Head On: A Novel of the Near Future (Lock In #2)(15)

Just not enough to keep Alex Kaufmann from being strangled on the other end of belt. He was very clearly dead. Vann went in and checked, to be sure.

“Well, shit,” Vann said, coming back out of the bathroom. She holstered her weapon.

I looked at her. “We’re not still going with the ‘it’s just bad luck’ theory anymore, are we?”

Vann looked my threep up and down. “New threep.”

“Yes.”

“How is it for recording and mapping?”

“It’s got all the bells and whistles. I’ve been recording since we entered the room.”

Vann nodded. “Map it. Map the entire room, including in there.” She pointed into the bathroom. “I want to get as much information as possible before Metro police gets in here and starts fucking up the scene. And then I’m going to need you to do something else.”

“What’s that?”

“Go to Philadelphia.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes,” Vann said. “We need to talk to Duane Chapman’s wife. Before someone from the league convinces her not to talk to us.” She motioned to Kaufmann’s body. “After this, the league’s urge to shut everyone up is going to be very strong.”





Chapter Four


I got back home an hour later for my trip to Philly. A welcoming party was waiting for me in the foyer.

“Tell everything,” the twins said. Or one of them, anyway—Justin and Justine shared a threep and you never quite knew which of them was operating their threep at the time, and after a while you stopped wondering and just thought of their threep as “the twins.” I was told there was a reason the twins shared their threep, and I had been promised early on it would be explained to me, but a year after moving into the house I shared with them and three other Hadens the reason had yet to be revealed. Honestly at this point I sort of enjoyed speculating more than knowing the actual answer.

“Chris can’t tell everything,” Tony yelled from the front room. “It’s classified.”

“It’s not classified,” I yelled back. I returned my attention to the twins. “But I probably don’t know anything more than you do about Duane Chapman right now.”

“There are rumors,” the twins said, backing up to let me into the house.

“That I don’t doubt.” I walked into the front room, where the threeps of Tony and Tayla Givens, two of my other flatmates, were shooting pool. Elsie Curtis, the final roommate and our most recent addition to the house, was on a work gig in Singapore and kept different hours from the rest of us. We rarely saw her around these days.

Well, that’s not true. We saw her every single day. Her body was in her room, along with her local threep. We checked in on her a few times a day, changed her various bags, and the one of us who was an actual doctor—that would be Tayla—would make sure there were no outstanding biological issues that needed to be addressed. Elise checked on all of us, too, usually while the rest of us were asleep.

That was the whole point of the house: six Hadens, living together and looking after each other’s bodies. It was cheaper and friendlier than hiring in-home staff, especially now that Abrams-Kettering had cut off medical subsidies to Hadens. These days every bit helped.

For the rest of my housemates, that is. My physical body still resided in my parents’ house in Northern Virginia, along with two full-time caretakers. I had been planning to move my body to the communal house at some point, but I was confronted with the optics problem of having two personal caretakers while the rest of my flatmates had none, or dismissing my caretakers and then being responsible for two people I’d known and cared about for years losing their jobs. Jobs they wouldn’t be able to easily replace, because the Abrams-Kettering Bill meant there was less money for Hadens for home care.

It was easier to maintain the status quo. Cowardly, perhaps. But easier.

Not that my flatmates minded all that much. One extra pair of eyes and hands paying attention to their bodies, one fewer body for them to take care of on a day-to-day basis. Plus I paid for the biggest room in the house. Really, I was a model housemate.

“We saw you on the news,” Tayla said. She was lining up a shot on the pool table. “You and your partner being mobbed while you were waiting for an elevator.”

“And then the two of you finding that NAHL executive dead in his hotel room,” Tony said.

“There are rumors,” the twins repeated.

“I’d rather not add to any of those,” I said.

“People are saying you wouldn’t be involved if there wasn’t a murder.”

“That’s not true,” I told the twins. “We’re involved because Duane Chapman died under unusual circumstances.”

“So did the executive,” Tony pointed out.

“Murder is an unusual circumstance,” the twins noted.

“Not that unusual,” Tayla said. She worked a D.C. emergency room, so she had standing to opine.

“There’s nothing to say it’s murder,” I said. “In either case. It’s unusual, that’s all. And Chapman’s threep was in D.C. while his body was in Philadelphia. That’s an interstate issue. When it’s an interstate issue, we get called in.”