Including spill monitoring.
His hands shook. He wasn’t interested in the backup for the spill monitor at the moment, although it would tell him where the spill originated (six feet up, in the middle of the room, on the floor itself), as well as some other choice details.
What he wanted to see were the movements inside the room on the night of the death.
He would have to turn the system on to have it play back inside the room.
He hesitated for just a moment. Either way, the blood would decay. If he set up the environmental system to his specifications, he could monitor the decay from this point forward.
That thought was the one that tipped him over. He set up the system, double recording the information about how he did so in several of his devices so he could share that with his assistants later.
He then opened the security backup and searched it to find when the spill occurred.
Two nights ago, after midnight. The spill registered relatively quickly. He then set up the playback as a holographic overlay on the room itself, so he could watch it in the space where it all occurred.
Movement replays disturbed some of his techs. That was why he often ran the replays himself. The replays did not show the actual people doing the actual deeds, but when speeded up, showed the changes in the air, light, and temperature.
He had a way of setting up the replays so that they didn’t show him the actual heat signatures of bodies or the chemical compounds as the air mixture changed. Instead, he watched for gaps and changes in surroundings. If he set the playback fast enough, the changes actually took on shapes.
He could make the changes in the program quickly, and he did. Then he set it to start five minutes before the blood spilled. He didn’t need to see how long the people had been in the room or how they arrived.
He simply wanted to see how the victim lost all that blood—if he could—from this.
He moved away from the panel to the arched door into the office proper. He saw two human-sized shapes cut out against the backdrop of the room. The human-sized shapes were both smaller than he was, and thinner. They looked like water that had risen up out of a pond and become a mobile, living creature.
That was in part due to the heat signatures, which he leached of their standard colors. He could never set up the playback so he could see through it, but he could set it up so that it didn’t distract.
The wobbly air around each person was the way that the motion sensors reported changes. And there were other, subtle things that contributed to the sense of watching water creatures enact a play written by humans. He usually paid attention to those subtle things, but he wasn’t going to tonight.
Tonight, he just wanted the general overview.
One shape stood near the window while the other stood near the table. If Hranek had to guess, he would have figured that one of the two had been eating before this drama began.
Arms flailed, the way that people did when they were animated talkers. Or when non-animated talkers (like him) had gotten very angry.
The person near the window took several steps to the person near the table. The person near the table backed into the center of the room. The person near the table swiped a hand over the table, and several things on the table jiggled.
Hranek made a mental note of it all. He had no idea what the jiggly things were, because they didn’t correspond with anything on the table at the moment: Nothing in real time occupied that space.
He squinted. Something had changed about the person who had swiped the hand over the table, but he couldn’t tell what that was.
Then the person jabbed her arm forward, and the other person brought her hands to her neck. She stepped backward one more time, then tripped over something that also was no longer there, and fell onto her knees.
The person who had hurt her stood in the same spot, watching for just a moment, arm down. The gesturing had stopped. She just watched.
The injured person fell onto her side, jolting her hands away from her neck. That bounce was when the blood arced—spraying upward, creating its own little watery image.
Because of the body’s placement, the blood spurt did not hit anything, but that must have been when the mist sprayed the couch and some of the furniture, as well as the killer.
The blood spray didn’t touch the killer, though. So maybe he had that one thing wrong: Maybe the tiny blood drops that Okilani had been following hadn’t come from a poorly sealed body bag, but from something on the killer’s clothing, something that she hadn’t seen.
The victim was losing blood quickly. Clearly, the killer had hit an artery. The hands flopped a little, then lay still. The blood pool grew, and the killer watched.
That surprised him. Someone who killed accidentally usually tried to help the victim. Or the killer ran.
This one did neither.
She just watched.
He scanned the room to see if he had missed any other shape, any person coming out of the bathroom or standing closer to him. No one did.
Only two people stood here, which meant he was looking at Taji Kimura on the ground, and Glida Kimura standing.
He didn’t see how Glida ended up bleeding as well, but that might have been something very simple.
Because, ultimately, the entire death was simple. And classic.
Glida had picked up a knife from the table and stabbed Taji. Knives sometimes injured the user as well as the victim, which was probably what happened here.
What was unusual was that Glida—Taji’s wife—just watched her die. In a fugue state? But the rest of the evidence belied that. Because Glida (or someone) had cleaned up the body after it bled out.
He had seen enough. The details of the cleanup and the hiding of the body would become someone else’s issue.
He now knew he was dealing with a murder, and a somewhat vicious one at that.
Even though he normally remained calm when he investigated a death, this disturbed him. The watching. What kind of person did that without trying to help? Or without fleeing?
He understood those: had seen them many times. But he had never seen the perpetrator stand, immobile, and observe.
He had studied it, though. He knew that natural predators, those who enjoyed the act of murder, often watched their victims die.
But those people were rare. What was more, they usually killed many times.
Glida Kimura had lived in Sandoveil for a very long time. If she had been killing people, he should have known.
At the very least, he should have suspected that someone was murdering others.
But he hadn’t. Sandoveil did not have an abnormal number of murders.
Although it did have a higher than average death rate, which he—and his predecessors—had all attributed to the landscape. But what if it wasn’t the landscape? What if…?
He checked the urge to hurry back to his office and look up how long Glida Kimura had lived in Sandoveil, and how long the death rate had been abnormally high for a city of this size.
He had no concrete proof that the killer was Glida Kimura, although logically it probably was. He didn’t see how that one little drop of blood had gotten onto the wall, not as he watched the watery forms repeat their movements in that enclosed space.
He had supposition, not fact.
Although the fact had become a lot more concrete.
He now knew for a certainty that Taji Kimura had been murdered. He even knew how she had been murdered.
And right now, he had a body in the death investigator’s office that someone had identified as Glida Kimura.
To throw him off his own investigation?
Or had she died after killing her wife?
The bodies would tell him.
All he had to do was listen.
THIRTY-SIX
THE IJO SEEMED like a ghost ship. Virji hated visiting her ship at a sector base. The lights were low, the environmental systems at minimum, and the crew at its lowest level possible.
> Mostly, her engineering and repair crews were the only people on board, cycling in and out as needed. Some of the sector base employees worked around the ship as well, doing repairs and requested additions.
Even the family quarters were empty. Virji had learned early to make sure everyone took a vacation at the sector base, whether they needed one or not.
She also made it mandatory that the crew and their families vacate the ship while the ship was at the base. She claimed it was because it was easier to work on the ship when it was empty—which was true—but it was also because a good third of her crew wouldn’t take time off unless she made it mandatory for them.
She headed through the darkened corridors to her rooms. She hadn’t expected to come back here for another week at least, but she suspected her vacation was over. She just hadn’t told Illya yet.
Fortunately, she hadn’t had to go far to get to the Ijo. It was in one of the main repair bays in the sector base, not too far from the security chief’s office.
She would probably be late to the meeting, but she didn’t entirely care. If arriving on time had been important to her, she would have had someone on her crew look up this information.
But she wanted to do it. She wasn’t sure she would believe it if someone else brought it to her, anyway.
Normally, the doors to her suite irised open as she approached, but she had reset them before she left. She wanted to make it hard for anyone to access her personal area.
She had not requested any repairs or upgrades here. In fact, she hadn’t had any sector base touch her quarters in years. If she needed upgrades or the occasional touch-up, she had her own crew do it. That way she could check every night.
She opened the door, and stepped inside. The air was stale. She had set it to refresh twice per day while she was gone, which wasn’t quite enough. The odors of everyday living—the scent of her shampoo, the smell of old coffee, the faint scent of the sandalwood sculpture she had attached to her wall—seemed even stronger than they usually did.
She didn’t normally catch the scents of her living space: She was using it too much, and the ship scrubbed the system enough so that odors didn’t linger. But her nose had acclimatized itself to that lovely cabin near Fiskett Falls.
She longed for it, as well as the bed—not because it was more comfortable than hers was here, but because Illya was probably in it, sound asleep, making that adorable little half-snore when he inhaled. Whenever she was with him, she had a sense of another life, one she could have had if she had opted for a different career in the Fleet.
Illya traveled as much as she did, saw many new places, and made hard decisions. He just didn’t command a ship to do so.
Then she smiled to herself. She would have hated his job. Managing personalities on the ship worked for her—she saw them all as part of a tight unit, almost an organism in and of itself—but managing a different group every month, getting to know them, learning their foibles? That did not appeal to her.
Rather like dealing with that Wèi person. He either didn’t respect rank or he didn’t know protocol. And he was very full of himself. She had rather quickly figured out how to control him, but not how to best work with him. Her curtness and disregard for his feelings might have made her an enemy for life.
Or he might not have noticed.
She had no way of knowing.
She had a small office off the living quarters. The office was keyed to her DNA. She also added a retinal scan, along with a blink pattern, and a small keyboard code as well. Everything had to be performed in the proper order.
She did so now, and the door slid open.
The air in here constantly refreshed. She had a mini bridge in this little room. She could run the ship from here if it were boarded or they were in some other kind of trouble. She wouldn’t be able to run the ship well from in here, but she could do so.
She sat down in her chair. It squeaked under her weight, a familiar sound that she had missed.
She shook her head slightly. So much for the longing for that cabin.
She used the database to go back decades, to the entire Sloane Everly mess. Virji had ordered a lot of protocol changes after Everly stole the runabout, but Virji hadn’t thought about DNA until this very evening.
She accessed Everly’s school records, particularly the ones from the Erreforma, and downloaded the DNA on file. Then she compared it to the DNA left on file for Everly here on the Ijo.
The DNA did not match.
Virji let out a small breath. She had expected that, but the confirmation irritated her. She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to know how completely they had been fooled.
How completely she had been fooled.
Again.
She sighed, and then, as a precaution, called up the images from Everly’s Erreforma records. Virji did an image cross-comparison with the woman who had taken the runabout all those decades ago.
That woman, according to the image cross-comparisons, had been Sloane Everly.
But the DNA did not match. Somewhere along the way, Everly had changed the DNA records on the Ijo.
To function on the Ijo, she would have either had to do it when she came on board or just before she left.
Virji was banking on the fact that Everly had done so just before she left.
Virji had the system search for any changes in personnel records around the date of Everly’s theft. That might take some time to find, time Virji didn’t have.
She needed to use that time for one more task.
She reached into the pocket of her shirt and removed the tiny data chip she had brought from the base. She wasn’t going to tie her system to theirs. This system remained completely autonomous—touching only the Ijo’s systems.
She uploaded the information, which took less time to load than it did to think about. Then she ran a cross-comparison—Sloane Everly’s original DNA compared to Glida Kimura’s.
They did not match, which Virji had expected.
The Kimura DNA did not match the Ijo Everly DNA either. As far as the computers were concerned, Virji had just included the DNA of three different people.
She probably had—and one of them had probably been the DNA of Everly/Kimura.
She put the different DNA profiles on the chip, then stood. She glanced at her system, wondering if she should shut down the search. But even as she wondered, she shook her head.
She wasn’t done with this woman. Finding her would close a dark chapter in Virji’s life.
She would be happy to leave it behind.
And with that thought, Virji smiled. She hadn’t realized how much that original theft of a runabout weighed on her.
But of course, it was about so much more than a runabout.
Just like this one was.
THIRTY-SEVEN
THE DEATH EXAMINER’S office was at the north end of the city of Sandoveil, where the valley narrowed and the mountains began their climb to the famous, impossible peaks. Fiskett Falls was to the west, and so were the mud flats. All the drama at the north end of the city came from the mountains themselves, an ever-looming presence that shadowed everything.
There were no real views here, because the mountains rose precipitously. But a lot of locals had houses on the mountains’ edges because of the isolation in this part of the valley.
When the death investigator’s office was built, the office stood alone. It had been built by the same Fleet engineers who created the sector base, probably because they wanted a place to store dead bodies.
Initially, Hranek had hated the nanobit building. The Fleet didn’t differentiate its nanobits: It used the same kind to make starships as it did to build underground facilities. No one gave thought to color-coding or even comfort. Hranek was certain someone could program the nanobits to make soothingly colored walls and floors with a bit of give, but no one had.
Either the Fleet engineers of three hundred years ago liked the black walls and incredibly solid floors, or those
engineers simply believed that being on a planet was that much more preferable to being in space, and everyone should be grateful for life here, in Sandoveil, as opposed to being crammed into a starship.
Hranek wasn’t grateful. He found the building gloomy and dark. It had the faint odor of rot. He noted that every time he walked in. The environmental controls could detect nothing: They scrubbed the air religiously of odors and harmful chemicals.
But he still smelled it, and, he knew, it was probably all in his head. He identified the place with death and so he constantly smelled death, even when that smell wasn’t present.
The thing was, he didn’t mind death. He found it fascinating, in all its infinite variety. Some deaths were easy, some were long, some were hard, but none were the same. He suspected that throughout the millennia of human history, no human had ever died in the exact same way as any other human. There was always something a little interesting, a little different.
He logged into his own office by touching the arrival panel near the door, pausing for a moment as it read his vitals, his features, and his DNA. The door was invisible to the naked eye until someone authorized touched the panel. Then the door outlined itself and, if the person was allowed inside, the door would click open.
He had set up the office so that he had an outer area with chairs and a large table, which allowed him to talk to families while sitting down, with something between him and them. Unlike the death itself, one person’s reaction was often exactly the same as someone else’s reaction. He could put them into categories—from the violent disbelievers to the calm acceptors.
The problem was that he could never predict which person would fall into what category until he broke the news. And if he wasn’t prepared for all eventualities, he could be in serious trouble.
Behind that outer area was his private office, alongside a door that led into the death examination rooms. He went into his private office, put most of the equipment he had used onto a shelf reserved for the latest case, and then changed out of the clothes he had put on to go to the office. He bagged those clothes, in case he had picked up some trace, and showered in the small bathroom he kept for just that purpose. The shower drain captured and filtered the water for any more trace.
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