Many Words

Amber let the silence stretch uncomfortably before she continued. “Now, we have something else to show you.” She slid the sheet of soft copy square to Heath and tapped it. It flashed, and then showed a still from the recording of Heath’s flight down the stairs of my building. She tapped it again, and it switched to a shot of Heath walking away from the Police Arm cordon. Again, and Heath going into an alley, the timestamp prominent in the frame. Again, and Heath coming out a minute later. “Mr. Heath,” said Amber, “you’ve already been caught in two lies. I don’t suppose there’s anything else you’d care to clarify?”

Heath remained mute, but I could see worry creeping into his expression, written in the set of his brow and the line of his jaw. Amber saw it, too, and embarked upon the second phase of our plan. “Very well. I’ll tell you what happened that night. Our technicians discovered something very interesting, you see. You were embezzling, Mr. Heath.”

I watched Heath’s expression with something like fanatical intensity, and grinned a triumphant grin when I saw confusion on his face.

“You were embezzling,” Amber repeated. “A pittance to you, but of course your greed knew no satisfaction. When McKenzie found out, your oldest friend or no, he had to go. You knew he would be making a jump that night, so you followed him there, your gun in hand.”

Heath’s expression grew concerned again. He fidgeted. I could see his struggle with the impulse to speak out. “Keep at him,” I said.

As advice went, it was not groundbreaking. Amber stood and began to pace around the interview room. Carpenter remained seated, his patent Caledonia glare boring into Heath. Amber said, “You came upon him just as he made ready to jump. He heard you coming to shoot him in the back, and he turned to face you.”

Heath twitched in his chair, drummed his fingers on the table, bounced his leg. I let Amber be; she was more than capable of bringing it home from here.

“You shot him—” she began.

“No!—”

“Do not interrupt me, Mr. Heath!” Amber shouted. “You shot him in cold blood, and then, to cover your tracks, you took the only thing of value he had with him—his revolver—to throw us onto the scent of a robbery! And then you expected to get away with it. Let me tell you, Mr Heath—”

Heath, in desperation, cried out, “That isn’t how it happened!”

Amber slammed her fist into the table. “Liar!”

“No!” Heath said. “He shot himself!”

“You were there?” replied Amber.

“Yes!”

“You pulled the trigger?”

“I did, but I saw with my own eyes that he shot himself!”

Amber relaxed, looked toward the observation room, and said, “Did you get that?”

I looked at Baker, who looked back at me. All of us knew the cameras had been rolling the whole time. Into the microphone, I said, “Very theatrical.”

Something of what he’d just walked into dawned on Heath, and he paled. Pleasantly, Amber explained, “Your gun fired the shot that killed Abbot McKenzie. We found forensic evidence that proves you were the one holding it at the time. We know all about McKenzie’s attempt at a frame. It wouldn’t have worked, Mr. Heath, but in killing him you granted him his vengeance.” She pressed the intercom switch by the door. “Take him to holding, if you would.”

By the time we were ready to leave, the sun had gone down and the skyline had lit up. Amber closed the file, and that marked the end of our day. Nineteen hours had passed since the shooting; we’d come in a full six hours under one day from crime to arrest. There would be paperwork to do, and likely appearances before the tribunal, but that was not in our immediate future. Baker had left half an hour ago, and Carpenter a few minutes after. Amber had started on the paperwork, and I had opened my notebook to begin the task of recording the case. After we’d both made a measure of progress, we came to the unspoken consensus that it was time to go; thirty-five hours uninterrupted is a long time to be conscious.

“Interesting enough to publish, is it?” Amber said.

I lifted a shoulder. “Certainly, it was out of the ordinary.”

She nodded. We watched the floor indicator tick downward toward the motor pool. “No doubt,” she said, “you’ve some teeth-gnashingly horrid pun for a name.”

I smiled. “Well…”

We waited another half an hour before the technicians had our last piece of forensic evidence ready: the revolver the uniforms had found in the alley was a match for the bullet that had killed McKenzie, and it had been handled recently by Heath.

We prepared our interview room. Amber filled a few boxes with unrelated case file hard copy, and gave them all the prominent label ‘Dalton Heath’. Any experienced criminal would have dismissed it as amateur hour, but Heath didn’t fit that profile, and although I didn’t expect him to cave merely because we appeared to have evidence, I counted it as a factor that would work in our favor. I set a sheet of soft copy to cycle through a few photographs and left it on the table. Baker made a quick run to the evidence department and returned with a pair of revolvers matching the weapons involved in our case, bagged and labeled as though they did. Amber ran over the plan with me one more time, though she hardly needed the help after five years of experience with my methods. With our preparations complete, Baker and I retreated to the observation room, and Amber called for Heath to be brought in.

He sat with his head held high. Carpenter gave him a minute to confer with his solicitor, then ushered the solicitor out. Pausing in the doorway, the solicitor looked over his shoulder and said, “Don’t say anything. Not a thing!”

Before he could get anything else out, Carpenter closed the door on him. Baker looked from the window to me. “Won’t that make this a touch more difficult?”

“If I read him right, I wouldn’t think,” I said. “We’ll see, though.”

“Hello again, Mr. Heath,” Amber said, revealing nothing by her tone or expression. “I don’t believe you’ve met Inspector Carpenter. We’ve a few question more for you.”

“My solicitor has advised me to answer nothing. Do you have a writ?” Heath said. Outwardly, he was calm. He was talking, though, and I relaxed a little. If he would talk to us, we had an in.

Amber shook her head. “We’ve chosen not to compel testimony at this time.” Heath sat back while Amber continued. “Some new evidence has arisen.” She moved one of the revolvers into Heath’s line of sight. “Are you familiar with this weapon?” she asked. Heath remained mute. “This one, perhaps?” she said, sliding a second revolver over to its twin. “We have it on good authority that these weapons were purchased by Abbot McKenzie—and also by you. They were to commemorate the founding of your company, were they not?”

The sight of the two guns together had drawn a reaction from Heath. He unfolded his arms and placed his hands on the lip of the table before him, and his posture shifted, straighter and further from Amber and Carpenter. “He might nearly have said something there,” I said into my mic. “He’s on the defensive.”

In the hall, I fit my comm to my ear and called Amber. “Sam,” she said, right as she picked up. “We have excellent news. My friend in University Park found the dealer who sold the weapon we found. The buyers? Abbot McKenzie and Dalton Heath, on the occasion of the founding of Heath, McKenzie, and Company. They bought a matching pair and a display case.”

“Tying Heath to the murder. I, too, have good news—the woman I spoke to, Minerve Caswell, knew both McKenzie and Heath. She says that McKenzie became withdrawn two months ago, when we would have expected him to should he have been framing Heath. More usefully, she saw Heath last night, with timing that proves conclusively that Heath was not at home at the time of the murder. Her building has cameras.”

“Well.” Once again, I could practically hear her smile. “Sounds as though we’ve some footage to watch.”

We invaded and occupied a conference room on the 72nd floor, and ten minutes later the technicians had readied video feeds from Caswell’s buildings and nearly all of the street-level cameras in Upside. We started outside Caswell’s apartment, where we found Heath arriving. The time stamp read 22:34. We ran the video backward, switching cameras to follow Heath out of the building and along the streets. Several times, he ducked into the Underground, paying in cash to take trans that didn’t lead directly toward his destination.

“Suspicious,” said Baker.

I could hardly disagree. Heath had some rudimentary knowledge of fieldcraft, and it might have fooled passerby or the police on the street, but watching it from afar revealed it as amateurish. Even so, we nearly lost him on a change of trains in Upside Central. Eventually, we followed him back to the vicinity of my apartment. He went down an alley and emerged a minute later, and then we ran out of cameras. Amber ran the video back to the first glimpse we’d had of Heath, walking calmly away from my apartment building while the Police Arm established its cordon.

Amber dispatched some uniforms to search the alley where it appeared Heath had stashed the weapon. “I’m rather more comfortable holding Heath now,” she said. “I’ve a growing pileup of circumstantial evidence to point to instead of a hunch.” She smiled, satisfied. “Do you think we might be able to force a confession?”

I mulled it over. Heath was a proud man, but he wasn’t stupid, and I doubted he would have planned such a high-profile killing with any chance of escape. He didn’t seem willing to sacrifice his freedom for vengeance, unlike McKenzie.

It was almost immaterial, though. If Heath had planned to kill McKenzie so publicly, he would have known he would be caught, and he would have aired his grievances without hesitation; therefore, he had probably killed McKenzie in the heat of the moment. A confrontation, one thing leading to another, and in a flash of anger Heath pulling the trigger.

If that was so, he would be more reticent to admit to any wrongdoing, hoping to escape the tribunal without a conviction for murder, and we’d have to draw the confession out of him. If it were McKenzie I were playing, I would have laid out the evidence before him and let his mind do my job, but Heath would take more prodding than that. I sketched out my plan for Amber.

I made a note of it. It fit the timeline on which I still suspected McKenzie had gone murderously vengeful. I had no doubt Amber would have more questions on the topic of McKenzie, so I turned to the next page in my notebook, wiped the writing on it back into its memory, and said, “Tell me about Dalton Heath.”

“Abbot warned me about him,” Caswell said. “Frequently. The only way Abbot could have been more severe would have been to outright call Abbot a predator.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Would that have been apt?”

“He was something,” she replied. She looked down at her lap and shook her head. “I was a rising star at Heath, McKenzie, and Company when Anneli left Abbot—my success had more to do with my own talents than patronage, and Heath took notice of me after several of my projects met with approval directly from Sigmund Brenner.” A high honor indeed; the man who lent his name to the interstellar drive had a well-known preference for more negative sorts of reinforcement. “We met a few times for business, then over dinner. I ended up sleeping with him.”

I resisted the impulse to look up from my pad. She had delivered her last sentence with an air of exasperation, and after a moment to gather herself, she launched into the explanation I expected. “I couldn’t tell you what it was about the man. I knew it was wrong—he was married, and if Abbot had known, he would have considered it a betrayal of the worst sort. Even so, the affair went on for the better part of a year before I was able to call it off. Thankfully, Heath didn’t make an issue of it.”

It seemed that she had run out of words, so I filled in. “You’ve established to my satisfaction that you’re familiar with both Mr. McKenzie and Mr. Heath. What caused you to come forward?”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Heath turned up at my apartment last night, at about half past ten.”

I checked her address in the file, did some quick mental pathfinding, and came to the conclusion that an adequately fit man could have covered the distance on foot in the hour and a half between the murder and Heath’s arrival at Caswell’s apartment. “What happened then?” I said.

“He told me he needed a place to stay. I told him he could afford a hotel room,” replied Caswell. “I saw the news this morning, and I think I knew Heath was involved . It took me this long to convince myself.” She sighed, and I could see it gave her no pleasure to indict Heath, no matter what their relationship may have been.

I lifted my head and looked her in the eye. “Miss Caswell, does your building have cameras?” She nodded. I said, “Please excuse me for a while. We’ll likely have more questions later.”