“Did you know Carl was a cyborg?” Laughton said.
Miss Enright sat up straight in her chair in genuine surprise, her cheeks flushed, distracted from her vigilance. She hadn’t known. “No. Which… ?” It wasn’t a polite question.
“An arm and a leg,” Laughton answered.
Her eyes went out of focus. She was remembering, trying to think if she had missed any indication.
“Is that a problem?”
“I… No, no,” she said; she wasn’t a bigot. “That must— Carl would always say they’d taken too much from him. I thought he just meant the way they’ve taken from all of us, that we’re stuffed on the preserve here, but maybe…”
Laughton nodded as Kir reappeared, and Miss Enright visibly relaxed some. It made sense. Robot destroys Carl’s arm and leg. Carl wants revenge on all of robot-kind, writes a killer program, and then someone killed him for it. But not to get rid of it, to use it? If they both wanted to use it, why kill him?
“He ever talk about his partner?” Laughton said.
“No.”
“Did he ever say anything about having met someone that could help him, getting even with the robots?” Kir said.
She shook her head. “Just that the robots couldn’t live without him. He took pleasure in that, how they needed his work. How pathetic he thought they were.”
Just one of those hackers who saw the sims trade as another way to lord human superiority over the robots, that they needed something from him, that he could control them. Definitely would further suggest a tie between this case and Kir’s; whoever wrote a deadly sim was probably a human supremacist.
Laughton waited a moment again to see if she would add anything. This all gave them a sense of who Smythe was, what kind of man, and it meshed with the picture he’d formed in his mind. But it wasn’t giving him anything to go on. After it was clear she wouldn’t talk, he held up his phone. “I want you to call us if you think of anything else.”
Miss Enright stood up, and crossed to the counter to retrieve her phone. She held it out, and they tapped them together to exchange information. She got shy then, looking at the children, using them as an excuse not to meet his eye, or Kir’s. “I’ll show you out,” she said after an awkward silence, and took a step forward. Laughton turned to let her pass him and she led the way down to the front door, less concerned about leaving the children alone than with Kir.
At the door, without meeting their eyes, she said, “Please don’t talk to Bobby.”
She was ashamed, not afraid of her husband’s reaction. All of that trouble to get the subpoena, and he’d gotten nothing. “We’ll try,” Laughton said.
Her shoulders relaxed. “Thank you.” She was truly grateful.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said, but with little more feeling than if he had held a door open for her.
Outside, Laughton said, “Not much.”
“The kids are nice,” Kir said.
“Hmph,” Laughton grunted, not amused. He pulled open the driver’s-side door to his truck and stepped up inside.
Kir got in on the other side. “It was a mistake for me to come,” the robot said. “I freaked her out.”
Laughton tapped the screen of the GPS, turning it on, but his hand hovered there as he tried to decide where they should go next. “Nah, I should have thought of that. It’s not going to be like it was. The people who moved here, they want to get away from you bastards.”
“That’s why I need you,” he said.
“No kidding. That’s why you always needed me. But I’m not moving to Washington, so don’t even start that again.”
The old argument filled the truck for a moment. Their ability to communicate with each other had been legendary—Laughton’s skill at reading micro-expressions, and Kir’s at reading Laughton, not just the basic hand signals they’d developed, but actually reading Laughton’s face based on thousands of hours of footage, gave them an enormous edge. Working separately was almost like working with half a brain, but Laughton’s days weren’t supposed to be handling anything more complicated than drunken bravado, and Kir’s weren’t supposed to be filled with many humans.
“So you want to check out the husband?” Kir said.
“We probably should, just to cross it off,” he said, opening the police database on the car’s touch screen, “but the thing with cutting the arm and leg open doesn’t scan. When I told her Smythe was a cyborg, she was shocked. I doubt her husband would have known.” He tried Bobby Enright, then Robert Enright without luck. His phone buzzed, and he looked. It was from Kir. File photo of Robert Enright. He looked at his ex-partner. “Don’t you see I’m doing it here?”
“I just got it first.”
Laughton felt a surge of exasperation that he had to make a conscious effort to control. It sent a new wave of tingles across his left cheek. He put his fingertips to his temples. He opened the file Kir had forwarded. “I don’t recognize the guy, and this doesn’t have anything other than this address.”
“Should we wait?”
“I’ll put Dunrich on it.” He tapped “Work” on the GPS, and the truck started backing out of the driveway. “Might as well go back to the station. See if anything’s come in.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Kir said.
Didn’t sound like much of anything.
Dunrich stood as Laughton and Kir entered the station. Laughton mentally rolled his eyes. Dunrich was fine on day-to-day things, but so far this case had revealed his limitations, and the chief didn’t want to deal with more incompetence just then.
“Chief,” the junior officer said, stepping around his desk, laptop computer in hand. “I found the hacker from TV.”
Laughton stopped short and looked at his junior officer, incredulous. “How?”
Dunrich was at his side now, showing the chief a social media page for someone calling himself Crisper, no last name. Or maybe it was no first name. The profile picture showed a man from the neck down to his midbelly wearing a black T-shirt with white writing in an old command-prompt font that read “Alignment Lawful.” All that could be gleaned from that was that the bit of skin visible at the neckline was white.
Dunrich kept stealing looks at Kir as the chief took in the page. “I called the station to see if Kara Letts would reveal her source,” he explained.
“You got Kara Letts on the phone?” The chief was still shocked.
“I might have threatened to get a warrant,” he said, glancing at Kir again, then down in embarrassment.
Laughton realized he should introduce them. “This is my old partner, Kir. Kir, Officer Dunrich.”
“Hi,” Dunrich said.
“Nice to meet you,” Kir said.
Laughton steered them back to the case. “You threatened the warrant, and she told you…”
“No,” Dunrich said, refocused, excited to show off. “She cited a whole bunch of court cases or something saying she didn’t have to reveal her sources, but she slipped in the middle and said, ‘I wouldn’t tell you if I could,’ so that made me think she didn’t even know who her source was. So I thought, how could he have gotten in touch, and I started going back through Letts’s social media accounts looking for someone contacting her with information, and this one jumped out. He made first contact this morning, the shirt’s some old computer game reference, and he asked to be given rights to private message her.”