“I could put out an emergency call for him, but I don’t want to,” Steefer said. “We don’t know how many people outside the building are involved in this, and we don’t want to alarm them.”
“No. Four men and one woman; the Fuzzies say there were only two men, presumably Herckerd and Novaes, brought them here. That means two men and a woman somewhere outside waiting for them. And we don’t really need Evins, at present. It’s after midnight now; we can keep calling at his home.”
Evins and his wife had probably gone to a show, or visiting. Evins’s wife; he couldn’t seem to recall ever having met her. He’d heard something or other about her… He shoved that aside.
“Don’t they have little robo-snoopers they use to go through the ventilation ducts?” he asked.
“Yes. Mr. Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, has a dozen of them. He suggested using them, but I vetoed it till I could see what you thought. Those things float on contragravity, and even a miniature Abbot-drive generator makes quite an ultrasonic noise. We still have two Fuzzies loose in the ventilation system; we don’t want to scare them, do we?”
“No. Let them carry on. There’s a chance they may come out in the gem-vault, if we don’t frighten them.”
He looked across the room at the viewscreens. Khadra and Mallin had their screen set up, Sandra had brought the Fuzzies over in front of it, and Diamond seemed to be explaining about viewscreens and audiovisual screens to the others. In the gem-vault screen, Lansky and the others were leaning forward across the table, listening. They had a couple of hearing aids, now, which Eggers and one of his detectives were using. Lansky turned to make frantic gestures at the pickup. Steefer picked up a speaker-phone and advised everybody to pay attention to the gem-vault screen.
For one of those ten-second eternities nothing happened in the screen. A moment later, a Fuzzy came climbing down the ladder. One of the detectives would have grabbed him; Eggers stopped him. A moment later, another Fuzzy appeared.
Eggers caught him by the feet with both hands and pulled him off the ladder; the Fuzzy hit Eggers in the face with his fist. The first Fuzzy, having dropped to the table, tried to get up the ladder again; Lansky grabbed him. One of the detectives came to Eggers’s assistance. Then the struggle was over, and the two prisoners had been secured. Lansky was yelling:
“We got them both! We’re bringing them up.”
Steefer yelled to the girl who was monitoring the screen to cut in sound transmission and tell Lansky and one man to remain on guard; Lansky acknowledged, and Eggers and one of the detectives left the vault, each carrying a Fuzzy. In the screen from Steefer’s office, they had an audiovisual of Moses Herckerd on the screen; it was the employment interview film, and Herckerd was talking about his educational background and former job experience. Steefer was talking to the sergeant at his desk; the latter beckoned Ahmed Khadra over.
“Good,” Khadra said, when Steefer told him what had happened. “That’s all of them. We’ll run Herckerd over for them when they come up, and show them Novaes. They’re the two who brought them here tonight, the three we have here all say so.”
“They’re still in here,” Steefer said. “That leaves two men and a woman outside. I wonder…”
“I think I know who they are, Chief.”
It was just a guess, of course, but it fitted. He had suddenly remembered what he knew about Mrs. Conrad Evins.
When Leo Thaxter, now Loan Broker Private Financier, first came to Zarathustra ten years ago, a woman had come with him, but she hadn’t been a wife or reasonable facsimile, she had been a sister or reasonable facsimile. Rose Thaxter. After a while, she had left Thaxter and married a company minerologist named Conrad Evins, who, after the discovery of the sunstones, had become chief company gem-buyer.
“What’s that call-number of Evins?” he asked Steefer, and when Steefer gave it, he repeated it to Khadra. “When those other Fuzzies come in, call it. It’ll be answered by an audiovisual recording. See if the kids recognize him.”
Steefer looked at him, more amused than surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought of that, myself, Mr. Grego. It seems to fit, though.”
“Hunch.” If anybody respected hunches, it would be a cop. “I just remembered who Evins was married to. Rose Thaxter.”
“Yeh!” Steefer muttered something else. “I know that, too; I just never connected it. It all hangs together, too.”
For a couple of minutes, they were both talking at the same time, telling one another just how it did hang together, and watching the screen from Steefer’s office. Eggers and the detective were coming in, still coatless, carrying a Fuzzy apiece; the one Eggers was carrying was trying to get the gun out of the lieutenant’s shoulder-holster.
Of course it hung together. Somebody in the gang had to have exact knowledge of the layout of the gem-vault, which Evins, and very few others, could provide. The arrangement of the ventilation-ducts wasn’t classified top-secret; anybody in Evins’s position could have gotten that. They had to have a place to keep the Fuzzies, big enough to build a replica of the gem vault and of the ventilation system. Well, there were all those vacant factories and warehouses out in the district everybody called Mortgageville. The ones Hugo Ingermann had been acquiring title to, with Thaxter as dummy buyer. How Herckerd and Novaes had been roped in wasn’t immediately important; catch them and question them and that would emerge. Ten to one, Rose Thaxter, Mrs. Conrad Evins, was the connecting link and mainspring.
The Fuzzies in Steefer’s office were having a reunion. Khadra and Mallin and Sandra were trying to get them to look at the communication screen. He turned to Steefer.
“Get some men to Conrad Evins’s place; make a thorough search, for anything that might look like evidence of anything.”
“They won’t be there.”
“No. They’ll be in one of those buildings over in Mortgageville, and we don’t know which one. I’m going to call Ian Ferguson.”
He told Ferguson quickly what he suspected. The Constabulary commandant nodded.
“Reasonable,” he agreed. “I’ll call the city police for help; we’ll close the place off so nobody can get in or out and then we’ll start making a search. It’s only about two thousand square miles, and there are only about three hundred buildings on it,” he added. “I think I’ll call Casagra, too, and see how many Marines he can give me.”
“Well, take your time searching; just make sure anybody who’s there now stays there. We’ll give you what help we can as soon as we can.”
He looked up at the screen from Steefer’s office. Khadra had called Evins’s home, now, and he could hear Evins’s recorded voice stating that he wouldn’t be home before midnight. The Fuzzies evidently recognized him. It was also evident that they didn’t like him.
“And put out a general alert to pick up Evins, Mrs. Evins, and Leo Thaxter, and I don’t think you need to worry about how much noise you make doing it.”
“And Ivan Bowlby, and Raul Laporte, and Spike Heenan,” Ferguson added. “And any or all of their hoods.” He thought for a moment. “And Hugo Ingermann. We may finally have grounds for interrogating him as a suspect. I’ll call Gus Brannhard, too.”
“And Leslie Coombes; he’ll be a help.”
“All right, everybody!” Steefer was calling out with his loudspeaker. “We have all the Fuzzies out; now let’s get the show started!” Then he rose and went around the desk.
Khadra was on the communication screen from the Chief’s desk:
“They made that fellow Evins, all right. He was one of the gang. Who is he?”