A Werewolf Among Us

the rider on the horse, the bloody heads of the two boar. 'I recognized quite early that Hirschel was the one individual in this household most capable of violence.'

And still is.

Not quite.

St. Cyr continued: 'Furthermore, he was basically an outsider who visited for a month or two every couple of years. Though the victims of the killer were his relatives, they were more distantly related to him than to any of you, perhaps distantly enough to be thought of as mere obstacles between Hirschel and the family fortune. He was also suspect because he was the sole living Alderban outside of this immediate family, heir to the entire industrial complex.'

'Which I wouldn't want,' Hirschel said. 'I can't think of anything more boring than managing wealth.'

'That's one of the reasons I finally rejected you,' St. Cyr said. When the others stirred, aware that the number of suspects had just dropped twenty percent, the detective said, 'Then I thought that it very well might be Dane.'

'I tell you it's the wolf, the du-aga-klava.'

'No,' St. Cyr said. 'But your superstition and your insistence on supernatural forces being involved were what first put you in a bad light. You're an educated young man, supposedly beyond such foolishness as that. Tina, however, has shown me how a hypno-keyed man might very well adopt such an unreasonable attitude despite the breadth of his education.'

Jubal frowned and pulled on his nose as if he were not artistically satisfied with its proportions. ''What on earth does hypno-keying have to do with all of this?'

'I won't go into that now,' St. Cyr said. 'Besides, Tina can give you a much better lecture on the topic than I can.'

Jubal looked at his daughter, perplexed, but she did not raise her eyes to meet his.

Possibility: Hypno-keying has unsettled Dane Alderban's mind. His reliance on superstitions would seem to indicate this and might also evidence an underlying taint of more serious psychosis.

At most: neurosis.

Psychosis.

St. Cyr ignored the other half of his symbiote and said, 'For a long while, I suspected Jubal.' The old man looked away from Tina, his face coloring. 'From the beginning, Jubal insisted that I should look outside of the family for the killer, and he would not entertain for a moment any other likelihood. Each time that he attempted to redirect my attention away from a member of the family, I had to wonder about his intent. Now it seems clear that this was only naivet?. Secondly, I was unfavorably impressed with Jubal's lack of emotional response to the deaths of his children. He seemed to view it all with a detached, almost academic sterility. Again, it was Tina who made me see how hypno-keying could be responsible for this unemotional reaction. And since Jubal has been a hypno-keyed artist a good deal longer than anyone else in the family, he has had more time to grow even cooler and more impersonal than his children are rapidly becoming.'

'What the hell is this?' the old man asked. This time, St. Cyr noticed that Jubal's rage even appeared to be acquired rather than genuine, as if he were imitating an actor he admired. St. Cyr could not be angry with him now. He could only pity him.

'Finally,' St. Cyr said, not answering the question, 'Jubal seemed suspect because of his reluctance to allow the family to be armed with deadly weapons. It appears now that this was only due to some genuine dislike for weaponry.'

'Of course it was,' Jubal said. 'And what motive would I have had for killing my own family?'

'The same motive Dane had — no motive at all. You could have been mentally unbalanced.' He turned immediately to Alicia and said, 'Then I suspected you. For one thing, you were the only one in the family who wept at Betty's death. That made you suspect simply because it was a different sort of reaction. When Tina explained that you had undergone hypno-keying much later in life than the others in the family, when you married Jubal, I felt that you were even more of a candidate for prison. What must it have been like, all these years, being at least somewhat emotional and caring in a house of people growing constantly more machinelike, colder, more selfish.'

'It hasn't been easy,' she said.

Jubal looked stunned. St. Cyr thought he really was, for once, what he appeared to be.

'But,' the woman said, I've had the guitar, my music, for comfort.'

'You've left me,' Tina said, after a long moment of silence.

St. Cyr sensed the ripple of surprise that passed through the others, heard Hirschel's quickly drawn breath of disbelief, waited for all of that to subside. He said, 'You came on the list of possibilities when I learned that you were the only one in the family who fully understood what hypno-keying had done to you and the only one in the family who seemed to be angry that your life had been perverted, against your will, before you were old enough to understand what was happening. It seemed distinctly possible that you might have become unbalanced by having to live with this realization for years, and that you might have felt that murdering your brothers and sisters, one-by-one, was the most fitting revenge on your father. Then again, you're a bright girl, too intelligent not to realize that Jubal's life has been tainted by hypno-keying, too, and that when he had each of you treated, he could not be said to be a rational man making a rational choice.'

'But you still suspected me.' She was still looking at her hands.

'Yes. You lived separate from the others. At a glance, that seemed to be because of the space limitations on other floors. However, it was soon clear to me that, with your family's resources, you could have adapted any part of the house to make a fine studio. You wanted to be separate from them. Perhaps because you hated them.'

'Felt sorry for them,' she corrected. 'I didn't want to have to see them.'

'Finally,' the cyberdetective said, 'I was wary of the relationship that seemed to be growing between us — at the same time that I encouraged it. Had I become sexually involved with you, or had I allowed my fondness for you to become something deeper than mere liking, my judgment in your sphere would have been severely affected.'

'Very logical,' she said. Her voice was bitter, not at all pleasant. St. Cyr thought that there might even be tears in it.

'I have to be.'

'It's your job.'

'Yes.'

She looked at him for the first time now, and she did have tears in the corners of her eyes. She said, 'Anything else I did that was suspicious?'

Yes, he thought, you always seemed, somehow, to be an extension of my nightmare, an analogue of the stalker…

Illogical.

He knew it was illogical even without the bio-computer's judgment. 'No other reasons,' he said.

Jubal roused himself. 'But why do you hate your hypno-keyed talents, Tina? I don't understand. How can you hate me enough to murder your own brothers and sisters?'

'She didn't,' St. Cyr said.

Jubal said, 'What?'

'She didn't murder them.'

They all looked at him again, surprised more than before. He saw that Tina was shocked too, and he realized that she had expected him to prove logically that she was the killer even though she was not. That made him feel tired and ill.

'Then what has been the purpose of all of this?' Hirschel asked.

'As I said when I started, I wanted you to see that I have been very careful to consider every angle before making an outright accusation. I want you to understand that I haven't been rash.'

You are being rash now, and you know it.

I have proof.

You seem to. But what you are about to suggest is impossible.