The Domino Pattern (11 page)

He headed back across the dining area, Kennrick at his side. “What do you think?” I asked Bayta.

“I was just wondering if Mr. Kennrick has figured out who was on which side of the contract discussion,” she said, her voice thoughtful.

“If Mr. Kennrick is worth anywhere near his salt, one would certainly hope so,” I said.

“Could he want the contract enough to kill to make sure it went through?”

“Possibly.” I said. “The problem with that theory is that, at the moment, two-thirds of the poisoning victims were already on his side.”

“Unless he misread their intentions.”

“True,” I said. “But if we’re going down the profit side of the street, it would make more sense if the killer was on the other side of the deadlock.”

“Master Tririn?”

“He certainly shows promise,” I said. “He’s opposed to the contract, and he had easy access to two of the victims.”

“But not to the third,” Bayta pointed out. “
Di
-Master Strinni was in first class, where Master Tririn wouldn’t have been able to get to him.”

“Unless Strinni liked to go back and visit the others like Kennrick did,” I said. “Givvrac implied that he didn’t, but Givvrac may not know for sure. Or Tririn might have come up here if someone in first asked for him.”

Bayta frowned into space. “No one asked Master Tririn to come forward,” she said.

I shrugged. “It was a long shot. It’s not like Master Tririn’s been in high demand around the train the way Dr. Aronobal and Dr. Witherspoon have.”

“True,” Bayta agreed. “It also occurs to me that we only have
Usantra
Givvrac’s word that Master Tririn was actually opposed to the Pellorian contract.”

“Very good.” I said approvingly. “As I told Givvrac. investigations require questions and answers. But you don’t necessarily believe those answers. Any other thoughts?”

“Just this.” She pointed at Givvrac’s abandoned drink. “Do you know what this is?”

I picked it up and gave the contents a sniff. The concoction had a tangy, exotic aroma, but with no scent of alcohol that I could detect. “Not a clue,” I said.

“It’s
miccrano
,” she said. “A traditional Filiaelian remedy for serious stomach and digestive trouble.”

“Is it, now,” I said, eyeing the drink with new interest. “Sounds like he may be feeling more than just a bit delicate. Has he had a chat with either of our two doctors?”

Bayta’s eyes defocused as she again consulted with the Spiders. As she did so, the server appeared from the rear of the dining area with the meals we’d ordered before Kennrick first came to our table. I’d actually expected the food to show up during our conversation, which could have been a little awkward since Givvrac would certainly have insisted on a polite departure. Knowing Bayta, she’d probably telepathically instructed the Spider to hold the meals until we’d finished and our visitors had left.

Bayta’s eyes came back. “He had a conductor bring Dr. Aronobal up from third class about an hour ago,” she reported. “Dr. Aronobal is the one who recommended the
miccrano
to him.”

“Which also probably explains why Kennrick was here instead of in his compartment.” I said as the Spider set our plates in front of us. “Givvrac would have been in the bar, working through his tummy-soothers, when Kennrick passed by on his way to lie down. Do we know how many of them he had?”

“This was his third,” Bayta said, nodding at the glass.

“Which he never touched,” I commenced, rubbing my chin. “I wonder why he decided to abandon it.”

“Maybe he was feeling better,” Bayta suggested.

“Or decided that the first two hadn’t done him any good anyway,” I said, something prickly running up my back as I eyed the glass. If someone had poisoned the drink…

I snorted under my breath. No—that one
was
pure paranoia. Even if Kennrick was the killer, he’d have to be crazy to poison Givvrac at a time when we knew they were having a drink together.

Still, it couldn’t do any harm to check. “Bayta, can you have the server in the dispensary bring me one of those little vials from the sampling kit?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said, her voice suddenly uncertain. “You think there’s something in
Usantra
Givvrac’s drink?”

“No, but we might as well be thorough about this.” I picked up my fork. “Meanwhile, this isn’t getting any warmer. Let’s eat.”

The meal was up to the usual Quadrail standards. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to properly enjoy it with my gut rumbling the way it was. Halfway through, I gave up and pushed the plate away.

Bayta was either feeling better than I was or else was stubbornly committed to not wasting any of the food her Spider friends had hauled across the galaxy for our benefit. She made it all the way through her vegetable roll, chewing silently but determinedly.

She was just finishing off her lemonade when a server Spider appeared and set a sampling vial and a small hypo on the table beside my plate.

“Thank you,” I said. Taking the hypo, I extracted a couple of milliliters of Givvrac’s drink and injected it into the vial. “I said thank you,” I repeated, looking at the Spider.

“He’s waiting for you to give back the hypo,” Bayta explained.

“Ah,” I said, reversing the instrument and holding it up. The Spider extended a leg and took it, then folded the leg up beneath his globe and tapped his way back out of the dining area. “Any news on the air filter?” I asked Bayta.

“It’s nearly done,” she said. “It should be ready by the time we get back there.”

“Good,” I said, standing up and slipping the sample vial into my pocket. “Let’s go.”

It was getting toward train’s evening, and the third-class passengers were starting to drift back to their seats after a busy day in the entertainment car, the exercise area, or the bar.

Which meant there was a large and curious audience already in place when Bayta and I moved toward the rear of the car and the disassembled air filter system waiting there for us.

I’d never asked Bayta what exactly the disassembly procedure entailed. Now, as we joined a group of knee-high mite Spiders and a pair of the larger conductors, I could see why the job had taken this long. A section of ceiling nearly a meter square had been taken down, probably with the help of the two conductors, and was currently hanging by thin support wires attached to its four corners at about throat level over the back row of seats. The occupants of those seats, not surprisingly, had found somewhere else to be for the moment.

“We couldn’t bring in a couple of cameras so the whole train could watch?” I grumbled as we passed our third knot of rubberneckers.

“I thought you’d want to take the sample yourself,” Bayta countered, a slight edge to her voice. Clearly, she didn’t like having the Quadrail’s innards exposed to the paying customers this way any more than I did, and she didn’t appreciate me getting on her case about it. “There’s no way you could have reached the filter while it was still in place.”

And given the tight tolerances of Quadrail floor space, there was probably nowhere more private where they could have lugged the filter assembly for the procedure. “I suppose,” I conceded.

We reached the hanging plate, and I took a moment to study its upper side. The filter assembly consisted of about a dozen boxes of various sizes and shapes scattered across the plate, all of them marked with incomprehensible dot codes. They were connected to each other by a bewildering and colorful spaghetti of tubes, ducts, cables, and wires. Other tubes and conduits, carefully sealed off, ran to the edges of the plate, where presumably they connected to equipment tucked away above the rest of the ceiling. The plate itself had sixteen connectors, four per side, for fastening it to the rest of the ceiling. The connectors, I noted, were accessible only from above. It was pretty clear that no one was going to tamper with the system without Spider help. “Which one do I want?” I asked Bayta.

“That one,” she said, pointing to the largest of the boxes. “The Spiders will take off the cover for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking down at the mites grouped around us like shiny seven-legged lap dogs. “Do they need a boost?”

“No,” Bayta said, and I quickly stepped back as a pair of fist-sized twitters appeared from inside the ceiling and deftly slid down the corner lines onto the exposed machinery. Picking their way across the miniature landscape, they reached the box Bayta had indicated and started removing one of its sides.

“Here,” Bayta said, pressing a pair of sample vials into my hand. “Will you need a hypo or scraper?”

“Got one, thanks,” I said, pulling out my multitool and selecting one of the blades. The twitters got the filter’s side off, and I leaned in for a closer look.

I’d expected to find some sort of thin but tangible layer of fluffiness, the sort of thing you might find in an office building air filter that hadn’t been replaced for a few weeks. But the dimpled white material sitting in front of me looked as clean and fresh as if it had come right out of the box.

It looked, in fact, like some industrious Spider had given it a thorough cleaning sometime in the past few hours. And if one of them had, this whole thing was going to be a complete waste of time. “You
did
warn the Spiders not to clean it, didn’t you?”

“Of course,” Bayta said. “It hasn’t been touched since Homshil.”

“Looks pretty clean to me,” I pointed out.

“It’s the third-stage filter,” she said. “It always
looks
clean.”

I suppressed a grimace. Of course it did. All the larger dust and lint particles would have been captured by a larger-mesh filter somewhere upstream in the system. But it was this filter that would have a shot at trapping impurities the size of cadmium atoms and compounds. “Just making sure,” I said, trying to salvage a little dignity.

Experimentally, I gently scraped the multitool blade along one edge of the filter. A small cascade of fine white powder appeared and drifted slowly downward. Moving the blade to a different part of the filter. I held one of the vials in position and scraped more of the white powder into it. I waited until the dust had settled and then handed the vial to Bayta for sealing. I repeated the operation on a third section of the filter, again handing the vial to Bayta when I was done. “That should do it.” I told her. Folding the blade back into the multitool, I turned around.

And stopped short. Standing three meters away, right in the center of the ring of gawkers, was the Filly I’d had the brief tussle with earlier that day in the third-class bar. He was Staring at me with an intensity I didn’t at all care for. “Can I help you?” I asked.

“What do you do here?” the Filly asked, his long nose pointing toward the filter assembly.

“Just a routine maintenance sampling,” I said in my best authoritative-but-soothing voice. “Nothing you need to be concerned about.”

I’d used that voice to good advantage many times over the years. Unfortunately, this particular Filly wasn’t buying it. “Is there danger in the air?” he demanded. “Is there risk to us all?”

“There’s no risk to anyone,” I said firmly if not entirely truthfully. “As I said, this is just a routine maintenance check.”

But it was no use. A low-level murmur was already rippling through the rest of the onlookers, some of whom had probably ridden this line before and knew that there was nothing routine about what we were doing. “If there is risk, we deserve to know the truth,” the Filly said firmly, his volume rising to a level that would reach most of the car instead of just the group assembled here at the rear.

“There is no risk,” I said again, letting my gaze drift over the crowd as I tried to think up an answer that would satisfy them. “But you’re right, you deserve to know the truth. If you’ll all be quiet a moment?”

I stopped, waiting for them to pick up on the cue. I could feel Bayta’s eyes on me, and her concern as she wondered what exactly I was doing.

I wondered what I was doing, too. Telling them there was a murderer aboard the train was definitely out—we could wind up with a riot on our hands, with nowhere anyone could escape to. But I’d had enough experience with rumor mills to know that if we didn’t give them
something
the situation would only get worse, possibly leading to the same riot I was hoping so hard to avoid.

Ergo, I had to give them some truth. The trick, as always, would be to figure out how much.

Slowly, in bits and pieces, the mutterings faded away. “Thank you,” I said. “I presume you’re all aware that two of your fellow travelers died yesterday.”

The last mutterings abruptly vanished. I had their full attention now. all right. I heard Bayta mutter something under her breath, but it wasn’t like the rest of the passengers wouldn’t have noticed the two newly empty seats. “What I’m doing here is checking for the presence of what are called
after-elements
,” I went on. “Those are bits of nucleic acid residue, antibodies, mucousids—the sorts of things that might have been exhaled by a person in his last battle against a lethal congenital defect.”

The Filly’s nose blaze darkened a bit. “A congenital defect? In both victims?”

“I can see no other likely conclusion,” I said, noting in passing his unusual use of the word
victims
. “No one else in the car has shown any signs of illness, which eliminates the possibility that they died from some contagious disease.”

I gestured toward a pair of Shorshians near the rear of the crowd. “It can’t even be something specific to Shorshians, since other Shorshians in the car haven’t been affected.”

“So you say it was a congenital disease,” the Filly said, his tone a hit odd.

“As I said, there’s no other likely conclusion.” I repeated. “Nothing for any of you to be concerned about. So please, return to your seats and try to put these unfortunate events from your minds.”

A fresh set of mutterings began to circulate through the onlookers. But the tone was definitely calmer, and at the rear of the group the passengers began obediently heading back toward their seats. Within a minute, the whole crowd had joined the mass migration.

Everyone, that is, except the Filly whose questions had gotten everyone riled up in the first place. He stayed right where he was, his eyes never leaving my face, as the rest of the passengers dispersed. “Was there something else?” I asked.

He took a step closer to me. “You are lying,” he said quietly. “If you sought a congenital disease, a proper investigation would begin with samples taken from the bodies of the victims.”

“I’d like nothing better,” I said. “But there are questions of religious protocol, and the leader of their group has prohibited me from taking direct samples.”

The Filly looked at Bayta, his blaze darkening a little more. “Perhaps that prohibition will yet be lifted,” he said.

“Perhaps,” I said.

He took another step toward me. “But should you discover a different cause of death.” he went on, lowering his voice still more, “I would urge you to let me know at once.”

“In such an unlikely event, I’m sure the Spiders will let everyone know at the same time,” I assured him.

“I would appreciate it very much,” he said, putting an emphasis on the last two words. “Even small bits of preliminary knowledge would be worth a great deal to me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I promised. “If I should happen to learn anything, whom shall I ask for?”

He studied me another couple of heartbeats. “I am
Logra
Emikai,” he identified himself. “My seat is four coaches forward, in the car just to the front of the dining car.”

“Understood,” I said. “A pleasant evening to you,
Logra
Emikai.”

“And to you.” With a brief nod of his head, he turned and headed down the aisle toward the front of the car and his own seat four coaches away.

“Interesting,” I murmured, catching Bayta’s eye and nodding toward the departing Filly. “You catch all that?”

“You mean the fact that he just tried to bribe us?” Bayta asked, her voice stiff.

“Well, yes, that too,” I said, turning back to watch Emikai’s progress. He was moving briskly, adroitly dodging around the slower-moving passengers who weren’t in nearly so much of a hurry. “I was mostly referring to the fact that he seemed to know we’d already taken samples from Master Bofiv’s body.”

“How do you know that?” Bayta asked, her moral outrage at the bribery attempt starting to fade into fresh interest.

“From his reaction to my comment that
di
-Master Strinni hadn’t let us take samples,” I said. “The question is, how did
he
know? Okay—let’s see what he does.”

“With what?” Bayta asked, craning her neck to see over the crowd.

“Not with
what
,” I corrected. “With
whom
. Specifically, with Master Tririn. Or hadn’t you noticed that Tririn didn’t bother to come back here to see what we were doing?”

“Maybe he’s just tired.”

“Or he already knows what we will or won’t find,” I said. “Or he didn’t need to come himself because he already had a friend on the scene.”

“
Logra
Emikai?”

“Could be.” I said. “You have any idea what sort of rank
logra
is?”

“Not in that form,” Bayta said. “It could be a dialectal variant of
lomagra
, one of the middle artisan classes.”

“Or else it’s something new, something private, or something he made up out of thin air.” I said.

“And you think he and Master Tririn are working together?”

“We’ll know in a second,” I said. “Even if they just know each other, there ought to be some signal or at least recognition as Emikai passes him.”

But to my disappointment, the Filly passed by Tririn’s seat without so much as a sideways glance in the Shorshian’s direction. “Or not,” I said. “Well, that tells us something, too,” I added, turning away.

“Wait a second,” Bayta said, her voice suddenly urgent.

“What?” I asked, turning back.

“
Logra
Emikai’s head dipped to his right just there,” Bayta said. “Like he was saying something to—”

And right on cue. Terese German stood up and stepped into the aisle.

“To our young friend with the bad stomach?” I suggested.

“Exactly,” Bayta said. Terese made a show of stretching as she casually but carefully looked around her, then headed after the departing Filly.
Logra
Emikai reached the vestibule and disappeared inside, heading for the next car. A few steps behind him, Terese did likewise. “Coincidence?” Bayta asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve been assuming that when we were in the bar earlier she just grabbed the first likely-looking lug to protect her from me. The whole incident makes a lot more sense if the choice wasn’t nearly that spur-of-the-moment.”

Bayta pondered that for a moment. “Thought it still could be perfectly innocent,” she pointed out. “They’ve been passengers on the same train for the past two weeks. If they’d already gotten to know each other, she would naturally go to him for help.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But she’s never struck me as the gregarious sort. Come on—time to go.”

“Where?” Bayta asked as I took her arm and steered us forward down the aisle. “We’re not going to follow them, are we?”

“We just happen to be going the same direction, that’s all,” I assured her as we wove our way around the other passengers wending their way to and fro down the aisle. “Tell the Spiders they can put the filter equipment back together again. We’re done here.”