Upon reaching Pegasus and taking a hotel room in Hektor, Virtue MacKenzie had immediately contacted Leander Smythe, a newsman who owed her a favor and very begrudgingly allowed her to access the raw data he possessed on Acosta’s murder from her room’s computer. There wasn’t much information to be gleaned: Acosta had a long record of shady dealings, and more than his share of enemies. His throat had been slit as he was leaving the Pearl of the Sea, a restaurant and bar catering to the less wholesome elements of Pegasan society, and he had died instantly. It was assumed to be an underworld murder, if only because Acosta himself hadn’t associated with any noncriminals in more than a decade.

Virtue then called up the shopping and restaurant guide that every hotel possessed but couldn’t find any listing for the Pearl of the Sea, invariably a signal that a local pub or restaurant had a steady clientele and neither needed nor desired any new business. She then accessed a video overview of the city and homed in on the area around the restaurant. It seemed as sleek and shining and well kept as the rest of Hektor, but she noticed that the police patrolled the area in pairs—which tended to support her tentative decision that visiting it alone and asking pointed questions wasn’t worth the risk involved.

Five minutes later she tied in to the local police headquarters’ press department and quickly ascertained that the authorities weren’t about to hand any information over to an offworld journalist. She immediately called back, asked to speak to the homicide department, identified herself as Acosta’s grieving half sister, and demanded to know what progress had been made in apprehending his killer. The answer was simple enough: There had been absolutely no progress, nor was there likely to be. From the contemptuous way they spoke about Acosta, she got the distinct impression that the only thing they would do if they actually found his murderer would be shake his hand, and perhaps pin a medal on him.

Finally she had the computer check her message drop—a dumb terminal in the city’s central post office—to see if there was any word from Cain or Terwilliger, found nothing waiting for her, and decided to spend a little more time investigating Acosta’s murder before going after Khalythorpe, the methane-breathing smuggler who was next on the Sargasso Rose’s list.

She asked the computer for a running total on her expenses thus far, found that she had run up almost three hundred credits in user and access fees, and told it to warn her when she reached the five-hundred-credit mark.