Chapter 9: The Third Suspect Runs

I found the apartment through official channels, which was the first mistake, and I made it deliberately.

Teel's registered address sat in the Bureau contractor housing block on Meridian Spur — one of those mid-ring developments that had been built with optimistic symmetry in the twenties and now housed the city's lower-management class in identical two-room units stacked forty stories high, all of them the same shade of municipal gray. The kind of building where everyone knew each other's schedules and nobody learned each other's names. I drove there because I wanted SEREN to know I was driving there. I wanted to establish, on the record, that I had followed the obvious procedural thread.

The terminal on my wrist had been active since I left the Bureau. SEREN's hardlight interface rode the signal like a passenger.