Luz Warren and her deputy emerged from Airlock C-7, advancing a few steps onto the Moon’s surface. Long shadows stretched ahead of them from the lunar dawn, and a gibbous Earth hung above the ridgeline near the horizon. The edge of a solar farm lay before them, with sifters combing the regolith on the northern periphery. None of the suited figures working on the farm seemed to take notice of them.
"Someone was supposed to meet us," Luz said. She walked ahead, turning her head to scan to her right. "Can you see it?"
Norris Enfield looked the same way. "Yes," he said, pointing.
Luz heard a low murmur over the helmet radio, as Norris ordered his suit computer to magnify the image on his visor. She did the same, and soon spotted it, more than half a kilometer away. The body lay face-down, eerily still.
Someone soon arrived from the direction of the farm. "Sorry I’m late," said her voice over the radio. "Lambertson told me to show you to the body."
"We’ve found it ourselves, thanks," said Luz. "Let’s go, Norris." She and the deputy started off, but soon she noticed the farm worker following a couple of steps behind. "Yes?"
"Well . . ." Her eyes wouldn’t settle, bouncing between the sheriff and the distant body. "He did tell me to take you there."
"We can handle it. You can go back to work." Luz made it sound like an order, and the worker obeyed, with disappointment. Luz turned to catch up with Norris.
They traversed ground covered with tracks from wheels, treads, and boots. Those tracks began thinning out, and within a hundred paces had vanished altogether, leaving pristine regolith. They were making brand-new tracks on the surface.
So had whoever lay dead, now just a hundred meters away.
A single line of disturbed regolith led back to Airlock 8, the northwest exit to the new tophouse. Luz magnified on it to be sure. Yes, it was a single line of bootprints, two and a half meters apart, marking a casual stride. They stretched a third of a kilometer to Airlock 8. There was a cluster of prints and tracks around that airlock from the recent construction, but it extended no more than thirty meters.
Luz looked back at the body. She had thought the original caller from the solar farm was wrong, that the body’s suit must be oddly colored or patterned, giving a false impression. He was right, though. The corpse–the man–was wearing nothing but regular indoor clothes. Outvac boots on his feet were the only concession to the unlivable environment.
He couldn’t have gotten here on his own. Yet here he was.
Luz turned on her recorder, and turned her head slowly to take in the whole scene. She zoomed in on the line of footprints. They seemed to match his boots, and each other, but she’d analyze them later to be sure. She could tell already, she could take nothing in this case on faith.
Norris was already crouching by the corpse. Luz joined him, moving with quick care. "Don’t disturb him yet," she said.
"I’ve got it recorded," he grumbled.
"I want a reverse angle, Norris, in case it reveals something." What Norris muttered in reply didn’t quite sound like a subvocal command to his computer.
Luz walked around the corpse, giving it and the prints around it a wide berth. She spent a moment recording the scene from the opposite side, then retraced her steps.
"Capillary ruptures," Norris said when she arrived at his side. He pointed at the spiderweb patterns on the body’s hands. "He died in vacuum."
Luz nearly snapped back that of course he did, before remembering her own advice about assumptions. "All right, let’s get a better look at him. Get the legs."
She took hold of his arms. They could have lifted him easily by the torso, but she didn’t want limbs flailing, beating at the regolith and the vacuum, heaping more indignity on him. They lifted him up and over, setting him down a few meters away, face up.
He was still real. Short, round-headed, starting to go bald even though he was still young. His face was in a rictus, blotched by burst blood vessels, purple in places, but not as grotesque as Luz had feared. Dried blood rimmed his mouth and nostrils. His clothes were simple cotton shirt and pants, though with a hideous belt buckle, huge, knobby and ugly. There were no airtight fabrics that might explain something. It was quite commonplace–which was the impossible thing.
Luz instructed her suit computer to send his image to the station, for identification. She handed Norris the medkit off her toolbelt, to take temperatures of the corpse while they still might mean something. She got ready to take regolith samples.
Just before she inserted the first scoop, though, she saw a rod. It was three decimeters long, made of green glass, and was half-embedded in the regolith where the body had fallen. Norris had no more idea what it might mean than she did. She put it in a large bag, then took her samples of the regolith: away from the body, within the body print, within the bootprints.
As she finished, Luz felt a tremor through her soles. Artemisia Dowling was driving up with the cart they had ordered when they first got the call. A stocky figure jogged beside the cart, wearing a labor suit. Luz moved to intercept him before he could disturb the scene.
"I’m Rob Lambertson," said a grating voice over the radio. He was supervisor for the solar workers, the man who had called in the report. He craned his head to look past Sheriff Warren. "Is that Ulrich?" Before Luz could react, she saw the outline of a magnification window inside his visor. "Yep, it is."
"You know him, Mr. Lambertson? You expected this?"
"It’s Ulrich Zeiss, part of our team." He finally looked back at Luz. "And he didn’t report for work today. I kinda figured it might be him."
Luz blew out a breath. "Missy," she told the cart driver, "get him back inside and to the coroner’s. Norris, I’ll need you to notify next of kin." Once they both acknowledged, she gave Lambertson back her full attention. "We need somewhere where we can talk."
The "hut" was a rolling airspace for outvac workers, providing bathrooms, crowded seating for meals, and some minimal space for anything else that needed unsuited bodies and air. The early lunch shift was coming in as Luz questioned Lambertson in a corner that didn’t stay isolated very long.
"Ulrich always looked and sounded a little worried, but it had gotten worse the last few months. He seemed almost paranoid sometimes. Whatever it was, it was hurting his work: he was missing goals, having little accidents that took time to fix up. I was getting ready to fire him." He slumped into the back of the bench. "I kinda feel bad about that now."
"Oh?" Luz put on her best innocently questioning look.
"Well, isn’t it obvious? He must’ve known someone was out to get him, and they finally did. Poor guy. He should’ve come to us. We look after our own, you know."
She got more information from Lambertson, then moved on to question other co-workers. They confirmed most of what she had learned. Ulrich Zeiss was introverted but inoffensive, and everyone accepted that. His work had been suffering of late, and they tolerated that less.
"He was dragging down our unit. We were in danger of getting a late penalty. Now we really are."
Jamie Munkacs took another fast bite from her sandwich. Her toned body and shaved head–a convenient style for outvac workers, even if Luz had never been tempted to affect it–made her intensity all the sharper.
"Sounds like his co-workers resented him," Luz said.
Munkacs gave her a sharp look, but only on half-strength. "We’d be pretty stupid to murder someone because his work was slipping. His replacement would have been even worse in the short run. It takes time to get experienced, to fit in with the team." She gave a shrewd smile. "It’s probably the same way in a police force."
It took some willpower for Luz not to say what it could really be like. "It would only take one person, not thinking straight."
"I suppose so."
Luz ran through the last few questions, a bit faster than she intended, and excused herself. "If you need more from me," Munkacs said, "you can get in touch with me. Anytime." Luz nodded and kept going, not sure she had been reading that right.
The rest of her interviews were far more routine, and settled two unresolved questions she had. One, glass rods were sometimes used by the solar farm workers, for handling of objects that might carry electrical charges. Two, the farmers had no vehicle in inventory that did not make tracks, and nobody there knew of even an experimental vehicle that could levitate. The notion that someone could have dumped the body and faked the footprints seemed less plausible now than when she first thought of it.
She headed back to the tophouse, her visor dimming the sun that the panels around her were drinking in. For two-thirds of her life, ever since the First Murder in Space had fired her young imagination and so many others, she had imagined solving a case like this. Now she had one, one that might even overshadow Chuck Clark and the infamous Lears.
All her education and experience in the intervening two decades had taught her better than to want to profit from other people’s misfortunes. No good law officer wanted personal aggrandizement at that price.
Even so, out here, alone, in the razor-sharp sunlight, Luz Warren could admit to herself the thrill she felt–and the fear that her long-ago wish had gotten her more than she could handle.
Deputy Enfield had already returned to the station and uploaded his video of his interview with Ulrich Zeiss’s parents into the case files. Luz went into her modest office and pulled up the public records on them. Artur Zeiss was listed as a general store owner. Stella Zeiss was a tech writer, who doubled in newslogging. Luz knew the name: she read Zeissgeist now and again. They were both around sixty, but looked older in the video.
Both took Norris’s news hard, in different ways. Artur sat limply in a chair, hovering near catatonia, giving soft, short answers to Norris’s queries. Stella became frantic, and almost unstoppably voluble, as though she could explain away the news. Norris kept pressing his interrogation, asking whether Ulrich had any enemies.
"Oh, his whole profession was an enemy. So intense and competitive, people backstabbing each other for any edge. You’ve heard what it’s like, Deputy. And maybe, maybe that was the perfect cover. You might not know, we came over during the European Civil War, the three of us. The Continental Council still calls people like us traitors, and you’ve heard how they persist against such people on Earth."
"After seventeen years, Stella? Why would they still care about us?"
"These are possibilities, Artur. The man needs possibilities. Of course, it could have been someone in love with Sariah, and jealous. That’s Ulrich’s girlfriend, a very nice young woman. They’re very . . . they were very close. Oh my, my competitors will have a field day with this, try to discredit me with it. You know what these people are like. But you don’t suppose. . . ."
Luz managed to glean some useful information from the increasingly painful interview. Ulrich Zeiss would never hurt anyone, according to his parents. He kept to himself a lot, tinkering at home, a common hobby for outvac workers like him. He bought parts from his father’s store. And of course, he had a girlfriend named Sariah.
Luz sifted through the public listings. There were two Sariahs in Peirce County: one was aged twenty-five, the other six. There was only one more Sariah in all of Mare Crisium, in her seventies and married. Picking which one was the Sariah she needed was easy, not that she should have needed to.
"That wasn’t your best interview," she told Norris, after she had him shut the door. "You pressed the Zeisses too hard. They were too distraught to be very reliable."
Norris glowered. "I was as persistent as I thought they could handle. The mother was eager to talk."
"Too eager. Most of what she said was hysterical, useless."
"How do we know that yet? I wasn’t going to hang back, murmur my sympathies, and miss getting some crucial piece of information from them. We’re going to need all the help we can get on this weird case."
Luz suppressed her own glare. "Then you should have gotten Stella Zeiss to give you the last name of Ulrich’s girlfriend. I just had to look it up myself."
Norris stammered, then fumed. "What did that take you, one minute? So now I’m too persistent, and I don’t ask enough questions. Is that it?"
"I did say it wasn’t your best interview." She moved on before Norris could finish spluttering. "I need someone to examine Ulrich Zeiss’s residence." She uploaded the address to a pad, and handed it over. "You can take Missy or Jack to help, if you want."
Norris read the pad, his lips pressed tightly together. "No, boss, I can handle this." He pivoted and walked out.
Luz sighed, and collected a vidset from her locker in the corner. She had to go break the news to Sariah Smith, if she didn’t already know. All else being equal, she would rather have traded jobs with Norris.
Sheriff Warren found Sariah at home, red-eyed but dry-faced. Sariah’s boss had taken her aside where she worked as an organic technician, told her the news, and let her go home early. Sariah explained this the first minute Luz was in her apartment.
"But . . . it wasn’t right. I feel like a fraud." Sariah dabbed at her face with a cloth.
Luz inclined her head, the right passive pose with which to draw someone out. Was Sariah about to incriminate herself?
"We . . . broke up just a few days ago. My boss didn’t know that. I shouldn’t have taken advantage of her that way. I shouldn’t . . . I shouldn’t feel it like this when. . . ." She broke off, shuddering with each breath.
Luz gave her a moment, then made gentle inquiries into Ulrich’s work, his habits, his friends and enemies. The answers gave her the same general impression that she had gained from everyone else. Sariah’s particular closeness didn’t alter the view, except for the emphasis she placed on his solitary habits.
Luz took a shot. "That’s what broke you two up, isn’t it?"
Sariah nodded. She had regained her composure, and the sharp question didn’t dislocate it. "It got to be too much. It was like Rick was afraid of me, or us. He was getting paranoid. Maybe he knew. . . ."
"Knew what?" Luz asked, after a silent moment.
"Knew that someone meant him harm. From what you described, he was murdered, wasn’t he?"
"We don’t know that yet, Ms. Smith. We may not know for a while."
Sariah dropped her head into her hands. "Find out, Sheriff. Please. I hate thinking that there was something I could have done, if I had known, if Rick had told me something, anything . . . just find out, will you?"
"Of course," Luz said.
Just outside the station, Luz heard the cry. "Sheriff! Stop!" She turned to see Stella Zeiss hurrying toward her.
"Sheriff, I just learned how you found Ulrich. All of it–and I had to find it out from The Lunar Chronicles, of all places. Why didn’t your man give me all of the details?"
Luz almost smiled. The one thing he had done well in that interview, Stella was mad about. "Deputy Enfield was trying to spare you the more bizarre aspects of what we found, Ms. Zeiss. He thought it would upset you and your husband."
"I’m upset now! Bad enough that my son is dead, probably murdered, but I have to be last logger in Crisium with the facts." She waved a pad at Luz. "You owe me, Sheriff. You owe me full accountings of the evidence, of your work. And exclusive!"
Before Luz could pull together a reply, someone else came running up. "Sheriff Warren!" he called. "I’m Joe Sorrell, of The Lunar Chronicles. Could I–"
"Leave us alone, you ghoul," Stella Zeiss said, interposing her body. "Can’t you show the slightest respect–"
"Stop!" Luz Warren got their attention. "I will not stand here indefinitely to answer questions from the media."
"You’re imposing an embargo?"
"But my son!"
"I will hold a news conference at six this evening in the station conference room. Anyone with a press license is welcome to participate. Now, I have to get back to investigating this matter, so you’ll excuse me."
She got inside the station with no hint of pursuit. Halfway down the hall, she stopped and took out her pad. She put the impromptu announcement she had just made onto the official police notice board. She had just made her day busier, but it was necessary.
Before she could put the pad away, a corner icon began flashing. She pulled in the message: the medical examiner had news for her. The coroner’s office was only a few buildings away, but couldn’t be reached by inside corridors. She had to go back outside to get there, and who knew whether the newsloggers were still out there, sniping away.
Luz headed back to the main door, hesitating only briefly. She could have called the doctor for the news, but she knew she should be there herself. Respect for the dead demanded that much.
Dr. Helene Dryer looked as she always did, severe and dispassionate. Luz had donned a gown before entering the examiner’s room, without having to be told, but that barely softened Dryer’s countenance.
"The subject died of asphyxiation," Dryer said without preamble. "There is internal pulmonary damage consistent with sudden, full decompression. Computer, display image eight."
"I don’t need to see that." Luz looked away, with just a glimpse of gray and red lingering in her head. She set her eyes instead on Ulrich Zeiss, his body lying on the table, mostly covered and restored from whatever disassembly Dryer had performed. "I trust your expertise."
"Hm. There are also surface capillary ruptures, consistent with vacuum exposure while the subject was still alive. You can see it on images–"
"I can see it now." Red traceries stretched across his face and neck, along with livid blemishes. Were they lighter now? A trick of the lighting, Luz thought. "Could you establish a time of death, Doctor?"
Dryer sighed. "Body temperature data were useless. He was exposed to direct sunlight for some time, and I can’t say how long he was in night or shadow before that."
"I can probably get that information," Luz said.
"I’m not sure how much it would help." Dryer bent over a display, and muttered into its voice interface. "There’s almost no data on body heating and cooling in vacuum. I could try to obtain a few fresh corpses for experiments–"
"Don’t." She couldn’t imagine explaining that at a news conference.
"That decision isn’t entirely up to you," Dryer said tartly. "I could always use the subject body itself, though the data–"
"You will not, and that is entirely up to me."
Dryer absorbed the sheriff’s burning stare without a flinch. "You did turn the body when you discovered it."
"For identification." But then she left it face up. "I didn’t think it–"
"Don’t apologize. It actually helped a little. Patterns of livor mortis have shifted slightly in the few hours since you turned the body. You might see the lividity is fainter here." Dryer pointed at Ulrich’s face. "Gauging precise timing through lividity fixing is impossible, especially with our light gravity. I can only approximate that Mr. Zeiss died twelve to twenty-four hours before he arrived here, between noon and midnight yesterday."
Luz knew she wouldn’t presume to narrow it any further. It meant the latest Zeiss could have died was just at lunar dawn at Tophouse C. "That helps," she said, not quite sure yet how. She took out her pad, to send more instructions to her deputies on facts to track down.
"In your professional opinion, Doctor," she asked as she tapped away, "could a man go a third of a kilometer on foot with no air?"
Dryer sniffed, then gave it a moment’s thought. "If he had hyperventilated on pure oxygen for ten minutes, then exited from full pressure to vacuum running all-out with his nose pinched, he might conceivably have made it that far, staggering from pain by the end. From what little I’ve heard of the evidence, that’s not how this man got there, is it?"
"No." Luz put the pad away. "When will I have your full report?"
"This evening, assuming you don’t want a more intrusive autopsy to gather very abstruse data."
"Like whether he was hyperventilating on pure oxygen before he died?" Luz groaned softly. "I’m sorry, but for this case, I may need every abstruse fact I can get."
Dryer frowned. Medical examiner’s work came on top of her full-time practice, and it was not an avocation she loved. "Then you’ll have my preliminary report this evening."
"Thank you, Doctor. I’ll be sure to read it."
Six hours later, she had it on a reader as she sat in her living room, but her eyes kept sliding off the text. She set it aside and rubbed her face. She needed to be fresher if she was going to retain and use all this information. She leaned back and closed her eyes. "Computer, give me sunset."
She could see the light dimming through her eyelids, shifting into yellows and reds. The rush of a breeze reached her ears. Immediately she felt tension seep away. She could start ordering things in her mind, after this most disorderly of days.
The news conference had been endurable, and even a bit exciting. There were thirteen connections when she began, large outlets and newsloggers alike, from as far as Tranquillitatis and Serenitatis, and even one Japanese service from Procellarum. By the end, there were twenty, their images jostling on the displays before her. She had seen from the time lag, and confirmed in the logs later, that one of the new ones was from Earth. It was happening just as it had twenty-two years ago.
For their part, the reporters ran through their questions fast, and rushed without a pause into speculations cloaked as questions. Half of them posited obviously absurd theories. The other half suggested obscure tests for obscure evidence, expecting Luz’s force to have unlimited time and inexhaustible manpower to pursue them all. She finally had to cut them off, promising another conference the next morning.
She couldn’t blame them for speculating, not even Stella Zeiss. All the questions were there in the circumstances of Ulrich’s death. Common sense said what she had seen was impossible, so common sense was misleading her somewhere.
Those footprints loomed large. Just one set led from the airlock to the body–but outvac boots were common, their tread patterns standardized. Someone wearing the same size and style as Zeiss could have made the prints. Airlock C-8’s log recorded opening and closing once at half past eight yesterday, within Dryer’s time range, and nothing for weeks before that. The log did not record identities, though: nothing said it couldn’t have been another person.
But then, where did that person go? Walking backwards to retrace one’s steps perfectly was impossible. She had examined images of the closer prints, and none of them showed any signs of double impression.
Could that person have been carried away instead? It made sense, if some kind of floating platform had gone out to drop the body in the first place. But no such floating platforms existed, not to general knowledge. Could someone invent such a thing secretly, to use in a murder?
Luz stopped following the string. She was becoming like the media people, looking for results now. She had to give it time. Plenty of new evidence would come in, tonight, tomorrow, soon enough. She should remember Chuck Clark’s example, and let it take the time it needed.
Unless this was only the first murder.
She forgot that brief worry, and opened her eyes a crack. The light was deepening past amber, fading into lavender and salmon. The wind sounded a little softer. She had used a fan once to simulate the breeze, but rejected it. It wasn’t the same.
She hadn’t felt a breeze or seen the colors of a real twilight since she was eight and the family moved up to Luna. Plenty of people used similar nature programs for relaxation. For her, it was more like nourishment, like a vitamin she could get nowhere else. She could live without it–she had for that first decade–but she would feel the deprivation.
Luz absorbed the ambience, so thoroughly that when the doorbell rang, she jumped and cried out. "Off, off," she said. Only when the light was white again, and the wind gone, did she ask, "Who’s there?"
"It’s Shep."
She wasted no time opening the door. Shepard Gubbins stood at the threshold. "Would I be interrupting an official investigation if I came in?"
"Oh, get in here." Luz pulled him inside, and soon found herself pulled right back, into a long kiss. She let him enjoy his show of strength. Shep had the height of someone born and raised on the Moon, with a well-tended build. His skin was a shade lighter than hers, coming from similarly mixed parentage.
They finally disengaged. "Is your safety course over?" Luz asked.
"Next week. I’ve got a good class this time through. I think this generation’s learning their precautions young. It’s much easier to get them to take proper measures with vacuum and radiation." He headed toward the kitchen space. "What can I make you for dinner?"
"Sorry, I’ve already eaten." She had thrown something together earlier, to keep her going.
"Oh." Shep shrugged. "Anyway, it was a good class. I wish your fellow had been up to their standard."
"My–what do you mean?"
"I mean if that Zeiss guy had known better–or if we had serious safety measures on equipment and facilities–he wouldn’t have gotten himself killed in that crazy way."
Luz couldn’t let that pass. "Shep, he was a third of a kilometer from the nearest airlock. How could this possibly be an accident?"
"How could it possibly be deliberate?" His hands began sweeping around, the way they did whenever he got exercised about something. "It’s a ridiculous way to murder someone, a huge waste of effort."
"Exactly. The circumstances are so crazy, they obscure the routine evidence that would normally lead to a killer."
"But what if there is no killer?" Shep said. Luz’s face hardened, and he quickly backed off. "Sorry, Luz. This is your work; you know it better than I do, even if I have a little expertise myself. I just can’t help thinking all the newsposts are coloring your judgment, throwing out lurid, outrageous theories. You know how they think. Murder’s a better story, so that’s the angle they chase."
"Are they really that obsessed?"
"It’s the lead story on every log this side of Sere–" His eyebrow quirked up. "You mean you don’t know?"
"I haven’t ready any logs," Luz said. "I held the news conference, and that got good attendance. Since then, though, I’ve been too busy." A smile peeked out. "It’s really been a big story, Shep?"
"Oh yeah, it’s big."
The smile grew into a grin, before she noticed and wiped it away. "It was better when I didn’t know. It’s going to be a distraction."
"Really? A second ago you looked like you enjoyed the idea."
She still did. As good a guy as Shep was, though, she wasn’t going to admit things like that. Luz shook her head. "I am glad you came, Shep, but I do have this case tonight."
Shep’s face fell, rallied for a moment, then dropped back. "Yeah. I’ll get out of your hair."
"You understand, it might be a while before things get back to normal."
"I understand. I won’t get in your way." He walked up to give her a gentle, grazing kiss. "But I’m not psychic. You’ll have to call me if you need anything, even if it’s just one of my fabulous meals."
That brought Luz’s smile back. Shep went to the door, turning at the threshold. "Call soon," he whispered. Before he could move, Luz leaped forward to get a parting kiss from him. She held the door open to watch his walk, down the apartment hall.
Luz returned to her chair and the coroner’s report lying next to it. For a second, she felt a tug toward her main workstation, where she could link up to any of the newslogs within seconds. With an effort, she stayed where she was and started scrolling through the autopsy report again.
Her second news conference the next morning had over thirty active links, many of the new ones relayed from Earth. She had to go over some old news for their sake, as well as encapsulating Dr. Dryer’s data. They were more demanding with their questions, and at once wilder and more dogmatic in their speculations. Luz had to be firmer in deflecting them.
By the time she returned to her office, she felt like she had spent an hour in an exercise cage. She barely settled in before she had to head off again. The assayer had results.
She rang his office chime twice, without reply. She knocked on the door, more out of frustration than expectation. A moment later, Jae Cheung opened up.
"Sorry, Sheriff." Cheung’s hand was fiddling below one ear, turning on one of his implants. "I was concentrating and forgot to hook the lights up to the bell. I felt your knocking through my shoes."
"Don’t worry about it." Luz rarely had reason to notice Cheung’s deafness. After that conference, though, she felt a twinge of envy for someone who could turn his ears off. "You have something for me?"
"Yeah, and it’s pretty interesting." Cheung bounded back into his office, stopping at the display next to his mass spectrometer. "First off, Ulrich Zeiss did make all those footprints, or at least his boots did. The regolith stuck in their treads matches the chemical composition of that in the ground the footprints crossed."
"Does that count all the ground? Outside the airlock, as well as where he was found?" Luz had had Deputy Enfield gather samples there late yesterday, one of several ideas she had thought of late. It hadn’t helped his mood.
"It tallied up fine . . . except for the area around the body. That’s the interesting part." Luz tensed, but Cheung didn’t notice. "There was a spike in volatiles there, stronger the closer it was to Zeiss. Judging by the amounts and isotope ratios, it was indoor air."
Her tension came unstrung at once. "You mean regular, breathing air?"
"Pretty much. Oxygen content tested a bit low, and water vapor and carbon dioxide were high. With their low partial pressures and the small sample size, it’s an acceptable variation."
Luz thought for an instant. "Was the amount of air about equal to a deep, held breath?"
"No. Much more than that–about a couple hundred times more. Got a pad?" She pulled one out of her pocket. "I’ll give you the numbers." Cheung took the pad, linked it to his spectrometer, and started to upload.
Luz spent longer with her thoughts this time. "Could the air have been the exhaust of a vehicle hovering on columns of expelled air?"
Cheung’s eyes widened. "An air-cushioned hovercraft, Sheriff? In vacuum?"
"Just a hunch, Cheung, but could it?"
"You’re asking the wrong person. . . ." His hand reached for a spare pad on his desk. "But how much mass would it be carrying?"
"At least one human body, plus its own weight."
"Oh." He started doing calculations on his pad. "This would be without rockets or nuclear engines, right? There weren’t any exhaust traces or radioisotope spikes."
"No, just regular, breathing air."
Cheung bent over his pad. "And the exhaust’s directed down. I originally assumed a spherical release, so that means less total air to create the concentrations measured." He worked away. When his head came up, he was shaking it. "My calculations are rough, but you could only hover a couple of seconds at most on that amount of air. I don’t mean fifteen or twenty. I mean two."
Luz pondered that. "It might just be enough time to drop the body and go."
"Go on what propulsion? It’d be out of–oh, right. The exhaust trail would go elsewhere. I guess it could, but I can’t help you with that."
"Could you help if I got more samples, from a ring around where Zeiss was found?"
"Yeah. It’d have to cross somewhere. And if it’s just a volatiles analysis, it wouldn’t take long to go through them."
"I’ll get them for you." Which meant, most likely, that her deputies would. She needed to gather statements of where people were the night before last, from coworkers, parents, and Sariah. She needed to find mechanics and engineers, who could tell her properly whether this air-blowing contraption was at all practical. And . . .
And all those jobs needed every hand the force could spare from the regular work of keeping Peirce County safe.
She gave a quick nod to Cheung. "I’ll get them right now."
Some long, indeterminate time after what should have been lunch, Luz returned to her office. She granted herself only a minute to rest in her chair before leaning in to work at her computer. A note from Jae Cheung said he’d have early assay results by evening. She would have plenty to occupy her until then.
Station computers had been analyzing records of those prints since yesterday, and they finally had results. Luz called up the animation, a recreation of Ulrich Zeiss’s last walk, hoping to see something strange, unexpected, suspicious.
What she saw was a figure loping out of Airlock C-8, covering ground with easy floating strides. The figure slowed, shuffled, then turned around a couple of times. It came to a stop facing the tophouse. An instant later the feet spasmed, and the figure tumbled and fell like a marionette with its strings gone slack.
Luz backed up the recording, and played the last quarter with confidence ratings displayed in the corner. The figure was over 99% on approach from the airlock, dropping a bit as Zeiss came to a stop. It lost points during the turning, and more at the fall, but it was still 88% overall.
For a simulation this complex, it was nearly as close to certainty as one could expect, but it still didn’t feel right. The way that figure–looking quite a lot like Zeiss–casually walked into vacuum, looked back the way it had come, and died was unsettling, unnatural.
She had to remind herself that the head positioning was an assumption: maybe he was looking elsewhere. It didn’t change the fundamental bizarreness, or her suspicion that the truth lay in that other twelve percent.
Her visits to the vehicle pools had fleshed out Jae Cheung’s off-the-cuff hovercraft speculations, without actually resolving the plausibility of her notions. Such a machine could work, and its thrust could just be spread through enough nozzles to avoid blowing the regolith around in ways the eye couldn’t miss. Such a craft would be dreadfully wasteful of air, though, enough so to break a few old laws still on the books.
Such charges would be nothing, of course, compared to murder. If it were the only way to commit a murder so bizarre that nobody could solve it, it would be worth it. And there was a possibility stranger still.
Luz called up Deputy Enfield’s file on Zeiss’s home. She saw his pictures of Ulrich’s workroom, an organized mess filled with chips, wires, optics, batteries, leaves of sheet metal, and myriad other parts, almost all of them small. She saw no pumps, compressors, nozzles, or large framework pieces.
If Zeiss had built the hovercraft, he had either used up all the telltale materials, or covered his tracks by disposing of the excess. He must also have had an outside work area, because she couldn’t see how he could get such a thing through his door.
Luz put her theories aside, and worked on facts. She combed through the statements she and her deputies had collected. No evasions or contradictions leaped out at her, and nobody pointed fingers at anyone else, not even Stella Zeiss this time. She made a few calls to check some statements, but everything held up.
That was bad news if this was murder: some possible perpetrators should be emerging by now. Neither did it mean that accident or suicide made any more sense.
Everyone had theories, of course. A few of the vehicle mechanics she had questioned had offered their own speculations, some informed, some just thinking they were. They all seemed to be following the newslogs and the established outlets closely.
Luz thought to put it off, but she had finished the work on her desk, those new assay results still weren’t in, and her mind was too drained to produce any genius insights. She pulled up a list of all the news sites she had been avoiding, and started reading.
It was as bad as she had suspected. They were all trying to outdo each other covering the story. When that didn’t mean producing their own solutions to the mystery, it meant peeling her apart for not solving the case–after all of thirty-six hours!
They all seemed to know what she should have done differently. Two newslogs thought she should have sifted for DNA samples from the regolith. They were far more likely to be on Zeiss, and Dr. Dryer hadn’t found any. One log thought she should have taken the temperature of the regolith beneath Zeiss, to determine exactly how long he had lain there. That fellow didn’t know how complex heat conduction equations could get between rock and regolith and human flesh. Yet another thought Luz should have measured the depth of Zeiss’s footprints, to see whether someone of his weight had made them.
That was actually a decent idea, and she set the computer to calculating it from its simulation. It felt good to get something positive out of this exercise.
All of the sites had pictures. One had a surveillance camera shot that caught Zeiss on its edge, the isolated tracks still pristine before the police had gotten there. Two others claimed to have much better shots, also with the original tracks, but Luz could see they were fakes. Shorter shadows meant they were taken later in the Lunar day, and once she noticed that, spotting the traces of digital erasure of cluttering prints was not hard. She could prefer misdemeanor fraud charges against them, once more important work was out of the way.
Another site’s simulation stopped her cold for a second, before she noticed some subtle differences in how simulated-Zeiss moved. If someone had gotten hold of the police simulation, there would have been bad trouble, either for a hacker who stole it, or a fellow cop who had presumably taken a bribe to sneak it out. Neither was anything she needed now.
Then there was Zeissgeist. Stella’s latest posts talked about the police interviews, the questions about her alibi and her husband’s. It was disturbing to see the woman expose herself this way when she should have been grieving, but she had little doubt that the viewing numbers made it seem worth it.
Luz blanked the screen. She had thought of skimming her mail and voice filters, hoping to find a nugget like that print-depth suggestion. Now, though, she couldn’t bear to confront the obsessions some people might have with the case.
Her perspective was skewing fast, and she needed to get it back. She made her own call, wondering whether Shep would understand why she wasn’t going to him first.
"Hello?"
Luz put on a smile. "Hello, Chief. I was hoping I could have a talk with you, to–"
"Have you eaten? If you get here in an hour, I’ll have dinner ready."
"Oh, that’ll be fine."
Chuck Clark was slowing down in his retirement. His body, tall for an Earth-grown man, was starting to sag, and more pink scalp showed through his while hair. Frontier living, even on a half-tamed frontier, was rough on a body, and the gentler gravity only mostly compensated. Still, Chuck held up well for his age.
He brought a bowl of fresh chicken salad and a juice decanter to the dining table. "Looks good, Chief," Luz said as she helped herself.
"I can always make it look good. That’s the easy part." Chuck smiled, crinkling his whole face. "Now, I hope you didn’t come here expecting tips on your case. That isn’t my job any more, and it’d make for a pretty lousy hobby."
"No, sir." It was her job now. She wouldn’t have it if Chuck hadn’t believed she could do it.
"As for help outside the case–it’s no secret that the media are flocking to you. They’re even looking me up for comments, and it has been a while."
Luz allowed herself a smile, and picked at her salad. "I never did ask you how you handled it."
"It’s not tough. Assert your powers sensibly. Give the newshounds a feeding time: nothing outside that, but level with them when it’s their time. Let ’em know that you have the power, and that you aren’t exploiting it."
"I . . . didn’t mean that, though I agree completely." She took a moment to chew. "I meant how you handled it personally."
"Do the work. Nothing different from any other case. Keep the work first, and the rest can sort itself out once you’re done."
Again, he was direct and succinct. Again, he was on the mark. Again, he didn’t really reach what Luz wanted to know. She ate silently for a few moments before coming out with it. "Did you want to be famous, Chief?"
"Oh." It was his turn to eat and think. "You know, I probably did at first, forty-five years ago. I came up to Luna in my prime, while it was still rough going up here. I think I expected to make my mark. That’d burned out by the time Morton Duberstein was murdered. Good thing, too. A sixty-year old itching for fame is liable to be a ridiculous figure. That probably goes for most people, really."
He leaned across the table. "Is that it, Luz? Do you want to be famous?"
Luz covered a gasp with her napkin. "Well, after you put it that way–"
"I’m serious."
"I know." She was too self-conscious even to stretch the pause by eating. "Maybe . . . but it isn’t the trappings I want, the face on the news. I want to be recognized, respected."
"For what?"
"My work. I want to be a good sheriff. You set a pretty high standard there: solve the big case, and become a celebrity. Now, I’ve got the same kind of chance to prove myself, maybe my only chance."
Chuck settled back. "Most law officers who only had to handle one mysterious death in their careers would be glad."
"I know. I should be. But I want to measure up. I want to prove you were right in picking me as your successor." She got a familiar disbelieving look. "All right. I want to be as good as you. Better, if I can."
"And you’re going to trust the newspeople to judge that?"
"I can tell myself I’m great anytime, Chief, for all it’s worth. It helps to have an outside opinion."
"Well, I’m retired now, so my opinion’s outside. Fame hangs on luck, Luz. Plenty of people may deserve it, but who gets it depends on chance opportunities. Kinda like bravery in battle: lots have it, but only those who show it in a tight spot get the medals."
This got Luz’s attention. Chuck Clark had been in the military on Earth, long, long ago. She knew that from the bios reporters wrote after his big case, not from anything he’d ever said to her or anyone she knew.
"You can be the best law officer on three worlds," Chuck said, "but if the chips don’t fall a certain way, nobody will know it, except the few people who know you best. Celebrity isn’t an accurate scorekeeper."
Luz nodded. "Not always . . . but isn’t this case one of those opportunities?"
"Maybe, maybe not. It’s a lucky break, but you don’t know what kind of luck it is yet–except for Zeiss and the folks close to him."
"I haven’t forgotten that," Luz said. "I won’t forget."
"That’s good." He polished off the last of his salad. "I’m sorry if I’m not all the help you hoped I’d be."
Luz’s eyes glinted. "Yeah, I was thinking you’d have someone’s signed confession in your bureau drawer."
Chuck shrugged. "No room. Always was lousy organizing my paperwork."
Luz went into the station the next morning half-asleep. A few hours of tossing in bed hadn’t produced any breakthroughs, and morning exercises had dulled rather than sharpened her. Feeding time for the press was in ninety minutes, and she dreaded it.
Deputy Jack Tantini met her in her office, giving her a thankfully short and dull status report. He was eager to head home for some rest, but he didn’t depart immediately when dismissed. "For what it’s worth, ma’am, I’d start barring that pig Sorrell from your press conferences. He’s got no business tailing you like that."
Luz’s eyelids snapped up. "Like what?"
"Like–oh, you haven’t read it. It’s in The Lunar Chronicles, top of the page. Unless you don’t want to give him the visit; then I can–"
"I’ll handle it, Jack. Head on home." He was gone before she could think to ask why he had been reading newslogs on duty.
There it was, as Jack said. Sorrell knew she had gone to Clark’s for dinner last night, splashing the fact, and plenty of opinion, across his lead page. "It’s too bad Sheriff Warren needs to turn to her old mentor for help cracking this case," read one passage, "but who better than Peirce County’s most famous, and sharpest, resident for the job?" He predicted that the case would be solved within forty-eight hours.
Luz briefly regretted not living on Earth. There, your news could come on printed sheets, which you could crumple and toss across a room without damaging valuable equipment.
She refused to look at other news sites for whatever they might have to add. She also declined to throw Sorrell out when feeding time came. When the press contingents logged on for the conference–up to forty today, including every licensed outlet on Luna–she did have a few choice words.
"I am loath to give details of my non-professional life, but allegations from a source here on Luna require a brief exception. I did meet with Chuck Clark for dinner last night, but the visit was a social one. I did not consult him on the Zeiss case, and he offered no opinions on it–a notable show of restraint." A few reporters and loggers laughed despite themselves. "Any outlets that have reported otherwise should post corrections, promptly. Now, for the case at hand . . ."
There was little to tell. The assayer had found no significant gaseous infusions in the samples taken to catch a hovercraft entering or exiting the area. The coroner’s extended work had produced all negatives: no hyperventilation before going outvac, and no muscular by-products indicating heavy exertions during anoxia. Ulrich Zeiss just strode onto the surface, and died.
She opened the floor. An Earth reporter asked whether the failure of her vehicle hypothesis meant the case was at a dead end. She denied this, claiming progress, masking disappointment. A Serenitatis newslogger asked why some deputies weren’t working on the case, and she explained that the department had other normal duties it was necessary to fulfill.
"Begging your pardon, but what could be more necessary than solving a murder?"
Luz felt her back tighten. "I did not say it was more necessary. Neither have I ever stated that this is a murder. Do you have evidence backing your claim that I should know about?" She let him stammer for a second. "Thank you." She tapped the screen almost randomly to pass the floor, making sure only to avoid Sorrell. An instant late, she realized who she had tapped.
"Sheriff Warren," Stella Zeiss said, "you say you’ve made progress solving the case. If you haven’t proven anything yet, that means you must have disproved something. What?"
"I . . ." She had disproved things, to any reasonable standard. What could you say, though, when your evidence disproved every possibility you could see?
"Nothing. So whatever evidence you’ve collected, you can’t do anything with. It’s been sixty hours or more since my son died, and you can’t even tell me whether it was by accident or malice. I think it’s time you admitted you’re over your head."
"Was that a question, Ms. Zeiss?"
"No, and neither is this. Once forty-eight hours pass after a murder without some critical break, odds are it never gets solved. If we’ve run out of patience, it’s because you’ve run out of time."
Finally, something she could answer. "I’m glad you weren’t here twenty-two years ago to tell Chuck Clark that." She tapped an Earth reporter, and used the lag-time to catch her breath.
"Sheriff, you’ve said you need part of your staff to handle routine matters during this investigation. Could it be that you don’t have enough officers for the work required of you?"
Great, a political trap. She set herself to answering, all hope fled that this conference would get any easier.
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