I looked at each of them in turn. “And that’s it? You don’t know who did it?”
Max shook his head. “We have no idea. We can’t find a starting point, except with you two.”
Meyer asked, “What kind of people would it be rational for them to supply over here with a thing like that?”
Marc shrugged. “A mole, maybe. Somebody who was put in place a long time ago. Any agitator of any consequence. Weathermen, Symbionese, anybody trying to alter the political equilibrium by violent means. But that doesn’t make it sound rational. It doesn’t seem like a useful target. One would expect it should be a visiting shah, a premier, or a red-hot research physicist. Let’s get to it. Mr. McGee, do you have any reason to believe that Gretel Howard was connected in any way with any political action group?”
I looked down at my fists as I sought the right way to say it. “We had a lot of intense time alone with each other. A couple of months aboard my houseboat. We talked a lot. We opened up to each other an the way. We tracked each other from childhood right on up to the moment. She was as apolitical as I am. We both lived in the world, and didn’t get too red-hot about who was running it. Maybe that’s wrong in your eyes. But it is the way she was and the way I am.”
“And she could not have been conning you?”
“Absolutely no way.”
“When and how did she get the alleged insect sting?”
“No idea. She was telling me over the phone every~ing that had gone wrong with her day. No, sorry. She didn’t tell me about the insect bite until I saw her in the hospital. She broke a mug I had given her when she was having breakfast, and then she learned her boss had fallen off his bike and died, and then a bug bit her, and then she had fainted and fallen and broken a lamp in the Lad- wigg house. From the sequence I’d say she got bitten, or shot, between eight and ten o’clock that morning. How was it done?”
Jake shook his long sandy head. “The thing is so damn small, delivery systems are difficult. It has so little mass it makes a poor projectile. Like a man trying to hurl a single grain of rice. One of the groups… I mean to say, we’ve experimented with silver beads which closely approximate the size and weight of one of the deadly ones. The propulsion force can be compressed air, a spring mechanism,
The Green Ripper or a small charge of propellant. Compressed air seems to provide the most convenient, quiet, and compact unit. But for it to penetrate the skin, the maximum effective range is about ten inches. Beyond that, the lack of mass reduces velocity and penetrating power drastically. So someone had to put the weapon within a few inches of her neck. It could have looked like a book, a camera, a walking stick, a tobacco pipe, a purse- almost any small unremarkable portable object. The best time and place would be out of doors, in a crowd.”
“Like a crowd around Ladwigg after he fell?” I said.
“Yes, like that,” Max said. “Here’s the scenario. Ladwigg’s early morning bike ride had been cased. Somebody picked the right spot, out of sight of any of the houses, where they could step out and chug} a rock into the front of his face as he came along at twenty miles an hour on his ten-speed. When the body was discovered, the sirens arriving brought people out of the houses widely scattered around there. And the people from the offices. It’s a new community. For the most part, the people are strangers to each other. An unfamiliar person would be assumed to be a new homeowner. When they got Markov, they poked him in the back of the leg with an umbrella tip. Mrs. Howard got it in the back of the neck, so, as I said, the weapon could have looked like any innocuous familiar object. And the crowd watching them load Ladwigg’s body provided enough diversion. After we learned what had killed the woman and went back in time and took a closer look at the way Ladwigg died, it became obvious they were part of the same assignment for somebody.”