FOURTEEN

 

“EVER SEEN A DEAD BODY before?”

Santino’s conversational colors glazed over in irritation. “I was a beat cop in downtown D.C. There were very few days when I didn’t see a dead body.”

“Liar.”

“Exaggerator,” he clarified. “The guys at the morgue said we went out to collect the garbage every Tuesday and Thursday.”

“That’s morbid.”

“Yup.”

Rachel was trying to ignore the elevator. Until today, she hadn’t appreciated how the elevators at the Consolidated Forensics Laboratory whispered to her. She usually got out on Jason’s floor, but the new autopsy suite was on the fifth; the cab had paused on its way up, asking her without words if she was sure she didn’t want to get out on the third floor?

She wasn’t sure if the elevator had recognized her or if she had unconsciously written a half-assed navigational autoscript for her own convenience, but she was not happy being second-guessed by a machine.

Next-generation technology, she thought. A few extra processors, and it starts getting a high opinion of itself.

The cab did not drop sharply to punish her; she was secretly grateful. She didn’t know what she would do if an elevator suddenly developed sentience. Or a sense of humor.

Or maybe it just has good manners, that little voice in the back of her head chimed in. She pretended to cough and shook her head, hard, to silence it.

The doors pulled apart and they exited on the fifth floor. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had relocated from its old building before Rachel had been sent to the MPD, and Santino assured her the new autopsy suites were spectacular. Almost as good as those in the movies.

Zockinski and Hill were waiting for them at the receptionist’s desk, Hill slightly green around the gills. Rachel was surprised; out of the two detectives, she had assumed that Zockinski would be the one who couldn’t stomach a corpse.

“Are we late?” she asked Hill.

“Right on time,” he said. She smelled mint on his breath, lots of it: Hill had been crunching Altoids to ward off his nausea.

The autopsies had already been conducted on the two officers who were killed on Gayle Street. Zockinski and Hill hadn’t caught their case, but Hill knew the detectives who did and had called in a favor. They had made sure Hill could sit in on a second walkthrough of the findings, with both of the late officers putting in an appearance.

Rachel was the only one of their small group who hadn’t yet attended an official MPD autopsy, so she had to run the usual gauntlet of forms and explaining to the receptionist that yes, she really was with OACET and no, she couldn’t adjust his bank account and make him a billionaire, oh so very funny! She would have enjoyed poking the receptionist apart, but he was her excuse for taking far too long to fill out a simple access request. Instead, she played nice and pretended to flirt while scribbling with Santino’s gel pen.

Ten minutes later, they were following a harried intern across one of the gross pathology rooms towards the autopsy suites. Rachel spotted a flock of visitors passing the windowed wall of the gross room, peering around and over each other to get a glimpse of the pathologist fiddling with the spot laser settings on a microscope. She was mildly shocked: she had known the MPD offered limited tours of the Consolidated Forensics Laboratory to the general public, but she had assumed that these did not include the autopsy suites because, well… autopsies. Rachel poked Santino, and tilted her head towards the tourists.

“Yeah,” he said in a low voice. “You can thank television for turning autopsies into a spectator sport.”

She was relieved to find that only the smallest of the gross pathology rooms was on display, with the real meat of the organization (so to speak) hidden from view behind a steel-reinforced wall. Rachel sent a deep scan through the wing, and found a long hallway, with rooms off to either side. Most of these were large and spacious, with multiple tables in each. The showpiece was the medical examiners’ operating theater, a large semi-circular room with a few levels of stadium seating on three sides. Out of all of the rooms in this suite, only the autopsy table in the operating theater was unoccupied: it was nearly a week after the bombings and the casualties of Gayle Street were still keeping the medical examiners busy. Rachel half-expected the intern to veer off and deposit them in the theater, but no such luck. He knocked on a door near the end of the hall, and then turned and left as quickly as he could.

The reason for the intern’s quick escape opened the door, a tall woman wearing a layer of antagonistic reds over a deep red core the color of fresh candied apples. The woman saw Zockinski, and her surface colors glazed over and faded to a muted yellow, with the detective’s core of autumn orange wrapped up in a tight ball of red. Even without those cues, Rachel could tell she wanted to be anywhere else but here; the woman slumped in on herself, fingers flicking back and forth against her smartphone as she pretended to have better things to do.

Rachel knew first-hand that Zockinski and Hill could be bullies, but she had assumed they had taken the sum of their anger out on her. It had never crossed her mind that could have also gone after other coworkers.

“Meet Dr. Kowalski,” Zockinski said, his conversational colors moving towards the piercing blues of directed intent, with a point of bright red light aimed at the medical examiner. “She’s an old buddy of ours, aren’t you, Kowalski?”

Rachel put one shoulder under Zockinski’s arm and shoved him out of the way, fullback-style. Zockinski blinked white in mild astonishment as she held out her hand to the medical examiner. “Pleasure to meet you,” she said to the woman, trying to put as much sincerity into her words as she could.

“Yeah, right,” Kowalski snapped, as she left Rachel with her hand dangling in mid-air. “Let’s get this over with.”

“See?” Santino stage-whispered to Rachel. “We’re not the only ones who can be assholes.”

The woman sighed, long and loud, and slid her phone into the back pocket of her pants. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t mean to be cold, but we’re helping the FBI with the Gayle Street victims. It’s been six days and we’re still backlogged. This is a huge waste of my time—it’s not like Officers McElroy and Reeves haven’t already been autopsied. This is going to be a lecture, not a discovery process. If you want something better than that, the original autopsies were conducted in the operating theater and you can watch the videos in high-def.”

“I was on the team that found the crime scene last night,” Rachel said. “I walked the room. I may be able to contribute something.”

The woman’s jaw dropped, OACET’s eye-searing greens and golds surging in her conversational colors; Kowalski might not have recognized Rachel, but she had heard about the discovery. “You’re an Agent?”

Rachel nodded.

Now she held out her hand. “Erin Kowalski, Medical Examiner, Forensic Pathology Unit. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Agent Peng,” she replied as she took Kowalski’s hand. She expected it to be sweaty and limp, but it was rock-hard from a very specialized type of labor. Kowalski was in her mid-thirties, and Rachel had expected the small frown lines at the corners of her eyes, but not the tattoos that shone across the insides of her wrists and wound their way under her lab coat.

Kowalski’s mood was starting to brighten. “I’ve met the other Agent who works here at the CFL a couple of times. Agent Jason Atran, right? Listen, any chance you can get him to come down here and sit in on an autopsy? I’m got some digital imaging ideas I want to run by him, but he never seems to have the time.”

Bonus points for Jason, Rachel thought to herself, but said, “Maybe you can show me how you run your autopsies first?”

“That’s fair,” Kowalski said, smiling at her. Apparently Santino and the detectives had ceased to matter. “Is this your first autopsy?”

“Stateside?” Rachel replied. “Yes.”

“Ah, I see,” Kowalski said, glancing at the detectives. Hill’s core of forest green was wrapped within a seasick green and an ugly orange Rachel associated with scorn. If context had anything to do with that combination, she’d guess that Hill had tossed his lunch during one of Kowalski’s autopsies. Maybe their mutual antagonism had started there.

Or maybe not. Interpreting conversational colors to learn about a person’s past was about as accurate as astrology, and the pictures weren’t nearly as pretty.

“Faster we get started, faster this gets done,” Zockinski said.

Kowalski colored red again. “Follow me,” she said to no one in particular, and led them at a brisk walk into the warren of pathology rooms. She stopped before a bright blue door to hand out disposable respirator masks. While the others were fiddling with the straps, Kowalski leaned in towards Rachel. “Just so you know,” she said to Rachel in a low voice, “women who have experience with autopsies but who are pregnant may still vomit.”

Rachel nodded. Vomiting might actually be a real concern for her. Not because of a chance pregnancy, but because of her weak stomach when in a doctor’s office. Autopsies in Afghanistan had been quick and dirty; she had never been in a formal autopsy suite before, and the clinical setting might send her scurrying for the sink.

Kowalski told them to enter single-file and find space along the back wall. Her directions were followed to the letter, as the room was barely big enough for the two pedestal tables and their occupants, let alone five living persons. Despite her best efforts, Rachel felt a sharp pain against her hip as she slammed into the edge of one of the stainless steel tables; Hill must have spotted the body on the table move when the table jerked, as he turned an entirely new shade of green and swallowed hard.

“Don’t be scared,” Kowalski told Rachel. “They were in the water for nearly two days and they’re not pretty, but they can’t hurt you.”

The two officers were lying naked, one to a table. Kowalski was right: two days in the water hadn’t done them any favors. They had been sealed in their car, true, but those small things which lived in water were infinitely cunning. The eyes were almost always the first to go.

Rachel fell into parade rest and moved her scans up and down the two men on the tables. This was her first autopsy as a cyborg, and it was…

It was fascinating!

Jenny’s diagnostic script had not been designed for use on patients who were already dead. The list of physiological errors kept growing, almost-familiar words forming like a wizard’s spell in her mind. Soft tissue injury occurring in the epidermis, basement membrane, dermis, hypodermis…

She reluctantly turned the diagnostic script off and went back to her environmental scans. The man on the table closest to her was piecemeal from the neck up. He had no face, no top to his skull, and Rachel assumed that it was his brain floating in the jar of preservative beside him. There was a strip of thick black cord running up the center of his sternum, a rough lacing to hide the damage of his autopsy. He had been shot twice, once at close range to the chest, once at really close range to the back. The entry wound on his chest looked like a delicate polka dot next to the cavern of the exit wound beside it. Rachel traced the track of that massive wound through the victim’s body, her mind brushing against cold meat and bone until it found the tabletop beneath.

The man on the far table had been shot in the neck. Cause of death had likely been from blood loss; his jugular might as well have been removed with an ice cream scoop. Other than that, the damage caused by his own autopsy, and the nibblings of those oh-so-finicky fish, the officer might as well have been asleep.

“Officer Reeves,” Kowalski said, standing over the far table. Her conversational colors were wearing her own version of Jenny’s professional whites. “Cause of death, gunshot wound to the throat. No other external injuries that predate immersion in the Potomac. Very straightforward case.

“Now,” Kowalski continued, snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. “Officer McElroy is more complex. He has severe cranial cerebral trauma.” Kowalski indicated the shattered pieces of the officer’s skull. “Injury is consistent with a baseball bat or a similar instrument.”

“There was a piece of pipe at the scene,” Rachel said.

“That might do it. The head wound would have killed him eventually, but he didn’t get the opportunity to die slowly. He was shot twice. I’m reasonably confident the first shot was front to back,” Kowalski said, indicating the polka dot. “It was a through-and-through. Perforation of the right lung was the most serious damage caused by this first shot.

Kowalski paused, her colors taking on a slight hue of rain-damp gray. “The second shot was back to front. Based on this second gunshot, the shooter would have needed to be standing over him and aiming down, at approximately a sixty-degree angle. I’m guessing that Officer McElroy was pushing himself up from the ground on his hands.

“This was a man who went down fighting,” Kowalski said, almost sadly.

The five of them pushed through a moment of silence, and then Hill said, “A pro didn’t do this.”

Kowalski snorted. “Are you kidding? These murders are the textbook definition of amateur. Your guy had never fired a gun at another human being before.”

“So,” Zockinski said. “The officers find our guy in the coffee shop. They interrupt him in whatever he’s doing, but he takes down Reeves with a lucky shot to the neck, and then fights with McElroy…” He trailed off as he realized that scenario didn’t quite fit.

“Where’s the head wound come in?” Santino asked.

“Our guy was waiting for them,” Hill said. “Come on.”

Hill practically shoved them out of the autopsy room, then took up a position in the hallway on the other side of the door. “You’re McElroy and you’re Reeves,” he said, pointing at Zockinski first, Rachel next. “Go back inside and come out again.”

They did, Zockinski leading. As Zockinski came through the door, Hill pretended to swing at his head with an invisible pipe. “McElroy gets hit and goes down,” Hill said. “Reeves sees what’s happened but doesn’t shoot. Maybe can’t get in the room fast enough to get a clear shot, maybe he does something dumb and goes to help his partner first.

“Bang,” Hill said, pointing an imaginary gun at Rachel. “You’re dead.”

She obliged by clutching her neck and sitting down on the ground to watch the rest of Hill’s performance play out.

“You’re up again,” Hill said to Zockinski. “Probably reaching for your gun. I shoot you once,” Hill said, pulling the imaginary trigger, “and you’re down.”

Zockinski dropped to the floor, then began to push himself up on his hands. Hill stood over him, his imaginary gun aimed down.

“And bang,” Hill said. Zockinski flopped face-down on the linoleum, then held up his hand. Hill took it in a soldier’s grip and hauled his partner to his feet.

“That works,” Kowalski said, nodding. “Everything fits.”

“How’d he switch from a pipe to a gun?” Santino asked. “It couldn’t have been that long between when he put McElroy on the ground and when Reeves entered the room.”

“There was all kinds of storage in that room,” Rachel replied. “If he was waiting for them, he could have had the gun lying on a nearby shelf.”

“Then why use the pipe at all?” Santino had started to pace. “Why risk having two angry cops in the same room with you?”

“Because he needed to get them both to come into the room with him,” Rachel realized. “He was trying to immobilize the first man who came in, but make sure the second would have time to enter.”

“But why?” Santino asked.

“Because…” Rachel mulled it over. When the answer hit her, she gasped. “Because he was already planning to blow the crime scene!”

“What?!” Zockinski and Santino asked together.

She pushed herself to her feet. “He wanted… I don’t know what he wanted. But he needed to kill them in that room. He couldn’t shoot them out on the street.”

Santino shook his head. “He wanted to blow the scene, he didn’t want to shoot them on the street… Then why go to bother of dragging them to their car and dumping them in the river? If he was worried about getting caught, why not just leave their bodies in the store and blow the whole thing?”

Nobody could answer him.

They were preparing to leave when a woman ran down the hall towards them. She had a vibrant core of orchid purple, and had a large Visitor’s badge affixed to her lapel.

“You’re Sturtevant’s team?” the woman asked, huffing slightly. “Good, I was worried I’d missed you.” She began the handshake rounds, starting with Zockinski and Hill. “You two are the detectives, right? I’m Elissa Smith, from the Firearms and Toolmarks Unit,” he said.

The name of her unit wasn’t familiar. Rachel pinged her badge. “FBI?”

Smith nodded. “They brought me in to consult,” she said. “The MPD has their own ballistics experts, but since this might be connected to Gayle Street…”

“Right.” Rachel understood. There would be less chance of the media calling out conflict of interest over the findings. (Of course, by this same logic, the autopsies should have been performed by one of the FBI’s own medical examiners, but people were complicated, bureaucracies infinitely more so, and nobody in their right mind wanted to drive to Quantico for meetings if they could possibly avoid it. But if they were willing to come to D.C.? Welcome, friend, and enter, indeed.)

Smith had reached Santino, and started pumping his hand in a vise grip. “I’ve wanted to meet an Agent forever,” Smith said. “Is it true that you can reach the Curiosity rover on Mars?”

“Yes,” Rachel said. “But it gives me a hell of a headache.”

The woman’s conversational colors plummeted. “Oh my God,” she said. “I am so sorry—”

“No problem. We get it all the time,” Rachel said, grinning to show she harbored no ill will. She didn’t: she picked her battles. As long as Smith didn’t make the same mistake again, she’d let it go.

“I’m really very sorry,” Smith said again. “Wait, are you... You’re Agent Peng!?”

Rachel nodded.

“Oh, I have got to talk to you after we’re done. Did I miss the autopsy walkthrough?”

“We just finished,” Kowalski replied.

“Oh,” Smith said. Then she asked, “The FTU has some new evidence that might help you look for the shooter. Mind if we go over your findings again?”

Hill froze in yellow-grays and greens, and Kowalski’s conversational colors rolled over themselves in an ugly orange when the rest of them replied no, certainly not, any little bit of information would help. They shuffled themselves back into Kowalski’s autopsy room, picking out their same places against the wall and then squeezing tight to accommodate Smith.

The FBI’s ballistics expert wore a combination of professional blues and curious yellows as she knelt to inspect Reeves. “This is my first time seeing the victims myself,” she explained, peering into the cavity where the front of Reeves’ neck used to be. “The MPD sent me high-res videos, but there’s nothing like a first-hand inspection.

“Your killer was standing so close that the bullets were through-and-throughs,” Smith said, her white mask bobbing up and down as she spoke. “Agent Peng, did you see any fragments or bullet casings at the scene?”

Rachel shook her head. “Nothing, but I did see some disturbances in the dust. He must have cleaned up after himself. There was a bullet stuck in a cinderblock wall, though.”

“They didn’t get a chance to retrieve it,” Smith said. “It was lost in last night’s explosion. They might find it during processing, but I’m not holding my breath.”

Damn. She had hoped that Special Agent Campbell had managed to get the bullet out of the wall before the store was blown.

“So you’ve got no way to determine the make or model of the gun,” Zockinski said.

“Not exactly—Well, okay, yes. Speaking from the perspective of expert testimony? You are correct. There is no way to determine the make or model of the gun. But if the bullet hit the bone, as occurred with McElroy’s shoulder—”

“Oh lord,” Santino sighed, as his colors began to drop into orange annoyance. “Reversed striations are fiction.”

“You’re right, you’re absolutely right,” Smith said quickly. “But we’ve made some progress with metallurgic engineering and imaging.”

“Guys?” Rachel said, her right hand pressed against her forehead.

“Right right right.” Smith thought for a moment, and then tried again. “Have you seen those procedural dramas where the bullet is missing, but the scientists take the impression the bullet left against the bone and reverse it to create a computer model of the bullet?”

“That’s a real thing?” Zockinski asked.

“No, it’s an excuse to use CGI. The science is total bullshit,” Santino said.

“It’s not total bullshit!” Smith protested. “It’s almost total bullshit. There’s enough of a difference to make it useful, even though I’d never stake my reputation to the findings.”

“Are you saying…” Rachel started, then gave up. “What are you saying?”

“She’s claiming that if a bullet comes in contact with bone, it’ll leave an impression which is clear enough to show the mirror image of the bullet.”

“No,” Smith corrected Santino. “I’m saying the impression will look like it’s been pressed in Silly Putty, stretched, distorted, and then chopped up to take out random pieces. What’s left after that can be useful.”

Santino’s conversational colors had become an unpleasant mix of oranges; Rachel had the impression that her partner was full of rotting citrus. Santino’s opinion was not lost on Smith, who sighed, pulled out her smartphone, and called up an image. “Here,” Smith said, handing the phone to Santino. “The shot to McElroy’s back passed through his left shoulder. We took a high-res in situ image of a particular aspect of McElroy’s scapula.”

The others gathered around Santino, leaning over to see for themselves. Rachel picked the image off of the phone, turning it around in her mind as she tried to find why Smith thought it was significant. It meant nothing to her, a goopy smear of red with fragments of white inside.

Smith seemed especially excited about one specific grouping of pixels. “There!” she said, pointing. “You see that?”

Zockinski glanced over at her. “Peng?”

“Got it.” The monitor mounted to the wall above them fizzed in static, then jumped into clarity as Rachel connected Smith’s smartphone to it.

“Oh,” Smith said. “Okay. Okay, that’s better. Okay, you see here?” she said, pointing at the monitor. To Rachel, it looked no different than anything else in the image, but that was specialization for you: education and experience could redefine the entire world. “The size of the wound means this was definitely caused by a .45 caliber. The size and shape of the injuries, in addition to the trace left behind, makes me reasonably confident that the bullets were copper total metal jackets.

“As for applying reversed striations… Well, we didn’t find anything clean. The bullet was traveling too fast to leave any significant imprint. That in and of itself is telling—almost every .45 leaves some kind of reversed mark.”

“Except the marks might as well be made by sandpaper traveling at a thousand miles an hour. While spinning.” Santino said. “It’s useless.”

“In a court of law? Yeah, definitely. But I’m going to tell you to look for someone carrying a relatively new M1911, one that’s been fired about five hundred to a thousand times. That’ll be the model of .45 with enough wear in the barrel to rub down some of the factory striations, but one that hasn’t been professionally cleaned and permanently rescratched yet. It’s the only .45 that comes out of production with a barrel that smooth.”

“Fuck,” Rachel and Hill both said.

“What?” Zockinski asked.

“The Marines recently switched over to the Close Quarter Battle Pistol for its elite units. It’s a custom version of the 1911,” Rachel explained. “It’s gotten really popular with other Special Forces units, too, so the 1911s have gotten a bump in demand.”

“And civilians like it,” Smith said. “So it might not be a newly-manufactured gun. It could be a collector’s piece. The basic design of the 1911 hasn’t changed too much in the past hundred years.

“Or,” she added as an afterthought, “it might be an older gun with the barrel swapped out. It’s highly customizable.”

Santino looked ready to choke her. “So we’re looking for a .45 caliber gun, which is probably one of the most popular models out there, and it could be new, but it also could be a century old?”

Rachel jabbed her partner in his side. “Take a walk, dear.”

“None of that is science!” he hissed at her. He glowered at Smith, his colors churning as he tried to find a polite response, then stormed out of the room without another word.

Smith took it in stride. “Forensic ballistics is as much about proving negatives as positives,” she said. “Drives the purists absolutely nuts. Just don’t rub it in that I helped you narrow down all of the handguns in the D.C. area to a specific category of M1911s.”

Rachel laughed. “He’ll figure that out as soon as he calms down.”

They left Kowalski’s autopsy room in a small pack. Kowalski guided them back the way they had come, and left without saying goodbye.

“We’re headed to First,” Zockinski said to her at the elevator. “Now that we have the general manner of death for McElroy and Reeves, we’re gonna see if they need us to help with some real policework.”

“Then you better hurry,” Rachel replied. “You need to find some real police before you get there.”

Zockinski laughed as the elevator door closed on him and Hill.

“Hey, Agent Peng?”

Rachel glanced at Smith as she pushed the down button with her thumb.

“I studied the video, the one where you pulled off those incredible trick shots,” Smith said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Would you be interested in doing a demonstration for the Firearms and Toolmarks Unit? I think we need to update the books because of you.”

“As soon as we wrap up Gayle Street, sure,” Rachel replied. The doors to the second elevator opened, and she waved goodbye to Smith as it whisked her down to the third floor. It wasn’t the first time she had been asked to show off her shooting abilities, and she had expected this sort of request when Smith had wanted to speak with her. Rachel had been at the MPD for less than a year, and she was already renowned for her skill with a gun.

(And for the subsequent frivolous lawsuits. After the video of her shooting a bad guy had gone viral, OACET was inundated with civil suits against Rachel for setting a bad example for idiots with guns. After discussing the first of these suits with Josh, she had let him handle the rest; every time a new one came in, his conversational colors brightened in sheer joy and anticipation. Typically, a single ten-minute call to the plaintiff’s lawyer would resolve the situation and leave Josh in a good mood for the rest of the day. The tears of shysters, he said, were mother’s milk to him.)

She stepped out on the third floor and followed Santino’s cell phone to Jason’s lab. The two of them were dissecting a pair of Santino’s optical smart glasses, and were deep in an amicable argument over how to improve the design. Jason’s computers pressed in on her mind; she swatted them off, in no mood to deal with their half-imagined antagonism, and fell into Jason’s desk chair to wait for the men to finish.

Paper crinkled under her elbow; she scanned the desk and found a copy of the Washington Post. “A newspaper?” she said, interrupting them. “Jason, please. You’re a cyborg.”

“Some of us still like to read,” he snapped at her without bothering to look up. Santino smacked him lightly across the top of his head; Jason’s colors went red and orange, then turned into a mortified blush. “Oh. Rachel, I’m… I didn’t mean—”

She grinned and blew him a raspberry, then flipped her implant to reading mode to check out the headline. Gayle Street was still front-page news, but it was nearly a week after the bombings: with no new leads, the story had dropped below the fold. At the top was a news article of an upcoming budget hearing, the subhead declaring that they were about to enter a new era of military funding.

Rachel forced herself to read the first few paragraphs; she felt she owed the Army that much. She had hoped for a puff piece but the article was heavy on statistics. Apparently, a series of Congressional hearings were to take place over the following month to evaluate the current status of the military. The reporter was using that new-old argument, the one where the United States was fighting a new type of war with an outdated military infrastructure, and the country was poised on a showdown between what was familiar and what was needed.

No shit, Sherlock, she thought. She wasn’t sure of the exact dollar value of the chip in her head, but she was sure it was a good bit less than an Ohio-class submarine. And, unlike the average submarine, it was actually applicable to a cyberwarfare scenario. As soon as the scientists found a way to remove the need for that pesky human element, the technology used to make her implant would revolutionize the military power structure all over again.

Every once in a while, she was glad the collective had decided to go public.

Rachel dropped the newspaper on Jason’s desk and went to nag the men about lunch.

The three of them hit a sandwich shop. The women behind the counters knew Jason by sight: the younger ones smiled at him. Santino was halfway through his third-rate meatball sub when the conversation turned to Smith’s reverse ballistics analysis. “I can’t believe that woman’s an expert,” he said. “Using distorted data to eliminate possibilities, prove what she wants to prove... God! That’s the worst kind of science snake oil.”

Jason put down his sandwich in mid-bite. “What are you, fucking stupid? You and I, we do that all of the time.”

“Bullshit.” Santino scowled.

“Christ, man. You play with computers and this is news to you? Almost every time I process an image, I build new content around existing data.”

“Yeah, but you don’t distort—”

“Of course I distort the data!” Jason sneered. “Half of the time, it’s distorted when I get it, and I’ve got to twist it around again just to figure out what it’s supposed to mean.

“Data’s corrupted,” he added. “Data’s always corrupted to some degree... sometimes by context, sometimes by manipulation. When I’m working on a render, the best method is to look at the results and work my way backwards to see how the pieces fit.”

“You gonna help me out here?” Santino asked Rachel.

“And crash your ass-kicking party?”

“Okay,” Jason said, moving past his orange scorn. “Remember my construct of Gayle Street? That was my end product. I got there by taking pieces of data and extrapolating the rest of the render around it. I’d never take it to fucking court, though—there’s no way I could justify some of the details the computer and I generated! But if you’re involved in the process, and you understand the pieces, you can build a whole picture out of those parts.”

Rachel couldn’t resist. “It’s not your fault if you don’t get it,” she said to Santino. “It’s not as if you’re in a profession where you have to police a scene, or detect small pieces of data—clues, perhaps?—and then put those together to learn the motive for certain events... Maybe use those clues or that motive to find the person who caused those events?”

“Fuck you both very much.”

After lunch, she and Santino said goodbye to Jason and returned to their office at First District Station. There was a plastic penguin on her desk. She ran a light scan across it to take in the details; this one was wearing an excessive amount of safety gear and riding a skateboard. Rachel pulled open her top drawer and dropped it inside. Something squeaked as it landed on a pile of its toy brethren; Zockinski’s work, she was sure. Ever since he had learned her nickname, a new penguin appeared on her desk at least twice a week.

Rachel had no idea what to do with them. What would probably happen was she’d fill a garbage bag and leave them on the checkout counter of the local Goodwill without saying a word, but that seemed a tremendous waste. She was playing with the idea of waiting until Christmas and conscripting as many uniformed officers as she could find into her formal escort, and marching them in parade formation to the local mall. Then, she would walk up to Santa, present him with a sack full of penguins, and order him in her best drill sergeant voice to “Give these to the little children!”

Really, when you had a desk full of penguins, the opportunities were endless.

Her subconscious nudged her away from the toys as she spotted something out of the corner of her mind. An almost-familiar core of tropical storm clouds split by lightning jostled its way down the hall.

“What on…” Rachel sent her scans through the walls. Yup, she thought.

“Hm?”

“Unless I’m very wrong—and I hope I am— Jonathan Dunstan is coming to visit us.”

“No shit?” Santino quickly moved his sandwich to the bottom drawer on his desk. Rachel followed his example and started cleaning at hummingbird speed. Even Madeline was shoved behind the curtains for safekeeping. By the time Dunstan was readying himself to knock on their door, the room had been stripped of personality; the only information Dunstan could carry back to Hanlon would be that one of them really liked plants.

“What do you want, Dunstan?” Rachel shouted as the reporter raised his hand to knock.

“I… Can I come in?”

Rachel and Santino exchanged a nasty look. “Sure,” Santino said. “Be our guest.”

Dunstan’s conversational colors were slightly gray as he entered: he wasn’t happy about being there. She noted he wasn’t surprised by Santino’s pocket jungle, and she was instantly furious—anyone who hadn’t been warned about such an impossibly stupid number of plants in one small office couldn’t not be surprised! Someone from First MPD had been keeping tabs on them for Hanlon.

“What do you want?” Rachel asked him a second time, and reached out to the OACET community server to record the conversation.

“This is hard for me,” Dunstan said. “I… You know who I… Occasionally, I do some work with…”

“You’re Hanlon’s lapdog,” she snapped. “We know.”

Dunstan tried to pace the length of the office as he arranged his words. Rachel watched her core of southwestern turquoise and Santino’s cobalt blue trip over themselves within a complicated tangle of colors.

“It’s okay,” she said to Dunstan in her best false-honeyed voice. “Just take your time and you’ll remember what he told you to say.”

He flashed yellow-white in surprise. “I came here on my own!” he snapped.

Liar, she thought, as the pockmarks appeared across Dunstan’s shoulders and temples.

“Fine. What is it you want us to know?” Santino asked.

“Nice phrasing!” she said appreciatively.

“Thank you.”

Dunstan’s colors started to roll with red loathing. “I’m here because I’ve got proof that Homeland’s responsible for Gayle Street,” he said. “If you don’t want to hear it—”

“No no,” Rachel said, launching to her feet. “Sit. Please.”

She let Dunstan take her chair, and she and Santino fawned over him for a minute or two before her partner asked, “What proof?”

“I can’t just hand it over,” Dunstan said. “You know that’s not how this works. But… Agent Peng? You know how you told me to think about what side I wanted to be on? Well…”

“Some things you can’t ignore,” she said, shaking her head sadly.

“Right. We need to bring those who destroyed Gayle Street to justice. So… Let’s say I got a hot tip about when and how those canisters went missing, and I’ve got the documentation to prove it. If OACET is willing to commit to going after Homeland—”

Rachel cut Dunstan off. “Don’t say anything else,” she told him. “Not right now. Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to Administration.”

“But…”

“No,” she said, shooing Dunstan out of the room. “Mulcahy or Glassman will be in touch, I promise. This is simply over my head.”

“But I just got here!” Dunstan stuttered in protest, as Rachel shut the door in his face.

Santino hummed the Jeopardy! theme, exactly thirty seconds long, while Rachel watched Dunstan slither his way down the hall.

“Lying?” Santino asked her when his countdown ended.

“Like a rug made of pants on fire,” Rachel said. “I chased him out of here because he was wasting our time.”

“Yeah,” Santino sighed, his colors a wistful purple-gray. Rachel felt the same: if it had been a normal day, they would have played with Dunstan like cats given a half-dead mouse. “Why the hell does he want OACET to go chasing after Homeland?”

“To discredit OACET, maybe break our alliance with the MPD as a bonus,” she said. It was becoming a familiar refrain: she was almost relieved to learn that Hanlon was a one-trick pony. “You and I go screaming after the government, Hanlon wrings his hands and says ‘I told you those people were nuts…’ God, what a bastard he is, trying to use something like Gayle Street to his advantage.”

“Does that mean Hanlon knows who did it?”

Rachel weighed that idea, then said, “Probably not. Except he doesn’t have evidence which might incriminate Homeland—there’s no way Hanlon would give us a lead that would actually benefit us.”

“What if he’s got the opposite? What if he’s got evidence which clears Homeland? Think he’d use that?”

“Oh yeah, definitely. Set OACET up to look like idiots, then drop the evidence to clear Homeland? One-two punch for him.”

She recovered Madeline and returned the owl to its place of honor in the center of her desk. It was too large for the space, but Rachel had developed a habit of touching it when she was thinking. She reached out to stroke the time-worn wood of Madeline’s beak. It had been polished by time and casual hands, and she wondered how many people before her had petted the owl for comfort.

“Did we make any progress today?” she asked Santino.

He shrugged. “We know how McElroy and Reeves died,” he said. “And, thanks to Dunstan, we know Homeland isn’t responsible, but we can’t prove it.”

“And we know our guy was an amateur.”

“At using a gun? Definitely. But he did manage to blow up an entire street and get away clean. You can’t call someone like that an amateur.”

Different types of intelligence, Rachel thought, running her thumb over the owl’s carved feathers. A person smart enough to set up a bomb, but not skilled enough to pull off the other parts of a successful crime. She mulled that over, then said, “That’s what I don’t understand—why did he go back to the coffee shop? We had already pieced together enough about the bombs from fragments to know how they worked and where the source material came from. There was no reason for him to recover that canister.”

She sighed. “If we don’t catch a huge break soon, he’ll have not only pulled off one of the top three deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil, but got away clean after the fact.”

“Oklahoma City, September 11… What about the Boston Marathon?”

“The Boston Marathon bombings killed three people. Three. Yeah, a couple hundred were injured and it shut the city down for a week, but that was the best those schmucks could do with some pressure cookers. Gayle Street is… It was a huge and incredibly efficient bombing, but everything since then has been sloppy. I mean, he couldn’t even dump a car in a river properly.”

“Additional proof that one guy did this,” Santino said. “Just one guy. Someone who was great at building and hiding bombs, and lousy at everything else.”

Hearing Santino say it aloud sealed it as fact; Rachel’s relief was so intense she sighed and slumped forward on her desk. I knew this was another set-up. I just knew it. I…

“Oh shit,” she said aloud, as she snapped upright in her chair. “Did what happened in August cause Gayle Street?”

“Hm?”

“Hidden bombs, set-ups, conspiracies…”

“No,” Santino said, digging through his desk drawers as he restored their office to normal. “That’s one thing we can be sure of—nobody’s come forward to say they noticed a dude from the gas company installing weird equipment in their stores. Those canisters had to have been in place since the last time the gas lines were refitted in that part of town, and that was around two years ago.”

“Maybe everyone who knew a different story died in the explosions.”

“Maybe. Unlikely, though.”

They both trailed off, poking at their own ideas. Rachel dropped her head on top of her desk again, and sighed.

Why is this never easy? she thought. She rested her chin on her closed fist and pulled Madeline towards her with her bad hand. One guy. Just one. He can blow up a street like a pro, but he can’t kill when he’s face-to-face with his victims…

She stared into the owl’s eyes, resisting the urge to flick the rest of the yellow paint from its irises with her thumbnail. The paint had been there for fifty years, easy; she had no right to hurry the owl along into entropy.

Entropy… Nothing…

We have no motive. And because of that…

Because of that, their most likely suspect was Homeland.

Or was it? She knew it wasn’t Homeland; so did Santino. So did Hanlon. And so did everyone else working the case, really… Even Sergeant Andrews, angry as he might be, didn’t consider Homeland to be a suspect as much as an institutionalized barrier to the investigation.

Because we’re so fucking egotistical that we think the only one clever enough to pull something like this off is our own government.

“Santino?” She shoved Madeline away from her. “Who benefits from chaos?”

“Hm?”

“Say Josh is right and Gayle Street becomes the tipping point for the middle class. Who would benefit from the change in the status quo?”

“Oh jeez… Politicians, anarchists, the upper and lower classes, the military… I can give you a historical background and rationale for each of those—”

“Please don’t.”

“—but it really comes down to anyone who hates the existing system, and thinks it needs to be shaken up if it’s to be changed.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Rachel said, as she pushed Madeline away from her and reached for Santino’s desk phone. “It’s time to call my golfing buddy.”