0347

"You want coffee?" Ramirez said. "I'm going up."

He stood up out of the chair two seats down and stretched both arms over his head, until something in his back popped. He was three weeks in. He still looked at the clock on the wall like it was going to tell him something worth knowing.

"I'm good," Rachel said. She didn't look over. She had her eyes on the board and one boot hooked up under the lip of the console, and she was rocking the chair a couple inches back and forth on that boot.

"You're always good."

"Somebody's got to be," she said, and kept her eyes on the board.

He picked his badge up off the desk and turned to go, and that was when she caught it.

It came in on the far-left edge of her screen, way out in the corner, down in the part of the board that catches junk all night long. Radar picks up more than airplanes. It picks up flocks of birds, and rain coming over the mountains, and the ground itself bouncing the signal back, and all that garbage piles up along the edges as little flickers that mean nothing. The computer is built to look at those flickers, decide they're trash, and wipe them off the screen before a person ever has to deal with them. It wipes hundreds of them a night. This one had been already wiped. There was just the little gray note it leaves behind, the one that says the software looked at a return, decided it was nothing, and cleared it.