The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  All the blood left her face, and she stood uneasily. I offered to let her wait in the front room, and after some coaxing, she agreed. I returned to the office.

  “This is great,” I subbed, straightening up. “I have to say, though, it’s a good bet that Tomason really did do it. She’s no pushover, and she had motive to protect her friends’ kid.”

  «It is a possibility. This new information does not entirely exculpate her, but it confirms her innocence in my mind. In your opinion, can any of those drafts have started with the words, “With reluctance, I regret to inform you of my . . . ?”»

  I looked them over. The most finished draft of the three, the one I read aloud, could have, starting as it did with the words “of my decision to resign.”

  «Satisfactory.»

  “Either way, we’ve got all we need. Call off this meeting and hand it over to the police; that letter’s enough for them to go on.”

  «No. I desire to end this myself.»

  “Look, I get what you said before about whoever this is, trying to kill you too, but this guy Grasso was a schmuck.”

  « ‘Schmuck’ or not, or worse, Antonio Grasso was a part of me in a way that not even a parent can be part of a child. I am deprived of the opportunity to explore that singular connection, and I resent it. I was powerless to prevent his death. When you were taken, I was thwarted in effecting your rescue by a mere two millimeter thickness of metallized cloth, and I resent that, too. The killer of Antonio Grasso will be brought to heel, and I will be the one to do it.»

  I didn’t know what to say. No, that’s not true—I did know what to say, and I said it.

  “All right. Let’s do this.”

  I crossed behind the desk, but did not sit down in the big overstuffed leather armchair. I wanted to be front and center and let them know they were being watched. The whole thing was hokey and doomed to fail, but I promised Rex I’d do my best. Our guests made themselves comfortable, or at least pretended to. From left to right sat Ahmed Desai, Maya Tomason, Jeanne Duvalier, Armin Fitzgerald, and Michael Joshi. I offered drinks from the reasonably well-stocked bar on the sideboard, but only Desai accepted anything stronger than Coke, a dry vodka martini. The small talk in that crowd was pretty damn small, and I got the feeling that Fitzgerald, for all his bluster, wasn’t used to rubbing elbows with his bosses. Duvalier held her own, I thought. Not too brash, but not obviously intimidated. I described the scene and my thoughts subvocally as I served the drinks.

  “They’re all here and settled, Mr. Rex,” I said, a little louder than strictly necessary. The speaker was connected wirelessly to my implant via the house network.

  “I don’t understand,” Desai said, frowning. “What’s going on? Where is Rex?”

  “I am here, Mr. Desai.” They all jumped a little at the sound of Rex’s deep voice through the speaker. “Or rather, I am at my home in the Caribbean. I apologize for my absence. Although I was prepared to dispense with my comfort for the sake of delivering my conclusions with a little more dignity, the vicissitudes of travel have, alas, prevented it.”

  “I could have sent a jet,” Desai said, with what I felt was a tinge of resentment.

  “I would not have accepted it, even had you still been my client. It is one thing to accept your money, or rather that of Turing Technologies. It is another to place myself bodily in your power. Given the international sensitivity of the matter, I must also decline to provide a video or holographic feed. I hope that you are not offended; I speak plainly for the sake of getting us through this ordeal all the more quickly.”

  “And who is your client now, Mr. Rex? I expected you to drop this matter when I released you.”

  “Does my client, or do my clients, wish to make themselves known at this time?” There was no response. “Mr. Desai, I must disappoint you.”

  Desai pursed his lips, but inclined his head.

  “He’s nodding, Mr. Rex,” I said. Desai blushed a little.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Rex said. “I welcome you to my home in the hopes of clearing up matters once and for all. This case has had some points of interest to it. I should say, in fact, that it was not entirely devoid of difficulty.”

  Tomason snorted and looked distinctly unhappy. I gave her my best apologetic shrug, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Fitzgerald looked irritated, too, but I didn’t care as much.

  “Be that as it may,” Rex said, “the matter is now plain to me. The five of you I have invited here this evening all have been involved in two crimes, most recently murder. Given that Dr. Grasso was murdered by his own weapon, access to which and knowledge of which was limited, and that he was murdered while most of the staff was accounted for, the pool of suspects is limited to the five of you.”

  Instantly the room erupted in shouting. Tomason stood up out of her chair and gestured angrily, though I couldn’t make out what she was saying over Joshi’s bellowing his indignation and Desai blustering about suing Rex for defamation.

  “Shut it!” I yelled after letting them go on in that vein for a minute, to get it out of their systems. “It’s all well and good to be outraged, but you’re all here for a reason, and as far as I can see that reason hasn’t changed. You want to know who stole the implant, well Rex knows and you don’t. So zip it.”

  “Thank you. As he says, you are here over the matter of the stolen cranially implanted computer. Although a year has passed, the event plainly hangs over the group of you. If one of you were a thief, it is conceivable that you learned that Dr. Grasso had retained my services, and so killed him before my prodigious talent could be brought to bear on the task. If, conversely, Grasso himself was responsible for the theft, but could not be brought to justice, then each of you might have reasons to take private revenge for the shadows cast on your reputations, and for the intrusive investigation that followed.”

  I knew Rex was talking through his metaphorical hat at this point, so I let them grumble.

  “Jesus, will you listen to this guy,” Fitzgerald leaned over and mumbled to Joshi. “He talks like Grasso and Jeeves 5 had a love child.”

  And I do believe that poor Armin Fitzgerald gave me a look almost like pity. If only he knew.

  “Mr. Rex, we agreed that the murder has bearing on the theft, but murder is properly the domain of the police.” That was Ahmed Desai, looking tired and irritated.

  “Peace, sir. I am merely ordering my thoughts. I have brought you all here to go over the one or two final points necessary to close both the theft of the device and the murder of Antonio Grasso.”

  Joshi leapt to his feet. “You mean you don’t even know? You dragged us out here for nothing?”

  “I know perfectly well who stole the device and who killed Dr. Grasso. What I lack—howsoever briefly—is the final proof needed for a conviction.”

  Fitzgerald’s look of indignation was priceless, but he kept his mouth shut.

  I leaned over the back of Joshi’s chair. “Sit down, Doc. We’re just getting started.” He sat.

  “I have brought up Dr. Grasso’s death,” Rex continued, “because it is clear to me that the year-old theft and his murder are connected.”

  “And you’ve solved the theft, have you?” That was Fitzgerald.

  “I have. It was conducted primarily by a pair of individuals, one of whom was Antonio Grasso. They were assisted by Clay Hindle, who has also been murdered.” There was some noise at that; Tomason looked particularly shocked, and even Fitzy looked a little pale. “Dr. Grasso’s involvement is why the long-term contents of his implant were wiped by the killer, to avoid detection by the police before the killer could sell the stolen implant.”

  “Not possible,” Fitzgerald said, waving his hands. “Grasso had absolutely no access to the device after it left his lab.”

  “You have assured me that there is no conceivable way in which the device could have been removed from Dr. Joshi’s lab. I believe you. It therefore cannot have been stolen from Dr. Joshi’s lab.”

&n
bsp; Fitzgerald scoffed. “So it wasn’t stolen at all? That’s a relief.”

  “Don’t be an ass, sir. I pay you a compliment. You are capable, but unimaginative. Once I determined that your description of the security precautions was not mere puffery, the solution was obvious: The device was taken instead from Dr. Grasso’s lab.”

  “Would you listen to this guy?” Joshi said. “Three armed guards brought it, and Dr. Tomason and I inspected and verified the device on its arrival.”

  “You verified a counterfeit. Dr. Grasso studied the device inside and out for months; he was in a unique position to create and pass off a copy. But he could not create a perfect one: on the receiving end, then, he required a confederate. The device was vouched for and examined on arrival, and he had no way to directly affect the inspection of the counterfeit to prevent detection.”

  Tomason spoke up, her voice cracking a little. “Where did this ‘counterfeit’ go? Fake or not, nothing left the room. We can prove that.”

  “The counterfeit was destroyed, and its run-of-the-mill components hidden in plain sight. I have from Mr. Fitzgerald’s files ascertained the most likely set of parts used to make up the counterfeit—unlike all of the other components, they were purchased by Clay Hindle, who was murdered shortly after Antonio Grasso.”

  Everyone seemed to have mostly dropped their objections. Even Fitzgerald, fuming though he was, kept his peace. For my part, I was starting to get nervous. Even with Bond copacetic about the whole thing, I still wasn’t thrilled with the idea of having such popular spy tech in my cranium, and with the theft linked to the murders I couldn’t see how Rex was going to out the murderer without handing the implant—and himself—to the police. Call me crazy, but I was starting to get used to having the obnoxious bag of bytes around.

  “All right,” Fitzgerald said. “Great. So who was his accomplice?”

  “I am coming to that, Mr. Fitzgerald. But first, a question. Who had sufficient access to the secure lab to destroy the counterfeit implant?”

  Fitzgerald frowned again, but more in puzzlement than his usual expression of dislike for the world and its happy inhabitants. “I did, of course. So did everyone here, really. Ms. Duvalier could have gotten in with an escort, and—”

  “Confine yourself to those who could enter the lab and act without being observed. To theorize additional conspirators at this point would be grotesque and unnecessary.”

  He grimaced. “Fine. Dr. Tomason, Dr. Joshi, and myself.”

  “Very well. And of those three, you can be excluded as not able to vouch for the counterfeit. Let us set this aside for the moment. However it was stolen, I believe the implant has been hidden since that day in such a way as to prevent Dr. Grasso and his accomplice from immediately retrieving it—or at least, his accomplice was led to so believe. Probably, this assisted in preventing its discovery by the police. But Dr. Grasso was planning to resign and leave the country on the day of his death, and he was preparing a final version of an advanced artificial sapient based on his personal implant software. This all indicates that he expected to recover the device imminently, and leave with it in his own head. In so doing, he would have left his partner behind, and likely condemned them to death. Before he could do so, he was murdered.”

  They all leaned forward in their chairs and stared at the speaker like it might jump out and bite them.

  Rex continued, “Dr. Grasso’s killer acted impulsively and out of anger, having discovered Dr. Grasso’s resignation letter and deduced the betrayal, then made use of the research seminar as a smokescreen for the police. Dr. Grasso did not defend himself or call for help. He therefore knew his killer. The trick with the temperature very nearly served to deflect attention onto a crowd of people, too many to effectively screen. The scene was staged to suggest suicide earlier in the morning, a suggestion that would likely have carried the day long enough for the killer to escape with the prize. In that light, the ten-o-four deletion was a gamble. I expect that it was one of necessity: the killer could not risk information about the theft to come out.”

  Desai leaned forward in his chair and demanded, “What resignation letter?”

  Following Rex’s instructions, I passed around the copies I’d made. Tomason herself had seen it already, and Joshi wasn’t mentioned, but Duvalier, Desai, and Fitzgerald all reacted as expected: surprised and pissed off. If any of them was faking it, they were too good for me to pick it up.

  “Pathetic,” Desai said, crumpling his copy in one hand. “He’s just masking his own failures by shifting the blame onto others.”

  “Then he has succeeded,” Rex said. “He has persuaded you of his incompetence by throwing around bluster and accusations. Via ridiculous personal insults, he induced you to arrive at the conclusion he desired: that he had made no progress worth searching his files for, and that you should be glad to be rid of him.”

  There was general silence at that. Desai looked absolutely miserable.

  “Mr. Baldwin informs me that you have three pages of drafts, Dr. Tomason. That was all you found?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet when Mr. Baldwin examined the pad from which they came, four pages were missing. When the police have apprehended the killer, I expect they may find that fourth page, likely a nastier draft still. Ms. Duvalier—after the seminar, you went with Dr. Joshi to the second floor lab for a piece of equipment that he asked you for.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Joshi—is the lab in which Dr. Grasso was found usually kept locked?”

  He blinked a couple times. “I’m not sure why you’re asking me—”

  “I’m glad. Was it usually kept locked?”

  “I suppose so. It’s not really used right now.”

  “But you know the key code.”

  “No, I don’t. Ms. Duvalier had to open the door for me.”

  “You tried the door.”

  He flushed. “Well, yes. Force of habit, I suppose.”

  “You tried the door twice.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember.”

  “Yeah,” Duvalier said, giving him a strange look. “I remember.”

  “It is not unreasonable for him to treat the door as if it were unlocked,” said Rex. “When Mr. Baldwin found the lab, the door was in fact unlocked. Mr. Baldwin locked himself in before calling the police.”

  “All right then,” Joshi said. “There you go.”

  “But if you knew it was unlocked, there was no reason to fetch Ms. Duvalier. Your actions indicate that you needed Ms. Duvalier not for access to the lab, but as a witness. An H5 connector was taken from her desk; I expect the police will find it in yours if you were not clever enough to dispose of it.”

  “This is ridiculous. You’re grasping at straws.”

  “Do you know the derivation of the word clue, Dr. Joshi?”

  He barked again, just a little laugh. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “It comes from an old English word for thread, and refers to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. By finding his thread—his clew—and keeping hold of it, Theseus found his way out of Daedalus’ Labyrinth. So, too, did I take ahold of this thread and find my way out.”

  “So you’re grasping at a thread, fine!”

  “More than one. For example, upon finding Antonio Grasso’s body, with the gun on the floor and Mr. Baldwin standing over them both, do you recall what you said?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Allow me to refresh your memory.” There was a faint hiss from the speaker, and then Joshi’s voice: “My God, he’s killed himself.”

  “So? I thought he had!”

  I smiled. Everyone else in the room looked confused, but one makes allowances for people who aren’t trained detectives.

  “Compare your response to an eminently more sensible one.” Fitzgerald’s gruff voice barked from the speaker, “Baldwin! What did you do?”

  The gentleman in question sat a little straighter in his chair, maybe puffed up a bit.

  Rex c
ontinued, “Mr. Fitzgerald made the reasonable assumption, that the egotistical and self-important Antonio Grasso had not killed himself, but had been killed by this stranger. Only a dunce would have said what you said, Dr. Joshi—a dunce, or a murderer.”

  “Could be both,” I suggested. “A dunce murderer. Meaning a dunce who kills people, not someone who kills—”

  “This is irrelevant,” Joshi interrupted. “You seem convinced that whoever helped Tony Grasso steal the implant is the killer. In that case, it had to be Maya, whom the police have already arrested. Call me a ‘dunce’ again if you like, but I didn’t know enough about the device to spot a counterfeit, I let Maya take the lead on it.”

  “That’s not true, Michael.” It took me a moment to recognize Desai’s voice: he sounded haggard, and looked worse. “I was there when you certified it, remember? You bulldozed through it. You were confident, did all of the talking. I thought at the time that you were showing off. Now . . . now I’m not so sure.”

  Detective Stevens loomed over Joshi’s chair all of a sudden. I’m embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t noticed her come in. I told Rex, but he wasn’t squawking, so I figured he’d invited her in to witness the kill.

  “Dr. Tomason,” said Stevens. “I’d like to hear about this resignation. And I’ll take that letter, thanks.”

  If the other guests were startled at the sudden appearance of a police detective, they didn’t say anything. They all sat bolt upright in their chairs and somehow looked a shade more innocent than two minutes before, but they didn’t object.

  “At the time, I thought Antonio was blowing smoke,” Tomason said, speaking carefully. “I thought he was angling for a raise, but something bothered me. I thought about it all morning, and then I followed Jeanne out of the seminar hoping to ask her opinion, but I couldn’t find her. I . . . when I heard that Antonio had been killed, I thought . . . I’m so sorry, Jeanne, I should have trusted you.”