We were in our suite during Dejah’s arrival. She had actually docked with Layabout less than an hour after us, but her transport had been held up during the security shutdown, and she didn’t make her way across the Concourse until twenty minutes after the Porrinyards and I retired to our suite. Occupied as we were, we also missed the separate arrivals of Philip Bettelhine and Vernon Wethers, Philip Bettelhine taking a special flight from the surface to join us, Wethers arriving after a brief meeting at one of the company’s orbital manufacturing facilities.
And that had been it, before the descent.
I rubbed the tip of my nose with the edge of one knuckle. “I believe we can afford a break right now. Why don’t the two of you join the others outside? Skye and I will be out directly.”
Paakth-Doy understood the situation completely. “You need privacy to talk about us behind our backs.”
I gave her an unsmiling nod. “Thanks for understanding.”
She remained unperturbed as she followed Mendez out the door.
The second she was gone, I turned to Skye. “First things first. What’s going on with the others?”
There was no transition from the Skye who had been present with me throughout the prior interviews and the one reporting events from Oscin’s viewpoint. “It’s been tense. Farley Pearlman’s been taking advantage of the bar service to work himself into a quiet, morose drunk. Dina’s been complaining about the smell, but not the same traumatized way she did before—it’s just an exercise in being unpleasant. The way she put it, the ‘Holy Man’ smells ‘even worse’ than he did when he was alive.”
“How did Jason and Jelaine take that?”
“About as well as can be expected. Jason invoked his father’s authority and ordered her to keep her, quote, ‘evil’ mouth shut. I think he was telling the truth before, about not knowing about her life before she reached Xana.”
“So do I. What else?”
“Philip’s ordered Mendez to set the air recyclers in the parlor to full power. They’re filtering out the worst of the odor out there, though you can still catch a whiff of the poor Khaajiir if you get too close. He’s also still holding out hope that the whatever-it-is, the Stanley, will be showing up any minute, and he’s pressed Jason for the reason we’re here—evidently, Dad didn’t bother to share it with him. Jason told him he’d find out in good time. He then took Jelaine aside, who said the same thing, word for word, at which point he got mad and said, ‘What’s the matter with you? We were never the closest brother and sister, but we used to be able to talk. Now you’re as bad as Jason.’”
“Either he totally lost control of himself, or your male half’s been especially deft at eavesdropping.”
“Both,” Skye said, without any special pride. “He did raise his voice, but the only reason I’m able to provide the full quote is that Oscin was able to come up behind Philip when he wasn’t looking. Jelaine saw Oscin but didn’t care. She seemed to relish the opportunity to share secrets with us. It’s like we’ve joined an old girl’s club without knowing it.”
“How did he react when he realized you’d heard him?”
“The same way, with an additional added helping of hurt. Make no mistake, Andrea. From what I can tell, there is love lost between Philip and his siblings. He believes they’ve turned their backs on him, and resents them for it.”
All of this dovetailed with what we’d already figured out about Jason and Jelaine, though perhaps not what their father’s place among them. I said, “And how’s he reacting now that Mendez and Paakth-Doy have returned to the party?”
“He’s a little upset that we’ve been left alone.” She hesitated. “Wait, he’s confronting Oscin, demanding to know just what we think we’re doing. Paakth-Doy’s telling him, ‘they’ve just established a timeline.’ He’s saying we had to have done more than that. She’s saying, ‘Yes, sir, they have, but I’m not permitted to share it with you.’”
I felt another surge of respect for Paakth-Doy. “The lady has a backbone.”
“That she does, and it doesn’t make Philip happy at all. And again, here come more spirited defenses of your reputation from Jason and Jelaine. I note that Dejah’s watching the two of them very carefully. She’s…Andrea, that’s a grin. That’s definitely a grin. I think she’s caught up.”
I found that I could picture the look on Dejah’s face. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s sharp. When we worked together, she frightened me to death.”
“She seems to like you well enough. That marks her as unusual right then and there.”
I didn’t take offense. It happened to be true. “Especially when we met. I was an even bigger bitch then than I was when you met me, and I shut her down every time she tried to be friendly. But that’s not what scared me. She’s scary-smart. I was used to being a prodigy, but she made me look like a stammering idiot. And there’s something else about her, something you need to keep in mind.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s as wealthy as the Bettelhines. She’s as well known as they are and, in some circles, as hated as they are. We learned during dinner that she and the Bettelhines have had unpleasant, even murderous, past history. And yet, she arrived at Layabout without a security entourage of her own. I can tell you right here and now that she’s never had one. She goes everywhere alone, or paired with whoever happens to be her husband this year. By all rights—including, I should say, her well-known habit of picking treacherous bastards as those husbands, for reasons that frankly escape me—she should have been assassinated long ago. But she survives. She thrives. I promise you, love, if there’s anybody on the carriage we don’t want to be the murderer, or the money behind the murderer, it’s her. Because if it is her, we’ve already lost.”
Skye considered that. “Do you think it’s her?”
“I don’t have enough data to know.”
“What do you think of what we learned from Mendez?”
“About his life? It feeds some suspicions I’m already working on, suspicions that resonate with some of the things we’ve noticed about Brown and Wethers. About the timeline? It establishes something odd about our complement. The one man most credited for wanting me here, Hans, had to change his plans at the last minute. Conversely, five others, including Brown, Wethers, Philip, and the Pearlmans, were all added to the guest list with the same lack of warning. There’s even a sixth anomaly, if I count Paakth-Doy, though I may not, since her assignment here has been planned for more than a month and fails to meet the pattern. Still, even if we discount her and maybe one or two of those others as coincidences, we still have a vehicle overcrowded with people who all went to extraordinary lengths to board just as a meeting of unexplained importance was set to take place here.”
“It looks to me,” Skye said, “like somebody doesn’t want that meeting to take place.”
I could only agree. That was the basis of the epiphany I’d been fighting since the moment I found the Khaajiir dead.
Discounting the Porrinyards, who had traveled here as my companions, only Dejah Shapiro and I had traveled to this system just to be here today.
We were the original reasons for this gathering. Everything else, all the pomp and all the violence we’d endured, was just noise and distraction.
But what would Hans Bettelhine have to say to either Dejah or me that any of the others would kill to prevent us from hearing?