Inspector Rames

Chapter 35

Lonn was lying at the far end of the room, sprawled in a pool of blood. I approached him.

He was middle-aged but wearing it well, in a way some women might have found attractive. His body was slim, his skin tanned, and his face handsome -- although a little twisted in death. His hair had already turned silver, but he'd kept it short at the sides and slightly longer on top in what probably had been a nice, slicked-back style before he'd fought for his life. He'd been stabbed several times in the chest.

Cassia was standing next to him with her robot assistant, the top half of her forensic suit undone and tied around her waist. Her platinum blonde hair was scraped away from her face, drawing attention to the dark circles that viciously underlined her brazen, blue eyes.

"Good morning," she said, straight-lipped. "You're late. But not as late as the victim."

I sighed. "It's far too early for morbid jokes."

She turned to the body. "The girl outside told me this is Lonn Temple, head researcher of this lab. He's been dead for roughly thirteen to fourteen hours, so that puts the time of death between seven and nine yesterday evening. He's been stabbed six times in the chest. Looks like the blade hit the descending aorta, which is probably the wound that killed him."

"Okay," I said. "Anything else?"

"Even if you ignore the mess in here, it's fairly obvious that there was a struggle because he has defence wounds across his palms. And I can't think of anything else important...except your murder weapon is sitting on that table." She broke into a grin and pointed at a lab table on the other side of the room. "One bloody scalpel. We've bagged it for DNA testing, but I thought you'd want to see it."

"You're a star." I smiled back at her. "If we can get the results quickly, we might actually have been given a stroke of luck. If we have prints..."

Alex crossed the room in a few long strides and looked at the weapon Cassia had pointed to. "The odds of us getting a whole fingerprint is low. Even for a scalpel, this thing is small."

"Spoilsport." I felt myself starting to relax. "Can I have a look?"

Before he could pick the murder weapon up, voices rose next door. A PRB moaned a monotone warning, and the girl who'd found Lonn exclaimed, "No, Nora!" just as another woman appeared in the doorway.

She stared across the electro-tape at the crime scene. Her eyes settled on the body of Lonn Temple...then rolled to the back of her head as she fainted.

***

We took Nora to a sofa in the ground floor lobby. There she lay, pale and listless, while Alex fetched a glass of water from the staff cafeteria.

She had a delicate face that made me think of a pixie: small mouth and nose, high cheekbones, and almost-pointed ears behind which her short hair was tucked. There was something fragile about her, although she looked as if she was at least a decade older than the woman who'd found Lonn.

That woman had followed us out of the lab and was now standing beside me, refusing to go back upstairs. I'd managed to drag a name out of her -- Riannon Sotello -- but she was much more interested in explaining who Nora was. It made me glad that I hadn't handed Nora off to a constable, because she seemed to hold some importance. She and Riannon had acted as assistants to Lonn, and she in particular had been a close friend of his.

She woke up a minute after Riannon had finished talking. As soon as her eyes were open, Riannon shot her a malicious look. I opted for a more neutral gaze. "Are you all right?"

She struggled to push herself upright on the sofa, her eyes cloudy. "What happened?"

"You fainted," I said gently. "In the lab."