"Gardner Dozois & S. Williams - Isaac Asimov's Detectives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

In the vivid and wildly inventive high-tech thriller that follows, one of SF's best murder mysteries,
he postulates a case where the detective, before he can determine Who Done It, first has to figure
which of the suspects is which ...

The body came to the morgue at 2246 hours. No one paid much attention to it. It was a Saturday night,
and the bodies were piling up like logs in a millpond. A harried attendant working her way down the row
of stainless steel tables picked up the sheaf of papers that came with the body, peeling back the sheet
over the face. She took a card from her pocket and scrawled on it, copying from the reports filed by the
investi-gating officer and the hospital staff:

Ingraham, Leah Petrie. Female. Age: 35. Length: 2.1 me-ters. Mass: 59 kilograms. Dead on
arrival, Crisium Emer-gency Terminal. Cause of death: homicide. Next of kin: unknown.
She wrapped the wire attached to the card around the left big toe, slid the dead weight from the table
and onto the wheeled carrier, took it to cubicle 659a, and rolled out the long tray.

The door slammed shut, and the attendant placed the pa-perwork in the out tray, never noticing that, in
his report, the investigating officer had not specified the sex of the corpse.

Lieutenant Anna-Louise Bach had moved into her new office three days ago and already the paper on
her desk was threat-ening to avalanche onto the floor.

To call it an office was almost a perversion of the term. It had a file cabinet for pending cases; she could
open it only at severe risk to life and limb. The drawers had a tendency to spring out at her, pinning her in
her chair in the corner. To reach "A" she had to stand on her chair; "Z" required her either to sit on her
desk or to straddle the bottom drawer with one foot in the legwell and the other against the wall.

But the office had a door. True, it could only be opened if no one was occupying the single chair in front
of the desk.

Bach was in no mood to gripe. She loved the place. It was ten times better than the squadroom, where
she had spent ten years elbow-to-elbow with the other sergeants and corporals.

Jorge Weil stuck his head in the door.

"Hi. We're taking bids on a new case. What am I of-fered?"

"Put me down for half a Mark," Bach said, without look-ing up from the report she was writing. "Can't
you see I'm busy?"

"Not as busy as you're going to be." Weil came in without an invitation and settled himself in the chair.
Bach looked up, opened her mouth, then said nothing. She had the authority to order him to get his big
feet out of her ' 'cases completed'' tray, but not the experience in exercising it. And she and Jorge had
worked together for three years. Why should a stripe of gold paint on her shoulder change their
relationship? She sup-posed the informality was Weil's way of saying he wouldn't let her promotion
bother him as long as she didn't get snotty about it.

Weil deposited a folder on top of the teetering pile marked "For Immediate Action," then leaned back
again. Bach eyed the stack of paper—and the circular file mounted in the wall not half a meter from it,
leading to the incinerator—and thought about having an accident. Just a careless nudge with an elbow ...