Flatlander - Larry Niven [122]
“By God, we could! If that’s Penzler down there, then the original assassin got him.”
“Maybe not. His methods seem to have turned crude. We’d still want to show how he could fire a laser at Chris Penzler’s window from out here and then get back into the city, or wherever he did go, and why I didn’t find him in the projection room. And after all, that might not even be Penzler’s body. All I know is there’s someone down there.”
“Um.”
“What I’d rather do is show that what Naomi was doing wasn’t an organ bank crime. She should’ve discussed it with her lawyer. What I think she—”
The dredge came out of the dust, and I dropped the conversation and loped over.
The corpse wore a blue skintight suit. The right hand had been sliced off cleanly four inches above the wrist. The face seemed shrunken, but I would have recognized him even without the torso painting, the Bonnie Dalzell griffin clutching Earth in its claw.
I opened my radio band and announced, “It’s Chris Penzler.”
Jefferson examined the severed forearm. “Clean cut. Message laser on high,” he said. “The beam must have sliced right through. If there was rock behind him, we’ll find the marks.” He set some of the cops to searching.
We didn’t bother to look for bootprints. The search party had left too many. But they hadn’t left puffer tracks. We found a set of puffer tracks and followed them backward from the pool until they disappeared on bare rock.
Someone behind us announced that he had found the hand. Jefferson went back. I didn’t. Those tracks could lead from the general direction of the tilted boulder.
Six nights ago Chris Penzler had glimpsed someone through his picture window. Only for an instant …and afterward he couldn’t decide which side of this particular boulder he’d been looking past. Maybe he’d come out to see.
The flat side of the rock was in deep shadow. I stepped close to the rock, out of the sun, and waited for my darkened helmet to clear again and my eyes to adjust. Then I played my headlamp over the rock.
My yell brought them running. They clustered around me to look at Chris Penzler’s dying message: big, malformed letters scrawled across the rock, black in the light of the headlamps.
NAKF
“He must have written it in his own blood,” Jefferson said. “In shadow, so the killer wouldn’t notice. He must have been jetting blood from the severed artery. But … that isn’t a name, is it?”
Desiree said, “It isn’t anything. I think.”
“The strap!” Laura cried in the joyful tones that go with the Eureka! sensation. “The strap; he must have used it for a tourniquet! He must have known he was dying—maybe he had to hide from the killer—” Her voice dropped. “It’s awful isn’t it?”
“Take a scraping of that blood,” Jefferson ordered. “At least we’ll find out if it was Penzler’s. He must have had something in mind.”
I got back to my room around midnight. I set it up on my phone screen:
NAKF
So here’s Chris Penzler out there on the meteor-torn moon, looking for clues. Maybe he remembers something. Maybe he finds something. Maybe not.
But a killer finds him.
A lunie citizen would be more likely to know it when Chris Penzler checked out a puffer. Assume he followed immediately … on foot, unless he was an idiot. I’d ask the computer if someone had checked out a puffer right after Chris did. Some killers are idiots.
If Chris had recognized his killer, he’d have written a name. I’d get the computer to search the city directory. Offhand I didn’t know anyone on the moon whose name started with NAKF. Or with—I started filling in letters. Written in haste in jetting blood, and possibly in darkness, a K could be a ruined R, F could be E, N could be M or W …
NARF NAKE NARE MAKF MAKE MARE WAKF WAKE WARE
No names sprang to mind. And Chris wasn’t a lunie; here on the moon I knew everyone he did.
NAKF NAOMI
It was a bad fit. And Naomi had one hell of an alibi. I should be able to persuade the lunar law to disgorge her on the strength of Penzler’s murder. If there were indeed two killers after Chris’s blood—Naomi the clumsy