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back in his seat.
I paused the holo. "You aren't surprised by this, are you?"
"No. Not a chance."
"Why not?"
"Because she's dead. If she'd done what she was supposed to do, whatever that
was, she would still be alive." He bared his teeth at me, skinned his lips
back in a poor and gloating imitation of a smile, and
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Lisle, Holly - Hunting the Corrigan's Blood said, "Now all we need to do is
watch the people who gave her the money."
I hadn't really looked at them. Seated, in the same flat gray as everything
else in the holo, they had failed to catch my attention. I guess they were
trying to avoid being attention-worthy, anyway. But when I
really looked at them, I realized I'd seen them before.
I gasped, and Badger's smile grew even more condescending. "Let me guess," he
said. "Those are the three people who attacked you."
"I can't be certain about two of them& but him& " I rose and walked to the side
of the man who had been seated in a booth with his back to me. His hand was
frozen in midair. I held mine up beside it, and my own large hand was dwarfed.
It looked like a child's hand next to his.
Badger's smugness vanished. "Is the scale on this holo right?"
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I stood beside the waiter; she'd seemed taller in the locker but only because
we had both been crammed in face-to-face. In fact, though, she was as petite
as she'd seemed when she stood by our table. "Scale's right. The only solid
detail I've been able to recall about the three of them is that one was a
giant."
We watched the holo through several more times: studying the waiter; following
the three men at the table as they rose without eating their meals and stalked
out into the corridor beyond the club aimed for the docks; looking for signs
that anyone else might be involved. We didn't get any other immediate
information.
"Here's the way it's going to go," I said. "I'll get as much information on
the girl as I can, and then I'll see what I can get out of Crane regarding why
he was paying to have me followed. And then I'll drop the little bombshell on
him about his helper's other friends and see what that gives me." I stood for
a moment, considering. "Meanwhile, you find out everything you can about the
three men. Everything.
We'll keep that information to ourselves."
"Deciding you don't trust Crane?"
"No." That was the funny thing. I did trust Crane. "I just want to have a few
extra cards to play later in this game."
Badger grinned at me, then instructed the shipcom to give him complete vital
statistics on the three men whose images we had captured. When he had them, he
settled in with the worm to see what he could fish out of the station records
on Cassamir Station.
I followed the same procedure with the waiter. I had to assume that everyone
else knew more about what was going on than I did. I had to assume that all of
them had reasons for doing things that I didn't know anything about& including
Peter Crane, whom I was loath to include in my list of people with hidden
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Lisle, Holly - Hunting the Corrigan's Blood agendas; I so rarely like anyone,
and I did like him.
Badger and I didn't have a lot of advantages, but I intended to get the most
out of every one we had. The doppler holos were my first advantage. The
waiters murder; my near-death experience; Cranes wish to have me followed: all
of these were related to the stolen
Corrigan's Blood
, and before we left Cassamir
Station, I intended to figure out how.
Chapter Four
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The waiter's name had been Sarah Idalto, and she hadn't been a waiter. She'd
been Crane's niece by marriage, the troubled rich-kid daughter of Crane's
wife's brother, McTavish Idalto. From her extensive rap sheet, I could see
that she'd spent more than a little time in what Cassamir Station spores
euphemistically called the "entertainment-for-pay" sector, and that she had
occasionally augmented her income by "reallocating client funds." That, again,
from the spores' reports. Had she been someone other than the niece of Peter
Crane, her sheet probably would have referred to her as a whore and a thief,
but perhaps I was only being cynical in thinking such things.
So Crane had hired her to follow me and report on my movements. But why? And
the three men who later beat the living crap out of me had hired her to& what?
And somebody had killed her, but who had that somebody been?
I spent the next few hours digging through the data on Crane's infochip. I
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read the information he had uncovered on Winterleigh, and I watched the holo
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