Matif had just said, “But what did this have to do with Lutran?”
“He was the one, the plan person, right?” Target Four said. “He was supposed to handle what happened next.”
“What happened next?” Matif asked.
Target Four put his hands in the air. “I don’t know, that’s what I was asking you.”
Target Five slumped back in her chair, telling Aylen, “Lutran was our contact, he always meets us at the station, whichever one it is.” She added miserably, “If somebody killed him, they know about us.”
I said, “The perpetrator is a BreharWallHan agent.” I mean, probably. The chances were running over 85 percent.
Indah flicked her fingers at the display surfaces, and Aylen and Matif stopped talking. She said, “Not necessarily. We need to find out what happened aboard that transport. We know Lutran used it to get here, that it was involved in a cargo transfer contract with the Lalow, and that Lutran was killed aboard it. What does that tell us?”
Tural said, “I bet the refugees were meant to go aboard the transport, to be taken to its next destination.” They made a vague gesture. “The refugees either never made it to the transport, or they were killed as well, and … we just haven’t found their bodies yet.”
Indah was frowning. “Or the refugees killed Lutran? Because he demanded something from them, like payment?”
I said, “What did the review of the Merchant Docks surveillance video show?”
Yeah, it was a trick question. I knew from my drones still out in the main office area that the video had just been transferred from PortAuthSys to StationSecSys, and none of the humans working on the case had had a chance to download the files yet.
Indah looked at me, and I realized that she knew exactly what I was doing. She said, “If that’s your way of asking if you can review the video, then yes.” She nodded to Tural.
On reflection, I could have handled that better.
Tural got into their feed and gave my feed ID permission to download the video. I pulled the files while they were explaining how to access and play the material, and got to work.
Indah signaled for the questioning to continue, but there wasn’t much left to find out. Target Five gave in and supported Target Four’s version of the story, and they both insisted that they didn’t know what was supposed to happen after the refugees disembarked. All they knew was that Lutran would take care of getting them off the station to safety.
We needed to find out where the refugees were now, if they were either a） murderees or b） murderers. Concentrating on the video taken in the area around the Lalow’s dock, within 1.3 minutes I had isolated the moments when the refugees had left the ship. That gave us more to work with than just the descriptions Target Five had provided to Matif, though the camera’s estimates weren’t as good as full body scans.
The refugees were dressed in work clothes, and a few had small shoulder bags. They looked lost, stopping to check the feed markers frequently and moving slowly, as if they had never seen a station like this before. （Trapped in a contract labor camp spread out over an asteroid field, they probably hadn’t.） It didn’t catch any attention in this section of the docks, where ships from a wide range of places disembarked a lot of humans who had no clue what they were doing. And one of the regular-route merchants had just set a large noisy crew loose, plus there were three cargos being unloaded with varying degrees of efficiency and confusion. The Lalow had probably waited until the docks had gotten busy, to let the refugees mix with the crowd. The Port Authority personnel were obviously too worried about humans causing hauler bot accidents to notice the quiet group hesitantly crossing the embarkation floor.
I spotted Lutran entering the Merchant Docks one minute after the refugees left the Lalow. Seventeen minutes later, he left again. He had managed to avoid any cameras while inside the docks, so there was no indication of what he had done while there. It was too bad he was dead; for a human, he had been pretty good at this.
I sent the images of the refugees to Indah and Tural, then checked the video near the Merchant Dock exits to see if we could get some idea of where the refugees had headed next.
Then it got weird.
It got so weird I took extra time running the video back and forth, checking for anomalies and edits.
The Targets had been sent to detention cells to wait, and Aylen, Matif, and Soire had joined Indah and Tural to make exclamations over what they had found out instead of anything more useful. I said, “They never left the Merchant Docks.”