Lock In by John Scalzi Read Free Book Online

limitations.”
    “Blow it up,” Vann said. Bell jerked and grew large, his hands racing toward us like a giant trying to play patty-cake.
    “Shane,” Vann said. “Tell me what you see.”
    I looked at the hands for a couple of moments, not seeing whatever it was that I was supposed to be seeing. Then it occurred to me that not seeing a thing was what Vann was going for.
    “No blood,” I said.
    “Right,” Vann said. She pointed. “He’s got blood on his shirt and his face but none on his hands. The broken glass has bloody finger marks all over it. Diaz, pull back out.” The image zoomed out again, and Vann went over to the corpse. “This guy, though, has blood all over his hands.”
    “This dude cut his own throat?” I asked.
    “Possible,” Vann said.
    “That’s genuinely bizarre,” I said. “Then this isn’t a murder. It’s a suicide. Which would get Bell off the hook.”
    “Maybe,” Vann said. “Give me other options.”
    “Bell could have done it and cleaned up before hotel security got there,” I said.
    “There’s still the bloody glass,” Vann said. “We’ve got Bell’s fingerprints on file. He had to give them when he became a licensed Integrator.”
    “Maybe he was interrupted,” I said.
    “Maybe,” Vann said. She didn’t sound convinced.
    An idea popped into my brain. “Diaz,” I said. “I’m sending over a file. Pop it up as soon as you get it, please.”
    “Got it,” Diaz said, a couple of seconds later. Two seconds after that the scene shifted to outside of the Watergate, to the hurled love seat and the crushed car.
    “What are we looking for?” Vann asked.
    “It’s what we’re not looking for,” I said. “It’s the same thing we weren’t looking for on Bell’s hands.”
    “Blood,” Vann said, and looked closely at the love seat. “There’s no blood on the love seat.”
    “Not that I can see,” I said. “So there’s a good chance the love seat went out the window before our corpse cut his own throat.”
    “It’s a theory,” Vann said. “But why?” She pointed to the corpse. “This guy contracts with Bell to integrate, and then when Bell gets there he throws a love seat out the window and then commits bloody suicide in front of him? Why?”
    “Throwing a love seat out of a seventh-story window is a pretty good way to get the attention of the hotel security staff,” I said. “He wanted to frame Bell for his murder and this was a way to make sure security would already be on their way before he killed himself.”
    “It still doesn’t answer the question of why he’d commit suicide in front of Bell in the first place,” Vann said. She looked back down at the corpse.
    “Well, we do know one thing,” I said. “Bell was maybe telling the truth when he said that he didn’t do it.”
    “That’s not what he said,” Vann said.
    “I think it was. I saw the feed.”
    “No,” Vann said, and turned back to Diaz. “Run the Timmons feed again.”
    The image snapped once more to the hotel room, and the bas-relief of Bell reappeared. Diaz set it running. Timmons asked Bell why he killed the man in the room. Bell responded that he didn’t think he had. “Stop it,” Vann said. Diaz stopped the feed just as Timmons zapped Bell. He was frozen mid-spasm.
    “He didn’t say he didn’t kill him,” Vann said to me. “He said he didn’t think he killed him. He’s saying he didn’t know .”
    A light went on in my head, and I remembered my one personal experience with an Integrator. “That’s not right.”
    “Integrators are conscious for their sessions,” Vann said, nodding. “They subsume and stay in the background during integration, but they’re allowed to surface if the client needs help or is about to do something outside the scope of the integration session.”
    “Or is about to do something stupid or illegal,” I said.
    “Which is usually outside the scope of the session,” Vann pointed out.
    “Okay,” I said, and motioned back