"Paul Levinson - The Copyright Notice Case (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

[Novelette, lead story in ANALOG, April 1996]
Copyright (c) 1996 by Paul Levinson
All rights reserved




THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE CASE


by Paul Levinson

The gust caught my umbrella the second I got out of my car,
before I'd even had a chance to fully open the thing. I
struggled for a bit, then gave in to the inevitable. Another
insideout dripping mess to deposit in the trashcan. The wild
force of nature wins again.
I turned my collar to the cold rain and hustled up the
brownstone stairs. I pulled out my ID and showed it to the
uniform.
"Down the hall, one flight up, second door on the right.
They're waiting for you, Dr. D'Amato."
"Right," I said. I hated these long brownstone stairs --
rushing up them always made me breathless these days. I guess I
could've walked up slowly, but that wasn't my way.
"Phil," that was Dave Spencer, even less hair and more
belly than I, bent over a body, male, looked to be in his late
20s. "Come take a look at this." Dave was the coroner. He
often called me in for special consultations -- came with my
forensic territory.
I looked. The corpse had his eyes wide open, like he'd
been shocked to death. But there were no electricity burns on
the body that I could see, and in fact the nearest electrical
outlet was some 15 feet away next to a computer on the other
side of the room.
"Chemical, food allergy, lethal injection?" I rattled off
the usual suspects in cases like this. And of course there was
the unstated omnipresent social tetrad of choices: death by
natural causes, accident, suicide, or murder.
"Not likely," Dave shook his head. "No obvious puncture
marks. No discoloration of the lips. We'll know more after the
full test course."
"So what's your best guess?" I asked.
"I have none," Dave said. "That's why I asked you in.
It's like something reached in and turned up the juice in this
guy's nervous system. Turned up the volume to lethal levels.
Looks like heart attack and ten other things gone wrong here --
never seen anything like it."
"All right," I said. "I'll have a look around." For some
reason, I had a reputation in the Department as the forensic