A man who still thought he could win was not as dangerous as a man without hope.
I scuttled back up the slope to place more distance between us, and said, “It didn’t take me long to find out that you’d slept with Cynthia Warmuth.”
He chuckled, with a sad little shake of his head to convey his regrets over the small-mindedness he found himself having to confront. “Is that the extent of your findings, Counselor? That I’ve had consensual sex with some of the women under my command? Is that even considered a crime, in this day and age?”
“Not in and of itself. But it was an odd omission. I’m sure you know what murder investigators call a man in your position who fails to disclose his sexual relationship with a murder victim.”
“What?” he asked.
“The most likely suspect.”
His eyebrows knit. “First: you didn’t ask. Second, it didn’t occur to me that it might be relevant. Third, and most importantly: what Cynthia and I had is hardly worth calling a relationship. We slept together a few times. She didn’t make anything special out of it, and neither did I.”
“People have been known to get violently obsessed over the slightest things, Mr. Gibb.”
Gibb was the very portrait of a man confronted by total lunacy. “There wouldn’t have been any point, logical or otherwise, in getting obsessed over Cynthia Warmuth. You’ve heard what she was like. She wanted total immersion in everything and everyone. If anybody woke up in a bad mood, she wanted to be the therapist. If anybody received bad news from home, she wanted to be mother confessor. If somebody wanted privacy, she considered herself the exception. She wanted to be in everybody’s skin, all the time.”
“Did she get under yours, Mr. Gibb?”
“Mildly. I liked her, had fun with her, but didn’t give up any deep dark secrets. I didn’t like the way she always tried to figure out my whole life afterward. It gave me the impression she considered sex just a tool for picking emotional locks.” Thinking about it, for just this moment reliving a past encounter in his head, he could only tsk in remembrance. “She certainly used it enough. I think she must have offered herself to every man and woman in the outpost. I know she went after your friends the Unison Twins, that’s for certain. And she was also with D’Onofrio, for a while. Lastogne, too, but you must know that.”
My surprise, regarding Warmuth and Lastogne, took some of the edge off a reply intended to be cold, staccato, and relentless. “You know what murder investigators call the ex-lover who says the dead woman slept around?”
“I think I can guess.”
“The most likely suspect.”
He projected waves of unjust aggravation. “If I’d wanted to kill her I wouldn’t have had to call attention to the crime by crucifying her. In this habitat, all I would have had to do was drop her from a height, and call it an accident.”
“Which is, conveniently enough, close to what had happened to Santiago.”
He sighed. “And nobody’s about to claim I ever slept with Santiago.”
“Why not?”
His weariness was no longer the performance of a man determined to show himself rising above a series of unjust accusations, but the deep, abiding exhaustion of one who really had taken everything he could stand. “If you’ve researched what Warmuth was like, you know what Santiago was like. She was angry, suspicious, walled-off, paranoid, almost inhuman in her determination to repel others. In short, she was a lot like you—and very much poor Cynthia’s opposite. Trust me, I didn’t want her any more than she would have wanted me. And you won’t find one person on-station who’d say anything different.”
That was true too. “Most of the people I’ve spoken back you up. They say she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with you.”
“Fine.” Gibb was more tired than ever. “I don’t have to be loved by every woman I deal with. I can afford to be disliked by a few.”
“True. And it’s also true that I don’t think you had anything to do with any of the sabotage aboard this station.” And then I took a deep breath and pushed on. “But by not getting involved with you, Santiago provided an excellent career baseline against which we can measure the performance evaluations of the other female indentures under your supervision.”
Gibb straightened, his eyes as wary as an animal’s who had just sensed a predator entering his woods. “What?”
“Once I discerned the pattern, it only took me a few minutes to run a hytex analysis that isolated the names of several women assigned to this outpost whose performance evaluations exceeded any reasonable measurement of their professional accomplishments. Warmuth was only the most obvious. You gave her a number of substantial time bonuses not long after her arrival on station—before she’d even completed her local training and experienced her first doomed overnight with the Brachiators. That bothered me the first time I saw it. What could she have done to distinguish herself so dramatically that she earned rewards long before she even accomplished anything?”
Now he’d popped a substantial sweat. “I can’t believe you’re implying—”
“I don’t imply, sir. I just come out and say. Santiago’s one of the ones you didn’t sleep with. You praised her memory. You called her work exemplary. You said she had a fine future. Given your predilection for generous time-bonuses, one would normally expect her to have worked off her contract at least as efficiently as Warmuth. But she wanted nothing to do with you. So there were no unusually large bonuses for her. She had to work off her debt at something approaching real time.”
“I hadn’t gotten around to evaluating her records yet—”
“Warmuth and Santiago establish the pattern. Robin Fish cements it. There was nothing at all special about Fish, was there? By her own admission, she was stuck in a dead-end position, doing scut work for the Corps, when she approached you begging for something a little meaningful. You befriended her and imported her for a difficult, sensitive mission in a Habitat so difficult that the Dip Corps had trouble staffing it. I can only wonder how she persuaded you to give her, out of all other possible candidates, a chance. Why you had her rushed through the program with minimal training. Or why you kept her around, and continued to reward her with big bonuses, long after she proved unsuitable. Could it have been that she was that convenient combination of attractive and desperate?”
“This is disgusting—”
“Tell me about it.” I pressed on. “The truth is, her inability to function inside the Habitat had nothing to do with the job you actually brought her here to do. And she wasn’t about to complain, demeaning or disgusting as she might have found her true purpose here, when all she had to look forward to if she left here was another no-future position, earning out her contract at real time. Under the circumstances, earning high bonuses for just making herself available to you was the best professional option open to her. And she was no doubt real cooperative at first, accepting your explanation that you needed a full-timer in the hangar anyway. You even gave her the responsibility of managing all off-station correspondence, which went a long way toward allowing her the illusion that she was a meaningful, productive member of your team. But once she realized how trapped she was, and how long she was likely to exist as a glorified concubine, the self-loathing kicked in, her already weak personality fractured, and she began to self-medicate—a process you happened to encourage by allowing intoxicants inside the hangar.
“Maybe you thought that would keep her quiet. Or maybe, somewhere deep inside, you were tired of her and hoped she’d drink herself to death. But your precise motives there don’t matter. The results do. And as a result it’s not hard to see how she became the woman she is today.