Houston, 2030 Read online

  “I do remember that Einstein started as a patent office clerk, but I did not know our own Deputy Woxman works in theoretical physics,” Mark was really surprised.

  “Well, it is not theoretical. He is already in the experimental phase. Every time the Deputy is on-duty, he experimentally proves that he can download new porno from the Internet before it is finished uploading on the other end!” Ben picked one of the reports, looked in, and suddenly made a face like he himself discovered a high-quality pornographic image within.

  Mark laughed. Unlike Mark's William, Ben Ferelli was excellent at making jokes. Even if some of his humor was a bit on the dirty side. “OK, Ben. You got me once again! But about the bodies… There were no relatives. And we only got the positive ID on the male. And – he is from bloody New York! What do I suppose to do with the corpses?”

  “I don't know. Take them home, something like this. Other people take their job home, why the FBI can't?”

  “The rules, Major, the rules. The corpses are confidential materials. For a federal case. We have no right taking the confidential stuff (of should I say: ‘stiffs?’) home. Must be kept locked on premises,” Mark was quick to return the joke.

  “Besides the jokes, I obviously support your decision, Mark. I will even allow the CSIs to do the proper body processing and an autopsy. They need some practice, right? I have already made the necessary calls. As soon as my friend Charlie gets his lazy, fat ass into his office, he will sign you all the paperwork.” Ben referred to the Justice of Peace, the Honorable Charles Steiner, whose office was across the road from the Station. “The papers are done too, by the way. Yours truly made Deputy Woxman to do some little work this early morning. For all his ‘experimental research,’ he has to give something back to his Station, right? You only need to scribble your initials, and off-you-go.”

  “Gee, thanks, Ben! It's wonderful you look after your poor FBI relatives.”

  “But Mark! These bodies have to be out of the fridge today. We have already burnt the monthly limit of diesel. The next murder you may be investigating on your damn bike!”

  “If we can't locate the relatives today, I will pay a visit to my friend in the Salvation Way Command. The male victim is an USACE vet, so the charity funerals should not be a problem.”

  “Fine with me, dude…”

  Reassured in such way, Mark went to his office. He quickly synchronized his phone with the laptop and added yet another pin to the map on the wall behind his desk. Now the map had sixteen color dots on it. Besides the map, there were no usual crime scene photographs or paper notes on the wall. Mark preferred to keep the information in the laptop. It was better this way for several reasons. Mark frequently said that saving the printer paper was his main priority, which was true to a degree. The real reason was that he was desperately paranoid about the information leaks. Somebody in the Police was too close to the media. Besides, the majority of the Sheldon Butcher case photographs were too gruesome to be posted on the wall. Even in the FBI office.

  Sergeant Alex Zuiko and CSI Natalie Gardener walked into Mark's office at 6:20. All together, they quickly discussed the things to be done today. Natalie would source another CSI and do the bodies' processing, while Alex and Mark would go to the area and start the potential witnesses and relatives search. Ten minutes later, Mark and Alex were on their bikes, pedaling towards the Sheldon Reservoir.

  Chapter 4

  On the way, they had decided that Alex would take one of the local officers, Deputy Tan, to check on the dwellings in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene, while Mark with the other local deputy would start on the address checks in the Garret Road Slum, and if needed would go even further to the north.

  Deputy Kim was waiting for them at the tiny local beat office, but Tan was not available. Early in the morning the policemen were summoned to a street fight, and now Tan was left behind to collect the witness statements. The fight originator, an Indomerican man in his early twenties, in torn shirt and with blackened eye and bloodied nose, was already in the beat, safely locked behind the bars at the far corner.

  “It seems, you gents will not be able to join us today,” Mark commented.

  “No, sir, we'll be fine. The man didn't do much at all. Vegetable theft, believe it or not…” Kim replied, passing Mark a one-page incident report. “Actually, I had to bring him in for his own protection sake. If Tan and I left the poor bustard with those angry Chinamericans, I am afraid, they would resolve to some far-eastern cruelty. A death by thousand cuts, a pond full of crocodiles, something like this… We can release the man by now, and go about our serial killer business.”

  “Let us play this a bit,” Alex suggested. “Can you bring the man here? Tell him the FBI came to see him.”

  The Deputy went to the back of the room and unlocked the cage.

  “Mister Sharma? I am Sergeant Investigator Zuiko; and this is Special Agent-in-Charge Pendergrass, from the F.B.I.,” Alex introduced them, heavily stressing every letter in the ‘FBI’ part. Mark mentioned how masterfully Sarge had avoided his own association not with the Bureau, but the Harris County Police. “Could you tell us briefly what happened this morning?”

  “N-n-noth'n, sir. I am liv'n in tee north of tee Slum. I am tak'n a shortcut like tees every morn'n, sir. Tee other men. Tey jump't on mee. I am mak'n noting ron', sir,” the man spoke in heavy Indian accent. He was surely shocked to learn the FBI was after him.

  “Did the Deputy here – read you your Miranda warning, Mister Sharma?” Alex asked with blunt expression. The man nodded in confirmation. “Thus, you must understand you have the right to remain silent, correct?” The man nodded again. “But… Do you think this makes it legal for you to lie in front of the FBI?” Sarge sounded like a high-profile court lawyer from a movie. “No, Mister Sharma, this does not give you the right to lie. Do you think the FBI would come here for no reason? No, sir. The uninterrupted food supply is a matter of national security. That what it is, Mister Sharma. Now, tell the jury what happened – really…”

  The man looked even more scared.

  “As I sa'd, sir. I am tak'n a shortcut like tees every morn'n, sir. About a week ago, I pick't a coupl' of carrots from tee veggie bed. Just two, sir. Eat tem on tee way. So I start't pick'n up one or two every morn'n. I fought: tey have so much carrot, no harm if I take one or two, sir. Today, sir, I pick't up one carrot, sir. And – tey jum't on me, sir.”

  “They – you mean: the veggie owners, correct?”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “Did you resist the arrest, Mister Sharma?”

  “No, sir. Tee Deputy hee – he took me to tee beat.”

  “Deputy Kim! Did or did not the defendant… I mean: the suspect, resist the arrest?”

  “No, sir! I mean: yes, sir! Oops, it is not right either… I confirm: the suspect did not resist the arrest, Your Honor… I mean: Sergeant! Sir!” Kim was surely enjoying the show.

  “OK, I believe we have a crystal-clear case here. Theft and trespassing. And – multiple offenses too. I reckon this could be up to two years of hard labor, if we take it to court. But to the suspect's defense – he cooperated with the Police, so the Judge may decide to reduce this to one year,” Alex stated, as if asking Mark's opinion. “Shall we do the paperwork and take the case to the prosecution, Special Agent?”

  Mark shook his head. He applied all his effort not to applaud over the comic ‘Court at Law’ scene.

  Alex turned to the man again, and spoke in determined hushed voice, as if switching roles to the defendant's attorney instead of the state prosecutor: “But… Tell me now… I must know this to help you… Was it just two carrots a day, or let say – two pounds of carrots a day?”

  “No, sir, I swe'a, I swe'a. Just one or two carrots a day, sir. I am so poor, sir. We eat one meal a day, sir…”

  “I believe you,” Sarge concluded, “we will let you go this time. But if… if we learn that you are collecting more carrots from other people's land, we will have to bring to p
rosecution, Mister Sharma. We can stretch our authority to keep you out of jail this time, but if you do it again – it will be up to the District Attorney, understand?”

  After releasing Mr. Sharma, three of them had a good laugh. Surely, this man would not come even near the neighbors' vegetable patch for a long-long while.

  So done with the morning case, the Deputy locked the beat office and placed a carton on the door: “On patrol. Wait here or call 911 operator if urgent.” They cycled at slow pace through the Garret Road Slum. Soon later, Alex waved to Mark and Kim and turned to the side path to meet with Deputy Tan around the Chinamerican wards.

  The Garret Road Slum, or GRS for short, was one of the late developments. Unlike the slums which evolved from the former suburbs, this one had few proper roads, and the transportation network in the area consisted of convoluted dirt paths. There were small shacks made from anything: from old tires to plastic film and cartons. The rest of the land was occupied by endless rows of vegetable patches. Soon, the dirt paths became too narrow to ride safely. Mark and Kim got off the bikes and were pushing them along. They caught up with a group of Amerasian women, all barefoot and with conical straw hats, carrying buckets of water on long shoulder poles – the entire scene looked a bit like a photograph from the Vietnam War, Mark thought. His father-in-law, David, had several albums of such old photographs – ‘chem photos,’ as the people called them now, as opposed to the proper digital photographs. Most photos in the albums were black-and-white, and only few – with unnaturally bright colors. Kodachrome-X, Mark suddenly remembered the foreign-sounding trademark name; David mentioned it on several occasions. He said, the photos did not come on the screen instantly, but had to be ‘developed’ and printed in a special chemical lab. As a matter of fact, the cameras had no screens at all, and one did not know if the pictures were any good until the lab did all this processing magic. Unbelievable, how much perseverance one had to have to make photos back then.

  David was in the Air Force, and was deployed in Vietnam from 1970 to 1972. He served as a ground mechanic, and avoided most of the dangers of the jungle warfare. Avid photographer since teen years, he snapped thousands of pictures: endless photos of his friends, some on the airfields, in front of a fuel truck, a cargo plane, or Huey helicopter, some on Saigon streets, some in a bar or on a beach. There were also photos of the daily life in Saigon and at the country-side: market stalls, racing pedicab drivers, female students in long white dresses, beggar boys playing on a dirty street in front of a fancy cafe, little huts under palms and papaya trees amongst rice paddies, women in black silk pajamas working in the fields, and so on. Here, in the Garret Road Slum, the resemblance was exceptionally striking. Was America now living the same lifestyle as Vietnam sixty years ago? The good thing, there had been no war in the United States. David's albums had few photos with the evidence of the brutal war, which was going on in Indochina for good 25 years: a carcass of a crashed helicopter in the jungles, houses, reduced to smoldering ruins, wounded soldiers being loaded on stretchers into a transport plane, Vietnamese cripples on the streets, burnt and mutilated beyond belief…

  Lucky, America had avoided all these, right? They turned the corner, and the reality sharply contradicted Mark's conclusion: there was a stripped carcass of the military ‘Hercules’ plane. Mark remembered seeing it on TV news. Few years ago, this plane had some critical failure after take-off and crashed into the slum, taking lives of six military personnel and thirty or so slum dwellers. The remnants of the plane now served as home for several families. On the footpath, an Amerasian man in his late twenties slowly walked on a single crutch, accompanied by little semi-naked girl, probably his daughter. The cripple was dressed in a civilian shirt, but military-issue pants and sunglasses told the officers the man was one of the recent vets. Perhaps, the war had not been on the American soil yet, but the life in the slum surely was not very different from one in Saigon back in the seventies!

  Kim asked the man how to locate the Hobsons' dwelling: according to the database, they lived not too far. The vet steadied himself by placing his short leg stump over the crutch handle and started explaining something in broken English, drawing an imaginary map with his finger over the palm of the other hand. The little girl watched the conversation curiously while sucking on her thumb. Another striking similarity with the Vietnam War photos, Mark thought. There was a photo in one of the albums he remembered very clearly: a Vietnamese Military Police chatting with a disabled ex-soldier at the market street, with two semi-naked kids watching them curiously. The cripple from the picture also had his leg stump on the crutch handle, and one of the kids was also sucking his thumb… Few minutes later Kim nodded, and the man continued crutching along the footpath. Passing Mark, he mumbled politely: “How-r-you, sir?” The girl waved her hand and said “Hullo.” Interesting, what the Vietnamese crippled ex-soldier and those kids from the photograph would say to an American GI during the War?

  “OK, these Hobsons aren't too far,” the Deputy pointed. “On that little path, then take the second right. But it seems we are after the wrong address. The man didn't recall a vet with an artificial leg around the neighborhood…”

  “Let check them anyway, hence we are here,” Mark suggested. It was going to be a long day. Unfortunately, Ben would never give a Police car for the investigation work. Besides, a car would be pretty useless in this slum, with its narrow dirt paths instead of roads.

  They walked along the path for another five minutes, meeting yet another group of women with water buckets on long shoulder poles. The shack, in which ‘these Hobsons’ lived, was built from recycled furniture and chipboard. An elderly woman, who introduced herself as Mrs. Hobson, was at the porch, cleaning veggies. Mark pulled out his badge. The old lady invited the officers in. A piece of battered plastic film served as the shack door. Inside, most of the space was occupied with an old sofa and a triple bunk bed. Mark guessed, no less than six or seven people lived here – on forty-five square feet. As expected, the first address did not give them much. The family was not from New York, but from Seattle, and moved here a couple of years previously. The old lady's grand-son was currently in the Army, serving, thanks God, at the border between Canada and Republique Quebecois, in the UN Peace-Keeping Corps. This was supposed to be a rather safe assignment: the real war between the break-away Quebec and the rest of Canada had ended about four years ago in a weary stalemate. Both countries simply ran out of steam. No, they were the only Hobsons around this area, and no, none of their relatives was one-legged, thanks God again…

  They bid good-bye to the talkative Mrs. Hobson and continued on their bikes towards the northern part of the Garret Road Slum, in which the database gave another possible hit for Hobsons. Here the population was predominantly Indomerican, the shacks were denser, and built in groups of ten or twenty. Women here carried water not on shoulder poles, but on their heads. There were visibly more school-age children around.

  “The Amerasians send their kids to school, no matter what,” the Deputy commented. He himself was from the Koreamerican community which concentrated at the western side of the Slum. “The Asians work hard. These Indian people are not so. Lazy bustards. See, how many children miss school? And the veggies are no comparison to ours. No bloody wonder, our late Mister Sharma was stealing those stupid carrots from the Chinamen!”

  “I don't think the people are lazy, Kim,” Mark disagreed – “there are just too many. The land is failing.”

  The soil on some vegetable patches was reduced to useless silty dust. The Presidential program, Sustainability Through Horticulture, advertised so much about ten years ago, was obviously not working too well. Without the chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, the land could supply food for only limited number of people, – and this number was clearly way less than the number of people actually living here. The situation in the Indomerican Slum was a miniature copy of India herself. Ten or eleven years ago, it was on the news every evening: the water and foo
d crisis in India, dead or dying on the streets, millions of hungry refugees…

  The fate of India was closed immediately after the Meltdown, as the software industry lost its momentum. The Apple went bankrupt and was bought (with all the debts) by the Microsoft for just one dollar. The Microsoft itself soon became a charity: a couple of hundred former software engineers in Vermont and Berkeley, surviving on Presidential grants to support the remaining operating systems. The collapse of banks, consumer electronics companies, and airlines followed. As the result, the Indian make-believe ‘middle-class’ simply ended overnight: all these programmers, data managers, project managers, outsourcing accountants, call center operators, and so on, were not needed anymore. After the ‘middle-class’ jobs, the other more-or-less lucrative occupations had disappeared: tourist attractions and tourist buses, hotels and for-profit beaches, souvenir-making and souvenir-selling, even the tailor shops. No more rich Western tourists for you, guys. The rich Westerners themselves had no money! Before the Meltdown, India boasted 1.3 billion population, of which 0.9 lived on less than fifty American cents a day. After the Meltdown, nearly all 1.3 billion qualified into the total poverty. For one cent a day income level!