The Gordon Mamon Casebook Read Online Free PDF Page A

Gordon, remembering just why he disliked robotics so much. “But isn’t it against your programming, somehow, to allow a murderer to go free? What if he, or she, strikes again? You’d be culpable, surely.”
    “No, I’d still be acting within the constraints of my programming. Hypothetically, if there was another murder, I’d be devastated—”
    “No you wouldn’t, you’d just simulate distress,” Gordon retorted.
    “Yes, if you wish. But I don’t anticipate that happening. I don’t see any motive for the murderer to attack anyone else on the ship—although, in your case, obviously you should watch your back …”
    Gordon turned around; but wherever Cassie was, it wasn’t there.
    “You did say you had a 100 percent success rate?” Cassie asked, behind him once more.
     
    * * *
     
    “Captain Kurtz. She’s dead,” the crewman explained. It was a redundant observation. Gordon, with his vastly limited knowledge of detection and homicide, could have deduced that aspect of Kurtz’s condition entirely unassisted. But as long as he didn’t look too closely at her neck, he probably wouldn’t vomit …
    Gordon selected the ‘crime scene’ function on his handheld, and swept it through the air like a mime artist marking out an imaginary glass cubicle. The handheld helpfully announced that there were traces of blood on the room’s surfaces.
    There were more than traces. He found it difficult to imagine how such a quantity of blood had been contained within Kurtz’s small frame. There was blood spattered on the walls and the spartan plastiwood furniture of the Captain’s quarters; blood soaked into the cheap fabric tiles on the floor; blood splashed over the Captain herself; and a considerable quantity of blood on the hands and clothing of the Harkness ’s troubled chief engineer, Rusty Flange. He was a pale, greying middle-aged jockey of a man in once-white overalls, who shook as though from cold. His voice shook also. Flange, Gordon judged, was understandably in distress.
    The engineer, who’d been in an adjoining corridor, told how he’d heard a commotion, and had rushed to Kurtz’s quarters to find her sprawled on the floor, blood pulsing from an ugly gash across her throat. He’d raised the alarm, and made a futile attempt to quell the bleeding with a haemoseal bandage from the cabin’s first-aid kit. The bandage, a sodden wreck of salve-impregnated cloth, lay discarded on the floor beside Kurtz. Using the stylus from his handheld, Gordon picked the bandage up carefully—Kurtz wouldn’t be needing it again—scanned it, and dropped it into an evidence bag.
    “Any sign of a weapon?”
    Flange started, staring first at the dead captain, then at Gordon. “W-weapon? No. Nothing.”
    Something had to slice through her throat. Gordon switched the handheld to ‘autopsy / forensics’ and held it, close as he dared, above that awful gash.
    “You see anyone leave her cabin?” Gordon asked, trying to avert his gaze from the magnetic pull of the Captain’s death-scar. This was much worse than the last time. The other time. This was what murder victims were supposed to look like.
    “No, I didn’t see nobody, but there must’ve been someone here. Think I probably just missed them again.”
    “What d’you mean, again ? Have there been other attacks?”
    “Nothing like this. But, last couple of days, I’ve been thinking there’s someone doesn’t belong on the ship, not on the list or anything. Never quite seen them, but I’ve been hearing things, and glimpses in my eye. That’s what I mean it was like, this time, just before I found the Captain. I could hear the tail end of an argument—dunno what about—and then that scream …”
    That should be long enough to get a forensics reading, Gordon thought. He pulled the handheld back towards him, still not looking directly. Nothing yet. “Have you moved anything in here?”
    “No, that would be presum—shit, sorry, that’s not what I