The rain had followed Elly back to headquarters. It streaked the windows of the spinner in silver threads and gathered in the gutters outside LAPD in oily, trembling pools. By the time she stepped beneath the overhang, the warmth of the restaurant had already begun to feel distant: spice on her tongue, salt at the corner of her mouth, the pleasant looseness of tequila still lingering behind her eyes.
For a little while, there had only been food. The three of them had sat around a table at two in the morning and eaten something that probably shouldn't have worked but somehow did, while Los Angeles carried on dying noisily outside.
It'd been almost ordinary... Elly wasn't sure what to do with ordinary...
The doors opened for her. Cool, recycled air washed over her face. She pulled the scarf down from her mouth and walked inside. Crowe and Wylde should be somewhere east of the city by now. She pictured the spinner slipping through rain and smog as they headed for the GENTEK facility, Crowe stubbornly pretending his ribs weren't cracked badly enough to matter and Wylde— Elly stopped the thought there. They could take care of themselves... Probably.
She pressed the elevator control. The doors opened. Crime Lab.
There were reasons she'd chosen this part of the investigation. Evidence didn't become defensive when you asked the wrong question, didn't decide it disliked you halfway through an interview, and didn't lie because it was afraid or loyal or ashamed.
Sure, it could be misunderstood, contaminated, destroyed... sometimes deliberately. But whatever remained was what remained.
Elly trusted that. More than she trusted people.
The elevator descended. Her reflection hovered faintly in the brushed metal opposite her. For an instant, she saw herself as someone else might: coat damp around the shoulders, hair touched by rain, face still carrying the faint signs of exhaustion that even a hospital and several hours away from the case hadn't entirely erased.
Alive. She reminded herself, letting her eyes and mind linger there a moment.
Then the doors parted and she walked out.
The Crime Lab at this hour had the same sleeplessness of the rest of Los Angeles: Machines hummed beneath fluorescent lights, half-empty cups sat beside terminals, and someone had abandoned a meal that looked as though it had been printed sometime during the Wallace administration.
Elly moved through it all toward Coco's section. She was already assembling the case again in her mind: Bolt-On, Bellefontaine, Turfan. The stolen truck. The damaged canimoids. GENTEK... And somewhere behind all of that, the older robberies Varela had been chasing. Separate things, perhaps... except separate things had an irritating habit of becoming one thing after you looked at them long enough.
That's what bothered her – not that they lacked leads, they had too many. A trail in every direction could mean they were close... or it could mean someone had scattered breadcrumbs deliberately.
Elly reached Coco's workspace and stopped just short of intruding into it. She rested one hand against the edge of the partition. "Coco." Her voice was quiet but carried easily through the lab. She waited until she had his attention. "What did you find?"
Coco looks up from his screen, rubbing his eyes and blinking like a kid woken from a nap. "Elly, yes" he says, soft-voiced. Shifting mental gears from whatever else he's been working on. "They told me you were injured. I'm glad you're... okay."
He pulls a sheaf of papers out of a drawer. Takes off a rusting bulldog clip and gulps down some coffee. Regrets his mistake there but presses on after a revolted shudder. "The little stuff first: there were two types of explosives used at your crime scene. The warehouse door was blown open with yīng máo, or something very like it." Seeing Elly's expression, he explains: "It's a plastic explosive made by the Chinese for the war. Basic enough that someone who knows what they're doing can manufacture it at home, which is what's happened here judging by the impurities. The charges in the steam tunnel were different. Sonic clearance charges, probably specially chosen not to do any structural damage."
He sighs and rubs the back of his head. "There wasn't much to say about the dogs, poor things. All just old consumer models, pets and companions. I don't know if they could've actually hurt you." A thump on a nearby workbench announces the arrival of Biscuits, the calico felinoid that someone let out of an evidence locker years ago and who's never been caught since. Coco strokes her head without looking around, his tension and fatigue visibly ebbing.
"Now, the bigger things. Almost all the blood at the scene was definitely human - A-negative and B-positive. But we did find some O-negative splatter and the DNA matches a surviving pre-Blackout incept record."
Words to make the ears of any Blade Runner on the force prick up, 'pre-Blackout'. Means Nexus-8, the Sixes all having died off long ago. Tough, but not built like a Nexus-9. More to the point, still outlaws on Earth. Persona non grata. Retire on confirmation with a nice bonus in your paycheck. Coco turns on an old monitor and Elly gets to look at the guy who just became her prey. Voto Jergic. Nexus-8 combat model, incept date 23 August 2021.
Woe unto Voto Jergic, who slipped up and came to RDU's attention.
Coco's still talking. "... there were components for twenty-five individuals, but the perps left the musculo-skeletal systems, skin and brains. Everything they took was fully internal. Or eyes. They took all the eyes, too. Now, here's the really big thing. None of it was Tyrell stock. Records from back then are incomplete, obviously, but the telomere signatures don't match what's recorded on the packaging, which is all the same. There's no sign of the degradation you'd see over at least fifteen years of even proper storage, either. These were brand new."
Brand new. You heard of people out on DNA row bootlegging replicant models for sale offworld and marketing them as old Tyrell stock. The name still carries a reputation for product reliability despite everything that happened to the actual company. First time anyone's seen proof of it for a good while, though.