by Aaron Pogue
Dismissed. She left the conference room with a clenched jaw and balled fists. She had a murder case to work. Her first day on the job, and he'd given her a homicide. That was something. Some guidance would have been nice, but there was a victim out there demanding justice, and Katie was the cop on the job. She headed toward an empty desk in the back corner against the outer wall, beneath a window with a view of the Washington Monument. She could tell from its cleanliness that it was available. On her way across the bullpen, she turned on her headset and said, "Craig? Is that right? Give me the Little Rock homicide case file on desk..." She tapped the blank desktop and the monitor sprang to life. She found an identifier in the lower right-hand corner. "Desk twelve. Thanks."
The case file appeared on the desktop immediately, and she breathed a sigh of relief. If she had access to the secretary, she could get something done. She opened it up, the same pages Rick had flipped through so quickly before, but it wasn't the same case file form she'd used at home. She looked through the various tabs, then started over at the top of page one, reading everything carefully.
Her victim was Janeane Linson, twenty-one and plain. Blonde hair, blue eyes, five-five, lived in an apartment in North Little Rock. Katie interrupted her reading to figure out how to request a financial report using the bureau's system, and got lost in the process for half an hour. It was much more powerful than anything they'd had back home, but with that always came complexity. She figured it out quickly enough, though, and blinked in surprise when she got the report back immediately. The bureau was making direct queries through Midas into the main database. Fascinating.
She tucked the financial report to one side, and went back to the case file. Linson was a Junior Administrative Officer for Pellincorp, a major Aggregator, which also ran a minor database service called Helen. Katie pulled up corporate details on Pellincorp for casual reading later, then discovered in the case file that Linson had been found dead in her office. That brought the company right back into the spotlight.
The victim had been found early that morning, but Hathor's last positive ID on her had been Thursday night, late. Her fingers kept twitching toward the HaRRE launcher, but she always made it a point to read through the full police report first. That would matter even more here, where HaRRE could lie. She shook her head at the thought and read on.
It was a strangulation. Video footage showed her dead before midnight on Thursday, but there was nothing on the actual event. Still, bruising was clear on her throat, and the overturned chair was enough to show there had been a struggle. There were no obvious suspects. Ms. Linson was single, and Hathor showed no signs of romantic involvement in the last six months. Katie made a note to look into possible romantic links anyway. After all, Hathor could be lying to her. Same for the financial report, really. If Hathor could be bought out, Midas certainly could, too.
She thought back to the report Reed had been reviewing for the Secret Service. The only evidence they had to go on, and it specifically showed a record of nothing illegal happening. And someone had tampered with the audio and video feeds to hide it. Her dad would have gone after Hathor for that alone. Hell, he did, back when Hathor was just Total Awareness Monitoring Systems, a partner of AT&T—back when judges issued search warrants against corporations, and no one even knew what an "aggregator" was. Her dad had chased TAMS right into the newspapers. Then Congress had gotten involved, and her dad had gotten retired just in time to attend her graduation from the Academy.
She sighed and rubbed her eyes. This case wouldn't be like that. Rick hadn't handed her a Secret Service case. She leaned back over the case file, reading on. She forced herself through her ritual, reading every page of the case file, then glanced at her watch. One-twenty already. She glanced at the HaRRE launcher, and shook her head. "Lunch first," she said out loud, then blinked in surprise. Rick was standing at her left hand, towering over her.
"I was thinking the same thing," he said, grinning at the surprise on her face. "If you're okay with a sandwich, the cafeteria downstairs does a good one."
"Do they make a decent grilled turkey, mayo?" she asked. He nodded and she said, "Sounds great, then." She swiped a hand across her desk to hide the monitor display. "Craig, save my workspace. Desk twelve." Then she darted off after Rick, through the frosted glass doors and down the long elevator ride.
As soon as they stepped into the cafeteria she spotted Dean, Simmons, and Reed all waiting at a table. Reed frowned at Katie until Rick clapped him on the shoulder and said, "She was still plugging away at her desk. Be right back. Don't start without me."
He led her across to the counter at the head of the room, and as she approached a server caught her eye and said, "You had the grilled turkey?"
She said, "Midas—" but Rick cut her off with a hand on her arm.
"Craig, pick up Katie's lunch, would you?" The server just waited for a green light acknowledging that someone had paid, then slid the tray across to Katie with a smile. She grabbed a glass and helped herself to some Coke, then turned to find Rick waiting just behind her.
"Prices are reasonable. Feel free to put your lunches here on the government tab. If you go off-site, you're on your own."
"Fair enough," she said with a smile. "We're sitting over there?"
He nodded and let her lead the way. As soon as he settled down beside her, though, Dean leaned across the table and said, "Canvas still isn't turning up anything, but we may have a lead on a private voice recording."
Rick shook his head. "No good. I spotted that Friday, but the timing is iffy and nothing on the consumer market would get us usable feed from six tables away in a busy restaurant. I still think our best bet is tourist photos taken outside the restaurant during our window."
Dean and Simmons groaned at that. Reed said, "I told you." He turned to Rick. "Phillips checked in ten minutes ago and he's willing to reinterview the other patrons, but you're talking serious overtime. He's already pushing a regular week from the time he clocked Saturday and Sunday."
Rick snorted. "Bullshit. The new girl had his case solved before her ears stopped ringing. Phillips can kiss my ass if he thinks I'm paying for a weekend playing with his nieces in Cincinnati." The others laughed, but an instant later they were back into their case. Katie listened intently, trying her best to keep up, but half of it was beyond her, and they never slowed for a breath. She'd barely finished her sandwich before Rick pushed back from his place, folded his untouched sandwich back into its wax paper wrapper, and rose to head upstairs.
While the others took their cue and started gathering their things, Katie caught at Rick's sleeve. "Umm...hey, could you help me out for a sec? I still don't know exactly—"
He patted her lightly on the shoulder and smiled. "Take it easy, kid. It's your first day. No one is expecting miracles. Just nose around and try to get a feel for our system. I'll assign someone to train you up as soon as we get a break in the big one."
And that was it. He turned away, and the others rose from their places to follow him out the door toward the elevators. Katie was left alone, frustrated and helpless, watching them leave.
Almost alone. She took control of herself, then turned back to the table to grab her trash, and nearly jumped when she found Reed still seated across from her. He was watching her with a frown, and now he nodded wordlessly to her seat, and she sank back down at the table.
"What's up?" he said.
Katie glanced at her watch, then took a deep breath and let it out. "I appreciate the confidence Rick's put in me," she said. "And I realize it's just my first day. I do. But I don't even know where to begin with this case. And I understand all too well that time is short when it comes to something like this."
He clasped his hands on the table between them, leaned on his elbows, and took a deep breath. "What we do...." He trailed off, thinking and shook his head. "Listen.... What we do isn't the same as what you did in Brooklyn. Jurisprudence has got most of the world tied up nice and neat right now—way better than
anything we ever had before—and the people are happy with that." He leaned back, never releasing her eyes from his hard green gaze. "I can't tell you the victim's family is going to be okay with that murderer getting away, but most of the world will never care. Most of Little Rock, even, takes comfort knowing that's probably the only bastard in town who'll go free all year."
"Yes, but I care. And he's not going to go free—"
Reed shrugged. "Chances are good he will, because you're right. Time is short, and you don't know what you're doing here. And everyone who does is too busy."
She bit her lip against an angry retort. "Okay," she said. "So why are you still sitting here?"
"Because I can't really get started until Phillips shows up, anyway, and because I'll be saving us all a lot of time if I can make you see things as they are. Rick's got a big heart, so he's not going to tell you this, but you've got to leave him the hell alone. You're small potatoes."
She didn't hit him. "Maybe I am," she said, fighting to keep her cool. "But the case isn't. It's a homicide."
He shrugged again. "That's the only reason we're looking at it at all. Listen, these cases aren't open-and-shut like the stuff you're used to. Put that kind of work out of your mind. It's days and weeks and often months of grueling research to put the truth together, when Hathor isn't there to do it for you. Sometimes—most of the time, really—it can't be done at all. There's a sitting senator down the street who assaulted four different women in the time I've been on this team, and we can't pin a thing on him. Everybody knows he did it. Everybody but Hathor. Hell, that dude in Seattle killed his wife and dumped her in the ocean, you know the one—"
She frowned. "The programmer?"
"Network architect, but yeah. See? That's my point. You know he did it, I know he did it, but two of our best guys put in six months trying to find some way to prove it to Hathor, and the links just kept getting thinner and thinner until there were no dots left to connect. Rick eventually had to pull us off it, because there was other work to do."
She shook her head. "I don't understand."
"Nobody's asking for Sherlock Holmes anymore. That's what I'm telling you. The law still allows for court trials, but try finding a judge who's willing to spend the time. There's barely a district attorney left who's even willing to try it. The system does a job that's good enough, as far as everyone else is concerned." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I disagree. That's why I work here. But we have to take what we can get. Nobody's throwing money at our department, and every time Rick has tried to get Congress to give us more powers, they've taken them away instead. Right now, we just don't have enough bodies on the payroll to work this Little Rock case. That's the fact of it."
"And, at the same time," Katie said, waving a hand toward the elevators, "you've been handed an opportunity to do something Congress won't ignore. If you can put a stop to this assassination attempt—"
Reed's eyes narrowed. "Yeah," he said, measuring her. "That would be a big deal." He pushed to his feet, eyes lingering on her face, and nodded. "Glad you can see the truth of it. Maybe you'll make it here after all."
She understood, but she didn't feel much better. Reed didn't bother offering her a pep talk, either. He tossed his trash in the bin on the way out, and left her there as the others had. She waited until she knew he'd had time to catch an elevator, then finally rose put away her tray before heading upstairs after him. By the time she got back into the office Reed was back in Conference Room One with Rick and the rest of his team, leaving her alone with the corpse of Ms. Linson.
She returned to her desk, and pulled up the case file report again. She couldn't rule out jealous lovers or financial disputes, but there was nothing surface-level to suggest those. She found a custom query tool for Hathor called "Conversation Analysis: Victim," and ran that, just to see what happened. It came back with an empty results string after about four minutes that could as easily have been her mistake as any actual cover-up. She didn't know how to use this stuff.
Hippocrates gave her an overview of the victim's recent health, and she was clean on any sort of illicit substance. The Automated Coroner's Report said there was nothing presenting or hereditary that would aggravate with a strangling. She rolled her eyes at the thought and pushed away from her desk. Another hour burned, and her most useful tools were trying to figure out if she should be looking for signs of anemia in a homicide victim. The camera stills were perfectly clear. Bulging eyes, dark purple bruises on the throat: the girl had been choked out. Katie was floundering.
There was too much information. She knew that was part of it. She'd never had direct query access to Hippocrates and Midas and Shopper and CV before. She was overwhelmed with data, and at the same time doubting every bit of it. She didn't know how to sort it all, or where the cuts had been made.
So she took a deep breath. Then she decided that wasn't enough and she went to get a drink of water at the cooler. No one said a word to her as she crossed the bullpen—too busy with their tasks—but she felt better by the time she got back to her desk. She brushed all her open database reports off to the side, opened up the case file report, and launched HaRRE. Hathor Real-time Rendering Engine. The real-time stream on Linson's case file showed the empty office Katie had seen in the still photos, although she only knew it by the dimensions. The corpse was as invisible as the furniture.
For the second time today (and the second time this year) she reached for the video source. The rendered environment disappeared, replaced by a roving camera view, and she saw that her invisible corpse was gone. Someone had taken care of the body, and neatened the room while they were at it. The disturbed chair was righted, tucked neatly behind the empty desk. Other than that, the room was empty.
She switched off the source video and went back to the rendered environment, rolling back in time until she saw the cleaners working in the room. Earlier still, she saw the coroners arrive, walking backward, and deposit Ms. Linson's body in a corner behind the plant. Nine in the morning, and she increased the rewind speed. She saw the cleaning girl pop her head into the office at seven, just a blip, and she could imagine the scream, but it was muted while the footage reversed. She thought about playing it back then, listening in on the conversations that followed the discovery, but she squashed the idea as more morbid curiosity than professional interest. The murderers wouldn't give themselves away over the coffeepot.
She still hadn't seen why the local police requested FBI assistance, either. She increased the rewind speed again, watched the clock fly backward as nothing else changed. Empty white room, still corpse in the corner, facedown and forgotten.
Then the screen went black, for just an instant, and it took a moment for that to register. After that, there was no corpse in the corner, but Ms. Linson moved out from behind her desk, walking jerkily backward around the room, examining invisible paintings on the wall, checking her watch and the invisible clock on the wall, and then back out into the reception area where she was just barely visible in the environment. Katie paused the stream, switched it back to play, but forty minutes had passed in the footage in the time it took her to react.
She skipped ahead half of that, putting the victim back in the corner office, and watched once again as she moved nervously about the room. She twitched and jittered, her body position snapping up to reality every time the roaming security camera drifted back to focus on her. Katie just sat back, watching for any clue. She turned on audio, and heard the disjointed, off-key singing of a girl listening to loud music over her headset. It was like hearing someone in the next room singing in the shower. She searched up the necessary keywords to overlay the audio from the victim's headset just in time to watch Ms. Linson reach up and mute it. Out in the lobby, the elevator dinged.
Katie moved the camera toward the lobby, but a moment later the screen went black. She sat back, stunned. That's what she had seen before. She played it forward, and the scene stayed black. Bizarre. Lighting in HaRRE was entirely ar
tificial, independent of real world light sources. She switched to source video, and found it blindingly white. Remembering the Cincinnati kids, she turned the volume down low, then switched on source audio. A solid hum came from her speakers, droning and useless. She switched it back off, turned off the white source video, and dropped back into the darkness that had swallowed HaRRE.
There was, predictably, no reconstructed audio. This was why Ghost Targets had gotten the case file, of course. Someone had come to see Ms. Linson, after hours, and she'd been waiting impatiently for her guest to show up. She'd been nervous, but she hadn't seemed scared. So Katie had that to go on, at least. Whoever had attacked the victim had had an appointment.
She paused HaRRE and ran a check through Ms. Linson's secretary, but there was no official appointment any time on Friday. That could have been cleaned, or it could have been an unofficial appointment. Anything untoward—whether a romantic liaison or a drug deal gone bad—would have been off the record anyway. She started to run a search on the building's receptionist, but shook her head. That was connecting the dots. That was the easy stuff. Even with the weird blackout, local cops would've nabbed the killer if he was in the records. The building sure looked empty. It wouldn't have taken long to check out everyone on the premises, even without a clear ID on the killer.
She sped up the playback, and waited four minutes real-time for the lights to come back on in the imaginary world of HaRRE. For Ms. Linson, it was over half an hour, and now she was a quiet rag doll in the back corner. She made a note of the exact time on the blackout, then skipped back to just before it. She waited for the ding of the elevator, then paused and zoomed the camera out into the foyer. The doors were already opening, just a crack, but the HaRRE camera could go wherever she wanted it to. She stepped into the elevator, but it was empty.
Of course it was empty. That would have been too easy. Ghosted like the conspirators in the Richmond restaurant. Like the kids in Cincinnati. He was there, frozen, in the spacious elevator car with her, but she couldn't see him. He'd been erased. It irked her, and she wondered at the difference between this empty space and the inky blackness that came later. What exactly had happened here?
