Justen felt a knot in his stomach. Kresh was not a man who missed much. “Yes,” he said. “There might be. I’m not prepared to say more just now, but there might.”
“You didn’t recognize Huthwitz’s name last night,” Kresh pointed out.
“But Melloy knew him,” Devray said. “She recognized him immediately. I still don’t know about that. I checked with our Internal Investigation unit as soon as I left the Huthwitz crime scene.”
“And they told you a thing or two you’re not quite ready to tell me,” Kresh said. “Even though we’re standing here watching them peel incinerated bits of the Governor off the wall.”
“Yes,” Justen said, rather defiantly. Justen could not bring himself to tell Kresh about the evidence linking Huthwitz to rustbacking. Not yet. Even in the face of the Governor’s death, he could not betray one of his own by confirming the report.
“You know, there are two reasons Melloy might have known who Huthwitz was. Either she was investigating him—”
“Or else she was in on whatever he was doing,” Justen said.
“Beg pardon, sirs, but there is a third possible reason,” Kresh’s robot said. “They are both law enforcement officers who were involved in gubernatorial security. She could simply have met him in the course of her normal duties.”
Justen took a good hard look at—what was his name—Donald? Justen normally wouldn’t pay much attention to a robot—especially one who was offering a rather charitable interpretation of events. Justen’s own personal robot, Genray, had gotten himself out of the way the moment they arrived at the crime scene. He had stepped into an empty wall niche and stayed there. But Justen had heard a story or two about Kresh’s robot, and Kresh clearly took him seriously. “Do you think that is a realistic possibility?” Justen asked.
The robot Donald raised his arms in a fair imitation of a human gesture of uncertainty. “It is certainly possible. I have no way of weighing the probabilities. But it is my experience that rejecting the innocent explanations out of hand is as unwise as refusing to consider the possibility of criminal action. The fact that Huthwitz is apparently under suspicion in some other investigation does not preclude the chance of his meeting Melloy in the course of their normal duties.”
“Point taken,” Justen said.
“But it doesn’t get you off the hook,” Kresh said. “I need to know what your internal investigators were working on.”
“Not yet,” Justen said. “You’ll get it, I give my word. But I can’t give it up now—for the same reason you didn’t call the Rangers the second you spotted the body.”
Kresh turned and looked him straight in the eye, and Justen squirmed inside just a bit. Kresh was not a man to trifle with.
“So you don’t trust me, either,” Kresh said.
“I trust you, sir,” Justen said to the older man. “But I do not trust every one of your deputies, or the inviolability of all your communications equipment. Things can leak.” And I don’t want to wreck Huthwitz’s reputation until I know he deserved to have it wrecked.
Kresh’s expression turned angry, and for a moment it seemed he was going to bite Justen’s head off. But then he stopped himself, and even smiled, just a bit. “Much as I hate to admit it, you might have a point. Tonya Welton once flat out told me that the Settlers could read encrypted Sheriff’s office signals. We’ve changed our encryption since then, but that’s no guarantee. All right. I’ll give you one day. Twenty-eight hours.”
“And if that’s not enough time?” Justen asked.
“Then that will just be too bad,” Kresh said. “Twenty-eight hours. This investigation has to move. We need to get somewhere before the other shoe drops.”
Justen frowned. “Shoe? What shoe?”
“You don’t go killing the Governor because you’re in a bad mood,” Kresh said. “This was very carefully planned and orchestrated, maybe even over-orchestrated. A conspiracy. Somebody had a plan, and I don’t think it’s complete yet. Someone is going to try and make a move, seize power in the next few days.”
“But the constitution,” Justen protested. “There’re the laws controlling the succession. No one could just walk in and take over.”
“Constitutions only work when people believe in them, have faith in them. Otherwise, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. Do you think there is enough faith in the system out there to keep someone from elbowing into the succession?”
“Sir, might I make an additional point?” Donald asked.
“What, Donald?”
“As you said, sir, this is a rather well-planned conspiracy. If, as you speculate, the assassins are planning to seize power, then they might well have co-opted the succession in advance.”
Kresh nodded and thought for a second. A strange expression came over his face. “Unless we’re looking at this backwards. Maybe it’s some band of civic-minded madmen who did this.”
“What?” Justen asked.
Kresh gestured toward the bed. “He told me himself, last night, that he was close to being impeached or recalled. He was fairly optimistic about his chances of staying in office, but maybe someone else wasn’t.”
“So?”
“So the Governor’s choice as successor doesn’t get the job if he’s removed from office by impeachment or recall. If the Governor is booted out, the President of the Legislative Council takes over. Shelabas Quellam. Maybe someone didn’t want Quellam in the Governor’s chair.”
“Is Quellam that bad?” Justen asked. “I hardly know the first thing about him.”
“That’s about all there is to know,” Kresh said. “He’s as close to a nonentity as you would ever wish to meet. The trouble is that Grieg named Quellam as his Designate. Supposedly he felt the same man should take over regardless of the circumstances, for the sake of stability.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Reasonably so,” Kresh said. “We’ll find out soon enough. Right now, I’m more interested in who killed the man, not who takes over from—”
But Kresh was interrupted by a woman who came in at the door. Justen recognized her as Fredda Leving, the roboticist. What the devil was she doing here? “Sheriff Kresh,” she said, “I’ve found something.” There was an excited glint in her eyes, an edgy sort of triumph. “Follow me,” she said. She turned and left the two men standing there, not bothering to look behind to see if they were following.
“Ah, Dr. Leving is here at my request,” Kresh said, answering Justen’s question before he had a chance to ask it. “I wanted to pull in a robotics expert as soon as I could.”
It took Justen a moment, but then he understood. “The SPRs,” he said. “How the hell did the shooter get past them?”
“That was my question,” Kresh said. “Let’s go see what she’s found.”
“There’s not much that I can see,” said Alvar Kresh as he peered into the recesses of the Sapper robot.
“That’s because you’re not in the business of dealing with these things up in Hades,” Fredda said. “But you will be.”
“Well, that sounds very dramatic,” Kresh said, “but all I can see is what looks like some sort of broken-off attachment clip and a torn bit of flat cable.”
“Let me have a look,” Devray said. Kresh stepped back and let the younger man peer into the robot’s interior. “It mean anything to you?” he asked.
Devray pulled his head out, a lot of astonishment on his face. “Burning devils. A restrictor.”
“What?” Kresh said.
“A restrictor. A broken-off connection point for a restrictor. Someone took the restrictors off a batch of New Law robots, modified them somehow to react to a different control system, and plugged them into these SPRs.”
Kresh opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. The SPRs shut down by restrictors removed from New Law robots? That was diabolical.
Every New Law robot had a restrictor built into it. In principle, at least, the idea was simple enough. The restrictors saw to it that any New Law robot attempting to leave Purgatory would be shut down as it tried to go. It was supposed to be impossible to remove the device without destroying the robot. No restrictor-wearing robot
