“Sure he did.”
A few days later there was some fallout from the broadcast. Alex was attending an auction and Gabe had gone to lunch with friends when a skimmer descended out of a threatening sky. said Jacob.
Greene was the guy whose interest in Charlotte Hill had raised eyebrows. I watched him climb out of the skimmer and stride up the walkway to the porch. He looked like a man on a mission. “Let him in,” I told Jacob.
“Just open the door, please.”
He was tall, lean, dressed casually in tapering stretch pants and a pullover shirt with stitched across it. He had clean-cut chiseled features, black hair, and an amicable expression except for a darkness in the eyes. “My name’s Reggie Greene,” he said. “I want to see Gabriel Benedict.”
“He’s not here, Mr. Greene. Can I help you?” He stood looking down at me, trying to decide how to proceed. “I’m Chase Kolpath. His assistant.”
“I watched him on the other day. He’s talking about opening up the Octavia investigation again. Do I have that right?”
“More or less,” I said. “Please come in.” I led him into my office and signaled for him to sit down. “It’s not Gabe who’s doing the investigation. It’s one of our other people. Benedict.”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“Unfortunately, he’s not here either. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“My first name is Reginald. Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. I understand you were a friend of one of the people lost on the station.”
“She wasn’t exactly just a friend.”
I was glad Jacob was there. In case this threatened to get out of hand. “Mr. Greene, what can I do for you?”
His eyelids lowered. “You think so too, don’t you?”
I knew what he was referring to, but I wasn’t going to walk into it. “I think what?”
“That I caused it.”
“Mr. Greene, if you’re talking about Octavia, I have no idea what happened. In any case, it’s hard to see how you could have had a hand in it.”
“Well, thank you. It’s nice to hear someone who’s willing to cut me a break.”
“Sir, do you by any chance know what happened out there?”
His features hardened. “No. How the hell would know?”
“Why don’t we start over? What can I do for you?”
“You must know that half the people on the planet think I destroyed the damned place and killed everybody on board.” He looked around the room and took a deep breath. “I wouldn’t even know how to think about doing something like that. But it doesn’t matter. They broadcast it on the news shows, and they had people showing up on HV saying how I’d gotten away with murder and that the justice system was useless. It’s been eleven years, and this damned thing is still hanging over my head.” His voice softened. “Chase, it’s never going to go away.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Greene.”
“It’s not your fault. But I’ll tell you that I wasn’t happy to see it all coming out again. I used to be a teacher. But that’s a long time ago now. The board decided I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near children, especially girls. I loved teaching. At one time, it was my life. It was all that mattered to me. Except Charlotte. I guess it’s time I admitted that. But my life is over now. I don’t see that anything can happen to change what I’m living with.”
“You travel out to Octavia, right?”
“Yeah. Dumbest thing I ever did in my life.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“Because I loved her. I’d have died for her. Given anything to have been able to hold on to her. Which, please understand, would never have allowed me to harm her in any way. Let alone kill her. I went out there because I didn’t want to give up. It was my last chance. If it didn’t work, I was going to walk away from it all. Be done with it. It wasn’t the first time I’d made that decision and then went back later. But it was getting harder. My God, Chase, she was light-years away. But I just wanted to try one more time. I was telling myself that if I didn’t make the effort I’d always wonder what might have happened. Whether I might have succeeded. So I got all the money I had, which I’d been saving for years, and I hired Oakie McCollough, and he took me out there—”
“Where you talked to her.”
“Yes, I did. By radio.”
“She was in the shuttle?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ask if you could rendezvous with her?”
“Does that matter?”
“I take it she said no.”
“That’s correct.”
“How many times did you go out there?”
“Three.”
“I had the impression you were only there once.”
“No. I didn’t give up that easily.”
“But that last time, you were back home before the station dropped out of sight?”
“Yes.” He was staring at me. “Maybe if I’d been there when whatever it was happened, I could have helped. Maybe I could have gotten them off the place.”
“All right. I’ve got the message. I’ll pass it along to Alex.”
“All I’m asking is that he doesn’t drag me into it again.”
“Mr. Greene, I’m not conducting the investigation, so I can’t make any promises. But I’ll tell him.”
“Please,” he said. “I’ve had all of it I can take.”
When Alex got back, I explained what had happened.
“It’s not an easy call,” he said. “Greene came from money. His family owned a substantial piece of the Green Valley restaurant chain.” One of them was located on Skydeck and had recently become a favorite of Alex’s. “The family also owned the yacht Greene had used. He’d served periodically on the board of directors and had been handling its public relations operations when the Octavia charges were first leveled against him. Journalists had reported that people who’d worked with him insisted that, in their experience, Greene had shown no signs of erratic behavior. And nobody knew anything about a connection with Charlotte Hill.”
“So where’d the story come from?” I asked.
“A couple of Charlotte’s friends had avatars. They reported that Greene possessed an undying passion for her. That he’d been unable to leave her alone. And that he’d visited Octavia. Which, of course, is on the record.” The ILEA, the Interstellar Law Enforcement Association, had conducted an investigation. “Charlotte and Greene had spent about four months dating during her senior year at the University of Andiquar.
“As far as either of the avatars said, Charlotte never thought of him as anything more than a casual date. When she realized he was falling in love with her, she broke it off. One of the friends said she did it as gently as she could, ‘but she could see the pain in his eyes.’
“Afterward Greene began showing up on the campus between her classes, wandering through the crowds of students. And at the restaurant she liked. She quit going there as a result. He rarely tried to speak to her, but instead pretended to look busy whenever she was in the area. To look as if he was there for other reasons having nothing to do with her. He even came to watch her play in the regional chess championships and congratulated her when she won her first game and again when she took the title.”
“Did the report name the friends?”
“No.” Alex sat down finally, closed his eyes, and let his head sink onto the back of the chair.