Taking the Highway Read Free Page A

Three other trails cut through the chest-high growth, all of them well away from Delandra’s path.
    “Stand clear,” a Jeff said. He triggered the holocams which first gridded then flashed the area between them. He checked the results on his datapad, readjusted the angles, and took two more sets before he was satisfied.
    Delandra waved the detectives in. “Everything is tagged and marked. He’s all yours.”
    They gloved, then moved in along the same path Delandra had taken and squatted beside the body. The raw smell of late-summer grass now hung heavy with the reek of death. A young black man, mid-twenties, hair cut in a tidy fade, lay face down, his head turned to the side. Inky eyes seemed to stare at Andre, and he moved lower to check out the clothing. The suit was standard business single-vent, but the shoes gave Andre a start. Seagull loafers, the exact style and shade that he wore himself—shoes that had cost him a month of fourthing income. Andre’s were freshly-polished while the victim’s were scuffed and scratched. He’d been dragged.
    Andre retrieved a wallet from the back pocket and flipped through it. What was a young, well-dressed man doing in the zone with a pair of holes through him? Drugs? This guy wouldn’t be the first urbanite looking for glaze in the zone, but dealers liked to keep repeat customers, not shoot them. So why him? And why here?
    “Nice suit,” Danny said. He pointed to the holes in the jacket. “Except for the exit wounds. Thirty-eight, do you think?”
    “Forget it,” sang a Jeff. “No shell casings, and you won’t find the slugs—”
    “Because he was killed elsewhere and dumped here,” Danny finished.
    The Jeff deflated. “Right.”
    “And if he has a phone or a pad, nobody knows about it.”
    Delandra gestured to the crumbling ruins around them. “Welcome to the oh-zone.”
    Andre frowned at the driver’s license and multicard he’d found in the wallet. The photo matched and their corpse now had a name, but nothing else. Citizens of No Fixed Address were becoming more and more common, but unlike indigents, who would get rolled for the dregs of their wine bottles, NFAs were less likely to be the victim of a crime. They were almost always middle class, stable, and clean. “His name is Matthew Davis Shepler,” Andre told Danny. “And guess what?”
    “He’s a mime.”
    “Nope, Matthew Davis Shepler was NFA.”
    “Not a zoner?”
    They both shook their heads. Zoners usually wrote down something on their ID. Besides, Shepler was too well-dressed.
    Danny leaned over the body. “No Fixed Address fucks us hard. No neighbors to talk to, no roommates, and even if we find his phone, there’s no way he’d enable GPS. Well, good thing he’s dead, otherwise, getting any kind of breach-of-privacy warrant would be a bitch. Del-Kel? Turning.”
    “Flip him,” she called. Danny tucked the right arm and they turned the corpse, then stood aside so the holocams could zap him again.
    A circle of plastic, not quite the size of a drink coaster, was attached to Shepler’s lapel, its holographic seal floating above the center. A fourthing badge.
    “Oh, shit.” Not again.
    “Huh.” Danny glanced at Andre’s badge. “Anyone you know?”
    “No.” The smell from Shepler seemed to roll over Andre. He stepped off the center island and away from the tall grass, waving away the droning insects that trailed him. He paced the weedy pavement in a tight circle.
    He opened his datapad and flipped through his notes. Less than a week ago, a fourth named Arthur Yalna had jumped off the edge of an overpark into the traffic emerging from the tunnel beneath. There had been no witnesses, and they were still waiting for the final report from forensics, but it had been tagged a probable suicide. Now, Andre wasn’t so sure. They hadn’t found any money on Yalna and Shepler’s wallet had been empty. Fourths made soft targets if someone was looking for cash.
    He accessed the forensics