Lock In

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Book: Read Lock In for Free Online
Authors: John Scalzi
numbers?”
    “I don’t see any,” I said. “Do we have the real thing in evidence?”
    Vann glanced over at Diaz, who looked up and nodded. “I can take a closer look at it if you want,” Diaz said.
    “If you don’t find anything on the exterior, see if you can scan the inside of it,” I said. “The processing chips probably have serial numbers on them. We can see when the batches were sent off, and from there piece together who’s supposed to be owning the scanner and transmitter.”
    “Worth a shot,” Vann said.
    I stood up and looked over to the corpse, facedown in the carpet. “What about him?” I asked.
    Vann looked back to Diaz. “Nothing yet,” he said.
    “How does that happen?” I asked Diaz. “You have to get fingerprinted to get a driver’s license.”
    “Our examiners only just got him,” Diaz said. “Metro took fingerprints and did a face scan. But sometimes they take their time sharing information, if you know what I mean. So we’re doing our own and running those through our databases now. We’ll be doing DNA too. We’ll probably find him by the time you’re done here.”
    “Let me see the face scan,” Vann said.
    “You want just the face, or the wide-angle shot when they turned him over?”
    “Wide-angle shot,” Vann said.
    The man on the floor instantly flipped. He was olive-skinned and looked mid- to late thirties. From this angle the severity of the cut throat was a whole lot more dramatic. The wound slashed from the left side of the neck, near the jawline, and continued downward, terminating on the right side of the hollow of the throat.
    “What do you think?” Vann asked me.
    “I think we’ve got an explanation for the arterial spurts,” I said. “That’s a hell of a cut.”
    Vann nodded but was silent.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “I’m thinking,” Vann said. “Give me a minute.”
    While she was thinking I looked at the corpse’s face. “Is he Hispanic?” I asked. Vann ignored me, still thinking. I looked over to Diaz, who pulled up the face by itself to examine it.
    “Maybe,” he said, after a minute. “Maybe Mexican or Central American, not Puerto Rican or Cuban, I’d guess. He looks like he might have a lot of Mestizo in him. Or he might be Native American.”
    “What tribe?”
    “No clue,” Diaz said. “Ethnic typing’s not actually my gig.”
    By this time Vann had gone over to the image of the corpse and was looking at the hands. “Diaz,” Vann said. “Do we have a broken glass in evidence?”
    “Yes,” Diaz said, after checking.
    “Shane got an image of it from under the bed. Pull it up for me, please.”
    The image of the room spun wildly as Diaz yanked it around, pulling us all under the bed and looming the image of the shattered, bloody glass over us.
    “Fingerprints,” Vann said, pointing. “Do we have any idea whose they are?”
    “Nothing yet,” Diaz said.
    “What are you thinking?” I asked Vann.
    She ignored me again. “You have the feed from Officer Timmons?” she asked Diaz.
    “Yeah, but it’s pretty crappy and low res,” Diaz said.
    “Goddamn it, I told Trinh I wanted everything,” Vann said.
    “She might not be holding out on you,” Diaz said. “Metro cops these days let their feeds run their whole shift sometimes. If they do that they use a low-res setting because it lets them record longer.”
    “Whatever,” Vann said, still clearly annoyed. “Put it up for me and overlay it onto Shane’s room shot.”
    The room wheeled around again and went back to its real-world dimensions. “Feed coming up,” Diaz said. “It’s going to be in bas-relief because of Timmons’s position. I cleaned up the jerkiness.”
    On the bed, Bell appeared, hands up. The feed started running in real time.
    “Wait,” Vann said. “Pause it.”
    “Done,” Diaz said.
    “Can you get a clearer image of Bell’s hands?”
    “Not really,” Diaz said. “I can blow it up, but it’s a low-res feed. It’s got inherent

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