by Timothy Zahn
“Sorry, but the last Soulminder guy already used those. Yes, for lunch we usually set steak knives out, and yes, we can do a partial cross-reference, but only for those people who paid with plastic. About thirty percent of our customers use cash, and there’s nothing we can do about those.”
“The bills themselves don’t have an automatic time stamp on them?”
“Nope. We do the checks here by hand—part of our old-fashioned charm.”
Blanchard grimaced. A blind alley. “I see. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.” She stepped back from the counter, turned around—
To find Frank Everly standing a few feet behind her. “Find out anything new?” he asked.
“Not really,” Blanchard said. “You always skulk around eavesdropping on other people’s conversations?”
He raised his eyebrows politely. “Believe me, Doctor, if I’d wanted to listen in without you knowing, you wouldn’t have.”
“Yeah.” She shifted her attention to the tables by the window that the cashier had mentioned. “It would have been trivial to do, wouldn’t it?” she murmured, largely to herself. “All someone had to do was walk in, peer over the railing back here as if looking for someone in the main dining room, and then walk out with a knife up his sleeve.”
“Perfectly simple,” Everly agreed. “And then out the door, turn left, next building over, up to the sixth floor, and hey presto—someone’s disappeared.”
Her stomach tightened. “You don’t have to be flippant about it.” She peered out the window at the Soulminder building, visible to the side of the Ridley Square greenery. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to suggest that half an hour wouldn’t have been enough time for either Walker or Holloway to have done all this.”
Everly shook his head. “I walked the route this morning. The timing’s a little tight, but no real problem.” He eyed her. “Particularly if the murderer had already tested out the timing himself.”
“Meaning Walker, of course,” she said coldly.
“He has a subscription to Time.”
“So do I,” she countered. “So does a reasonable percentage of the greater Los Angeles population. What does that prove?”
“It doesn’t prove anything,” Everly said patiently. “It’s just one more pointer in Lamar’s direction. He had access to that article on Griffin; Holloway didn’t. Information, Dr. Blanchard. Remember what Dr. Sommer said about information?”
“I’m not likely to forget.” Blanchard looked at the tables again, a sudden thought striking her. “You said there were a set of prints under Walker’s on the knife, didn’t you?”
Everly nodded, fishing a set of heavy-looking sunglasses from his coat pocket. “Yes, but they don’t do us any good.”
“Maybe they do,” she said, feeling the stirrings of cautious excitement. “If we can track down the person who used it, maybe we can find out what time he left the restaurant.”
“Nice idea,” Everly said, slipping the sunglasses on. For a moment he stared through them in silence, as if looking at something. “Unfortunately,” he continued abruptly, “it turns out that the knife was from a clean table setting. The other prints belong to one of the busboys, and he was setting tables all morning.”
Blanchard grimaced. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“That’s what I’m paid for.” He pulled the sunglasses off and slipped them back into his pocket. “Come on—we’re wanted back at Soulminder.”
“Is something wrong?” Blanchard asked, hurrying to catch up as he turned and strode out onto the sidewalk.
“No, just the opposite. Murray got Lamar sprung already and they’re on their way in. Means we can talk to Holloway now, instead of this afternoon.”
Blanchard swallowed. “Oh,” she said. “Great.”
The indicator lights changed color, and on the table Lamar’s body twitched to life again. “Mr. Holloway?” Blanchard asked.
He turned his head from his contemplation of the ceiling to look at her. “Hello, Dr. Blanchard,” he said, blinking a few times. “Boy, that didn’t take long. The jury ready with its verdict already?”
“Not exactly,” Blanchard told him, watching his face closely. The muscles were tight, but that was more or less normal for Holloway’s transition periods. “Something else has come up,” she continued. “There are some people here who want to ask you some questions.”
He blinked again, eyes narrowing as he seemed to suddenly become aware of the silent group standing behind her. “Is something wrong?” he asked, his voice trembling slightly.
Everly took a step forward. “Mr. Holloway, we’d like to know exactly where you went yesterday after your court testimony,” he said. “During the time you were alone, after you left Dr. Blanchard.”
A cheek muscle twitched. “I don’t understand. All I did was walk around Ridley Square for a while … ” He trailed off, eyes coming back to Blanchard. “There is something wrong, isn’t there?”
“Someone’s been killed,” she said, as gently as possible. “We need to know where you went yesterday.” A sudden flash of inspiration—“To see if you might have been in a position to see anything.”
The tension lines didn’t go away. “I just went … around. You know—around the square. I touched some trees, smelled some flowers, looked in a couple of shop windows, watched the other people.” He waved a hand helplessly.
“Did you go anywhere near Richardson’s Garden Spot?” Everly asked. “It’s a restaurant a quarter of the way around the square from here.”
He shook his head, shoulders hunching briefly in a nervous shrug. “I don’t know. Probably I went past it sometime, but I don’t know. I wasn’t—you know, really paying attention to things like that.” He swallowed. “Who was killed? Was it someone I knew?”
“His name’s Eliot Griffin,” Blanchard told him. “An investment advisor. Does the name sound familiar?”
He shook his head. “Not really. Sorry.”
“That’s okay.” Blanchard pursed her lips. “All right, then, try this. Think back to when you returned here yesterday, just before we put you back into Soulminder. What were you feeling?”
He gazed up at her, not quite suspiciously. “I don’t understand.”
“Were you feeling angry, for instance?” she offered. “Frustrated by the trial, or perhaps by the way Austin treated you during the cross-examination?”
Slowly, he shook his head, eyes gazing at infinity. “I was a little sad,” he said softly. “You know—seeing trees and sunshine for almost the last time.” A tight smile twisted his lips. “You know that old saying, what would I do if this were the last day of my life? I thought about that a lot.”
“And what did you decide?”
He shook his head wordlessly.
Blanchard looked back at Everly, and at Sommer and Katovsky and Porath behind him. “Anything else?”
“Not right now, no,” Sommer told her.
“So what happens now?”
Blanchard looked back at the table. “You’ll be going back into Soulminder,” she told him.
“And I’m afraid you’ll have to stay there for a while,” Sommer added. “At least until we resolve this mess. There may be other questions we’ll want to ask you.”
A cheek muscle twitched. “I’ll do anything I can to help.”
“Thank you.” Sommer looked at the doctor and nodded. “We’ll talk to you later, then.”
His cheek twitched again as the hypo pricked his arm. His eyes closed, and he was once again dead.
“Interesting,” Sommer murmured from behind her, his voice sounding thoughtful. “Well, gentlemen, Dr. Blanchard. Shall we adjourn to the conference room?”
“I’d like to stay here until Walker’s back in his body,” Blanchard said. “If that’s all right.”
“As a mat
ter of fact,” Sommer said quietly, “it’s not all right. What I have to say is going to be of extreme interest to you.”
A chill ran up her back. “Yes, sir,” she said.
“I’d like to begin by hearing your opinions about our little chat with Mr. Holloway,” Sommer said when they were all sitting around the conference room table. “Dr. Blanchard, why don’t you begin.”
She shook her head slowly, neck muscles feeling tight as she did so. The guarded tightness in Sommer’s eyes could only mean bad news. Bad news, and almost certainly about Walker. “I’m afraid I don’t have much to offer,” she said. “Holloway was obviously very tense—I’m sure you could all see that. But whether it stemmed from guilty knowledge or everything else about his current situation, I couldn’t tell.” She hesitated. “That bit about keeping him in Soulminder awhile longer got a definite reaction, too.”
“Yes, well, I’m afraid none of us has any choice about that,” Katovsky grunted. “The D.A.’s office has already made it clear that we can’t release Holloway’s soul until this mess is sorted out. Even if that includes bringing Lamar and Holloway to trial.”
“Which we’ll all hope like hell it doesn’t,” Porath added grimly. “We could be years seating a jury that would be willing to convict a murdered man.”
“How about you, Frank?” Sommer asked, turning to the security chief. “You hear or see anything out of the ordinary?”
“Not really,” Everly said. “For a while it looked like he might fall into the old trap of forgetting to ask who’d been killed, but he got to that eventually. He also didn’t seem to know anything about the murder that he shouldn’t, the other classic trap. I’d say we came out about as flat inconclusive as we went in.”
Sommer nodded. “Thank you. Any other comments? Anyone?”
No one spoke, and Blanchard braced herself. Here it comes.
“Well, then.” Sommer pursed his lips. “Up to now we’ve been concentrating on which of the two suspects actually held the murder weapon, letting the question of motive slide temporarily into the background. As of early this morning, I’m afraid we can no longer do that.” He touched a folder lying on the table in front of him. “This is a standard medical/psychological report on a certain Soulminder employee, dating from several months ago up until the present. It details increasing stress levels, generated—according to the analyst—by job-related frustration and anger.”
He took a careful breath. “I have to ask you, Dr. Blanchard: why do you hate Soulminder?”
It was so totally unexpected that for a half dozen heartbeats Blanchard couldn’t even speak. “I don’t hate Soulminder,” she managed at last. “Who said I did?”
Sommer shrugged slightly. “You’re a psychologist. You know how these conclusions are arrived at.”
“And I know that six times out of ten they’re completely wrong,” Blanchard retorted, trying to whip up some anger through the numbness clouding her brain. “This being one of those six.”
“Is it?” Sommer asked quietly.
She glared at him. But the righteous indignation was all an act, and down deep she knew it. There was no anger down there for her to feel, only a weary sort of relief. The burden was coming out at last. Probably for the best. “I don’t hate Soulminder,” she said with a sigh. “I hate the Pro-Witness program.”
Sommer’s eyebrows lifted slightly. Perhaps he’d expected her to waste more time denying it. “You mind telling us why?”
“I hate it for the same reason I hate the idea of perfectly fertile women hiring surrogate mothers,” she bit out. “Or the idea of people donating blood or organs for cash on the barrel. It’s all variations on the same theme: poor people like Walker selling their bodies for the convenience of the rich.”
Katovsky snorted. “Oh, for—”
He stopped at a gesture from Sommer. “I understand what you’re saying,” Sommer said. “But the Pro-Witness program is hardly in the same class as those others. We’re not talking convenience or vanity here, but justice.”
“Justice?” Blanchard shook her head. “I’m sorry, Dr. Sommer, but I can’t call anything justice that only works for a small knot of rich people who had the buckets of spare cash necessary to buy into a Soulminder computer before they were killed.”
“Justice has always been skewed toward the powerful,” Porath pointed out. “So is most everything else in life. Besides which, if you want to be strictly technical about it, isn’t anyone who works for someone else renting out his or her body?”
“It’s not the same,” she insisted. “It’s a matter of dignity. Of—” She shook her head, suddenly tired. “The hell with it. If you can’t see the difference, I can’t explain it.” She looked at Sommer. “You didn’t bring this up just to have a theoretical debate.”
“No, I didn’t.” Sommer hesitated. “It’s occurred to us, Dr. Blanchard, that assuming either Lamar or Holloway killed Griffin on his own requires us to stretch things a little too far. Lamar, for example, had access to that article on Griffin. But he wouldn’t have known that Holloway had been out of touch for half an hour, thereby giving him an alibi. Holloway, on the other hand, apparently knew that Lamar always took a solitary walk after his Pro-Witness stints—”
“He knew that?” Katovsky cut in, frowning. “How?”
Blanchard clenched her teeth. “I probably mentioned it to him at one time or another. He asked a lot of questions about Walker.”
“And he made an off-hand reference to it just before going back into Soulminder yesterday afternoon,” Sommer added. “So he knew that Lamar would be out for a while, giving him an alibi. But he didn’t know about Griffin’s shady dealings.” He looked hard at Blanchard. “Do you see where we’re going with this, Doctor?”
“It would be hard to miss it,” she said bitterly. “You think I set the whole thing up. Talked either Walker or Holloway—or both of them—into murdering a total stranger for me. I presume my motive was to somehow discredit the Pro-Witness program?”
“It’s the most plausible motive we’ve come up with yet,” Everly said coolly. “Why else would you stay with a program you hate?”
“It may come as a shock to you,” she growled, “but there are people in this world who stay where they’re needed for the simple reason that they are needed. Who’s going to look out for Walker and the others if I go? Certainly not any of you—you’re all so madly in love with either the money or the gosh-wow technology that you can hardly see straight.”
“That’s enough, Doctor,” Katovsky snapped.
“Why?” she retorted. “What’re you going to do, fire me on the way to the D.A.’s office?” She looked back at Sommer. “Did it happen to occur to you that a person who’s concerned with the quality of other people’s lives is hardly the type to commit cold-blooded murder?”
“It did,” Sommer conceded. “But as Frank said, it’s the most plausible motive we have. The only other option at this point is that either Lamar or Holloway went homicidally insane.”
Blanchard took a deep breath. “I didn’t kill Eliot Griffin,” she said. “Nor did I aid or abet whoever did. If that’s all, I’d like to see Walker before they take him back to jail.”
Sommer gazed at her for a moment, then shrugged fractionally. “All right. Frank will take you down. Although”—he added as she pushed back her chair and stood up—“there’s really no rush. Murray’s arranged to have Lamar released into our custody. He’ll be remaining here, at least for now.”
“Good,” she said shortly. “He’ll probably need some counseling after what’s happened. This way he can get it from his cellmate.”
It was as good an exit line as any. Turning, she left the room.
And tried to ignore the aching in her stomach.
Lamar was lying curled up on the cot when they let Blanchard into his room. Curled up, watching her with dull eyes. “Walker,”
she nodded in greeting as the door closed behind her. “How are you doing?”
For a moment he didn’t respond. Then his shoulders hunched a little. “Okay. I guess.”
“That’s the spirit,” she said. “I don’t believe you, of course, but that’s the spirit.”
He shrugged again. Crossing the room, Blanchard snagged the single chair and pulled it next to the cot. “I understand Katovsky’s made arrangements to keep you here instead of sending you back to jail,” she commented.
“Probably so it’ll be easier to do all their mental testing on me,” he muttered, his eyes on her.
Pointedly on her. “I’m not here as a psychologist, Walker,” she told him gently. “I’m here as a friend.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” His eyes drifted away, to stare at the wall. “You know what really scares me about this? That maybe I really did do it. That I just sort of blanked out and killed the guy.”
She sighed. “I don’t know, Walker. I really don’t. Under normal circumstances, I’d say you weren’t the type to crack like that. But in this case … ”
“You think maybe Soulminder did something to me?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “In this kind of transference, the resident soul and the body do affect each other. We’ve known that for a long time. That’s why there’s a three-hour limit on it, in fact—supposedly, no significant alterations can happen in that time. But whether that’s really true … ” She waved her hands helplessly. “I just don’t know. And I don’t know how we’d prove it even if I did.”
Lamar’s forehead was furrowed in deep thought. “You’re saying that, like, if Mr. Holloway wanted to kill someone that I might go ahead and do it later on?”
Blanchard shook her head. “Again, I don’t know. I talked to Holloway about that a few minutes ago, asked him if he’d been angry or frustrated just before he transferred out yesterday. But he said that all he’d been was sad.”
“Doesn’t sound like something that would’ve made me go out and kill someone, does it?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “Don’t worry, though. We’ll keep hammering at it.”
