“Beats the Seven Hells out of me,” Karn growled. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ve seen as much as I want to.”
“Wait!” Lilli caught his arm. “What…what’s that?”
She pointed a trembling finger and he turned to follow her gaze. When he saw what she was pointing at, his face grew hard.
“Come on.”
They walked up to the side of the abandoned metal cage and looked down at the dark streaks dried on its bars and the floor in front of it.
“Looks like dried blood,” Karn said at last, frowning.
“Quite a lot of it,” Lilli whispered. She couldn’t seem to stop staring at the streaks and smears on the cage and the floor. “Do…do you think this is where he did it?”
“I’m still not convinced he did do it,” Karn said, frowning. “Come on, let’s go back this way and try to find Mistress Zangelo’s bedchamber. According to the report I read, that’s where the body was found.”
“Okay.” Lilli clutched his hand tighter and he gave her a reassuring squeeze.
“It’s all right, little Mistress,” he rumbled, looking down at her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know.” It was the only thing that made Lilli keep going. She knew that if she’d been down here alone in the dim apartment where a bloody murder had been committed, there was no way she could have gone on after seeing those awful smears of dried blood. But being with the big Kindred made her feel safe.
She and Karn wandered around some more until they finally came to a large, circular room with what appeared to be a vast round bed in the middle.
“Do you think this is it?” Lilli looked doubtfully at the chamber. It wasn’t set up like a normal bedroom, and the bed, which was covered in a vast black spread, certainly didn’t appear to be a normal bed.
It was big enough to hold eight or ten people for one thing. For another, the bed seemed to be arranged very strangely. Instead of having pillows at the top of it—if a circular bed could be considered to have a top—it had seven or eight large, long, furry pillows arranged in a spoke-like pattern all around it.
The pillows were almost as long as Lilli was tall and they were covered in soft, thick fur in colors that ranged from deep magenta, to burnt umber, to turquoise. They stood out brightly against the black bedspread.
“What’s the point of all this?” Lilli asked, stepped forward to look at the furry pillows in their strange, spoke-like pattern which almost made the circular bed look like some kind of a wheel.
“Don’t know.” Karn shook his head. “But look—” He pointed. “A surveillance room!”
Lilli followed his finger and saw that there was an open door at the far side of the strange bedchamber. She would have expected it to be the bathing chamber but instead, the glint of computing equipment could be seen.
“This could be what we’ve been looking for!” Karn’s voice was excited. “Come on!”
Twenty-Eight
Karn couldn’t believe his luck. The setup in the surveillance room was essentially the same as what Lilli’s mother had in her secret home office. It was humming quietly to itself—clearly the Opulex authorities had neglected to turn it off when they had declared this apartment a crime scene area.
He took a seat and grabbed the manipu-cube at once, looking for files of the night the murder had been committed. Everything was encrypted but that didn’t bother Karn a bit. After years in the Elite Espionage Corps, he was excellent at breaking encryptions. After a few moments, he figured out the rather simple code the programmer had used and he was in.
As he had hoped, the entire house was under surveillance with a hidden camera apparently secreted in each room—some rooms had more than one. He was looking for images from the bedchamber where the body had been found, but that file came up blank, along with many others.
Looks like someone erased it, Karn thought grimly. Who had done it? Was it the murderer, covering their tracks? Or some authority figure who didn’t want to accuse a prominent Mistress of a heinous crime?
He was just about to despair when he found a file for the large kennel room he and Lilli had already visited. It had been hidden in an innocuous folder marked, expendable assets, which might explain why whoever had erased the other files had missed it.
He clicked on it and up popped an image of the kennel room.
“Oh!” Lilli whispered in shock as Karn played the footage. “Look at that! That must be the Nightwalker Kindred!”
“And that must be the murderer,” Karn growled. They watched together as the scene played out. It was only a few moments long, but it was clear what had happened—the Nightwalker Kindred had been framed.
He pressed the spy device on the nail of his left ring finger again, hoping to record the data and send it on to Commander Sylvan and the Mother Ship—but there was a problem.