by Rachel Ford
“Of course we’re ready.” Maggie sounded almost as impatient as I felt.
Malone laughed. “What I’m saying is, you can pack your bags, Ms. Landon. You’re going home.”
It wasn’t quite as cut-and-dried as that, of course. The initial results backed up Dave’s theory, but the magistrates required the full report before they’d entertain a petition for release. Still, we were ecstatic – and Dave was every bit the sore victor we expected him to be.
“Well,” he pointed out to Mags, “for all his quantum computing, or whatever he’s got going on, I didn’t see the robot solving this one. Did he?”
“No,” Maggie agreed with a smile. “He sure didn’t. That was all you, Dave.”
“Damned right it was. Maybe humans aren’t so obsolete after all.”
“I never said they were.”
“You implied it. And as for you, Katherine…”
“Me?” I cringed.
“I don’t think you’ll be so quick to get rid of me now, eh? Just think, if you had replaced me with that stupid robot, you’d probably be heading back to prison soon.”
“Jesus, Dave…no one was trying to replace you.”
He waved this aside with a brush of his hand. “At any rate, I accept your offer to return, Captain. For the promised pay raise, of course.”
“Of course,” she grinned. “I look forward to having you back in the galley, David. We all do.”
A few groans sounded from the bridge, somewhere out of view. He glanced over his shoulder, declaring, “Ah, shove it.” Then, he turned back to us. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually missing that Kudarian. At least he’s got a sense of humor.”
“He’ll be delighted to hear you say it,” I laughed.
“You shut your mouth, Katherine. Not a word, you understand me?”
Zaldar was quieter and more contemplative when he heard the news. “Interesting. Not surprising, but interesting. It means our culprit has a good knowledge of poisons, not only foreign ones, but domestic as well.”
“I guess so,” Maggie nodded.
“And access to the Nikyas. He’d have to introduce a hefty dose of poison to kill one and do in the other. So how did he administer it? He or she, I should say.”
“I don’t know.”
“And how did they acquire it?” Zaldar shook his head in silence for a minute. “It raises so many questions. But at least we know we’re asking the right ones now.”
And, with not much more than a promise to keep digging, he signed off.
Eventually, the full tox report was finished, and it confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt that Kia had been poisoned with kalgra, not saffron. Malone’s petition to waive our travel restriction was filed fifteen minutes later, and L’char’s petition to release Frank not long after.
The story hit the news within an hour, and breathless casters relayed it to viewers in ominous tones. “Shocking new evidence suggests that the trio suspected of the murder of Kia arn nikya might go free after all,” one station framed it.
Another said, “Under reported pressure from the Union diplomatic corps, magistrates are reviewing new petitions to release F’er ark inkaya and lift the travel restrictions imposed on his human associates.”
R’ia hissed in disgust and flipped off the box. “Even when the evidence is against them, they believe what they want.”
“Let’s just pray the magistrates are not so immune to fact,” her husband nodded.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Maggie and I woke the next morning to her communicator buzzing. It was Malone. Dispensing of formalities without so much as a perfunctory greeting, she said, “My God, are you watching this?”
Maggie blinked blearily at the apparition in our bedroom. “What now?”
I yawned, trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes as Malone gestured impatiently. “What do you think I mean? The shitshow all over the news.”
“We just woke up,” Maggie said. “I have no idea what’s on the news.”
“Then you better turn it on.”
Sighing, she stood to get out of bed, but our defender held up a hand. “Before you go, I need to ask you something. You swore you had no hand in this.”
“Of course.”
“You’re a hundred percent sure your friend didn’t?”
“Dammit, Malone,” I said, “of course we’re sure.”
She nodded. “I told you before, I don’t deal in guilt and innocence. But – against my better judgement – I believe the pair of you. Which means, we found our murderer. Now if only we can find some damned evidence to tie it to the son-of-a-bitch.”
Her cryptic pronouncements lost me, and I told her as much. But she just shook her head. “Turn on the telly. You’ll see. I need to call that investigator you’re working with.”
We did turn on the casts and sat in stupefied silence as they rolled a familiar face: Kor ark nikya. But this wasn’t the pleasant Kor ark nikya with whom I’d conversed, nor the fragile young man who had inspired so much sympathy.
This was an angry man, whose demeanor flipped between tears and rage with almost no warning. “I cannot believe they’d consider freeing my sister’s killer,” he thundered one moment. Then, weeping the next, he added, “Poor Kia. It’s bad enough to lose her, but to know her life means nothing, her death means nothing?”
“If you could say anything to the magistrates mulling these requests,” the interviewer asked, her forehead creased in sympathy, “what would it be?”
He was back to anger. “My sister is barely cold in her grave. For the love of the gods, don’t let these damned foreign bureaucrats make a mockery of our law. This is Kudar, not Earth or Alfor or one of their godless planets. We don’t let murderers walk for political reasons.”
For the first few minutes, I believed this to be a genuine show of emotion: the raw and ugly and real feelings of a man in the throes of grief. As awful as it was, I could not fault him for it. If he believed Frank to be the killer, I could understand his anger. Who wouldn’t be furious to see a sibling’s killer set free?
But then the caster asked, “What do you have to say to people who argue that this new evidence exonerates them?”
He scoffed. “You mean the nonsense about poisons? I don’t care where the poison came from. That’s never been what this is about. Whether he got it on Earth or Kudar, he still poisoned my sister. That’s what matters.”
“So there’s no doubt in your mind that F’er ark inkaya is the poisoner?”
“None whatever. I told you, K’riya: she was scared of him.”
Maggie and I exchanged glances. “What? Scared of Frank?”
The newscaster nodded sympathetically. “Tell us about that. You said she was frightened, but she agreed to go out with him a second time.”
“Yes. She was afraid to say no. She wanted me to go with her, in case things got…well, ugly.”
“Is that why you went with her in the first place? Because she was afraid of things getting ugly?”
He shook his head. “No. I just…had a feeling. I can’t explain it. Something about him…worried me. But Kia…” His voice trembled. “Kia always saw the best in everyone. She thought he was just embarrassed, after the betrothal business. She…” He trailed off, covering his face in his hands for a moment. Quiet sobs wracked his chest.
“I’m sorry,” K’riya, the newscaster, said. “We can do this later.”
“No,” he shook his head. “No…I…just give me a moment.” In a few seconds, he lowered his hands. His cheeks were red, his eyes puffy.
Son of a bitch. He’s a good actor.
“People need to know the truth,” he said. “Kia’s dead. I let my guard down when she was alive, and she’s dead now. In a way, that’s my fault. This is all I can do for her. This is all I can do to make it right.”
“I’m so sorry,” K’riya mumbled.
He nodded. “Me too. But people need to know. When she got home, she was scared of him. She was afraid o
f what he was going to do when she told him she didn’t want to see him again. She told me she’d tried to do it that night. Tried to tell him it was too soon after our mother’s death.
“But he started getting angry, and she didn’t know what to do.”
“But you didn’t see anything? When you were there, I mean?”
“No. He was very polite, very civil. He has excellent manners, when he chooses to exercise them.”
“So after you left, it all changed?”
He nodded again. “Yes. She said he wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. She said he seemed threatening when she wanted to go early.”
“He was threatening her, then? What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything exactly. It sounded like it was more his body language, his tone. That kind of thing. But I don’t know precisely. All I know is, she was scared, and made me promise I’d go with her the next day. But she was too tired to talk more and said she needed to sleep. She’d tell me everything in the morning.” He brushed a hand across his face. “Oh gods. She was dying. Right in front of my eyes, she was dying. That bastard killed her. He must have planned it before we even got there. To kill us both. Oh gods.”
After a few more minutes, Maggie shut the set off. “Son-of-a-bitch. So we’ve got our killer.”
I nodded slowly. “After Nefi’s death, Kia inherited: she was the eldest, the heir. So if he bumped her off, it’d all go to him.”
“And the idea of her courting someone probably scared him,” she added. “Made him think he needed to act sooner, while he still had access to her, rather than later.”
“And Frank was the perfect fall guy.” I shook my head. I didn’t, for a moment, believe Kor. I had no reason to believe Kia ever said anything Kor was claiming. It was his word against what I knew of Frank; and I knew Frank pretty well.
He was my friend, which, I suppose, might have blinded me in his favor. But I’d seen him handle rejection firsthand. He’d been sweet on me almost as soon as I joined the Black Flag crew, back when I was still figuring out that my feelings for Maggie were more than platonic. It had been a strange and confusing period, for all sorts of reasons – but not least of all, because I’d always assumed I was straight until I met her.
Frank had been the truest and most reliable of friends throughout. Even when I was stupid, incredibly stupid, he never took advantage; he never pushed when I was vulnerable; he never expected anything in return for his friendship; and he never let his own heartache or wounded pride get between being us, between him and being a damned good friend.
It didn’t mean he absolutely couldn’t be a secret monster, in some bizarre twist, in the way that anyone, conceivably could be. But I trusted Frank as much as I trusted anyone else; as much as I trusted Maggie. I would have staked my life on his innocence.
So when it came to his word versus Kor’s, there was no question in my mind: Kor was lying. There was motive enough to support the idea, and opportunity too. He could have poisoned Kia before they even left the Nikya residence. Based on what Fredricks had said about the quantities of poison she’d need to ingest, I imagined that to be likely.
Means was less certain, but the plant was native to this system. I didn’t have proof that he had access to it, but it would be easy enough for him to get his hands on.
There was only one aspect of it all that didn’t make sense to me. “How did he end up poisoned, though?”
“He must have taken some of the kalgra, to throw off suspicion. In small quantities, it’s not lethal.”
I nodded slowly. “Frank found that out the hard way, thanks to Dave.”
“Exactly. It’ll make a Kudarian sicker than hell, but it won’t kill them.”
“So you think he ate some on his own? Deliberately?”
“It made everyone think he was a target too. Hell, we knew Frank didn’t do it, but we still assumed he was an intended victim. And didn’t even consider that he might be involved, even though he stood to gain the most.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
In a way, the discovery was good news. It meant we knew not only who the killer was, but also the whys and hows behind the murder.
On the other hand, it meant we had our work cut out for us. Kor ark nikya was fixed in the public eye as a sympathetic figure: the loving brother who had lost his sister to the revengeful whims of a madman, and had almost died in the process. He was a tragic figure, a traditional Kudarian whose family had been destroyed by the perversity of foreign influence. There was more than Kia’s death at play here, and had been almost as soon as the story hit the news.
As it had played out, the tragedy that struck Kor’s family was the inevitable result of open borders and the Union’s diversity. Kor was a poster child for the old ways, and Kia for what would happen when they were abandoned.
Which meant that most of Kudar felt personally invested in the case in a way that defied reason. It was already a proxy battle between worldviews; and Frank, Maggie and I were stuck in the middle. How much worse would it get when we pointed the finger of blame at the figure so many saw as a victim in all of this?
Still, I leaned toward optimism. We had the answers we sought. Now all we needed to do was figure out how to convince everyone else of the truth.
A tall order? Sure. But we had to start somewhere. And the truth seemed a damned good place.
Zaldar was excited too. “Now we know he did it. We just have to prove it.”
“What if we can’t?”
“Guys like Kor are never as smart as they think they are. He’s already made a mistake: he didn’t tell this story from the beginning. Not publicly, anyway.”
“But he can say he was just letting justice take its course. He felt he had to speak out now.”
“He can say whatever he wants. But still, it looks suspicious.”
“We don’t know that he hasn’t been telling investigators this from the start,” Maggie pointed out. “He was in the hospital during the early days, and his first statement was barely two dozen words; but he might have added this once he was out.”
“He’s tipped his hand, Miss Landon. That’s what counts. We will get him. The rest is just details.”
“There’s a saying on my world, Investigator: the devil is in the details.”
He smiled. “Very quaint. On Kudar, we say ‘The devil prays I live forever.’ It means, I fear no devils. It’s they who’d better fear getting my way.”
Maggie smiled too. “I gathered.”
“Very well. I will speak to you soon, I trust. Zaldar out.”
Kor, it turned out, had been spinning this tale for awhile though. He’d told police this in his first post-hospital interview. The Kudarian legal system being what it was, our defenders simply had not yet been made privy to his statement. “It would have been shared at the relevant juncture,” Malone was informed.
“This is not new information,” a spokesman for the judicial office told the local news. “Kor ark nikya made a full statement upon his release from the hospital, and this was a part of it. It may be new to the public, but it is not new to the magistrates. We know the public is deeply concerned about this case, but we request patience as the magistrates review all pertinent information. They expect to have a decision within the week.”
All of our excitement seemed to fall away. Whatever political momentum Dave’s discovery had created for us, Kor snatched it away. And he’d set the groundwork from day one. Frank was his fall guy, and he’d laid a careful trap for him. Even when one bit of the lie unraveled, he – we – were still stuck fast.
Zaldar’s assurances notwithstanding, my pessimism grew. Our upper hand, any marginal benefit we’d received by showing that the wrong poison had been identified, was gone. The Kudarian press was happy to turn from discussion of mistakes made by their own investigators back to the more comfortable narrative of sinister outsiders.
All the old accusations and insinuations bubbled back, but now with the goal of proving that Frank was s
ome manner of vengeful, threatening monster. Where they’d struggled to define a motive before, now the casts’ armchair analysts had plenty to say. The entire betrothal business was bandied about again and again, facts lost to fit the narrative.
It was, they would insinuate, Kia who had called off the engagement. “Or had she shown some indication that she wasn’t going to go through with it? Did she hear something that made her hesitate?”
“Was that why he constructed that elaborate ruse, with the human female?”
“If nothing else, it shows his need to save face was strong. Emotionally, he couldn’t handle rejection. So he concocted a ridiculous story, he deceived his friends and family, all to avoid owning the truth: that Kia arn nikya was not going to be his wife.”
The psychoanalyses were particularly brutal. “We’re seeing patterns of stunted maturity here, of toxic ideals. But it fits with the larger pattern of his life: fleeing Kudar, turning his back on his familial responsibilities and duties. These are all actions of a man who is not capable of functioning like an adult. These are the actions of a man who lashes out when pushed into a corner, who takes drastic action over slight provocations – the kind of action that boggles a rational mind.”
“We’re not seeing a healthy mind here. We’re seeing a man who may be intelligent, but who suffers from stunted emotional and moral growth.”
“I know, in today’s arena, I probably shouldn’t say this out loud, but facts don’t conform to political convention or social whim. And the truth is, F’er ark inkaya’s proclivity to associate with humans, the way in which he’s abandoned his own species to sort of cast his lot among mankind – and not just any humans, but pirates: the dregs of humankind…well, it all tells a story. And the story is one of an unhealthy – dare I say it, imbalanced – man, a man who can’t cut it among his own people, whose intellectual and ethical standing is more at home among human pirates than decent Kudarians.”
On and on they went, prim-faced professionals and sneering agitators alike. Now and then, someone with a more measured view would be given a few minutes in some semblance of neutrality.