“It was reported to us that the deceased is a bio,” I said.
He shook his head and turned down the corners of his mouth. “Can’t prove it by me, inspector. Looks like any other old sky rat to me.” He grinned. “No shortage of pigeons in Exeter, is there,” he said with an attempt at jocularity that faded rather rapidly as neither of the pips hovering before him reacted. The corners of his mouth resumed their downward turn.
“If the victim is a bio,” said Shad, still as Marcus Licinius Crassus, “it probably carries a human imprint, Styles. It may be a murder victim.”
The police constable shrugged his wide shoulders, his face devoid of expression. “Not paid to worry about bios,” he said. “Your job, now, isn’t it? No offense, detective, but the bloke couldn’t of thought much of hisself getting copied into a pigeon suit. Might as well’ve copied into a toad or a flippin’ dung beetle, right? Besides, amdroids all got bodies tucked away in stasis somewheres, don’t they?”
“Some do,” began Shad coolly.
“Thank you, Police Constable Styles.” Outside of Styles’s hearing, I transmitted to Shad, “Stop turning your crank and follow me.”
“The bozo,” Shad muttered as we swooped into the dark narrow passage, the walls on either side made of poured composite glass, smooth but tinted to look like brick. The only illumination came from the lights on High Street.
As we reached midway in the walk, my light picked up a small still figure on the left near the northeast wall. We descended until we were next to it. The corpse was indeed a pigeon. The bird was lying on its right side on the cracked gray paving, his head toward High Street, his dark pink toes curled up, landing gear retracted in death. The bird’s feathers were disheveled particularly on the side against the pavement. There were a few spatter marks near the corpse that could have been blood. “Shad.”
“Yeah?”
“Be a good fellow and notify Sergeant Dunn of our presence. Ask him to make available whoever it was who reported finding this body over at DC Parker’s command post. Also, explain we’re shorthanded and ask Dunn to keep his men on duty until we clear the scene.”
“You got it.”
As Shad streaked toward High Street, I played my lights down the length of the bird, measured its dimensions and calculated its weight. It was a common Rock Dove model, bluish-gray wings, no wing bands but white coloring along the wings’ leading edges. It had a partial white ring around its neck, open in the front, and its breast was a warmer hue than the rest. The bird’s head coloring was darker, but not iridescent toward the neck as you see with so many pigeons. As the general run of pigeons go, this one was neither handsome nor unique. It was almost as though this model had been chosen for its dullness—its ability to blend into a background.
I checked my instruments and I picked up the fading marker beacon of a bio receiver. This was how one bio could always identify another as a bio, which meant the one who discovered the body was likely an amdroid or human bio. I opened the mech’s neural reader and checked the pigeon’s imprint and recall bank. Both neutral. Unless the occupant had been on continuous sync with a neural net or a body in stasis, the memory information was lost to wherever such energies go after life can no longer sustain them.
“We’re logged in, Jaggs,” transmitted Shad as he returned. “I don’t get it. That Dunn seemed really irritated we didn’t come in from High Street. There’re two mechs out there from the Forensic Medical Examiner. Dunn says he’ll send them in to haul off the vic once we’re done. There was a newshound out there who says you know him.”
“Fidelis?” I asked.
“That’s the one. Sniffs out tips for BBC 228? I know him from Rougemont Gardens.”
“I’ve thrown him a bone on occasion. What does Fido have to say about the news frenzy out on High Street?”
“He was told to be there and to be heavy with camera. Worthwhile story alert.”
“Any idea what the story concerned?”
“I got the definite feeling everyone out there is expecting to catch someone official with his pants down.”
“Really.” I thought on that for a second then shrugged. “Shad, scan the vic, get a liver temp, DNA, and ID while I set up a prang and fly the grid. Analyze this spatter here, as well.”
While Shad got to work, I pulled away and up until I hovered approximately ten meters away from the corpse toward the shopping center end of the walk. Because of the narrowness of Parliament Street I couldn’t both get a good view and a solid fixed wall position upon which to mount the Vader prang—cop slang for the high definition image marker used for recording and analyzing the content of crime scenes. I attached one end of a high-tension poly web to one building wall about four meters up, stretched the web across the street, and attached it to the opposite wall. Mounting the prang in the center of the web, I remotely activated it. Once it settled down it began making a three-dimensional wideband record of the scene and I began a grid search of the entire space between the walls.
The walkway was unobstructed relatively clean concrete, it’s condition making it more than fifty years old. Save for the images of a couple of false doors imbedded in the glass below and images of a couple of false windows and exhaust ports four stories above, the building walls were simply two solid featureless slabs of poured glass: Modern, secure, low maintenance. When I got to the High Street end I looked out at the crowd. Although the curiosity seekers had thinned somewhat, the media reporters were just as thick as before and not moving. Nothing to see at that end; no one issuing statements. The tip they had gotten must have been made of solid gold—or that’s the way they were regarding it. I returned to the grid.
I noticed a small whitish feather stuck on the southwest wall approximately three meters up from the corpse. I closed on the site and hovered across from it. UV light showed a variety of organic materials—bird waste, skin cells, and a small amount of medium-velocity blood spatter—surrounding the feather in a vertically elongated impact pattern. In normal light there were a few microscopic red fibers scattered through the lower right portion of the pattern. I took images of the site, retrieved samples of the fiber evidence, took DNAs from the skin cells, feather, and blood, then measured the impact pattern to compare with the corpse’s particulars to calculate impact angle, force, and trajectory.
“Jaggs,” said Shad, “The spatter on the walk is medium-velocity blood matching the vic’s. Pattern is the result of ground impact on already present surface blood. The vic’s wound is on the side against the ground. Scan shows several broken bones on the bird’s right side: Two in the right wing, five ribs on the right side of the breast. Wing and rib bones broke the skin. Dead about four hours.”
“Around five this evening, then.” I transmitted my data. “Does this match your DNA?”
A pause. “It’s a match,” answered Shad. “What do you have?”
“Blood, a feather, and some additional material. It appears that the deceased was propelled against the southwest wall from below—perhaps someone throwing the body up against the wall. It bounced, the trajectory arced up and the body landed next to the opposite wall. Evidence would indicate that the vic was already dead.”
“Kids playing handball with a dead bird?”
“Only one wall impact. Do you have the area surveillance camera locations yet?”
“Working.”
“ID?”
“No name yet, Jaggs, but Bio Registry says this is one of a super flock of eight thousand basically identical pigeons purchased from London Industrial Biotronics four years ago by a private security firm headquartered in Slough called Pureledge, Ltd.”
I descended toward Shad and the corpse. “Are you telling me that bird is a private dick?”