Excerpt: Briah

Lugzolcs looked over, flipping on the ignition of the car and then glancing in his mirrors to make sure there weren’t any more Gypsies hanging around. Running one over was still a crime, and would bring down a mountain of paperwork on the both of them. “I think we need to look a little closer at who this scientist is. Where did his Identification say he was from?”

“Munchen. But he’s been here in Constanta for almost a year.” He plugged the Identification codes into the casepad, getting Tehnarhul’s complete overview of the man off the Central Database. “since April of 35, anyway. He was in Iasi for a year too, teaching at the university. Doctorate from University of Munchen, three point eight average. Poor marks in political science brought his average down – figures. They should leave the politics to the linguists and let the scientists do their math.”

Lugzolcs chuckled. “Spoken like a true scientist.”

“Not true; my degree is in anthropology, which isn’t quite the same as chemistry.”

Lugzolcs shook his head, smiling as he merged into traffic and engaged the autodrive for the trip to their district office, freeing him up to run his own checks against Technarhul’s databases using his casepad. “Splitting hairs. My degree is in Romanian Literary Critique, but I passed my Calculus exams just fine. And you had no trouble with political science or math either, I’m sure.”

“You just like being argumentative.” Cyprian flipped through immigration records, not sure what he was looking for.

“Probably. Anyway it seems too contrived to be random. Miraculous that the owners had no description or explanation. There’s still some possibility that he did it himself, you know. A suicide.”

“You’ve spent enough time at this to know what that would look like. The front of his skull is blasted away – so if he did it himself, he put the gun to the back of his head rather than his temple or in his mouth.” Cyprian reached back with his own arm to illustrate the difficulty and awkwardness, if not outright impossibility, of this arrangement. “If anything we can pretty definitively rule that out.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t do it before you’d finished your lunch, anyway. But how did they not hear – even if the killer had a silenced weapon, you’d think the sound of his skull coming apart and landing on the table would have gotten someone’s attention. It’s not something you hear all the time, you know, like sirens and trains.”

“Nevertheless – either everyone in the restaurant was in on it, or they genuinely didn’t hear it.” It was an ‘either-or’ fact, the sort of thing he knew to look for and treasure; sometimes, if a crime could be reduced to enough of them, it could be solved from an armchair. “And it seems highly unlikely that everyone in the restaurant could be in on it. That’s simply too many stories to synchronize. It will become obvious once we’ve looked at the register data and talked to a few people who were there.”

Lugzolcs nodded, pecking on his casepad to pull up that register data. “It’s an old machine…Tehnarhul will have to convert it out from Straight Quad to proper Romanian.”