Crimes of the Grey Detective

Chapter Three

The room had been designed as an office suite, with a mahogany-lined steel desk bolted to the floor by the far wall and a shuttered window behind it that might have had a decent view of the front lawn. The carpeting wasn’t as plush as the hallway, but it made for a comfortable enough atmosphere. The walls were grey and without panels, the golden glow of the hydro lights a little harsher than those in the hallway – more for function than ambiance. All in all, not bad, and much nicer than Dickens’ old office, except for the dead woman floating in the middle of it.

“Bloody six indeed,” Dickens said.

“Told you,” said Sera.

Dickens knew instantly what had killed her. Her brown hair floated like thin sheets of silk in front of her pale face. Her skin was pale to the point of translucent, and the three days she had spent suspended here in death revealed the bruises of burst arteries in her cheeks and brow. Ruptured veins in her eyes had turned the whites a dark red, the colour of blood in the shadows. Her limbs were splayed out as Maverick’s had been when the Disabler hit him. Her fingernails were the same dark red as her eyes.

“How many times was she hit with a Disabler?” Dickens asked.

Sera stepped up to the corpse, which floated just above her head and pointed to Mrs. Langard’s wrists and neck in turn. “The rupture patterns are pretty close together, so it’s hard to tell how many, but what that tells us is that there was less than twenty seconds between the first hit and the killing one. At an educated guess, I’d say she was hit at least seven times in that span.”

Dickens’ gut hitched as he touched his Twin Universal Gravity Chips. You couldn’t really drown in the Orbitals. No one kept a body of water large enough out in the open, but you could suffocate in the vacuum of space. You couldn’t be burned to death, either, since fire was forbidden on all stations and most heat sources were either gaseous or thermo-liquid, but God help you if you spilled the wrong acid directly onto your skin. You could absolutely be beaten to death with nail-spiked clubs in space, but Dickens would have taken that over death by Gravity Transition Trauma any day in the Orbital calendar.

“Mr. Charles,” said August. “You look uneasy. Are the conditions of this case going to affect your ability to bring it to a satisfactory close?”

Fuck you

“No, it won’t. Sera’s the forensic expert. I’m the investigator. She deals with the dead and I deal with the living.”

Daniels couldn’t peel his eyes from the dead woman’s. It would have been hard under any circumstance. But for the pale blue irises, they seemed to be replaced with balls of congealed blood.

“So,” said Dickens, swallowing his stomach before it pushed up his throat. “We have a woman killed with a Disabler, which means the killer didn’t even have to be in the same room as her. They just had to have a semi-accurate direction to aim at.”

“Right,” said Sera.

Dickens turned to the Councilman. “Of the people who were on this station at the time of the murder, how many are cleared to carry Disablers?”

Councilman August shot him a look of blue hatred. Dickens didn’t budge. He knew it was nothing personal, but he didn’t like the answer it was forewarning. The Councilman walked slowly to the mahogany-top desk and sat down on the edge of it. He rubbed his eyes with manicured fingers then looked up at Dickens again, the hatred cooled to despair.

“Only two.”

Dickens pointed to his partner. “Sera and who else?”

With a deep sigh, the Councilman reached into his own blazer pocket and pulled out a slim steel-cased Disabler, barely longer than his index finger, and tossed it at Dickens. It landed on the carpet beneath his feet. The only thing the damn things had over pistols was that it was impossible for one to fire accidentally.

“Right,” said Dickens, kneeling to pick up the Disabler. “So the woman you were having an affair with is murdered two rooms from you, although well within range of the murder weapon – a murder weapon that belongs to you. So there’s means and opportunity and the very existence of an affair borders on motive. Sorry, Councilman, I’m a little slow. You’re going to have to go over how you’re not guilty again.”

“For one thing,” said the Councilman, “I’m the one who fuckin’ called you in.”

“Aye, because the Force would have had you in handcuffs by now and there’d be a Supreme Judge breathing down the neck of his colleagues for the Orbital’s first death sentence.” Dickens pocketed the Disabler for later inspection. “Hiring the private firm of the Guild of Inspectors gives you time to shape your narrative while staying out of a holding cell and keeping this whole business hush-hush until you have a neat explanation to offer law enforcement, not to mention the extra insulation if the Guild found you innocent.”

“A very compelling case that any prosecutor worth their Gravity Chips could make,” the Councilman said, “and an equally competent defence attorney would tell you that, in the end, I was still the one that called you. They would explain that, while I had the means and opportunity to commit this atrocity, I also had the means and opportunity to bury it completely. There are infinite ways to dispose of…” He eyed the corpse again and his shoulders deflated, a lick of disgust and shame touching his face. “There are infinite ways to dispose of Merida’s body, any of which would have absolved me of any unjustified punishment, but here I stand, Mr. Charles. I’m risking the very thread of Orbital life to see justice done as best as it can.”

“First thing,” Dickens said, “while you might have had the means to hide your crime, you sure as hell didn’t have the opportunity. Sera was with you the whole time, discussing a separate case. She heard the screams same time you did. And even that doesn’t give you an alibi given the nature of the murder.”

It was a bit of a dark art, interrogating a suspect in front of the victim, worse when they used to be lovers, but Dickens needed the Councilman’s emotional defences strained on all sides if he was going to get to the heart of the matter. Ethical Force practices would have restrained him from carrying out any questioning outside the safety and sanity of an Orbital-approved interrogation room, with a jug of water and everything. That rarely yielded results on Earth and it sure as hell wouldn’t here, where the rules of society were so warped and everything so new and raw and naked. The Trills had wanted space exploration, and so they had pushed until they got it. It was no different with anyone anywhere who had every needed to get anything done.

It still felt pretty s**t, though.

“Can we do this literally any other place?” Councilman August asked.

“Afraid not,” said Sera, who knew Dickens’ methods almost intuitively at this point. She walked around the victim, her focus running along the bruised lines of her calves now. “Given what transpired, this is the only room I can be positively sure hasn’t been bugged in the last three days. Though I doubt the murderer would want to leave a longer trail, better safe than sorry.”

The Councilman massaged his eyes again. At this point Dickens was convinced it was another defence mechanism; this one to keep him from looking up. That was dangerous. He couldn’t be dealing with a man who hadn’t quite come to grips with the reality of what was in front of him. That trait made for the most doggedly defensive type of suspect and the most dangerous sort of murderer.

“Councilman,” said Dickens, slowly, as if prying a dog’s better senses from the frightened edges of its own snarl, “I’m going to ask you a series of questions now. I’d like you to answer clearly and honestly. You may explain yourself as well as you deem necessary, but I want no excuses. If you want your name struck from the suspect list, then you’re going to have to do it the hard way – by being innocent.”

Dickens came to stand before the Councilman, so that his back was to the floating corpse. If the Councilman deigned to look over his massive shoulder, he’d be confronted with the body of his dead lover. It was another cheap trick, one that would force him to make eye contact with Dickens or look down at his shoes, and he was too smart and too proud to do the latter without knowing what type of guilty figure he’d be cutting.

“Councilman,” said Dickens, “when this Disabler is put through a decoder and the records for when it was activated and the serial numbers for which Twin Universal Gravity Chips are revealed, what am I going to find?”

“You’re going to find that that Disabler was never fired at Merida.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“The Disabler was in my pocket the entire time,” the Councilman said. “Of that I’m certain.”

“And that I believe.” Dickens pushed his hands into his pocket. “But, Councilman – and I’m telling you this so that you understand my questioning – whether or not you did or did not kill this vic… Merida, the simple fact is this. If your Disabler is run through a decoder, and it comes back that it was fired at Merida at the time of her death, and worse, that it was repeatedly fired, then you’re guilty of the crime by the simple fact that any standard Disabler is voice activated.”

“Used to be that some that were touch activated,” Daniels chimed in. He was holding down a hand for Sera to examine.

Sera seemed to find something interesting on one of the fingernails. “But of course the myth that no two thumb prints are identical was proven to be just that – a myth. And all things considered, Councilman, you and I were in conversation at the time of death. The only trick is whether or not you slipped your password into the conversation at any point.”

The Councilman’s face paled three times over. “My password was ‘warning.’”

Dickens actually leapt into the air as the Disabler tucked inside his suit pocket vibrated. With desperate and clumsy fingers, he fished it out and tossed it halfway across the room before planting his hands on the desk and forcing a calming breath into his fear-scorched lungs.

Daniels had the grace to confine his laughter to the base of his throat.

“And did you,” Dickens said, regaining himself like a seamstress gathering up spilled fabric, “at any point in your conversation with Madam Agent, utter the word ‘warning’?”

“I… I don’t recall, truly.”

“You did, Councilman.” Sera was peeling something off of the corpse’s hand now. “When I showed you the bugs I’d managed to find around your facility, I mentioned that one had been placed under your mattress but had not been activated. You asked what that meant and I said a possible warning. You repeated the sentiment in shock. I’d say screams came not twenty seconds later.”

“I’ve seen what the guards at Third Orbital Light Correctional can do with those things,” Daniels said, equally fascinated with whatever Sera was cutting off the corpse. “The password gives them about thirty seconds before the Disabler shuts off.”

Right, time to put the nail in the coffin. “Councilman, did Merida say or do anything in the past couple of days that might have led you to kill her? I understand that this is an awfully brazen way to ask a question you could easily lie your way out of, but keep in mind that I’ll be interviewing your staff next. Even if you have the wherewithal to fool me, whatever answers you’ve fed them won’t hold up if they’re not the truth. I’m that good.”

“Yes, Mr. Charles, you are that good.” The Councilman seemed to be near the end of his wits. “And I would remind you that your competence is the exact reason why I went to the husband of my dead lover and begged him for a pardon to release you, so that you could solve this case.”

“You didn’t get me pardoned so I could help Madam Agent solve this case,” Dickens said. “You got me pardoned so that I could dig up any possible reason for this murder that wouldn’t point directly at you.”

“And to that end, you’ve been sorely disappointing.”

“I’ll ask again, Councilman, did Merida say or do anything in the days before her murder that might have led you to desire her harm? Not necessarily death, just harm. If you’re innocent, an honest answer here may be the key to absolving you.”

If Councilman August truly believed that, he made a good show of hiding it. In fact, his entire body had tightened up like a newly-tuned guitar string. He sat on the only desk in the office, his fingers clasped together as his hands lay on his lap. Dickens had seen the look a great many times before. It was crunch time and they both knew it. Whatever false realities of an easy exit out of this situation he had been feeding himself this past week, it was time to be confronted with the ugly truth.

“What I’m about to tell you,” the Councilman said, “may seem like motivation but it in no way – ever – made me consider bringing harm to Merida.”

“Well s**t,” Daniels muttered, loud enough for the whole room to hear. “Here we go.”

“Merida…” The Councilman looked down at his hands and frowned. “She told me that she was thinking of leaving her husband.”

Why the actual f**k are mistresses forever thinking about leaving their husbands right before getting killed off? Part of Dickens wondered. It was not an uncommon case. He’d seen it repeated one too many times. And why is it always the concubine that kills them? Another part wondered.

The answer wasn’t all that hard to dig out. s*x, violence, and hunger had carried the caveman to outer space. And that instinct had only been multiplied when storms raged on overhead and the first bolt of lightning struck the first branch at just the right angle for fire to form until someone stumbled across it (or something like that, Dickens’ knowledge of anthropology was part Saturday morning cartoon reruns). But so far as Dickens was concerned, where there was s*x or hunger involved, there was potential for a deep, embedded sort of violence that could surprise even the most docile in the species.

“And what was your reaction when she told you that she was considering leaving her husband?” Dickens asked.

The Councilman looked him right in the eye. “I was thrilled. There was nothing more I wanted.”

“But you do realise that that would have caused the same types of problems this situation does, right? Sans the fact that a human being is murdered.”

“No, no, no.” Councilman August shook his head. “You don’t understand. That would have been perfect. Supreme Justice Langard wouldn’t have been pleased with a divorce. It would have been ugly, maybe even a little bit scandalous – especially back home in the Second Orbital – but as it did so often back on Earth, eventually, the scandal would die and people would forget. We’re in space, for Chrissake. This is where gossip should come to die.”

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The Five Orbits are just an interstellar version of a small town.

“And while the gossip was dying down,” the Councilman continued, “Merida would find work in the Third Orbital. She would live in a commune for a while, work a menial lower middleclass job here at the council building, and swallow her pride for a few months. But then we’d enter open courtship, as if we’d simply met by chance here and hit it off. It wouldn’t really be that strange, if you think about it. We’re confined to a population in the thousands, not the billions. The statistics of a recent divorcee finding love again on short notice…”

“And as far as Supreme Judge Langard is concerned, Merida has never even left the Second Orbital for any other,” Dickens finished. “He’d never suspect that you’d been carrying on a secret affair and in those months where Mrs. Langard was a divorcee working in the counting house,. She would be as close to you as she’d ever been and you could still continue your trysts, only with far less risk, until you were ready to announce yourself to the Five Orbitals.”

A sliver of hope snaked into the Councilman’s blue eyes. “Exactly!”

Slipping one hand back into its adjacent pocket, Dickens turned on his weighted heel and strolled out of the office. Now in the clean, cold air of the hallway, he could feel the cloying sweetness of artificial purifiers being pulled from his skin like a clinging film of oil. As he breathed in deeply, he surveyed the facts before him.

There was a dead woman in a Councilman’s work residence. She was the wife of a Supreme Judge, who operated even above the Trillionaires who had built the Orbitals they currently all lived in. That judge had granted Dickens a pardon that killed off his own sentence after only a month served. Sera was a member of the Guild of Inspectors now, and had used her pull to convince a Third Orbital Quadrant Councilman to beg that very same pardon.

Now here was the s**t kicker; the councilman had begged the pardon from his mistress’ husband, a mistress who was dead.

The murder weapon belonged to the Councilman.

The Councilman had activated the murder weapon at the time of the murder.

He couldn’t have gotten rid of the body in time…

…but he could have destroyed the murder weapon.

He could have —

Dickens kicked the hallway paneling so hard the wall shook. “f**k!”