Charlie stood there, looking at Malcolm's image-another virtclip, a young black guy not that much older than Charlie, tall, good looking, cheerful. And dead now. Charlie's mother had been pretty certain that you couldn't cause anyone to suicide if they weren't already suicidal. But even she had been willing to admit that new ways of doing things were being invented every day…
And how do I know this isn't a coincidence, anyway? Granted, it would have to be a huge one…
Charlie walked around to the third set of data that had shown the drug. This was Jaime Velasquez, from Fort Collins. He was a little, dark-haired, dark-eyed boy built sort of like Mark Gridley, but older, and with a much more innocent face. The picture Charlie had of him was of a guy almost completely muffled up in ski clothes, grinning past a ski mask which a friend just out of shot in the same virtclip had just pulled down, waving his ski poles at the camera, then falling down in the snow as the same out-of-shot friend hooked a sky behind one of Jaime's knees and knocked him sprawling backward into the powder. In Jaime's bloodstream-either because he had had a very slight dose, or had lived long enough to detoxify it, or had been too long dead before they had found him-there had been almost none of the whole scobro molecule left at all. The toxicologist had either missed the bromide fragments in the postmortem blood samples, or had seen them and assumed they had come from some other source… or perhaps had dismissed them as unimportant. Either way, they hadn't been mentioned in his dictated text report.
But all the same, the drug had been there. Charlie heaved a big sigh of frustration. If the coroner in Colorado had known about the findings of his associates in New York and Maryland, he might have been able to get his own police force to examine the crime scene more carefully for signs that anyone else had been there. But it hadn't happened. There had been no comparison of data.
Charlie scowled as he walked around to the next set of exhibits. Some of it had to do with what Mark had described: separate states' failure to contribute information to a common pool, intrastate authorities' unwillingness to cooperate with one another. But there could have been other causes as well. Coroners who saw what they wanted to see, Charlie thought. Or what they were convinced that they should be seeing. Just another suicide. Nothing unusual…
But then each of them was looking at a separate case… not at one case as part of a group or set of cases. It's not their fault they didn't realize what they were looking at.
But here I am, Charlie thought, and 1 think I know what I'm looking at.
Murder.
The minute you find anything… said James Winters's voice in the back of his head.
Charlie opened his mouth to tell his system to place a call…
… then closed his mouth again, thinking.
You know what he's going to say, said something in the back of Charlie's mind.
He sat down on his bench again and looked out at the exhibits.
There were very few things that Charlie hated more than drugs. He had seen them ruin people's lives, had seen them ruin the life of his birth mother, the one person he had loved more than anyone else in the world. They'd killed her, slowly, by hours and inches. That memory was one that he didn't often examine closely. He was not up for looking very hard at it right this minute, either. But the moment he called James Winters and started to present this data to him, that painful old history wasgoing to be held up in front of him by that careful and thorough man. Winters would say to him, Are you sure this isn't clouding your judgment a little, Charlie? You know how you feel about drugs. I understand it completely. It makes perfect sense to me that you would want to keep other people from suffering the same kind of loss that you have.
But you shouldn't let it make you see losses like that where there aren't any…
And he would remind Charlie once again about the huge numbers of people on the Net, and the incidence of accident and circumstance among those people, and the way they impacted on mortality statistics.
But it wouldn't matter. I know what I'm seeing here. These people did not commit suicide. They were "helped" to die.
Charlie looked over at the New York data again. Here, unfortunately, the investigation into Renee's death had been less wonderful. The coroner had been conscientious, but the police had not, and they had done very little work on the actual area where she had been found dead. Up in Maine, in Bangor, though, someone had been-suspicious? Or just not certain of what they were seeing. And there were some odd findings at the scene.
Charlie went around to Richard Delano's exhibit and looked at what was spread out there. There was a virtclip of Richard, a short, well-muscled guy, blond, gray-eyed, in baggies and a hot-weather vest, walloping someone's fastball in a softball game on some unnamed summer afternoon, then taking off around the bases, leaving a cloud of dust behind him. And there, spread out next to the clip, was the Bangor police department's own virtual version of the crime scene, the living room of the house where Richard had been found. They had gone right around the room and virtsnapped everything, in both macro and micro. They had come up with some odd fiber evidence: bits of cotton fluff that were found nowhere else in the house but in this one room, the living room. And they were on the "top" of the rug, not old, not trodden in as they might have been expected to be, but something new. And not native to any of the suicide's clothes. Charlie looked at the fibers, enlarged and hanging in the air like tangled white ropes.
A friend? Maybe. But a friend who had never been in the house before? Or in any part of it except the living room? That was a little weird. Someone the person didn't know? But there was no sign of forced entry. Whoever that person was, Richard Delano had let him or her in.
It was very odd, and Charlie didn't know what to make of it. Neither had the Bangor police. They had not been able to confirm any other person being in the apartment any time around the time of death unfortunately the entrance to Delano's house had been hidden by shrubbery from the other houses in the street. The outside light had come on and gone off again within a minute or so as it might have no matter how many people were entering the house, and that was all anyone had noticed. Finally, after days of investigation, the police had listed their concerns about the crime scene as "inconclusive" and had moved on to other issues. If they had noticed scorbutal cohydrobromate in the body, they might have thought otherwise, but they hadn't.
Charlie looked over at the other two sets of evidence. They were inconclusive, too, lacking either any suggestion of other persons being in the area, or any detection of scobro in the victims. His case was not at all complete… and James Winters would not be convinced.
This'll all have been for nothing.
He put his head in his hands, depressed. Nick was still somewhere in the middle of Deathworld, and Charlie felt sure in his bones that someone else was still there, too, stalking the place, looking for another victim. If 1 don't convince Winters that I'm right about what I've found, someone else is gonna get killed. Maybe not Nick… maybe someone else. But it doesn't matter in the slightest. Murder's going to happen.
Especially since it's still May. Charlie could not get rid of the idea that this meant something specific.
Anyway, it's beyond coincidence at this point. What are the odds that all these suicides should just happen to be using this drug?… And just happen to be in Deathworld, and just happen to kill themselves this way? Taken separately, there was always the chance. But this many coincidences, taken all together… suddenly they weren't coincidences anymore.
Charlie breathed in, breathed out.