AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

right.”
    The minister looked in Munroe’s direction. “I don’t know what to think, officer. Some of the people I’ve talked to on the AfterNet I knew when they were alive. They were people I’ve counseled, people I visited when they were sick or who helped out at a church function. I don’t care if the national church officially recognizes them or not. I know they are who they say they are.” He put his right arm on the edge of his desk and picked up a paperweight, a round river rock, which he rolled around in his hand. “They aren’t the devil. They’re not aliens. I don’t know what to think.
    “I’ve done a lot of transition counseling, you know, for some of my older members, people who were terminally ill. Maybe if I’d had a chance to work with Tralawna’s mother, but a traffic accident, so sudden. Evelyn gets a visit from the Army one day and a few days later hears from her daughter. The Army really has to do a better job with counseling. If I’d known … oh, well, all I can do is learn from their mistake.”
    Yamaguchi stood, and then the minister. “Thank you, sir. I’d appreciate you getting in touch with me if you hear from Sgt. Johnson.” She handed him a business card. They shook hands again. He walked to his office door, unlocked and opened it for her.
    He touched her lightly on the shoulder before she stepped out.
    “Tell your partner, he has my respect,” he said softly as he handed her his business card. “I’d be pleased to chat with him sometime.”
    She smiled and accepted the card and stepped outside.
    “Seems like he’d be pretty sympathetic to Sgt. Johnson,” Munroe said.
    “If they ever meet.”
    “Right. Hey, aren’t you about done for the day?”
    “Yeah, I’m bushed.”
    “OK, drop me off downtown and call it a day.”
    Munroe spent a few hours that night at Duffy’s, a bar near the eastern end of the 16th Street Mall. They had recently remodeled and put in a large screen TV that the regulars ignored, so the management just left it turned on with closed captions. Sometimes Munroe would call ahead and ask them to leave it on for some show he wanted to see and every once in a great while he’d buy a round at the bar (a difficult thing to arrange through PayPal).
    He’d stopped at the station to check his email, of course, and found a reply from Rybold saying he’d expect him and Yamaguchi. He also sent a message to Cheryl Miller telling her that they’d talked with the minister. As with Brian’s mother, he did not voice any suspicions that she’d been abducted.
    Afterward, he cleared his inbox of new disembodied witness reports and was going to see what kind of buzz his latest blog update had generated. But several uniform cops, including the desk sergeant, walked into the break room. He was curious what they were doing and followed. Munroe assumed it was something of interest to men, because all the cops were male and they had that mischievous look he associated with bachelor parties.
    One of them produced a laptop and typed in the address of one of the local TV stations and played a video from a local news show. An anchorman was talking and the words “Disembodied cop rescues boy” appeared to his right. The picture switched and showed a reporter at the scene, then quick images of firefighters and cops staring at the crack, a mug shot of himself (probably taken about 1985), then firefighters removing the boy from the hole in the basement and finally out of the building on a backboard. The reporter returned, talked some more and then he saw Yamaguchi talking to the reporters.
    Apparently this was what the assembled cops had been anticipating. He could tell they were laughing — actually laughing so hard one man was turning red and seemed to be choking. His friend had to slap him on the back.
    He wasn’t quite sure what was so funny. Without closed captioning, he was missing any obvious humor in what she was saying. Granted, she looks kind of wild and she’s waving her hands around a lot and … He saw why they were laughing when the desk sergeant paused the video and then replayed it frame by frame. He saw her use her sleeve to wipe her nose and the glistening smear it left on her upper lip. Oh, yuck, he thought, poor Linda. He watched as they replayed the scene again. I wonder if I can find it online .

Chapter 8
From The New Yorker
The heavy metal door slams shut behind him; a sound totally in place with the man, the building, the institution