When, three days following their first meeting another of Alice Smith’s microchipped belongings set off an alert, this one on the resort island of Tiare, in New Tahiti, Russell and Philips took an emergency transport to the AT. Within seven hours of the alert the two and their combined response team was stepping off the inter–AT transport that moved between Tiare and the mainland. Sheriff Philips had never been to New Tahiti before, nor has she been since, and recalls with perfect clarity the island’s strange atmosphere. “It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen,” she recalls, “warm and sunny and incredibly green. The ocean was so clear you could see the fish swimming in it. But a quarter of the hotels were closed◦– these huge, beautiful buildings just shut-up walls and chains and barbed wire. All that potential just dying on the vine.”
Russell and Philips traced Griffith to a small apartment on the outskirts of Tiare. Images of his companion, clearly the same woman with whom he’d travelled to the AT the night of the Keck murders, was identified as Sloane Deeds, only suspect in the stabbing death three years earlier of a man named Brackett Jones, a store–owner in a small town on the slopes of the Maxwell Montes.
Russell and Philips tracked the pair down and observed them for two days before making their move. Griffth Sinkman, they learned during those forty–eight hours, was restless, getting up early to wander about the resort–town and spending the better part of every day away from his partner. Sloane Deeds, however, seemed more or less content to spend her days sunbathing on the beach.
They arrested Deeds first, approaching her as she lay napping on a red towel. A team of twelve armed officers surrounded the sleeping woman, Philips taking lead. When Philips said Deeds’ name, the young woman sat up, observed the twelve officers with their guns trained on her, and said “well, okay then.” She gathered up her things and went without a struggle.
Griffith Sinkman proved more problematic to arrest. Russell and his team descended on Sinkman as he was leaving a small diner; Sinkman ran. It took three shots to bring him down; none fatal. He was transported to a local hospital where his condition was stabilized. In the days before Sinkman was well enough to be transported back to the IT, Philips and Russell went through the couple’s meager belongings: some clothing, a piece of jewelry identified as belonging to Jen Keck, and seventeen dollars in cash. A response team sent to the Sinkman family motel outside Eos discovered the charred remains of more clothing, tentatively identified as belonging to Alice and Farouk Smith.
The two were tried separately. Griffith Sinkman pled not guilty by reason of insanity, the prosecution now faced with proving beyond a reasonable doubt not only that he committed the crimes, but that he did so with a full and complete understanding of the difference between right and wrong, an ancient but still robust legal definition of sanity. Sloane Deeds pled guilty to four counts of murder in the first degree. When informed that she would be eligible for the death penalty even if she gave a full confession and implicated Sinkman in her crimes, Deeds shrugged. Although she had given complete and entirely useable evidence of both Sinkman’s sanity and his guilt during her own arraignment, the prosecution at Sinkman’s trial put her on the stand to give her testimony in person, believing that having her describe the murders in front of a jury would be more powerful than merely reading aloud her confession for the record.
The entirety of her testimony was recorded and broadcast in near–delaycast to an audience of four billion.
“It started in 2016, I guess,” she begins. Her voice is flat, steady. “I had just come off the mountain, and was trying to get to Helios. I only had a few bucks, but I figured men are men anywhere, so I could get there somehow.
“I was standing by the side of the road when this car pulls up, and he◦– Griffith◦– is behind the wheel. He asked me if I wanted a ride, so I said sure, and where he was going, and he said wherever I was going. So that’s how me and him hooked up.
“We palled around for three years, more or less. We didn’t ever have any steady jobs, but we’d get part–time work here and there, and case joints to steal stuff. We moved around the IT a lot. Every time somewhere got a little hot for us, after we’d been there a while, we’d pack up and move on. We changed cars a lot; we’d steal a car then switch out plates, then switch them out again. It’s easy if you know how to jack the plate operating systems, which Griff did, and he showed me, so we did it all the time. I guess he learned up in Garden City.
“Griff liked the IT a lot, because it’s so big and empty and we could just move and move, but sometimes we were living on nothing at all, and I was getting tired of it. Every time he talked about the AT, about all the casinos and stuff, I’d be like ‘I want to try it there.’ I never been off the IT before, and the planum’s about as boring as the Max mountains. I wanted to see a real city, and go someplace fun, but Griff was always like ‘it sucks just as much there as here, and they’re all big fakes, and it sucks even more if you don’t have any money, and here it’s easier not to have money’ so we never went.
“And then finally I got real tired of it, and all his crap about how we were ‘realer people’ than everyone else, like being poor was this noble thing, and I told him I was going to go no matter what, and he could come or not. He was like ‘I’ve been poor my whole life!’ but he’s full of crap. I’ve seen where he lived, and he went to college, too. We had a big old bust–up about it and then a couple days later he said he was sorry and I was right, it was time to leave the IT, and explained that when he was down at Garden City he met a guy who had been a worker out on the farms all over the IT. He said how people there don’t believe in banks so they keep their money in the house in cash, and it was a real cinch to just knock over a house and make off with all the money, and it was pretty untraceable and everything. So this guy in Garden City had worked out in this town in the middle of nowhere, but everyone was super well–off, and in particular there was this old guy who was super, super rich and kept all his money in a safe in his office at home.
“So Griff said we should go knock over this old guy. He◦– Griff, I mean◦– knew all about the old guy, because he’d made the Garden City guy tell him everything, like where exactly the house was and how to get there. And we went to the library and learned all about the town, Hartmann, and studied maps so that we knew how to get there and back again, all the different ways. And he got a job in a salon in Helios so that he could collect random hair DNA so we could confuse the crime scene. He collected it over a long time, because we planned carefully and took our time to make sure we got everything right. We stole dampers from all over, a few from Helios and one from somewhere else, even, and rigged them up to work together so the old guy couldn’t call anyone while we were robbing him
“And we set up an alibi, too. There are some homeless guys who sleep outside the [Helios] city hall and Griff started sleeping there at night, ‘cause there’s a camera that watches them and they all sleep huddled up, and he got good at joining them and then slipping away so you couldn’t see he wasn’t there anymore. I used to watch him to make sure he was doing it right. And I went into one of those all–night moviedromes, but it was one with a broken window, so I’d be recorded going in but I could sneak in and out without anyone seeing.
“So we decided on a night. It wasn’t supposed to be that night [Thursday the eighth], because Griff wanted to do it on a Friday thinking no one would notice anything if the old guy didn’t show up anywhere over a weekend, but the night we picked out to do it we got into an argument and so we didn’t go. Then when we made up Griff was like ‘we got to do it now, I’m tired of this place’ so we just left. That was that Thursday, I guess.