Security - Keith R. A. DeCandido [18]
“Your mother was a peace officer, too?”
Vale nodded. “Until she retired last year, yeah. Her father before her was also, as were both his parents before him. Kind of the family business.”
“I know what you mean. My family’s got a long line of service of some kind in it. In any case,” Corsi said quickly—Vale assumed she didn’t feel comfortable talking about her personal life—“you should have access to the records of all homicides in the last ten years in Federation space, as well as any allied powers that share those types of records with us.”
“Good.” Vale turned to the computer station and started entering in commands. When she banged the side again, the commands took. If I joined Starfleet, I’d get to use up-to-date equipment, probably. “What I’m doing right now is a basic search to see if there are any commonalities to our case.”
“Like what?”
Vale realized that Corsi didn’t really know the specifics of her own case, and if she was to be the liaison, she should know. Of course, she could just read the reports, she thought, once again in her mother’s voice, but Vale didn’t mind repeating the facts again. Sometimes you caught something in the retelling you didn’t before.
Once she got the search running, she called up the images of the two dead bodies to her screen and turned it toward Corsi. The images were stacked one over the other, both human women—ninety percent of Izar’s population was human—both looking to be in their thirties or forties, both with long darkish hair of about the same length as Vale’s own, and both lying on a sidewalk. The one on top was facedown; the one on the bottom was on her back, so on her you could see the circular chest wound.
“The victim on top is Marianne Getreu, a librarian working at the Garthtown Public Library, in the special collections section. She lived alone, and was walking back from a late night working at the library to her house. The murder occurred on a side street about half a kilometer from her home.”
“She walked?” Corsi asked.
Nodding, Vale said, “The weather’s pretty nice in Garthtown this time of year. But it was late at night, so there were no witnesses. Cause of death was a phaser shot to the chest that vaporized skin, several ribs, and twenty percent of her heart. Death was probably painful but quick. It was a type-two phaser set on level four.”
“The burn setting,” Corsi said unnecessarily.
“Yeah, hence the ‘painful but quick’ part.” She pointed to the other victim. “That’s Kelly Fleet, an actor with a troupe called Mermaid’s Revenge. They’ve been specializing in neoclassical Betazoid theatre.”
“Why is a Betazoid theatrical troupe called that?”
Vale smirked. “Some mysteries even a detective of my skill can’t solve. Anyhow, same COD.”
“Same phaser?”
She nodded. “That’s the one thing these two do have in common besides being female and having long hair. The resonance pattern is the same for both phasers.”
“Have you scanned for the phaser with that pattern?”
“The scan’s been running constantly, both in Garthtown and elsewhere, but Garthtown is a city of six hundred million, plus the rest of the populace of Izar. It’s a big planet, and picking out one phaser from all that isn’t easy.”
“Starfleet has top-of-the-line sensors. I’ll have the Roosevelt scan for the phaser also.”
Vale hadn’t thought of that. “Couldn’t hurt. I’ll send the resonance pattern up there.” She called up the autopsy reports. “Fleet lived with three other members of the troupe in a house in the suburbs of Garthtown. She liked to take walks in a park near their house. She was on her way to the park when she was killed.” She leaned back in her chair. “The thing is—there are no witnesses and no trace evidence in either case. No DNA residua, nothing left behind at the scene, not a goddamn thing.”
“No commonality between the two women?”
“Nothing we could find.” Vale let