There was drainage piping from the stables, but it was a completely separate enclosed system with all wastes purified and recycled. No connection to the fox runs. While he was at it, Shad ran a search on anyone who ever had any connection with Fantronics's experimental insect imprint or mental health programs. The scientist who had been in charge of both programs, Beatrice Widdows, PhD, had moved to Florida three years before to join the faculty of the state university there as professor of applied biotronics. It was reputedly the only college course in the world taught by a manatee. Among the names of Dr. Widdows's assistants that Shad had listed, the name of one caught my attention. “Why does the name Shirley Wurple seem familiar?"
"Dr. Wurple is the current bio amdroid assignment supervisor at Fantronics. Remember, she ducked my call?"
"Is there any connection between her and Houndtor Down Hunts you can find?"
"Working,” Shad announced as his tail twitched. As the cruiser came down from the Bovey Tracy Roundabout, the rain had stopped, but it was still overcast, making the night deadly dark, which was perfect for our purposes. Just as we came over the village of Leighon, Shad announced, “Back at the beginning of Houndtor Down Hunts, when Archie Quartermain imprinted onto his first fox bio, Dr. Wurple assisted Dr. Widdows with the imprint and supervised the transfer of Archie's human meat suit to its new owner. As far as my software knows, that's the only connection. Where do you want me to put down?"
"Put us into a hover just east of the lodge grove below treetop level and run up both micros. If we find another way from Champion's stall out of the stables, we're going to follow it wherever it goes."
Copied into our micros, we entered the stables through an air vent leaving open the hole we had made through the screen and air filter. Keeping above the cameras and motion detectors, we came to the horse stable wing and once there, aligned ourselves behind a vertical electrical conduit and descended until we could enter an open transom. Keeping beams, boxes, or bales of hay between us and the security sensors, we made our way to Champion's stall and slipped in undetected. The horse was lying down in the straw on its right side.
"I thought horses slept standing up,” said Shad on our secure net.
I hovered my micro just above the horse's head and extended my holo. “They may very well sleep standing up, Shad, but this one is as dead as Dillinger.” I did a quick neural activity scan and came up empty. “This bio has been dead long enough to zero out all recoverable neurological activity and data.” I initiated a full scan and Shad opened a channel to it and watched. We both noted the results at the same time: Champion's red blood cells were almost devoid of oxygen.
"Chemical asphyxia?” said Shad.
"Let's see.” I looked up horse anatomy, located a big artery, and shot an independent microanalyzer into the dead animal's blood stream. The rice-grain-sized laboratory reported its results within seconds: “Blood cyanide leveclass="underline" two-point-three milligrams per liter. Get a liver temp."
Shad moved his micro around to the horse's flank and fired a sensor into the dead animal's liver. “Champ's been dead about two hours."
"Perhaps our killer was neating up.” I looked back at the dead horse. “The poison still had to be administered. Do your wireless magic and see if you can access the stable security vids. Any and everything of Champion, his stall, and anyone going to or coming from the stall the past three or four hours. I'll check the horse's food and water and see if the poison was administered that way."
"I'm on it, Jaggs."
While Shad was busy accessing the security vids, I tested Champion's water and feed station for cyanide. Neither had even trace amounts. The feed was automatically mixed, apportioned, and transported to the stalls on overhead belts, and down through vertical chutes into the feeding stations.
"Shad, while you're checking the surveillance vids, be a good fellow and run the schematics for the automated feeding and watering systems. See if there's any way for something or someone to get through them into the stalls."
"Got it."
On the other sides of the walls—both sides, the back, and back corners—were other stalls, all occupied. I checked the adjoining stalls and examined the walls. They were covered with white imitation wood planking made from a durable combination of poly and gypsum cement. Very well done. Until I actually put the holo to them, I thought them to be of genuine oak. The stall walls were solid down to the imitation concrete plastic foundation. The foundation was solid and one uninterrupted piece with the textured floor. I poked through the straw on the stall floor, as well as beneath lumps of horse poo, finding no opening large enough to allow even a micro to enter, much less something as large as a Kaiser roll.
"I've run through the vids of all three cameras that have views of this section of the horse stables, Jaggs. Nothing."
"The feed and watering systems?” I prompted.
"The water goes through a series of filters and screens. The feed is run through larger mesh screens, but goes through foreign matter detectors designed to find and remove all ferrous and nonferrous metals, plastics, rocks, insects, rodents, contaminants—anything that isn't the intended feed. Find anything with the foundation or floor?"
"What I found was that this building is tight and made of practically indestructible materials. The only place I haven't examined is beneath the horse."
"We could put our power supplies in parallel and give Champ a zap,” Shad offered. “Maybe we could frog-twitch him off that spot."
I aimed my lens at my partner. “Before resorting to measures that have equal chances of either crushing our micros or setting this straw on fire, Baron Frankenduck, let's do density and matrix continuity scans on the floor and foundation that we can reach."
"Think someone pulled a plastic plug and put it back, Igor?” he said, I believe, with the voice of Colin Clive.
"Let's see. And that's Detective Inspector Igor to you."
Density and matrix continuity scans, originally adopted by forensics for restoring purposefully obliterated serial numbers from weapons, autos, and stolen goods, were, because of that, deadly slow if the area to be scanned was larger than a few square centimeters. The stall was approximately three meters wide and four deep. Fortunately, we both began scanning at the back of the stall, I on the right and Shad on the left. We hadn't been at it longer than twenty minutes when Shad said, “Got it."
I glided over to his side of the stall, tuned in his scan, and saw in his corner of the stall an arc, the complete circle of which would be twenty-five centimeters in diameter and would include part of the floor and a bit of the back. I began scanning the back, and in minutes we had marked bits of arc the complete circle of which would, if the plug were removed, make a rather high-tech foxhole. “Are we back to Archie Quartermain?” asked Shad. “What motive?"
"Perhaps he's a better actor than you thought. He originally got into that fox suit for money."
"I don't buy it. Back when we were in New York, Archie liked money the same way I liked money. We both preferred eating to starving and sleeping with a roof over our heads to shivering beneath all the news that's fit to print out on a park bench. In the end, that's why I became a cop and Archie became a fox, but money wasn't what was driving us. Acting, getting a great role, hearing that laughter, that applause, getting a thousand men and women to play with you at the same time, leading them along into your game, and springing the surprise on them, collecting all those oohs and aahs. Applause. That's what drove us—that's what drove Archie. Judging by what he told you when I was out mapping the burrows, that's what's still driving him: the game, although I admit the appeal parameters seemed to have changed."