Richard peered inside, but did not go in. A slightly metallic smell greeted him. The room was tiny, the bed pushed against one wall. There were no windows. A chair and a tiny desk pushed against the other wall.
And in the center of the room, on the floor, lay Agatha Kantswinkle, black shoes pointing toward the door, frumpy skirt slightly askew, meaty thighs pressed together.
She had not fallen decorously, like Lysa had. Agatha Kantswinkle had toppled like a tree. He half expected to see a dent in the floor. He wondered why no one had heard the fall from below, then wondered if there was a room below. He tried to remember the layout, and couldn’t.
He could feel someone else peering over his shoulder, but he effectively blocked the door so no one else could see inside. Then he pulled the door closed and stood in front of it
“She’s not there, huh?” Bunting asked.
“You could say that,” Richard said, his gaze meeting Hunsaker’s. Hunsaker was still crouched over Lysa. He didn’t seem sure how to revive her.
Richard knew a few tricks—none of which used technology—but he didn’t want to try them in front of the small group. Instead, he said to Hunsaker, “Let’s take her back to her room.”
Hunsaker looked relieved at the suggestion.
They enlisted the help of Bunting who was one of the strongest men that Richard had ever met. Unfortunately, Richard knew this because he’d had Bunting’s help carrying dead weight before. Only that weight had been really and truly dead, not unconscious like Lysa.
Richard helped Bunting get her upright, then Bunting scooped her in his arms as if she were no more than a pile of clothes.
“Which way?” he asked.
“I’ll show you,” Janet said, and Richard bit his tongue. Better to remain silent than to warn the man she might show him more than her room.
Together they went up the stairs. Richard followed, mostly because he didn’t want to be alone with the small group on the landing—and he really didn’t want to talk to Hunsaker. At least not right away.
Instead, Richard would supervise the two in Janet’s room and probably help Bunting make his escape.
Or Bunting would help him.
Richard frowned. This damn nightmare trip wasn’t over yet.
* * * *
Hunsaker looked at the medical equipment, then moved his gaze toward the closed door. The look that crewman, Richard Ilykova, had given him had sent a chill through him. As had his response when asked if Agatha Kantswinkle was inside her room.
Ilykova was one of those men Hunsaker had seen hundreds of times over the years on Vaadum. Working some kind spaceship, going from one place to another because the previous place didn’t suit.
After he’d checked in, on the company’s money (unlike the passengers), he had moved away from the desk, so that he didn’t see Hunsaker move all his information to the handheld pad. Hunsaker usually did that with crew, because so many of them traveled under false names, with very thin personal identification documentation.
Ilykova’s was better than most. In fact, that was what caught Hunsaker’s attention. Hunsaker had expected a tissue-thin biography, something that showed Ilykova wasn’t who he seemed and seemed to ask the technological question Really, this man is so unimportant. Who cares?
But the identification looked real at first, so real that it nearly fooled Hunsaker. In fact, it would have fooled Hunsaker if it weren’t for the fact that Hunsaker expected crew to be a bit dodgy.
So he’d looked a little deeper, saw a ripple in one bit of biography and followed it, finding another layer of biography under yet another name. Usually that meant someone was traveling on some government mission, and while he couldn’t rule that out, he also couldn’t rule out the fact that Ilykova was dodgier than most.
“Well,” Hunsaker said to the people around him to get rid of them. “There’s nothing we can do now. Did Miss Carmichael let you know that we’re serving dinner?”
“She did,” one of the women said.
“Then perhaps you’d best move along. My chef, while excellent, doesn’t like an empty restaurant and will close if no one shows up.”
“I’m not really hungry,” the other woman said. “But I suppose I could eat.”
“You never know when you’ll get another chance,” the first woman said to her.
Hunsaker watched through a slat in the railing as the women made their way to the bottom of the stairs. He waited until they were out of sight before he moved. Then he peered up the stairwell to make sure no one was coming down.
No one was. He was alone, for which he was quite relieved. Although that sense of relief didn’t last long. His heart was pounding and his palms had grown damp.
He hated this part of the job. Back when he was training, they had called it “crisis management,” but really, it was more like surprise roulette. Which bad thing would happen today?
He wiped his hands on his pants, then stepped toward the door. He pushed hard with his shoulder, knowing that the latch didn’t work, knowing that he would regret that in the hours, days, maybe weeks to come.
The door creaked open. He made himself look down.
There she was, just as he expected, Agatha Kantswinkle, dead on the floor. In a room without a functioning lock or any kind of portal or any other way out.
She had placed her small bag of items on the bed—and he hoped it was that bag that gave off the slightly metallic smell that was now filtering out of the room. Because he could only think of two other things that could cause such an odor. One was a surplus of blood. The other—
He sighed.
He would check the other after he made certain the woman was dead.
He made himself walk into the room, hoping he wasn’t stepping on anything important. He crouched beside her like he had done with Lysa, but with Agatha Kantswinkle, he didn’t touch her.
There was no need. She was dead. He didn’t need a doctor or any kind of expert to tell him that. Truth be told, he was probably the expert on the outpost, given how many dead bodies he’d dealt with in the past few decades. Really, it was one of his pet peeves—one of his major pet peeves—one of his major pet peeves that he could never admit to anyone—the habit that people had of dying away from home.
He’d known when that woman cut to the front of the line that she would be trouble, and here she was, being trouble.
He bit his lip so that he wouldn’t curse her. He was just superstitious enough to think that might be bad luck. Instead, he sighed. Now he was going to have to call the base doctor and have her preside over this mess, even though he really didn’t want to.
Not because he didn’t want a doctor overseeing a corpse, but because he didn’t want this doctor overseeing a corpse.
He left the room and pulled the door closed, hoping no one else would try to get in, since it was so damn easy. This time, he did curse, but he cursed himself. And shook his head.
And headed to the bar to fetch Anne Marie Devlin before she got too drunk to walk.
* * * *
“A body,” said Anne Marie Devlin with great relish. She hadn’t had a body to deal with in at least six months, maybe even a year. She slapped her hands on the bar and slid out of the bar stool, hoping that Hunsaker didn’t know how much she needed the leverage just to move.
She was drunk, but not as drunk as she got by the end of the day.