Dead Man on the Moon (20 page)

"Founded by a mess of liberals," Linus repeated. "Speech is all free."

"Oh yeah." Noah scratched his nose. "Gotta love those liberals, then."

"So what's on the schedule today, Karen?" Linus asked.

"Very little. All those autodocs in the medicine chests make my job so easy, I barely have to come in most days. I checked on Viktor Riza—he's still on the mend, but feeling understandably depressed—and then I thought I'd come down and look at crime scene bits with you."

"Oh," Linus said, nonplussed. Karen had never asked for this before. Was she . . . was this an excuse to get closer to him? He gave himself a mental shake. Silly thoughts. They were
friends,
and she had come down because she was bored. Linus turned to Noah. "You up for it, Kid?"

"Nope," Noah replied. "Not only do I not want to be called
kid
all day—"

"I didn't call you—"

"Yes, you did," Karen and Noah said together.

Linus folded his arms and pouted. "It's a conspiracy."

"As you like," Karen said with an impish grin. It made her even more attractive, and Linus tried very hard to think of dead puppies and cold showers. He didn't need this right now, not with two murder cases and the Mayor-President breathing down his neck.

"—
and
I have to work on the Viktor Riza case," Noah finished. "The floor at the fish hatchery should be dry by tomorrow morning. I can examine for trace and footprints."

"See you, then," Karen said with a little wave. "And break a leg at your show tonight. We've got tickets."

"Oh great," Noah groaned. "I don't want to know what kind of stuff a medical examiner might throw at the stage." And he left.

"Nice to see you two are getting along," Linus observed.

"How could we not?" Karen said. "I used to baby-sit him."

"Uh, right." Linus got to his feet. "And now that my morning meeting is over, there's evidence to examine with my favorite Luna City doctor."

Two doors down from Linus's office was an evidence examination room. A large light table took up most of the center, and debris from the crime scene lay spread out across the surface—boot castings, the drag mark, sample envelopes, the red shirt, the brown trousers, a single brown loafer. White light shone up from the table and down from the ceiling, sweeping all shadows from the room and making it harder for clues to remain hidden. Linus and Karen pulled on gloves and got out a set of scanners. The room was considerably warmer than Linus's office.

"These clothes look like they've been dry-cleaned," Karen commented.

"They have, really," Linus said. He bent over the red shirt. "That's part of the problem—any liquid-based trace evidence is long gone. Still, we might find a stray hair or flake of paint or something similar."

Karen had already picked up a scanner and was running the light bar over the trousers. "Cotton-poly fabric," she reported, now all business. "Synthetic thread, plastic button on the fly. I'll run an exclusion scan for anything not matching any of those substances."

"Take a scan of the weave, too," Linus said. "Just in case it's unique. We might be able to learn where the clothes were made or sold."

"Grasping at straws already?" Karen asked. "Clothes made in Mexico are routinely sold to the European Union."

"Yeah, but there's no point in ignoring the possibility of a clue when it only takes a second to check."

They worked in silence for a while. Linus ran his own scanner over the shirt, looking for anything that wasn't a cotton-poly blend. Nothing. He took a scan of the weave and ran it through the database. Half a dozen clothing manufacturers in various countries used it in clothes made for export. Dead end there.

After half an hour of tedious work, Linus's frustration level began to rise. He was no closer to identifying the victim than he had been yesterday, and the Mayor-President was breathing down his neck. Usually Linus loved teasing at a case, pulling at this thread or that until something came unraveled. But this was an exercise in pure bafflement. He set the shirt back down and turned to the casts. Footprints and the partially obscured drag mark made a neat row on the table. Linus picked up the first footprint and examined it, then examined the second, third, and fourth ones.

"Treads look like a public-issue vac suit," he said.

"So do these," said Karen, who was working toward him from the other end of the line. "And even if we
did
know who made them, it wouldn't prove much. The footprints could have already been out there when the killer dumped the body. No wind or rain to change them. They could have been out there for years before our poor lad showed up."

"Yeah." Linus shook his head. "So why do I keep thinking I'm missing something here?"

"You are," Karen said. "You're missing a shoe. Or the victim is."

"Uh huh." Linus picked up the victim's sole remaining brown loafer and scanned it. Nothing of interest. "Why is he missing a shoe?"

"Maybe the killer knew there was trace evidence on it, so he removed it and destroyed it?"

"You're very helpful."

"Aiming to please, love."

"In most cases, the simplest answer is the correct one," Linus mused aloud. "And the simplest explanation is that the shoe fell off while the killer was transporting the corpse and the killer didn't notice."

"So it's still out there somewhere?"

"Most likely." Linus set the shoe back down and turned for the door. "Come on."

Karen folded her arms. "Come on where?"

"We need to go outside and look for it."

"Why?"

"It might have trace on it," Linus replied impatiently. "And its location might give us a clue about which airlock the killer used.
That
might lead us to something else. Coming?"

Karen sighed. "All right. But only because it's you asking, love. I don't put on silvery vac-suits for just anybody, you know."

A few minutes later, they were suited up and bouncing across the lunar landscape in a rover. The pitiless sun poured harsh light over them. The lunar day lasted about twenty-nine and a half Earth days, meaning it took the sun about two weeks to cross from horizon to horizon. Earth itself just seemed to sit there in the sky, going through phases just like the moon as seen from Earth. Linus, however, kept his eyes on where he was going. Rover accidents were rare—between the driver and the computer, very little could happen—but he didn't see that as a reason to tempt fate. It also gave him an excuse to keep the conversation to
a minimum. Linus was very aware of Karen's silver-clad form in the seat next to him. It felt nice not to be alone, and nice to be alone with Karen. She was funny, she was pretty, she was intelligent, she was—

Linus set his mouth. There was no way he was going to entertain this sort of thing.

And why not?
whispered a treacherous little voice.
You're almost fifty thousand miles away from Earth. Do whatever you want.

He told the voice to shut up so he could drive.

They arrived at the crater lip without incident. The two of them clambered out of the rover, and Karen put her hands on her hips. Linus took a few breaths of metallic air and wished he could get a few lungfuls of
real
outdoor atmosphere, feel a real breeze against his face, maybe even rim naked through a field of grass and flowers. Homesickness washed over him, and he suddenly understood the drunken frat boy who had taken off his helmet. Sometimes you just had to
try,
even when you knew it would end badly.

''Where do we start looking?"
Karen asked, breaking into his reverie.

Linus gave himself a mental shake. "We know the shoe isn't in or around the crater," he said, "because we already looked there. But the drag mark pointed that way—" he gestured "—so let's try that way."

"Just bring the rover,"
Karen said.
"I don't fancy walking all the way back."

With a few quick commands, Linus connected his obie with the rover's onboard computer and told the vehicle to stay a few meters behind him. Then he took a few experimental steps forward. The rover followed like an obedient dog.

"Forward!" he said. "The game is—"

"I am not Dr. Watson,"
Karen growled.
"And I am
definitely
not a sidekick."

"Too bad," Linus said. "I've always wanted one."

"I'll kick your side, though, if you want."

Linus called up a navigational display to keep them going in a straight line. He and Karen took up positions four or five meters apart and moved forward, visually scanning the ground ahead of them. Smooth gray dust and misshapen rocks filled Linus's field of vision, and the steady hiss of air in his helmet made a comforting noise in the background. The rover followed behind them, silent as Eurydice on the heels of Orpheus. The blank faceplate on Karen's helmet only added to the eeriness of the situation.

"So what did you do last night?"
Karen asked out of nowhere.

"Me?" Linus said.

"I don't see anyone else around, love."

"Nothing much. Ate a late supper, read for a while, went to bed."

"What did you read?"

"A
romance novel.
Winds of Passion"

Karen laughed.
"No, really. What'd you read? I'm curious."

"Psych book," Linus said. "Chapter on human behavior in dense populations."

"What's wrong? Have trouble sleeping?"

"It's practical application," Linus protested. He skirted a large rock, and the computer beeped a warning that he was straying from his course. "We're getting more people than we have room for up here, and it worries me."

"Me, too,"
Karen admitted.
"I've been able to keep up with being the only doctor so far, but I've seen the projections. By the end of next semester, I'll be overwhelmed if they don't bring in someone to help."

"I had to fight hard for another deputy," Linus said. "The Mayor-President's gung-ho to get Luna City out of debt, but she doesn't have to directly deal with rising crime and violence. You might want to start demanding another doctor now."

"Already started that battle,"
Karen replied.
"I just hope I can win it."

They continued forward. Twice Linus thought he saw something, only to realize it was a shoe-shaped rock. Karen halted, raising Linus's hopes, but she only squirmed inside her suit for a moment before resuming the search. After an hour of slow, careful walking, they found themselves within a few meters of an airlock. It was the one Noah had investigated as the murderer's most likely exit point. No shoe.

"You game to keep going?" Linus said. "There's another airlock up ahead. The killer may have used that one."

"Anything for a handsome cop who reads romances,"
Karen sighed.
"I'm batting my eyes, in case you were wondering."

"I wasn't, but thanks for sharing that," Linus laughed, though he wondered if Karen was halfway serious. It was getting damned hard to read the situation. He'd have to sit down with her eventually and flat-out ask if she'd been flirting with any serious intent. It was the only way to know for sure.

Of course, if he were wrong, it'd be embarrassing all around and make their working relationship awkward. On the other hand, it was already growing more and more awkward by the moment.

They loped onward, past little domes and occasional vac-suited people wandering about on errands of their own. Linus wondered if they'd missed the shoe because someone had already picked it up without realizing it was the clue in a murder case. It might be worth his while to publicize what he was looking for, see if anyone came forward with the lost footwear like Cinderella's prince. Ahead, the antenna of Luna City's spaceport crept over the horizon, followed by the spaceport itself. A flare of white light caught Linus's attention, and he stopped to look up. A miniature tongue of flame rose up to the velvet sky bearing the rounded shape of the weekly shuttle to Tether Station. In a few hours it would dock with the station, take on passengers and cargo, then return to Luna City. Among those passengers would be the entertainment representatives who worried Mayor-President Pandey so much. Something itched at the back of Linus's
mind, like an imp tickling his brain with a feather. He knew the sensation well—it meant he was missing something, and it was usually something obvious.