The door was unlocked—the door doesn’t have a lock. No need with robot sentries on either side of the door.”
“But Grieg’s office has a lock,” Fredda protested.
“Not for security reasons,” Kresh said. “For privacy. It’s a one-way door setup to keep one set of visitors from running into another.”
“In any event, Grieg was sitting up in bed, reading,” Devray went on. “He probably didn’t notice the SPRs in his room had shut down—even while they had been on, the three of them would have been doing nothing more than standing, motionless, in their niches. Bissal came in, got as close as the end of the bed, and fired, once. Grieg’s body shows no sign that he tried to escape. Maybe he was actually asleep, having dozed off over his book, and came awake with a start just as Bissal fired. Maybe he decided not to make any sudden moves, or any moves at all, for fear of spooking the intruder. Maybe he just froze, held his position exactly, as he tried to reason with Bissal. Or maybe—maybe he was set up. Maybe he didn’t react, or try to flee, because he knew Bissal, and was expecting Bissal.”
“What?” Kresh half shouted.
“I agree it sounds ridiculous. But can we afford to discount the possibility?”
“Why the devil would he be expecting Bissal?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Bissal was supposed to have a message for him. Maybe Grieg’s personal tastes were not what we assumed. Maybe a lot of things. I don’t think any such thing happened, but we’re trying to examine all the possibilities.”
“All right, point taken. In any event, Bissal shoots Grieg.”
“Unless Verick or the robots did,” Fredda said, “but then why was Bissal here? Or do you have an answer for that, as well, Donald?”
“I grant that Bissal’s presence is the largest weakness in my theory,” Donald said. “I assure you that I will continue to search for an explanation.”
“I’ll lay odds that you don’t find it,” Fredda said. “In any event, we are now up to the murder itself—possibly the simplest part of the whole affair. Bissal—a loser, a nobody from nowhere, raises his weapon and blasts a hole in the planetary leader.”
“There’s something almost anticlimactic about it,” Devray said. “After all the complications and scheming and plotting, that one shot was all there was to it.”
Fredda nodded. “Commander Devray, maybe I should do the narrative for the period after the murder. I think I’ve come up with a few things I haven’t had a chance to report.”
Devray nodded. “By all means.”
“Thank you,” Fredda said. “It’s virtually certain that Bissal shot the three SPRs immediately after killing Grieg. You can get a pretty clear sequence of shots by charting the blast intensity, with each shot a bit weaker than the one before. That much we knew. But what I’ve established is that Bissal wasted his blaster charge. He had enough power in that thing to kill Grieg and knock out a hundred SPRs. But a blaster keeps shooting as long as you hold down the trigger—and Bissal held that trigger down too long.
“All he had to do to the SPRs is burn them deep enough to vaporize the range restrictors and eliminate the evidence that rustbackers were behind the plot, but about half the SPRs that did get shot have holes burned clear through their chests—and so does Grieg, for that matter. If Bissal had given each robot, say, a quarter-second blaster shot instead of a full second, the robots would be just as dead, the restrictors would be thoroughly destroyed, and he would have had the blaster power left over to knock out all the SPRs he missed. Also, the Trojan robot in the basement was only partially destroyed. One of the Crime Scene robots said it looked like a deliberate overload meltdown from a blaster with a depleted power pack.
“I think Bissal was supposed to shoot all the SPRs, and then put his blaster back in the Trojan, set it for an overload, and run. If he had been careful with his blaster charge, he would have had enough power left to shoot all the robots twice, and still melt the Trojan robot down to a puddle on the floor, destroy it so completely we’d never know it was a Trojan.”
“It seems like a lot of trouble to hide the fact that they were using range restrictors,” Devray said, “especially when you consider that we were going to find a bunch of robots all shot in the chest. Seems to me we would have thought about range restrictors pretty quick anyway.”
“Maybe,” Fredda conceded. “It would have been a little harder to realize the importance of chest shots if Bissal had done more shots to the head and the lower torso, or shot a few of them through the back instead of the front. But even so, think about it. If he had shot them all, the way he was supposed to, there would have been forty-nine SPRs shot dead, one SPR melted down to slag, and Grieg dead. Maybe we’d all be wondering what sort of super killer could get past that much security. We wouldn’t know for sure they had used restrictors—or known what sort, or how they had done it. Besides, covering their tracks wasn’t much of a priority with this crowd.”
“In fact, much the opposite,” Kresh said. “Think about all the things in this case that seem to have been done for the purpose of unnerving us—or the public. Just think how they’ll react to it all. The dead Ranger that the assassin killed by sneaking up from inside the perimeter. The false SSS agents. Blare and Deam posing as Ironheads, and Simcor Beddle denying they were any such thing. Was he lying, or not? Suppose we had found all the security robots wrecked by blaster shots and could not explain why or how it had happened? That would have thrown people to a pretty understandable panic. Even with the plan slightly botched, they’re going to find it unnerving.”
“Psychological warfare?” Devray asked.
Kresh shrugged. “Maybe they just want to get the public so rattled that the commotion interferes with the investigation.”
“Bear in mind that we don’t have and won’t get any audio or video record from the destroyed robots. Maybe the plotters just wanted to cover their tracks. Whatever the reason, I think that we were supposed to find fifty dead robots.”
“There’s something else that went wrong,” Kresh said. “Me finding Grieg so soon after he was killed. In the normal course of events, it might have been eight or ten hours before anyone discovered the body, as opposed to ninety minutes.”
“And your discovery came as a direct result of Huthwitz being killed,” Devray said. “If he had not died, you would not have been out here, or gotten suspicious, or called the Governor twice to make sure he was all right.”
“All true,” Kresh said. “And more reason to think Bissal is a bit of a loose cannon. All he had to do was not kill Huthwitz—if he was the one who killed Huthwitz. Maybe the two deaths aren’t related at all—though I don’t believe that. I think killing Huthwitz was not part of the plan, but that Bissal did it anyway, for whatever reason. You’d think that people who have set up this elaborate a plan could have come up with a more reliable person to carry it out.”
“I think I know why they got someone like Bissal,” Devray said. “But—”
Suddenly Donald stood bolt upright. “Excuse me, sir, but I am receiving a priority communication from one Olver Telmhock.”
“Who?” Kresh asked.
“Olver Telmhock. I have no further information, and the hyperwave signal carries a Crash Priority rating. The coding prefix indicates his message must be related in person for security reasons. His aircar is arriving at the Residence now. You are urged to hear him immediately.”
Kresh sighed. “Another one crawls out of the woodwork. All right, if I have to go, I have to go.”
Fredda watched as Kresh stood up to go. “You don’t seem too excited by a Crash Priority.”
“I’ve gotten about a half dozen of them so far today over hyperwave. The most useful one was the mayor of Dustbowl City extending his condolences, and the next best was a deputy back in Hades reporting that Grieg has been sighted alive walking down the street, dressed in women’s clothing.”
Fredda smiled wanly. “If only they were right. Wouldn’t you love to wake up and find out this was a bad dream? That our biggest problem was a Governor with odd tastes in clothes?”
Kresh nodded. “That would be nice,” he said. “I’m tired of nightmares that come while I’m awake. Come on, Donald. Let’s get the latest fashion report.”
