Rule 34 - Charles Stross [55]
“—chain of command—”
Moxie raises his hands in surrender right as your frustrated snarl runs down.
You glance around. Then you stare into his eyes, hard. “Run that past me again.”
Moxie swallows. “Like I said, it was an urgent request for input on a homicide investigation. You were off shift, and there was a no-delay flag on it: golden forty-eight. So I pointed it at the duty desk. I havnae been telling tales out of school to Dodgy, skipper, please! What would you have done?”
“I’d have—fuck.” You restrain the urge to punch the corridor wall and draw a deep breath instead. The trouble is, Moxie isn’t wrong. “Who was on the duty desk?”
“It was Inspector Rodney, ma’am.” Sheila Rodney. Who doesn’t, as far as you know, carry a knife for your back. But who knows well enough to forward a lead to the Blair murder investigation.
“Fuck.” You take another deep breath. “Grab yourself a coffee, then see me in my office in fifteen minutes. You heard what Dickie said? That means your work-load just doubled for the rest of the week, so let’s go run through it before I have to go talk to the Europol investigators.”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“If I’m being pulled off ICIU for the duration, I’ve got to brief Doc Green.”
Moxie looks at you as if your dog just died, and you don’t have the heart to stay angry. You give him a gentle shove on the shoulder. “Get going, Sergeant. There’s more than enough shit to go round, this time.”
And then you head upstairs, across the walkway, into the adjacent block, and around the corner to Chief Inspector Dixon’s wee office.
George “Doc Green” Dixon is (a) your nominal superior, and (b) not interested in the day-to-day running of ICIU, outwith its potential to dump embarrassing shit in his lap without warning. George is old-school, trained up via computer forensics to occupy a trusted niche in CID (trawling paedophiles’ phones for evidence of thoughtcrime) while keeping one foot in the stirrup of the runaway horse that is Infrastructure IT.
He doesn’t have much time for ICIU—especially after the time he dropped round when you weren’t in, and Moxie showed him the Goatsedance video followed by a brisk webtour of the shocksites of Lothian and Borders, culminating in the infamous penile degloving accident fansite (which apparently left him with PTSD and permanent scarring on the insides of his eyelids). Ever since, he’s been more than happy to leave you alone to run your little fiefdom as you see fit.
George is a verra verra busy man, as he never tires of reminding you from behind the cover of his salt-and-pepper moustache. He probably thinks his manner is avuncular: You think it’s patronizing, but it’s not your job to pass comment. In any case, he’s effective. Before Dodgy Dickie dissolved the morning briefing, you’d already emailed Doc to beg a minute of his time, so you have no compunction about going straight round to IIT and hammering on his battered office door.
“Enter.” Doc looks up as you open the door. For a moment you think he’s playing a Sims game on his desk: Then you recognize the new annexe over the road. Sims, yes, but it’s some kind of architectural model—he’s probably looking for a way to shoe-horn more bandwidth through the crumbling concrete walls. “Have a seat. What’s come up this time, Liz?”
You can’t help yourself: You pull a face. “Have you been following Dickie MacLeish’s murder investigation, sir?”
“No.” He raises an eyebrow that looks like it’s got a sleeping caterpillar glued to it. “Should I have?”
“It’s a crawling horror. First, it’s gone political. Secondly, it looks like it’s not a one off. We’ve had contacts from Europol about similar killings in Germany and possibly Italy. It’s a three-sigma match or better—if they hadn’t happened simultaneously, we’d be looking for a serial killer. Anyway, the initial lead-in came via ICIU, and there’s an input angle from one of my current cases, so Dickie just upped and announced that he’s drafting me to coordinate with the foreign investigators, without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“Well,