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I
WHEN IT CAME DOWN TO IT, Simon almost wished that he’d taken up Athena on her boss’s connection to a spirit medium.
It was hard, though, to think of anyone to summon with the right level of technical know-how. Add in the bit where most sane spirits would need therapy if dragged back to the realm of the living, and that list dwindled to a single name.
Simon wouldn’t, couldn’t have brought himself to draw her back after she’d finally been allowed to rest in peace.
And besides, when it came down to the wire—like it had now—even Cykes-sensei’s mechanical know-how was nothing near the level of Aura’s.
“It’s not that funny,” he grumbled into the phone receiver. “Someone’s fucking died, unless you’ve managed to forget even that in the past five minutes.”
“Yeah, I know,” Aura assured him, gesturing to the file folder on Simon’s side of the glass. “You showed me. His finger was wrapped perfectly in that nigiri. Can’t say the robot isn’t precise. Bloody impressive. And morbid,” she shrugged.
Morbid had just been the start of it. No one on the crime scene had been able to stomach the sushi shop’s offer to provide lunch during that preliminary investigation.
It wasn’t unheard of, some sort of gruesome crime making its way across Simon’s desk, but the cause of death had caught his attention immediately, setting off a familiar pang in his chest. Even if the details from years prior had turned out to be different, one thing he could say for certain now: death by machine (knife-wielding robot, in this case) was never anything short of horrifying.
Simon shook his head, trying to shove the past aside and focus on the case in front of him.
“Can you help with it, or should I go waste my fucking time somewhere else?” he asked. Not a bloody second to waste.
The look Aura leveled at him told him what to expect before she even spoke. “Maybe I can,” Aura mused. “Maybe I can’t.”
“It’s not a ‘maybe’ sort of situation, and you bloody know it.”
“It’s going to take more than just what you’ve told me to rule this manslaughter,” she snarked. “Know you haven’t got a mind for mechanics, but don’t tell me you’re so thick-headed that you don’t even know that.”
Simon grimaced. “I need to know if you can help before I share more information. Don’t tell me you’re so thick-headed you don’t even know that.”
Already, the investigation lead was breathing down his neck, insisting that poor sap of a mechanic had to have been the culprit. Simon had spoken (read: subtly interrogated) with Mika Nichtman earlier. He’d seen the look in his eyes as he’d recounted his alibi. Shoddy as it was, Simon had his answer: No real malice, no credit to the supposed motive. Not our guy. But as badly as he wanted a second opinion, he wasn’t going to share case details with anyone—family included—without the promise of actually getting one. The last thing he wanted was to sit through an earful from that bull-headed detective if he found out.
And in spite of everything—she had to at least somewhat understand why; she’d helped him study a lifetime ago, had been on the other side of due process—Aura had the nerve to snort a laugh at him.
“So what, you’re just going to waste time for both of us if you’re wrong? Get a grip.”
It left Simon balking, but whatever scathing remark he could think up next got caught in his throat. “It’s not going to be a waste of time…” he grumbled, tucking the file under his arm as he got to his feet. “Fucking… Fine, then. Guess I’ll find some other way to make sure someone gets the right verdict.”
He turned back when he heard her rapping at the glass, just in time to watch the guard side-eye her. Simon picked the receiver back up.
“You’re just gonna leave, then?” she huffed.
“I’m not going to waste time for both of us, as you so keenly put it.”
There was a look in her eyes like she was trying to bore holes through the glass like one of her robots. Maybe right into his skull. “Alright,” she decided. “Try me. Give me the blueprints or whatever shit you’ve got, I’ll take a look.”
He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of making his relief known, but inside, it felt like finally letting out a breath.
“I’ll have a copy brought to you.”
II
“HE FUCKING DID IT.”
Simon had barely picked up the receiver before Aura was shoving the file up against the glass. Her distaste was strong enough that if Athena were here beside him, she’d be covering her ears.
“The hell do you mean, he did it?” Simon spat back, trying to make sense of the rushed scrawl across the page. The wires reinforcing the glass weren’t doing anyone any favors either—was that an I or an l there? “I told you. Not a way in any afterlife that wasn’t on purpose. It’s too obvious, points back to the mechanic too easily.”
There was that spark in Aura’s eyes, the same one she got when she’d added some other inane feature to one of her creations. “It is,” she agreed. “That’s why he fucking did it. I mean, look at this cog.” She was altogether too proud of herself for Simon’s liking.
“Yeah, I can bloody see it,” Simon deadpanned.
Aura groaned in annoyance. “Fine, I’ll dumb it down for you. This one,” she said, holding up a blueprint, “controls the chopping mechanism. You can change the maximum angle to which it can raise its arm. It’s cutting… what? Tuna, at best? And not even a whole one, since the designer couldn’t figure out how to get the robot to debone cleanly… Amateur.”
“Yeah, because you could do so much better, understand robots on another level,” Simon snarked. “I know already. Get to the point.”
“Anyway, to reach that angle you don’t need this big a gear…” she punctuated her point with slamming a photo against the glass, startling the guard by the door to attention. “... feeding into the output gear. To big a gear, knife moves higher in the same amount of time. Add in the force this thing’s capable of… Well, that’s obvious. First thing anyone with half a brain would think to make sure works, if you were making… I don’t know, a knife-wielding robot.”
If he was honest with himself, Simon did know that—or rather, he knew that Aura knew what she was talking about, and in the context of this case that was just as good. If he wanted some half-assed opinion on this case, he wouldn’t have stuck his neck out to bring her into this mess.
And yet, on the other hand…
“But it doesn’t make a bloody lick of sense,” he gritted out, rifling through his briefcase for a file. A copy of the case data, with his own notes scrawled across it in messy handwriting. A working profile. No one in their right mind would ever have complete confidence in their words while sitting through an interrogation, but that didn’t change the facts: “No known motive, no clear hatred for the establishment, much less the victim. No off-kilter, out-of-the-ordinary reactions during questioning. People make mistakes sometimes; no one’s infallible. He didn’t fucking do it.”
“People make mistakes,” Aura repeated back. “Either this is a blunder of epic proportion, or it was done on purpose. Do you really think your guy was that much of an idiot? Missing the most basic safety failsafe while repairing his own robot?”
“Then why the hell do you think he did it?” he snapped. “Go on then, tell me what brilliant idea you’ve come up with.”
“I don’t fucking know,” Aura snarked. “Money, skipped-out contracts, arguments over credit… Isn’t this your job?”
“First, none of those make sense, and second, that’s the point I’m trying to make. What, have you spent so much time with your precious robots that you’ve forgotten how actual fucking humans work? We’ve ruled those out. No incidents reported when he was fixing the damn thing. People tend to not act without some kind of reason, spur-of-the-moment or no.”
The annoyance on Aura’s face turned venomous as she sneered, “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard of someone acting without an obvious motive.” Simon must have pulled some kind of look, because she added, “What? Have you got your own head too far up your arse to imagine any other time where a motive’s been lied about?”
Simon stared for a moment before biting out, “The devil are you getting at?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Aura spat.
“This is different,” Simon warned.
“How?” Aura threw her hands up in exasperation. “How the fuck is it different, Simon? Go on, explain it then, since you’ve been so wonderful about explaining everything up until now.” The vitriol dripped from her words like dirty motor oil. “What the hell are you going to do? Come back and finally clue me in after the fact, about why you couldn’t just explain it like a normal person from the start?”
The chair clattered to the floor behind him.
There was uncertainty in the way the guards acted now that Simon had been exonerated. Like they didn’t know if they should be on top of him or not. He waved them away, taking deep breaths, jaw set tight.
“I’ll come back once you’re calm enough to talk sense.”
III
IT WASN’T A MATTER of whether Aura was calm enough, or at least it wasn’t only a matter of that. If he’d gotten that collect call even an hour earlier, he might have not picked up, anger still stewing within. Now, it had simmered down—at least enough for Simon to hear out whatever it was that Aura had figured out.
If you actually care to know, she’d said.
Case or otherwise, Simon did.
Aura was just sitting there when he arrived this time. There wasn’t any paper shoved up against the glass proving how literally tangible the divide was. That didn’t mean the distance felt any less present.
“Wasn’t sure if you were going to actually show up,” Aura said as he picked up the receiver.
“You knew,” Simon countered. The fact she’d even bothered calling him at all said that she knew the odds were good. Actions always drowned out—and oftentimes fully contradicted—her words. She wouldn’t admit that, but the way her posture turned rigid told Simon he was right.
She carried on as if he hadn’t said anything. “I went through the schematics and the photos again,” Aura said, paging through the file. “Figured out what gear should actually go with that mechanism, then found an invoice for the most recent repair order.”
“The repairs that happened before the incident.”
Aura nodded. “Yeah, those.” She held up a photo. “This one’s not just too big. It wasn’t ordered. In fact, I got some chump to look up the catalogue for me. They don’t even make it.”
Simon’s brow furrowed. “That doesn’t make sense. Nichtman used to work for Cameron Machinery. He’s been getting parts from there for the past… however long. Even had them fabricate some pieces from scratch. Weird that he wouldn’t just have them make a new piece.”
“I thought so too. Might not know psych like you do, but I know ordering machinery. You find a quality parts maker that you trust, you don’t go to another if you can avoid it. There’s a reason GYAXA ordered everything from Sprocket for ages.”
“Where’d that part come from, then? We get an invoice from there, I’d call it certain that we find our actual culprit. Or a nasty case of broken trust…” Simon was still fairly certain Nichtman wasn’t the culprit, but if Aura was going to take his side into consideration, the least he could do was the same.
“Piston Parts Fabrication,” Aura said proudly.
He nodded, standing up to leave. “Thanks. Got it.”
There was a rapping at the glass, and Simon turned around to pick up the receiver again.
“You’ll tell me if I was right, yeah? So that I can rub it in your face when I am.”
His laugh came out sharp. “I’ll come and tell you to your face,” he agreed. “So I can rub it in when I’m right.”
Never mind the fact that it didn’t matter what the reason was now. Simon was going to come in person either way.