“Working, Jed—got your example to follow, you know.” Sutter’s station was on the fourth level, not the seventeenth. “Had a citizen complaint about you, as a matter of fact, and I was asked to take care of the problem. Asked from pretty high up.”
Her face was bland. Lacey frowned in genuine surprise and asked, “Since when do the high-ups care what citizens think, for god’s sake?”
“When the citizen looks a good bet to develop a matter transmitter in the next couple years, they manage to get interested.”
Lacey slid down into his chair. “Umm. Sure. Wilhoit wasn’t around, but he probably had access to scanner inputs from his own building, huh? Not really supposed to, but. . . . And I don’t guess he liked what he saw, either.” The squat man chuckled. “That’s real freedom of information, isn’t it? A murderer using a scanner to track the cops?”
Sutter took a sip of her drink. “The Net says it’s an accidental death. Ninety-nine plus probability.”
“Going to pull me off it, then?”
“Not if you say it’s murder.”
Lacey felt his muscles loosen. He had not realized until then how tense he had been. “That’s good,” he said, running a hand across his forehead. “I was going to nail him anyway. Though I guess you knew that already.”
“You do your job, Lacey, and leave me to mine,” Sutter replied. The smile left her face and she leaned forward, careful not to touch the agent or even threaten to. “But be careful, Jed. You can’t push Wilhoit the way you did Ashby. Even with your past record and everything I can do for you, it’ll be your ass if you go one step beyond the law with somebody with Wilhoit’s clout.”
She leaned back and grinned again. “But just between us and the data banks, that was a lovely bluff you ran on Ashby. Pretending the Psycomp had scrambled your brains and you were going to tear him open unless he talked.”
“Bluff?” Lacey repeated. “Oh. Well, he was going to talk. He was the kind who would.”
Sutter reached out a hand to brush the air inches short of Lacey’s arm, a caress in intent but not in execution. Ever since the Psycomp had gotten through with him, physical contact with a woman threw Lacey into vomiting and convulsions. Sutter knew that and knew why, as she knew everything necessary to the well-being of her agents. It did not keep her from caring. “You’re not going to lose control of yourself, Jed,” she said. “Not over Ashby. Or anybody.”
She stood and walked away.
Lacey was humming to himself very softly as he pulled down his scanner helmet and began running data on the victim. Silvers had spent four nondescript years driving Coeltrans delivery trucks before being picked as Wilhoit’s personal chauffeur after the suicide of the previous driver. The data bank showed no reluctance to release information on the boy. Unlike the electronics magnate, Silvers was one more out of billions and his file was open to anyone with access to the computer. There was not even need to show cause.
But the life stats were as uninteresting as they were open. So, with a careful precision that combined years of practice with a knack beyond any experience, Lacey began to dig into the scanner records which stored Silvers’ whole life.
“Death site minus 30 seconds,” he ordered, using his mastoid implant to control the scanner helmet. Silvers’ lounging beauty flashed up obediently, one hand on each of two quarter-circlets of railing that would soon be lethal. Lacey flicked the CS Net to attention again. “Tracer request.”
“Go ahead,” the computer link said.
“Terrence Oscar Silvers. Template as currently on screen.”
“Ready.” In a microsecond the Net had analyzed Silvers as he appeared moments before death, taking into account not only externals but details of height and bone structure subject to change only by trauma or the most extensive surgery.
“Same camera, same template—scan to death minus one week,” Lacey ordered.
Using the analysis it had made on the victim during life, the Crime Service computer ran the past week’s input from the Coeltrans scanner Lacey had made his vantage point. It quickly found and marked congruent subjects. A man could have made the same check—but only if he had a week to spend. Computer review was labor saving, though in the same sense that a power drill saves labor—per hole. It does not mean that a miner at the rock face works less hard than his grandfather did, only that he cuts out more ore.