Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) (15 page)

‘The staff like to call this frame by that name. They say that it gives it more personality.’

‘Right… thanks.’ Fox turned right and immediately spotted a door at the side of the reception area labelled with a ‘3.’ The admin AI, she decided as she headed for the office, was not a class 4 like Kit, but a lot of people felt that class 2s and 3s did the job and were less likely to decide to take over the world. They were cheaper too.

Grant Poll looked like a man with too much on his mind. He was attractive, of course, and not too old according to the profile she had on him. His hair was black and he had sharp, blue eyes, and not a single wrinkle to be seen, but he looked harried. He glanced at Fox as she walked in and she saw irritation flicker across his features. He was not best pleased with her turning up to talk to him.

‘Mister Poll? I’m Inspector Tara Meridian, NAPA precinct nineteen. I’m doing background interviews regarding the death of Julianne Marie Trent.’

‘I know who you are and why you’re here, Inspector.’ Poll waved at a seat, his irritation not subsiding. ‘You understand that I’m short a principal writer on my premier show because of this.’

‘I do understand that, sir, and I’m sure it was very inconsiderate of Miss Trent to get herself killed mid-season, but she did, so I need to ask a few questions.’

His anger flared, his mouth opened, and Fox stared at him placidly and watched the fire die in his eyes. He sagged back in his seat. ‘My apologies, Inspector. I have backers and advertisers riding me like a rodeo bull.
Murder on My Mind
was really making headway in the market and Julianne’s death… Replacing her is going to be hard, but even getting through the shows we have scripts for is not going to be easy.’

Fox nodded. ‘I
do
understand, Mister Poll. Miss Trent was
that
vital to this production?’

‘She spun us the original concept, wrote and redrafted the pilot several times until it fit what we needed, but she had a vision for the overall arc. She knew where Charlie Tasker was going over the next three seasons, and now we
don’t
know.’

‘Tasker is the detective character?’

‘That’s right. Played by Elaine Ross.’

‘There’s… a degree of similarity between this show and
Murder is My Business
–’

‘There is bound to be some similarity,’ Poll cut in, ‘but Julianne was careful about keeping the two series separate.
Mind
was the show she
wanted
to write, Inspector. The other one was taken out of her control years ago and she felt constrained by the environment at IB-Nineteen. She was going to tell the story
she
intended to tell with Charlie, and now she never will.’

‘When did you last talk to her?’

‘On the Friday. It’d be the sixteenth, I think. We had a meeting, virtual of course, to go over plans for the next three episodes.’

‘And how did she seem? Any worries, problems?’

‘None. She seemed fine. Enthusiastic about getting on with the work. Uh, Elaine may have spoken to her later. I think they would meet online occasionally.’

Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you know where?’

‘I don’t, but Elaine is shooting. We can spare her for a few minutes if you’re willing to wait.’

‘I’ll wait, Mister Roberts. That’s not a problem.’

~~~

‘I saw her Saturday night, or her avatar anyway. She seemed fine to me.’ Elaine Ross sucked on a plastic tube of caffeinated something or other, wrapped in a towelling wrap which left her long legs exposed. She did not seem especially troubled by Trent’s death.

Ross was an attractive, quite bright woman, green eyed and with shoulder-length, red hair. Her legs were a little thin, but from the substantial amount of limb on display, Fox could tell she worked out; the musculature was probably natural, firm, long, and moulded by effort. She had a slim body, narrow waist, wider hips, and the breasts which the camera seemed to love on her show were almost certainly enhanced. Nature did not provide many women with that much volume and yet maintain such a firm, pert shape. Her face was interesting: attractive, certainly, but not conventionally so. Her nose was a little larger than Fox might have expected, her features harder, more angular. It made her distinctive, not like the typical, off-the-shelf beauties you saw on a lot of IB channels.

‘You, uh, moonlight in Alexandria?’ Fox asked.

‘Oh, God, no. I sometimes wish I could, but if the fans found out I was doing that… Well, we’d lose some and I’d never get any peace from the rest. No, I… appreciate variety and Alexandria gives me that, but I frequent a couple of other sections of Niflhel, and some other community sites. Saturday night I was in Alexandria and Julianne was in good form. She was popular in there, and for good reason. She had a talent for it. I think it was her imagination, you know?’

Fox nodded, her eyes on Ross’s face. The actress’s demeanour of dispassion was slipping as she talked more about Trent. There was a softening in the corners of her eyes, a slight tightening around her mouth as she fought to maintain control of her expression. ‘You can’t think of anyone who might have wished to harm her? Any reason for someone to want to do that?’

‘God, no!’ Ross’s hand, the one not holding the drink, tightened into a fist and relaxed just as rapidly. ‘No. No one hated Julianne enough to kill her. No one. She was even doing right by the crowd at Nineteen. She was fed up with that gig, wanted out, but it paid the bills and she felt an obligation to her ex and the team there.’

‘You seem to have known her quite well.’

‘I… guess I did.’ Her brow shifted, trying not to wrinkle, and she bit at her lip. Her eyes darted around, but they were alone and maybe she needed someone to confide in. ‘Not as well as I’d have liked. I had kind of a crush on her, and she would indulge me, but I knew she wasn’t
really
that into it. I was hoping to spend time with her on Saturday night, but she was booked through all night.’

‘Did you ever take this up on a physical level?’

‘Once. She was up here for face-to-face stuff, script conferences. I invited her out to my place to discuss the character. She was a little surprised I was interested in her outside the net, but… Well, she wasn’t
quite
as acrobatic in real life, but the imagination was still there.’

‘As far as you know, there was no one else in her life? No one regular?’

Ross shook her head. ‘She definitely preferred men. Wasn’t averse to women, but preferred men. She had several regulars in Alexandria, but they were all just
there for what she could do in a virtual bed. Straight sex, no attachment.’ Ross frowned. ‘I don’t get the feeling she really
wanted
anything more committed right now.’

‘Thank you, Miss Ross,’ Fox said, smiling. ‘You’ve helped a lot.’

Ross returned the smile. ‘You don’t have time to stick around longer, I suppose? I’d love to get some ideas about making Charlie a little more… realistic. Give her a bit more of a real cop feel. I’m not a bad cook…’

The invitation was hanging there for something rather more interesting than discussing police motivation for a video character. And Fox had always had a thing about red hair on women… And then a message window popped up indicating that Kit was waiting to talk to her. ‘Uh… I have a call I need to take.’

The smile stayed in place, twitching to more of a smirk as the actress read Fox’s body language. ‘Sure.’

Kit’s low-res avatar appeared in Fox’s vision field; the 2D avatars were less intrusive than the full-immersion, 3D versions and quite good enough for what amounted to a video phone call. ‘Kit, have a good reason for interrupting me.’

‘I have taken receipt of messages from the precinct’s technical department and Captain Canard,’ Kit responded. ‘A sweep of transit records found evidence that Nathan Shark took a maglev journey to this building on Sunday the eighteenth, arriving at zero-seven-forty-two.’

‘His building computers have him resident in his apartment at that time.’

‘Yes, Fox, it is an anomaly. Captain Canard was apparently notified of the matter. He sent a message indicating that, since you were in Boston, he was sending Detective Sandoval to bring Mister Shark in for questioning.’

‘Sandoval? Don’t know him. Damn, this smells. Get on the data records and go over what they’ve found. Get me data on Sandoval, and go over Shark’s profile again. And get an autocab out to my location and put through a request to Jackson to get me flown back to New York.’

‘Of course, Fox,’ Kit replied. ‘Is it possible I missed something?’

‘If you did, we both did. Don’t second guess. Just do the checks and the job.’

‘Right.’ Kit’s image vanished.

Fox looked up at the actress in the gown which had, she noticed, slipped to show more cleavage. ‘I’m going to have to ask for a rain check on that dinner,’ Fox told her. ‘I need to get back to New York before my boss screws up my investigation.’

Ross tilted her head, the smile not faltering. ‘Rain check?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I can wait.’

New York Metro.

Fox marched into the observation room of the interview suite Sandoval was using to talk to Shark just in time to hear the words she had been hoping to avoid.

‘I don’t believe I should speak to you any further without legal representation.’ Up on the wall screen, Shark was looking angry: chances were that Sandoval had gone in hard and bounced.

Fox glared at Canard, who was watching the interview, now with an irritated look on his face. ‘You tell him to press this, Captain?’

‘We let him sweat for forty minutes after bringing him in,’ Canard replied. ‘I’ve used tactics like this before when we’ve evidence that they’ve lied. He sits and worries over–’

‘It’s taken me eighty-two minutes to get here after getting your message, and in that time my agent managed to find enough evidence of falsification in the records the data search found that I’m pretty sure he’s not lying. And now you’ve turned a friendly witness into a hostile one. And he’s in broadcasting. How long do you think it’s going to be before the story comes out saying that NAPA doesn’t fact-check before arresting someone?’

‘Your agent has… How the Hell were you able to get that done so fast?’

‘Quantum processor. Really good at massive database queries. If you’d let me know you were sending Sandoval to arrest Shark
before
doing so, I could have confirmed the data.’

Canard was doing his best to recover from what he was rapidly realising was a fuck-up. ‘Wait, you’re saying that someone falsified records in the maglev transit database to make it
look
like this guy was out of his apartment?’

‘Kit found inconsistencies in the timestamps and row identities dotted all over the period these records were found in. It’s not an absolute proof of tampering, but it’s plenty for a lawyer to use to present reasonable doubt
and
it’s enough to suggest a more detailed analysis is required before jumping to conclusions.’

The captain’s jaw was tightening, which was possibly fair, but she knew
why
he was pushing the case and was not pleased. The data Kit had dug up on Sandoval indicated that he was a recent hire out of a private security company with strong history in the Southern Protectorate, Wayden Executive Services. Wayden was trying to move into the metro zones having previously done most of their work in the two protectorates, and one of their ways of doing that was political pressure applied through those brokering law and order votes. Canard spent a lot of his time brokering law and order votes, and he was about to say something when Sandoval walked into the room.

‘Sorry, Captain…’ The tall, blonde-haired detective paused as he saw that Fox was also there. ‘Oh, uh, and Inspector. Sorry. He’s lawyering up. We’re not going to get anything more out of him until he’s got counsel.’

‘Inspector Meridian has some new information on the matter,’ Canard growled. ‘We’re letting him go until we can verify where the discrepancy lies.’

Sandoval frowned. He was moderately good at that having an expressive sort of face with a good supply of character to it. He shared blonde hair with Shark, but Sandoval wore his cut low on the neck and fairly shaggy. He was tall, taller than Fox, and well-built, but it was the face that made him. He had a face that suggested he had seen some action, strong features, rugged, a furrowed brow and a slightly heavy nose which a more vain man might have had reshaped. ‘I thought the point of getting him in here was to get
him
to explain the discrepancy.’

Fox bit back on her immediate answer: it was probably not Sandoval’s fault that Canard had wanted a fast resolution with an ex-Wayden man grabbing the collar. ‘I’ve determined that the transit records were likely faked,’ Fox said, watching Shark fuming in the other room.

‘Already?’ he sounded surprised, but when she flicked a glance at him his expression suggested that he was impressed. ‘That’s fast work.’

‘I’ve a few resources some don’t have.’

‘Okay, so if those were faked, why would someone want to put Shark here in the crosshairs?’

‘That’s not the question.’

Sandoval
did
look surprised now, or confused anyway. ‘It’s not?’

‘No. The question you need to be asking is why would someone attempt to frame Mister Shark and do such a piss-poor job of it?’

‘Huh?’

‘They doctored transit records to suggest he was out of the building. They
didn’t
doctor the building records, at all. So Kit, my agent, spotted the problem easily. If they’d messed with both sets of data then we wouldn’t know which was actually wrong. It would have made him appear to be guilty. Now it looks like someone’s targeted him to take the fall.’

‘Which suggests this is all about the show he’s producing,’ Canard put in. ‘First a writer, then a producer. What did you get from the channel in Boston?’

‘They wouldn’t have killed off their main writer to get at
Murder is My Business
. It doesn’t make sense. No, it’s not them. This is someone external with a grudge. I’ll run possibilities and see if I can salvage enough goodwill from IB-Nineteen to get them to help.’