their car and they went into the department. After entering the secure area, they passed by a couple of cops talking in the hall, the hated Sgt. Diller among them. Yamaguchi prepared herself for the inevitable nickname.
“Hey, it’s supercop,” Diller said. “Your meteoric rise continues, I hear.”
She stopped and said, “Hey, sarge. Yeah, I’m moving on up. Probably be a lieutenant before too long, or maybe a deputy chief. Don’t worry, I won’t forget about the little people. Bye.”
She continued down the hall and heard laughter from the other cops and Diller say “Fuck you, Gooch.”
“Oh God, I’m dead cop walking,” she muttered to Munroe.
“No, that would be me,” he said.
She left work around 11 p.m., a little early but she’d started the day with the noon meeting with the chief. She said goodbye and left Munroe alone in the detectives’ room. It had been a busy day and he’d had little time or opportunity to get on the Internet, so now that he was alone he went online.
The tsunami news continued its depressing toll, with most news organization talking about a hundred or hundred and fifty thousand dead. It remained the topic of conversation of most of the chat rooms, forums and blogs frequented by the disembodied. There were already thousands of postings by people who claimed to have died in the flooding, but he found most of them implausible. Many of the countries where the death toll had been the worst had little Internet, much less AfterNet access. The irony was that the political and social upheaval that resulted from the discovery of the afterlife had made it difficult to install the infrastructure needed to support the sudden arrival of so many disembodied. The timing of the discovery, coming on the heels of the broader Asian economic collapse, didn’t help.
So Munroe knew that many of the postings were from poseurs. Still, a handful of postings seemed genuine. Not surprisingly, most of those postings were from Westerners, the few tourists brave enough to travel to the region. And most of them had accessed the Internet from the few AfterNet terminals shipped there by international relief efforts. The postings were often garbled as the newly dead struggled to use the field interface.
He felt a little chastened after reading all the news and postings, realizing his woes were pretty trivial compared to what the survivors and the dead would have to face.
He thought he’d better check his AfterNet email account and found the expected hundreds of messages. He gave them a quick look after running the filters that would separate them into neat piles: blog related, friends, whackos, spam, cop related, etc. He was about to consign the majority to the trash when he saw one that caught his attention. It wasn’t forwarded from his blog and so didn’t use the header “Re: The next big wave of disembodied is happening now.” Instead, the subject line was: “Who’s kidnapping the dead in Colorado?” He opened it.
You don’t know me and don’t try to find me. It would be bad for me if you did.
I want you to know that I don’t believe in what they’re doing anymore. Not since my wife died and a more kind, loving Christian woman I have never known. If she couldn’t go directly to heaven, then no one can.
I know you’ve been in the springs looking into the abductions. I don’t have any new info but I still know some people who are starting to think like me. I left them after she died because I knew they wouldn’t trust me and I’m scared what they will do to us.
Maybe I can make up for what I did. We both do.
There are more raves they’re planning for New Years Eve and its going to be big. And not just Colorado but all over. I don’t have any more information for you now, but if I find anything else, I;ll let you know.
He checked the sender’s username and was surprised to find it was his own: (Alex Munroe)
[email protected]. It appeared to been sent at 6:31 p.m. Denver time.
He’d gotten spam messages before where his own address appeared in the from field. He didn’t know how it was done but he did remember that he could reveal the crap at the start of an email that normally gets hidden. He revealed the long headers and saw that the email had been bounced around several times, including an email server in Romania, judging by the “.ro” at the end of the address.
Maybe Linda could figure out who really sent this, but no way I’m able to, he thought. Maybe
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