The Cold Between (11 page)

He shrugged, and made his way back around his desk. “Found out last time we were on Earth that my wife was cheating on me.”

In retrospect, he had to admit it shouldn't have caught him off guard; he was lucky if he made it home six times a year, and then only for a few days. But if Jessica thought he was an idiot, she hid it well. “I'm sorry, sir,” she said, her expression all sympathy. “What did you do?”

Turned tail and ran,
he thought. “Not much. She said . . . she thought it was understood, with me being away so much. She didn't seem to think it was a big deal. I suppose you're on her side on that one.”

“Don't be an ass. Drifting through—what is it, eleven, twelve years of marriage?—and then saying ‘Oh, honey, didn't I tell you?' That's a big fat lie, not an open relationship.”

“Yeah, well, that's what she wants,” he said.

“And you don't.”

It was nothing like that simple. “Did you know, Lieutenant,” he said, “that there are women on my ship?”

“It hasn't escaped my notice, sir.”

“An awful lot of them are good-looking. Well, all of them, really. Not knocking the rest of the crew, you understand, but these last six months . . . I'm finding it hard to miss how good-looking the women are.”

“But it's not you,” she said gently, “is it, sir?”

He felt a flicker of annoyance that she would know that about him. “I don't want to cheat on my wife. No matter what she thinks she promised, I
know
what I promised. The fact of that promise hasn't changed.”

“And Elena gets too close,” she said, and he thought she knew what he was keeping to himself. She shook her head. “Respectfully, sir, you're handling this end of it the wrong way.”

He had no doubt of that. Two weeks before, he had handled it as badly as he had handled anything before in his life. He remembered Elena walking into the pub, remembered wanting, as he did every time he saw her, to tell her everything, as futile as it was. He remembered needing to strike at her, to get her away from him. He remembered drinking; he did not remember stop
ping. Well, he'd already exposed himself as hopelessly naive and a moralistic idiot; he was unlikely to make himself look worse. “What did I say to her, Lieutenant?”

Jessica's eyebrows shot up. “You really don't remember.”

He recalled Elena's reaction, the flash of hurt in her eyes before it disappeared behind that icy, splintered rage that had not left her since. “No.”

She told him.

He swore, and put his elbows on the desk, running his hands over his head. “On the record, Lieutenant, I am never drinking again.”

“That's nice, sir, but how are you going to fix it?”

“Hand it over to Bob, probably, and tell him not to—”

“How are you going to fix it with
Elena
?” she clarified patiently.

Ah, right.
That, of course, was more problematic.
I have no idea.
“How the hell do I fix something like this?”

“I'm partial to sincere apologies myself,” she said. “In Lanie's case . . . you could try telling her the truth.”

“How would that help?” he snapped, before remembering he hadn't told Jessica what the truth was. Well, she wouldn't be the first person in his life who had figured it out . . .

“Might not,” she agreed. “But you broke it, sir, into little tiny pieces. It's not going back the way it was. You tell the truth, at least you guys are starting level. And it might give her some perspective on what you said.” Her expression softened, and he realized she must have seen something in his face. “She doesn't hate you, you know. If she hated you, she wouldn't be so angry with you.”

They startled him, those brief words of kindness. “I'll fix it when this is done,” he promised. And he would, he was certain of it. She had forgiven him so much over the years; she would forgive him this. “You know there's a rumor floating around that she was in on Danny's murder,” he said.

“Floating around the
Demeter
crew, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“See, the one
I
hear from them,” she told him, “is that maybe
you
killed him.”

Anyone could have done it, Bob had said. No particular strength required—just the ability to get close enough to Lancaster without triggering the man's fight reflex. Someone he knew. Someone he trusted.

That was a long damn list.

Jessica was watching him, her expression far too astute. “Is this your life all the time, sir?” she asked. “Responsible for everything, and suspicious of everyone?”

“Pretty much.”

She shook her head. “Rank is looking less attractive, sir.”

“You don't know the half of it, Lieutenant.”

She gave him a look he was beginning to recognize as sympathy. “I'll let you know what I've got when I've got it, sir,” she told him, and saluted before she left the room.

Volhynia

M
ay I ask you a personal question?”

They had caught a tram in front of a bakery where he had procured sandwiches, and were seated together in a corner of the small car. He had told her they had enough time to eat—nearly fifteen minutes, he said, to travel to the edge of the city. Despite her hunger she found it difficult, but she had caught him watching her out of the corner of his eye as he ate his own food. She had consumed the sandwich methodically, like medicine, and was surprised to find it cleared her head.

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that after last night, he should feel free to ask her whatever he liked; but she did not know what he was thinking about that. They had not thought to see each other again; they had not even exchanged names. And she had returned to let him know that the dead man was her ex-lover—she was lucky he was speaking to her at all. “Of course,” she replied.

“What is your agenda here, Elena?”

She thought of Greg's plan to use Trey for intelligence on PSI. Trey was right to mistrust her. He might be retired, but he had
not survived twenty-six years as captain of a Fifth Sector generation ship by being a fool.

And she had survived eight years in the Corps following orders, the last seven trusting Greg with her life. She gave Trey as much of the truth as she could.

“I'm not sure I know,” she said. “It's useless, really. He's gone. Forever. I can't fix that. I can't go back.” Oh, all the things she would change if she could go back. “But I can find out what happened. It's nothing—it's meaningless—but it's all I can do, and I have to do
something.
”

“You may fail,” he said, but his voice was kind. “You may never know.”

“I need to try.”

“You may find out something you do not like.”

“The truth is always better than the unknown.”

At that he smiled at her. “I do forget how young you are.”

“I've led a sheltered life.”

“Have you really?”

His voice was low and quiet, and she became aware suddenly of how close he was sitting, how broad his shoulders were; his arm brushed against hers, just a little, every time someone stepped on or off the tram. She was aware of stress and exhaustion, and she knew she was running on little more than adrenaline, sandwich notwithstanding. She closed her eyes and tried to focus, but instead her mind filled with memories: his hands on her, his skin against hers, his hair as she tangled her fingers in it . . .

When her comm chimed, she felt a surge of relief. “It's Bob,” she told Trey. “Doctor Hastings.” She completed the connection, leaving it loud enough to be audible to them both.

“You've done a fine job pissing off the old man,” Bob said irritably. “And now I have to fly myself home? You know I hate flying.”

She had no intention of engaging in an argument with him. “You've finished the postmortem,” she said. “What did you find out?”

There was a pause, and she remembered that he had just spent an hour with a dead man. “Their report was accurate, although we got a little more precise on the times. He died of sudden, catastrophic blood loss, via a severed artery in the neck. It would have been very quick, Elena,” he added gently. “Close to painless.”

She wondered how that made it better. “What about the other wounds?”

“Postmortem, all of them, by more than half an hour.”

“Made by the same person?”

He hedged. “Same weapon, certainly. And the cuts didn't take any more strength than the killing stroke. But either way, Chief, none of them would have required unusual power.”

“You're saying he knew his killer. Or was caught by surprise.”

“I don't draw conclusions.”

But she could not think of any other way a trained infantry soldier could have had his throat cut by an ordinary person. “Did you find anything to suggest that he was moved after he died?”

“Lividity is uneven enough to support that, sure,” he said. “Why?”

She glanced at Trey. His eyes were on the floor as he concentrated on Bob's words. “Mr. Zajec found the body,” she said, “and he seems to think so.”

“He say what gave him that idea?”

Trey met her eyes, and for an instant she saw his age, and the weight of everything he had seen in his life. He looked at her steadily as he spoke. “There was not enough blood,” he said. “And what was there was in the wrong place. It was pooled beneath his torso, not below the killing stroke. And it—” He stopped, and looked away from her. “An arterial cut would have sprayed,” he said roughly. “There was no spatter, no spread at all.”

Her mind produced a vivid image: Danny standing, talking to someone, turning his back, relaxed, trusting . . . and then one cut, and brief surprise, and the end. She swallowed the ball of rage flaring in her stomach.
Later,
she told herself, harshly. “Does that fit with what you found, Bob?”

She thought her voice had been steady, but Trey was looking at her again, face full of concern. She sat up straighter; it would not do to have him worrying about her. She needed his mind on Danny.

“It does,” Bob said, unaware of their silent exchange.

“I thought you didn't draw conclusions.” This was from Trey.

“Generally I don't,” Bob admitted. “But those postmortem cuts—they bother me. They've got all the hallmarks of rage—apparently random locations, obliteration of identifying marks, unnecessary violence. But they're all the same depth, within a few millimeters. And the entry points are smooth, not torn as they would be with a violent strike. As if someone chose each location carefully. This was made to look like a crime of passion, but I don't think it was. I think someone staged this with great deliberation.” He paused. “Where did you find him, Mr. Zajec?”

“At the kitchen entrance of my workplace,” Trey told him.

“Somebody doesn't like you,” Bob remarked dryly.

Trey made a sound that was almost a laugh. “A great many people do not like me,” he said.

“We're going to talk to the people Danny was with last night,” Elena added, trying to sound confident. “With luck that'll clear up some of the ambiguities.”

“You're not a detective, dear. You're a mechanic.”

“It's debugging, Bob, like I do every day. Start with what's wrong, and go backward until you find the cause.”

“You're not infantry, either.”

Being infantry hadn't helped Danny. “If I were infantry, Volhynia would have thrown me off-planet by now.”

She heard him sigh, but he let it go. “When are you supposed to check in?”

She checked the time. “Two and a half hours, roughly. If you could fill the captain in on the crime scene—”

“You can't keep avoiding him, Chief.”

“Yes I can.” With the two of them ganging up on her, there was no way she was talking to Greg any earlier than she had to. “I will check in with him at the appointed time, and not before. Have a safe flight home.” She disconnected the comm.

Trey was studying her curiously. “You did not tell him about the reporter.”

“I don't want that getting back to the captain.”

“Hm.” The sound was speculative, but he did not press the point. “Can you tell me, Elena, what the police will hear about you and Danny?”

“That depends on who they talk to,” she replied. “Someone will tell them how hard it had been for Danny lately, or how everyone had been trying to cheer him up.”

“It was you, then, who called it off.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She opened her mouth to tell him. She had told no one. Even Bob Hastings, who thought he knew, did not know all of it. She told herself Danny was dead now; surely telling couldn't matter. But when she spoke, she told him not why she had ended it, but why she should have. “He wanted to retire,” she told him. “He wanted a house on some colony. Marriage. Children.”

“And you did not.”

She shook her head, swallowing the knot in her throat. She could not bring herself to tell him more. “We were bad for each other, Trey. Maybe not at first, but very much so by the end. If I'd confronted him sooner, maybe—”

“Maybe what?” he interrupted. “Maybe he would not have come down on shore leave? Or spent so much money, or wandered off on his own? Even if you believe such things, Elena, you must remember: Danny's death is not your responsibility. His death is on the conscience of the one who killed him, and no one else.”

“Now who is being naive?” But she said it gently; he was trying to make her feel better. She turned to look at him. His face held frank concern, and something else, something watchful in his eyes that she did not know him well enough to interpret. She looked away, letting her eyes stray through the window, and was relieved when she felt his gaze drop. Kindness was more than she could take.

Trey was not sure Elena was lying, but he was quite certain she was leaving things out. There had been a precipitating event
that had caused her to leave the dead man, but she was still protecting him. She thought it did not matter, but so often it was the small, personal details of a life that led to murder. She could not know. He would leave her that secret for as long as he could.

The offer of protection was another matter. He remembered the look on her face, the careful neutrality that suggested to him Foster's offer was not a surprise to her. He would need to figure out what exactly it was Central thought he knew.

What was more immediately curious was the dynamic with her captain. There was more there than simple antipathy. He thought of the conversation he had overheard, and how skillfully they had struck at each other. What had she said?
If it was me who'd been found dead, what would you do?
That one had hit its target, and gained her exactly what she wanted. The casual cruelty of it had shocked him. She had not seemed cruel. Direct, perhaps, but not cruel.

I know so little of this woman.
He wondered if she had been cruel to Danny Lancaster. He wondered how the dead man had felt about Captain Foster.

“How much did Danny spend at Gregorian's?” he asked.

“Thirty-three thousand,” she said. “More than usual. He'd been winning more at cards lately; everyone was talking about it, but I didn't realize it was this much.”

“Even at Gregorian's he could not have spent all of that money alone.”

“He had a tendency to buy for the house,” she said.

“They have regulars there,” he told her. “If he was spreading his money around, there will be those who remember him.”

The tram reached the outskirts of the city, and there were fewer and fewer people with them on it. Those who remained
sat far away from them, and it occurred to Trey that they might be reacting to her uniform. Given the city's dislike of off-world authority, it made him wonder if anyone at the bar would talk to her at all.

Not that he would fare any better. He had patronized Gregorian's twice, despite preferring whiskey to beer, both times in the company of his friend Ilya Putin, who sometimes consulted at the observatory. The staff had treated him with the same friendly courtesy they treated the rest of their customers, but cheerfully taking his money was not the same thing as sharing secrets. “We would be better off if we brought an astronomer,” he mused aloud.

She glanced over at him. “I hadn't thought about that,” she admitted. “They won't want to talk to me, will they?”

“Perhaps not,” he said, “but that is not what I meant. The bar is popular with the astronomers and cartographers at the observatory. Most of the regulars study the pulsar. If we had an astronomer, we could at least engage them in conversation.”

She was frowning. “Is it mostly the scientists? Do they really drink enough to keep the place in business?”

“It does better than you would think, given how far away from the center it is. The local citizens like it in part because it is usually missed by tourists. There are exceptions, of course,” he told her. “Some weeks ago there was another of your ships in orbit, and they apparently caused a fair amount of chaos. It seems they were not shy about spending their money, but they were less sanguine about leaving when asked.”

He had meant to reassure her, but her eyes had gone sharp. “The ship,” she asked him. “Do you remember which one it was?”

He did remember. Trey had never dealt directly with Captain MacBride—he had been part of Valeria's watch, and Trey had happily left her to deal with the man—but he had followed the ship's movements for a decade. “It was
Demeter,
” he told her. “She usually prefers Shenzhu, or at least used to, so I was a little surprised when she took shore leave here. Elena, what is it?”

All of the color had drained from her face, but when she spoke, her voice was strong. “
Demeter
was here? How long ago?”

He thought back; he had been with his niece when he heard the news, a few days before she was due to start school. “About four weeks.”

She was staring at him, her eyes searching his face, desperate for something, he could not know what. “I asked you before,” she said to him, “if you trusted me. You said you had no choice.”

“Elena—”

“Can I trust you?”

He looked down at her, into her dark eyes—so determined, so intelligent,
so lovely.
He should have said no, told her that her doctor was right, that she needed to go back to her ship and let her angry captain exercise diplomacy. She should leave him here, where he would not look at her and remember how it had felt to kiss her. Where he would not find himself trusting her when everything he had ever learned about the universe outside of PSI was telling him he should not.

“Yes,” he said. “You can trust me.”

She looked away, brushing a wisp of hair off her forehead. “
Galileo
wasn't meant to come here,” she told him. “Volhynia is far beyond our territory.”