"What"s the idea-"
"She"s dead," St. Cyr told him. He blocked the patio entrance.
"Betty?"
"Yes."
Dane tried to say something, moved his lips without making a sound.
"No need for you to see her."
Slowly the boy"s face dissolved, working its way from fear into horror, slowly through the horror into an emotion that would last, into grief. In a few minutes, it would not be a face any longer, just a pale wet ma.s.s of doughy flesh.
St. Cyr told him to get the police and to make it quick.
Dane turned slowly and, numbed, not nearly so agile as he had been only a short while ago, started for the door.
St. Cyr added: "And tell everyone to stay together, right in the corridor outside. No one is to wander off by himself. If Tina hasn"t heard the commotion by now, two of you go and fetch her back here."
Dane nodded and went through the open doorway, weaving from side to side; he bawled something unintelligible to the others.
St. Cyr turned away from him and walked onto the patio again, careful not to touch anything or to step in the blood. He looked at the corpse and fought down the nausea it caused. Several very sharp tines-claws?-had caught her at the base of her slim neck, just above the collarbone, gouged deep and then ripped straight up with awful force, nearly tearing her head loose.
Everywhere: blood. Blood looked black in the darkness.
At the patio railing, not daring to lean against the bars for fear of smearing some trace of the killer, St. Cyr looked down on the well-kept lawn, at the lumps of shrubbery, the well-groomed trees and the hedge-bordered flagstone walkways. It was all so manicured, so still and perfect in outline, that it might have been made of wax, a stage setting. He looked beyond the boundaries of the estate, at the rangier valley floor where all manner of scrub grew, beyond that at the foothills and the mountains in the distance, the peaks from which that afternoon"s dark thunderhead clouds had come. So far as he could see in the dim light of the two tiny moons, nothing moved in that adumbrative landscape.
He knelt beside the corpse and peered into the wide, gla.s.sy eyes that stared at the patio ceiling. Her fixed stare reminded him of the trophies on Hirschel"s wall, and from there it was an easy second step to visualize Betty"s head ranked among the others, posed between the snarling, wild-eyed boar heads...
Suddenly, thanks to the bio-computer, St. Cyr recalled that the suite had been in darkness when he and Dane had first entered-still was, for that matter. Taking his gun out of the holster again, he stepped off the patio into the sitting room again, called up the overhead lights, which reacted to vocal stimuli. In two minutes he had been in every closet in all three rooms and bath, and he had not encountered anyone.
He put his gun away once more.
He had known it would not be that easy.
Dane appeared in the doorway, still holding himself together, much to St. Cyr"s surprise. "I called the police."
"How long until they"ll be here?"
"Always been fast-other times. No more than twenty minutes by helicopter."
"Tina?"
"She"s in the corridor, with everyone else."
"Keep her company."
Dane went away, and no one else tried to enter. Alicia Alderban was sobbing loudly, and Jubal seemed to be trying to console her. Both of them sounded distant, faint. If Betty had been killed indoors, rather than on the open patio, the noise would never have carried far enough to alert anyone. The sound-proofing truly was excellent.
St. Cyr pulled a chair up next to the open gla.s.s doors and sat down to wait for the authorities. He did not join the family because he wanted time to think, to sort out these recent developments and decide what they meant One thing: Dane must be innocent, for he was with St. Cyr when Betty was killed. Forget him as a suspect, then.
Do not completely forget him, the bio-computer qualified.
And why not? He could not possibly have torn the girl"s throat out; he could not have been two places at once.
He could be an accomplice. If two persons are involved, it could have been Dane"s responsibility to see that you were occupied during the murder-and to be certain that you quickly identified the screamer. Without him, you would not have reached her room as quickly, for you do not know the way without a map. He may have been a.s.signed to lead you to the scene.
To what purpose?
The bio-computer sh.e.l.l, still tapped into his spine, its gossamer fingers still splayed throughout his flesh, offered no further postulation.
St. Cyr thought, forming the segments of the thought rigidly as if trying to convince himself more than anyone else: Dane would not have any reason to lead me to Betty"s room if he were mixed up in the murders.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. This is merely a point that should be given careful consideration.
The more he thought about it, the more St. Cyr found that he had to agree. It was something to consider, all right. From the beginning he had doubted the sincerity of Dane"s belief in werewolves, for he knew that the Alderban boy-like the entire family-was well-educated. Too well-educated to hold such silly superst.i.tions easily. It had occurred to him that Dane was feigning these beliefs, acting out some role that, somehow, would protect him against accusation. Perhaps he felt that, playing the superst.i.tious fool, his true reaction to anything that happened or anything that was asked him would be misinterpreted, and that his genuine intentions would therefore be obscured. This notion, atop the possibilities the bio-computer had just suggested, made it impossible for him to remove Dane from the list of suspects.
In the distance, the night was broken by the clatter of helicopter rotors turning at high speed.
St. Cyr rose and stepped onto the patio. Far down the valley but drawing swiftly closer, large yellow headlights burned three hundred feet above the valley floor.
St. Cyr turned and looked at the dead girl one last time.
She had not moved, even though he would not have been surprised to find her position changed.
Nonsense.
He bent and pulled her lids closed, one at a time, holding them down until they remained in place. It was a small gesture. He had not known the girl well enough to feel sorry for her, but since she had lost her cla.s.sic beauty to the wicked tines that had torn her open, he felt that the least she deserved was a bit of dignity when the strangers started pouring in.
FIVE: A Policeman and a Girl
The federal police, with the aid of their limited-response robotic helpmates, spent more than four hours going over the suite, the corpse, the balcony, and the lawn immediately below the balcony. St. Cyr was convinced, after watching them sift and a.n.a.lyze even the dust in Betty"s room, that they were not going to turn up anything worthwhile. In the first five minutes of the investigation they had discovered four animal hairs alien to the human body-three of them in the b.l.o.o.d.y wound and one under Betty"s right thumbnail. Ten minutes more, and a mobile robotic lab had definitely matched them with the wolf hairs found on the previous corpse. After that discovery, they were all wasting time. It was almost as if every possible clue had been removed by the killer-who had then planted the four hairs especially for them to find. This one thing. No more.
The Inspector Chief a.s.signed to the case was named Otto Rainy, a plump little man whose quick, pink hands were forever pressing his hair back from his face. He looked as if he had not gotten a haircut in six months, though more because he neglected his appearance than for any reason of style. His clothes were rumpled, his shoes unpolished, the cuffs of his coat frayed badly. He was, despite his appearance, a thorough investigator, careful with his questions, probing. St. Cyr doubted that he missed much.
"Cyberdetective," he said, first thing, when he approached St. Cyr.
"That"s right."
"Does it really help?"
"I think so."
"Government isn"t so sure about them, though," Rainy said. "No one has issued a ban on them, of course. But if the fedgov really trusted them, the word would have come down long ago for every copper on every world to hook up soonest."
"The government usually is a couple of decades behind science-behind social change, too, for that matter."
"I suppose."
"What have you found?"
Rainy wiped at his hair, pinched the bridge of his nose, wiped at his hair again. His blue eyes were bloodshot and weary. "Nothing more than those four d.a.m.n hairs."
They were standing at the end of the side corridor that lead to Betty Alderban"s room. The others, huddled outside the half-open door to the death scene, had ceased to talk among themselves. No one was crying any longer, either.
St. Cyr said, "Theories?"
"Only that it must have gotten to her on the balcony."
"From the lawn?"
"Yes."
"How far is that from the lawn-thirty feet?"
"Thirty-five."
"Climb it?"
"No handholds," Rainy said. He brushed angrily at his hair now, as if he could feel it crawling purposefully toward his eyes, as if it were a separate, sentient creature. "And no hook or rope marks on the balcony rail."
"Suppose the killer didn"t come over the balcony rail, though. Just suppose that he walked right in through her door."
"We"ve already investigated the possibility," Rainy said, hair-wiping. "Each member of the family has a vocally-coded lock to insure his privacy and, as Jubal said after one of the earlier murders, "to increase his sense of creative solitude." "
"Teddy can open those doors," St. Cyr pointed out.
"Oh?"
"You didn"t know?"
"No."
"He uses a high-pitched sonic override to operate the mechanism."
"You think his tone could be duplicated?"
"All that anyone would need to do," St. Cyr observed, "is hang around with a tape recorder and wait for Teddy to serve someone breakfast in bed, record the tone for later use."
Rainy thrust both hands in his pockets with such measured violence that it was only good fortune that kept him from ripping his fists through the lining. He seemed to be making a conscious effort not to smooth down his hair. "You talk as if our man must be a member of the family."
"That seems most likely."
"Yes, it does. But what in the world would any of them have to gain by it?"
"Hirschel, for instance, has the entire fortune to gain -if he comes out of this as the sole survivor."
Rainy shook his head and said, "No. He is not so naive as to think that he can kill all of them without arousing suspicion, then walk away with the cash. He appears to me to be a very clever, able man, not a bungler."
"I"d guess not. Still, it"s something to keep in mind."
Rainy looked toward the Alderban family, removed one hand from his pocket and wiped his hair, caught himself halfway through the nervous habit, shrugged and finished wiping. He called to Teddy, where the master unit waited with the mourners.
"Yes, sir?" Teddy asked, gliding swiftly forward on gravplates, his long rod arms hanging straight at his sides.
Rainy said, as if blocking it all out for his own benefit, "Each bedroom door-except for the guest bedrooms-is responsive to the voice of its occupant. Also, you can open all of these doors with a sonic override. Otherwise, is there any way that someone might gain entrance quickly and without making much noise?"
"Yes," Teddy said, surprising both of them. "There is an emergency master key for manual cycling of the doors, in the event of power failure."
"Who keeps the emergency key?" Rainy asked.
"I do," Teddy said.
St. Cyr: "On your person?" It sounded like a strange object for the preposition in this case, but the only one that came to mind.
Teddy said, "No, sir. I keep it in the bas.e.m.e.nt workshop, in my tool cabinet, racked with other keys that I sometimes require."
"The cabinet-is it locked?" Rainy asked.
"Yes, sir."
"And where is that that key?" St. Cyr asked. key?" St. Cyr asked.
Teddy slid open a small storage slot high on his right side, a tiny niche that had been invisible only a moment earlier. Twisting his shiny, double-elbowed, ball-jointed arm into a fantastic, tortured shape, he extracted the key from this slot and held it up for their inspection.
Rainy sighed rather loudly and put both hands in his pockets again. "Could anyone have made a duplicate?"
Teddy said, "Not without my knowledge. It is always kept in the recess that you have just seen."
"You"ve never lost it, misplaced it?"
Teddy looked the same, for his metal features were immutable, but he sounded hurt. "Never."
"And it has been with you since the house was built?"
"No, sir," Teddy said. "I have only been with the Alderban family for eight months."
"But it was with the master unit who was here before you?"
"No, sir. The Alderban family had a large number of limited-response mechanicals prior to the acquisition of a master unit. I am their first master unit."
"Well," St. Cyr said, "that means that everyone in the household could have copied the key previously, when it was in the hands of one of the limited response domos. The lesser mechanicals would have given it to any human on demand and taken it back again, once a copy had been made, without retaining a memory-bit on the incident."