And then I made a whole bunch of new calls.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
Forensics analyst Jerry Spencer was a hard man to like, and so far most people didn’t want to do that much labor. He didn’t work at it with much diligence, either. He was curt, often rude, dismissive, egocentric, secretive, mean-spirited, and fussy. He was also brilliant, which is why everyone walked softly around him and tried not to offend him. His skill in collecting and analyzing evidence was superb, and with the resources of MindReader Q1 it was second to none.
He oversaw a department of forty-two highly trained technicians and scientists. They feared, hated, and admired him in equal measure.
Spencer had the debris from the thresher drone that had killed the Pool Boys and Jack Ledger. His team couldn’t tell, but Spencer was very upset. He liked Jack and had known him for thirty-five years. He often went out to the farm in Robinwood and spent long days fishing with Joe Ledger’s uncle. During those days, neither Jack nor Spencer would say more than a handful of words, preferring curmudgeonly silence to idle chitchat. If Spencer ever had a real friend, it was that man, and now he was dead. His blood was on the blades of the thresher.
Jerry Spencer was not a forgiving man. He wasn’t a nice man, and since working with the DMS he had processed hundreds of crime scenes that were splashed with innocent blood. He knew that his lack of obvious warmth didn’t come from any innate meanness of spirit. It was all hurt. It was the anger that came from seeing the dead ones. From seeing firsthand the evidence of merciless greed, of lethal avarice, of unrelenting cruelty. How could anyone look at such horrors and not feel it grind away at optimism and joy? That was Spencer’s view, and standing here with the machine that had murdered his only friend did nothing to shine light into his inner darkness.
Instead, the more destruction he saw the more cold and determined he became. If that was him acting in response to a wounded ego, then so be it. They — the eternal, many-faced they that the DMS fought — had taken something very important from him. As a result, he would take everything that was important to them. Life, liberty, and every shred of their happiness.
He had his people drop everything they were doing and focus on the drone. It was photographed, weighed, measured, scanned, scraped for samples, and then completely disassembled. The pieces were individually analyzed down to the threads on the screws and the blend of polymers in the plastic blades. Most of the parts were off-the-shelf material available through any manufacturer of machine metals and plastics. Spencer made no assumptions about that, though. He had each part entered into MindReader Q1 and traced to its source.
For the elements that were not mass-produced, he had people delve into the ultrasecret and supposedly restricted records of the Department of Defense, DARPA, and the private-sector defense contractors. Nothing happened in big-budget DoD projects without some kind of trail, and the golden rule of forensics is that “all contact leaves a trace.” Manufacture, design, budget appropriations, filed patents, research and development, field testing, and every other step of the complicated bureaucracy left traces.
What he found was that unique parts of the thresher were manufactured by sixty-eight different companies, but the assembly was done at Mueller-Trang, Inc., a defense contractor. That was very, very interesting to Spencer because Mueller-Trang had been one of several companies that came under investigation after the Predator One affair. That firm made several of the chassis for drones used by the Seven Kings. They had been cleared of any criminal involvement, but now Spencer had to wonder how that decision was reached. So he tried a different tack — investigating the people associated with the parts. That meant looking at the investigators of that case, the litigators, the members of the House and the Senate who were involved in the hearings. Everyone.
It was a complicated chain, and it quickly became clear that someone had gone to very great lengths to hide key links between players in this game. False identities, shell corporations, numbered accounts, and accounting tricks that bordered on sorcery. Yesterday it would have gone nowhere and left Spencer even more frustrated and angry. Yesterday’s ship had sailed and sunk. Today was something else. Today was that damned MindReader Q1 system. Spencer was no sentimentalist, but he liked this new system. It was a more precise tool, a sharper edge, a more powerful lens through which he could examine the minutest elements of the evidence.
A few names began appearing with notable frequency. Donald Hoeffenberger, a three-term senator, was the brother-in-law of Carter Hooks, who, in turn, was the brother-in-law of Mitchell Stoeller, who was the college roommate of a principal stockholder in a development conglomerate called Julius Systems. The owner of record of Julius Systems was the kind of false identity that was created when someone uses the Social Security number of a person who died poor and young, and builds a new official persona with that crucial information. That has been happening since Social Security numbers were first issued in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As soon as any new system is created, some con man steps up to figure out a way to game that system. This was a classic example, but MindReader broke through it in a microsecond.
It took a little more time to sort out who actually owned it, and Spencer was impressed by the attention to detail. However, it is actually impossible to hide forever, especially from a computer system that’s designed to intrude in any database and then collate that data using a huge number of linked processors. What Spencer found was that Julius Systems was owned, through sixteen removes, by Harrison Industrial, a shell corporation that Bug’s people traced all the way back to Bain Industries, currently owned by a woman named Zephyr Bain.
Ms. Bain was a notable scientist and computer engineer who had developed the Calpurnia artificial-intelligence system. She was also deeply invested in dozens of companies tied to DoD R & D contracts for robotic combat systems, computer-software systems, drone warfare, and nanotechnology. Spencer studied this information, piecing it together as his people brought it to him and as MindReader collated it.
The name Zephyr Bain tickled something in Spencer’s memory, so he initiated a new search to connect her name to anything — absolutely anything — that was linked to this case. He didn’t expect much except for maybe another link in a chain, and another and another beyond that.
That isn’t what he found.
“Well, piss on my blue suede shoes,” he said aloud as he read the data. Then he picked up the phone to call Mr. Church.
“Jerry,” began Church, “I was about to call to see how—”
“Skip the shit,” interrupted Spencer. “I think I know who Bad Sister is.”
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
“Zephyr Bain,” I repeated. On the viewscreen Church looked grave, Bug looked angry, and Jerry Spencer — for once — looked almost happy. He was never happy when ordinary people were happy, and it usually meant that someone was going to get hurt. I could relate. “I thought she was dying or something.”
“She is,” said Bug. “A little less than three months ago, she was told that her cancer had metastasized and that she was terminal. Best estimate was that she would last six months, but there is a private note in her medical file from one oncologist to her primary-care physician that it was more likely she would live two to three months, and she’s at that limit now.”