The Reporter (The Galactic Football League Novellas) by Sigler Scott & Lafferty Mur

Author:Sigler, Scott & Lafferty, Mur [Sigler, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Empty Set Entertainment
Published: 2012-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

• • •

Their suite at the Peking Hotel had filled with lines of light, glowing messages and the floating heads of the sentients involved with the case. Yolanda finished moving all of her notes from the messageboard to Whykor’s ad-hoc holoprojector. The living room was a sea of faces: Grace, Ju, Anna Villani, Miriam, Lil-A-Kewitt, Joey Clark, Regat the Smooth, Parmot the Insane, Tarat the Smasher, Commissioner Rob Froese, Carol Tweedy and her son, John, Quentin Barnes, Gredok the Splithead, Marik the Covetous and even Turon the Ugly.

She set the messageboard down on the table. “There,” she said. “Now we can get started.”

Whykor looked at the messy hologram. “So you … understand this? This system works for you?”

“It works for me,” she said. “I don’t have your memory. And even if I did, I have to look at the notes to get a sense of who is connected to who else, time lines and other things.”

She stepped into the middle of the room. There floated a smiling Grace McDermot. She had been so beautiful. It was easy to see why men — and women — had fallen for her.

Yolanda reached out with her pointer finger and drew a line of yellow light around Grace’s head. “At the center of everything, Grace McDermot.” She put two fingers on a floating note showing Grace’s bio and slid it closer to the face. “High-profile, kept woman, girlfriend to gangsters and running backs.”

Yolanda drew a red line from Grace to an image of Anna Villani and circled Villani. “Grace was the paramour of an underling of Sikka the Death, an underling that killed Sikka to take over the syndicate.”

She drew another red line from Grace to Ju Tweedy and another circle. “Grace started dating Ju. Maybe she left Villani, maybe not. Ju had access to Grace’s apartment because he lived there, and Villani had access, of course, because she owned the building.”

“Which makes Villani and Ju the obvious suspects,” Whykor said. “Both of whom, incidentally, are untouchable.”

Yolanda took a step to the right, to Miriam’s picture. “And here we have my friend and former bodyguard, Miriam Connor.” She drew a red circle around Miriam. “Connor found the body and could have done the crime, possibly at the behest of Villani.”

“Villani would have given Connor access to Grace’s apartment, if Connor even needed it,” Whykor said. “If she was Grace’s bodyguard, she could have knocked, been recognized and walked right in.”

Yolanda turned back to Ju’s face. “Tweedy arrives at the apartment to find Grace dead. Maybe he came at a specific time each day, maybe he was called there. If he didn’t kill McDermot, he sees the body and is smart enough to immediately know how it looks. So he runs.”

“And the neighbors see him leaving the building.”

She nodded. “Right. So he could have killed her, or this could have been part of a bigger setup to get him there at the right time. That means Miriam could still be the killer. She owed Villani. But here’s the thing we never thought of until this afternoon.

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