Biding Time Page 2

  I nodded, impressed at her ambition. “Anybody else come by to ask about her since she was killed?”

  “Well, Detective McCrae called.”

  “Mac came here?”

  “No, he called. On the phone.”

  I smiled. “That’s Mac.”

  * * *

  I headed over to Gully’s Gym, since it was on the way to my next stop, and did my daily workout—treadmill, bench press, and so on. I worked up quite a sweat, but a sonic shower cleaned me up. Then it was off to the shipyards. Mostly, this dingy area between the eighth and ninth circles was a grave for abandoned ships, left over from the early fossil-rush days when people were coming to Mars in droves. Now only a small amount of maintenance work was done here. My last visit to the shipyards had been quite unpleasant—but I suppose it hadn’t been as bad as Megan Delahunt’s last visit.

  I found Lennick’s Folly easily enough. It was a tapered spindle, maybe a hundred meters long, lying on its side. The bow had a couple of square windows, and the stern had a giant engine cone attached. There was a gap of only a few meters between the cone and a brick firewall, which was now covered with soot. Whatever had been left of Megan’s shiny new body had already been removed.

  The lock on the cockpit door hadn’t been repaired, so I had no trouble getting in. Once inside the cramped space, I got to work.

  There were times when a private detective could accomplish things a public one couldn’t. Mac had to worry about privacy laws, which were as tight here on Mars as they were back down on Earth—and a good thing, too, for those, like me, who had come here to escape our pasts. Oh, Mac doubtless had collected DNA samples here—gathering them at a crime scene was legal—but he couldn’t take DNA from a suspect to match against specimens from here without a court order, and to get that, he’d have to show good reason up front for why the suspect might be guilty—which, of course, was a catch-22. Fortunately, the only catch-22 I had to deal with was the safety on my trusty old Smith Wesson .22.

  I used a GeneSeq 109, about the size of a hockey puck. It collected even small fragments of DNA in a nanotrap, and could easily compare sequences from any number of sources. I did a particularly thorough collecting job on the control panel that operated the engine. Of course, I looked for fingerprints, too, but there weren’t any recent ones, and the older ones had been smudged either by someone operating the controls with gloved hands, which is what I suspected, or, I suppose, by artificial hands—a transfer offing a transfer; that’d be a first.

  Of course, Mac knew as well as I did that family members commit most murders. I’d surreptitiously taken a sample from Jersey Delahunt when he’d visited my office; I sample everyone who comes there. But my GeneSeq reported that the DNA collected here didn’t match Jersey ’s. That wasn’t too surprising: I’d been hired by guilty parties before, but it was hardly the norm—or, at least, the kind of people who hired me usually weren’t guilty of the particular crime they wanted me to investigate.

  And so I headed off to find the one surviving child of Megan and Jersey Delahunt.

  * * *

  Jersey had said his son Ralph had been born shortly after he and Megan had come to Mars thirty-six Earth years ago. Ralph certainly showed all the signs of having been born here: he was 210 centimeters if he was an inch; growing up in Mars’s low gravity had that effect. And he was a skinny thing, with rubbery, tubular limbs—Gumby in an olive-green business suit. Most of us here had been born on Earth, and it still showed in our musculature, but Ralph was Martian, through and through.

  His office at the water works was much bigger than mine, but, then, he didn’t personally pay the rent on it. I had a DNA collector in my palm when I shook his hand, and while he was getting us both coffee from a maker on his credenza, I transferred the sample to the GeneSeq, and set it to comparing his genetic code to the samples from the rocket’s cockpit.

  “I want to thank you, Mr. Lomax,” Ralph said, handing me a steaming mug. “My father called to say he’d hired you. I’m delighted. Absolutely delighted.” He had a thin, reedy voice, matching his thin, reedy body. “How anyone could do such a thing to my mother…”

  I smiled, sat down, and took a sip. “I understand she was a sweet old lady.”

  “That she was,” said Ralph, taking his own seat on the other side of a glass-and-steel desk. “That she was.”

  The GeneSeq bleeped softly three times, each bleep higher pitched than the one before—the signal for a match. “Then why did you kill her?” I said.

  He had his coffee cup halfway to his lips, but suddenly he slammed it down, splashing double-double, which fell to the glass desktop in Martian slo-mo. “Mr. Lomax, if that’s your idea of a joke, it’s in very poor taste. The funeral service for my mother is tomorrow, and—”

  “And you’ll be there, putting on an act, just like the one you’re putting on now.”

  “Have you no decency, sir? My mother…”

  “Was killed. By someone she trusted—someone who she would follow to the shipyards, someone who told her to wait in a specific spot while he—what? Nipped off to have a private word with a ship’s pilot? Went into the shadows to take a leak? Of course, a professional engineer could get the manual for a spaceship’s controls easily enough, and understand it well enough to figure out how to fire the engine.”

  Ralph’s flimsy form was quaking with rage, or a good simulation of it. “Get out. Get out now. I think I speak for my father when I say, you’re fired.”

  I didn’t get up. “It was damn-near a perfect crime,” I said my voice rock-steady. “Lennick’s Folly should have headed back to Earth, taking any evidence of who’d been in its cockpit with her; indeed, you probably hoped it’d be gone long before the melted lump that once was your mother was found. But you can’t fire engines under the dome without consuming a lot of oxygen—and somebody has to pay for that. It doesn’t grow on trees, you know—well, down on Earth it does, sort of. But not here. And so the ship is hanging around, like the tell-tale heart, like an albatross, like”—I sought a third allusion, just for style’s sake, and one came to me: “like the sword of Damocles.”

  Ralph looked left and right. There was no way out, of course; I was seated between him and the door, and my Smith Wesson was now in my hand. He might have done a sloppy job, but I never do. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  I made what I hoped was an ironic smile. “Guess that’s another advantage of uploading, no? No more DNA being left behind. It’s almost impossible to tell if a specific transfer has been in a specific room, but it’s child’s play to determine what biologicals have gone in and out of somewhere. Did you know that cells slough off the alveoli of your lungs and are exhaled with each breath? Oh, only two or three—but today’s scanners have no trouble finding them, and reading the DNA in them. No, it’s open-and-shut that you were the murderer: you were in the cockpit of Lennick’s Folly, you touched the engine controls. Yeah, you were bright enough to wear gloves—but not bright enough to hold your breath.”

  He got to his feet, and started to come around from behind his funky desk. I undid the safety on my gun, and he froze.

  “I frown on murder,” I said, “but I’m all for killing in self-defense—so I’d advise you to stand perfectly still.” I waited to make sure he was doing just that, then went on. “I know that you did it, but I still don’t know why. And I’m an old-fashioned guy—grew up reading Agatha Christie and Peter Robinson. In the good old days, before DNA and all that, detectives wanted three things to make a case: method, motive, and opportunity. The method is obvious, and you clearly had opportunity. But I’m still in the dark on the motive, and, for my own interest, I’d like to know what it was.”

  “You can’t prove any of this,” sneered Ralph. “Even if you have a DNA match, it’s inadmissible.”

  “Dougal McCrae is lazy, but he’s not stupid. If I tip him off that you definitely did it, he’ll find a way to get the warrant. Your only chance now is to t
ell me why you did it. Hell, I’m a reasonable man. If your justification was good enough, well, I’ve turned a blind eye before. So, tell me: why wait until your mother uploaded to kill her? If you had some beef with her, why didn’t you off her earlier?” I narrowed my eyes. “Or had she done something recently? She’d struck it rich, and that sometimes changes people—but…” I paused, and after a few moments, I found myself nodding. “Ah, of course. She struck it rich, and she was old. You’d thought, hey, she’s going to drop off soon, and you’ll inherit her newfound fortune. But when she squandered it on herself, spending most of it on uploading, you were furious.” I shook my head in disgust. “Greed. Oldest motivation there is.”

  “You really are a smug bastard, Lomax,” said Ralph. “And you don’t know anything about me. Do you think I care about money?” He snorted. “I’ve never wanted money—as long as I’ve got enough to pay my life-support tax, I’m content.”

  “People who are indifferent to thousands often change their ways when millions are at stake.”

  “Oh, now you’re a philosopher, too, eh? I was born here on Mars, Lomax. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by people who spend all their time looking for paleontological pay dirt. My parents both did that. It was bad enough that I had to compete with things that have been dead for hundreds of millions of years, but…”

  I narrowed my eyes. “But what?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “No? Why not?”

  He paused, then: “You got brothers? Sisters?”

  “A sister,” I said. “Back on Earth.”

  “Older or younger?”

  “Older, by two years.”

  “No,” he said. “You couldn’t possibly understand.”

  “Why not? What’s that got—” And then it hit me. I’d encountered lots of scum in my life: crooks, swindlers, people who’d killed for a twenty-solar coin. But nothing like this. That Ralph had a scarecrow’s form was obvious, but, unlike the one from Oz, he clearly did have a brain. And although his mother had been the tin man, so to speak, after she’d uploaded, I now knew it was Ralph who’d been lacking a heart.

  “JoBeth,” I said softly.

  Ralph staggered backward as if I’d hit him. His eyes, defiant till now, could no longer meet my own. “Christ,” I said. “How could you? How could anyone…”

  “It’s not like that,” he said, spreading his arms like a praying mantis. “I was four years old, for God’s sake. I—I didn’t mean—”

  “You killed your own baby sister.”

  He looked at the carpeted office floor. “My parents had little enough time for me as it was, what with spending twelve hours a day looking for the god-damned alpha.”

  I nodded. “And when JoBeth came along, suddenly you were getting no attention at all. And so you smothered her in her sleep.”

  “You can’t prove that. Nobody can.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “She was cremated, and her ashes were scattered outside the dome thirty years ago. The doctor said she died of natural causes, and you can’t prove otherwise.”

  I shook my head, still trying to fathom it all. “You didn’t count on how much it would hurt your mother—or that the hurt would go on and on, mear after mear.”

  He said nothing, and that was as damning as any words could be.

  “She couldn’t get over it, of course,” I said. “But you thought, you know, eventually…”

  He nodded, almost imperceptibly—perhaps he wasn’t even aware that he’d done so. I went on, “You thought eventually she would die, and then you wouldn’t have to face her anymore. At some point, she’d be gone, and her pain would be over, and you could finally be free of the guilt. You were biding your time, waiting for her to pass on.”

  He was still looking at the carpet, so I couldn’t see his face. But his narrow shoulders were quivering. I continued. “You’re still young—thirty-four, isn’t it? Oh, sure, your mother might have been good for another ten or twenty years, but eventually…”

  Acid was crawling its way up my throat. I swallowed hard, fighting it down. “Eventually,” I continued, “you would be free—or so you thought. But then your mother struck it rich, and uploaded her consciousness, and was going to live for centuries if not forever, and you couldn’t take that, could you? You couldn’t take her always being around, always crying over something that you had done so long ago.” I lifted my eyebrows, and made no effort to keep the contempt out of my voice. “Well, they say the first murder is the hardest.”

  “You can’t prove any of this. Even if you have DNA specimens from the cockpit, the police still don’t have any probable cause to justify taking a specimen from me.”

  “They’ll find it. Dougal McCrae is lazy—but he’s also a father, with a baby girl of his own. He’ll dig into this like a bulldog, and won’t let go until he’s got what he needs to nail you, you—”

  I stopped. I wanted to call him a son of a bitch—but he wasn’t; he was the son of a gentle, loving woman who had deserved so much better. “One way or another, you’re going down,” I said. And then it hit me, and I started to feel that maybe there was a little justice in the universe after all. “And that’s exactly right: you’re going down, to Earth.”

  Ralph at last did look up, and his thin face was ashen. “What?”

  “That’s what they do with anyone whose jail sentence is longer than two mears. It’s too expensive in terms of life-support costs to house criminals here for years on end.”

  “I—I can’t go to Earth.”

  “You won’t have any choice.”

  “But—but I was born here. I’m Martian, born and raised. On Earth, I’d weigh… what? Twice what I’m used to…”

  “Three times, actually. A stick-insect like you, you’ll hardly be able to walk there. You should have been doing what I do. Every morning, I work out at Gully’s Gym, over by the shipyards. But you…”

  “My… my heart…”

  “Yeah, it’ll be quite a strain, won’t it? Too bad…”

  His voice was soft and small. “It’ll kill me, all that gravity.”

  “It might at that,” I said, smiling mirthlessly. “At the very least, you’ll be bed-ridden until the end of your sorry days—helpless as a baby in a crib.”

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