"Robb, J D - In Death 14 - Interlude In Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robb J D)

[version 1.1 - March 2, 2002 - Converted to .rtf, fixed formatting, read
in detail and corrected typos.] INTERLUDE IN DEATH
J. D. RobbCopyright (c) 2001
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Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.
-- Aristotle
Happy is the child whose father goes to the devil.
-- sixteenth-century proverb
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CHAPTER ONE
The faces of murder were varied and complex. Some were as old as time and the
furrows scoring them filled with the blood spilled by Cain. One brother's keeper
was another's executioner.
Of course, it had been rather elementary to close that particular case. The
list of suspects had been, after all, pretty limited.
But time had populated the earth until by the early spring of 2059 it so
crawled with people that they spilled out from their native planet to jam man-
made worlds and satellites. The skill and ability to create their own worlds,
the sheer nerve to consider doing so, hadn't stopped them from killing their
brothers.
The method was sometimes more subtle, often more vicious, but people being
people could, just as easily, fall back on ramming a sharpened stick through
another's heart over a nice patch of lettuce.
The centuries, and man's nature, had developed more than alternative ways
to kill and a variety of victims and motives. They had created the need and the
means to punish the guilty.
The punishing of the guilty and the demand for justice for the innocent became
-- perhaps had been since that first extreme case of sibling rivalry -нan art
and a science.
These days, murder got you more than a short trip to the Land of Nod. It shut
you up in a steel and concrete cage where you'd have plenty of time to think
about where you went wrong.
But getting the sinner where justice deemed he belonged was the trick. It
required a system. And the system demanded its rules, techniques, manpower,
organizations, and loopholes.
And the occasional seminar to educate and inform.
As far as Lieutenant Eve Dallas was concerned, she'd rather face a horde of
torked-out chemi-heads than conduct a seminar on murder. At least the
chemiнheads wouldn't embarrass you to death.
And as if it wasn't bad enough that she'd been drafted to attend the
Interplanetary Law Enforcement and Security Conference, as if it wasn't
horrifying enough that her own commander had ordered her to give a seminar, the
whole ball of goddamn wax had to take shape off-planet.
Couldn't hold the sucker in New York, Eve thought as she lay facedown on
the hotel bed. Just couldn't find one spot on the whole fucking planet that
could suit up. Nope, just had to send a bunch of cops and techs out into space.
God, she hated space travel.
And of all the places in the known universe, the site-selection committee
had to dump them on the Olympus Resort. Not only was she a cop out of her
element, but she was a cop out of her element giving a seminar in one of the