Headcase, p.3
Headcase, page 3
‘Timothy Blake,’ I said. ‘Here to see Sam Garcia. He’s on level three, right?’
‘Yep.’ The receptionist pushed a visitors’ log across the counter.
I was still getting used to writing with my left hand, and without a thumb. I had to clench the pen like a toddler with a crayon. My signature was a meaningless squiggle.
There had been no other visitors that morning. ‘Can I see yesterday’s log?’ I asked.
‘Why?’
‘To see who visited.’
‘Are you police?’
‘Security consultant.’
‘Right. Yeah, I’ll run that request up the chain,’ the receptionist lied. He gave me a swipe card. ‘You have visitor-level access privileges across the complex. If a door won’t open for you, that’s because it’s not supposed to.’
I don’t like elevators, so I took the stairs. On my way, I dropped the pen into my pocket. I never turned down free stuff. My years of homelessness and starvation were still too fresh in my memory.
Level three had tough grey carpet, the dense weave gripping the soles of my loafers. The doors were maroon-painted wood with silver brackets holding nameplates—the kind you could slide in and out whenever someone got promoted or fired. I passed one that said Franklin Anders and paused. Anders had seemed like he was hiding something, and he was still on Mars. Now would be the perfect time to snoop around his office.
I tried the handle. Locked.
‘Can I help you?’ said a voice from behind me.
I turned. Sam Garcia had huge hands, a heavy brow and a receding hairline. His tie looked like a clip-on. His broad shoulders were straining the seams of his short-sleeve polyester shirt. The faint spiderweb patterns on his arms might have been mistaken for veins, if you’d never seen the inside of a human arm. I was pretty sure they were the remnants of tattoos that had been lasered off.
He’d bulked up a bit since I’d seen him last. It was almost impossible to get fat on prison meals, but candy bars and soda were available from the commissary, and most inmates didn’t get much exercise, so they often gained weight.
His eyes widened. ‘You.’
‘Me,’ I said.
He looked around, as though worried someone might see us together. ‘What do you want?’
He had a deep voice. That usually meant nice, fatty vocal folds at the back of the throat.
‘I want to talk about the body,’ I said.
‘FBI send you?’
‘No.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Follow me.’ As he turned away, I noticed that one of his socks had two big holes in it, like the very hungry caterpillar had gone through it.
His office was only a few doors further up. He held the door open for me, and I walked in. A big window overlooked the rest of the complex. Most of the buildings were only one or two levels, so I could see a lot of rooftops with satellite dishes and solar panels.
As Garcia entered behind me and closed the door, I took in the rest of the room. Half his desk was taken up by three computer monitors, side by side, and the other half was filled with photos of him and other men in waders, holding giant fish and grinning. I’d never understood why hurting animals for fun was considered an early warning sign of serial killer behaviour, while fishing and hunting were seen as healthy male bonding activities.
I only had a second to note all these details before Garcia’s knuckles crashed into my ear.
CHAPTER 4
What do you call it when you lift an armed robber?
I didn’t scream. I’d learned that lesson early in life. As I stumbled sideways into the wall, knocking down a whiteboard covered with Greek letters, I was already recalculating. I hadn’t expected this reaction. Some of the criminals I’d put away were angry, sure—but most were too shamefaced to actually attack me, particularly in their workplaces.
I couldn’t fight Garcia. He was too big. ‘Hold up,’ I said.
He didn’t. He twisted his core like a batter swinging for the stands and drove his other fist into my stomach. The air exploded out of me, along with a good deal of spit and blood. I hit the floor, wheezing.
Garcia aimed a stomp at my chest. I waited for him to lift his leg all the way up, then twisted around and kicked his other ankle. He yelped as he fell ass-backwards onto the carpet. I scrambled over and went to grab his throat, but without a thumb, I couldn’t clench it.
He swiped my hand away, and then gripped my other wrist, trying to pin me. The snap fasteners around my shoulder popped and my fake arm came off at the elbow, the loose straps slithering out of my sleeve.
Garcia dropped the prosthesis, alarmed. It wasn’t one of the expensive ones that could clench and unclench. The hand was just limp silicone, like I was part sex doll. Still, it was the same colour as my skin, and most people didn’t look closely enough to notice that it wasn’t real. Apparently it had fooled Garcia.
I could see him deciding whether or not he was the kind of man who would beat up a cripple.
‘You finished?’ I wheezed.
After a beat, Garcia nudged the prosthesis across the floor towards me with his shoe. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Other than just now? And seven years ago?’
‘I served my time. You can’t harass me like this.’
I clambered to my feet and picked up my prosthesis. I wasn’t about to take my shirt off, so I just pushed the fake wrist back into my sleeve and buttoned the cuff to hold it in place. Buttons were hard without a thumb—I clamped the fabric between my teeth to keep it still.
‘There’s a body,’ I mumbled as I worked. ‘You’re a felon. You didn’t expect a visit?’
‘You said you weren’t with the FBI anymore.’
‘It might have been wise for you to ask some follow-up questions before you—’
Someone knocked on the door. Garcia shot me a look and then said, ‘Yeah?’
A woman opened it. Forties, squat, lots of make-up, greying hair cut short. ‘Everyone okay in here?’
Garcia forced a smile. ‘We’re fine.’
The woman looked uncertainly from him to me and back. ‘I thought I heard …’
‘Mr Blake was helping me move my desk, but we bumped the whiteboard.’ He gestured to the fallen panel.
She seemed to believe this. ‘All right. Holler if you need anything.’
‘Thanks, Grace.’
The woman disappeared.
‘She’s helpful,’ I said.
‘Amazing Grace, we call her.’ His eyes were hard. ‘Who are you working for, Blake?’
‘I’m a security consultant.’
‘Uh-huh.’ He looked doubtful.
I wiggled a finger in my sore ear, looking out the window at the matrix of square buildings. ‘I don’t see a launch pad.’
Garcia rubbed his knuckles. ‘We don’t do launches here. We train astronauts, design their equipment and run comms for spaceflights. You know, “Houston, we have a problem?” We’re Houston.’
‘What’s your job?’
‘Data transmission. I maintain secure connections between satellites and ground systems.’
‘I’m amazed NASA hired you, given your background,’ I said.
The corner of Garcia’s mouth twitched.
‘They don’t know? How’d you hide it?’
‘A friend from college works here.’
‘He erased your criminal record?’ That was mid-level treason, right there.
‘He didn’t erase anything. My name was automatically flagged. He unflagged it.’
‘So the recruitment officer wouldn’t delete your application without reading it?’
‘Right.’ Garcia sat down on his swivel chair. His bulk made the desk look tiny, like you’d see in an elementary school classroom. ‘I was ready to explain everything, but they just hired me, no questions asked. Guess they didn’t read past page five.’
‘Who was this friend?’
‘What do you want, Mr Blake?’
I sat opposite him. ‘Firstly, I want to know why you told the 911 dispatcher that the body was Chinese.’
‘I just told her what Franklin Anders told me.’
‘Anders seemed to think the body was Japanese.’
‘Oh.’ Garcia shrugged his big shoulders, like the difference didn’t matter. ‘That would make more sense, I guess, since there is a Japanese astronaut in orbit right now—but Mission Control would have heard about it if anything had happened to her. And didn’t you say the, uh, body was male?’
I hadn’t said that. ‘You’re not saying you think the corpse actually came from space?’
‘I heard his face was swollen and purple, and he was bleeding from both ears. That’s what happens if your space suit leaks.’
‘Anders told me it was impossible.’
‘Did he?’ Garcia looked thoughtful.
‘He said no one could get an astronaut into orbit in secret, and that the guy would’ve burned up on re-entry.’
Garcia’s chair squeaked as he leaned back. ‘Maybe he was aiming to dock with a space station, and he got beyond the atmosphere, but failed to reach orbital velocity? His suit could have been punctured when he bailed out. His rocket’s probably at the bottom of the Pacific.’
It still sounded absurd to me. ‘And his body landed in the middle of a NASA training field?’
‘On a long enough timescale, the unlikely becomes inevitable.’ Garcia sounds like he’s quoting someone, but I don’t know who. ‘We’ve had sixty years of human spaceflight, and plenty of strange things have happened.’
‘As strange as this?’
‘Look, I’m just a communications engineer. If you want a better theory, you’ll have to talk to an actual rocket scientist.’
‘I’m told you spotted the corpse on a satellite feed?’
‘Actually I saw him out the window, but he was just a tiny speck. Could have been anything. There’s a weather satellite that passes right over us, so I checked the feed for a better view.’
I looked back at the window. The Martian training area was visible, but it was a long way off. I wouldn’t have noticed a tiny speck out there—and I was very observant. ‘What time was this?’
‘Um …’ Garcia tapped on a keyboard and pointed at one of the screens. ‘I checked the most recent aerial photograph at seven thirty-one.’
‘Are you always here so early?’
Garcia gave me a searching look. Like he was trying to work out if I already knew something.
‘My wife served me with papers six months into my sentence,’ he said finally. ‘So I come in early. No sense hanging around in an empty apartment. My colleagues are my family now.’
This was exactly what you’d expect the boss to say at a farm, or a restaurant, or an auto shop. In an office environment, it came off as creepy. Office drones were interchangeable. They weren’t supposed to care about one another.
I noticed Franklin Anders in one of the fishing photos on Garcia’s desk, holding up a tackle box. Grace was in another, and I could see the receptionist from downstairs in the background.
‘Six months?’ I said. ‘That’s fast. Was she already seeing someone else when you went away?’
When I looked back at Garcia’s face, I was startled to see tears in his eyes. Apparently the wound was still raw.
I wasn’t going to waste any sympathy on a man like him. ‘Could the body have been here yesterday?’
Garcia took a deep breath, steadying his voice. ‘No. I went back and checked yesterday’s pictures.’
‘Email them to me,’ I said.
‘No can do. Space City is on an air-gapped network, for security. We can send files from one building to another, but nothing touches the internet.’
‘All right. Just show me.’
Garcia used a swipe card to log into his computer, tapped at his keyboard for a minute, then swivelled one of the monitors around. There was the body, lying in the middle of the field. From that height, it didn’t even look like a person. More like a tiny white starfish.
‘So this is at seven-twenty this morning.’ Garcia clicked. ‘And this is ninety-five minutes earlier.’
The screen was black.
‘Your satellite can’t see in the dark?’ I asked.
‘Correct.’
‘Why ninety-five minutes?’
‘That’s how long it takes to go around the world and take another picture.’
‘Pretty limited.’
‘Well, if you think you can do better, feel free to design, build and launch your own satellite.’ Garcia clicked back a few more times, and the field reappeared. ‘Sunset yesterday: no astronaut. So he must have landed during the night.’
‘Or he’s just some guy who climbed the fence.’
Garcia shook his head. ‘The fence is surrounded by cameras that can see in the dark. And even if he somehow avoided them, then what? He walks into the middle of the rock yard and suddenly dies of decompression sickness? Now that’s impossible.’
I thought of the text message about the space launch in Guizhou, and the email about the spy satellite. ‘How hard would it be to get something into space in secret?’
‘OPIR—Overhead Persistent Infrared surveillance—is designed to detect rocket launches. But if you set off some other explosions nearby to confuse the signal, and if you had total control of the local media, and the capacity to arrest anyone who asked too many questions …’
‘If Beijing wanted to spy on us, why wouldn’t they just use existing satellites, like you?’
‘The cameras up there are twenty years old. They can barely tell the difference between a human and a stain on the sidewalk.’ Garcia gestured at the starfish on the screen again. ‘If Beijing launched a new satellite with up-to-date camera technology, they could use it to read text messages off the screen of your phone as you walked down the street.’
No wonder Zara was concerned. ‘So you saw the body this morning. Then what?’
‘I didn’t know it was a body,’ Garcia said quickly. ‘I thought it might be someone on drugs, just lying down in the middle of the field.’
‘Are you thinking of someone in particular?’
‘No, but this place …’ He moved his mouth in silence for a moment, trying to find the words. ‘We spend all day every day talking about unfathomably giant, heavy objects travelling incredible distances at mind-blowing speeds over stupendous timescales. It’s a trip, even if you’re not on anything. Sometimes you just want to lie down and marvel at it all.’
I found myself a bit jealous—I wished I cared about anything as much as Garcia seemed to care about space.‘Why did you tell Anders to investigate, instead of going yourself?’ ‘I didn’t exactly tell him—I asked him.’ Garcia shifted on his chair. ‘He got in early. About eight. We were the only two people in the building at that stage, and I was supposed to be preparing some files for the deputy cybersecurity chief, who’s covering for her boss while he’s on leave. I could have asked the guards at the gate, but if drugs were involved, I didn’t want to get anyone fired. Whoever it was, I thought Anders might be able to wake them up, and either sober them up or tell them to call in sick.’
‘But he found a dead body instead. And called you?’
‘Right.’
‘At what time?’
Garcia checked his phone and showed me the call log. ‘Eight-fourteen am. I told him to wait right there, and then I called the police.’
‘After that, you didn’t go out to join Anders?’
‘The cops told me not to. Didn’t want the scene contaminated.’
I could see the outgoing call to 911 on the screen, at eight-fifteen. There were no calls after that, but he could have deleted the records. I hadn’t trusted him seven years ago, and I didn’t trust him now.
‘Show me the CCTV from the fence,’ I said.
‘I don’t have access to that. You’ll have to talk to Rob Cho, chief of cybersecurity—but he’s on leave this week, like I said. He’s visiting his sister in hospital.’
He was avoiding my gaze. I could imagine why he might not want me talking to the cybersecurity chief.
‘So who do I talk to?’ I said.
‘Hazel Cuthbert, I guess. She’s the deputy. Her office is in the museum.’ Garcia blinked a few times, his breathing shallow. ‘You’re not going to tell her about …’
I stood up. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
•
Diaz taps her pen on her notebook. ‘Was Sam Garcia a good friend of yours?’
Apparently she’s only been half-listening. Some therapist. ‘No. He was a suspect in a case I investigated.’
Diaz stares, that polite half-smile still fixed on her lips. ‘You mentioned several times how big he was.’
‘Yeah. Six three, maybe two hundred pounds.’
‘Were you attracted to him?’
I think of his thick forearms and his bulging chest. The memory alone put my saliva glands into overdrive. ‘Not in the way you’re thinking.’
She waits for me to fill the silence.
‘Anyway, that wasn’t the deal,’ I say.
‘The deal?’
‘When I was at the FBI. The director used to reward me with cadavers after executions. But he only brought me in to consult on kidnappings, and didn’t pay me unless the victim was found alive. Kidnapping isn’t a capital crime if the victim survives. Therefore, I never got to eat the suspects from my own cases.’
If Diaz is shocked by any of this, she doesn’t show it. ‘I’d have thought that the substances used in lethal injections couldn’t be safely consumed.’
‘They used a special chemical, just for me. Suxamethonium chloride.’
Her eyebrow twitches. She writes the name down, maybe so she can google it later. I’m sure a proper doctor would have recognised it.
‘Perhaps you can tell me how you and Sam met,’ she says.
‘You want to hear about the case?’
‘Right. The case.’
I look at the clock. Twenty minutes left. Then she’ll let me out of this little room, and into the rest of the Behavioural Health Unit, where I’ll be surrounded by the other crazies. There’s one in particular I have my eye on.
