Captivate (Manipulate, Book 2)

Chapter 23

“Defensive wounds on his hands,” Basher said, pointing to one of the men who was further in the room. “I think this other guy was killed first, the stab wound is in his back. Then the other two... they’re not positioned like they fought each other. And usually in a knife fight somebody gets away. It’s not like a shoot out where everyone could die.”

“But we’re only looking for eight Rik,” Sam said. “I mean, all the Rik who were on the space station are here. Are we looking for a ninth person?”

“We’ll ask the neighbors if they heard or saw anything...” Basher trailed off. The neighbors here would most likely tell him nothing. There were so many influential people on Selta it was safer to keep your mouth (or beak) shut. Basher himself had a somewhat unsavory reputation on Selta, and that wouldn’t help either. Maybe he would send Sam.

Basher conferred with the constables about where the bodies would be taken. He would prefer to take them back to the embassy to examine, but they didn’t have the room. Or the cold storage. Seltan law was pretty strict about dead bodies in their pristine closed environment.

Shara arrived soon after, and if Basher had expected the sight of eight dead Rik to subdue her he was disappointed.

“Ew,” she said. “That’s nasty.”

“Thank you for the critical analysis.”

“Well, it IS nasty. And I wasn’t chosen to be a Rik assassin for my compassion, so if you expect me to cry over people I never met then that’s silly.”

“Clearly.”

“Would you like me better if I cried? I can.” She focused intently on her own nose, and her eyes filled until two tears ran down her cheeks. “See?”

Basher turned away without replying, vaguely disgusted. He began to go through the contents of the small locker in the bathroom.

“Fine, be that way.” She went back to the front room.

There was nothing personal in the locker. He went through their pockets and the other cabinets in the main room. If these people had anything with them besides extra clothes, it had been taken.

“Definitely sasoikeo,” Shara called from the front room. “I can smell it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.” She joined him again. “I’m an assassin. Do you even know what that means?”

“It means you should be in prison.”

“It means...” she lifted the fingers of the man who’d been stabbed in the back. “It means I can tell you that this guy administered the poison to the others. He’d had on rubber gloves to avoid getting it on his skin. That means the poison was probably in liquid form and administered in a drink. The solid and aerosol forms are safe to touch. I can smell the latex and there’s a bit of that powdery residue on his skin.”

Basher sat back on his heels. “Alright, what about the stabbing?”

“I’m not as sure about that part. We are usually trained in all types of weapons though I wouldn’t consider knives a Rik favorite. I would guess...” she looked around the room. “I would guess that there was a fourth person here who stabbed this guy when he got back from poisoning the others, and then killed the other two. But that’s just a guess, I really don’t know.”

Her admitted ignorance made Basher give more credit to her other surmises. It was the mark of a professional to know where the line lay between deduction and guesswork and not to pretend to know more than they did. It didn’t lessen his dislike for her, however.