"Laura Resnick - Heaven's Only Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Laura)

used to advise people how to fornicate _without_ reproducing). But after that
memorable altercation our men and women in uniform had with the fierce and
bloodthirsty inhabitants of Polonius IV (all of whom are now safely dead or in
"cheerfully decorated rehabilitation camps"), a lot of government funding was
diverted to the military to pay for those weapons that we now have to
liquidate, under the terms of the most recent Interstellar Arms Reduction
Treaty.
So I found myself out of work just about the time my best friend's
partner disappeared -- after having embezzled three million credits from the
business they owned jointly. I held her hand all through her dealings with the




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firm of detectives she hired to find the bastard. By the time they'd been on
retainer for four months, I decided that after five years of being overworked
and underpaid, _I'd_ sure like to make that much money for supplying so few
results. So I went back to school for another year, then got an entry-level
job with Harker and Fontina Investigations.
Like some others in this business, I've read a few private eye books by
some of the classic authors, many of whom have been dead for centuries --
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler among them. A lot of the references are
pretty baffling, even after you read the footnotes, but there's an archaic
romanticism there that appeals to me. That, of course, is part of my problem.
Even after two years at the agency, two years of catching adulterers in
the act, dealing with perverts and sex offenders, tracing teenagers who
probably had a damned good reason for running away in the first place, and
retrieving stolen property that no sensible person would want back, I still
had this crazy idea that I was in a moral profession. I believed that I was
one of the good guys and that I was supposed to do what was right. How I
managed to keep believing this, even as I photographed copulating couples
without their knowledge (on adultery cases, I mean), is a question that could
probably occupy a therapist for several years. Maybe some of that stuff I
read, in which heroes and heroines were always doing the hard thing for the
right reason, got to me.
Anyhow, I was pleasantly surprised (which shows how naive I was) when
Harker and Fontina assigned me to the Heaven case. Though I had worked on over
a dozen interplanetary cases, this was my first interstellar case. It was also
my first case involving non-humans (which goes to follow, since the
Interstellar Migration Act prohibits alien races who act like _us_ from coming
here, which means we have virtually no alien crime in this system). It was
potentially the most politically sensitive case I'd ever been assigned to, and
I was very excited about having a chance to prove my mettle (we're talking
_naive_). I thought the fact that I was assigned alone to the case, with no
supervision other than the usual progress reports, was a measure of the firm's
confidence in me (yes, I know, you needn't say it).
Mrs. Heaven's personality made it immediately apparent to me why aliens
had kidnapped her daughter instead of _her_. Though quite beautiful, she was
as cold as ice, with a hard, ruthless edge and an imperious manner that made