CHAPTER ELEVEN
For a long moment neither of them moved or spoke. Chomps watched their shadows on the far wall, wondering what he was going to do if she didn’t go for this. He could escape from her, of course—his size and training pretty much guaranteed he would win any real fight between them. But assaulting a sheriff’s deputy would end any chance of ever getting back into either Delphi or the Navy.
On the other hand, probably so would being arrested for breaking and entering.
“You must have suspected it wasn’t an accident,” he continued into the silence. “Otherwise, why hide the wreck out here?”
“Who said anyone hid it?” she countered. “It was put in police impound after the investigation like every other piece of evidence. Two weeks later some idiot souvenir-hunter broke in and tried to break off the decorative grille. When someone else tried the same thing a week after that, Devereux offered to put it out here at his vacation home where no one would think to look for it.”
“The fact that there was nothing official about any of it didn’t bother you?” Chomps asked.
“We wanted there to be nothing official about it,” Terry retorted. “We let him handle it all quietly, through civilian channels, in case the police records got hacked.”
“So you buried both the car and the paperwork?”
“I think I just said that,” Terry growled. “Which brings up another question. If the details were so well buried, how did you get to them?”
“I have a few specialized shovels in my tool kit,” Chomps said. She was arguing with him; but she still hadn’t clamped on the cuffs. “Do you want to hear what I found? Or would you rather haul me away and lock me up?”
She exhaled noisily. “I’m listening.”
“The first problem was the impact point,” Chomps said. “It was on a line from the duke’s mountain retreat to the capital—I’m sure that was the first thing everyone looked at. But there were other, taller trees along that same line. Why did he miss all of those?”
“Maybe he wasn’t drunk enough? Maybe his son wasn’t sneezing behind him when he passed those?”
“Maybe,” Chomps said. “But then there’s the next question. If he was coming straight from his retreat, why is the impact point ten degrees off that line?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that to hit that particular spot he needed to veer off the direct line to the capital and then change his angle again just in time to crash into the tree.”
He heard her give a tired sigh. “Fine,” she said reluctantly. “There was some veering involved. Mostly near the end, just before the impact.”
“How sharp were these zigzags?”
“Sharp enough,” she said. “One of the other theories is that he unstrapped to go get something from the supply cabinet at the back—maybe some medicine for his son if you’re feeling charitable, another drink for himself if you aren’t. He forgot to engage the autopilot, grabbed wildly for the controls when the air car swerved, overcorrected, and crashed.”
Her shadow seemed to shake itself, as if she was shaking away the memories. “And I’m not the who’s supposed to be doing all the talking,” she said, the official tartness back in her voice. “If you’ve got something solid, let’s hear it.”
“I don’t know how solid it is,” Chomps conceded. “But there are some more questions that seem to lead to suspicious answers. First: again, why that particular tree? As I said, there are plenty of other ones scattered along the way.”
“You mean why didn’t he hit a tree that wasn’t conveniently near an inn where some traveler might see everything?” Terry countered. “Seems to me you’re arguing against yourself.”
“Not really,” Chomps said. “Yes, it’s near potential witnesses, which I agree could have been a problem. But the killer had to risk it…because this was the only tall tree on the path that bordered a clearing big enough for the car to fall into.”
“In case the first crash didn’t do the job?”
“Maybe partly,” Chomps said. “But more important, I think, was that the killer needed to get to the car after the crash, either to put something in or to take something out. If he’d crashed it anywhere else it might have ended up off the ground, wedged in between the surrounding trees.”
“Interesting theory, I’ll give you that,” Terry said. “What exactly could he have wanted to put in or take out?”
“I don’t know,” Chomps said. “I’d need to know exactly what was in the car that the police took out. But the obvious target would be the black box. If he was able to manipulate the records, everything you think you know about the crash could be wrong.”
“Can’t be done,” Terry said flatly. “Black boxes can’t be tampered with.”
“Maybe ours can’t be,” he pointed out. “But this was a Solarian car. Would you even know if its black box had been hacked?”
“Solarian car; Manticoran black box,” Terry said with strained patience. “Really, Townsend, you think we’d let the duke tool around in an air car without all the legally required safety equipment?”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t touched?”
“Am I suddenly speaking German?” she retorted. “Don’t you think we know how to do our jobs?”
Chomps scowled. So much for that potential lead. “No, of course you do,” he said. “But remember that your focus was on the cause of an accident, not evidence of a murder.”
“We don’t go into these things with preconceptions,” Terry said stiffly. “Speaking of which, I’m hearing a lot of theory and supposition but I’ve yet to hear any facts.”
“Let me remedy that,” Chomps said. “I’ve got two nice little facts right inside the car. Easiest to see from the right-hand side.”
“Fine,” Terry said, finally stepping out from behind him and walking around the front of the car. “Show me.”
“You said there were two theories as to why the duke wasn’t wearing his restraints,” Chomps said, following her. The cuffs, he noted uneasily, were still in her hand. “But both of them should have put him at or near his seat at the time of the crash.” He pointed through the gap where the right-hand door had been before the police pried it off. “So why was his body way over here on the opposite side of the car?”
“I don’t see the problem,” Terry said. “It hit and then fell, remember? Plenty of time in there for the car to have canted up onto its right side and slid him over there.”
“But there aren’t any impact marks I can see near his seat,” Chomps persisted, pointing his light at that section of the dashboard. “If he was thrown there first—”
“Son of a bitch,” Terry muttered. “Give me your light.”
“Sure,” Chomps said, frowning as he handed it over. “What do you see?”
“There’s light coming in from my floodlight,” she said, squatting down and shining her light toward the area beneath the steering yoke. There was an opening there, one of the equipment access areas that Chomps had noted in his earlier sweep.
“There’s probably a lot of light coming in through the various gaps,” he reminded her. “That one—”
“Shut up, Townsend,” she cut him off. Her voice was still quiet, but there was a sudden new edge to it. “The computer’s gone.”
Chomps looked back at the dashboard and all the holes where access panels had been. “I assumed the investigators took everything.”
“Everything except the computer,” she ground out. “It was a complete mess, besides being so badly wedged in it would have required a cutting torch to get out. That much heat on top of the crash damage would have scrambled anything that might have still been in there. No point in taking it, especially since all the flight records were duplicated in the black box, which was in much better shape.”
“I see,” Chomps said. He would probably have pulled the computer anyway, just for completeness sake. But maybe that was just him. “So what happened to it?”
“Three guesses,” Terry growled, getting back to her feet and thrusting his light back into his hand. She scowled at the car, then turned and stomped toward the shed door. “Come on,” she said, stuffing the cuffs back in their pouch. “I think we need a little chat with Mr. Devereux.”
Chomps had half expected Devereux to be frantically throwing clothing into a carrybag in preparation for a guilty dash out the back door and a mad run though the woods. Instead, he was sitting quietly on an old couch in his front room, his face expressionless as he watched his visitors cross the foyer toward him, only the restlessness of his hands as they rubbed against each other betraying his tension. “Hello, Deputy,” he greeted them, his voice under rigid control. “I assume you’re here about the computer.”
“Yes, I am,” Terry confirmed, her own tone calm and professional. “I notice that wasn’t a question. So?”
Devereux shrugged, his eyes flicking briefly to Chomps before returning to Terry. “There’s not much to tell,” he said. “I didn’t realize you’d left the computer in the wreck until it got here. I thought if I could get it out I might be able to salvage some of the records.”
“We already had all the data from the black box,” Terry said.
“You had all the data,” Devereux said, smiling wanly. “I…” The smile disappeared and he lowered his gaze to the floor in front of him. “I was the duke’s mechanic, Deputy. I didn’t know much about the computer—the duke handled that—but I was in charge of everything else. I thought…I needed to know…” He trailed off.
Terry looked at Chomps. “You needed to know if the crash was your fault?” she suggested quietly.
A spasm of pain crossed Devereux’s face. “Yes,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s silly. Probably useless even to look. But I had to try.”
“How did you get it out?” Chomps asked. “Hammer and chisel?”
Devereux frowned up at him. “How did you know?”
“Detective Lassaline said the heat of a torch would have scrambled anything that was left of the data. I also noticed that one of the access ports had what looked like chisel marks around the edges.”
“Yes, that’s what I did,” Devereux confirmed, still frowning. “You’ve got a good eye.”
Chomps shrugged. “I try.”
“Have you made any progress?” Terry asked.
Devereux shook his head. “It was pretty well wedged in there, and I only got it out a couple of weeks ago. As I said, the duke was the one who dealt with the computer—part of the whole Solarian mystique, I suppose—and I’ve just barely figured out how to turn it on and get to the startup sections. Or what’s left of them, anyway.”
“Sounds good,” Terry said, gesturing to him. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Devereux nodded and stood up. “It’s in my workroom downstairs. Follow me.”
A minute and a cramped flight of stairs later—cramped for Chomps, anyway—they were in the basement. Devereux led them past the power generator and laundry room and through a doorway into a large corner room dimly lit by the diffuse starlight coming in through a pair of window wells. On a workbench under one of them were several small piles of battered and blackened electronic components laid out under the soft glow of a focused desk lamp. “You can see the kind of shape it’s in,” Devereux said as the three of them made their way across the room. “Even without causing any further damage when I got it out it was already falling apart.”
“Which part is the computer itself?” Terry asked.
“These two parts, actually,” Devereux said, pointing to a pair of fist-sized components connected by several cables to a display and what looked like a diagnostic bank. “I think they’re supposed to be connected together, but as I said Duke Serisburg was the one who handled all the computer work.”
“Is there a manual?” Chomps asked.
“Yes.” Devereux tapped one of the components. “Right in here.”
“Yeah, that’s useful,” Terry growled, pointing at a rectangular box with a half dozen ports laid out along the two narrow sides. “This the outer casing?”
“Yes,” Devereux said. “Here, let me show you what I’ve got.”
He sat down at the work bench and keyed on the various components. Terry stepped behind him, leaning slightly over his shoulder as she watched the images come up.
Keeping to the side, Chomps picked up the outer casing and gave it a close look. It wasn’t quite like any other computer casing he’d seen before, with its ports and access points arrayed in vastly different configurations from their Manticoran cousins. A couple of the ports were of shapes he’d never seen before, not even during his and Travis’s quiet incursion into the world of Silesian data thievery. Apparently, even general, nonclassified, civilian Solarian tech was years beyond anything in this part of the galaxy.
Or at least beyond the Manticoran and Silesian regions. Maybe Travis would find the Andermani a bit more up to speed.
Which, in the larger scheme of things, could be very good or very, very bad.
He frowned, holding the casing a little closer. Surreptitiously, he pulled out his recorder and ran it over the bent metal.
“Doesn’t look very promising,” Terry commented. She glanced over her shoulder, saw Chomps holding the casing. Scowling, she took it away from him and set it back on the table.
“As I said,” Devereux replied. “As you can see, I figured out how to get power to it and turn it on, but I’m mostly getting what you see there: error messages and scrambled screens. But I did find some serial numbers on the computer and two of the ports, if that would be helpful.”
“Could be,” Terry said. “Where are they?”
“Hang on—you’ll need more light,” Devereux said. He reached for the lamp’s control—
“Hold it,” Chomps said, catching his wrist as something in one of the window wells caught his eye. “Terry, does your car’s floodlight have an auto-off setting?”
“Yes, but it’s not on,” she said, frowning. “Why?”
“Because it just went off,” Chomps told her. “I saw the reflected light on the treetops go out.”
“What does that mean?” Devereux asked.
“It means someone turned it off,” Terry said grimly, drawing her sidearm. “You two stay here.” Hurrying across the room, she slipped through the doorway and disappeared out into the hall.
“Like hell,” Chomps said under his breath. “You—stay here,” he ordered Devereux as he headed off after her. He wasn’t armed, but there was no way he was going to let Terry head off into a dangerous situation alone.
He had finished with the stairs and was rounding the final wall toward the front door when the windows lit up with sudden light and a violent explosion shattered the quiet of the night.
* * *
“Get that thing away from me,” Terry snarled at the med tech dabbing at her unnaturally rosy cheek with a sponge. “I’m fine.”
“Like hell you are,” one of the other deputies, Carl Broganis, snarled right back. “You’re damn lucky you’re not already in the hospital.”
“What, for a little heat rash?”
“It’s called flash burn, Deputy,” the medic said in a tone that gave Chomps the impression that Terry already had a reputation for being a bad patient. “And we need to make sure you didn’t get any shrapnel in along with it.”
“So shut up and let him work,” Broganis added.
Terry glared at him. But there was no real force to the glare, and after a second her eyes drifted away. Broganis eyed her another moment; and then, as Chomps had known he eventually would, he turned both optic barrels full-bore onto the civilian intruder.
“As for you, Townsend, you’re going to spend the next week in one of my cells if I don’t get some answers.”
“I’ve already given you all the answers I’ve got,” Chomps said. “I can’t help it if you don’t like them.”
“Oh, we’re way past liking,” Broganis said. “We’re to flat-out disbelieving. You just happen to be flying out here in the middle of nowhere, and you just happen to notice something wrong with Mr. Devereux’s shed, and instead of screening it in you decide to take it upon yourself to land and check it out yourself?”
“You left out that I just happen to be a veteran of the Royal Manticoran Navy who’s been trained to spot trouble.” Chomps raised his eyebrows. “And that I just happened to be right.”
Broganis’s lips curled back from his teeth in what would probably have been a retort for the record books.
But he left it unsaid. After all, the proof of Chomps’s statement was still smoldering behind him.
Chomps shifted his eyes over Broganis’s shoulder, suppressing a withering curse of his own. The shed was pretty much gone, the parts that hadn’t been scattered across the landscape by the hydrogen tank explosion burned to ashes and charcoal. What was left of the duke’s car, caught in the center of the blast, had been badly charred by the blast, the remains of the ducal seal gone.
If there’d been any evidence the investigators had missed, it was pretty well gone now.
“Yeah, you happened to be right,” Broganis growled. “Of course, if you’re the one who blew up the tanks in the first place then it’s not that amazing of a prediction, is it?”
“I was in the house with Devereux when they blew,” Chomps pointed out. “Deputy Lassaline can confirm that.”
“She also said you were alone in the shed before she arrived,” Broganis countered. “You could have rigged a delay switch or something.”
“He wasn’t involved,” Terry spoke up. Waving away the medic, she stood up. “If you’re going to arrest him, arrest him. If you’re not, let him go.”
Broganis sent Chomps another glare. “Fine,” he growled. “Go. We’ll think about filing charges in the morning. As for you, Deputy, we need to get you home.”
“My car’s right here.”
“And it’s not going anywhere until it’s been towed in and checked,” Broganis said.
“It’s a patrol car,” Terry said with clearly strained patience. “A little explosion isn’t going to bother it any.”
“And you’re not in any shape to do any driving anyway,” Broganis added. “I’ll get someone to drive you home.”
Chomps cleared his throat. “Actually, I talked to her mother while the medic was checking her out. She said that maybe she should come back to the inn for the night. So that, you know, she could keep an eye on you.”
“If you screened my mother—” Terry broke off, her expression completing the threat without the need for further words.
“No, no, she screened me,” Chomps said hastily. “She heard about the explosion and knew you’d been heading to Whistlestop. I told her you were all right, but she…uh…sort of insisted.”
“Well, you can just screen her back and uninsist her,” Terry growled. “I have my own place in the Point, thank you very much.”
“Actually, that’s a good idea,” Broganis said blandly. “Vespoli will insist you take a couple of days off anyway. Might as well get some home cooking while you’re at it.”
“Broganis—”
“I can screen Vespoli and ask her if you’d like,” Broganis offered. “Of course, she’d probably insist you spend those same couple of days in the hospital.”
Terry glared at him another moment, then seemed to wilt. “I hate you, you know. Both of you.”
“Then it’s settled,” Chomps said. “And since I’m already heading that direction, Deputy Broganis won’t need to assign someone else to drive you.”
“Like hell,” Broganis retorted. “You’re a suspect in a—”
“Give it a rest, Broganis,” Terry said, managing to sound tired, irritated, and righteous all at the same time. “Besides, you have to wait here and oversee the arson squad. Townsend can take me.”
“You sure?” Broganis asked, eyeing Chomps suspiciously.
“I already said he’s in the clear,” Terry said. “Anyway, anything he does from now on he’ll have to answer to my mother for.”
“Point.” Broganis made a face. “Fine. Go on—get out of here.”
“I’ll go get my car,” Chomps said. “Be back in a minute.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, he and Terry were in the air.
“How are you feeling?” Chomps asked as he turned the air car toward home. “I mean, really feeling?”
“I’ve been better,” Terry conceded. “But it’s really just heat rash. No shrapnel, not even any splinters. A good night’s sleep and I’ll be fine.” She stirred in her seat. “I still don’t know how I let you talk me into leaving the computer with Devereux.”
“Because even with your brain bouncing around your skull you recognized it was the best move,” Chomps said.
“Really?” she countered. “I thought it was because you Svengalied me into it.”
“The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.” Chomps held a hand up against the retort he could sense her prepping. “Look. If we’d taken the computer, we’d have needed to stash it in either my car or yours. No guarantee Broganis or the other first responders wouldn’t have searched either vehicle before they let us go. As it is, no one knows Devereux’s got it, and he already promised to keep it hidden and secret.”
“You think you can trust him?”
“After someone blew up his shed to try to get rid of it?” Chomps nodded. “Trust me—he won’t tell a soul.”
“If the computer was what the attacker was after, and if he thinks he succeeded.”
“Yes, on both counts,” Chomps said. “You remember how you didn’t realize the computer was missing until you saw a glimmer from your spotlight leaking through the opening? Well, our attacker had already shut down the light, so he didn’t have that clue. You also had to squat down to make sure it was gone, which means a quick glance on his part wouldn’t have done it.”
“Unless he also squatted down,” Terry said. “We’re all very big on knees in Serisburg, you know.”
“One: he didn’t have time,” Chomps said. “He had to shut down your light, rig the connector on Devereux’s hydrogen storage tanks, and get out before you showed up to investigate. And two: if he’d seen the computer was missing, there’d be no reason to destroy what was left of the wreckage and thereby tip us off that someone was actively involved with the duke’s death. No, he thinks he succeeded.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Terry said slowly. “But that would imply that there’s something damning on the computer that someone doesn’t want us to see.”
“I don’t see any other conclusion,” Chomps said. Technically, he assured himself, that was a precisely correct statement. “All the more reason to make sure no one knows we’ve got it.”
“And Devereux understands that? I saw you talking to him while they were cleaning me up.”
“Oh, he understands it, all right,” Chomps assured her. “He understands he’s holding some damning evidence, he understands that his life is potentially in danger, and he’s mad as hell at the thought someone might have killed his beloved duke and his family. No, he’s as much on our side as you can get.”
For a moment they flew in silence as Terry rested and thought, or maybe just rested. “So what’s our next move?” she asked.
“We need to find out everything we can about that computer,” Chomps said. “First step is to see if we can get some specs on the thing.”
“Devereux said the manual was on the computer.”
“Damned inconveniently, yes,” Chomps growled. “But someone imported the car for the duke, and that someone may have access to Solarian files that might help us. That same someone might also be able to dig up useful data on the car itself.”
“And if that person isn’t local, he’s probably in Landing,” Terry said. “How early do you want to leave?”
“Whoa,” Chomps said. “Those couple of days off Broganis mentioned were for purposes of healing, not road trips.”
“I’m fine,” Terry growled. “Besides, you’ll be doing the driving.”
“Not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
Chomps hesitated. How exactly should he bring up this particular topic, especially given her injuries and her current mood?
Gradually, he decided. Very gradually. “Tell me, when you headed out to check on your car and the shed, did you pause anywhere inside the house along the way? Or did you go straight through and out the door?”
He could feel her eyes on him. “What exactly are you implying?”
“I’m just exploring the possibilities,” Chomps said evasively. “Did you pause, or didn’t you?”
“I didn’t pause, hesitate, or trip over my own feet,” Terry growled. “Straight up the stairs, through the front room, out the door, and face-first into an explosion. Does that help?”
“Maybe,” Chomps said. “I was just thinking that whoever wanted to eliminate the evidence might also figure it would be a bonus to eliminate whoever seemed to have developed a sudden interest in the case.”
“Because he would have expected us to be in Devereux’s front room instead of his basement?” Terry countered. “Where the dousing of my floodlight would have been a lot more obvious, and the distance to the shed a lot shorter?”
Chomps grimaced. So much for approaching it gradually. Clearly, she’d already done the math on this one. “Basically.”
“Is that why you suggested taking me to the inn? To keep me away from my apartment?”
“I thought it might be a little safer, yes.”
“You thought,” Terry said darkly. “So you didn’t really talk to Mom.”
Chomps shrugged. “I have a mother, too. I know how they think.”
“Fine,” Terry growled. “Let’s assume you’re right on the timing. Two problems with your conclusion. One: the official investigation is long over, and none of us is interested in reopening it. That includes me. Two: killing a cop in Serisburg would buy him a lot more trouble than anyone should reasonably want.”
She leaned over so that she could look him squarely in the eye. “You, on the other hand, are not only the one poking a stick into this particular hornet’s next, but you’re also not a cop. Would you like me to do the math on that one?”
“No, I’ve already run the numbers,” Chomps conceded. “Doesn’t mean our mystery man wouldn’t take a twofer if he could get one.”
“Yeah, well, my problem right now is that he might also go for a fourfer,” Terry bit out. “Or hadn’t it occurred to you that taking me to the inn also puts my parents at risk?”
“Maybe,” Chomps said. “On the other hand, this way we’ll both be there to keep an eye on them. On top of that, the only one who knows we’re heading there is Broganis, and we aren’t being followed. I’ve been watching.”
“Yeah. So have I.”