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from the body, but held her gaze steady, waiting for the shift. Slowly it came, but not before she'd had to
spend a good long while looking at the chiseled, clas-sic beauty of Omren dil'Sorden's face. It had been
much easier, last night, seeing it in just a glimpse, on the news, be-fore she knew his name.
Lee held her pity in check, waited. It was not pity she needed now, but paraperception, and slowly it
came. The body was no longer lying in front of her, but falling to the ground past her left shoulder.
Through the silvery mist of uncertainties implied by the movement of the air molecules between her and
the murdered man, Lee felt the wind and concussion of the second shotgun blast as it hit dil'Sorden. A
second, faded perception overlaid her first: the last tatter-ing impressions leaking from dil'Sorden's
sensorium as he fell. Lee took note of the perception, but didn't expect much from it. Hydrostatic shock,
nerve damage and blood loss, let alone the overriding disbelief and horror at what was hap-pening, had
left dil'Sorden's own view of his last moments nothing much more than a terrible dark blur, with a long
wet jagged bloom of brightness laid across it at the very end, the remnant of a last glimpse of the nearby
streetlight as he went down.
Slowly, because the moment resisted quick movement and was likely to be denatured by it, Lee turned a
little, looked over her shoulder. The fall was in process again, from a slightly earlier point in time. There
were only so many of these reversals she could induce without draining that "site" or point of view dry:
she had to see as much as possible in each of them. Here was the first shotgun blast, from a little farther
down the sidewalk. Lee looked at the shape holding the gun, but from this "angle" could only see clearly
what dil'Sorden had seen clearly; and that was little. Eyes, then the barrel of the gun. The shape itself was
far more uncertain, a dark blur. Still, not a tall man: he barely came up to dil'Sorden's shoulder. Stocky,
perhaps a hundred kilograms, a head that looked almost rectangular. Turn a lit-tle, she willed him, but
from this angle there was no profile, or not enough, the features all lost in darkness and blur.
The emotional context was starting to force its way through the merely physical. This was inevitable, but
Lee re-sisted it for the moment and concentrated on seeing. What she saw was no longer a fall, but a run,
the tall slender blur running around the corner, away from the light of Melrose, garish through the
Heisenberg blur. The second shape, the stocky man, running after, bringing up the sawed-off shot-gun.
Lee watched as they ran toward her, seeing the first blast again, and saw dil'Sorden's arms fling up as if in
sur-prise as he stumbled; but before the second blast, she turned away from the fall she knew was
already beginning, and saw the second shape come around the corner.
But not all the way around. Close to the wall he stopped, watched, a shadow. He was in sharper focus
than the others, the uncertainties about him less, though still present. Tall, taller even than dil'Sorden; a
slender man, erect, very still. After a moment he slipped back around the corner, out of sight.
Lee knelt there and considered going after him. That had its dangers: pull too much energy out of the
forensic "field" of the area right now and it could be exhausted for further investigation later. I have
enough to go on with as a start, she thought: after we've pulled his profile and coordinated with
physical forensics, I can have another run.
She closed her eyes, let the state of investigative vision lapse, and looked around her again, closing down
the recording her implant was making and adding her digital "signature" to it as it closed. The sealed
record would feed itself wirelessly into the city judicial-data system as soon as she got near a
transponder: it might be doing so now if there was a 'sponder in one of the black-and-whites, which
seemed likely. Blessington was standing not too far away: as Lee replaced the tarp and got up, brushing
herself off, he walked over.
"One triggerman," she said. "Human. A hundred seventy centimeters or so, stocky, very square-built, say
a hundred kilos. Wearing a business suit of some kind, to judge from the color and the contour of the
artifact."
"Good, that's good," Blessington said.
"But look for someone else, too," Lee said. "Alfen. Tall, say two hundred ten centimeters. Thin. Not
muscular. An-other business-suit type, but more elegantly cut."
"Aren't they all," Blessington said rather sourly.
Lee smiled slightly. "Maybe just a witness," she said, "but somehow I don't think so. I'd see if physical
forensics finds any trace of his involvement on the body ... fibers or whatever. They might give us a lead
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