084: INTERROGATION

“So you guys didn’t find any bloodstained clothing, then?” I ask. “Any signed confessions? Nobody broke down crying and explained why and how they did it?”

“Not yet. They are, very suspiciously, doing a lot of laundry at this exact moment, so I daresay we were too late on the bloody clothing front.”

“That’s not suspicious. They’ve been doing laundry all afternoon. You know how it is; you move, and it’s a good opportunity to get round to washing all your linen and stuff.”

“Whatever the reason, the murderer would be an idiot not to throw their clothing in there. No matter; I’ve already asked Celi to start doing full health workups of all the suspects. If one of them has so much as a bruised pinkie, we’ll know.”

The suspects are all in various stages of inebriation. The spectrum runs from Tal, who looks mostly normal (if rather agitated by the current situation) to Lina, who only remains upright with considerable assistance from Denish. Sam and Sunset keep an eye on the group while Captain Sands and I commandeer a bedroom well out of earshot for questioning.

“Who’s our main suspect, in your opinion?” the captain asks as we push the bed back against the wall to make a bit more room.

“Denish,” I admit reluctantly.

“Right.” The captain goes to get Denish.

Denish takes a seat on the bed and glowers at me. Yeah, I probably deserve that. We’re supposed to be friends, and here I am accusing him of murder.

“Where were you between seven and nine o’clock tonight, Mr Calhurn?” the captain asks.

“In here,” Denish insists. “Went to check aft engines for a little bit. Then back in here.”

So he did leave the ring. The aft engines are in the opposite direction to the murder, though. “The aft engines aren’t on,” I point out. “They’re broken. Why run off to check them?”

“Trying to see if they were sabotaged. We have big mystery on our hands, remember? Tal suggested new way for sabotage, I wanted to check them. But mostly I am here all night with my friends.”

Tal? I exchange a glance with the captain. Tal’s one of the less likely suspects, in my opinion. Ke doesn’t tend to get as directly upset about things like Lyson projects and isn’t really the hands-on type, but as support, providing Denish with an excuse to leave and maybe covering for him in the computer system? Maybe.

“Someone can corroborate your presence over the time in question, except for when you left in the opposite direction to check the engine?”

Denish shrugs. “Maybe? We moved around a lot. Did not exactly keep timesheets.” He fixes his eyes back on me. “You really believe I would kill like this, Aspen?”

“You’ve done it before,” Captain Sands says, coldly.

Denish swears at him in Texan. “Did not know she was there! She had pulse suppressor! What are we supposed to do, spend hours every ship scanning for hiding people that are never there? Who stows away in a fuel storage room?! I cut airlock of stolen ship without checking enough, yes! I did not kill two crewmates with kitchen knife!”

“The Friend was stabbed through the heart from behind,” I say, as gently as I can. “Celi says that it would take a lot of strength to do that. More than perhaps any of the suspects have, except you.”

“Then Celi is wrong! You really believe – ?”

“No, ’Nish. I don’t for one second believe that you could have done something like this. But I – okay, look. Who do you think did it?”

“Nobody in here would do this. You know this, Aspen. You know us. It must have been one of the new crew, and this captain, who has never trusted any of us from the start – ”

“Every single new crew member except for the two dead were playing computer games at the time. All of us had eyes on each other. I agree with you; none of you could’ve done this, in my opinion. I can’t imagine it of any of you. But at least one of you did. Which means that my judgement is useless here, and frankly I’d rather find out who was guilty as soon as possible so I can go back to trusting everyone else again. Someone in this ring killed two crewmates, ‘Nish. That’s a fact that we have to deal with. Don’t you want to know who it was as badly as I do?”

“It wasn’t me,” he grumbles.

“Alright,” Captain Sands says, “thank you for your time, Mr Calhurn. Can you please send in Ms Li Null when you leave?”

Denish stalks out.

“What do you think?” Sands asks me when he’s gone.

“You know what I think,” I snap.

“That he’s a good man, you’ve relied on each other for survival many times, and he’d never do something so horrible, yes. Well, I hope you’re right.”

“I’m wrong about at least one of them.”

“Yes, but if it isn’t Denish then they’ll be easier to catch, since they quite probably injured themselves stabbing the Friend with that much force.”

“What are you going to do when you catch them?” I ask.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Confine them to a ring and let an established court handle it when we get to Hylara.”

“That’s an option, yes.”

“Is it the one you’re going to take?”

“That depends on what the specific circumstances of the killing were. My primary interest is making sure that our murderers aren’t an ongoing threat to the rest of the crew.”

I narrow my eyes at him. In his home nation, I remember, the death penalty is in use and not considered controversial.

Okay. New task. Find out who the killer is, and somehow make sure that Captain Sands won’t kill them.

Tinera stalks in (slightly unsteadily, she’s far from sober), leans on the closed door and glares blearily at us. Captain Sands gestures to the bed, inviting her to sit down. She just crosses her arms and stays where she is.

“Well? You have questions?”

“Did you kill Dr Sunn or the Public Universal Friend?” Captain Sands asks.

“Obviously not. I was locked in here, remember?”

“The airlock doors have been unlocked for you for hours.”

“What? Why?”

“That’s no longer important. The point is, if you discovered such a thing, it would be the perfect alibi for you to sneak out and – ”

“I’m sorry, captain, but are you stupid? No, I didn’t discover a mysteriously unlocked door and run off on a murder spree.” She shifts her stance, stumbling a little.

“Did you or did you not threaten to cut the throat of any supporters of Lyson projects?”

“I was joking! Also I said I’d kill people who were actually committing Lyson projects on the ship, if I remember right. Not just someone having bad politics. How do you even remember that? I barely remember that.”

“Of all the people on this crew, you’ve shown the most violent tendencies. Your fight with Heli – ”

“That bitch deserved far more than what I was able to give her, and if I was going to kill anyone on this fucking disaster of a spaceship, it’d be her, not a psychologist with bad politics and a brain damaged servant. Furthermore, if I had killed those two arseholes, I wouldn’t be denying it, I’d be bragging about it. So do you have any evidence beyond ‘the mouthy girl must have done it’, or are we done here?”

“We’re done for now, but – ”

Tinera leaves. Captain Sands shouts after her, “Send Tal in!”

We stare at the closed door.

“Is it just me,” the captain says, “or is this crew extra disrespectful today?”

“They already don’t like us and we broke up their party to accuse them of violent murder,” I point out. “What do you expect?”

“They like you.”

“They did until I came with you to break up their party and accuse them of murder. I think I’m burning a lot of bridges right now.”

“Hmm. Unfortunate.” There’s no regret or contrition in his tone. Maybe this is the reason Captain Sands wanted me here – not to play fill-in psychologist, but to make my old friends dislike me. Like I wasn’t feeling bad enough. I shoot him a suspicious look, but he’s not looking at me; he’s staring contemplatively off into space, rubbing his chin.

“Do you think she’s innocent?” he asks.

I shrug. “I mean, yeah. That interview gave us no information. There’s not really anything to discuss there. Although, come to think of it, Tinera has a really weak stomach, especially for blood. So everything else aside, I don’t think she’d go after people with a knife like that.”

“The person she was convicted of killing was murdered with a knife,” Captain Sands points out. “Even if she runs off to throw up afterwards, she’s demonstrated that she is capable of – oh, hello, Mt Smithson. I was worried that she wouldn’t send you in.”

Tal perches on the edge of the bed for a few seconds, then gets up to pace restlessly. “So you guys want to know what I know about the murders, right?”

“You know something?” I ask, surprised.

“Not very much. But I mean, yeah. That’s why I’m here, right?”

“Did you kill them?” Captain Sands asks.

Tal looks floored by the question. “What? Me?!”

“Yes. You.”

“Of course not! Seriously? You think that little of me? You honestly think that I would kill two crewmates – ”

“I know, Tal,” I say, “but somebody – ”

“ – with a knife? What is this, the stone age? ‘Oooh, look at me with my state of the art murder weapon, the newly invented wedge! Next I’ll run someone over with a wheel, or push them out of a tree!’ Come on. If I was going to kill those two, I’d have waited for them to go through an airlock, then altered Amy’s emergency programming again to lock them in and dropped the air pressure to the minimum the systems allow when there’s a person inside, then freeze-lock the system so they’d suffocate before Denish could find them and cut through. Which would be easy to do because this computer system is absolute garbage and I can think of three ways to freeze-lock the air pumps just off the top of my head. Then the whole thing looks like a computer error, see? Or,  you wait until your victim needs to go through – ”

“Okay, okay,” I say quickly, not really interested in an hour-long lecture of all the ways we could die on this spaceship at any time, “we get the point.”

“A knife. Come on. Whoever did this was a fucking idiot, and I’m not a fucking idiot.”

“Who do you think did it?” I ask.

Ke shrugs. “I wasn’t there.”

“You said,” the captain breaks in, his voice already gaining that edge characteristic of somebody trying to have a productive conversation with Tal, “that you had information about the murders?”

“Oh, yeah. They didn’t take place until after seven fifty-seven.”

“How do you know that?” Captain Sands asks.

“Well, that’s when I left the ring, and there weren’t any corpses in it then.”

Sands and I exchange a glance.

“You were in Network and Engineering Ring 2?” I ask.

“Yeah. The password lockout on wrong guesses for Reimann’s password had passed so I went to squeeze in a few more brute-force attempts and got distracted looking through Amy’s architecture. I didn’t see the other two but I could hear both of them talking when I left at seven fifty-seven.”

That greatly narrows our timeline. Nobody checked the clocks, but we estimate that the Friend probably went to help Renn at about seven o’clock. We know that I raised the alarm at twelve minutes to nine. Celi says that the body had very definitely been dead when I found it, and probably by the time I left Network and Engineering Ring 1, although ke couldn’t give a better estimate than that. So we’d figured that the murder itself probably happened between seven and eight-thirty.

Eight and eight-thirty is a much tighter window. If Tal’s telling the truth, this narrows us down to half an hour in which the murders must have happened.

“Did you run into anyone else on your way back to this ring?” Captain Sands asks.

“Nope,” Tal says. “I mean, except Adin, obviously. But nobody suspicious.”