Final Inquiries (26 page)

"Because of whatever," said Hannah, in an oddly gentle voice. "Because we are investigators who know how many murders are committed by family members and lovers and the like. Because it is a fact, and a statistic. But not because we know of or suspect anything dark or difficult between you and your intended. Because we are obliged by duty to examine the possibility and for no other reason."

"I thank you, most deeply, for those words. They help. If
I
were to commit this crime for whatever reason, or if another Kendari were jealous, or perhaps some other Kendari or human had some other deep, personal, emotional motive, it is possible they might choose to disguise the crime as political."

"It would take a very rare and dangerous sort of human to commit what might be considered a crime of passion in this cold and calculating a manner. Would that be true of Kendari?"

Brox clenched his fist and fought down the impulse to shout, to scream,
This was my intended, this was my Emelza.
He dared not indulge that desire. "Most definitely," he said in a calm and dispassionate voice. "I have studied human crime, and murder, and found much that was familiar. As with your people, our crimes of passion are--are passionate. An impulsive act, driven by the need for emotional release, the drive to let something
out.
"

Jamie leaned forward toward Brox and looked from him to Hannah. "Hold it, both of you. Let's save some time and stop torturing ourselves and each other. I'll say it short and fast and we can move on. Assume for the moment that we don't believe a BSI agent would be dumb enough to leave that many clues pointing to himself, and the most likely possible motives we're left with are someone trying to break up the negotiations--but what you two
haven't
said was that making it look like a human killed a Kendari would
have
to improve the odds of the Kendari snagging Pentam.

"Alternately, perhaps Emelza knew something, had some bit of knowledge, that might sway the decision. Maybe someone, on one side or the other, felt she needed to be silenced. We could dream up a bunch of other political motivations, but that's a good start. Then there's the personal angle--and I don't know enough about Kendari mores and customs and love affairs and so on to speculate. But someone could have killed her for personal reasons, and made it look like a political murder to throw us off the scent.

"We also have to look at who had easy access to the crime scene and the victim." Jamie Mendez slumped back in his chair. "The short form is that we all know perfectly well you're the best fit for all of that stuff. I believe very strongly that you didn't do it, and that goes for Hannah too, I'm sure--"

"It does," Hannah Wolfson agreed.

"--But it's not about what we
believe
--it's about what we can
prove
. And, I have to say, Hannah and I have both believed things that turned out to be wrong. We
can't
exclude you as a suspect--but we can't exclude you as an investigator, either. We trust you--but we can't trust you absolutely in this situation."

"I thank you for your frankness, and your understandably limited support," Brox said. "I would point out that it would be quite difficult for me--or any Kendari--to steal coffee and a coffee mug from the human compound. I'd remind you that no caffeine products of any kind are permitted in this building, for obvious reasons. We were not exactly given free rein of the rest of the facilities--and, as you say, we dare not deal with anything containing caffeine without taking very careful precautions."

"Those objections are quite valid," said Hannah Wolfson, "but whatever the motive for this crime, if we assume it wasn't just Frank Milkowski grabbing a Kendari and forcing coffee into her mouth--and I wouldn't want to try that with a Kendari--this was a carefully planned crime, staged to make it look like something it wasn't. Whoever did it took his or her time, and chose the moment. If it took forty days to collect the materials--pilfer a cup someone had left out, filch a jar of instant coffee from the trash--so be it."

Hannah Wolfson went on. "Or else the killer came upon the cup and the coffee accidentally, or from some other source outside the embassy compound. There are any number of humans living just up the road. Buying or stealing coffee from them would be no problem. And I've seen at least four of those BSI souvenir mugs floating around the embassy compound. My guess is they are given out to all sorts of people as souvenirs. They're very popular with visitors to BSI HQ."

Brox cocked his head to one side and turned his hands upward. "You might as well know now that I have one at my workstall back in our main embassy building. And Emelza had one as well. They are a convenient size for holding writing instruments, and there is--or at least was--a certain ironic humor in decorating our workstalls with the sign of the enemy. Both of those mugs are still there, as of this morning. I checked. But certainly there could be others in our embassy. There probably are. Your people seemed to enjoy handing them out. So yes, I could have done it. But I didn't."

"I am not calling you off the case," said Hannah. "I don't see how I can, in the situation we're in. But you know as well as I do that you should not be investigating this matter, for all sorts of very obvious reasons."

"I agree. But it was bad enough that Flexdal had to send a QuickBeam message reporting Emelza's death. He did not wish to face the further dishonor and loss of face that would be involved in making the slightest suggestion that I might be a suspect. That would be extremely difficult on a professional level, but that is only part of it. He is a distant connection of both my family and Emelza's, and was part of the group that arranged for us to be espoused. To take me off the case would, in effect, be to admit to a large group of high-social-status Kendari that he had introduced her to her killer, and arranged for them to be together. He also has family ties to the office that would have dispatched a replacement investigator and would have faced grave embarrassment there as well, on similar grounds. He was instantly convinced that Milkowski did it, or that some other human made it look like Milkowski did it. There was also the time element. The Vixa were going to give us one round-trip on the
Eminent Concordance
--but not two. As I understand it, it takes a dozen or so days to replenish the ship between journeys. That meant we had to choose, quickly, between getting in human or Kendari investigators.

"For all the reasons I just listed, my Superior chose humans. He dispatched me to collect you in order to assert his official confidence in me, and to establish me as the senior, leading partner in the investigation. My job, as he sees it, is to force you to reach the conclusion that a human did it and force humans to absorb the full humiliation of declaring yourselves guilty. He is, obviously, a fool, but those were his intentions."

"And maybe you should do what he says," said Jamie Mendez. "If that's the way evidence is pointing, and we're heading another way, you push us back. You keep us honest. But your boss is right, at least up to a point. You can't be the lead investigator on this."

"Agreed. I can assist. I can provide support. But you two are the only ones here who
aren't
suspects. You must lead the investigation. And if you conclude that the best way I could help would be to lock me up in solitary confinement starting right now, so be it. If I am innocent--and I am--then I have the strongest possible motives--personal, professional, and patriotic--for wishing you to succeed."

"I think we can find better uses for you than locking you up," said Hannah Wolfson. "But you remind me of another point. Your xenologist and our ambassador both put all of their personnel in voluntary confinement. I've got a few ideas about how we're going to deal with it, but it's going to be a huge nuisance. I frankly don't see how we can manage interviewing your people as well--and I don't think it would be such a bright idea for either side to have enemy aliens in the room for those sessions. I'd like to suggest that we simply do sight-and-sound recordings of all interrogations and provide the recordings to the other side."

"Agreed. I was planning to suggest the same idea to you."

"How are you going to deal with interviewing your entire staff?"

"It is actually a fairly trivial problem. It is our custom for all of our staff to take their last meal of the night together. Only three embassy staff Kendari--myself, Emelza, and a maintenance worker--were not present at the meal. What that means, of course, is that everyone else has the rest of the dinner party to provide an alibi for the period around the time of death. I was present for the entire meal myself--except for when I went to collect Emelza. I planned to chide her for working late again. Instead, I discovered her body."

"So you have an alibi as well," said Hannah Wolfson. "That's certainly something."

"Unfortunately, I left for about twelve minutes just about at the time of--of the murder. There will be several witnesses who noticed my departure, I am sure."

"Where did you go?"

"I spilled some bloodsauce on myself, and went to my own quarters to clean up before it could stain my body felt." Brox looked from one human to the other, and decided to press ahead, play no games. What point in pretending not to notice what they would see instantly in any event? "And you are not fools, and are of course well aware that staging an accident like that--especially one that would account for my returning with mussed body felt, or with damp, recently washed portions of my body--is exactly what someone wishing to provide himself with a chance to slip away and commit a crime that might involve violence or struggle might do."

Jamie Mendez frowned. "You said it. We didn't."

Hannah Wolfson spoke up in a brisk tone of voice. "Getting back to your own people. How do you plan to proceed?"

"I will work up a written interview form for all of them to fill out, describing where they were and what they did during the evening, without drawing any sort of special attention to the time during which the murder was committed--and see if I can determine who else went away from the meal and came back, or arrived late. I'll then go back and interview the appropriate parties directly."

"That's more or less how we'll be proceeding. We'll want to see copies of all your interview forms, and recordings of the live interviews."

"Will you wish to have them translated first?"

"Frankly, our security rules say we can't rely on outside translation. We'd have to have our computers translate them anyway. The translator programs might miss a few things that we'll need clarified, but otherwise, don't waste your time."

"Likewise, provide us--or, rather, me, I suppose--with your materials without bothering to translate."

"It looks as if we're all going to have a lot of boring written statements to wade through," said Jamie Mendez in a cheerful tone of voice. "But speaking of information--that datapad you've got--you mentioned something about first fruits of the investigation?"

Brox slid the human-made datapad across the table. "I'd appreciate it if you'd get that information transferred as rapidly as possible and get that datapad back to me. We don't have many of them."

"I should be able to do it here and now," said Jamie Mendez, reaching out to take the pad.

"Hold off on that just a moment, Jamie," said Hannah Wolfson.

"Why?"

"Just indulge me for a little bit." She turned to address Brox. "What is the data on that pad?"

"Medical tests and studies concerning the cause and time of death. All the raw data is there, along with a discussion of the procedures used by Medical Technist Remdex 290 to arrive at his conclusions. I would expect that in your service, the medical technist would normally just give you final numbers, without going into a great deal of detail about how they were obtained. However, given the current circumstances, I assumed your people would want to work through from the raw data and confirm our procedures."

"They will, if our people are still speaking to us," Hannah said. "Thanks, Brox."

Brox looked from one of them to another. "Might I ask why your own people might
not
be speaking to you?"

"We just had to tear a couple of heads off," said Hannah.

Brox jerked his head back in surprise. "I beg your pardon?"

"It's just an expression," Jamie said with a smile. "It means we had to yell at the ambassador and Dr. Zhen Chi. Let's just say they weren't following proper procedure."

"And
I
will just say that sometimes your experiences parallel my own," Brox said, allowing himself a small moment of entertainment. "But getting back to the matter at hand, I can give you a verbal summary of the hard data. Your side can, must, and should verify all this, and we'll preserve the evidence for later confirmation and so on--but the matter is so straightforward that I doubt there will be any difficulty."

"Before you do--have you got anything on the coffee mug yet?" asked Hannah Wolfson. "Were you planning to brief us on that right now? Is the data on it in that pad?"

"Medical Technist Remdex is doing that work now, I believe."
And Medical Technist Remdex is practically at the boiling point, ranting that his working conditions are intolerable, and he can't work for such long periods without rest.
"I was not aware that you wanted the data on the container first." Brox's tone of voice made clear the unstated and annoyed addendum
because you never told me.

"No, just the opposite. I
don't
want the analysis of the coffee mug just yet. We're not going to be ready for that information for a bit anyway."

"Ready for it?" Jamie Mendez echoed.

"Indulge me, Jamie, indulge me," Hannah said again. "It would be useful to our side if you kept the medical data separate from whatever you get on the mug and delivered all the information on your analysis of the coffee mug in its own package. I place no restrictions on our analysis of the samples we took from the cup, and of the broken chip of cup. You may have that information as soon as Dr. Zhen Chi has completed it."