Starbase Human Read Online Free Page A

clothes must be made of some kind of organic material. So my people couldn’t figure out what was causing the extra weight.”
    “You didn’t find this, then?” she asked.
    “No, sir,” he said.
    “I’d like to talk with the person who did,” she said.
    “She’s over there.” He nodded toward a small room off to the side of the crates.
    DeRicci suppressed a sigh. Of course he’d cleared the employee off the floor. Anything to make a cop’s job harder.
    “All right,” DeRicci said, not trying to hide her annoyance. “How did your ‘people’ discover the extra weight?”
    “When the numbers didn’t show anything non-organic causing the extra weight,” he said, “they had the system scan for a large piece. Sometimes, when crates come in from the dome, someone dumps something directly into the crate without paying attention to weight and size restrictions.”
    Those were hard to ignore. DeRicci vividly remembered the first time she had tried to dump something of the wrong size into a recycling crate. She had dumped a rotted roast she had never managed to cook (back in the days when she actually believed she could cook). She’d put it into the crate behind her then-apartment building. The damn crate beeped at her, and when she didn’t remove the roast fast enough for the stupid thing, it actually started to yell at her, telling her that she wasn’t following the rules.
    There was a way to turn off the alarms, but she and her building superintendent hadn’t known it. Clearly, someone else did.
    “So,” DeRicci said, “the system scanned, and…?”
    “Registered something larger,” he said somewhat primly. “That’s when my people switched the information feed to visual, and got the surprise of their lives.”
    She would wager. She wondered if they thought the woman was sleeping. She wasn’t going to ask him that question; she’d save it for the person who actually found the body.
    “When did they call you?” DeRicci asked.
    “After they visually confirmed the body,” Ansel said.
    “Meaning what?” she asked. “They saw it on the feed or they actually lifted the lid?”
    “On the feed,” he said.
    “Where was this?” she asked.
    He pointed to a small booth that hovered over the floor. The booth clearly operated on the same tech that the aircars in Armstrong used. The booth was smaller than the average car, however, and was clear on all four sides. Only the bottom appeared to have some kind of structure, probably to hide all the mechanics.
    “Is someone in the booth?” she asked.
    “We always have someone monitoring the floor,” he said, “but I just put someone new up in the booth, so that the team that discovered the body can talk to you.”
    DeRicci supposed he had put the entire team in one room, together, so that they could align their stories. But she didn’t say anything like that. No sense antagonizing Ansel. He seemed to be trying to help her.
    “We’re going to need to shut down this part of your line,” DeRicci said. “Everything in this part of the warehouse will need to be examined.”
    To her surprise, he didn’t protest. Of course, if he had protested, she would have had him shut down the entire warehouse.
    Maybe he had dealt with the police before.
    “So,” she said, “who actually opened the lid on this container?”
    “I did,” he said quietly.
    She hadn’t expected that. “Tell me about it.”
    “The staff contacted me after they saw the body.”
    “On your links?” she asked. She would wager that the entire communication system inside Ansel Management was on its own dedicated link.
    “Yes,” he said. “The staff contacted me on my company link.”
    “I’d like to have copies of that contact,” she said.
    “Sure.” He wasn’t acting like someone who had anything to hide. In fact, he was acting like someone who had been through this before.
    “What did your staff tell you?” she asked.
    His lips turned upward. Someone might have called