Another
foray into the urban jungle was not advisable in this condition. Unfortunately, I had already squandered a
full day with little to show for it. I
had only two days left before a verdict was expected. I decided to split the day between self-pity
and self-abuse.
For the first part, I would stay
home and study up on the case. Hopefully
my brain wasn’t too badly damaged. I
needed to find something that would stick a couple of puzzle pieces together
and show a pattern. I didn’t have much
time, so I needed a direction that would pay off immediately. In my favor, there wasn’t any further need to go to
court. Much of the day there would be occupied
by routine statements, mostly from witnesses establishing their various
versions of events. If I really needed
to know more than could be gleaned from Shllokwa’s notes, I could tune in
the proceedings on my compad.
At some point, though, I couldn’t
afford to continue sitting on my comfortable stump, nursing my wounds. I’d have to venture out and do something. Investigators only solve crimes while sitting
at home, nibbling cakes, in intellectual fiction. If this case could be cracked by compad, the
custodians would already have swapped Grust for the real villain. The second part of my day would involve the
masochism of stalking the streets.
The problem was: what should I do? Starting another bar fight was off the
list. Once those drugs wore off, I’d be
an easy mark for a Hrotata yearling. I
could do some interviewing, maybe scare up some new witnesses to stretch out
the trial. At best, though, the defense could only
hope to drag out proceedings through the end of the third day, and that far only if the
witnesses had something relevant to say.
Nothing said that my interviews wouldn’t turn into physical confrontations,
either. If I stumbled onto the sapient
responsible for Grust’s very bad night, I might rouse them to action. I probably already had. Hopefully, the second time around, I’d know
who I was looking for and they wouldn’t have pawns around to throw at me.
I
noticed one discrepancy right away.
Neither side, defense or prosecution, had listed the bartender as a
witness. On my first read-through of the
witness list, I had overlooked that omission.
After visiting the Thunder Bar, I was more attuned to the setting, plus
now I had a description to match to the bare-bones docket. Did I think she was my culprit? Not really, but I knew better than to let
instinct guide my hunt. I popped off a
message to Shllokwa to relay to the defense counsel, Ktlrsh. I didn’t elaborate much on where I had gained
my insight; she would undoubtedly figure that out soon enough.
Immediately
afterward, I reconsidered my ‘insight’.
Surely both sides had considered the bartender, at least as a present
witness. She owned the frosted scene of the crime! Yet if that was the case, why exclude
her? Maybe they thought she would
contribute little not otherwise known.
Technically speaking, the ‘crimes’ Grust was accused of happened
outside, in the street. Unless he had
said, “Hey, I think I’m going to go outside and assault a Hrotata,” she
couldn’t attest to much more than his liquid intake.
Maybe she was too risky for one
side or the other. The prosecution might
think she would bolster the defense’s position by describing all the
opportunities someone had to dose Grust.
She might be sympathetic to one of her regulars, too. The defense might consider her ability to
describe the accused’s drinking habits as a negative. She might also dredge up past fights and make
their victim sound like a brawler.
Other on-scene witnesses were more
exclusive to that specific night and less likely to be personally connected to
Grust, with the exception of his Herd-mates.
Leafing through that list, I made another discovery: there had been a Hrotata
present at the Thunder Bar. The witness
list gave only a name - Krrutoki - and contact information. That was still enough to turn up a profile
through the networks, including a picture.
I couldn’t be precisely sure, but he looked familiar enough. He could have been the same spectator who watched my one-against-three
death match the previous night.
The prosecution had summoned
Krrutoki. As a Hrotata, they probably
assumed he could give an impartial retelling of earlier events at the Thunder
Bar. Maybe he was just an innocent bystander.
Or maybe he was a voyeur. Maybe
he liked to watch the dumb saurians mix it up for his entertainment. I vaguely remembered him perking up when I
got clobbered. That impression wasn’t
really worth a note to the defense. This
guy was already a problem for them, on the list for the other side, and
there wasn’t much they could do about him.
Plus, I’d have to explain where my misgivings came from… again, not
so proud of my earlier work.
The coincidence was worth a note to
myself, though: another potential
connection to trace. I was doing great
at finding overlooked elements in this case, but failing at turning them into
usable proof. At this point, something
to create reasonable doubt would be valuable.
I wouldn’t manufacture false leads, but I didn’t mind some temporary
confusion to slow down the trial until I could find the real solution.
I went back and reviewed the
timeline of the case. Nothing new popped
up there. The order and timing of events
matched what had been presented already.
What were missing were the events preceding Grust’s departure: the
unrecorded events that caused his odd behavior.
I started a new notebook and listed my ideas again.
Drugs were still the top candidate. Hallucinogens or maybe a really potent
aphrodisiac? Mental conditioning? Conditioning required that the responsible
party have access to Grust for some extended period prior to the event. Again, the bar was the likely point of
contact there. That assumption was the
only way I could reconcile the second incident at the same locale. Then again, there could be multiple causes. I might not be the only one working to
obscure this case.
I could come up with all sorts of
complicated conspiracies to explain the events as known. Before I wandered off into some twisted
mental maze, I needed to consider ‘simpler’, singular explanations. Genetic manipulation? Parasitic infestation? Money? Grust might have been hired to
threaten the victim and took the deal too far.
One or more of my assailants at the Thunder Bar could have been paid off
to start a fight or else covering for the responsible party. It wasn’t impossible for a Taratumm to frenzy
at will, just very unlikely. “Violently
unstable stomper for hire,” wasn’t a job you could advertise publicly, but there
were private buyers.
Frost and a malfunctioning heat
suit! I couldn’t even consider means
without tangling it up with motive. Why would someone mess with Grust, or Herd
Torbur, or Trrptet Thunder Bar, or whoever this crime was meant to harm?
Wait. I was still assuming that the victim was my
client. The victim might be the victim: the Hrotata still prone in
intensive care. What if he was the
target all along? That still left the
second incident to explain, but it remained possible that I was the target in that case.
The Taratumm were just the assault weapon.
I looked up what I had on the
victim, Tharrliki. According to his
mate, Yavirrt, Tharrliki had
no connection to Grust prior to the challenge.
Their Clan, Takerrl, had some remote links to Herd Torbur, but no
notable business dealings. Clan Takerrl
was moderately prosperous, though a newcomer to ChtkKttp, having made their
money among the newer Great Family colony worlds. Tharrliki was first-generation local, both to
the planet and to Layafflr City; his matron was an immigrant. His mate was an ‘acquisition’ favored by the
Clan matriarchy, a female with closer ties to the City’s political
establishment. Nothing exactly
suspicious there, just the usual entrenchment of wealth into power. I made a note to myself to research the
mate’s background, but that seemed a less meaty trail than others. I returned to focus on Tharrliki.
The victim’s proximity to Trrptet also
appeared to be a matter of chance. The
couple, along with their Vislin bodyguards, had been shopping on the adjacent
street. One of the wrecked storefronts
had apparently belonged to a moderately successful silversmith. If I strained, I could call up a fuzzy memory
of the place.
After browsing the shiny trinkets
there, the couple had decided to sample the local atmosphere, strolling toward
the ornamental parks. They bought some
candied insects… strolled through the hedges… boring… boring… then were ready
to leave when Grust approached. The
mate, Yavirrt, said they thought he was just
drunk, maybe sick. They felt sorry for
what they assumed was a Herd-less, luckless sot, possibly reduced to beggary
for train fare home. Unlike a properly
cautious resident, they let him get close enough to talk without allowing their
bodyguards to block the way. Even when
Grust voiced his challenge, they were more confused than alarmed.
Though it wasn’t in the testimony,
I suspected that the well-off Hrotata couple were amused. Maybe they had a laugh at the poor, dumb,
pickled Taratumm. Maybe not. That could have been my prejudices
talking, but really, why did they misread the situation so badly? What happened was weird, true, but they should still have anticipated the possibility of getting robbed,
not to mention plain old assault.
Civilization doesn’t preclude occasional savagery; modern medicine
doesn’t always spot mental illness.
Plenty of unpredictable, dangerous people can jump out at you through
cracks in the urban façade. In a place
like Layafflr City, rapid growth and economic divides spread those cracks
plenty wide. I know this from first-claw
experience. Pile that up together along
with organized crime, theft at every level, and the daily sins of those
striving for dominance… let’s just say there’s plenty of work for the
custodians.
Precious little of that workload
comes to your noble narrating investigator, mind you.
Usually, the victims are dead or poor and the survivors are just
happy to stay alive and avoid provoking their tormentors further. It takes a rare combination of events to create clients with credit to spare, something to gain from spending it on my services, and
the courage to seek help... along with a case not already solved by
custodial detectives. The corruption
among the custodial forces is the main reason I can eke out a living doing what
I do. If the wronged party can’t outbid
the bribes of their enemies, they can perhaps spend that budget on me, and buy
a chance at justice.
Other types of cases that came to me were like
this one: weird. Cases where the
custodians couldn’t or wouldn’t look deep enough to find the real causes. “Grust of Herd Torbur is a violent
degenerate” was a much easier explanation than, say, the experimentation of a
mad social scientist in a slum neighborhood.
Yes, I wrote that one down.
Stranger events had already come to pass in Collective history.
Where was I? Right, the flash point itself, the moment of violence. Grust issued a slurred, formal challenge in a language neither Hrotata spoke. When he got no satisfactory response, he bent double at the waist and smacked his bony, crested head into Tharrliki's forehead. The medical examiner's report noted a fractured skull, intracranial bleeding, some minor neural damage, and spraining between the neck vertebrae. Tharrliki was knocked out into a coma that took him three days to recover from. He was still having trouble speaking as of that date.
The Hrotata mate’s account didn’t have much
more to add after Tharrliki was attacked.
Grust struck, Tharrliki fell, Yavirrt dove to protect her mate, and her
Vislin guards slashed at Grust to drive him back and sounded a general alarm. They took some whacks for their trouble. I could directly empathize with them. From there, Grust was driven away, pursued by
bystanders struggling to bring him under control. The female’s perspective from then on was
focused on protecting and escorting her mate back to safety and eventual
medical care.
Tharrliki, of course, would not be
able to witness on his own behalf. There was such a thing as too much efficiency. In all likelihood, the two sides of the trial
had probably agreed that they didn’t need
Tharrliki’s account to make either of their cases. He wasn’t likely to add anything to his
mate’s testimony. The guards weren’t
being put on the stand, either. They had
submitted sworn statements which – no surprise – conformed to their employer’s
account with perfect precision. Kkkk,
they’d swear an AI attacked Tharrliki, if his Clan paid their Pack enough and
said Pack ordered them to corroborate the story. I know my own species all too well.
So where did this leave me? The
remaining witnesses broke down into three groups: those who had been in the Thunder
Bar earlier, those who were out in the street later, and those who were
character witnesses for and against Grust.
I looked more closely at the latter category. The defense’s notes indicated that both
negative character witnesses were Taratumm with grudges against Herd Torbur. Hopefully, they would be easily dismissed as
biased.
Reaffirming my suspicions of an
outside agency, Grust had no prior criminal record, no previous assaults, and
therefore no ‘prior victims’. That
didn’t mean he was a paragon of virtue.
He could have had minor charges dropped or expunged, particularly given
Herd Torbur’s influence. At the least,
though, he shouldn’t be considered unstable.
The only real assets the prosecution had on their side were the flagrant
and public nature of the crime, plus the lack of a competing explanation.
I couldn’t do much to debunk the
known facts. The testimonies were
largely in agreement. What I needed,
apart from a comprehensive proof of causation, was a strong alternate
theory. It had to be stronger than the
current defense, namely “drugs”.
Right then, the biggest question I
had was: Why that particular act? Why challenge and attack anyone for a mate
Grust had never met, much less a Hrotata?
Grust’s account was very specific about being aroused, albeit toward a hallucinatory Taratumm female. Tharrliki’s mate agreed that Grust seemed
very intent on her and very aggressive toward her partner. That could be a side effect of something
chemical, I supposed, but it might also be the intentional purpose of the
influence. ‘Aphrodisiac’ was rising on
my list of causation. Maybe the bartender
had the ruts for Grust and tried to get him to reciprocate… then she somehow
mistargeted his arousal? Other patrons
could have been triggered to come to her defense in the same way when I became a problem. Looking
back now, this all sounds dumb, but right then it gathered up more facts than
any of my other knotty nets.
The main problem with that plot was
that I didn’t believe it. Besides the extent to which it stretched
logic, the aphrodisiac scenario didn’t match with my impressions of the bartender. Not that I thought she was innocent, necessarily,
but she did exert herself in my
defense, sort of. Plus, I hadn’t gotten
any sense that she was grieving for Grust’s plight. She defended him, but in a general way,
like any other patron. So, she was
either a villain and a great actor or else innocent in this case.
All this deduction was great, but I
was deducting myself out of ideas. So
far, the one gap that really gaped was the specificity of the victim. There were lots of better, more ‘threatening’
targets for Grust to attack, either in the bar or on the street. There were better reasons to attack a couple
of well-off Hrotata slumming in his neighborhood… but if you were going to do that, why
not take down their guards first? The
consensus of testimony said that Grust left the bar, walked half a block over, and went on a
direct approach to Tharrliki. What was
the attraction?
I came to a decision. I needed to find out more about the injured
party. The case notes, corroborated by
several media reports, said that Yavirrt and the rest of Clan Takerrl were maintaining a
vigil at Tharrliki’s hospital bed. That hospital was where I needed to be. I
might learn something from the Clan, given the right approach. Maybe there was some link even his family
didn’t know; they might be willing to explore the matter with me. I had some ideas about how to gain their
cooperation… better ideas than I had tried before.
My traumatized, screaming flesh
gave me incentive to be more clever this time.
I stood back up with some difficulty and risked a second dose of pain
pills. I was even getting low on
those. I might have considered picking
up another bottle, except that I was going to have to wager my remaining
savings on transportation. There was no
way I could walk to the hospital and back, not in this condition. Today's gamble had to pay off or else I’d
be broke and still no closer to cracking this case.
While looking up the hospital’s
information and checking my credit balance on my compad, I put the court
proceedings on in a separate window. The
summary said that Yavirrt had already testified, along with Grust’s Herdmates,
Ktuck and Veruth, and most of the random patrons of the Thunder Bar. I left that feed running while I prepared to
venture out, holstering Rtrtr and applying a bandage to my shoulder. My stiff, slightly too small, second-hand suit of formal armor was actually helpful in that it limited my range of motion. I'd have some problems moving quickly - or breathing deeply - but it might reduce the agony from my torn shoulder.
The next witness caught my
attention: an expert witness for the prosecution, the custodial forensic
scientist reporting on evidence collected from the scene and from Grust. I watched with a sinking stomach as the
simple questions were ticked off. Was there any evidence of psychoactive
chemicals in the defendant? No. Any
evidence of said chemicals or residues in the containers seized from Trrptet
Thunder Bar? No. Anything
related found on the furnishings, in the garbage bins, or anywhere on the
premises? No, the Bar was apparently
the cleanest recreational facility within kilometers. It contained not a trace of anything more mind-altering
than good old alcohol, vinegar, and the usual trace narcotics found in exotic liquors
both local and imported.
The defense’s “drugs made him do it”
argument was pretty well sunk. It was
still a possibility, sure. It wasn’t
impossible to introduce a chemical that did its dirty work, then metabolized
into something untraceable. It also wasn’t
impossible to bribe a custodial functionary.
Either explanation suggested a level of expert manipulation well beyond
anything the court would believe… without reason.
I needed to get out there and find that
reason. Maybe that reason would lead me
backwards into the cause of Grust's behavior. The way things
stood at that moment, Grust was going to rot in the cages, and I was going to
starve to death. Both tragedies taken together
outweighed my desire to stay home and sleep off my aches.
I have to admit, either one
separately might not have been enough.
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