The Cause of Death (39 page)

Something in what Brox said brought Jamie up short. Somewhere in there, his subconscious was telling him, was a piece to the puzzle, a big one, and an important one. But where it fit, or what the puzzle would look like, Jamie could not yet see. "Thank you, Inquirist Brox," he said. "But getting back to the case, if we're looking for motives, and if my suggestion about Penitence
was
the motive, then we've only got two suspects. Zahida heard it, and so did Marta."

"You have
three
individual suspects," said Brox. "And, my apologies, one additional pair of conspiratorial suspects."

Hannah looked at him coldly. "Go on."

"The Lady Zahida heard your idea," said Brox. "Marta Hertzmann heard it.
And so did the Thelm
. Perhaps--perhaps--this looks like a suicide because it
was
one. The Thelm realizes that the only way he can save his sole surviving son, and his family, is to kill himself. For whatever reason, he has the booby-trapped weapon and
knows
it is booby-trapped. Maybe one of the two dueling pistols has been booby-trapped from the start, so that the Thelm could not lose a duel--even if he missed, his opponent would shoot himself in the chest."

"Unless his opponent happened to pick up the gun intended for the Thelm," said Hannah. "Then it would be impossible for the Thelm to
survive
a duel."

"A trivial objection," said Brox. "There are a thousand ways the pistols could have been marked. But let us imagine he had no way of knowing which gun was which. That might add a little of the absurd drama that our Reqwar Pavlat friends seem to need in their politics and personal life. The Thelm deliberately selects a gun without knowing which it is. He fires, not knowing if he is about to smash a hole in the wall, or through himself. Let the fates decide, or whatever other poetry you might wish to apply to a random choice."

"What about the shoe print, and your idea about an accelerant and a fire that started after the death?" Hannah demanded.

And how about the fact that
you
found the shoe print while no one else was looking your way
? Jamie thought, his eyes on Brox.
You could have stashed the shoe in your iso-suit and made the print while we were all examining the Thelm's corpse, then disposed of the shoe somehow. It's still missing, after all.
But he didn't want to explore those ideas just at the moment.

Brox cocked his head to one side. "Those are flaws," he admitted.

"Easy ones to answer," said Jamie, glad for the chance to steer things in another direction. "As long as we're theory-spinning, let's say the Thelm sets the fires out of anger, despair, or whatever,
then
kills himself immediately, shooting before the fire can spread very much. He gives himself a Viking funeral."

"A what?" asked Brox.

"Viking funeral," said Hannah. "A human death ritual involving fire. Go on, Jamie."

"Georg comes in, sees what has happened, realizes he can do nothing--or is so disgusted or horrified he leaves in a panic--or perhaps he arrives after the fire has really taken hold and he can't get close enough to do anything. He manages to leave the shoe print, probably without realizing it. By the time he gets outside, a few minutes later, he decides that explaining all that won't make him look too good, so he keeps quiet."

"And what happened to his missing shoe?" Hannah asked. "Why was he in socks but no shoes after the fire?"

"Because the right shoe, the one that left the print, has some sort of fire marks or heat damage, or just smells strongly of soot and smoke. Maybe he accidentally stepped on a hot ember and melted the sole of the shoe. Whatever. It's marked in some way, but the left shoe isn't. Since the right shoe's condition is evidence he was there when he says he wasn't, he has to conceal it or destroy it. Maybe he just chucked the shoe into the hottest part of the fire.

"The main thing is, if he doesn't know that he left a shoe
print
, he doesn't know there is no point in hiding the shoe, if you followed that. Either he meant to get back to Marta's apartments and take the second shoe anyway, but never got the chance, or else he didn't think of it until it was too late. Wearing just one shoe would draw attention to the missing one--so he goes out during the evacuation in his socks."

"That more or less holds together," Brox conceded.

"Of course," Jamie went on, "if Georg
did
do it, instead of just finding the Thelm right after his suicide, and if for some reason he felt he had to conceal that fact, then we can play the postmurder events pretty much the same way." He turned to Brox. "But I want to hear about this pair of conspiratorial suspects," he said.

Brox lowered his arms, hands open, shoulders out--the Kendari equivalent of a shrug. "I was simply making a point, and a poor one at that. Each of you serves as an alibi for the other during the period of the murder--but who serves as an alibi for you
both
? The conversation in the car might or might have something to do with your motive. Perhaps the suggestion of Penitence merely started some later train of conversation between the two of you.

"Or perhaps the Penitence plan has nothing to do with it. Perhaps you realized that the human race could claim the rule of a whole new planet, merely by disposing of a single tiresome old alien and installing a human ruler in his place. Control over a whole planet is a strong motive for murder--especially for two police agents who also have orders to be alert to the political agenda."

Jamie felt himself getting angry, but controlled himself--just barely. Hannah saved the situation by speaking first. "It's an excellent motive for murder. In fact, I'd suggest it's possibly the strongest motive in all of human history. The trouble is, it never even occurred to either of us."

Speak for yourself
, thought Jamie. It
had
occurred to him, as a bit of logical theorizing. But no, he hadn't acted on it, or mentioned it, and he certainly wasn't about to do so. "I'm not so sure it
is
that great a motive, just because it is so big and long-term and impersonal," he said. "Besides, Georg's becoming Thelm doesn't make this a human world. It just makes it more possible for humans to have some political influence down the road. The motive wouldn't be 'kill the Thelm and win yourself a world.' It would be 'kill the Thelm today, then if everything goes just right, and they don't throw Georg out right away, in ten or twenty or a hundred years, my people might have the start of a nice big settlement on one of the other continents.' "

"I merely offered a theory that others will no doubt think of," Brox said mildly. "But setting the human race on course to colonize a world would result in a positive rating in one of those Employee Fitness Reviews that you BSI agents seem to worship without end."

Hannah laughed. "Your point is made. I know quite a few agents who might kill for a high-positive EFR." But then her expression grew more serious. "But jokes and theories to one side, I will tell you in all frankness, that the blade cuts both ways. If
we
have a motive for wanting Georg to have done it, or perhaps a motive to do the murder ourselves and make it look like Georg killed the Thelm, then
you
have a motive for proving that Georg did
not
kill the Thelm."

"And that possible motive will evaporate if it turns out Georg ascends even if he didn't commit the murder," Brox said calmly. "However, in that case,
your
motive for the crime becomes even stronger."

"Assuming we knew for sure that Georg would ascend if someone else was the killer," said Hannah. "We didn't. We still don't."

"There are few things as easy to feign as ignorance," said Brox. "And few things as difficult to conceal, if it comes to that."

And suddenly Jamie had it. He saw. It wasn't logic that told him so. It was a gut feeling. But the logic was there. It held together. He was sure of it. But he had to walk through it, lead the others behind, see if it all worked. He was the junior partner here. Brox and Hannah were the seasoned investigators. They had seen it all before. They weren't going to be impressed by some fresh-faced kid spinning one more theory. Facts. He needed to show them
facts
.

"We're going at this the wrong way," he said slowly. "We're trying to say what this or that person
could
have done, and bending the known facts to fit the theory. Turn it around. You'd
have
to know certain things for sure before you killed the Thelm--such as who would ascend to the Thelmship. Or else you might have to
think
you know something--but make a mistake based on incomplete knowledge."

"What do you mean?" Brox asked.

"Well, the weapon, for example. The killer knew some things, but not others," Jamie said. "Wait a sec. I'll be right back." He stood up, went to his room, and came back with the duplicate weapon in its box. "This was waiting on the table when I first got up, while you two were still sleeping. It doesn't have all the fancy stuff on it that the real one had, but it's mechanically identical. I think it tells us a lot."

He held up the rocket-gun pistol. "The weapon itself is almost too simple to explain," he said. "The barrel is a straight tube. It's not even rifled. The breech end has an exterior screw thread. It takes a single round of ammo, which screws into place." He held up the dummy round Darsteel had provided. It was a cruel-looking thing, shaped like an oversized bullet, about four centimeters wide and fifteen centimeters long. "The rocket-projectile round has its base mounted to the screw-on endcap. The electrical connection with the pistol's firing mechanism is made through the screw-on cap. The round loads this way."

He shoved the projectile up into the breech end of the gun barrel and screwed it in place. "That's all there is to it. Pull the trigger and you complete an electric connection and
POW!
the thing fires. The projectile flies out the end of the barrel. The muzzle end of the tube is flared out like a bell or a funnel to keep the rocket exhaust more or less out of the shooter's face. The projectile has snap-out fins that unfold as soon as it is clear of the barrel. The fins are canted to provide spin stabilization of the projectile."

He unscrewed the dummy round, set down the gun, and held up the round. "All you have to do in order to shoot again is unscrew the cap, run a thing like a bottle brush through the barrel, then screw in a fresh round. There are various types available. High-explosive, armor-piercing, even ones that explode just in front of the target to create a really horrible wound. And, if you know who and where to ask--there is the suicide round, also known as a backfire shot. One of Darsteel's colleagues saw a picture of the Thelm's wounds and instantly knew a backfire had done it. Darsteel sent along everything he had on them."

He held up the other dummy round, one that looked much like the first--except the pointed end of the projectile had been sliced off, and the projectile was mounted to the endcap backwards, so that the rocket engine pointed at the muzzle, with two thin electric leads connected to its igniter.

"Suicide round is an ironic name, of course. They aren't meant to be used when you
deliberately
want to kill yourself. They are meant to do what was done in this case--to cause the shooter to kill himself when he tries to shoot someone else. You can see most of the modifications that have been made. The one that's less obvious is that the screw-cap's threads have been very precisely filed down, and that the screw-cap is made of a much thinner piece of a much weaker material. When the rocket fires, the threading will shear clean off, and the screw-cap will be driven into the shooter's body, where it will shatter on impact, with the rocket projectile plowing right through it. We saw what the results look like last night."

"But what does all this tell us that we did not already know?" Brox demanded. "We knew the rocket fired backwards and killed the Thelm."

"Yes, but
how
it was done tells us a great deal we did not know," said Jamie. He held up the suicide round. "This is a premade part, all of a piece. It's not something an amateur could put together on the kitchen table. Either the killer was someone who knew weapons, and this particular weapon, and had the skills to build one of these--or else the killer would have had to go shopping for it--quietly, and very carefully. And that would take time, possibly quite a bit of time. But once the killer had the suicide round in hand, he or she could swap it into the Thelm's gun in seconds." He demonstrated by picking up the gun, unscrewing one round, and screwing the other back in. "That's all it would take," he said. "Now the gun is ready to kill the shooter."

"So you're saying this would take a lot of time to prepare, but very little time to put into operation," said Hannah. "And of course the suicide round could have been put in the gun at any time. Months ago, maybe."

"Yes, but I tend to think it wasn't," Jamie said. "There's a whole line of sporting and target-shooting weapons that use the same type of rocket-cartridge ammunition. According to everything I've read about him, the Thelm went target-shooting pretty regularly--but he has never fought a duel.

"Maybe Plan A was to load a backfire round into his long gun. That way you'd kill him the next time he goes shooting, and you don't have to goad him into reaching for a decorative pistol in his office. Then, for whatever reason, the killer went to Plan B. Of course, it might even be that the killer had the rounds in stock for some other reason, some other intended attack, and simply reached for the tool at hand when he or she decided to kill the Thelm."

"So what does
that
tell us?" Brox demanded.

"That the killer has been on Reqwar long enough to learn about these rocket guns, perhaps long enough to make some contacts with someone willing to come up with a few suicide rounds for sale. Or maybe the killer dreamed them up independently, or found the plans for them on the reference net somewhere and worked from there, and the round
was
homemade. There hasn't been any chance to analyze the remains of the round that buried itself in the Thelm's chest. Once that's done, it might tell us a lot. But it already tells us that the killer has been preparing to kill someone for a while."