The excitement of the last few days quickly gave way to professional tedium. Homicide again became about pushing the corpse-broom around. Days passed. Paperwork was shuffled around, network passwords and security layers changed. Carter remained at Central, sewing things up over the Anderson case and deflecting the press while Gray drove around waiting for someone else to get shot in the face, which strangely did not happen for several days. He chalked it up to patriotic fever and the fact that the boys in Pacification had made a real example of the protestors down in the city center. Everybody seemed to calm the hell down after the microwave guns and riot cannons came out.

Eventually he got a call to handle a domestic case over in the Redmond sector of the Verge.

Some guy went apeshit about gambling debts, shot his wife in a fight before turning the gun on himself. Very straightforward. Gray had crouched over the body of the murdered woman, stared at her blue eyes looking skyward as if they were made of glass. The victim had been shot through the chest and the blood had blossomed across her white blouse like a flower; she lay on the floor with her arms spread wide, just feet away from the man with whom she had shared their apartment, their life. She looked as if she were welcoming something other than the numbing oblivion that science knew she would find, or at least the peace of termination. Gray had never really looked at a vic like that, not really, and it made him shudder in a way very different from the chill that seeing Anderson’s flayed corpse had.