by Isaac Asimov
“He was on duty as part of the Governor’s security detail, and therefore under the Rangers’ authority,” Kresh finished.” Lovely. So we all get to bump heads. Any other facts as yet?”
“No, sir. Not even the victim’s name. That is the sum total of my information.”
“Wonderful,” Kresh said. “Let’s get over there and find out more.”
The two of them headed for Kresh’s aircar, parked outside the guest house. Kresh got in after Donald, and sat down in his accustomed chair.
Donald rolled the aircar out of the garage and lifted off, up into the rain that was still thundering down, buffeting the car around once or twice before Donald could compensate. Kresh was barely aware of any of it, his mind focused on other matters. The Welton attack, the phony SSS guards, and now the death of a Governor’s Ranger. What the devil was going on?
The Governor. What about the Governor? Kresh thought to ask Donald, but then didn’t bother. No matter what Donald said, Kresh would feel obliged to check for himself. Kresh turned in his seat and switched on the comm system. He punched in the crash scramble code, the direct line to the Governor. He had used it exactly twice before in his career, but never felt more need of it than now.
The screen snapped on to show Grieg in his ceremonial office, at work at the big formal desk. There were papers scattered about, and Grieg was still in his formal clothes, but his hair was mussed and he was starting to show a bit of stubble. “Good evening, Sheriff,” he said. “I see I’m not the only one working late.”
“No, sir. I wanted to call personally and confirm that you were safe.”
Grieg set down the papers he was working on and frowned. “Safe? Is there some reason I shouldn’t be?”
“No one has informed you? Sir, one of the guards on the perimeter around the Residence has just been found dead, killed on duty, at his post.”
“The hell you say,” Grieg said. “What more do you know?”
“That’s all I have, sir. I am en route to the murder scene now.”
“Very well. Keep me informed.”
“Ah, yes, sir,” Kresh said. “I’ll keep you posted.” He switched off and frowned at the screen. Why the hell hadn’t anyone informed the Governor? Just how muddled was the security operation? He shook his head. Never mind. Other things to worry about just now.
They were almost there.
A dead-white face stared bug-eyed at the sky, its rain-filled mouth open in shock.
Raindrops splattered on the corpse, the scene lit in the harsh, shadowless glare of high-power portable beam lights. The dead man’s hands clutched at his neck, as if he were still struggling to pull the cruel, hard wire from around his throat. The corpse was in a small depression in the ground, tangled up in scruffy bramble, surrounded by a scrubby, anemic forest of small, elderly trees.
Lightning flashed and thunder blared, and Alvar Kresh stood over the corpse in the driving rain. The Crime Scene robots were already at work. Not that they would do any good. The CS robots could measure and sense and detect all they wanted, but there were no answers here. They could go back to their labs and come up with a time of death, perhaps, but that was going to be about it.
Alvar Kresh looked down at the dead man and sighed. He had been in this business for a while, and experience taught you things. There were times when you knew enough to know you weren’t going to know any more. Sometimes the scene of a crime spoke volumes. Other times–right now, for example–it was plain to see that prodding at the corpse was useless. What had once been a man was now a meaningless bit of grotesquerie, as impersonal, as anonymous as a crumpled-up food wrapper.
But you went through the ritual all the same, because it was part of your job, because there was the faint chance that your instincts just might be wrong, because it was expected of you, because it was standard procedure. But you knew that there was no real point.
It was clear, to Kresh’s eye, that whoever did this job had not done it with the simple goal of killing. He or she had taken on the job of killing undetected. It was a careful, professional job. A garrote, for example, was not going to show any fingerprints. A rainy night would insure that a lot of clues would be washed away. Besides, anyone who could slip through a perimeter of Governor’s Rangers, kill one of their number, and get away undetected was not going to be stupid enough to leave a calling card behind.
Sometimes–like right now–when it was obvious there was nothing to be learned, crime scenes devolved into little more than macabre social occasions. Kresh didn’t get to see his opposite numbers in the SSS and the Rangers all that often. But tonight it was old home week. Devray of the Rangers and Melloy of the SSS were both here.
That in itself was interesting. Neither service was in the habit of dispatching its highest-ranking officers to a murder scene. It was clear to Kresh that neither side wanted to concede a centimeter of ground in the endless turf war between the two services. Kresh was glad he had nothing at stake in this one. Let the two of them duke it out.
Kresh didn’t have much faith in the SSS or the Rangers. The Settler force was nothing more than a bunch of bullyboys, a goon squad given official sanction. Cinta Melloy’s SSS was little more than a band of hired thugs.
The Rangers were a decent enough group, and good at what they did. Kresh was more than willing to grant that. The only trouble was that security was not what they did. Their usual line of work ran toward guarding trees, not people. Their primary jobs were search and rescue, wildlife management, ecological maintenance. Their tasks had been seen as dull, plebeian, low-status jobs in the past. These days such work was all-important, high-profile stuff. The needs of the day had vaulted the Rangers out of their previous obscurity.
And yet, here they were, guarding the Governor for no better reason than that their charter said it was their job. Never mind that the charter-writers had been talking about ceremonial guards. Back in those days, no one had ever dreamed that the Governor would require actual protection against real threats, let alone that humans would be expected to do the job.
Kresh could make the case that their inexperience in such matters meant that having the Rangers on the job actually endangered the Governor. But the Rangers were insisting on the prerogative of their service even though Kresh’s deputies–or perhaps even the SSS–could do a better job of it.
The Rangers had not been trained for security work. They had spent their lives being protected from all harm by robots. At the end of the day, they were Spacers, and Spacers tended to assume that a situation was safe until they learned otherwise. A good security officer had to do just the opposite.
Commander Justen Devray of the Rangers crouched down over the corpse next to Kresh, peering at it intently in the rain, as if he would be able to spot some clue the Crime Scene robots had missed. Devray was a tall, muscular man, with tousled blond hair and blue eyes, his skin tanned and supple. His face was still youthful, but a life in the outdoors had lined it, shaped it. He was gentle and careful in his movements, the way big men were sometimes. He was a good thinker, if not always a fast one, but he simply was not a detective. He had made his way up through the scientific side of the Rangers’ ranks. An arboriculturist, if memory served. An expert knowledge of tree sap was not going to be of much use in the average murder investigation.
“Have you picked up anyone?” Kresh asked of Melloy.
She just shook her head. She made no move to squat down and examine the body, or even show much interest in it. She knew there was nothing here. “We’ve done every kind of sweep we can think of. No unauthorized personnel here now, and no sighting–and that’s strange, right there. I had teams beyond the security perimeter, doing scans. Someone should have seen something.” She nodded toward the corpse and raised her voice a bit. “Not going to get much out of him, Justen, “she said.
“I suppose not,” Devray agreed in his slow, careful voice. “But I couldn’t know that until I got a look at him.”
Devray stood up and turned toward Me
lloy. “Do you see much of anything?”
“I see Ranger Sergeant Emoch Huthwitz dead,” Melloy replied, a bit curtly. “Killed by someone who knew where he was and how to get at him without making a sound.”
Security Captain Cinta Melloy of the Settler Security Service ought to have been of more use at a murder than a tree surgeon. She had served in trouble spots throughout the Settler worlds. But not to put too fine a point on it, Kresh didn’t trust Melloy. There was something about the woman didn’t sit right with him. Even now, there was a tiny alarm bell ringing somewhere in the back of his mind.
“I see a bit more than that,” Kresh said. “This man was on the Governor’s security detail, on duty, with the Governor not two hundred meters away. I don’t think we can start out assuming that it was–ah–”
“Huthwitz,” Donald said, quietly prompting Kresh.
Damnation! He hated when that happened. Made it look as if he didn’t know what he was doing. “I don’t think we can start out assuming it was Huthwitz who was the primary target.”
“But the Governor survived,” Melloy objected.
How do you know that? Kresh wondered. The Governor didn’t even know anything had happened. No, that was too paranoid. Melloy probably checked in with the security robots. “The security plans were changed, beefed up, at the last moment,” Kresh answered. “Maybe an assassin got this far, but no further.”
“Possibly,” Melloy said, not sounding very convinced. “But why kill Huthwitz if you were after the Governor? It could do nothing but increase the risk of detection. The Rangers weren’t using any sort of detection grid, just Rangers lined up around the perimeter of the Winter Residence, on watch. Why go up against a Ranger when it would have to be easier to sneak between two Rangers in the line?”
“Maybe the killer tried to sneak between Rangers and came upon Huthwitz by accident,” Kresh said.
Melloy pointed to a toppled-over camp stool by the body. “Maybe Huthwitz was bending a reg or two by sitting at his post, but you can see by the way the stool was positioned he was looking out, toward the exterior of his perimeter, the way he was supposed to. Whoever it was who killed him had to get inside the perimeter, then head back out toward him. Besides, there aren’t any signs of a struggle. Even after three hours of rain like this, we ought to be able to see something.”
Kresh had noticed the camp stool, but had not put it together to figure out the attacker had come from inside the perimeter. It irritated him to have missed that obvious a clue. “Maybe you’ve got a point, Melloy, but I have the Governor to think about. You work this any way you want, but I have to work on the assumption that this was an attempt on Grieg’s life.”
Melloy shrugged. “As you like.”
Devray was listening, but still staring at the corpse, as if he had never seen such a thing as a murder victim before. Well, maybe he hadn’t. “You know, Melloy, you’re making an assumption here yourself,” he said. “Perhaps not a valid one.”
“And what might that be, Commander Devray?” Melloy asked, not making any special effort to keep the contempt out of her voice.
If Devray noticed the disparaging tone, he chose to ignore it. “The direction,” he said. “You pointed out the murderer had to come from behind, from inside the security perimeter.”
“So?”
“So there were a lot of people who wouldn’t need to go past your scanners or sneak between two of my Rangers to get inside the perimeter and get behind him. People who wouldn’t show up on your scanners.”
“Wait a minute,” Kresh protested, suddenly understanding.
“All the people at the party, “Devray said, his voice so soft and quiet Kresh could barely hear it over the rain. “Anyone of them could have come out here, done the job, and then gone back. A quick step into a refresher to tidy themselves up and get their clothes dry, and no one would ever know.”
“All right,” Kresh said. “Maybe so. But why the hell would anyone want to kill Huthwitz?”
“That one, I don’t know yet,” Devray said.
Kresh sat in the copilot’s chair and let Donald do the flying. There was a lot to think about here. Things were not fitting together they way they should have. Melloy and Devray both seemed to be following agendas that just didn’t hold together.
A man–a guard–killed two hundred meters from the Governor he was guarding, and neither of them seemed the least bit interested in the idea that the killing might be politically motivated.
And another thing. Melloy had been the one to volunteer the victim’s name. That was the thing that had been bothering him. Devray hadn’t even seemed to have known the victim.
“Donald–the first call-in you got did not have the victim’s name. When was the first general police band hyperwave call with that information?”
“There has been no such call as yet, I presume as a security precaution. I was alerted by a private call from the Governor’s Rangers Operations Center.”
“Hmmph. Check in with whatever traffic control centers would have it. We got to the crime scene last. Of Devray and Melloy, which got there first, and by how much?”
“One moment, sir.” Donald was silent for a moment as he ran the query over his hyperwave links. “Limbo Traffic Center reports that Captain Melloy landed first, with Commander Devray arriving five minutes later, approximately two minutes before we got there.”
“So Devray had maybe one minute, maybe three, tops, with Melloy, before we actually got out of our aircar and got to the scene. When we got there, the two of them were not exactly in the midst of warmhearted conversation. The name of the victim is not going to be the first topic of conversation.”
“I’m not quite sure I follow you, sir.”
“Even if you assume Devray knew the victim well enough to recognize him, it just doesn’t follow that the first thing he would do upon arrival at the scene would be to tell Melloy the victim’s full name and rank.”
“I don’t quite see why not, sir. It is a valuable piece of information.”
“Maybe so, but it’s just not in character. Devray wouldn’t tell you the sun was coming up tomorrow before he sat back and thought it through–and Melloy’s hardly the first person he’d confide in. The two of them are barely even on speaking terms.”
“It still would seem reasonable to me for him to tell Melloy the victim’s name.”
“I don’t think Melloy or Devray are exactly reasonable toward each other. Besides, Melloy rattled Huthwitz’s name off as if she were familiar with it, knew it well. I agree with you that there is no logical reason preventing Devray from knowing the name, but I tell you it doesn’t make sense as a piece of human behavior.” Kresh thought a moment or two longer. “Of course, I’m assuming Devray knew who it was in the first place, but he didn’t act as if he did.”
“What actions revealed he did not know Huthwitz?” Kresh shook his head. “Nothing distinct enough for me to point it out. But there was something detached about his actions. Not like he was dealing with a friend or an acquaintance. No. I’d bet whatever you like that Melloy knew Huthwitz and Devray did not. But how the hell would Melloy come to know a low-ranking officer in a rival police force?”
“It seems a minor point, but surely we could resolve the issue by calling either Devray or Melloy and asking.”
Kresh shook his head. “No. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to tip my hand.”
“Sir, I am confused. What is it you wish to conceal?”
“I don’t know yet, Donald. Maybe just the fact that I think something doesn’t smell right. I don’t want anyone rushing around with disinfectant until I find out where the odor’s coming from.”
“Sir, I’m afraid I still do not understand.”
“Me neither. I can almost see Devray being worried more about having one of his officers killed than the politics of the situation–but that doesn’t explain Melloy. It’s almost as if she already knew it was nothing to do with the Governor.” Or, he could not help thi
nking, as if she already knew that it was.
Wait a second. Wait a goddamned second.
Kresh turned back toward the comm panel and punched in the crash scramble again. The Governor reappeared on screen again. Still at his desk. Still working on the same papers. Still in his formal clothes. “Sheriff!” he said. “Is there some further news?”
“Governor, I was wondering. Could you remind me–what did you send me on my birthday last year?”
“What? What the devil are you talking about?”
“What present did you send me last year?”
“Kresh, how the devil should I know?”
“You should know quite well, sir. You sent nothing at all.”
“You called me at this hour to ask me that?”
“No, I didn’t.” Kresh cut the connection, his heart pounding. “Donald. Back to the Residence, full emergency speed.”
“Yes, sir.” The aircar made a hard turn and rushed back the way it had come, gathering speed. “Sir, I could not help overhearing, and I am greatly confused,” he said, his voice steady and level. “According to my recollection, the Governor sent a memo to all the top government officials as soon as he took office just over two years ago. He told them he was ceasing the tradition of gubernatorial birthday gifts to them effective immediately, as it tended to promote favoritism.”
“And just by chance, the memo arrived on my birthday,” Kresh said. “I didn’t feel much like a favorite that day. I remember, Donald, I remember. But why didn’t the Governor know?”
But Kresh already had the answer to that, even if it scared him to death. The aircar landed hard, and Kresh was out the hatch and running through the rain toward the front door before it had stopped moving. There should have been an SPR on duty at the front door, but instead the door was wide open. Kresh rushed inside. The SPR robots were there–but motionless, inert. And if the security robots were out–he ran upstairs to the Governor’s office, almost toppling over another security robot standing uselessly in front of the door–with a hole shot through its chest. He slapped his palm on the security panel. The damned thing was supposed to be keyed to his handprint, but was it? He had never tried it. The door slid open and he all but dove into the room, not daring to think what he would find. But the lights were off. He could not see a thing. Kresh pulled his blaster.
