“Dr. Jennifer Hardacre.”
“Where do you work?”
“Physike Manufacturing.”
“What do you do there?”
“I’m currently training my replacement in special compounding for uncommon disease treatment.”
“Your replacement? Are you leaving the company?”
“Yes. I’m getting ready to retire.”
“Oh, I see. How long have you been there?”
“Thirty-eight years. I was twenty-eight, pushing twenty-nine, when I hired in, fresh out of school with my doctorate.”
“So you were there before Ms. Song was named heir to Empress Adonnaya III?”
“Yes. I’d been there two or three years before that happened, if memory serves.”
“And you were doing special compounding work at that time?”
“Yes. I hired in under the previous chief compounder, Dr. Peter Allen. He handled the Empress’ medications, and I handled any other needs in the Palace. Then, when Ms. Song was named Heir, I handled hers almost exclusively, and...” She shook her head. “it’s been a long time. I don’t recall for certain, but somewhere in there, we brought in Tomás – er, Dr. Staffordshire – to handle everyone else.”
“What happened to Dr. Allen?”
“He retired after Adonnaya III died.”
“Which left you the chief compounder?”
“Yes.”
“And Dr. Staffordshire handled everyone else?”
“Yes.”
“Then how did it come about that he was handling the medications for Ilithyia I?”
“Oh,” Hardacre said. “I’d almost forgotten about that. I developed cancer, and had to go on a medical sabbatical while it was treated. It was pancreatic, so it was… difficult.”
“So Dr. Staffordshire filled in for you during that time.”
“Yes, and the company hired a technician to assist, I think. Tomás was very upset; we had become rather good friends, and he was afraid things might not go well.”
“I assume they did…”
“More or less,” Hardacre said with a wry smile. “I never had quite the same stamina I did before, but I survived. So when I came back, I let Tomás stay on as chief compounder, and I handled the others, and the corporation transferred the tech elsewhere – though I gathered from Tomás that she wasn’t much help to him, so they may have let her go. Somewhere in there, Ms. Garrity came on board with the Palace staff, and what few vitamins and supplements she took were made by me.”
“I see. And she became Ilithyia II?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you know she was the Heir at that time?”
“No, but we received a specific request from Her Majesty to see to Ms. Garrity’s needs. So I did.”
“Ah. So Her Majesty saw to it without revealing she had chosen Ms. Garrity?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“Whenever you filled in for Dr. Staffordshire, how did you go about it?”
“Oh, that was fairly easy,” Hardacre said. “I just looked up the latest prescription from the Imperial physician, ran the numbers, mixed the compound, then pressed it into pill molds or ran it into the capsule fill machine.”
“Each time, you ran the numbers from scratch?”
“Yes, to be sure I was doing it right,” she averred. “Because I didn’t do those all the time. When I was, say, putting together the healing accelerator drugs for then-Lieutenant Robert Dunham – now Emperor Trajan, of course – after he was injured on Wollaston, I compounded that medication every few days to ensure maximum potency of the drugs, and sent it over via an Imperial Guard courier to that little medical center they have in the Palace. When I was doing that, it didn’t take long to memorize the process and the mix formula. So I didn’t check that every single time.”
“I see. And did Dr. Staffordshire do the same?”
“I’m sure he did. It’s pretty much what all compounders do. It’s standard procedure, Dr. Allen told me.”
“Would you ever have harmed any of the Empresses?”
“No! Never!”
A quick glance at the console in the corner saw both the technician and the physician giving Ashton a high sign; Dr. Hardacre was telling the truth.
“What did you think of Tomás Staffordshire?”
“He was some few years younger than I was, and from a more privileged family, but I thought a good deal of him,” Hardacre said with a soft smile. “He never lorded his family over me, as so many of the elite of Imperial City did in that time.”
“Did you have any sort of special relationship?”
“Um, no,” she said, flushing. The technician shook his head: She’s lying.
“You appear embarrassed by the question. Why?”
“Because despite our ages, we did… discuss it.”
“Did you do more than discuss?”
Hardacre drew a deep breath.
“Yes,” she finally confessed. “We did.”
The technician nodded. That’s the truth.
“Were you lovers?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Until he d-died. I…” she shook her head, tears forming in her eyes. “I miss him.”
“Do you think he would do anything to harm any of the Empresses?”
“NO!” she cried. “No, Tomás would never have done anything like that! I’d stake my life on it! If he did anything wrong, it was an accident! An arithmetic error!”
Ashton glanced at Officer Sanders and Dr. Withers; both nodded and gave him thumbs-up. She’s being honest. Which, Ashton realized, didn’t necessarily mean it was the absolute truth – rather, it was simply the truth as she knew it.
“Very well. Thank you, Dr. Hardacre; that will be all for now.”
Ashton sat in his office, chewing his lip in thought. Then he sat up straight and commenced a detailed search through the IPD records for anything to do with Tomás Staffordshire’s death. The only thing he found was in the morgue records, where cause of death was found to be unexpected: acute appendicitis had been mistaken for muscular pain, and Staffordshire had died of complications – specifically a severe abscess in the abdominal cavity.
“Ohhh-kay,” a surprised Ashton decided, reading the documentation in VR in the lower half of his vision. “And there’s the coroner’s report, and the imagery appended to it. Yeah,
