Final Inquiries

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Ambassador Stabmacher took a moment to calm himself. He had to admit the woman had a point. You'd have to be blind drunk or dead to miss someone coming in, poking at the corpse, and running away. Jumping up and down and yelling wouldn't change that, or get them any further forward. "You're right," he said, trying to sound calm and reasonable. Perhaps a note of humor would help. "You're absolutely right. I can't imagine what the explanation might be, but there's that old Sherlock Holmes rule, isn't there? 'When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"

  The two BSI agents exchanged a glance, and muttered some sort of agreement. The ambassador suddenly realized they must have had that line quoted back at them a hundred times before. It must be as old to them as all the lame jokes about diplomatic immunity were to him. He cleared his throat uncertainly and went on. "In any event, Agent Wolfson, your point is well taken. My apologies to you both."

  "Sir?" Mendez was speaking. "Pardon me, and I'm not trying to defend or excuse myself. But if we do exclude the possibility of my going crazy, or lying, or the Kendari messing with my mind, obviously something must have happened to make that handprint in some way we don't know about. And for whatever it's worth, the Kendari didn't seem all that surprised or bent out of shape when they spotted the handprint. Their side didn't start jumping up and down. Ours did."

  "So you think they were expecting that handprint?"

  "N-n-nooo. Not exactly. But they didn't seem to regard it as out of the ordinary."

  The ambassador considered. "Yes," he conceded. "You're right about that." He thought for a moment. "Some of their people--and ours--are less than happy about all the interspecies cooperation on this investigation. Consorting with the enemy and so on. If the roles were reversed, I could very easily imagine one of our less, ah, cooperative people letting the Kendari sweat for a while, instead of immediately volunteering information that could clear up just this sort of misunderstanding. If our people can behave badly, why not theirs?"

  He drummed his fingers on his desktop for a moment. "All right then. We'll leave it there for the moment until the Kendari are more forthcoming. I expect Dr. Zhen Chi is also researching the point. Let's move on to other matters. I would say our next and immediate priority is going to be getting all our people out of confinement."

  "Sir?" asked Wolfson. "We never have gotten a clear explanation of all that. I for one am not sure why they were confined. Could you go back a few steps and tell us about how and why exactly everyone was locked up? It's possible that Jamie--Agent Mendez--and I--have gotten the wrong idea. It might be better to get the whole story on that from beginning to end. And there are a number of other areas we need to discuss. You said something that suggested there are more simulants around, and I think we need to know more about the mobs--the ah, groups of humans and Kendari outside the compound."

  Ambassador Stabmacher glanced out his picture window again. It was the sort of window that ambassadors got so they could look out on whatever magnificent view might be on offer. In this place, all he could see was the embassy ship, the compound wall, and a thin pall of red dust floating up from just outside it. And that cloud of dust indicated that the demonstrators were still there. If he strained his ears, he could at least imagine he could hear them shouting and chanting. "Several topics," he said meaninglessly. "Of course, of course."

  The ambassador realized that his visitors were still standing. That was all right when he was bawling them out, but not when they had shifted gears into a more conventional sort of meeting. "Please, both of you, take a seat. I suppose this will be part of the official case. Use whatever recording system or whatever you want."

  He was a bit surprised to see both of them pull out paper notebooks, though at least the younger one also pulled out a semiobsolete datapad and flipped on its record function. He would have thought they would been more likely to reach for the latest and greatest gadgets.

  "For the present," said Agent Wolfson, "I'd like to concentrate on what you saw and did--not about what others told you. As per our previous discussions, I want to leave out any discussion of the crime itself, the crime scene, and the discovery of the crime. I don't want to start out with hearsay--uh, secondhand accounts on those matters."

  "A more diplomatic way of saying the same thing," said the ambassador with a smile.

  "Yes sir. That is, unless, ah, you discovered the crime scene--"

  "Me? Oh, good heavens, no. It was Special Agent Milkowski."

  Wolfson made a small frown. "Would that be Special Agent Frank Milkowski?"

  "Yes. You know him?"

  "Slightly," she said, obviously not too happy about it. "Not enough to complicate matters, if that's what you're concerned about."

  "Thank God for that. I don't know what your term for it is, but if you had to recuse yourself, or withdraw from the case or whatever--well," he said, turning toward Mendez. "You'd have had a lot more on your plate."

  "Yes, sir," said Mendez, in a tone that was both respectful and a trifle impatient. "Getting back to how the lockdown happened. You say Milkowski found the body."

  "That's right. I suppose I have to at least start with a bit of hearsay to set the scene. Late yesterday evening, about two hours after dark. About 2200 hours. He went back into the joint ops center to do some paperwork."

  "That seems a bit late to start working," Mendez suggested.

  "Not so late as you might think. We run on a sort of ad hoc clock here that runs from 0000 hours to 2700 hours. The planetary day is near enough to twenty-seven hours long that we run on a clock that long, and just restart our embassy clocks at 0000 hours whenever we start getting too far out of sync with the local day reckoning. So you might think of 2200 hours as five hours before midnight--call it 7:00 P.M. People adjust to the longer day in different ways. Milkowski liked--likes--to catch a quick late-afternoon nap after official hours, then go and do a little catch-up work before going to bed for the night."

  "You know his daily routine that well?"

  The ambassador gestured to indicate the space around them. "This compound is a pretty small place, and there aren't that many places to go. We're pretty much right in each other's laps. It would be pretty hard not to learn each other's habits. Besides, Milkowski and the other BSI agents provided--provide--outside security for me, and that put us even more in each other's lives."

  "So he goes into the ops center," Wolfson said. "What happens next?"

  "He found the body and immediately withdrew from the ops center."

  "Pardon me, Ambassador, and I know it's tricky, but so far this is nothing but secondhand evidence," said Mendez. "I understand that it's necessary to give your own actions some context, but even so. Just to be absolutely clear, you weren't a witness to any of this, were you?"

  "Well, no, I didn't see him go in, and I certainly didn't see him find the body."

  "Is there any way of confirming his movements?" asked Mendez. "Maybe an enter-exit log tracker on the ops center entryway?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "We have to think in alibis and evidence," said Wolfson. "Particularly for whoever found the body."

  "There is an automatic entry-log system, in the joint ops center and for all the secure buildings in the compound. But I expect you know as well as I do those sorts of systems aren't always utterly reliable. Sometimes something as simple as two people going through the door at once, or someone leaving his tracker-badge on his desk, can be enough to throw them off."

  "Yes, sir. But even so, we'll want to secure that tracker data at once."

  "There might be a problem there, too, then. One we're going to run into over and over again. Milkowski was--is--responsible for that data." It was damnable the way he was falling into the trick of speaking of them all in the past tense. "But since everyone in the compound--including me--has to be treated as a suspect--virtually all the information you're going to get from any of us is going to be suspect to one degree or another."

&
nbsp; "It's a challenging problem," said Mendez. "But it sort of helps make the point I was about to make--it might be best if you speak of what you know, rather than what you assume, or what someone told you he did."

  "Hmmm? Ah! For example, Agent Milkowski said he went in, found the body, and immediately sealed the human-side doors. That is what he told me, and I was a direct witness of his saying all that. But I don't know for myself whether he actually did it or not."

  "Exactly," said Mendez. "Please do go on, keeping that idea in mind. How, precisely, did he contact you?"

  "Well, he called me on his commlink, and I of course went right over to the human-side entrance of the joint ops center."

  "Why didn't he come to your office?"

  "Because he--well, he didn't say why, now that I come to think of it, but I assume it was because he didn't want to leave the entrance unguarded."

  "Why call you first?" asked Agent Mendez. "Why not one of his colleagues?"

  Because he already suspected one of his fellow BSI agents, the ambassador thought. That was the clear implication of the question. Or else, even worse, because he had done the murder himself and saw calling in the highest possible local authority immediately as a good cover. It was amazing how one short question could stir up so many suspicions out of nothing. Ambassador Stabmacher found himself starting to get nervous. "Because I am the ambassador, and a murder had been committed, and he felt I should know about it first," he said in a voice that was a trifle more defensive than he intended.

  "Of course," said Mendez. "What did he say?"

  "He told me that he had found the dead body of Inquirist Emelza 401, and described it to me."

  "Had he thought to take any photographs, or anything like that? Did he have anything to show you?"

  "No," said the ambassador. And why didn't he take such a perfectly obvious step? "He wasn't walking around the compound carrying one of your crime scene bags, after all. He was working a straight desk job. Why would he be carrying a crime scene camera?"

  "All right. How did you respond, and what did you do next?"

  The ambassador noticed that it was the junior agent interviewing him--no, questioning him, interrogating him, while the senior agent just sat back and watched. Was she the one he should be nervous about? Perhaps Mendez's job was to keep him distracted while she watched and analyzed without being noticed. "I, ah, ordered him to lock down our side of the ops center, put tamper-indicator seals on all the doors, and summon the other BSI agents."

  "Which did you have him do first?"

  And putting it that way reminds me that I took over command of the crime scene at that moment. "I had him summon the other agents by commlink in order to witness the lockdown and the seals going up, and to tell them what was going on."

  "How long did it take to get them over there?"

  "Not long. Three or four minutes--though that seemed very long at the time. The compound is a small place, and neither of them had gone to bed."

  "Did you order them to bring the seals with them?"

  "Ah, yes."

  "Then what?"

  Ambassador Stabmacher realized that he was sweating. "Then I had them put the seals up. Then I started thinking about the old story about how you catch a skunk. All you need is a big bucket. You sneak up on the skunk, turn the bucket over, drop the bucket down over it--and then you can use the bucket as a place to sit and think while you try to figure out what to do next." It wasn't all that funny a story, or perhaps in the best taste under the circumstances, but the fact remained that he had thought of it the moment the seals went up.

  "I'm not sure I follow," said Mendez.

  "Well, we had the place sealed up, at least from our end--but things were bound to explode at any time. If the Kendari had gone in at that moment, and found the body and found the doors to our side locked down and sealed, I don't like to think what might have happened. They could easily have interpreted it as a deliberately staged provocation. We might be at war right now."

  "Things are that tense?" Wolfson asked, interrupting the flow of the questioning.

  "We've made great progress in the Pentam negotiations, but, yes. All that we have built up is still quite fragile. It all relies on trust--and there is precious little trust between the two species. You might say the trust we've built up here isn't between humans and Kendari, or even the human and Kendari governments--it is between the two staffs, the two embassy compounds--and it runs--or at least ran--through the joint operations center." The ambassador frowned. That answer was too high-flown, too much like a speech meant to rally the troops. Not at all the right tone for this situation.

  "So that an attack on someone in the joint ops center was more or less literally an attack on the relationship between the two sides," Wolfson suggested.

  "That's right," he agreed, resisting the temptation to elaborate.

  "Let me edge over into speculation for a moment," she went on. "Might that just possibly be the motive for the crime? Not dislike of the victim, or any personal motive--but a deliberate attempt to derail the Pentam negotiations? Perhaps to force us to withdraw?"

  "The short answer is yes," said the ambassador. It was exactly the point he had been stewing over since the first moment of this nightmare, and he had no desire to discuss it further--particularly with a pair of intrusive police officers.

  "I see," said Mendez. "All right then. Getting back to our chronology, you and Flexdal speak on the phone. What sort of record is there of that call? Once again, a time and date stamp, or a call duration, would come in very handy."

  "I can do better than that," said the ambassador. "I recorded the call at my end. I'll get you the full recording whenever you like."

  "Excellent," said Mendez. "For the moment, however, can you give us a quick summing-up of that conversation?"

  "Well, yes," said the ambassador, and hesitated for a moment. "But I believe it would be best if I gave you some background to the situation. First off, you must understand that we might be very close to settling the Pentam issue."

  "Who's going to get the Pentam System, then?" asked Wolfson.

  The ambassador smiled wearily. "I haven't the faintest idea. We haven't even gotten close to that issue yet. What I should have said is that we're close to settling on the procedure for negotiating the Pentam issue. You might say we're having talks about the talks. To put it very crudely, we, the Kendari, and the Vixa, and the other interested parties have just about agreed on the rules for how the humans and Kendari will state their cases. What we can and cannot do and say to convince the Elder Races in general--and the Vixa in particular--that we are the species that should take over the Pentam System. To use an old diplomatic expression, we've finally agreed as to what size and shape of table we're going to use. We're just about ready to get it built and sit down at it."

  "Do you have to convince them that we're more deserving, or that we'll do a better job, or what?"

  "We don't know for sure. Part of the procedure--or, if you will, part of the game--is that neither side is to be told what, exactly, the decision criteria will be."

  Mendez smiled at that himself. "Great. So long as they don't make it too hard on you."

  "Precisely. But the point is that neither Flexdal nor I wants to wreck the progress we've made. If, God forbid, we had to start over from scratch, it might be years or decades, even centuries, before we got back to this point. This death--this murder--is a terrible thing, but it must not be allowed to interfere with the negotiations--especially given that, as Agent Wolfson suggested, upending the negotiations might well have been the motive for the crime. I called Flexdal, told him what had happened, and the steps I had taken. Flexdal got off the line and called me back a few minutes later. I expect--but I can't say for certain--that he was having his people check on the situation. He immediately suggested that, rather than risk wrecking the negotiations, we initiate a rush investigation and call in outside investigators if at all possible. He suggested that we request the use of one o
f the Vixa's hyperfast ships.

  "We placed a conference call to the Preeminent Director's household to advise him of the situation and request assistance. The Vixa haven't exactly fallen over themselves to be helpful in the past, so we weren't expecting it would be easy to convince them. I'd bet that Flexdal was as surprised as I was when the Director immediately offered the use of the Eminent Concordance for the purpose of collecting an investigator who wasn't a suspect in the case."

  "Why us?" Mendez asked.

  The ambassador smiled slightly. "Why human BSI agents, and not Kendari Inquirists, or why you two in particular?"

  "Both, I suppose. My impression was that Brox requested the two of us specifically."

  "He did indeed, shortly after the Preeminent Director finished speaking with us. As for why the BSI, it was of course the obvious choice after the decision was made to request a human rather than a Kendari investigator."

  "But why not a Kendari investigator? Why didn't they insist on that? After all, it was a Kendari that had been killed."

  Ambassador Stabmacher frowned, sat up straight in his chair, and needlessly tidied up a few papers on his desk. "You'll have to ask them that, to get a definitive answer--and good luck to you. However, I can offer some guesses.

  "First off, we know nothing of the actual relationship between Inquirist Brox 231 and the deceased. For all we know, they could have been seen fighting loudly an hour before. There might be some other evidence of which we are unaware that would cast suspicion on Brox, or on someone else on that side of the wall. Perhaps they were hoping that human investigators would have more difficulty proving a case against a Kendari.

  "Or there might be some political issue back on Kendal that would make it impossible to dispatch any Inquirists. Perhaps the whole affair is so scandalous--a lover's quarrel, a murder in front of outsiders--that Flexdal didn't even want to try to get support from back home. Perhaps some other reason that isn't remotely close to my guesses. All I knew for certain was that I wanted BSI, and not the Kendari Inquiries Service--and when the other side agreed, I wasn't going to ask why. I was the one who suggested dispatching Brox to collect you. I pointed out we wanted to keep the knowledge closely held, that he knew as much as anyone, and that our people had a high regard for him." The ambassador cocked his head slightly to one side. "All that is true, so far as it went--but there was more to it, of course. It was a way of my paying a compliment to the Kendari, and conceding that harm had been done to them and not us. And it said we trusted that Brox wouldn't try to escape--but Brox was going to be on a Vixa ship, then in BSI custody, then returning on the same ship. For all practical purposes, he was just as confined to quarters as the rest of us--even if he was traveling the devil knows how many light-years in one day."