The Cause of Death (41 page)

The other aliens still at large--Georg Hertzmann and his family--were physically easier to control--but politically speaking, they were even more dangerous than the Stannlar. Georg Hertzmann might be his Thelm by morning--might, indeed, be his Thelm already, if it turned out to be a case where succession was automatic. And yet, tonight Darsteel had to arrest all three of the Hertzmanns, keep them separate from each other, and keep them from returning to their quarters.

In the event, keeping them away from their quarters was easier to do than he thought. The Keep had been kept sealed after evacuation for "safety" reasons. Of course, the real reason was security. Nearly all of the Keep was intact and undamaged--and Darsteel needed places to keep people under control--such as the three aliens he had locked up in there.

Those displaced by the evacuation were herded into various nearby outbuildings, or sent to find places for themselves in the town. Georg and his family had been placed in reasonably comfortable rooms in a gatekeeper's cottage. Darsteel simply decided to leave them there. Darsteel found one of his most diligent and stubborn-minded subordinates, and told him to split the Hertzmanns up, and keep them split up, no matter how much they--meaning Marta Hertzmann--protested. They were not to have the chance to compare notes or get their stories straight.

Future Thelm or not, Georg Hertzmann had been in no mood to debate the issue. His wife had been another matter, raising eight different kinds of ruckus and demanding that she and her daughter be allowed to return to their apartments in the Keep. That plainly wasn't going to happen with fire officials and safety inspectors swarming all over the place, and the local police finally getting organized enough to take their turn at the crime scene. And, meantime, the corpse of Thelm Lantrall still lay sprawled on the floor of his Private Audience Chamber.
That
state of affairs could not be tolerated much longer--and it wasn't. An hour after dawn, the corpse was removed by a most respectful team from the coroner's office. Darsteel made it doubly and triply clear that their examination was to be accurate, detailed, and precise--and not so respectful of the dead that there was scarcely any point in holding a postmortem at all.

At the same time, Darsteel had had to find and secure the person of Zahida Halztec. She hadn't been hard to find, and was so distraught that she was far less of a problem to manage than he had feared. She allowed herself to be filed away in another commandeered room in another outbuilding. But she, too, was a person it might well be dangerous to trifle with. Her family's honor had been besmirched a generation or two back--but she had been granted the power of the Thelm's Hand, at least in a limited circumstance. That showed the favor of the old Thelm, and clearly enhanced her status. And it was known that she had met with Georg Hertzmann--who might be the new Thelm. It was not hard to see how she might grow to be powerful, influential. It would be wise to handle her gently, just in case the day dawned when she was in a position to remember how she had been handled--and do something about it.

Which left only the High Thelek. Darsteel reluctantly decided to leave him alone. He would have had to recruit and arm a whole regiment of lawkeepers just to take the Thelek into custody. The odds of the Thelek's cooperating with an effort to detain or secure him were zero--and the odds of any attempt to compel him going horribly wrong were close to a certainty.

That much accomplished, there was nothing more to do than to send lawkeepers to follow up on the young human investigator's odd queries, obtain a binding legal opinion regarding the succession, dispatch investigators to organize interrogations of witnesses, send further lawkeepers out to check on the whereabouts of various opponents of the Thelm, on the off chance that this was a more routine, home-grown, political murder, and order searches, where possible, of the various premises of the persons he had detained. In other words, a lifetime's worth of work that had to be done within a few hours--and that was just the start of it all. A thousand other details, some mundane and trivial, some utterly essential, had to be managed as well.

And then the reports started to come in--the answers to the questions he had asked, the results of the searches, updates on the prisoners--correction, the persons in protective custody. One of the those protective custody reports brought Darsteel up short.

It seemed that his diligent subordinate had been a little
too
diligent. The Herztmann's little girl, Moira, had been kept separate from both parents and confined in a room by herself. Apparently Moira had been exhibiting a quite remarkable series of hysterical tantrums.

Darsteel felt a sharp pang of guilt as he read the report. He had met Moira several times, even come to know her fairly well. His first instinct was to go to her and personally take her back to her mother at once. But then he thought again. The damage, after all, had already been done. And it might be,
might
be, that great good could be done by keeping her from her parents for just a little longer. Certain threads of logic had been starting to come together in his mind. At the very least, he might be able to test them by talking to Moira.

He thought for a moment about where best to meet with her. Once she calmed down, would she feel safer where she was? Or would she be more cooperative in an official-looking office? His instincts told him to go to her.

He was just about to do so when the next bit of news arrived at his office. It was a large, formal envelope from the Court of High Crime. It had to be the ruling on the succession.

Darsteel had played it all straight, up until that moment. But as soon as he opened that envelope, he would receive official notification of what was, so far, only a theory about who the next Thelm would be--or, in fact, was already.

Darsteel decided it would be best for--nearly--all concerned if it stayed a theory just that little bit longer. It was time to bend the rules a little. He left the still-sealed envelope on his desk and went to have a chat with a frightened little girl.

* * *

Or maybe not so frightened as all that. They had put her in a disused ground-floor room of the gatekeeper's house, and left the door open, and set a guard in the doorway, sitting there on a perching stool, watching her. Every light in the house was blazing, and there was a seemingly constant bumping and thumping as various sorts of officers and lawkeepers headed up and down stairs, trying to look very important indeed.

And there was Moira on a sitting cushion, back to the far well, facing the doorway and framed by it, staring at the guard, solemn-faced and determined-looking, with something of her mother's stubbornness shining through. Streaks of tears shone on her face--but the tears themselves were gone. There was something about the set of her chin, the way her arms were folded across her chest, that told him something more than childish fear was going on here.

She wore an oversized pink flannel nightgown and was clutching a large and rather lumpy object covered in some sort of fabric that had been made to resemble brown fur. It took a moment for Darsteel to realize that it was meant to represent an animal--no doubt an Earth creature of some sort.

Darsteel stepped forward to the doorway and dismissed the guard with a gesture. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

"Hello, Moira," he said.

"Hello," she said, her voice tired, even surly, but with that tone of stubbornness plain to hear. "I want to go to my mother. Now."

Darsteel knew that tone, and what it meant: She had argued a half dozen grown-ups to a standstill already, and was ready and willing to take on another. So he decided not to play the game. "No you don't," he said, pulling over a sitting cushion and seating himself right in front of her. "In fact, that's the very last thing you want."

Moira frowned, cocked her head, and looked at him in puzzlement. "What do you mean?"

"You know perfectly well you can't see your mother now," he said. "But you know that it's what a child you age is
supposed
to want. So you have to play the part in front of the grown-ups. Except I know. I know that your mother told you it was very, very important that you stay away, that you
don't
go to her, until you do something very, very important."

Darsteel had been bluffing, making it up as he went along when he started to speak, but he wasn't anymore. Her reaction told him at once that he was right. "So what you
really
want is to keep up arguing with everyone, demanding what you know you won't get, because that's what a regular little girl would do. Except you're not a regular little girl."

"I am so," she protested.

"No, you're not. A regular little girl would have given it up by now. But the other thing I know is that you haven't gotten a chance to do the job yet, because if you had, you'd stop the pretend tantrums and stop being stubborn. You'd have gone to sleep by now. Because you must be awfully tired."

Moira didn't say a word, and that told Darsteel everything. "And I don't think you've even had a chance to hide it here in this room, or anyplace else," he said, "because people have been watching you every second. So I think it must still be hidden on you somewhere, maybe inside your too-big-for-you nightgown, or maybe--"

"You can't touch me!" she shouted. "No one is allowed to touch me!"

"I know that," Darsteel said. "But you didn't ask me what the job was, or what it was you were supposed to be hiding. That tells me I have it all figured out right." He paused for a moment, then stood up, careful not to get any closer to her. "And I'm
not
going to touch you," he said. "I don't have to. All I have to do is call to the guards, and tell them to get a portable X-ray viewer from the hospital. They can bring it right here, and I can point it at you. It's for looking at bones and stuff inside you--but right next to the view of your bones, it'll show whatever is in your pockets, and whatever is hidden in your gown, and in your--"

"Wait!" Suddenly that stubborn look was gone, to be replaced, for the space of two or three heartbeats with a look of cold and naked calculation--which was replaced in turn by a look of the sweetest, most angelic, and most artificial innocence. "Oh!" she said in patently false surprise. "
That's
what you want. Why didn't any of your guards just ask for it? I would have given it to them," she lied.

Moira set the simulacrum of an animal on the floor, facedown, fumbled with some sort of fastener strip in its back, reached into its interior--and pulled out a human male's semiformal dress shoe for the right foot.

"My teddy bear has a special inside pocket for pajamas and stuff. But Mommy didn't give me the shoe or tell me to get rid of it or any of that stuff," she said. "I just found it, and figured I'd better take it to give to Daddy when I got the chance."

Darsteel stared at Moira, and the shoe. He reflected that even the youngest criminals made the mistake of explaining too much when they were caught. All such explanations were always unconvincing. The idea that she had just happened to find Daddy's shoe and just happened to conceal it in her toy was absurd--but what other story could she tell without betraying anyone? Darsteel made a heartfelt wish that he himself would one day be blessed with a daughter as clever, as poised, as intelligent--and as loyal. But that was all to one side. The main thing now was evidence--finding it, getting it, securing it.

"Thank you," he said. "That was what I wanted." He resisted the urge to reach out and take the shoe. It showed every sign of having been wiped clean of any finger marks or fire debris or other evidence, but there was always the chance that it still held some clue that might be disturbed if he touched it. And if he just took it, he might spend the next fifty years of his life denying a charge of planting evidence in the case. "I still want it," he said, "but I want to be extra-careful how I take it, so we don't mess it up. And then you can
really
go to your mommy, if that's what you want."

And Moira smiled in genuine relief. "Yes, please. It is. Really."

"Then you'll really get to do it. In a minute." He stood up, opened the door, and called to the guard on duty for a vid recorder and an evidence bag, and witnesses. Then all he'd have to do was have her tell him again that she had "just found it," get the actual transfer recorded, get her to drop the shoe in an evidence bag and get the bag sealed.

* * *

Ten minutes later, all that was accomplished, and Darsteel was headed back to his office.

The letter from the court, the one that would give him a ruling on the succession to the Thelmship, was still there waiting for him.

Until he opened the envelope, Darsteel could at least
pretend
he didn't have a new Thelm. Except he couldn't hide from the news forever--or for long. And whoever the new Thelm was, his first orders were bound to concern themselves with the investigation.

Which meant he had mere hours, perhaps mere minutes, to assemble an honest case, put together legitimate evidence of what had really happened, and secure that evidence against tampering. The task seemed flatly impossible--but at least he could get a start on it. He locked the shoe away in his office safe, along with a full copy of the recordings he had made of its receipt.

Darsteel doubted very much that the shoe itself could tell them anything at this point. But the means by which it had gotten to him told him a lot. It had unquestionably been in the possession of the killer. Hours later, it was in the possession of Moira Hertzmann, who, all but certainly, had received it from one or both of her parents, who obviously felt they had a very strong motive for concealing it if they were willing to involve the daughter they both doted on. All that was suggestive, to say the least.

But with that accomplished, what was there to do next? He sat down at his desk and stared at the pile of reports that was growing even as he watched. Couriers were coming and going, depositing their papers and packages. Nearly all of them were strictly routine, reporting that this site had been searched with no result, twenty-seven eyewitnesses to the fire had been interviewed so far, and so on.