Seasons of Murder: In the Shadow of This Red Rock Read online

  “Did he just stand in front of him, pushing them in? Is that possible? What kind of force would that take?”

  The doctor shook his head again. “No, that’s the interesting thing.” He took the removed piston back off Cal and placed it against the corpse’s thigh in an unmarked spot. “Even standing above with the addition of gravity and good angle of penetration…”

  Suddenly, he put his weight on the projectile and tried to stab it in. “See, it’s—” He didn’t finish.

  There was a crash as the tray of instruments hit the ground, closely followed by one green-eyed Minder.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Zero woke up on a gurney in the medical centre next to the dead body, which was disconcerting, but with Cal standing alongside him, which was not. He coughed lightly. “Have I just blown any attempt to convince you that I’m really a lean, mean, fighting machine?”

  “Why, because you fainted at the sight of blood?”

  “I did not faint. I shut down to conserve energy.”

  “Ah, good. How are you feeling?”

  Zero put a hand to his head. “Did I hit something?”

  “The floor.” Cal helped him sit up, clearly trying to conceal his amusement at Zero’s predicament.

  “What did I miss? Did you find anything?”

  “Do you want to get out of here? Coffee? I can spare five minutes.”

  Zero wondered idly how much time the lieutenant had already spared for him whilst waiting for him to come around, but didn’t ask. As they were walking along toward the crew quarters, he said instead, “I’ve been thinking. Perhaps you should find out who can’t account for their movements at the estimated time of death. Presumably a number of crew were on duty, and the colonists would have people who could vouch…Oh. Sorry.”

  Cal was nodding his head in wide-eyed admiration of this brilliance, as if he’d not actually thought to do any of these things already. He seemed to relent though and admitted, clearly trying not to laugh openly, “The doc estimated the guy died between midnight and 0200 hours, so Holliday’s checking anyone unaccounted for. But, seriously, I appreciate the help.”

  They arrived at Cal’s cabin and went in. Zero flung himself into a chair, feeling stupid and frustrated. He wanted to tell Cal everything he knew, but had to make it appear conjecture only. “This guy can’t be entirely sane, surely? Maybe that would show up on some personnel record?”

  “He wouldn’t get into Inter-Sol Corp with anything abnormal on his record. But I’m pretty sure a colonist could slip through the vetting easily enough.” Cal placed two mugs of coffee on the table and sat down opposite Zero. “How are you feeling now?”

  “I’m fine. Stop fussing. What did the doc conclude about the…?” He paled and made a poking motion with his finger.

  Cal frowned. “The semen?”

  “What? No! Wait, there was semen? Where? Oh, no! I don’t want to know. Actually, I do, where?”

  Cal followed this ramble with a wry expression and replied dryly, “The body had traces of semen on top of the wounds; he ejaculated onto them. He must have stood…Sorry.”

  Zero realised he’d risen, physically backing away from the unfortunate imagery. He sat back in his chair tentatively as if it was going to bite him. “So you’ve got DNA.”

  “Sure, but I can’t go around and force nearly two hundred men to jack off into a cup for me.”

  “Tempting as that might be?”

  Cal spluttered his coffee. “I meant, I have no legal right to, despite the circumstances, although I guess at a push I could get the captain to mandate the crew be tested. But even if I did, we don’t have the facilities on board to run mass tests like that. We’d have to store the results and have the analysis done when we got back to Earth. By that time, the murderer would have been on Titan for nine months. Unless he’s crew, in which case we’d have another nine months of his company on the way home. Come to that, I’m not even sure we’d have facilities to store all those samples.”

  “I actually wanted to ask about what the doc was saying about how the rods were…inserted, before I—”

  “Fainted? They weren’t pushed in by hand. The force required would have been too great. One went right through bone. Anyway, doc reckons the killer rigged up some sort of device that would have projected them at high velocity—hence the random pattern.”

  “Fuck. Do you know who the victim is yet?”

  “Yeah. He was one of the scientists in the nuclear fisson project. I’m heading back to the crime scene…If you want to come…Perhaps you’re an experienced Scene of Crime officer, too?”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “Yeah, I kinda am…”

  They eyed each other across the small table. Zero licked his lips. Cal’s eyes widened fractionally. “I can’t do this now. I don’t have time…” But despite his denials, Cal rose swiftly anyway and snagged Zero’s shirt, pulling him close, murmuring, “I’ve never kissed a SOCO before.” He then remedied that situation, manoeuvring them around the small table and pushing Z back against the wall. Zero could feel a hum of machinery against his spine, and lips on his stubble. He could smell the lieutenant’s hair, coconut, he realised, feel the heat from his body, and for the first time in his life, he wondered whether he had enough with just these physical sensations without needing to share the man’s thoughts as well. He danced his fingers along the severe military cut of Cal’s hair, linking hands at the back, grinding him closer. He was hard and desperately wanted to take everything further, but with a grunt, Cal eased off, eyes wide. “Do you think they were fucking, and it just went wrong?”

  “What!” Zero shoved him away, incredulous. “We were having a moment there!”

  Cal had the grace to appear sheepish. “Yeah. I know, but then I was thinking, fuck, I could do bad things with this guy…and then that led to me thinking, well, about bad things…”

  “You think maybe that’s what this nutter was doing?” Z thought about this, curious, but then remembered the voice he’d heard, the pure insanity that had radiated from the murderer. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Wow. You’re a mood killer, aren’t you?” He levered off the wall and headed toward the door. Just as Cal caught him up, looking sadly chastened, Z nudged him with his shoulder. “Come on then, Mr Romantic. For our second date, you can take me to your crime scene and tell me all about the bad things you want to do to me…”

  “You are disastrous for my concentration.” Cal shot Zero a small smile. “But it’s good to have you on board.”

  Z found it extremely amusing that they were both inappropriately happy with how things were currently working out, given they had an insane killer on the loose. Thinking how useful it would be if he could read dead minds, he followed Cal down to the large cargo bay where the body had been displayed.

  §§§

  “What I don’t get,” Cal mused, as they walked around the strut that the Titan colonist had died on, “is why now? Why would he do this now? If he wanted to kill the guy, why not wait until he got to a place with more people to hide amongst? If I discount the crew, which seems rational, there’s only a limited number of men left.”

  “You think he’s rational enough to think like that?”

  “I think something pushed him. Whatever urges he had, I think something drove him to do this now.”

  Zero suddenly had the awful memory of being in the killer’s mind when he was fantasising about murder, dreaming of blood. Had his thoughts, intruding in the man’s head, pushed him over some edge he’d been delicately negotiating? Had he created the madness by confirming the reality of other voices in the killer’s already damaged mind?

  I have voices in my head would be given a whole new meaning, he assumed, if there actually were…voices in your head…

  He could not speak of his fears to Cal, so he kept them to himself, but it changed everything. This initial tragic contact between a human and a Sender could be the first of many…perhaps all human minds were too inherently w
eak to survive contact with him?

  He suddenly realised that he was alone, standing next to the drying pool of blood, and who knows what else, in the sinister blue-black darkness of the cargo bay. He coughed nervously then spotted Cal some distance away, pacing. He went over, trying not to appear as if he was scurrying. “What are you doing?”

  Cal had one of the metal rods in his hand and was considering a narrow set of struts about twenty feet away from where the man had been tied. “The doc suggested this to me. Look, I reckon the killer tied some kind of flexible strap, possibly one of the gym resistance bands, around these two supports, drew it back and fired the rods into the guy from here.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought. C’mon, you hungry?”

  Zero looked askance at him. “Now? Doesn’t this kinda thing put you off eating?”

  Cal thought about this for a moment, his face scrunched in concentration. “Nope.”

  They began to walk back together, but when Cal didn’t make toward the mess hall, he was forced, at a questioning brow raise from Z, to admit sheepishly, “Yeah, sorry, but I’ve told all your people to stay out of public areas until we’ve caught this guy. I don’t want anything coming back on them.”

  “What about me?”

  Cal stopped for a moment and said with a small smile, “You seem to be the exception to all my rules.” He led them to his cabin and ordered some food to be brought down, explaining it was a privilege of rank he didn’t often use.

  Zero went to the small viewing portal and gazed out at the blackness. He sensed Cal come up behind him and a hand was placed on the bare skin of his neck. “Is this all it took?”

  Zero turned. “All what took?”

  “For you to read my mind. Was it just one touch like this?”

  Zero stared at him for a long time then eventually said, “I’ve never needed to be able to read your mind to know exactly what you’re thinking.” He snagged Cal into his arms and kissed him slowly and leisurely, easing apart only to find a new position to join their mouths, hands roaming in hair and tugging, just the sound of flesh enjoying flesh. Totally closed off to the human’s mind, as he had been since he’d decided to play detective, Zero had to wonder whether being a mind reader was such a good thing after all. Like this, he had to work hard with his other senses to anticipate what the human wanted, to read with his lips and fingers what Cal liked and wanted to do again. It was intensely exciting and erotic.

  Too stimulating. When a knock on the cabin door came, signalling that the food had arrived, neither was in a state to receive it. Cal yelled for them to leave it on the floor outside. He gave it a moment, bent over to regain control, then opened up the door and brought the trays inside.

  Zero gave an amused snort at his own greedy nature when the need for food overcame his desire for the pretty lieutenant. It evolved into a rueful huff when Cal didn’t even spare him that much thought but began to hoover his meal with ruthless determination.

  When they’d finished and were picking at a few remaining items, both deep in their own musings, Cal suddenly commented, “I suppose I have to thank you for not pointing out the extreme irony of this situation.”

  “Can you have ironic kissing?”

  “Not that, arsehole, the murder. I have a murderer on a spaceship full of mind readers who’ve just been rendered…utterly useless.”

  Zero raised his brows in shocked surprise but cast his eyes down at his empty plate. “That seems to raise an interesting dilemma then. If we could still read minds, would you want us to use that ability to find this man?”

  Cal frowned. “It’s a redundant question because if you could you wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

  Zero sighed. “It’s not redundant. It goes to the very heart of what my people are trying to do here. So humour me. Answer the question. If I could read minds would you want me to—to help you solve this murder?”

  Cal shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t. No more than I would use rape as an interrogation technique.”

  Zero hunched in on himself, wounded. “Well, there you go then.” He rose to his feet. “I need to go speak with my people. See how they’re taking the new lockdown.” He already knew because he’d been chatting with Mina while he ate, but he wasn’t about to tell the human that. He wanted to get away from him now. He’d been called little more than a rapist, but knowing what he did now about the wonder and intensity of the way humans could interact with their world, he was beginning to question whether this wasn’t an accurate description of what he was after all. “Thanks for the food.”

  Cal stood too and after a moment’s hesitation, snagged Zero’s shirt and pulled him closer. “Thanks for today.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah. I know. But it was fun watching you do it.”

  Zero shook his head fondly and made his escape.

  How could the life of an all-powerful mind reader have suddenly become so complicated?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Zero had barely been in bed for more than an hour when he was jerked out of a half-asleep, half-awake doze by the searing terror of an anguished mind, and he realised his life had only just begun to get complex.

  This time he was not in the mind of the killer. He was hearing the agonised thoughts of a victim—someone in horrendous physical torment. The awareness was tangled in layers of consciousness, all jumbled and confused, but overlaid with the terrible certainty of pain. Zero was paralysed by the intensity. He had lived with people who whispered thoughts, mindful, polite. This was a human mind-scream on full, petrified, desperate, and hopeless send, and it was like standing next to an engine on maximum power, gears grinding and screeching, hot metal smoking. He tried to stand but wobbled helplessly to the floor.

  With an effort of will that nearly tore him in two, he began to project back. It was like standing in the face of a Martian dust storm, knowing it was about to obliterate him, but not running. He desperately wanted to pull away from this tormented mind, put his walls up and stay safe behind them, but instead he stood his ground and curled around the agony, dulling it where he could, taking it upon himself and flooding the tortured consciousness with other images—anything he could conjure: the vast, towering cliffs of Mars at sunset, bright stars seen from a world with no ambient light. He swamped the dying man’s thoughts with storybook visions of a perfect life after this one. He lost awareness of time. It could have been minutes or an hour when it all just…stopped.

  For one awful moment, Zero thought he would be sucked down through the final door and into death itself. He teetered on the brink then broke away.

  It was over and he was free.

  He was sweating and shaking uncontrollably. He began to drag himself along the floor to the tiny bathroom. He held it in until he got there, but then vomited, and kept doing so until there was nothing left but raw misery and red eyes and a throat that he could hardly croak out of.

  §§§

  Cal spent the first few hours of the night reviewing the details that he had for the unfortunate Titan colonist who had been so savagely and inexplicably murdered. He had requested them some hours before, but the communication delay from Titan meant they had only just arrived at his comms station via the lasers. He sat in his tiny office and scrolled through the very short bio. Graham Nash had been born on Titan forty years previously and had been a forerunner in the nuclear fission programme that served the power requirements of the entire colony. He seemed an uncontroversial scientist with no family and no history that would put him in the sights of a killer. No one who had known him amongst the colonists on board had noticed anything unusual about the man. He had been back on Earth to oversee the provision of the new fission reactor parts, had monitored them being loaded, and had been responsible for their safe transport. Hence his access to the cargo bay where he had been found. There was no record of any partner, although this was not unusual for those who chose a life on one of Saturn’s moons. By us
ing the logs of the comms on the ship, Cal was able to get a picture of the man’s contacts since he’d come on board. He had no record of subjects discussed, but he could see a number of calls had been made to other colonists and to one or two of the crew.

  Cal made a note of names called and decided to speak with each one. Given the nature of their jobs, he wasn’t all that surprised to see that almost all the personnel from his own security section had been in contact with Nash at some point or other, as had the doc, either during pre-flight briefings or during the weeks they’d been in space.

  He took a break, rubbing the back of his neck, feeling weary but oddly elated. And the elation he could trace directly back to his last encounter with Zero. He knew he was being ridiculous; he knew he was being weak, but he couldn’t stop replaying each of their kisses, feeling once more the rush of desire, the heady sense of losing himself to physical sensation. With a wry huff at his own foolishness, he reminded himself that he hadn’t worked out for days and was probably just missing the endorphins. But knowing he was an idiot didn’t prevent him from thinking about paying the Minder a quick visit—just to check up on him. See what he was doing…

  He was furious and frustrated in equal measure, therefore, when he arrived at the cabin to find it empty. He had ordered a lockdown. He didn’t like people disobeying orders. He went to Mina’s cabin and asked if she had seen her brother. She had not.

  He was about to return to security and initiate a search when he got a call through.

  Another body.

  Private Fuller sounded badly shaken—and she was his most stoic soldier.

  A pair of teenagers, searching for a space where they could have some privacy, had found the body. Cal would have laughed in other circumstances, for they weren’t looking for a place for nefarious activities—things he assumed teenagers wanted to do—but to complete a homework project. They had liberated a microwave oven from the kitchens and were intending to experiment making ball lightening. He had a feeling they wouldn’t get much of a grade on this project now. The small space they had appropriated, an empty storage bay off one of the holds on the lower decks, had already had an occupant.