Retrieval Artist 06 Recovery Man by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch [Rusch, Kristine Kathryn]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-03-07T21:21:11.718000+00:00

— 29 —

Flint got up and peered out the door to Van Alen's office. No one was in the waiting room. No one was even in the hallway that led to it.

Still, his stomach clenched. He felt like everyone was watching him. He felt like a man about to collapse.

He didn't trust his own eyes. He wanted a double-check.

So he went back inside and called up holoscreens of the information. He stared at the access logs for Emmeline's files. The lettering looked like it had been written on the air around him. It wouldn't matter if someone else saw it. They wouldn't know what it meant. They wouldn't even know if he had it read aloud.

So he did.

The computer's voice was the default voice, a vaguely androgynous digitized thing that sounded weak and tinny.

The killer's attorneys had accessed the files repeatedly. No surprise there. The killer had been appealing his case for years now. Or rather, they had. The killer himself hadn't appealed at all. He'd even asked them to call off the appeal, but they wouldn't.

Armstrong law provided for retrials if something was wrong with the first. There was always something wrong with a trial. It took very little to get the first retrial, a little more to get the second, and just a little more to get the third.

Flint had gone to none of them, not even the first. He didn't want to see the man who had killed his daughter—the man who had worked at a day care center, charged with protecting children, and who had somehow managed to murder three of them.

Flint didn't trust himself to look at that man. Flint wasn't sure the man would have survived the encounter.

But his name on Emmeline's records—and the name of his attorneys—was no surprise. And the names of the prosecuting attorneys in all the retrials were no surprise, either. The surprises were scattered throughout the list. Paloma, more than once. Flint would have expected the once, just to make sure whoever had come to see her had reason. But not repeatedly. Not five times, all with police approval.

His stomach churned. He looked at the lettering. Through it, he could see the walls of Van Alen's office, the exit into the waiting room, the desk that dominated the entire space. Over it all: Paloma, Paloma, Paloma.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and listened. Five times. He hadn't missed that. And mixed with her name, another surprise. Lawyers again, but lawyers with odd names. Names he didn't recognize. He had to hear them pronounced to know what they were. Some sort of alien firm.

That made him nauseous. That made him believe that someone thought Emmeline was still alive, but disappeared. Because Rhonda—not him, it couldn't have been him, he'd been a computer programmer, for heaven's sake—had done something to anger an alien government.

One whose name he didn't recognize.

He commanded the system to shut down the audio, then he opened his eyes. The names were spelled nothing like they sounded, which was not unusual for alien translations.

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