The Cause of Death (37 page)

Allabex and Cinnabex both stopped all motion and activity when it happened. First signal number HB2XR7 from Special Agent Mendez's device died, and then, seconds later, the signal from number X3477B, the unit given to Senior Special Agent Wolfson. They both
sensed
each signal die, like the touch of a hand being withdrawn, a song cut off in midnote. They waited a moment, to see if the devices given to the Hertzmann family would go as well--but no, for the moment at least, those three remained online.

But the two sudden silences sent a message as clear as any words spoken aloud. Fear and distrust were spreading, strengthening. Events were moving toward a crisis.

Without a word exchanged between them, the two Stannlar returned to their preparations with redoubled speed.

* * *

Hannah had meant her question to be ironic, but Brox 231 was in no mood to parse the subtleties of human wit. He knew exactly what he wanted to talk about, loudly and forcefully. He wanted someone to get him a proper sleep-sling, and something to eat, and some sort of civilized arrangement for Kendari sanitary needs.

Fortunately, someone on Darsteel's staff had already had the sense to contact Hotel Number Two, which had at least some Kendari-suitable gear in stock, including a complicated-looking hammock arrangement that Brox conceded was more or less acceptable as a sleep-sling, and a remarkably compact, portable, fully hygienic and completely self-contained refresher unit suitable for Kendari. Getting that and his sleep-sling into their suite and setting it all up took most of an hour. The new equipment filled up most of the common room, but they would all be able to manage. Somehow.

But once it was done Jamie could shut the door on the outside world, and sleep, uninterrupted, for the first time since his arrival on Reqwar, on something more or less like the beds back home--even if the mattress was too hard and the sheets were somehow slippery and scratchy at the same time.

Simple exhaustion should have had him dead to the world the moment his head hit the pillow--but instead his eyes snapped open, and his mind started racing. What had happened? Who had done it? And why?

Better to start at the beginning, with the solid facts. They knew that the gun in the Thelm's hand had malfunctioned in spectacular fashion, and very likely had been sabotaged. The Thelm died with his finger on the trigger, and several of the fragments he had seen in the wound looked the right size and shape to be part of the missing endcap of the gun.

There was no plausible alternative to the conclusion that the Thelm had fired the gun, and that the wound was caused by the shot he fired. So, in a very limited sense, the Thelm
had
killed himself. But it was all but impossible to believe he had done it deliberately. His attitude and behavior mere hours before were anything but suicidal. Besides, Brox had shown that the fire had been set deliberately,
after
the Thelm had been shot and killed and had fallen to the floor. Suicides can't set fires after they die.

But who or what had the Thelm been shooting at, and why? To Jamie, at least, it looked very much as if the Thelm had been manipulated into shooting at whatever-it-was, in order to cause the gun to malfunction and kill him.

Look at it from another angle.
Who benefits
? It was the most basic question in any criminal investigation. Answer that question, and you'd almost automatically have a solid list of suspects. The devil of it was that who benefited depended on who had done the killing. The simplest case was that, if Georg did it, then by all the lunatic, barbaric, old-stone-age laws of Pavlat,
he
would benefit by becoming Thelm--and, just incidentally, by not being executed, or exiled.

But the murder as planned required very specific preparations--for example, rigging the gun and planting it. Georg had manifestly
not
been carrying out any such plan, but had been doing his best to be visibly far away from the Thelm, and visibly sitting there in his glass house, not doing anything to prepare for killing anyone.
Except he was here at the Keep last night
, Jamie reminded himself.
And that shoe print was there
.

But the guns had been on display--and the business about being ready to deal with an affair of honor at a moment's notice, absurd as it seemed, was probably all the reason a Reqwar Pavlat Thelm would need to keep loaded weapons in his study. The guns could have sat there more or less indefinitely. There might have been a risk that the Thelm would want to get in a little target practice--but he would not have used the ornately decorated pistols on the show table for that. The guns could have been rigged--and planted in the Thelm's audience chamber--months ago--or the day after Irvtuk and his brothers died. So it had to be conceded that Georg had motive, means, and opportunity.

Except
, Jamie had to keep reminding himself,
it's not only legal for him to kill the Thelm--the law requires it. But it had to be that the law had some sort of provision for cases where the father died of natural causes--or at the hands of someone besides the son--before the deadline. What were the rules covering those cases?

And if Georg decided to kill Lantrall, he wouldn't skulk around. He would want it known,
need
it known. Georg would not kill with a booby trap, or make it look like a possible suicide. What Georg would need would be absolute proof that
he
had personally and deliberately killed the Thelm.

If Georg had any sense, he would have marched right up to the closest news reporter and handed him a video recording of him committing the murder--and thus secured his claim to the Thelmship. Georg had motive, means, and opportunity to commit a
public
murder of the Thelm. But doing it the way it was done was exactly
contrary
to Georg's apparent motive. He might have decided to kill the Thelm to avoid execution or exile. But even in such a case, he could only be safe if he was very, very public about the murder. Unless or until they could come up with an alternate motive for Georg to kill the Thelm furtively, Georg was a problematic suspect.

What if Georg was a knowing accomplice--or had hired a contract killer? Jamie couldn't quite think what motive Georg would have for having someone else do the job--but never mind about motives for the time being. Just as a piece of legal theory, would
that
be a crime for Georg? Would it be a crime for the accomplice? Jamie could invent a plausible argument for either possibility, but he had a hunch that calling in an accomplice to do the dirty work would be considered dishonorable.

What if an unknown party carried out the murder
without
Georg's knowledge or permission? Then Georg would likely, but not definitely, benefit by becoming Thelm on the death of his father. Darsteel should be able to tell them for sure in the morning. But Georg was the
only
person for whom the murder would
not
be a crime. So the unknown person would be subject to arrest and punishment.

Tentative conclusion: The murder was definitely and indisputably a crime only if Georg has nothing to do with it, and clearly
not
a crime only if Georg definitely and indisputably did the killing, and did it entirely by himself.

But there was another weird angle: Since the murder was definitely and indisputably a crime
only
if Georg had nothing to do with it, any attempt to frame Georg for the killing would
benefit
Georg by preventing his death or exile, and by making him Thelm--and
also
protect the real culprit from punishment.

Jamie turned to the question of who
else
might benefit. In other words, who else would have a motive for killing the Thelm? Anyone who
didn't
want the Thelek to be next in line for the Thelmship would have a motive to kill the Thelm--and to do so as soon as possible. If the Thelm
didn't
die before Georg was executed, and before the Thelm had any chance to come up with a way to establish an alternate heir, then the High Thelek would be indisputably next in line for the Thelmship. Thelek Saffeer would become Thelm Saffeer once the Thelm did die, in a week or a century.

Therefore, anyone who wanted to prevent the Thelek from becoming Thelm would have a reason to kill the present Thelm immediately,
before
the last four days of the time period expired and/or before the Thelm could find a suitable replacement heir. The only problem with that idea was that an awful lot of people didn't want the Thelek to become Thelm. They'd have a long list of suspects if they went by that motive.

And then there was the whole category of motives that had nothing to do with the succession. Hannah had mentioned that someone with a grudge against the Thelm might choose this moment for revenge simply because everyone would assume the killing had political motives. What she hadn't mentioned was that their good friend Lady Zahida Halztec fell neatly into that category. She had certainly played the part of a good and loyal subject--but on the other hand, her family might hold a grudge against the present Thelm, who had not lifted a finger to prevent her great-uncle Bindulan's exile, or done anything much to clear his name.

And, edging back over into succession-related motives, the Bindulan clan most decidedly would not want the High Thelek to be Thelm. Family self-interest, even self-defense, might well serve to reinforce a revenge motive.

There was another element. The killer, or an accomplice, had to get to the dueling pistols and tamper with them before last night. Of all the suspects Jamie could think of, Zahida was the only one that he knew for certain had recently been in the Thelm's Private Audience Chamber. That she had gone there to save the lives of a certain two BSI agents made him less than happy to use that visit to help build a case against her, but those were the facts.

What about other suspects? The Thelm was the ruler of a faction-plagued world, and he had been in power for a very long time. It would be a miracle if he hadn't made some enemies along the way. There might be dozens of them, all eager to do him in.

If he wanted to cast his net even farther, Jamie could go look in the mirror. Darsteel hadn't just locked them up to keep them safe. It had to be that Darsteel was treating them as suspects. After all, they were in the Keep the night it happened, and it shouldn't have been too hard for Darsteel to imagine a motive strong enough to inspire the humans to murder the Thelm.

Jamie smiled to himself in the darkness. So either Georg did it, or someone else did. He decided to give it up for the moment and try again in the daytime. He quit staring at the ceiling, shut his eyes, and went to sleep.

* * *

Hannah wasn't in the least surprised to come fully awake once again when she got to bed, her thoughts speeding along almost too fast for her to keep up with them. She'd been on too many cases not to expect it.

The Thelm's death must have, to a certainty, set chaos loose on Reqwar.
The High Thelek has to be jumping out of his skin by now
, she thought. And it must have been doubly bad for him to have his tame Kendari vanish into thin air. Hannah was entirely prepared to believe Brox when he said the Thelek did not know he had gone to the fire. But even if Brox had been lying, he vanished for sure and for real once Darsteel had gotten them all locked in together.

But the Thelek would not be the only one starved for information. Every land-thelm and thelek on the planet had to be wondering what the devil was going on, and who was going to wind up on top. Every small-time land-thelm who distrusted his neighbor would be wondering if the neighbor was going to take advantage of the confusion to strike now, when the central authorities were likely too distracted to interfere. And every small-time land-thelm who got that far in his thinking would start reflecting on the advantages of striking first . . .

It could be the case that civil war, a whole series of civil wars, had already broken out, that the whole Reqwar political system was unraveling already. But she was letting her imagination run away with her. With a little luck, there would still be time to calm the situation before it reached that state.

But the only way to calm it would be to replace uncertainty with clarity. And the only way to do that would be for one undisputed and universally acceptable successor to the Thelm to emerge. And the only way for that even to be
possible
would be to figure out who the devil had killed the Thelm, and why.

Did
the means and timing of the Thelm's death affect the succession? If so, how? Were they looking in all the right directions for their suspects? Jamie's list of suspects had certainly erred on the side of inclusiveness. He had included the two Stannlar Consortia, for example. Hannah wished she had had the chance to ask him why--but with Brox right there, and Darsteel too for that matter, there hadn't been the chance.

But why
had
he included them? Perhaps simply because, mere hours after playing host to the Thelm in their converted warehouse, the Thelm was dead. Had the Thelm--or anyone else at the meeting--said or done something she had missed that would suffice as a motive? Or was it just that it would be awfully convenient to have their business partner made the king of the planet? Or might they have done it for some related, if more altruistic, reason? The Thelm himself had warned that the planet's terrestrial ecology would collapse altogether if the High Thelek took over, booted out the human-Stannlar team, and asked the Kendari to take over--or, rather, start over from scratch. Kill Thelm Lantrall, make Georg Thelm, and save the world?

The Stannlar did have a well-earned reputation for being rather casual about the death of an individual. Death, after all, was something that happened to insignificant components. The Consortium itself lived on.

It suddenly occurred to Hannah that this particular murder would have been absurdly easy for a Stannlar Consortium to commit. The whole case revolved around persuading or compelling the Thelm to fire that ridiculous dueling pistol, so that the rocket slug would shoot backwards, out the wrong end of the gun, and kill him. Well, what better way to scare him than with a nasty monster right in front of him?