Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) Read Free Page B

at the end, one delicate hand low on the marble wall. The hand slid down, leaving a slow wake of black blood against the white marble.
    Hill hit pause and the screen froze. It said something about Zockinski and Hill, how they must have seen this tape a couple dozen times but didn’t play it down with humor. 
    “The camera in the hall got this from the knees down,” Hill said. “She’s alone, and then there’s another set of feet, and then you can see her on the ground but she’s alone again.”
    Santino exhaled heavily. “So what can we help you with?”
    “Can the cyborg tell anything from the video?”
    “The cyborg can tell a woman was murdered,” Rachel snapped. Santino flashed an irritated red and Rachel sat on her temper. “What exactly are you looking for?”
    “It’s just…” Zockinski hesitated, “the room’s empty. We have two clear shots of the door, and everyone who used the ATM before her is accounted for. She’s the only person there, and nobody followed her in. This guy came out of nowhere. She might as well have been killed by a ghost.”
    “Is there one of those little access doors for service?” Santino asked, leaning towards the monitor. He was a lifelong fan of the locked room murder mystery, but the reality of that handprint scrubbed the romance from it. “Some of those cover a space big enough to hide a person.”
    Zockinski shook his head. “It’s a newer machine. The entire face pops open. Insurance companies want banks to get rid of the ones with service doors because of, well…” He pointed at the monitor, the smeared handprint.
    “And there’s no line-of-sight into the room itself?”
    “Nope.”
    Rachel thought aloud. “Business district… There’s probably dozens of cameras on that street, right?”
    Hill nodded. “We got them in the canvas. They all show Griffin going into the bank, and then nothing until she’s found, fourteen minutes later. We went back three hours and everyone going in, went out. We even asked the maintenance guy who restocked the machine around noon, and he said the room was empty when he left.”
    “There’s probably a few other cameras on the street you don’t know about, private ones. Nanny cams, mostly, maybe some security systems that wouldn’t show up in your records. I’ll have to be at the bank to find them.”
    “Can’t you do that from here?” Zockinski asked. Rachel didn’t have to check his mood to tell he wanted to kick them to the curb.
    “It is just so cute how you people think we’re omniscient,” Rachel said. 

     
     
     
    THREE
     
    When they had first been paired as partners, Rachel and Santino had seen no other option than to go out and get completely hammered on straight whiskey. Rum, they agreed, was too popular to be interesting, tequila suffered from delusions of grandeur, and vodka had lost its hearty Russian heritage to peer pressure from vanilla and fruit. But whiskey, good old-fashioned whiskey, still had roots running deep in Tennessee and remembered its sole purpose was to help make awkward social situations bearable.
    As it happened, they had more in common than whiskey. Professionally, they couldn’t have been more different but they clicked on the important things (him: “Sophia Loren in Houseboat. ” her: “Yes, yes, a million times yes!”). They lurched from bar to bar, finally coming to rest on the front stoop of a local bookstore with a handful of Georgetown students. The students were elated to hear she was with OACET, and they traded her opinions on how cyborgs fit into the U.S. Justice System for bottles of warm beer. 
    Sometime after the students had shuffled home but before the sun came up, Santino admitted to savage jealousy. At the same time Rachel had a tiny chip implanted in her brain, Santino was finishing up his graduate degree at Cal Tech, developing manual solutions for problems she could now solve with a thought. If he had known what was truly possible, he would have