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“Lights on,” she ordered and was rewarded with a flickering, hopeless yello fro unit

Absently, she stuck her hands in her jacket pockets It was colder inside than it was out in the frisky, late-winter wind The entire place, such as it was, smelled of old sweat, older dust, and what she assuht’s dinner of hash and beans

“What did you say this guy pulled down a year?” she asked Peabody

Peabody pulled out her PPC, scanned “Union scale for his position is eight hundred and fifty a shoith ascending hourly wage for put-ups, tear-downs, turnaround, and overtime pay Union takes a twenty-five percent bite for dues, retireuy still raked in about three hundred thousand annually”

“And chose to live like this Well, he was either spending it or stashing it somewhere” She strode across the bare floor to the computer unit “This piece of crap’s older than the piece of crap I just got rid of Computer on”

It coughed, wheezed, snorted, then eht “Display financial records for Quim, Linus”

Password required for data display…

“I’ll give you a password” Halfheartedly, she rapped the unit with her fist and recited her rank and badge number

Privacy Act protects requested data Password required…

“Peabody, deal with this thing” Eve turned her back on it and began riffling through the drawers in a cabinet that had the consistency of cardboard “Arena ball programs,” she announced while Peabody tried to reason with the coaot it all written down here, wins and losses Mostly losses Petty-ante stuff, though Doesn’t look like he was spine-cracker material”

She moved on to the next drawer “Well, well, look at this Brochures of tropical islands Forget the financials, Peabody See if he went searching for data on Tahiti”

She h a handful of shirts, feeling the pockets, checking for hiding places in the two pairs of shoes

As far as she could see, the guy had kept nothing—no raphs, no personal discs Just his notebooks

He had a week’s worth of clothes, obviously old, which included one wrinkled suit His cupboards turned up several dehydrated single packs of hash, several bottles of brew, one ju of soy chips, as yet unopened

She took the bag out, frowned over it “Why does aof chips, then hang himself before he eats them?”