A thought suddenly occurred to me. What had Jimmy’s political leanings been? Had he had a problem with Brick? That, combined with the issue of an unpaid debt, could have snowballed into something violent.
I brought my attention back to the interview. “Why do they want so much from the scientists?” I asked.
“Beats me. It’s just so much pressure, and it places the scientists under a lot of stress too. Katrina and Sally are getting ready to rip me a new one. I’m not the one demanding all these reports, mind you, but as the one who actually has to ask for them...” He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s exasperating, that’s all.”
“Mind if I sit?”
“Sure, right here.” He gestured to a chair and I lowered myself into it.
“Ever have a problem with Jimmy?” I asked.
He laughed heartily. “You get right to the point, don’t you?”
My expression was wry. “Why waste time?”
“Sure, I understand. The answer is no.”
“What were his political views?”
He looked thoughtful. “You mean because I’m a Council rep? You think he was anti-Council?”
“Occurred to me.”
A shrug. “He never said a bad thing about the government. Not to me, at least.”
“What about to someone else?” People generally suspected Council reps of spying on the people around them, perhaps even recording private conversations to use as evidence.
“I don’t spy on people,” he said in a flat voice. His eyes were piercing.
I ignored his anger. “Have you ever had a problem with anyone on the station?”
“No, but I’m sure some people have a problem with me. Can’t blame them, really. I’m used to it.”
“Who in particular?”
He thought for a minute. “I’d say two of the crew, Grossman and Larry Balch. Also one of the officers—Bel Bertram.”
“What has it amounted to?”
“Oh, nothing much. A look or two. A sneer. Snapping at me in anger. That’s about it.” He slapped his knee. “But then there’s the scientists. They’re ragging at me all the time.”
“About all the reports?”
“Yeah. I know it’s nothing personal. I’m just as upset as they are, trust me.”
I consulted my reader. Here we go. I was about to reveal my only real motive for the crime. I had to be careful. “I’m curious about something, Brick. You asked Jimmy for money a while back.”
His lips instantly pressed into a thin line, and he examined me in tortured silence. It was an abrupt transformation.
“How much did Jimmy lend you?” I asked, ignoring his body language.
“Fifty thousand,” he growled after a beat.
I blinked. “That’s a lot of money. What did you need it for?”
“Why is it important?”
“I heard you never paid it back.”
“That’s a lie!” he snarled. “I gave all that money back.”
“That’s not entirely true, is it? And you know what?” I leaned forward. “That’s motive, Brick.”
His features grew harder. “I asked him for a loan and I paid him back. That’s it.” I remained silent while he fidgeted. He was clearly uncomfortable with the direction the interview had gone. He spent a minute pretending to go over reports on his reader.
“Failure to cooperate implies guilt, Brick.”
“I’m not guilty. I didn’t do anything to Jimmy. I liked him—he was a nice guy. I hated how he died and what happened to his body, but I didn’t do it.”
I studied him and tried to decipher his outburst. He seemed to be telling the truth, but his refusal to answer didn’t look good. I got to my feet. “I have one more question before I go.”
He seemed to deflate, perhaps realizing how his behavior had made him look. His expression turned to one of regret. “Sure. Go ahead.”
“What’s your beef with Jase Lassiter?” Earlier, when I had mentioned the name, Brick had called him an asshole. I’d noted it at the time, but hadn’t yet asked about it.
He was eager to answer this one. “He’s a prick. All these requests for reports, he’s the one responsible. He sits there on Mercury, in charge of our Command Group, and all he does is order me to produce more paperwork! What’s the use?”
“That’s it?” There was something more, I was sure of it.
“Well...” He stumbled slightly. “There’s Shaheen.”
Ah. “What about her?”
He looked away, embarrassed. “I put some moves on her, a couple of months ago. She turned me down flat. She’s one beautiful woman, let me tell you. I was hoping we’d been out here long enough that she’d be ready to move on, but I was wrong. Anyway, I heard he wasn’t the nicest guy. A little abusive.”
“She’s seeing Lassiter?”
“Yup. She was, at least. She doesn’t talk to me much anymore. They might be over—I don’t know. Either way you cut it, the guy’s a jerk.”
I turned my reader off. “Okay, I’ll leave you alone for now. But remember this: until you answer my questions about the money Jimmy lent you, you’re my number-one suspect.”
He stared at me, mouth agape, and I stalked from his quarters without another word.
* * *
After the interview with Brick, I went to see Reggie Hamatsui, the scientist. I spoke with him for about two minutes, and he seemed incredulous as I told him what I needed. Afterward, however, he agreed to my request, and I gave him the other half of the blood droplet that I had found in the life-support module. Five minutes later I had the results that I had come for.
There was something going on here bigger than anyone had thought.
Chapter Ten
The site of a murder is the most important location in any investigation. A host of physical evidence often remains following the crime, and finding it can often lead to a swift capture. In other cases, serial murderers stage the scene and manufacture evidence that may or may not be useful. They sometimes leave clues meant to point the investigator in the right direction, and the case can evolve into a game of cat and mouse that the killer inevitably loses. It’s usually just a matter of time before capture. Famous catches involve chases that last for months or even years, though those are extremely rare nowadays. In such cases, it is the game that the killer is after—a test of his wits against the lead investigator’s. I had wondered whether the killer had manufactured this situation for such a purpose, but the answer was still a long ways off. I needed to know more about the original accident that had brought me to SOLEX.
It was necessary to examine the location where Jimmy had died, but I’d waited until some of the interviews were out of the way. My original suspicion that his death was actually an accident—and not murder—had further lowered the importance of going outside the station. Now, however, there was no more putting it off.
The captain assigned Shaheen as my partner, then gave me a couple of quick instructions before going EVA. I had to remain tethered to my partner and the station at all times, I had to set my alarm to remind me when to return, and I had to report to Dr. Malichauk immediately afterward for medicine to counteract the radiation exposure. All three rules were essentially nonnegotiable at SOLEX, and I noticed Manny shoot me a glance as he ticked them off on his fingers. Perhaps it was the look in my eyes that got him, or maybe it was his own conscience.
Shaheen stood next to me in the air lock. I listened to the pump as it cycled. “How many hours have you accumulated?” I asked as I shifted from foot to foot in the small enclosure.
“Twenty-five, so far. Not too bad. Close your visor,” she suggested with a grin.
Embarrassed, I snapped the shield over my face, and the air-lock hatch slid open. I gasped and took an involuntary step back
. The scope of the scene was fantastic. Tongues of fire roiled over the sun’s surface, weaving about like wheat in a windy field. The sun appeared thirty times larger than as seen on Earth! It stretched completely across my view; I couldn’t even see black space. I stuck my head out the air lock and peered at a solar prominence near the star’s north pole; the flare was a small one, but I knew it was more than ten times the size of Earth. I looked at my wrist readout and saw the temperature soaring. Three hundred...six hundred...eleven hundred...thirteen hundred...
“My God,” I muttered. It stopped climbing at close to fifteen hundred Kelvin. The vacsuit I wore, slightly thicker and more reflective than normal, was also equipped with a skintight coolant suit of a type that hadn’t been worn for centuries. It could handle the temperature for a limited time. It was the radiation that was the danger. I had a warning label that changed from green to red as the levels built. When it reached critical exposure, it would display crimson and an alarm would sound in my helmet.
I turned and studied the station around me. It was magnificent. The cylinders, coated in gleaming white ceramic, floated serenely against the backdrop of inky space. The mass-driver module above the cylinders ran the entire length of the station, and the microwave dish attached to Module D projected like a crow’s nest high above the facility. The glow of the sun flickered over everything, glittering like a devilish ghost in the night.
I swallowed. Being outside SOLEX was part magical and part nightmare, and I wasn’t yet sure which had the greater effect on me.
With an effort, I turned back to Shaheen. We hitched our tethers to a safety rung on the hull and swung out of the air lock.
“This way,” she said.
We grabbed the rungs and pulled ourselves along the docking-port cylinder and over to Module D. We reached a strut that connected the starboard collector array to the station and clipped our tethers to a recessed eyebolt in the hull.
“What’s this?” I asked. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“We can’t spend too long out here, so speed is of the essence.” Her voice sounded tinny in my helmet. “This bolt is in a track that runs the length of the collector’s support structure. We can get out there faster this way.”
She pushed a button on her suit’s control panel and the eyebolt began to move. Our feet dangled behind as it dragged us along. The two solar collectors were simply massive. Each was two hundred meters long, constructed of ceramic-coated steel struts and shimmering solar panels.
If the struts were the skeleton of the collectors, the panels were their flesh. The eyebolt moved along a track in a central strut that stretched the length of the collector, and I floated above an array of solar panels the size of two football fields. There was another one of equal size connected to the other side of the station. Incredible.
Within minutes we had traversed the entire collector. It would have taken us an hour of spacewalking to achieve the same feat.
“Jimmy was out about as far as you can go. I can’t believe he didn’t have a partner.”
“Don’t hold it against Manny,” she said. “He knows what he did was wrong. He’s broken up about it. I can tell.”
“Someone died because he didn’t follow regs.”
She snorted. “Regs. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. You can’t have standardized regulations for every place in the entire Confederacy! Imagine using the same ones here at SOLEX as on some colony light-years away.”
I scowled. “Come on, Shaheen. You can’t deny that EVAs are standardized for safety. ‘Never go out alone.’ It’s drilled into us right from training. If anything, EVA regs should be more rigorous here.”
She huffed but didn’t respond.
“You don’t agree?”
“I guess. I just feel bad for Manny. Don’t mind me.”
Do you feel bad for Jimmy? I thought.
She pointed to a nearby electrical-access console. “That’s it there. We got a warning light on that panel. It could have been anything from a short to a localized failure in the heat shield to what it really was.”
“And?”
“The sensor failed. Jimmy had to replace it.”
I’d had the notion that the warning had been deliberate in order to lure Jimmy outside the station. The idea, however, was ludicrous. First, it meant the killer knew Manny would assign Jimmy, and second, it meant the killer knew the regs would be cast aside and that Jimmy would be on his own.
Only the captain could have ensured those things.
We were at the edge of the collector, drifting near a precipice that overlooked the incredible furnace below. A waist-high console abutted a narrow rail that ran the length of the edge. “Where was he when he reported the rip?”
She gestured at the console. “He’d just finished working on it.”
I removed my datachip reader from a thigh pocket and snapped a few pictures. I looked back at the station; my visor depolarized immediately as I turned from the sun.
Something occurred to me. “Surveillance was gone during the accident, right?”
“For twelve hours.”
“So if the cameras stopped recording just before the accident—”
“Which they did.”
“—then they should have been back on at about 0100 hours that night.”
“Seems right.”
“So we know that the mutilation of the body must have occurred between the time that Malichauk left the clinic at dinner until 0100 hours that night. A seven-hour period. It couldn’t have occurred while Malichauk was still in the clinic.”
“What’s your point?”
“The captain said no one could have had an alibi during a twelve-hour period. But what about a seven-hour one?”
“So?” She sounded puzzled.
“Well, did Manny even check for alibis? Maybe he just assumed. Perhaps I can narrow the suspects down. My list is pretty big right now,” I admitted.
She seemed unconvinced. “Sounds weak.”
“Well, it’s something, anyway.” I turned back to the sun and watched the immense ball of fury in silence. It was unnerving. The scale was almost impossible to accept. All the mass in the solar system could be placed in there, with lots of room to spare.
I tore my eyes from it with difficulty and looked at the radiation indicator on my wrist. It was now light yellow. “Let’s get out of here,” I murmured.
* * *
As I checked in with Malichauk after the EVA, I showed him the tab from the vacsuit and he smiled.
“You didn’t take too much, don’t worry,” he said. “What did you think of it out there?”
“Daunting.”
“Being so close to Sol?”
“Yes. Ever been out?”
“Not here.”
He prepared the medicine—just a few tiny pills—which I popped in my mouth. They were bitter but thankfully went down easily.
“Did you figure out whose blood that was?” I was referring to the droplet I had found in the life-support module.
He turned to me, a perplexed look on his face. “Are you trying to test me or something?”
My brow creased. “No. Why?”
“Because I couldn’t make a match.”
I paused, startled. “What do you mean?”
“It was old blood. It could have been here since construction.”
I pondered that for a long moment. Then, “You think it’s from a construction worker or an engineer?”
“Probably. It doesn’t belong to anyone here, that’s for sure.”
* * *
I decided to check everyone’s alibi for the period when Jimmy’s body had been in the clinic’s freezer and surveillance was down. The time was from 1800 hours to 0100 hours, during which Malichauk had been
off doing something else rather than performing the autopsy. Most people had gone to sleep—or back to their cabins, alone—at 2200 hours. Before that, the crew had socialized together, the officers had socialized together and the scientists had studied the sun by themselves in their respective labs. No one had an alibi for the entire period; Manny had been correct.
Still not much progress, but it had been worth a try.
* * *
It had been a busy third day on SOLEX. I kept to myself at dinner and spoke to no one, but I watched the personnel closely. Everyone was there again, including the scientists, although they grumbled a bit about being taken away from their work.
The other officers shot a few looks at me, no doubt wondering how the investigation was progressing.
After the meal, I marched straight to my cabin with the intention of falling asleep. I removed my new pistol, which I now carried everywhere I went, and placed it under my pillow. Sleep didn’t come quickly, however. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jimmy Chin and how he had died.
I listened to the murmur of the ventilation fans and considered everything I had discovered since arriving at SOLEX. I had a single piece of physical evidence, but Malichauk had jettisoned the rest of it. I had nothing else to help me. Nothing except...
The body.
The thought reminded me of the pictures Malichauk had taken of Jimmy’s corpse. I had forgotten about them. I sat up in the darkness and fumbled along the side table for my reader. It was never easy viewing the remains of a grisly death, and looking at Jimmy’s body was no different. The signs of decompression were all there: the cracked and bloody skin, the intestines spilling from the anus, the flesh blackened from freezing and/or burning. Someone had indeed removed the head with an incredibly sharp blade—perhaps the very one used against me. The hands were missing; I could see the white knobs of the radius and ulna protruding from the stumps.
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