Authors: Roger MacBride Allen
"Forgive me, Special Agent Wolfson," said Brox, "but I must point out that you are being a trifle mysterious."
"Yes I am," Hannah Wolfson agreed. "I wish to avoid planting preconceived notions or causing misdirection. It is because I wish all sides to proceed with open minds, and open eyes, that I do not say more. It is for the benefit of the investigation."
"It doesn't
sound
like it's for our benefit," Jamie Mendez said. "That evidence is important."
"It certainly is," said Hannah. "And we'll get to it. I'm even going to risk the wrath of the catering staff and get the ambassador's permission to make use of the food supplies in the canteen to make sure we can make the best use of the information we get off that coffee mug--and how's
that
for being mysterious? For the time being, you just go ahead and pull everything off the datapad Brox brought in."
"Yes, ma'am. Whatever you say, ma'am," Mendez muttered in English as he reached for the datapad.
Brox observed that the two human investigators were not in perfect harmony. One had ideas or information the other did not. That in and of itself was of interest. "I will handle the report on the coffee mug in the manner you have requested," he said.
Remdex will be glad of the break.
"Shall I proceed with the summary of our other information?"
"Please," said Hannah Wolfson.
He exhaled, and forced himself to speak with the same calm and professionalism he would have brought to any other case. It was not easy. He consulted his information plaque and read off the data it displayed. "Emelza 401 did in fact die of acute caffeine poisoning, brought on by a massive dose of the substance received through the mouth. The time of death can be fixed fairly sharply. She died at roughly 1950 hours, in your units of duration measure. Converting to your units once again, Medical Technist Remdex estimates there is a ninety-two-percent chance she died within plus or minus twenty-two minutes of that time, and a ninety-seven-plus-percent chance she died within plus or minus forty-four minutes of 1950.
"One slightly unusual feature of the case was that she apparently did not have time to swallow. There were chemical burn marks and so forth in her mouth and oral cavity, but not in--I am sorry, I don't know of a good word for this term in Lesser Trade--her swallowing tube. I expect we'll run into a few problems with technical and medical terms as we go."
He paused to steady himself, and continued. "The absence of any damage to any tissue below about this point"--he gestured to about a handbreadth below where his neck met the base of his jaw--"suggests that death was quite rapid, and came about as a result of direct absorption of the caffeine through the membranes in her mouth and oral and nasal cavities."
"Just a moment," said Hannah Wolfson, speaking carefully. "Forgive me for discussing unpleasant details, but it is necessary. In humans, at least, many sorts of trauma are not possible after death. There are other definitions for other purposes, but if this was a human who had been murdered by a fast-acting poison, we'd declare the moment that the person's heart--the person's circulatory fluid pump--stopped as death. The poison would travel around the body in the circulatory fluid, the blood. Once that heart, that pump stopped, the blood would stop moving almost instantly. The poison would therefore also stop spreading through the body. It might be transported by some other means, but only very slowly, and probably not very far."
"All that is quite similar to how things work in the Kendari body," said Brox. "I do not quite see what you are leading up to."
"Forgive me once again. Perhaps your personal involvement has caused you to miss a point. Perhaps it is a nonissue, and I am assuming Kendari are too much like humans. But let me be careful and thorough." Agent Wolfson checked her datapad and her handwritten notes. "Here we are. I wrote down some notes, and I have photos as well. I don't think you need to see them again, but if you do, I have them. I noted down 'apparent chem burns on the skin around back of mouth, also on visible int. mouth tissue. Inside of mouth, extensive inflammation.'"
"That is all just what I got done saying."
"Yes, but my notes go on. 'Also some discharge/irritation around visible eye and ear,'--she was lying on her side and I couldn't see the other eye and ear--'and inflammation and discharge from nasal openings.' It's pretty significant damage in all three areas. My photos show that."
Agent Mendez checked his datapad. "Mine too," he said. "I guess what Hannah is asking is, if death was that fast, and if the Kendari equivalent of a heart stopped and the circulatory system stopped, how did the poison get transported to the eyes, ears, and nose fast enough to do that much damage? In humans at least, that sort of inflammation and discharge is driven directly or indirectly by the flow of blood, or else by things like breathing and blinking and swallowing that can serve to move fluids--and whatever poisons are in those fluids--around. And none of those things happens after death."
Brox was stunned. How had he and the medical technist missed that? They had seen the discharge and inflammation, of course. Only a blind fool could have missed those. But they had forgotten that the processes that caused them ceased at death. How? "You are quite right," said Brox. "If anything, it sounds as if human bodies might be subject to more postmortem trauma than Kendari. For us, at least, they stop in effectively the same moment that circulation stops."
"Okay. Again, my apologies for dwelling on unpleasant details, but if she doesn't have burn marks in her throat, which means she didn't swallow, yet she
does
have trauma to her eyes, nose, and ears, which means she was alive for some time after the poison got in her mouth--that can only mean that she was holding the poison, the caffeine, the coffee, in her mouth for a fairly extended period before she died. Or am I missing something?"
"No, you're not," said Brox. "But it would appear I was."
Hannah Wolfson drummed her fingers on the table--a common signal of agitation and uncertainty among humans. "All right," she said. "I'm probably about to divulge something that's classified. It's one of those damned fool things where
we
know something that you
know,
and we even know that you
probably
know we know it--but they slap a secret label on it anyway.
"Here's the thing. We know various of your guys carry suicide pills on this or that sort of mission. The pills are pure caffeine--but they're coated with some sort of material that dissolves in about five seconds after it is swallowed. That coating is there because Kendari don't have internal nerves that respond to the sort of damage done by caffeine. The stuff will still kill you--it just won't hurt. The reason the coating is there is that the burning sensation in the
mouth
is so painful that no Kendari can suppress the gag reflex. The body instantly insists on your spitting the stuff out because it hurts so much. Is that all about right?"
"I don't know your sources," said Brox, "but they don't appear to have let you down."
"And you can report back to the Inquiries Service that the BSI has made the startling discovery that being poisoned can be very painful. I don't think I've just given away anything much. The point is that Emelza somehow or another held this stuff in her mouth long enough to cause damage to her eyes, nose, and ears without spitting it out. That might have happened if the killer held her mouth shut or something--but I didn't see any sign of any sort of struggle. Her fur--sorry, body felt--wasn't even mussed. Or was there something I missed?"
"No. There were no signs of a struggle. The various distortions of the body--the arched back, the rigid fists, the fixed grin, are all common features of a phenomenon that, once again, I don't believe even has a name in Lesser Trade. 'After-death paralysis' would be close enough."
"Human bodies often react in very similar ways after death. We call it rigor mortis, two words from an archaic human language that translate more or less as 'death stiffness.'"
"Excellent. I doubt the processes in humans and Kendari are identical, but near enough. But in any event, there was nothing about the body that indicated any sort of fight or attack."
The room was silent for a moment. "And here I thought we were getting together to clear up a few questions," said Jamie Mendez. "Instead we invent new ones."
"Wait a second," said Hannah Wolfson. "What about that handprint?
That's
a sign of a struggle."
"A battle with the dead, perhaps," said Brox, deeply puzzled. Then he understood. "Another mistake on my part," he said. "Something so well-known among Kendari we assume that all others know it. There are even sayings that derive from it. 'A touch only the dead would notice,' meaning something that happens late that is noticeable but doesn't change things, and 'a light touch leaves a deep mark,' meaning that even doing something small can have a big result later on."
"That's all very interesting Kendari folklore," said Jamie Mendez, "but what are you talking about?"
"It's a phenomenon related to death stiffness. If left undisturbed after death, the skin of a Kendari becomes rigid and tends to swell up a bit--but it is only when something happens to disturb the swelling that it becomes noticeable.
"The amount and duration and severity of the phenomenon vary depending on a number of different conditions, but everyone knows not to touch a dead body between, oh, let's see, in your measures it would be a period starting no sooner than a bit less than two hours after death, and lasting about three to five and a half hours from that time. If a body is touched during that period, some hours later, when the postmortem swelling and stiffening of the skin takes place, any place where the skin was disturbed
won't
swell up. The touch induces a set of subskin adhesions. The result is just what we saw--any point where the body was touched in that period after death will later show as an indentation when the postmortem skin swelling sets in."
"So
that's
why your people weren't surprised when that handprint appeared," said Hannah. "Human bodies don't react that way after death. We'd never seen that before--and we hadn't seen any marks on the body when we got there.
Our
people all assumed that, somehow, someone must have come in and poked at the body
after
we first examined it."
"But wait a second," Jamie Mendez protested. "Who
did
poke the body?"
"Obviously, Special Agent Milkowski," said Brox. "He enters the joint operations center shortly after I discover the body. He sees Emelza on the floor. He leans over her and touches her. Perhaps he is checking for signs of life or trying to awaken her."
"We haven't interrogated Milkowski yet," said Hannah, "but we have a hearsay version from the ambassador that contradicts that. According to our ambassador, Milkowski finds the body before you, touches nothing, and immediately retreats out the blast doors on our side of the joint ops center. The ambassador is then a witness and participant in what happens next. He calls Diplomatic Xenologist Flexdal, who sends you in to confirm the body is there."
So. Flexdal had started things out by deceiving the humans--and Brox himself. Brox knew he should have figured that out.
I didn't want to know,
he admitted to himself. But he also had to admit it--or at least hint at it clearly enough for his colleagues to understand--if he were not to cause even worse damage. "Clearly there was some error in communication. I was in the act of informing Flexdal of Emelza's death when the call came through from your ambassador."
"Right," said Jamie with an odd little smile. "We figured there might have been that sort of mix-up."
"But if the, ah, 'mix-up' happened that way, Milkowski and the ambassador could easily have believed that Milkowski was the first on the scene," said Hannah. "He wasn't lying. He was just wrong. Why would he lie about poking or not poking the body?"
"Maybe he didn't even realize what he was doing," said Jamie Mendez as he examined something on his datapad. "Maybe he was embarrassed about doing something as dumb and unprofessional as poking at a corpse. And maybe he didn't do it."
"I beg your pardon?" said Brox.
"I got a look at his simulant just a little while ago," said Jamie. "Judging from what his sim looks like, he's a pretty big guy, isn't he? A hundred-eighty centimeters, or maybe a bit under that. Bigger and taller than me, by a pretty fair bit."
"That's about right," said Hannah. "What of it?"
He passed his datapad to Hannah, and let her see what was on it. "Then how is it that the handprint he supposedly left is about one-third smaller than mine, and also smaller than yours? Okay,
maybe
he's got the hands and feet of a teenage girl, but I doubt it. People would notice."
Hannah handed the datapad to Brox. It was displaying various shots of the handprint, with scaling data overlays. Jamie silently held up his own hand, fingers spread out, to make the comparison. "And before you can ask, Brox," Jamie said, "I'd say it's essentially impossible for a human with large hands to compress or distort his or her hand or fingers to make a convincing small handprint. Unless there is something seriously weird about Milkowski, there is no way he made this print."
"You are quite right. We'll have to check, of course, and measure Milkowski's hand. But he didn't make this handprint." Brox laughed wearily. "When we worked together on Reqwar, it was a spurious human footprint that caused trouble."
"No," said Hannah. "It was a
shoe
print. Big difference--especially because it is vastly harder to create an even remotely plausible print of a bare foot--and harder still to make a real-looking fake handprint. We have to presume that this handprint is legitimate unless and until we have reason to believe otherwise."
"Let me back up on another point," said Jamie. "Remdex reports that Emelza died at about 1950, and he's more than ninety-seven percent certain that she died no later than forty-four--call it forty-five--minutes after that, or, 2035 at the outside. What time did you find the body?"