referred to the index for Discoloration, Mild, Under Stress, to learn why the crease of her
buttocks was turning gray in the universal deep black. Have you been taking your vinegar
baths every two weeks? the handbook chided.
“Yes, Dr. Sumpler.” She had come to enjoy the acrid half hour.
Continuing hydroacetic therapy may be accelerated if stress discoloration occurs
Custom melanin replacement is fed from above and below, from vitamin supplements and
from epidermal uoumhment. Discoloration may be due to excesswely tight clothing
(loosen or change styles); it may also be due to poor nutrition habits, which are not
always correctable through vitamin therapy. Do not won3’ about discolorations lasting
only a few hours or a day; these are common in the first years of your adjusted body.
“Glorious.” Dr. Sumpler had not warned her about such minor piebaldness. Mary
shut the handbook and lifted it onto the tiled washbasin, then tilted her head back to soak
hair, rid it of the airgrime and sweat of three unrelieved days.
She could not wash away the sight of eight young comb citizens in various stages
of disassembly. Last night, the first investigation team had gone to the third foot of East
Comb One in response to neighborhood medical detectors picking up traces of human
decay. In the first two hours the team had mounted a sniffer, performed assay and
scanned for heat trails. Then the freezers had come and tombed the whole apartment.
Senior in her watch, Mary had been assigned this rare homicide at seven hundred. Spin of
the hour.
Layer by cold solid layer, forensics would now study the scene corpses and all
and take as long as they wished. From the large scale to the microbial everything would
be sifted and analyzed and by tomorrow or the day after they would know something
about everyone who had been in and out of the apartment during the past year. There
would be lists of skin flake, hair and spittle traces to match with medical records now fair
game under the Raphkind amendments, bless the bastard; she could track suspects
through microbe population deviances and projected points of origin as fine as rooms in a
suspect’s apartment, bless evolution and mitochondrial DNA.
With eyes closed she saw again the corpses hard and still, covered with a thin
layer of rime, their blood clotted in dark cold lakes lives and memories fled. A grisly
meat puzzle for masters to riddle.
Mary Choy had been a pd for five of her twenty eight years. Competence and the
laws banning discrimination against voluntary transforms (bless the libs before
Raphkind) had moved her on the sly spin to full lieutenant in supervisory investigation in
three and a half years. She had remained an investigator by choice, specking this to be her
slot in life. She did not love death. She loved mystery and capture. She loved finding the
social carnivores, the parasites and untherapied misfits.
Mary still believed she helped hold the line against the Selectors and others who
would exact retribution beyond the
law. Their way lay unbelievable misery for all. Her way lay swift decisive justice
and forced therapy or incarceration. Ninety five percent of all crimes could be solved;
leave itto the therapists to find and erase the perverse drives and motivations.
Two hours after her arrival at the scene, pd ensigns had brought her a possible
witness, a tall gaunt graying male R Fettle, friend of the apartment’s owner E Goldsmith.
Mary had not then seen the interior of the apartment but she had been fed by the on scene
techs; suspicion was falling heavily on the owner. interrogated, Fettle had had little to tell