I shook my head slightly, baffled, and she took a half step back to appraise me. “Look at you! You’re a mess! Cut, frostbitten, filthy. Go off and get yourself fixed up, get some sleep, and be ready to go by 6:00 p.m.”
“Go where?” I said.
“Dinner, silly. You still owe me dinner at Bleaney’s.”
My jaw dropped, and it was a few moments before I could get it working again. “Diana?”
Her smile was a mile wide. “The one and only.”
My heart was pounding, and I’m sure I was grinning, too, but there’d been enough twists and turns in this case that I had to be sure. “Prove it,” I said.
“Your left testicle—”
“Fine! Fine. Fine. Diana! But—no, no. I saw your dead body.”
“You saw my discarded body.”
“With a bullet hole in the middle of its forehead.”
She waited for me to get it, and I did. “A frame-up,” I said. “You were framing Lakshmi for murder.” I thought about it. “Her gun, doubtless with her fingerprints, the body at her place—well, at Shopatsky House.” I nodded. “But why? And how? You couldn’t possibly afford to transfer.”
“It pays to have friends in the right places,” Diana said.
I’d been aware that she’d been seeing someone else of late, of course, but . . . well, well, well. “I didn’t even know you knew Reiko Takahashi.”
“Isn’t she adorable?” Diana gushed. “I fell for her the first night she came into The Bent Chisel.”
“But why frame Lakshmi?”
“She and Reiko were working together at first,” Diana said. “You knew that: Reiko willingly loaned Lakshmi her grandfather’s diary because Lakshmi supposedly had made a study of the Weingarten and O’Reilly expeditions; if there was a coded reference to the location of the Alpha in the diary, Lakshmi said she’d figure it out and split the riches with Reiko. But Lakshmi wasn’t going to do that at all; she had learned where the Alpha was, but kept telling Reiko she didn’t know its location—a double-cross. We had to get Lakshmi out of the picture, and, well, we did have a spare biological body that we had to dispose of somehow . . .”
“But if Lakshmi knew where the Alpha was, why frame her for murder before you’d found the location?”
“Because, my darling Alex, I knew that you knew where it was.”
“How?” But then it came to me. “Dirk. The switchblade. You figured if Rory Pickover was back to being my client, I was bound to eventually learn where the Alpha was, and so you arranged for me to acquire something that had a tracking chip in it.”
Diana nodded. “Sorry, baby, but, well, it was Reiko’s rightful claim, not yours and not Dr. Pickover’s. Lakshmi was already working with Dirk, and every time you returned to the dome, the tracking chip uploaded its data to the Shopatsky House computer—so Reiko and I took it when we planted the body.”
“Clever,” I said.
“Yes, but Lakshmi must have been anticipating something, because by the time we got it, she’d wiped the data from the computer. And, of course, by that point you’d figured out about the tracking chip and destroyed it.”
“Ah, and so you decided it would be easier to just force Lakshmi to show Reiko where the Alpha was than it would be to get the secret from me—and so you kidnapped her.”
“I didn’t; Reiko did. But I did tail them, running a couple of kilometers behind, just in case Reiko needed help—which, of course, it turned out she did.”
My head was spinning. She’d betrayed me, she’d used me, she’d outsmarted me. I took a step back and looked at her, absolutely stunned.
“You . . .” I said, my voice quavering, and I raised my right hand, pointing a finger at her. “You are . . .”
The blue eyes blinked. “Yes?”
“You are amazing,” I said.
“I am that,” she replied, and smiled. “Sorry, honey.”
“So what happens now?”
She lifted her blonde eyebrows and grinned lasciviously. “Now? Why, we go to Bleaney’s, of course.”
“But you don’t need to eat.”
“No, of course not. But I love to dance.”
“And after?”
She indicated her amazing new body with a sweeping motion of her hands. “A night we’ll both remember.”
FORTY-FIVE
Transfers weren’t supposed to die. I’d never heard of a funeral for one, and, anyway, there couldn’t be much of a funeral for Rory Pickover here on Mars. Whatever family he had was back on Earth, and he had few friends here. In fact, I think he had only one.
Dougal McCrae had released the dead transfer bodies, including that of