“Depends on the hosting dunnit?” Foxy said. “How far it was, how good the transmission is, how encrypted. I mean, it got through on a special guest permit—a stolen one I may add, but even so. That’s not a hard data barrier, only a mild checker. You can get in and out on it. Maybe. But the host would have to have some kind of transmitter in the hotel and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any. I’m askin’ all the same.”
The triton in charge of the shack had been updated and came out to greet them. He was a tall humanoid with a silver, sharkskin finish and many cartilaginous finny appendages, webbed fingers, but human hands otherwise for handling the gear. A triple row of ridged fins framed his face instead of hair, shielding a mass of trailing tentacles that hung to his waist in the back.
“Detective Foxy. Detective Tiggs. Welcome to the Bay. How can I help you?”
Behind him Foxy watched other tritons preparing a skim boat, loading it with picnic supplies, fishing rods and speeder skis. “Hey there, Lucas. We’re looking for news of a guest that was murdered out here sometime last night, we think around one a.m. local time. Has anyone asked about someone missing?”
“No, nothing like that. We’ve been tracking all our gear and doing a backcheck since your shuttle sent out the alert. Nothing missing. And none of the deepwater services have mentioned anything.”
“The water was from this Bay,” Foxy said. “What goes on here at night?”
“Everything that goes on in the day time, minus the sunbathing I’d say,” Lucas said, “But last night was the weekly big bonfire up over on the point. Big cookout, lots of drinking, lots of partying. Everyone goes to it.”
“We have a sighting that looks like it was at night. Here.” Foxy displayed it for him on his mindnet.
“Ah, that’s definitely near the fire. What’s this from, a guest net?”
“There’s something at work in the background,” Foxy said. “Very few pictures of him and what we do have is blurred, like interference. I think it’s a local firewall.”
“Nothing like that here hotel side,” the triton said. “Maybe got yourself a stalker.”
“Thought it,” Foxy said, tipping her hat to him. She was getting very hot and thought quickly, to spare herself some sun. “I’m going to go check out all the shanties and the buildings down on the far shore at the end of the ’walk, see if we can find someone who recognises him. Tiggs here is going to do the hard work, aren’t you, Tiggsy?”
Tiggs flattened her crest. “I need someone expert on the water. See if we find an exact profile.”
“I know the guy,” Lucas said and beckoned. “C’mon.”
Foxy excused herself and took a drink of water as she watched Tiggs walk off, Lucas pointing, talking. After a moment her partner set off down the beach at a run, giving the sunbathers a wide berth, which didn’t stop several groups of them getting up and running off in a moment of panic. Foxy didn’t laugh. That would have been unprofessional. A lot of people started asking if there was a cross-level event, a dino invasion, something exciting like that going on, and was it a real dino and would it really eat anyone…
Humans. They were such dipshits. If they bothered to read any of the hotel menus, they’d know they could go for a hunting party by special request, lethal or any other kind. But she made a note for Entertainments about the interest in unplanned monster attacks.
Foxy finished her water and took a trike up from the shack to the walk, spinning along, taking readings of the air to see if any traces of interest were about, but the air was thick with barbecue fat and smoke, high with ozone. Even moving slowly among people, she didn’t find a human that had been in contact with him. Not that she expected to. Murderers who could falsify hotel data systems were few. But they must have hijacked a Private Skimmer to make the flight and the drop without getting rebuffed by Sysops, and that meant that they took it, like any guest, from the Skim Depot. So she was going there and showing her photos on the way. She asked a lot of people, all finding her “so cute, look at this fox, honey, look, she works for the security people, isn’t that adorable…” but although people did recognise that Foxy was especially lovely, nobody recognised the john.
Tiggs reached the cliff guest house and turned to the water when she found the barbecue pits and stone circle where Bay Services were steadily cleaning up from the previous night’s fire and entertainment. Records of the dead man’s few moves flashed through her mindnet and she matched them to the landscape she could see. He’d been here, here… and here. The moves took her towards the water in the direction she was going anyway. He had left the fire shortly after the music started and the dancing. He’d come out here… but of course the tide had washed all the marks away.
She was met at the edge of the surf by Tovi from Deepwater Safety. Tovi was, like her, almost an identical replica of the creature he resembled: a giant mantis shell crab. His carapace gleamed, heavy with weeds and limpets. Mussels festooned his back. He raised his larger pincer in greeting and together, with him as the guide, they began to move out to sea. He walked and Tiggs swam above him, helped by some web-sheet that Lucas had given her for her hands and feet. Her skin found the water very cold but surprisingly enjoyable.
“There’s a regular patrol at the reef’s edge,” Tovi told her as she was lifted and lowered by the rolling waves. “I’ve called in a few of the lads. They’ll meet us there. They know what they’re looking for.”
By the time she had swum out that far, Tiggs was starting to feel tired. She was glad when Tovi pointed out a spot where the reef was close to the surface, and relatively safe for her feet, so that she could stand and have a breather. Their contacts were already there, gliding around, their fins breaking the water’s surface. Grey sharks. They could smell an individual ten miles away in the ocean, even more. She gave them the aroma of the dead man and they vanished, one by one, silently, into the depths.
They were soon back with an answer. “Found it. The old raft beyond the point. There were swimmers in the water all night, but there’s residue on the rope there. Maybe on the top there’s more. I’ll call Vince, he’ll give you a lift.”
Vince was a megalodon and couldn’t get too close to the reef. He surfaced at his slowest speed so Tiggs could swim out to him and walk up onto the broad back behind his head, as tall as the enormous fin behind her.
“All aboard,” he said, mindnet to mindnet, and then, with imperceptible movements of his fins, they were off, Tiggs surfing all the way, her ankles breaking the water but never going deeper, her balance never in doubt. She thought that Foxy might be right about the luck. It was sad to lose a guest and perhaps dangerous to rout a troublemaker, but riding on a shark across the ocean on a fine day was an unexpected and complete joy. She held out her arms and her feathers caught the wind. She could imagine that she was flying…
The fixed raft came up all too soon, and she had to leap off and onto the weathered old decking, hoping she wasn’t ruining a crime scene. Vince loitered as she made her inspection, studying the area as closely as she could, mapping it, then taking various tastes of the boards and the ropes with her tongue. Her nose was good, but the seawater was abrasive and pungent itself and she wanted to feel confident—the tongue never lied. And there it was. A match. And a lot of other DNA traces along with it.
She pinged Foxy. “He was here. Vince verifies that the water profile by this raft matches his. It has a particular coral and protein signature from the plankton rising up that is almost unique to this kilometre. He was alive on this deck—I’ve got semen matching. It’s mixed with female human DNA. I’m relaying to the lab and to reception and guest services. I’m coming back.”