direct testimony wouldn’t really hold up well against a high-priced lawyer. She needed hard evidence to hang Lintel with.
She got it when Beirkoff took her down to the holding cells. A man in a white lab coat—Beirkoff’s thoughts identified him as Dr. Ramchandra, the only other on-the-books Threshold employee with Black Level clearance—lay dead in the hallway, shot neatly through the chest. Beirkoff was horrified, and Ria suspected that he’d never seen anyone freshly dead before. Like so many yuppies, his only encounters with death were via the media, or perhaps the sanitized and beautified body of a friend or relative after the mortuary professionals had made it accep­table. Ria thought back to the battle in Griffith Park. She’d seen violent death in every possible aspect. Bored with his horror, she moved on.
All of the cells were full, and all of the occupants were dead as well. They looked like the mummies from the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was hard to believe they’d ever been human.
“They were the ones who survived,” Beirkoff said from behind her in a shaken voice. “If the stuff didn’t kill them on the first shot and you gave them a second dose, it was like they just . . . burned out.”
“There’s no one here,” Logan said, coming back down the hall. He glanced at Ramchandra’s body and then back at Ria, his expression unchanging. i