Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) by Aaron Pogue

for the time period. The company was doing well, but not quite well enough to keep a Junior Administrative Officer busy for eight hours a day. It was a quiet little life.
    And then, all of a sudden, it was over. Nothing Katie could find made that any clearer. It all seemed surreal. Usually, once she had a murder victim, she could look in the database and find a big red arrow pointing at a suspect. Then, from there, she could follow the glowing lines between the murderer and the victim, seeing (usually from days out) the intersecting paths that would end in the victim's death. Tragic though it might be, there was an air of destiny about it all that made the crime almost mechanical.
    A bug, certainly. A flaw in the system that had to be fixed. But not...random. Oh, sure, in the first moments after a murder, it always seemed random, but Hathor had cleared all that up. Almost always, the crime was set in motion long, long before it actually occurred.
    She stopped the playback, freezing Ms. Linson in the middle of a call to her best friend from high school, who had just gotten a job at Disneyland and called to gloat about it. Katie shook her head. For no reason whatsoever, this girl was about to die.
    Then she saw the clock on her desktop: after six already. Her day had burned up like a candle, listening to real-time audio streams. She put together a request to compile and transcribe the rest of the victim's voice audio for the previous week, then closed down her desktop and headed for the door. She could skim through that faster, anyway.
    Katie stayed home Tuesday night and watched a movie, but she missed most of the details. Curled up on her loveseat, she spent the whole evening scrolling through chat transcripts on her handheld. At a quarter past ten, she glanced up and realized the TV screen was black, had been for an hour. She shook her head with a chuckle, put away her handheld, and headed to bed.
    An hour passed, her mind buzzing here and there, and finally she grabbed the headset from her nightstand and hooked it over her ear. "Hathor, connect me to Dad," she said. She left him a forty-minute message, laying out her day for him, bit by bit, and as she talked it through the pieces fell into place. She had to fight a yawn when she finally said, "Goodbye," and she fell asleep with the headset still on.
    Wednesday she woke up early, dressed in her most authoritative outfit, and had a bowl of dry cereal before she started her day. Then she checked her watch and checked her schedule again. "Hathor, get me travel details to the supreme court in Brooklyn, now."
    The long-familiar voice of Hathor said in her ear, "From home to Supreme Court, Brooklyn, New York, now, by private car, will take two hours, twenty-one minutes. Conditions are optimal. Weather in Brooklyn, New York—"
    Katie shook her head, confused, and interrupted. "Hathor, stop. Details to my handheld." The voice fell silent while Katie darted over to her loveseat and tossed aside throw pillows until she found her handheld. Her travel itinerary waited on the screen. She'd set it up last night, booking a seat on the train at eight o'clock. Now, the reservation showed as canceled, replaced by an order for a private car to pick her up at her apartment. She pulled up details on the reservation, and found it paid on the Bureau's account.
    She rolled her eyes as her headset buzzed. Rick's voice boomed, "Pratt."
    "Yeah," she said. "Connect him."
    "Hey, kid," Rick said, and she could hear his grin. "Did you get my present?"
    "You don't have to do that. The state of New York is happy to pay for my travel. The chief just wanted me to express his gratitude to you for giving me the day off—"
    "Oh, forget that," Rick said. "Due diligence and all, I checked on your court date. You didn't tell me it was one of those piss-ant confidence appeals. I hate  that stuff. The whole Jurisprudence Project was set up to avoid exactly that sort of wasteful motion."
    "Well, yeah—"
    "So I