Chapter 22. Murder Mystery
After showers and breakfast, we headed over to Andrew Kirk's office. He was there, and so was Nick Durwood.
"Did you get it?" asked Nick the minute we walked in. Andrew held up his hand, trying not to smile, and asked us cordially how we were this morning.
"Fine," I said.
"And yes, we did," added Shep.
"Excellent. Would you like some coffee?" asked Andrew, leading us over to the chairs we'd sat in before. I said no, Shep said yes.
"Which one of you is going to tell it?" Andrew asked when we were settled.
You should, Shep told me, so I can drink my coffee. I'll supply any details you leave out.
So I started in with us waking up with the Ys and went on from there. Between us we remembered the names of all the people and establishments that the Ys had met and visited in the course of the day, and Nick Durwood made notes of most of them. When I'd finished, there was silence for a moment or two.
"Was he dead when you—they left?" asked Andrew finally.
I mentally consulted Shep. "We don't know. We don't think so," I told him. "The femoral artery was still beating when Yancy took his finger off."
"Nick?" Andrew turned to Durwood, who was shaking his head.
"No," he said, but not as if he was convinced. "I'll go back and check again, of course, but I could swear there was no puncture in the femoral artery."
He turned to us. "I went to World A and looked at Halloway A's body in the morgue," he explained, "to see if I could find a cause of death. And of course I suspected he'd been injected with something, so I was on the lookout for evidence of that. But I'll go again."
"What do you think it was?" asked Andrew.
"No convulsions, you said," Nick asked us. "Nothing out of the ordinary."
"No," I answered. "He just kept sleeping."
"And it was ten mgs that you—Yancy injected?"
I nodded.
He thought for a moment. "Not morphine, then. Not insulin. Not something crude like bleach. Not air, if it came out of an ampoule. I'm guessing digoxin. It would only take about five minutes to kill him, and his wife probably wouldn't have noticed a thing even if she hadn't been drugged. And presto, she wakes up next to a corpse.
"But I don't understand why I didn't find the puncture..." His voice trailed off and he gazed past the floor.
"So there were two of us, I mean four of us?" Shep asked.
Andrew and Nick looked at us in surprise.
"While the Ys were cavorting with Angel and Desarya," I explained, "they were also—another set of them—were murdering Halloway A?"
"I guess so," said Andrew. "Although that isn't really a safe thing to do."
"Killing somebody?" asked Shep. "Ya think?" I winced through the link at him and he shrugged back.
Luckily Andrew smiled. "No," he said. "What I mean is, it isn't safe for there to be doubles. It's possible, of course, for someone to go from the TSA back to their own world at a time before they left—so that there are two of them in the same reality. We've discovered, however, that if there are two of you, reality seems to try to 'fix' this anomalous situation by bringing the two together.
"So," he went on, "I would expect that at the moment you—the Ys arrived from the TSA onto the campus, the original Ys would suddenly have an overwhelming urge to leave the strip club and go to the campus as well. We've never let this kind of situation play out, because we're not at all sure what would happen if two of yourself were to come face to face. Would they merge somehow? Would each try to destroy the other? We don't know.
"And forty-five minutes is plenty of time," he added, "to get from where they were downtown to the president's house on the campus. I'm surprised they didn't run into themselves at some point."
"But we—they didn't leave the strip club," I objected. "They never even considered it. So we know they didn't go." That made no sense, but everyone seemed to know what I meant.
"Or, wait," said Shep. "Maybe, once they hit the campus, that fact—because it was after they had already been to the strip club originally, and gone home to bed, and woke up in the TSA, maybe them going from the TSA back, maybe that changed what happened at the club. In which case we wouldn't know. Because it happened afterward?"
"Right," I said excitedly. Being on the inside track, as it were, I knew what Shep was trying to say even though it didn't come out very well. "Having already experienced what was, to us, to the Ys, the past, we couldn't be the same us, or them, that was experiencing it as the present at the club when we, they were on the campus." I wasn't sure whether I had made it clearer or not.
"This is the problem with changing the past," said Andrew after a moment. "Or one of the problems. You only experience your own time line, the one you're in, and you can only experience it once, apparently. So if there are two of you in the same time line, you would be separate—you'd be two separate time lines that didn't overlap. If the people overlap, the time lines don't. When the second you arrives in the same time line as the first you, the first you splits off from the time line it was on originally and the second you no longer knows what the first you is doing, because the past that the second you experienced is no longer what the first you is experiencing."
I'm not sure he cleared it up either, but now we all pretty much knew what we were talking about. I think.
"So there are two problems," said Nick. "One is, how come there was no puncture mark on Halloway A's femoral artery? Because, damn it, I know there wasn't. I'll go back and look again—but that's what I was bloody looking for and I swear it bloody wasn't there.
"And the second problem is why the two sets of Ys didn't meet at Halloway A's house or on their way across the campus."
We all sat and looked at each other.
"Wait a minute," said Andrew finally. "Everybody in World A—well, not everybody, but all concerned parties know that Kirk A hates Halloway A and has it in for him. All concerned parties in World A also know that the Ys are Kirk A's personal storm troopers. So if Halloway A dies and there is the slightest suspicion that it isn't a completely natural occurrence, the Ys would be the primary suspects. Right?"
We all nodded.
"But that's why we—they set up the very elaborate and airtight alibi," Shep reminded him.
"Which wouldn't be airtight," Andrew went on, "if the Ys at the club suddenly felt an overwhelming compulsion to rush off and take a stroll on the campus."
"Maybe," suggested Nick, "Kirk A doesn't know about the way reality tries to repair itself by bringing the doubles together."
"How likely is that?" asked Andrew. "First, he's a very intelligent man—I should know." He grinned, and we all grinned back.
"And second," he went on, "this is very important, crucially important for him, this alibi business. How likely is it that he would neglect to do some experimenting to find out what happens when there are two of the same someone in the same reality?"
"Not very," said Nick. "So where does that leave us?"
I had an idea. As it began to form in my mind, Shep silently shouted Yes.
"What about," I began diffidently. "Um, isn't it called resonance? Isn't that what Heather called it?"
Andrew and Nick both looked at me. Nick had his mouth open. A smile grew on Andrew's face.
"That's it," he said reverently. "That's it. Good for you, Mitch!"
"What?" asked Nick, looking bewildered.
"You tell it," Andrew said to me.
"They didn't wear gloves," I began. "Yancy touched the back doorknob. Yarnall touched the switch on the bedside lamp. I think Yancy probably touched the nightstand.
"They didn't wear masks, or any kind of disguise. They didn't get close to anyone when they were walking on the campus, but they could have—someone could have seen them, and they're pretty distinctive.
"They set up a very elaborate alibi," I went on, "for much longer than they apparently needed, both before and after the actual time of the murder. They didn't worry
about reality trying to get two sets of them together, which they would have if—and they didn't worry about someone finding a puncture wound.
"So, could they have killed, not Halloway A but, like, Halloway 437? The Halloway in a world near World A but one they don't exist in? You said they were also an anomaly, with no counterparts in our world.
"And if Halloway was killed in World 437, and it was near, right next to World A, then Halloway A might die too. Because of resonance." I stopped talking and sat back.
Nick was on board now. "The resonance of a murder, of any violent act like that, would be very large. In fact, Halloway, our Halloway, in our world, had chest pains that day, didn't he, Andrew?"
Kirk nodded, smiling.
"We assumed," Nick continued, "that it was resonance from the heart attack Halloway A suffered. But the heart attack might well have been resonance from the murder!" He sat up straighter, grinning.
"I think that must be it," said Andrew. "I believe you, Nick, that there was no puncture wound on Halloway A's body. Resonance is the only explanation, and it explains everything, all the facts. Good thinking, Mitch."
I grinned too.
"So," Andrew continued, "we have good news and bad news. The good news is that Kirk A does not have a secret weapon for killing people, just a clever method. The bad news is, Kirk A has a clever method for killing people and there's no clever one-step way to stop it. Stopping it would have to be on a case-by-case basis."
"In this case, we could kill the McDowells," suggested Shep. "I mean, get rid of them. Or get rid of Kirk A. Or get rid of World A."
"Well," said Andrew, "not the world. We don't know how to eliminate a whole world. And I hope nobody ever finds out. We could—eliminate the people, of course. Except that we don't do that. We don't kill people."
"I'd say, just let World A stew in its own nasty juice," said Nick, "except what about poor old Halloway 437? We can't have them stepping into innocent parallel worlds to do their dirty work."