by John Zakour
“Ona?” Foraa said.
“What is it?”
“Your renewed familial spirit is drowning one of Threa’s nymphs.”
Ona looked down and saw the now unconscious nymph in the wine glass that she was filling.
“Oh, for Gates’ sake.”
She plucked the soaked nymph out of the glass with two fingers and tossed it away. It bounced and skittered across the floor and under the cupboard.
“I hope it has a hangover when it wakes up,” she said. Threa, this glass will be yours.”
She quickly filled the remaining glasses and gave them to each of her sisters.
“Now stand up and raise your glasses. I’d like to propose a toast,” she said. “This is the original part.”
The sisters stood and reluctantly did as they were told.
“To us,” Ona said. “To making the most of what we have and to using it to make this world a better place.”
“Here, here,” Threa said.
Twoa, Threa, and Foraa raised their glasses to drink but stopped when Ona continued.
“And to the joy that we create through our works and all the good it does for humanity.”
“To joy and good works,” Twoa said.
The sisters raised their glasses then stopped again, as Ona continued.
“And most of all, to the personal euphoria we feel when we give selflessly of ourselves to help those less fortunate.”
“Oh, come on,” Foraa said. “I’m going to gag here.”
“Excuse me?”
“When have you ever given anything selflessly? When in your life have you ever done anything that hasn’t been carefully designed first and foremost to help yourself?”
“I beg your pardon.”
Foraa shook her head and waved her hand at Ona. “Nothing, forget it. Just go on.”
“I can’t believe you’d say that, Foraa,” Ona said. “I mean…after everything I’ve done for this world, after all the good that I’ve created with my wealth...”
“Ugh! I can't take it anymore,” Foraa said, raising her glass. “Let's just get this over with.”
She tossed her head back and took a long gulp from the glass.
The spasms began almost immediately.
Her head lurched forward and rivulets of the wine spilled down her chin like blood from a slashed artery. She dropped her glass as she grabbed at her throat, as though trying to rip the skin away.
“Foraa…” Twoa mumbled, through bored, pursed lips.
“Very funny, Foraa,” Ona said as she rolled her eyes. “I suppose you've never had fine wine before.”
Foraa kicked her chair and sent it skittering across the tile floor like a hardwood Louis the fourteenth cockroach caught in the light. Then she sank to her knees and clutched desperately at the table to keep her balance but only managed to pull her entire place setting down on top of her.
“Very dramatic, sister,” Threa said.
“This is why I never enjoyed our family dinners,” Ona mumbled.
“I take it she did this kind of thing a lot?” I asked Ona as we watched.
“At least twice a week growing up,” Ona replied. “Albeit never quite so convincingly.”
Back on the screen, Foraa was now laying on the floor, kicking her legs spastically like a spider in hot oil. She rolled onto her stomach and desperately pawed at the nearby puddle of spilled wine. I wouldn’t have recognized the action if I hadn’t already seen the crime scene but she was carefully drawing the sigils that I’d found beneath her hand. Watching her now, it was amazing that she was able to do it considering the pain she appeared to be in.
“What’s she doing there?” Ona asked.
“Her hand’s spasming,” I said uncomfortably. “I guess it’s a product of the poison.”
Ona nodded. I felt strange, keeping the sigils secret from the police and my client but right now their existence was the only advantage I had and I wasn’t going to share it until I knew what it meant.
Foraa's spasms stopped and she lay in the death-still position in which I’d found her earlier in the evening. Elsewhere in the dining room, Ona, Two and Threa applauded.
“Bravo,” Twoa said. “Your best performance ever.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Ona. “The one she did at Daddy’s funeral was very moving as well.”
Threa was the first to stop applauding. She leaned ever so slightly to where Foraa lay and the expression on her face did a fast fade from polite joy to uncertainty and concern.
“Foraa?”
Two of Threa’s nymphs, clearly reflecting their mistress’ change of mood, softly landed on Threa’s shoulders and stared at the prostrate Quad.
“Uh-oh,” they chirped.
Twoa moved quickly to her sister’s side but was careful not to disturb the body. “My super-hearing’s not picking up a heartbeat.”
“She’s not breathing,” Threa said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ona said. “She’s faking.”
“I don’t think so, Ona.”
“Oh, dear Goddess,” Threa mumbled.
One of the surveillance cameras was tight on Ona’s face as the realization struck her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one face go through so many emotions so quickly. Confusion, annoyance, disbelief, shock, fear, desperation, and I swear that she almost looked relieved for the briefest of nanos. Then her big eyes blinked once, her lower lip curled ever-so-slightly beneath her teeth like a faun seeking shelter beneath a tree, and she looked away. Sadness.
“Shall I continue with the playback?” the computer asked.
I turned my gaze away from the wallscreen and stared at the floor.
“That's enough for now,” I replied. “Download the entire thing, an hour before and an hour after what we just saw to my computer. I'll let the police know we have some new information for them.”
I turned to Ona and was taken aback to see tears on her face. She wiped them away from her purple cheeks with an elegant gesture and then stared at the moisture on her fingertips as though it were water from the moon.
“Well,” she said, “this is unexpected.”
It occurred to me then that that might well have been the first time in her life that Ona Thompson had ever cried and meant it.
10
We downloaded copies of the computer records to the SFPD. Tony was taking no chances and asked for all visual and audio records of the house for the twenty-four hours leading up to the murder. I had no doubt that he’d have his people comb every pixel of it. I was hoping that they wouldn’t find anything that I wouldn’t already know.
In any event, Tony was pleased with our disclosure of the records. It earned us some good will and I think it made him a lot more comfortable with the “share-and-share-alike” deal that we’d made.
After that HARV and I called it a night, especially since it was now well past dawn, and we headed home. I promised Ona that I’d be in touch with her later that afternoon. I also told her and her sisters not to talk to anyone about the murder. Tony had promised as well to keep the investigation quiet. He certainly didn’t want to deal with a media frenzy this early in the game. So I was hopeful that I’d be able to at least get my feet under me before the solid waste hit the ventilation system. This, I suppose was the second of my many mistakes (but I’ll get to that later).
Electra, not surprisingly, was gone when I returned home. She had left for work at the Children’s Clinic a couple hours earlier. I’d miss her warmth beside me, but at least I’d have some covers this time.
“Wake me in three hours,” I said to HARV as I undressed and fell onto the mattress.
HARV’s hologram appeared at the foot of the bed, making a big show of winding a hologram in the shape of an old-fashioned alarm clock. His presence in my head over the past year has given his personality a little more imagination (for lack of a better word). His thought patterns have changed subtly, although he’s loath to admit it.
“Is there anything I shoul
d do while you’re asleep?”
“Put together some background information on all of the Quads,” I said. “Find out how much they really dislike one another. See what you can find as well on the household staff, that W guy. What’s-his-face butler.”
“Wintercrescenhavenshivershamshawjamison.”
“Whatever. And the security duo, the Pfauhans. And while you’re at it, see what you can find on that ape.”
“Check, the butler, the identical twin cousin security experts, and the intellect-enhanced, silver back mountain gorilla named, Opie. The usual suspects.”
“And find out if there are any outsiders that might have murderous axes to grind with any of the Quads.”
“You got it. Although I doubt we’re looking at the work of an outsider here.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “It would be too difficult to engineer this from the outside.”
HARV’s eyes lit up a bit and he smiled.
“You know what we have here, don’t you, boss?”
“You mean aside from a mess?”
“We have a puzzle.”
“Yes, I guess we do,” I said.
“An exercise in deduction, a riddle of time, space, and action, an obfuscated equation of reality.”
“An exhausted detective and an overly prosaic computer.”
HARV had begun to pace now, clearly excited at the idea of the mystery.
“Don’t you see, boss, this mystery is the kind of thing for which a computer such as I is best suited. This mystery is akin to a mathematical equation. You know the components involved. You know the starting point and you know the outcome. All that remains is to fill in the blanks. It’s real world mathematics.”
By this time, I had rolled over and stuck my head under the pillow. Unfortunately, I could still hear him (one of the downsides of having the interface in my brain).
“I doubt it will be that simple.”
“Of course it will,” HARV replied. “Oh, you don’t know how lucky you are to have me to help you with this. Logic is my specialty, as you know.”
“Whatever you say, HARV.”
“I may need to do some additional research in order to properly prepare for this. Is that okay with you?”
“Anything that keeps you quiet,” I said. “Just wake me in three hours.”
“No problem.”
His hologram disappeared, but as it did, I heard him say something that I had never heard from him before.
“This is going to be fun.”
Needless to say, I had trouble getting to sleep after that.
11
I eventually slept, although, again, it was fitful and dreamless and I woke feeling far less than refreshed, but somewhat more than exhausted, which, at this point was pretty much all I could hope for. I showered, dressed and was just about ready to face the world again when HARV’s hologram reappeared.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“Yes, but I’m sure that won’t last long. Anything happen while I slept?”
“The rain stopped.”
“What?”
“Somewhere between the hours of eight and nine this morning, the low pressure system over the city dissipated and the rain ended.”
“I didn’t know that was forecast.”
“It wasn’t,” HARV said. “But the meteorologists on the news shows are all currently ret-conning their forecasts from last night to imply that they foresaw the clearing.”
“Well, at least the day is starting out nicely. That will give us some wiggle room before everything goes to DOS again.”
“That’s the spirit. I’m sure Ms. Thompson will appreciate your optimism.”
“She didn’t hire me for optimism. She hired me to catch a killer?”
“Did she?”
“What does that mean?”
I walked to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee from the brewer. HARV has programmed the house computer to have fresh coffee brewed for me whenever I wake up. That sounds like a kindness, I know, and I try to think of it that way whenever I can. I am, however, also well aware that the interface in my head fires quicker when there’s caffeine in my bloodstream so HARV reaps a benefit from this too. This also explains why the house computer is always offering me freshly brewed iced tea. If it were up to HARV, I think I’d have a permanent caffeine drip in my arm. Is it any wonder I that I have trouble sleeping?
“It just seems to me,” HARV said, as his hologram reappeared next to me at the kitchen table (drinking his own holographic cup of coffee), “that Ms. Thompson didn’t actually instruct you to find her sister’s killer. She merely said that she had a problem.”
“And by ‘problem,’ of course, she meant that her sister had just been murdered,” I said.
“True,” HARV agreed. “But there are two ways one can perceive that statement. The first is that Foraa Thompson’s demise means that there is now a murderer at large who needs to be brought to justice. That would be the traditional view of the situation but catching the murderer is not necessarily Ms. Thompson’s problem. That’s a police matter.”
“Are you going somewhere with this?”
HARV ignored me and kept right on talking. I hate it when he does that and he knows it but that doesn’t seem to stop him. As a matter of fact, it seems to encourage him.
“The other way to view it is that when Ms. Thompson made the statement there was the dead body of a famous person in her dining room, which presents something of a cleaning problem.”
“And I’m the maid, so to speak?”
“Possibly.”
I went to the fridge and grabbed a sandwich from the rack. HARV has also programmed the house computer to keep a store of pre-made sandwiches at the ready. Apparently, protein and carbohydrates are also necessary to keep the interface at peak performance. This one I don’t mind so much because I really like the way the computer makes corned beef.
“Okay, I appreciate your careful study of the situation,” I said politely as I returned to the table, “so I’ll make two points here and then we’re abandoning this line of discussion and moving on to something that’s actually useful to our situation. One is that Ona wouldn’t need me to clean up the mess. Her pyramid…”
“Ziggurat.”
“Ziggurat, is a secluded fortress. She could have erased all evidence of Foraa’s death and no one would have been the wiser.”
“Except for her two sisters,” HARV said.
“Secondly, as you’ll recall Ona’s view of the situation was that someone had tried to kill her and that Foraa had inadvertently gotten in the way.”
“And you take her statements at face value?”
“I do until the validity becomes questionable.”
“It’s already questionable, boss.”
“Innocent until proven guilty, HARV. That’s our motto here.”
“Yes, especially if the party in question is rich and paying us handsomely.” HARV sat back in his chair and pretended to sip his coffee. “But before we move on, let me offer an alternative theory.”
I raised my hand to stop him and (for once) spoke before he could.
“Ona actually planned to murder all three of her sisters last night. Foraa jumped the gun and ruined it. Ona needed to cover herself to avoid suspicion, so she called me and is currently playing the part of the shocked, terrified and grieving innocent, manipulating me to her own purposes.”
HARV was silent for a nano.
“Well,…yes.”
“I’ve already thought of that.”
“Clearly. It doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me but right now it’s just one possibility of many. We’re going to explore all the possibilities. The fact that we’re doing it while on Ona’s payroll is superfluous.”
“And borderline improper.”
“My understanding is that we’ve been hired to find a killer. That’s what we’re going to do.”
“And if the killer turns out to be our empl
oyer?”
“Then we probably won’t get a bonus at the end. Until then, we get paid in advance and verify the credit transfers right away.”
The maidbot topped off my coffee cup. I pulled my chair a little closer to the table and rolled up my sleeves a little.
“Now, on to the nuts and bolts. Show me the weird drawing that Foraa made in the wine just before she died.”
HARV flashed a picture of the wine puddle onto the wall screen. I’d only caught a glimpse when I’d first discovered it, and it was interesting to stare at it now.
“Any idea what it is?” I asked.
“An equation of some sort,” HARV said, as he approached wall screen.
“It doesn’t look like any equation I’ve ever seen.”
“Admittedly, it’s odd, but as you can see, the parentheses, the division symbol and the footnoted numbers signifying exponents are all clear indications that this is mathematical in nature.” HARV stood in front of the screen and pointed at the various symbols as he spoke, like a college professor before a telescreen. “The mystery comes from the variables. This symbol here, for instance which is repeated several times, is a Chinese pictograph representing the sun. These three lines here are called the Awen symbol, which is druidic in origin. This one is an Egyptian hieroglyph known as the basket. This is the Russian symbol zheh, the Arabic Hlaa, the Hebrew Khaf, and this one, well, that’s the letter ‘v.’”
“Yeah, I kind of recognized it.”
“So although the symbols are uncommon, the structure and form is clearly mathematical.”
“Any idea what it means?”
“Not yet. The problem is that the equation doesn’t actually mean anything,” HARV said. “It begins in a straightforward manner but it becomes chaotic here. Almost random. Clearly, this requires more rumination.”
“Clearly. But let’s look at the big picture for a nano. Foraa wrote this just before she died.”
“We saw it for ourselves on the computer recording.”
“The question, then is why?”
Clearly, it’s a dying clue,” HARV said.