The Cause of Death (34 page)

Most Reqwar Pavlat, including the Thelm, disapproved strenuously of interior surveillance. Cameras and security should not intrude into the living areas, into one's private life. It was an extension of how the Reqwar Pavlat felt about their flesh-and-blood guards. The protectors should stand on the outside, ready to defend against exterior threats, not stand on the inside interfering with those they were meant to protect. It would be unseemly for the Thelm to have his every move observed, as if his life were merely some performance put on for the guards' amusement. A laudable sentiment, no doubt--but it left Darsteel with no inside cameras, and no imagery at all of any part of the Keep's private living areas.

Darsteel forgot about the fire officer and moved on to the next problem. Two other police organizations--the Thelm's Keep City Constabulary and the Thelm's Valley Rangers--already had officers on the scene. Sooner or later an official from one or the other of them, someone of higher rank than Darsteel, would show up and claim jurisdiction over the crime scene. Inevitable. Law of nature. Lawkeepers from other security services were likely on the way. The only way to avoid complete jurisdictional gridlock was to have the situation under firm enough control before the high-rankers showed up, and then make them feel involved enough to protect the arrangement that had been made. And the best way to do that was to involve their people.

Darsteel ordered three-lawkeeper static posts all around and inside the Keep, assigning one lawkeeper from each service to each post. If they spent most of their time keeping an eye on each other, then they would keep each other honest. Darsteel posted the most reliable teams he could at the entrances to Thelm Lantrall's Private Audience Chamber, with orders not to admit anyone at all unless Darsteel himself was present.

Whether or not he could make that stick he didn't know, but he had to try. He might not have the legal authority to command in this situation--but
someone
had to take charge, and fast, before things got completely out of control.

Just as he was ordering that more powerlights be aimed at the Keep's upper stories to give the crews hanging the tarps more light, he spotted the Lady Zahida Halztec pushing her way through the crowd, trying to get to him. He shouted orders to let her through the barrier.

She headed toward him on the run. "Unitmaster Darsteel!" she called out as soon as she was close enough. "The aliens! The alien investigators!"

"What?"

"The humans and the Kendari. The off-worlders want to offer their services to you in an immediate joint search of the crime scene. A joint investigation."

Darsteel was so relieved he almost smiled. "I'd be mad to turn that offer down--unless they start asking for favors or conditions." His own experience in managing a major crime scene was all but nil, and he did not trust most of the lawkeepers who would likely try to move in and take over if he didn't have a legitimate investigation of his own launched at once. The odds on drawing a chief investigator more interested in enhancing his own status and/or reaching the conclusions most likely to keep his patron happy were far too high. "Let's go see what sort of deal they're trying to make."

* * *

If the off-worlders were aware of how urgently Darsteel needed their expertise, they didn't show it. He had expected them to demand rights of control over the investigation, or else to insist on some completely unrelated favor in exchange. Instead, somehow, he found that
they
were deferring to
him
. Maybe they needed an honest investigation as much as he did. Maybe it was just that the humans and Kendari did not trust each other. The fact that they distrusted each other could prove useful to Darsteel. It might serve to cancel out whatever opposing biases the two species would bring to the case.

Knowing they were not interested in demanding conditions made Darsteel willing to impose a few of his own. "If--if--I agree to let you join me in the crime scene investigation," he told them, "you
must
first agree not to touch or disturb anything, but merely to observe. You must examine without making any physical contact, aside from walking around the room."

"Agreed," said Brox.

"Fine with us," said Agent Wolfson.

"I have two requests," Brox said. "For our mutual protection, I suggest none of the four of us be allowed into the crime scene unless all of us are there. Second, I would ask that in future, any evidence shown to the humans be shown to me at the same time--and any evidence shown to me be shown to them in similar fashion."

"I was about to ask for the same things," said Wolfson.

"Very well," Darsteel said, trying to mask his eagerness with a show of reluctant agreement. He would have trained and experienced professionals examining the evidence, and full access to whatever they learned--and their mutual distrust was a superb guarantee that they would not start plotting together against him. "I would suggest we collect whatever equipment we can, and get started at once."
Before some higher-up can cancel the arrangement.

* * *

It took time to get organized, and to improvise solutions to some fairly basic problems. Brox had his own isolation wear and had it brought to him. Brox was also able to produce some lights and cameras, and Darsteel came up with a few bits of hardware as well.

The crime scene gear Hannah and Jamie had brought to Reqwar had been destroyed in the
Lotus
. The emergency packs they had managed to grab after the crash were full of survival gear, not investigative equipment. However, Darsteel was able to scrounge together some Pavlat-style sterile foot coverings and yellow-colored isolation garments that would more or less fit humans. He also provided them with bright pink Pavlat-style surgical masks and hoods and six-fingered rubber gloves. None of the Pavlat gear fit the humans properly, but it would get the job done.

They were a motley crew at best in their bulky, varicolored, mismatched, ill-fitting iso-suits. None of the rest of their gear was anything much, and it wasn't all they would have wanted, but it was all they were going to get. They were as ready as they were going to be.

* * *

The Thelm's Private Audience Chamber was a big room, taking up just about all of one floor of the Keep, and it was a burned-out wreck. The ancient stone walls, and the scarcely less ancient wood-plank floors and ceiling were badly scorched and damaged, but still appeared to be sound. It was mainly the room's appointments--the richly embroidered sitting cushions, the handsomely carved perching stools, the wall hangings and tapestries, the worktables--that had burned.

But that was all incidental, the mere loss of property. What had brought them there was the dead Reqwar Pavlat--the dead Thelm--on the floor.

"The Thelm is dead," said Hannah Wolfson, kneeling by the body, looking into the lifeless, staring eyes. "Long live the Thelm."

But that was the question, of course, Jamie thought. With Lantrall dead, and the planet teetering on the brink of disaster, who
was
the Thelm?

Jamie, Hannah, and Darsteel focused on the victim, but Brox seemed happy to let the others study the corpse. He looked the body over for a few moments, then began studying the room itself.

The corpse lay on its back, on an elaborately embroidered carpet, almost in the center of the room. The body was barely burned at all, though its clothing was blackened and charred on the chest. Blobs of fire retardant that had yet to disintegrate were splashed about on the carpet and the corpse. It looked as if the fire had been closing in on the center of the room. If the fire had gone on much longer, it would have incinerated the corpse, destroying whatever information might be derived from the condition of the body. The investigators had been lucky on that score.

The corpse had not been lucky at all. Its limbs were splayed out, its arms and legs thrown wide. The face was contorted into an expression that seemed to speak of shock, anger, fear--but that expression might be some side effect of the Pavlat equivalent of rigor mortis.

The carpet that the body lay on had burned along one edge, and in a few patches here and there, but the rest of it had not sustained much damage. There was a scorched but mainly intact table next to the carpet on which the body lay. It had been pushed over on its side somehow, and the bottles it had held had all been knocked over and emptied. Their contents had soaked into the carpet, in and around several of the most intense scorch marks.

It was instantly obvious that it was not the fire that had killed the Thelm. There was a gaping wound in the center of the corpse's chest, the flesh around it burned and scorched. Near the wound, the clothing was burned and blackened, and there were twists and bits of metal visible in the chest cavity. It looked very much like a fairly slow-moving projectile had struck the victim in the chest and exploded.

There was a weapon in the two-thumbed, four-fingered left hand of the victim; it was an elaborately carved and decorated pistol of some sort, almost certainly handmade, and the corpse was holding it as one would to fire it. One finger was on the trigger, and by the looks of things, the corpse had a firm enough grip on the pistol that it would possibly require postmortem surgery to remove it. The pistol was badly damaged, though not, it would seem, by the fire. The barrel of the weapon had burst. The breech end of the firing tube was threaded, so that an endcap could be screwed into place--but the threading had been sheared off, and there was no endcap to be seen.

Jamie knelt there in his rustling bright yellow iso-suit and stared at the lifeless face.
The Thelm is dead
. It was impossible to take it in. The Thelm had been alive and vigorous, full of schemes and plans, with a kind word for everyone, and perhaps a knife in the back for some, just a few hours before.

Unitmaster Darsteel knelt next to Jamie and stared solemnly down at his Thelm for a long time. "I had seen him, many times," he said. "I had always hoped to speak more than a word or two of greeting with him, to offer myself for his service at any time or place. Now it is too late."

"Then do him the last service of helping to find his murderer," said Jamie.

"Murder!" Darsteel said in shock. "But it is suicide! He was distraught over the loss of his birth-sons and the crisis of his adoptive son. The gun is in his hand! He fired at himself."

"Quite right," Brox said, sarcasm dripping from his voice. The Kendari was standing by the wall at the far side of the room, examining something there. "Hours after being seen in very good spirits, enthused over some new scheme, he comes up here, shoots himself in the chest, then knocks over the furniture, empties all the bottles in his drinks cabinet onto the floor, sets fire to the room in several places, then collapses on the floor and dies of the wound that should have killed him instantaneously."

"How can you tell he shot himself--or was shot--
before
the fire started?" Darsteel asked.

"Two things," said Brox. He extracted a handlight from his shoulder tool harness and directed it to a ragged pattern of irregularly shaped and sized pits and holes in the wall. "One glance at the wound makes it clear that the projectile that hit him shattered. It might even have had an explosive charge. Unless I am very much mistaken, these holes are the impact points for fragments of the projectile that hit the Thelm, passed through his body, and lodged here in the wall. If you come here and look carefully at the holes, you will see that bits of cloth--and what might be small portions of the Thelm's skin--were torn loose from the Thelm's body and have lodged with the fragments."

Darsteel moved carefully over to the spot in the wall and studied the area Brox indicated. "I see," he said. "But how do fragments in the wall prove the fire happened after the shot was fired?"

"They don't--but the cloth and skin fragments do. The wall is badly burned. The bits of cloth that protrude from the holes have been thoroughly charred. But the bits lodged
in
the wall by the projectile fragments have not been burned at all. Conclusion: They were lodged in the wall before the fire started. Furthermore, the wall itself has been badly damaged and weakened by the fire, practically reduced to charcoal--yet the holes produced by the fragments are sharp and angular, and the fragments have not penetrated far. The impact points would not look like that if the fragments had struck a wall that had been weakened by fire."

Darsteel studied the section of wall carefully. "I follow your argument, and grant your logic. But it might be that the materials used here are outside your experience and are misleading you."

"Possible, but unlikely," said Brox. "And in any event, my second proof is clear enough that I can see it from across the room and saw it with one glance at the Thelm. If you examine the carpet under the Thelm, you will see it is blackened and discolored everywhere but
under
him. I expect that when the body is removed, we will find an area of more or less undamaged carpet forming a perfect outline of his body. Also, there is fire debris--ash and soot and bits of the ceiling that fell and so on--scattered about on the carpet, and on top of the Thelm's body--but there does not appear to be any
under
his body. The obvious conclusion is that he fell to the floor, and was lying motionless in that position, when the fire started."

Darsteel returned to the side of the body, and studied what he could see of the area under the Thelm. "You're quite right," he said. "It's very clear, now that you point it out."

"There's more," said Jamie. "Look at the weapon again. It's badly damaged. It malfunctioned, drastically, somehow. The breech, the end of the gun closest to the shooter, is destroyed. You can see that the breech end is threaded on the outside. If you look at the Thelm's chest wound, you can see shattered fragments with about the right curvature, and they have what looks to be the corresponding threading on the inside. Those have got to be bits of the endcap from his pistol."

"And look how he's holding that pistol," said Hannah. "Straight out, away from his body. With a barrel that long, he couldn't possibly have held the gun in that way and pointed the weapon at himself. If he had wanted to shoot himself with that gun, he would have held it in both hands, in the center of his chest, with the barrel pointed
at
him. He fired the weapon, yes--but he did not intend to shoot himself. He fired it--but instead of the round flying out of the weapon away from him, it shot backwards, shearing off the endcap and smashing the round and the endcap into his chest."