I cut off Skye’s gruesome recitation. “Still, you’re talking about a K’cenhowten’s nervous system. Would the Claw of God affect a Bocaian or a human being the same way?”
“It could if calibrated,” Skye said. “What’s more, the device is designed to locate the heart and lungs—or, with minor adjustments, their alien equivalent—and shield them from the full effects of the pulse. The blow to those organs remains fatal, all by itself, but it’s the kind of fatal that would take several hours to kill. Meanwhile, they continue to feed the victim’s brain for several minutes, even as the rest of him turns to soup.”
Paakth-Doy had turned green. “You are saying that he might not have been aware of the terrible thing happening to him.”
“I’m saying that if he failed to notice the blood, he might have interpreted what he was feeling as fatigue.”
I rubbed my chin. “Meaning that we cannot use his participation in conversations to isolate the moment the Claw was used on him. Anything he said, after being moved to this chair, could have been said after he was already dying.”
Skye said, “He might have been dying even earlier, though that would have been cutting it very close for the killer, given how soon after the attack the Khaajiir would have started to…leak.”
I nodded, the ugliness of the crime scene receding as its value as evidence moved to the forefront. Signaling for silence from the other two, and sparing a quick look at the crowd over by the bar, which seemed to be enduring the search about as well as could be expected, though the Pearlmans in particular were eyeing their own small pile of valuables with the glumness of people who suspected that their own paltry wealth an embarrassment in the eyes of the people who owned their very world. There was no point in calling to Oscin to ask how things were going. If he found anything of importance, Skye would alert me.
So I folded my arms before my chest and circled the chair, examining it from all angles, sometimes leaning in close to appraise the scene from a fresh angle. As a place to obscure the fate of a sentient about to die from exsanguination, the chair could not have been better. Had the Khaajiir been sitting on one of the couches, the blood pooling beneath him would not have been hidden by raised armrests at either side. As he grew weak, he might have collapsed to one side, and drawn the attention of others who would have been able to isolate those who had been near him at the moment of the crime. Had he been sitting on one of the hard chairs beside the dinner table, the blood mixture would have spilled over the sides and formed a spreading puddle on the floor by his feet, where it could have been spotted by Mendez, Colette, or any diner who left the table for as long as thirty seconds.
This chair, though? The seat tilted backward, forming a perfect reservoir for the accumulation of liquids. The cushions had absorbed some, too, slowing discovery of the murder even longer. The armrests, propping him up at either side, made him remain upright and thus seem healthy, if only dozing. In short, moving him here, before or after applying the Claw, virtually ensured that we would not be able to notice anything wrong for several minutes.
But was that a sad happenstance, or a deliberate strategy on the part of the killer? If the latter, it had been Jason and Jelaine who had moved him here, and Jelaine who had stayed with him for several minutes. That made them prime suspects.
On the other hand, Jason and Jelaine had enjoyed access to the Khaajiir for some time. Had they wanted him dead for some reason, they would not have needed to wait until they could commit the crime within a room filled with distinguished dinner guests.
Monday Brown and Vernon Wethers had also checked on him. Colette had been in and out of the room several times, and Dejah Shapiro had passed right by the Khaajiir on her way to doing something in her own suite. I hadn’t seen the Pearlmans approach him after the emergency stop, but either of them could have clapped the Claw of God against the Khaajiir’s back when the lights went out. Anybody upstairs during the crime could have been the killer, and anybody downstairs could have provided material aid.
All it would have taken was decisive action during a single moment when everybody else was distracted.
And that’s all it would take again if the assassin was not finished, and I was right to expect a third Claw of God…
I was still considering the foul implications of that when the people over at the bar started shouting.
9
MAGRISON’S WOMAN
Oscin had found an octagonal chip, about the size of pinky fingernail, and so well integrated with the skin it was imbedded in that it was impossible to discern a seam where flesh ended and metal began. I knew, without examining it further, that it would be only a few molecules thick, that it would resist any attempt to remove it, and that the thousands of infinitesmal filaments extruded on its subdermal side would be threaded throughout the wearer’s nervous system, forming a braid of sorts that would culminate in a seething terminus somewhere in the meat of the brain. Worse, though, was the pattern of raised dots, at its center, forming a letter that to my eyes had always resembled a pair of serpents swallowing each other whole. The letter, corresponding to the sharpest of the three consonants Mercantile devotes to the M sound, did not belong to the Mercantile alphabet at all, but rather to another, famous only as the birthplace of a destroyer not seen in civilized space for almost thirty years.
The mere sight was enough to make my ears throb with trapped blood. I released the forearm bearing the hateful artifact, turned my back on the glaring figure it belonged to, and confronted the three Bettelhines, now huddled together in whitening silence. “Did you know about this?”
Jason Bettelhine shook his head.
Jelaine had paled in a manner that suggested blood loss on the scale of the Khaajiir’s. “I swear to you, Counselor. I had no idea.”
Philip said nothing. But I noticed that Monday Brown had moved a little closer to him, like a mother cat attempting to comfort a kitten crying after a great fall.
My fury colored my vision, like a red curtain turning everything behind it the color of blood. “You did know, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
Philip Bettelhine’s mouth had become a horizontal slash as white as a bloodless wound. “I would watch your tone of voice, Counselor. You’re on our ground.”
“To hell with my tone of voice! Answer my question!”
He rolled his eyes. “I knew. So did Father, if you’re wondering. And my grandfather before him.”
“And you had no problem with that?”
“Historical precedent. Whenever any great war ends, the victors imprison some of its leaders, execute others, release a few more, and recruit the remainder to serve their own cause. Your own Dip Corps employs some intelligence assets guilty of crimes as vile as anything this poor woman ever did. Hell, look at yourself. Are you in any position to complain about any system that puts war criminals to work?”
I trembled with fury. “We don’t have any of Magrison’s people working for us. We hunt Magrison’s people.”
His pitying look only threw fuel on the fire. “That’s naïve, Counselor. Your Confederacy has several of Magrison’s people on the payroll. If you want, I’ll provide you with a list.”