The Lowest Heaven Read online

  There were no shotgun casings – the killers must have removed them – and the knife used to slit Hershel Keck’s throat could not be found.

  The forensics team did find something, however; something Philips specifically asked them to search for. At six separate locations outside the house, nestled up against the wall, the forensics team found powerful, non–brand, professional–grade dampers – those clever little machines that schools use to block radio and electromagnetic signals from wireless devices, preventing their students from calling or texting or in any way interacting with each other or with the outside world when they should be listening to their lectures. Back in the forensics lab at Riccioli, it was discovered that the six dampers interfaced in such a way as to emit a pale green glow.

  III

  Ashen light is the name a seventeenth–century astronomer gave the soft, greenish glow he detected emanating from the dark side of Venus. Although a number of astronomers, both amateur and professional had, over the centuries, claimed to observe the ashen light, sightings remained rare enough that it was generally considered a fluke, a phantom of wishful thinking and unrelated, easily explained, phenomena. An early observer argued that the light came from the fires Venusians lit to celebrate the crowing of a new emperor. Once it was determined that Venus was neither habited nor habitable, and, in fact, that its atmospheric composition was so inimical to life as we understand it that it is improbable to the extreme that biological life ever existed there, other hypotheses were proposed to explain the occasional soft green glow of which some few observers caught sight. Perhaps, some suggested, it was caused by carbon dioxide being torn apart into carbon monoxide and oxygen, the process of which splitting emits a faint green light. Or, it was proposed, the greenish light could have been nothing more than the glow of lightning from Venus’ many electrical storms, diffused through carbon dioxide and nitrogen clouds that suffocated the planet pre–activation. Whether the effect was even real remained a topic of heated debate well into the twenty–second century.

  When the dynamo was activated and the terraforming project began in earnest, a strange and entirely unexpected effect was noted. Although the planet’s atmosphere, both real and artificial, was configured to resemble the Earth’s, something about the way sunlight refracted off the Overdome meant that, very rarely, on dark, cloudy nights, a faint greenish glow could be seen on the horizon. Papers were written, doctorates were awarded, and academic conferences were convened to discuss and dissect the new ashen light, but the majority of Venusians cared not one whit about official explanations. They were content in the knowledge that Venus’ Overdome, the greatest feat of engineering in all human history, which was otherwise wholly invisible, had this single, rare, beautiful manifestation. That it was something unique to their planet. To them.

  The Keck family, Riccioli’s forensics team determined, died several hours after they’d first been tied up. To this day, Alvin Go, the man who lives in the cabin east of the Keck family farm, who couldn’t sleep the night they died, who looked out the window and congratulated himself for having been awake to see the rare glow of the ashen light, says only one thing. “If I’d have known. If I’d have had any idea. Maybe I could have saved them.

  “But I thought it was the ashen light.”

  For a while, Sloane and Griffith lived well in New Tahiti, having taken a secluded cabin on an atoll well away from the busier tourist resorts. They coexisted peacefully for three and a half weeks, Sloane sunbathing and swimming and wandering the little island, running her fingers across the lush green leaves as she passed through the jungle, whispering the names of the plants to herself. There’s a photo of her from this period, recovered from Griffith’s phone, showing a small woman in a bikini standing thigh–deep in unnaturally blue waters, her face glowing with joy. When the money ran out, Griffith, already bored with island life, proposed they find a mark at one of the resorts – a rich old woman, he suggested, who might be interested in maintaining a healthy and handsome young man for some period. Sexual jealousy was beneath the two of them, he reminded Sloane; the province of middling, lesser people who cared more about possessions than about freedom. Sloane acquiesced more or less gracefully, unwilling to be parted from Griffith. But once they’d returned to Tiare, New Tahiti’s primary island, Griffith found inveigling his way into the good graces of a wealthier older patron more difficult than he’d imagined. It fell to Sloane to take up the casual prostitution that paid for their cramped two–room apartment on the outskirts of town while Griffith slipped around the resorts during the day, creeping into empty rooms to rummage through colorful baggage for money and valuables as the tourists to which the luggage belonged snorkeled, oblivious, off the coast of Tiare.

  The first lead came from the dampers, which yielded no fingerprints or DNA evidence, but proved to be the property of three different institutions, all in or around Helios. Over time, too, the forensics team accumulated enough data to indicate that the majority of DNA found at the scene of the crime but not connected to the Keck family or any regular visitors to the farmhouse could be traced to hundreds of people who had, at some point in the recent past, been in Helios. Much of the hair, moreover, had the blunt edges characteristic of recent cutting. Philips’ response unit, with Philips taking lead, went to Helios in early January 2520, to begin the arduous task of visiting Helios’ seven hundred and twelve salons and barber shops to request security footage. They were able to locate the correct salon, an establishment serving commuters on the edge of Helios’ financial district, within ten days. But there the trail went cold. No security cameras had caught anything in the least suspicious, and Sheriff Philips wasn’t sure what gender the Keck family murderers were, much less how many people had been involved in the killings – although she felt reasonably certain there had been two.

  Philips had arrived at the conclusion that two people had murdered the family on a hunch: the blanket drawn over Jen’s corpse. The ropes binding the bodies – Jen had also been bound, they discovered, when they pulled the blanket away from her – had been tied with the same type of knot, and three of the murders had been carried out with the same weapon, probably a 12–gauge shotgun. But the act of kindness toward the teenaged girl, and the ragged cut had that severed Hershel’s jugular, suggested to Philips that there were multiple perpetrators.

  The second lead came from a call Philips received two weeks after the murder of the Keck family. A middle–aged couple, Alice and Farouk Smith, who’d left their hometown on the southern edge of the Lakshmi Planum three weeks earlier to take a much–anticipated cross–planum vacation, had never come home. Three days after the Kecks were killed, the couple was found stuffed into the handicapped stall of an isolated roadside rest–stop. The husband had had his skull crushed with a heavy, jagged object – likely a stone – and both had been strangled. Time of death was determined to have been somewhere between 2.30 and 4 am on Friday, the ninth of November. Their car and possessions were missing. Ten days after the Kecks were killed, a passenger manifest for an IT/AT transport pinged; the couple had, apparently, taken a transport to Eos on the AT several hours after their deaths.

  The team investigating the Smith murders learned that, all told, the killers had made off with their car, their clothes, and a card with a $7000 credit limit. $275 had been spent on the transport to the AT; from there, the trail went cold. The lead detective on the case, Coulter Russell of the IT regional police, was forced to let the case lie fallow.

  Three months passed between the night the Keck family was murdered and the morning that Griffith’s mother, Elin Sinkman found a wallet on her property, the grounds outside the Eos Express Inn. Although the wallet itself was empty, it was microchipped; when Mrs. Sinkman dropped it off at the local library and the library personnel ran it through the scanning database, an alert was triggered. Within twelve hours detective Russell had flown down to the AT to take Mrs. Sinkman’s statement. The wallet had, as the alert notified Russell, belonged to one Alice
Smith, late of Bastet, Lakshmi Planum, Ishtar Terra; murdered on or about 3.30 am, Friday the ninth of November, 2519, by person or persons unknown. Apparent motive: robbery.

  Mrs. Sinkman had a son, Russell learned. By curious coincidence, that son had been the part–time employee of a down–market barber shop implicated in another unsolved case: the murder of Michelle Keck and her family on or about two am, the ninth of November, 2519, by person or persons unknown.

  Russell and Philips met on February twenty–second, 2520, at a small bar in Helios, IT. They exchanged notes on their respective cases, discussing the hunches and proposals they had not included in their official case–files. Russell had also generated a detailed report on Griffith Sinkman, and in the course of the investigation into Griffith’s background and movements turned up not only his three–year stint in Garden City, but that he had, at some point after his release, travelled to the IT and begun travelling with a young woman, identity unknown.

  When, three days following their first meeting another of Alice Smith’s microchipped belongings set off an alert, this one on the resort island of Tiare, in New Tahiti, Russell and Philips took an emergency transport to the AT. Within seven hours of the alert the two and their combined response team was stepping off the inter–AT transport that moved between Tiare and the mainland. Sheriff Philips had never been to New Tahiti before, nor has she been since, and recalls with perfect clarity the island’s strange atmosphere. “It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen,” she recalls, “warm and sunny and incredibly green. The ocean was so clear you could see the fish swimming in it. But a quarter of the hotels were closed – these huge, beautiful buildings just shut-up walls and chains and barbed wire. All that potential just dying on the vine.”

  Russell and Philips traced Griffith to a small apartment on the outskirts of Tiare. Images of his companion, clearly the same woman with whom he’d travelled to the AT the night of the Keck murders, was identified as Sloane Deeds, only suspect in the stabbing death three years earlier of a man named Brackett Jones, a store–owner in a small town on the slopes of the Maxwell Montes.

  Russell and Philips tracked the pair down and observed them for two days before making their move. Griffth Sinkman, they learned during those forty–eight hours, was restless, getting up early to wander about the resort–town and spending the better part of every day away from his partner. Sloane Deeds, however, seemed more or less content to spend her days sunbathing on the beach.

  They arrested Deeds first, approaching her as she lay napping on a red towel. A team of twelve armed officers surrounded the sleeping woman, Philips taking lead. When Philips said Deeds’ name, the young woman sat up, observed the twelve officers with their guns trained on her, and said “well, okay then.” She gathered up her things and went without a struggle.

  Griffith Sinkman proved more problematic to arrest. Russell and his team descended on Sinkman as he was leaving a small diner; Sinkman ran. It took three shots to bring him down; none fatal. He was transported to a local hospital where his condition was stabilized. In the days before Sinkman was well enough to be transported back to the IT, Philips and Russell went through the couple’s meager belongings: some clothing, a piece of jewelry identified as belonging to Jen Keck, and seventeen dollars in cash. A response team sent to the Sinkman family motel outside Eos discovered the charred remains of more clothing, tentatively identified as belonging to Alice and Farouk Smith.

  IV

  The two were tried separately. Griffith Sinkman pled not guilty by reason of insanity, the prosecution now faced with proving beyond a reasonable doubt not only that he committed the crimes, but that he did so with a full and complete understanding of the difference between right and wrong, an ancient but still robust legal definition of sanity. Sloane Deeds pled guilty to four counts of murder in the first degree. When informed that she would be eligible for the death penalty even if she gave a full confession and implicated Sinkman in her crimes, Deeds shrugged. Although she had given complete and entirely useable evidence of both Sinkman’s sanity and his guilt during her own arraignment, the prosecution at Sinkman’s trial put her on the stand to give her testimony in person, believing that having her describe the murders in front of a jury would be more powerful than merely reading aloud her confession for the record.

  The entirety of her testimony was recorded and broadcast in near–delaycast to an audience of four billion.

  “It started in 2016, I guess,” she begins. Her voice is flat, steady. “I had just come off the mountain, and was trying to get to Helios. I only had a few bucks, but I figured men are men anywhere, so I could get there somehow.

  “I was standing by the side of the road when this car pulls up, and he – Griffith – is behind the wheel. He asked me if I wanted a ride, so I said sure, and where he was going, and he said wherever I was going. So that’s how me and him hooked up.

  “We palled around for three years, more or less. We didn’t ever have any steady jobs, but we’d get part–time work here and there, and case joints to steal stuff. We moved around the IT a lot. Every time somewhere got a little hot for us, after we’d been there a while, we’d pack up and move on. We changed cars a lot; we’d steal a car then switch out plates, then switch them out again. It’s easy if you know how to jack the plate operating systems, which Griff did, and he showed me, so we did it all the time. I guess he learned up in Garden City.

  “Griff liked the IT a lot, because it’s so big and empty and we could just move and move, but sometimes we were living on nothing at all, and I was getting tired of it. Every time he talked about the AT, about all the casinos and stuff, I’d be like ‘I want to try it there.’ I never been off the IT before, and the planum’s about as boring as the Max mountains. I wanted to see a real city, and go someplace fun, but Griff was always like ‘it sucks just as much there as here, and they’re all big fakes, and it sucks even more if you don’t have any money, and here it’s easier not to have money’ so we never went.

  “And then finally I got real tired of it, and all his crap about how we were ‘realer people’ than everyone else, like being poor was this noble thing, and I told him I was going to go no matter what, and he could come or not. He was like ‘I’ve been poor my whole life!’ but he’s full of crap. I’ve seen where he lived, and he went to college, too. We had a big old bust–up about it and then a couple days later he said he was sorry and I was right, it was time to leave the IT, and explained that when he was down at Garden City he met a guy who had been a worker out on the farms all over the IT. He said how people there don’t believe in banks so they keep their money in the house in cash, and it was a real cinch to just knock over a house and make off with all the money, and it was pretty untraceable and everything. So this guy in Garden City had worked out in this town in the middle of nowhere, but everyone was super well–off, and in particular there was this old guy who was super, super rich and kept all his money in a safe in his office at home.

  “So Griff said we should go knock over this old guy. He – Griff, I mean – knew all about the old guy, because he’d made the Garden City guy tell him everything, like where exactly the house was and how to get there. And we went to the library and learned all about the town, Hartmann, and studied maps so that we knew how to get there and back again, all the different ways. And he got a job in a salon in Helios so that he could collect random hair DNA so we could confuse the crime scene. He collected it over a long time, because we planned carefully and took our time to make sure we got everything right. We stole dampers from all over, a few from Helios and one from somewhere else, even, and rigged them up to work together so the old guy couldn’t call anyone while we were robbing him

  “And we set up an alibi, too. There are some homeless guys who sleep outside the [Helios] city hall and Griff started sleeping there at night, ‘cause there’s a camera that watches them and they all sleep huddled up, and he got good at joining them and then slipping away so you couldn’t see he wasn’t the
re anymore. I used to watch him to make sure he was doing it right. And I went into one of those all–night moviedromes, but it was one with a broken window, so I’d be recorded going in but I could sneak in and out without anyone seeing.

  “So we decided on a night. It wasn’t supposed to be that night [Thursday the eighth], because Griff wanted to do it on a Friday thinking no one would notice anything if the old guy didn’t show up anywhere over a weekend, but the night we picked out to do it we got into an argument and so we didn’t go. Then when we made up Griff was like ‘we got to do it now, I’m tired of this place’ so we just left. That was that Thursday, I guess.

  “We stole a car and then exchanged plates every two hundred kilometers. It took us four hours to drive to Hartmann, and it went perfect. We drove through the town, and Griff was like ‘there’s the school, turn right at the hardware store, three kilometers past.’ We came to the tree–lined drive, and it was dark as I ever saw. We killed the headlights once we were out of town and drove slow, but we didn’t see a single person. The town was totally empty, and there wasn’t anyone on the roads, not one person. So we drive slow down the tree–lined street, and as we pull up we can see the house in the sort of dim light. It was huge and white and looked real cozy. Griff keeps saying ‘look how big that fucker is; this old fart must be loaded.’

  “We pulled off the driveway a little and got out really quiet, but couldn’t hear a thing. So we snuck around and put the dampers out and set them off, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw, to watch them do their thing. They buzzed a little then this green glow spreads up and out from them and meets up and then there’s this soft green light shaped like a bowl, covering the whole house. I could put my hand through it like it was the ocean. I told Griff I didn’t know it would make light but he said we were super far from anyone else and if anyone saw anything they’d think it was the ashen light. So we went inside.