The Prometheus Incident, A Martian Murder Mystery Read online

  Chapter Eight – Speculation

  It took Detective Sergeant Wilson nearly all afternoon to set up the situation room with the sort of security that Richardson had requested. This was actually surprisingly quick. This level of security was most unusual in a police station and would normally have been very difficult to organise. He found, however, that when he mentioned the case he was working on, red tape just seemed to vanish and there seemed to be no limit on the resources available to him. It was clear that someone with a lot of influence wanted this case solved and fast. The priority that this gave his requests pleased Wilson even as it made Richardson, who had spent all afternoon in his office reading, very nervous. Richardson inspected the room quickly but carefully when he walked in in the late afternoon.

  He simply said, “Good, this’ll do nicely,” as he sat in one of the armchairs provided.

  “I ran a probability matrix on the Forensic AI Engine,” Wilson said. “It rated O’Connor and Proctor as the most likely, although all of them had a pretty low probability score.”

  “And yet someone did it,” Richardson said dismissively. “Trust AI to tell you the bleeding obvious.”

  Wilson looked at his boss. Richardson had a habitual ‘shabby’ look about him but Wilson knew that he was much smarter than he let on. Most people who looked at him simply thought he was old for his rank and disregarded him as a journeyman police constable who had probably been promoted one step too many. Wilson, however, knew that Richardson had turned down several major offers of promotion. He hadn’t asked why but he suspected that it was simply because he disliked meetings and forms: he would rather be a policeman than an administrator. He was conservative, certainly. A product of that generation that reacted to the wild excesses of the early twenty-first century. But that didn’t mean that his mind was slow, or ridged, or closed. Wilson came from another generation, one open to new ways of doing things but that didn’t mean that he underestimated his boss. He sat down next to Richardson.

  “How was your reading, boss?” he asked.

  “Interesting,” Richardson replied. “I read O’Connor’s book, the one Freeman described as strange. It’s a kind of spiritual memoir of a journey on a spaceship. As the trip proceeds, O’Connor becomes increasingly disenchanted with planetary science, not because he doesn’t believe in it or find it interesting but because he finds it too easy. He wants to stretch himself, to do something much harder.”

  “By becoming a monk and praying all day?” Wilson asked, incredulous.

  Richardson nodded. “Basically, yes,” he said. “At least that’s the way the book’s written. Anyway, while he was mostly focused on his own inner journey, the book contains a lot of insights into the crew dynamics on board that ship. That was a very valuable couple of hours. Now, let’s get started.”

  “Okay, boss,” Wilson said. “I thought we’d start with the basics.” One wall dissolved into a series of holographic images of a spaceship partially buried in the red dust of Mars. These were followed by images of the three bodies: two outside in spacesuits and one lying on a bunk inside the ship. “This is the crime scene,” Wilson continued. “We obviously don’t have access to it so we need to rely on the report of the technical team – only we don’t have that either. All we have …”

  “Is a personal briefing given to me by the head of the UN Space Agency,” Richardson finished. “The crucial part of which, the part which has been kept an extraordinarily well-guarded secret, was that they died because all their electrical circuits were burnt out by a massive induced current and that the only thing that could have done that was a full power burst from the Mars Microwave Sounder instrument. Okay, let’s push on.”

  “Right,” Wilson said. “We only have four suspects: Carter, Freeman, O’Connor and Proctor.” Their images appeared on the wall. “The others were either the alternate surface crew, who were confirmed asleep at the time, or those crew members concerned with the maintenance and navigation of the Ares II itself. None of them had access to the sounder instrument.”

  “You can get rid of Carter too,” Richardson said. “He didn’t have access to the MMS and the damage to the ship was well beyond anything he could reasonably be expected to carry out by way of sabotage.” Wilson nodded and Carter’s image disappeared from the wall.

  “We have these three then,” Wilson continued. “All three had access to that sounder thing, so they all had the means. Freeman and Proctor also had opportunity: there’s no record of what they were doing at the time in question. O’Connor seems to alibi out here. The data recording systems show him using that other thing, the imaging gizmo, right through this time period.”

  “Leave him in anyway,” Richardson said. “The guy was a scientific genius and he knew these systems really well. I’m not sure we can trust the integrity of those data recordings.” Wilson nodded and O’Connor’s image stayed on the wall.

  “That brings us to motive,” Wilson said. “Two of these have obvious motives. O’Connor had a very lucrative job offer which would have been placed in jeopardy if the Prometheus crew had lived. I checked his communications log. He was certainly expressing doubts about taking the job but he didn’t finally turn it down until after the incident.”

  “He lied to us?” Richardson asked. Wilson looked doubtful.

  “Maybe,” he said. “It’s also possible he just didn’t remember properly. How precise is your memory after twenty years? As I said, he was expressing doubts about the job much earlier. You read his book. What do you think?”

  Richardson spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “I think he would be capable of killing,” he said. “But not for money or career; certainly not for something as mundane as a job opportunity. He’s driven by other motivations.”

  “What about the conflict with DeWitt?” Wilson asked. “He said DeWitt would laugh at them for praying.”

  “But in a fairly matter-of-fact sort of way,” Richardson said. “There was no real bitterness. If anything, there was a sort of regret that he couldn’t bring himself to like DeWitt. He also mentions this in the book but again, only in passing. I think Proctor is right. I don’t think DeWitt bothered him. He may be a monk now, but there was a great deal of intellectual arrogance in the man who wrote that book. I think he mostly just ignored DeWitt as an unimportant nuisance.”

  “Well, that brings us neatly to Proctor,” Wilson said. “She really hated DeWitt – maybe enough to kill him. The thought of spending another six months with him, in the close confines of a spaceship, may have just been too much.”

  Richardson shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think her antagonism to DeWitt could possibly be bad enough to cause her to kill two innocent crewmates just to get at him.”

  “Well, he bullied her, humiliated her and accused her of falsifying data,” Wilson pointed out. “That may have pushed her to the point where she regarded the others as just unfortunate collateral damage. To me, she seemed a bit too sorry about the death of the other two. That may have been guilt playing itself out.”

  “Maybe,” Richardson said, “but I doubt it. Let’s keep going.”

  “Well, there’s the business of the message DeWitt scrawled on the wall of the lander,” Wilson said. “Who did he think had gotten to him and what was he close to?”

  Richardson shook his head. “No, he said. “Even if it’s not just dying ravings and has some connection to reality, which I’m inclined to doubt, it’s too vague to be of any use. I’m ignoring that as fantasy. Let’s move on.”

  “Well, that brings us to Freeman,” Wilson said, “and his motive is the weakest of the lot. Sure, he’s had a stellar academic career but …”

  “But he was almost as bright as O’Connor and would have had a great career anyway,” Richardson continued. “Damn! My gut is telling me that motive is the key to this case but there’s nothing here that works. Let’s try a different angle. Do you notice anything about all the theories we were given?”

  �
��They were all wrong?” Wilson suggested.

  Richardson gave a wry smile. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said. “They were all wrong but they were all wrong in a very particular way. All of our suspects are highly intelligent but in one respect they have all shown a remarkable lack of imagination. All of them suggested a problem that occurred on the surface of Mars. Carter suggested an equipment failure caused by sabotage: an equipment failure that occurred on the surface. O’Connor suggested a weird accident caused by DeWitt’s incompetence – on the surface. Proctor suggested that DeWitt killed his crewmates – on the surface. The Prometheus’ crew died on the surface so they all assume the cause must be something that happened on the surface. None of them considered that the killing could’ve been done from orbit, even though they all knew about the MMS.”

 

  Wilson shrugged. “They could be lying,” he said. “You know, making up some weird story to throw us off the track.”

  “That could be true of the killer, but unless you’re suggesting all three were in it together, two of these people are innocent,” Richardson pointed out.

  “Yeah, well, maybe they just didn’t think of it,” Wilson suggested. “You know, like those puzzles where the answer is obvious once you know it but you need to sort of step out of your normal way of thinking to get to it. Maybe to them, this MMS was just a scientific instrument and they didn’t see it any other way. It was just natural for them to think that if people died on the surface, then whatever killed them must have happened on the surface.”

  Richardson sat back in the chair and stared intently at the three images on the wall. “That’s not true of one of these,” he said slowly. “One of these knew.” He was speaking slowly but his mind was racing. He knew the answer.

  “Yeah, boss,” Wilson said. “But the question is: which one?”

  “No,” Richardson replied firmly. “The question is why and how can we prove it? Motive is the key. Without a decent motive we have no hope of a conviction.”

  “There’s another possibility, boss,” Wilson said. Commander Chang’s face appeared on the wall. “He was the commander of the ship and all those mission reports, those reports that played such an important part of the original inquest, the reports that we have been relying on; well, he wrote them. He could easily have misled everybody.”

  “How could he do it?” Richardson asked. “He didn’t have access to the MMS.”

  “He was the commander of the whole thing!” Wilson said. “I’ll bet he had some command override code or something that let him have access to any system on that ship. Look, at the time of the accident, Freeman was using that polarimeter thing, whatever that is, and O’Connor was using the imaging thingy. No one was using the MMS.”

  “So they say. We only have their word,” Richardson pointed out.

  “Yes, but it means that it’s possible that Chang took control of the MMS without anyone else knowing about it,” Wilson insisted.

  “Okay,” Richardson said. “What’s his motive? Sure, he’s now rich and powerful but that would have happened anyway. He was renowned for his driven ambition. There’s no strong connection with the delay coming back from Mars.”

  “Sex,” Wilson said. “You remember what O’Connor said? That Chang was very protective of Colonel Prentice. What if that was more than just the care of a commander? What if he made an advance and she rejected him? Rejected, scorned. Lust is a great motive for murder and he could easily keep that out of the mission logs that he himself was writing.”

  “Maybe,” Richardson said doubtfully. “But I don’t really buy it. He was known to be ambitious and he would have been risking an awful lot for a tumble in the airlock.”

  “Perhaps they had already had an affair and she threatened to expose him,” Wilson suggested.

  “Then why start this investigation?” Richardson asked. “Why not just use your influence to downplay the evidence and let it fade into history as a great unsolved mystery? Why not let DeWitt’s fellow travellers develop great conspiracy theories about alien invasions and the UN’s attempt to hide them? He’d be off scot free.”

  “Do you want me to take him off the board then?” Wilson asked.

  Richardson was silent for a long time. Eventually he said, “No. Leave him up there and bring back the first image, the one of the ship.” The image of the ship returned to the wall. Richardson stared at it intently.

  “Why?” he asked. “Not just why were they killed, but why was this investigation given to me? This is way out of my normal experience.”

  “Hey, don’t short-change yourself, boss,” Wilson said. “We’re also good at what we do.”

  “Yes, we are,” Richardson agreed. “But what we do isn’t this. As far as the UN is concerned, we’re provincial policemen with a purely local jurisdiction. Why wasn’t this given to a UN investigative team with a whole bunch of high-powered investigators and lawyers?”

  Wilson shrugged. “Keeping a low profile maybe,” he suggested. “They may not want a lot of publicity. Also, while the incident occurred on Mars, it was an Australian crew aboard an Australian ship, so we certainly have some claim at jurisdiction.”

  “Maybe,” Richardson agreed. “But it was technically a UN ship and something here just doesn’t smell right.”