Nobody on station believed them, of course, but given what had happened during that first station riot, it was just possible they were telling the truth. What if someone else was involved? Someone who’d known those murderous fanatics were planning to kill Ianira and her family? It was certain that somebody had broken up the attempted kidnapping at the daycare center—there’d been plenty of terror-stricken witnesses. Where was that somebody now? And who had he been? And if the Ansar Majlis hadn’t snatched Caddrick’s daughter, who had?
Skeeter narrowed his eyes and slicked back wet hair, scrubbing at his hide with soap while he went over the whole thing in his mind again, from the first sign of trouble to the disastrous end of the first station riot. Come to think of it, there’d been two people involved in the initial attack on Ianira, neither of whom fit the profile of terrorists carrying out a hit mission. There was that wild-eyed kid who’d shot the construction worker—one of the same crew that had later tried to kill Bergitta—and somebody else, who had knocked Skeeter and Ianira to the floor.
At the time, Skeeter had thought that second person had shoved them out of the way to keep the wild-eyed kid from killing Ianira, but now he wasn’t so sure. Killing that construction worker might’ve been accidental, if the kid had been aiming at Ianira. But maybe that kid had been aiming at the construction worker, instead? Who’d been standing right behind Ianira? If that were true, they might not be looking at a relatively simple case of kidnappers running with a hostage and setting up a hit against Ianira on their way through the station.