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wearing your clothes. Not much left after the animals, right? And they take hair and saliva samples from your house. Yep, the DNA matches. No doubt in the world. You’re dead. But it wasn’t your hair or saliva in your bathroom, was it? The man you killed, you took some hair from him and left it in your bathroom. And brushed his teeth, right?” “And a little blood on the Gillette. You police do love your blood, don’t you?” “Who was the man you killed?” “Some kid from California. Hitchhiker on I-70.” Keep him uneasy—information’s your only weapon. Use it! “We never knew why you did it, though, Peter. Was it to sabotage the SSD takeover of Rocky Mountain Data? Or was it more?” “Sabotage?” he whispered in astonishment. “You just don’t get it, do you? When Andrew Sterling and his folks from SSD came to Rocky Mountain and wanted to acquire it, I scrounged every bit of data I could find on him and the company. And what I saw was breathtaking! Andrew Sterling is God. He’s the future of data, which means he’s the future of society. He could find data that I couldn’t even imagine existed, and use it like a gun, or like medicine, or like holy water. I needed to be part of what he was doing.” “But you couldn’t be a data scrounger for SSD. Not for what you had planned, right? For your . . . other collecting? And the way you lived.” She nodded at the filled rooms. His face grew dark, his eyes wide.
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