Chief Laughton watched McCardy’s face, and said, “He was murdered.”
eyes closed, lips tightened—pain
“No,” McCardy said, shaking his head. “No, no, no, no.”
“Is there someone who would have wanted to hurt him?” Mathews said.
“No. Wait. Of course. Look at this shit.” He looked back and forth at the policemen. “It’s all legal,” he hurried to say, not fooling anyone, “of course, all legal. But you know. Sims…”
Laughton walked over to the rack of books and pulled one off the shelf at random. Blended Worlds. He pulled a few more out. The Hidden Triangle. The Twenty-Year Death. He’d never heard of any of them. The things seemed one step away from dust.
“Did you know that Mr. Smythe was a cyborg?” Mathews said.
“Yeah. Of course. What does that matter? You think it was because he was a cyborg?”
“It’s possible. Are you a cyborg?”
McCardy jerked back like he’d tasted something unexpectedly bad. “What? No. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They’re humans first. They have the same rights to be on the preserve, and everything.”
“No one’s saying anything against cyborgs,” Chief Laughton said, putting the books back on the shelf. “Where’d you get all of these books?”
“What does it fucking matter?” The shock over his friend’s death had turned to anger, eyebrows lowered, pulled together.
“I’ve just never seen so many books. Why do you have them?”
“Metals like human-written sims because of the messed-up shit we can think up that they can’t. Old books give us a lot of stuff to use. Those are all crap books that no one thought were worth digitizing, so metals have never seen them.”
“Who’s your distributor?” Mathews said.
McCardy turned back to the officer, caught off balance between the two men. He hesitated.
“Look, we don’t care about your sims,” Laughton said. “We’re not here to bust anyone on sims. That’s a metals problem, not a preserve problem as far as I’m concerned. But we need to find who killed your friend. And we need the names of anyone who might be able to help.”
McCardy’s shoulders slumped. “Something Jones. Carl handled all of that, and he just always said Jones. Crap, what am I going to do now?”
Laughton met Mathews’s eyes. The officer gave a slight shake of the head; he didn’t know the name Jones either.
“Was he in town to meet Jones?”
“No, he’d just gone for groceries.”
“And you stayed here?”
“Yes.”
“You were here all day? Didn’t go to town too?”
“I haven’t left the house.” He said it matter-of-factly, without the insistence of someone trying to establish an alibi. He didn’t even seem to consider that was what was being asked.
“Did Carl have family?” Laughton said.
“Just a sister. His dad died when he was little. His mom was killed in a car crash. That’s how he lost his arm and leg. He isn’t some modder,” he said, defending his friend. “He actually needs those prosthetics.”
“Does his sister live on the preserve?”
McCardy shook his head. “Oakland. She was paralyzed in the crash. She’s more machine than orgo. Says she’s happier out there.”
If she’d been paralyzed, there was no way she could blend. Despite McCardy’s egalitarianism, a cyborg that couldn’t blend wouldn’t be particularly popular on the preserve.
“Friends? Anyone else we should talk to?”
“I don’t know,” McCardy said. “Some robots, before we moved to the preserve. He did all of the runs into town. Maybe he knew some people there.”
“Yeah. Okay,” Laughton said. “What’s his sister’s name?”
“Cindy.”
“Do you have her contact info? We couldn’t find Smythe’s phone.”
McCardy fumbled for the phone on his desk, swiped through, and then looking up at the chief, extended his phone.
Laughton caught Mathews’s eye and gave a slight nod. The junior officer took his own phone and tapped it to McCardy’s.
“I’m giving you my info too,” Mathews said, “if you think of anything else once we leave…”
McCardy nodded.
“He didn’t leave his phone here, by any chance, did he?”
McCardy frowned, and shook his head. “No.”
“We’ll need to go through Mr. Smythe’s computer,” Chief Laughton said.
“I don’t know the password.”
“We’ll get experts out here tomorrow to go through it all.”
“Tomorrow,” McCardy repeated, not a question, just a sound.
“You sure there’s no way you could get in, maybe help us out.”
“Carl perfected the burner, a program that literally sets a computer on fire. If he didn’t want anyone on his machine, there’s no way on.”
“Our man will give it a try,” Laughton said, but he didn’t have much faith that it would yield anything. If the hard drive didn’t get burned out, these guys were too cagey to leave a trail of any kind. “And what was Jones’s first name again?” the chief said, circling back on the question in the hopes of shaking loose an answer.
“I don’t know,” McCardy said with the first twinge of annoyance.
“I find that a little hard to believe,” the chief said.
“Why? I didn’t deal with him. Carl never said.”
“You’re a sims hacker, but you have no idea how your product is sold, where the money comes from? Come on, Sam. You know that sounds ridiculous.”
“I’m a hacker. That’s all I know. Look around. I don’t even leave the house. And the one person I do see, you’re telling me is dead.” His face crumpled, and tears slid down each cheek, but he managed to avoid a full breakdown.
“We just want to find the person that killed your partner,” the chief said. “Given the business you’re in, it seems most likely to be related. Any names you could give us…”
McCardy opened his mouth, but closed it again, pressing his lips together in order to avoid losing control of his feelings. When the danger of crying had passed, he opened his mouth again, but the first words came out as a choke, and he had to swallow and repeat himself. “I really have nothing to do with the business side. Carl does all of that. This guy Jones moves it to a larger distributor who gets it off the preserve, I don’t know who. And then, I guess, I don’t know, metals?”
He really didn’t know. There were plenty of husbands who didn’t know what bills got paid because their wives took care of them. It must have been like that. “Okay,” Laughton said. There were only so many times the man could swallow his tears. If they pushed him too far, he’d be reluctant to come to them with more information later. “If you hear from Jones, though,” Laughton said, “let us know.”
McCardy had receded into his shell again. “Yeah. Of course.”
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Mathews said.