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know we’re just about the best you’ve got right now. You get good PR. We get a fee commensurate with the work we  really did, instead of some split-fee bargain basement deal with one of the DA’s superannuated cronies. Maybe even a leg up into the Upper Bar next year; at least another rung on the ladder. And everybody’s happy. Including, we desperately hope, the soul of that poor bastard, avenged by the event; and Justice Herself, for being served. That being the reason we’re all here, or so I’m told.”
    Matt looked at her—Lee counted the seconds off: she knew exactly how long he liked to hold one of these “penetrating looks”—and then made a sour half-smile. “You put your case subtly, as ever,” he said.
    “She speaks for me,” Gelert said, “so don’t get personal. Say the word, Matt, and we’re on it. We’ll get on the horn to Hagen and get him off your boss’s case.”
    Matt sighed. “Go,” he said. “The crime scene team wants to see you soonest. Call Parker Center, get the address, get down there and deal with them. Blessington’s handling it.”
    And they were left staring at the blue screen again. Gelert gave Lee one of those big toothy grins. “What a social animal he is,” he said. “I see why you ditched him.”
    His irony was showing only slightly less than it might have been. “Would it had only been so,” Lee muttered, and got up, staring at the commwall as it dissolved back to her default view. “What’s Hagen’s problem, I wonder? He’s usually been fairly mellow when we’ve worked with him.”
    “Maybe he doesn’t have an asbestos seat cushion,” Gelert said. “Let’s call him and find out. Mass?”
    “You don’t have to shout. Got his assistant on the line now.”
    “ETA?”
    “He’s playing the talking-to-someone-more-important-right-now game, the little  cucaracha . Five minutes, because he knows his boss really wants to hear from you.”
    “Gee, what would he do if this was a matter of life and death?” Lee said softly, and bent backward a little with her hands in the small of her back, trying to work out a kink. Her sleep had not done her much good last night.
    “How’d you know about the murder?” Gelert said.
    “The same way you would have, if you weren’t snoring within minutes of getting home last night, or playing with the pups before breakfast,” Lee said.
    “Guilty and guilty,” Gelert said. “If I didn’t save the broadcast news and the papers and the online stuff for when I got to work, what else would I do in the office all day? But now I won’t bother. Why prejudice myself with some yellow journalist’s take on whatever minuscule evidence there was at that point?” He lay down on his cushion and sagged back, yawned. “So do we play this as usual?”
    “We may as well start that way,” Lee said. “We’ll sniff the scene together, anyway. But after that you’d better see what you can do with prediscovery.”
    “You always do this to me when Alfen are involved,” Gelert said. “I hate it.”
    “You’re better at data search than I am,” Lee said. “It’s not my fault you take every opportunity to rub my nose in your competence. And with those people’s data protection laws, any tricks you’ve got, we’re going to need.”
    Gelert looked glum. “Mass?” Lee said.
    “Two minutes, Lee.”
    “Not that. Cut a copy of the usual discovery-and-litigation agreement and sim it over to Matt’s office before he thinks of a way to weasel out of the commitment.”
    “There before you, boss lady. You’re slipping.”
    Lee smiled slightly. “Heads up, he’s on,” Mass said.
    The commwall went bright with the view into Charl Hagen’s office. This could have been mistaken for a view of the outdoors, for Hagen was fairly “old management” in what was now the biggest of the telecomms multiuniversals, and Lee remembered her astonishment at discovering that the witness she had been dispatched to interview had not only a