Six Shadows

  Six Shadows

  A Shot of Gabe Bach

  by Nicole Grotepas

  © 2018 Nicole Grotepas

  Cover by Sanja Gombar

  This story was supported by my patrons via Patreon. Thank you to them! Additionally, the warmest thanks to my beta readers who gave of their time to read this story in an earlier form and advise me—Terry Tippets, David Gervais, E.T. Roske, and Chris Curtis.

  Races:

  Centau: a race of people from a system of planets in the Centaurian constellation. Very tall, dark skinned, with hair colors ranging across the lighter hues of white, silver, blond, etc. They’re far more advanced than humans. They are the race responsible for having terraformed and settled the 6-moon region. Muibaus produces an element known as hydrantium that when refined provides a form of energy that powers ships, vehicles, and energy weapons.

  Druiviin: a race of people from the planet Yaso. Violet skinned with hair ranging from white to silver, and almost blonde. Rather calm and peaceful and more given to artistic pursuits.

  Constellation: a race of people from the planet Acxia. Their pale skin is reflective due to conditions on their home planet. Their moral advancement is similar to humans.

  Human: a race of people from Earth.

  Locations:

  Ixion: a gas giant in the solar system Achelois. Also known as Muibaus (“pale mother”) to the Centau. Provides hydrantium and ionium to the settlers of the 6-moon system. Also referred to as Moebius.

  Kota: a moon orbiting Ixion. Captital city the City of Jade Spires.

  The Sliver: the safest region of Kota and most populated.

  MY FRIDGE WAS ALMOST TOTALLY empty except for three bottles of the best Kotan-style double IPAs, a chunk of brie cheese, and some juka-berry preserves to eat with the brie. These were the remainders of my contribution to a party I hadn’t wanted to attend, and the “contribution” was the only thing I knew I’d want to eat when I ended up going.

  I pulled out a beer, opened it, and put the preserves and brie on the counter. The beer hit my mouth hard and woke it up, then rippled through my body like a numbing tidal wave. I hadn’t eaten all day and the alcohol went straight into my bloodstream. The crackers that I’d taken to the party were in a cabinet. I pulled them out and began spreading brie and preserves over them. From a stool at the counter, I looked across the room and out the window to the city spires glittering in the afternoon light. I always kept my windows wide open. The view helped alleviate some of that feeling of being suffocated from living in the massive, teeming city.

  The day had been long, though it was only noon. I’d been awake since four when the homicide unit had gotten a call about the body of a witness related to the Trippel investigation. I’d gone in because my daughter Lucy was with her mom. The witness had been slated to testify against a corrupt government official, Enzo bloody Cole, who was still in office. Trippel had been his advisor. She’d been murdered.

  And now Ynes Oliver was also dead. Ynes could have broken the silence on whatever the hell was happening with the human proxies to the Centau-run Syndicate government—the race who ran the 6-moon system. And now, nothing.

  My communicator rang. “Shit,” I said, before I even saw who it was. I had a hunch that it would be someone from the precinct.

  I held my communicator up to my ear. “Gabriel Bach.”

  “Hey Gabe. Having a good afternoon?”

  It was Miko, from the station. So I’d been right, but then I’m usually right about that because they’re the only ones who call me.

  “I was, but now I’m not.”

  “Sorry. I had no choice. We’ve got another dead one. Looks like murder.” She sounded unnaturally chipper. Probably because she hadn’t been at the early morning fun with me.

  “Then it probably was,” I sighed, rubbing my eyes. “Does anyone in this city ever die of natural causes?”

  “That’d be nice, for once . . . Oh, and Gabe, it’s a Druiviin. So it’s worse than normal.”

  She was right: the Druiviin were the peaceful race. Sure, they could be scoundrels, but if someone was murdering them, it was more a reflection on the murderer than anything the Druiviin had done.

  “Damn. This won’t be good—they never are, but a Druiviin? Murder weapon?” I paused, then added. “And where’s Meg? Is she with you?”

  “She’s not here. Just me and a couple of uniforms. We haven’t recovered the weapon yet. Still can’t tell how it happened. They’re looking. We’re looking.”

  “Alright. Find Meg for me. I’ll be there soon.”

  ***

  A feeling permeated the victim’s condo. I knew it well, the strange fog that hung in a room where death lingered, a dampening of spirit that pressed up against the living. It was more an impression, a sense that the world wasn’t right more than anything else. It was an altogether different animal from the stench that accompanied bodies that had been left for a week or so.

  “Where’s Meg?” I asked Miko, who stood to my side scrawling stuff into her small notebook.

  “I called her but she said she’ll be at the station later. ‘I’m not Gabe’s lapdog.’”

  “Her words?”

  “Yep.”

  “Funny. I guess she and I think differently about that.” I stopped one of the forensic workers and asked him two things. One, if he could clear out for a few moments so their team didn’t overwhelm my space and make it hard for me to focus. And two, if he’d turn the temperature down in the room. We were in the middle of a Kotan summer and the days were especially hot in the tops of the spires where the sun beat hard on them. “You get a profile on the victim yet?”

  Miko flipped through her notebook. “Name’s Lennox Fogg. He lived here alone, but the neighbors often saw him bringing girls to his apartment. A while back, maybe seven or eight months ago they continually saw him with one woman. They say he spent most of his time in here, however. Didn’t have a job he went to, at least not one that had him leaving at regular times.”

  The body lay in the center of the front room. It wasn’t the penthouse suite, but close enough at two floors down from the top. The view from the window looked out on the City of Jade Spires, a seemingly endless city built by the Centau on the moon Kota. I stared out at the afternoon light. I could see the gondolas of the Spireway filing between the buildings on an intricate cable system. It was the best way to travel through the city, especially if you were rich and lived in the spire-tops or ever got claustrophobic down in the slot canyons of the city, like me.

  I took a deep breath and went to examine the body. I was sick of dead bodies. The idea is that a detective should get used to this shit, but I never have. Every victim got to me in some way, whether it was the frozen expression on their face, the signs of struggle under their fingernails or in their teeth, their age, or what I knew would nag at me about this one: that it was a Druiviin.

  “Druiviin male, perhaps twenty-nine, thirty human-years old,” I said.

  “Sounds right to me. That’s what I thought, too,” Miko said. “But it’s always hard to tell with the Druiviin.”

  “It’s their violet skin. Ages better than mine and yours.”

  The gray and red rug wasn’t soaked in blood, so we weren’t looking at that kind of injury. The body was facedown. I pushed the victim’s silken silver hair aside with my pen. Looked like he’d been hit in the back of the head. In that gruesome way of skull fractures, there was a depression where the hair and skin seemed to be caving in. Maybe not meant to be murder, but only time would confirm that. I inhaled, choking back my gag-reflex from seeing it.

  I really, really hated this part of the job. I usually saw signs of some kind of struggle or movement that might have happened after the injury—blood on a hand from ins
tinctively trying to protect the wound. Or an indication that the victim tried to crawl away. This death looked almost instantaneous.

  I stood up. “Who found the body?”

  “His ex-girlfriend—Trixie Black. Says she came by to ‘drop off some of his things.’ Though they’ve been broken up for a while, she was still able to get into the condo. She knew the code on his scanner lock.”

  “You get to question her?”

  Miko nodded. “She’s gone already. I printed a photo already.”

  She handed it to me. The photo was a headshot of a girl with tired eyes. Black hair and a light complexion. The corners of her lips were turned down. No one ever looked good after finding a body, especially when they were being photographed as a suspect in the investigation.

  “I’ll want to see your notes.” I handed the photo back to Miko and walked around the room, dodging the forensic team as they moved into a different room to give me space. “He hasn’t been dead that long, so it could have been her. Get someone checking the time-stamps on the locks as soon as possible. I want to see your notes on your preliminary interview with this ex-girlfriend. If she was his ex, why would she insist on getting inside? These indentions in the carpet,” I said, crouching again and pointing with the pen. “Did you notice them?”

  “Of course, sir. They’re older though. I can’t put a time frame on them, but the furniture’s been moved,” Miko said, stepping back. She bent down beside me, her long black hair falling forward till it covered the side of her face and shoulder, and tilted her head to judge the angles.

  “Get that hair contained,” I said, bristling that it wasn’t. Miko usually didn’t forget shit like that. She was a professional and that’s what I liked about having her on my team. She was a no-nonsense investigator.

  She pursed her lips, straightened, and fished a hair band out of her blazer pocket. After she put her hair up, she joined me again.

  “The chairs. Moved to get more space. A month or more ago. This rug is stiff. Firm. High quality fibers,” I said, testing it with my gloved fingers. I raised an eyebrow. “Something like this could hold its shape for quite a long time. But for what? Right? Seems odd.”

  She nodded and scribbled something into her notepad.

  I straightened and moved gingerly around the body, scanning the carpets before I put my foot down. Miko followed. “And did the murderer do it, or the victim?”

  “Never seen it before. Usually furniture gets moved to hide a bloodstain. But I can see under the chairs. There’s nothing there.”

  “What would have been happening that prompted the victim to move his furniture?”

  I bent to get a closer look at the head.

  “Red marks around the eye sockets and on the cheekbones. Pre-death bruising, it looks like. We’ll need the medical examiner’s report to tell us more.” Whether this was an accident, or something else, something natural: a heart attack, an aneurysm, or whatever else people died from that wasn’t murder.

  But usually a giant head wound meant it was murder.

  “Got an idea yet?” Miko asked.

  “No.”

  If not premeditated murder, then manslaughter.

  I glanced around the room from where the body was to gather the lay of the land. To the condo entrance from the body, it was a straight shot to the short corridor that led to the door. Off that corridor there was a coat closet and small bathroom. Another corridor led to the bedrooms. There was a fireplace and French doors to a balcony about eight feet from the victim’s head. A vast kitchen opened into the living room, giving the whole condo a spacious feeling. It was the armchairs that seemed to have been moved the most. They appeared to have been picked up and moved about two feet from their normal positions. From where I crouched, I spotted a few random-seeming holes in the wall.

  Rising again, I dusted off my hands and pen and went to inspect this abnormality. When I got closer, I saw that the hole wasn’t a hole at all, but a small, empty nail. Glancing around the room, I spotted three more like it.

  Using a black pen, I sketched into my notebook the layout of the place and the approximate locations of all the big items, including the dead body at the center. The empty nails in the wall. The decorative gas fireplace. The gray-fabric couch. A console table against the far wall, near the door, there for design. It held the display of an orrery. Ixion, what the humans called the gas giant that held our moon in orbit, was at the center. The Centau called it Muibaus, which they claimed meant “pale mother” But humans had decided at some point that they preferred a word that sounded more human and Ixion stuck.

  I went to the console table and studied the orrery. There were six colonized moons, six shadows that fell on the Ixion: Kota, Itzcap, Po, Joopa, Paradise, and Helo. The orrery moved like an old clock, featuring gears that softly ticked out approximations of the moons’ orbital paths around Ixion. The little machines were all the rage sixty years ago, when the Centau finished setting up the first trans-moon zeppelins and they began operation. The victim might have collected old oddities like that. There was an empty space on the table, delineated by a square outline of missing dust. “Something’s goes here,” I said loudly to get Miko’s attention.

  Miko came to stand beside me as I bent to get a straight on view of the dust coating the table like a light fur. She copied me. “It looks square, the empty spot. Maybe slightly rectangular.”

  “Any bets? Think that was the murder weapon?”

  “Could have been. The wound doesn’t look like it was made with a traditional weapon. But what was here could also have been just a box. And he finally moved it.”

  “This is a spot for art,” I pointed out.

  Miko stared at me like I didn’t know art. Or have style. “You’re thinking of my desk at work.” I said, giving her a sidelong glance.

  “It’s a mess, Gabe. I’ve never seen a more cluttered desk.”

  “There’s a reason for that—the clutter. But I know what I would put here, next to this elaborate orrery. It’d be an important centerpiece of the room,” I said, indicating the un-dusted area with my hand, and the line where it ended, where an object had been. “The victim is showing off his wealth and success right here. What went here in this place of honor was something beautiful, like the orrery.”

  She nodded.

  The room suddenly got busy with forensic workers taking photos, measuring distances, and dusting for fingerprints. I felt my chest tighten with anxiety as the walls seemed to close in around me.

  “It’s getting too crowded here. I’m going back to the precinct. You’ll stay to finish managing this?”

  “Sure, Gabe. Was planning on it since you took the one this morning.”

  “Bag it all. When they’re done,” I said, nodding at the forensic workers, “get the body to the medical examiner. We need her report. You talked to any other neighbors yet?”

  Miko made a notation. “Yeah, I canvassed for a bit while the crime scene team set up. None of them heard anything, at least those who were home.”

  I looked around. “It’s not the most expensive condo. But the furnishings . . . He was doing well. Maybe he worked from home? Ok, I’m heading out.” I stopped, feeling like we were missing something. Or someone. “Where’s Meg?”

  “She said—”

  “Oh right. I know what she said,” I smiled.

  ***

  “Gabe?” Meg asked.

  “Hmm? What?” My gaze was glued to the suspect chart, but I was lost in thought. We were in our homicide wing, which was tucked into the corner on the bottom of an Ice Jade spire—I’d been back at the precinct managing a hand-off of the dead witness on the Trippel investigation. Since that whole ant’s nest had been disturbed, bodies were showing up left and right and the homicide teams in the Ice Jade district were stretched thin, but I needed to focus on this new case

  Meg waved her hand in a ‘let’s continue’ motion as I turned to look at her.

  “The suspects?”

  “Righ
t. Just the one, so far,” I pointed at the single photo of a suspect, positioned around a photo of the Druiviin body in the condo. The suspect had black hair, blue eyes—I’d seen it before. “The girlfriend. Yes? She’s the one who supposedly still had the code to his lock. Miko already got a preliminary questioning session in.”

  Meg folded her arms and leaned against her wooden desk. “Yes, but the girlfriend’s pregnant, Gabe.”

  “So?”

  “Just, it seems unlikely that a pregnant woman could commit murder.”

  “Not if she was on drugs. Or jealous.”

  Miko looked at Meg, then at me and said. “Pregnant women aren’t high on the list of violent crime perpetrators.”

  “Suspects lie. That’s a cardinal rule. Like how pregnant? What, 4 months or something?” I prodded, trying to put my elbows on my desk, but it was covered in papers and old taco wrappers. I found a spot to settle them and kept talking. “Because at 4 months, that could just be a bit of a tummy, especially if it’s her first.”

  Meg laughed, looking at Miko’s notes from the crime scene. “The girlfriend said she’s due in four weeks.”

  “OK, so then very pregnant. Harder to fake that. Let’s make sure our next photo is a body-shot. For the board. I want to see that belly.” I leaned back, scrubbed my hands through my hair, and stared at the board, thinking. “So, that’s it. We have one suspect. None of the neighbors?”

  Daxan, one of our typical team members and a Druiviin, walked into the area and handed Meg a printed sheet of paper. “Hey Meg, I just got this from forensics. Is that our suspect? She looks lonely up there.”

  “We’re working on filling it out.” Meg glanced at the paper, then passed it off to Miko.