Darsteel felt a sharp pang of guilt as he read the report. He had met Moira several times, even come to know her fairly well. His first instinct was to go to her and personally take her back to her mother at once. But then he thought again. The damage, after all, had already been done. And it might be, might be, that great good could be done by keeping her from her parents for just a little longer. Certain threads of logic had been starting to come together in his mind. At the very least, he might be able to test them by talking to Moira.
He thought for a moment about where best to meet with her. Once she calmed down, would she feel safer where she was? Or would she be more cooperative in an official-looking office? His instincts told him to go to her.
He was just about to do so when the next bit of news arrived at his office. It was a large, formal envelope from the Court of High Crime. It had to be the ruling on the succession.
Darsteel had played it all straight, up until that moment. But as soon as he opened that envelope, he would receive official notification of what was, so far, only a theory about who the next Thelm would be--or, in fact, was already.
Darsteel decided it would be best for--nearly--all concerned if it stayed a theory just that little bit longer. It was time to bend the rules a little. He left the still-sealed envelope on his desk and went to have a chat with a frightened little girl.
* * *
Or maybe not so frightened as all that. They had put her in a disused ground-floor room of the gatekeeper's house, and left the door open, and set a guard in the doorway, sitting there on a perching stool, watching her. Every light in the house was blazing, and there was a seemingly constant bumping and thumping as various sorts of officers and lawkeepers headed up and down stairs, trying to look very important indeed.
And there was Moira on a sitting cushion, back to the far well, facing the doorway and framed by it, staring at the guard, solemn-faced and determined-looking, with something of her mother's stubbornness shining through. Streaks of tears shone on her face--but the tears themselves were gone. There was something about the set of her chin, the way her arms were folded across her chest, that told him something more than childish fear was going on here.
She wore an oversized pink flannel nightgown and was clutching a large and rather lumpy object covered in some sort of fabric that had been made to resemble brown fur. It took a moment for Darsteel to realize that it was meant to represent an animal--no doubt an Earth creature of some sort.
Darsteel stepped forward to the doorway and dismissed the guard with a gesture. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.
"Hello, Moira," he said.
"Hello," she said, her voice tired, even surly, but with that tone of stubbornness plain to hear. "I want to go to my mother. Now."
Darsteel knew that tone, and what it meant: She had argued a half dozen grown-ups to a standstill already, and was ready and willing to take on another. So he decided not to play the game. "No you don't," he said, pulling over a sitting cushion and seating himself right in front of her. "In fact, that's the very last thing you want."
Moira frowned, cocked her head, and looked at him in puzzlement. "What do you mean?"
"You know perfectly well you can't see your mother now," he said. "But you know that it's what a child you age is supposed to want. So you have to play the part in front of the grown-ups. Except I know. I know that your mother told you it was very, very important that you stay away, that you don't go to her, until you do something very, very important."
Darsteel had been bluffing, making it up as he went along when he started to speak, but he wasn't anymore. Her reaction told him at once that he was right. "So what you really want is to keep up arguing with everyone, demanding what you know you won't get, because that's what a regular little girl would do. Except you're not a regular little girl."
"I am so," she protested.
"No, you're not. A regular little girl would have given it up by now. But the other thing I know is that you haven't gotten a chance to do the job yet, because if you had, you'd stop the pretend tantrums and stop being stubborn. You'd have gone to sleep by now. Because you must be awfully tired."
Moira didn't say a word, and that told Darsteel everything. "And I don't think you've even had a chance to hide it here in this room, or anyplace else," he said, "because people have been watching you every second. So I think it must still be hidden on you somewhere, maybe inside your too-big-for-you nightgown, or maybe--"
"You can't touch me!" she shouted. "No one is allowed to touch me!"
"I know that," Darsteel said. "But you didn't ask me what the job was, or what it was you were supposed to be hiding. That tells me I have it all figured out right." He paused for a moment, then stood up, careful not to get any closer to her. "And I'm not going to touch you," he said. "I don't have to. All I have to do is call to the guards, and tell them to get a portable X-ray viewer from the hospital. They can bring it right here, and I can point it at you. It's for looking at bones and stuff inside you--but right next to the view of your bones, it'll show whatever is in your pockets, and whatever is hidden in your gown, and in your--"
"Wait!" Suddenly that stubborn look was gone, to be replaced, for the space of two or three heartbeats with a look of cold and naked calculation--which was replaced in turn by a look of the sweetest, most angelic, and most artificial innocence. "Oh!" she said in patently false surprise. "That's what you want. Why didn't any of your guards just ask for it? I would have given it to them," she lied.
Moira set the simulacrum of an animal on the floor, facedown, fumbled with some sort of fastener strip in its back, reached into its interior--and pulled out a human male's semiformal dress shoe for the right foot.
"My teddy bear has a special inside pocket for pajamas and stuff. But Mommy didn't give me the shoe or tell me to get rid of it or any of that stuff," she said. "I just found it, and figured I'd better take it to give to Daddy when I got the chance."
Darsteel stared at Moira, and the shoe. He reflected that even the youngest criminals made the mistake of explaining too much when they were caught. All such explanations were always unconvincing. The idea that she had just happened to find Daddy's shoe and just happened to conceal it in her toy was absurd--but what other story could she tell without betraying anyone? Darsteel made a heartfelt wish that he himself would one day be blessed with a daughter as clever, as poised, as intelligent--and as loyal. But that was all to one side. The main thing now was evidence--finding it, getting it, securing it.
"Thank you," he said. "That was what I wanted." He resisted the urge to reach out and take the shoe. It showed every sign of having been wiped clean of any finger marks or fire debris or other evidence, but there was always the chance that it still held some clue that might be disturbed if he touched it. And if he just took it, he might spend the next fifty years of his life denying a charge of planting evidence in the case. "I still want it," he said, "but I want to be extra-careful how I take it, so we don't mess it up. And then you can really go to your mommy, if that's what you want."
And Moira smiled in genuine relief. "Yes, please. It is. Really."
"Then you'll really get to do it. In a minute." He stood up, opened the door, and called to the guard on duty for a vid recorder and an evidence bag, and witnesses. Then all he'd have to do was have her tell him again that she had "just found it," get the actual transfer recorded, get her to drop the shoe in an evidence bag and get the bag sealed.
* * *
Ten minutes later, all that was accomplished, and Darsteel was headed back to his office.
The letter from the court, the one that would give him a ruling on the succession to the Thelmship, was still there waiting for him.
Until he opened the envelope, Darsteel could at least pretend he didn't have a new Thelm. Except he couldn't hide from the news forever--or for long. And whoever the new Thelm was, his first orders were bound to concern themselves with the investigation.
Which m
eant he had mere hours, perhaps mere minutes, to assemble an honest case, put together legitimate evidence of what had really happened, and secure that evidence against tampering. The task seemed flatly impossible--but at least he could get a start on it. He locked the shoe away in his office safe, along with a full copy of the recordings he had made of its receipt.
Darsteel doubted very much that the shoe itself could tell them anything at this point. But the means by which it had gotten to him told him a lot. It had unquestionably been in the possession of the killer. Hours later, it was in the possession of Moira Hertzmann, who, all but certainly, had received it from one or both of her parents, who obviously felt they had a very strong motive for concealing it if they were willing to involve the daughter they both doted on. All that was suggestive, to say the least.
But with that accomplished, what was there to do next? He sat down at his desk and stared at the pile of reports that was growing even as he watched. Couriers were coming and going, depositing their papers and packages. Nearly all of them were strictly routine, reporting that this site had been searched with no result, twenty-seven eyewitnesses to the fire had been interviewed so far, and so on.
And then another courier came in and dropped another report on his desk, on top of all the others. Darsteel gave up on the heap of papers on his desk and reached for the new one, on the theory that it had the latest news.
It did. He read it and started to get a sinking feeling in the gut of his stomach as he realized that it did indeed. It was, in a sense, the end of the case before it really began. Together with the evidence of the shoe's being concealed by the Hertzmanns, it was all but conclusive.
That should have made him happy, even relieved. But Darsteel had just discovered another little flaw in playing it straight. Sometimes it led to conclusions you didn't really want to reach.
TWENTY-FIVECONSPIRACIES
"So that's it," Darsteel said in disgust to Hannah, Jamie, and Brox. "There are multiple witnesses at the fire scene--including all of you--that place Georg Hertzmann here at the Keep once the fire starts, when he's supposedly been staying away in that museum of his all the time. There is the shoe print in the crime scene, and the shoe winding up in his daughter's possession. We found the other shoe of the pair found in Marta Herztmann's apartments in the Keep, which very strongly suggests Georg Hertzmann was there before the murder. As you suggested, Lawkeeper Mendez, finding it was central to the case. And then there's this." He dropped the report onto the table in the common room. "It's the information you asked for, Lawkeeper Mendez. Some of it, anyway. Last night, roughly two hours before the murder, Georg logged onto the Keep's reference net node and pulled up all the information he could about the succession. He didn't even try any of the standard dodges for hiding who he was. It's a positive lock ID that he was the one doing the research."
Darsteel looked bitterly at Hannah and Jamie. "He did it," he said at last. "Never mind all that high and proud language about the Pax Humana, and being willing to die but refusing to kill. Some of us on Reqwar admired that notion. We've gotten tired of every political problem being solved with a bang from a gun and a thud as the body hits the floor, tired of no one in the roomful of people seeing who did it. But it turns out Georg Hertzmann killed his adoptive father to become Thelm of all Reqwar. Perfectly legal, and fulfilling all the requirements of the law--but none of that makes it right. He might have done what the law told him to do--but the law is wrong."
"But none of this proves anything," Jamie objected. "If Georg committed the murder, he ascends to the Thelmship. That's the most clear-cut case of all. There's no doubt about it. There's no need for him to look it up. He knew that. It's only if he didn't do it that the question is uncertain."
"And," said Hannah, looking at the report Darsteel had thrown down, "it looks like what he pulled up here were very general texts on succession law--not legal cases or anything like that. Besides, this report doesn't tell you what parts he actually read--just the names of the reference files he found and opened up. And he does the lookup just a couple of hours after Jamie popped up with his idea about Penitence. And he pulled up a copy of the Pax Humana bylaws too. What could that have to do with anything? Any good Earthside defense lawyer could put together a totally different scenario."
"Such as?" Darsteel asked skeptically.
Hannah shrugged. "His wife contacts him and reports that the Thelm has been given a very dangerous idea that might threaten the family, please come over at once. He does. Marta tells him about the Penitence idea. He broods on that, and looks up succession law to see, I don't know, if there is anything about permanent exile. Or maybe he was trying to figure out what would happen to Moira if he went to Penitence alone. Could Moira be used as a pawn, a bargaining chip--or a rallying cry? It might be just about anything. Maybe he hoped there was something in the Pax Humana regs that would make it harder to deport the child of a member to Penitence for some reason. Who knows? Then it's late. He should get back to his glass house--but he hasn't seen his wife in a long time. Their child is asleep, but if he spends the night, he can see her in the morning--perhaps for the last time."
"And the very sad music starts to play," said Brox, with heavy sarcasm. "Just the sort of absurd story the Pavlat would love."
"All right, all right," said Hannah. "But I think I've made my point."
"Whatever the merits of your story," said Brox, "it's quite clear that this murder was planned sometime in advance. Why do something as basic as reviewing the succession law at the last minute?"
"So you're all saying that you don't think he did it," Darsteel said.
"I wouldn't go that far," said Hannah, "but I would say he seems an unlikely suspect."
"And if he did do it, it wouldn't make any sense for him to keep it hidden this way," said Jamie. "After all, this was the one murder he could commit that wasn't a crime."
"Unless," suggested Brox, "you consider what our noble friend Darsteel has just demonstrated--that at least some Reqwar Pavlat would like a Thelm who believes that murder is wrong. Legally, he can get away with this murder, yes. But he has the political savvy to realize that a damned alien coming to power by killing the Thelm isn't going to be too popular. He'd have motives beyond strict legality for wanting to keep people from thinking of him as a murderer. And I come back again to his Pax Humana membership as a strong motive for concealing the fact that he had committed murder, even legal murder."
There was a nervous cough from the doorway. Darsteel turned to see one of his more youthful-looking couriers standing there. "Yes, what is it?" he asked.
"Ah, sir, I have a message--"
"Of course you do," he said. "What else would a courier have but messages to bring?"
"Yes, sir," the courier agreed meaninglessly. "But it's a message for them. An invitation, really. I think yours is being delivered to your desk by another courier," he went on. "Sorry, sir."
Darsteel looked at the addressing on the big thick envelope. "From 'Thelm Georg Hertzmann' it says here. He didn't waste any time." He turned and glared at the messenger. "I seem to remember giving orders to keep Hertzmann in isolation--no contact with outsiders."
"Yes, sir. And they followed those orders--right up until the Court of High Crime ruled that Georg Hertzmann should ascend to the Thelmship."
Darsteel let his ears droop wearily and leaned up against the side of the table. "And someone decided that Thelm Georg ought to be informed. And the new Thelm started giving orders, and people started obeying them."
"Well, ah, yes sir."
"Including you."
A hint of green came to the courier's face as he blushed. "Yes, sir."
"All right," said Darsteel. He pulled a packet out of his blouse. "I might as well open this now," he said. "It's the report from the Court of High Crimes." He pulled out the papers and stared at the top one. "'The said human Georg Hertzmann-Lantrall, having been duly adopted by the late Thelm, and the late Thelm having duly named him in the line of
succession, and all other persons with prior claims to the succession having died, and, conditional to confirmation that the Thelm died properly, the said Georg Hertzmann-Lantrall is provisionally found to have succeeded to all the rights, titles, and powers, of the late Thelm, and shall hereafter be styled Thelm-Designate until such time as the propriety of the death of the late Thelm is confirmed.' "
Brox frowned. "Either I missed something, or that is a very long-winded way of saying 'we haven't decided yet, but he's probably the Thelm.' "
Darsteel nodded. "You're right. Everything hinges on the words 'conditional' and 'provisionally.' "
"So he's bending the rules pretty hard right from the start," said Hannah, taking the message from the courier. "He's calling himself Thelm instead of Thelm-Designate."
"And he's sent another message, just by sending us that one," said Jamie. "He's telling us he knew the three of us were here, together. Don't you just wonder how he found that one out, when he was supposed to be kept in isolation--just like us?"
Darsteel glared again at the courier.
"It--it wasn't me, sir," the courier protested.
"No, it never is. It's always the one who's not here."
Hannah had been reading the invitation. "All that Thelm-Designate stuff won't matter long anyway," she said. "We're summoned to join in witnessing the 'formal declaration of ascension' in which it will be certified that 'the late Thelm did truly die properly and thus that his heir-designate is hereby declared his heir in fact, and named to all his heritable titles, ranks, powers, rights, and other things.' "
"In other words," Jamie said grimly, "he's going to wheel out a stack of Bibles and swear that he did it."
"So much for running a proper investigation," Darsteel said with savage anger. He turned to the courier. "You and all your friends who all say 'it wasn't me' are going to find out the hard way that this job is not about protecting yourself from your own actions. It's about protecting others, protecting the innocent from harm."
The Cause of Death Page 30
