World-weary Ceres detective, hat-wearing Earther-born cop quietly obsessed with a missing rich girl.
Detective Miller is a Star Helix Security officer working the docks and corridors of Ceres, a Belt station where, as he puts it, there are "no laws in Ceres, just cops." Though he wears a hat to keep imaginary rain off his head and affects the manner of a Belter, his partner Havelock needles him that he'll never pass — "every time they look at you, they're always gonna see Earth." Miller fires back that Havelock, too, dresses like an Earther, and the two trade the cynical, practiced banter of men who police a population that mostly hates them; to an OPA agitator he is simply "welwala," a traitor to his people. He reads bodies and tells like a connoisseur of Belter biology — the spurs, the shakes, the rejected growth hormones that mark a station ward.
Captain Shaddid hands him an off-book "favor" for an Earth shareholder: find Julie Mao, the runaway daughter of the Luna-based Mao-Kwikowski shipping dynasty, who fell in with the radical Far Horizons Foundation, and ship her home. Miller calls it a "kidnap job" and takes it with a shrug. His past is a closed book on Ceres — an Earther who has clearly made the Belt his graveyard of choice. His ex-wife or former partner Octavia (also a cop) tells him to eat something and stop looking like hell, and trades barbed affection with him; she helps him think through what a rich girl might do to spite her father. Beneath the rumpled fatalism, Miller is the sort who beats a suspect bloody in a holding cell and then asks, dryly, whether there are any laws against it.
Wears a distinctive hat "to keep the rain off," though Ceres has no rain; described by others as looking like hell and unwell.
A jaded, alcoholic-leaning Star Helix detective on Ceres Station, freshly assigned the off-book case to find and detain heiress Julie Mao.