It Was Murder by Jack Q McNeil

Author:Jack Q McNeil
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2018-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

Marshal Harry walked away and I followed her through to the crew lounge. She examined the six bodies, without touching them, but found nothing.

She dropped into the one vacant chair and stared at the table. There were three opened bottles and seven used glasses. She picked up one with a lipstick smear on the rim and toyed with it.

“I need a forensic team. I need reports,” she said. “There’re no obvious signs of violence, no bruising or torn clothing. They might have been poisoned, but I can’t know for sure without forensic scanners.”

I raised my head above the table and waved my antennae over the glasses. “Smells like arsenic in the glasses and bottles,” I said.

Marshal Harry did the mouth open thing as she pointed eyes at me.

“You can smell arsenic?”

“Sure, there’s a lot of it in the ground back home. You’ve got to smell it and then dig round it or you’re dead.”

“So... someone maybe... paid these guys to bring the bodies aboard and lock us in the baggage compartment. Then killed them to keep the whole thing a secret. Yes... that sounds about right.”

“It would take someone with a large organisation behind them to arrange all this.” I waved my antennae at the ship. “You’d need to grease a lot of palms to pull this off.”

Marshal Harry wiggled the glass she was holding.

“Lipstick on the rim, but none of these guys is wearing lipstick. I think we have a chance of surviving this only because you got us out of that baggage compartment. We were supposed to be trapped in there until the ship crashed and now the owner of this glass is making it up as she goes along. She disabled the security cameras and joined our group when you came out of the air vent and took her by surprise.”

“Is there a reward for that?” I asked.

“My eternal gratitude and thanks.” The marshal smiled.

“You’ll be surprised to hear I don’t get a lot of gratitude in my line of work.” It touched me. I dropped a claw in her lap. “Look, I want to live, so let’s put this murder shit on the back burner until we stop the ship crashing?”

“Good point. Let’s go see what’s plugged into the ship and shouldn’t be.”

Emgeenie quietly approached and placed a mug of coffee before the marshal.

“Where’s mine?” I asked.

“You drink coffee?” he sounded surprised.

“I refuse nowt but blows,” I replied. It’s an ancient proverb where I come from.

Marshal Harry emptied the mug in one long chug and wiped her mouth.

“No time for coffee, Chunglie,” she said. “Let’s go solve this latest mystery.”

She hurried away and a grumpy invertebrate scurried after. You help people and then they expect more help? Catch me doing that again.

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