MURDER BY PROXY
THE ROOM IS SCARLET. A valentine from hell.
As a twenty-year veteran in the most crime-ridden area of the city, I’ve seen things no man or woman should ever lay eyes on. But even I had to wince at the carnage inside apartment 327.
Flesh, as if made of paper, torn to pieces, strewn in clumps and chunks. Strips of skin like giant band-aids. Limbs separated from the torso, tossed willy-nilly around the room. Blood. Buckets of it. Spattering the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Saturating the bed, as if the mattress had been dunked in the world’s biggest can of red paint.
The room smelled like a penny had thrown up on a penny.
I clock the red light blinking in the corner.
Yeah, no shit ALERT. Thanks for the hot tip.
“What’s the name of this A.I.?” I ask the blue suit, who’s doing his best to keep what’s left of his morning bagel inside his guts where it belongs.
“Uh….” He scrolls through notes on his tablet. “That’s a Maytime model. Beximo.”
Overhearing the voice pattern, the blinking red light turns green, goes steady.
Waiting.
I take another step—a small one—into the room. I look down, check my feet aren’t stepping in… well, anything.
“Beximo, this is Los Angeles Police Detective Dixon Merriweather, fourteenth precinct, badge number nine-eight-one-tango-tango-four.” I look at it so it can register my face. I’ve never talked to this particular model so neither my voice nor my ugly mug are in its files. Still, now that we’ve met, I doubt we’ll be besties.
The green light pulses, then steadies once more. The voice, when it comes, is sultry but clear, like a dame at the bar who’s been drinking soda waters with lime all night, playing it for gin.
“Good morning, Detective Merriweather. How can I help?”
“How many cameras in this room?”
Blink-blink-steady.
“There is one security camera in this room, detective.”
“Uh-huh. How much of that feed is backed up?”
“64.3 terabytes.”
“I mean how many days, hours.”
“The maximum storage for this camera is seventy-two hours, Detective.”
“Wonderful. Mail that file to Los Angeles Police Department, Fourteenth Precinct, media services division. Include my badge number in the Subject, please.”
Blink…blink…blink…blink…steady.
“Message sent from Maytime servers.”
I grin. Nothing makes my day like cooperation. “That’s jake. You’re all right, Beximo. Five stars.”
“Thank you, detective. Feedback noted.”
“Don’t let it go to your head,” I mumble, turning to the blue suit with the green face. “Call precinct and confirm that file arrived. And do it from the hall, will ya? You look like Lincoln on a fin.”
“Yes, sir.”
He leaves and I turn back once more to survey the scene.
Studio apartment. Spartan and tidy. Bed. Small dining table. One painting hung above a frayed couch. A bookcase crammed with paperbacks, which makes me think the guy is some sort of Luddite, paper being a novelty these days. Older guy, then. They’d get his file from the net soon enough. The floor is thin gray carpet. Renter’s carpet. The body is everywhere, but if the victim had been hit by a meteor, the epicenter of his remains would be just past the foot of the bed.
Guy might have been tying his shoes, then… what? He explodes?
A crispy white suit enters the room, stands patiently behind me. I turn my head and see a halo of face, a young woman behind a plastic shield, the rest of her covered in a paper-thin hazmat suit. Our eyes lock a moment, long enough for her to arch a brow in response, then I look shamedly down at my loafers, sans footies.
“My bad, Rose. For what it’s worth, I didn’t jump in the red sea over here.” I nod toward the room, freshly drenched in blood.
“That’s fine, detective. Are you finished? My team would like to start.”
I am, but I give the space one last scan before my grand exit, checking for anything that might seem important. Reflexively, my eye falls on the steady green dot of the A.I., its white cylindrical body—the size of a pint glass—sprayed red. “I’m done for now. I look forward to your report. My assumption is that mess is all one guy, but when you’re looking at soup it’s hard to say what the ingredients are.”
“You’ll have it this afternoon, detective.” She waves a white mitt, indicating for her three similarly suited assistants to enter.
It’s like someone spilled a bag of marshmallows.
