They were shown into a large lounge with a stone tile floor; a grand fireplace dominated one wall, with a real grate and logs sitting at the center of it. The walls had various hunting trophies hanging up, along with the stuffed heads of alien animals, their teeth and claws prominently displayed to portray them as savage monsters.
“Yours?” Hoshe asked.
“I bagged every one of them,” Matthew deSavoel said proudly. “There’s a lot of hostile wildlife still living up in the hills.”
“I’ve never seen a gorall that big before,” Hoshe said, standing underneath one of the heads.
“I wasn’t aware Oaktier had a guns and hunting culture,” Paula said.
“They don’t in the cities,” deSavoel said. “They think those of us who tend the land are barbaric savages who do it purely for sport. None of them live out here; none of them realize what sort of danger the goralls and vidies pose if they get down to the human communities. There are several political campaigns to ban landowners from shooting outside cultivated lands, as if the goralls will respect that. It’s exactly the kind of oppressive crap I came here to get away from.”
“So guns are quite easy to get hold of on this planet?”
“Not a bit of it,” Tara said. She made a big show of flopping into one of the broad couches. “You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to get a license, even for a hunting rifle.”
Paula sat opposite her. “Did you ever hold a license?”
“No.” Tara shook her head, smiling softly at some private joke. She took a cigarette out of her case, and pressed it on the lighting pad at the bottom. It gave off the sweet mint smell of high-quality GM majane. “Do you mind? It helps me relax.”
Hoshe Finn frowned, but didn’t say anything.
“Did you ever possess a gun?” Paula asked.
Tara laughed. “No. Or if I did, I never kept the memory. I don’t think I would, though. Guns have no place in a civilized society.”
“Most commendable,” Paula said. She wondered if Tara was really that unsophisticated, or if that was something she wanted to believe post-death. But then, most citizens chose to overlook how easy it was to get hold of a weapon. “I’d like to talk about Wyobie Cotal.”
“Certainly. But like I told Detective Finn last time, I only have a couple of weeks’ memory of him.”
“You were having an affair with him?”
Tara took a deep drag, exhaling slowly. “Certainly was. God, what a body that kid had. I don’t think I’d ever forget that.”
“So your marriage to Morton was over?”
“No, not really. We were still on good terms, though it was getting a bit stale. You must know what that’s like.” There was an edge of mockery in her voice.
“Did you have other affairs?”
“A couple. Like I said, I could see where it was heading with Morton. Our company was doing well, it was taking up more and more of his time. Men are like that, always obsessing about the wrong things in life. Some men.” She extended a languid hand to deSavoel, who kissed her knuckles indulgently.
“Did Morton know about the other men?”
“Probably. But I respected him, I didn’t flaunt them, they were never the cause of any argument.”
“Did Morton have a gun?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. We had a good marriage.”
“It was coming to an end.”
“And we got divorced. It happens. In fact, it has to happen when you live this long.”
“Did he have a gun?”
“No.”
“All right. Why would you choose Tampico?”
“That’s the place I filed the divorce from, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. The first time I heard about it was right after my re-life when the insurance investigators were asking me what happened. I never even knew the place existed before.”
“You and Cotal bought tickets there. You left with him four days after your last memory dump in the Kirova Clinic’s secure store. Why did you run off with him?”
“I don’t know. I remember meeting him, it was at a party, then after that it was just for the sex, really; and he was fun, enthusiastic the way only first-lifers can be. I enjoyed him, but I always found it hard to believe I gave up everything for him. It was a good life Morton and I had here.”
“You weren’t the only girl Cotal was seeing.”
“Really? Somehow I’m not surprised. He was gorgeous.”
“You’re not jealous about that?”
“Irritated, is about as far as it goes.”
“Did Wyobie have a gun?”
“Oh…” She appealed to her husband. “Please.”
“Come now, Chief Investigator,” deSavoel said loftily. “There’s no need to take such a line. Wyobie Cotal was also killed.”
“Was he? We haven’t found a body. In fact, we haven’t found your wife’s body either.”
“If I’d been alive, I would have turned up for rejuvenation,” Tara said sharply. “And I’ll thank you not to open that can of worms.”
“I understand. We do have to examine every possibility.”
“But perhaps not out loud when it can cause such distress,” deSavoel said irately. “This is not pleasant for my wife to raise such specters again after she has finally accustomed herself to complete bodyloss.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Paula said. “To make sure it won’t happen again.”
“Again?” Tara’s voice rose in alarm. She stubbed her cigarette out. “You think I’ll be killed again ?”
“That’s not what I meant. It would be most unusual for a killer to strike at you twice; and you have been alive for over twenty years this time. Please don’t concern yourself about the possibility. So, Wyobie didn’t have a gun?”
“No. Not that I remember.”
“You mentioned other affairs. Were you seeing anybody else at the same time as Cotal?”
“No. Wyobie was quite enough for me.”
“What about enemies, yours or Cotal’s?”
“I must have fallen out with many people, you do over a hundred years, but I can’t think of any argument or grudge that would warrant killing me. And as for Wyobie, nobody that age has enemies, not ones that kill.”
“His other girlfriend might have been angry enough.”
“Possibly.” Tara shuddered. “I never met her. Do you think that’s what happened?”
“Actually, no. If you and Wyobie were killed, then it certainly wasn’t a crime of passion, or at least not a spur-of-the-moment slaying. As yet, we don’t know where and when you were killed. To throw up that much uncertainty takes planning and preparation. Other than your ticket there’s no real proof you ever went to Tampico.”
“The divorce,” deSavoel said. “That was filed on Tampico. And all Tara’s things were sent there.”
“The divorce was lodged with a legal firm, Broher Associates, on Tampico. It was a pure data transaction. In theory it could have been filed from anywhere inside the unisphere. As for your effects, Tara, they were sent to a Tampico storage warehouse for seven weeks, then removed by your authorization into a private vehicle. The insurance company investigators were unable to trace them. What I find interesting about this is your secure memory storage arrangement. There isn’t one apart from the Kirova Clinic, not on Tampico, nor on any other Commonwealth planet as far as the investigators could find, though my Directorate will start double-checking that now. And you would have made one, everybody has a secure store they can update for precisely this reason: re-life. The ticket, your effects shipped out there, your divorce, it’s all evidence you were settled on Tampico. But to me, the lack of a secure memory arrangement calls the whole Tampico episode into question.”
“But why?” Tara asked. “What would be the point in killing me or Wyobie? What did we do?”
“I don’t know. The last time you were seen alive was when you had lunch with Caroline Turner at the Low Moon marina restaurant. If anything was wrong, you didn’t tell her. In fact, she said you seemed quite normal.”
“Caroline was a good friend, I remember. I might even have told her about Wyobie.”
“She says not, and certainly nothing about leaving Morton to go off with Wyobie. So if you didn’t go crazy wild and run off, we have to consider you got involved in some criminal event.”
“I wouldn’t!”
Paula held up a cautionary finger. “Not necessarily deliberately. The logical explanation would be an accident, something you saw or discovered that you shouldn’t have, and were killed because of it. My problem with that theory is where it happened. If it was here, then we only have a very small incident window to investigate. Morton had been away from home for two days, and was scheduled to stay at his conference for another four days. He says you stopped answering his calls two days after your lunch with Caroline, the same day your Tampico ticket was purchased. Now, your last memory deposit in the Kirova Clinic secure store was the same day Morton went away. So at the most you had four days for this event to happen to you. I believe we can safely say it didn’t happen in the two days prior to your lunch, which leaves us with just two days, forty-eight hours, for it to occur.”
“Police records don’t show any major crime incident that month,” Hoshe said. “Actually, it was a quiet year.”
“Then they were good criminals, clever ones,” Paula said. “You never caught them, and the only evidence is this ice murder. That doesn’t leave us with a lot to go on. I have to say that if Saheef and Cotal walked in on something bad, then the chances of discovering what actually happened are slim. Which leaves us with Tampico. You arrived and bumped straight into something you shouldn’t have. Our hypothetical Tampico criminals maintained the illusion that you were alive by picking up your effects and then filing for the divorce. That would explain the lack of a memory store.”
“What sort of criminals?” Tara asked shakily. “What would they be doing to make them kill me and Wyobie?”
“It is only a theory,” Paula told her quickly. “I have difficulty in accepting major criminal conspiracies—the probability is extremely low, though we can’t ignore it. But that implausibility does leave us with a quandary. If it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t your private life, which appears blameless, then what did happen?”
