California Bones by Greg van Eekhout

have to send you to one of my interrogators who uses pain instead of osteomantic assistance.”
    The tree-drawer paused, his hand shaking. Then he turned the page and began sketching a face.
    *   *   *
    The next day, Gabriel visited the morgue, a sunless, stone-lined chamber in a subbasement of the Ministry of Osteomancy. There was no particular reason why it had to be kept so far out of sight, except the specialists who worked here weren’t particularly pleasant to be around. Gabriel descended the long flight of stairs with Max trailing him. Max moved tentatively.
    “You’re used to leading, not following,” Gabriel said.
    Max looked at him.
    “You can walk ahead if you want.”
    “I don’t know where I’m going,” Max said. “If you’re not going to keep me on a leash, you could at least tell me where we’re going.”
    “Fair enough. But can you tell me one thing?”
    “I can tell you if I know it. I don’t know much. I’m a hound.”
    “Why did you kill your master?”
    Max’s answer came without a moment of hesitation. “I wanted to die.”
    Gabriel found himself frozen, halfway down the stone steps. In the dim light, Max’s eyes were the brightest things in the stairway.
    “Why, Max?”
    “I thought I already said, Inspector Argent. I’m a hound.”
    “Do you still want to die?”
    “Not before I’ve had a chance to pee,” said Max.
    Gabriel nodded. “Then you have something to live for. Come on.”
    They continued down the stairs and came to a room the length of a high school gym. Technicians sat on benches behind long tables, piled with file boxes and folders. There was no conversation, no music, only the shuffling of paper, the soft noise multiplied by volume and repetition into a mechanical crackling. The air smelled of paper dust and ointment.
    “Who are these people?” Max whispered, as though they were in a library. It occurred to Gabriel that Max hadn’t been in a library for a very long time.
    Almost all the workers were stoop-shouldered old men and women with failing eyes and sun-starved flesh, sorting through old crime reports, mug shots, and composite sketches of criminal suspects, subversives, and insurgents. Younger workers lugged file boxes between towering shelves and the worktables.
    “Our memoraticians,” said Gabriel. “They’re fed a mix that enhances memory, concentration, and facial recognition.”
    He approached Station 21-A, where a man in a sweater vest sat with his back to him. Gabriel watched him work for a few minutes, sorting through piles of photos with lists of physical descriptors at his elbow.
    Once it became evident that the man was never going to acknowledge his presence, Gabriel coughed into his hand. “Excuse me, you’re the supervisor down here?”
    “I’m busy,” the man said, continuing to sort.
    “Which is laudable. I’m Inspector Gabriel Argent.”
    No reaction from the man, but Gabriel thought he detected a hint of a smirk on Max’s face.
    Gabriel tried again. “I brought down a sketch of the sint holo suspect at Farmers Market. I heard you were able to ID him.”
    The memoratician stopped and turned around. Gabriel was surprised to find him grinning.
    “Oh, that one. Yes, yes, I have something to show you. You’ll find it quite interesting.”
    The man sprang up and led Gabriel and Max on a near chase through a labyrinth of shelves, over to a corkboard. There, partitioned off by a border of yarn, was a sketch of a narrow-faced man, brown-skinned, probably some Hispanic in him, with unruly black hair. Gabriel put him in his late teens to early twenties.
    “We ran the sketches from the apothecaries you brought in. Eight hundred seventy-three in all. Of those, five had criminal records, all for minor offenses. I had them sent up to your office.” The memoratician’s eyes sparkled like a dog playing fetch. He pointed at the drawing of the narrow-faced man. “Now, this one is different. Look at the photos.”
    Two prints were