The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery
Chapter 3

Inside the mind of a dead man

Contained herein is the account of my greatest achievements. Consider these confessions both a blueprint for the committing of atrocities and a warning as to the decayed system of criminal investigation that has occurred during my lifetime.

Not a bad way to start, if I do say so myself. Full of mystery.

When I first noticed the discrepancies in the investigation system, I was a young man, just barely on my way up the corporate ladder. I was a junior vice president in charge of mergers and acquisitions.

That, at least, explained his violent tendencies. You don’t have nice people in mergers and acquisitions.

In those days, due diligence was performed after even hostile takeovers, and those who had operated outside the procedures outlined by the Better Business Bureau were taken to task for it. Even then, very few people ended up being retired.

I worked for B3 at one point. And in my tenure, we never really investigated anything more serious than embezzling.

I thought about it then, considering what this decline meant. I had a long time to think. I eventually became a senior vice president, decorated for my involvement in three different successful hostile takeover bids. I earned my promotion into Wired Marketing just shy of my two hundredth birthday.

Wired Marketing allowed me access to the Net, letting me stay Connected often enough that I upgraded my own Wiring at company expense. They never had any idea where I sent my sub-programs to research while I was performing the day to days of marketing. While part of me was looking at the campaigns of our competitors, part of me was still on the violent kick that had become such an important part of me.

I worked in Mergers and Acquisitions for more than a hundred years. You don’t forget that kind of violence that quickly. You start to ache for it, like an old mistress you no longer see. My training in psychology told me that the company would understand that, and wouldn’t begrudge me what I was doing on the side if they ever found out. They might think I was preparing to make a bid for Corporate Market Research, so that I could plan more Mergers and Acquisitions at a later date, moving back to the top of my old field.

So I looked at violence. I looked at the history of assassination, everything from the ancient Hassassin through the sniper, all the way up to the Early Retirement craze of my youth. In doing all this, I learned that life has changed, corporate policies are not what they used to be. People are thinking more in the larger term. Corporations have started hiring people away instead of just having higher casualties in a merger.

There was less and less need of someone of my skills in the world of Acquisitions. That meant that, after such long service to the corporation, my skills would be allowed to stagnate and die.

This is not something I could permit.

I retired after giving three full centuries to the corporate world; more than most genalts spend alive. I was able to retire with full pension, thus allowing me to continue whatever I wanted to do at the level at which I was accustomed.

That’s when I began my true research. Without the company to keep track of where I went, I was able to expand my searching, looking up the few people who I identified with, the people that I felt were kindred spirits. Jeffrey Dahlmer. Nero. Hannibal Lector. Jack the Ripper. Charlie Manson. Lucas Abraham. Dozens of others, unnamed, real and fictitious. My friends. My teachers. My competitors.

I began my art in the Sprawl, where I felt it most likely that I would get away with things. The B3 has no authority out there, and no one would ever expect someone like me to go out there.

As easy as it was to kill out there, the most difficult part was getting from the Tiers to the Sprawl without anyone noticing. I considered several methods. Part of me wanted to take the roof access of a building and just jump off, letting a parachute trail behind me and landing me somewhere among the Sprawl. But this was too great of a risk of being seen on the way down. Worse yet, it afforded me no way back up.

There were channels I had taken as a Mergers and Acquisitions executive. Occasionally, forays took us briefly to portions of the Sprawl, as we moved from one tower to another without taking the walkways and byways. Those mergers were always surprises, sudden bids for ownership.

The problem with those channels was that they were watched, even guarded, by the current guard of M&A.

Still, I reasoned that if some channels existed that were known, others must exist that were not. I’ll not explicitly state what those are; such a thing is left for the B3 to do when they receive this manuscript. Then they can act and make up for their own stupidity.

A pity it won’t save the lives they could have if they’d never relaxed their standards.

I made my first kill in the Sprawl on my birthday, as a special present to myself. The thrill of it was so great that it lasted me through that year and into the next, allowing me to watch what had gone on and plan my next attack.

Still, I researched. I looked at the B3’s practices and wondered if maybe, just maybe, I could get away with an attack In Town. I decided to try again on my birthday. It seemed only proper, though not a pattern I would continue.

By the time I made my foray into Town, I’d killed three in the Sprawl. Nothing had come of any of it, and I was convinced that nothing would. More than five years had passed since the first killing, and I had yet to even read about it in the papers. This was, understandably, part of the frustration.

When killing someone in Town, I knew that the most important thing was that I not be connected to it. If there was any thought that the killer had come from the Tiers, I would end up on the B3’s suspect list. With my history in M&A, I was too obvious a selection. There was no way for me to properly avoid it.

So I had to make sure it wasn’t coming from the Tiers. So the woman that I killed in Town was a woman I followed back into Town from the Sprawl. She was some kind of middle management woman, slumming it for a night with a man who wore glasses. Something about the genetically degenerate appealed to her. I didn’t bother to ask why when I cut her open from groin to throat. I performed some minor surgery, as several of my idols had done. Things were easier for me than for them. Such primitive tools, such magnificent results.

After desecrating her body, I returned to the Sprawl, making no attempt to hide my path, but taking the time to hide my genes. If the B3 learned that I was not a natborn, but rather a genalt, they wouldn’t look in the Sprawl. They would look where we dwell, and they probably would have further analyzed the sample. The more they looked, the more certain they would become that the genetic material they had was something from the Tiers.

I could not allow that.

That at least gave me somewhere to start with. I wasn’t about to figure out how he got out to the Sprawl from the Tiers. I knew how to get there from my office, and that was all that mattered.

I couldn’t follow the shit in the Sprawl from here. Really there were only three people out there that I could talk to: Raymond, The Bicycle Man, and The Albino. Two of them would kill me on sight. The third was too dangerous to even think about. So I decided to do what I could in Town first. If I couldn’t prove anything without leaving the safety of Town, then I’d go out into the Sprawl.

It wasn’t something I was looking forward to. Which is how I knew I’d end up there eventually.

Looking up old man Langley’s birthday was so simple, I didn’t even need to Connect. I did, but more because I wanted to than anything else.

In the Net, I was able to walk around without leaving the comfort of my office. I looked down at my avatar. It was probably a waste of money to have made such an effort on it, but I liked what I had. Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade. Maltese Falcon. Even with all the books and movies that have been made since then, it’s still my favorite. Sidney Greenstreet. Peter Lorre. Lorre is probably why I like Max so much.

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my trench coat and huddled myself against the cold hard streets. When Connected, there is neither cold nor hard. To be honest, there’s not much in the way of streets either. But the look is still important.

In the distance, I saw my blocker dealing with all the crap they tried to sling at you. There was a time when the Net was nothing more than ads and porn. The information sources of the Net were less than one percent of the entire thing. There was so much porn online back then that you could watch it non stop for the rest of your life, and never run out of fresh new porn.

A lot has changed over the years. Thank god that’s not one of them.

I’m not here looking for porn. Doesn’t mean the porn won’t replace me.

I call up the media records of the city. While I’m flipping through an old crumpled newspaper, looking at every article written for the past hundred years, I brush away a leather clad girl bound up in every conceivable way, begging for me to do terribly inappropriate things with her.

Not my style.

Oliver Langley was born on January the 16th. I called up every article printed on that date for six years running, starting when he would have turned three hundred and eighty. At the start of my look, there was nothing about any murders. That fit with what the diary said. No one cares what happens out in the Sprawl, not unless you’re living there.

As I got closer to the right place for the girl’s murder, I had to knock away a barely legal natborn showing me all that the lottery had endowed her with.

The porn started getting more pervasive. Unsure of what I liked, the Net started showing me lesbians, then naked men with huge members, and even a woman with a horse. I knocked them all aside, hating myself for how many horrified glances I’d made at the last one, knowing the image would be burned into my mind and would wake me up in a cold sweat some night.

That last bottle of whiskey started calling my name. Maybe I could just kill those brain cells.

Finally, I found what I was looking for, and it wasn’t porn.

Jenny Fischer.

Woman found Slain In Town!

Jenny Fischer, 37 years of age, was found murdered this morning outside her apartment in GE Towers. No suspects are yet forthcoming, but the Better Business Bureau believes that this murder was linked to forays into the Sprawl. Possible sexual deviance was involved.

Fischer worked in GE’s accounting department, still completing her CPA. There was a bright future, cut tragically short.

“In another thirty years, she might have been the head of our department,” said Donald Lamsey, her superior at the office. “I don’t know who would do such a thing.”

The B3 is withholding details as to the method of death, but this reporter has little doubt that there was foul play involved.

More details as they develop.

Would you like to know more?

There were no details about the method of death. I reached forward and clicked the link. After being prompted for a password, and proving that I had an investigatory license, I was able to see the coroner’s report.

Method of death was listed as strangulation. There was also a note about a post mortem mutilation.

This information was not in the papers. It was not given public access. Normal people couldn’t check on this sort of thing. There was no way for a civilian to know how she died, or to know about the mutilation. The only way to know about that would be to either have access to this level of information or to have done the act. The problem was that Oliver might have had either one, or both.

I stepped back from the newspaper. “Search Engine,” I said. Immediately I found myself face to face with a proper British gentleman, who looked down his nose at me with all the proper respect.

“May I help you sir?” He asked; his enunciation was perfect.

I scratched Bogey’s chin. “I need to know about Oliver Langley,” I said.

“I have fifteen thousand, two hundred and ninety three entries that would fit those criteria, sir.”

“Search within those for his level of access.”

“Please be more specific.”

“Access to restricted information,” I said.

“Nine hundred and seventeen entries.”

I groaned. This would take forever. “Did he have access to coroner reports?”

“Seventeen entries.”

This is why I hate search engines. They can’t suggest what would be best, just what appears most often. What I’d really like is to replace out if he accessed the reports on that date. I take a breath. At least, I think I do. “Search all entries for evidence that Mr. Langley accessed coroner reports for murder victims.”

“Seventeen entries.”

Fuck. I was feeling pretty defeated. I was hoping to get down to just the one. But seventeen isn’t all that bad. Maybe there’d be something I could use. “Display entries.”

Turned out, it was exactly what I was looking for. Seventeen entries, seventeen murders. Which is just what the diary suggested. He accessed the coroner reports for each of the seventeen people he killed. That was good. It meant that he might have made the whole thing up, supplying information that no one could have known, getting it with his Net access.

It was a flimsy case, but it did what the client wanted. I thought about just going to her with that. Then something occurred to me.

“Has anyone else accessed these files within the last week?” Before he can answer, I hold up one of Bogart’s hands. “These specific files, and only these files.”

The British gentleman bows slightly and then smiles. “These files were accessed by Theresa Langley four days ago,” he said.

I dismissed him and disconnected. Okay, so she knew that much. She knew that he had a way of knowing everything. So that wasn’t enough. She was paying me for more. She was paying me for what I could actually dig up.

I figured I’d start with the most recent. There wouldn’t be as much info about a murder that happened eighty years ago. I flipped to the end of the diary.