He sighed and crossed over to her.

"Come on," he said. "Let me introduce you to terrible cafeteria food and the intricacies of legal research."

"Will we be safe there?" she asked.

"Safe enough," he said, and hoped it was true.

25.

Savita Romey had been right: Roshdi Whitford"s house looked like it had been built to survive the collapse of the dome. Nyquist walked around the first floor, careful to avoid any areas that the techs hadn"t finished with yet.

The blood spatter surprised him. He hadn"t expected so much from a single man. But Romey had had the techs do a preliminary test on-site, and their equipment said that the blood belonged to the same person.

Her theory that at least two arteries had been cut at the same time was one of the few things that made sense of the blood evidence. Her discovery, from the young employee in the squad, that anyone with the right pa.s.s codes could get into the house was disturbing.

They started their conversation after Nyquist took a look at this crime scene. Then they continued the conversation as they walked along the path around Whitford"s house. The police security system didn"t extend to the grounds, although the Whitford system did. It had been shut down, so when Nyquist and Romey talked outside, no one listened in.

He hoped.

Romey had already ordered a high-end tech to evaluate the security system. She"d also had it shut off, and a police system installed around the perimeter, afraid, she said, that the employees at Whitford Security might be monitoring the investigation.

Romey was methodical and she was thorough. Nyquist appreciated that.

He also appreciated the concentration she brought to his side of the case. As he told her about the deaths in the Hunting Club forest, she asked pointed questions about the evidence, the position of the bodies, and the weapon used.

It seemed that the weapons used in that crime and this one were similar. Then he told her that the second body belonged to Enzio Lamfier of Whitford Security.

She let out a soft whistle. "No wonder you wanted on this case," she said. "Either Bowles got in the way of some Whitford-specific killing or Whitford and his man died because they were tied to Bowles." Nyquist nodded. "That"s two working theories. I"m hoping there are no more dead Whitford bodies around town, but I"m not even sure of that. Have you been to their offices yet?"

"I had them locked down," she said. "The staff remains until we get there." "I suppose that"s where we should go next," Nyquist said. "Unless there"s more here that you need to see."

He was letting her remain in charge on the Whitford side of the case. If it became clear that Whitford was the target, then she could be the main investigator, no matter what Gumiela said. It was only fair. The responding detective had the right to close the case.

But if it turned out that this was, indeed, about Bowles, then he would take all the glory. And all the criticism.

Romey tilted her head. She was one of those people who seemed to move whenever she got a message across her links. Apparently, her system hadn"t shut down the way his had.

"Message?" he asked. "I thought all outside communication was blocked by the jammers across the property."

"But apparently not internal communication," she said. "That was one of the techs. They found something when they picked up Whitford"s body."

She had told Nyquist before that she had suspected there was something under the body. There was no reason for the furniture in the main room to be so haphazard or the body to be left in that odd position. She hurried inside. Even though she was significantly shorter than he was, Nyquist almost had to run to keep up.

The coroner"s office had the body on a gurney. A slimy stain, vaguely human shaped, still covered the floor. And beneath it, a square etched into the tiles.

"That"s not a design," said a tech that Nyquist didn"t recognize. "It clearly opens. We ran some equipment over it. It"s not part of the floor. It"s hollow down there."

Hollow. Fascinating. Nyquist knew what order he"d give, but he waited for Romey to do it. "You got everything you need from the floor"s surface?" she asked the tech. "Yeah," he said. "Then let"s open this thing."

The tech bent over. He reached around the edges of the square with his gloved hands, looking for a latch, and clearly finding none. He tapped nearby tiles, then reached into his kit for a crowbar. "Before you ruin the floor," Nyquist said, "check with the guy examining the security system. See if there"s some kind of command that opens this thing."

"It"ll take forever to find," Romey said. Nyquist just raised his eyebrows at her. She met his gaze, then shook her head and sighed. "Check," she said to the tech.

He handed her the crowbar. She tried to hand it to Nyquist but he backed away. Instead, he walked over to the wall.

The concrete looked Earth-made, which meant it was heavy. A hollow floor couldn"t sustain this kind of weight. So only that small section had to open.

It would seem unwieldy to hide the opening in the floor"s design, then make the opening contingent on the security system. Not just unwieldy but dangerous as well.

If the security system shut down, anyone who had gone inside the hollow s.p.a.ce would be trapped down there.

Nyquist looked at the concrete, trying to see a variation in its pattern. He found none. Then he looked at the tiles leading up to the wall, and he spied one raised edge.

He tapped it with his left shoe. There was a rumbling sound as the floor inside the square dropped away. Romey swore and stepped back. "What the heck did you do?" "I found the automatic door opener," he said. She came over to his side and stared at the raised area. "You realize you contaminated the evidence." "Oh, I doubt it," he said. "They should have examined it when they examined the room." "Then why didn"t they find the automatic opener, as you call it?" "Because they didn"t step on it," he said. "They worked around it, like they were supposed to do."

He walked to the large hole in the floor. The center part of the flooring-the door, for lack of a better term-had lowered and landed on the floor below. The mechanism that allowed it to go down also formed a rather rickety-looking staircase. Nyquist tapped the back of his hand and started recording this part of the investigation. Romey did the same.

"I"m going down there," Nyquist said.

"We should wait for the techs to come back," Romey said.

"I"ve been waiting too much in this investigation," Nyquist said. "I want to see what we have down here, and why someone felt it was necessary to put Whitford"s body over this opening."

"You think it was a message?"

"I don"t think it was a coincidence," Nyquist said.

He put a foot on the top step. He had been right; it was rickety. He eased his way down, making sure he kept his balance. As he got deeper into the hole, lights came on, and he heard the whoosh of an environmental system.

He also heard pinging, and it took him a moment to realize that was internal.

His links had come back on.

He stopped, about to shut them down, when he realized he had half a dozen messages from Miles Flint, the last of them urgent.

Nyquist"s stomach clenched. All he and Flint had in common these days was DeRicci. Nyquist paused so that he could access Flint"s message. He didn"t want to listen and go deeper into that hole at the same time. He was afraid he might miss something-on both counts.

The message had come from Flint"s internal link. There was no visual attached to it, just Flint"s distinctive inflections: I know about Bowles and I have some information to trade that you might not get anywhere else. Contact me immediately. I know about Bowles and I have some information to trade that you might not get anywhere else. Contact me immediately.

It should have surprised Nyquist that Flint was involved somehow in this investigation, but it didn"t. Ever since he"d met the man, Nyquist had realized that Flint knew more about most things than most people-including people who were paid to know.

And so far, Flint hadn"t steered him wrong in an investigation. Although his behavior had seemed suspicious at times.

"You okay?" Romey asked.

Nyquist nodded. He moved the message aside-no matter how urgent Flint thought his knowledge was, it paled compared to this-and went down the last few steps, careful to keep his balance. The room was the same size as the square. Obviously it was part of the bunker, made either to hide someone who was in danger or to store information.

Or both. The tile floor, with its bloodstains, seemed to cover a matching floor, but Nyquist couldn"t be certain. The walls were made of the same concrete as above.

It bothered him that his links worked down here. The jammers should have kept all but the emergency links off-even with the security system down. And it was colder down here than it should have been. The air smelled musty.

If this was supposed to be an area where someone could safely hide, the environmental systems should be top grade. Instead, they seemed to have failed.

"Find anything?" Romey asked. "No," Nyquist said. He looked around, examined the area above, then the floor again, but saw nothing unusual.

Finally he climbed out of the square hole and back into the main part of the living area. The internal pinging shut off.

"My links work down there," he said.

"They do?" she asked.

He nodded.

She peered down as if the hole held obvious answers. "They shouldn"t work at all."

"I know," he said. "The air seems old, too. There"s something odd about it."

"Let me look," she said, and before he could respond, she went down the steps.

He watched her reexamine everything he had looked at. She gently used her gloved hands to examine the wall, and then she crouched.

She leaned forward, and there was a bang. Then the floor rose and slammed into place. Only she didn"t rise with it. She should have. That floor covered the base of the hole, and she had been standing on that base.

"Romey?" he shouted. "You okay?"

She didn"t answer. Or maybe she couldn"t.

He sprinted across the floor to the automatic opener, but as he was about to press it, the bang repeated itself.

The floor fell open, and he heard Savita Romey laugh.

"This is brilliant," she said.

He walked back to the hole, as if she hadn"t scared him to death.

He peered inside. "What the h.e.l.l just happened?"

"The floor doesn"t fall," she said. "It only looks like it does. It slides under another part of the floor. When everything closes, lights come on along the walls. It"s yet another security system. Or maybe a storage area."

"Did your links work when it closed up?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said. "And you"d think they wouldn"t. Someone can trace you through links." "So maybe it"s not designed to hide people, but things," he said. "Or maybe it"s malfunctioning," she said. He sighed. "We need more techs."

"Everything about this case seems to be about techs," she said, "and I have a hunch it"s only going to get worse."

26.

DeRicci turned to the third report without looking at the raw data again.

So this time, she was surprised to find that the information was about power glitches in the Port of Armstrong.

The power glitches were minor, maybe two or three seconds long at their worst, just enough for a dimming of the lights and backup systems to start.

The port had enough of those glitches that it called in outside experts to examine the system. Those experts found nothing wrong with the port"s systems, nor any reason the glitches should have happened. Yet they had.

And the dates of the power losses coincided with the dates that the fifteen-year-old information vanished from the system.

Or at least, that was what it seemed like when computer records got traced. No one knew for certain when the information vanished.

It could have vanished ten years ago or during the week of the power glitches.

All the data stream told the researchers was that something in that data pool-where the information had been stored-had been either accessed or removed during that period of time.

Or, as one researcher noted, someone tried tried to access or remove the information during that period of time. to access or remove the information during that period of time.

No one knew for certain.

DeRicci put a hand to her forehead. Her stomach was in knots. Something about this series of reports bothered her, and it wasn"t just that the raw data was too technical for her to understand. She could get someone whose expertise she trusted to look at the material.

What bothered her was that all of this seemed important, but she couldn"t tell at first glance what the importance was.

Usually security breaches were pretty clear cut. A member of a species without access to the Earth Alliance had gotten stuck in holding at the port. A bomb threat against Gagarin Dome. A murder threat against the governor-general.

DeRicci had dealt with all of that and more, and while it might have seemed difficult while the case was ongoing, her understanding of the security breaches was easy.

She wasn"t even sure whether this was important. Although the loss of banking records and port records was troubling.

She turned to the last three reports and saw more of the same. Those reports, written by a.n.a.lysts farther up the food chain, tried to put the three disparate pieces of information together, to show why there could be a threat.

These were the kinds of reports she hated. And these three reports were the kind that had caused her to examine the raw data herself before reading reports.

Sometimes she thought the midlevel a.n.a.lysts were hired for their imagination, not for their knowledge. They could make up a threat where none existed or they could completely miss the real threat for some imaginary threat.

She skimmed these reports, seeing very little worthwhile in them except that the three separate a.n.a.lysts, working without contact to each other, were as disturbed by the preceding three information reports and the raw data as she had been.

Because during the time she"d been looking at the reports, she wondered whether the sense of unease that she felt had come from the resurrection of Ki Bowles"s news story or the reports themselves. That separate a.n.a.lysts who had nothing to do with each other had the same sense of unease that she had made her feel better.

Or worse, depending on how immediate the threat seemed.

DeRicci wasn"t sure how immediate this threat was or wasn"t.