The Cause of Death Read online

  There was no plausible alternative to the conclusion that the Thelm had fired the gun, and that the wound was caused by the shot he fired. So, in a very limited sense, the Thelm had killed himself. But it was all but impossible to believe he had done it deliberately. His attitude and behavior mere hours before were anything but suicidal. Besides, Brox had shown that the fire had been set deliberately, after the Thelm had been shot and killed and had fallen to the floor. Suicides can't set fires after they die.

  But who or what had the Thelm been shooting at, and why? To Jamie, at least, it looked very much as if the Thelm had been manipulated into shooting at whatever-it-was, in order to cause the gun to malfunction and kill him.

  Look at it from another angle. Who benefits? It was the most basic question in any criminal investigation. Answer that question, and you'd almost automatically have a solid list of suspects. The devil of it was that who benefited depended on who had done the killing. The simplest case was that, if Georg did it, then by all the lunatic, barbaric, old-stone-age laws of Pavlat, he would benefit by becoming Thelm--and, just incidentally, by not being executed, or exiled.

  But the murder as planned required very specific preparations--for example, rigging the gun and planting it. Georg had manifestly not been carrying out any such plan, but had been doing his best to be visibly far away from the Thelm, and visibly sitting there in his glass house, not doing anything to prepare for killing anyone. Except he was here at the Keep last night, Jamie reminded himself. And that shoe print was there.

  But the guns had been on display--and the business about being ready to deal with an affair of honor at a moment's notice, absurd as it seemed, was probably all the reason a Reqwar Pavlat Thelm would need to keep loaded weapons in his study. The guns could have sat there more or less indefinitely. There might have been a risk that the Thelm would want to get in a little target practice--but he would not have used the ornately decorated pistols on the show table for that. The guns could have been rigged--and planted in the Thelm's audience chamber--months ago--or the day after Irvtuk and his brothers died. So it had to be conceded that Georg had motive, means, and opportunity.

  Except, Jamie had to keep reminding himself, it's not only legal for him to kill the Thelm--the law requires it. But it had to be that the law had some sort of provision for cases where the father died of natural causes--or at the hands of someone besides the son--before the deadline. What were the rules covering those cases?

  And if Georg decided to kill Lantrall, he wouldn't skulk around. He would want it known, need it known. Georg would not kill with a booby trap, or make it look like a possible suicide. What Georg would need would be absolute proof that he had personally and deliberately killed the Thelm.

  If Georg had any sense, he would have marched right up to the closest news reporter and handed him a video recording of him committing the murder--and thus secured his claim to the Thelmship. Georg had motive, means, and opportunity to commit a public murder of the Thelm. But doing it the way it was done was exactly contrary to Georg's apparent motive. He might have decided to kill the Thelm to avoid execution or exile. But even in such a case, he could only be safe if he was very, very public about the murder. Unless or until they could come up with an alternate motive for Georg to kill the Thelm furtively, Georg was a problematic suspect.

  What if Georg was a knowing accomplice--or had hired a contract killer? Jamie couldn't quite think what motive Georg would have for having someone else do the job--but never mind about motives for the time being. Just as a piece of legal theory, would that be a crime for Georg? Would it be a crime for the accomplice? Jamie could invent a plausible argument for either possibility, but he had a hunch that calling in an accomplice to do the dirty work would be considered dishonorable.

  What if an unknown party carried out the murder without Georg's knowledge or permission? Then Georg would likely, but not definitely, benefit by becoming Thelm on the death of his father. Darsteel should be able to tell them for sure in the morning. But Georg was the only person for whom the murder would not be a crime. So the unknown person would be subject to arrest and punishment.

  Tentative conclusion: The murder was definitely and indisputably a crime only if Georg has nothing to do with it, and clearly not a crime only if Georg definitely and indisputably did the killing, and did it entirely by himself.

  But there was another weird angle: Since the murder was definitely and indisputably a crime only if Georg had nothing to do with it, any attempt to frame Georg for the killing would benefit Georg by preventing his death or exile, and by making him Thelm--and also protect the real culprit from punishment.

  Jamie turned to the question of who else might benefit. In other words, who else would have a motive for killing the Thelm? Anyone who didn't want the Thelek to be next in line for the Thelmship would have a motive to kill the Thelm--and to do so as soon as possible. If the Thelm didn't die before Georg was executed, and before the Thelm had any chance to come up with a way to establish an alternate heir, then the High Thelek would be indisputably next in line for the Thelmship. Thelek Saffeer would become Thelm Saffeer once the Thelm did die, in a week or a century.

  Therefore, anyone who wanted to prevent the Thelek from becoming Thelm would have a reason to kill the present Thelm immediately, before the last four days of the time period expired and/or before the Thelm could find a suitable replacement heir. The only problem with that idea was that an awful lot of people didn't want the Thelek to become Thelm. They'd have a long list of suspects if they went by that motive.

  And then there was the whole category of motives that had nothing to do with the succession. Hannah had mentioned that someone with a grudge against the Thelm might choose this moment for revenge simply because everyone would assume the killing had political motives. What she hadn't mentioned was that their good friend Lady Zahida Halztec fell neatly into that category. She had certainly played the part of a good and loyal subject--but on the other hand, her family might hold a grudge against the present Thelm, who had not lifted a finger to prevent her great-uncle Bindulan's exile, or done anything much to clear his name.

  And, edging back over into succession-related motives, the Bindulan clan most decidedly would not want the High Thelek to be Thelm. Family self-interest, even self-defense, might well serve to reinforce a revenge motive.

  There was another element. The killer, or an accomplice, had to get to the dueling pistols and tamper with them before last night. Of all the suspects Jamie could think of, Zahida was the only one that he knew for certain had recently been in the Thelm's Private Audience Chamber. That she had gone there to save the lives of a certain two BSI agents made him less than happy to use that visit to help build a case against her, but those were the facts.

  What about other suspects? The Thelm was the ruler of a faction-plagued world, and he had been in power for a very long time. It would be a miracle if he hadn't made some enemies along the way. There might be dozens of them, all eager to do him in.

  If he wanted to cast his net even farther, Jamie could go look in the mirror. Darsteel hadn't just locked them up to keep them safe. It had to be that Darsteel was treating them as suspects. After all, they were in the Keep the night it happened, and it shouldn't have been too hard for Darsteel to imagine a motive strong enough to inspire the humans to murder the Thelm.

  Jamie smiled to himself in the darkness. So either Georg did it, or someone else did. He decided to give it up for the moment and try again in the daytime. He quit staring at the ceiling, shut his eyes, and went to sleep.

  * * *

  Hannah wasn't in the least surprised to come fully awake once again when she got to bed, her thoughts speeding along almost too fast for her to keep up with them. She'd been on too many cases not to expect it.

  The Thelm's death must have, to a certainty, set chaos loose on Reqwar. The High Thelek has to be jumping out of his skin by now, she thought. And it must have been doubly bad for him to have his tame Kendar
i vanish into thin air. Hannah was entirely prepared to believe Brox when he said the Thelek did not know he had gone to the fire. But even if Brox had been lying, he vanished for sure and for real once Darsteel had gotten them all locked in together.

  But the Thelek would not be the only one starved for information. Every land-thelm and thelek on the planet had to be wondering what the devil was going on, and who was going to wind up on top. Every small-time land-thelm who distrusted his neighbor would be wondering if the neighbor was going to take advantage of the confusion to strike now, when the central authorities were likely too distracted to interfere. And every small-time land-thelm who got that far in his thinking would start reflecting on the advantages of striking first . . .

  It could be the case that civil war, a whole series of civil wars, had already broken out, that the whole Reqwar political system was unraveling already. But she was letting her imagination run away with her. With a little luck, there would still be time to calm the situation before it reached that state.

  But the only way to calm it would be to replace uncertainty with clarity. And the only way to do that would be for one undisputed and universally acceptable successor to the Thelm to emerge. And the only way for that even to be possible would be to figure out who the devil had killed the Thelm, and why.

  Did the means and timing of the Thelm's death affect the succession? If so, how? Were they looking in all the right directions for their suspects? Jamie's list of suspects had certainly erred on the side of inclusiveness. He had included the two Stannlar Consortia, for example. Hannah wished she had had the chance to ask him why--but with Brox right there, and Darsteel too for that matter, there hadn't been the chance.

  But why had he included them? Perhaps simply because, mere hours after playing host to the Thelm in their converted warehouse, the Thelm was dead. Had the Thelm--or anyone else at the meeting--said or done something she had missed that would suffice as a motive? Or was it just that it would be awfully convenient to have their business partner made the king of the planet? Or might they have done it for some related, if more altruistic, reason? The Thelm himself had warned that the planet's terrestrial ecology would collapse altogether if the High Thelek took over, booted out the human-Stannlar team, and asked the Kendari to take over--or, rather, start over from scratch. Kill Thelm Lantrall, make Georg Thelm, and save the world?

  The Stannlar did have a well-earned reputation for being rather casual about the death of an individual. Death, after all, was something that happened to insignificant components. The Consortium itself lived on.

  It suddenly occurred to Hannah that this particular murder would have been absurdly easy for a Stannlar Consortium to commit. The whole case revolved around persuading or compelling the Thelm to fire that ridiculous dueling pistol, so that the rocket slug would shoot backwards, out the wrong end of the gun, and kill him. Well, what better way to scare him than with a nasty monster right in front of him?

  One or both Stannlar could have sent any number of smaller components into the Keep, through any number of routes. The components could have met up in the Keep, then assembled themselves into whatever sort of size and shape monster would be most likely to scare the Thelm. Well, all right, subcomponents going "boo" was getting a bit outlandish, but she was casting about for possibilities, not probabilities. They might have used some other way to get the Thelm to fire that gun.

  The Stannlar would have to sabotage the gun first, but that was true of every possible suspect. But, after the murder--that was the beauty part. The Stannlar components could start the fire in the room, making sure to destroy any bits of evidence they needed to get rid of--such as whatever it was they used to create that shoe print--then throw themselves into the fire. That would leave whoever investigated searching for an escaped murderer, when the murderer in fact no longer existed.

  Suicidal for the components themselves, yes, but for the Stannlar Consortium of which they were a part, it would be a sacrifice, a degree of stress to the system, somewhere between a haircut and a blood donation. How much stress would it be? How would it show, and how much? If, say, both or either Stannlar suddenly showed signs of needing to regenerate, or seemed to have not quite as many components on view, that might well tell the investigators something. The signs might be subtle, or fleeting. They would have to check at once, as soon as Darsteel came in to talk with them in the morning.

  She moved on to other questions. What, exactly, had Jamie asked for in that second note? Brox's being there was a dreadful nuisance. Though, it had to be confessed, Brox really was a decent sort. No. More than that. Downright honorable. Capable of seeing beyond short-term advantage for his side, of worrying about the long-term consequences for all.

  She yawned. Good old Brox. Good man to stand by in a crisis. But he wasn't a man. Kendari. Got to watch out for trusting him. Yes, sir. She yawned mightily, shut her eyes, and stretched. Watch out for the Kendari, even the good ones . . .

  And she slept, fitfully, nervously, her slumbers disturbed by dreams of trying to work a crime scene while a whole herd of miniature component-Kendari in tiny iso-suits endlessly split up and re-formed into all sorts of monster shapes, before turning into the Thelm, up and walking around with a gaping hole clean through his chest, then melting into a pair of earnest Stannlar who kept interrupting her measurements with eager explanations of how death was nothing to worry about.

  And then the dreams faded down into the calm and welcoming darkness, and she slept.

  * * *

  Brox 231, as an individual, liked to believe that he was not much given to fretting in bed. He was, for that matter, a member of a species not much given to it either. His main problem was with the confounded excuse for a sleep-sling that they had brought in. The blasted thing had obviously been built by someone who had seen a picture of one once, but that was where its resemblance to a proper sling ended. It somehow managed to be too long and too short, too narrow and too wide, all at the same time. He finally gave up trying to adjust it and resigned himself to suffering with things as they were. He probably would have been better off simply curling up on the floor somewhere.

  But Brox had always prided himself on being honest with himself. It wasn't just the badly designed, badly made sleep-sling--though that was a part of it. There was a great deal more going on to keep him awake.

  He was only thankful that the humans and Darsteel showed no signs of realizing the real reasons he had left the Thelek's home without a word, the moment he had heard of the fire.

  First and foremost, the Thelek had to know, backwards and forwards, the exact laws of succession under every possible set of circumstances. He had lived and breathed the ambition of ascending to the Thelmship for so long that it had all become second nature to him. But the instinct, even the need, to scheme and plot had also become second nature.

  The Thelek would not be able to resist the temptation to find advantage in this catastrophe. Given half a chance, the Thelek would have sucked Brox into whatever plots he started to hatch. Brox wanted no part of such schemes and wanted the Kendari government to have no part of them.

  If, as seemed quite possible, there was a way for the Thelek to ascend to the Thelmship legally, properly, and openly, Brox would do all he could to assist him. But if Thelek sought to achieve that goal by exerting pressure to suppress evidence, by encouraging witnesses to forget certain details, or encouraging them to remember other details in a more helpful manner, by altering documents or "correcting" evidentiary photos, or any of the rest of it, the Kendari government could not be involved. Not only was such nonsense stupid and dangerous, not only was it dishonorable--worst of all, it was doomed to failure. After all, the human investigators were there, ready and watching for all the usual tricks.

  And of course there was the very real possibility that the Thelek had committed the murder. Oh, not himself. Of course not. That would not be the done thing. But as the head of a vast, complex, and murky conspiracy? Yes, absolutely. And the ev
idence all pointed to the sort of conspiracy the High Thelek would have come up with. A needlessly complicated way to do the murder itself, involving an upper-class obsession like dueling. Various indications of a botched follow-up, such as the repeated attempts to start the fire, and the odd scratches on the Thelm's hands and fingers. The attempt--however crude--to plant evidence implicating an enemy in the crime. Brox did not know for sure who had done the killing, but he had not the slightest doubt in his mind that the shoe print was faked, somehow.

  It looked all too much like a High Thelek job. And if Brox had been there at the High Thelek's side in the aftermath, he would have gotten sucked into the explanations, the deceptions, the cover-ups that were likely being devised even now.

  Far better to be safely locked up here in these apartments, literally caught in the middle, with a snoring human in either side room. Put that way, his current situation seemed quite satisfactory indeed.

  Brox sighed, stretched out into the least uncomfortable position he could manage, and went to sleep.

  TWENTY-THREECONFERENCE

  Somehow or another, Jamie managed to be the first one up in the morning. He emerged as quietly as possible from his room, and slipped in and out of the human-style refresher without waking Brox. It was only after he emerged that he noticed a box on the main table. It had his name--written in very clumsily written Roman letters instead of Greater Trade Writing phonetics--scrawled on the side. He scooped it up and took it to his room to open. Inside was a rocket-gun dueling pistol, two dummy rounds, and a simplified manual with lots of pictures. That was helpful, as Jamie's ability to read Reqwar Pavlat was severely limited.

  He set to work studying the gun. It took only a minute or two for him to understand its basic workings--but somehow, he got the feeling that it could tell him a lot more if only he gave it a chance. He sat there, thinking, for a long time. It was almost coming. Almost.