When the dynamo was activated and the terraforming project began in earnest, a strange and entirely unexpected effect was noted. Although the planet’s atmosphere, both real and artificial, was configured to resemble the Earth’s, something about the way sunlight refracted off the Overdome meant that, very rarely, on dark, cloudy nights, a faint greenish glow could be seen on the horizon. Papers were written, doctorates were awarded, and academic conferences were convened to discuss and dissect the new ashen light, but the majority of Venusians cared not one whit about official explanations. They were content in the knowledge that Venus’ Overdome, the greatest feat of engineering in all human history, which was otherwise wholly invisible, had this single, rare, beautiful manifestation. That it was something unique to their planet. To them.
The Keck family, Riccioli’s forensics team determined, died several hours after they’d first been tied up. To this day, Alvin Go, the man who lives in the cabin east of the Keck family farm, who couldn’t sleep the night they died, who looked out the window and congratulated himself for having been awake to see the rare glow of the ashen light, says only one thing. “If I’d have known. If I’d have had any idea. Maybe I could have saved them.
“But I thought it was the ashen light.”
For a while, Sloane and Griffith lived well in New Tahiti, having taken a secluded cabin on an atoll well away from the busier tourist resorts. They coexisted peacefully for three and a half weeks, Sloane sunbathing and swimming and wandering the little island, running her fingers across the lush green leaves as she passed through the jungle, whispering the names of the plants to herself. There’s a photo of her from this period, recovered from Griffith’s phone, showing a small woman in a bikini standing thigh–deep in unnaturally blue waters, her face glowing with joy. When the money ran out, Griffith, already bored with island life, proposed they find a mark at one of the resorts◦– a rich old woman, he suggested, who might be interested in maintaining a healthy and handsome young man for some period. Sexual jealousy was beneath the two of them, he reminded Sloane; the province of middling, lesser people who cared more about possessions than about freedom. Sloane acquiesced more or less gracefully, unwilling to be parted from Griffith. But once they’d returned to Tiare, New Tahiti’s primary island, Griffith found inveigling his way into the good graces of a wealthier older patron more difficult than he’d imagined. It fell to Sloane to take up the casual prostitution that paid for their cramped two–room apartment on the outskirts of town while Griffith slipped around the resorts during the day, creeping into empty rooms to rummage through colorful baggage for money and valuables as the tourists to which the luggage belonged snorkeled, oblivious, off the coast of Tiare.
The first lead came from the dampers, which yielded no fingerprints or DNA evidence, but proved to be the property of three different institutions, all in or around Helios. Over time, too, the forensics team accumulated enough data to indicate that the majority of DNA found at the scene of the crime but not connected to the Keck family or any regular visitors to the farmhouse could be traced to hundreds of people who had, at some point in the recent past, been in Helios. Much of the hair, moreover, had the blunt edges characteristic of recent cutting. Philips’ response unit, with Philips taking lead, went to Helios in early January 2520, to begin the arduous task of visiting Helios’ seven hundred and twelve salons and barber shops to request security footage. They were able to locate the correct salon, an establishment serving commuters on the edge of Helios’ financial district, within ten days. But there the trail went cold. No security cameras had caught anything in the least suspicious, and Sheriff Philips wasn’t sure what gender the Keck family murderers were, much less how many people had been involved in the killings◦– although she felt reasonably certain there had been two.
Philips had arrived at the conclusion that two people had murdered the family on a hunch: the blanket drawn over Jen’s corpse. The ropes binding the bodies◦– Jen had also been bound, they discovered, when they pulled the blanket away from her◦– had been tied with the same type of knot, and three of the murders had been carried out with the same weapon, probably a 12–gauge shotgun. But the act of kindness toward the teenaged girl, and the ragged cut had that severed Hershel’s jugular, suggested to Philips that there were multiple perpetrators.
The second lead came from a call Philips received two weeks after the murder of the Keck family. A middle–aged couple, Alice and Farouk Smith, who’d left their hometown on the southern edge of the Lakshmi Planum three weeks earlier to take a much–anticipated cross–planum vacation, had never come home. Three days after the Kecks were killed, the couple was found stuffed into the handicapped stall of an isolated roadside rest–stop. The husband had had his skull crushed with a heavy, jagged object◦– likely a stone◦– and both had been strangled. Time of death was determined to have been somewhere between 2.30 and 4 am on Friday, the ninth of November. Their car and possessions were missing. Ten days after the Kecks were killed, a passenger manifest for an IT/AT transport pinged; the couple had, apparently, taken a transport to Eos on the AT several hours after their deaths.
The team investigating the Smith murders learned that, all told, the killers had made off with their car, their clothes, and a card with a $7000 credit limit. $275 had been spent on the transport to the AT; from there, the trail went cold. The lead detective on the case, Coulter Russell of the IT regional police, was forced to let the case lie fallow.
Three months passed between the night the Keck family was murdered and the morning that Griffith’s mother, Elin Sinkman found a wallet on her property, the grounds outside the Eos Express Inn. Although the wallet itself was empty, it was microchipped; when Mrs. Sinkman dropped it off at the local library and the library personnel ran it through the scanning database, an alert was triggered. Within twelve hours detective Russell had flown down to the AT to take Mrs. Sinkman’s statement. The wallet had, as the alert notified Russell, belonged to one Alice Smith, late of Bastet, Lakshmi Planum, Ishtar Terra; murdered on or about 3.30 am, Friday the ninth of November, 2519, by person or persons unknown. Apparent motive: robbery.
Mrs. Sinkman had a son, Russell learned. By curious coincidence, that son had been the part–time employee of a down–market barber shop implicated in another unsolved case: the murder of Michelle Keck and her family on or about two am, the ninth of November, 2519, by person or persons unknown.
Russell and Philips met on February twenty–second, 2520, at a small bar in Helios, IT. They exchanged notes on their respective cases, discussing the hunches and proposals they had not included in their official case–files. Russell had also generated a detailed report on Griffith Sinkman, and in the course of the investigation into Griffith’s background and movements turned up not only his three–year stint in Garden City, but that he had, at some point after his release, travelled to the IT and begun travelling with a young woman, identity unknown.