We arrived at Socrico University a while later in our new gear. Knowing that everything we said, heard, and observed would go straight to Sten was unnerving, and we entered the open grounds in silence.
Passing under the arch of the decorative gatehouse, we entered a gravel courtyard the size of a surface football pitch. Old, regal sandstone buildings clustered around it, narrow archways leading to the rest of the campus behind this impressive front. The buildings towered over us in a sweeping U-shape like a palace, complete with spires and mini battlement-style finishes against the grey-tiled roofs. Real flowers had been potted carefully in baskets, and they swung gently in a brief but welcome breeze.
The campus was quiet, those who were awake already in their lectures. I led Alex through an archway and down a random path, praying I would soon see something that was obviously a research laboratory.
"There's a PRB over there," he said when we were almost at the end of the gravel.
I pushed my glasses further up my nose and looked to the side. A black robot with a rifle was standing at the entrance to a fork in the path. "Oh, good. You can do the talking."
We approached the PRB. Alex flashed his warrant card. "Police. Take us to the crime scene."
If I'd asked it the same question, it probably would have taken me to the moon.
The PRB led us down the path. For a while, it seemed to be taking us away from the rest of the campus towards nothing at all, until the ugliest building I'd ever seen came into view.
It looked like something that had landed in an ashtray. We didn't have many concrete structures in the city, but this was one of them, and its discolouration over time had only made its appearance worse. It had the same ungainly structure as a twenty-first century block of scraggly offices, only much squatter. The enormous sign hanging over its doorway marked it clearly as our destination. Socrico University Research.
Alex looked at me as we approached the automatic doors. "Ready?"
For the investigation of my lifetime? Not at all.
***
When we were wearing our forensic suits, we passed through a huddle of scientists standing outside a room marked as Lab S. Inside, only one civilian remained among the rows of white tables. She was standing at the far end, beside an office closed off with electro-tape. Young and pale, she alternated between chewing her thumbnail and glancing inside the crime scene.
We left the PRB and strolled across the room towards her. I dug out my warrant card. "Excuse me, ma'am. Would you like to --"
Her eyebrows, drawn on so that they were as thick as slugs at one end and thin as a pinprick at the other, shot upwards. "Oh, they said -- they said you'd want to talk to me and I should, like, wait here? Those robots?"
I exchanged a glance with Alex. "You found the victim?"
"Lonn," she amended. "I was the first one here. I just -- I knocked on the door to his office, just to say good morning, like, he's usually here before everyone else, and I always say good morning, so --"
"We'll need to have a look around first," I said firmly. "Then we'll come back out and talk to you."
She nodded fervently, golden earrings swinging. "Okay. Can I wait just here?"
"Sure." I ducked under the electro-tape.
The office was small and full to bursting. A desk stood in the middle of the room, covered in notebooks, scraps of paper, and chemical stains. A shelf of old-fashioned lever arch folders stood in the far corner, but the rest of the wall space was filled with cluttered lab tables. One had been upturned, tipping glass beakers and hundreds of papers onto the floor.
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."
Dress shoes clicked down the lobby, and I looked over my shoulder to see Alex arriving with a glass of water. He passed the glass to our patient. Her hands trembled as she took it, and the water sloshed over the rim. "Thank you."
I gave her a moment to sip the water and regain some composure. When Alex had taken the glass back, I said, "You're Nora Fitzroy?"
"Yes." Her eyes were clearer now, and she looked at me keenly. "I recognise you."
That made me determined to skip my own introduction. "You were a close friend of Lonn's?"
Her face crumpled. "A family friend. I sometimes have dinner with him, and Janet and Frankie..." Her voice cracked, and she pressed a hand against her forehead. "I can't believe it. Someone will have to tell them..."
Something clattered down the staircase behind us, and I turned around. Detective Constable Emily Laney reached the bottom, passing a handful of scientists toing and froing from the canteen before stopping in front of us. "Do you want me to keep an eye on her, ma'am?"
"Yes, please." I turned back to Nora. "You should stay sitting down for a while until you feel better. I'll be in touch to ask more questions later."
"Thank you." Nora frowned. "You're Amber Rames, aren't you? The one in the news."
I smiled wryly and turned away. "For my sins."
Alex fell into step with me as I crossed to the staircase, raising a teasing eyebrow. "Am I that bad?"
"No. It's the Trials. We have a lot riding on this."
Riannon appeared on my other side a moment later, her earrings swinging madly. "You didn't forget about me? I thought you wanted to, like, talk to me."
She sprang up the stairs. Alex extended his stride, leaving me to lag behind. I felt like I was in a race.
"Do you know if there's CCTV in this building?" I asked.
"I think there's some outside, but not in the labs."
Great. "Are there any other security measures?"
"The labs are usually locked if no one's here, but once someone is, the doors remain open."
"So anyone could have entered Lonn's office after he did?"
"Yes."
"What time did you come in this morning?" Alex asked.
"Half eight."
We reached the top of the stairs. I finally fell into step with them. "Was anyone around when you found Lonn?"
"What, like, someone with murderer stamped on their forehead?" She laughed breathlessly, but the sound was forced.
"Anyone."
"No. It was just like I told you. I came in and swiped my card to clock in, and then I went to Lonn's office to say hello. I knocked and there was no answer, so I opened the door because I thought maybe he was just concentrating so hard he hadn't heard me, and he was lying there with blood everywhere. I started screaming, how awful is that? I wasn't the one who should have been..." She caught her breath, her eyes suddenly filling.
"I went in a bit further and looked at him to check he wasn't alive, and then I called nine nine nine. I didn't actually check his pulse -- I feel really bad -- but there was so much blood that I instinctively thought he was dead, and it never even crossed my mind to check because, like, how could he have been alive when he looked like that? It was so awful, like I'd walked into a serial killer horror film."
"I'm sorry you had to see it," I said. "We'll be taking formal statements from everyone who works in Lab S, but do you have any idea of what time everyone left last night?"
She shrugged. "I was the first to go, sorry. Lonn didn't seem like he needed anything. Sometimes he stays late, but he wasn't supposed to be staying late yesterday."
"What time did you leave?"
"Five on the dot."
"You were in a hurry?" Alex said.
Her voice hardened. "Who isn't when the hour hand gets to five?"
We stopped by the entrance to the lab, and I glanced at the cluster of people inside. "Riannon, Lonn was killed between seven and nine last night. If he'd given you the impression he wasn't staying late, why do you think he was still here?"
"Oh, it wasn't just an impression. Every Thursday, he went home on time to have dinner with his wife, and his niece, Frankie. She's a student here at the university. Her mother died last summer and left her as an orphan, but Lonn and Janet have been looking after her when she's not living on campus." Riannon's voice faltered. "I suppose it will just be Janet now. That's so sad. It's not, like, really sinking in. I keep thinking it can't have been Lonn, it must have been someone else I saw..."
"I understand this is difficult for you," I said. "There's just one more thing I have to ask -- to follow protocol. Where were you last night?"
"At home," Riannon said.
"All night?" Alex asked.
"Yes. Yes, I was watching something on Xplora Films. Underground Angel."
"Okay." I moved towards the doorway. "Thank you. Has someone taken your Xplora details?"
She nodded fiercely, her earrings swinging. "Yeah."
"Good. You can stay out here now."
Riannon stood aside. We passed through the lab again and ducked under the electro-tape.
"Sorry about that, Cassia," I said as I straightened up.
The body was gone now, but she was amusing herself at the desk in the centre of the room. She looked up with bright eyes. "It's okay. The victim's work was very interesting."
While Alex went to the lab tables, I joined my sister and squinted at the papers she was holding. "That looks like an alien language."
"Also known as chemical equations," she said. "I think Lab S was researching a cure for fatal familial insomnia."
I racked my brain. "That's the genetically inherited version of the rare prion disease that causes terminal insomnia."
Alex looked over his shoulder. "Did Cassia teach you that?"
I scowled. "Why is that your assumption whenever I say something clever?"
He raised his eyebrows.
"Fine, she did," I said. "Pass me the scalpel. Have you found anything useful over there?"
Alex picked up the bagged murder weapon, but he stayed where he was. "Yes. Come and look at this."
Squashing down my annoyance, I trooped across the small room to the shelves he was staring at. He passed me the scalpel without looking, keeping his gaze on the folders. "One of these is missing."
I blocked him out, examining the thick layer of blood over the blade instead. "Do we know for definite that this came from in here?"
"Yes," Cassia said. "There's one scalpel missing from the drawer to your left."
Alex was still patiently staring at the folders, so I finally put the scalpel down and followed his gaze. They were arranged in rainbow order, tucked up against each another tightly and leaving one folder-sized gap in the middle of the formation. Three red, three yellow, three green, two blue, three purple, three black.
"The last one might be in the main lab," I said. "Tell the PRBs to search for it. In the meantime, I'll find Janet Temple's address."