"May I keep this for a day or so, just in case?" Ry asked. He could demand it, and I wondered why Bel hadn't asked for it. Perhaps it had slipped past him, somehow, during the questioning.
"Of course. I didn't find it until recently, I heard it ringing and found it tucked beneath Jaske's mattress. I'd have turned it over to the other man if I'd known about it before. I thought it was with Jaske when he—when he," she couldn't finish, she was weeping. I pulled tissues from the small handbag I carried and offered them to her. She took them and wiped her eyes and face. Jaske had killed himself, much like Maris Krastel had, by shooting himself in the neck and head with the laser pistol he had. More and more I found the similarities between the two cases curiously disturbing.font><p>
"Mrs. Trispe," I said, once she'd gotten herself back in hand, "I know this has no bearing on the case, but I heard that two of Schuul Enterprises' ships were hijacked by pirates shortly after your son died. I imagine that was a terrible blow to the company you work for."
"Yes. An entire month's work, stolen," she nodded. "We were all upset over it, and many of us had to work double shifts afterward to replace the orders. Thankfully, the second shipment wasn't intercepted."
"They asked you to work overtime, after such a grievous tragedy in your life?" Ry asked.
"I know. Maybe it was better that I didn't have much time to dwell on my sorrow," she said, wiping her cheeks again. "And we earned a small bonus for getting replacement chips manufactured so quickly."
"You're a strong woman, Mrs. Trispe," Ry said. "If you would, think back to the questioning by the other agent. Did he ask any unusual questions? That you recall?"
"He did ask one strange question," Shedrith Trispe replied, her brown eyes red from weeping, and a bit of gray showing in dark hair that I imagined hadn't been there before the death of her son.
"And what was that?" Ry asked.
"He asked if Jaske had ever gone to Stellar Winds."
"That is so strange," Ry agreed, as we discussed Bel's question to Mrs. Trispe. Why would he want to know if Jaske had ever gone to Stellar Winds? Mrs. Trispe said that Jaske hadn't.
"The local ASD office has Maris' and Lethia's comp-vids. Maybe we should ask to look at them, too," I said. I was going through Jaske's, trying to determine if he'd gotten any calls or messages that might have set him off. So far, I hadn't found anything, but personal communication was password protected. I'd need the comp at the local ASD office to get past that.
"And we can ask if they confiscated a second comp-vid off his body," Ry said. I nodded—I'd been thinking the same thing. Nobody went anywhere without a comp-vid. It was foolish to do so.
After a quick lunch, we took the transit train to the western edge of Quezlos where Faldin Bierla had an apartment. It struck me as strange that Maris hadn't moved in with him and that they lived so far apart. I shrugged it off for the moment—Ry could have folded us or I could have skipped us over, but for some reason he was content to ride public transportation. Sometimes it's interesting and informative to do so.
I'd once killed a half-crazed Ra'Ak who'd gotten onto a bus, intent on killing all on board. He hadn't counted on a High Demon being there, who'd beaten him to the punch. He'd dusted after I'd taken his head in my smaller Thifilatha, blowing out the windows in the hoverbus and injuring many of the passengers. At least nobody died; Lendill and Norian had confiscated the vid-recording and explained it away as an accident.
This time, there were no homicidal Ra'Ak to deal with on our bus trip, just mothers with small children on their way home after finishing a day in early-school, or those with physician's appointments or some such. A young unmarried couple was on their way to the space station terminal. They were traveling to Stellar Winds and discussing their trip excitedly. Somehow, they'd gotten a discounted trip to the popular party planetoid.
Ry and I glanced briefly at one anomesy at onther as the couple talked. Some people (and I wasn't one of them) looked forward to drinking until they were sick, having sex until they passed out, or both. Stellar Winds was an all-inclusive resort planet, but if one wanted to visit the better nightclubs and restaurants, one had to purchase an upgrade, which included a chip that granted access to the exclusive spots. It was a point of pride and an indication of wealth if the visitor could afford the upgrades.
Our stop came up long before the one for the space station, so we didn't get to see the couple off on their vacation. Instead, we walked toward Faldin Bierla's high-rise apartment to question him about his deceased lover.
"I told the other agent everything I know," Faldin was rude from the start. I could tell when someone was lying, and Faldin Bierla was concealing something. I just didn't know what it was. He lived well for someone of his station, but he was nearing sixty. Plenty of time to put together enough wealth to afford such a nice apartment.
"I'm very sorry for your loss," I said. "And I hope you'll forgive us if we ask a few of the same questions," I added, disliking him quickly.
"I will protest this treatment," he snapped. "I'll go straight to the Director myself."
"Go ahead. Would you like to speak to him now?" Ry called Faldin's bluff by hauling out his comp-vid and tapping in Norian's code.
"What do you want to know?" Faldin grumbled angrily.
Neither Ry nor I asked any questions about Stellar Winds; we asked instead about the relationship he had with Maris, when he'd seen her last, that sort of thing. To Faldin, his and Maris' association didn't seem to be anything other than casual, although Maris' coworkers had made it sound quite serious. Maris may have presented it as more than it was; therefore, the employees at Abinger's Legal Firm thought it to be a significant relationship.
Faldin pointed out that he'd only seen Maris twice during the month leading up to the murders, and repeated what the others had said about how close she'd been with her sister. It made me wish I could have questioned Lethia, but she was dead. Maris and Lethia's parents were also deceased—killed in an accident, years earlier. Faldin didn't volunteer anything and didn't answer anything, other than what he was forced to. We left him behind roughly a click later, feeling unsatisfied.
"I want to get into the information supplied by the legal firm—you know, the cases that Maris researched. And Lethia, too," I said.
"I'll help," Ry said. "I sent a request to the local ASD office; they've got the comp-vids they took from Maris, Lethia and the one they found on Jaske."
"So, he did have a second one," I said.
"Looks like it. Come on, Sherlock, let's do a little sleuthing." Ry gave me a brilliant smile and led me toward the public transportation kiosk.
"Sherlock?" I lifted an eyebrow.
"A fictional character. Reah, you really need to brush up on your English reading skills."
"Uh-huh." That colloquialism had Ry grinning at me. "You could brush up on your cooking skills at the same time."
"Point taken," he nodded and ushered me onto the next transport.
"You're welc Fi;You'reome to look through that box of tangled mess that Bel left behind." The supervisor at the local ASD office led us to one of the locked cubicles inside the facility. "There's a desk comp in there as well, to get into the other files you want. Just enter your codes and you'll get it."
"Thanks, Supervisor Steeb," I said. This one was looking at me the whole time. Ry had already sent mindspeech, telling me she preferred women. I'd figured that out quickly on my own. Bel had certainly left a box of tangled objects inside the cubicle. Maris' comp-vid, Lethia's comp-vid and a few other things were lying on a steel table inside, along with clothing and other evidence. The box Doras Steeb mentioned was in a corner of the room. Usually, evidence was sequestered in a basement, inside a much smaller space. A killing such as this, as odd and as violent and deadly as it turned out to be, rated its own cubicle above ground.
"Look at this—there's at least six comp-vids in this box." Ry held up one of the small, rectangular electronic devices. I stared at it; it looked as if it had been gutted, with the back missing, the battery pulled out of it and what looked to be part of a data chip hanging out and damaged.
"You think Bel was hard on his comp-vids?" I asked. "We can pull up the registration on all of them to see for sure."
"I'll do that, you get into the comp," Ry jerked his head at the chair. I scooted into the padded seat and booted up the desk comp, entering my clearance codes as soon as the screen appeared.
"Here—it looks like Maris was working on files submitted in that Prekisule Company case," I said, reading through information on the screen.
"The one that said they were not only making the screens for the comp-vids, but the cases as well, even though the case company is listed under a different name?"
"Yeah. That other company is Meldrim Enterprises; it's mentioned here, too. The case was dropped in the last three weeks from lack of evidence," I said.
Everything was in the file that I'd pulled up from Abinger's Legal Firm. Someone from Meldrim had come to the ASD, claiming that the two companies were actually owned by the same conglomerate, which couldn't be. It violated the anti-trust laws of the Reth Alliance. The chips were manufactured by Schuul Enterprises, the screens by Prekisule, the cases by Meldrim, and other parts and pieces by this company or that, not all of which were on the same worlds. Prekisule and Meldrim were certainly not on Surnath, I knew that much.
"So, Maris was doing the legal legwork on that, then," Ry grunted, digging through Bel's box of stuff.
"Looks like it. And then she went crazy and shot up the office." I turned to her comp-vid next; it was carefully labeled as such. A bit of dried blood was on it, too. I handled it gingerly, although it had already had any fingerprints scanned by the locals. Syncing it with the larger system in front of me, I entered my security codes to get the larger comp to sort out Maris' passwords. They pulled up quickly—someone had already done this, as I'd expected. Likely, it had been Bel. I scrolled through personal messages Maris had sent and received just before the murder; there wasn't anything unusual about any of them, so I worked my way backward, until I came to one she'd sent to her sister two eight-days prior to the murders.