Officer Konstantin is head of Technocrime, which sounds good until you realise it's a scuzzy one person department, well, one person and a junior so bad that Konstantin actually *wants* them to keep getting borrowed to work Traffic detail...
Hastings Dervish lives in Key West, a place where crime is a private matter and the police are hired hacks, pretty much doing what they are told...
The joy of Cadigan's work is that it doesn't always make sense, like life, really. Her main character is self destructive, fixated on her ex and not fond of people who go into Artificial Reality with borrowed bodies, particulartly bodies of nine year olds. Which provides a nice little element of bitterness to the fact that the person Konstantin needs to team up with to take down Dervish is a Japanese guy called Goku, who likes going into AR as... (You got it.)
As ever with Cadigan, it's AR not VR, an important distiction and one that makes this much more than recycled cyberpunk.