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couldn’t afford their own home or ended up stranded and unemployable in the city could stay in one of the cubicles for six months, no questions asked.
    After six months, they needed to move to long-term city services, which were housed elsewhere. DeRicci wanted to ask if anyone had turned up dead in those neighborhoods, but she’d do that after she looked at his records.
    “I’m confused,” she said. “Do these people crawl into the crates and die?”
    The crate didn’t look like it was sealed so tightly that the person couldn’t get oxygen.
    “Some of them,” he said. “They’re usually high or drunk.”
    “And the rest?” she asked.
    “Obviously someone has put them there,” he said.
    “A different someone each time, I assume,” she said.
    He shrugged. “I let the police investigate. I don’t ask questions.”
    “You don’t ask questions about dead people in your crates?”
    His face flushed. She had finally gotten to him.
    “Believe it or not, Detective,” Ansel snapped, “I don’t like to think about it. I’m very proud of this business. We provide a service that enables the cities on the Moon to not only have food, but to have great food. Sometimes our system gets fouled up by crazy people, and I hate that. We’ve gone to great lengths to prevent it. That’s why you’re here. Because our systems work .”
    “I didn’t mean to offend you,” she lied. “This is all new to me, so I’m going to ask some very ignorant questions at times.”
    He looked annoyed, but he nodded.
    “What part of town did this crate come from?” she asked.
    “The port,” he said tiredly.
    She should have expected that after he had mentioned the port a few times.
    “Was the body in the crate when it was picked up at the port?” she asked.
    “The weight was the same from port to here,” he said. “Weight gets recorded at pick-up but flagged near the conveyer. The entire system is automated until the crates get to the warehouse. Besides, we don’t have the ability to investigate anything inside Armstrong. There are a lot of regulations on things that are considered garbage inside the dome. If we violate those, we’ll get black marks against our license, and if we get too many black marks in a year, we could lose that license.”
    More stuff she didn’t know. City stuff, regulatory stuff. The kinds of things she always ignored.
    And things she would probably have to investigate now.
    “Do you know her?” DeRicci asked, hoping to catch him off balance.
    “Her?” Ansel looked confused for a moment. Then he looked at the crate, and his flush grew deeper. “You mean, her ?”
    “Yes.” Just from his reaction, DeRicci knew his response. He didn’t know the woman. And the idea that she was inside one of his crates upset him more than he wanted to say.
    Which was probably why he was the person talking to DeRicci now.
    “No,” Ansel said. “I don’t know her, and I don’t recognize her. We didn’t run any recognition programs on her either. We figured you all would do that.”
    “No one touched her? No one checked her for identification chips?”
    “I’m the one who opened the crate,” he said. “I saw her, I saw that her eyes were open, and then I closed the lid. I leave the identifying to you all.”
    “Do you know all your employees, Mr. Ansel?”
    “By name,” he said.
    “By look,” she said.
    He shook his head. “I have nearly three hundred employees in Armstrong alone.”
    “But you just said you know their names. You know all three hundred employees by name?”
    He smiled absently, which seemed like a rote response. He’d responded to this kind of thing before.
    “I have an eidetic memory,” he said. “If I’ve seen a name, then I remember it.”
    “An eidetic memory for names, but not faces? I’ve never heard of that,” DeRicci said.
    “I haven’t met all of my employees,” he said. “But I go over the pay amounts every week before they get sent to the employees’