Rule 34 - Charles Stross [94]
It only takes you five minutes to figure out that he is not, in fact, a killer. You don’t even need the speech-stress analyser; he’s not dissembling, his story lines up, and his probationware-riddled phone places him on the far side of town at the time. Everything so far checks out, and if the public CCTV confirms his movements, he’s definitely off the hook. Anyway, he’s not smart enough to have done something like this.
Right now he’s a bit of a mess: not quite a blubbery mass, but obviously very upset. And he’s beginning to push you for details. “I don’t understand. What has happened to my cousin? Why are you here? Who did it? What did they do? Have you arrested anyone?”
“I don’t know,” you tell him, honestly enough. It’s not as if you can give him information that might compromise an ongoing investigation, but even if that was not the case, the scene upstairs is more than slightly mad. “Listen, I’m going to check with my colleagues. I don’t want to say anything until I know what I’m allowed to say, but I’ll be right back. Drink your tea—I won’t be five minutes.”
You rise and step out into the hall, pull the door closed, and nod at the PC on duty, who steps sideways to cover the door.
You go upstairs. Kemal is standing on the landing outside the bathroom—why is it the fucking bathroom again?—airboarding notes. He shakes his head when he sees you. “You’ve seen it. What do you think?” you ask him.
Behind his Eurocop-standard specs, Kemal’s eyes are tired. “Was the Blair murder scene like this?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Haven’t examined this one yet.” But you’ve got a good idea what to expect. Otherwise, why the IM asking you to ask Mr. Hussein about domestic appliances?
You knock on the bathroom door, ignoring the yellow warning icons buzzing around it like angry hornets. “Hello inside?”
The door doesn’t open, but a chat window drops front and centre. SGT MADDOX, SOC: WHATSUP?
“Sitrep,” you call.
You hear a muffled voice: “Just a mo.” Then a huge and grisly multimedia dump with about six gigabytes of metadata hanging off it drops across your view like a luminous crime-fighting jellyfish. In the middle there’s a doorway-framed view of the bathroom. You zoom on it: It’s live; someone’s had the good taste to hang a webcam from the hook on the back of the door, so you’ve got the equivalent of X-ray specs.
Your view is partially obstructed by Maddox and her co-workers, who are dancing the dance of the forensic bunnymen within a much smaller stage than that afforded by the bad-taste palace of the late Michael Blair—but the focus of their attention is broadly similar. No dead Warsaw Pact dictator’s colonic irrigation machine here, just a vacant-eyed skinny guy slumped half-out of the bath . . . but what in James Dyson’s name is the vacuum bot doing?
You don’t have one of the things—your wee flat’s too small to need it—but you get the picture: It’s supposed to bumble around the house sucking on the rugs and scaring the cat, periodically retreating to its wall wart to recharge and hork up a cricket-ball-sized sphere of compacted fluff and household dirt. This is an upmarket jobbie, with two sets of wheels so it can walk up stairs and a couple of extension hoses so it can stick its knobbly nose into crevices where the sun don’t shine. It features an especially big battery—which is currently one hundred–per cent discharged, having shorted out through the bathwater in which the very dead Tariq is marinating.
There’s a big evidence bag laid out beside the robot. And you don’t need to be a technical genius to figure that cracking this case hinges on fingering whoever fitted a live wire down its snout and programmed it to go drinkies while Tariq was in the tub.
If someone’s tampering with domestic appliances with murder in mind, the blogosphere is going to have