“But you must have some idea.” Runstom flipped a few pages back in his notebook. “You’ve been a Life Support operator for several years now.”
“It had to be a glitch in the system,” Jax said quietly. He seemed to be deep in thought. “That is the only explanation.”
“You don’t sound too convinced of that.”
The operator sighed and his head dropped. He looked defeated. He was a younger guy, somewhere in his mid-to-late twenties, but the wavy brown hair on the top of his head was beginning to thin, revealing the stark white skin beneath. “Okay, what the hell,” he said into the table. “My only other explanation is that I was set up.”
Runstom’s heart skipped a beat. What a cliché, for a suspect to claim to be set up. He couldn’t possibly believe the man. Yet here it was, the kind of explanation Runstom was looking for – one that promised a deeper and more complex case than just some guy going crazy and killing a bunch of people.
“Did you tell that to Detectives Brutus and Porter?”
Jax raised his head slightly and shook it slowly from side to side. “It sounds stupid. They wouldn’t have believed me.” He looked at Runstom. “I’m sure you don’t believe me either.”
Runstom thought quietly for a moment before answering. Brutus and Porter would never consider that there could be conspiracy behind these murders. The biggest crime in domed life in decades. Runstom felt like he had to believe anything was possible in such a situation. “I believe that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law.”
The operator’s face brightened ever so slightly and he made a noise, something between a sigh and a laugh. “Thanks,” he said, and seemed to be at a loss for anything else.
Runstom arched his back in a stretch. “Let’s talk about these safety measures you mentioned,” he said. “If someone wanted to open both sets of venting doors, they would have to circumvent the safety measures, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Runstom said, hoping for more. “How would someone go about doing that?”
The prisoner looked at Runstom warily. “Should I have my lawyer here?”
The officer could feel his brow furrowing in frustration. Then he realized what he was asking: for the only suspect of a crime to describe how the crime in question could be pulled off. He was supposed to be asking a hypothetical question but he was asking the wrong person. He should be asking another operator, or better yet, an engineer. But he didn’t know any. And since he was just an officer, not an investigator, he had no resources to find any that he could question.
“You have the right to have your lawyer present,” he said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. What kind of interrogator tells the suspect his lawyer should be present?
Jax’s mouth scrunched up to one side of his face. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. “So far he hasn’t been a whole lot of help. But I hear I’m getting a new lawyer.” He paused, then added, “Off-planet.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Runstom said, then cursed himself for revealing that he didn’t know that fact already.
“The detectives – they were from B-3, right?” Jax said, keeping the conversation off the subject of safety measures in Life Support systems.
“Yeah, that’s right. Most of the people in my precinct are B-threers.”
“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Jax said. “Where are you from, Officer … Runstom, was it?”
“Yes. Stanford Runstom.” The ModPol officer glanced self-consciously at the B-fourean officer standing quietly off to the side of the room, observing the conversation with mild interest. “My mother was a detective,” he said. “In ModPol. An undercover detective, actually. She gave birth to me while on assignment, in a transport ship. That’s where I spent the first few years growing up.”
“I see.” Jax looked Runstom up and down briefly. The officer waited for the question that always came next, the one that asked why his skin was green, exactly, but it never came. “Is that why you joined ModPol? Following in your mother’s footsteps?”
Runstom caught himself in the middle of a weary sigh and tried to stifle it with a polite cough. “My mother did great things and made many sacrifices in the pursuit of justice,” he said. “If I accomplish only a fraction of what she did, I’ll be proud.”
Jax’s gaze drifted off to the side of the room as though he were looking into the distance beyond the wall. “Yeah, me too,” he said quietly. Then he blinked and turned back to Runstom. He jabbed the table with a pale finger. “This is an injustice, right here, Officer. If I’m convicted of this crime, an innocent man goes to prison.”
“Call me Stanford.” Runstom watched the prisoner in silence for a moment before continuing. “So you believe this was either an accident, or that you were set up.”
“I was set up,” Jax said firmly. “Accidents like this don’t happen. Plus there was that fake debt – some paper saying I owed money to Milton.”
Runstom flipped through his notebook. “Fake debt?”
The operator eyed him suspiciously and again Runstom cursed himself for showing his ignorance. “The detectives had some piece of paper that said I was in debt to Brandon Milton,” Jax said after a moment. “He was my supervisor.”
“And one of the victims,” Runstom added, finding Milton in the list of names he’d recorded. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking up. “You mean Brutus and Porter had documentation of a debt – of you owing this Brandon Milton money – and you did not actually owe him money?”
“Right.”
“For how much?”
“Ten thousand Alleys.”
“Seems like the kind of thing you would remember. If you owed your supervisor ten grand, that wouldn’t have slipped your mind.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Jax said, nodding.
“But it makes a good motive.” Runstom tapped his pencil against his notebook. “Killing someone because you owe them money, I mean.” Before Jax could object, he continued, “So if someone made this fake document, and did so to set you up, who did it? Who wanted you to take the fall for murder?”
The operator sighed wearily. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for three days and I just don’t know.”
“Okay. Maybe it’s someone you know, maybe it’s someone you don’t know. Let’s just say for now that someone out there framed you, and we don’t know who it is. So the next question is, how did they do it?”
“That’s something else I’ve been thinking about non-stop for the past three days. The way I see it, there’s two parts to it.” He raised one finger and then another as he talked. “One, they would have had to figure out a way around the safeties on the doors to open both at the same time. And two, they would have had to make it look like it came from my console, because the commands were in my log file. Which means they either ran the commands directly from my console, while I was sitting at it and logged into it, or they ran the commands somewhere else in the system and managed to write the history to my console logs.”
Runstom quickly jotted down some notes, although he wasn’t entirely sure what the operator was talking about. “So, overriding the safeties …” he started to say.
“That’s the easier one, honestly,” Jax said. “Because it’s mostly theoretical. From my perspective? It’s impossible. But I can tell you what part of the system they would have to break to make something like that work.” He put his elbows on the table and brought his hands together, slowly cracking his long fingers