Man-Kzin Wars 9

by Larry Niven

  No, I corrected myself, he wasn’t a human being, he was a kzin, an alien carnivore whose species was dedicated to the enslavement of mine. Did that make a difference? Perhaps it did. After all, it was his own species working him over. Why did it disturb me then?

  Because I’m a cop and so was Hunter-of-Outlaws and cops don’t beat up prisoners to extract confessions—not where I come from.

  Not on Earth, but they did on Wunderland and kzinti still weren’t human. It wasn’t for me to tell them how to run their internal affairs. I didn’t even know if a kzin would respond to a nonviolent interrogation; maybe this was the only way that worked.

  I still didn’t like it.

  I pushed the unease away. We had the evidence, we had the murderer, soon we would have the confession.

  Except…The hyperdrive question kept buzzing around in the back of my head. If Miranda’s death was connected with a spy ring that Hunter was covering for, how better than to hand me a culprit and dump the blame on a defunct cult? It wouldn’t be hard for them to find a volunteer amid the despairing, honour-starved kzin of Tiamat.

  That thought decided me. I wasn’t going to accept confessions at face value. After Hunter was through with his interrogation, I’d pass the suspect up to the frightening efficiencies of UN Intelligence. I’d have an answer I could trust by shift-end tomorrow.

  Case closed.

  I opened the next file, someone was reprogging stolen keycards and draining citizens’ bank accounts. It would take a lot of specialized knowledge, electronics, crypto and bank procedures at least. I set up some search keys and began screening dossiers, trying to tune out the sounds coming through the wall.

  After an hour I’d made some good progress, narrowing down the field to about two hundred possibles. I picked the dozen who seemed most likely and set up a movement trace to link them with fraudulent withdrawals. While the trace ran in the background, I worked the opposite angle, starting with those who had access and linking that data back to the required skills. Hopefully I would get cross-matches and a start point for my investigation. I stopped noticing the violence next door until it ended.

  I was trying to put my finger on the absence when Hunter strode in. He had a nasty slash on his chest and his expression was even less pleased than before. He didn’t waste time. “We have a confession.”

  I wasn’t surprised. “Good, put him in confinement and I’ll get the proceedings drawn up.” Hunter was in no mood for paperwork. That was a help. I’d have the suspect shipped up to UNF Intel quickly and quietly and he wouldn’t even know I’d done it.

  “Slave-of-Kdapt has confessed to no crime against human law.”

  “What?” I was dumbfounded.

  “He is not the criminal we seek.”

  I gestured mutely at the box containing Miranda’s remains.

  “He tried to imply that he had slain the human Miranda Holtzman himself. He has now admitted that he bought the skin from a human. Not only did he accept carrion from…” he paused, substituting words “…another species and claim it as hunt-prey, he lied to hide his shame. That even the lowest coward could sink to such!” He paced and spat curses in the Heros’ Tongue.

  “Let me get this straight. He pretended that he did kill Miranda, but he didn’t really? Why would he do that? He must know the penalties he’s playing with.”

  “He has the liver of a sthondat and less honor. We pitiful survivors of K’Shai are thrice cursed by the Fanged God.” He snarled again, twitching his tail and raking the air with his claws.

  I decided to let the point go. The complexities of kzinti honour weren’t my concern. The fact was, Slave-of-Kdapt wasn’t a fall guy for kzin intelligence, or at least if he was, Hunter-of-Outlaws wasn’t involved in the coverup. That was the good news. The bad news was the killer was still unknown, still at large, and human.

  Case reopened.

  I filed my account-fraud data and went over the interrogation with Hunter. Slave-of-Kdapt had been Machine Technician. He was known to be a Kdaptist. He’d been caught because he’d started bragging about “following the true Kdapt faith.” Tracker was quick to pick up on this spoor and the pursuit had been easy. Kdapt rituals with human sacrifice had been forbidden by the Conservors as disruptive of the essential kzin/human relationship but the hapless Technician’s real crime in kzin eyes was trying to gain status through lying.

  Hunter and Tracker were both too wound up with bloodlust for my taste. It was another hour till shift end but I sent them off to catch a ztigor in the Tigertown park. I wanted to talk to Slave-of-Kdapt myself and see what I could learn. They left, snarling amicably to each other. I called their battered prisoner in, had him make himself comfortable and began. I started by pulling up the schitzies I’d culled from the databank. Slave-of-Kdapt didn’t finger any as the one who’d sold him the skin but admitted he couldn’t always tell humans apart. His own description was almost uselessly vague and it fit a Belter, not a Wunderlander. He was pathetically eager to please, as though he could save himself through cooperation. Hunter thought he’d committed no human crime, but I could think of a dozen charges to bring against him ranging from concealing evidence to accessory to murder. For a kzin the penalties ranged from a short life in a labour camp to quick death in front of a firing squad. Even that was better than the fate his fellows had in store for him. Slave-of-Kdapt had violated his honour code. He would be an outcast. Eventually he would starve or die of misery or fall afoul of another kzin and be torn to shreds.

  I questioned him thoroughly and fruitlessly. I was used to dealing with kzin like Hunter, whose mind stalked problems like game and pounced on solutions with precision and clarity. Machine Technician wasn’t dull exactly—just woefully naive and uncurious beyond his narrow specialty.

  He knew of other Kdaptists but didn’t think any of them had anything to do with the murder or any other crime. They all followed the Conservor’s dictum that human laws be respected. He didn’t know Miranda Holtzman or anyone who might want to kill her. He didn’t have any enemies who might be trying to frame him for her murder. He’d lied about killing her because he wanted the honour it would bring. Evidently that didn’t violate the Conservor’s dictum because it broke no human law—so he’d thought. Of course he realized he’d broken his honour code but he didn’t think he’d get caught at that. Obviously he hadn’t thought out the consequences of his claim becoming well known. His only motivation was status—he wanted more space and a kzinrett. It was the human who sold him the skin who’d suggested that Miranda’s skin and the false prey-claim could be the way to achieve that. What humans would know he was a Kdaptist? He didn’t know, he’d made no particular secret of it. He was sure he didn’t recognize the human involved? Absolutely.

  There was one correlate. Machine Technician’s job was servicing loading equipment in the down-axis hub. That put him just five hundred meters from the point Miranda’s body was found. It might be coincidence, but it was the only link I had.

  I didn’t charge him, I bought him a ticket to Wunderland. There were thousands of miles of wilderness down there, where Machine Technician could become Trail Stalker or Chaser-of-Gagrumphs with all the space he wanted and his own kzinrett if he could find one. Slave-of-Kdapt and dishonor would be forgotten. Pity for criminals is something a cop can’t afford. Those feelings are reserved for the victims, but Machine Technician was as much a victim as Miranda. He’d been set up to take the fall, and he would have played his part to the hilt and to the death if Hunter-of-Outlaws’ thorough…interrogation…hadn’t allowed the truth to come out.

  Or, come to think of it, the interrogation I had planned for him with UN Intelligence. Their methods are much gentler, but they’re a lot less pleasant on balance. Machine Technician was lucky he’d been caught by one of his own.

  He left, thanking me with embarrassing profusion. The one thing worse than an arrogant, dominant kzin is a pathetically humble one.

  When he was gone, I went over the data and summed
up.

  Item: A male Wunderlander had left the Inferno with Miranda—if our only two witnesses were to be believed.

  Item: A male Belter had sold her skin to Machine Technician, someone who knew him well enough to know he was vulnerable to this particular frame-up, but not so well that the kzin had recognized him.

  Item: Machine Technician’s admittedly inadequate description of the suspect was at considerable odds with the couple’s.

  So if there were two people involved, that pointed to a conspiracy and away from a schitz. If not, it pointed back at Jayce and Tanya. I still lacked too many pieces of the puzzle. I didn’t even have a motive.

  Tammy stuck her head in the door. “I hear you got a Kdaptist confession.”

  “Sort of. What we didn’t get was a culprit.”

  “I heard that too. What’s up?”

  “Hunter tracked down this kzin who claimed he’d killed Miranda. It turns out all he really did was buy her skin from a human and try to claim credit.”

  “So he’s an accessory after the fact. Why did you send him to Wunderland?”

  “You hear a lot.”

  She grinned. “I keep my ears open.”

  “He was set up and framed, pure and simple. Now that his honour is compromised he’s an outcast up here. I thought I’d give him another chance.”

  “What about using him as a witness?”

  “Wunderland is still the safest place for him. How long would he have on Tiamat?”

  She winced. “Good point. Well, I have to say I’m glad to hear it wasn’t a Kdaptist after all.”

  I cocked my head. “Why is that?”

  She held up her beltcomp. “Here’s all the data I’ve tracked down on the Kdapt cult and current Kzin intelligence operations.” She held her other hand up, thumb and forefinger forming an empty circle. “Zero.”

  “Sorry for the goose chase.”

  She smiled. “Don’t be.” She waved the beltcomp. “I’ve got a new contact and some leverage for a couple more out of it anyway. So where are we now?”

  “We know there are at least two people involved. They must have planned to frame Machine Technician in advance of the killing—that’s not the sort of detail you work out while you’re hiding in a transport tunnel with a corpse. So Miranda wasn’t chosen at random. That puts us back to Vorden and Koffman the love-birds, unless someone—some group—wanted her dead for a specific reason.”

  “It can’t be the couple.” She waved at the composite holo on the screen. “This is a male.”

  “We only have their testimony to say there’s a second male. Anyway, I think it would be pretty easy to fool Machine Technician on that aspect. Loose clothing would be all it would take.”

  “Visually, yah, but he could smell the difference. But you’re right about the testimony.”

  “Suppose it’s a group for the sake of argument. They must have had a specific reason they wanted her dead.”

  “So what’s the reason?”

  “That’s what we need to know. Something she knew or something she’d done. She just wasn’t up here long enough to have become involved in anything serious. Trist Materials doesn’t handle anything worth killing for and if they did the target wouldn’t be their brand-new exchange student.”

  “So it must have been something she was already involved with down on Wunderland.”

  “Right. Especially since a Wunderlander is a major suspect.”

  “What groups operate both groundside and in the Belt?”

  I considered. “Anyone could send up an assassin. Any of the crime rings, the Isolationists, Kzin intelligence, collabo underground, collabo hunters. Even a few branches of the Provisional Government if she crossed the wrong people.”

  She shook her head. “We know it’s not the tabbies at least. The killers are human.”

  “But they could be working for the kzinti.”

  “Get serious. They tried to frame a kzin for the crime and ruined his honour in the process. If they were working for the kzinti, their bosses would eat them when they found out. Alive.”

  “Good point.”

  “We’ve got a lead, though. If she was killed by Wunderland assassins, they must have come up between her arrival and her death. That’s a narrow window. Cross-check the Inferno’s attendance list with the passenger manifests for every ship that arrived during that time period.”

  I entered the search request and we watched the screen while it collected the data and compared it. It came up NO MATCHES.

  “Maybe they knew she was coming. Try the previous six weeks.”

  I tapped in the query. It took a little longer this time because there was more data to retrieve and sort. The result was the same. NO MATCHES.

  “Damn!” I cleared the screen.

  “Not damn. Now we know the killer was already here. That means we’ve got to be dealing with an organization that’s already in the Swarm. Smugglers for one of the crime rings probably.”

  “We’ll have to get the Provopolizei involved. Get them to dig out a contact list for us.”

  “Attack it from both sides. Run a movement trace on every person who went through the Inferno that night too.”

  “I already thought of that. It’ll take hours to run and weeks to analyze.”

  “So what have you got to lose? Run it overnight and we’ll start the Goldskins on it in the morning. If we get a match, we’ll refocus. At least you won’t be totally reliant on the Provos.”

  She was right, of course. I wrote a cable to the ARM on Wunderland instead of the Provopolizei. It was adding another bureaucratic step, since they’d have to go to the Provos anyway, but I knew people I could trust in the ARM—people who could smell an evolving coverup. Then I set up my board to run the trace and let it go. Somewhere in the mass of data that it would generate would be the critical clue. I’d just had to find it—if the murderer was in fact the man she left with and if he didn’t have a false ident. It would be hours before the trace was done. I screened Suze and made a date for dinner.

  We met at the same Earth cuisine restaurant as before. Why not? The atmosphere was intimate and the menu inviting. Suze was already waiting when I got there. She greeted me with a kiss and asked, “How’s the case going?”

  “Well, we got a kzin who confessed to the crime.”

  “So you’re done?”

  “Well, not exactly. It seems he was confessing because he thought he’d gain status by it. He didn’t actually do it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t think he understood himself.”

  “So where do you go from here?”

  “Good question. Right now I’m running a movement trace on everyone who went through the Inferno that night. The murderer has got to be in there somewhere, unless he used a false ID.”

  “How do you know the man she left with is the killer?”

  “Miranda wasn’t just a random victim; someone wanted her dead for a reason. They watched her, figured out her movements and set her up.”

  “She was just a kid! Why would anyone want to kill her?” Her eyes showed worry.

  “We don’t know yet. Someone she was involved with on Wunderland, a criminal group.”

  “Do you know which group?”

  “I haven’t got a clue right now.”

  “I think that’s your problem alright.” The concern went away and her smile developed those mischievous dimples.

  I missed the joke and riposted with a brilliant, “What?”

  “You haven’t got a clue.”

  I threw a miniature shrimp from my stir fry at her. I didn’t throw it hard but I grossly misjudged the gravity field and the morsel went flying past her on a high, slow trajectory that eventually intersected the back of a balding patron’s head. He looked around in irritated surprise while I tried to look oblivious and Suze suppressed giggles with difficulty.

  It became a game after that. We took turns picking targets and launching shrimp at them. The low light l
evel helped conceal our nefarious intent but the fifth time the maitre d’ caught us and we were asked firmly to leave. Suze asked him if he’d call the ARM if we refused at which we both collapsed into gales of laughter. He turned red and looked ready to burst but she got ahold of herself and apologized, then smoothed over his feelings by insisting on being allowed to buy two liters of their crumbleberry cream pudding before going because it was so incomparably good. On the way down to the tube station she poked me in the ribs.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have picked the maitre d’ as a target.”

  “You’re the one who threw the shrimp while he was looking.”

  “I had to. He was already watching us to see if we were the ones doing the throwing.”

  “No need to confirm his suspicions.”

  “He wasn’t suspicious, he knew. He was just waiting to catch us.”

  “All the more reason not to hit him with a shrimp.”

  “He was a witness. I couldn’t let him live,” she said with mock ferocity.

  “The shrimp or the maitre d’?” I asked innocently.

  She laughed and poked me again. I caught her around the waist and held her and we walked arm in arm to the tube car, giggling and kissing. It wasn’t in the best traditions of the ARM for Tiamat Station’s Chief of Investigation to go around in public acting like a giddy teenager. Well, hopefully nobody knew who I was. Anyway, I felt better than I had since I’d arrived at Alpha Centauri and if anyone did notice me I didn’t care.

  Back at her apt she called, “Dessert!”, opened the pudding container and sampled some with her fingers, then gave me a crumbleberry-flavored kiss. In the process some of the pudding spilled on her jumpsuit. That was an invitation if I ever saw one so I unsealed it and spilled some more pudding, then kissed it off. We fell to the floor into a sticky tangle of clothes and pudding, and passion. That led to the shower and steam and more passion which in turn led to the bed, cuddling, contentment and…love?