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  CITY OF SENSORS

  CITY OF SENSORS

  A Novel

  A.M. TODD

  Copyright © 2022 by A.M. Todd

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior ­written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations ­embodied in reviews.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s ­imagination or are used ­fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: City of sensors : a novel / A.M. Todd.

  Names: Todd, A. M., author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana 20210369523 | ISBN 9781989689332 (softcover) | ISBN 9781989689370 (epub)

  Classification: LCC PS8639.O335 C58 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Printed and bound in Canada on 100% recycled paper.

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Now Or Never Publishing

  901, 163 Street

  Surrey, British Columbia

  Canada V4A 9T8

  nonpublishing.com

  Fighting Words.

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing program.

  PART ONE: BLACK MARKET

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Don’t answer any questions when we get out,” Stingsby said. “Not on a night like this.”

  I nodded, straightened my tie, and stepped out of the car. Eighth Avenue seethed with spectators and reporters jostling for a better view, hemmed in by the skyscrapers lining the streets. Above their heads, the wind whipped scraps of garbage through the night. Cop cars sprawled crookedly on the sidewalks, police equipment lay scattered around, and no clear area had been given to the media, so officers had to fight their way through the crowd. This crime scene was a mess.

  A reporter hovering a few feet away was the first to spot us. Her eyes widened behind rectangular glasses when she saw the insignia on my suit jacket. She nudged her colleague. “Him,” she said, pointing at me. “He’s data police.”

  They’d all seen us now, and they swarmed us, bursts of light from their cameras brightening the night. A man with a wilting moustache raised his voice above the roar of questions and threw a microphone in my face. “Sir, will you comment on last week’s threats against the data police?”

  “What about tonight—will you speak about what’s happened here?” a woman asked.

  Her question blended into the noise, cameras, hands, faces and the smell of sweating bodies pressing thick on all sides. I braced myself. A microphone brushed my face, and I quickly moved away; I’d have to wash later. I regulated my breathing, like Dr. Luong had told me. Just a minute more, then we would leave this crowd behind. And when we did, the city would slide back into view—calm and precise, the workings of an orderly network, the pulse of data-directed traffic, the sensors that monitored and recorded, the circuits of a vast system.

  We passed three policewomen keeping the media at bay, liberating us from the mess. The reporters seemed willing to let Homicide do their jobs; we had been their primary targets. I wanted to wash my face where that microphone had touched me, but I didn’t want to do it in front of the cameras. While Stingsby stopped to talk with an officer, I shouldered through the cops and police robots milling outside the force field that surrounded the crime scene, its blue surface flickering behind the smoke from nearby food stalls. Flung over Eighth Avenue, the semi-circular dome concealed a stretch of the street and sidewalk. The new “police tape” was more conspicuous than the old, but it did a better job shielding the scene—and the body—from prying eyes.

  A detective with orange hair stood in front of the police forcefield, dressed in the plain clothes worn by Homicide. He was barking out orders to his officers, who ran around in confusion. Maclean deserved a better investigation than this.

  As I approached the detective near the dome, he glanced at the insignia on my suit. “Nobody called in data,” he said. “Who are you?”

  One of the lapels on his shirt was rumpled; I resisted the impulse to straighten it.

  “I’m Detective Frank Southwood,” I said. “I worked in the same unit as Maclean.”

  “Fine, Detective, but no one—”

  “Maybe nobody called us in,” Stingsby said, approaching from behind me, “but Maclean was one of mine, and now she’s lying in there on the sidewalk with a bullet in her.”

  “Commissioner Stingsby,” the cop said. “I didn’t see you.”

  His face reddening, he handed a scene pass to Stingsby. Blue light from the police dome stained Stingsby’s white hair and long, narrow face, pooling in the deep lines around his eyes, the hollows under his cheekbones. The strain of the job had marked him. Lately, it had marked all of us. It showed on me in the red eyes I saw in the mirror every morning, in the stubble on my jaw that never seemed to go away, in the lingering scent of last night’s whiskey.

  “Let’s go then,” Stingsby told the homicide detective.

  We took a few steps before the detective held his hand up to stop me. “We can let you in, Commissioner, but not him,” he said, nodding at me.

  Stingsby waved his hand dismissively in my direction. “Fine. Southwood can wait here.” An opening formed in the side of the dome, swallowed Stingsby and the homicide detective, and sealed again.

  I bristled. Stingsby underestimated me on a daily basis. I glanced around to see if anyone had heard what he’d said. That woman over there—was she laughing at me? Wind pelted me with sodden plastic wrappers, and I felt like a hollow cardboard cut-out, standing outside the crime scene like a tourist. I shoved past a police robot towards the yellow ring of a streetlamp, where I stood a safe distance from the media. Smoke, drifting from a nearby vent, refracted the light of a nearby sign for SHUTTER GARDENS, green neon blinking in the haze.

  I was only here by chance. Stingsby and I had been driving back from the police station on unrelated business when he got the call. After five seconds on the phone, he turned the car around and drove the two blocks to Eighth Avenue in less than a minute. Even though Homicide wasn’t my jurisdiction, Maclean had been a close colleague, and I hated the idea of ­leaving the investigation of her murder in the wrong hands. I wondered who would break the news to Maclean’s husband and daughter. I could almost see how they would look when they heard the news, the way they’d sit there for minutes afterwards, not moving, as the world they knew ended and a new one began. I tried to push those thoughts away.

  “You’re not needed inside?” asked another detective walking by, a hologram-capture in her hand.

  “Stingsby asked me to come in with him, but I had a call to take out here,” I said, motioning towards my phone.

  She studied me with tired eyes, then gestured towards the spot where Stingsby had disappeared. “Don’t worry about Stingsby. He’s hard on lots of his people.”

  “That must be tough for them.”

  She smiled faintly. A few strands of hair had escaped her ponytail and straggled loosely around her face, caught by the wind. “I’m sorry about Maclean,” she said.

  I nodded and shoved my freezing hands in my pockets. Maclean hadn’t been my partner, but we’d worked together in the corporate crime unit. The detective continued towards the dome, and when a gap opened to admit her, that was when I saw the body.

  Maclean lay on her back in a narrow walkway between two buildings, wearing unmarked clothes. It looked like she’d been walking away from
where I stood when she was shot, then toppled backwards. Her face was turned sideways, away from me, revealing only the outline of a cheek, an ear, and an exposed, vulnerable-looking neck. I imagined what her last seconds must have been like, lying on that cold pavement. Did she know that would be it?

  The body vanished from my sight when the detective disappeared behind the blue crime scene forcefield. But even after the forcefield closed, Maclean’s corpse filled my head. My chest tightened, and suddenly I became aware of how dirty my surroundings were: the filthy mud near my shoes, that scrap of garbage that just blew by—had it touched my skin? My hands were shaking; I shoved them in my pockets to hide them from the cameras. Images of Maclean’s body lingered.

  I shouldered my way through the crowd back to the car. I moved quickly, rummaging through the glove compartment for a bottle of sanitizer, which I applied to my hands, neck, and face. My heartrate slowed and the mental images of Maclean’s body faded. I sat, very still, while a holographic palm tree fluttered outside Shutter Gardens. It was already November, and the first snow was gathering in the sky, waiting to fall.

  When Stingsby finally returned, he climbed into the car and pulled us back onto the road, weaving through traffic. “I’ll drop us back at the office,” he said. “I’m going to start looking into this.”

  Murders weren’t supposed to be his business, but if one of his detectives had been shot, he’d be the first one in, protocol be damned. And in a city run on data like this one, nothing got done without data detectives.

  “Thank God this case will be in better hands,” I said. “The way that crime scene was run back there—Christ.”

  “This is an emergency, Southwood. Cut Homicide some slack. Maybe when you were a kid your Mom told you all your homework had to be perfect, but this is the real world.”

  I didn’t accept that, and I never would.

  “I need to notify Maclean’s family,” Stingsby said. “I know them well, and they’ll want to hear it from me.” His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing further. His gloved hands clamped tightly on the steering wheel, one vein pulsing in his neck. He and Maclean had been close, since they’d worked together before he became Commissioner of the data police.

  “You think Maclean’s murder was connected to any of her cases?” I asked.

  The lines around Stingsby’s eyes deepened; it clearly annoyed him when I asked questions about anything other than my own cases. He kept his eyes on the road and said, “Listen, Southwood, you’ll keep what I’m about to tell you confidential until it’s released publicly. I know you love parading around in that uniform giving interviews, acting like you’re the hero.”

  “Sir, I don’t—”

  “I only tell you this because our safety’s concerned—all of us, in our line of work. I don’t think Maclean’s murder was related to her investigations. The crime scene made it pretty clear who was behind this. They left a sign.”

  “A sign?”

  “It was her eye. They left the glass lodged in the socket, too.” Stingsby cleared his throat. “Looks like privacy fanatics.”

  “Jesus.”

  We drove in silence. Windswept streets rolled by our windows as we moved through currents of seamless traffic, sensors regulating the changes of the lights. Freezing rain had started slicing up the sky, and the streetlamps gave a yellow glow to the water on high-rise windows.

  “What about the case Maclean was working on?” I asked.

  “It’ll get transferred. Next detective under her, corporate sector crime.”

  There was no need to say who that was.

  Stingsby watched me intermittently while he drove. “On Monday, I’ll send you everything Maclean had on the investigation. I don’t think you’re ready for this, and normally a case like this wouldn’t go to you. The suspect’s too high-profile. But with Maclean gone, you’re next in line.”

  “I am ready, boss—I’ve been telling you for years. Who’s the suspect?”

  “August Donaldson. We think he’s embezzling money from his company.”

  I paused. “Donaldson. That’s big.”

  “You know him?” Stingsby asked.

  “Who doesn’t?” Donaldson was rich as shit, one of the most powerful corporate suits in the city. I’d met him once or twice at the casino, but I chose not to mention that. Stingsby might think I’d try to use my acquaintance with Donaldson to snoop around off the record, going behind Stingsby’s back—like I had in the past.

  “And you’re confident there’s no relation between Maclean’s murder and my new case?” I asked. “Any chance the eye wound was a cover-up?”

  Stingsby grunted. “It’s unlikely they’re related, but I’ll take a look at the evidence she’d collected. Homicide will too. You just let us deal with that, alright? You stick to the data on this one, and don’t run off on any of your extra missions. Your job is not to solve Maclean’s murder, it’s to put Donaldson behind bars for white-collar crime.”

  The gravity of this began to sink in. With such a high-profile suspect, probably linked to powerful networks of organized criminals, it was possible Maclean had gotten tangled up in something dangerous. I didn’t accept what Stingsby said about this case not being connected to Maclean’s murder. Maybe this would give me a chance to find out what happened to her. If Stingsby didn’t want to investigate every single possibility thoroughly, then I would do it myself. My investigation, my methods—everything would be perfect.

  We rounded a corner onto Twelfth Street and a skyscraper rose ahead of us: the headquarters of the data police. When we reached the building, Stingsby parked across the street. “Go home, Southwood,” he said. “You’ll start the Donaldson case on Monday. Stick to the book on this one. Follow protocol.”

  He stepped outside and headed towards the building without me. As he fell into pace behind two pedestrians, electronic billboards lining the sidewalk bombarded the young woman in front of him with personalized ads for student debt relief. The man behind her was shadowed by images of expensive phones. But when Stingsby passed the screens, they went dead, displaying nothing as he glided by like a spectre.

  Setting out into the damp streets, I lit a cigarette to calm my nerves. That damn Stingsby underestimated me; I’d show him that. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure he was out of sight. When he’d disappeared safely into the building, I slipped into an empty street and pulled out my Sentrac portable.

  “Yeah, Frank?” said a familiar voice on the line.

  “Can you help me out with some data?”

  “I guess, but have you heard? About Maclean?”

  “Yes. I want to find who did this to her. I’m taking over the case she was working on, and I’m going to do some digging.”

  “Let me guess. You’re going beyond what Stingsby told you again? That didn’t work out well in your past cases.”

  “You want me to just let something like this slide? And Homicide can’t be trusted to do this right—you should’ve seen the way they ran that crime scene. It was a goddamned mess.”

  “Frank, if you see a tiny speck of dust on a counter you think it’s a mess.”

  I ignored that. “Here’s what I need. August Donaldson, Maclean’s old suspect. When did he last use a transfer scanner to make an in-store purchase?”

  Sirens droned in the distance, and the odd laugh or cry rose above the sound of falling water.

  “At 23:21 tonight,” the voice on the line said. “The Indigo Palace Casino. He spent $500,000 on casino credit.”

  The current time was 23:40. Donaldson had just bought that casino credit twenty minutes ago. And the Indigo Palace was only a few blocks away. I’d been on the job for years, but sometimes I was still struck by the immensity of the information at my fingertips. Being a data detective in a city like this—it was one hell of a thing.

  I put out my cigarette, making doubly sure the flam
e was safely extinguished, then deposited it in the trash. No littering. In a minute I was back on Twelfth Street, the sidewalks bustling. Voices rose and fell. I moved faster now, with intent, tracking my suspect through the city with the brutal efficiency of the data-driven traffic that wasted no time, no money. Engines whined as cars streaked by, wheels clanking on metal grates. I would find the people who did this to Maclean. Stingsby wanted me to get started on the Donaldson case on Monday. But it just so ­happened that tonight, I’d been planning to take care of some business of my own at the Indigo Palace anyway. And if a man went to the casino for his own private reasons, and just happened to do a little extra digging on the side, no one could fault him for that.

  My trip to the Indigo Palace would look like any of my regular Friday night visits there. An off-duty data cop at a casino was an everyday sight these days, gambling being the city-wide addiction it was. But as for the extra business I’d been waiting all week to take care of at the Palace tonight—that was a private affair. That would be done discretely.

  Pedestrians parted to make way for me, staring at my insignia, and a man eyed me from behind the wheel of a rusted van. Ahead, at an intersection, a stranger stood waiting to cross, the outline of his figure standing out against the blur of passing traffic. His eyes made the familiar dance, the flick to my insignia then back again quick to the street.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I swallowed the Acetropen in a back street where no one was watching. It would take effect in fifteen minutes, just enough time to sneak past the staff. This would be the last time I cheated like this. Just one final night would set things right at the Indigo Palace, then I’d be clean for good. This whole mess, my nights at the casino, had only started after what happened with Celeste, but tonight, I’d put all that history behind me.

  I brushed some dirt off my grid-patterned tie and smoothed a wrinkle out of my uniform. I would need this uniform tonight at the Indigo Palace. Without it, I might get lost among the other guests; the place would be writhing with them—with the super-rich, simmering in their digital money, the lifeblood that coursed through the silk, cashmere, skin. Corruption grew there like fungus. My suspect, Donaldson, would be just the beginning. But as long as I had this uniform, I wasn’t one of them.