“Ah, yes, sir,” Kresh said. “I’ll keep you posted. ” He switched off and frowned at the screen. Why the hell hadn’t anyone informed the Governor? Just how muddled was the security operation? He shook his head. Never mind. Other things to worry about just now.
They were almost there.
A dead-white face stared bug-eyed at the sky, its rain-filled mouth open in shock.
Raindrops splattered on the corpse, the scene lit in the harsh, shadowless glare of high-power portable beam lights. The dead man’s hands clutched at his neck, as if he were still struggling to pull the cruel, hard wire from around his throat. The corpse was in a small depression in the ground, tangled up in scruffy bramble, surrounded by a scrubby, anemic forest of small, elderly trees.
Lightning flashed and thunder blared, and Alvar Kresh stood over the corpse in the driving rain. The Crime Scene robots were already at work. Not that they would do any good. The CS robots could measure and sense and detect all they wanted, but there were no answers here. They could go back to their labs and come up with a time of death, perhaps, but that was going to be about it.
Alvar Kresh looked down at the dead man and sighed. He had been in this business for a while, and experience taught you things. There were times when you knew enough to know you weren’t going to know any more. Sometimes the scene of a crime spoke volumes. Other times-right now, for example-it was plain to see that prodding at the corpse was useless. What had once been a man was now a meaningless bit of grotesquerie, as impersonal, as anonymous as a crumpled-up food wrapper.
But you went through the ritual all the same, because it was part of your job, because there was the faint chance that your instincts just might be wrong, because it was expected of you, because it was standard procedure. But you knew that there was no real point.
It was clear, to Kresh’s eye, that whoever did this job had not done it with the simple goal of killing. He or she had taken on the job of killing undetected. It was a careful, professional job. A garrote, for example, was not going to show any fingerprints. A rainy night would insure that a lot of clues would be washed away. Besides, anyone who could slip through a perimeter of Governor’s Rangers, kill one of their number, and get away undetected was not going to be stupid enough to leave a calling card behind.
Sometimes-like right now-when it was obvious there was nothing to be learned, crime scenes devolved into little more than macabre social occasions. Kresh didn’t get to see his opposite numbers in the SSS and the Rangers all that often. But tonight it was old home week. Devray of the Rangers and Melloy of the SSS were both here.
That in itself was interesting. Neither service was in the habit of dispatching its highest-ranking officers to a murder scene. It was clear to Kresh that neither side wanted to concede a centimeter of ground in the endless turf war between the two services. Kresh was glad he had nothing at stake in this one. Let the two of them duke it out.
Kresh didn’t have much faith in the SSS or the Rangers. The Settler force was nothing more than a bunch of bullyboys, a goon squad given official sanction. Cinta Melloy’s SSS was little more than a band of hired thugs.
The Rangers were a decent enough group, and good at what they did. Kresh was more than willing to grant that. The only trouble was that security was not what they did. Their usual line of work ran toward guarding trees, not people. Their primary jobs were search and rescue, wildlife management, ecological maintenance. Their tasks had been seen as dull, plebeian, low-status jobs in the past. These days such work was all-important, high-profile stuff. The needs of the day had vaulted the Rangers out of their previous obscurity.
And yet, here they were, guarding the Governor for no better reason than that their charter said it was their job. Never mind that the charter-writers had been talking about ceremonial guards. Back in those days, no one had ever dreamed that the Governor would require actual protection against real threats, let alone that humans would be expected to do the job.
Kresh could make the case that their inexperience in such matters meant that having the Rangers on the job actually endangered the Governor. But the Rangers were insisting on the prerogative of their service even though Kresh’s deputies--or perhaps even the SSS-could do a better job of it.
The Rangers had not been trained for security work. They had spent their lives being protected from all harm by robots. At the end of the day, they were Spacers, and Spacers tended to assume that a situation was safe until they learned otherwise. A good security officer had to do just the opposite.
