A Werewolf Among Us

TWELVE: A Murderer Revealed

A cyberdetective rarely removes his bio-computer shell during an investigation, for he knows that many cases are solved by taking notice of the smallest developments. Often, some mundane action is the trigger that fires the memory and shoots down the veil of confusion shielding the true nature of events. In the case of the Alderban murders, for Baker St. Cyr, understanding was triggered by an ordinary back-scratcher…

When they reached the kitchen, St. Cyr dispatched Teddy to patrol the main corridor on the second level and to keep a special watch on the elevator light-boards in the event that someone had illegally entered the mansion. Next, he carefully marked off limits in the huge kitchen, making it clear that no one was to move out of the large, open center of the floor, and certainly not toward one of the many utilities drawers that might contain a knife or other weapon. This done, the others sitting either on the floor or in the few chairs that were in the room, he perched on the block table to the right of the open area, keeping all of them in sight.

They talked among themselves and occasionally asked him questions. What were they waiting for? He didn't know — perhaps for the killer to make a move of some sort or to give himself away through a bad case of nerves. Preferably, they were just waiting for morning. What would happen in the morning? The delivery boy from Worldwide Communications would copter in with St. Cyr's light-telegram. He would probably be riding a one-man machine, but he could send help when he returned to the port.

When they had been in the kitchen more than an hour, everyone was quiet, wrestling with his own fears and working out his own suspicions. By morning, St. Cyr thought, they would all be just as cynical as he was. Even Jubal would no longer find it impossible to accept the notion that the killer was one of them. Already he was looking oddly at Hirschel.

Tina, who had been sitting on the floor with her pretty legs tucked under her, rose and stretched, walked slowly toward St. Cyr. She stood to his side so that she would not interfere with his view of the family. She said, "How's the shoulder?"

"I'll live."

"You should have had another dose of morphine by now."

He used his good hand to scratch his back and said, "I'm getting used to the pain, but I'll soon be nuts if it doesn't stop itching."

"Want a back-scratcher?" she asked.

"You have one?"

"In that drawer over there," she said. "It's full of odds and ends."

"Knives?"

She did not smile. "No knives."

"Get it for me, would you?"

She crossed the room, opened the drawer and rummaged through it while everyone else in the room watched her closely. She turned a moment later and came back with a stainless steel back-scratcher. It was formed like a human hand, with five blunt fingers.

"Turn around and I'll get it for you."

He smiled and took the tool out of her hand. "I'll do it myself."

"Of course," she said, "I forgot. I might try to beat you with it, knock you out or something like that."

"Something like that," he agreed.

She was angry, but she did not go away. She folded her arms under her full breasts, making them fuller, and leaned against the edge of the table. Even now, during this penultimate moment, he could not help but want her.

Re-direct your attention.

St. Cyr reached over his shoulder with the silvery tool and began clawing at his back below the bandages. He shivered as relief flooded over the affected area. And that abruptly, he knew who the killer was.

Impossible suspect.

He held the back-scratcher up before his face and looked at the tiny hand with the hooked fingers. He had no doubt at all that he was right, though it would be necessary to do a little breaking and entering to find the evidence he needed.

There will be no evidence. You suspect the wrong person.

No.

Let me feed you the data that cancels out your newest supposition. And, without his permission, it did just that, ran tapes that refuted the possibility of his suspicions in the minutest of detail.

Still, St. Cyr thought, hesitating now…

You are wrong.

He put the back-scratcher down. I guess I am, he thought.

He could not possibly be a killer.

For a few minutes the detective sat on the edge of the table, completely detached from everything except his new theory. The bio-computer had effectively disproved the possibility that he was still toying with, and yet…

Impossible.

Despite the wealth of data that the other half of the symbiote had fed him to the contrary, St. Cyr slowly became certain, once again, that he was right and the bio-computer was wrong. He was elated, felt light as air, energetic as he only was when he knew that he was on top of a solution.

To progress on feeling alone is illogical.

He stood and said, "I'm leaving the room for a few minutes."

"To go where?" Jubal asked.

"I want to look around a bit, collect a few pieces of evidence thai I'm fairly sure I'm going to find." He looked at each of them, slowly, one-by-one, giving the bio-computer a chance to supply him with some suspect different than the one that he was now so certain of. Jubal… Alicia, looking more frightened than anyone else… Dane staring with disbelief, still clinging to the batch of superstitions he thought was the only answer to the affair… Hirschel, watchful but not unsettled, almost smiling… Tina standing beside him, so innocent and attractive… But the bio-computer could not produce any viable alternative. St. Cyr told them: "I believe I know who killed the others."

Jubal was on his feet an instant later. "Good God, man, tell us who it was!"

"Not yet. I want to be sure of everything before I make any accusations. Give me twenty minutes or half an hour to look around."

"You don't mean that you're leaving us here alone, without any weapons?" Jubal asked, incredulous.

"That's best."

The old man was in a cantankerous mood again. Sitting there with nothing to do but brood for almost an hour, something he had probably never done before, he had put himself quite on edge. "I won't permit—"

"You haven't any choice," the cyberdetective said. He quickly crossed the room, opened the door, stepped into the corridor, and let the door shut behind him before anyone else could object — including the bio-computer, which had almost gotten to him once before.

"Mr. St, Cyr?" Teddy asked, looming suddenly out of the dark hall. His sight receptors glowed like cat's eyes. "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," St. Cyr said. "In fact, I think I know which one of them did it."

Nothing could shock the master unit; he had no capacity for genuine surprise or outrage. He said, "Do you require any assistance in the apprehension, Mr. St. Cyr?"

"Thank you, Teddy, but not just yet. I have some prowling to do first, to be sure my suspicions are right."

"I'll help with that, if you want."

"You can help most by standing guard right here and making certain that none of them leave that room."

"I'll do that, sir." Efficient. Polite. Obedient. And just about as human as anyone in this strangely cool Alderban family.

"Excellent I'm going up to the fourth level, and I'll be back in about half an hour."

"Good luck, sir," the master unit said.

In the basement workshop some minutes later, Baker St. Cyr located a prybar in an open-front tool rack and used it to break into the cabinet in which Teddy kept the keys that he had shown Inspector Rainy and the cyberdetective only a few days before. The cabinet door was strong, and it screeched loudly as the lock tore loose and it grated open over the jagged ruin. St. Cyr hesitated when he had it open, listening for some sound that would indicate the break-in had been heard. He did not know if the house computer monitored things like that. When two minutes had passed in agonizing silence, he decided that he was unobserved, and he began to read the tags on the keys, looking for those that he might be able to use.

He found them and placed them on the counter below the cabinet, then forced the violated door shut again.

This is all a useless endeavor.

He looked at his watch and saw that he had fifteen minutes of his half hour left. He did not want to keep them waiting beyond that time, for he did not want anyone to go onto the fourth level to look for him.

Five minutes later, he was done. He left the workshop carrying a paper sack full of interesting discoveries, crossed the garage, and stepped into the elevator shaft through the doors that he had forced open from the inside a short while ago. The shaft was lighted only by the glow that spilled through the open doors. The floor was only three feet below those lift doors on this last level, and he was able to use that minimal illumination to find the pair of parallel tracks on the righthand wall. It was on these that the lift rode; because the system was designed for horizontal as well as vertical movement, there were no cables to contend with. Standing on the thick lower rail, holding the sack in his left hand, he grasped the notched upper rail in his good right hand and began to laboriously work his way upwards.

Teddy was waiting outside the door to the kitchen, where St. Cyr had left him. "Nobody tried to leave?"

"No, Mr. St, Cyr." Teddy did not show any interest in the paper sack or its contents. "Do you want support in there, sir?"

"Not yet. If you'd continue to guard the door, I'd feel as if my back was well covered."

"Yes, sir."

St. Cyr vocal-coded the door and went inside, made certain it shut completely behind him, and walked to the table, where he put down the sackful of evidence.

Tina was sitting on the floor with the others again, her black hair fallen across her face like a mourning cloth. He supposed that if anyone here had it in him to mourn, it was Alicia. Still, the girl held that same mournful image in his mind. Dane also sat on the floor, Hirschel on a stool, Jubal and Alicia on matching white chairs. They almost looked, St. Cyr thought, like some medieval court — the king and queen above everyone else, the nobleman on the stool, the distant and unimportant cousins on the lowest level. They all watched him cross the room, put the sack down and seat himself on the table. Then, suddenly, as if realizing that he was not the one most to be feared, they looked furtively at one another, wondering… Only Tina made no attempt to read something sinister in the others' eyes; she stared at her hands, which were folded in her lap.

"The proof?" Jubal asked.

"Yes."

"Who?" He sounded very old, and not at all cantankerous. He sounded as if he would rather not know who, would rather St. Cyr took the evidence away and never came back again.

"I'll come to that in a moment," the cyberdetective said. "First, I want to tell you who I've suspected over the last several days and my reasons for not trusting each. That way, when I come to whom I now know committed those four murders, you'll understand that I've not made a rash decision."

No one said anything.

Sr. Cyr said, "I first suspected Hirschel."

The hunter smiled. He looked like a wolf.

Succinctly, the detective explained the circumstances under which he had first seen their uncle: the storm, the rider on the horse, the bloody heads of the two boar. "I recognized quite early that Hirschel was the one individual in this household most capable of violence."

And still is.

Not quite.

St. Cyr continued: "Furthermore, he was basically an outsider who visited for a month or two every couple of years. Though the victims of the killer were his relatives, they were more distantly related to him than to any of you, perhaps distantly enough to be thought of as mere obstacles between Hirschel and the family fortune. He was also suspect because he was the sole living Alderban outside of this immediate family, heir to the entire industrial complex."

"Which I wouldn't want," Hirschel said. "I can't think of anything more boring than managing wealth."

"That's one of the reasons I finally rejected you," St. Cyr said. When the others stirred, aware that the number of suspects had just dropped twenty percent, the detective said, "Then I thought that it very well might be Dane."

"I tell you it's the wolf, the du-aga-klava."

"No," St. Cyr said. "But your superstition and your insistence on supernatural forces being involved were what first put you in a bad light. You're an educated young man, supposedly beyond such foolishness as that. Tina, however, has shown me how a hypno-keyed man might very well adopt such an unreasonable attitude despite the breadth of his education."

Jubal frowned and pulled on his nose as if he were not artistically satisfied with its proportions. ''What on earth does hypno-keying have to do with all of this?"

"I won't go into that now," St. Cyr said. "Besides, Tina can give you a much better lecture on the topic than I can."

Jubal looked at his daughter, perplexed, but she did not raise her eyes to meet his.

Possibility: Hypno-keying has unsettled Dane Alderban's mind. His reliance on superstitions would seem to indicate this and might also evidence an underlying taint of more serious psychosis.

At most: neurosis.

Psychosis.

St. Cyr ignored the other half of his symbiote and said, "For a long while, I suspected Jubal." The old man looked away from Tina, his face coloring. "From the beginning, Jubal insisted that I should look outside of the family for the killer, and he would not entertain for a moment any other likelihood. Each time that he attempted to redirect my attention away from a member of the family, I had to wonder about his intent. Now it seems clear that this was only naivet�. Secondly, I was unfavorably impressed with Jubal's lack of emotional response to the deaths of his children. He seemed to view it all with a detached, almost academic sterility. Again, it was Tina who made me see how hypno-keying could be responsible for this unemotional reaction. And since Jubal has been a hypno-keyed artist a good deal longer than anyone else in the family, he has had more time to grow even cooler and more impersonal than his children are rapidly becoming."

"What the hell is this?" the old man asked. This time, St. Cyr noticed that Jubal's rage even appeared to be acquired rather than genuine, as if he were imitating an actor he admired. St. Cyr could not be angry with him now. He could only pity him.

"Finally," St. Cyr said, not answering the question, "Jubal seemed suspect because of his reluctance to allow the family to be armed with deadly weapons. It appears now that this was only due to some genuine dislike for weaponry."

"Of course it was," Jubal said. "And what motive would I have had for killing my own family?"

"The same motive Dane had — no motive at all. You could have been mentally unbalanced." He turned immediately to Alicia and said, "Then I suspected you. For one thing, you were the only one in the family who wept at Betty's death. That made you suspect simply because it was a different sort of reaction. When Tina explained that you had undergone hypno-keying much later in life than the others in the family, when you married Jubal, I felt that you were even more of a candidate for prison. What must it have been like, all these years, being at least somewhat emotional and caring in a house of people growing constantly more machinelike, colder, more selfish."

"It hasn't been easy," she said.

Jubal looked stunned. St. Cyr thought he really was, for once, what he appeared to be.

"But," the woman said, I've had the guitar, my music, for comfort."

"You've left me," Tina said, after a long moment of silence.

St. Cyr sensed the ripple of surprise that passed through the others, heard Hirschel's quickly drawn breath of disbelief, waited for all of that to subside. He said, "You came on the list of possibilities when I learned that you were the only one in the family who fully understood what hypno-keying had done to you and the only one in the family who seemed to be angry that your life had been perverted, against your will, before you were old enough to understand what was happening. It seemed distinctly possible that you might have become unbalanced by having to live with this realization for years, and that you might have felt that murdering your brothers and sisters, one-by-one, was the most fitting revenge on your father. Then again, you're a bright girl, too intelligent not to realize that Jubal's life has been tainted by hypno-keying, too, and that when he had each of you treated, he could not be said to be a rational man making a rational choice."

"But you still suspected me." She was still looking at her hands.

"Yes. You lived separate from the others. At a glance, that seemed to be because of the space limitations on other floors. However, it was soon clear to me that, with your family's resources, you could have adapted any part of the house to make a fine studio. You wanted to be separate from them. Perhaps because you hated them."

"Felt sorry for them," she corrected. "I didn't want to have to see them."

"Finally," the cyberdetective said, "I was wary of the relationship that seemed to be growing between us — at the same time that I encouraged it. Had I become sexually involved with you, or had I allowed my fondness for you to become something deeper than mere liking, my judgment in your sphere would have been severely affected."

"Very logical," she said. Her voice was bitter, not at all pleasant. St. Cyr thought that there might even be tears in it.

"I have to be."

"It's your job."

"Yes."

She looked at him for the first time now, and she did have tears in the corners of her eyes. She said, "Anything else I did that was suspicious?"

Yes, he thought, you always seemed, somehow, to be an extension of my nightmare, an analogue of the stalker…

Illogical.

He knew it was illogical even without the bio-computer's judgment. "No other reasons," he said.

Jubal roused himself. "But why do you hate your hypno-keyed talents, Tina? I don't understand. How can you hate me enough to murder your own brothers and sisters?"

"She didn't," St. Cyr said.

Jubal said, "What?"

"She didn't murder them."

They all looked at him again, surprised more than before. He saw that Tina was shocked too, and he realized that she had expected him to prove logically that she was the killer even though she was not. That made him feel tired and ill.

"Then what has been the purpose of all of this?" Hirschel asked.

"As I said when I started, I wanted you to see that I have been very careful to consider every angle before making an outright accusation. I want you to understand that I haven't been rash."

You are being rash now, and you know it.

I have proof.

You seem to. But what you are about to suggest is impossible.

"Who is it, then?" Hirschel asked

St. Cyr got a grip on the table and said, evenly, though the bio-computer still tried to reason him out of vocalizing the absurdity, 'Teddy, the master unit, killed all four of them."