Free Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) by Aaron Pogue

was enough to make her day.
    That left her with just Eva, who caught her watching Marshall's exit when she returned from the bathroom. "You are some kind of homesick, aren't you?" Katie tried to shrug it off, but something in her demeanor gave away the lie, and Eva's joking grin faded to concern. "Oh, gosh, Katie. Are  you going to make it?"
    Katie shrugged, suddenly miserable. "I'll be fine," she said. "It's just tough making a start in a new town, a new job. And I've got this awful case...."
    Eva said, "Oh." She put her smile back on, and tugged Katie's hand to get her moving. "Well, we'll get it sorted out," she said. "Come on, let's walk and talk."
    "Yeah," Katie said. "Good plan." She leaned across the table to grab her jacket, then followed Eva out the door.
    They walked a couple blocks while Katie filled in the broad strokes for her, then she said, "You know what it's like? It's like the books I read when I was a kid. It's like...do you remember Law and Order ? That old TV show? It's like that. I need to be hitting the beat. I need to be knocking on doors and asking the tough questions." She thought for a moment, and shook her head. "They always used to say, 'After three days, the trail's cold.' Maybe that doesn't matter when it's all in the database, but my new perps aren't . So all of a sudden it's like I'm an old-timey cop again, just like I used to dream about, and right now I'm looking at a trail that's gone cold. I'm spending day three hanging out with old friends and parroting back decade-old congressional talking points to a judge who already agrees with me. I need to be in hot pursuit, you know?"
    Eva chuckled, and when Katie turned she caught the other woman just watching her. She'd always been a good listener. Katie said, "What?"
    "Katie Pratt, Gumshoe," Eva said, and then laughed at Katie's frown. "Fine," she said. "Tell me about it. I bet you've already got more than you think you do."
    So she laid it all out. She spent hours bringing Eva up to speed. Most of it they spent walking, strolling Katie's old beat, but after a while she summoned her car and they sat in its spacious interior while she pulled out her handheld to show Eva the HaRRE video.
    She pulled off her headset and turned up the volume to use it as a speaker, then she opened her notes while the video was loading so she could skip to the really creepy part. It took a while for the video to render on her handheld, so she narrated while they waited. "Okay, so she's standing in the office, the elevator dings, and everything goes black." Even as she said it, the HaRRE screen resolved, already black. An unbroken roar came from the speaker. She stopped the video and checked the time in the environment, then double-checked her notes. "Weird."
    "What?"
    "She should be...." Katie skipped backward in time five minutes, and there was the girl, staring at a painting on the wall. Katie said, "Ooh, there she is."
    "Pretty," Eva said in an analytical sort of way. "Shame."
    Katie said, "Okay, well, here she's listening to some music. She looks nervous to me, but not exactly scared."
    Eva nodded.
    Katie went on, "Now she moves around behind the desk and—oh." The screen went black.
    "Wow." Eva said. "That's spooky. It's not—"
    "No," she said, and switched back to her notes. "It has shifted. We've lost...almost three minutes off the record, since Monday." She turned to Eva, eyes wide. "It's growing."
    She shrugged. "So?"
    "So I was already stumped. This...I don't know what the blackout represents, but it's totally blind. I looked, and it covers the whole downtown building and halfway down the block. I can't get details on anyone or anything within it. We're already pushing half an hour. That means unbroken positive IDs are about to start popping. Anyone inside that blackout—whether it's janitors cleaning up the building or an executive working late on a proposal across the street—if they stay inside the blackout past half an hour, the confidence level on