Red Ransom part 1

It sounds like after the rain. Bombed out ruin weeps water and fire suppression foam. Its metal skeleton, torn and twisted, still ticks as it cools. There is a lot of room for the night breeze to roam now - amidst bent columns and maimed floors covered with shattered blackened glass. This sooty carpet creaks with every step I take.
My flashlight cuts through humid darkness. I prefer it this way, even though night vision would've been more efficient. As if this lone cone of light can reveal me something I'm missing. Or maybe I just want to separate light and darkness, even if darkness ends up so much overwhelmingly bigger.
Nineteen people died here. Victims, collateral damage... and misdirection. Whoever did this was obviously targeting servers - thick bundles of cables and cooling pipes leading to epicenter of explosion tell that story. I wonder if this could be considered a compliment. Bombers didn't much care about victims, but they made a point of destroying their life's work. Maybe the dead will take some solace in this. They did something that mattered.
Red and blue strobe lights from police cars outside pass freely through the gutted structure, casting macabre shadows on even more macabre shapes of destruction.
I should be more careful. If they question me, my bullshit cover may not hold, even this late, when everybody is focused on just getting it done and going home.
Funny. This applies to me too.
There. Curved gallery bending out of sight, a lot of destroyed furniture and mishapen, but still standing partitions. I'm no bomb tech, but shockwave would've slowed down in place like that. And it may have left something behind. With luck and some digging I may found something cops have missed.
Wind doesn't reach here, and I smell plastic smoke and destruction especially vivdly. This smell hangs in the back of my mind like a mosquito ringing near one's ear. I brush it away.
Behind what I suppose was a fancy water cooler I spot my find. A piece of green plastic the size of a pinky nail, three seams meeting in one point. Looks like a corner of a rectangular package to me. Barely even burned, and only on the inside. I zoom in to the limit of my implants - there is microscopic brown residue in the inside folds of the seams, very homogenous. Could be explosives.
I pack this piece of trash in the bag and let out a sign - it can be shit for all know. Wouldn't be a surprise in this city. Salem will have to take a look. He landed us all in this mess and effortlessly installed himself as Scapegoat-in-Chief, so it's only fair he should pick up a shovel.
Small police drone with a wide bluish light beam whooshes across the gallery in the distance, poking around the ruin seemingly without logic, like a curious puppy. Yeah, now it's really time to go. I don't need my face in the feed of this mongrel.
As I walk out of the remains of the building and try to shake my sneakers clean of ash, ringing mosquito finally bites.
Commune riots smelled like that.
Fires, water spray, soot in my nose, black, violent desperation we were told to push against, total exhaustion day after day for weeks, hatred that soaked both sides to the bones, deaths, so many deaths that could've been avoided.
I stop myself before I run into someone’s parked car.
First on-duty fatalities I ever saw.
That was half a lifetime ago, a lifetime for some people in 7C. Back then I was not that much different from Salem. Acted without thinking sometimes.
And now I should really think.
Crime scene, "Red Legion", contacts, surveillance, netrunning - there is enough people digging through the case from this end. And those people have magnitudes more resources, so there is no sense to compete with them. Not to mention we might run into each other. That would be awkward.
I should probably look into Orbitedge right away - that's the real probable perps. Digging from the other end gives us chance to get ahead.
I've just realized.
We will be digging under Orbitedge. We will have to be as careful as if we are walking on glass eggshells in front of a lightly sleeping tiger.
Or a lion. Did that lion really escape? What a mess of a job.