She looked up at him. He blinked, looked at DeRicci in surprise, and then said, “I’d—um—investigate the histories of the couple here, and see if the building’s security keeps the coded entry logs. I’d wait for the DNA on the mystery corpse before identifying her and her relationship to the Lahiris.”
“And the theory you’d use as the basis for your investigation?” DeRicci asked.
“That there was an outside intruder, one who knew the family well enough to get in, and was calm enough to leave without leaving a trace of himself,” Cabrera said.
The female tech was shaking her head, probably warning Cabrera not to go on. He didn’t notice, but he had stopped anyway.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because,” DeRicci said, “I always figure hands-on examples are better than lectures.”
She pointed at the corpse’s back. The tech who had been shaking her head stopped, and gave Cabrera a look of pity.
“See that?” DeRicci asked.
“What?” Cabrera didn’t move. It was clear he didn’t want to get any closer.
“Come here,” DeRicci said, patting just above the ground next to her. “You can see better from down here.”
“I’m fine standing,” Cabrera said.
“All right.” DeRicci suppressed yet another sigh. “Do you see what I’m pointing at?”
“I’m not sure what you want me to see,” Cabrera said. “It’s pretty clear she’s been here awhile. The...materials have gelled. Maybe I haven’t been doing this long enough, but that doesn’t seem like a surprise to me.”
“What else?” DeRicci asked.
Cabrera took two large steps, ostentatiously stepping over a trickle of blood, so that he was directly beside her. Then he bounced downward, the sign of an in-shape body.
He squinted at the corpse and started to shake his head. Then he stopped, closed his eyes for just a moment, and swore as he reopened them.
“That’s the weapon, isn’t it? On her back. She fell on it.”
DeRicci wanted to give him a sarcastic cheer, but that wouldn’t help anyone. Now she had to see if he was going to get angry at her for showing him how to do his job.
“Possibly,” DeRicci said. “That’s where the techs come in. They’ll see if the weapon fired the shots, or even could have created the damage in those wounds.”
“If she fell on it—”
“She might have been pulling it out to save herself when the perp shot her. And the perp might have shot her quickly, so he didn’t have time to go for the torso. She might have been bending down to get that weapon when he shot. He aimed for the torso, and hit her in the face.”
“You think that?” Cabrera asked.
“All I think at the moment,” DeRicci said, “is that the weapon fell shortly before she died. She clearly landed on it, and her weight, along with the coagulated blood, made the weapon adhere to her back.”
“It might be a cheap pistol,” the female tech said. “It might have fired hot. Then it would have burned into her back when she landed on it.”
“All questions we need answered.” DeRicci still wasn’t going to explain her theory, even though the gun added weight to it.
Cabrera hadn’t left his crouch. If anything, he leaned farther forward, as if he were trying to see more clearly.
“You don’t think she killed them, do you?” His question was soft, almost as if he were embarrassed for thinking of it.
DeRicci turned toward him in surprise. She hadn’t expected him to make an intuitive leap. “I think murder-suicide is an option.”
He nodded. “You already thought of it. That’s why you wanted the floor searched, why you wanted the body moved.”
DeRicci liked him better and better. “That’s one reason. But I also think the more we find out at this crime scene, the faster we’ll solve the crime, and the faster I’ll be out of your life.”
He was still staring at the gun, as if he couldn’t believe it was there. “You actually think we’ll solve this fast?”
DeRicci considered the question.
“No,” she said after a moment, “I don’t.”
He sighed, then shook his head. DeRicci felt sympathy for the movement. So many cases never got closed. So many mysteries never got solved.
She stood and nodded toward the techs. “This part of the scene’s all yours,” she said.
She was going to look at the rest of the apartment, to see if these people lived the way that their front room said they did. So many people had clean front rooms and sloppy bedrooms, or respectable art in the living areas and pornography across from the bed.
She headed down the hall, past bookshelves lined with matching books. She glanced at them; they were legal tomes—Earth case law from the United States—probably collectible.
The first bedroom and bathroom didn’t tell her much. Either they had been cleaned or they weren’t used. She headed into the master bedroom, and stopped.
It was the largest room in the apartment. The walls were covered with some kind of silk, and the floor was carpeted with a thick white shag. Two chairs were pushed against the floor-to-ceiling windows—also covered with that heavy silk—and two more chairs sat on the other side of the room, like two separate groupings designed for reading.
A large bed with a real wood headboard and matching frame leaned against one of the walls. The coverlet was a thick gold brocade that somehow accented the silk in its own gaudy way. Pillows four and five deep leaned against the headboard, making the bed look soft, at least, although not inviting.
DeRicci had concentrated most of her attention on the end tables. They were a dark wood—real wood again—that matched the headboard, and in their upper drawers, she found all sorts of burned chips, discarded info nodes, and ancient handhelds. She would tell the techs to take all of that and test it, hoping to find something.
In the end, though, it was the armoire that dominated one side of the room that yielded the only truly viable clue that DeRicci found outside of the living room.
The double doors were heavy, made of that same dark wood, and very old. She had no doubt that the piece had been imported from Earth. The interior smelled strongly of the same perfume that floated through the apartment.
Only a woman’s clothes hung inside, and DeRicci almost closed the doors. Then she changed her mind. She used an old-fashioned search, the kind the techs didn’t even do any more, and touched each article of clothing, seeing if anything was hidden beneath it.
She also stuck her gloved hand in every pocket. In the past, she had found a lot of items in pockets, usually lost chips, broken jewelry, and a few slips of very expensive paper, usually on someone who had just come from Earth.
This time, the pockets gave her little. She was about to give up when her fingers found the edge of a stiff card. It was in a golden blazer in the right-hand pocket, which was pressed against the back of the armoire.
DeRicci pulled out the card and stared at it for a long moment. It was blank except for three chips along the middle, and a number handwritten on the side. Pressed into the paper itself was a watermark with a design she recognized:
MF
Miles Flint. This was the card he gave prospective clients so that they could shovel money into one of his many accounts. If she took the card into processing, she’d find accounts on each of the chips, accounts that would only have a small amount of credits in them so that Flint could keep them active.
He transferred the money out and filtered it through several other accounts, finding untraceable ways to get it to his main accounts. At least, that was what he told her the one time she had asked him. He’d even given her a card of her own, just in case she came across any more Disappeared cases as bad as the one that made him quit the force.
Miles Flint. He even had the money to waste on paper cards.
She slapped this one against her hand. So Flint had had something to do with these people. Since they were so established in Armstrong society, she dou
bted they were Disappeareds themselves. Flint wouldn’t have given them a card in that instance.
They had asked him to find a Disappeared. Or at least one of them had—the woman, judging by the blazer.
And that changed the entire nature of the case.
DeRicci let out a sigh and stared at that very faint watermark. She would find no other information in the apartment. She was lucky to have found this.
The question was whether she told anyone else about this or not. Armstrong law enforcement had strict orders not to work with Retrieval Artists. If anything, the police were to hire Trackers to find Disappeareds, and even that took channels upon channels upon channels.
Flint had been involved in the Moon Marathon case, but on his own. His connection to DeRicci had never come up, for which she was grateful. Gumiela had complained too many times about the fact that it was Flint, and not her detectives, who had ended that case. At least he hadn’t wanted public credit.
But he had been DeRicci’s partner. Of all the rookies she’d had to train, he had been the best. She still missed him, although she would never admit that to him.
And he owed her. For her silence, for her support, and for her willingness to look away when he had used a few codes that he wasn’t supposed to know in that Moon Marathon case.
She slipped the card into the pocket of her own blazer. She would talk to him first, see if he would break confidentiality for her.
After all, they were dealing with a murder here. And it was on a case that Flint had worked.
Maybe he’d be interested enough to get involved.
Twelve
The Great Hall of the Armstrong Cultural Center had pretensions to art. Orenda Kreise had positioned her chair so that she wouldn’t be subject to most of the things hanging on the walls. She still had to stare at the still-lifes of the famous footprint, theoretically left by Neil Armstrong himself, in Moon regolith however many centuries ago, but at least she didn’t have to look at the other things passing as quality Moon art.
The building itself was beautiful, however, and Kreise appreciated the sunlight flowing through the treated dome above her. She had lived most of her life on Earth and couldn’t get used to the artificial light most of the humans in this solar system suffered through. Dome lighting and its sophisticated imitation of an average Earth day simply didn’t work for her.
She had arrived ahead of the rest of her colleagues, early enough to move the tables away from that wretched art, and to take her seat at the head of the table. She was the Senior Ambassador for the Council of the Governments of Earth. Her position as the chief representative of Earth made her the leader of this meeting of the Executive Committee of the Earth Alliance.
Earth had formed the Alliance, first with human colonies off-Earth, many of them nonaffiliated to Earth member countries, and then with various alien governments.
The agreements between the member planets and the Alliance could probably fill this dome, and most of those agreements had to do with ways to balance the various cultural systems with each other. Of course, there were rules that applied to all member planets—the greatest being that each member planet had to have some kind of ruling body that spoke for all of the planet’s peoples and/or governments, just like the Council of the Governments of Earth.
Kreise sighed and blinked so that the time would appear in her left eye. Five minutes until the meeting. She was relieved that the Etaen representative was still delayed in Port. That gave her one last chance to stop this farce before it began.
The faint scent of garlic and onions floated through the large hall, matched by the smell of baking bread. Armstrong had promised excellent meals, which was one of the many reasons Kreise had picked the largest city on the Moon for the meeting with the Etaen representative.
Kreise had several other, sneakier reasons for choosing this site—one of which was in play at the moment. She knew that Armstrong’s recent dome crisis had led to stringent reforms. Armstrong wouldn’t change its entrance rules for anyone—although she’d had some moments of concern early on, when the Alliance booking committee managed to get blanket entrance immunity for the members of the Committee and their entourage.
Still, they’d all had to go through decon, even people like Kreise, who was from a planet that had been cleared for general decon sixty years before, and ident records were still checked against watch lists as one extra security precaution.
So far the Etaens had been caught in that snare and, she hoped, the problem would continue, making this series of meetings impossible. Someone would suggest a new meeting place, of course, and she had an entire list programmed into her links of places just as stringent as Armstrong, if not as deep within Alliance space.
The main door opened and she heard voices. The bodyguards and attachés all waited in the outer rooms. Sometimes the diplomats liked to have “their people” in the meeting room with them, but Kreise did not allow it. The talk was freer in meetings without underlings, simply because the diplomats knew there wasn’t even the potential for leaks.
Pilar Restrepo came into Kreise’s view. Restrepo was a short, pear-shaped woman who wore flowing robes to conceal her figure. She had a former spacer’s view of enhancements: enhancements to improve performance—particularly of a job—were fine, but those designed to improve appearance were silly luxuries that wasted both time and money.
She smiled at Kreise. Restrepo also had the air of a friendly matron until she got down to business, and then she was the most ruthless of all of them.
“Are the others boycotting?” Restrepo asked without even saying hello.
“They’re not late yet,” Kreise said, although she did double-check the time again, this time downloading from a different server. It was only a minute later than the last time she’d checked.
Restrepo placed a handbag on the table. The bag matched her flowing clothing, and even seemed to be made of the same ethereal material.
Kreise did not comment on it. She hated carrying everything with her, feeling that her links and downloads were more than enough. Restrepo didn’t trust anything wired, so she would shut off all but her emergency links whenever she interacted with someone.
Kreise felt that she should probably do the same. After all, Restrepo had decades more experience in the diplomatic core than Kreise had. Restrepo represented Jupiter and her moons, but her first job had been a junior attaché on Mars, just before the Disty took over.
“If we’re going to meet,” Restrepo said, “perhaps we should compromise and use Döbryn’s ship. Then her people won’t have to be cleared by Armstrong.”
Kreise folded her hands together and rested them on the tabletop. “I don’t trust the Etaens.”
“It’s been more than a decade since the war ended,” Restrepo said.
“On Etae.” Kreise kept her voice level. “There’ve been suspicious deaths all over the known universe, all of them with ties to Etae.”
Restrepo shrugged. “Such things happen with many Alliance members, some of them longtime Alliance members. If you use that standard, even Earth is not immune. Centuries-old religious and tribal disagreements that began on Earth are still be enacted in outlying colonies.”
Kreise had heard that argument before and hated it. She didn’t even dignify it with a response. “The Port Authority won’t let us board that ship. If the ship’s inhabitants aren’t welcome in the Port, then no one from the city itself may board.”
“All of which is probably relevant to Armstrong natives, but that doesn’t include us,” Restrepo said. “I’m not fond of the games the city is playing. These provincial politicians have no idea how many lives they’re tampering with.”
The door opening at the end of the great hall saved Kreise from having to answer. Uzval, the Peyti representative, stopped just inside the door, her long fingers clasping the edge of the door like three tails wrapping around the frame. She appeared to be speaking to someone outside, but Kreise couldn’t tell whom.
&nbs
p; That was one of the many problems of having a Peyti on the Executive Committee. Their conversation was quiet, partly because of the breathing masks they had to wear to survive in any kind of oxygenated atmosphere.
Uzval nodded once, let go of the door, and crossed the room. Her translucent skin caught the sunlight, making her glow from within. It was such a startling image that Kreise stared at Uzval as if she had never seen her before. Usually the Peyti’s skin looked gray, but the direct sunlight made it come alive.
“Wow,” Restrepo said. “You look stunning.”
Uzval nodded her head in acknowledgement. As she drew closer, it became clear that the direct sunlight also made the fluids than ran beneath her skin phosphoresce.
“That’s not going to hurt you, is it?” Kreise asked, pointing to her own skin.
Uzval looked down, and then shook her head. The movement seemed so brittle. The Peyti always seemed as if they were going to break.
“It is good for me. Better, in fact, than the human-made lights.” She bent in the center of her torso, folding herself into thirds as she sat in her chair. Then she leaned upright, an unnatural position for the Peyti, but one they had adopted in their interactions with humans. “The others are missing, I see.”
“They’ll be here soon,” Kreise said.
“Perhaps they are boycotting in protest against the treatment of the Etae representative,” Uzval said.
“Then I’ll cancel this conference altogether.” Kreise didn’t care if that sentence tipped her hand. She wouldn’t tolerate uncivil behavior in the Committee.
“No matter whether the Etaen representative speaks to us or not, this will be a difficult session,” Uzval said. “I do not think we can conquer our differences.”
Uzval’s use of the word conquer made Kreise frown. She was never certain whether Uzval’s command of English had some faults in it or if she was excessively precise.
“The advisory committees sent the petition to us,” Restrepo said. “We should consider it with open minds.”
As if Restrepo had one. The Jupiter colonies liked her representation because her firm beliefs coincided with their political philosophy. Many of the Jupiter colonies were founded by the intergalactic corporations, and a lot of the residents were fifth- and sixth-generation employees of those corporations. The educational systems and the living conditions did not value the free exchange of ideas, nor did they like a lot of clear dissent.
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