The Cause of Death

by Roger MacBride Allen

  * * *

  The other two were awake, in and out of the refresher, fed, and ready for the day by the time he came out again. There was a tray waiting for him, and he saw with regret that the food had dropped back from palatable to merely digestible again. But it was all he was going to get, and so he sat and forced it down, whatever it was, as best he could. Brox studiously looked the other way, apparently not finding the sight of a human eating all that pleasant.

  "One of Darsteel's flunkies brought a message in for you a few minutes ago," said Hannah.

  "What was it?" Jamie asked.

  "It was sealed, and still is," she said, handing him a message tube. "It was addressed to you."

  And if we don't want Brox opening messages that aren't for him, we can't do it either. "All right," said Jamie. He broke the seal on the end of the tube and fished out the note itself. He read it over quickly and summed it up out loud. "It's a quick update and an answer to one of my queries," he said. "It's date-stamped about ninety minutes ago. As of then, everyone on our list of suspects except the Stannlar has been removed from where they were staying and placed elsewhere, with reasonable but limited freedom of movement. There was no other good place to keep the Stannlar, and so Darsteel has left them where they were in the warehouse and posted guards all over the place. None of the suspects has said anything useful, and nothing remarkably suspicious was found when the places where they were living were searched. However, he does report that Georg's left shoe was found in Marta's quarters in the Keep. Not being all that familiar with human shoes, they tested it, and confirmed that it makes a print that is a mirror-image copy of the print found at the scene."

  "Very interesting," said Hannah. "So that pretty much nails down the fact that Georg was here at the Keep before the fire last night."

  It does a lot more than that, thought Jamie. But he wasn't quite ready to work on that side of the puzzle. "So it does," he said, and went no further.

  "Brox and I have been talking about the timing of the crime," said Hannah.

  "In reality, we have been doing our best to pass the time until the door opens up, and Darsteel brings us some news, and not just notes that tell us nothing we couldn't guess," said Brox. "Or, better still, until he lets us out of here."

  "I'm not so sure I want to get out just yet," said Hannah. "Feelings are likely to be running a little high just now--and the locals have already tried pretty hard to kill Agent Mendez and me."

  "I grant your point," Brox said.

  "What's this about the timing of the crime?" Jamie asked. "You mean its happening so soon before the execution deadline for Georg?"

  "That too," said Brox, "but we were mainly looking at events that happened before the murder, to see if any of them might have been the trigger, so to speak. Your arrival, for example. It might well be that someone in some faction feared that you might cause trouble for them. Perhaps someone who feared that you would suggest a solution to the Georg Hertzmann crisis."

  Jamie and Hannah exchanged looks. Jamie was startled to realize that his suggestion about Penitence was only a few hours old--and that Brox had very likely not heard about it yet. But should he hear about it now?

  "What do you think?" Hannah asked, engaging in a not particularly difficult bit of mind reading.

  "I think he's played pretty much straight with us, and it won't stay quiet for long, anyway."

  "That's about the way I figured it," said Hannah, "but I wanted to get your okay first."

  "Might I ask what in the soul's dark forest you are talking about?" Brox demanded.

  Jamie wasn't quite sure what a soul's dark forest might be, but he took the sense of the question. "I made a not-very-smart little suggestion toward the end of the meeting last night," he said, and quickly described his idea about sending Georg on a one-way trip to Penitence. Brox instantly understood its significance, and was not shy about sharing his opinion that Jamie had not been wise. He asked a series of sharp and detailed questions about how the Thelm reacted and what had happened next.

  "This is vital new information," said Brox when he had heard it all. "It was a serious failing on your part not to report it at once last night."

  Hannah let out a weary sigh. "You're right," she said. "But in our defense, we were a little busy with other issues. I don't even think it occurred to us that you didn't know it already."

  "How could I have?"

  Jamie resisted the temptation to laugh, or worse, answer that question. Brox could have known easily, through all sorts of means he might not want to talk about. "Let's just leave it there," he suggested. "We've told you now, and that ought to count for something."

  "Anyway, for the sake of argument," said Hannah, "let's assume that Jamie's bright idea about Penitence was the motive."

  "Let's not," Jamie said. "I don't want the Thelm's death to have been caused by my shooting my mouth off."

  "It was not," Brox said flatly. "It was caused by a sabotaged rocket-propelled projectile blasting back into the Thelm's chest when the Thelm attempted to fire his gun, even though the Thelm had no intention of shooting himself. Whoever set the--what was the term you used?"

  "Booby trap," said Jamie dejectedly.

  "Whoever set the booby trap caused his death. You spoke--unwisely, perhaps, but out of honorable motives--to try to save the life of your fellow human. You cannot be responsible for another party's deliberately acting to subvert or prevent what you intended. The Thelm fired, most likely to defend himself against some unknown intruder--and yet he killed himself instead, as an unintended consequence of his own actions. It would be no more logical to blame him for his own death than to blame you."

  Something in what Brox said brought Jamie up short. Somewhere in there, his subconscious was telling him, was a piece to the puzzle, a big one, and an important one. But where it fit, or what the puzzle would look like, Jamie could not yet see. "Thank you, Inquirist Brox," he said. "But getting back to the case, if we're looking for motives, and if my suggestion about Penitence was the motive, then we've only got two suspects. Zahida heard it, and so did Marta."

  "You have three individual suspects," said Brox. "And, my apologies, one additional pair of conspiratorial suspects."

  Hannah looked at him coldly. "Go on."

  "The Lady Zahida heard your idea," said Brox. "Marta Hertzmann heard it. And so did the Thelm. Perhaps--perhaps--this looks like a suicide because it was one. The Thelm realizes that the only way he can save his sole surviving son, and his family, is to kill himself. For whatever reason, he has the booby-trapped weapon and knows it is booby-trapped. Maybe one of the two dueling pistols has been booby-trapped from the start, so that the Thelm could not lose a duel--even if he missed, his opponent would shoot himself in the chest."

  "Unless his opponent happened to pick up the gun intended for the Thelm," said Hannah. "Then it would be impossible for the Thelm to survive a duel."

  "A trivial objection," said Brox. "There are a thousand ways the pistols could have been marked. But let us imagine he had no way of knowing which gun was which. That might add a little of the absurd drama that our Reqwar Pavlat friends seem to need in their politics and personal life. The Thelm deliberately selects a gun without knowing which it is. He fires, not knowing if he is about to smash a hole in the wall, or through himself. Let the fates decide, or whatever other poetry you might wish to apply to a random choice."

  "What about the shoe print, and your idea about an accelerant and a fire that started after the death?" Hannah demanded.

  And how about the fact that you found the shoe print while no one else was looking your way? Jamie thought, his eyes on Brox. You could have stashed the shoe in your iso-suit and made the print while we were all examining the Thelm's corpse, then disposed of the shoe somehow. It's still missing, after all. But he didn't want to explore those ideas just at the moment.

  Brox cocked his head to one side. "Those are flaws," he admitted.

  "Easy ones to answer," said Jamie, glad for
the chance to steer things in another direction. "As long as we're theory-spinning, let's say the Thelm sets the fires out of anger, despair, or whatever, then kills himself immediately, shooting before the fire can spread very much. He gives himself a Viking funeral."

  "A what?" asked Brox.

  "Viking funeral," said Hannah. "A human death ritual involving fire. Go on, Jamie."

  "Georg comes in, sees what has happened, realizes he can do nothing--or is so disgusted or horrified he leaves in a panic--or perhaps he arrives after the fire has really taken hold and he can't get close enough to do anything. He manages to leave the shoe print, probably without realizing it. By the time he gets outside, a few minutes later, he decides that explaining all that won't make him look too good, so he keeps quiet."

  "And what happened to his missing shoe?" Hannah asked. "Why was he in socks but no shoes after the fire?"

  "Because the right shoe, the one that left the print, has some sort of fire marks or heat damage, or just smells strongly of soot and smoke. Maybe he accidentally stepped on a hot ember and melted the sole of the shoe. Whatever. It's marked in some way, but the left shoe isn't. Since the right shoe's condition is evidence he was there when he says he wasn't, he has to conceal it or destroy it. Maybe he just chucked the shoe into the hottest part of the fire.

  "The main thing is, if he doesn't know that he left a shoe print, he doesn't know there is no point in hiding the shoe, if you followed that. Either he meant to get back to Marta's apartments and take the second shoe anyway, but never got the chance, or else he didn't think of it until it was too late. Wearing just one shoe would draw attention to the missing one--so he goes out during the evacuation in his socks."

  "That more or less holds together," Brox conceded.

  "Of course," Jamie went on, "if Georg did do it, instead of just finding the Thelm right after his suicide, and if for some reason he felt he had to conceal that fact, then we can play the postmurder events pretty much the same way." He turned to Brox. "But I want to hear about this pair of conspiratorial suspects," he said.

  Brox lowered his arms, hands open, shoulders out--the Kendari equivalent of a shrug. "I was simply making a point, and a poor one at that. Each of you serves as an alibi for the other during the period of the murder--but who serves as an alibi for you both? The conversation in the car might or might have something to do with your motive. Perhaps the suggestion of Penitence merely started some later train of conversation between the two of you.

  "Or perhaps the Penitence plan has nothing to do with it. Perhaps you realized that the human race could claim the rule of a whole new planet, merely by disposing of a single tiresome old alien and installing a human ruler in his place. Control over a whole planet is a strong motive for murder--especially for two police agents who also have orders to be alert to the political agenda."

  Jamie felt himself getting angry, but controlled himself--just barely. Hannah saved the situation by speaking first. "It's an excellent motive for murder. In fact, I'd suggest it's possibly the strongest motive in all of human history. The trouble is, it never even occurred to either of us."

  Speak for yourself, thought Jamie. It had occurred to him, as a bit of logical theorizing. But no, he hadn't acted on it, or mentioned it, and he certainly wasn't about to do so. "I'm not so sure it is that great a motive, just because it is so big and long-term and impersonal," he said. "Besides, Georg's becoming Thelm doesn't make this a human world. It just makes it more possible for humans to have some political influence down the road. The motive wouldn't be 'kill the Thelm and win yourself a world.' It would be 'kill the Thelm today, then if everything goes just right, and they don't throw Georg out right away, in ten or twenty or a hundred years, my people might have the start of a nice big settlement on one of the other continents.' "

  "I merely offered a theory that others will no doubt think of," Brox said mildly. "But setting the human race on course to colonize a world would result in a positive rating in one of those Employee Fitness Reviews that you BSI agents seem to worship without end."

  Hannah laughed. "Your point is made. I know quite a few agents who might kill for a high-positive EFR." But then her expression grew more serious. "But jokes and theories to one side, I will tell you in all frankness, that the blade cuts both ways. If we have a motive for wanting Georg to have done it, or perhaps a motive to do the murder ourselves and make it look like Georg killed the Thelm, then you have a motive for proving that Georg did not kill the Thelm."

  "And that possible motive will evaporate if it turns out Georg ascends even if he didn't commit the murder," Brox said calmly. "However, in that case, your motive for the crime becomes even stronger."

  "Assuming we knew for sure that Georg would ascend if someone else was the killer," said Hannah. "We didn't. We still don't."

  "There are few things as easy to feign as ignorance," said Brox. "And few things as difficult to conceal, if it comes to that."

  And suddenly Jamie had it. He saw. It wasn't logic that told him so. It was a gut feeling. But the logic was there. It held together. He was sure of it. But he had to walk through it, lead the others behind, see if it all worked. He was the junior partner here. Brox and Hannah were the seasoned investigators. They had seen it all before. They weren't going to be impressed by some fresh-faced kid spinning one more theory. Facts. He needed to show them facts.

  "We're going at this the wrong way," he said slowly. "We're trying to say what this or that person could have done, and bending the known facts to fit the theory. Turn it around. You'd have to know certain things for sure before you killed the Thelm--such as who would ascend to the Thelmship. Or else you might have to think you know something--but make a mistake based on incomplete knowledge."

  "What do you mean?" Brox asked.

  "Well, the weapon, for example. The killer knew some things, but not others," Jamie said. "Wait a sec. I'll be right back." He stood up, went to his room, and came back with the duplicate weapon in its box. "This was waiting on the table when I first got up, while you two were still sleeping. It doesn't have all the fancy stuff on it that the real one had, but it's mechanically identical. I think it tells us a lot."

  He held up the rocket-gun pistol. "The weapon itself is almost too simple to explain," he said. "The barrel is a straight tube. It's not even rifled. The breech end has an exterior screw thread. It takes a single round of ammo, which screws into place." He held up the dummy round Darsteel had provided. It was a cruel-looking thing, shaped like an oversized bullet, about four centimeters wide and fifteen centimeters long. "The rocket-projectile round has its base mounted to the screw-on endcap. The electrical connection with the pistol's firing mechanism is made through the screw-on cap. The round loads this way."

  He shoved the projectile up into the breech end of the gun barrel and screwed it in place. "That's all there is to it. Pull the trigger and you complete an electric connection and POW! the thing fires. The projectile flies out the end of the barrel. The muzzle end of the tube is flared out like a bell or a funnel to keep the rocket exhaust more or less out of the shooter's face. The projectile has snap-out fins that unfold as soon as it is clear of the barrel. The fins are canted to provide spin stabilization of the projectile."

  He unscrewed the dummy round, set down the gun, and held up the round. "All you have to do in order to shoot again is unscrew the cap, run a thing like a bottle brush through the barrel, then screw in a fresh round. There are various types available. High-explosive, armor-piercing, even ones that explode just in front of the target to create a really horrible wound. And, if you know who and where to ask--there is the suicide round, also known as a backfire shot. One of Darsteel's colleagues saw a picture of the Thelm's wounds and instantly knew a backfire had done it. Darsteel sent along everything he had on them."

  He held up the other dummy round, one that looked much like the first--except the pointed end of the projectile had been sliced off, and the projectile was mounted to the endcap backwards, so
that the rocket engine pointed at the muzzle, with two thin electric leads connected to its igniter.

  "Suicide round is an ironic name, of course. They aren't meant to be used when you deliberately want to kill yourself. They are meant to do what was done in this case--to cause the shooter to kill himself when he tries to shoot someone else. You can see most of the modifications that have been made. The one that's less obvious is that the screw-cap's threads have been very precisely filed down, and that the screw-cap is made of a much thinner piece of a much weaker material. When the rocket fires, the threading will shear clean off, and the screw-cap will be driven into the shooter's body, where it will shatter on impact, with the rocket projectile plowing right through it. We saw what the results look like last night."

  "But what does all this tell us that we did not already know?" Brox demanded. "We knew the rocket fired backwards and killed the Thelm."

  "Yes, but how it was done tells us a great deal we did not know," said Jamie. He held up the suicide round. "This is a premade part, all of a piece. It's not something an amateur could put together on the kitchen table. Either the killer was someone who knew weapons, and this particular weapon, and had the skills to build one of these--or else the killer would have had to go shopping for it--quietly, and very carefully. And that would take time, possibly quite a bit of time. But once the killer had the suicide round in hand, he or she could swap it into the Thelm's gun in seconds." He demonstrated by picking up the gun, unscrewing one round, and screwing the other back in. "That's all it would take," he said. "Now the gun is ready to kill the shooter."

  "So you're saying this would take a lot of time to prepare, but very little time to put into operation," said Hannah. "And of course the suicide round could have been put in the gun at any time. Months ago, maybe."

  "Yes, but I tend to think it wasn't," Jamie said. "There's a whole line of sporting and target-shooting weapons that use the same type of rocket-cartridge ammunition. According to everything I've read about him, the Thelm went target-shooting pretty regularly--but he has never fought a duel.