He rewarded me a grudgingly respectful glance. «Yes, sir. Every morning. It was a kind of an unofficial inspection tour, she liked to see how Eden was progressing; and Davis Caldarola said she used the solitude to think about her projects. She spent anything up to a couple of hours rambling round each day.»

«She walked specifically through this area around Lincoln lake?»

His eyelids closed in a long blink. A green circle started flashing over one of the houses on the parkland edge of the town. «That's her house; as you can see it's in the residential zone closest to Lincoln lake. So she would probably walk through this particular chimp's area most mornings.»

«Definitely not a suicide, then; the chimp was waiting for her.»

«Looks that way. It wasn't a random killing, either. I did think the murderer might have simply told the chimp to shoot the first person it saw, but that's pretty flimsy. Whoever primed that chimp put a lot of preparation into this. If all you want to do is kill someone, there are much easier ways.»

«Yes.» I gave an approving nod. «Good thinking. Who's Davis Caldarola?»

«Maowkavitz's lover.»

«He knows?»

«Yes, sir.»

The «of course» was missing from his voice, but not his tone. «Don't worry, Rolf, I'm getting my symbiont implant this afternoon.»

He struggled against a grin.

«So what else have we come up with since this morning?»

Rolf beckoned Shannon Kershaw over. «The gun,» he said. «We handed it over to a team from the Cybernetics Division's precision engineering laboratory. They say it's a perfect replica of a Colt .45 single-action revolver.»

«A replica?»

«It's only the pistol's physical template which matches an original; the materials are wrong,» Shannon said. «Whoever made it used boron-reinforced single-crystal titanium for the barrel, and berylluminium for the mechanism, even the grip was moulded from monomolecule silicon. That was one very expensive pistol.»

«Monomolecule silicon?» I mused. «That can only be produced in microgee extruders, right?»

«Yes, sir.» She was becoming animated. «There are a couple of industrial stations outside Eden with the necessary production facilities. I think the pistol was manufactured and assembled in the habitat itself. Our Cybernetics Division factories could produce the individual components without any trouble; and all the exotic materials are available as well. I checked.»

«It would go a long way to explaining why Eden never saw the pistol before,» Rolf said. «Separately, the components wouldn't register as anything suspicious. Then after manufacture they could have been put together in one of the areas where the habitat personality doesn't have total perception coverage. I'd say that was easier than trying to smuggle one through our customs inspection; we're pretty thorough.»

I turned to Shannon. «So we need a list of everyone authorized to use the cyberfactories, and out of that we need those qualified or capable of running up the Colt's components without anyone else realizing or querying what they were doing.»

«I'm on it.»

«Any other angles?»