Pallene quickly made arrangements for me to travel back to the Titan so I could start my job as the princess’s personal detective/ambassador. Pallene escorted me to the ship’s undercarriage; there, a pilot was waiting for me inside one of the same silver ships that tried to shoot me down earlier. “Good luck, Miss Caprica.” With that, Pallene walked away from the silver ship.
“Make sure you keep your hands in your lap while I close the ship,” the pilot said. I watched as the top half of the ship rose up from out of the thin opening on the sides; just like my dad’s flying saucer, the two sides perfectly snapped together. “Hold on tight; we’re getting ready to take off.” Three seconds later, the panels underneath the ship opened up and the ship took off with so much force that I was pushed from the edge of my chair to the back of it.
After the pilot dropped me off on the Titan’s parking lot, I was greeted by two stone-faced security officers. Without uttering a single word, I knew that I was supposed to follow them. The three of us took an employee elevator that was on the other side of the parking lot. Once the doors to the employee elevator swung open on the security room floor, all of the commotion in the hallway stopped immediately. As the two security guards escorted me down the hallway, I could feel the cold, hard stares of the people near me, examining every inch of my body, trying to figure out why I was there and not in the cell that I was in hours ago. One of the guards stopped in front of a door that was near the end of the hall. He knocked on the door twice. Someone called out “Come in,” and the guard pushed the door open.
As I walked through the doorway, I read the shiny silver plate that was hanging over it: “Hayate.” I sat down in front of Mr. Hayate’s chaotic-looking desk. I looked up at him, and he had his fingers tightly pressed together directly in front of his lips. “I’m sure you must be very proud of yourself right now. Just look at yourself.” He smacked his hands down onto his desk. I jumped a little in my seat, but I kept my eyes on him. I couldn’t look away and if I showed any kind of weakness or apprehension, he wouldn’t take me seriously at all.
I readjusted myself in my chair. “You may not like the fact that I’m here or that I’m the princess’s ambassador, but that’s the way it is. You’re just going to have to deal with it.”
Mr. Hayate let out a tiny little chuckle. “I bet you think this is some type of game. Do you really think that I’m going to just let you frolic around my ship and just do whatever you want in the middle of my investigation?”
I smiled. “Oh, but I have been doing whatever I wanted in the middle of your so-called investigation.” I got up from my seat and I placed my hands on the empty spot where the three stacks of papers used to be, leaned forward, and looked into his black eyes. “This isn’t a game to me. And I think it would be in your best interest to cooperate with me, seeing as I have the princess on my side.” With a grim look on his face, Mr. Hayate pushed his chair away from his desk. “The way I see it, you can do your investigation and then I can do my own. We can compare pieces of evidence and I’ll report our findings to the princess.”
Mr. Hayate rolled his eyes. “Our findings,” he said after letting out a puff of air.
I thought I had the perfect cure for Mr. Hayate and his nasty little attitude. I reached down into the bag that Pallene had given me and pulled out the receipt I’d found in Mimas’s trash can. With as much force as I could muster, I slammed the receipt down onto Mr. Hayate’s desk. Three tall stacks of paper to the left of me toppled over. “I know for a fact that you have a woman named Mimas in custody and that she’s a prime suspect in the robbery.” I paused for dramatic effect; I had Mr. Hayate’s complete undivided attention. “But this receipt, which, by the way, I found in her garbage can in her home, proves that she couldn’t have stolen the rings because she was at home during the time of the robbery!” I picked my hand up from off the receipt. Mr. Hayate quickly snatched it up. “If you look at the bottom of the receipt, you’ll see a time stamp and underneath that is Mimas’s signature.” I sat back down in my chair with my arms folded. “You’ve got no choice but to release her.” Rubbing that evidence in his face after everything that I went through to not only get it but keep it—God knows that felt really good. Mr. Hayate reached over his desk, then he dropped the receipt onto the floor. “You didn’t even look at it!” I hissed through my teeth.
Mr. Hayate rested his face on his knuckles; he had a crooked devilish-looking smirk on his face. “I don’t need to look at it because the fact of the matter is Mimas is guilty. Now while you were digging through the trash for your little piece of evidence, I’m sure you must have noticed the unorganized state that Mimas house was in, correct?” I shook my head yes. I was not sure where he was going with this. I had undeniable proof that she wasn’t on the security room floor during the robbery. He couldn’t debunk that! “In the middle of their search, they found something very interesting.” Mr. Hayate reached underneath his desk and pulled out a black lockbox. He brushed some papers aside and placed the box on his desk. After fiddling with the lock, he turned the box toward me and threw the lid open. Sitting on top of a small satin pillow inside of the box was one of The Rings of Saturn. I recognized it from the book that the princess showed me. Unfortunately, the illustration in the book couldn’t capture the brilliance and radiant beauty of the rainbow gems that were neatly placed across the golden ring. As the light that came from above Mr. Hayate’s desk hit the ring, each gem cast off its own tiny multicolored ray of light. Gorgeous, mesmerizing hues of red, yellow, blue, purple, and orange danced across the room.
There was no way they found this in Mimas’s house! She was home! I had evidence that supported this; I mean, there was no way she could have taken the rings, escaped, and gotten back home in time enough to hide them. This made no sense at all. Mr. Hayate slammed the lid on the lockbox shut. “Mimas is not as innocent as you think she is.”
I couldn’t believe they found one of the rings in her house. Wait, one of the rings; they only found one of them! “Where are the rest of the rings? Is this the only one you found?”
“Yes, this is the only one. We’re keeping Mimas in custody until she can tell us where the rest of the rings are.” He leaned back in his chair, that same devilish smirk still on his face; he seemed so proud of himself and the fact that he was able to destroy the single piece of evidence that he thought that I had. I was going to keep my hunches to myself and I’d see what other pieces of information I could pull out of him.
“What a perplexing situation. Mimas was clearly home at the time of the robbery and yet your men only managed to find one single ring. Her home is so small, there’s no way she could hide all of the rings from you. Tell me, when did you find the ring?”
“Oh, we found it yesterday afternoon somewhere around two o’clock.” It took everything in me not to point my finger at him and call him a complete and utter liar. Yesterday around two o’clock, I was in Mimas’s house alone digging through her smelly trash can looking for the receipt I had just shown him. This wasn’t right! He was really going out of his way to pin this entire robbery on Mimas and I didn’t know why. But I did know this: it was his word against mine and if I were to say that I was there at the supposed time when his men found the rings, he would deny it or change the time when he found the rings. I’d keep that bit of info to myself. The best thing I could do was to find cold, hard facts to help rule out the possibility that Mimas had anything to do with this robbery. But that was going to be tough, seeing as I was going up against the head of security for this ship whose word was law. It was no matter; I had a lot of work that I needed to do and I couldn’t accomplish anything by sitting here in this room looking at this liar.
“I want you to make a formal announcement to everyone here that I’m the princess’s ambassador and that my mission is to give the princess a progress report on how things are going with your investigation on this ship along with my own. I want full access to everything here on the security room floor and I require an assistant as well.”
The smirk on Mr. Hayate’s face faded away, and he planted his hands back on his desk. “Fine,” he said sharply. I politely extended my hand toward Mr. Hayate. “I’m looking forward to working with you and your staff.”
Thankfully, all of my needs were meet in a timely fashion. Mr. Hayate made an announcement to all of his staff members about my position and that they were to help me with whatever I needed. My first order of business was to get back all of my confiscated belongings. Fortunately, both my camera and my cute little tea dress covered in roses were still in perfect condition. I changed out of the dress that the princess had given me and back into my comfortable tea dress. Since I’d had such great chemistry with Carol and Gary earlier, I decided to make them both my assistants for the time being.
Before I had the chance to sit down and talk with Carol and Gary the video phone next to the door started to ring. The words “private number” scrolled across the screen next to the receiver.
“Hello.” For a brief second all I could hear coming from the other end were sharp panic-filled breaths.
“I’m looking Miss Caprica. The detective.” Whoever was on the other line sounded very distressed. “I—I’m good friends with Kari and Hati. She told me about you and what you’re doing and I just wanted to report something that I had seen.”
She wanted to report something! I scooted out into the hallway with the receiver pressed to my ear. “What did you want to report?”
The caller let out a few sharp breaths. “Well. The day of the robbery, after I had escaped from that place...” By “that place” she must have meant where all of the Martian women were being held and interrogated against their will. “I live on the same housing row that Mima’s does. I saw the head of security going into Mima’s house.”
I pressed my hand against my chest to help hold in the scream that I wanted to let out. “Was he carrying something when you saw him?”
“Yes. He was carrying a black box under his arms. He had a lot of people with him when he went into the house.” The caller paused. “I don’t know if this helps you or if it means anything. But I just thought it looked weird that he was going into Mima’s house with this black box.”
“You’re absolutely fine. I’m glad that you called. Is it okay if I have your name, please?”
The caller drew in a small breath. “My name is Pan.”
“What’s your last name?”
“I have a very complicated and hard-to-pronounce Martian last name.” She chuckled. “I have my grandmother to thank for that.” I absolutely understood what it was like to have a long and hard-to-pronounce name.
“Okay, Pan. I appreciate you calling me. If you remember anything else please let me know. Okay?”
“Okay,” Pan whispered before she ended the call.
This was beyond wonderful! I had a witness that placed Mr. Hayate at the scene with that black box of his. I started to nibble on the end of my fingernails. If my hunch was correct, then this proved that Mr. Hayate planted the ring that he found in Mima’s house. If so, then why? Perhaps since he was under so much pressure to find the rings and an actual culprit, he planted that one ring in Mima’s house. I mean, it kind of made sense, seeing as his little plan to interrogate every Martian woman on this ship had backfired and all of this happened under his watch. He was desperate for a conviction. But I was not going to let him pin this entire thing on Mimas!
* * *
I decided the best thing that I could do was to re-watch the security footage from the day of the robbery. Unlike when I watched it earlier, this time, I had the chance to watch it uninterrupted and without the pressure of knowing that I could get in trouble for doing so. I watched the footage three times; each time, I started the video at 7 a.m. and, each time, I hoped I would maybe see something suspicious or extraordinary. But each viewing was the same; everything was pretty normal until 9 a.m.; that was when the strange purple gas clouds appeared, then that suspicious-looking janitor ran toward the cloud while everyone else was running away from it. At 9:03 a.m., the explosion came at the end of the third hallway, blowing away the door to the room that The Rings of Saturn were held in and, by 9:33 a.m., the smoke had cleared from the hallway. I was about to give up, but I decided to watch the footage one more time, except this time I was going to watch each person in the third hallway one at a time. I had examined almost everyone in the hallway except for this one young man; he had a medium build and short auburn-colored hair that was parted to the side. He kept taking short glances over his shoulder. His right hand was jammed into his left pocket, and occasionally, he would look down at it with this very nervous look on his face. Eventually, the young man tripped; I was not sure what he tripped over, but he fell directly beside a potted plant that was in the hallway. His left hand, which had been in his pocket, was now inside of the potted plant. When the young man got up, he pressed his fingers into the dirt before finally walking away. He looked over at the potted plant one last time before he reached the end of the hallway. God, that was weird. Who was that guy? Just what did he have in his hand and why did he see the need to bury it in a potted plant on the security room floor? I ran the footage back, then I paused it; that potted plant was at the exact spot where that shifty-looking janitor stopped before she ran straight into the purple cloud of smoke. Also, I remembered she bent down to get something before she ran into the cloud; she also threw away a little black bag before she ran into the cloud of purple smoke. I wondered if this guy gave her what she needed to blow the door at the end of the hallway into pieces or if he was passing something else on to her to help her with the robbery. I needed to go check that potted plant out right now!
For a second, I was afraid that I wasn’t going to find the potted plant at all. I thought to myself that surely I couldn’t have been the only one who made the connection between this security officer who tripped and the mysterious janitor. But to my surprise, it was still in the third hallway, untouched. I knelt in front of the pot and started to dig the dirt from out of it. After digging out a third handful of dirt, the tips of my fingers brushed up against a piece of paper. I carefully pulled the piece of paper from out of the dirt; it was neatly folded into four parts. I carefully separated each part; it was a letter. “Dear Phoebe, all of the preparations for today are finished. The only thing I need you to do is to bring me the rings. Contact me after you have everything finished on your end.” Oh my God! This was huge! Could Phoebe be the name of that mysterious-looking janitor who ran straight into the purple cloud of smoke before the explosion took place? Also, I needed to find out who that guy was in the hallway. This could be it. I might have this entire case solved!
I folded the note and raced back to the observation room. My monitor was still paused directly on the security officer right before he tripped into the flowerpot. I turned to Carol. “Hey, Carol, do you know this guy?”
She took a quick glance at the monitor. “Oh, that’s Cole. He’s been working on this ship for a while now.” Okay then, as a security officer, he had access to this floor that the rings were on and he could easily provide Phoebe with any information that she might need so that her robbery could go smoothly.
“Okay, I have a second question. What are the names of the female Martian custodians who specifically clean the security room floor?”
“Oh, there are only two of them. That’s Mimas and Phoebe.” That was just the answer I was hoping she would give me! So there was a custodian by the name of Phoebe who worked here! Cole must have been working with Phoebe. They must have been in cahoots. I mean, they had to be since he asked her to meet him after everything was finished on her end and said that all she needed to do was to bring him the rings. I wondered if he was buying them from her or something. There was really only one way to find out. I was going to have to interview Phoebe and Cole. If they were both employees here, then that meant they lived on this ship; since Phoebe was a Martian, she obviously lived in the Martians-only living quarters below the parking lot! I could start there.
Gary snapped his fingers. “I just remembered that Phoebe busses tables on her day off at that fancy restaurant on floor A, The Loge.” That was a good place to start. It could give me the chance to ask more questions and to learn more about her and her daily routine, which would ultimately help me to narrow down where she could be hiding herself and the rings.
With a name like The Loge, I wasn’t sure what type of restaurant I was going to be walking into. To my surprise, it was a high-end BBQ restaurant. Each table had a small grill planted in the middle of it. Customers could choose from a wide selection of items to place on their BBQ, from shark fin to lean cuts of Kobe beef. This was definitely not the type of place where they served hotdogs on a bun. After standing in the lobby area of the restaurant for a few minutes, I was finally approached by a young black woman in a crimson red sheath dress with shiny black buttons that started at the top of her dress and came to a halt at the bottom. “Hi, welcome to The Loge. My name is Shelia. How can I help you today?”
I reached into my white purse and I pulled out my notepad, pen, and an official security badge, which I had Mr. Hayate give me. I figured that would make things easier for me and people would be more open to asking any questions I might have in regard to my investigation. I handed the badge over to Shelia. “Hi, Shelia, I’m a part of a special taskforce that’s investigating the missing Rings of Saturn.”
Shelia flipped my badge over in her hands. “Oh, I think it’s an absolute shame that the event had to be canceled!” She handed my badge back to me.
“Yes, it is. I wanted to know if you could answer a few questions for me about one of your fellow employees. A young lady named Phoebe.”
Shelia pressed her hands to her chest, looked over her shoulder, then motioned for me to walk over to the other end of the restaurant. We sat down together in an empty booth. With a giddy look on her face, Shelia hunched her shoulders and, in a low voice, she said, “I knew it! I knew that if anyone stole those rings, it had to be Phoebe!”
“That’s a pretty bold statement. What makes you say that?” I pressed my pen to my little notebook. I was ready to jot down everything that she was getting ready to say. “Well, I’m the hostess and I’m the shift manager, so I know everybody here from the front to the back of the restaurant. And I consider myself to be a good judge of character.” I really wished she would get to the point and stop talking about herself. “Anyway, I always considered Phoebe to be a nice girl. She would always come in on time. I never had any issues with her at all.” She paused to catch her breath. “All of that ended when some of the food went missing.” Okay, good. Finally, some real details that I could write down.
“So Phoebe stole some food from the restaurant?”
“Oh yes! I don’t know if you looked at our menu, but we use the finest ingredients that money can buy. Our Kobe steaks are the most requested item on our menu. We do inventory on our more expensive items every night before we close and some of our Kobe steaks were going missing each night after the restaurant had shut its doors to the customers, so obviously, the culprit had to be one of the workers here.”
“So how did you figure out that Phoebe was the thief?”
Shelia smiled at me as if she were the cat that just ate the canary. “I started doing random purse checks for all of the women at the end of their shift and when I checked Phoebe’s purse one night, I found three Kobe steaks inside! Which didn’t surprise me at all seeing as Phoebe worked in the kitchen.”
“What did Phoebe do in the kitchen?” I asked.
“Nothing special. She just did prep work for the meals. She would slice up the meat into thin slices. Then the waiters bring the meat out to our customers so they can place it on the grill.”
So Phoebe had a history of stealing on the job. Things weren’t looking good for Phoebe right now.
“The thing that hurt me the most is that I found out that Phoebe was being nice to me when she was around me but then she was bad-mouthing me when I wasn’t around,” Shelia continued. “She was saying things about the way I dress and she was only being nice to me so she could work the shifts that she wanted to work. And those were the shifts where she felt like it would make stealing the Kobe steaks easier!” I wrote down everything except how Phoebe talked about the way Shelia dressed.
“I take it that Phoebe is no longer employed here?”
“Oh no! Phoebe was fired immediately after I found those steaks in her purse!”
“How long ago was that?”
“About two weeks ago.” I wrote down that last piece of info before I got out of the booth. “Do you need to know anything else about Phoebe?” Shelia asked with a tone of enthusiasm in her voice.
“Only one thing. Can you give me her home address please?”
Having access to the employee elevators certainly made moving from place to place much easier. I couldn’t image trying to get all of this information while plowing through the crowds on the ship. Things had calmed down a bit; people were still upset over the fact that they couldn’t leave the ship or make any outgoing calls, but the ship’s hospitality committee squashed any upset feelings the passengers might have had. All of the restaurants were offering happy hour prices all day long, and waitresses with plastic smiles were going around offering finger sandwiches and all sorts of cocktails with cute, colorful paper umbrellas stuffed between the ice cubes. Basically, what they were doing was putting a bandage on a wound that was gushing out huge pints of blood. Eventually, they were going to run out of sandwiches and people were going to sober up and start asking questions again about what was happening on this ship. No amount of free things would be able to make them go away or calm down.
There was a security guard stationed outside of the entrance to the Martian living quarters. I flashed my badge at him and he let me through the door. Nothing had changed since I had been down here earlier; the ship’s security was still swarming around, and things still seemed tense. The Martian people were trying to go on about their everyday lives all while tiptoeing around these stiff trigger-happy-looking security guards.
Apparently, Martian houses were identified by their house number, since they were under the ship’s main floors and not on an actual street. Phoebe lived in house number 30. Shelia also told me that she lived with her mother; her name was Helene, but everyone called her Hellen instead. It didn’t take me long to find Phoebe’s home; I followed the house numbers until I found house number 30. Just like every other house here, this one was made out of thick blocks of metal, but instead of an actual door, there was an old dusty quilt. I knocked on the front of the house directly underneath the window. After the fourth knock, a robust Martian woman in a gray housedress with red stripes peeked her head through the side of the quilt. Her round green cheeks were stained with fresh tears. “Yes. How can I help you?” I handed my security badge over to her.
“Hi, is Phoebe home?”
The woman’s eyes became filled with worry. “No. No, she’s not. I’m her mother, Hellen. Is something wrong with her? Has something happened to my Phoebe?” She wiped the edges of her eyes with the thick quilt that was in the doorway.
“No, nothing has happened to her. My name is Cosmo and I’m a part of a special task force that’s investigating the disappearance behind The Rings of Saturn.”
Hellen pulled the quilt back. “Please come in and have a seat.” There wasn’t much inside of the house; just a brown three-legged couch with a matching lumpy love seat, a large bucket filled with dishes, and a tiny circular grill. Over to the right was another room that was separated by a quilt just like the one in the doorway. Hellen sat on the far end of the three-legged couch while I sat on the lumpy love seat.
“If you don’t mind me asking, are you okay, ma’am?”
Hellen’s shoulders started to shake. “It’s my daughter, Phoebe. I’m just so worried about her.”
I reached over and I placed my hand on top of hers. “Why are you worried about her?”
“She’s been acting pretty funny the past few weeks. She just hasn’t been herself.” Hellen dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “She’s been coming home late and, call it a mother’s intuition, but she’s definitely keeping something from me. I can feel it in my bones.” Even Phoebe’s own mother had a hint of suspicion toward her daughter’s actions. The quilt in front of the doorway flew into the front room. “Momma, I’m home.” That must be Phoebe!