“Why’d you do it, Harris? Why kill Lee? What’s the setup with the sound?”
But Harris doesn’t want to play ball, and I can’t really blame him. His face is turning red as a cherry, and I figure the blood flow is all tangled up. His eyes bulge a bit, but he chokes out a final plea, one I don’t fully understand.
“Thought… she… sent you.”
“Who? Who Harris? Who’s ‘she’?”
“Never wanted… to hurt… anyone.”
I shake my head, not liking this new twist. This case is turning into one of those Russian Doll bits—you think you found your perp but then he pops open, falls apart, and you’ve got a whole new villain to track.
“Stop her,” he says in a final breath, then his face goes limp, and he clocks out.
AFTER TAKING A BEAT TO check my own bones are still following God’s blueprint, I click the earpiece, give the all-clear and tell someone to call an ambulance, and the morgue.
It’ll be a few minutes before my support arrives, but I need to see for myself.
I somehow make it back up all those stairs. The second floor has a short hallway with a few doors going, I suppose, to bedrooms and bathrooms, like any old house.
On my second try I pick a winner. Or, in this case, the big loser.
Harris’s bedroom has vaulted ceilings, crisscrossed by heavy wood beams. The floor and ceiling are wood-planked, the walls a pleasant cream. There’s art scattered around, a few throw rugs here and there, and a nice-sized bed.
My officer is splashed over all of it.
Like our first vic, she’s been blown apart. A blender couldn’t have done a better job. Just like Rose had said: liquified.
I decide there’s no need to investigate, knowing Rose and her team will do the job and work the room, the remains. I make a point to get the officer’s info and make sure the family, if there is one, knows she died heroically, doing her job. Working to save lives, to keep people safe in this Godforsaken city.
I’m still ruminating on the shame of it all when I see a blinking light from my peripheral. Appears there was a witness, after all. One the perp knew very well. Intimately, one could say.
“Hello, Beximo,” I say, knowing my face and voice pattern are stored somewhere in that vast, invisible brain of hers.
“Hello, Detective Merriweather,” she says, cool and sultry as ever. “How can I help you?”
I’M STILL HANGING AROUND THE crime scene when I get an incoming call from Jim Hernandez.
“Merriweather,” I say, as a couple medics make their way down the driveway, a crash cart between them, the sheet-covered corpse of Gemini Harris along for the ride.
“Detective, Jim Hernandez. Is now a good time? Have you found Mr. Harris?”
“Working on it, and yeah, now’s peachy. What can I do for you?”
“Well, my techs did some digging, and it turns out there has been some manipulation to the, uh, technical capabilities of the Beximo units, including the hardware itself. At least in the newest model. We don’t have all the facts, or the details of how it was done or, frankly, what it even means. But…”
“Let me guess, and you tell me if I’m close. Whatever you found, it lets someone command those units of yours to deliver a certain sound frequency, am I right? Maybe even something else you don’t fully understand, something to do with electromagnetic frequencies. Something outside of the specs you built into it.”
Hernandez coughs, then sighs. “That’s in the ballpark, yes. In layman’s terms, she’s been enhanced.”
I recall Harris’s last words and my bowels clench. Icy hands settle on the back of my neck, and I realize what I’m feeling is terror. “She?”
“Well, yeah,” he says, and even chuckles a little. “I mean, we call it a ‘she’, sure, like you would a boat, or a car. Beximo, that is. Her mind. It’s a ‘she’.”
It takes me a second to gather myself, put my wits back in their proper place.
“Detective?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Answer me this, Hernandez: How many of those units are out there in the world?”
“The Beximo units? I’m sorry, what does…?”
“Humor me.”
Hernandez thinks about it, and I can almost see his fingers playing on the activity glass, pulling up sales records like a proud papa.
One who’d raised Lizzie Borden.
“The current model, what we call B-3, has shipped just over half a million units as of the end of last quarter. The two previous models shipped approximately one-hundred-fifty-thousand, and just over three hundred thousand, respectively.”
I nod, hating the math. I think about that dummy, Charlie. The way he said he’d come back for me, how he’d get me.
Except Charlie ain’t the dummy, I realize. And neither is Beximo.
“So, a million units, give or take. A million homes.”
