Many Words

For a moment, I thought she might get up and walk out, so desperately did she stare at the door, but after a moment, a marked change came over her. She sat straighter, stopped drumming her fingers, and looked me in the eye for the first time. She spoke, and sounded determined. “I knew both of them.”

Again, she volunteered nothing further, but I could see the effort it took her to hold onto her nerve. Before she had a chance to lose her grip on it, I said, “We’ll start with Mr. McKenzie. How did you come to meet him?”

“I was a student at the University of Nexus, in the theoretical physics program. Abbot—” she sniffled, closed her eyes for a heartbeat, and pushed on “—Abbot was a common sight, recruiting for his firm. We met after one of his events. He took a liking to me.”

“He was still married at the time?” I asked.

She looked almost horrified, and hurriedly corrected me. “It was nothing like that. I think he saw some of himself in me, or maybe he thought of me as a surrogate daughter.” She let out a laugh that was half-sob. “It does sound trite, doesn’t it?”

“There is an element of reality to most cliché,” I said. “Please, go on.”

“We were close,” she said. A moment passed, and she said, “We only rarely had the chance to meet. Even so, after I finished my program—three years ago, it would have been—Abbot offered me a position with his company. I accepted, and we were able to have lunch together every week or two.”

“Was his wife aware of your meetings?”

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and I looked back to my pad. She seemed to find it easier to talk into space which happened to be occupied than to someone concrete, and she went on. “I couldn’t say for sure, but I would think so. He spoke often of her, and he conveyed her best wishes on more than one occasion. He took it very hard when she left, and I haven’t seen him outside of work for a month or two.”

“Could you be more specific as to the last time you spoke?”

She mulled it over, ticking off weeks on her fingers. “Two months ago, nearly on the nose.”

The desk sergeant gave me the file and the interview room number, and mentioned that Heath had been moved to a waiting room. I stopped there on my way and took a quick look in through the window in the door. Heath paced impatiently in front of the sofa, and his solicitor spoke at a handset comm. I frowned. If Heath or the solicitor had a working relationship with any of the local tribunes, keeping Heath detained could quickly become uncomfortable for Amber’s superiors, and soon after for Amber herself.

I moved on before they noticed me, and by some measure of good fortune I found my way to the interview room. This one was used for cooperative persons of interest, and I found it almost cozy. A coffee table stood between pairs of leather-upholstered chairs, and the cityscape hanging from the wall gave the room an airier feel than most windowless rooms seventy floors above the ground.

A young woman sat in one of the chairs facing the door. She was, in a word, stunning; shapely from tip of toe to top of head, pale-skinned and finely-featured, with wispy blonde hair that would have gently wafted around her head on the slightest breath of air if it hadn’t been gathered in an understated bun. I confess I was so distracted that I didn’t notice just how nervous she was, drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair and fixing me with a deer-in-the-headlights stare. I glanced down at the file to remind myself of her name: Minerve Caswell. Attempting to salvage some of my professional detachment, I took the chair across from hers and put on a calm, inviting face. “Miss Caswell, yes?” At her nod, I smiled. “I’m Dr. Hill, consultant with the Investigative Arm.” That was a calculated introduction; the idea of a police consultant was likely a novelty to Caswell, and I hoped it would suggest that I meant special treatment rather than the more truthful thought that all of the inspectors were busy. “Inspector-Lieutenant Brighton asked me to speak to you. You say you have information regarding the Abbot McKenzie case?”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes darted to the door and then to the painting, and although she looked as though she had plenty more to say, she said none of it.

Before the silence could become oppressive, I said, “Were you acquainted with either Mc. McKenzie or Dalton Heath?”

“Good. Lieutenant Li just rang; they ran ballistic tests on our recovered revolver, and it was not the weapon that killed Abbot McKenzie. She thinks it may have been the same model, though. Either way, it seemed to me that we must have heard two shots, and Sam’s retelling—you agree that I didn’t lead him on?—bears me out. I’m afraid, Sam,” she said, “that it isn’t a suicide at all, unless it’s much more unusual than even you had suspected.”

The sun cast slanting bars of light through the windows and across the floor. It lit a few dozen scenes not altogether unlike ours. Amber had already thrown my pet theory onto the rocks, and soon after she dashed it to pieces with a call to the district’s Department of Dome Maintenance. She proposed that McKenzie, with a gun in hand, would have fallen backward off the balcony, firing into the air as he fell. Just as she expected, a dome repair crew had filled a chip in the dome not more than a few hundred yards from the scene of the crime. I gave my theory a moment of silence, then reflected that a murder that looked like a suicide that looked like a murder could hardly help but rank highly on the list of most interesting crimes I had seen.

The investigation, on the other hand, had taken a decided turn for the uninteresting. The prevailing opinion was that Dalton Heath was the killer, but the absence of hard evidence left us little to go on. Amber, Baker, and Carpenter had sent uniforms to go over Heath’s apartment again. Amber had high hopes that the favor she’d asked would pay dividends, although she remained customarily silent on precisely how it would do so. Nothing required our immediate attention, so the inspectors took the opportunity to put some time in on their other cases. I rescheduled the appointments I had missed, fetched coffee, and made shadow puppets. I was thinking about a nap when Amber took a call and said to me, “Sam, we’ve a witness coming in who says she has information on the McKenzie case. Could you have a word with her? I would, but…” She waved apologetically at her desk, which had been resurfaced with hard copies of a half-dozen case files. “You understand.”

“Are you sure?” I said, holding my hands in a sunbeam and wiggling my fingers. The shadows danced across her desk. “That last one was rather good.” She snorted and went back to her work, and I went down to the seventieth floor.