Tek Kill (3 page)

Grossman shook his head pityingly. “Why don't you face reality, Bascom,” he said quietly. “Everybody knows—and, yes, let me assure you, that includes Kay herself—everybody knows you're too old for her.” Turning his back, he went striding for the open doorway leading out to the bright holographic garden outside. “Very much too old.”

Bascom tugged an ebony lazgun out of a rumpled pocket of his coat.

He ran after the departing Grossman.

Halting on the threshold, he swung the gun up and fired.

The sizzling beam dug into the younger man's narrow back.

“Terrible,” gasped Karin as the picture ended.

“What about that gun?” asked Jake.

“It hasn't,” answered Anselmo, “been found.”

“Walt,” observed Leo Anson, shifting in his chair, “would never shoot anybody in the back.”

“This is the pertinent footage from Mr. Bascom's home sec-tapes.” Karin touched the panel again.

“You're looking, if I may say so, sir, a trifle seedy,” observed the silver-plated, white-suited android who showed on the wall-screen now.

Bascom, even more disheveled than he had been at Grossman's, was crossing his wide yellow-and-white kitchen. “Must be because I'm in love, Ambrose,” he said, his voice raw and raspy.

“May I fix you a nightcap, sir?”

Bascom glanced toward the wall clock. It showed that the time was 4:06 A.M. “Too late. I'll just turn in.”

“Very good, sir,” said the mechanical valet. “I trust you'll feel a bit more chipper come morning.”

“No doubt.”

The agency wall went blank.

“That's most of what the tapes show,” said Anselmo. “Detective Lieutenant Drexler is convinced the footage wasn't faked or even tampered with.”

“Crap,” observed Jake. “If Walt really was going to knock somebody off, he'd know how to disable a secsystem. And he'd also make damn certain his own tapes didn't catch him pussyfooting home at the wrong time.”

“Sure, that's the logical conclusion,” agreed Anselmo. “The cops, however, are claiming that Walt was so emotionally distraught that he didn't use any caution. Overcome by rage, he simply went busting into Grossman's.”

“Doesn't matter what Drexler says,” put in Gomez, “footage like that can be faked.”

“The prelim police tests show no evidence of electronic tampering,” said Anselmo. “Even though Walt denies he was ever at the guy's house, the police are accepting the footage as real.”

“What's our own expert, Doc Olan, say?” asked Jake.

“Dr. Olan was rushed copies of this material,” said Karin, returning to her seat. “His initial testing shows nothing suspicious.”

Gomez was studying the distant ceiling. “I think I'll talk to some
hombres
who are also experts at this sort of thing,” he said. “Get me copies, Roy.”

“There's no need,” said Karin, frowning at him, “for you to be showing potentially damaging material like this to your underworld cronies.”

Shrugging, Gomez said, “Never mind. I can acquire them on my own.”

Anselmo coughed again. “Jake, Bascom wants you to go talk to him at the jailhouse,” he said. “I'm obliged to go along with his wishes, although I personally think relying on an ex-con in a situation like this—”

That was as far as the blond detective got.

Jake had left his chair and grabbed hold of the front of his jacket. Lifting the acting head of the Cosmos Detective Agency clear off the floor, he suggested, “I think we ought to forget our personal differences for the duration of this problem, Roy. You quit calling me an ex-con and I'll refrain from booting your fat ass from here to Tuesday.”

“Whoa,
momentito.
” Gomez had lunged and caught the angered Karin before she could use her stungun on his partner.

“Okay, all right,” said Anselmo as Jake let go of him. “I was probably out of line, Jake.”

“Probably, yeah,” agreed Jake, taking a slow, deep breath.

“You're right. Walt Bascom's fate is what's important. We're all part of the handpicked team that's going to save his life.”

“Sid and I are a team,” corrected Jake. “I'll report to you so long as you're in charge, Roy, but I sure as hell don't consider you a teammate.”

6

THE silver-and-gray elevator dropped swiftly down and down through the underground levels of the SoCal Central Jail in the LA Sector of Greater Los Angeles.

The chill cage hissed to a stop and an overhead voxbox announced, “This is Level 13.”

The door whispered open.

“L
EFT TO THE
V
ISITOR
S
CREENING
R
OOM
. H
AVE
A
LL
N
ECESSARY
I
DENTIFICATION
M
ATERIAL
R
EADY
.”

Jake left the elevator, obligingly turned left, and started along the long gray corridor.

Every two yards, large litesigns on the gray walls reminded, W
E
A
RE
O
BLIGED
U
NDER
S
O
C
AL
S
TATE
L
AW TO
I
NFORM
Y
OU
T
HAT
Y
OU
A
RE
U
NDER
C
ONSTANT
E
LECTRONIC
S
URVEILLANCE
.

“Thanks for telling me,” muttered Jake as he went striding along.

Two large gunmetal robots stood at the doorway to the screening room. The one on the left held out his hand, palm up, as Jake approached. “ID packet with skycar license foremost and facedown.”

As Jake complied, the other big robot began a thorough frisking. “Mandatory weapons search.”

“Your buddies already did one up on Level 1.”

“Part of standard procedures.” Satisfied, the bot returned to his position to the right of the door.

“All IDs in order,” announced the other mechanical man. “You are cleared to continue.”

“Proceed to the sign-in desk.”

Stowing his ID packet back in his pocket, Jake crossed the threshold.

A slim blond woman in her late twenties was coming toward the doorway as he entered the big gray room. She came hurrying forward, took hold of his arm. “So you're one of the ops who's working on this, huh? He wouldn't tell me.” She looked into his face, frowning some. “Well, I suppose it could be worse.”

“I'm surprised to see you hereabouts, Kacey.”

Letting go, Kacey Bascom took a step backward. “Oh, sure, that's right, isn't it?” she said. “Coldhearted conservatives like me don't care if their father gets tossed in the pokey.”

Jake grinned. “You and your pop have been none too close for as long as I've known him.”

“I happen to feel, Jake, that a daughter has a duty to her father, no matter how crack-brained his political views happen to be,” she informed him. “He's in very serious trouble and, considering my background in police work and my—”

“Those goons you work for down in the San Diego Sector aren't my notion of cops, Kacey,” he told her. “Just about all the undercover agents in the Political Surveillance Department of the SD Local Police would have to polish up their behavior before even being considered for jobs in a lynch mob. Their ideas of civil rights are—”

“The crime rate down there, and the rate of antigovernment activity, is impressively below that of Greater LA,” she pointed out.

“You people give witch-hunting a bad name.”

Kacey gave an impatient shake of her head. “The point of all this, Jake, is that I'm well schooled in investigative techniques and—”

“Breaking and entering isn't an accepted police procedure in these parts,” he said. “Neither is working some poor protester over with a stungun until—”

“Listen, stop ranting,” she put in. “I'm not working in San Diego anymore.”

“Oh, so? Did they decide you weren't narrow-minded enough for them?”

“I'm in the communications business now, have been for almost six months.”

“Communications? What do you do, scrawl hate messages on the sides of churches and—”

“I'm executive assistant to J. J. Bracken.”

Jake laughed. “That's perfect, Kacey,” he said. “Bracken's the patron saint of all narrowest right-wingers in GLA, and that vidnet show of his,
Facin' Bracken
, is a fount of enough fuzzy-headed claptrap to—”

“J. J. Bracken is a very intelligent and well-informed man,” Kacey stated. “If people like you, and my equally stubborn father, would listen to him with even a halfway open mind, you'd—”

“I'm here to talk to your father, not get into a pointless debate.”

“What I'm struggling to convey to your impenetrable brain, Jake, is that I'm now serving as an investigative reporter for J. J. Bracken. I have a hell of a lot of experience gathering facts.”

“Facts? What would Bracken want facts for?”

Kacey clenched her fists at her sides, remaining silent for several seconds. “My father was framed,” she said slowly. “He was obviously set up for this murder.”

“We agree on that.”

She hesitated, then said, “You're probably one of the Cosmos Agency's best operatives, despite your muddled outlook on life. I just now tried to offer my services to my father directly.” She sighed. “I'm a damn good cop myself and I know I can dig out the truth. He turned me down.” Her hand touched Jake's sleeve. “But if you let—”

“Wait now, Kacey,” he said firmly. “I already have a partner—if that's what you're working up to.”

“All I want, Jake, is to be able to check in with you regularly,” she said hopefully. “And maybe, you know, I could tag along once in a while on the more routine sort of—”

“We can talk occasionally.”

“Well, that's a—”

“At a distance and not all that frequently. I'll accept the fact that you're honestly concerned about your dad, but I can't promise a partnership.”

“All right, okay. I'll settle for that,” Kacey said. “Although I really could be a great help to him and to—”

“I have to see him.” He turned away from her and walked over to the sign-in desk.

“Friends of the prisoner consoling each other, was it?” inquired the copper-plated bot behind the desk.

“You've guessed it,” answered Jake.

THE GRAY-WALLED CELL was small and contained two gray chairs and a gray cot.

Bascom, looking almost dapper in an unrumpled tan suit, was slowly pacing the gray floor.

Jake, settled in one of the hard metal chairs, said, “Courting Kay Norwood has had a very positive effect on you, Chief. No more wrinkled—” Standing suddenly up, he snapped his fingers.

“Developing a twitch?” inquired the head of the Cosmos Detective Agency, scanning him.

“It just occurred to me that the Bascom on display in all those sectapes is based on the old you. The wrinkled, sloppy Bascom of bygone—”

“Hey, we already know they're faked,” cut in Bascom. “What we have to uncover is who did the dirty work.”

“And why,” added Jake, sitting again. “Any notions on motives for wanting this Grossman fellow dead?”

“Could be he's an innocent bystander. Killed simply to frame me.”

“Naw, that's too roundabout a way of doing things,” said Jake, shaking his head. “We can look into that angle, but meantime, what about Grossman as a target?”

Bascom took the other chair. “I don't as yet know all that much about the guy, Jake,” he admitted. “He worked for the Thelwell Brokerage Services outfit. According to Kay, Grossman specialized in investigating companies and preparing reports on them for would-be investors.”

“What sort of companies?”

“Mostly pharmaceutical businesses. Might be an angle there, though I don't see what the hell it is at this juncture.”

“What about his private life?”

“Outside of being an obsessive asshole when it came to trying to get Kay to come back into his life,” answered the chief, “the late Dwight Grossman was a relatively normal citizen. When he started making trouble—calling her on the vidphone, dropping in at her office—I had the agency run a preliminary check on him.”

“And?”

Bascom shrugged. “Sweetness and light for the most part, Jake,” he said. “No criminal record, no outstanding debts. He was married once to a respectable lady who's a graphics supervisor at a reputable GLA advertising agency. Divorced, with no fuss and no scandal, two years ago. Mother's dead, father is very well off, and he has a sister who dropped out of college last year. The kid had some sort of mental problems. Seems to have been a breakdown that was pretty likely triggered by a serious Tek addiction.”

“Tek,” said Jake quietly. “But Grossman himself has no involvement, no connection with the stuff?”

“None that I could unearth. But, again, it's something to dig into further.”

“Did you really threaten him?”

“I threatened to coldcock him if he didn't quit harassing Kay.” He held up a fist. “I might well have slugged him. But shooting a guy down with a lazgun—nope.”

“And you were nowhere near his place last night?”

“Never been there, Jake,” he said.

“The security tapes from your house show you coming home around four in the morning,” said Jake. “They were faked, obviously, but when were they substituted for the real ones?”

“I've been thinking about that quite a lot,” admitted the agency boss. “I never heard a damn thing and no alarm went off. Ambrose, my valet, was found sprawled on his backside in the kitchen. Could be Drexler and his crew did that, but maybe it was done earlier by parties unknown.”