“You know what cryogenics is?” Wise asked.
“Sure. It’s where they put you on ice until doctors can invent a cure for whatever killed you. I didn’t know there was a rewards program, though.”
“That’s the deluxe version. The goal is to get the cadaver into cryostasis as quickly as possible, to minimize postmortem decay.”
“Let me guess: this is one of those clever-sounding ideas that turns out not to be.”
“There is a contradiction,” said Wise, “between wanting to live forever, and offering a cash bounty for the discovery of your corpse.” He passed me a stack of what looked like baseball cards. But the pictures were of both men and women, and the stats on the back weren’t sports-related. “These are all the customers of the Ozymandias Corporation who’ve died within the past six months.”
I counted thirteen cards. “How big is their client list?”
“Not that big. Going by the average of previous six-month periods, there should be two cards in that stack at most.”
“So someone’s killing them off for the bounty money…But wouldn’t that be kind of hard to get away with? I mean, you’d think the company would get suspicious when the same person kept claiming all the rewards.”
“The bodies were all discovered by different people,” Wise said, “and there’s no obvious connection between any of the discoverers. But we believe a connection exists.”
“So it’s an organized racket? Murder for profit?”
“Profit, and one other motive.”
“What?”
“Evil. We believe the killers’ ultimate goal—after making as much money as possible—is to attract the attention of the police.”
“Aren’t the police already paying attention?”
“Not yet. But their involvement is inevitable if the deaths continue at this rate—and the first thing they’ll do when they launch their investigation is order an autopsy of all the bodies.”
I thought about it. “Autopsies mean thawing them out…”
“Thawing them out, and cutting them up.”
“So not only are they dead before their time, they lose their shot at resurrection.”
“You find that amusing?”
“Well no, I think it’s horrible, but…come on. The whole cryogenics thing is bullshit anyway, right?”
“Yeah, like organ transplants. Or cloning.”
“OK,” I said, not wanting to argue the point, “OK, back up, I still don’t understand why the police aren’t already investigating this. If thirteen people were murdered—”
“You didn’t look closely enough at the stats.”
I shuffled through the cards again. “Cause of death: heart attack…Cause of death: heart attack…Cause of death: stroke…Cause of death: heart attack…” I looked up. “Are you guys missing an NC gun?”
“Along with its owner.” He laid one more card on the counter.
“Jacob Carlton.”
“Former Good Samaritan, transferred to Bad Monkeys in 1999. He disappeared last June during an operation in Reno. Originally the thinking was he’d been taken out by the guy he was hunting, but now it looks like there’s another explanation.”
“So how do we find him?”
“We believe Carlton has taken a job inside the Ozymandias Corporation. Panopticon’s been trying to bug their headquarters for weeks, but the surveillance equipment keeps malfunctioning. You and I are going to go in there today, posing as clients.”
The Ozymandias facility was another forty miles out in the desert. “If they’re in such a hurry to freeze people,” I asked, as we drove across the wasteland, “wouldn’t it make more sense to build the place in town?”
“Zoning regulations,” Wise said vaguely.
“They have those in Vegas?”