The Eyes Have It

A Minority Report/"A.I." crossover

By "Matrix Refugee"

Author's Note:

I'm very delighted at how well this one is turning out so far, and at how well it's been received. I had a few misgivings about it from the first, but the more I work at it, the better it gets. Very special thanks goes to my friend Sapphire Rose, for her glowing comments on this: when I saw Minority Report I had the same exact sentiments regarding the time frames of the two films (for more details, read her comment on the "Reviews" page for this fic). Mild warning to "A.I." fans: Bevins shows up in this chapter, and he's nastier than he was in "You Killed Me First", another effort of mine in which he appears.

Disclaimer:

See the Prologue

Chapter II: Narrowed Eyes

"Bet you're wishing you had the benefits of Pre-Crime to fall back on," Stuyvesant needled Anderton next morning as Anderton checked his messages. "Then you'd be able to tell exactly who killed Samantha Bevins."

"It wasn't as easy as it sounds," Anderton replied. "We had a few misses, didn't arrive in time to stop the crime from being committed, not that I condone that system."

A message from an unfamiliar address showed in his inbox. Anderton almost deleted it, but the subject line caught his eye.

"Mr. Anderton, my visions have come back."

He opened it.

Mr. Anderton—

I know I am not allowed to contact you, but this is urgent. I have had another vision as strong as it was when I was part of Pre-Crime. A man will kill a young woman in a hotel room 102 and he will confront a young man as if to accuse him.

Perhaps this will be of use to you, or you can tell me what it means.

Agatha L.

Stuyvesant passed by his desk. "What's up, Anderton? Message from your girlfriend?"

"No, just a message from an old friend from Pre-Crime," Anderton replied, nonchalantly.

Stuyvesant moved on; Anderton hit the "reply" button.

Agatha:

Tell me more about this vision. Call me tonight at 8.

He added his phone number and sent it.

"Hey, stop wasting time sending messages to your girlfriend!" Stuyvesant said, coming back to the desk. "You and Fletcher gotta go uptown and pay your respects to Frazer Bevins."

"I'm on it," Anderton said, shutting down the e-mail program.

It somehow didn't surprise Anderton that Bevins lived in a house in a gated community in the north end of town, close to Camden, where most of the wealthier folk lived. They had to pass through a labyrinth of security first: retina scans, facial recognition, DNA sample, just to get in through the gate.

"And I thought my dad was just bluffing when he talked about this joint's security," Fletcher said, as they walked up the brick path to the door.

"You know this Bevins at all?" Anderton asked.

"No, not personally. My dad did some carpentry for him once. ONCE. He'd never work for this creep again, didn't pay up. He's that kind of a rich snob."

Fletcher pressed the button for the buzzer, beside the door, but Anderton knocked.

A chain rattled, a bolt shot back, a smart lock buzzed. Then the door opened.

A short, heavy-set man in his early fifties looked out, his pale yellow eyes narrowed at them. "If you're looking for donations for the CRF, you've come to the wrong place—again," he snapped.

"We're with the Haddonfield police," Anderton said, showing his badge while Fletcher dug in his pockets for his wallet. "I'm Detective John Anderton, and this is my partner, Carton Fletcher."

Bevins's dull eyes brightened. He stepped aside and pulled the door open to them. "I was hoping to hear from you soon. Did you catch that thing that killed my daughter?"

"No, we just wanted to ask you if you know anything about your daughter's relationship with the Mecha in question," Anderton said as they stepped inside.

Bevins pushed the door shut and led them into the front room, which was neat and punctiliously tidy. The couch spotless, the bookshelves lining the room carefully dusted. He turned to them with a thin smile. "I know more about her and that thing than I care to know. Samantha wasn't what you'd call a wild girl, or anything like that, not even when she was in high school. She was one of the prettiest girls in her class, but she avoided the boys. I figured she was saving herself for the ring, the way I wanted her to. I wish she'd paid more attention to the sterner sex of her own species, she might not have ended up like this. She was studying dance, had a scholarship to the New Manhattan School of Ballet. She'd be starting there this summer, if she hadn't gotten involved with that thing. I warned her about those machines of iniquity, but you know these young folk."

Anderton sauntered past the gas fireplace, studying the framed pictures on the mantelshelf: Samantha in various dance costumes: in a long blue tutu with five other girls in the same costume, in a black goth gown, peering around her arms crossed in front of her face; with two other girls, all of them in tight bodices and short, pouffy skirts the kind the dance hall girls in ancient Westerns wear, in a button-down shirt, vest and slacks, a gray fedora tilted over one ear. No pictures of the family,. Not even one of her mother.

"What makes you call them that?" Fletcher asked.

Bevins's eyes glittered. "Are you the sort of men who consort with creatures like that?" he asked.

"No, I'm happily married," Anderton said.

"Besides, we're asking the questions," Fletcher said, bantering.

"I call them that because I've followed the rise of the machines. The first droids built fifty years ago were mere clunkers that could barely fulfill the tasks a human could do more efficiently. But then they started building these mechanicals, these mechaniques. And they built them to do what: to replace us, first in the work place, now in our beds. I'd rather that I found Samantha rolling on the floor with the kid next door than with one of those!"

Anderton's seasoned ears filtered the words, seeking a reason for this tirade. "That's all interesting, but we'd rather that you stuck to the facts. Did you know how long she'd known this Mecha?"

Bevins cleared his throat and paced across the room, passing a bookcase. Anderton scanned the titles of the books as Bevins spoke. "She finished high school about a year ago and she was working at a video store in town. She started going out a lot, at night, said she was going to the library or shopping." He turned and smiled sourly. "That wasn't the only place she went. She used to end up on that street a lot, in one of those dives I'd warned her about. I went in once, about five months ago, found her in bed with one of those things, probably the same one that killed her. I dragged her home then; she gave me a million excuses, that she and that thing were just friends."

"Did you follow her again?" Anderton asked. He made a mental note of the titles of the books on the shelves: Seven to One: A Reductionist's Resource Guide; Machines on the Rise and what looked like bound volumes of The Fleshly Clarion, the official magazine of the ARM.

"Of course I followed her again," Bevins said. "So would any concerned father. You have a child, Anderton?"

"I have a three year old daughter," he said.

"I got a half sister two years younger 'n me, but I know better than to hang over her and her friends," Fletcher said.

Bevins ignored Fletcher. "Then you understand my concerns."

"Did you follow her last night?" Anderton asked.

Bevins paused, then nodded. "I did. And it's good that I did. I followed her up to the Shangri-La. I'd found a date in her planner. I got delayed by my work—I was in plastics but I'm semi-retired now, I'm in advertising—I had a batch of copy to finish. But I headed out just after seven." He drew in a long breath. "But I got there too late. I asked the clerk if he could tell me what room she was in. He wouldn't say, so I went looking for myself once the clerk turned his back." he paused again, passing the tip of his tongue over his lips, but Anderton thought he saw something affected in the gesture. "I went upstairs…and this Mecha passed by me in the hallway: blond hair, blue eyes, they'd made it to look like a twenty year old man…and I could see red splotches on the cuffs of its sleeves. I kept to the shadows so it wouldn't take notice of me. It walked right by me.

"I noticed a door was ajar in the hallway, so I pushed it open." He drew in a long breath and blotted his eyes on the back of his hand. "That's where I found her…She was already gone."

"Did you call the police?" Fletcher said.

Bevins shook his head. "I was too stunned. I couldn't think straight. Her mother died when she was twelve, so losing her…I lost what's left of my family…If you've ever had a loved one…die so suddenly—and especially so senselessly…you know the pain."

Anderton nodded. "I hear you, Mr. Bevins. I lost my son when he was five. He was kidnapped and killed. He'd be going on twelve now. Busted me up terribly: my wife and I separated for almost two years."

"Then you know exactly how it feels," Bevins said.

"Yeah."

Bevins smiled thinly. "Good, I'm glad a man like you is on the case—you're better equipped to handle it properly."

"We're doing what we can to solve it," Anderton said.

"Do what you have to, but be very careful around that Mecha if you catch it: it's dangerous," Bevins warned.

"I've been in homicide for fifteen years: I know the drill," Anderton said.

"I bet you do," Bevins said. "But remember, this is not an ordinary human you're dealing with: this thing is tireless. Doesn't have to rest, doesn't have to eat, so chasing it down could be impossible."

"Even machines can be stopped," Anderton said.

"Only another machine could probably stop it," Bevins said. "But if they came up with a machine that could do that kind of work, they'd use it for other police work, and you'd find yourself out of a job."

"That ain't gonna happen," Fletcher scoffed, his hands gathered slightly.

"One last question: where did you go last night after you found your daughter's body?" Anderton asked.

"I came home…cried myself to sleep on the couch. You'd do the same if your daughter was killed…by one of those," Bevins wiped his eyes on his sleeve. Anderton didn't see any moisture there: either a blocked duct or he was faking it.

"We'll be in touch," Anderton said. "You must be in a lot of pain; perhaps we should leave."

"I've got a lot of things to do, people to call," Bevins said. "But talking about it has helped. Thanks for stopping by."

Fletcher glared sideways at Anderton, but he ignored his partner's dirty look. "We're doing everything we can to help you get some closure to this," Anderton said.

Once they were back in the car, Fletcher glowered at Anderton. "That guy was lying and you know it."

"We haven't any evidence that he isn't," Anderton said. "We weren't questioning him yet: we were just testing the waters."

"You knew?"

Anderton wagged his head. "Little cues, body language. Not enough to establish him as the perpetrator, but enough to start unraveling his alibi." He looked at the other houses nearby. "Let's see if the neighbors know anything about Bevins's whereabouts last night."

The only person they found at home was Mrs. Pineau, an elderly woman and her young male companion Mecha in the unit next to Bevins's.

"So did Bevins come home at all last night?" Fletcher asked her.

"No, not till late. Reginald said he heard Bevins come in about one in the morning, but I was asleep. I didn't see his girl come out this morning, so I got worried. Then I heard about her death on the news." She eyed Fletcher. "Too bad she died, she'd be a good girl for you and she'd get away from her old man."

"Why, were they having trouble?" Anderton asked, turning from the window. The way the unit was angled on the lot, there was no way anyone in Bevins's unit could go out without Mrs. Pineau and her companion seeing or hearing something.

"Trouble?" she laughed humorlessly. "Those two were at it every night. Sometimes it sounded like he was stabbing her, what with the screams. I sent Reginald out one night to complain to the superintendent. He told me the superintendent told him Bevins was chasing out a burglar that had broken into Samantha's room."

"This gets interesting," Anderton said, as he and Fletcher drove back to the station.

"Yeah, starting to sound fishy if you ask me," Fletcher said. He glanced out the window, then looked at Anderton. "Think those Pre-Cogs would know what the heck this is all about?"

Agatha's e-mail flashed before Anderton's eyes. "Fletch, you don't want to go there."

"I take that as a yes."

"You don't know what that entails."

At the station, they had a message from the CS unit: they'd lifted a few prints from the door latch of the fire escape, but they didn't match anything in the system.

"Mechas got fingerprints, yes or no?" Anderton asked Stuyvesant.

The older man snorted, which turned into a raucous laugh. "You never had Mecha then. Weren't you divorced?"

"Separated: I kept celibate; I was trying to find my son."

"Well, then, no, they don't."

"So it could have been the Mecha," Fletcher said.

"Well, does, anyone know where this Joe is now?" Stuyvesant asked. "Have you talked with it?"

"No," Anderton replied.

Zhulianova from dispatch came in with a report which she tossed onto a desk. "I heard that: Blue Diamond Escort Service just filed a missing Mecha report; they'd also like to know where's Joe."

"Can you ask them to pull any phone records on him? Pager messages? Anything?" Anderton asked Berube, their technical wizard.

"I'm on it," he said, reaching for a phone.

An hour later, Berube had the records on Joe's pager: he'd had several calls since his disappearance, but apparently he'd switched off his pager, and there had been a call for him from a public phone near Jack's Hotel, up Hackney Street, a couple blocks from the Shangri-La, just an hour and a half before Samantha Bevins had been found.

"Back to square one," Anderton said.

"Simple enough: She called to double check he was coming, but she didn't know her date had a bug in his brain," Stuyvesant said.

"We can't say that for certain, we haven't established time of death," Anderton said. "And we don't know if he was malfunctioning either."

"We might know soon," Berube said. "They're sending over his file: see if they recorded any malfunctions.

And he'll probably be clean, Anderton thought. Even Mechas got alibis.

Anderton kept an ear cocked, listening for the phone that evening, but it never rang. He was going to tell Lara about Agatha's message, but he decided it would be better to tell her after Agatha had actually called him.

The phone rang at 4 a.m., waking him out of a sound sleep. Wide awake, he jumped out of bed and ran for the phone.

"Hello?"

A long pause, heavy breathing. "Is this line safe?"

"Agatha?"

"Are you…Anderton?"

"Yes, it's me. Is something wrong?"

Another long silence. "I cannot tell you here. The lines might not be safe. Can you get me to the States?"

He knew he'd be violating a number of restrictions, but if it was that important…"Sure. I'll email you the details."

"Thank you. I know you can help."

"Help? Help you do what--?" the line cut out before he could ask another question.

He hung up the phone and went to the computer to start searching for the cheapest flights from Kilarney to Camden.

To be continued…