The Dogs of God

by Chris Kennedy

  More puzzle pieces.

  While I was down in the lounge falling in love all over again with the starlit beauty of Mother Universe—then having my schizophrenic conversation with Ligeia—Dean Barstow’s pain receptors had been shutting down from overload.

  “Uh, Lieutenant Medina said he’d prefer no one went in—”

  I ignored Trask again and pressed the lock panel. The door to the kids’ vacant suite disappeared into the wall. I stepped in and cut off the military protest behind me.

  The silence was refreshing. As were the pristine walls and lack of paint-by-viscera everywhere.

  Still, there was similar, if less bloody, chaos in the kids’ bedroom. A week’s worth of teenaged lack of decorum. Clothes everywhere. Two beds flanked the wall farthest from my point of entry. A 3D gamepad sat on the top of the one bed that looked slept in, the paired haptic interactive suit tossed on the floor with the rest. Lucius’s, I guessed. Silver trays of half-eaten meals were stacked up on a grav-cart. They’d been there a few days, too, if the chemistry experiments blooming were any indication.

  The room was about what you’d expect for a rich kid’s suite. Large, with a broad window framing the stars—part of the upsell, that view. An en-suite bathroom, a towel dropped across the door’s threshold. I walked over and picked it up. Soaked. Switching on the light, I surveyed the bathroom. Spit-shine clean. The shower was surprisingly dry.

  Turning back to the shared bedroom, I played out the story as related by the twins in the brig. I watched as Ligeia Taulke, flustered by sleeplessness, tossed her covers off, got up, and walked through the connecting suite, eventually finding me in the ship’s lounge. I imagined a disheveled Lucius athwart his bedcovers, asleep. He’d woken up and called for Barstow sometime after two a.m. When the old boy didn’t answer, Lucius said, he went looking and found the manservant massacre in the connecting room. Then he’d jetted straight through to the servants’ quarters and wrested Longbaum out of bed. She’d pried her nutcrackers apart long enough to scream herself hoarse, then raised the ship’s alarm.

  I took one more look around the kids’ suite, then slid the door aside and returned to the in-between. Trask gave me a sour look, which I also ignored. Other ship’s personnel wearing Skrivanek’s colors had shown up: the post-evidence-gathering mop-up crew.

  I glanced from one room to the other. Both screamed chaos. One room, the stuff of every parent’s nightmare. The other, just nightmarish. And yet, one thing niggled my noggin. No matter how sound a sleeper Lucius and Longbaum were—no matter how fast the killer had stuffed Barstow’s gut-harness into his mouth before starting the wetwork—how could no one hear a sound?

  “All that noise,” I muttered. “And no one woke up?”

  Skrivanek stepped back from overseeing his minions. “That’s easy.”

  “What’s easy?”

  “The main function of the Stargazer’s Dream requires…discretion,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “A pleasure packer?”

  Skrivanek’s half smile was ironic under the circumstances. “‘Every voyage a dream—’”

  “‘—and every dream a fantasy,’” I said, finishing the slogan from the ad campaign.

  The ship’s name made more sense, now. How do you lure men beyond the Belt where the airless, freezing cold of space is likely to kill them? Make that nine-day trip something they’ll never forget, that’s how. Great Expansion, indeed. And, after a little flaccid respite, another one…After the men are in the outer system, it’s a lot harder getting back home to Earth. Pun intended.

  Tony knows what he’s doing.

  “Walls: private,” Skrivanek ordered.

  The subtle murmuring from the corridor outside the death house ceased. We were sealed in with sound dampening tech.

  “All the walls have this built in?”

  Skrivanek nodded.

  “And how do you know—”

  “I’m the ship’s doctor, remember? The Company suspended the Dream’s regularly scheduled passenger servicing to accommodate Mr. Taulke’s request for a private charter.”

  I made a contemplative noise. Tony loves his privacy. Leave it to him to commission a pleasure yacht for personal, private business.

  “Nice break from doling out regular doses of antibiotics, Doc?” I asked wryly.

  Given Skrivanek’s earlier graveside manner, I thought he’d appreciate my dark humor. He glanced at the open anatomy lesson still tied to the chair. Barstow’s unnatural expression seemed to think I wasn’t very funny.

  “Not really,” Skrivanek said, agreeing with his past-caring patient. He returned to moonlighting as a medical examiner.

  Careless comment aside, at least I had my answer. You could fire a cannon in here, and short of the ball crashing through the wall, you’d never hear it in the next room.

  “Hey, Sergeant,” I said to Trask, “send me the forensic evidence stack when it’s compiled.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said with snark.

  Given my recent rhetorical faux pas, I didn’t return the serve for once.

  * * * * *

  The Interviews

  “I think I should be the one talk to them,” Merida said.

  “Thanks for the input. I’ll just be a minute.”

  I touched the wall panel, and the door slid shut between us. Lucius Taulke stood in the middle of the holding cell. It was Spartan and small. Y’know—jail. Designed to show criminals what they could look forward to long-term if they kept breaking society’s rules. I hoped pulling Lucius out of his comfort zone of comfortable living might shake some new details loose.

  He stood looking at me from under his entitled brows. His posture was rigid. His fingers flexed compulsively.

  “Sit on the bunk,” I said.

  “What?”

  I put my hands in my coat pockets. “Is that how this is gonna go? You play deaf and dumb?”

  After some internal debate, Lucius sat down.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I already told Lieutenant Merida,” he said.

  “Is this the deaf or dumb part?”

  “Okay, okay!”

  There was the pissy little brat I’d slapped back in Pacific Heights. This Lucius had seemed like a different person from that kid—maybe still in shock from finding Barstow, I had to allow—but my gut didn’t trust the transformation.

  “I woke up from a bad dream,” he said, focused on the wall. He had that same thousand-light-year stare Ligeia had had in the lounge. “I turned on the lights and couldn’t find my sister. Her bed was empty. It freaked me out after the nightmare. So I went looking for her. That’s when I found…”

  Lucius looked at me then, silver eyes focusing like lasers. He blinked a couple of times, his expression flushing hot pink beneath white skin.

  “You think I did it,” he said, his tone lifeless and smooth.

  “I don’t know if you did it,” I replied truthfully. “But I think—”

  “I loved Barstow!” Lucius exploded, leaping to his feet. He advanced across the cell. I fought my instinct to back up. I don’t buffalo easily, but that kid’s face, so twisted and hateful…“He was like a father to me! Who the fuck are you to accuse me of doing that to him!”

  For a second, maybe two, I stood still. I let his fury roll over and past me. I could smell the stink of sleep still on his breath.

  “Sit down, Lucius,” I said. I carry a blade on a spring under my right wrist in case my hand-artillery runs dry. My job was to protect the kid, not kill him—but the blade gave me comfort with him so near. “Sit down.”

  He didn’t move.

  The cell door slid aside.

  “Lucius!”

  Ligeia entered over Merida’s protests. She bolted to her brother’s side like he was the flame and she the moth. She grabbed him by the shoulders, and Lucius let himself be pulled out of my personal space. My right hand relaxed.

  “Mr. Fischer,” Merida said behind me, “I think that’s enough for
now.”

  Ligeia guided Lucius back to the bunk and sat down with him. She stroked his forehead, and he calmed down immediately. It was downright Pavlovian. I was seeing firsthand why a kid who hated everything loved finding his sister after a bad dream. I was learning a lot.

  Ligeia Taulke was her brother’s handler.

  “Yeah,” I said, not really addressing Merida. “For now.”

  I left the cell. The door slid shut.

  Lucius’s raw reaction to my insinuation had been right on target for a person who’d just lost someone close. But the Taulkes have that drama card in their DNA deck, and they know just when to play it, remember? Plus, I didn’t buy for a nanosecond that Lucius Taulke had ever thought of his lower-class manservant like a father.

  * * *

  “Is he all right?” a woman’s voice asked.

  I turned around.

  Ellie Longbaum had softened in the wake of the murder. Her perpetual expression had seemed to be that of a nun—dour and disapproving. But that was gone now. Vanished, like Lucius’s entitled attitude. She just seemed a tired old lady whose life had wrung her out long before she’d reached her current age.

  I motioned to a chair. She sat down at the central observation console, where the brig officer kept tabs on the prisoners via video. One of the monitors recorded the ongoing drama in the cell I’d just vacated. Ligeia must have seen her brother getting out of control, like I was watching them now.

  “He’s far from all right,” I said to Longbaum. Now was as good a time as any to interview her. “Do you feel like talking?”

  “No,” she whispered. It was like corpse air escaping with a word wrapped around it.

  I cleared my throat. “Will you, Miss Longbaum?” I glanced at the monitor, and her eyes understood. We had a finite window of privacy.

  “Yes. And please, call me Ellie.”

  I got to the point. “You didn’t hear anything before Lucius woke you, Ellie?” Keep it clinical, Fischer. Keep it detached.

  Ellie Longbaum hesitated. “I’m a light sleeper by nature. Comes with the job.” She kneaded her palms in her lap.

  “Okay,” I said, still waiting for the answer to my question.

  “But no. Nothing. Until Lucius came into my quarters, screaming.”

  A couple of breaths’ worth of thinking on that. “At some point ship’s gravity was turned off to make it easier to…Anyway, there would likely have been noise as items clunked around. Lamps and…such. Did you hear anything like—”

  “I said no. Do you think I’m lying?”

  Her eyes roared to life. Fired by emotion, like Lucius. Her hands seemed desperate to rub their own skin off. But pressing her had been worth it to test Skrivanek’s intel about the sound-dampening tech in the walls—not to mention her story.

  “I think there’s a truth you’re not telling,” I said honestly. “But what it is…”

  Tears spilled onto Longbaum’s cheeks. Her posture caved in on itself. Her shoulders shook. So, Madam Lockjaw had been playing a role, too—that of taciturn, tight-lipped caregiver to the children. She’d had decades of practice to perfect it. Now? She was just an old lady, grieving.

  “Dean, and I, we…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. A secret held so long like that sometimes gets stuck when you try to let it out. Which is its job.

  I heard what she wasn’t saying anyway. When you’re the only two people on the island, nature takes its course. Longbaum and Barstow had shared more than babysitting duties. They’d cohabitated, too. The murder method screamed personal. It screamed hatred. But why would she have killed him? And could she have done that to Old Baldy and still come off the grieving paramour? Try as I might, I just couldn’t wrap my head around this prim-and-proper old lady gutting her lover like a hung hog, much less decorating the room with his innards.

  The door to the holding cell slid into the wall. On the monitor, Ligeia helped her brother off the bunk, still stroking his forehead. Merida appeared.

  “Fischer…” he said, all officer in his tone.

  “I was just finishing up here,” I said, with a glance at Longbaum. I didn’t have time to answer the question on her face.

  “Miss Longbaum, if you would—I’d like to take you and the kids down to the infirmary for a more thorough examination,” Merida said.

  “I’ll join you,” I said. Ligeia tossed me a dirty look, her arms around Lucius, guiding him. He seemed dazed. Checked out. Ellie Longbaum followed them, not looking at me at all.

  “Figured,” Merida said.

  Like a lineup on the move, everyone filed out of the brig. I reviewed them as they passed: I had one kid who claimed to love the deceased like a surrogate father—didn’t believe it—who’d found the body. I had his twin sister, who could freeze you like Medusa with a single word—but she had an alibi confirmable by ship-wide camera logs. And I had a lover-cum-widow, whose anguish seemed genuine enough. Still, nothing motivates murder like emotional attachment. The human animal is perverse that way. There were, of course, ship’s personnel, including Captain Handwringer Hathaway, and Merida and his crew. But it was the three with the personal connection to Barstow who were the most likely suspects.

  I followed them all from the brig with more questions than I’d brought in with me.

  * * * * *

  The Duel

  Another day passed. I was no closer to knowing who’d killed Barstow, or why, despite spending a large portion of it pouring over the evidence stack. I couldn’t let my thoughts linger too long on that. I had the twins to protect. If Barstow’s murderer wanted them dead, too, he—or she—had missed a prime opportunity to shank the boy in his bed or snag Ligeia while she wake-walked around the ship. Something told me they weren’t a target for Old Baldy’s killer. And Barstow didn’t much care anymore who’d turned him inside-out.

  The whole ship was edgy. On Skrivanek’s recommendation, we’d moved the kids and Longbaum to tighter quarters nearer the infirmary. All of them seemed to be suffering from post-tortured servant disorder. Or some kind of PTSD. Skrivanek rattled on about persistent high cortisol levels and the effect on the human brain, and I just nodded until he stopped talking. Since the new digs were easier to secure, I’d allowed the move.

  “You should get some sleep,” Merida said. He and Quinn stood shift outside the twins’ room. Longbaum’s quarters were directly across the corridor. “You look like shit.”

  Twenty-four hours without shuteye will do that.

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” I said. “Kids still tucked in?”

  Merida shrugged. “Haven’t unlocked the door since you fed ’em last. Want I should check?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll poke my head in.”

  “How come you’re the only one who gets to go in there?” Quinn asked.

  “Because I hate mysteries,” I said. Then, to his perplexed face: “If they turn up dead, we’ll know who did it, now won’t we?”

  Longbaum’s door slid open. She saw me, paused warily, then nodded, eyes flitting away.

  “Ms. Longbaum,” I said formally.

  “Mr. Fischer. Dr. Skrivanek says he wants me in for a follow-up.”

  Merida cleared his throat. “Escort Ms. Longbaum, please, Trooper. It’s almost time for the shift change anyway. I’ll have Sergeant Trask and McGuire meet you there.”

  Quinn saluted, and he and Ellie headed for Skrivanek’s office.

  “Anything new on Barstow?” Merida asked after pinging Trask.

  “Nothing. Cameras showing nothing plus sound-proofed walls equals one big, fat goose egg.”

  “What about aberrant DNA? I mean—”

  “Sub-atomic genomic analysis, whatever the hell that is, shows the scene was a Petri dish of aberrant DNA from a dozen different men, and almost as many women. You know this ship usually functions as a planet-hopping bordello, right? I’m thinking our crime scene was the orgy room for the flanking suites.”

  “Huh.” Merida’s eyes lost focus. He seeme
d to be voyeuring past events. Then: “Well, I’m glad to lend my expertise and resources—”

  “And I’ll gladly leave the whole bag of flaming shit on your doorstep, Lieutenant,” I said. “Just as soon as the package is delivered safely to Titan. Speaking of which…”

  Merida caught the clue and stepped aside to allow me entrance to the kids’ quarters. I reached for the pad to open the lock.

  The corridor lighting snapped to a deep, pulsating red. The ship’s alert klaxon cycled through once, then cut off.

  “Medical emergency!” a man’s voice cried over the comms. It took a second to recognize the high-pitched desperation was Skrivanek’s. “I mean, emergency! Infirmary!”

  I shared a tired look with Merida. “Stay here. Guard the kids.”

  Pulling my .38, I bolted down the corridor. The infirmary wasn’t far.

  I almost stumbled over Trooper Quinn’s prostrate body when I got there. He was facedown, a broad knife wound salted with brains at the base of his skull.

  Skrivanek kneeled in the middle of the exam room, wrestling with someone.

  “Don’t just stand there, idiot!” he shouted. “Help me here!”

  I hurried forward to find Ellie Longbaum, hands gripping her neck like she was strangling herself. Her feet scraped along the floor. Bright red lifeblood gushed between her fingers. Skrivanek was trying to help her, but I knew it was pointless. That kind of flow only happens when the carotid is severed. Someone had slashed Longbaum’s throat from ear to ear.

  “Fischer!” the doctor pleaded.

  But Longbaum’s fight for a life she’d already lost was waning. I leapt to Quinn’s corpse. Grabbing up his headset comms, I shouted, “Merida, come in!”

  Nothing. I double-checked to make sure I’d engaged the transmitter right.

  “Merida, answer me!”

  A racket of distant rifle fire answered instead.

  Bracka-bracka-bracka! Bracka-bracka!

  I knew exactly where it was coming from, too.

  Shit.

  I sprinted through the doorway for the kids’ quarters. Longbaum had been a distraction, and it’d worked.