Starbase Human Read Online Free PDF

accounts. I see the names. I rarely see the faces.”
    “So you wouldn’t know if she worked here,” DeRicci said.
    “Here?” he asked. “Here I would know. I come here every day. If she worked in one of the other warehouses or in transport or in sales, I wouldn’t know that.”
    “Did this crate go somewhere else before coming to this warehouse?” DeRicci asked.
    “No,” Ansel said. “Each crate is assigned a number. That number puts it in a location, and then when the crate fills, it gets swapped out with another. The crate comes to the same warehouse each time, without deviation. And since that system is automated, as I mentioned, I know that it doesn’t go awry.”
    “Can someone stop the crate in transit and add a body?”
    “No,” he said. “I can show you if you want.”
    She shook her head. That would be a good job for her partner, Rayvon Lake. Rayvon still hadn’t arrived, the bastard. DeRicci would have to report him pretty soon. He had gotten very lax about crime scenes, leaving them to her. He left most everything to her, and she hated it.
    He was a lazy detective—twenty years in the position—and he saw her as an upstart who needed to be put in her place.
    She wouldn’t have minded his attitude if he did his job. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She would have minded. She hated people who disliked her. But she wouldn’t be considering filing a report on him if he actually did the work he was supposed to do.
    She would get Lake to handle the transport information by telling him she wasn’t smart enough to understand it. It would mean that she’d have to suffer through an explanation later in the case, but maybe by then, she’d either have this thing solved or she’d have a new partner.
    A woman could hope, after all.
    “One of the other detectives will look into the transport process,” DeRicci said. “I’m just trying to cover the basics here, so we start looking in the right place. Can outsiders come into this warehouse?”
    “And get into one of our crates?” Ansel asked. “No. Look.”
    He touched the edge of the lid, and she heard a loud snap.
    “It’s sealed shut now,” he said.
    She didn’t like the sound of that snap.
    “If I were in there,” she asked, “could I breathe through that seal?”
    “Yes,” Ansel said. “For about two days, if need be. But it doesn’t seal shut like that until it leaves the transport and crosses the threshold here at the warehouse. So there’s no way anyone could crawl in here at the warehouse.”
    “All right,” DeRicci said. “So, let me be sure I understand you. The only place that someone could either place a body into a crate or crawl into it on their own is on site.”
    “Yes,” Ansel said. “We try to encourage composting, so we allow bypassers to stuff something into a crate. We search for non-organic material at the site, and flag the crates with non-organic material so they can be cleaned.”
    “Clothing is organic?” DeRicci asked.
    “Much of it, yes,” Ansel said. “Synthetics aren’t good hosts for nanoproducts, so most people wear clothing made from recycled organic material.”
    DeRicci’s skin literally crawled. She hadn’t known that. She wasn’t an organic kind of woman. She preferred fake stuff, much to the dismay of her friends, what few of them she had.
    “All right,” she said. “I’m going to talk with your people in a minute. I’ll want to know what they know. And I’ll need to see your records on previous incidents.”
    She didn’t check to see if he had sent her anything on her links. She didn’t want downloads to confuse her sense of the crime scene. She liked to make her own opinions, and she did that by being thorough.
    Detectives like Rayvon Lake gathered as much information as possible, multitasking as they walked through a crime scene. DeRicci believed they missed most of the important details while doing that, and that led to a lot of side roads and wasted time.
    And, if she