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He's scared, so he moves fast, she thought. Takes only what he needs. He's former military. He knows how to decamp fast. Some clothes, some money. Not enough money on him for a man going under, she realized. Not nearly.
Greed, she thought. That was another facet of the man. He'd been greedy, hoarding his money, overcharging his clients who paid because of his magic hands.
He'd have taken cash, credits, bank and brokerage passkeys.
And where was his bag? He'd have packed a bag. Could be in the river, too, she decided, hooking her thumbs in her front pockets. Or whoever killed him took it.
"He'd've had money," she thought aloud. "He sure as hell wasn't spending it on home decorating or personal hygiene and enhancements."
She'd check into his finances.
He packs a bag. Going under, she thought again. What does he put into it?
He'd have taken a palm-link, a PPC. He'd have wanted his logs, his connections. And weapons.
She moved back out, poked under the counter. She found an empty rack with a quick-release bar. Hunkering down, she narrowed her eyes as she studied it. Had the old bastard really had an illegal blaster? Was this some kind of weapon holder? She'd check the sweepers' report, see if they'd confiscated a weapon.
She hissed out a breath, picked up the rack to examine it. She didn't have a clue what an army-issue blaster circa the Urban Wars looked like.
Then she sighed, pushed the rack into her evidence bag. She knew where to find one.
*** CHAPTER FOUR ***
Because she wanted to speak to Feeney in person, Eve swung back to Cop Central. She took the glide up to EDD, hopping off long enough to hit up a vending machine for a nutra-bar.
The Electronic Detective Division was a hive of activity. Cops were working on computers, tearing them apart, rebuilding them. Others sat in privacy booths playing and copying discs from confiscated 'links and logs. Nevertheless, the beeps and buzzes and whines of electronics crowded the air and made her wonder how anyone could manage to squeeze in a stray thought.
Despite the noise level, the door of Captain Ryan Feeney's office was open. He sat at his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, his wiry, rust-colored hair standing up on end, his droopy eyes enormous behind the lenses of microgoggles. While Eve watched from the doorway, he plucked a tiny translucent chip from the guts of the computer upended on his desk.
"Gotcha, you little bastard." And with the delicacy of a surgeon, he slid the chip into an evidence bag.
"What is it?"
"Hah?" Behind the goggles, his hound dog eyes blinked, then he shoved the goggles up to his forehead and focused on her. "Hey, Dallas. This little darling? It's basically a counter." He tapped the bag and smiled a little. "Bank teller with a talent for e-work installed it in her unit at work. Every twenty transfers, a deposit got zipped into an account she'd set up for herself in Stockholm. Pretty slick."
"You're slicker."
"Damn right. What are you doing over here?" He continued to work as he spoke, methodically tagging evidence. "Want to hang out with real cops?"
"Maybe I missed your pretty face." She eased a hip onto the corner of his desk, grinning when he snorted. "Or maybe I wondered if you had any spare time."
"For what?"
"You remember The Fixer?"
"Sure. Bad attitude, magic hands. The son of a bitch's nearly as good as I am. He can take a unit like this XK-6000 here, strip her down, harvest her, and spread her into six other units before she cools down. He's goddamn good."
"Now he's goddamn dead."
"Fixer?" Genuine regret showed in his eyes. "What happened?"
"He took a last swim." She filled him in quickly, moving from her meeting with Ratso through her quick tour of the shop.
"Had to be something big and something bad to scare an old warhorse like Fixer," Feeney mused. "You say they didn't take him from inside?"
"I'd say that would've been next to impossible. He had full security scan. Interior and exterior. A hive of locks. One exit—reinforced—and one window, one-way luminex, barred. Oh, and I checked his supplies. He had enough unperishables and bottled water to last a man used to rations a good month."
"Sounds like he could've held off an invasion."
