“Sure,” she said, and folded her hands on the tabletop. Two could play the I’m completely relaxed even though I’m not game.
“Are you certain she killed her wife?” he asked.
“As certain as we can be without a body,” Bassima said.
“She disposed of the body?” he asked.
“Somehow,” Bassima said, and then added another tidbit. “We are in the process of tracking that, and figuring out who the second murder victim was.”
His mouth opened, and she realized he had been about to ask another question before he had heard her answer.
“Other victim?” he asked.
“It looks like Glida Kimura dropped a body—not Taji Kimura—into the pool behind Fiskett Falls. That body was supposed to make us think Glida had died and been dumped there, and it probably would have, too, if it had been discovered later.”
He didn’t look shocked. In fact, he looked intrigued.
“She planned that,” he said, more to himself than to Bassima.
“Yeah,” Bassima said. “But I can’t figure out the end game or why she would come to work. The only thing I can figure is that there’s some other exit from here that none of us in Sandoveil know about.”
He shook his head so quickly that she thought he was covering something up.
“You know all the physical exits,” he said. “It’s the other exits that you haven’t thought of.”
Bassima let out a breath. The only other exit she could think of was impossible.
“I didn’t think Fleet vessels took passengers,” she said.
“They don’t,” he said.
“Then what—?”
“She tried to steal a ship,” he said.
“Tried to?” Bassima asked.
He nodded. “We have no idea yet if she was successful.”
“I don’t understand,” Bassima said.
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what I can tell you. I need to check a few things first.”
He was going to check Bassima’s background. That was what she would do in his place. But she didn’t have time for screwing around.
“Listen,” she said. “We only have a very short window here. If Glida tried to escape from this base, she’ll try again. And we’re looking at her for two murders. This is our best chance of catching her.”
Nicoleau sighed. He looked as if he was about to say more, then he shook his head.
“Yeah,” he said. “Today is our best chance of catching her.”
His wording was odd. Bassima frowned, wishing he could tell her what he was holding back.
“If we do, we’re going to have a jurisdictional nightmare.” He looked down, as if he were considering something. “Can you speak for the Sandoveil Security Office?”
“As a security officer,” she said.
“Legally,” he clarified. “As someone who runs the office.”
She felt cold, and she wasn’t sure why. “I think you’ll need Amy Loraas for that. Why? What’s the jurisdictional problem?”
“I don’t think I’m revealing anything classified when I tell you that not only will you have a case against Glida Kimura when we capture her, but so will the sector base, and so will the Ijo. And maybe other jurisdictions as well.”
Bassima frowned. “Are you telling me she’s committed crimes on the base, crimes against the Ijo?”
He shook his head. “It’s worse than that,” he said. “It’s a whole hell of a lot worse.”
FORTY-NINE
TEVIN PUSHED BACK his hood as he stomped out of the water.
“Tell me this is some kind of primitive sculpture,” he said as he walked to the shore.
Dinithi had already reached the shore before him. She had gone to the rocky edge, as far from the group as she could get. She had her hood off, and she was losing whatever she had eaten for the past three days.
Novoa had kept pace with Tevin. She didn’t look queasy or even frightened. She looked angry.
Hranek, Zhou, and Marnie Sar were crowded around screens, pointing and arguing. They didn’t seem to notice Tevin.
“I said,” he repeated, “tell me—”
“We heard you,” Hranek said without looking up. “And since you opted to abandon the dive, we have no more information than you do.”
“Actually, we do.” Zhou stood up. He gave Dinithi a sideways glance, filled with concern. They had all lost their stomach contents on one recovery mission or another, and they all knew how embarrassing it could be.
Novoa grabbed some medicated water and walked past the entire group. Her body language told Tevin that she believed they should be tending Dinithi first, and only then discussing what they had seen.
He didn’t care. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.
“Unless those skeletons are covered with some kind of preservative,” Zhou said, “they are definitely not primitive. They could only have been in the water for a few decades at most. With that churn and the warming water temperatures from late-spring to mid-summer, those bodies would have lost any connective tissues relatively quickly. You would see some bones lodged against the rocks, but most of those bodies wouldn’t be intact.”
“They’re recent enough to still have tissue?” Tevin asked, making sure he understood.
“Yes,” Zhou said.
“You do not know that,” Hranek said. “We cannot speculate, based on almost no evidence.”
“You might not have evidence,” Zhou said, “but I have plenty of it. I know how the currents work, I know how water destroys rock in that area alone. Think of bone as something not quite as strong as rock, but just as malleable. And tissue—well, you all know how tissue degrades.”
“We have to conduct experiments—”
“For anything to have a legal ramification, yes,” Marnie said, shutting down Hranek. He was good at his job, but he was good precisely because he was anal.
They didn’t need anal here.
What they needed were members of the YSR-SR to deal with the situation at hand. Hranek wasn’t a member of the YSR-SR. He was an investigator, with a focus on answering all the questions in an unassailable way.
Right now, Tevin needed rescue-and-recovery questions answered, not how-to questions. He needed to know if he and his team would continue to risk their lives for this…bone pile.
They needed to know if this bone pile was worth recovering.
“How do you want us to proceed?” Tevin asked Marnie.
“I counted five skulls in addition to the one you initially found, is that correct?” Marnie asked.
Tevin nodded. “And that was just on this side. We didn’t go very deep.”
“There’s a nasty current on the edge of that rock pile.” Dinithi added. Her voice was raspy. She took a swig of the medicated water, rinsed her mouth, and then spit the water out.
“You have to drink that,” Novoa said softly.
“Baby steps,” Dinithi said.
In spite of himself, Tevin smiled. He’d been there too. She was using taste to see if she could hold down the water.
“I don’t understand the relevance of the current,” Hranek said. “We’re—”
“There’s a lot to that current,” Zhou said. “It proves my point about connective tissue.”
“It also makes dives doubly and triply dangerous,” Marnie said. “We need the team to investigate the bone pile, but it has its own undertows and surprise currents. We can put up a barrier, but that will hamper the investigation—”
“Which is why I came up here,” Tevin said. “If we’re going to recover all of those bodies, then we’ll need a much larger team and a huge effort.”
“We need to send in probes,” Dinithi said. “Believe me, that current is so strong that I’m not sure how many probes will survive this thing. I know some people won’t.”
“She’s right,” Novoa said. “It took most of my strength to pull her back from that edge.”
Tevin nodded. “Probes wo
uld work.” He looked at Marnie. “This isn’t something we can finish in one day.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m beginning to understand that.”
Hranek sighed. Tevin looked at him, surprised. He would have thought that Hranek was the one who would want them to take their time investigating this.
“What’s the hesitation, Mushtaq?” Marnie asked.
Hranek shook his head. “You’re all correct. We need to take this one step at a time. I was simply hoping that I would solve at least one mystery today.”
“And that is?” Marnie asked.
Hranek shrugged. He looked a little lost, something Tevin had never seen from him before.
“I thought I knew who that body belonged to,” Hranek said. “I was so certain I knew how the body got here—”
“We don’t have to rule anything out,” Zhou said.
Tevin stared at Hranek. “I thought you didn’t like to make assumptions.”
Hranek gave him a bitter smile. “I don’t, and this is why. Had I assumed, and had you not gone in with lights blazing, we might have proceeded from my guess, rather than from fact.”
Hranek approved of the work Tevin was doing? That surprised him.
Marnie Sar was looking at the frozen image on all of the screens.
“We need to plan this like one of the most difficult rescues we’ve ever done,” she said. “And, I’m sorry, Tevin, we can’t go slowly.”
He frowned at her. “Taking our time—”
“Oh, I would love to take our time,” she said. “But this is the kind of thing that will bring out the crazies. We won’t be able to protect this information and this site for very long, even with the protected entry behind these Falls. We need to work on mapping and recovering whatever the hell all that is for the next several days.”
She looked around at the entire team. They all peered at the screens—everyone except Dinithi, who looked at the pool as if she expected something to launch itself out of the water and attack her.
“Does anyone disagree?” Marnie asked.
“I don’t know how I feel about this.” Dinithi punctuated the sentence by taking a swig of that water. She swallowed, winced, and took another sip.
Tevin watched her. She wasn’t just recovering from her reaction. She was thinking about something.
“I mean,” Dinithi said, her voice less raspy. “We saw parts of at least six bodies down there.”
Her voice wobbled a little, and she swallowed again, this time clearly keeping something down. Her hand visibly tightened on that bottle.
“Six people, recent deaths,” Dinithi said. “And then today’s—yesterday’s—floater. How come we didn’t know that so many people had died in such a short space of time? I mean, Sandoveil is a small town. We should know this stuff, right? When someone disappears? When someone dies?”
Zhou looked up from the screen, and let his gaze skim the water as well.
It felt to Tevin as though his team was searching the water for answers.
“A lot of strangers come through Sandoveil,” Zhou said tentatively.
“Yes, they do,” Hranek said, his tone businesslike. “But that’s the cause of the problem, not the actual problem.”
The entire team looked at him. His lips had thinned. He had deep circles under his eyes. Apparently he hadn’t gotten much sleep in the last twenty-four hours either.
“The Sandoveil Valley has one of the highest death rates per capita on all of Nindowne,” he said. “We also have one of the highest disappearance rates.”
Tevin’s stomach twisted. How come no one had ever told the YSR-SR this? Or did anyone need to tell them? After all, the YSR-SR should have been dealing with both the deaths and disappearances, at least in theory. Maybe the YSR-SR was just too busy to notice.
Or, more likely, as a primarily volunteer organization, the YSR-SR didn’t have time to do anything extra, like track statistics. The YSR-SR was too busy rescuing, finding, and recovering people to pay attention to what was going on in some other community.
“And you thought it was okay to keep that a secret?” Dinithi snapped. Novoa put a hand on her arm, calming her down.
It wouldn’t do to have any of them get angry right now. Their anger really wasn’t at each other. It was at the situation, which had spiraled out of control.
“I wasn’t keeping it a secret,” Hranek said. “It was just a fact until a moment ago, one I always attributed to the terrain. We are the most heavily populated wild place on the entire planet.”
“I wouldn’t call Sandoveil heavily populated,” Marnie said, almost under her breath.
“But it is,” Hranek said. “Our population grows by factors of ten each time a Fleet ship lands. Sometimes more than one Fleet ship is at the sector base at a time. We don’t usually have to worry about hotel rooms for the Fleet, but there are times when the crew must leave the ship, due to the repairs. We have enough hotel rooms and rentals to accommodate one DV-class vessel’s worth of people, but not two. And that doesn’t count all the tourists we get from all over Nindowne. We are one of the major tourist destinations on the entire planet.”
Tevin frowned. He had known some of that, but he hadn’t put it all together.
“The crews would know if someone was missing,” Marnie said. She had crossed her arms.
“They would,” Hranek said, “and they do. Sometimes they believe that their colleagues have deliberately left the Fleet, without saying a word. Apparently, that happens.”
“It’s common?” Novoa asked.
“It’s not common,” Hranek said. “But it happens. What happens most is that tourists either don’t arrive here or don’t make it home. We hear about it, but what can we do? The Sandoveil Security Office investigates, puts up notices, and lets nearby communities know that someone either didn’t get home or didn’t make it here. But for all we know, that person’s plans changed and they went somewhere else. We rarely hear about the follow-up.”
Dinithi took another swig of her water. Then she looked at the pool, her expression downcast.
Tevin looked too, but he wasn’t seeing the surface of the water. He was seeing that pile of rocks and bones beneath it. That pile was huge and it went deep.
“You had an idea who did all of this,” Tevin said. Even though he was speaking to Hranek, he didn’t look at Hranek. Tevin kept staring at the pool, the pile superimposed over it in his mind.
“I did,” Hranek said. “I must have been wrong.”
“Did you think it was Glida?” Tevin asked.
Hranek didn’t answer for a long moment. And no one else spoke either. The only sound was the thunder of the Falls. Spray hit Tevin’s face so continually that he barely noticed it anymore.
Finally, Hranek spoke. “Why would you ask that?”
“The floating body,” Tevin said. “It looked like Glida, but it wasn’t.”
He turned, wiping the spray off his face. Hranek’s expression was flat. Novoa bit her lower lip. Zhou looked surprised. Only Dinithi hadn’t changed her position.
“And the body, the one on top of that rock pile, that’s Taji,” Tevin said.
“I told you,” Hranek snapped. “You can’t do identifications without me. They’re not always accurate—”
“This one’s accurate,” Tevin said. “I knew her. I saw the scar under her chin. She thought that scar was a badge of honor. It was Taji.”
Now, it was his voice that wobbled. He hadn’t expected to be emotional over Taji Kimura. They hadn’t know each other that well, and he had had all night to contemplate her loss.
But somehow, saying it out loud made it real in a way that seeing her underwater hadn’t.
“You thought Glida killed her and planted the other body,” Tevin said. “Right?”
Hranek’s lips moved for a moment, then he pursed them. “As I said, making assumptions is always a bad idea. Something else clearly is going on.”
Dinithi drained the bottle, then set it in her kit.
/> “How would she have gotten here?” Dinithi asked.
“What?” Marnie asked.
“Glida, or whomever put these bodies in the water. How did she do it?” Dinithi frowned at all of them. “I’ve been trying to picture it. You can’t throw them from above, not and get those rocks in position. You’d have to do it from here.”
“Oh, God,” Novoa said. “You’re saying she carried the bodies in?”
“That would take someone really strong,” Zhou said.
Tevin frowned. Then he shook his head. “All of it would require strength,” he said. “Whether you tossed the bodies off a great height or carried them in, you’d need some upper body strength.”
“And then you’d have to dive the rocks,” Dinithi said. “Just like you wanted us to do.”
She looked at Hranek, as if blaming him for what was going on.
“Only in reverse,” he said. “I wanted you to remove the rocks.”
“So, whoever did this was a diver.”
“Or had access to equipment,” Zhou said. “Some kind of robotic arm or something.”
No one spoke again. The ground shook from the falling water. The YSR-SR had a lot of equipment designed to keep the humans out of dangerous situations. Robotic arms, some submersibles that had grappling capability. But none of them worked well in a pool of this size. It was too small. They were all designed to work in the ocean or in some of the deeper mountain lakes.
“Nothing we have could get in here,” Marnie said. “Not from above or from the ground here. That’s why we dive this pool. Because our equipment doesn’t work here.”
Everyone knew that, except Hranek. He nodded once.
“Well, speculation gets us nowhere. We need facts. And since Egbe here decided to abort the dive, facts are few and far between.”
Tevin felt a rush of heat to his face. Anger. He tamped it back.
“Facts are few and far between,” he said to Marnie. “We need probes. We’ll probably lose a number of them in that current, but I think it’s worthwhile.”
“And we need someone to get the records from all the barriers around here,” Zhou said. “We need to know who has been accessing them.”
The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016 Page 30
