Sometimes I write fiction. And by write fiction, I mean I get about 2 pages into a novel that I never pick-up again. Instead of just letting them molder on my hard-drive, I’ve decided to start a feature on Dang Dude, What the Heck? where I occasionally publish these beginnings. In doing so I’m offering them up to the public. Feel free to use them to start writing your own stories. Take whatever part of them you like, if any, and use it as your own. I won’t tell. Or just read them and take them for what they are. Here’s the fourth one: A Locked Door
The door was locked from the inside. Of course. No windows either. Despite all that Jerry Doogan’s body lay on the floor, spread-eagled, blood splattered on the cement floor. I, Detective Alphonse St. Pierre, thought poor Mr. Doogan looked a little like the Vitruvian Man. Just with less muscle definition. I shook my head. No time for such thoughts. A murder had come on to my docket. A damn locked-door mystery of a murder, but a murder, nonetheless.
I paced around the room, occasionally taking sips of awful coffee. My mug said, “125th Annual Mennonite Quilt Auction.” I don’t know either. The forensics team had finished setting up outside and wanted to come in, but I wanted to take another look around. So I made them wait. For the neighborhood we were in, the room was shabby. Someone had spared every expense, limiting themselves to just the standard nanomite walls, cut-crystal windows, and the city-required safety systems. Unlike the rest of the apartments in the vicinity the room had no real wood, no hand-artificed finishes, no charming little holographic programs that welcomes visitors. Nothing, except for the property tax bill, that proved the owner could afford such bespoke work. The only places for in- or egress were the door and an air vent. Unless the murderer had figured out a way to break and replace crystal windows without registering such an event in the central computer. Which I was pretty sure was impossible.
I muttered a few curses to myself and stepped out of the room. I let the forensics team out of their holding pattern. The filed in one by one, but before the last person could enter, I pulled her aside. Jaime Cross, a blonde haired tech, the best on the force. I had worked with Jaime on a few cases and valued her insight. I had tried to take her on a date once, but she shut me down.
“Hey James.” Might as well be familiar.
“Hey yourself Alphonse.”
“Listen, I’ve got a weird feeling about this one. No reason for it. Could be something, could be the pasta vongole I ate last night. But keep a sharp eye out. Let me know if anything looks weird.”
“Vongole? With real clam? They up your salary?”
“Funny. Soy-based clam. But I’m serious. Something’s up with this one.”
I stared her hard in the face. She looked back at me, her light violet eyes meeting mine. She nodded and went into the room. I watched her leave. I sighed and turned, looking for a refill of whatever the hell they called coffee around here. I found the machine and poured myself another cup. At least it was hot. You could always count on the nanos to make your drink hot. They couldn’t make it good, but they could make it hot. Sipping the hot, black, robot-made coffee, I stared into the blank middle space, trying to gather my thoughts. “Marshalling the facts,” as my police academy instructor called it. No, it was too early to marshall. The techs had not even gone over the scene yet. They would pick up residues, trace DNA, remnants of any nanos that might have been in the area. And not just the what, but the when and the where too. It was my job to put together the how and why. I figured I had better get a start on that. And to do that, I didn’t need to be in this building.
I left the building. An easy enough task. The elevator, crystal all the way around, naturally, took me down in no time. My ears popped twice, but that was par for the course. I flashed my badge at the secretary trying to ask me to scan out of the building and headed out to my car. As I got into the thing, a late model Jüngerprole, I flipped on my comms and radioed the station. I heard my favorite voice on the line.
“Hiya Alphonse.”
“Hiya back Freddie. I need you to run a name check for me.”
“Right to business today are we Detective St. Pierre?”
Freddie said “Detective” like no one else on the force could. The practiced sarcasm of someone who knew they could get away with it.
“Sorry Freddie. How's the boyfriend?”
“Oh, now he asks. He’s great. Thanks. Says hi back, and that he wants to ask you about something he found the other day. Thinks it might be pre-Convergence.”
“Tell him to send me a hi-rez. I’ll take a look at it.”
Freddie’s boyfriend, they’d been going out for fourteen years but hadn’t pulled the trigger on a marriage yet, was a scavenger for some of the higher-end boutiques. On the side, I did a little history/archeology work. It worked out well for both of us, and got me on Freddie’s good side. Which was the best side to be on.
“Thank you Alphonse.”
He had dropped the sarcasm, a good sign.
“Just tell me that name of yours and I’ll get on it.”
I turned over control to the car’s AI. It managed lift off and merged onto the new expressway that cut above the city. No clouds in the sky as we sped toward the downtown police station.
“Jerry Doogan. 1415 Kinsbad Plaza. Citizen.”
“Kinsbad? You pulled something a little bigger than your usual street murder I see.”
“Guess I’m out of the doghouse.”
“You’d better hope. I’ve gotten tired of looking up petty criminals.”
A pause from Freddie. He was working on my request. I looked around and watched the city beneath me. The spiral crystal towers sprung up like lancets, glittering in the sun. The carstream wove around them, above the tops of the old “skyscrapers,” which now looked like groundcover in a crystalline forest.
“Okay, got it.” Freddie was back.
“Jerry Doogan, thirty-eight years old, importer/exporter.”
“Of what?”
“Huh?”
“Importer/exporter of what?”
“Oh. Let me see. Some sort of Eastern European artifacts. Antiquities mostly, though it looks like he’ll sell anything he can get his hands on.”
“No record?”
“None to speak of. Got a speeding ticket back in ‘93 and a dropped charge for Necro possession a couple years later. But nothing since that.”
“Necro? In ‘95? Did he miss the THCX revolution?”
“I guess. Not sure what these rich people get up too.”
“Anything else of note?”
“Not really. He’s had contact with some of the more outré Ukrainians because of his business, but that’s just standard procedure. Nothing ever came of it. I was able to pull up a few mentions of his name in the press, but it’s all just society stuff. Seen at so-and-so's party. You know the drill.”
I did know the drill. I asked Freddie to send him the articles. I had a bit until I reached the precinct, so I laid back and took a quick nap, letting the AI do the rest of the work.
Ten minutes later, or thereabouts, I arrived at the office. The city governors had just seen fit to upgrade the building, and I still hadn’t fully acclimated to it. Grown crystal siding, reinforced nanosteel girders that would shut down at even the hint of a safety breach. The finest in security tech according to the architects. I was not convinced, but I was just some detective who had solved a couple of crimes. So no one listened to me. I made it to my office, waving to Freddie and a few other uniforms I knew. I poured another cup of coffee. No better than the stuff at the crime scene. A few other files sat on my desk, so I started going through them. I flexed the folders and a few new notes came up on them. The techs had discovered the culprit in the Smith murder, so I marked it as solved and sent it along to the beat cops who would make the arrest. I completed a few other small administrative tasks on the other cases I had. After what seemed like an eternity, my comm started going off. It was Jamie.
“Go for Alphonse.”
“You’ve been watching those old movies again Alphonse? Who answers their comm like that?”
“I thought it sounded cool.”
“Let other people tell you what’s cool. Trust me. Either way I’ve got the tech report for you.”
“Okay, let me have it.” I grabbed a notepad and activated its write function. As Jaime listed off the facts, I put them down on the pad, its internal programming translating my chicken scratch into plain text.
“I’ll start off with the bad news. We’ve got nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Exactly what I said, nothing. No nanomites, no tech, no trace particles, no non-corpse DNA, nothing. Nothing in the air, nada.”
“You checked the vent too? The air duct?”
“C’mon Alphonse. You know me. We checked the hell out of it. Nothing.”