AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

death.
“Well, I’m dead now. I guess I’m lucky because I don’t remember dying, but they say few people do. My mom said I had a pulmonary embolism, which I looked up. Basically it’s a big ole blood clot and I guess it had something to do with a bicycle accident when I broke my leg.
“I never knew I had this problem. I’ve been healthy my whole life. I guess I even kind of looked down on people who were sick because I never was. If I really come clean, I guess I thought it was their punishment for the life they lead. I always thought, you live a good life and believe in God, you’ll be okay.
“But being dead is not what I deserve. I worked hard at school. I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. I never hurt anyone. I tried to live my life the way I was taught. You know. Do unto others.
“So why am I here? I mean, I knew about the afterlife. I even went on the Afternet and talked to some dead people. But I just didn’t think it would happen to me.
“Mom says young people never think their going to die. But I knew I would die someday. But I thought heaven still existed for some people who were good enough. Now I know that’s not true.”
    Munroe recognized Brian’s feelings. He shared them with Brian and apparently Sgt. Johnson. At least Brian didn’t go through the hell of thinking that it was only happening to him. But he also appreciated what it must be like for someone so young and seemingly healthy to die so suddenly, and then have your whole belief in God and heaven turn upside down. For Munroe, God had always been someone of whom to be suspicious, so it didn’t surprise him when God let him down.
    He looked at the more recent entries and saw that Brian was sliding into depression, which wasn’t unusual, and that he was trying to find his belief in God again, which was unusual.
“There has to be a reason for this. How can there be a soul but no God?
“The Explorers say God’s design is not easy to read and that the path is not easy to follow, but that I must have faith that the destination is worth the effort. I want to believe that but I don’t think I have that kind of faith anymore. And I’m tired of being laughed at for even asking if there is a God.”
    Munroe looked at the last entry.
“Mom says Mrs. Wallace is sick and she’s going to stay in Brush until her surgery. I told her I’d stick around the school and she’ll try to meet me at the latest by the 14th. Theres going to be a party tomorrow night and I think I’ll go to that.”
    A clue, Watson, Munroe said to himself. Now he knew what Brian had planned for Saturday night. And then he remembered what Cheryl Miller had told him. He went back through his user log and found the chat transcript: She said she was going somewhere Saturday night, meet some people, mix with the living.
    Are we getting beyond coincidence? Munroe thought. Two people, both worried about their religious beliefs, who disappear around the same time?
    Munroe sent a message to detective Rollins to let him know he’d talked to Miller, but not about his suspicions, which seemed pretty tenuous. Just as he was hitting send, the floor dropped out from under him, or more correctly, someone had pulled out the chair he was on and he bounced to the floor. 360-degree field of view and I still can’t tell when one of those bastards is going to do that, he thought from his vantage point on the floor. Normally Yamaguchi looked out for his chair, although she was also the cause of some of the trouble when she put up a sign asking people not to steal his chair. For a week, a chair didn’t last at his desk for 15 minutes before someone stole it.
    He decided to leave the CID room and hang out at one of the bars along the 16th Street Mall. He’d send an email to the secretary for the detectives’ room and maybe she’d put the chair back at the end of the day.
    He ended up at one of the brewpubs on the mall, one of the quiet ones that had large screen TVs left on all day. Before the discovery of the afterlife, Munroe always found that bars were the best places to watch TV, and they still were. Bar owners usually turned on the subtitles to keep the noise down or so that you could follow the game even if it was noisy. So Munroe camped out at the bar and watched ESPN Classic. Unfortunately it was an old Broncos game: the stupid “The Drive” AFC championship game against Cleveland that Denver fans worshipped. Then again, he hated the Browns even more than the Broncos.