Final Inquiries (14 page)

Hannah felt herself catching Brox's mood as she made her own preparations, unpacked her own iso-suit, laid out her own gear. She was the bullfighter dressing for the ring, the duelist making sure that everything was just as it should be so that the deadly event would be carried out properly, the knight girding himself for battle. What was usually done by habit and rote motion somehow became ritualized, a ceremony of preparation. She half expected to hear stirring background music rising to a climax as she strapped on the last recorder and clipped on the final measuring device, then pulled the absurd little booties on over her shoes and slithered the surgical gloves onto her hands.

The iso-suits, the gloves, the booties, the face masks were meant to keep a bit of dried skin, a bit of hair from Jamie or Hannah, a bit of body felt from Brox, a droplet of spittle transported by a cough or a sneeze, from contaminating the crime scene, destroying or masking some vital bit of evidence.

Brox drew on his gloves just as Hannah finished, with Jamie done just a little ahead of them both. Hannah felt a completely irrational flash of annoyance that they didn't all finish in unison.

Finally they were ready.

Brox stripped the tamper indicators off the inner door, released the lock, and pulled it open. He did not step through the door, but instead gestured for the two humans to go first.
One last effort to keep us unbiased,
Hannah told herself. Or was it just that Brox wanted it to appear that way? This could all be stage management to prime them for some bit of manipulation yet to come.

If so, it was too deep a scheme for Hannah to perceive. She and Jamie collected their gear and stepped through the door. Whatever they had been summoned to see, whatever had set off this interstellar, interspecies furor, whatever had caused two embassies to lock down altogether and summoned two mobs, was just inside. Hannah felt her gut tighten.

They stepped into a large central room that took up much of the structure's interior. The lights were off, and the only illumination came dimly through a large overhead skylight. The room was stuffy, the air stale, with a faint musty scent overlaid with a hint of an unpleasant sickly-sweet odor, a smell that every police investigator knew to link with death. The two simulants followed the humans and Brox inside, but they made no effort to move forward, or to participate. Brox seemed barely aware of their presence as he pulled the inner door shut and locked it down. "Give me just a brief moment," he said. "Part of the agreement was that all power be cut until our arrival."

Jamie stood by Hannah as she waited and looked the place over. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Brox working at some sort of control panel. They were in what was plainly a room divided in two, with the furniture and equipment in the half they were in designed for Kendari use, while the other side was equipped with human-style desks and chairs.

There was a row of three Kendari workstalls--basically low desks with sling arrangements instead of chairs--facing a row of three banged-up government-issue-style human desks. The space between the workstalls and the desks was very obviously a neutral zone, a border, between the two sides. Indeed, the border between the two compounds was very clearly visible: the Kendari side of the floor was covered with a bright orange carpet, while the human side was slate-grey government-issue linoleum. Hannah had not the slightest doubt that the precise border between the two compounds ran right along the line where carpet met flooring tile.

All that she saw in a single glance. Then Brox got the environmental systems going. The room turned dazzling bright and the ventilation system whisked away the worst of the sickly-sweet scent of decay. Hannah's attention was utterly and instantly focused on what they had plainly come to see.

"I told you I was performing Final Inquiries," said Brox, standing in the far corner. "In other words, a death investigation. We Kendari tend to use overly polite, unemotional, perhaps even clinical terms for anything we find upsetting. What humans call 'dying in the line of duty,' we call 'performing one's final duty,' as if the death itself were the duty to be fulfilled--instead of being the disaster that
prevents
completion and fulfillment."

Brox walked toward the center of the room, and paused a few paces away from the motionless form that lay there, collapsed directly over the dividing line between human territory and Kendari.

The body lay on its side, the neck, the spine, and the long tail all arced inward, the four walking legs rigid and extended, the arms stretched out forward, the hands clenched in fists. The muzzle was frozen in a grimace, the lips drawn back from the teeth. The eyes were shut, almost peaceful, but the expression frozen on the face was one of fear and pain. There was what looked to be burn marks on the skin around the back of the mouth, and the gum tissue visible inside the mouth was badly inflamed. There was some sign of discharge and irritation around the visible eye and ear, and around the nose as well.

Hannah flashed back to the training photo they had shown her on the opening day of the mandatory xenoforensics class every trainee agent sat through. It was almost a textbook case of caffeine poisoning. Any human who came in contact with Kendari was warned endlessly not to use any caffeine product near them. This was why. On the floor, not twenty centimeters from the dead Kendari's clenched fists, was a human-style white-china coffee mug, the twin of one Hannah kept on her desk back at the Bullpen--down to the BSI logo emblazoned boldly on its side. It was slightly cracked, and a chip off the rim, a sharp, curved triangle of ceramic material about two centimeters on a side, lay on the floor next to it. There was a dried whitish residue on the linoleum around it. There were a few whitish spots on the Kendari carpet, and a wider, fainter pool of similar residue around the dead xeno's head, roughly centered around the jawline.

Jamie came around to the other side and stepped forward, gingerly, carefully, respectfully, kneeling down by the head, not coming close to touching anything. "Who is this, Brox?" he asked in a quiet voice, almost a whisper.

Brox hung back from the corpse, standing well to the rear of Hannah. He gestured vaguely toward the body, knotted his fingers together, and shifted back and forth on his walking limbs as his tail twitched, ever so slightly. "There is a tradition--a common way of doing things among Kendari of my age and social class. Some of your cultures have arranged marriages. We have a similar but not identical procedure--proposed marriages. Families will seek out eligible and suitable partners for their adult offspring. It would be arranged for the potential partners to spend time together, work together. If the two work in the same profession, that is all to the good."

Hannah looked up at Brox. It was not like him to speak so obliquely, to say things in such an indirect, unfocused way.
You're wrong,
Hannah told herself.
It
is
like Brox. It's like Brox when he's in shock, in mourning, straining to deal with a hurricane of personal emotions and professional crises that all come at once.

"Go on, Brox," said Jamie. The two humans glanced at each other, in silent agreement that Brox had to say it, had to get the words out there. No one could perform this last part of his current duty for him.

"Her name is--was--Emelza 401. She--she was an Inquirist, approximately one-quarter of a ranking level above me in the Inquiries Service. And she was my prospective mate. My fiancee, I suppose you would call her."

Neither Jamie nor Hannah pushed any harder.
We know the rest,
thought Hannah.
You were going to marry her. You were here together working to keep the peace between humans and Kendari. And approximately sixteen hours ago, she was found dead of caffeine poisoning.
It was unquestionably a murder. And she died in the office she shared with three BSI agents, with a BSI coffee mug next to her head.

EIGHT

DOCUMENT OF DEATH

Now we know,
thought Jamie as he worked the crime scene.
Now we know why it had to be this way.

Why the BSI agents on the scene couldn't take on the investigation. That coffee mug--and the fact that the body was found in their workplace--made them prime suspects.

Why Brox couldn't do the job all by himself. He was not only too close to the case emotionally--he also had to be considered a suspect. Jamie didn't know anything about Kendari crime statistics, but it was at least a reasonable bet that the percentage of murders that turned out to be domestic disputes wouldn't be that different than the rate for humans--and an awful lot of human murders were committed by spouses, intended spouses, and ex-spouses.

Why no human--or Kendari--on the scene could do the job. Why both the Kendari and human embassies were in lockdown until Hannah and he could examine the crime scene.
Every
human and every Kendari, in both embassies, had to be considered a suspect. Emelza 401 had died in the midst of a diplomatic battle for the control of two whole planets. If the murder of one enemy xeno--or, indeed, the murder of one of your own people, staged so as to discredit the opposition--could win that battle for one side or the other, was there a government anywhere, at any time, that wouldn't at least have been tempted by such a prospect?

Or had Emelza known something, said something, possessed something that could have led to her death? Was she merely a passive victim? Or had she, in some way, been playing the game of worlds herself--and taken one risk too far?

The worklights from their crime scene kit were powered up and casting harsh cones of cold and clinical brightness down on the sad little scene of death, illuminating the dark corners, making the shadows sharp and hard. Nothing could look right, or natural, or simple in light that hard.

They decided to examine the nonmedical physical evidence first. The big, obvious item was the coffee mug--but it was rarely a good idea to go for the big, obvious thing first. Hannah and Jamie pulled samples from the dried-up spill off the hard flooring on the human side and the carpeting on the Kendari side. They snipped fabric and did adhesive-tape lift-samples of every nearby surface, but all of that was more or less pro forma. If there was anything there to find, they'd find it--but there wasn't going to be anything there.

They photographed the rest of the room as well, from the desk chairs placed neatly behind the remarkably tidy human desks and the equally tidy Kendari workstalls to the plain, undecorated walls and doors. Probably pointless, all of it, but there was always the off chance that some mark, some small item might be a clue. Later, they would have the photographs to check.

Thinking about it for a moment, Jamie wasn't much astonished by the compulsively clean work areas. You wouldn't want to risk leaving anything around for your counterparts to see--not when those counter-parts were onetime enemy agents and likely would be so again in the future.

The three human desks were arranged identically. On each sat a pencil cup, holding three pencils and three pens, a plastic deskpad writing surface, a stack of blank writing paper, and a set of sockets for a desktop data display and input system. If the agents here had been using anything like standard BSI security procedures--and they plainly had been--the data units were taken away and locked up when not in use. Faint scuff marks on the desk showed where the data system units had sat.

Once the surrounding area had been examined and recorded, they focused in on the areas of central interest--the victim, and the coffee cup that was the apparent murder weapon.

Jamie photographed Emelza. Overall views from all angles, close-ups of her head, her feet, her hands clenched into fists. He moved through the process systematically, methodically. One shot after the next. He shifted position to get another angle--and caught himself a moment later, just crouching there, motionless, lost in thought, staring at nothing at all.

"Jamie?" Hannah called out. "Stay with us, okay? It's bad enough we're nearly losing Brox. You need to keep sharp."

"Huh? What? Oh--okay." He blinked and forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand. Measure. Photograph. Evaluate. Seek for the small thing, the tiny detail that would speak and tell them big things. Study the corpse as a record, a result, a document that displayed the physical results, the defining marks, of whatever it had experienced, and therefore would show, to a discerning eye, how death occurred.

Think of the corpse as a
thing,
an it--not a she, not a person, not the intended spouse of your friend, your enemy, your colleague. Think of the corpse as a puzzle piece, a crossword to be solved, a part of an intellectual game--and not as the centerpiece of an interstellar, interspecies crisis.

Keep it clean. Keep it simple,
Jamie told himself.
Solve the crime. Let the victim, and the victim's intended, and the politics, take care of themselves.

"It'd be nice if it were that easy, wouldn't it?" he said to himself, speaking out loud.

"What?" Hannah asked, busy herself, doing a quick pencil sketch of the scene. "Were you talking to me?"

"No," said Jamie. "Not to you." He was going to have a hell of a time keeping things clean, simple, and impersonal if he started out by talking to the dead victim.

"Okay," Hannah said absently, not really listening as she finished up her drawing. "You just about done with the initial photography of the victim?"

"Yeah," said Jamie, his voice close to a whisper. "But I'm not in any hurry to finish. I don't know what, exactly, we do next."

"What do you mean?"

"What I'm thinking is if this was a--a
regular
murder, and we had more or less normal facilities, some sort of trained tech would magically appear and draw samples here in the field for analysis, then take the body away to a lab to run tests. We might never see the body again, but we'd get a nice fat data file full of medical evidence. But we don't get that this time--and I don't know how to draw Kendari blood or take tissue samples for toxicology and so on. What happens instead?"