AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

9:15 a.m. MST
Munroe,
Glad you liked it. Hey, I was hoping you could do me a favor. I have a missing persons report filed by a Cheryl Miller on a disembodied woman, a dead Fort Carson woman, Staff Sgt. Tralawna Johnson. She was supposed to meet with Johnson in Denver last week and they never hooked up. She hasn’t heard from Johnson since then.
You know we don’t really have a policy on this. I don’t even know where I’d begin. Would you mind taking a look?
Thanks
Josh
    The email had an attachment containing the missing persons’ report.
    Munroe replied to Rollins, saying he’d contact Cheryl Miller, and then he emailed the woman, who was living, and asked if they could meet to chat.
    While writing up the emails, he also saw that he’d got an email from Brian’s mother saying that she still hadn’t heard from him. She also said that she’d learned that Brian had a blog and gave him the address.
    OK, two missing dead people reports a few days apart. He looked more closely at the report Rollins had sent and saw the date that Sgt. Johnson was supposed to meet Miller. Correction, possibly the same day if I take Brian’s disappearance from the AfterNet as the date he went missing. Two disappearances don’t make a pattern, Munroe thought to himself. Still, it gives me something to do.
    Well, let’s see when Sgt. Johnson dropped off the AfterNet, he thought to himself. He sent another message to Steve Howland asking for that information.
    Munroe decided he needed to go back to the department and made his farewells to the group. Someone asked, “Same time tomorrow?”
    Yamaguchi woke up to her ringing phone about 10 a.m.
    “Hello,” she said, after smacking her lips a few times to break up the gunk in her mouth. She was a little confused and was unsure what day it was. Is today Monday?
    “Why didn’t you reply to my email?”
    “Mom?”
    “I talked to your partner. He said you’re sick.”
    Yamaguchi hated it when her mother used the phone. Her mother had paid someone to digitize her voice from recordings she had saved on her computer so she could use her own voice when calling people. Yamaguchi hated it. Although she’d gotten used to the idea of having a disembodied mother, the sound of her mother’s voice on the phone was too eerie — especially with the slight Scandinavian-like accent that the speech synthesizer introduced.
    “Yes, mom, I’m sick. I think I have the flu.”
    “Go to the doctor. You’re sick.”
    “The doctor can’t do anything. Mom, just send me an email. Or I can chat later. I just don’t feel up to talking.”
    “Did your partner stay last night?”
    “What?” How the hell would she know that? “Sorry, Mom, I … think I’m getting another call. It may be important, bye.”
    She hung up and didn’t answer the phone when it rang a few minutes later. Mom, don’t do this, not today.
    The phone didn’t ring again and Yamaguchi relaxed, hoping that her mother had given up. This isn’t fair, she thought. I shouldn’t have to put up with her after she’s dead. I hope to God she doesn’t call the watch commander. She still shuddered at the thought of the time an officer had come to her door on a “check the welfare.” She was a rookie cop then. There were still cops two years later who could bring that up.
    The fear her mother’s call had induced made it impossible for her to go back to sleep. She got out of bed and went into the kitchen. She cleaned rice and put it in the rice maker and then made green tea the way her mother had taught her. She couldn’t help but think of the last year of her mother’s life. She had stopped taking her medication and had slid further into depression.
    Her mother had loomed so large in her life then. Her father had left her mother a few years earlier. She couldn’t really blame him, but after he moved back to Japan, she was the one responsible for her mother. Her father paid generous alimony, but it still left her with the day-to-day care of her mother, making sure she took her pills, paid her bills and remembered to eat.
    She hated to admit it, but her mother’s death came as a relief, a relief that lasted only a few months when her mother contacted her through the AfterNet.
    She sat down at the kitchen table and poured her strong green tea from the small ceramic pot her mother insisted made the best tea. She could almost feel her mother’s presence.
    Oh, my God, she isn’t here, is she? She ran back into the bedroom and saw