“So talk to her.”
“I can’t, Beggs. I can’t go anywhere near the case.”
“Yeah, well I’m up to my elbows in bodies right now.”
“I know that, but–”
Beggs hung up on her. Salvi sighed, but figured it was probably a good thing if Beggs didn’t want to do it. The mood he was in, Myki would run a mile. She looked back at her iPort, then put a call through to Ford.
“Yeah?” Ford answered. Salvi could hear her walking, saw a parking garage behind her.
“You feel like working another case in my absence?” Salvi asked.
“Jesus, who died this time?”
“No one, but I think we need to question Myki Natashi again. We weren’t sure what the marks on the side of her face were, but Riverton has matched them to one of Mitch’s vics. They have to be from these neural devices. She and Barker were at Floor To Ceiling the night he was killed. We need to talk to her again. She knew more than she was letting on and I think we can get her to open up.”
Ford sighed. “Alright. I’ll handle it.”
“Ford?”
“Yeah?”
“Go easy on her. I think she’s a little fragile. She needs a woman’s touch.”
Ford smiled. “Women are my specialty, Brentt.”
Salvi smiled back.
“Don’t tell my wife I said that,” Ford signed off.
Salvi spent the next few hours poring over all the cases that Mitch, Hernandez, Beggs and Ford had been working the past few days, dipping in and out of the Taskforce Trident casefiles, seeing which ones Riverton had connected and which ones it hadn’t. Though she had familiarized herself with all the detail, she had not, so far, managed to come up with anything the team had not already theorized on. It was looking very much like the Flyte drug had leaked from the exclusive rich clubs, perhaps just Floor to Ceiling, then someone associated with the Bounce club, or possibly Hasties, had reengineered it into Fyte, and now it had leaked from there and was spreading. From what Sorenson had reported about the Fyte that Farrugia and Burke had bought, it was still in the pricey range. Which meant there didn’t seem to be any evidence that a cheap version of the drug was on the streets. Yet. Regardless, so far it was still a mystery just how the Chief’s daughter fit into this, or why Caine was killed.
She was so ensconced in the files she jumped when her burner phone sounded with a message. It was from Lance Chaney.
“Bingo!” she smiled.
His reply was simple:
‘I got your message, Sarah. No problem. I hope he realizes it was his loss.’
She thought long and hard about what to reply, then sent her response:
He did me a favor. I had a great night, thanks to you. Next time I see you, the drinks are on me…
Salvi continued to pore over the files, hoping to be of some assistance to the worn out team. She rewatched the footage from Kelto’s Diner of Williams killing Delroy, then pacing agitatedly, while the blood poured from him. Knowing what she knew now, she could clearly see the guy was souped up on Fyte. Despite his bullet holes, given half the chance, he probably would’ve killed everyone in that place. He wore no neural device, though. He was running on the drug alone.
It made her think of the gang fight footage again. The brutality of the fighting. It scared her. The threat of a cheap knock off version of Fyte spreading across the streets of America was terrifying. Especially if the neural tech was added into the mix, like these gang-fighters had done. Reading through the files, the motive for the fight was still unclear. A group of guys just decided to beat the living shit out of another bunch of guys. This scared her the most; violence of this magnitude without reason.
She studied the screen shots of their neural devices again and thought of the indentations on Myki Natashi. When The Crash occurred, permanent connected neural implants were still fairly new, and only a small amount of the world’s population had had them. The victims of The Crash were the first adopters. After The Crash, most of those who’d survived couldn’t wait to be rid of them. They were terrified by the threat that their brains might be hacked by more terrorists, that a virus could be sent online that would cause the implants to malfunction and leave them brain damaged or brain-dead – like so many victims of The Crash had been. After the tragedy, when the government provided funding for those with the implants to have them removed, most people took up the offer. What else could they do once the laws passed to make neural implants illegal?
Only a very small few had refrained from having their implants removed, but many soon regretted their decision, as, in the time that followed, the neural devices came to symbolize a certain shame. The Crash was a black spot on world history, a tragedy, and many couldn’t understand why anyone would want to keep their devices.
But, as the saying went, Salvi thought, time heals all wounds. Though there were scars left across the human population, the scars were healing, and some people were coming around to the idea of perhaps giving them another try – with the relevant safety measures in place, of course. Just like Attis Solme hoped they would.
Salvi realized as she researched that some youth subcultures these days wore neural device headwear as a fashion accessory, as an act of defiance. It was a statement that no one, terrorists especially, would dictate to them what they could and couldn’t do with their bodies. But these kids hadn’t really been around for The Crash. They were babies at the time. They hadn’t lived through the pain or the heartache the
