+J.M.J.+

The Eyes Have It

A Minority Report/"A.I." Crossover

By "Matrix Refugee"

Author's Note:

Just in time for the release of the DVD of Minority Report, I finally came up with another chapter. This one has been a LOT harder to write than I expected, which explains why I took so long updating it. I actually have the LAST chapter of this written out, but obviously I can't post that one because it will spoil the ending. But the first chapter was better received than I expected it would be. And so…on with the crossover.

Disclaimer:

See Part I.

I: EyeWitness

Since he had all but single-handedly exposed the lie that had helped to institute Pre-Crime as a test project, John Anderton had fallen somewhat afoul with the police union. He'd left the D.C. area in something like a low-key disgrace; he and Lara had had to rebuild their life, with their new daughter Agnes, in a small hick town in New Jersey called Haddonfield. A friend in the force had helped him get a job there as a homicide detective.

He'd figured it would be an easy job. Haddonfield seemed like a harmless town, inhabited mostly by workers at the two Mecha factories north of the town, Cybertronics and Simulate City. There was a rough side of town full sleazy bars with neon lighting and no-tell hotels frequented by hookers of both makes, Orga and Mecha, but every city has its seedy elements.

He'd ended up eating his words a few days later. Every night seemed to bring another rumpus on Hackney Street in the heart of the rough section, often with someone getting killed or wounded. Many times, he'd go to examine a body someone had found in an alleyway only to find lubrication fluids spilled on the ground beneath it, wires and torn components protruding from a gash in the silicon-based dermis. Mecha destructions… they fell under property damages, but he sometimes wondered if they were better off considered homicides (Mechacides?). He'd seen a lot of cut-up Orga bodies in his day, before he went into Pre-Crime, but he could never get used to cut-up Mechas.

And if he wasn't called to the scene of a Mecha destruction, he was inspecting the scene of an assault by a malfunctioning Mecha.

He'd gotten to used to the high-tech equipment he'd used in D.C. Fingerprint scanning, DNA readings, heat-seeking Spyders—in Haddonfield, they were lucky if the ancient desktop computers back at the station worked properly. He almost had to relearn things he'd learned years ago at the academy. Stuyvesant, his supervisor, sneered at him the first day when he had a mental block on fingerprints, but Fletcher, Anderton's young partner, took little notice. He acted like it was some great honor to be the one spotting Anderton when his mind went up in the air. Anderton would have brushed this off as typical townie/rookie behavior, but Fletcher was a smart kid and a good partner with a sense of loyalty worthy of a Mecha. At first, he'd pested Anderton about Pre-Crime, what it all entailed, how it worked, what was it like arresting someone before they got a chance to strangle their wife or smother their kid. But after a few days, and after Anderton told him what had spawned Pre-Crime, Fletcher shut up about it. He'd seemed to think that Pre-Crime was a great thing, but he seemed to give up the idea, once Anderton told him about what it had done to the PreCogs…and what maximum security was like.

One night, a couple years after the Andertons had resettled in Haddonfield, Lara and he were getting ready to go out for the night to celebrate their wedding anniversary, when the phone rang.

"I hope that's not Krista canceling out," Lara called after him as he headed out into the hallway to answer it.

"Maybe she's just going to be late," Anderton called back as he picked up the handset.

"Anderton, there's been a murder," said Stuyvesant's gruff rumble on the other end.

"Where?"

"A woman at the Shangri-La Hotel on Hackney. And get there quick."

"I thought Ralston and Brickman were on tonight."

"So did I, but Ralston was a no-show and Brickman called in with a stomach bug. It's gonna be you and Fletcher."

"All right. I'll be over in ten minutes." Anderton hung up and went back to his and Lara's room.

"What's going on?" she asked, just wanting to know.

"There's been a killing at the Shangri-Las Hotel," he said, unbuttoning his dress shirt and reaching for the sleeveless black jersey he usually wore to work.

"But I thought someone else was on tonight."

"He didn't show up."

Lara nodded. She was used to it: she was a cop's daughter as well as a cop's wife. Most other women would have complained, but she knew better.

A crowd had gathered in front of the Shangri-La Hotel when Anderton and Fletcher drove up. They elbowed their way through the throng, into the lobby and upstairs to Room 102.

A reporter and a news photographer, a tall slim kid in his late twenties and a short guy in a Homburg and a too-big trench coat, had come in. Skinny Cub had started jotting notes, while Short Shutterbug was snapping shots of the room. Skinny Cub kept his eyes averted from the still female form on the bed, while Short Shutterbug ducked under the arm of one of the medical examiner's men to get right up to the bed.

"Who let the press in?" Anderton demanded to one of the crime scene investigators.

"They got here right about the same time we did," the CSI man said.

"Hey! Let the professionals have a look!" Fletcher cried.

Anderton put a hand on his shoulder. "That'll do." To the reporter he showed his badge and added, "Could you gentlemen step outside?"

Skinny Cub studied the badge for half a second. He stuffed his palm-sized datascriber into his coat pocket with the hurry of a schoolboy caught in a prank. "Oh, we're sorry," he said, utterly apologetic.

Shutterbug, whom Anderton had mentally renamed Weegee Wannabe, turned from the bed; still blocking Anderton's view, he turned the digital camera on him and snapped a shot. Anderton blinked, his left eye twinging at the flash, a souvenir of his escape from the long arm of Pre-Crime and his extreme efforts to avoid the Eyedentiscans.

"Oppression of the press, eh?" Weegee Wannabe drawled.

Skinny Cub tugged on Weegee Wannabe's shoulder. "C'mon, Hal, that'll do. We got enough to start." They went out.

On the bed, face down across the garish orange sheets, the spread pulled up over her back, lay a young woman in her twenties, dark brown hair, violet eyes, a classically beautiful face except for the blood congealed on her right temple. The ME's pulled back the covers. The girl was naked except for a pair of black lace panties and a strapless black halter-top.

They turned her over. Some of the blood had pooled on the faux satin sheets, but not much. Her throat had been cut, not at the veins, but lower, over the windpipe. A wound gaped in her chest, over her heart.

"Do we know who she is?" Anderton asked.

"We found her purse in the bathroom with the rest of her clothes. Driver's license says she's Samantha Bevins. The desk clerk ID'ed her as well, says she's a regular here," one of the CSI men said.

"Guess she won't be checkin' in here no more," Fletcher said.

"Any sign of the murder weapon?"

"Not yet. We're guessing from the size and shape of the wounds it may have been a regular pocket knife."

"Is the clerk still here?" Anderton asked.

"Yeah, he works the graveyard shift, six p.m. to six a.m. He's downstairs."

Leaving the medical examiners to prepare the body of Ms. Bevins for transport, Anderton and Fletcher went downstairs.

They found the clerk sitting in the bar, steadying himself with a glass of water. A few barflies had gathered around him, offering their moral support, including a couple females whose figures were just too shapely and whose faces were too shiny to be flesh and blood. One, a brunette in a black catsuit, leaned against the low back of the clerk's stool.

"You work the desk here?" Anderton asked the man in the middle of the group.

"Yeah, name's Williamson, Jared Williamson," the clerk replied in a slightly nasal voice. "But everyone just calls me Williamson." Slim, non-descript middle-sized guy in his early fifties, thinning gray-brown hair cropped back, faded blue eyes with the deep lines of a night worker under them which gave his face a calm, meditative expression despite the shock that had stripped it of emotion.

"I'm Detective John Anderton, this is my partner Carton Fletcher," he replied, showing his badge. Fletcher fumbled his wallet out of his pocket. "Can you tell us anything about what happened to Ms. Bevins?"

"She came in around six p.m., meetin' up with her boyfriend."

"This boyfriend got a name? Number?" Fletcher asked.

The clerk's face betrayed a faint smile tinged with humor. "I'm not sure of his number, bur everyone knows his name. They call him Gigolo Joe, or just Joe for short."

"Joe what?" Anderton asked.

"Doesn't have a last name… He's a lover-Mecha. She meets up with him every week or so. They were set to meet at their usual time, 'round seven, but she got here early as usual to spruce up for him without her old man getting wise, she said. Next thing I know after she headed upstairs, this old creep shows up, demanding to know if a Ms. Samantha Bevins had checked in. I told him I wasn't in the habit of giving out information on our guests, and I wasn't about to start. He showed me his ID, told me he was Frazier Bevins, Samantha's father. I told him even if he was the President of the United States, I wasn't giving out that info. He started to get pushy, so I told him if he didn't lay off, I was gonna call security to show him to the door. So he went out by his own manpower. I run a tight ship in some ways, keep the reins loose in others." He glanced around. "Y' know what they say: 'No-tell hotel'."

"Did you see anyone after that?" Anderton asked.

"I didn't see Bevins again. Nobody else came looking for Sam except Joe. He came by just before seven, regular as clockwork. You could set your watch by him. I gave him the key; told him to be careful after he left and open his collar, show his license. Flesh Fair's in Barn Creek as you may know, so I didn't want the Hounds pickin' him up. I worry about the guy: he's so vulnerable. He ast me to put a D.N.D. on the door of room 102, where she was waitin' up for him. I go up there every half hour, check the rooms." He paused, drawing a breath. "That's how I found her."

"Did you see Joe leave?"

"Yeah. He left 'bout five minutes after he got here. I figured they'd had a quarrel or something, or she'd changed her mind and kicked him out. Women have been known to do that. He come by the desk, dropped the key off, then he went out. I'd say he looked like he saw a ghost, but even if he had, it wouldn't faze 'm."

"Did you hear anything like a struggle upstairs?"

Williamson's shocked deadpan cracked a grin. "Oh, I hear a lot of struggles up there, but not the kind you mean. I might have heard something, but it was hard to place. Y' hear a lot of yelling in a place like this, and when you've worked it as long as I have, it tends to run together." He glanced at the shapely brunette Mecha at his back. "They do that to you."

"It's just what we do," she said, stroking Williamson's shoulder. He moved out from under her touch.

"You sure you didn't see anything else?" Fletcher asked.

"I'm sure," Williamson said. "You fellas do yer best, find the jerk who did this. I'll tell one thing: Joe didn't do it, he's too gentle for that."

"He could have been malfunctioning," Anderton said.

Williamson shook his head. "I'd have noticed something wrong with the boy. I've known him since he showed up here two years ago."

"One last question: Is there a back entrance?"

"The only other door down here is through the kitchen, but you gotta get by the front desk to get to it. But there's a fire escape exit upstairs."

"Thanks," Anderton said, shaking Williamson's hand.

"Sam had a hard life, and Joe was one of the first guys who ever treated her right. If I didn't know better, I'd say he cared about her. You make sure you find the right guy."

"We'll do our best," Anderton said.

In the lobby, Anderton passed on a word to one of the crime scene investigators. "Make sure you dust the fire escape for prints. The killer may have ducked out that way."

"Times like this, I bet you wish you were still in Pre-Crime," Fletcher said as they headed out.

"No," Anderton said, shaking his head. "Nothing could make me go back to that."

"Not even if someone restarted it with the right intentions and the right means?"

"You know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions," Anderton said sagely.

"Sorry," Fletcher said. "I forgot you spent a month in hell."

"I spent a year in hell before that: Working Pre-Crime was hell, but I didn't know it." He didn't want to think about the month he'd spent in a maximum-security crypt for a crime he didn't commit.

Across the Atlantic, Agatha Lively sat crouched over her laptop, typing a message, her fingers trembling.

She drew in a long breath to relax herself. Then after a long moment, she hit the 'Send' button. Anderton would know what to do with these images in her head. Dr. Forrest, her guardian, had tried to give her a sedative to help calm her down, but Agatha had palmed the pill into her pocket. If she was going to rid herself of these images, she going to use more thorough means to send them away, once and for all.

To be continued….

Literary Easter Eggs:

Weegee—The professional name of perhaps the most famous tabloid photographer of all time, known otherwise as Arthur Fellig, who was infamous for his especially gritty photos of crime scenes in Manhattan in the 1930s.

"ast"—this is not a typo, I believe it's a New Jersey pronunciation of 'asked'.