Judge Dredd Year One: City Fathers Read online

  JUDGE DREDD: YEAR ONE

  CITY

  FATHERS

  Matthew Smith

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2012 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Desk Editor: David Moore

  Design: Simon Parr & Luke Preece

  Marketing and PR: Michael Molcher

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Copyright © 2012 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-448-6

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-449-3

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  JUDGE DREDD

  #1: DREDD VS DEATH

  Gordon Rennie

  #2: BAD MOON RISING

  David Bishop

  #3: BLACK ATLANTIC

  Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  #4: ECLIPSE

  James Swallow

  #5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

  David Bishop

  #6: THE FINAL CUT

  Matthew Smith

  #7: SWINE FEVER

  Andrew Cartmel

  #8: WHITEOUT

  James Swallow

  #9: PSYKOGEDDON

  Dave Stone

  MORE 2000 AD ACTION

  JUDGE ANDERSON

  #1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  #1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

  DURHAM RED

  #1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE - Peter J Evans

  ROGUE TROOPER

  #1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

  STRONTIUM DOG

  #1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

  FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

  #1: OPERATION VAMPYR

  #2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

  #3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

  Mega-City One

  2080 AD

  One

  “I THINK WE can rule out suicide.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re standing on his pancreas.”

  Dredd glanced down at his feet and the sticky brown-red smear beneath his boot. He grunted an apology and stepped back, closer to the door. Part of the organ came with him, leaving a thin trail across the carpet. He felt awkward and impatient at a crime scene—surplus to requirements, perhaps. After the initial adrenaline rush of discovering the body, there was little he could do but wait for the med and tek teams to finish their work, and he was finding it difficult knowing where to place himself. He slid to one side as a pair of auxiliaries squeezed through with a stretcher.

  It was doubly hard with the room sprayed as it was with viscera. There seemingly wasn’t a surface or item of furniture that hadn’t been spattered by the contents of the victim’s gut, his torso sliced open from gullet to navel. He was sitting back in his chair by the window, waxy and stiff like a hollowed-out anatomist’s model, the gore fanning around him. It had dried dark and textured on the walls and ceiling, seeped into the floor. The stench was ripe.

  “He couldn’t have ingested a micro-explosive?” Dredd asked, watching as McCready trod delicately around the corpse, shining a torch into its face and stomach cavity, poking matter with the end of his pen. “Unlikely, I know, but I’ve heard of it being used before as a means to an end.”

  “No,” McCready replied, shaking his head as he continued his inspection. “No scorch marks, no residue to suggest that. He wasn’t blown open from the inside, he was stabbed, repeatedly. The cuts suggest a bladed weapon—kind of a frenzy killing, to have caused these kinds of wounds and this amount of trauma.” He straightened up. “I’d say you were looking at either a maniac or a creep making a point. And then,” he added, nodding at the far wall, “there’s that.”

  Dredd followed his gaze to the symbol painted in blood. It had been slapped on hurriedly, with little finesse, and much had dribbled down onto the sofa beneath it so its intended design was not easy to discern. The letters ICU had been blobbily added underneath.

  “A gang tag?” McCready offered.

  “Intensive Care Unit,” Dredd murmured. “Local punks, morons for the most part. Spend much of their time fighting amongst themselves. Something like this seems out of character.” But that didn’t discount the possibility that this was a revenge slaying for some slight or betrayal: he had to admit, it had the ritualistic air of a gang snuff, the gruesome showiness of it a warning to others. He’d get units to round the ICU up, see what they had to say within the unforgiving walls of an interrogation cube.

  Only problem was, the vic had no history of ever running or dealing with one of the many street gangs that operated in the sector; that, and the fact that at the time of his death he was working for Justice Department.

  “Eye See You,” McCready intoned. “Could that be relevant, given the vic’s occupation?”

  Dredd grunted in thought. “Maybe.”

  He had caught the call a couple of hours earlier whilst on routine patrol: neighbours at Robert Shaw block had been making complaints about the smell emanating from one of the apartments. Eliciting no response, the Judge had overridden the lock and entered, discovering the source of the problem slumped in a chair beside a large picture window and a powerful telescope. He must’ve been dead for at least three days.

  Control identified him as Jacob Croons, a twenty-three-year-old with peeping busts stretching back to his juve days. He had serious voyeurism issues—had even sought out counselling after doing his first month in the cubes—and was a persistent offender, totalling over twenty counts within the past six years. The last arresting officer had wisely decided enough was enough, and offered him an ultimatum: utilise your talents in a positive fashion and peep for the city, or enjoy a spell in a psych-ward. Croons had unsurprisingly opted for the former, and so was set up as a Justice Central-sanctioned peeper; one of the Judges’ many eyes in the metropolis, a linked network of spies reporting all suspicious activity and criminal movements to their masters. It was an arrangement that had brought decent results—peepers were nothing if not diligent—and according to his records, Croons had a higher-than-average hit rate. He was a man who clearly loved his work; passionately, some might say.

  Integral to that job—and also for the peeper’s own safety—was secrecy. He would’ve been instructed to tell no one about what he did, and to keep all monitoring of suspects utterly discreet. Looking around the deceased’s apartment, Dredd surmised that Croons had little trouble with that side of things: the man had basically been a shut-in. His kitchen cupboards stocked with multiple tinned foodstuffs, the single sets of plates and cutlery, and the minimal clothing all painted the picture of a man who entertained alone. All he’d lived for was his obsession, to watch and record, to catch sight of the forbidden, and if his home was austere and functional everywhere else, his viewing equipment was state of the art, and spotlessly maintained. The huge digital telescope dominated the living space, connected to a humming, blinking black monolith of a com
puter. Everyone he’d seen, everyone who’d passed under his gaze, was captured, filed and stored in Croons’ beloved machinery.

  The downside of such a reclusive existence was that none of the citizens who lived around him could shed much light on his murder. Dredd had cursorily canvassed Croons’ neighbours while he’d waited for the med and tek teams to arrive, and they’d told him nothing. Few could remember even seeing him leave his apartment, and, of course, no one had heard anything out of the ordinary, or witnessed visitors entering (security cameras in a rundown block like this were predictably absent, either stolen or sabotaged). Not for the first time, he felt that engaging the cits to aid him in his investigation was a waste of time; they saw nothing beyond their tri-d sets, showed no interest in the comings and goings of their fellow blockers. Each habitat was a world unto itself, sealed off from the others. Everyone minded their own business. He endured their customary remarks about his age with the grace he thought they deserved, and they quickly shut up when they realised that their quips were being greeted with a stony silence. He handed out a couple of fines while he was there—overdue pet licences, and one count of noise pollution—promising to be back with a 59c if they weren’t paid promptly. They started showing some respect, then.

  Croons’ body was being bagged and placed on the stretcher. McCready nodded for it to be removed.

  “Any DNA lifted off the corpse?” Dredd asked.

  “No, none that I could find. No fingerprints either, on the stiff, the window, the telescope or the computer, which suggests to me the murder was pre-meditated. Creeps came with the express purpose of killing him and leaving no identifying traces behind. Gloved, unquestionably; maybe even with a change of clothes, given the amount of blood that would’ve been shed.”

  “You’re thinking more than one perp?”

  “I’d say so. Bruising around the shoulders indicates another pair of hands holding down the vic from behind as he was stabbed in the chair.”

  “But why go to the trouble of leaving no identifying traces, and then painting that on the wall?” Dredd muttered to himself. “Why draw attention to themselves?”

  McCready shrugged. “Beats me. The blood on the wall’s the victim’s own, you won’t be surprised to hear. Smeared on with the knife, I expect, which they took with them.”

  Dredd looked back towards the apartment’s front door. “No sign of forced entry...”

  “Nope. Croons must’ve not only opened the door for them but also invited them in. Clearly he wasn’t expecting what they had planned for him.”

  “So he knew them, he recognised them...” Dredd’s gaze circled the room before fixing on the telescope. “What have we got on that?” he asked, nodding towards it. “Who was the last subject that Croons was monitoring?”

  “We’ve got some idea,” one of the teks replied, raising his grey-haired head from behind the computer. “The perps have hacked into this, deleted the majority of the files. Or it’s possible they forced the vic at knifepoint to call them up and got him to bin them. Either way, the records for the past eight months are gone. We—”

  “Check with Croons’ liaison at the local sector house,” Dredd interrupted. “He would’ve passed on any pertinent information.”

  “Yeah, thanks for that, son. We’ve already checked. Cases up to the beginning of the month had been brought to a conclusion. Anything the deceased was working on in the last couple of weeks he had yet to pass the info on.”

  Dredd walked to the window, the city spread before him. It was an extraordinary view; Croons had had at least four blocks within his scope, and the dozens of pedways between each of them. He would’ve had all manner of illegalities parading before him, any number of zziz deals, muggings, gang rumbles... a multitude of suspects. “When did the liaison last speak to him?”

  “About a month ago, when the last case was actioned. Said Croons had given no indication of being scared of anything, or thinking his life might be in danger.”

  “Terrific.” Dredd watched a hovercab attempt an unlawful U-turn, forcing a flock of batgliders to quickly disperse, and made a mental note of the licence number.

  “However,” the Tek-Judge continued, “as I was saying, we have got something. They tried to destroy the telescope too, but didn’t do a very good job. These things are tougher than they look. We’ve managed to reconstruct one of the recordings, and it shows that the day he died, the telescope was pointed at an apartment in William Holden, just over there.” He nodded at the block directly opposite the one in which they were standing.

  “Which apartment?”

  “774/F,” the tek answered, glancing at a pad in his hand. “Registered to one Travest Vassell. Served a five-term in 2066 for Stookie smuggling; a known dealer, manufacturer and distributor of narcotics. Linked to a couple of unsolved drugs murders too.”

  “Good,” Dredd said, turning away from the window. “Forward me a copy of the recording. I’ll follow up the Vassell lead.” He marched towards the door, adding as he left: “And watch the attitude. Don’t ever call me ‘son’ again.”

  McCready and the tek exchanged looks. “That’s you told,” McCready said, slapping his colleague on the back.

  DREDD TOOK THE el to Vassell’s apartment while Control filled him in on the dealer’s history. He’d been selling narcotics since he was a teen, always an independent trader, never part of a cartel. He’d moved around the sector some in the past two decades, had a handful of aliases that he hid behind, but Vassell was his parents’ name—used to live in Chuck Jones, over in Sector 80, now deceased—and seemingly the moniker he adopted the most. He was a regular user: his first bust was for Umpty possession when he was sixteen, did a month in the juve cubes. Since then he’d always been on Justice Department’s radar; his MO was all over an abandoned zziz factory that was raided three years ago, and his name would perennially circulate intercepted shipments of contraband out of Banana City. The fact that he was still walking the streets was testament to a sound business head—he never dealt with the flakes that were going to get stoned, incompetently try to rob a bank and then sell their supplier down the river for a reduced sentence—and a slippery ability to either evade the law altogether or not be caught holding.

  The drug snuffs his name was linked to were tangential at best, and frankly it was unlikely he was involved: a couple of slab-rats gunned down outside the southside stackers and a suspected mule minus a head found stuffed in the trunk of a mo-pad didn’t sound like Vassell’s handiwork. He was far too savvy to get his hands dirty. In fact, the more Dredd heard about him, the more he begrudgingly began to believe that the dealer was an unlikely fit for the Croons killing; it was difficult to imagine him putting his revenue at risk in such a way. He certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with a band of idiots like the ICU.

  Dredd gave a nominal rap on the door before putting his boot through it. The instinctual warning was leaving his throat as he passed over the threshold and swung his Lawgiver to bear on the apartment, but it instantly died in his mouth as he realised that the bird had flown. The place was empty, cleared out. He relaxed, holstered his gun, and cast an eye about the living space: this hadn’t been a hurried evacuation, with clothes and detritus still strewn over the furniture. Possessions had been packed up and removed—what little, he guessed, there had been. This smelled of a short-term let. It was clean, Spartan, the closet containing minimal appliances; Vassell must’ve rented it just as a base. Dredd would call in forensics as a matter of course, but he doubted they would find anything that would give them a clue as to where the dealer had gone, or much of what had transpired within these walls. Similarly, the vendor would tell him that the rent was paid in cash, nothing to lead back to the creep.

  Standing before the living-room window, Dredd looked back at Shaw, and wondered if it was possible that Vassell could’ve known he was being watched by Croons. Surely there was no way to discern the peeper’s telescope at this distance? And was Vassell really capable of butchering
the Justice Department operative, if he thought a deal had been compromised? He had no previous record for violent crime. So if Vassell wasn’t in the frame, could those he was dealing with be responsible? Perps he hadn’t encountered before: vicious, brutal, ruthless, a new gang moving into the sector...

  Dredd paced, imagining Wallace, one of his old Academy tutors, murmuring in his ear: extrapolate, extrapolate...

  Creeps that could be aware that they were being monitored from a block away. Creeps that could gut a man, and let those that found the remains be aware of who had done it with a symbol painted in blood. Creeps that could’ve quite possibly scared Vassell enough to have vacated these premises. The more Dredd ran with the idea, the more he felt that the dealer had got himself entangled in a transaction that was out of his league. In the Judge’s mind, all the signs pointed to non-humans. An alien outfit, looking to stamp their mark on the underworld; only they could have the sensory or psychic perception to pick up on Croons watching them from another building.

  Eye See You... Perhaps McCready hadn’t been far off the mark.

  He had to check out Croons’ last peep that the teks had managed to reconstruct. He left the apartment at speed, and tore back down to his Lawmaster parked outside.