Rule 34 - Charles Stross [51]
You can’t get out of town, even if you want to. The Polis have got your DNA on file as belonging to John Christie, a contact of Mike Blair (deceased). You need to dance the John-Christie-is-an-innocent-bystander fandango until you can serve the paper-work to get your samples destroyed, or your usefulness to the Operation will be at an end: and with it, your career.
To make matters worse, you’re here now. Vivian Crolla isn’t going to vanish silently from Scottish society without anyone asking questions: Sooner or later, one of her business associates or relatives or nosy neighbours will crawl whimpering to the public servants, who will break down her door, pinch the bridge of their nose beneath suddenly watering eyes, and call for CID and forensics. And then it’ll be déjà vu all over again, and you’d better hope you’re not shedding flakes of dead skin because if they get a sequence match linking you to both scenes—
You begin to sidle back towards the front door, shuddering beneath the livid caul of rage that has settled over your shoulders, all the while thinking:
Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action.
Someone’s going to bleed for this. And it’s not going to be you.
LIZ: Snowballing Hell
Thursday morning dawns moist and miserable. You turn yourself out of bed, scramble two eggs, and remember to bag up the plastic waste for collection on your way out the door. Then—forty minutes before you’re due on shift—your phone pulls on its work personality and rings for you. It’s Moxie. This can only be trouble.
“Skipper?” He screws his face up like a hamster worried you’re going to steal his peanut: “You decent?”
You take your thumb off the camera. “I was about to head in. What’s come up?”
“I think you want to be here half an hour ago; it’s about that wave you were tracking with ICIS? I got a call from a lieutenant in the Dresden KRIPO; he’s trying to get in touch with you urgently about an investigation?” Moxie’s bamboozled befuddlement is not unreasonable—death in Deutschland isn’t a regular bullet point on your daily team briefings.
“I’ll call him as soon as I’m in the office.” You pause. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Uh, Chief Inspector MacLeish wants to see you. It’s about the Blair case. He’s raising a request for research and says it’s priority one.” Screamingly urgent, in other words.
“Well, ping him and tell him I’m in transit.” You hang up and neck your coffee, burn your tongue, swear in an extremely unladylike manner as you grab for a glass of tap-water, then run through your check-list and are out the door in record time. You make it to the end of the road as a minibus trundles away from the stop, swear again, and drop the ghost of a tenner on its icon. For a miracle, it accepts the bid, whines to a halt, and kneels as you run to catch up. The other passengers glare irritably at you as you climb aboard, slightly breathless. You take a seat, then realize you left your hair-brush at home. So: another bad hair day is already underway.
There’s no hurrying the bus as it meanders around the back streets, diverting to pick folks up and drop them off. Sooner or later, your work-subsidized travel pass will get you to the office, but unlike a taxi, there’s no quality-of-service guarantee and no privacy. So you’re left tapping your fingers in frustration, unwilling to log into CopSpace in public (because you’re an inspector, and your work is a wee bit more confidential than J. Random Plod’s notebook: There’s a lot at stake if your desktop leaks). So much for telecommuting. Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.
So it is that you arrive at work at 8:42 A.M., ahead of your start of shift and in a timely manner . . . but disastrously out of touch with the events unfolding around you.
Your first inkling that this may be something worse than a regular bad-hair day comes as you step down off the bus and walk towards the front entrance in Fettes