“Look, what you fucking want from me? Everything you ask me, I give you answers. Now I got places I got to be.” She leaned across the table. “You know, I don’t show up for shift tonight, they don’t pay me. Not like you public sector guys.”
“Zdena Tovbina,” said Norton. “Filigree Steel co-worker. They got her off video archive from the building where this guy used to live. Seems she came looking for him when he didn’t show up for work two shifts running.”
“Nice of her. Shame Filigree Steel didn’t think to do the same thing.”
Norton shrugged. “Fluid labor market, you know how it is. Apparently they did call him a couple of times, but when he didn’t call back, they just assumed he’d moved on. Hired someone else to fill his shifts. These security grunts make shit, staff turnover’s through the roof. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Unionize, maybe?”
“Ssssh.”
In the interview room, Alicia Rovayo was pacing about. “We’ll inform your shift manager if we need to keep you much longer. Meantime, let’s go over it one more time. You say you didn’t actually know anything was wrong with Driscoll.”
“No, I knew was something wrong. Something wrong was he saw inside of that ship.” For just a moment, Zdena Tovbina looked haunted. “When we saw, we all got sick. Joey was first, but we all saw what was there.”
“You actually saw Driscoll vomiting?” Coyle asked from his seat.
“No, we heard.” Tovbina tapped her ear twice, graphically. “Squad net. Radio.”
“And later, when you saw him?”
“He was quiet. Would not talk.” A phlegmatic, open-handed gesture. “I tried, he turned away from me. Very male, you know.”
“These guys went in masked,” Norton murmured. “Minimal stuff, upper-face goggle wrap, but they were smearing anticontaminants as well. You beginning to see where this is going?”
Sevgi nodded glumly. She glanced across the gallery at Marsalis, but he was focused wholly on the woman beyond the glass.
“When was the last time you actually saw Joseph Driscoll?” Coyle asked patiently.
Tovbina all but ground her teeth in frustration. “I have told you. He went back on Red Two shuttle. Climbed in by mistake. We were all shaken. Not thinking right. When we’re back at base, I looked for him in squad room. He was already gone.”
“Oh yeah,” breathed Marsalis. “He was gone all right.”
“Where’d they find the body?” Sevgi asked.
“Caught up in deep-water cabling a hundred and something meters down, on the edge of one of these bioculture platforms they’ve got out there. It’s pretty much the area where Horkan’s Pride came down, allowing for drift. Whoever threw Driscoll over the side weighted him around the legs with a couple of bags of junk from the Horkan’s Pride galley. Probably made them up in advance. Took him down fast and clean, heading for the seabed until he hit something that snagged him. Pure chance a repair crew was out that way yesterday.”
“Did he drown?”
“No, looks like he was dead before he went into the water. Crushed larynx, snapped neck.”
“Fuck. Weren’t these guys wearing vital signs vests?”
“Yeah, but no one checks them, apparently. Staffing cuts, Filigree Steel eliminated the deck medics on their shuttles sometime last year when they went up for retender.”
“Great.”
“Yeah, market forces, don’t you just love them. Oh yeah, and there are a lot of smaller contusions on Driscoll, some abrasions, too. Forensics reckon he was stuffed inside one of the disposal chutes up near the kitchen section, then dumped straight out into the ocean. A couple of those hatches at least would have been on the submerged side of the hull. No one would have noticed.”
Sevgi shook her head. “Blowing an outer hatch should have shown up on a scanner somewhere. Takes power. Either that, or you have to use the explosive bolts like he did with the access hatches, and that would have made a noise, even submerged.”
“There’d be plenty of power in the onboard batteries,” said Marsalis distantly. “You wouldn’t need the bolts. And by the look of it, these people were too busy puking their guts up to be watching their screens for low-level electrical activity.”
He sat back and puffed out his cheeks.
“Our boy Merrin really played this one.” He shook his head. “A thing of beauty, really.”
Norton shot him an unfriendly look.
“So.” Sevgi wanted to hear someone say it, even if it was her. “Merrin walks out of there as Driscoll. Steals his gear, masks up, and slips aboard the wrong transport in the general confusion. Think that was deliberate, or did he just luck out?”
Marsalis shook his head again. “Deliberate, absolutely. He’d be paying attention for that stuff.”
“He makes it back to the base, gets off the base somehow. I’d guess that’s not hard. Got to be a hundred different outs for someone with Merrin’s training. Security’s going to be focused on incoming personnel anyway, not the graveyard shift going home. And with all this breaking loose, everyone’s running around like a Jesusland snake-handling meet.” She stopped. “Wait a minute, what about the quarantine?”
Norton sighed. “Fudged. They applied it, made the announcement on the way back. Everyone through the nanoscan. Apparently”—irony lay heavy on the word—“no one at Filigree Steel realized Driscoll didn’t take the scan.”
Marsalis grunted. “Or by the time they realized, it was too late and they just covered their arses.”
“Yeah, well, in any case, quarantine cleared inside the first couple of hours. Some biohazard outfit down from Seattle, they checked the hull for contaminants before it was towed. If someone at Filigree Steel was covering their asses, they knew they were safe by lunchtime.”
Sevgi nodded gloomily. “And by the time we’d get to digging any deeper with Filigree Steel, Ward shows up dead so we assume that’s how Merrin got ashore, and we don’t bother. What a fucking mess.”
“It’s classic insurgency technique,” Marsalis said. “Misdirect, cover your tracks.”
“Can you sound a little less fucking impressed, please.”
In the interview room, they were done. Zdena Tovbina was escorted out, ostentatiously checking her watch. Rovayo stayed behind, played a long, weary glance through the one-way glass to the gallery as if she could see the three of them sitting there.
“That’s all, folks,” she said.
“He planned this.” Sevgi was still talking to make herself believe it. “He opened up the cryocaps and ripped the bodies apart to create a fucking diversion.”
“Yeah.” Marsalis got up to leave. “And you guys thought he’d just gone crazy.”
Coyle and Rovayo had been busy. There was a full CSI virtual up and running for Joey Driscoll’s death, including a gruesomely modeled corpse-recovery site. They stood, briefly, in fathomless, lamplit blue and Driscoll peered down at them out of the tangled cabling, one puffy hand waving gently in the current. A CSI ’face reached up helpfully and pulled in magnified detail that Sevgi, syn or no syn, could really have done without. Driscoll’s eyes were gone, and the earlobes, the mouth eaten back to a lopsided harelip snarl, and the whole swollen face gone waxy with adipocere seepage through the skin from the subcutaneous fat layers beneath. Sevgi’d seen worse, much worse, fished out of the Hudson or the East River every so often, but it was all a long time ago, and now the illusion of floating beneath the waterlogged corpse in the depths of the ocean kept triggering an impulse to hold her breath.