A Fraudulent Death, Draft 02, CH 11 (Patreon)

Marlot stared at the screen.

This made no sense.

No Result

How could providing a name to Stalker 1.0 return a no result response? How could there be no one named Hardir Mixcoat within the revenue database? He couldn’t get details without putting his Registered Investigator ID in, but everyone was still listed by name and city of residence.

Stalker 1.0 was limited to this city, so his body might have been a visitor, someone here for work, or a tourist. Although the way he was dressed made either doubtful. Money was needed to travel, and the baker had mentioned he been over regularly. That implied he lived in the area. Even getting an apartment caused a transfer of residency, so he should show up in the search 1.0 did.

He called up the search based solely on the description, and the result was large. Brindled wolves with a coloring close to his body, and overall description were more common than he’d imagine. Asking for those whose tax had been claimed removed all but six. Adding those without activity over the twenty-four hours before the body had been found added eleven. None of whom match his body.

He placed a call when another idea occurred to him.

“Hello, Wolf,” Bahamel answered. “What trouble do I need to extricate you from this time?”

“I haven’t—”

“Yes?” she asked, sounding amused.

“I don’t get in that much trouble.”

“And yet it does seem to be the only times I hear from you.”

Marlot sighed. “I’m trying to arrange more social time, but life…” Life hadn’t been kind to him lately. Hopefully, it would straighten as soon as this nonsense with Trembor’s legal problems were resolved.

“How can I help you?”

“Do you have any cases of identity theft going on?”

“Are you kidding? There hasn’t been one of those in over a decade.” She typed. “Twelve years ago. They upgraded the Revenue Bureau security and plugged all the holes that had been used, or something like that. All I know is that there hasn’t been one since. Why do you ask?”

“I have a body and the name I got for it isn’t coming up. I thought it might have been stolen.”

“Wouldn’t the name still be in the database if that was the case?”

Marlot groaned. “Right. Sorry, grasping at scents. He probably gave the baker a fake name.”

“That’s what people tend to do when they want to hide who they are.”

“Thanks for not laughing at me.”

“You’re welcome, Wolf. Come for dinner at some point and we’ll consider ourselves even.”

He and Trembor had been supposed to have dinner with Bahamel and her family before life got in the way. “I will, I promise.” He ended the call and looked at the screen.

Giving a false name only worked if someone didn’t use their ID to pay, which the bakery didn’t require. A lot of lower productivity neighborhoods used physical money since at that point getting money the legal way became ever so harder. A false name was the same as no name, and Marlot didn’t relish the idea of going back to nothing.

Could there be an error in the ID? He didn’t know of any errors surviving the quality check processes, with more after the fact, starting with every kiosk requiring the owner to confirm the information was accurate. Still, he knew how inattentive people could be, especially when the process happened every time and was annoying. Marlot couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually read what the kiosk asked him to confirm.

He should pay more attention again.

He quickly programmed a letter flipping algorithm and set it running.

1.0 crashed.

With a sigh, Marlot wrote a cleaner version of the program and ran it. It returned thousands of meaningless results. He added a filter to limit it to wolves and received three names. A Hadrir, an Ahrdid, and a Hardri, all males, and the second a brindled wolf, but he was too tall, and productive and alive, and hadn’t put in any complaints about a lost ID, which would be a way to steal an identity.

Was it worth doing the same with the last name? First names had variability to them, but families had used descriptives for as long as there had been families. Names had started sounding odd with the borders open to other countries, as names in their language were mixing in, but how likely was it they’d be one letter off? He’d have to write a program that would look at every permutation to get anything. And at that point, ignoring that 1.0 would never survive that, he had his nose in a lake expecting to smell something.

He marked it as something to do if nothing else worked.

He logged into the revenue database, using his ID, and did the searches 1.0 couldn’t. He requested the city lupine population as the last census. Nearly half-million. In a population of eighteen million, that seemed high to him. Brindled wolves brought it down to a hundred thousand. Male, just under fifty thousand, starting with the letter H, a thousand three hundred and four results. HA.

Hardir Mixcoat came up, eighth name in a list short enough the database showed them without him asking. Thirty-nine names. He frowned. While his search had been more complex than what Stalker 1.0 did, the name was exactly what it had searched for. How had it not come up with it? Was something else out of parameters?

He lived in this city, right height, and weight range, then saw the male had lived in the city. The tax had been paid six years ago. Deadman walking.

He would be funny, if this wasn’t the body he was investigating.

He messaged Trembor to see how things were going for him and received a generic I’m busy message. So still with his lawyer. Was it a good or bad thing the meeting was going on for so long?

He let his head fall back and looked at the ceiling, noting the imperfection in the paint. Had that always been there?

He had nothing. He couldn’t recall a case where he’d started with no usable data. No match with the DNA or dental records. And the only match in the bureau database had been paid six years ago.

Marlot straightened.

Paid, but was he dead? Could the database misclassify an ID? What if it hadn’t deactivated the ID when the tax was processed? He searched for any reports about it, but found nothing and decided to look at the code himself. It would tell him more than any research paper ever could, anyway.

He was halfway through the Revenue firewall when he paused, Trembor’s words coming back to him.

“A lot of criminals start with good intentions.” The lion had said. Marlot didn’t remember how the conversations had started, but he suspected it had been about how he disregarded the law because he did what he did to help people. “But then they have to consider what will happen when they get caught, so they have to cover up what they did, breaking more laws in the process, and they have to cover that, and soon they can’t do it alone so they contact other criminals, and now they break laws to pay them and the cycle just keeps getting worse.”

He wouldn’t get caught, Marlot thought. He’d probably told the lion the exact same thing, but in a more dismissive tone. He wouldn’t get caught. But what he was doing played directly in what he always did when frustrated. He ignored everything else but getting what he was after.

He wouldn’t get caught.

But he could be better.

He wanted to be better for his lion.

He backed out of the firewall, erasing all traces of his presence.

He accessed the revenue department site and looked through the IT department for anyone he knew. He didn’t know any of them. Unlike Trembor, he didn’t go looking to make friends. Those he had, the other tech-heads, like his lion enjoyed teasing him. Marlot had met through one of them getting in his way, but not being a problem, showing equal or superior skills. He’d never even considered calling up some programmer and just talking.

He called the IT queue and waited.

“Larmor, IT,” a female answered.

“RI Marlot Blackclaw, I have a question about the database.”

“ID number, please.” She sounded like an automaton performing the same function over and over. Marlot gave it. “What’s your question, RI Blackclaw?” now she sounded more like a person.

“Where can I find the status of an ID card on someone whose tax has been paid?”

“There isn’t a status on deactivated cards,” she replied, gaining more life.

“That’s my question. How do I confirm the card’s been deactivated?”

“The ID comes back as dead,” she answered, now doing some typing. “It’s an automated program,” she paused and mumbled something. Reading, he decided. “When the tax’s paid, the ID is marked as suspended.” More reading. “Once the physical ID is logged at the processing center, then it’s moved to the dead files.”

“Can I access that?”

“Let me check.” More typing. “I’m sorry, the system isn’t accessible from the outside.”

“But you can access it?”

“Yes.”

“Good, then how about I give you the name and you confirm it for me?”

“Sure, what’s the name, oh and when was the tax paid? I’m going to have to limit the search if I want anything returned.”

“It was paid six years ago, the name is Hardir Mixcoat.”

The typing stopped. “Sir, are you serious?”

“Yes, is some wrong?”

“Do you have any idea how many dead IDs are processed each year?”

Marlot shrugged and did quick calculations. “With a population of eighteen million and a death rate of around ten percent, it would be close to two million.”

“How do you get a population of eighteen million,” she asked, sounding amused.

“It’s the city’s population as of the last census, I just happened to look it up.”

She chuckled. “Sir, you do realize that we process the entire country, not just your city. You need to add a few zeros at the end of that number, and that’s for one year. If we tried to maintain a database going back even six years, there wouldn’t be any power left for the population.”

Marlot almost told her she was wrong. It was just information, after all. She sounded young; the government had all the money so it could power anything it wanted. But he knew how hot his old computer ran when he tried to get Stalker 2.0 working. It was all data, but the servers on which it was stored needed to be powered, to be cooled.

“How long are the IDs kept for?” he asked, trying not to let his dread sound. More typing, during which it only increased.

“Two years for any cards coming through the kiosks. Five for any cards that didn’t get a confirmation receipt, but show no activity, I think those are sent to the investigative division if there’s activity. IDs for bodies being investigated are kept so long as the body is under investigation. Once the investigation is closed, the ID is removed if it falls within the other parameters.”

“So, if there had been a glitch six years ago, it could be possible for it to slip through the wind and now no one would know?”

“I suppose it could,” she said, “but even six years ago, it would have to have been a pretty big glitch for an ID to slip thought, I’d think that would have been logged, even if the ID itself hadn’t been noticed. There are a lot of systems and checks in place to keep that from happening.”

“But it’s all computerized,” Marlot said. “Speaking as someone with experience programming, I know it can happen.”

“You’re right, it can. I just don’t think it’s likely.”

“Not likely doesn’t hold quite the same meaning when it’s over billions of IDs every year.”

“I… I see what you mean.”

“Thank you for your assistance, Larnor.” He hesitated, “Do you happen to be based out of Orventon?”

She chuckled. “No.”

“Of course, Sorry.” He disconnected. He did not know how Trembor did it.

So even if this was a case of the ID still being active, he couldn’t know for sure. He looked at the rest of the information. That Hardir Mixcoat had had a family, a mate, and three cubs. He called up the public information, Omatia Mixcoat. Had she kept the last name? Or had he taken hers? If it was his, was it a sign he was still in her life? Or just that he had meant so much to her she hadn’t wanted to lose the name?

He smiled as he thought about taking Trembor’s name, being Marlot Goldenmane. It was more appealing this time. Maybe having to fight to get his lion back, understanding him better was why. It wasn’t like Marlot would lose much by abandoning the Blackclaw name. The name didn’t extend beyond Low Valley, and it had so many bad memories attached to it along with good ones.

He entered her number in his pad and almost called. He needed to know if Hardir was still alive, at least as of a few days ago. But if he was dead. If she’d kept his name as a show of her love for him. What would it do to her to be reminded he was no longer there?

That death was common didn’t mean it stopped hurting.

He brought up her address. This is something he should do in person. If it was going to be painful, he owed it to her to be there so she could direct her anger somewhere.

He hesitated. He remembered a young jackal who’d love the female who had carried his cub when she was killed. How he’d rushed along to tell him, thinking it would help and never once considering the damage the information would cause the young male.

Another time he’d put what he wanted before other people’s feelings. The more he looked at his past behavior, the more he saw this pattern extended beyond Trembor, although often he’d trampled both Trembor and the other person’s feeling when he’d ignore his lion trying to caution him.

Was this what he was doing again? No, of course not, he was thinking about his actions, he was considering what could happen.

Hadn’t he felt the same each time Trembor cautioned him?

He called his lion, wanting to know what he thought, and he would listen this time. But all he received was the generic message. Without his lion to guide him, Marlot had to decide without help.

Maybe it was for the best. He had to learn to trust himself, and that meant making mistakes. He pocketed his pad and stood. He would be careful. He’d keep his nose to the wind and not push. He’d stop the instant she seemed distraught.

His need for information couldn’t outweigh someone else’s feelings.

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