In any event, he did not expect to see a bald man in rather loud blue-checked pajamas and a clashing red- and-white-striped robe padding barefoot down the hall.
Tierlaw Verick—or at least the person calling himself that sat in his unfortunate sleepwear, looking most ill at ease. He was perched on a hard-backed chair in the center of a room with no other furniture in it save the interrogator’s chair. Verick’s chair had been placed so his back was to the door, with the deliberate intent of making him just that bit more uncomfortable.
Half the Residence seemed never to have been used. The place was filled with fully stocked, well-maintained bedroom suites with everything a guest might need, and never mind that Infernals did not care to have overnight guests. The Residence had any number of handsomely appointed sitting rooms no one had ever sat in, gleaming kitchens that had not served a meal since Kresh had been born. A sad commentary on the grandiose attitude of Inferno’s architects, and on the wasteful nature of a robot-based economy, but it did mean there were ample facilities for interrogation. In fact, it had taken a little doing to find a room barren enough to serve as a suitable interrogation chamber, from the psychological point of view.
Fredda Leving sat in the chair facing Verick, while Justen Devray leaned in a corner and Kresh paced the room. Donald stood, unobtrusive as ever, in the room’s only wall niche, facing Verick, on the far side of the room from the door. He was, of course, recording everything, but Donald could do one better than that. When Fredda Leving had first built him, years before, she had equipped him with the sensors to let him serve as a lie detector. He was monitoring Verick’s heart rate, respiration, pupil dilation, and other physiological factors that provided an estimate of stress levels. Verick didn’t know that, of course, and no one was going to tell him.
Not that Verick knew much of anything, to hear Verick tell it. Verick was an older-looking man, thin-faced, pale-skinned, with not a single hair on his head, aside from heavy brown eyebrows and lashes. His eyes were piercing blue, and quite expressive; his face was lean and hungry-looking. The skin over his skull gleamed, a healthy pink, shining as if it had been polished—as perhaps it had. It was baldness so thoroughgoing and absolute that it had to be an affectation, a deliberate choice in his personal appearance that had to be as carefully maintained as the most elaborate coiffure. Either he shaved his head at least daily, or had himself depilitated on a regular basis.
In Kresh’s experience, men who put that sort of effort into their appearance—and chose such a startling one as absolute, perfect baldness—were rather aggressive and assertive types, and Verick fit the bill. Other men arrested in such silly-looking sleepwear would have acted sheepish or apologetic. Verick gave the sense of a man who didn’t like being kept waiting.
Verick’s story was simple, if utterly implausible. He was a Settler businessman, here to try to sell a Settler- model Control Center to the Inferno Terraforming Authority. He had been a guest at the reception the evening before. He had, by prearrangement, stayed after most of the other guests had gone to have an after-hours meeting with the Governor. Likewise by prearrangement, he had stayed the night after the meeting, sleeping in the west wing of the Residence. He had awakened to hear voices and people moving about, and had gotten up to see what was going on—only to be taken into custody by Donald as he set foot in the hallway.
It would follow that he knew nothing about Grieg’s death, having slept through the whole thing, and his behavior was consistent with that state of affairs. Either he did not know Grieg was dead, or he was doing a first- rate job of acting like he didn’t.
Kresh was not about to tell him. If a man who claimed to know nothing made a slip that demonstrated that he did know something, that could be most informative.
But the irritating—and baffling—thing about his story was that it seemed as if it might check out. Donald confirmed that there was a Settler businessman by the name of Verick on the guest list. That was a start, anyway. But how the devil had Kresh’s deputies missed him when they searched the house?
Kresh was too old a hand not to know there were lots of answers to that one. Human error could explain it in a dozen ways, any of which might be true—and none of which would sound the least bit convincing to outsiders.
There had not been many robots available when the first search had been performed, and those had been put to work either on specialized work or general heavy lifting. Human deputies had performed the search. The place had at least a hundred rooms, and Kresh could easily imagine a hurried deputy not being sure which room he had checked, or just opening a door to peek into the ninth or tenth obviously empty room in a row—and missing the motionless lump under the covers. Verick might have locked his door from the inside, and the deputy searching that section might have intended to come back later with the keys, and then forgot.
His deputies were only human, after all, and all of them were in one degree or another of shock. It was, after all, their Governor who had died this night. It was the head of their nation, their planet, who had fallen to enemies unseen.
But even so, it was the sort of foul-up that could easily dog this case for all time, if it were not put right immediately. Kresh could imagine the board of inquiry already. Kresh had set new teams of deputies to work to search the place allover again, just to see what else they might have missed—and, this time, with some sort of Crime Scene Observer robot accompanying each deputy. Later, if it came to that, Kresh was prepared to take the whole Residence apart, brick by brick. Nothing could be permitted to threaten the integrity of this investigation.
But Verick. If his innocence seemed implausible, so too did his guilt. For if he were a member of the elaborate conspiracy, then why in Space had he remained behind in the Residence? Why had he allowed himself to be arrested in his pajamas?
In the main, it seemed to Kresh, Verick’s story seemed more plausible than any attempt to tie him to the crime. But they were damned short of suspects and motives at the moment, and Kresh saw no reason to turn his back on one. Besides, stories had held together in the past, only to crack later on under sufficient pressure. “All right, Mr. Verick, let’s try it again,” Kresh said. “From the top.”
“Can’t you tell me what all this is about?” Verick said. “Can’t you tell me what’s happened?”
“No,” Kresh said, his tone as clipped as his reply.
“It’s important that we not tell you too much just yet,” Devray said, clearly playing good cop to Kresh’s bad cop. “We want to know what you know, without muddying the tracks.”
“I want to speak to the Governor,” Verick said.
“I can promise you that the Governor does not want to speak to you,” Kresh said. True enough, if more than a bit misleading. And it seemed to have the desired effect of unnerving Verick. “From the top,” Kresh said again—
“All right, all right.” He hesitated long enough to take a deep sigh and slump down in his chair, and then began again, his eyes staring out. “My name is Tierlaw Verick. I live on the Settler world of Baleyworld. I represent a firm that sells highly sophisticated control equipment. We’ve sold a great number of our systems to Settler terraforming projects, and I was sent here in hopes of selling one of our systems to the terraforming center here. I attended the reception last night, and afterwards had a meeting with Governor Grieg. Knowing that accommodation was very tight in town, and that I had come a very long way, he very kindly offered to put me up for the night.”
“You and you alone?” Fredda said. “Of all the people here last night, you were the only one who stayed the night?”
“Hmmm?” Verick looked at Fredda, as if he were surprised by the question. “I don’t know. I didn’t notice anyone else, one way or the other. I don’t see why I should be the only one. There’s certainly plenty of room here. But to the best of my direct knowledge, yes. I must say that surprises me in a house this size, though. Back home, every one of the guests at the reception would have been an overnight guest. But are you telling me there was no one else here?”
“No, there wasn’t,” Fredda said, to Kresh’s annoyance. Rule number one of interrogation was never to answer the suspect’s questions. The more Verick knew, the more able he would be to craft his answers.
“Dr. Leving,” Kresh said, “I think it would be best if you let the Commander and myself ask the questions, and if you did not supply any answers yourself.”
Leving looked toward Kresh, a bit startled. “But I—oh,” she said, about to protest and then thinking better of it. “Forgive me, Sheriff.”
“No harm done. In any event, it’s a very minor point,” Kresh said, hoping that he was telling the truth, now that Verick’s attention had been drawn to it. “But you weren’t the only one to meet with the Governor last night, were you?”
