked as if the writer was not only unpracticed at the craft, but had probably never been taught it. I knew from my cousin they didn't bother teaching handwriting in the extra requirement schools. But none of this made any difference. It was far more likely that Hobb would have used the tool he had been using his whole life rather than take up the craft of handwriting for his last document.

As I saw it, there was only one reason for a paper note. Someone was trying to frame Hobb, as people had been doing from the outset. That also explained why they would take his tablet which likely contained the actual suicide note in the form of a recorded message.

It unsettled me that Fache could be smiling with the view of Hobb over the top of my head. "This is it. No bits of snake are going to appear this time to back us up if we come out saying it wasn't him. The trail is drier than the fracking Baesian dunes; you told me so yourself. We have to write this case up and move on before it destroys us like it has everyone else. The longer it lasts, the longer we are standing with our dicks out in a room full of hungry beasts."

"That was true yesterday, not today," I said. "Hobb didn't commit the murder, but I know what I overlooked. I'll find the killer now–"

"This is the killer! I can't back you if you say otherwise in your report. Mine is going to say exactly what this looks like. Hobb killed himself due to his guilty conscience, and fracking admits to the crime in his suicide note."