The Third Claw of God (18 page)

Skye hovered close, protectively. “You said a few words earlier tonight.”

“Really? I don’t remember.”

“It is to be expected,” Paakth-Doy clucked. “I know at that times of stress I revert to my first tongue, Riirgaani.”

I’d been around far too many dead bodies in my professional life, and had learned to face the cooling collections of meat as abstractions, more problems to be solved than truncated lives to be mourned. But being around another dead Bocaian, after all these years, was tearing the scabs off old wounds. For a few seconds I found myself eight years old again. I sniffed, rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand, and, unable to come up with any more relevant comments, murmured, “It must have been agony.”

“I would not want to die in such a way,” Paakth-Doy said.

“It’s not what you think,” Skye told us. “Based on my readings, when I worked with the species, the K’cenhowten were never torturers in the way you and I understand the term.”

“How so?”

“Torture means something else to the K’cenhowten. Their sense of pain is not acute by human standards. They know when horrific things are being done to their bodies, and they feel all the dismay you and I might expect when they see their persons ravaged, but there’s always been a certain upper limit to the agony they can feel, and it’s well within their ability to function. It’s a built-in limit that prevents them from being incapacitated by agony, and relieves them of our human tendency to faint or convulse or, for prisoners experiencing extended torture, mind-destroying shock.”

“That’s one hell of a survival mechanism,” I said. “But would it work with a Claw of God?”

“Especially with a Claw of God,” Skye said. “K’cenhowten’s age of darkness did feature several methods of execution unbearable by human standards, but the Claw itself fries most of the body’s internal pain receptors the same way it fries the rest of the organs. The point of the torture was not inflicting pain, but rather horror. Its victims were positioned in front of mirrors and forced to watch everything that made their lives possible drain from them, despite exoskeletons that remained intact. For a K’cenhowten, wrapped in its impervious shell, this would have upset their very perceptions of the world.”

Paakth-Doy shuddered. “I’d imagined…agony.”

“And you imagined correctly, Doy, but not the right kind. Imagine that you were a human prisoner in medieval times, slowly roasted over an open flame after first being provided a drug that incapacitated your ability to feel any pain whatsoever. Imagine you were able to watch your skin turn black, your fatty tissues bubble and run like water. Imagine that your agony was not great enough to drown out every other thought, or to give you the blessed escape of unconsciousness. Imagine instead having to dwell on what was happening to you, and its terrible permanence, at whatever length your captors decide it should last. Is that better? Or worse?”

I cut off Skye’s gruesome recitation. “Still, you’re talking about a K’cenhowten’s nervous system. Would the Claw of God affect a Bocaian or a human being the same way?”

“It could if calibrated,” Skye said. “What’s more, the device is designed to locate the heart and lungs—or, with minor adjustments, their alien equivalent—and shield them from the full effects of the pulse. The blow to those organs remains fatal, all by itself, but it’s the kind of fatal that would take several hours to kill. Meanwhile, they continue to feed the victim’s brain for several minutes, even as the rest of him turns to soup.”

Paakth-Doy had turned green. “You are saying that he might not have been aware of the terrible thing happening to him.”

“I’m saying that if he failed to notice the blood, he might have interpreted what he was feeling as fatigue.”

I rubbed my chin. “Meaning that we cannot use his participation in conversations to isolate the moment the Claw was used on him. Anything he said, after being moved to this chair, could have been said after he was already dying.”

Skye said, “He might have been dying even earlier, though that would have been cutting it very close for the killer, given how soon after the attack the Khaajiir would have started to…leak.”

I nodded, the ugliness of the crime scene receding as its value as evidence moved to the forefront. Signaling for silence from the other two, and sparing a quick look at the crowd over by the bar, which seemed to be enduring the search about as well as could be expected, though the Pearlmans in particular were eyeing their own small pile of valuables with the glumness of people who suspected that their own paltry wealth an embarrassment in the eyes of the people who owned their very world. There was no point in calling to Oscin to ask how things were going. If he found anything of importance, Skye would alert me.

So I folded my arms before my chest and circled the chair, examining it from all angles, sometimes leaning in close to appraise the scene from a fresh angle. As a place to obscure the fate of a sentient about to die from exsanguination, the chair could not have been better. Had the Khaajiir been sitting on one of the couches, the blood pooling beneath him would not have been hidden by raised armrests at either side. As he grew weak, he might have collapsed to one side, and drawn the attention of others who would have been able to isolate those who had been near him at the moment of the crime. Had he been sitting on one of the hard chairs beside the dinner table, the blood mixture would have spilled over the sides and formed a spreading puddle on the floor by his feet, where it could have been spotted by Mendez, Colette, or any diner who left the table for as long as thirty seconds. This chair, though? The seat tilted backward, forming a perfect reservoir for the accumulation of liquids. The cushions had absorbed some, too, slowing discovery of the murder even longer. The armrests, propping him up at either side, made him remain upright and thus seem healthy, if only dozing. In short, moving him here, before or after applying the Claw, virtually ensured that we would not be able to notice anything wrong for several minutes.

But was that a sad happenstance, or a deliberate strategy on the part of the killer? If the latter, it had been Jason and Jelaine who had moved him here, and Jelaine who had stayed with him for several minutes. That made them prime suspects.

On the other hand, Jason and Jelaine had enjoyed access to the Khaajiir for some time. Had they wanted him dead for some reason, they would not have needed to wait until they could commit the crime within a room filled with distinguished dinner guests.

Monday Brown and Vernon Wethers had also checked on him. Colette had been in and out of the room several times, and Dejah Shapiro had passed right by the Khaajiir on her way to doing something in her own suite. I hadn’t seen the Pearlmans approach him after the emergency stop, but either of them could have clapped the Claw of God against the Khaajiir’s back when the lights went out. Anybody upstairs during the crime could have been the killer, and anybody downstairs could have provided material aid. All it would have taken was decisive action during a single moment when everybody else was distracted. And that’s all it would take again if the assassin was not finished, and I was right to expect a third Claw of God…

I was still considering the foul implications of that when the people over at the bar started shouting. 9

MAGRISON’S WOMAN

Oscin had found an octagonal chip, about the size of pinky fingernail, and so well integrated with the skin it was imbedded in that it was impossible to discern a seam where flesh ended and metal began. I knew, without examining it further, that it would be only a few molecules thick, that it would resist any attempt to remove it, and that the thousands of infinitesmal filaments extruded on its subdermal side would be threaded throughout the wearer’s nervous system, forming a braid of sorts that would culminate in a seething terminus somewhere in the meat of the brain. Worse, though, was the pattern of raised dots, at its center, forming a letter that to my eyes had always resembled a pair of serpents swallowing each other whole. The letter, corresponding to the sharpest of the three consonants Mercantile devotes to theM

sound, did not belong to the Mercantile alphabet at all, but rather to another, famous only as the birthplace of a destroyer not seen in civilized space for almost thirty years. The mere sight was enough to make my ears throb with trapped blood. I released the forearm bearing the hateful artifact, turned my back on the glaring figure it belonged to, and confronted the three Bettelhines, now huddled together in whitening silence. “Did you know about this?”

Jason Bettelhine shook his head.

Jelaine had paled in a manner that suggested blood loss on the scale of the Khaajiir’s. “I swear to you, Counselor. I had no idea.”

Philip said nothing. But I noticed that Monday Brown had moved a little closer to him, like a mother cat attempting to comfort a kitten crying after a great fall.

My fury colored my vision, like a red curtain turning everything behind it the color of blood. “You did know, didn’t you?Didn’t you ?”

Philip Bettelhine’s mouth had become a horizontal slash as white as a bloodless wound. “I would watch your tone of voice, Counselor. You’re on our ground.”

“To hell with my tone of voice! Answer my question!”

He rolled his eyes. “I knew. So did Father, if you’re wondering. And my grandfather before him.”

“And you had no problem with that?”

“Historical precedent. Whenever any great war ends, the victors imprison some of its leaders, execute others, release a few more, and recruit the remainder to serve their own cause. Your own Dip Corps employs some intelligence assets guilty of crimes as vile as anything this poor woman ever did. Hell, look at yourself. Are you in any position to complain about any system that puts war criminals to work?”

I trembled with fury. “Wedon’t have any of Magrison’s people working for us. Wehunt Magrison’s people.”

His pitying look only threw fuel on the fire. “That’s naïve, Counselor. Your Confederacy has several of Magrison’s people on the payroll. If you want, I’ll provide you with a list.”

The wearer of the chip, Dina Pearlman, met my gaze with a cold, defiant look of her own, her eyes transformed from the red weeping springs they had been a few minutes before to dry, reptilian marbles absent not only of fear but any human warmth. It was impossible to reconcile that look, and its dangerous intelligence with the vapid, fluttery idiot she had been pretending to be only a few moments before. Her husband, by contrast, had deflated utterly, the cheerful confidence he’d projected replaced now with resignation and, yes, relief. There was no surprise in his eyes, just like there was no fear. He mostly looked like he just wanted to sit down.

I jerked a thumb his way. “What about him?”

“Farley? He’s who he’s supposed to be. A third-generation corporate citizen. He married her the day she entered our employ.”

The Porrinyards noted: “That sounds like a marriage of convenience.”

The woman known as Dina Pearlman expelled one brutal, explosive laugh. “Of inconvenience is more like it. The man’s useless to grown women. If I told you what age he prefers—not just single digits, but low single digits—you’d all forget your civilized scruples and kick him to death right now.”

“Possibly,” the Porrinyards said. “You might have to wait your turn.”

Farley Pearlman just hung his head, waiting for it to be over, so much a puppet of forces beyond his control that he had nothing to do or say once those strings were cut. Dejah Shapiro placed her drink back on the bar and dabbed her lips with a napkin. “You know, Philip, every time I dare hope that your family can achieve some kind of collective redemption, new evidence wipes my face in the cold, ugly reality. I’m honestly sorry I came.”

“You’re a fine one to talk,” Philip said, his own voice just as controlled.

“Really?” she asked. “What have I done?”

“You’re married to a criminal, for starters!”

Dejah’s smile communicated disappointment that his best shot had been so pathetically feeble. “I’ve been married to a couple of different criminals, in my time. Indeed, I’ve already mentioned Ernst. Which one are you referring to right now?”

“That moron you left at home!”

“Oh, Karl.” She picked up her drink, treated herself to another drink, savored the taste, put the glass down, and replied, “You’re absolutely right. My current husband, whom I love with all my heart, has a criminal record. That’s common knowledge. He’s also of subaverage intelligence. That’s a verifiable medical fact. He was led astray by people with will greater than his own. What’s your excuse?”

For a tenth of a second or so I thought Philip was going to hurl himself at her throat. Dejah must have thought so, too, because she turned toward him, her expression calm but her chin outthrust, her arms free, and her posture transformed into a warrior’s.

Before anything could happen, the Porrinyards stepped between Philip and Dejah, positioning themselves back to back with a calm efficiency that placed any possibility of the confrontation turning violent in the distant past. They spoke, as they’d moved, as one.

“Andrea? I believe you have the subject of your first interview…”

There was another tiresome pissing match with Philip over whether I’d be permitted to speak with Mrs. Pearlman alone, or whether I’d have to bring Monday Brown and Vernon Wethers along, as Bettelhine counsel. I might have argued longer about the idiocy of suggesting that she even needed counsel when interviewed on the home soil of a power that had no interest in prosecuting her for past crimes, but I was eager to get past the preliminaries and into a room with a monster who, unlike myself, had committed her crimes as an adult. I let Brown come along.

The five of us (Paakth-Doy, Brown, Wethers, Skye, and me), escorted Mrs. Pearlman into my suite, taking seats around the outer room in what, without consultation, turned out to be a perfect circle with the defiant Mrs. Pearlman at dead center. She appropriated an ottoman for her own use and perched there with legs crossed, as comfortable in her interrogation as she would have been making arrangements for a formal party.