by Timothy Zahn
“Thank you,” he said, glowering briefly at Morse as he closed his bag. “I’ll leave a report with one of the conductors before we reach Bellis.”
He stepped to the doorway. The conductor standing watch from the corridor tapped his seven-legged way to the side to let him pass, then resumed his silent vigil. “Thank you so very much,” Morse growled, unloading a standard-issue ESS glare at me with both barrels. “You have any idea how important a timely autopsy is in collecting and preserving evidence?”
“Absolutely,” I assured him. “I also know it’s no less important than a close examination of the crime scene. You probably aren’t going to get that, either.”
Morse looked around the room as if suddenly remembering where we were. “You’re right. I’ll need the Spiders to detach the car.”
“Good luck,” I said. “Unfortunately, this train has a schedule to keep, and that schedule includes a compartment car pulling out with the rest of it. If they’ve got a spare at Bellis they can throw in on the spur of the moment, you might get lucky. Otherwise, forget it.”
Morse threw a hooded glare at the conductor in the doorway. “There should be agreements to cover this sort of thing,” he muttered.
“There should be free beer and onion rings at every roadside pub, too,” I said. “You don’t always get what you want.”
“Look—”
“Meanwhile, what we do have is twenty-two hours until we reach Bellis and a couple of carloads of first-class passengers,” I interrupted him. “We should probably start with interviews in the next car back. See if anyone remembers who’s been coming in and out of this one.”
“We should probably start?”
“You’d rather do it all yourself?” I shrugged. “Fine—you’re the one with the badge. Have fun.”
I started to turn away. As I did so his hand snaked out to catch my arm, a look of sudden recognition on his face. “Compton,” he said, making the name a curse. “Frank Compton? Damn—I knew you looked familiar.”
“You’re one hell of a detective,” I said, twisting my arm out of his grip.
“And you’re one hell of a bloody bastard,” he shot back.
I blinked. Even Losutu hadn’t reacted this strongly the first time I’d met him after the Yandro embarrassment. “So I’ve been told,” I said. “What does Yandro mean to you, anyway?”
His forehead furrowed slightly, then cleared. “That’s right,” he said, still growling. “You were involved with the Yandro thing, too, weren’t you?”
“It’s been a busy few years,” I said, frowning in turn. If he hadn’t been talking about Yandro, what had he been talking about? Nearly everyone who knew me at all knew me because I’d tried to blow the whistle on the UN’s Yandro colonization scam. “But this isn’t about me,” I added, gesturing to the wallet in his hand. “Did our mystery guest have a real name?”
For a couple of seconds Morse continued to stare at me. Then, almost reluctantly, he dropped his eyes back to the wallet. “According to this, his name was John Smith.”
I cocked an eyebrow. At least he’d told the truth about that. “Really?”
“Really,” Morse said, his voice odd. “Or it was Kevin Abrams, or Emile Dorfmann, or Homer LaGrange.”
“Come again?”
“Four IDs; four credit tabs,” Morse said. He held up a handful of cash sticks. “And just over a million dollars in cash.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Sounds like he was expecting to be on the buying end of the business transaction he mentioned.” I pointed toward the wallet. “May I?”
He hesitated, then handed it over. I sorted quickly through the contents. “At least we know he wasn’t murdered for his cash or credit tags,” I said, handing it back.
“Unless there used to be more than just four of the latter,” Morse countered. “Maybe someone was hoping to pick up a new identity.”
I shook my head. “The indentation pattern in the leather doesn’t show anything missing.”
He took another look at the wallet. “Yes, of course.”
“They’re excellent forgeries, though,” I said.
“That they are.” He gave me a speculative look. “Rather the sort of documents a former Westali investigator might know how to get hold of.”
“You’d better make up your mind as to which slot you want me in,” I warned. “You can’t tag me as his killer and as his loyal private watchdog, too.”
“Of course I can,” he said. “The case files are full of watchdogs who changed sides when the price was right.”
“Right. Whatever you say.” I turned and headed toward the Spider still standing in the doorway. “I still suggest you talk to the rest of the first-class passengers before we hit Bellis,” I added over my shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” Morse assured me, “I will.”
Motioning the Spider aside, I walked past into the corridor and returned to my compartment.
The divider between my room and Bayta’s was still closed as I locked the door behind me. But as I took off my shirt the curve couch collapsed into the wall, and the wall itself retracted into the side of the half bath to reveal Bayta standing facing me, her hands making nervous little twitching movements.
“You get all that?” I asked as I hung the shirt in the sonic cleaner. I might have picked up a few traces of Smith’s blood while we were working on him, and I wanted them gone before it occurred to Morse to confiscate my whole wardrobe as evidence.
“I was listening in through the conductor,” Bayta said, her voice tight. “What are we going to do?”
“For starters, we’re not going to worry about Morse,” I said. Crossing into her compartment, I took her arm and eased her gently back toward the bed. “What do the Spiders think of all this?”
“They’re concerned,” Bayta said, still looking troubled as she let me sit her down on the edge of the bed. “They’re really not sure what to do.”
“I thought the Spiders had a procedure for everything.”
She hunched her shoulders slightly. “The procedure in the case of a major crime is to turn the likely suspect over to his own people.”
I grimaced. “Ah.”
“Oh, don’t worry, they aren’t going to hand you over to Mr. Morse,” she promised. “Even if they wanted to, I certainly wouldn’t let them.”
“Thanks,” I said. That wasn’t just plucky assistant talk, I knew. Bayta had been raised by the Chahwyn, and was herself a strange sort of amalgamation of Human and Chahwyn minds and bodies. As such, she could pretty well order the Spiders around if and when she needed to.
But doing so in any obvious way would draw unwelcome attention, and attention was something we very much wanted to avoid right now. Far better if I could arrange things so that blatant manipulation of the system wouldn’t be necessary.
“But they can’t just take a whole car out of service, either,” she went on. “Keeping the trains on schedule is their first priority.”
“I know,” I said. “Any chance of substituting another car at Bellis, like I suggested to Morse?”
“Maybe, if they have a spare available,” she said. “They can send a message ahead when we stop at Helvanti.”
“Good.” Though even if they had a substitute available, they’d have less than forty-five minutes to swap out the cars and transfer all the passengers and their stuff. Even for Spiders, that would be pushing it. “Looks like we may have to do without a full crime-scene analysis for once,” I said. “Maybe that’s a good enough reason all by itself to kill him here instead of somewhere else.”
“Do you think we should mention that to Mr. Morse?”
“I’m sure it’ll eventually occur to him,” I said. “Meanwhile, we have more immediate problems to deal with. Starting with the fact that our plan of sneaking quietly into the Bellis system is now pretty well shot.”
Her throat tightened. “Oh,” she said.
“Well might you say ‘oh,’” I agreed. “We’ve got three stops betw
een here and Bellis. That’s three chances for someone to sniff out the story and load it into a data cylinder bound for the nearest Intragala News office. By the time we make Bellis, the sensational story of Mr. Smith’s murder will be on its way to every corner of the galaxy.”
“And Mr. Morse will make sure your name is in there somewhere,” she murmured.
“Definitely,” I said sourly. “Which means that if the Modhri isn’t already aware that we’re on this train, he will be well before we reach Bellis.”
“Which means we can’t go looking for Korak Fayr.”
“Not unless we want to do it with a parade of Modhran walkers behind us,” I agreed.
Bayta turned her head to gaze toward the compartment door. “Do you think that was why he killed Mr. Smith? To alert the rest of the mind?”
“Who says the Modhri was even involved?” I countered. “There is other crime still going on out there in the galaxy.”
“I suppose.” She shivered. “It seems like such a horrible way to kill someone.”
“It’s also very inefficient,” I said. “That’s why the only time you bother with it is for revenge or for information.”
“Information about what?”
I shrugged. “All I know is what Smith said before he died. He said someone wanted the Nemuti Lynx. Or maybe the third Lynx—he used both terms. He also mentioned someone named Daniel Mice.”
“Do you know this person?”
“Never heard of him,” I said. “But I’m starting to think I should correct that omission. Next station where we have time, I want you to get the stationmaster busy sifting through the master records. If there’s a Daniel Mice riding the Quadrail right now, I want to know it.”
“All right,” she said. “What about us?”
I grimaced. “As far as Fayr is concerned, the best thing we can do is turn around and go somewhere else.”
“You have someplace in mind?”
“Not really.”
For a moment we sat together in silence. Then Bayta got up and walked to the display window, gazing out at the faintly lit Tube surface rushing past. “Could Mr. Morse himself be involved?” she asked.
“There were no obvious blood spatters on his clothing,” I told her. “And his hands didn’t show any bruising or other marks.”
“Yet he seems very anxious to put the blame on you.”
“Unfortunately, I’m a very logical suspect,” I said. “I was on the scene, and I have the training to know how to do this.”
“But you have no motive.”
“He’s probably working on that as we speak,” I said. “What’s he doing right now, by the way?”
“He’s in the first first-class coach car,” she said, frowning in concentration. “He’s asking one of the Halkas if he saw anyone going into or coming out of our car in the past three hours.”
“Can you get that conductor to stay with him?”
“He was already planning to do that.”
Which meant Bayta would be able to listen in on Morse’s investigation via her handy little telepathic link. “Good,” I said. “Be sure to take notes.”
“I will.” Bayta hesitated. “Frank … what did Morse mean when he said you were involved with the Yandro incident, too?”
“Obviously, he must have originally recognized my name from somewhere else.”
“Obviously,” she said patiently. “I was asking where that someplace was.”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Whatever it was, though, he wasn’t remembering it fondly.”
Her throat tightened. “He’s not going to let you go on this, is he?”
“I’m sure he’ll give it his best shot,” I said. “But it’s over twenty hours to Bellis. We’ll think of something.”
THREE
Twenty hours later, I still hadn’t thought of anything. Morse, unfortunately, had.
He was waiting on the platform with a pair of well-dressed Bellidos as Bayta and I disembarked from our car. The Bellidos were looking very solemn, their dark eyes staring hard at me out of their striped chipmunk faces.
The typical Bellido was shorter than the typical Human, which meant they were looking up at me. But that particular stare had an amazingly effective leveling effect.
Standing a few paces behind them was the lady politician who’d discovered Smith’s body, still looking a little shaken. “There he is,” Morse said to the Bellidos, pointing at me. “That’s Mr. Frank Compton.”
“Can I help you?” I asked, giving the Bellidos a quick once-over as Bayta and I walked up to the group. Along with their expensive clothing, each of the two aliens was wearing a double shoulder holster on each arm, making a total of eight small-caliber handguns between them.
Not real guns, of course. The Spiders banned weapons of any sort aboard their trains, and had a highly sophisticated layered sensor array in every Tube station to enforce that edict. The Bellidos’ real guns were safely secured in lockboxes beneath the cars, which the drudge Spiders were busy packing aboard one of the outgoing cargo shuttles for shipment to the transfer station floating in space a hundred kilometers away.
But guns were an indication of Belldic social rank, and the soft plastic substitute guns currently riding the Bellidos’ holsters were no less valid a mark of their status than were the real things.
Four guns apiece implied that status was pretty high. Whatever Morse had up his sleeve, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it.
I was right. “Mr. Compton is under suspicion of felony murder,” Morse informed the aliens. “I’m going to go and speak to the stationmaster about having him officially handed into my custody for return to the Terran Confederation. But in case I can’t persuade him, I wanted to lodge a formal warning with the Bellidosh Estates-General as to who and what this man is.”
“Who he is and what he might be,” I corrected stiffly. “Mr. Morse has absolutely no evidence against me.”
“Mr. Compton had both opportunity and ability,” Morse countered. “Belldic law, if I’m not mistaken, allows extradition or temporary confinement under such indicators while an investigation is launched.”
“It does,” one of the Bellidos confirmed, eyeing me thoughtfully.
I eyed him right back with all the innocence I could dredge up at such short notice, and sent a few mental daggers in Morse’s direction. I’d already decided we weren’t going to Bellis, but there had still been the option of getting off somewhere else in the Estates-General and backtracking again after the uproar over Smith’s murder had died down.
Now, that option was also down the plumbing. The minute I stepped onto a shuttle and headed for any Belldic transfer station I would be out of Spider jurisdiction. If Morse could persuade the Bellidos to arrest me and extradite me over to him, he could bypass the Spiders completely.
A little obfuscation was clearly called for. “What Mr. Morse fails to mention is that everyone with a compartment on this train had the same level of opportunity that I had,” I pointed out.
“A moot point, since everyone else is continuing on,” Morse said before either of the Bellidos could respond. “All we can do here is to send a warning on ahead to the various Belldic stations down the line.” He looked expectantly at me, and I could tell he was dying for me to also bring up the passengers in the other two first-class coaches as possible suspects.
Fat chance. I already knew from Bayta and her eavesdropping conductor that no one in either car remembered seeing anybody leave the compartment car during the hour before Smith’s body had been discovered.
Obviously, they’d simply forgotten. People did that a lot, and every cop knew it. But just the same there was no point in offering Morse the opportunity to add that bit of weight to the case against me. “Still, we do know of at least one person who entered the compartment car prior to the discovery of the crime,” I said instead.
“Who?” one of the Bellidos asked.
I pointed to the lady politician still hovering behind them. “He
r.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “What did you say?” she demanded. Unlike her screaming voice, her demanding voice was solidly in upper-crust territory.
“Just stating facts, ma’am,” I said mildly.
“Lady Dorchester had nothing to do with the crime,” Morse put in hurriedly. “I can personally vouch for her.”
“So what?” I scoffed. “Bayta here can personally vouch for me, too. That proves nothing.”
The mental daggers I’d been sending Morse earlier reversed direction. “This is nothing but an attempt to muddy the waters,” he ground out. “I’ve shown you my credentials. If Mr. Compton has any of his own—”
“Excuse me, but Mr. Compton and I have business to attend to,” Bayta spoke up unexpectedly. “You three go ahead and continue your discussion.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Morse growled. “Until this is settled you can’t go anywhere unattended.”
“What’s to settle?” I countered. I had no idea where Bayta was going with this, but I was willing to play along. “As long as we’re still in the Tube none of you has any right to hinder our movements.”
“That may change momentarily,” Morse warned darkly.
“When it does, be sure and let me know,” I said. “Until then, we have lives to lead. Honored sirs; Lady Dorchester,” I added, nodding in turn to the Bellidos and the woman. Taking Bayta’s arm, I turned us in the general direction of the stationmaster’s building and started walking.
I half expected Morse to try to stop us, but he didn’t. I gave us five or six steps worth of distance, then leaned my head toward Bayta. “What’s up?” I asked quietly.
Her answer was to pull subtly on my arm, changing our course a few degrees to the left. “Those hatchways,” she murmured, nodding toward a set of shuttle hatchways fifty meters ahead.
I craned my neck to look over a line of goose-feathered Pirks that were hurrying past across our path. Two of the hatchways had the glowing rims that proclaimed the presence of docked shuttles. A crowd of travelers had gathered in the area, waiting their turn to embark for the transfer station and the torchliners that would take them to their ultimate destinations here in the Estates-General’s capital system. As I watched, one of the two glowing hatchways opened and began disgorging a line of passengers, upper-class Bellidos with lots of plastic guns riding beneath their arms. “What about them?” I asked Bayta.