by Timothy Zahn
“The only question now is who was controlling that hand.”
Carstairs stirred in his seat. “It seems to me that there ought to be some kind of physical evidence that would let us determine which one. Odd bloodstains, timing—something.”
“One would think so, yes,” Sommer nodded. “But so far, nothing like that has surfaced.”
“Wait a minute,” Blanchard said slowly. In her mind’s eye she saw Lamar shuffling out for his post-transfer walk … “When we found Holloway, he was carrying his blazer folded across his arm. When Walker left a few minutes later, I think he left the blazer in the transfer room.”
“He did,” Katovsky nodded. “We spotted that when we reviewed the video of the transfer operation. Unfortunately, the police lab’s already gone over the blazer, and there’s no blood on it anywhere.” His cleared his throat uncomfortably. “They said that Griffin’s own jacket absorbed most of … what came out.”
“Was it checked for dust signatures, then?” Carstairs persisted. “If Holloway was the killer, he would have had to put the coat down somewhere first—he couldn’t have known the blood wouldn’t spurt all over it.”
“They say it’s been checked for everything,” Katovsky told him. “One assumes they know what they’re doing.”
“Mr. Carstairs brings up a good point, though,” Sommer said. “At the moment the traditional elements of method and opportunity fit both men equally well. It may indeed come down to some obscure bit of knowledge like whether one of them knew how a knife wound like that would bleed.”
Porath clucked his tongue softly. “If it does, you can kiss a conviction good-bye,” he warned. “Probably the trial, too—a D.A. with half a brain would know better than to bring a case based on anything that esoteric.”
“Or in other words,” Everly said, “we need to find a motive.”
“Assuming there is one,” Sommer said, his eyes on Blanchard.
“Walker was beginning to develop some personality problems, Dr. Sommer,” she said stiffly. “He was not, however, going psychotic.”
“I’ll accept that,” Sommer said. “At least for the moment. Tell me about Mr. Holloway’s mental state.”
Blanchard felt her stomach tighten. “The man was murdered six months ago. He’s spent those six months locked in limbo in a Soulminder trap, the monotony punctuated only by brief intervals of being stuffed into a strange and totally unfamiliar body so that people can ask him to relive his death over and over again. What kind of mental state would you be in?”
“That’s enough, Doctor,” Katovsky said, his voice dark with official menace.
“It’s all right, Bob,” Sommer said. “As it happens, Dr. Blanchard, I have spent time in a Soulminder trap. I remember it being quite peaceful, and not monotonous at all.”
Blanchard swallowed. She had known that. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“As to the rest of it, though, you make a good point,” Sommer continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “One expects God to inform you of your death, not some assistant district attorney.” A shadow of something like pain flicked across his face. “Some have taken it well. Others not so well. We need to know which category Holloway falls into.” Again, his eyes hardened, just that little bit. “And we need to know fast.”
“I suppose you’ll want me to talk to him,” she said, a familiar acid pain jabbing briefly at her stomach. For a moment she was back in St. Louis, preparing to examine yet another suspected psychopath. “Will tomorrow morning be soon enough?”
Sommer looked at Porath. “Murray?”
“We expect to have Lamar released into our custody by noon tomorrow at the latest,” the lawyer said briskly. “So any time after that will do.”
Sommer nodded and glanced at his watch. “Let’s schedule a transfer room for one o’clock, then—”
“Just a minute,” Blanchard cut in as it belatedly hit her. “You’re not suggesting we use Walker for the transfer, are you?”
Porath’s forehead wrinkled. “Of course. Why not?”
“Because—” Blanchard floundered for words, fighting to get past the mind-numbing horror of the whole idea. “We can’t ask Walker to let Holloway into his body again,” she said at last. “If he used Walker to commit a murder—” She looked around the table, saw nothing but puzzlement there in their faces. “Don’t you see?”
“Not really,” Sommer said, his tone quiet but firm. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t matter whether we do or don’t. We have no choice but to use Lamar on this. You’ve never known Holloway in any other way—never known his expressions or voice patterns or mannerisms in any other body. If we switch him to some other Pro-Witness, you’ll have no chance at all of reading anything from his responses.”
Blanchard exhaled quietly. He was right—on a purely logical level she could see that. But on a gut level … “Yes, sir,” she said. “For the record, I don’t like it.”
“I don’t especially like it either,” Sommer told her. “But it has to be done.” He looked around the table. “And with that, I think we’ve done all we can do for the moment. We’ll meet back here at twelve-thirty tomorrow afternoon to discuss developments. After which … we’ll see what Mr. Holloway has to say.”
Twelve-thirty tomorrow, Blanchard thought bleakly as she headed from the conference room, leaving the others still collecting notes and papers behind her. Sixteen hours away.
And then she would have to tell Walker that his body was once again going to be used by someone else. Not by a victim this time, but by a suspected killer.
Which gave her just those same sixteen hours to talk Sommer and Porath out of it.
Or to identify the killer herself.
The door to the late Eliot Griffin’s sixth-floor office was unguarded, save for the wide yellow tape with POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS endlessly repeated in black letters that had been stretched across the doorway. The lack of a guard was in itself mildly surprising, given the media attention.
What was even more surprising was the fact that the door itself was open a crack. The guard must be inside, she decided, giving the door a gentle push and ducking low under the yellow tape. Mentally rehearsing the story she’d worked out during her morning shower, she stepped into the office.
It was impressive. The news reports had called Griffin a high-caliber investment counselor. Looking around, she saw for the first time just how much wealth and success that terminology implied. From the rich, yet tasteful, carpet to the equally rich and equally tasteful curtains, everything in the room struck the perfect balance between leisurely elegance and hard-headed business acumen.
Everything except the smeared bloodstains on the top and front of the polished mahogany desk …
“Who the hell are you?”
Blanchard jumped, twisting around to her right. Framed in the doorway to an unsuspected second room was a glowering cop, his hand resting none too subtly on the butt of his Sig. “I’m Dr. Carolyn Blanchard,” she told him between stiff lips. Suddenly the story she’d dreamed up didn’t sound nearly as convincing as it had an hour ago. “I’m with the Soulminder office, working on the Griffin murder.”
The cop cocked his head slightly to the side, his eyes never moving from Blanchard. “Is she?” he asked.
“Close enough,” a second voice grunted, and behind the cop, Frank Everly stepped into view. “You can put her down as being with me.”
The other shrugged, dropping his hand to his side. “If you say so.” He looked her up and down once, shrugged again, and moved toward the taped doorway. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”
The door clicked solidly shut behind him. “Thanks,” Blanchard said to Everly. “I couldn’t tell whether he was going to arrest me or shoot me.”
“Don’t worry, he wouldn’t have shot you,” Everly assured her. “Too much paperwork. What are you doing here?”
She f
orced herself to meet that icy gaze. “If I’m going to talk to Holloway about this, I need to know as much as I can about Griffin and his death. It seemed simplest to come directly to the source.”
“Uh-huh.” Everly’s expression seemed to sour a bit more. “And if you just happened to stumble on something along the way that would solve the case for us … ?”
She felt her face warming. “I’m not just some self-appointed amateur detective who wandered in off the street, Mr. Everly,” she reminded him. “I’m a trained observer who specializes in building personality profiles from random bits and pieces of data. I’ve got as much chance of seeing something significant here as you do.”
For a long second she thought maybe she’d overdone it. But Everly merely cocked an eyebrow and gestured to the room. “Help yourself, Doctor. Tell me what significant things you see.”
She looked at him a moment longer. Then, almost against her will, her eyes drifted to the bloodstained desk. “How did it happen?”
“From the penetration angle and position of the body, the police think Griffin was leaning over his desk shaking hands with his killer when he was stabbed.”
“A left-handed blow, in other words.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t buy us anything,” Everly said. “Doesn’t take a left-handed man to hold someone pinned across a desk while he stabs him. Anyway, both Lamar and Holloway are right-handed.”
Blanchard nodded, letting her gaze drift across the rest of the desktop. Almost compulsively neat, with two stacks of papers in the front left corner and a computer in the front right. “Has anything been taken from this room?” she asked, starting toward the terminal. If Griffin had been working on the computer when he was killed …
Everly snorted. “Sure. Griffin’s appointment calendar, his client list, his scratch pad, his phone, his phone list, his Kindle, every flash drive the police could find, and the hard drive from his computer. They’ve also started the wheels rolling to get them into his E-mail file, his WallStreet/Link file, his three online information subscriptions, and his GamesNet file. Not to mention his personal banking records, his business banking records, and all his credit card records. Anything we’ve missed?”
She sent a glower in his direction. “What about that room?” she asked, nodding at the door he’d come in by.
“It’s a small bedroom,” he told her. “Looks like Griffin was accustomed to late nights and early mornings.”
Or else was accustomed to specialized entertainment for special clients. “They’ve cleaned that out too, I presume?”
“Pretty much.”
She sighed and looked slowly around the room. Much of the right-hand wall next to the bedroom door was given over to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, loaded with both leather-bound books and a considerable number of crystal objects. The love of crystal was repeated on his desk, where a handful of tiny knick-knacks lined both sides of the front edge, the ones that had presumably been in the middle having been scattered onto the floor. Behind them, lying with its edge precisely parallel to the two piles of papers, was a gold-handled letter opener. “Whoever the killer was, I don’t think he’d ever been here before,” she said.
“Because if he had, he’d have known about that lovely letter opener and wouldn’t have bothered swiping a knife from the restaurant,” Everly agreed.
Behind the desk the tall windows looked out on the buildings across Ridley Square, with the top corner of the Soulminder building just visible through one of them. On the left-hand wall were four picture frames, three with modern paintings in them. In the fourth …
She frowned, stepping over for a closer look. Inside the matting was a narrow article from Time magazine—a sidebar, probably, to a longer story—with a photo of a blandly smiling man at the top of it. A man sitting at a familiar-looking desk. The desk, in fact, that was ten feet away …
“Yeah, it’s an article about Griffin,” Everly confirmed from behind her. “Go ahead. Read it.”
Blanchard eyed the photo another moment, then lowered her eyes to the text.
From his sumptuous office overlooking Ridley Square—and, perhaps ironically, the Los Angeles Courthouse Annex—Eliot Griffin sees dozens of clients, makes a good deal of money, and scoffs at the suggestion that he and Trintex are in any way out of the ordinary. “You get a group of people who beat the odds—any group, any type of odds—and you’ll have people out there who assume they’re cheating,” he claims. “In our case, it was a group of sore losers in the financial market and an SEC that has more time on its hands than it knows what to do with.”
Griffin has had his share of experience with both sore losers and the SEC. Growing up in the prairies of rural Nebraska, he was continually having to prove himself to teachers and childhood friends …
Blanchard finished the article, turned to find Everly watching her. “Are the allegations here true?” she asked.
“No one really knows. Or I should say, no one knows well enough to take him and his group to court. Yet.”
“His group being these Trintex people?”
Everly nodded. “The main article had a profile of the whole gang. You’ve never heard of it?”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
“Mm. Basically, Trintex is a loose group of high-tech investment advisors scattered across the country. All highly successful, highly adept at generating money for their clients, and”—Everly cocked his head—“allegedly playing off each other’s balance sheets to create assets and profits on paper that aren’t really there. An updated version of the old revolving-fund con scheme, or so the SEC thinks.”
Blanchard looked back at the article. “And he frames this to put in his office?”
“Oh, they’ve got chutzpah to burn,” Everly said with a snort. “The Washington edition carried a sidebar interview with the New York member of the club, and he apparently has his framed in his office, too.”
Blanchard nodded, again looking at the photo. Griffin was all smiles and sincerity, yet at the same time exuding the air of a total hard-headed business professional. A perfect match for his office decor. “You can just see the top of the Soulminder building in the picture,” she commented. “There, at the edge of the curtains.” She frowned, skimming the article again. There was something wrong here. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on …
“Yeah, I noticed,” Everly said. “Not exactly the kind of neighbors we like to have. Did you notice the date of the article, by the way?”
Blanchard dropped her eyes to the bottom of the page. There it was—
She stared at it, a hollow feeling twisting at the pit of her stomach. “Three months ago,” she murmured.
“Three and a half, to be precise,” Everly said.
And Holloway had been murdered almost six months ago, locked away from the world in a Soulminder trap ever since. “It doesn’t prove anything,” she said, unwilling to turn and face Everly. “Holloway could have heard about Griffin in some other way before he was killed.”
“Sure,” Everly agreed. “He could have read about him somewhere else, or maybe had a friend or relative get screwed over by the guy.”
“Have you checked into that?”
“Oh, we ran everything,” Everly said. “Financials, socials, professionals, family connections—the whole ball of wax. There’s just no connection anywhere between Lamar, Holloway, and Griffin.” He gestured toward the desk. “And before you ask, there were also no appointments, phone calls, or anything else between them.”
“But there is this story,” Blanchard pointed out.
“Right,” Everly said. “But until Time got hold of it, no one outside the financial community was really paying attention to the group. Or to Griffin himself.”
“What you’re saying is that the only one who could possibly know that Griffin was a shady operator was Walker,” Blanchard bit out. “Is that
it?”
“That’s part of it,” Everly said. His voice was suddenly grim. “The other part is whether whatever Griffin’s been doing was really worth killing him for.”
She stared at the photo. The blandly smiling con man … “Someone might think so.”
“Someone who was borderline psychotic, maybe?”
Deliberately, she turned away from the framed article. “I’m going downstairs to check out the restaurant,” she said, keeping her voice level. “You coming?”
“I’ve already talked to them,” Everly said. “But help yourself. Just don’t forget we’ve got a meeting at twelve-thirty.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be there.”
“Another Soulminder person, huh?” the cashier at Richardson’s Garden Spot said, peering at Blanchard’s ID. “Boy, between you, the police, and the reporters this place has sure been popular lately.”
“I know, and I’m sorry to bother you,” Blanchard told her, slipping the ID back into her wallet. “I’d just like to ask you a couple of questions, if I may.”
The cashier sighed. “Yes, I was the cashier on duty yesterday between twelve and one. Yes, the place was crowded to the gills the whole hour. No, I don’t remember anyone with Walker Lamar’s face coming in during that time. Yes, we’ve checked with all our employees, and none of them remembers seeing him, either. Yes, we are missing one of our steak knives. No, there’s no way we can tell which table it was stolen from. Yes, it was most likely from one of those six tables by the front window. No, nobody’s found any useful fingerprints there. Did I leave anything out?”
“You have been through the wringer, haven’t you?” Blanchard said with a commiserating smile.
“And there’re never any new questions, either,” the cashier said. “That’s the part that really gets to me. Don’t you guys ever talk to each other?”
“Yes, but obviously not enough.” Blanchard thought a moment. “Okay, let’s see if you’ve heard these. Do you routinely set out steak knives with your table settings, or just bring them with steak orders? If not, can you pull a list of everyone who ordered steak yesterday?”