A Meeting At Corvallis

At their enquiring expressions he went on: "Whoever did it should have just left them with the bottles; a murderous drunken frenzy followed by swinish collapse. Making it look as if they'd been doing the nasty as well was a bit much. And Vat 69-I ask you! Catty, very catty."

"You're sure?" Signe said, her glance keen. "They were supposedly drunk."

"O delightfully strong-jawed Amazonian queen of Castle Rustic, mother of my honorary nieces and nephew: radar may not work anymore, but my gay-dar is, I assure you, fully functional. You could draw the shortest line between any two points with either Harry or Dave. Pity. Dave's a bit dishy, in a rough-trade Tom of Finland sort of way."

He struck a pose, and Havel snorted laughter. Aaron wasn't only gay, but outrageously swish-two characteristics which Havel had learned in the Corps didn't necessarily go together. He suspected the doctor enjoyed shocking the rather insular rural community he'd ended up in, as well.

"Gosh, you're making me feel so butch again, Aaron," Signe said.

"Oh, just let me do the makeover! A nice James Dean cut for the hair, the right plaid shirt, that brutally handsome little scar on your nose: OK, OK, let's get back to business."

He stooped over the body, manipulated wrist and limbs, rubbed a little of the blood between rubber-clad finger and thumb to test how much it had thickened, then moved clothing aside to check on the lividity. There was an impersonal gentleness in the way he moved the corpse.

"Someone crushed his foot, too," he said. "That would be quite, quite agonizing. Not as bad as having it cut off and eaten in front of your eyes"-he tapped his own artificial foot against the floor, encased in a trim Oxford loafer with a tassel-"but sufficiently painful. And there was a blow to the larynx; that would have kept him quiet."

Havel grunted again, and looked at the door. "He came over to the door. Someone unlocked and opened it, and then maybe he started out. Whoever was outside stamp-kicked him on the instep, broke his collarbone, hit him in the throat and pushed him in. Jumped on him as he tried to get away and killed him with a single thrust to the heart."

"Which means the late unlamented probably knew whoever it was and let them get close, not expecting to be attacked," Signe said, with a low whistle. "Slick!"

"Yeah," Havel said. "Real pro job. Time of death?" he went on to Rothman.

"Sometime within the last few hours. And the esteemed Mr. Hatfield checked on them before he went to bed, so that narrows it down. The police doctor was right about that at least."

"Right about that at least? " Havel asked.

Rothman nodded, taking off the rubber gloves with slow care-they were hard to replace, and had to be reused after a spell in an autoclave.

"She thought they really had passed out after three bottles of eighty-proof local 'whiskey,' pseudo, so-called. I can't absolutely prove it but I'm pretty certain one was slugged behind the ear with something heavy but malleable, and the other was chloroformed. Then they were tranked, at a guess with a cocktail including scopolamine. My colleague is competent but she's young, trained here post-Change-not as familiar with the concept of exotic drugs as a big-city boy like moi. Whatever it is, it mimics an alcohol-induced stupor and the aftereffects quite convincingly, including some retrograde amnesia. Scopolamine wipes your short-term memory, so you don't recall what happened before you went bye-bye. Anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or so is blanked."

"But if they don't have anything like that here in Corvallis, where-" Havel began.

Signe and Rothman were both staring at him, a slight look of exasperation in their eyes. "Portland," he said.

Rothman nodded. "I've talked with doctors who work there, a few times. They have quite a pharmacopoeia. Less new production than here in Corvallis, but the Lord Protector's had a scavenging operation of quite remarkable scope going since the first Change Year, stockpiling everything his men could find. No dust from a saint's tomb for him when he's feeling a bit peaked, I assure you."

"Sir Jason here would have made the Association look bad if he talked when the Rangers showed him off," Havel said thoughtfully.

"Astrid says he wasn't going to talk, which cut his value. But having him dead will make the Dunedain and Bill Hatfield look very bad," Signe said. "Those rumors that we're all fanatics, barbarians and nutcases? What better proof than our dragging a man in and him ending up knifed and dead here in law-abiding Corvallis?"

"We're supposed to have killed him?" Havel asked. "Or at least, Astrid and Eilir are supposed to have brought him into town, and then killed him? Or the Bobbsey Twins out there did it?"

"Honey, betcha the rumors are spreading right now. Rumors don't have to be credible, just juicy."

Havel looked at the doctor, who threw up his hands in a theatrical shrug. "No, I can't prove what we all know to be true. Not enough to satisfy a court."

"Not a court here in Corvallis," Havel said grimly.

"Oh, this is bad," Juniper Mackenzie said sorrowfully, as a stretcher team brought the body down the stairs. "This is very bad indeed."

The policeman turned on Hatfield. "Bill, what the hell were you thinking, keeping someone locked up on your lonesome, in the first place? You may have noticed we don't have slavery in this town, unlike some people I could name, and kidnapping's still a crime last time I looked."

Detective Simon Terwen was a man in his early thirties with rather shaggy brown hair and a gold wedding band on his left hand, in civilian clothes, denim jacket and pants and tire-soled leather boots, unremarkable except for the badge on one breast pocket and the shortsword, handcuffs and nightstick at his belt. The constables behind him were in blue uniforms with the same equipment, except that one-the tall man standing next to the close-coupled stocky woman-had a catchpole as well, a shaft with a Y-shaped, spring-loaded fork at the end. All three of them looked disturbed; violent crime within the city wall was rare, with no more than one or two murders a

"Lady Astrid, Lady Eilir, Mister Hordle, you all say a figure in black came out of the room where the deceased was held, eluded you and ran away? After calling for the police."

"That's right," Astrid said stolidly. "She was very fast."

"She?" Terwen asked.

Alleyne nodded stiffly, his right hand kneading his neck; there were fresh bruises on his face as well. "From the sound of her voice when she called for the police-which meant that we couldn't chase her, since we were too busy explaining things to your people, Detective."

"Things were completely shambolic," Hordle said. "Like chasing a bloody rubber ball, it was." He turned to Eilir, who spoke to him in Sign, then turned back. "Eilir says she was about her size and build, but that she couldn't get close enough to see anything else."

"Well, there is blood on the ground outside the window," Terwen said. "And on the barbed wire, and on the rooftop across the alley. That does tend to corroborate your story: which doesn't mean it's very convincing. I still have a dead body with a knife in it, and it's your employee's knife, Mr. Hatfield, and you were imprisoning the victim without legal authority. You may have noticed judges are getting more sensitive about stuff like that this last little while, Bill."

"That bastard was from the Protectorate, not a Corvallan citizen," Hatfield said stolidly.

"Well, why were you dragging him around?" Terwen asked, turning on the Dunedain leaders.

"He led a bandit attack on our territory," Astrid said, making a dismissive gesture. "We brought him here to explain that to your Faculty Senate, with the rest of the evidence."