The Eighth Day

Chapter 4

Detective Sam Harrington pushed his way through the front doors into the Midtown North precinct where a uniform sat behind the front counter, bent over an untidy tabletop of open files and apps, fingers swiping and slashing with furious abandon. Before him stood a woman. She wore a faded sundress that might've been pretty once. Perhaps she, too, had been pretty once, but time had faded her looks as well. She rummaged in an oversized purse and slapped a piece of paper on the counter.

"What the hell's this?" she asked, her voice a nasal Brooklyn whine.

The uniform glanced at it. "A ticket," he said.

She rolled her eyes. "I know it's a ticket, Mr. Wiseass." She pronounced it Mistah Woise-ass. "Do you know what kind of day I had? First, my goddamn car wouldn't start. Then..."

Sam slipped past them to a door at the rear of the room and leaned into a retinal scan. The door's lock disengaged with a buzz and a click, and he yanked it open and stepped across the threshold.

Multi-touch interface panels, holographic maps that tracked locations and statuses for both units and incidents in real time, and ringing phone lines crowded the room beyond. Uniformed officers and detectives peppered it as well, typing and swiping frantically or standing around and sipping from Styrofoam cups of coffee while they caught up on the latest casework or interoffice gossip. It was organized chaos.

Sam made his way through a labyrinth of cubicles to the rear of the precinct and the private offices. Thin walls with windows covered by blinds partitioned them from the rest of the precinct, and bold, black letters on the door to one of them proclaimed it to be that of Samuel F. Harrington, Detective First-Grade. Sam pulled it open and stepped into the gloom. A switch next to the door brought to life a single naked bulb that hung from the ceiling by two frayed wires. It illuminated a scuffed and dented metal desk painted beige with a faux-wood top at the far side of the room, a solitary locker in one corner, and a bookshelf in another.

He took off his suit jacket and hung it in the locker, rolled up his sleeves, and adjusted the leather holster strapped under his arm before easing himself into a chair behind the desk, its springs crying out in anguish. He logged on to his computer, an old-fashioned desktop model with a flat-screen monitor, mouse, and wired keyboard.

When he first joined the police force, he'd filled out form after form until his hand throbbed and cramped. Who knew he'd miss that one day? Now, everything was digital, hung on some server in a dusty back room like an old shirt that's gone out of style.

Technology couldn't be trusted. He'd learned that early in his career, when he'd still been a wet-behind-the-ears detective.

It wasn't even a case at first, just a series of random accidents, all of them involving the Internet of Things—a self-driving car that went haywire and plowed into a herd of pedestrians, a security system that short-circuited and locked a family of four in their house during a fire, a malfunctioning thermostat that overheated a hospital nursery and killed a roomful of newborns.

As time passed, the killer got overconfident and careless. It was as if he'd left a trail of bread crumbs, then gone back and tried to brush it away. Digital notes vanished from tablets. Reports and files were deleted or corrupted. Computers crashed and multi-touch interfaces malfunctioned. And Sam began to notice a pattern: if you stopped assuming they were random accidents, all of it was connected.

Sam followed the bread crumbs to a former Nanosoft programmer who'd been fired for trying to insert code that siphoned off a fraction of a penny to his own account whenever a customer purchased an app via the company's online store.