by Timothy Zahn
“Which means he didn’t set it up then, at least not completely,” I told her. “He must have done all the cutting as soon as he came back here, leaving the loose cord wadded up against the base of the crate where we wouldn’t notice it. Once he spotted us and slipped away around the back of the crate stacks, all he had to do was loop the end through here and tie it down back here.”
“And then lure us into running after him,” Bayta said, grimacing. “We should have known better.”
“We did know better,” I assured her. “I was just expecting a different sort of trap, that’s all.”
“Wait a minute—there he goes,” Bayta said, staring suddenly into space. “He’s left the baggage car and is heading forward.”
“What species is he?” I asked. I knew Spiders usually couldn’t distinguish between individuals, but a species identification would at least get us started.
Bayta frowned in concentration. “He can’t tell,” she said, sounding rather nonplused. “He’s wearing a sort of hooded cloak that’s completely covering his head, arms, and torso.”
“What about his height? His build? Anything?”
“He’s tall enough to be a medium-sized Filiaelian, a tall Human, a slightly overweight Fibibib, or a slightly underweight Shorshian,” Bayta said, sounding rather annoyed herself. This was her plan, after all, that he was outthinking us on. “All the Spider can tell for sure is that he’s not a Pirk, Juri, Bellido, or Cimma.”
I mouthed a foul word one of my French-born Westali colleagues had been overly fond of. “Fine,” I growled. “He wants to play games? We can play games, too. Have the Spiders keep an eye on him. Sooner or later, he’ll have to take off the party outfit.”
“Do you want the conductor to try to pull aside his hood when he passes?” Bayta asked.
“No,” I said. “If he doesn’t already know about our close association with the Spiders, I don’t want to tip our hand. Just have them keep an eye on him.”
“All right,” Bayta said. “What now?”
“We go do what we actually came here for,” I said. Pulling out my multitool, I cut the trip-wire cord and pushed the ends out of the way. Then, getting a grip on the safety webbing behind me, I pulled myself carefully to my feet. “Let’s go look at some dead bodies.”
I had hoped there would be a way of telling which and how many of the storage tanks our intruder had broken into. But no such luck. There were no locks on the tanks, nor were there any breakable—or broken—seals. The four bodies lay quietly and peacefully in their temporary coffins, each wrapped like a mummy in wide strips of plastic. “I guess we’ll start here,” I said, gesturing to the coffin which had been ajar when we’d arrived. Swiveling the lid all the way up, I started gingerly unwrapping the corpse.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Bayta asked, her voice sounding a little queasy. “Needle marks?”
“Mostly,” I said. “I’m thinking one of the needle marks may have something different about it.”
The wrapping came free of the head, and I saw that it was Master Colix’s rest I’d disturbed. “Here we go,” I said, working the plastic free of his shoulders. “You want to start on one of your own, or shall we both work on this one?”
“You go ahead,” Bayta said, making no move toward the other coffins. “I’ll just watch.”
“Okay, but this is the really fun part of investigative work,” I warned. Forcing my mind into clinical Westali mode, I leaned into the coffin and got to work.
I’d expected the job to take a while, with a lot more unwrapping necessary before I got anywhere. But as seemed to be happening more and more these days, I was wrong.
“There we go,” I said, pulling Colix’s tunic back to reveal the tiny needle mark a few centimeters below the top of his collar and just to the left of his corrugated spinal ridge. “One needle mark, comma, hypodermic. Definitely fresh.”
“How can that be?” Bayta objected. “The Spiders have accounted for all the hypos the passengers brought aboard.”
“Which means it was either Aronobal or Witherspoon, or else someone managed to smuggle a spare aboard,” I said.
Bayta shook her head. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
“Possible or not, here it is,” I said, gesturing to the body. “Take a look.”
Bayta shuddered, but gamely leaned in a little closer. “Seems like an odd placement,” she commented. “How could someone make an injection back there without him noticing?”
“Actually, it’s a perfect spot,” I said. “Generally speaking, in order for poison to be injected without the victim noticing, he or she has to be asleep, comatose, or drunk. Those third-class nighttime privacy shields have openings at the top for ventilation. All our killer needed to do was go up to Colix’s seat, reach in with his hypo—”
“Did Master Colix use his privacy shield?” Bayta interjected. “A lot of Shorshians don’t.”
I stared at her, then down at the needle mark I’d felt so proud about finding ten seconds earlier. Damn it, but she was right. And if Colix’s whole skin surface had been available, surely the murderer could have picked a more out-of-the-way spot for his injection.
Had it happened at dinner, then? The mark was also in the right spot for someone who’d sneaked up behind him and surreptitiously poked a hypo into his back.
Only that brought us back to the question of how that little trick could have been performed without Colix noticing. A brief twinge of pain he’d passed off and immediately forgotten? A close encounter, moreover, that his dinner companions hadn’t even noticed? “Good point,” I told Bayta. “Let’s think about it a minute.”
Gingerly, I slid my hand down inside the plastic wrappings to Colix’s chest and started feeling around the vicinity of his tunic’s inner top pocket. “What are you doing?” Bayta asked.
“Looking for this,” I said, pulling out Colix’s Quadrail ticket. “I guess the murderer didn’t steal it after all.”
“Then how did he get into Master Colix’s storage compartment?” Bayta asked, frowning at the card.
“Two possibilities,” I said. “One is that he didn’t need the ticket because Colix’s compartments were never locked that night.” I wiggled the ticket between my fingers. “The other is that that’s precisely what our intruder was doing back here just now. He’d taken the ticket, used it to open the compartment and steal Colix’s goodies, and was hoping to return it to its rightful owner before we came looking for it.”
“That has to be it,” Bayta said. “Master Colix was very possessive of those snacks. He wouldn’t have left them unlocked where they could be stolen.”
“Not so fast,” I warned her. “We also know that the compartment was unlocked the next morning, when Tas Krodo returned Colix’s blanket.”
“Which only means the killer must have left it unlocked after he stole the snacks,” Bayta countered.
“Or else that Colix was already feeling too sick to bother locking it after he got out his blanket,” I said. “But that brings us to another interesting point.” Sliding Colix’s ticket into my own pocket, I reached back down to the body, loosened the braidings tying up the front of his tunic, and pulled the collar all the way down. “As the French say, voilà,” I said, pointing to the faint parallel scars running lengthwise along his throat on either side of his larynx. “Twenty to one those are the marks of the infamous Gibber Operation.”
“The what?” Bayta asked, frowning as she leaned over for a closer look.
“It’s an operation the Shorshians don’t talk much about,” I explained, resisting the temptation to point out how unusual it was for me to have found a gap in her otherwise encyclopedic knowledge of the galaxy. “It creates enough range in the Shorshic vocal apparatus to allow them to speak languages other than their own.”
“Oh,” she said, her face clearing. “You mean the Kilfiriaso Operation.”
“Ah … right,” I said, feeling slightly deflated. Not only did she know about the operation,
she even knew its real name. “I don’t know how fast Shorshians heal, but I do know that the Gibber Operation isn’t supposed to leave any permanent scars. The fact that we can still see something implies the work must have been done fairly recently.”
Bayta frowned at me. “You mean it was done on Earth?”
“So it would seem,” I said. “And given the typical Shorshic view of aliens, I imagine there would be a hefty percentage of them who would find it offensive that Colix would let a bunch of primitive Humans cut into him that way.” I gestured. “Which may explain both why he wouldn’t share his fruit treats, and why they were stolen.”
“Because they weren’t treats, but fruit-flavored postoperative throat lozenges?” Bayta asked.
“That’s the first part,” I agreed. “The second is that the facility that issued him the lozenges undoubtedly had their name or logo on the bag. Best explanation for the theft is that the killer didn’t want it known where Colix had his operation.”
Bayta was gazing down at Colix’s throat. “And since we know Mr. Kennrick also tried to find the bag,” she said slowly, “that suggests Master Colix had the operation at Pellorian Medical.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“But the rest of the contract team surely also knew about it,” Bayta objected. “Stealing the lozenges wouldn’t have kept the secret from getting out—” She broke off. “Are you suggesting …?”
“That that’s why the team members are dropping like dominoes?” I shrugged. “It certainly fits. The problem is, it fits a little too neatly. Especially when we add in that spare first-class pass. It could just as easily be that our murderer latched on to Colix’s operation as a convenient smokescreen.”
I smoothed Colix’s collar back into place. “But that’s just grist for the hopper at the moment. Come on—let’s check out the other bodies.”
It was a few minutes’ work to open the other three containers and unwrap their occupants to the shoulders. Both Bofiv and Strinni had the same suspicious needle marks as Colix, and in similar places. Givvrac, in contrast, seemed to be unmarked, at least down to his waist, which was as far as I was willing to take this particular exercise.
“But we already knew that Usantra Givvrac died because of the antibacterial spray,” Bayta reminded me as I closed his coffin again.
“We assumed that, anyway,” I said, moving back to Strinni’s body. “It was still worth checking. Shine the light in here, will you? Right here, on the needle mark.”
“What are we looking for?” she asked, taking the light and directing the beam onto Strinni’s neck.
“You’ll see.” Pulling out my multitool’s thinnest probe, I began peeling away the skin at the edge of the needle mark.
“You probably shouldn’t be doing that,” Bayta warned. “If someone from the Path of Onagnalhni finds out we disturbed his body they won’t like it.”
“They’re welcome to file a grievance,” I said. My probe hit something solid, and I teased a little harder at the edges of flesh until I exposed the end. Putting the probe away, I pulled out my most delicate set of tweezers and gave a gentle tug.
And with a brief moment of resistance, the two-millimeter-long hypo tip that had broken off in Strinni’s skin slid out.
“And now we really know why the murderer jumped Witherspoon and me last night,” I said, holding up the tip for Bayta’s inspection. “He managed to smuggle a hypo aboard, but unfortunately ruined it when he broke off the tip. He already had his cadmium, so he didn’t need anything from Witherspoon’s collection of drugs, but he hoped he could make off with a new hypo without anyone noticing.”
“Only we did,” Bayta said, her voice odd. “Did Dr. Witherspoon have anything in his bag that could kill?”
“Probably,” I said. “Painkillers in particular tend to be lethal if you overdo the dosages. But our friend obviously prefers more subtle ways of offing his targets.”
“I was just thinking,” Bayta said slowly, staring at Strinni’s needle mark. “Why did he just tie you into the chair instead of killing you?”
“That’s a cheery thought,” I said, an unpleasant chill running through me. Normally, it didn’t do a murderer much good to kill the cop who was after him, since there were always more cops where the first one had come from.
But at this immediate point in time and space, that comforting logic didn’t apply. As far as cops aboard this train were concerned, I was it. “Luckily for me, he didn’t.”
“No,” Bayta murmured. “Not this time.”
“This time was all he had,” I told her firmly. “He won’t get another shot. Not at me.”
She shivered. “I hope you’re right.”
“Trust me.” Pulling out a handkerchief, I carefully wrapped the needle tip and put it in my pocket. “Come on, let’s put everything back the way it was,” I said as I started rewrapping Strinni’s body. “I think it’s time we sat Mr. Kennrick down in some nice first-class bar seat and found out what other little secrets he and Pellorian Medical are sitting on.”
THIRTEEN
As it turned out, we didn’t have to go all the way to first to confront Kennrick. We found him sitting in the late Master Bofiv’s seat, conversing earnestly with Master Tririn. “There you are,” Kennrick said, standing up as Bayta and I stopped beside them. “I was looking for you earlier.”
“And now you’ve found me,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
Kennrick hesitated, then looked down at Tririn. “Master Tririn, with your permission, I’ll get back to you later on this.”
[As you wish, Mr. Kennrick,] the Shorshian said with a polite nod. [Mr. Compton, have you any further information on the tragic deaths of my colleagues?]
“We’re making progress,” I said. “As soon as we have anything solid, I’ll let you and the rest of the contract team know.”
[Those of us who remain, at least,] he said heavily.
“Yes,” I conceded. “Regardless, you will be informed.” I raised my eyebrows to Kennrick. “Mr. Kennrick?” I said, gesturing for him to step out.
Carefully, Kennrick stepped past the Nemut in the aisle seat and joined us. “Shall we try the bar?” he suggested. “I don’t know how your head feels, but my ribs could use a drink.”
I gestured. “Lead the way.”
We walked past Terese German, who was playing her usual oblivious self behind the social barrier of her headphones, and continued forward. “You looked like a man in full fire-control mode,” I commented to Kennrick as we walked through the next car.
“You have no idea,” he said grimly. “Esantra Worrbin is calling for a binding vote on the contract, even though the terms explicitly state that such a vote can’t be taken until we reach Rentis Tarlay Birim and the team presents its findings to the Maccai Corporation controllers. Asantra Muzzfor and Asantra Dallilo are insisting we follow the terms as written. Esantra Worrbin has countered by threatening to pull rank on them and possibly even revoke their santra status if they don’t go along with him.”
“Can he do that?”
“A simple esantra? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try.”
“And you were back here trying to talk Master Tririn onto your side?” I suggested.
Kennrick exhaled loudly. “I’m not sure I even have a side anymore,” he said ruefully. “Like you said, from here on it’s pure fire control. I’d settle for calming things enough that the Filiaelians and Shorshians don’t put Pellorian Medical on eternal blacklist.”
“Not much of a payoff for all the time and money you’ve put into this thing,” I sympathized.
“Hopefully, my bosses will understand,” Kennrick said grimly. “Frankly, I’m more worried about Dr. Witherspoon than I am about myself.”
“Really?” I asked. “Why?”
Kennrick gave me a sideways look. “Nothing,” he said. “I shouldn’t even have mentioned it.”
“Well, now that you have, you might as well give us the rest of it,” I said.
He grimaced. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. The fact of the matter is that Master Colix had some work done while the contract team was on Earth. Medical work.”
“You mean the throat job?” I asked.
He stared at me. “You knew about that?”
“We were told he and his seatmates were chattering up a storm,” I said. “What does Dr. Witherspoon have to do with it? He wasn’t the surgeon, was he?”
“Good God no,” Kennrick said. “But he was the one who talked Master Colix into having it at Pellorian instead of waiting until he got back home.”
“Why did he do that?”
“Which he?” Kennrick asked. “Master Colix or Dr. Witherspoon?”
“Both,” I said.
“Witherspoon wanted to show the contract team how competent Humans were at surgical work. Master Colix liked the idea of getting the work done for free.” Kennrick grimaced. “Free. It only cost him his life.”
“Those freebies will get you every time,” I murmured. So Kennrick was also thinking that Colix’s demise had to do with the dishonor of his Gibber Operation. Interesting. “Any of his colleagues in particular take offense at his decision?”
“None of the other three Shorshians liked it, I can tell you that,” Kennrick said. “Master Bofiv, in particular, was quite vocal in his objections.” He grunted. “But I suppose he doesn’t qualify as a suspect anymore, does he?”
“Not unless his return ticket covers more options than the Spiders currently offer,” I said.
Kennrick grunted again. “Yeah. The Spiders.”
Beside me, I felt Bayta stir. This wasn’t the first time that Kennrick had mentioned Spiders in a disparaging way. Bayta hadn’t liked it then, either. “You have a problem with the Spiders?” I asked.
“That depends,” he said. “But let’s not discuss that until we have some more privacy.”
“This’ll do,” I said, gesturing to the third-class dining car just ahead.
He frowned. “Here? First class has a better selection.”
“First class is twenty-four cars away,” I pointed out. “I’m thirsty right now.”