“The body is in the inner private office,” said Suze, leading the way. That door, too, was already open. She stepped in first, and I followed.

Skye Hissock’s body sat in a chair behind his desk. His head had been blown clean off. A great carnation bloom of blood covered most of the wall behind him, and chunks of brain were plastered to the wall and the credenza behind the desk.

“Christ,” I said. Some utopia.

Suze nodded. “Blaster, obviously,” she said, sounding much more experienced in such matters than she really was. “Probably a gigawatt charge.”

I began looking around the room. It was opulent; old Skye had obviously done well for himself. Suze was poking around, too. “Hey,” she said, after a moment. I turned to look at her. She was climbing up on the credenza. The blast had knocked a small piece of sculpture off the wall — it lay in two pieces on the floor — and she was examining where it had been affixed. “Thought that’s what it was,” she said, nodding. “There’s a hidden camera here.”

My heart skipped a beat. “You don’t suppose he got the whole thing on disk, do you?” I said, moving over to where she was. I gave her a hand getting down off the credenza, and we opened it up — a slightly difficult task; crusted blood had sealed its sliding doors. Inside was a dusty recorder unit. I turned to Skye’s desk, and pushed the release switch to pop up his monitor plate. Suze pushed the recorder’s playback button. As we’d suspected, the unit was designed to feed into the desk monitor.

The picture showed the reverse angle from behind Skye’s desk. The door to the private office opened and in came a young man. He looked to be eighteen, meaning he was just the right age for the mandatory adult soothsaying. He had shoulder length dirty-blond hair, and was wearing a t-shirt imprinted with the logo of a popular meed. I shook my head. There hadn’t been a good multimedia band since The Cassies, if you ask me.