Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 by Gardner Dozois

it needed.
    No vaccine had turned up. Apparently Cristea had got into the European Community without having his bags searched, as there was no evidence that the documents relating to the alleged vaccine had ever been examined.
    The missing “vaccine”—at some point in the police file the skeptical quotation marks had appeared—had convinced the Paris police that Cristea was a murdered drug courier, and at that point they’d lost interest in the case. It was rarely possible to solve a professional killing in the drug underworld.
    Michelle’s brief investigation seemed to have come to a dead end. That Terzian might have witnessed a murder would rate maybe half a sentence in Professor Davout’s biography.
    Then she checked what her spiders had brought her in regard to Terzian, and found something that cheered her.
    There he was inside the Basilica di Santa Croce, a tourist still photograph taken before the tomb of Machiavelli. He was only slightly turned away from the camera and the face was unmistakable. Though there was no date on the photograph, only the year, he wore the same clothes he wore in the video taken outside the church, and the photo caught him in the act of speaking to a companion. She was a tall woman with deep brown skin, but she was turned away from the camera, and a wide-brimmed sun hat made her features indistinguishable.
    Humming happily, Michelle deployed her software to determine whether this was the same woman who had been on Terzian’s arm on the Place Dauphine. Without facial features or other critical measurements to compare, the software was uncertain, but the proportion of limb and thorax was right, and the software gave an estimate of 41 percent, which Michelle took to be encouraging.
    Another still image of Terzian appeared in an undated photograph taken at a festival in southern France. He wore dark glasses, and he’d grown heavily tanned; he carried a glass of wine in either hand, but the person to whom he was bringing the second glass was out of the frame. Michelle set her software to locating the identity of the church seen in the background, a task the two distinctive bell towers would make easy. She was lucky and got a hit right away: the church was the Eglise St-Michel in Salon-de-Provence, which meant Terzian had attended the Fête des Aires de la Dine in June. Michelle set more search spiders to seeking out photo and video from the festivals. She had no doubt that she’d find Terzian there, and perhaps again his companion.
    Michelle retired happily to her hammock. The search was going well. Terzian had met a woman in Paris and traveled with her for weeks. The evidence wasn’t quite there yet, but Michelle would drag it out of history somehow.
    Romance. The lonely mermaid was in favor of romance, the kind where you ran away to faraway places to be more intently one with the person you adored.
    It was what she herself had done, before everything had gone so wrong, and Michelle had had to take steps to re-establish the moral balance of her universe.

    Terzian paid for a room for Stephanie for the night, not so much because he was gallant as because he needed to be alone to think. “There’s a breakfast buffet downstairs in the morning,” he said. “They have hard-boiled eggs and croissants and Nutella. It’s a very un-French thing to do. I recommend it.”
    He wondered if he would ever see her again. She might just vanish, particularly if she read his thoughts, because another reason for wanting privacy was so that he could call the police and bring an end to this insane situation.
    He never quite assembled the motivation to make the call. Perhaps Rorty’s I don’t care had rubbed off on him. And he never got a chance to taste the buffet, either. Stephanie banged on his door very early, and he dragged on his jeans and opened the door. She entered, furiously smoking from her new cigarette pack, the athletic bag over her shoulder.
    “How did you pay for the room at my