Rule 34 - Charles Stross [96]
You put your glasses back on. And while your head’s bowed, and you’re looking elsewhere, Anwar opens up.
Two hours later you’re missing your lunch break for the sake of clogging up the meatspace incident room, laying it on the line for the peanut gallery.
“Here’s our Anwar Hussein. On probation, done time for identity theft and fraud—not very smart. He’s a foot-soldier, not a general: retired foot-soldier at that, or so he says. He gets a call from his wife, who got it from the first bystander, Mrs. Begum, to go visit Mrs. Begum and her son, the victim. He arrived on the scene after our first responder and Sergeant MacBride. Because he’s on release, we have his probationware record, and I can confirm that he’s been nowhere near the scene of crime for two days. Subject to confirmation by municipal CCTV, but it really doesn’t look like he did it.
“However. Our Anwar is a bit of a wide boy, and his first reaction was to clam up. I was eventually able to determine that he’s got a guilty conscience over some work the victim had asked him to do. There might be an issue of possible violation of probation terms here, but Mr. Hussein is eager to assure us that he hadn’t actually got round to doing anything illegal as yet.”
There is much rolling of eyes from the peanut gallery at this point, which you deliver with ironic lack of emphasis—I didn’a mean to put me hand through tha winda an’ take tha wallet, it just sort of happened—so you feel the need to clear your throat. “He coughed to it voluntarily, and more to the point, he handed over the material which he claims his cousin Tariq gave him to work on, along with the device. It’s downstairs in Forensics being imaged right now. If he hasn’t touched it, then it may give us some insight into the murderer’s motivation.” Assuming there is a murderer, something in the back of your mind nudges. Because if you were wrong about there being no such thing as an artificial intelligence, things could get really embarrassing, couldn’t they?
DCI MacLeish—for he is back from the Hussein residence—gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What sort of business was Mr. Hussein involved in, do you know?”
You stare right back at him: “I arrested him three years ago in the course of an ongoing investigation into an identity-fraud ring. He coughed to a variety of charges, including spear phishing, ownership of stolen authentication credentials, unauthorized access to personal account details, and Internet-banking fraud. Came to court, entered a guilty plea, two years in Saughton, cut on appeal to one plus one. Interestingly , Anwar was the only body we bagged on that case; I’m certain he wasn’t working alone, but you know how these Internet cases are.” You tap your forehead.
Dickie’s eyebrows waggle, then he nods deeply, satisfied. (There is stuff you can say and stuff you can’t say on the record—and everything that’s said anywhere in a police station is recorded under rules of evidence these days—but waggling eyebrows and forehead tapping don’t show up in the automatic speech-to-text transcripts. What you just sent via monkeyspace, bypassing CopSpace entirely, is that you know stuff but you don’t want to contaminate the investigation by introducing hearsay or out-of-band intelligence. And Dickie, for once, agrees with you: He doesn’t want you screwing up his investigation either.)
“Three victims so far,” he rumbles. “Inspector Aslan, you have some input?”
Kemal is fidgeting with his glasses. “We have two more,” he says diffidently. “One in Sofia, one in Trieste. That’s all in the past hour. Bringing the running total to eleven.”
Dickie looks simultaneously aghast and almost, in an odd way, hopeful: It’s a clusterfuck, but it