Final Inquiries

by Roger MacBride Allen

  The ambassador and Zhen Chi turned their backs on the sims the moment they emerged from their holding pen, paying not the slightest attention to them, any more than a farmer would stay and chat with his cattle after letting them out into the pasture for the morning. Jamie couldn't blame them. Spending time with them meant you were equating them with humans--and, whatever the grand exalted and mysterious Vixa might be, the simulants were far, far less than human.

  "Good morning to you both!" the ambassador called out when he saw them, studiously ignoring the fact that his simulant and Zhen Chi's were trailing after them. "Did you sleep well?"

  "Well enough, yes," said Hannah, her tone formal.

  "Have there, ah, been any developments overnight?" the ambassador asked.

  "Not that we're aware of. We're just off to meet with Brox. After that, we're going to do a full-court press on getting everyone out of confinement as soon as possible."

  "Yes, good, I'm glad of that. I, ah, can see that I might have created at least as many problems as I thought I was solving with the lockdown--but the damage is done, and I take it you might as well take advantage of their being in isolation. No, ah, chance of simply, ah, letting them out before they're questioned?" It was hard to miss the hint that the ambassador would very much like to have them set loose at once.

  "No, Mr. Ambassador, I'm afraid not," said Hannah. "There still might be some value in keeping them isolated from each other--and, frankly, I wouldn't want to be the one to tell them that they'd been cooped up all this time for nothing."

  The surprised and worried look on the ambassador's face made it plain that he hadn't thought of that angle at all. "Ah," he said. "Ah, yes. A good point."

  "Was the info on the handprint of any use?" Zhen Chi asked, speaking for the first time.

  "What info?" Jamie asked

  "On Kendari rigor mortis. I found it last night and gave it to the ambassador. Since we're still suspects at the moment, I figured I'd better go through channels."

  "We got no such information," said Hannah. She looked hard at the ambassador, who seemed to be turning an even paler shade than he had been. "Ambassador?"

  "Oh, yes, well--ah--Zhen Chi got it to me after you had turned in for the night, and I, ah--well, I didn't wish to disturb you, and, well--"

  "You thought it might be fun to get even with us just a little, after we didn't show sufficient and due respect to you last night," said Hannah. It wasn't a question, and the ambassador made no denial, no reply. "Let's make this clear--news comes in, you get it to us. Direct. This is no game. This is about a murder and a pair of planets. You wake us up, you chase us down, and if we've gone off, you stand in the rain for hours to make sure we get it the second we return."

  "I'll, ah, yes, of course." The ambassador reached for his datapad. "I can transfer Zhen Chi's report to your data system immediately--"

  "No you can't," said Jamie. "We don't want the report beamed around through the air to give the Kendari and the Vixa and who the hell knows else a chance to practice their decryption skills. Besides, if we get it from you, we have to verify it against Zhen Chi's report anyway, because you might have a reason to diddle the data."

  "What! How dare you--"

  "I dare because you're a murder suspect, Ambassador! In a criminal investigation, we don't get information 'through channels,'" said Jamie, bulldozing right over the ambassador's protests and making no attempt to mask his annoyance. He turned to Zhen Chi and spoke to her alone, as if the ambassador wasn't there. "We get it direct from the source, or as nearly direct as we can manage. Especially, as you say, since you are all still suspects." He paused and looked at both of them. "Maybe I'd better be very blunt about this. You people seem to be treating this as some sort of pro forma thing. Going through the motions to show you respect the process, but thinking it's all for show. It's not. Someone is really dead, and someone really killed her on purpose, for motives unknown, and we have no information that excludes any person at this embassy as a suspect. So if you have anything to tell us, you tell us--you don't go through channels and pass the information to a suspect in the case. Is that clear?"

  Jamie's blood was pounding so hard that he barely heard their fumbling replies. He wondered what had gotten into him, tearing the ambassador's head off like that. He wasn't even sure how much of that had been real anger and how much had been theater. He didn't care. Pulling a stunt like this demanded a little theater in response. Hannah looked as infuriated as he did, but he also had to wonder if she was going to tear his head off in private--or agree with him. He had no idea. But his gut told him that these people needed a good swift kick or two--and that Hannah would feel the same way.

  "I'll get--get the report to you, a secure paper copy, into your hands, in five minutes."

  "No you won't," said Hannah, "because we are going to meet Brox in three minutes. But you will be cooling your heels outside the joint ops center, report in hand, when we're done. We want this to be a quick meet, but if we're in there until nightfall, you're planted outside the door until then. Clear?"

  A flash of temper played across Zhen Chi's face, but then she calmed herself, nodded, and swallowed whatever protest she had been about to make. She glanced around at the ambassador, at Hannah, and at the simulants who had gathered around, plainly interested in seeing the show. Jamie couldn't help but spare an errant thought for them. What would those creatures--and whoever was watching through them--make of this scene? "Clear," Zhen Chi said at last. "I will be there."

  "See that you are," said Hannah. "Jamie, we've got a date with an enemy agent. Let's go."

  Hannah stalked away from the ambassador and Zhen Chi, fast enough that Jamie almost had to run to catch up, and a couple of the simulants had to scatter to get out of the way. She didn't care. She was angry enough that she felt more like tearing the outer blast door off the ops center with her bare hands rather than opening it normally. But she calmed herself down enough to punch in the right keycode and hear the dead bolt unlock. She pulled the heavy door open far enough for Jamie to get through, then followed him in--and slammed the door shut and rammed the dead bolt closed with as loud a crash as she could manage.

  "Okay, boss," Jamie said. "I was about to ask if I went too far out there, but I guess maybe not."

  "You did fine, Jamie," Hannah growled. "Let's just say those two characters out there ought to be glad you spoke up first." The inner blast doors were still shut. She checked the time. They still had a minute or two before they were due to meet with Brox. Good. She could stay in the dim antechamber and simmer down for a bit before the meet. "Do they really not get it? Have they really suffered that great a failure of imagination? Don't they understand that this isn't bureaucratic paper shuffling and covering your backside and scoring points? This is life and death, and then some!"

  "Weirdly enough, I think it all gives us something," said Jamie. "I think what the two of them have told us without realizing it is that they are both innocent. The ambassador knows he didn't do it, and Zhen Chi knows she didn't do it--and therefore they assume we must know it too. They'll cooperate, but it is pro forma, because no one could really think they did it. They'll go along, but they expect us to know that they know it's all for show."

  Hannah laughed coldly. "Like the ambassador's very democratic coffee mug that everyone knows he'll never use. Hang the window dressing well enough, and everyone can pretend they think it's real, and no one has to lose face."

  "Yeah. Except sometimes guilty people are very good at finding elaborate ways to act innocent. One--or both of them, I suppose--could be putting on a very brilliant and sophisticated act. But maybe they haven't really allowed for the way reality musses up the window dressing sometimes."

  "It sure as hell did this time. And the damnable thing is that I'm sure our little chat with Brox would go better if we had had a chance to read Zhen Chi's report first. But we don't dare postpone the first meeting, or everyone on the Kendari side will go even more paranoid. So, here we go
in, not knowing everything our side knows. Ain't it grand, how everything always works out for the best?"

  She stepped to the lock panel on the inner door and started punching keys.

  FOURTEEN

  THE LAND OF MIRRORS

  Inquirist Brox 231 greeted his two rivals and colleagues, who were obviously relieved to be led to a side room of the ops center. That suited him as well. He certainly didn't want to have their meeting in the crime scene area itself. The side room was for small secure meetings. It had a split-height table--one side suited to a comfortable Kendari working height, and the other, slightly higher, intended for seated humans. They all went in, sat down, and got right to it.

  "Here," said Brox, pulling out a human-built datapad, "are the first fruits of our collaboration, at least from our side of things."

  "Good. Thank you, Brox," said Special Agent Hannah Wolfson.

  Brox felt his insides go just a bit cold. He prided himself on his knowledge of human gestural language, voice tone, and other clues to emotional state. And every cue he was picking up from Hannah Wolfson told him that she wasn't happy about what she was about to say--and that he wouldn't be happy either.

  "But before we get to that," Wolfson went on, "we need to talk motive just for a moment. Some sort of theory of the crime. Based on what we've got so far--the identity of the victim, the location of the crime and who had access to it, the timing and circumstances surrounding the crime, and apparent means used to kill the victim--take all that together. You've had more time to think about it than we. What does it all say to you? What's your theory of the crime?"

  Brox froze up, staring straight at Hannah Wolfson, his eyes locked with hers. Brox's ancestors were pack predators, and Wolfson's were little better than scavengers, gatherers of roots and nuts--but in that moment, he felt as if he were the prey, frozen in the gaze of the hunter who was about to take him down.

  He forced himself once again to reach into his rapidly depleting reservoir of cool and calm, and the moment passed. "The obvious, surface motive would appear to be to cause a rift between your people and mine--or rather, to make the existing rift wider. It was made to appear that one of your people killed one of mine in a particularly cruel way that would be easy for a human to manage but much more difficult for a Kendari--if for no other reason than that your people ship coffee and tea to all of your posts a thousand kilograms at a time--while we of course do not. A Kendari can get caffeine, and can handle it safely with reasonable precautions--but it would be much more difficult, and the safety precautions themselves would add to the risk of detection. A discarded pair of surgical gloves, or a respirator mask that had caffeine dust clogged in the filters, for example."

  "So you think a human did it."

  "I did not say that. I was careful to speak of the surface motivation. The manner in which the murder was committed was so crude as to be unbelievable--to the point where one could posit the theory that the means of murder were meant as a double-blind--a human, perhaps one of the BSI Special Agents, kills Emelza and leaves clues that point so obviously toward a BSI agent that no one can believe it because we assume no BSI agent would be fool enough to leave such obvious clues behind."

  "Is that what you believe happened?"

  "No. It's simply too elaborate, too complex. And I would suggest it would require a contrary mixture of political and personal motives. If the motive was to disrupt human-Kendari cooperation, and the goal was to make it look like one of you killed one of us, the killer, whoever it was, would want the clues to point unambiguously at a human assailant, preferably one with a direct connection to the human government. A BSI agent would do nicely. But the idea of making the clues so obvious that no one believes them would be counterproductive to that goal."

  "Unless the killer concluded that creating uncertainty, and destroying the small amount of trust between the two sides would do the job equally well," Hannah Wolfson suggested.

  "And then we are off into the land of mirrors," said Brox, "where every move is a feint and a deception, where every arrow that points north is meant to fool us into trotting south, but we know that, so we gallop north, but our enemies know that, and therefore the gambit to make us gallop north was meant to prevent us from walking south--"

  "Until we are so frozen by indecision that we fail to move at all," put in Hannah, "and perhaps that was the goal of our enemies, and so we dare not stay still--"

  "And by then we have forgotten that our original plan was to march west," put in Jamie Mendez in a voice so low it was almost a growl. "We should pursue our own goals and not be herded about by ghosts and phantom conspiracies."

  "I agree," said Hannah Wolfson. "But even that is far from easy." She looked back toward Brox. "Do you see any other motive for committing this crime in this way?"

  "If someone wished to--to kill Emelza for some other reason--this is difficult for me--perhaps for a personal or emotional reason--then that person might well seek to disguise it as a political murder in order to avoid detection." He took a deep breath and stamped his right forefoot on the floor. "Let us not play a game. If I were to commit this crime because--because--"

  "Because of whatever," said Hannah, in an oddly gentle voice. "Because we are investigators who know how many murders are committed by family members and lovers and the like. Because it is a fact, and a statistic. But not because we know of or suspect anything dark or difficult between you and your intended. Because we are obliged by duty to examine the possibility and for no other reason."

  "I thank you, most deeply, for those words. They help. If I were to commit this crime for whatever reason, or if another Kendari were jealous, or perhaps some other Kendari or human had some other deep, personal, emotional motive, it is possible they might choose to disguise the crime as political."

  "It would take a very rare and dangerous sort of human to commit what might be considered a crime of passion in this cold and calculating a manner. Would that be true of Kendari?"

  Brox clenched his fist and fought down the impulse to shout, to scream, This was my intended, this was my Emelza. He dared not indulge that desire. "Most definitely," he said in a calm and dispassionate voice. "I have studied human crime, and murder, and found much that was familiar. As with your people, our crimes of passion are--are passionate. An impulsive act, driven by the need for emotional release, the drive to let something out."

  Jamie leaned forward toward Brox and looked from him to Hannah. "Hold it, both of you. Let's save some time and stop torturing ourselves and each other. I'll say it short and fast and we can move on. Assume for the moment that we don't believe a BSI agent would be dumb enough to leave that many clues pointing to himself, and the most likely possible motives we're left with are someone trying to break up the negotiations--but what you two haven't said was that making it look like a human killed a Kendari would have to improve the odds of the Kendari snagging Pentam.

  "Alternately, perhaps Emelza knew something, had some bit of knowledge, that might sway the decision. Maybe someone, on one side or the other, felt she needed to be silenced. We could dream up a bunch of other political motivations, but that's a good start. Then there's the personal angle--and I don't know enough about Kendari mores and customs and love affairs and so on to speculate. But someone could have killed her for personal reasons, and made it look like a political murder to throw us off the scent.

  "We also have to look at who had easy access to the crime scene and the victim." Jamie Mendez slumped back in his chair. "The short form is that we all know perfectly well you're the best fit for all of that stuff. I believe very strongly that you didn't do it, and that goes for Hannah too, I'm sure--"

  "It does," Hannah Wolfson agreed.

  "--But it's not about what we believe--it's about what we can prove. And, I have to say, Hannah and I have both believed things that turned out to be wrong. We can't exclude you as a suspect--but we can't exclude you as an investigator, either. We trust you--but we can't trust you absolutely in thi
s situation."

  "I thank you for your frankness, and your understandably limited support," Brox said. "I would point out that it would be quite difficult for me--or any Kendari--to steal coffee and a coffee mug from the human compound. I'd remind you that no caffeine products of any kind are permitted in this building, for obvious reasons. We were not exactly given free rein of the rest of the facilities--and, as you say, we dare not deal with anything containing caffeine without taking very careful precautions."

  "Those objections are quite valid," said Hannah Wolfson, "but whatever the motive for this crime, if we assume it wasn't just Frank Milkowski grabbing a Kendari and forcing coffee into her mouth--and I wouldn't want to try that with a Kendari--this was a carefully planned crime, staged to make it look like something it wasn't. Whoever did it took his or her time, and chose the moment. If it took forty days to collect the materials--pilfer a cup someone had left out, filch a jar of instant coffee from the trash--so be it."

  Hannah Wolfson went on. "Or else the killer came upon the cup and the coffee accidentally, or from some other source outside the embassy compound. There are any number of humans living just up the road. Buying or stealing coffee from them would be no problem. And I've seen at least four of those BSI souvenir mugs floating around the embassy compound. My guess is they are given out to all sorts of people as souvenirs. They're very popular with visitors to BSI HQ."

  Brox cocked his head to one side and turned his hands upward. "You might as well know now that I have one at my workstall back in our main embassy building. And Emelza had one as well. They are a convenient size for holding writing instruments, and there is--or at least was--a certain ironic humor in decorating our workstalls with the sign of the enemy. Both of those mugs are still there, as of this morning. I checked. But certainly there could be others in our embassy. There probably are. Your people seemed to enjoy handing them out. So yes, I could have done it. But I didn't."