Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [4]
Kyle looked at the floor, carpeted in institutional blue. “So I did kill him.”
“It’s quite possible that you did, yes. Or contributed to his death, which would probably be more accurate. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Kyle said sadly. “I’d like to be able to contact his next of kin, if that’s possible, to express my deep regret.”
“I’ll try to get you that information, sir. In the meantime, we’ve checked your computer’s memory, and it confirms your version of events.”
“I could have faked that,” Kyle suggested.
“You could have,” Dugan agreed, his narrow, hooded eyes fixed on Kyle’s face. “But you would have had to work fast. We were there shortly after everything started happening. And the computer was recording events the whole time-it would have been pretty tricky of you to fake the record without any gaps in the real-time log.”
Kyle had intentionally kept the computer recording everything, just for that reason. Once the authorities had been notified, he knew one of their first priorities would be to investigate what the computer had observed from the first phaser discharge on.
“Did Mr. Hall have any genuine reason for coming to see me?” Kyle asked. “Was he bringing a message from Bonner, or anyone else in the command?”
“Not that we’ve been able to determine,” Dugan responded. “He went off duty at eighteen hundred hours, and last anyone knew he was headed to his home in Daly City. There seems to have been no Starfleet-related reason for him to even have still been in uniform, much less passing himself off as on official business. That’s how he got through the door of your building, by the way. And he had a Starfleet keytag to make it seem on the level. It wasn’t activated-wouldn’t have got past a first-year cadet-but it was good enough to get into a century-old civilian apartment building.”
Kyle felt defensive. “It’s a nice place,” he said quickly. “Lots of atmosphere.”
“I’m sure,” Dugan replied. “And substandard security.”
“Which is normally not a problem,” Kyle countered. “I’ve been living there for years. This is the first time I’ve been attacked. So statistically, it’s still a good bet.”
“Statistically, most people only get killed once,” Dugan pointed out. “We’re not charging you with anything, sir. And we’ll keep investigating Yeoman Hall, to see if we can figure out what he was doing there. But if I were you, I’d be a little careful.” He looked away, wordlessly dismissing Kyle.
“I will,” Kyle assured him. “And thanks.”
His own office on the twenty-third floor of the Headquarters skyscraper tower was, Kyle thought, a good deal more “lived-in”-looking than Lieutenant Dugan’s. As he kept books at home, he also had a cabinet full of them here. One wall was entirely covered in old-fashioned paper maps. Some were antiques-a map of the battleground at Antietam, from the American Civil War, in which one of his ancestors had distinguished himself, for instance, and a map of San Francisco from the twentieth century. Others were nautical charts of the world’s oceans, and still others two-dimensional printouts of stellar cartography-not especially practical, but he still enjoyed looking at them. He liked being able to see the lines on his maps and visualize himself at a particular point in time and space.
Just now, though, Kyle sat at his desk, chair turned away from it, looking at a shadowbox frame above the bookshelf in which there were some other items with a deeply personal meaning to him: his wife’s wedding ring, the key to the first house they’d lived in, up in Alaska, and a holoimage of her outside that house, holding their baby boy, Will, in her arms. She had been standing in the shadow of a tall fir, but the sun’s rays had fallen on her as if cast there by one of the ancient Dutch masters, picking her and the baby out and limning them clearly against the dark backdrop. Her hair was golden in that light, reminding Kyle of a honey jar in a window with the sun beaming through it, and her smile had been equally radiant.
Less than two years later, Annie was dead, leaving Kyle and young Will