I recall thinking that the day would come when I’d walk past those restaurants and beaches and wish that I hadn’t let him get away.
XII.
.
We got a call from the Action Network. A small, balding man with a carefully trimmed beard blinked on in my office. He was seated at a display. A dark brown jacket hung on a hook directly behind him. He identified himself as Benjamin Hollingsworth, the producer of
Alex was just coming out of the dining room.
I waved him in and showed him our caller. “Hello, Ben,” he said. “Good to see you again. How’ve you been?”
“Couldn’t be better. Especially now that my uncle’s back home.”
“I’m sure he’d enjoy sitting down with Hiroka.” Hiroka Itashi was ’s host.
“We’ve been trying to see if anything got missed during the original investigation.”
“I’ll let you know if we do, Ben.”
“Let’s hold off on that for a while, Ben. Where I’m concerned. Right now we’re just looking at the situation. I’d rather wait until we have something. But in the meantime, I suspect Gabe would be happy to participate.”
I was alone in the country house two hours later when a skimmer descended into the parking area and a tall, heavyset man climbed out.
“You have a reading on who this is?” I asked Jacob.
“No, Jacob. It’s okay.” We had valuable artifacts spread throughout the property, so caution was a requirement. But I had defenses that would be more than adequate should a situation turn hostile. I understood Jacob’s concern, though. Our visitor did have the appearance of a pugilist.
I met him at the door. “Can I help you?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I hope so. My name is Joseph Womack.” Instead of the baritone I’d expected, his voice was soft. He was big, with wide shoulders and a lantern jaw. “I’m looking for Alex Benedict. Am I at the right place?”
“You are, Mr. Womack. But he’s not here at the moment.”
“Are you his secretary?”
“More or less. My name is Chase Kolpath. What can I do for you?”
“I’ve heard that Mr. Benedict has become interested in the Octavia.”
“Come in, please, Mr. Womack.” I ushered him into my office. “He has been looking into the event.”
“My cousin Archie was one of the victims.”
“I’m sorry. Did you have something that might help us?”
“Unfortunately not. If you’re asking whether I know something about that thing, the answer is no. I have no idea what happened. Just that we lost a good man.”
“Everything we’ve heard of him supports that.”
“We encouraged him to go. His folks thought it was a great career move. So did I. We regret it now.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Mr. Womack.”
“We know that. He wasn’t anxious to leave Andiquar for two years. He didn’t think that screwing around with black holes was a good idea.” There was no way I could disagree with that. “Archie was a physics teacher. The students loved him. They kept in touch, invited him to anniversary celebrations. He knew how to arouse their passions about physics. I wish I’d had a science teacher like him. He didn’t just spend time showing them how to calculate how long a loaf of bread would take to hit the ground if you threw it off the roof of a skyscraper. He did that, of course. But he also asked them why, if they walked off the roof, would they fall? They’d tell him gravity and he’d ask them to explain what gravity was and how it worked. Nobody could do it. So he’d say how space was made out of rubber, and when you put a weight in it, like a planet, you made it bend. And gravity had to do with sliding down the curve. He was brilliant. There’s a whole crew of physicists out there who used to tell him that he was the reason they’d gotten into the field.”
“I can understand why you feel proud of him, Mr. Womack.” We looked at each other. “How can I help you?”
“If Mr. Benedict can find out what happened to him, to Octavia, I’ll pay him ten thousand markers.”
Alex called him that afternoon. “I appreciate your generosity, Mr. Womack,” he said, “but whatever happens, please keep your money. We’ll do everything we can to get at the facts.”
“Your sudden generosity,” I told him after Womack was gone, “continues to astound me.”
“No problem,” said Alex. “We’re never going to get to the bottom of this.” He smiled. “It’s easy to be generous when you have nothing to lose.”
A call came in over the weekend from a Jordan Kaye. Jacob relayed it to my cottage. he said, Mary Kaye.
I wasn’t dressed so I left it on audio. “Mr. Kaye,” I said, “we’ve been doing some research on a lost artifact that was brought back to Rimway by Rick Harding. You know him, I assume?”
“We’re trying to track the source of the artifact. To that end, we’d like to talk with the yacht AI.”
“The Andiquar area.”
I set it up for the next day. I’d planned to go to Salazar and have lunch with Chad but first things first. Gabe and I took off in the skimmer, turned north under a bright sky, crossed the Melony, and descended twenty minutes later onto a lush, neatly maintained hilltop property, surrounded by forest. The house was in the style of the previous century, fronted by a wide porch and a pair of fluted pillars. It was three stories high, with an arched roof, circular windows, and a large swimming pool in back.