Unfortunately, the very wealth of those records worked against a sense of sureness in the instances in which there was no recorded evidence. And in this instance, it did more than that, because they did have imagery—complete with time and date stamp—of Mangrum reporting to the storage area for the garrison’s powered armor for a routine day of scheduled maintenance. What they did not have was imagery of him actually working on the armor… or of him crossing the base to his quarters, where Weiller’s body had been discovered that afternoon. The pickups inside the Morgue had been few and far between, and no one had bothered too much over whether or not they were in working order. Which made sense, since no slaves were ever permitted anywhere near the battle armor, and the main function of the system was to keep an eye on them. But if they didn’t have Mangrum on chip performing the scheduled work, they did have his log sheets for the day, and they seemed to support his claim that he’d been in the Morgue all day.

“Of course,” McKeon murmured, “we only have his logs’ word for the fact that he actually performed any maintenance checks. He could have falsified them. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time someone did that to get out of a little work!”

“I know,” Longmont said, her expression as troubled as Gonsalves’ had been. “And the fact that he didn’t log a single component replacement is certainly suspicious. According to his records he worked on—what?” She consulted her own memo pad. “Here it is. According to his log sheets, he up-checked fourteen sets of battle armor… and he did all that without finding a single faulty component?” She shook her head. “I find that highly suspicious, but it’s not enough to offset the fact that we don’t have any evidence that positively places him at the scene of the murder.”

“He knew about the pickups in his quarters,” Hurston pointed out. “We know he deliberately disabled them on at least four other occasions, and someone sure as hell disabled them the afternoon Weiller was killed. What makes you think it wasn’t him that time?”

“What proves it was him?” Simmons countered. “Certainly the fact that he knew where they were and had previously shut them down indicates he could have done the same thing again. But each of the four times we know the pickups were down as the result of his actions and not a genuine malfunction were very shortly after he brought her back to Styx. It certainly looks like he was shy about being recorded having sex with her—”

“Raping her, you mean, Sir,” Gonsalves said grimly. Simmons paused, then nodded.

“Raping her,” he agreed, and Longmont nodded sharply.

“You’re quite correct, Captain,” she said, and managed a wintry smile. “Neither Commodore Simmons nor I ever said he wasn’t a loathsome, revolting piece of human garbage. I simply said we don’t have any supporting evidence of Hedges and Usterman’s contention that he’s the one who murdered her. And the point I believe the Commodore was going to make is that he’d become increasingly less shy about performing for the cameras.”