The gust caught my umbrella the second I got out of my car, before I'd even had a chance to fully open the thing. I struggled for a bit, then gave in to the inevitable. Another insideout dripping mess to deposit in the trashcan. The wild force of nature wins again.
I turned my collar to the cold rain and hustled up the brownstone stairs. I pulled out my ID and showed it to the uniform.
"Down the hall, one flight up, second door on the right. They're waiting for you, Dr. D'Amato."
"Right," I said. I hated these long brownstone stairs--rushing up them always made me breathless these days. I guess I could've walked up slowly, but that wasn't my way.
"Phil," that was Dave Spencer, even less hair and more belly than I, bent over a body, male, looked to be in his late 20s. "Come take a look at this." Dave was the coroner. He often called me in for special consultations--came with my forensic territory.
I looked. The corpse had his eyes wide open, like he'd been shocked to death. But there were no electricity burns on the body that I could see, and in fact the nearest electrical outlet was some 15 feet away next to a computer on the other side of the room.
"Chemical, food allergy, lethal injection?" I rattled off the usual suspects in cases like this. And of course there was the unstated omnipresent social tetrad of choices: death by natural causes, accident, suicide, or murder.
"Not likely," Dave shook his head. "No obvious puncture marks. No discoloration of the lips. We'll know more after the full test course."
"So what's your best guess?" I asked.
"I have none," Dave said. "That's why I asked you in. It's like something reached in and turned up the juice in this guy's nervous system. Turned up the volume to lethal levels. Looks like heart attack and ten other things gone wrong here--never seen anything like it."
"All right," I said. "I'll have a look around." For some reason, I had a reputation in the Department as the forensic scientist to call in when something inexplicable seemed to have happened. Well, I knew the reason--I'd been involved in my fair share of weirdo cases in my time, some of them public. And my popular writings in fields ranging from physics to genetics were pretty well known. "This guy have a name?"
"Glen Chaleff," Dave replied. "Some kind of computer programmer."
Chaleff's apartment was nothing out of the ordinary. Bland furniture arranged unsurprisingly around off-white painted walls. The computer was the only thing that caught my eye. It was a sophisticated machine, lean and very powerful, it seemed to me, something well beyond the latest commercial chip. The screen had two words on it.
"Copyright Notice"
I put on my gloves before touching the keyboard--never mind the standard precaution of not doing anything to disturb possible fingerprints and evidence, I was thinking more about not getting electrocuted on the outside chance that's what had happened to Chaleff. I pressed the up and down arrow keys to see if there was any other text above or below on the screen.
Nada. Just a bunch of hash above, three quarters faded to nothing, like I had come in on the end game of some kind of program that self-destructed after use. I arrowed back to "Copyright Notice."
It was fading away now too.
)
