No Dogs in Philly
on the wall. All the copper was polished and
shiny, the uniforms crisp and clean. The guards themselves looked
like competent men—tall, fit, poised, close-cropped salt-and-pepper
hair and hard eyed—not the pudgy houseplants you normally saw
parked behind a reception desk. The guard’s eyes watched her sign
in; she saw the twitch in his jaw as her thumbprint came up as
Susan Greere, CPA, CFO, Meadow Media. He knew it was fake as a
stripper tit but she was a guest. He walked her to the elevator and
stood glaring at her. She glared right back and resisted the urge
to flip him off just as the doors sucked closed.
    Jojran lived in one of the top quarter suites,
an open two-floor affair of dark wood, brushed steel, and
wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of
the city below—away from the filth of humanity it almost looked
nice. The view was a waste as Jojran spent 99 percent of his waking
life on the Net—a self-titled super-user, uber, viking, elite,
professional masturbator, whatever you called it. He greeted her in
a leopard-print silk bathrobe that did little to distract from his
height deficit and surplus fat. She hoped to God there were silk
boxers on underneath—and why was he wearing just socks?
    “ Welcome,” he said, dramatically,
squeakily. “To my humble abode.”
    “ Lovely,” she said. She pushed
past him and went to the bar, an actual bar in the corner, and
began rummaging for the most expensive thing she could find. Dimly
it occurred to her that if she solved this case then she could
afford to live in a place like this, to stare out the windows at
the little people below and drink vodka swirling with pulverized
diamonds. She poured herself a glass and drank.
    “ Can I get you anything?” he
asked, as she finished the first glass and started on a second. He
was following a script, some rehearsed plan of seduction. There was
a twinge of pity for him somewhere in her, but that was about it.
If he wanted sex he could buy a girl or a guy or a mountain goat if
that tickled his fancy. Whatever need made him act this way toward
her was something she couldn’t understand—or entirely afford to
neglect. Certainly he didn’t help her for the money; he made enough
of that stealing IDs and scraping corporate accounts. Nor did she
bring him particularly interesting cases, present case
excepted.
    “ I’ll have this,” she said, now
studying a bottle of what looked like potent grain alcohol that had
been drunk by beautiful women and then urinated out and distilled
again. Would there even be any alcohol left? Worth a shot. She took
one. Not bad.
    “ Ah, yes. I have the full range of
Virile Vodkas—I’m something of a connoisseur. Might I tempt you
with this?”
    He sallied over and found a small bottle of
clear glass in the shape of a penis. He poured out a generous glass
and handed it to her. She took it and sniffed. Her poison detectors
found traces of an aphrodisiac cocktail, a mix of designer chems
meant to make her horny, but nothing malicious. They’d been
tailored to her to increase potency, which she found oddly
touching, and she wondered where he’d gotten a sample of untainted
DNA. She had a viral shedder that sprinkled taints of gobbledygook
throughout her body so genetics were usually useless against her.
Had they failed? Or had he spent the time to go through and extract
what he could to match her somatic profile? That was a little
creepy. The poison sniffer gave her the green; she could
disassemble and neutralize the cocktail. It was simple enough that
she copied it to study later, maybe she could reverse engineer it,
have it secreted from her lips or pheromones and take a stab at
Eugene one day. She sipped.
    “ Oh that’s very nice,” she said,
and commanded her face to blush a little. Might as well play along.
She tossed her coat on one of the white leather couches and
adjusted her shirt and bra to maximize her cleavage. He noticed.
Her scanners swept him, saw

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