Rule 34 - Charles Stross [5]
The next fifteen minutes is likely to be your entire quota of face time with the witness before a blizzard of virtual paper-work descends on your head—that’s why you’re leaning on Jase. And you really want a chance to get your head around what’s going on here, before the regulars from X Division—the Criminal Investigation Department, as opposed to your own toytown fiefdom (which is laughably a subsidiary of theirs, hence the “D” in front of your “I”)—take the stiff with the stiffy off your plate.
It’s a dead certainty that when the shit hits the fan, this case is going to go political. You’re going to have Press Relations and Health and Safety crawling all over you simply because it happened on your watch, and you were the up-and-coming officer who put Mikey in pokey back when you had a career ladder to climb. Not to mention the fact that something has twitched your non-legally-admissible sixth sense about this whole scene: You’ve got a nasty feeling that this might go beyond a mere manslaughter charge.
Mikey was a spammer with a specialty in off-licence medication. And right now you’d bet your cold overdue dinner that, when Forensics return that work-up on the enema fluid from the colonic irrigation machine, it’ll turn out to be laced with something like Viagra.
Shock, disgust, and depression.
You are indeed late home for your tea, as it happens—and never mind the other appointment. Michael Blair, esq., has shafted you from beyond the—well, not the grave, at least not yet: But you don’t need to mix the metaphor to drink the cocktail, however bitter. So you’re having a bad hair day at the office tomorrow, and never mind the overtime.
Doubtless Jase is going home to his wife and the bairns, muttering under his breath about yet another overtime claim thanks to the ballbreaking politically oriented inspector who disnae ken her career’s over yet; or maybe not. (He’s still young: born to a couple of ravers after the summer of love, come of age just in time to meet Depression 2.0 head-on. They’re a very different breed from the old-timers.) And on second thoughts, maybe he’s a wee bit smug as well—being first on scene at a job like this will probably keep him in free drinks for years to come.
But in the final analysis your hair-do and his dinner don’t signify. They’re unimportant compared to the business at hand, a suspicious death that’s going to make newsfeeds all over the blogosphere. Your job right now is to nail down the scene ready for CID to take over. There’s a lot to do, starting with initializing the various databases and expert systems that will track and guide the investigation—HOLMES for evidence and case management, BOOTS for personnel assignment, VICTOR for intelligence oversight—calling in the support units, preventing further contamination of the evidence, and acting as firstresponse supervisor. And so you do that.
You go down to the kitchen—sterile, ultra-modern, overflowing with gizmos from the very expensive bread-maker (beeping forlornly for attention) to the cultured meat extruder (currently manufacturing chicken sans egg)—where you listen to the housekeeper; Mrs. Sameena Begum, middle-aged and plump and very upset, wringing her hands in the well-appointed kitchen: In all my years I have never seen anything like it. You nod sympathetically and try to draw out useful observations, but alas, she isn’t exactly CID material.
After ten minutes and fifty seconds, Jase can no longer draw off the incoming flak and begins forwarding incoming calls. You make your excuses, send PC Berman to sit with her, then go outside and start processing a seemingly endless series of sitrep requests from up and down the food-chain.
An eternity later, Detective Chief Inspector MacLeish from CID turns up. Dickie’s followed by a vanload of blue-overalled SOCOs and a couple of freelance video bloggers. After another half-hour of debriefing, you finally get to dump your lifelog to the evidence servers, hand over the first-responder baton, finish your end-of-shift wiki updates and hand-offs,