Lacey came out of his reverie. He looked at his neighbor, then at the clock across the circular room. 15:40. For the past three nights he had caught cat naps at his desk as leads branched and twined and he wanted thirty hours a day to study scanner images. “Might, yeah,” he agreed. There were five hundred desks and investigators on Level 17 of the State Building. Lacey knew and cared as little about Billings as he did about any other of his co-workers.
Billings was straightening the pleats of his collar. “I put in for two hours in the target range,” he confided to Lacey’s disinterest, “but really I got a date. Love-ly girl, lives in the section next to ours. We’re going to a time house and buy an hour of privacy. It’ll cost a bundle, but it’s worth it to keep my wife from learning.”
Before Lacey could make his noncommittal reply, the light on Billing’s desk blinked orange and the blond man stiffened as information came through his mastoid implant. He swore with frustrated bitterness, punching his left palm with his other hand. “She’ll never believe this,” he said. “They’ve cancelled my range time and given me an accidental death to check out. An accident!”
“Maybe the computer’s a secret puritan,” Lacey said, more of a smile on his mouth than in his eyes.
“I always get the leftovers,” Billings whined. “You think they’d give me a murder where I could get a little recognition? Hell no! But let some clod touch a hot wire and fry, they drop it in my lap and expect me to work every bleeding hour till I prove it’s an accident. And you can’t prove something didn’t happen!” Billings thudded his hands together again. “That tight-assed bitch Sutter’s had her thumb on me ever since I offered to give her the time back when I was first on the unit. She won’t let the Net give me any decent assignments!”
Billings face suddenly smoothed and he looked at the close-coupled man still listening with bare politeness. “Look, Jed”—Lacey had never called Billings by his first name, did not even remember it—”look, for me this damn thing’ll take forever, checking out the number of times each electrician burped for the past year before the Net’ll take a negative report from me. But if you took the call, hell, you know how they’ll pass just about anything on your say-so. You do five minutes’ scan and report ‘no crime,’ they’ll clear it, and we both get the afternoon off.”
The younger agent saw and misinterpreted the chill in Lacey’s eyes. “Ah, say . . . Marie’s got, I mean, she’s got friends and . . . I think maybe we could—”
“I’ll pass on that,” Lacey said very softly. The scar on his neck stood out in relief against the veins pulsing there. He caressed it with his stubby, gentle fingers. “But I’ll take the call, yeah. I didn’t have much on for the afternoon.”
“You’re a champ, Jed,” Billings said, squeezing Lacey’s biceps and then striding quickly toward the stairway. He was toying with his collar ruff again, a beefy man who would always be alloted bottom-priority calls and would never understand why.
Lacey sighed and pulled his scanner helmet back down to cover his head like a fat, black artillery shell. Quirking his left ring finger to activate his implanted link with the Crime Service Net, Lacey said, “You just routed a call to station four-three-seven. Transfer it to me and give me a current scan.”
“Accepted,” said the computer voice from Lacey’s mastoid, and the Net tapped his helmet into the output of one of the cameras on Level 15 of the Coeltrans Building. The screen showed emergency technicians who were laying a body on their medicomp, a dull-finished unit that looked like a coffin on casters. God knew why the men bothered, because the charred corpse was clearly beyond repair by any human means. There would be little enough of the victim to send to the Reclamation Depot after Lacey had cleared it for processing.
The rest of the level was normal enough, eccentrically furnished but in the fashion that executive levels of powerful corporations could be expected to be eccentric. Part of the work force was still at its desks, following routine as though that would deny the ghastly incident in the center of the room. The remainder were divided between those elbowing for a closer look at the body and those forcing toward the staircase, waiting to be passed by the bored Red Team securing the death site. No one sat at the broad mahogany desk which stood like an island in a green sea of carefully-tended plants.