Underbox: Four
© 2021 by Walter Reimer

Thumbnail art by  Capt. Horatio Hortense Bezoar


“You all right?” Joachim asked the next morning. The boar and the cross-fox had reported for work, and were surprised when told that the coroner wished to see them. The pair had taken a public tram to the Steglitz-Friedenau district of New Berlin and now the two detectives were taking an elevator up to the medical examiner’s office.

Hamo glanced at the boar over their coffee cup, sipped at the beverage and replied, “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” his partner declared. “You’ve been in a damned mood again.”

A shrug and another sip. “Thinking about retiring.” Joachim gave a start, and the cross-fox added, “Started thinking about it yesterday.”

“What brought this on?”

“Forty-three murder cases,” Hamo replied as the elevator doors opened. The two detectives walked out into an antiseptically-clean corridor and past a sign proclaiming that this wing of the government complex was part of the Ministry of Health. At the far end was the receptionist for the coroner’s office. “I’m starting to worry. So’s Karin.”

Joachim started to say something, paused, and sighed. “Yeah, I can guess. Patricia worries about me sometimes.”

The cross-fox wagged a finger at him. “Never give up talking,” they said. “I stopped talking to Rolf about the job soon after our son turned four. By the time Young Rolf was ten, there was no clearing the air between us.” They reached the receptionist’s desk and Hamo said, “Detectives Suleymanoglu and Schmidt, to see Dr. Addison.”

The pretty feline smiled. “You’re expected,” she said in a pleasant tone. “Examination Room Five, through the doors and fifth door on the right.”

Joachim smiled and replied, “Thank you,” and the two detectives entered when the feline hit a switch to unlock the door. “I hate this part of the job,” the boar muttered as the door swung shut and locked behind the pair of officers. Hamo flicked his ears at him and he said, “It’s hard to look at a dead guy laid out on the table like that, you know what I mean? Very impersonal.”

“Yeah,” Hamo said. “I know what you mean.”

“You’re used to it though.”

“Doesn’t mean I like it.” The cross-fox’s ears swiveled. “And you should hope you never get used to it.” The duo reached the exam room door, and after tapping their knuckles against the door Hamo opened it and the two went inside.

If the hallway had been white, the examination room reminded Hamo of a surgical operating theater. Everything was white or chromed stainless steel, and two shrouded forms lay on matching tables. A middle-aged gray squirrel in blue surgical scrubs was glancing back and forth between a monitor and the tablet in his paw when he noticed the cross-fox and the boar. “Ah, Detectives!” Hamo felt their ears go flat against their skull as the man’s voice echoed in the room. “Come in, come in! You’re right on time.”

“Good morning, Doctor,” Hamo said, his ears relaxing somewhat. Hugh Addison was always a bit on the loud side. “You said that you had something for us? We were expecting your office to call us this afternoon.”

“Yes,” Addison said, his voice getting a little quieter. It may have been Joachim pointedly digging a finger in his ear that gave the squirrel the hint. “Well, we put in some overtime. Did you have any difficulty getting the identity of the two deceased?”

The cross-fox and the boar glanced at each other before Hamo replied, “Yes. The identcards were corrupted somehow. Our cybercrime lab had to reconstruct the files.”

“Their identities are verified now,” Addison remarked, “by genetic coding as well as fingerprints. So you want to go over the older one, or the younger?”

Hamo replied, “Lobel first. His wife asked when you’re planning to release the body.”

“Ah.” The squirrel drew the sheet back as a holograph of the weasel from his identfile appeared over the corpse. “Paul Lobel. Medical files show usual middle-aged issues – beginnings of arthritis and so on, but no signs of heart disease or anything that could lead to heart failure or stroke; no signs of any illegal drugs in his bloodstream. Stomach contents show that he’d eaten recently.”

“Any idea where?” Joachim asked.

“It was Italian, and there’re no Italian restaurants in Sublevel 4,” Addison said. “He ate maybe an hour before he died, so he could have had dinner anywhere in New Berlin. He had no wounds – “

“Not dressed like that,” Hamo interjected. “There are parts of New Berlin where he’d be reported to the police if he tried to get a meal dressed like he was, or at least talked about.”

Addison sighed. “And to think I moved from London because I thought Berlin would be better. Anyway, no wounds on him. No punctures that would indicate a needle.”

“Poison absorption?”

The squirrel shook his head. “Patches would leave residue.”

“So maybe he had dinner, dyed his fur and dressed the part, before heading to the Underbox for a back-alley tumble with a prostitute,” Hamo said, putting a paw to their chin and talking half to themselves, “when he could have gone to any licensed brothel. Odd.”

“I’ll start a sweep of the surveillance cams,” Joachim said.

“We turn now to Gerstein,” Addison said. “Still trying to get in touch with his family.”

“His ident didn’t have them,” the cross-fox said.

“Hmm. Files show that he was certified clean at his last exam by the Health Ministry’s Prostitution Section. Puncture wounds consistent with injections – “

“We found a syrette of Bliss on him,” Hamo said.

“ – And there is a negligible amount of it in his bloodstream,” Addison conceded. “Therefore not an addict, which is a little surprising. Again, no wounds and nothing that could cause him to die so suddenly.” He covered both bodies, leaving the holograms of the two hovering in the air.

“So what killed them?” the cross-fox asked.

“I have to admit, I was pretty stumped by that,” the squirrel said, “until I thought about it a bit. Lobel had an implanted cyberway, and Gerstein was wearing a jackglove. It was then that I recalled a story making the rounds in the net from Singapore, about another mysterious death.”

“I never read stories about dead people; the dialogue is much too stiff,” Hamo said with a deadpan expression, causing Joachim to groan and roll his eyes, and Addison to break into quiet laughter.

Recovering from his mild laughing fit, the squirrel said, “I came back here, quite early in the morning. Really surprised poor Dr. Belovsky, but I had to do some checking on these two unfortunates. What I found was rather surprising. Both Lobel and Gerstein died because they were told to die.”

“What?” the two detectives practically chorused.

“Well, maybe not as dramatic or direct as that,” Addison amended. “Their cyberways were corrupted, but in very specific ways. One of my technicians knows these things – used to work in IT, you know – and it took her some doing, but she managed to figure out that Lobel and Gerstein’s cyberways had certain lines of code slipped into them along with the usual traffic.”

“Code?” Hamo asked. “You mean a hacker?”

The squirrel nodded. “As you know, some uses of the cyberbahn are designed to trigger physical responses in the subject. Games, you know, and things like that.” The cross-fox nodded. “The code infiltrated into the cyberway seems to have been designed with the purpose of killing both Lobel and Gerstein.”

There was a pause as the cross-fox and the boar digested this. Hackers had been a pernicious fact of life even before the cyberbahn had been developed, but most of the crimes associated with them were either theft, of varying degrees and types, and mischief.

But this hack had killed.

“What – what about the death in Singapore?” Joachim asked, the boar’s eyes narrowing. “Same method?”

“From the published report, yes,” Addison replied with a nod. “I’ve already sent a request, through channels, to their medical examiner’s office to inquire if there’s any information that didn’t show up in the published account.”

Hamo’s face was drawn down into a pensive scowl, their eyes hooded as they thought. “Was there anything else, Doctor?”

Addison paused, one finger raised as if he was trying to recall something, and the finger dropped as he said, “Yes. There were signs of sexual activity, of course, the crime scene techs saw that, but when I did a more thorough inspection I found this.” He tapped the pad and the lights lowered before he took up a UV light and drew back the sheet over Gerstein’s corpse. The squirrel panned the light over the young wolf, stopping at the right forearm. “What do you make of this?”

The UV light caused a patch of the wolf’s fur to fluoresce in a variety of colors, describing a series of circles that were linked diagonally to resemble wings. “It’s not dye,” Addison said. “These are fiber-optic filaments embedded in the skin.”

Joachim fingered one of his tusks as he looked at it. “Never seen anything like it. Have you, Hamo - ?” His voice trailed off as he looked up at his partner.

If anything, Hamo’s scowl had turned into a half-snarl, their eyes wide and ears laid back. “It’s a gang sign. The Butterflies, used to run in Sublevels 5 and 6 in the Underbox.”

“’Used to?’” Joachim asked.

“Yeah. They disbanded nearly ten years ago after their leaders tried to get the rest of the gang to commit mass suicide.” That caused the ears of the other two furs in the room to go flat. “There’s no way that Gerstein could have been a member, though; he’d have been too young to join.”

“How do you know?” Addison asked.

The cross-fox pulled up their right sleeve, and in the black light a similar Lorenz butterfly shone on their fur. “Because I would have recognized him.”







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