“I’ll come along.”
“To hold my hand?” Lacey asked with a grin. “No, you can watch here just as well.”
Sutter bit her lower lip. “Look, just let me run down to my desk and I’ll be right back.”
“Ruby, you wouldn’t need a gun for this anyway—and I really don’t want you to come. You’d threaten Wilhoit in the wrong way.”
“I’m supposed to trust your judgment?” she asked, but she bent a smile around the question. She was watching his back as he walked through the door to the landing pad; then she covered her head with his scanner helmet.
* * *
As Lacey entered the top level of the Coeltrans Building, eyes all around the room turned toward him like filings aligned by a magnet. The man in the center of the pool of plants was no exception. He stared over the mahogany desk and the litter of charts and tools and components upon it. Paying no attention to the employees, Lacey picked his way through the snaky aisles of plants leading to Wilhoit. The silence was uncanny. Only the hiss of his clothing on the leaves seemed to mar it. “Good afternoon, Citizen Wilhoit,” the agent said. “I’m Lacey.”
The executive nodded. “You were here this morning, too, while I was in a board meeting. I would have expected you to check through your—cameras to see if I was here before you came.”
“I did.” Lacey poised the fingers of his left hand on the desk for support. He looked at ease but the scar on his neck burned like a magnesium flare. “I’ve been investigating your murder of Terry Silvers—but that’s not news either, is it?”
Wilhoit picked up a delicate construct of glass and etched metal. His short, capable fingers turned it over for his inspection. Without looking away from his hands, he said, “I didn’t kill Terry Silvers. Or anybody.”
“But there’s evidence, isn’t there?” Lacey pressed. “There’s all the records you could ask for that he was blackmailing you—”
“Citizen,” Wilhoit said, now staring in the agent’s face. His voice was no less vibrant for being pitched too low to pass beyond the circles of plants surrounding him. “You can prove my—orientation, if you want. And you can prove that Silvers was using the threat of exposing it to extort things from me that he would not have been granted otherwise. He was an animal, yes, a predator more interested in the fact that he could ruin a powerful man than in any real benefits the fact brought him, but yes. . . . What you don’t have proof of, because it doesn’t exist, not in any form the Justice computers could accept, is that I killed him. And so you can’t arrest me, and you may as well leave.”
“Oh, I can arrest you, all right,” chuckled Lacey. “If you’re right, of course, you’d be released as soon as you had your preliminary hearing at the State Building.”
“And you would be fired, perhaps even prosecuted under the circumstances.”
Lacey ignored the comment. “You gave Silvers a key to the elevator,” he said. “You knew how the support rods were constructed—you’re the sort who would—but I’ll bet you checked the working drawings anyway before you ordered the work done on the elevator. That I could prove.”
“It wouldn’t mean anything.” Wilhoit had set his electronic tracery back on his desk.
“Then you rigged the recorder for your geranium experiment,” Lacey went on, “so that it had a coil of the right frequency to trip the Dorafeen in the column. You could have used an electronic trigger instead of the plant, but computers understand electronics. Sure, the coil’d do something reasonable as well, move a stylus or the like—but you’re used to thinking about multi-use components, aren’t you? And then you waited for the right time and . . . conducted your experiment. Quite a job of planning.” He looked sidelong at Wilhoit. “What, ah, formula did you use to send the plant off? I think I’d try something like, ‘You are life; I am life; we are one in the universe’, since the idea is to blend with the plant.”
“You too,” Wilhoit said. His breath was hissing as he rose to his feet, his flesh gone sallow and trembling. “Just like Terry, aren’t you? The lust for a chance to bring down someone who really can do something important in this wretched world. But you won’t do it, either—if your scanners don’t show a damned thing, you can’t prove a damned thing. Now get out!”