Flatlander - Larry Niven [148]
I didn’t believe that had been done by a spacecraft’s oxygen tanks. It was too intense. That smooth wash must have been made by the rocket motor itself.
“The footprints must have been made afterward,” I speculated. “Anything earlier was washed out. I’m going to have to apologize to Luke.”
“No. He called it,” Hecate said. “Nobody sets out to make a locked room mystery. The perp was hiding something else. Now, he fired from the south rim? And prints made afterward lead from the center south-southeast. She ran toward the killer?”
“Right toward her only source of escape. And oxygen. And medical help.”
“She was hoping for mercy,” Hecate said.
I looked over at her. Hecate didn’t seem unduly disturbed, only bemused. Whoever had set a woman down in that radioactive hell would not offer mercy.
I said, “She might have begged. Who knows? I know people who would have been gasping curses. She might run to the center to leave a message, then run away from it to distract the killer.”
“Did you see a message?”
“No.” I wasn’t even sure I liked the notion. “That rocket flame had to be erasing something. It looks like the killer didn’t have the guts to go into the crater, but propping his lemmy right on the rim took some nerve. Why? To erase footprints?”
“Gil, only a madman would trudge out into the middle of Del Rey Crater unless he already knew something was there.” She caught my smile. “Like you did. But someone might peek over an edge. The perp erased the bootprints that led in from the edge. The ones in the center, he left.”
“Could have waited and got them all. And any later message.”
“Your turn,” she said.
The last time I had read a murdered man’s dying message, he’d been lying. But at least Chris Penzler hadn’t erased it and then made me guess what it said!
“I need a nap,” I said. “Give me a call when you know something.”
It felt like I’d been asleep for some time. I was on the rug, totally comfortable in lunar gravity. I had a view of Lawman Hecate Bauer-Stanson’s back. She was studying a diffuse rainbow glow. I couldn’t see the hologram from down here.
I got to my feet.
Hecate had a split screen going. Through one holo window they were carving a woman like a statue of petrified wood. The band saw was running itself. I could see vague human shapes out of focus behind a wall of thick glass.
One of the slices was passing through a second window. The view would zoom in on some detail: arteries and sections through the liver and ribs. Details might fluoresce before the view backed off.
A third window showed the archaic suit.
“The damn trouble,” I said, talking to myself because Hecate had her privacy on, “is that there’s nobody to pull in. No witnesses, no suspects … millions of suspects. With a proper leak in her suit she could have died yesterday. With no leak she could have been out there ten years. More.”
What if her suit was new when she lay down?
No. Even sixty years ago the missiles were still falling in Del Rey Crater. “From ten to sixty years. Even on the moon that’s a million suspects, and nobody has an alibi to cover a fifty-year span.”
A fourth window blinked on, showing a fingerprint— another—another—something unidentified— “Retina,” Hecate said without turning. “Completely degraded. But I got fingerprints and partial DNA. Maybe the ARM can match them.”
I said, “Boot them over to me.”
She did. I called the Los Angeles ARM. I left a message on Bera’s personal code, then got through to a duty clerk. He showed signs of interest when he realized I was calling from the moon. I gave him the dead woman to track down.
Hecate was looking at me when I clicked off. I said, “There are short lunies.”
She said, “Bet?”
“What odds?”
She considered, and my phone blinked. I picked it up.
Valerie Van Scopp Rhine. Height: 1.66 meters. Born 2038 A.D., Winnetka, North America. Mass: 62 kg. Gene type … allergies … medical…. She was forty or so when the picture was taken,