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Sitting down, chief of police Jesse Laughton put his palms on his desk to steady himself, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. He was exhausted. His headache, coupled with the chronic pain in his face, made it hard to focus. Life would be easier if I was dead, he thought, then opened his eyes and looked at the clock on the wall without turning his head. The thin red hand made its stuttering march through the numbers into the late afternoon. Only forty-three minutes left in his shift.
Then the phone on his desk buzzed, the vibration sliding it across the out-of-date calendar-blotter. He had it set on Do Not Disturb, and lying facedown. He knew that having his phone in Do Not Disturb mode during his shift was not only against the police department’s bylaws, but as chief was irresponsible. But this late in the day, he just didn’t care. Now it was ringing anyway, which meant that somebody needed to get through badly enough to call him more than once in two minutes. Still, he watched it buzz for another few seconds before working up the strength to turn it over to see who was calling. It was Mathews. That was bad.
He answered. “Chief Laughton.”
“Well, we won the lottery,” Mathews said without a hello.
Laughton felt his stomach drop, followed by a wave of nausea. He waited for it.
“Dead body,” Mathews said. “Taser to the neck.”
Laughton closed his eyes again. “Homicide.”
“Looks like it. First one on the preserve.”
Shit. Nine months since they opened the SoCar Preserve, and the first body has to show up in Liberty. Really, it’s amazing it took this long. The drop in violent crime since the preserve opened was something both the robot and preserve governments were touting as proof that the preserve had been a success that far exceeded expectations. Well, the honeymoon was over.
“It’s Carl Smythe. Body was behind Kramer’s Market, between the dumpster and the loading dock. I thought you’d want to come look.”
Chief Laughton could feel his left lower eyelid fluttering. The whole left side of his face began to tingle.
“Chief?”
“Anything I can’t get from the pictures?” he said.
“It’s just when they start asking questions,” Mathews said, “they’re going to be asking you.”
Why did it have to be in Liberty?
“Okay,” Laughton said. “I’ll be right over.”
“We’ll be waiting.”
Chief Laughton hung up, and held the phone a moment in a daze. He looked at the clock again. It promised thirty-seven minutes left in his shift, but that didn’t mean anything now. If only his head didn’t hurt. He opened his desk drawer and took out a bottle of Advil. Each pill cost a fortune these days, but if there was ever a time to use them, this was it, even if he knew they probably wouldn’t help. He swallowed four, dry, dropped the bottle back in the desk drawer, and looked at his gun sitting in the drawer as well. The way his face felt, he couldn’t shoot straight if he had to. There was no reason to make the first murder in preserve history also the first day he carried a gun since coming to Liberty. He slammed the drawer shut, stood, and strode out of the room.
* * *
Liberty was the smallest of the three towns on the preserve outside of Charleston. The town had started out with a larger than normal human population because of two separate Southern Baptist churches that had attracted strong congregations. That gave it a reputation of being orgo-friendly, and the churches had advertised that all were welcome. Now that Liberty was overflowing with preservationists, the churches’ importance had waned. The town instead sported more bars than any other kind of establishment, and they were all lax with whom they served and how much.
Chief Laughton pulled his truck up to where Mathews’s cruiser was parked. The blacktop was cracked, green shoots growing where they could. A chunk of concrete sat beside the supermarket’s loading dock, a rusty bit of rebar at the edge of the platform showing where it had been. There were two dumpsters, both overflowing, and garbage bags neatly lined up on the ground all around them. A refrigerated box truck, its compressor huddled on top, was backed up against the loading bay with a crude painting of a cornucopia emblazoned on the side. The word “Sisters” was written in fancy script above the cornucopia, and stenciled block letters below it read “SoCar Preserve.”
Mathews and his partner, Dunrich, were talking to Larry Richman, the store’s manager, and some skinny, white kid, looked maybe fifteen. The kid had his arms folded high on his chest, hands in his armpits, like he was cold despite the early spring weather. A young black man sucking a vape leaned against the delivery truck. Richman kept peeking over his shoulder at the body slumped against the building. Jesus, Laughton thought. He put the truck in reverse, and pulled it back so that it blocked the view of the body for anyone who happened to be going by. They didn’t need an audience.
The chief willed his mind to focus, pushing the pain in his face and his head down as best he could to get through the job that needed to be done. He got out of his truck, and Mathews turned to meet his boss.
“The kid found him when he came out to receive the delivery,” Mathews said without bothering with a greeting.
Carl Smythe’s body was propped up in the corner formed by the loading dock and the back of the building. He was wearing cargo shorts and a three-quarter-sleeve baseball shirt for some team called the Cougars. His head was tilted back, his eyes closed. “You close the eyes?” Laughton said.
Mathews shook his head. “They were like that.”
Laughton nodded. The eyes hardly mattered. The real showstopper was Smythe’s left arm and leg. They’d both been cut open, jagged tears consistent with a dull blade. But instead of a bloody mass of flesh, the wounds revealed metal bones encased in simul-skin. “So he was a robot,” Laughton said. “Shit.”
“Cyborg,” Mathews said.
“You knew?”
“Nah. We did a scan when we saw the bones. Rest of him’s one hundred percent orgo.”
“Hate crime?”
Mathews shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t see it. Records search said Smythe was into sims.”
Laughton pulled out his phone and took a picture of the corpse.
“We got it on the 3-D,” Mathews said.
“A picture comes in handy,” Laughton said, checking it. “Black guy the deliveryman?”
“Yeah.” Mathews looked at his phone. “Barry Slattery. He doesn’t have a record.”
Laughton examined the area around the body, but there was nothing to find. It wasn’t like there would be footprints in the asphalt. “You said it was a Taser?”
“I didn’t want to move him, but you can just see it, back of the neck.”
Laughton stepped closer to the body. He saw the discoloration Mathews was talking about. “Give me gloves.”
Mathews pulled a pair of black latex gloves from his pocket and handed them to the chief.
After putting them on, Laughton tilted the head forward with great care, as though he didn’t want to wake the man, and there, in the center of the back of the neck, were twin puncture wounds, swollen like bee stings, reminiscent of vampire bites from old horror movies. “Good spot, Officer.”