“I was wrong,” I said. “This wasn’t a professional assassination.”
“Because he didn’t bleed?” said Jimbo, frowning in confusion.
“Because he was dead when he hit the floor,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I saw it the second the holograph appeared,” I said, “but it didn’t register. Come over here,” I said, walking him to the far side of the room, then turning back to the corpse. “What do you see?”
“Mglias.”
“I know that,” I said impatiently. “Look at his head. Now what do you see?”
“The marks where he was attacked.”
“That’s right,” I said. “The killer stands behind him—not beside him, because your race has wide-set eyes and probably has excellent peripheral vision. The killer puts a huge dent on the top of his head—and he falls down right here, dead on contact. Then he cracks him on the temple, just to be sure. In the idiom, it’s called paying the insurance.”
He gave me a puzzled look. If he’d been a man, he’s have said ”So?”
“Any professional would know he was dead the second he staved in his skull. And if not, he’d have known it when he fell, didn’t move, and stopped breathing. He’d nail him on the temple for good measure, and then get the hell out of here.”
He continued staring at me.
“Look at his left side,” I said. “I wasn’t quite sure when I first looked, but he was kicked there”—I pointed—”and there, and there. I’ll bet the autopsy shows some busted ribs.”
“How does that make it the work of an amateur?” asked Jimbo.
“There’s no sign of a struggle,” I said. “If you kick him while he’s down and alive, he rolls and bumps into something, probably knocks it over. You kick him while he’s standing, you do it with enough force to knock him halfway across the room.” I could see he still wasn’t following me. “Look,” I continued, “a pro kills him, pays the insurance, and leaves as quick as he can. Probably doesn’t know him, maybe never even saw him before. He clubs him with something that won’t break the skin—a statuette, a carving, something—makes sure there’s no blood on anything and especially not on himself or his clothing, and makes his getaway.”
“Yes?” he said. If he’d been a Man, the next words out of his mouth would have been: “So what’s your point?”
“What a pro doesn’t do is a few vicious kicks at a corpse that’s beyond feeling it. Those kicks didn’t make the corpse feel any worse, so we have to assume they made the kicker feel better. And that’s why it’s not a professional job.” I paused. “It’s not a solo job either.”
“There were two killers?” he said dubiously.
“No. But the killer had to have a confederate to disable the security system in the right room at the right time. If security had gone down throughout the embassy, someone would have noticed it, or remarked on it, but no one did. Anyway,” I concluded, “what we have is a crime of passion.”
“Passion?” he repeated.
“Yeah. Now, among my race, that usually implies something to do with sex. In this case it probably doesn’t. I have no idea why Mglias was killed…but I’m pretty damned sure he was killed by someone who hated him so much that he couldn’t help taking a few kicks at him after he was dead.”
“I don’t know, Jake,” he said. “There’s a lot of profit to be made from a war, even a little one like ours. It could have been someone from either side who wanted the conflict prolonged.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “But the conference wasn’t over, and for all anyone knows the two sides weren’t going to resolve anything. I’m not saying I know who it was, but I sure as hell know who it wasn’t—a paid professional assassin. It may well be someone with an interest in keeping the battle going—or ending it, if Mglias was a hard-liner, but whoever it was, he had a personal grudge against Mglias. I think we’d do well to check into his private life.”
“He’s been in our Alien Service for twenty years,” said Jimbo. “Do you know how many enemies he could have made in the time?”
“Most of them don’t count,” I replied.
“Why not?”
“Because we know he was killed by someone who was in the embassy. It shouldn’t be that hard to find out who he knew before he got here.”
Suddenly a big grin spread across his face. “You’re very good at your job, Jake Masters,” he said. “That was precisely my conclusion.”
“It was?” I said. “Since when?”
“Since I surveyed the scene a few hours after the murder, when the police had left.”
I returned his grin. “You’re a ringer.”
“If that means what I think it means, yes. It will be a relief not to play dumb any more.”
“Are you a detective too?” I asked.
“No,” said Jimbo. “I’m a senior officer in Spdaine, Tjanti’s largest city. I came here incognito, as a member of our security staff.” He paused. ”I think it will be a pleasure to work with you.”
“Same here,” I said, taking his alien hand in my own. “Now let’s go catch ourselves a killer.”
I suppose if I was a writer of holo entertainments, it would have been just that easy. Maybe I fooled myself into thinking it’d be a piece of cake for a couple of old pros like Jimbo and me.
I should have known better.
My first step was to inspect the security system. Since Jimbo had already seen it, I told him to stay upstairs, that I thought the staff would speak more freely if there wasn’t a Tjanti taking notes.
Security was headquartered in the basement, though the surroundings were so luxurious that “basement” seemed an inappropriate word. The thick carpet massaged your feet if you stood still for more than a couple of seconds, the chairs were as comfortable as anything you’d find this side of Ambassador Ruskin’s office, and there was even a small but well-stocked galley. I remembered seeing holovids about prisoners left to rot in dungeons, and I decided those same prisoners would have paid good money to be incarcerated here.
The walls were covered with screens, one for each bedroom in the place (there were eighteen), three for the dining hall, two for Ruskin’s office, three for the kitchen, four for the ballroom (yes, it had a ballroom), others for every corridor in the place, every storage area that was big enough to turn around in, every office, the security crew’s quarters, the garage where the official vehicles were kept, and (though they asked me not to mention it) every bathroom in the building. Finally, there were screens showing every inch of the embassy grounds. The holos were crystal clear, most were Tri-D, they all had sound though I couldn’t hear it. (It was explained that overhearing seventy or eighty people all at once, to say nothing of all the background noise, would drive me crazy; that if I wanted to listen, I could insert a tiny receiver in my ear and tune in to any room or area that I wanted.)
McKay, the Chief of Security who I had briefly met in Ruskin’s office, greeted me. He was a pudgy, balding man with a troubled expression on his face. He told me he had a spotless record for the twenty years he’d been in the service, and acted more than a bit defensive. It didn’t imply guilt as far as I was concerned. Hell, if someone was killed on my watch, I’d feel a little defensive myself.
“So what exactly happened?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Mglais entered his room and turned off the lights. We can switch our camera to infra-red, of course, but we respected his privacy and did nothing—until a minute or two later when the Spy Eye in the corridor outside his room stopped functioning. Then we activated the infra-red, but it wasn’t working either. We spent about two minutes, no more than that, trying to find the source of the problem down here—we had no reason at that time to suspect anything was amiss on the second floor—and then the screens came back up, and we realized what had happened. We signaled to Brochinsky and Dunn, our men on the second floor, to seal off all exits, but it was too late.”
“Has anyone left the building since
you found the body?” I asked.
“Only to take the body to the Droon forensics lab and to pick you up at the spaceport.”
“So the killer and an accomplice are almost certainly still on the premises.”
“Why do you think we’re so jumpy, and no one’s turning his back on anyone?”
“Got any idea who might have done it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It was supposed to be a fucking peace conference.”
“Have any members of the embassy—from Ambassador Ruskin right down to the butler and the low man in your department—lost anyone near and dear to them in this conflict?”
“You’d have to check the records. No one down here has ever mentioned it.” He paused. “Hell, most of them didn’t even know there was a war going on.”
“It was a very minor war,” I acknowledged. “That’s why the Democracy didn’t step in.”
“Will they now?”
It was my turn to shrug. “Who knows?”
“Well, is there anything else I can show you?”
“One thing,” I said.
“What is it?”
“How do you kill the security system in just Mglais’s room and the corridor?”
“There’s the computer that controls the whole system,” he said, pointing to a surprisingly small machine on a table in the middle of the room.
“So you couldn’t walk over and kill the room without someone noticing?”
“A bunch of someones,” said McKay. “There were five men and woman on duty at that time.”
“And they were always in each other’s field of vision?”
“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “Someone could have gone to the john, and if you kneel down in the galley you can’t be seen from here. But,” he added, “you can’t approach the computer without everyone on duty seeing you.”
“You got a list of the five who were on duty?”
He nodded and handed me a readout. “I thought you’d ask sooner or later.”
“I want to question them all.”
“Roberts is on duty now,” he said, indicating a man about twenty feet away who was doing his best to act like he wasn’t trying to overhear what we were saying. “When do you want to speak to the other four?”
“As soon as I’m finished with Roberts,” I said.
“I’ll call them in.”
“As big as this room is, it’s pretty small compared to the first floor of the embassy,” I said. “Makes it easy to overhear. You got another room down here where I can question them privately?”
He smiled. “We have eight storage rooms, a couple of small bedrooms, and”—the smile became a broad grin—”a pair of detention cells.”
“So you do have a dungeon,” I said, returning his smile. “I’ll have to cancel that nasty letter I wrote to the video producers.”
“We’ve never had cause to use it…yet,” he said. “I assumed you’d want to question my people, so I’ve set up one of the storage rooms for you.” He pointed to the room in question. “Hey, Ralph!” he called, and Roberts looked up. “This is Jake Masters. He wants to talk to you.”
“I can’t leave my post,” said Roberts. “You know that.”
“I’ll cover for you,” said McKay.
“Who is he?”
“If you haven’t figured out who I am yet,” I said, “I’m going to recommend that they demote you.”
He looked half angry and half embarrassed, but he got up and followed me into room McKay had indicated. There were two chairs, a desk, a pitcher of water, a couple of glasses, and not much else. I was sure a hidden holocam would record every second of the interview. I spent about five minutes questioning him, then repeated the process with the other four who were on duty during the murder. Didn’t learn a damned thing; didn’t really expect to.
“Will there be anything else?” asked McKay when we emerged from the storage room.
“Not now,” I said. “But I’ll be back.”
“Why?” he asked. “I gather you didn’t get anything out of the staff.”
“Why?” I repeated. “Because the odds are that someone down here rigged the security system for the killer, and since everyone knows why I’m here, I’d like to catch him before he rigs the system in my room and the killer pays me a visit.”
His expression said: Now, why didn’t I think of that?
That’s when I knew I wasn’t going to get a lot of help solving this damned thing.
I figured my next step was to pay a visit to the Droons’ forensic lab, and find out exactly what they’d managed to discover. I had no idea where it was, but Jimbo had been on the planet for a week, and made a couple of excursions into the city that housed the embassy.
“How far?” I asked as we climbed into an aircar after Jimbo gave our destination to the embassy chauffeur.
“About two miles.”
We took off, skimming just above the ground. I’d arrived after dark, so this was my first real look at Keladroon II. We were in a mid-sized city that would hold about 300,000 Men, though I had no idea how clustered or spread out the Droons were. The buildings didn’t abound in straight lines; I don’t think we passed a rectangular one the whole trip. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to them; skyscrapers stood side-by-side with little storefronts, some smaller buildings seemed composed almost entirely of glass while a couple of the tallest ones didn’t have a single window. The streets didn’t make much sense: they turned, they twisted, they circled back on each other, and there was no pattern to the traffic either. More than once vehicles were parked in such a way that we had to elevate to a dozen feet in altitude to get past them. Which is to say, Keladroon II was a typical alien world.
I can’t say the Droons themselves were typical of anything. They looked at first glance like shaggy, bright yellow, seven-foot-tall worms or snakes. It was only when they ambulated that you realized they really did have legs, which seemed to shrink back inside their bodies when not in use. The same with their arms—two on each side, hidden in their torsos until needed. I’m sure they had skeletons, but they were so flexible you couldn’t prove it by looking at them. They had such small eyes that it was clear they’d never been nocturnal at any point in their development. Their noses were small and flat, their ears weren’t visible, and their toothless mouths looked like they’d been made for sucking fluids.
They clearly had trouble forming the consonants used in human and Tjanti languages, because once we reached the police station they were all wearing t-packs, translating devices that turned their high-pitched buzzing into monotone approximations of Terran.
A cop named Blaish (that wasn’t really his name, but it’s as close as I can come to spelling it) led us to the lab where he introduced us to the head technician, a Droon who’s name I can’t even begin to spell or pronounce (it sounded like yodeling underwater). We were shown Mglias’s body, which looked exactly the way it had in the hologram. No one had bothered to do an autopsy.
“So what have you got for us?” I asked
“There were two blows to the cranium,” said the technician. “The first one killed him instantly.”
Which confirmed my initial conclusion: the second was just the killer paying the insurance.
“What about the torso?” I asked. I didn’t want to call it his ribcage, because I was pretty sure Droons didn’t have any ribs.
“Very curious,” was the answer. “He was brutalized”—he didn’t used the word kicked, either because his race couldn’t kick like that or because he didn’t want to commit himself—”three times after he was already dead. Almost all the bones on this side of the torso have been damaged.” Which was probably as close as a seven-foot wormsnake could come to saying “fractured”.
“Will you be doing an autopsy?”
“Only if you request it. We’ve taken soft tissue samples, and there seems to be nothing untoward about them. He wasn’t poisoned, he wasn’t taking stimulants, and he seems to have been in good health.”
“Consider it requested,” I said.
“Why?” asked Jimbo.
I shrugged. “You never know.” I turned to the technician. “If there’s any charge, bill the embassy.” I paused, wondering what to ask him next. “What other evidence did your team bring back?”
He looked surprised. Well, as surprised as a snake with tiny eyes can look. “Just a chair, a table, a desk, and a trash atomizer,” he said. “I would have thought they told you that. We examined all the possible weapons in the room while we were there, but the tests were all negative. There was no DNA, nothing to indicate any of them had been used in the commission of the murder.”
“Did you examine any potential murder weapons elsewhere in the embassy?” I asked. “There’s no law that says the killer had to leave it at the scene of the crime.”
“We were not given access to most of the embassy.”
Clearly it wasn’t his fault, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a ton of work still to do. “All right,” I said. “I’d like whoever the investigating officer was to come back to the embassy with us.”
“What for?” he asked.
“There are probably a hundred blunt objects in the embassy, objects that could crush a skull without breaking the skin. I’ll make sure he has access to all of them. If he can’t test them there, we’ll bundle them up and he can bring them back here for examination.”
He shrugged, which was almost worth the price of admission, as it started at his very narrow shoulders and undulated down to his tail. “That would be Officer Ploorh. I am afraid he is working undercover right now. I have no idea how to get in touch with him. Let me recommend Blaish. He is the most promising of our newer officers, and I think working with a Man and a Tjanti, however briefly, would be a useful experience for him.”
“Was he part of the crew that went to the embassy when the murder was originally reported?”
“No, he was off-duty at the time.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll be happy to have him.” I turned to Jimbo. “You got any questions?”
“None.”
We met Blaish in the outer office, invited him to come along with us, and he enthusiastically accepted. The three of us went out to the aircar, where our chauffeur was waiting for us.
Masters of the Galaxy Page 21