“That’s pretty severe. What’s the penalty for all this?”

“Erasure.”

“Erasure? You do that here?”

Ortega nodded. There was a small, grim smile playing all around her mouth, but never quite on it. “Yeah, we do that here. Shock you?”

I thought about it. Some crimes in the Corps carried the erasure penalty, principally desertion or refusal to obey a combat order, but I’d never seen it applied. It ran counter to the conditioning to cut and run. And on Harlan’s World erasure had been abolished a decade before I was born.

“It’s kind of old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

“You feel bad about what’s going to happen to Dimi?”

I ran the tip of my tongue over the cuts on the inside of my mouth. Thought about the cold circle of metal at my neck and shook my head. “No. But does it stop with people like him?”

“There are a few other capital crimes, but they mostly get commuted to a couple of centuries in storage.” The look on Ortega’s face said she didn’t think that was such a great idea.

I put my coffee down and reached for a cigarette. The motions were automatic, and I was too tired to stop them. Ortega waved away the offered pack. Touching my own cigarette to the packet’s ignition patch, I squinted at her.

“How old are you, Ortega?”

She looked back at me narrowly. “Thirty-four. Why?”

“Never been d.h.’d, hmm?”

“Yeah, I had psychosurgery a few years back, they put me under for a couple of days. Apart from that, no. I’m not a criminal, and I don’t have the money for that kind of travel.”

I let out the first breath of smoke. “Kind of touchy about it, aren’t you?”

“Like I said, I’m not a criminal.”

“No.” I thought back to the last time I had seen Virginia Vidaura. “If you were, you wouldn’t think two hundred years dislocation was such an easy rap.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” I didn’t know what had led me to forget that Ortega was the law, but something had. Something had been building in the space between the two of us, something like a static charge, something I might have been able to work out if my Envoy intuitions hadn’t been so blunted by the new sleeve. Whatever it was, it had just walked out of the room. I drew my shoulders in and pulled harder on the cigarette. I needed sleep.

“Kadmin’s expensive, right? With overheads like that, risks like that, he’s got to cost.”

“About twenty grand a hit.”

“Then Bancroft didn’t commit suicide.”

Ortega raised an eyebrow. “That’s fast work, for someone who just got here.”

“Oh, come on.” I exploded a lungful of smoke at her. “If it was suicide, who the fuck paid out the twenty to have me hit?”

“You’re well liked, are you?”

I leaned forward. “No, I’m disliked in a lot of places, but not by anyone with those kind of connections or that kind of money. I’m not classy enough to make enemies at that level. Whoever set Kadmin on me knows I’m working for Bancroft.”

Ortega grinned. “Thought you said they didn’t call you by name?”

Tired, Takeshi. I could almost see Virginia Vidaura wagging her finger at me. The Envoy Corps don’t get taken apart by local law.

I stumbled on as best I could.

“They knew who I was. Men like Kadmin don’t hang around hotels waiting to rip off the tourists. Ortega, come on.”

She let my exasperation sink into the silence before she answered me. “So Bancroft was hit as well? Maybe. So what?”

“So you’ve got to reopen the inquiry.”

“You don’t listen, Kovacs.” She bent me a smile meant for stopping armed men in their tracks. “The case is closed.”

I sagged back against the wall and watched her through the smoke for a while. Finally, I said, “You know, when your clean-up squad arrived tonight one of them showed me his badge for long enough to actually see it. Quite fancy, close up. That eagle and shield. All the lettering around it.”

She made a get-on-with-it gesture, and I took another pull on my cigarette before I sank the barb in.

“To protect and serve? I guess by the time you make lieutenant, you don’t really believe that stuff any more.”

Contact. A muscle jumped under one eye and her cheeks pulled in as if she was sucking on something bitter. She stared at me, and for that moment I thought I might have pushed too far. Then her shoulders slumped and she sighed.

“Ah, go ahead. What the fuck do you know about it anyway? Bancroft’s not people like you and me. He’s a fucking Meth.”

“A Meth?”

“Yeah. A Meth. You know, and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years. He’s old. I mean, really old.”

“Is that a crime, lieutenant?”

“It should be,” said Ortega grimly. “You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well they don’t really matter any more. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you’ll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.”

I looked seriously at her. “You pin anything like that on Bancroft? Ever?”

“I’m not talking about Bancroft,” she waved the objection aside impatiently, “I’m talking about his kind. They’re like the AIs. They’re a breed apart. They’re not human, they deal with humanity the way you and I deal with insect life. Well, when you’re dealing with the Bay City police department, having that kind of attitude can sometimes backup on you.”

I thought briefly of Reileen Kawahara’s excesses, and wondered how far off the mark Ortega really was. On Harlan’s World, most people could afford to be re-sleeved at least once, but the point was that unless you were very rich you had to live out your full span each time and old age, even with antisen treatment, was a wearying business. Second time around was worse because you knew what to expect. Not many had the stamina to do it more than twice. Most people went into voluntary storage after that, with occasional temporary re-sleevings for family matters, and of course even those re-sleevings thinned out as time passed and new generations bustled in without the old ties.

It took a certain kind of person to keep going, to want to keep going, life after life, sleeve after sleeve. You had to start out different, never mind what you might become as the centuries piled up.

“So Bancroft gets short-changed because he’s a Meth. Sorry, Laurens, you’re an arrogant, long-lived bastard. The Bay City police has got better things to do with its time than take you seriously. That kind of thing.”

But Ortega wasn’t rising to the bait any more. She sipped her coffee and made a dismissive gesture. “Look, Kovacs. Bancroft is alive, and whatever the facts of the case he’s got enough security to stay that way. No one here is groaning under the burden of a miscarriage of justice. The police department is underfunded, understaffed and overworked. We don’t have the resources to chase Bancroft’s phantoms indefinitely.”

“And if they’re not phantoms?”

Ortega sighed. “Kovacs, I went over that house myself three times with the forensics team. There’s no sign of a struggle, no break in the perimeter defences and no trace of an intruder anywhere in the security net’s records. Miriam Bancroft volunteered to take every state-of-the-art polygraphic test there is and she passed them all without a tremor. She did not kill her husband, no one broke in and killed her husband. Laurens Bancroft killed himself, for reasons best known to himself, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sorry you’re supposed to prove otherwise, but wishing isn’t going to make it fucking so. It’s an open-and-shut case.”

“And the phone call? The fact Bancroft wasn’t exactly going to forget he had remote storage? The fact someone thinks I’m important enough to send Kadmin out here?”