[2382] An Oral History of the Avalon Murders

Hi. This is (almost) the entire first chapter of a technoir story I’m tinkering with. It’d be great to get some opinions on it. Likes, dislikes, general vibes. All welcome. Let me know what you think.

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It’s not every day you walk into a Stone Whodunnit and walk out with a new best friend.

I should back up. I’m a murder police and, generally speaking, murders in the City come in three flavours. First, you’ve got your Gimmes. Husband standing over a freshly murdered wife, blood drying on tattooed hands, “She made me do it!” That kind of thing. Then, you’ve got your Wicks. That’s short for Wick-Wicks which, in turn, is short for ‘Who Knows? Who Cares?” Gangland stuff, mainly. Some Bolthead scumbag pops another over six inches of turf in front of a hundred witnesses, all of whom are suddenly stricken with amnesia, blindness, and a peculiar selective mutism that flares up in the presence of badges and uniforms. Who knows, who cares?

Finally, you’ve got your Stone Whodunnits. No-one becomes a murder police to mop up gangbangers. You join for the Stones. The Agatha Christie shit. Although, frankly, they’re more likely to leave you baffled, embittered, and convinced of your own ineptitude than anything else. You see, these days, nearly all non-Wick murders are gimmes. Even the ones that are carefully planned. Most killers aren’t as smart as they think they are. In fact, most killers are only killers because they’re too dumb to think of a non-violent solution to their problems. Occasionally, however, you’ll get a dummy who thinks he’s Moriarty and actually puts some thought into trying to get away with it. We usually have them in a headset in a couple of hours. They underestimate what we can do with forensics these days, or they leave a tell-tale digital footprint somewhere. Kid’s stuff.

So when you get a genuine Stone, you’re likely dealing with someone who’s put months, maybe even years of thought into their sin. That’s why they’re rare, and that’s why they’re damn near impossible to close.

Unless you’re Oliver Elmcross, my new best friend.

I got the call at about 9pm. A Mr Mortimer Whitlock (55 years old, engineer by trade), had come home from a night at his favourite Neosym Cafe to find his wife dead from a single gunshot wound to the head. There were no signs of forced entry, no unfamiliar fingerprints or DNA, and before you say “It must’ve been Morty”, he had a cast iron alibi. He was a regular at the Cafe, he was chatting with the barista and other patrons all night, he was on CCTV, and if that weren’t enough he had so much Neosym in his system when we got to the house that if I’d told him to piss on the floor he’d have probably missed. Frankly, I was surprised he could even tell she was dead.

The Whitlocks lived on the sixty-third floor of an eighty storey tower block called the Falls of Arcadia. Strange place. Deliberately retro. Ostentatiously so, in fact. Take the security, for example. Most places in the City are big on security, for obvious reasons. I live in a one-bed shitbox in Tanawa Heights, but you still need a keycard for the main entrance, a code for the lift, and a retinal scan or voiceprint for the front door. If the law mandated that the security on an apartment had to be commensurate to the value of its contents, Morty Whitlock’s place would’ve been guarded by dobermans and Special Forces, and I’d have been given a bike lock and a pat on the back.

Now, for a murder police, the fact that you can’t open so much as a matchbook without a security code is nothing less than a Godsend. As much as my inner Libertarian baulks at the notion, you can’t say Panopticons don’t work. When everything you do is monitored, digitised, and stored on Avalon, solving murders is often as easy as cross-referencing a few access logs. You say you were home all night? Well, the fingerprint scanner on the public toilet you used to take a quick pre-homicide anxiety shit while you were waiting for your victim says different. Have a headset. Enjoy the next ten thousand years.

But I digress (I do that). The Falls wasn’t like most places. There were no codes or cards. All you needed was a good old-fashioned house key. Granted, keys at the Falls come equipped with DNA scanners, and the electric shock you’d get off the keyhole if you tried opening a door that wasn’t yours would be enough to kill you six times over. But that aside, there was no overbearing supervisory presence. There weren’t even security cameras in the halls. Just one in the main lobby.

Everything about the Falls suggested it was built for people who wanted to forget what year they were in. The furnishings were real wood - Cocobolo, Oliver said, in a way that made it rhyme with ‘Expensive’ - the lobby floor was black marble veined with gold. Art-deco sconces bathed the halls in warm, inviting light. It was proudly unfashionable and utterly gorgeous. Until you got to the Whitlock’s apartment on floor sixty-three.

The apartment was spacious and open-planned, and Angela Whitlock lay face-down in the middle of it, head pointing towards the open door, forensic techs in white bodysuits surrounding her like wraiths. I walked in, not even acknowledging the body at first. This is a trick I learned my first week on homicide. When breaking down a new scene, the body is usually the least important thing in it. The victim isn’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, the scene around them is deteriorating minute by minute. Fingerprints are eroding, DNA is unspooling, and lumbering uniforms with two left feet are tripping over shit and picking things up from one place and putting them down in another. As the old saying goes, “A person can only be murdered once. A crime scene can be murdered a thousand times”.

So, I had a good long look around apartment 63. A few years ago, I’d picked up an old book about two warring cities that, for murky political reasons, were condemned to share the same geographical space. Residents of one city were forbidden on pain of death from acknowledging the residents of the other. Something about the Whitlock’s place reminded me of that book. It was like two separate flats inhabited by people completely unaware of one another.

The lounge was to my left (Mrs Whitlock’s right). Between the body, and the couch on the far left wall, an ancient plasma TV stood on a hardwood cabinet. Meanwhile, built into the couch itself was a single Avalon port, one lone headset curled around the armrest. I imagined Mr Whitlock watching old movies on his vintage TV while his wife surfed a different universe three feet away, or maybe it was the other way round. It made me think how long it’d been since I’d gone on a date.

By the back wall, there were two tall African wood carvings, one on each side of the French windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. Near the carving on the left, flush to the window frame and about two feet off the floor, was a bullet hole. The bullet had already been bagged, along with, in all likelihood, a few stray fragments of Mrs Whitlock.

Framed videographs dotted the walls, all the more eerie for being soundless. Mrs Whitlock kayaking, Mr Whitlock playing the piano, Mrs Whitlock at the finish line of some hellish endurance event, arms outstretched, running the final paces with a beatific smile on her face, doomed to loop those last triumphant strides forever. Mr Whitlock painting. There wasn’t a single vid of Mrs Whitlock inside the apartment, or a single one of Mr Whitlock out of it. Two flats in one. Two lives separated by everything but distance.

The kitchen was opposite the lounge. It was an antiseptic pine and marble construction. Showroom chic. Counters so clean you could build microchips on them. A hall led off the kitchen to the bedrooms, and I could hear Paulie Ngo talking to Mr Whitlock, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Finally, I approached the body. Every time I see a new murder victim, I always think back to the first homicide I ever caught. Can’t help it. It’s a reflex. Not an uncommon one, apparently. Paulie says he does it, too. Still, it’s not a memory I look back on fondly. I was a month out of the academy, at least a year out of my depth, terrified I’d fuck up, even though the case itself was the gimmiest of Gimmes. A guy with Avalon psychosis had stabbed his girlfriend because he thought she wasn’t real. He didn’t deny it, didn’t put up a fight, just sat placidly on the couch wearing the bracelets I’d put on him, waiting for the simulation to end. When the goons turned up with the headset, he’d grinned and tapped his temple and said “No need boys. Already wearing one!” There was so much blood you could taste metal, feel it on your skin somehow. By all accounts they’d been happy.

I called in sick the next two days and spent them both in my dog crate apartment, wasted on booze and Neosym because I couldn’t sleep any other way.

Twelve years later, and I’m standing over Angela Whitlock’s corpse, scrutinising the hole in the back of her head and feeling nothing but curiosity. Part of this was desensitisation, of course. Eight years in City police and another four in City homicide will do that. But part of it was that the hole in the back of Angela Whitlock’s head was genuinely curious. Quick ballistics lesson: a modern bullet is like a tiny grenade that hits its target at 2,000 feet per second. This tremendous kinetic energy causes it to fragment on impact, and the shrapnel rips through the body like a swarm of piranhas. A typical entrance wound is small and neat, no wider than your little finger, while exit wounds are fist-sized maws of churned and smoking flesh.

However, Angela Whitlock’s exit wound was no bigger than the entrance wound in her forehead. From this, it was possible to deduce a good deal about the weapon that had taken her life. First, the bullet must’ve been travelling at a low velocity, probably less than 1,000 fps, meaning the gun was likely very old. Successfully retrofitting a modern gun to fire that slowly would mean fucking with the barrel so much it might blow up in your hand. So yeah, an old gun. Maybe even an antique.

Second, the bullet itself was likely a Full Metal Jacket. With an FMJ, the bullet’s lead core is fully encased in a harder metal like copper and so it doesn’t break apart, meaning that it passes through the body cleanly. Third, it would’ve been a low calibre round, probably a .22 long rifle if I had to guess. I could confirm that with whichever tech had dug the slug out of the hole by the windows. The sooner I did, the sooner I could tackle the real question; what sort of killer would bring an antique sniper rifle to a home assassination?

Because this was an assassination. I could feel it. Something ineffably businesslike had occurred here, something a police’s gut could only pick up after spending years sifting through the butchered, bullet-ridden victims of the City. The scene was cleaner than it had any right to be, as if the killer hadn’t even entered the room. There was no foreign DNA, no signs of struggle, the port in the couch - which must’ve been worth about thirty grand - was exactly where it was supposed to be, and there were no signs of anything sexual. Mrs Whitlock’s killer had arrived and stolen her life with the cold, transactional indifference of a man picking a magazine off a rack. I sighed, and headed towards the bedroom to see how Paulie was getting on with Mr Whitlock.

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That’s it so far. Let me know what you think. Cheers.