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pain on the
back of his head. Rees tried to raise a hand to rub it, but his
limbs didn’t respond. He was strapped into his chair.
    “ Please, Detective, this
will go much smoother with your cooperation.”
    Rees knew enough about SICA’s interrogation
procedures to take her word for it.
    “ Where am I?”
    Reilly smiled, which made Rees wish he had
just kept his mouth shut.
    “ I’m afraid I can’t say,
Detective,” she said.
    True to form, Rees thought.
    Reilly reached into her pocket and produced
a small plastic chip.
    “ Case #4563367-6638,
Addendum. Dr. L. S. Morgan,” she said. “You remember this, I
presume?”
    Rees nodded.
    “ Who else has seen
it?”
    “ Everyone that should,” he
said. “You know the procedure for that sort of thing, don’t
you?”
    “ Of course. I also know
that this isn’t a routine autopsy report. I’ll ask you again,
Detective: Who’s seen it?”
    Rees shook his head. She likely already knew
the answer, anyway.
    “ Just me and
Morgan.”
    He remembered Squibby’s transmission then,
that last moment when something had gone wrong.
    “ And Squibby,” he said.
“What happened to Squibby?”
    Reilly raised an eyebrow.
    “ That would be Lynn
Squibel? Ex-cyberanalyst for the department?”
    “ Yeah,” he
said.
    “ Dead. Found her facedown
in her rig. She’d bled out through the eyes and nose. Still trying
to work out what fried her, but there wasn’t much brain tissue left
to work with.”
    Rees closed his eyes. She didn’t have to be
involved in any of this, could have gone on blissfully ignorant.
But he’d needed her for answers, had gotten her in deeper than she
needed to be.
    Her death was on him.
    “ No one else, then?”
Reilly asked.
    “ No, just
them.”
    “ Good,” she said. “I’d
hate for anyone else to get involved. There’s enough blood on this
case already.”
    “ What do you mean?” Rees
asked. “Did something happen to Morgan too?”
    “ Well, it seems that a few
hours after you left the precinct, your John Doe climbed off the
slab and smashed in Doctor Morgan’s skull.”
    “ Christ.”
    “ The killer got away
clean,” Reilly said. “Nobody even knew what happened until about
four hours later.”
    “ Wasn’t anybody watching
the damn security feed?”
    “ Of course,” she said.
“Trouble is, there’s nothing on it.”
    “ What do you mean?” Rees
asked. “Every inch of that fucking lab is covered!”
    “ I wouldn’t have believed
it either, but I watched it with my own eyes. One second, Morgan
and the body are there and then,” she snapped her fingers, “the
room is empty. Not a sign of anyone or a hint that a bloody corpse
was sitting on the table a second earlier.”
    “ And nobody saw it
leave?”
    “ Not a soul. And it gets
even better,” she said. “After they found Morgan’s body and
forensics swarmed over the room, the security feed still never
showed his corpse. That’s when I was called in. We never would have
found out what happened had I not been able to salvage some of the
data from Morgan’s optic implants. They showed some of what the
security feed missed.”
    Reilly paused for a moment.
    “ I’m… well, let’s just say
it was an image I’d rather forget about as soon as I
can.”
    Although he could only imagine such a scene,
Rees shared her sentiment.
    “ Wait,” he said. “Why the
hell would Morgan’s eyes record the attack, but the security
cameras were fooled?”
    “ I wondered that too,”
Reilly said. “Turns out, Morgan had his eyes replaced six years
ago. Two years ago the city switched suppliers for all its optics
and surveillance equipment and every security feed in the police
department was replaced or updated. Care to guess the new
supplier?”
    “ Sircotin.”
    Reilly nodded.
    “ My security clearance
allowed me to dig up Morgan’s case file on the John Doe and your
interrogation of Vandum out of the department’s datatrash heap.
After that there were just too many