The Cryptic Coroner

by Nancy and Harlan Weikle

It was raining, it had been all week. Gardner tucked his collar up around his throat and forced himself through the door. 

And it was cold. He should have ignored the harsh ring of his phone but it was from the captain so here he was out in the rain, the cold and it was dark, he knew it would only get worse. He knew.

Twenty minutes later the detective was standing over a corpse listening to a fuzz faced, blue jacket recite some departmental gibberish about when the call came in and who was on scene first and goddamn, he had heard so many renditions of this crap, he should have ignored the phone.

 “You got a name officer?’

“Caruso, sir. Officer Robert Caruso, sir.”

“Not your name.” he wanted to snap but instead nodded towards the thing on the floor. “The vic’s.” 

 “Oh, yes, I mean no. Not yet sir. We’re waiting for Captain Dannard to clear the scene for witnesses before the medical examiner can do the preliminary…”

Gardner, now annoyed, cut him off. “Damn it, you mean to tell me no one has even started an… are you sure it’s dead?”                                                                 

The officer turned pale in the dim light of the hallway and began to say something but Gardner had already turned and started out to find the Captain in charge. “Damn it, back in the rain,” he muttered to himself.

 By now daylight should be showing but it was still overcast and ‘colder' he thought. He’d been assigned here now for about two weeks as liaison with the local police and headquarters for this sector. It was a terraforming operation on Europa which was the only planetary body other than Earth that had an oxygen atmosphere, tenuous but oxygen all the same. By now, after two decades, the colony had increased the O2 levels to the point where it could rain and that’s about all. But he was a cop not a terraformer and cops had a thing about rain. Rain washed away evidence, screwed up the time-line and generally made his job harder, it sucked. 

A large figure loomed out of the dark coming toward him so suddenly that he thought they would collide. “Whoa chief,” he said, planting himself firmly in the figure’s path, ” You Dannard?” 

The figure halted abruptly as if struck by a loud noise. “Yeah, you Gardner? I heard they called you. Sorry about the rain.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Gardner lied, hoping to assert his detachment. “Well, what have we got, a homicide, any kind of cide? Any witnesses, is it even dead?”

The officer seemed startled by Gardner’s question and a little farmisht. “We’re waiting on the coroner’s office,” he announced authoritatively.

The detective turned and marched away saying, “Come with me, we’re not waiting for some pencil neck public servant, I’ve seen enough dead to know it when I see it. We’re gonna start with the what and we’ll get to the who, when and why later.”

A few moments later they were standing under a tent erected over the body to preserve the scene which, Gardner observed, had already been pretty well corrupted, “Damn rain” he muttered under his breath. 

Turning at a light that now interrupted his thought Gardner stared at the coroner’s white and red hovercraft as it settled nearby. “I guess they finally got around to accepting our invitation” he said to no one in particular as two figures emerged from behind the shadows and began walking toward them. One, the shorter one walked clumsily as he tried to secure his overcoat collar with one hand while holding an umbrella awkwardly with the other. 

The second shadow raised a hand and announced, “I‘m Calhoun with the coroner’s office” in a clear, decidedly feminine voice.

Gardner managed to stifle his surprise and replied, “Yes Ma’am, I just arrived myself, I’m Detective Gardner…sorry about the rain.” Christ, he thought mentally cringing at his fumbling response, “We haven’t processed the scene but I’m afraid this rain hasn’t left us much to work with.”

“Well first things first Detective, let’s roll it over and see if we can get an ID.” As she bent over to grasp the body a light from the side showed an attractive young woman, maybe in her early thirties, dark red hair and a slim figure, not what Gardner imagined a local coroner would look like. 

“Let me,” he said. 

The body was surprisingly heavy and it took three of them to turn the victim face up… if there had been a face. What the dim light revealed was a tangle of tubes and frayed glassine material that had no features as such, just a vague allusion of a head and face protruding from the neck of a uniformed colonial officer. “Well, that should simplify identification,” Calhoun half chuckled. “Find its ID number and we’ll have a place to start.” Gardner waited until Calhoun’s associate produced the ID marker and read.

“It’s an ArkCorp synthetic, standard walker model 224 assigned to this colony as a patrol unit, ID Alpha Tango 302niner.”

 Gardner turned his attention to the young coroner, “Someone or something did a real number on this ‘waster.’” He used a term meant to imply a waste of skin in both its derogatory meanings. “It must have been a planned attack and violent, it’s not easy to bring down a synth    

with the sensors it has.” Walkers were generally assigned solitary patrols in urban areas where human police were too vulnerable so they were outfitted with a battery of detection sensors   including proximity monitors, sonar and some stuff they didn’t even talk about as well as a variety of weaponry. Plus they were tough as hell. He’d fought beside a few of them in the first colonial war and he wouldn’t want to go up against one alone. Now here was one lying on the ground, its head blown apart and not a sign of a struggle. “What do you think could have done this?” He heard himself saying to no one in particular. 

And no one answered.

Calhoun was busy constructing a mental image of the scene, lost in her own thoughts. Gardner now had a moment to study her more carefully, she carried herself with the surety of an experienced officer, her blazing red hair seemed like a warning to anyone who doubted her, that she was someone to be dealt with.

“I have,” the coroner suddenly spun around, “I have seen this before,” she continued, almost knocking into the senior officer. He caught a whiff of her perfume, it was subtle but full of the scents of rain on a spring day he recalled from another afternoon on Earth.

“You’ve seen what?” he demanded, coming back to the moment.

 “There were two cases I examined one before my assignment here, back on Earth and another more recent… a few months ago. A soldier, a synthetic assigned to protection detail for the Bureau, was found strangled, if that’s the right term, after it didn’t file an end of tour report. I say strangled because that’s what it looked like although the official cause of deactivation was ruled accidental. All the pneumatics and control pathways in its neck were crushed.” Her eyes lit up then as she seemed to recall something important. “Just as the one back on Earth, a standard labor walker’s head was removed—they never found it.”

She smiled, the first smile he’d seen since she arrived. It was a pleasing smile set in a now animated face and he felt drawn to that smile as if it held the promise of something more. 

Gardner had had partners on the job before but now he was feeling as if he had found an ally. He thought to himself, “An equal.”

Gardner still, reflecting on this transformation, asked, “Have you got those case reports?”

“Well no,” she replied but they’ll be on file with central. You think there might be a connection between the three?” 

Letting himself return to his normal tone of irascibility, the detective replied, “We’ll know that when we can prove it.” Immediately he realized he had just signed her on as a partner and somewhere inside the realization pleased him.

Calhoun looked hard at Gardner and liked what she saw. “You and I could make a good team, and I’m ready to help solve this case.” 

Calhoun gave him a smile that made Gardner forget all about the rain. “What do you say we give it a go?”

Gardner nodded, touched her arm and said, “Let’s do it.”