The NewYou franchise was under new management since the last time I’d visited. The rather tacky showroom was at ground level; the brain-scanning equipment was on the second floor. The basement—quite rare on Mars, since the permafrost was so hard to dig through—was mostly used for storage.
“Mr. Lomax!” declared Horatio Fernandez, an employee held over from the previous ownership. Fernandez was a beefy guy—arms as big around as Gargalian’s, but his bulk was all muscle.
“Hello,” I said. “Sorry to bother you, but—”
“Let me guess,” said Fernandez. “The Megan Delahunt murder.”
“Bingo.”
He shook his head. “She was really pleasant.”
“So people keep telling me.”
“It’s true. She was a real lady, that one. Cultured, you know? Lots of people here, spending their lives splitting rocks, they get a rough edge. But not her; she was all ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Of course, she was pretty long in the tooth…”
“Did she have any special transfer requests?” I asked.
“Nah. Just wanted her new body to look the way she had fifty Earth years ago, when she was twenty—which was easy enough.”
“What about mods for outside work?” Lots of transfers had special equipment installed in their new bodies so that they could operate more easily on the surface of Mars.
“Nah, nothing. She said her fossil-hunting days were over. She was looking forward to a nice long future, reading all the great books she’s never had time for before.”
If she’d found the alpha, she’d probably have wanted to work it herself, at least for a while—if you’re planning on living forever, and you had a way to become super-rich, you’d take advantage of it. “Hmmph,” I said. “Did she mention any titles?”
“Yeah,” said Fernandez. “She said she was going to start with The Remembrance of Things Past.”
I nodded, impressed at her ambition. “Anybody else come by to ask about her since she was killed?”
“Well, Detective McCrae called.”
“Mac came here?”
“No, he called. On the phone.”
I smiled. “That’s Mac.”
I headed over to Gully’s Gym, since it was on the way to my next stop, and did my daily workout—treadmill, bench press, and so on. I worked up quite a sweat, but a sonic shower cleaned me up. Then it was off to the shipyards. Mostly, this dingy area between the eighth and ninth circles was a grave for abandoned ships, left over from the early fossil-rush days when people were coming to Mars in droves. Now only a small amount of maintenance work was done here. My last visit to the shipyards had been quite unpleasant—but I suppose it hadn’t been as bad as Megan Delahunt’s last visit.
I found Lennick’s Folly easily enough. It was a tapered spindle, maybe a hundred meters long, lying on its side. The bow had a couple of square windows, and the stern had a giant engine cone attached. There was a gap of only a few meters between the cone and a brick firewall, which was now covered with soot. Whatever had been left of Megan’s shiny new body had already been removed.
The lock on the cockpit door hadn’t been repaired, so I had no trouble getting in. Once inside the cramped space, I got to work.
There were times when a private detective could accomplish things a public one couldn’t. Mac had to worry about privacy laws, which were as tight here on Mars as they were back down on Earth—and a good thing, too, for those, like me, who had come here to escape our pasts. Oh, Mac doubtless had collected DNA samples here—gathering them at a crime scene was legal—but he couldn’t take DNA from a suspect to match against specimens from here without a court order, and to get that, he’d have to show good reason up front for why the suspect might be guilty—which, of course, was a catch-22. Fortunately, the only catch-22 I had to deal with was the safety on my trusty old Smith Wesson .22.
I used a GeneSeq 109, about the size of a hockey puck. It collected even small fragments of DNA in a nanotrap, and could easily compare sequences from any number of sources. I did a particularly thorough collecting job on the control panel that operated the engine. Of course, I looked for fingerprints, too, but there weren’t any recent ones, and the older ones had been smudged either by someone operating the controls with gloved hands, which is what I suspected, or, I suppose, by artificial hands—a transfer offing a transfer; that’d be a first.
Of course, Mac knew as well as I did that family members commit most murders. I’d surreptitiously taken a sample from Jersey Delahunt when he’d visited my office; I sample everyone who comes there. But my GeneSeq reported that the DNA collected here didn’t match Jersey ’s. That wasn’t too surprising: I’d been hired by guilty parties before, but it was hardly the norm—or, at least, the kind of people who hired me usually weren’t guilty of the particular crime they wanted me to investigate.
And so I headed off to find the one surviving child of Megan and Jersey Delahunt.
Jersey had said his son Ralph had been born shortly after he and Megan had come to Mars thirty-six Earth years ago. Ralph certainly showed all the signs of having been born here: he was 210 centimeters if he was an inch; growing up in Mars’s low gravity had that effect. And he was a skinny thing, with rubbery, tubular limbs—Gumby in an olive-green business suit. Most of us here had been born on Earth, and it still showed in our musculature, but Ralph was Martian, through and through.
His office at the water works was much bigger than mine, but, then, he didn’t personally pay the rent on it. I had a DNA collector in my palm when I shook his hand, and while he was getting us both coffee from a maker on his credenza, I transferred the sample to the GeneSeq, and set it to comparing his genetic code to the samples from the rocket’s cockpit.
“I want to thank you, Mr. Lomax,” Ralph said, handing me a steaming mug. “My father called to say he’d hired you. I’m delighted. Absolutely delighted.” He had a thin, reedy voice, matching his thin, reedy body. “How anyone could do such a thing to my mother…”
I smiled, sat down, and took a sip. “I understand she was a sweet old lady.”
“That she was,” said Ralph, taking his own seat on the other side of a glass-and-steel desk. “That she was.”
The GeneSeq bleeped softly three times, each bleep higher pitched than the one before—the signal for a match. “Then why did you kill her?” I said.
He had his coffee cup halfway to his lips, but suddenly he slammed it down, splashing double-double, which fell to the glass desktop in Martian slo-mo. “Mr. Lomax, if that’s your idea of a joke, it’s in very poor taste. The funeral service for my mother is tomorrow, and—”
“And you’ll be there, putting on an act, just like the one you’re putting on now.”
“Have you no decency, sir? My mother…”
“Was killed. By someone she trusted—someone who she would follow to the shipyards, someone who told her to wait in a specific spot while he—what? Nipped off to have a private word with a ship’s pilot? Went into the shadows to take a leak? Of course, a professional engineer could get the manual for a spaceship’s controls easily enough, and understand it well enough to figure out how to fire the engine.”