Chapter 4: Covered Sins

Square one really was not a pleasant place to be.

No matter how he looked at it, the failed raid in Gawundhana Valley didn’t look good. And Olt-mar-rost-kam was, needless to say, his own staunchest defender. Anyone else would most certainly think worse of it than he himself did.

Including Admiral Log-tel-par-mon-vir.

He had lost half a day pursuing a perpetrator who had existed only in his own mind, giving the real murderer a head start. He had squandered valuable Sunguard resources and terrorized a retired old couple whose only offense had been wanting to live in seclusion off the grid on a world dominated by interstellar megacorporations.

It really did not look good.

Absentmindedly, he reached for the tablet Coil had prepared for him earlier, hoping against hope to find something that might point him in the right direction. He strongly doubted it would do him any good. This was a human crime. It should be solved by a human. What could Coil really know about murder? It was nothing more than an intelligent computer, an artificial brain grown from miniscule self-replicating computer chips arranging themselves into a structure resembling that of a biological brain. For its entire existence, it had sat in a vat inside a dark bunker back at Merkel Base.

This was a street crime. Solving it required a street detective.

He flipped through the list of files, not looking for anything in particular. The surveillance logs might contain something useful, if he was lucky. But chances were that whoever had dumped the body had not incriminated themselves by showing their face on camera, and merely knowing when Ms. Santos had been thrown into the alley would not bring Olt-mar-rost-kam any closer to an arrest.

The detailed technical plans for the entertainment blocks from the Municipal Planning Office he ignored entirely. While they might prove useful for reference once he knew more about the case, they could not possibly contain any information that would help him solve it at this stage. The long lists of sensor components, software versions, and electrical diagrams would only interest a civic engineer, he thought. Or possibly an intelligent computer.

When he came to the dossier of environmental photographs Coil had prepared for him, his eyes lingered. Not because the files contained anything of value to the investigation, but simply because he found them relaxing to look at. After the drawings and diagrams and lists of the previous documents, pictures of façades and flower beds and fish ponds eased some of the crushing tension that had built up inside him.

Like the dossier from the Municipal Planning Office, these images had little to do with the crime itself. They had all been taken weeks, months, or even years earlier. There were official press photographs from the city mixed with stills from security cameras and images scraped from social media posts. Together, they painted a detailed and surprisingly pleasant portrait of the neighborhood. Granted, all the neon signs he had loathed the night before were still there, but most of these photographs had been taken during the day, when the glow of the signs no longer dominated the cityscape. Now he could see the beautiful stonework of the old buildings and the artistic care with which the city planners had designed the neighboring park.

His heart skipped a beat when the next picture showed a close-up of one of the park’s flower beds. Filled with native flowers from all over Gloria, it was a miracle of composition. Whoever had chosen the species growing there truly had an artist’s heart.

But it was not the beauty that took his breath away.

It was the sight of a row of tubular flowers ending in a star-shaped flare of pink and white petals.

Catching his breath again, Olt-mar-rost-kam swore loudly.

This was where the seeds had come from. It was through this park that Joleen Santos’ dead body had been dragged before being dumped in the alley on the other side of the road.

He swore again.

If only he had looked through Coil’s dossier before the botched raid. In fact, he could have read it before he had even gone out to the crime scene. Lieutenant Ratanapol had already handed it to him while they were en route to the entertainment district. He could see now that there had been nothing in it that would have biased him if he had only bothered to read it. Coil had known exactly what it was doing when it assembled the files. The dossier was a collection of facts, not a curated list of opinions. Most of the material was probably irrelevant to the case. Coil had included it anyway, because the intelligent computer had trusted Olt-mar-rost-kam to decide for himself what mattered and what did not.

And some of that material, like the photograph of the flower bed in the park, had now turned out to be very much relevant to the case.

Even the information the computer had provided to the forensics team during their initial examination of the body had been correct, and Olt-mar-rost-kam had ignored it. He saw that now. He remembered how Rabar tot menkeltar had read the botanical information from the screen that the computer had looked up for them. The words had been there all along—H. wilsonia had nearly been driven to extinction in the wild.

He should have realized from the very beginning that the intelligent computer that had authored the botanical summary would never have used that phrase if the plant had not also been domesticated.

When this whole debacle became known, Admiral Log-tel-par-mon-vir would surely think him incompetent.

Fear for his status and career sank its cold claws into Olt-mar-rost-kam’s soul as panic pressed down on his chest. For a minute, he considered how best to hide his failure from his superiors. Perhaps he could lie and claim that he had looked through the dossier beforehand, but without the context of the crime scene he had found nothing in it worthy of his attention.

But no. When Lieutenant Ratanapol had handed it to him, he had explicitly told her he was not going to look at it. Should there be an official investigation into the botched raid, chances were that fact would come to light, sooner or later. It was not that he thought she would deliberately tell on him, but she was a good soldier, and she had no reason to conceal the truth of his conduct from an official inquiry.

No, there was no way around it. Sooner or later, everyone would know that Olt-mar-rost-kam was not truly fit to be a Sunguard Agent.

For a moment, he considered what else he could do to salvage his standing. But beyond actually solving the case before word of his failure began to spread, he could think of nothing.

And so, that was exactly what Olt-mar-rost-kam resolved to do. Knowing that his only shield against public humiliation now was finding the actual murderer, he requested a car to take him back to the park. By the time he arrived, the white-blue orb of Procyon was already beginning to set behind the skyscrapers and smokestacks lining the hazy horizon.

This time, he came alone.

It would do him no good to have a Sunguard team with him. The credit for solving the case had to be his, and his alone.

Slowly, he walked through the small park. Like most Kelar, he had an eye for beauty, and on any other day he would have enjoyed the graceful lines of the sculptures scattered among the Japanese cherry trees and Glorian peachettes. But tonight, his gaze remained fixed on the ground.

Finding the right flower bed posed no difficulty. Coil’s dossier was precise and comprehensive. Every photograph was geotagged and labeled with complete metadata. After donning a pair of white gloves with thickened fingertips to protect the fragile rubber from his claws, he began methodically parting the flower stalks and searching the ground beneath them.

Some of the plants were broken. They could have been damaged when Ms. Santos was dragged through the flower bed, but they could just as easily have been crushed by a wild dog running through the park or by a night raptor pouncing on a pararodent scurrying beneath the leaves.

It meant nothing.

The location itself, however, was significant. Olt-mar-rost-kam now had two points where he knew the victim’s body had been the previous night: the end of the back alley and the flower bed where he was now standing.

Two points meant he could draw a line.

He mentally extended it from the alley through the flower bed and deeper into the park. Then following the direction of his gaze, he walked slowly away from the road with his attention still fixed on the ground.

His newfound resolve paid off. Eight meters farther in, he found what he was looking for. Hidden beneath the broad leaves of a ground fern, he found a black shoe. Consulting Ms. tot menkeltar’s preliminary report from the autopsy now underway back at Merkel Base, he confirmed that the shoe matched Joleen Santos’ size. It wasn’t exactly proof that it belonged to her, but it was close enough. And the truth was that, for the moment, he was looking for clues, not proof, anyway.

Three points, all lying on a straight line tracing the path along which the victim’s body had been dragged: through the park, across the street, and into the back alley on the other side.

His gut told him something was wrong.

For a moment, he ignored the feeling. Over the past day, his instincts had led him badly astray and had probably ruined his career. It was probably better to think logically about the geometry of the scene.

Standing in the middle of the small park, Olt-mar-rost-kam looked back toward the alleyway across the thoroughfare and considered the implications. In his mind’s eye, he imagined one or more men dragging Joleen Santos’ limp body through the bushes, stopping before crossing the street to wait for a lull in traffic, then finally hauling her across the road and into the back alley once no one was looking.

It made no sense.

He was certain the body had been left there during the night. Despite the neighborhood’s dubious reputation, he could not imagine anyone dumping it there in broad daylight. Not only would the perpetrator have run a significant risk of being discovered, but if the body had been lying on the street during the day, someone would surely have found it. The fact that it had not been discovered until well past midnight was proof enough that it had been disposed of under cover of darkness.

There was another factor to consider.

Despite its nature, the entertainment district was still basically a commercial area. The businesses here, though peddling vices that appealed to the darker sides of humanity, ultimately existed to make money for their owners. That meant most of the people working here stayed away from drugs. Their clients did not, but the owners themselves had to remain clearheaded enough to run their depraved businesses.

Which meant the perpetrator could have gotten away with things during the night, when those roaming the streets were addled by drugs, that would have been impossible during the day, when sharper minds populated the entertainment district. Even if someone had seen them dragging the body across the street that night, chances were the witnesses would not have been sober enough to question what they were seeing. And even if they had been, they probably would not have remembered any of it the following morning anyway.

Across the street.

Olt-mar-rost-kam felt it, like a flash of lightning surging through his body.

That was it.

Joleen Santos’ body had been dragged across the street.

Throughout his career, he had hunted both serial killers and murderers driven by passion. And all of them had shared one thing in common: though for different reasons, none of them had wanted to get caught. The serial killers might taunt the Sunguard. The deranged ones might even put their victims’ bodies on display for the world to see. But they all wanted to continue killing, and so they disposed of their victims in ways that made it less likely that they would be captured. The spontaneous murderers, on the other hand, the husbands killing their wives’ lovers and the burglars killing the homeowners who stumbled upon them, all tended to hide the bodies because they hoped no one would ever discover what they had done.

The motives were different, but the objective was always the same. They all wanted to avoid getting caught. And that meant minimizing their exposure to security cameras, witnesses, and orbital surveillance.

Dragging a dead woman through a park and across a public street was the exact opposite of that behavior. Why had the perpetrator not simply driven along the thoroughfare, stopped beside the back alley, dumped the corpse, and sped away? It would have taken only seconds. Instead, they had spent valuable time dragging her across half a block.

To Olt-mar-rost-kam, the disposal of the body felt almost... industrial.

He pondered the conundrum for a minute before turning back to his tablet. This time, he told himself, he would not ignore Coil.

Opening the dossier again, he navigated to the files from the Municipal Planning Office, searching for something that might confirm the suspicion taking shape in his mind.

Two minutes later, he found what he was looking for.

The documents were highly technical, forcing him to skip large sections he did not understand, but their overall meaning was clear. Walking back to the thoroughfare to read the signs posted along it, Olt-mar-rost-kam confirmed that he had interpreted the documents correctly.

The entertainment district was indeed also a business district. During the day, transport vehicles, couriers, and the private cars of business owners needed access to the clubs, dens, and brothels scattered throughout the area. At night, however, the thoroughfare became the domain of people too drunk or too high to safely share it with traffic. Consequently, the Hartmann City Traffic Office had restricted motorized vehicles on the thoroughfare to daytime use. During the night, it became an entirely pedestrian street.

The Municipal Planning Office had then enforced that decision. Embedded beneath the pavement of the road were thousands of sensors capable of reading the identity tags of every vehicle passing over them. Should one enter the street during prohibited hours, its owner would be automatically fined.

Olt-mar-rost-kam had his answer.

The perpetrator had dragged Ms. Santos’ body through the park and across the street simply because driving directly to the back alley during the night would have guaranteed detection. As long as the route had been, it was still the shortest one available.

And if that was true, then the place he was looking for wasn’t in the back alley, along the thoroughfare, or in the park.

If he extended the line he had mentally drawn even farther, beyond the far edge of the park, there was another road.

And beyond that, another block of entertainment establishments with highly dubious reputations.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While The Wolf Reforged is entirely standalone and can be read without any prior knowledge, I think you'll also enjoy Scorched Earth, Wonders From Beyond the Sky, and A Game of Wolf and Mouse which are prequels to this story, and Twilight Duty, Guardian of the Wolf, and Conscience of Steel, which are sequels.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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