Final Inquiries Read online

  "So that's why your people weren't surprised when that handprint appeared," said Hannah. "Human bodies don't react that way after death. We'd never seen that before--and we hadn't seen any marks on the body when we got there. Our people all assumed that, somehow, someone must have come in and poked at the body after we first examined it."

  "But wait a second," Jamie Mendez protested. "Who did poke the body?"

  "Obviously, Special Agent Milkowski," said Brox. "He enters the joint operations center shortly after I discover the body. He sees Emelza on the floor. He leans over her and touches her. Perhaps he is checking for signs of life or trying to awaken her."

  "We haven't interrogated Milkowski yet," said Hannah, "but we have a hearsay version from the ambassador that contradicts that. According to our ambassador, Milkowski finds the body before you, touches nothing, and immediately retreats out the blast doors on our side of the joint ops center. The ambassador is then a witness and participant in what happens next. He calls Diplomatic Xenologist Flexdal, who sends you in to confirm the body is there."

  So. Flexdal had started things out by deceiving the humans--and Brox himself. Brox knew he should have figured that out. I didn't want to know, he admitted to himself. But he also had to admit it--or at least hint at it clearly enough for his colleagues to understand--if he were not to cause even worse damage. "Clearly there was some error in communication. I was in the act of informing Flexdal of Emelza's death when the call came through from your ambassador."

  "Right," said Jamie with an odd little smile. "We figured there might have been that sort of mix-up."

  "But if the, ah, 'mix-up' happened that way, Milkowski and the ambassador could easily have believed that Milkowski was the first on the scene," said Hannah. "He wasn't lying. He was just wrong. Why would he lie about poking or not poking the body?"

  "Maybe he didn't even realize what he was doing," said Jamie Mendez as he examined something on his datapad. "Maybe he was embarrassed about doing something as dumb and unprofessional as poking at a corpse. And maybe he didn't do it."

  "I beg your pardon?" said Brox.

  "I got a look at his simulant just a little while ago," said Jamie. "Judging from what his sim looks like, he's a pretty big guy, isn't he? A hundred-eighty centimeters, or maybe a bit under that. Bigger and taller than me, by a pretty fair bit."

  "That's about right," said Hannah. "What of it?"

  He passed his datapad to Hannah, and let her see what was on it. "Then how is it that the handprint he supposedly left is about one-third smaller than mine, and also smaller than yours? Okay, maybe he's got the hands and feet of a teenage girl, but I doubt it. People would notice."

  Hannah handed the datapad to Brox. It was displaying various shots of the handprint, with scaling data overlays. Jamie silently held up his own hand, fingers spread out, to make the comparison. "And before you can ask, Brox," Jamie said, "I'd say it's essentially impossible for a human with large hands to compress or distort his or her hand or fingers to make a convincing small handprint. Unless there is something seriously weird about Milkowski, there is no way he made this print."

  "You are quite right. We'll have to check, of course, and measure Milkowski's hand. But he didn't make this handprint." Brox laughed wearily. "When we worked together on Reqwar, it was a spurious human footprint that caused trouble."

  "No," said Hannah. "It was a shoeprint. Big difference--especially because it is vastly harder to create an even remotely plausible print of a bare foot--and harder still to make a real-looking fake handprint. We have to presume that this handprint is legitimate unless and until we have reason to believe otherwise."

  "Let me back up on another point," said Jamie. "Remdex reports that Emelza died at about 1950, and he's more than ninety-seven percent certain that she died no later than forty-four--call it forty-five--minutes after that, or, 2035 at the outside. What time did you find the body?"

  "At about 2140 or 2150, I'd say."

  "The ambassador's statement and his comm log show Milkowski calling him at 2200. We don't have any proof that he's speaking from the joint ops center, but we have no reason to believe he isn't. Then the comm log shows our ambassador calling your Diplomatic Xenologist at 2204."

  "And I was present when that call came in. I had just about finished reporting that I had found Emelza, and Flexdal was questioning me pretty sharply about it. He was instantly convinced that the humans had killed her. He had just gotten through saying so when your ambassador called. Let us say it was not a moment in which he was eager to share much information with your people. He was not entirely forthcoming with Ambassador Stabmacher, and he let him believe that the humans had found Emelza first, and that I was going to go see for myself--when I had already seen the body, sealed our side of the ops center, and reported to him. Before I departed to summon you here, I reopened the outer blast doors, put my crime scene kit inside, and resealed the doors. That was witnessed and recorded. I did not go past the antechamber between the blast doors. I did not disturb the inner door seals."

  "All very good. Except that you said it takes a while after death for the body to be sensitive to this delayed-imprint phenomenon. If she dies at 1950, or even at 1905, how likely is it that her skin is going to be susceptible to the delayed-imprint syndrome at 2200? Or what if she died at 2035?"

  Brox frowned and worked it through. "It would be essentially impossible for her skin to produce a delayed imprint before 2200 if she died at any time after 1950. It would be very unlikely--a chance in a thousand--even if she died at 1905."

  "Let's assume she did die at 1905. What would be the earliest moment, in a normal case, for her skin to be susceptible?"

  "At the very earliest, about 2230, but 2300 would be more likely. Especially considering the very clear, distinct handprint we saw. It takes some time for the full susceptibility to build up."

  "And by 2200 hours, all the entrances to the joint ops center were locked down and sealed with tamper-indicator strips," said Hannah.

  They were all silent for a time. It was Jamie Mendez who finally spoke.

  "So--now that we've gotten together to clear these points up, we've established that Emelza somehow or another got a massive dose of poison in her mouth, but did not spit it out or swallow it, but instead held it in her mouth, despite the extremely intense pain, long enough for tissues around her eyes, nose, and ears to become inflamed, then died. Her body was discovered at about 2150, and again, ten minutes later, at 2200. The inner door to the building was sealed from the Kendari side by about 2200. The human side wasn't sealed immediately, but there were multiple witnesses observing the human-side entrance from about 2204 until it was sealed, so we can treat 2204 as the terminal moment.

  "After that moment, to all intents and purposes, no one had access to the building. Yes, it takes a while to get everyone pointlessly confined, but according to the ambassador, they're all locked down by about 2500 hours. During that three-hour period, no one was really keeping watch over the embassy staff, but I think someone would have noticed a person breaking into the ops center. It's locked down and it's got tamper seals on the doors. And from that moment to when we collected the ambassador and Zhen Chi, the entire embassy staff was confined to quarters."

  Jamie looked around the table. "So, with all that in mind, let's get ready for another nice long silence as I ask--who, exactly, made that handprint, and when?"

  FIFTEEN

  COLLEAGUES

  Frank Milkowski woke up instantly the moment he heard the sound. He had been waiting for that noise--a faint rustling and scratching from outside the hatch of his shipboard compartment--for a long time. Endless hours. It seemed like endless years.

  And suddenly he had only a few seconds. He threw back the cover and swung his feet out of bed to sit there in his underwear. There was no time to get properly dressed, let alone shower or shave. He pulled his pants on, stepped into his shipboard slippers, pulled on yesterday's--or was it the day before's?--badly rumpled work
shirt, and stepped into the tiny cramped refresher unit.

  He splashed some water on his face, gargled for a moment, ran wet fingers through his hair, and stepped back into the main compartment. He stripped the sheets off the bed, stuffed them and the pillow in their storage box, and refolded the bed back into its other incarnation--a semicomfortable one-person couch.

  He just barely managed to sit down when the scraping stopped. Thank God it took a while to peel off that tamper-detect stuff--and more thanks that the chief engineer had warned everybody going into confinement that it had to be removed completely for fear of jamming up the doors.

  Suddenly he remembered another bit of evidence that needed to be concealed. He scooped up the empty pair of gin bottles that were sitting on the floor in the corner. He had managed to smuggle the booze in with his food supplies during the confusion of getting everyone billeted aboard the ship. He shoved them deep into the recycler bin and made sure they were completely buried under all the food wrappers and other junk before he sat himself back down.

  Frank had spent all of the last day and a half in that small compartment--and used nearly all of that time trying to think through the moment that was about to happen, the door that was about to slide open. He had been locked down early. Any number of things could have happened. He had no way of knowing who would be behind the door.

  Perhaps Ambassador Stabmacher coming in to tell him all was well? One of the other two BSI agents, Singh or Farrell? If either or both of them had managed to clear themselves of the charge, obviously they would be on the case. Or had Stabmacher changed his mind, found some way to convince himself that letting the Kendari or even the Vixa investigate would be for the best? Neither Vixan or Kendari would fit comfortably in the ship's cramped corridors. Some human would have to escort him to where the xenos would sit in judgment.

  Or had they actually managed that loony idea of sending for an outside investigator, setting interstellar speed records to bring in someone else? If so, who? What species? What organization? What individuals? There were only a limited number of plausible possibilities once you evaluated all the variables.

  Even as half his mind was telling him it was pointless to speculate, since he would know in another few seconds, the other half was frantically working the problem, desperately trying to work the inaccurate, sketchy, and dated information he had for all it was worth and come up with the right answer, be ready to deal with whoever it was right off the bat.

  He could hear the low beep-beep-beep tones of someone entering a combination into the lock-pad, and decided it had to be a stranger, but a human. The embassy workers all used the same model of lock-pad a dozen times a day. They'd have worked it faster. But an alien would be much slower. It would have to decipher the human number symbols, and might not even be sure whether to press the buttons or do something else.

  He could hear the cheerful boop-boop tone pair that indicated that the right code had been entered, then the dead bolt sliding back. But the door did not open. Instead there was silence. Why? And then, of all improbable things, the annunciator, the doorbell, rang. And who would bother to push that button?

  Frank wasn't much for making intuitive leaps, but he made one then. He knew, in the half heartbeat between the annunciator tone and speaking, the answer to that question, who it had to be. "Come on in, Hannah," he said, in the most casual voice he could muster. "You should know better than I do that it's open."

  If he had just guessed wrong, he was about to look very foolish. But if his guess was right, then maybe he had just scored enough points, shown himself to be smart enough, on the ball enough, to win the coming interrogation before it ever began. That was the secret, Frank firmly believed. An interrogation was not just one person asking and another person answering. It was a game, a fight, a battle. Zero-sum stuff. If you win, I lose. If you get what you want, that means you took it away from me.

  The door slid open--and sure enough, there was Senior Special Agent Hannah Wolfson. She stepped inside, carrying the breakfast tray he had figured was the thing that was slowing her down. Food and drink for the prisoner, playing the good cop to win him over. "Hello, Frank," she said. "I guess I won't bother asking if you're surprised to see me."

  "You know me," he said, not bothering to stand up. Let her stand in his presence, show her that he felt no need to defer to her. "A regular junior Sherlock Holmes. Only an outsider who didn't know our lock-pad by heart, and who was going to play this extra, extra nice would push that doorbell button. Brox talked my ear off about his adventures working with you and your poodle-boy. If he went for help, and it was going to be a human--who else would it be? Elementary, my dear Watson."

  "Supposedly that line doesn't even show up in the real Sherlock Holmes stories," Wolfson said, still standing with the tray. She glanced at the walls, spotted a pullout table panel, balanced the tray with one hand for a second, pulled out the panel, and set the tray down on it. She reached for another foldout and pulled down a chair facing Frank. "And if you're ever up against my poodle--I assume you're talking about Mendez, and yes, he's here too--I'd be careful," she said, being very calm and casual herself. "He's got some pretty sharp teeth and claws--and he tends to go for the throat. More of a Doberman, really."

  "Goodness, I'm scared," Frank said in a deadpan. "Thanks so much for the warning." He looked Wolfson in the eye as he considered her opening moves. All very nice, very friendly--but also pushing in on his space, taking over the compartment, telling him he had his facts wrong and that she had a goon she could sic on him if need be. She wasn't bluffing either. Frank had seen a couple of after-action reports about how Mendez handled himself in a firefight. Truth be told, Frank was a little scared of the guy.

  And of Wolfson, too, for that matter. She had a hell of a reputation--and she was looking the part, sharp and confident. Her hair neat, her tunic and slacks fresh, clean, and neatly pressed, showing every sign of being rested, relaxed, and in control. Frank spotted a pen-sized video camera in her pocket, with a small blinking light indicating that it was running. She didn't draw attention to it, but on the other hand she was making no effort to conceal the fact that she was recording their conversation.

  Maybe Wolfson knew how to play interrogation too. Frank decided he should push back a little harder. "Don't try scaring me," he said. "You work at making me happy. You're going to need me by the end of this."

  "I hope so, Frank. I truly do. And I am trying to make you happy. I brought you breakfast."

  He turned his attention to the tray--and realized that was a mistake as he tried to keep his mouth from watering. Eggs, bacon, toast, coffee--all of it fresh, all of it hot. He hadn't seen anything but low-grade emergency medpacks for two days. It was an act of will to keep from lunging for a fork. Instead he pointed a disdainful finger at the BSI coffee mug, full of fresh, steaming-hot coffee, that sat at the corner of the tray.

  "Am I supposed to see you brought me a cup just like the one at the crime scene, burst into tears, break down, and confess that I did it?"

  Wolfson grinned coldly. "First off, I'm here to ask questions. You don't ask, you answer. Second, I'll cut you a break and answer that one. You're supposed to be polite and say 'thank you for bringing me breakfast.'" She paused for a moment. "On the other hand, Frank, if you did do it, yeah, it would save me a lot of time and paperwork if you'd just let me know right now."

  "Well, I didn't do it," he said. "I had nothing to do with it, period. And I had all of thirty seconds to look at the crime scene, so I'm guessing you know more than I do. Next question."

  "I haven't asked the first one yet," Wolfson said mildly. "And I won't spoil your breakfast by making you answer questions while you eat. You go ahead. I'll catch up on my case notes while you shovel those eggs in."

  And with that, she pulled out a datapad and started scrolling through whatever information it was showing. Frank couldn't see any of it from his angle. For all he knew, it could be last week's sports page--or a full forensics worku
p from the crime scene.

  Another good-cop move that also served to get him off-balance, he noted as he added milk and sugar to his coffee and stirred it. He would have much preferred eating while being questioned. Chasing a piece of egg around the plate, chewing on a piece of toast, sipping coffee--even just having a knife and fork to play with--would all have been first-rate stalling tactics. Instead she sat there calmly, quietly, ignoring him, while he felt obliged to eat as quickly as possible to keep from wasting her time. It would be damned hard to bark and bluster at her five minutes after she had managed to put him oh so deftly in his place.

  "What's on the datapad?" he asked. "Forget to file in a requisition for your new pencil with the Bullpen Admin officer?"

  Hannah gestured with the datapad. "Sure. You bet. If you're trying to say I just hang around the Bullpen dodging assignments, maybe you're mixing me up with your buddy Kosolov. If it was a slag to make me feel like a wimp for following all the rules, let's just double-check who's been in solitary for two days. And if you're just angling in on a question that would let you know where I came from--yeah, we were flown in straight from the Bullpen to here, nonstop. Damnedest ride I've ever been on. And if it was just a clumsy attempt to make conversation, loosen things up, get things friendly so it's tougher to make them rough in a minute--well, we can find out how well it worked real soon." She glanced at his plate and powered down the datapad she had been reading--or pretending to read. "Finished eating? Good. Then let's get on with it."

  "I didn't do it," Frank said stolidly. "There's your beginning, middle, and end."

  "That's twice you've denied committing a crime no one has accused you of committing."