“Aha. Well, let’s move in, then.”
“Consider it done,” Peterson said, and grinned.
Several months later, Ashton was promoted to Lieutenant Investigator; Peterson had placed him on a fast track from the very beginning of his tenure with the Imperial City Police. By this time, Peter Rassmussen and Roger Armbrand were getting close to being promoted to Captain Investigator, and several of the others had moved into Sergeant Investigator, as well. Four new investigators had also joined the team – John Smith, Hugo Weaver, Callista Ames, and Alan Compton.
“But we’re still one big team,” Peter had told Nick, and Roger agreed.
“Yeah, what Pete said. Even when we’re all detectives, I can’t see us doing anything but working together, like we do now.”
“Besides,” Pete added, “we might be able to help some of the others bump up their ranks, while we’re at it. Kind of like what Gorski’s doing with you.”
Nick Ashton now settled more permanently into his work at the Imperial City Police, learning more and more and becoming ever more skilled in detection, especially with Stefan Gorski as his mentor. In a large city like that, murders were not uncommon, and burglaries and thefts reasonably frequent, so he had plenty of opportunities to hone those skills.
And as he gained seniority in “the Team,” as he’d taken to thinking of it, his pay went up, his wardrobe improved in quality, and he let his hair grow more than a bit on the sides while trimming the top much closer. The blond highlights had proliferated to augment the difference, and now gave him a golden blond look, especially with the tan he tried to maintain year-round. He even grew out his beard into the stubble-length currently fashionable, and which he’d gotten Colonel Peterson’s permission to do, in order to look as different as possible from the rookie officer who had started at Imperial Police Headquarters. He kept in shape in the department’s gym, and as his body continued to mature, it filled out in musculature.
Some three years into his work at ICPD, few people would have recognized the lanky young, uniformed cop who worked the streets of Imperial City for IPD as this serious, well-built, talented investigator.
Unfortunately, “few” was not “none.”
Teamwork and Leadership
Ray “Droppoint” Murphy was a petty thief and pickpocket who operated in Imperial City in the arcades nearest the Palace. Not that he was apt to get wallets or cash; those hadn’t existed – at least on Sintar – in hundreds of years, having been replaced by virtual reality transactions long ago. Oh, some of the more rural planets in the Empire still had people who only carried actual coin, but they rarely showed up on Sintar, let alone in Imperial City. A few credits in coin was as much as most people on Sintar carried.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t other trinkets in pockets and on wrists and around throats – jewelry, inlaid pocket knives, and other such valuable items were easy to acquire for a skilled pickpocket like Droppoint. And he had been on a spree in recent weeks in the arcades; when one of the wealthier matrons lost a valuable bauble, matters had come to a head.
It was time, the ICPD decided, to put an end to it. But Gorski and Demetrius were already out on minor cases, having taken Rassmussen and Armbrand along to help them get a leg up on their upcoming promotions to Detective; Taylor and Amundsen were still on the other side of Sintar, stuck in a kind of courtroom hell.
So Ashton was given the job of scouting out the specific locations Droppoint was hitting, then setting up an operation to catch him.
The first thing he did was to go into VR and use the city planning records to set up a three-dimensional map of the arcade that Droppoint frequented the most, then he had the computer take all of the complaints and reports of pickpocketing and try to locate them within the map. Most of the time, the best that could be done was to highlight an area, or a store; Droppoint was very skilled, and most of his victims didn’t know they’d been robbed for some little time after he stole from them.
Still, it began to give Ashton a good feel for the areas of the arcade that Droppoint preferred to hit. When he then added in the times of the robberies, and animated them, he started to see the ebb and flow of the pickpocket’s movements.
And I can probably use this to command a surveillance team, he thought, zooming in and out of the model by grabbing this or that storefront. I just need to set it up so their VR triggers their location in here, and I can follow their movements, and even tap their markers to communicate with ‘em. Huh. This is pretty cool.
Ashton decided to take the newbies, by way of providing some on-the-job training, along with Timothy Jones to help him “wrangle,” as Jones put it…grinning as he did so. This meant his team consisted of relative rookie investigators John Smith, Hugo Weaver, Callista Ames, and Alan Compton.
“Now, the first thing we need to do is to go undercover and see exactly where he’s hanging out,” Ashton noted. “Ray Murphy, a.k.a. ‘Droppoint,’ is a known pickpocket, but he’s good and he’s fast, so he’s hard to catch out. Which means that the reports we have in don’t have any hard locations – the victims only know where they discover they have a missing item, and sometimes that’s not until they get home. But he’s been at it this time for a couple of months, and not only are the locals starting to complain, he’s scored a couple of really expensive items, one of which was an heirloom bracelet
