His office at the water works was much bigger than mine, but, then, he didn’t personally pay the rent on it. I had a DNA collector in my palm when I shook his hand, and while he was getting us both coffee from a maker on his credenza, I transferred the sample to the GeneSeq, and set it to comparing his genetic code to the samples from the rocket’s cockpit.
“I want to thank you, Mr. Lomax,” Ralph said, handing me a steaming mug. “My father called to say he’d hired you. I’m delighted. Absolutely delighted.” He had a thin, reedy voice, matching his thin, reedy body. “How anyone could do such a thing to my mother …”
I smiled, sat down, and took a sip. “I understand she was a sweet old lady.”
“That she was,” said Ralph, taking his own seat on the other side of a glass-and-steel desk. “That she was.”
The GeneSeq bleeped softly three times, each bleep higher pitched than the one before—the signal for a match. “Then why did you kill her?” I said.
He had his coffee cup halfway to his lips, but suddenly he slammed it down, splashing double-double, which fell to the glass desktop in Martian slo-mo. “Mr. Lomax, if that’s your idea of a joke, it’s in very poor taste. The funeral service for my mother is tomorrow, and—”
“And you’ll be there, putting on an act, just like the one you’re putting on now.”
“Have you no decency, sir? My mother …”
“Was killed. By someone she trusted—someone who she would follow to the shipyards, someone who told her to wait in a specific spot while he— what? Nipped off to have a private word with a ship’s pilot? Went into the shadows to take a leak? Of course, a professional engineer could get the manual for a spaceship’s controls easily enough, and understand it well enough to figure out how to fire the engine.”
Ralph’s flimsy form was quaking with rage, or a good simulation of it. “Get out. Get out now. I think I speak for my father when I say, you’re fired.”
I didn’t get up. “It was damn-near a perfect crime,” I said my voice rock-steady. “Lennick’s Folly should have headed back to Earth, taking any evidence of who’d been in its cockpit with her; indeed, you probably hoped it’d be gone long before the melted lump that once was your mother was found. But you can’t fire engines under the dome without consuming a lot of oxygen—and somebody has to pay for that. It doesn’t grow on trees, you know—well, down on Earth it does, sort of. But not here. And so the ship is hanging around, like the tell-tale heart, like an albatross, like”—I sought a third allusion, just for style’s sake, and one came to me: “like the sword of Damocles.”
Ralph looked left and right. There was no way out, of course; I was seated between him and the door, and my Smith & Wesson was now in my hand. He might have done a sloppy job, but I never do. “I … I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
I made what I hoped was an ironic smile. “Guess that’s another advantage of uploading, no? No more DNA being left behind. It’s almost impossible to tell if a specific transfer has been in a specific room, but it’s child’s play to determine what biologicals have gone in and out of somewhere. Did you know that cells slough off the alveoli of your lungs and are exhaled with each breath? Oh, only two or three—but today’s scanners have no trouble finding them, and reading the DNA in them. No, it’s open-and-shut that you were the murderer: you were in the cockpit of Lennick’s Folly, you touched the engine controls. Yeah, you were bright enough to wear gloves—but not bright enough to hold your breath.”
He got to his feet, and started to come around from behind his funky desk. I undid the safety on my gun, and he froze.
“I frown on murder,” I said, “but I’m all for killing in self-defense—so I’d advise you to stand perfectly still.” I waited to make sure he was doing just that, then went on. “I know that you did it, but I still don’t know why. And I’m an old-fashioned guy—grew up reading Agatha Christie and Peter Robinson. In the good old days, before DNA and all that, detectives wanted three things to make a case: method, motive, and opportunity. The method is obvious, and you clearly had opportunity. But I’m still in the dark on the motive, and, for my own interest, I’d like to know what it was.” “You can’t prove any of this,” sneered Ralph. “Even if you have a DNA match, it’s inadmissible.”
“Dougal McCrae is lazy, but he’s not stupid. If I tip him oft that you definitely did it, he’ll find a way to get the warrant. Your only chance now is to tell me why you did it. Hell, I’m a reasonable man. II your justification was good enough, well, I’ve turned a blind eye before. So, tell me: why wait until your mother uploaded to kill her? If you had some beef with her, why didn’t you off her earlier?” I narrowed my eyes. “Or had she done something recently? She’d struck it rich, and that sometimes changes people— but …” I paused, and after a few moments, I found myself nodding. “Ah, of course. She struck it rich, and she was old. You’d thought, hey, she’s going to drop off soon, and you’ll inherit her newfound fortune. But when she squandered it on herself, spending most of it on uploading, you were furious.” I shook my head in disgust. “Greed. Oldest motivation there is.”
“You really are a smug bastard, Lomax,” said Ralph. “And you don’t know anything about me. Do you think I care about money?” He snorted. “I’ve never wanted money—as long as I’ve got enough to pay my life-support tax, I’m content.”
“People who are indifferent to thousands often change their ways when millions are at stake.”
“Oh, now you’re a philosopher, too, eh? I was born here on Mars, Lomax. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by people who spend all their time looking for paleontological pay dirt. My parents both did that. It was bad enough that I had to compete with things that have been dead for hundreds of millions of years, but …”
I narrowed my eyes. “But what?
He shook his head. “Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“No? Why not?”
He paused, then: “You got brothers? Sisters?”
“A sister,” I said. “Back on Earth.”
“Older or younger?”
“Older, by two years.”
“No,” he said. “You couldn’t possibly understand.”
“Why not? What’s that got—” And then it hit me. I’d encountered lots of scum in my life: crooks, swindlers, people who’d killed for a twenty-solar coin. But nothing like this. That Ralph had a scarecrow’s form was obvious, but, unlike the one from Oz, he clearly did have a brain. And although his mother had been the tin man, so to speak, after she’d uploaded, I now knew it was Ralph who’d been lacking a heart.
“JoBeth,” I said softly.
Ralph staggered backward as if I’d hit him. His eyes, defiant till now, could no longer meet my own. “Christ,” I said. “How could you? How could anyone …”
“It’s not like that,” he said, spreading his arms like a praying mantis. “I was four years old, for God’s sake. I—I didn’t mean—”
“You killed your own baby sister.”
He looked at the carpeted office floor. “My parents had little enough time for me as it was, what with spending twelve hours a day looking for the goddamned alpha.”
I nodded. “And when JoBeth came along, suddenly you were getting no attention at all. And so you smothered her in her sleep.”
“You can’t prove that. Nobody can.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”