“Come on,” I said. “Are we really going to do this?”

The other threep spun the handle of the pot in its hand, waiting.

“Look,” I said. “The police have already been called. They’re on their way. You might as well—”

The threep went high with its pot and swung down heavy. I backed up and stepped to the side, avoiding the pot. The threep’s arms came down, leaving its head exposed. I smacked my skillet into it like I was a tennis player returning a volley. The threep fell back flat on its ass.

I took advantage and kicked it in the side as it tried to scramble back up, sliding it farther back and to the right, into the kitchen. Its right arm, the one holding the pot, was splayed out. I drove my legs into it, immobilizing it, pushed the body into the stove, driving the other arm under the threep body. I raised my skillet.

The threep looked at it, and then at me.

“Yeah, I know, a goddamn skillet,” I said.

Then I drove it into the threep’s neck, edgewise, seven or eight times, until the carbon fiber casing cracked. Then I reached over and picked up the knife from the floor and slid it under the cracked casing, until I could feel the tip resting against the bundle of control fibers that went from the threep’s processor to its body systems.

“See, this is how you use a knife in a threep fight,” I said, and then hammered the knife on its handle with the skillet.

The knife severed the bundle fibers. The threep stopped fighting me.

I wedged the knife in and cracked open the neck a little more, looking in until I could see the cord that carried power from the battery back to the processor in the head. I reached into the neck and wrapped a finger around it. Then I looked at the threep.

“I know you’re still there and I know you can hear me,” I said. “And I know this threep can still talk. So why don’t we do this the easy way.” I looked around at the mess. “Well, the easier way, anyway. Tell me who you are and why you were here. I have your threep. I have its onboard memory. I’m going to find out all of it sooner or later.”

The threep said nothing. But whoever had been controlling it was still there, still looking at me.

“Have it your way,” I said, and yanked at the power cord, feeling it rip away at one of its terminals. The threep was now officially dead.

I stood up and looked around the apartment. It looked like a couple of idiots had trashed the place. I went to the door and opened it and saw Rachel Stern, on the phone, gawking at me.

“I heard noises,” she said. “I called the police.”

“Excellent idea,” I said. “Call the FBI’s L.A. office while you’re at it. Tell them I need an entire crime scene team and whoever they’ve got handling technology forensics. Tell them the sooner they’re here, the better.”

“Are you okay?” Stern asked, looking at my threep’s head.

“Well, let me put it this way,” I said. “I don’t think I’m getting the deposit back on this threep.” I turned away from her and wandered back into the apartment.

On the floor was the envelope the threep had dropped.

I picked it up. It was a plain white envelope on which the words “For grandma and Janis” had been written in very large, not-terribly-adult writing. The envelope was sealed. I debated for a moment and then opened it. On the inside was a data card.

“Hello,” I said.

A call pinged into my field of view. It was Klah Redhouse.

“Agent Shane,” I said.

“So, uh, Chris, this is Officer Redhouse,” Redhouse said.

“I know,” I said.

“You know that thing you’re investigating.”

“I do,” I said.

“Well, I have some people here who want to talk to you about it.”

“Important people, I would guess.”

“That would be a good guess,” Redhouse said.

“They wouldn’t happen to be at your desk with you at the moment, would they?” I asked.

“Actually, yeah,” Redhouse said. “How could you tell?”

“The nervous stammer, mostly,” I said.

There was a little laugh on the other end. “You got me,” he said. “Anyway, these people were hoping they might get to talk to you today.”

I held up the data card to get a closer look at it. “I think that can be arranged,” I said. “I have people there I want to talk to, too.”

Chapter Sixteen

“TELL ME YOU have video of your fight,” Vann said to me, when I got back into the office.

“I’m fine,” I said, coming around to her desk. “Thanks for asking.”

“I didn’t ask because I knew you were fine,” Vann said. “You were in a threep. The worst that could happen is you get a dent.”

“That’s not the worst that could happen,” I said. My last moments in the Los Angeles area consisted of handing my insurance information over to a very annoyed manager at the Pasadena Avis, so they’d deal with the threep I had brought back with a cracked and dented head.

“You survived,” Vann said.

“The other threep got it worse,” I allowed.

“And do we know who the other threep was yet?” Vann asked.

“No,” I said. “The L.A. forensics team is looking at it now. But when I was looking at it I didn’t find any make or model information on it.”

“Which is weird,” Vann said.

“It’s very weird,” I said. “Every commercial threep carries that information by law, along with a vehicle identification number.” I raised my arm to show where my threep’s number was etched, just below the armpit. “There was none of that.”

“Theories?” Vann asked.

“One, it’s a prototype model,” I said. “Something that’s not on the market yet. Two, it’s a market model with aftermarket modifications, including stripping off make and model numbers and the VIN. Three, it’s a ninja.”

“Ninja threep,” Vann said. “That’s funny.”

“It wasn’t so funny when it was trying to bash my head in with a pot,” I said. “The L.A. team said they will let me know when they find something. I told them to pay special attention to the processor and memory. They looked at me like I was an asshole.”

“No one likes to be told how to do their job, Shane,” Vann said.

“I’m not hugely impressed with the L.A. office, I have to tell you,” I said. “But maybe their trying to put me in a threep in a wheelchair set me off a bit.” A fleeting memory of a very annoyed call from Agent Ibanez, who waited ten minutes for me to return before figuring out I was gone for good, surfaced in my memory. I won the argument when I pointed out that if I had showed up at the Bradbury Park Apartments in a wheelchair, our mystery threep would be long gone, and with important evidence.

Which reminded me about the evidence. “I need to go back to Arizona this afternoon,” I said.

“Random shift in conversation, but okay,” Vann said.

“It’s not random,” I said. “Johnny Sani left a data card for his sister and grandmother. It’s what the ninja threep was there for. It’s got data on it but it’s password protected.”

“Whatever password Johnny Sani is going to think up is not going to be that difficult to figure out,” Vann said.

“Probably not, but it will still be easier to ask his family first,” I said. “Pretty sure it was meant for them. I made a copy of data. I need to take the copy to them and see if they know what to do with it.”

“Are you going to ask them if they know why Johnny was living under an assumed name, too?”

“I will, but I don’t expect they’re going to know,” I said, and thought about it a bit. “What’s weird is that Oliver Green doesn’t seem to have any ID, either.”

“What do you mean?” Vann asked.

“When I was talking to the lady at the post office, she said that Sani wanted to rent a P.O. box, but when she said he’d need two forms of identification, he lost interest,” I said. “And the apartment wasn’t rented by him, it was rented by Filament Digital. He didn’t need any ID there, either.”

“What is Filament Digital?”