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It was unlikely the criminal had carried the bodies any distance in the daylight, so the victims must have
come on their own. So what motivated Mona? She was a mechtech, but the fuel cells were her baby, not
the pumps. Still, she was qualified, and no one was more overworked than Cal. So someone says,
"Come and look at the river pump, there's a problem." That someone says it because his motivation is to
get Mona alone, and there's no more isolated point in our little world than the riverbed. Anything beyond
that is wild country. Something caught my eye in the mud, a water sample bottle. I picked it up and
looked at it.
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 Then what? Mona comes, the last decision she'll ever make. There's no reason she shouldn't; in our tiny
little community we all have faith in each other. And then she's at the pump, nothing wrong with it after all.
Is she tricked into taking that short walk off the trail into the shrubs, or is she forced? She must have been
tricked. It wouldn't be impossible to force her, but why? The criminal had her trust, and manipulation is
his game. I dug a scrap of paper out of my pocket, carefully wrapped the water sample bottle in it, and
tucked it away. Hopefully that would prevent any fingerprints from being rubbed off. If I'd been thinking I
would have brought some plastic bags to keep the evidence fresh, but I'm a rank beginner at this. I
hoped I'd never become an expert.
So the perpetrator pretends to hear something, or see something, and she goes with him. I got up and
walked the fifty meters through the alien shrubs to the rocks where we'd found Vlad's body and then
down to the bank where we'd found Mona. And then when they're far enough away that he feels
comfortable, not so far that she'll question where they're going, he just puts his hands on her throat from
behind and the pretense is over. She tries to pry them off of course. I thought about that and made a
note. We needed to check everyone for injuries to their hands. She gets free for a second, he catches her
and her clothing is torn, and at some point, when she's unconscious or already dead, he cuts her pants
open and rapes her. That takes some time, and then what?
Something was wrong. He wouldn't rape her in the mud, he'd wind up covered in it, and he's smart
enough not to generate such obvious evidence. And it's a bit of a scramble down the bank to the river.
No, she wasn't killed where we found her, she was killed up where we found Vlad. I went back up the
bank to that point. Suddenly I understood the little clearing was perfect, well hidden, the undergrowth
thick and soft, no discomfort for his knees while he's raping her.
And then what? Then he hauls her body down the bank, and now that I looked I could see the drag
marks on the edge of the rock, or maybe they'd been caused when her body was hauled back up. I
made another note to put forward a rule at the next colony meeting that crime scenes would be left
undisturbed until they could be examined. So, not proven, but assume it's true. He drags her down there
and puts her in the river and the evidence just floats away. Vanished the way Cheryl had.
Except Mona never made it to the river. I went back down to the bank and now the reason was clear.
The pump was downstream. Before she floats off to oblivion she's going to float right past it, and at that
very moment Vlad arrives at the river to take water samples. I put my hand in my pocket to the little
water sample bottle and made another note to fingerprint it and confirm that it was Vlad who'd left it
there.
So Vlad doesn't know what's going on the fact that he was going about his business with the sample
bottle proves that, but our perpetrator hears him shut the pump down, and he doesn't know that Vlad
hasn't heard something, Mona's managed to make some noise before she dies. He gets scared and starts
acting on impulse, and this is where the crime starts to unravel. I remembered my own experience in the
bank, twelve years ago now. The urge is to get the situation back under control, by whatever means are
necessary. Instinct starts to override thought.
So Vlad is big enough to put up serious resistance, and our guy doesn't want to deal with that. So
another trick he calls out for help. Vlad comes running. I climbed back up to the clearing. The
perpetrator points out Mona's body, tells Vlad she's collapsed. Vlad turns to look, and bang, a rock is
grabbed up and slammed down. The crime is over. I looked around with the flashlight for a bit and found
a hollow space in the ground, just the right size for the rock Genia had found. Bingo! Not exactly a
Sherlock Holmes piece of deduction, but the first piece of evidence I'd theorized first and found later.
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 And why then didn't he put both bodies in the river? Because someone else is coming, Jessica and
Porter. Neither of them had any reason to be down by the river at all, that's a question I'll have to come
back to. Their reasons don't matter so much as the killer's thought processes as they arrived. He can't
handle more than one at a time with no weapon better than a rock. So then what? He runs, not directly
back to the trail but through the bushes, paralleling the path until he gets up out of the shrubs into the
clearer area where the plowed field is. Genia had said the bodies had been there no more than an hour. I
was willing to bet they were there less than five minutes.
Except why would he run and not simply hide and wait in silence? Because they're coming toward him,
moving off the trail towards the same clearing he's in for the same reason it's easily accessible, and they
need privacy. Were they paired? The claim that they'd heard something was to cover up their
rendezvous. So he has to run and then, only after they've turned off the trail into the shrubs, might Porter
and Jessica hear something as he runs away. They reach the clearing and find the bodies, but they don't
know that the culprit has just left. I went to the edge of the clearing away from the river and looked
carefully until I finally found some bent and broken branches. Adrenaline shot through me. I was definitely [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]