The Domino Pattern

TWELVE

“What do we do?” Bayta whispered tensely.

I watched the shifting shadows, thinking hard. Chances were good that our intruder was unaware of our presence—the fact that he was still moving around argued that assumption. If we kept it quiet, we might be able to sneak the rest of the way to the bodies and catch him in the act. Whatever that act turned out to be.

On the other hand, sneaking up on a murderer carried its own set of risks. But standing here in nervous indecision would be to lose by default. “Let’s take a look,” I said, slipping the kwi out of my pocket. It was tingling with Bayta’s activation command as I settled it into place around the knuckles of my right hand. Tucking Bayta close in behind my left side, where she’d be partially protected and out of my line of fire, I started forward.

We were nearly to the gap where I’d estimated the earlier movement had come from when I realized that the motion had ceased. In fact, as I thought about it, I realized it might have stopped up to a minute or even a minute and a half earlier.

I stopped, turning to put our backs against the nearest stack of crates as I searched for some clue as to where he might have gone. Nothing. Whoever this guy was, he was quick and smart.

But then, I was quick and smart, too. And I had a huge advantage he didn’t know about: I had a weapon. Resting my thumb on the kwi‘s activation button, I gestured Bayta to follow and headed in.

No one jumped us before we reached the gap. Pressing my shoulder against the side of the last stack, I eased a cautious eye around the corner.

Wedged into the narrow space between crate stacks were four coffin-sized tanks. The lid of the nearest was cracked open, while the other three appeared to still be sealed. The intruder himself was nowhere to be seen. Touching Bayta’s arm, I slipped around the corner into the impromptu mortuary.

“What do you think he wanted?” Bayta asked quietly as I stopped beside the partially-open tank.

“For starters, not to be caught,” I said, getting a grip on the lid and experimentally pushing it closed.

It latched with a loud click that could probably have been heard fifteen meters away. “Which is why he left it open instead of closing it and trying to pretend no one had been here,” I went on, popping the lid open again. It made the same loud click as it had when I’d closed it.

And then, from somewhere near the front of the car, I heard an answering sound. Not another click, but the thud of someone bumping into one of the crate stacks. Our intruder, it appeared, was making a run for it.

“Stay close,” I murmured to Bayta, and headed at a dead run back toward the vestibule.

Or at least, I tried to make it look and sound like a dead run. But I knew this trick, and I wasn’t about to be taken in so easily. The suspicious-noise ploy was a classic way to get the hunter charging off in the wrong direction while the prey slipped away through the dark of night to freedom.

Here, with only a single exit from the baggage car, slipping away for more hide-and-seek was pretty much a waste of effort. Hence, the prey had opted for suspicious-noise variant number two: lure the hunter into ambush range and clobber him.

Which was why my dead run wasn’t nearly as reckless as it looked. I was in fact carefully checking every side aisle as I ran toward and past it, my kwi ready to fire in whichever direction it was needed. Between aisles I kept a careful watch on the tops of the stacks in case the intruder had scaled one of them in hopes of pulling a Douglas Fairbanks on me.

And with my full attention shifting between right, left, and up, I completely missed the low trip wire that had been stretched out across the aisle in front of me.

I hit it hard, catching my right foot and launching myself into an unintended dive across the dim landscape. I barely managed to get my hands under me before I slammed chest-first into the floor. Even with my arms absorbing some of the impact I hit hard enough to see stars.

For a long, horrible second I couldn’t move, my brain spinning, my lungs fighting to recover the air that had just been knocked out of them. Then, through the haze, I felt someone grab my upper arms. I tried to bring the kwi around to bear, but my arms weren’t responding and my wrists burned with pain. The hands gripping me pulled me up and half over, and I saw to my relief that it was Bayta. “Where is he?” I wheezed at her.

“He’s gone,” she said, fighting to drag me over toward the nearest crates. I got my legs working enough to help push, and a moment later was sitting more or less upright with her crouching beside me. It was, I reflected grimly, the perfect time for an ambusher to attack.

Only no one did. Apparently, he really was gone. “Are you all right?” I asked Bayta, still working on getting my wind back.

“I’m fine,” she assured me, eyeing me warily. “The question is, are you all right?”

“Aside from feeling like an idiot, sure,” I said sourly, experimentally flexing my wrists. They still hurt, but they were starting to recover. “No chance of catching him now, I guess.”

“Do we need to actually catch him?” Bayta asked. “Or do we just need to know who he is?”

I peered up at her. “You have a plan, don’t you?”

She nodded toward the front of the car. “I’ve moved a conductor into the last passenger car,” she said. “He’s watching to see who comes out of the baggage section.”

“Nice,” I complimented her. “I don’t suppose you and the Spiders have figured out yet how to relay images back and forth.”

“Our communication doesn’t work that way,” she said. “But he doesn’t have to send me an image or even a description. The conductors know who’s assigned to which seat. All we have to do is see where he lands, and we’ll have him.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed. “But warn him not to get too close. We don’t want our friend to know he’s being followed.”

“He won’t be followed,” Bayta said. “The conductor in the rear car will stay there and merely pass him off to a Spider who’s already in place ahead. In the two cars after that, if they’re needed, there will be some mites working inside the ceiling systems who will watch his movements. The next car after that has another conductor, and so on.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “All those dit rec mysteries I’ve been pushing on you have obviously done you a world of good.” I nodded toward the trip wire behind her. “Let’s have a look at our friend’s handiwork.”

Successful booby traps, in my fortunately limited personal experience, tended toward one of three main flavors: simple, elegant, or opportunistic. This one managed to be all three.

The intruder had cut a section of safety webbing from the base of one of the crates, picking a strand about ankle height, and had continued his cut all the way around the stack until he’d freed enough slack to reach twice across the most likely aisle for us to take when we came charging after him. He’d stretched the line straight across the aisle, looped it through the webbing on the stack on that side, then run it back to the original stack at about a thirty-degree angle.

The result had been a pair of trip wires with a continually varying distance between them, the sort of arrangement that would be perfect for use against two pursuers with different stride lengths. Odds were very good that at least one of us would hit at least one of the lines, which was precisely what had happened. “Nice work,” I commented. “This guy’s definitely a pro.”

“But how did he set it up?” Bayta asked, frowning as she poked experimentally at the taut line. “He couldn’t have had more than a couple of minutes once he knew we were here.”

“Which means he didn’t set it up then, at least not completely,” I told her. “He must have done all the cutting as soon as he came back here, leaving the loose cord wadded up against the base of the crate where we wouldn’t notice it. Once he spotted us and slipped away around the back of the crate stacks, all he had to do was loop the end through here and tie it down back here.”

“And then lure us into running after him,” Bayta said, grimacing. “We should have known better.”

“We did know better,” I assured her. “I was just expecting a different sort of trap, that’s all.”

“Wait a minute—there he goes,” Bayta said, staring suddenly into space. “He’s left the baggage car and is heading forward.”

“What species is he?” I asked. I knew Spiders usually couldn’t distinguish between individuals, but a species identification would at least get us started.

Bayta frowned in concentration. “He can’t tell,” she said, sounding rather nonplused. “He’s wearing a sort of hooded cloak that’s completely covering his head, arms, and torso.”

“What about his height? His build? Anything?”

“He’s tall enough to be a medium-sized Filiaelian, a tall Human, a slightly overweight Fibibib, or a slightly underweight Shorshian,” Bayta said, sounding rather annoyed herself. This was her plan, after all, that he was outthinking us on. “All the Spider can tell for sure is that he’s not a Pirk, Juri, Bellido, or Cimma.”

I mouthed a foul word one of my French-born Westali colleagues had been overly fond of. “Fine,” I growled. “He wants to play games? We can play games, too. Have the Spiders keep an eye on him. Sooner or later, he’ll have to take off the party outfit.”

“Do you want the conductor to try to pull aside his hood when he passes?” Bayta asked.

“No,” I said. “If he doesn’t already know about our close association with the Spiders, I don’t want to tip our hand. Just have them keep an eye on him.”

“All right,” Bayta said. “What now?”

“We go do what we actually came here for,” I said. Pulling out my multitool, I cut the trip-wire cord and pushed the ends out of the way. Then, getting a grip on the safety webbing behind me, I pulled myself carefully to my feet. “Let’s go look at some dead bodies.”

I had hoped there would be a way of telling which and how many of the storage tanks our intruder had broken into. But no such luck. There were no locks on the tanks, nor were there any breakable—or broken—seals. The four bodies lay quietly and peacefully in their temporary coffins, each wrapped like a mummy in wide strips of plastic. “I guess we’ll start here,” I said, gesturing to the coffin which had been ajar when we’d arrived. Swiveling the lid all the way up, I started gingerly unwrapping the corpse.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Bayta asked, her voice sounding a little queasy. “Needle marks?”

“Mostly,” I said. “I’m thinking one of the needle marks may have something different about it.”

The wrapping came free of the head, and I saw that it was Master Colix’s rest I’d disturbed. “Here we go,” I said, working the plastic free of his shoulders. “You want to start on one of your own, or shall we both work on this one?”

“You go ahead,” Bayta said, making no move toward the other coffins. “I’ll just watch.”

“Okay, but this is the really fun part of investigative work,” I warned. Forcing my mind into clinical Westali mode, I leaned into the coffin and got to work.

I’d expected the job to take a while, with a lot more unwrapping necessary before I got anywhere. But as seemed to be happening more and more these days, I was wrong.

“There we go,” I said, pulling Colix’s tunic back to reveal the tiny needle mark a few centimeters below the top of his collar and just to the left of his corrugated spinal ridge. “One needle mark, comma, hypodermic. Definitely fresh.”

“How can that be?” Bayta objected. “The Spiders have accounted for all the hypos the passengers brought aboard.”

“Which means it was either Aronobal or Witherspoon, or else someone managed to smuggle a spare aboard,” I said.

Bayta shook her head. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

“Possible or not, here it is,” I said, gesturing to the body. “Take a look.”

Bayta shuddered, but gamely leaned in a little closer. “Seems like an odd placement,” she commented. “How could someone make an injection back there without him noticing?”

“Actually, it’s a perfect spot,” I said. “Generally speaking, in order for poison to be injected without the victim noticing, he or she has to be asleep, comatose, or drunk. Those third-class nighttime privacy shields have openings at the top for ventilation. All our killer needed to do was go up to Colix’s seat, reach in with his hypo—”

“Did Master Colix use his privacy shield?” Bayta interjected. “A lot of Shorshians don’t.”

I stared at her, then down at the needle mark I’d felt so proud about finding ten seconds earlier. Damn it, but she was right. And if Colix’s whole skin surface had been available, surely the murderer could have picked a more out-of-the-way spot for his injection.

Had it happened at dinner, then? The mark was also in the right spot for someone who’d sneaked up behind him and surreptitiously poked a hypo into his back.

Only that brought us back to the question of how that little trick could have been performed without Colix noticing. A brief twinge of pain he’d passed off and immediately forgotten? A close encounter, moreover, that his dinner companions hadn’t even noticed? “Good point,” I told Bayta. “Let’s think about it a minute.”

Gingerly, I slid my hand down inside the plastic wrappings to Colix’s chest and started feeling around the vicinity of his tunic’s inner top pocket. “What are you doing?” Bayta asked.

“Looking for this,” I said, pulling out Colix’s Quadrail ticket. “I guess the murderer didn’t steal it after all.”

“Then how did he get into Master Colix’s storage compartment?” Bayta asked, frowning at the card.

“Two possibilities,” I said. “One is that he didn’t need the ticket because Colix’s compartments were never locked that night.” I wiggled the ticket between my fingers. “The other is that that’s precisely what our intruder was doing back here just now. He’d taken the ticket, used it to open the compartment and steal Colix’s goodies, and was hoping to return it to its rightful owner before we came looking for it.”

“That has to be it,” Bayta said. “Master Colix was very possessive of those snacks. He wouldn’t have left them unlocked where they could be stolen.”

“Not so fast,” I warned her. “We also know that the compartment was unlocked the next morning, when Tas Krodo returned Colix’s blanket.”

“Which only means the killer must have left it unlocked after he stole the snacks,” Bayta countered.

“Or else that Colix was already feeling too sick to bother locking it after he got out his blanket,” I said. “But that brings us to another interesting point.” Sliding Colix’s ticket into my own pocket, I reached back down to the body, loosened the braidings tying up the front of his tunic, and pulled the collar all the way down. “As the French say, voilá,” I said, pointing to the faint parallel scars running lengthwise along his throat on either side of his larynx. “Twenty to one those are the marks of the infamous Gibber Operation.”

“The what?” Bayta asked, frowning as she leaned over for a closer look.

“It’s an operation the Shorshians don’t talk much about,” I explained, resisting the temptation to point out how unusual it was for me to have found a gap in her otherwise encyclopedic knowledge of the galaxy. “It creates enough range in the Shorshic vocal apparatus to allow them to speak languages other than their own.”

“Oh,” she said, her face clearing. “You mean the Kilfiriaso Operation.”

“Ah …right,” I said, feeling slightly deflated. Not only did she know about the operation, she even knew its real name. “I don’t know how fast Shorshians heal, but I do know that the Gibber Operation isn’t supposed to leave any permanent scars. The fact that we can still see something implies the work must have been done fairly recently.”

Bayta frowned at me. “You mean it was done on Earth?”

“So it would seem,” I said. “And given the typical Shorshic view of aliens, I imagine there would be a hefty percentage of them who would find it offensive that Colix would let a bunch of primitive Humans cut into him that way.” I gestured. “Which may explain both why he wouldn’t share his fruit treats, and why they were stolen.”

“Because they weren’t treats, but fruit-flavored postoperative throat lozenges?” Bayta asked.

“That’s the first part,” I agreed. “The second is that the facility that issued him the lozenges undoubtedly had their name or logo on the bag. Best explanation for the theft is that the killer didn’t want it known where Colix had his operation.”

Bayta was gazing down at Colix’s throat. “And since we know Mr. Kennrick also tried to find the bag,” she said slowly “that suggests Master Colix had the operation at Pellorian Medical.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“But the rest of the contract team surely also knew about it,” Bayta objected. “Stealing the lozenges wouldn’t have kept the secret from getting out—” She broke off. “Are you suggesting …?”

“That that’s why the team members are dropping like dominoes?” I shrugged. “It certainly fits. The problem is, it fits a little too neatly. Especially when we add in that spare first-class pass. It could just as easily be that our murderer latched on to Colix’s operation as a convenient smokescreen.”

I smoothed Colix’s collar back into place. “But that’s just grist for the hopper at the moment. Come on—let’s check out the other bodies.”

It was a few minutes’ work to open the other three containers and unwrap their occupants to the shoulders. Both Bofiv and Strinni had the same suspicious needle marks as Colix, and in similar places. Givvrac, in contrast, seemed to be unmarked, at least down to his waist, which was as far as I was willing to take this particular exercise.

“But we already knew that Usantra Givvrac died because of the antibacterial spray,” Bayta reminded me as I closed his coffin again.

“We assumed that, anyway,” I said, moving back to Strinni’s body. “It was still worth checking. Shine the light in here, will you? Right here, on the needle mark.”

“What are we looking for?” she asked, taking the light and directing the beam onto Strinni’s neck.

“You’ll see.” Pulling out my multitool’s thinnest probe, I began peeling away the skin at the edge of the needle mark.

“You probably shouldn’t be doing that,” Bayta warned. “If someone from the Path of Onagnalhni finds out we disturbed his body they won’t like it.”

“They’re welcome to file a grievance,” I said. My probe hit something solid, and I teased a little harder at the edges of flesh until I exposed the end. Putting the probe away, I pulled out my most delicate set of tweezers and gave a gentle tug.

And with a brief moment of resistance, the two-millimeter-long hypo tip that had broken off in Strinni’s skin slid out.

“And now we really know why the murderer jumped Witherspoon and me last night,” I said, holding up the tip for Bayta’s inspection. “He managed to smuggle a hypo aboard, but unfortunately ruined it when he broke off the tip. He already had his cadmium, so he didn’t need anything from Witherspoon’s collection of drugs, but he hoped he could make off with a new hypo without anyone noticing.”

“Only we did,” Bayta said, her voice odd. “Did Dr. Witherspoon have anything in his bag that could kill?”

“Probably,” I said. “Painkillers in particular tend to be lethal if you overdo the dosages. But our friend obviously prefers more subtle ways of offing his targets.”

“I was just thinking,” Bayta said slowly, staring at Strinni’s needle mark. “Why did he just tie you into the chair instead of killing you?”

“That’s a cheery thought,” I said, an unpleasant chill running through me. Normally, it didn’t do a murderer much good to kill the cop who was after him, since there were always more cops where the first one had come from.

But at this immediate point in time and space, that comforting logic didn’t apply. As far as cops aboard this train were concerned, I was it. “Luckily for me, he didn’t.”

“No,” Bayta murmured. “Not this time.”

“This time was all he had,” I told her firmly. “He won’t get another shot. Not at me.”

She shivered. “I hope you’re right.”

“Trust me.” Pulling out a handkerchief, I carefully wrapped the needle tip and put it in my pocket. “Come on, let’s put everything back the way it was,” I said as I started rewrapping Strinni’s body. “I think it’s time we sat Mr. Kennrick down in some nice first-class bar seat and found out what other little secrets he and Pellorian Medical are sitting on.”