“What do you need us to do, Lieutenant Investigator?” Ames asked.
“No, no, no,” Ashton said with a smile, holding up a hand. “We’re a team, here. There’s no formality required unless we’re in one of the chiefs’ offices, or a department briefing or something like that. I’m Nick, and this is Tim.” He indicated Jones.
“Or you can call me ‘Wrangler,’” Jones noted with a smirk. They all laughed.
“Um, okay,” a flushing Ames said with a slightly shy grin. “What do you need us to do, Nick?”
“We’re going to all get into disguises and go scope out his activities in the arcade,” Ashton explained, even as Jones gave him a surreptitious elbow nudge, which he ignored. “Once we have a good feel for where he’s most likely to be, when, one or two of you are gonna become bait and see if we can’t get him to fall for it. It’s called a sting operation. Everybody good, so far?”
A chorus of “uh-huh” came back to him.
“Great. I brought in an expert in disguise to help us go undercover.” Ashton waved an invited bystander from the doorway; he was average in height, with a clean-shaven face and shaved head. “This is Detective Adrian Mott; he’s going to help us with this.”
“Hi, guys,” Mott said, moving to stand beside Ashton. “Call me Adrian. The key to working undercover is to look nondescript, to look ordinary, not stand out. If you’re going to be undercover for a long time, you have to be your character, but for our purposes today, and for the next few days, we just want to make sure you don’t stand out...”
While Mott worked with the rookie investigators, Jones was giving Ashton a good ribbing in the corner.
“Man, she likes you,” he murmured. “She’s hardly taken her eyes off you the whole damn time. She likes you.”
“I’m running this show,” Ashton pointed out. “Of course she’s watched me. She’s paying attention to the plan. There’s every indication she’s gonna be a good cop, if her academy record is any judge.”
“C’mon, man. With all those blond streaks and that tan, never mind those golden-brown eyes of yours, you got the whole ‘golden god’ thing goin’ on. She all but drooled.”
“Lay off. I do not, and she did not.”
“Did too. Didn’t you see her blush and drop her eyes when you told her to call you Nick? Dude, she’s got a thing for you.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have jobs to do.”
Exasperated, Jones eyed Ashton.
“I’ve never seen you with anybody, man or woman, the whole time you’ve been with us, Nick. And that’s been – what? A couple of years now, man. Yet I’ve seen you eyeing that VR actress you think is hot, so you’re not, like, asexual or something. What gives?”
“What gives,” Ashton told him, mildly irked, “is that my last girlfriend turned out to be the kowtowing, crooked-cop niece of the guy that runs IPD Headquarters, over in the south quadrant. And, near as I was able to tell, she was sicced onto me, rather than really being interested. She sure as hell didn’t waste any time hooking up with somebody else after I got moved over here – she’s on her third live-in since – nor yet try to contact me after my old apartment blew, to find out if I was okay. I’m just glad I found out before it got as far as one of us spendin’ the damn night. My old mentor told me, once I got old enough, ‘never stick it in crazy, son,’ and as far as I’m concerned, dirty cop is even worse than crazy. But I came close, before I found out who and what she really was. I was serious. She wasn’t.”
“Oh. Shit. I...I’m sorry, Nick. I had no idea.”
“Yeah, well. Now you do. So...”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll lay off. Sorry.”
Soon the members of Ashton’s team were all dressed and made up as fairly ordinary pedestrian shoppers, neither poor nor rich, and their hair was covered by either caps or wigs, depending on the officer’s preference.
“Okay, good,” Ashton declared, looking them over. “Good job. At a glance, I don’t think I’d recognize any of you without staring at you for a few seconds. And I know you! So we should be able to fool Droppoint, who’s never met any of you. Tim? Do you have the grid worked out based on what I gave you?”
“Sure do, Nick,” Jones averred. “Can everybody join me in channel 227? I want to go over the areas of the arcade each person is responsible for, as well as the store fronts...”
They arrived at the arcade by ones and twos, to avoid drawing attention to a group. Each investigator moved casually to his or her assigned area using the slidewalks, and began to “shop.”
No sign was seen of Droppoint Murphy until mid-morning. Then he appeared in one corner of the arcade, not too far from the west archway to the people-movers. Compton spotted him first, and used VR to send a vocal alert.
“He’s here, guys,” Compton notified the others. “Over by the dry cleaners.”
“Right,” a disguised Ashton responded in kind, sitting by the central fountain and pretending to read in VR; in reality, he was keeping track of each member of his team in a special virtual control room he’d worked out – the entire room comprised that same three-dimensional space that modeled the arcade in miniature. He had spent some time in his off-duty evenings updating and enhancing it, and now it had the capability of tagging any given pedestrian in the arcade’s security system, which currently fed even more data into the control room.
