“Kindly credit me with a little intelligence, Mr. Compton.” Witherspoon growled. “I’ve checked on all my painkillers and other potentially dangerous drugs. They’re all still there. I doubt anyone would go to this much effort just to steal a packet of QuixHeals.”
“So let’s find out what was worth this much effort.” I reached over and opened the bag. “Inventory. Now.”
Witherspoon grimaced. “Fine,” he said. “But I can tell you right now that we’re not going to find anything significant.”
“Five bucks says I will,” I said nudging the bag a little closer to him.
For possibly the first time that day, I was right.
Bayta was alone in the dispensary, sitting on one of the foldout seats and gazing wearily at Usantra Givvrac’s body, when the Spider and I finally returned. “You all right?” I asked, peering at her as the Spider crossed the room and put Witherspoon’s bag back under lock and key.
“I was just thinking about this afternoon, in the bar,” she said. “When you told me that putting off a conversation usually meant that person will be the next to die.”
I winced. “I’m sorry I said that.”
“I’m sorry he’s dead.” Bayta paused. “The killer’s not finished yet, is he?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” I conceded. “You listened in on our inventory of Witherspoon’s bag?”
She nodded again. “There’s a hypo missing.”
“Right,” I said. “Inevitable, I suppose, in retrospect. The three basic ways of delivering poisons are inhalation, ingestion, and injection. With the first two mostly off the table, that leaves only the last.”
“What do you mean, mostly?” Bayta asked.
“We still haven’t totally eliminated the possibility that someone added the cadmium to the Shorshians’ food after it was delivered.” I said. “Did you check with the servers, by the way, on whether Colix and Bofiv always used the same reaches for the common dish?”
“They didn’t,” Bayta said. “All three Shorshians switched off between galla bread, prinn scoops, and rokbi sticks, with no particular pattern the servers noticed.”
“So no one could have poisoned the reaches, at least not if he was targeting specific victims,” I concluded. “That leaves our killer with a choice of poisoning the common dish—or, rather, half the common dish, since Tririn wasn’t affected—or two separate individual dishes. And all that without anyone at the table noticing. Not impossible, but pretty damn difficult.”
“Unless Master Tririn himself is the killer,” Bayta said slowly. “According to Usantra Givvrac, he was one of the four members of the team opposed to the contract with Pellorian Medical. Three of the four victims were for the contract.”
“True,” I agreed. “But that runs us immediately into another problem. Two problems, actually. If he was trying to stack the vote in his favor, Master Colix’s death already accomplishes that. So why keep killing? Especially since the second death. Bofiv’s, evens up the vote again?”
“It doesn’t make sense, does it?” Bayta admitted.
“Not yet,” I conceded. “A bigger problem with Tririn is that you’ve already proved he hasn’t been up to first class since we left Homshil, which means he had no access to Strinni or Givvrac.”
Bayta winced. “Actually, that might not be true,” she said reluctantly. “It occurred to me—a little late, I’m afraid—to ask the conductors about unlimited first-class passes. They tell me eight passes came aboard the train, but only seven of the holders are actually riding in first class.”
I stared at her. “Oh, hell.”
“I’m sorry.” Bayta apologized. “I should have asked about that sooner.”
“Not your fault,” I told her. So someone else had the same ability we did to flit back and forth between classes without a single locked door or raised eyebrow. Terrific. “If Spiders were smart enough to volunteer this stuff on their own instead of having to be asked—” I broke off. “Never mind. Water under the bridge. Very interesting water, too.”
“Because it shows that the killer had everything planned in advance?”
“And because it shows he has some serious financial backing,” I said. “I don’t suppose there’s any way of finding out who has this eighth pass?”
Bayta shook her head. “If it wasn’t used to board, the conductors won’t have that information.”
“Who would have it?” I persisted. “The stationmaster back at Homshil?”
“Yes, he would have been the one who informed the conductors about the eight passes in the first place,” she said. “But there’s no way to get a message back there until we reach Venidra Carvo.”
“Why not?” I asked. “There must be a few of your secret little sidings scattered along the way. Can’t you shoot the Spiders a telepathic message as we pass, like we did on our last trip back to Earth? They could then load the request onto a message cylinder and send it back to Homshil via one of their tenders.”
“It won’t be easy,” Bayta said doubtfully. “We don’t get very close to the Spiders when we pass a siding. That’ll make the contact difficult. We’re also going much faster then we do when we pass through a station, so we won’t be able to send anything very long or detailed.”
“Then we’ll just have to be clever.” I said, trying to kick a few of my comatose brain cells back to life. “What if we give all the conductors aboard the same message and have them line up along the length of the train? Hell, let’s give it to the servers, mites, and twitters, too. Maybe between all of them we can get enough of it across to make sense.”
For a moment Bayta was silent, either thinking it over or consulting with the Spiders. “It might work.” she said at last. “No guarantees, but it might.”
“No guarantees expected.” I assured her. “When will we pass the next siding?”
“In about six hours,” she said. “It’ll still take a while for a message cylinder to get from there to Homshil Station, though. And of course the only way to get the information back to us will be though a tender, and depending on where they have to send it from—”
“Yes, yes, I get it,” I cut her off. “But even limited information will be better than nothing. Let’s figure out the shortest way to phrase the message and then start rehearsing the Spiders.”
“All right,” she said, running a critical eye over me. “But I can do that. You’d better get to bed.”
“I’m on my way,” I promised. “One other thing.”
I hesitated, wondering if I really wanted to do this. During my last private conversation with a Chahwyn Elder I’d promised that I would hold on to their new secret as long as I could. Not just because he hadn’t wanted Bayta to know about it, but also because I agreed with him that the truth would be a troubling shock for her. Besides, at the time I’d made the promise there wasn’t any particular reason she needed to know.
But circumstances had changed. We were locked aboard a super-express Quadrail, four weeks from our destination, with a shadowy killer who’d made an art out of sneaking death past the Spiders’ sensors. We needed reinforcements, and we needed them now. “Along with the unlimited-pass information,” I said, “I want you to put in a request for a couple of the Chahwyn’s newest class of Spider.”
“There’s a new class?” she asked, frowning. “When did you hear about this?”
“When we were delivering Rebekah to her friends,” I told her. “There was a Chahwyn aboard the tender, and he and I had a little chat.”
Bayta’s face had gone very still. “You never told me about that,” she said.