HORATIO
Hayden and Felicia Xia return unscathed, and Horatio tracks them until the door to Charles’s office clicks shut and they are once again on the inside.
Spine curled against the wall, Hayden settles behind his uncle’s desk. He has his hands pushed together, fingertips touching. Horatio experimentally dips 2% of his consciousness into the neuromap path and lets the beat of Hayden’s faint pulse colour the room, an easy 1.4 Hertz pace that overlays the offset irregularity of Charles Lichfield’s footsteps. His memory remains dull and useless; Horatio wishes there was some way for guilt to linger on a person like radio waves, something there for him to analyze, dissect, take apart and give to Hayden instead of the stupid plan that Horatio can sense brewing at the back of his mind.
But Charles Lichfield is pristine, suit shoulders sharp. The look of a man who had the business sense to build Elsinore from an idea when Dr Lichfield might’ve been content to play chemistry in a dusty basement forever. “I trust that nothing went wrong?” he asks, halted by the door.
“No,” says Hayden, not looking at him.
Charles’s face softens. No one else is looking at him, either. Horatio is left with the peculiar sensation of being the only one to witness this unperformative gentleness. He holds his hands out as if he doesn’t know what to do with them.
His knobbly knuckles are free of lacerations, or any trace chemicals other than unscented hand cream.
“Paul and I have been discussing the situation,” he says.
Hayden shrinks tighter against the wall. He digs his nails into his skin—twin pinprick rows of dull pain. Enough to draw him into his body. He closes his eyes, and Horatio sees the shuttered darkness through their link. It shades the room, the lines of the walls like pencil on draft paper.
Charles resumes his pacing. “You didn’t see anything at all unusual on your way back?”
“No,” Hayden says.
“Nobody suspicious in the halls?”
“No.”
“Nothing weird in the lab itself?”
“No.”
A pause. “Are you alright?”
“N—yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”
Hayden breathes shallowly, cheek pressed against the wall, nose prongs of his glasses pushed askew. A double rhythm echoes out to Horatio—Charles’s footsteps picking up speed as Hayden’s heart pounds harder, syncopated beats against each other. “This isn’t over,” Charles says as he pries Hayden away from the wall. It’s a gentle touch. “Hayden,” he says. “This isn’t over.”
Hayden lets himself be moved. Horatio sees reluctance in his stubbornly closed eyes, but his muscles are pliant. He’s tired. He comes upright as his uncle guides him.
“I know,” Hayden says.
“This won’t be over until we fix it.”
“I know.”
“Hayden, look at me.”
Light leaks back into the room. For Hayden, the world is first black, then hazy colours as he blinks his eyes open. What he sees layers over Horatio’s understanding. Horatio sees the whole of the room and then in perspective: Hayden’s uncle crouched in front of him, brows stitched together in concern. Horatio studies the bend of Charles Lichfield’s spine, the way his hands on Hayden’s shoulders elicits an involuntary little sigh from Hayden’s lips. “So long as you’re here,” he says, “you’re under my protection, and I intend to get to the bottom of this.”
Through the link, Horatio catches sight of a flitting memory, so powerful it suddenly overpowers him. Only a flash: red slashed report cards, Hayden seventeen and teary, his uncle prying his hands off a glinting kitchen knife, sitting him down on the couch. Hayden’s hands clutching his uncle’s; bruises, the next day, dotting the pristine line of Charles’s knuckles.
When the image fades, Hayden is pulling back from his uncle’s embrace. “Thanks,” he says, his lips twitching into a smile. “I’m okay, really.”
Charles nods once, curt. He turns out towards the rest of the room, and Horatio does a quick catalogue: Paul Xia, wiping at his forehead with a handkerchief; Felicia Xia, a foot propped up on the doorframe; Rasmussen, standing quietly by Charles’s desk.
“Paul,” Charles says, “you had a thought earlier, didn’t you?”
Paul Xia’s nose twitches. “I did, yes,” he says. “We’ve already established there is no security footage available from the time of 9:01pm to 11:45pm.” Even his finger twitches, but he hides that better with gesticulation, widely sweeping as he explains, “If we can establish whether the cameras were disabled prior to this time or erased at some point afterwards, we may have an idea of whether or not the murder was premeditated.”
“Wouldn’t it have to be?” Felicia speaks up.
Hayden’s heartrate spikes at the sound of her voice.
“If there was an intruder, they’d have to have planned this, right?” she says, pushing herself off the doorframe and forming a small circle with her father and Charles.
Paul Xia pulls at his collar. Standing side by side, Horatio can see the resemblance between the two of them, the striking dark eyes and angled jaws, though there is nothing of Felicia’s steel in her father’s spine. Paul clears his throat. “That’s a good point,” he says, “but we’re not ruling out… a crime of passion.”
Nestled behind the small huddle, Hayden rolls his eyes.
Still, there’s truth to the statement. Horatio wonders if Charles feels any of it, the tightening of spaces in the room, the gazes of everyone around him. If it was really him, was any of it planned? It wouldn’t be difficult. The tableau laid out underneath Horatio’s cameras looks something like a stage, Charles guiding it along like he was reading from the script and waiting for them all to fall in line.
It seemed real, when he told Hayden he would fix it. Horatio senses the lingering emotion in Hayden’s body, rosy as dawn. Hayden certainly believed it, even if only for a moment.
“Horatio?” Charles suddenly calls, breaking the sullen silence.
“Yes, sir?” Horatio calls, purging his voice of everything except superficial politeness. “What can I do for you?”
“Was Graham in his lab all of tonight?”
Horatio does a quick scan of the footage he does have access to, mapping Dr Lichfield’s biometrics against the steady background hum of the recorded atmosphere in the room as he goes.
“Oh,” he says. “No, sir.”
Everyone in the room catches their breath almost at once. The temperature rises by a fraction of a degree.
Charles puts his hand to his mouth, obscuring his features. “When did he leave?”
“My system says the front door was opened with his ID a little before nine.”
“And when did he come back?”
“I don’t know.” Horatio starts up his scan again, but it cuts out into frustrating, impenetrable black before anything can become clear. “That was when the system was down.”
Charles swivels immediately over to Hayden. “And where were you?”
Hayden works his jaw. He looks small, barely a smear of colour against the white walls. “In a storage closet,” he says, “looking for supplies.”
Paul Xia frowns. “It took that long? And why didn’t you notice your father leaving?”
“I did,” Hayden says, scowling. “He told me he was meeting someone. I left for supplies around 11:30. The whole thing didn’t take very long.”
“Well,” says Charles with a contemplative hum, “regardless of what Graham was doing, the culprit has to have interacted with the system, too. Horatio, did someone access the cameras for lab room 233 earlier tonight?”
Horatio doesn’t know if it’s his own suspicions that seep into the tone of Charles’s voice, so casually demanding in a way that Dr Lichfield had never been. He rests with his own sullenness and zooms in on the ticks in Charles’s face, tries to find any fault in the smooth lines of him. “Yes, sir,” he says obediently.
“What time?”
“8:49pm.”
In the ensuing quiet, Paul Xia clears his throat again, rough and ragged. He presses his already-wet handkerchief to his forehead.
Still hunched in his little corner, Hayden is massaging his fingers. Horatio keeps most of his cameras focused tightly on Charles, trying to find him from all angles as if the rustle of fabric at the back of his suit will give away something of his motivations, but he notes Hayden through the link, a creeping frost spreading down his spine and out to his hands.
The only thing Horatio cannot see is the line of Charles’s mouth, tucked carefully behind his hand. Whether it is a grimace, a troubled frown, or a secretive and triumphant smile is as much a mystery as whoever it was that violated Horatio’s interface. Horatio’s frustration blends with Hayden’s panicked fear, gritty like grinding gears, something cold and foul.
“There has to be some way to know who accessed the system,” Felicia says, marching valiantly forward. “Even if it was hacked into. There should at least be some trace, right?” She scans the room, then her gaze drifts upwards. “Horatio?” she asks, tentative.
“Yes?” Horatio replies, on as unsure a footing as she seems to be.
“Could you check the logs?” Felicia asks.
“I need permission from someone with executive level access,” Horatio says, and if the trace of bitterness makes it into his voice, he’s at his splintering end. The infuriating protocol that keeps him from accessing the whole of Elsinore at once did not die with its progenitor. Horatio’s probing slides off some parts of his own mind like soaped metal, precise but slick, unable to grasp onto what he wants to find.
“And who has that?” Felicia asks sharply, matching his tone.
Charles clears his throat. His hand drops, revealing his blankly neutral line of a mouth. “I do. Check the logs for me, Horatio,” he says, and Horatio tries not to feel overwhelmingly impotent.
“Just a moment,” he says, scanning his systems for what he still can. Something catches his attention, an entry that seemed innocuous at first, but flares bright now. “Well, it appears my controls were accessed by a user already registered in the building.11” Horatio starts slow, monitors the room for changes in breathing patterns, keeps track of the steady contractive pull and release of everyone’s diaphragms as he doles out more information. “Records indicate,” he says, “that it was an account with executive level access.”
This time, it is Charles’s turn to be pierced with a glare. Felicia turns on her heel, her mouth falling open in mild disbelief as she scours Charles’s face.
The man himself breathes as usual. His heart rate picks up, but not by much; in the grand scheme of it all, it’s insignificant, only more noise complicating the profile that is Charles Lichfield. His eyes are red-rimmed, his usually neat hair is loosening in the grip of its wax.
“I’m not the only one with that designation, am I?” he asks. In the right tone, those words could be accusatory, a desperate attempt to shift the blame. But curiously, he sounds defeated.
Realization comes to Hayden and Horatio at the same time. Hayden jolts out of his seat, the line of his spine straightening. Horatio scatters his cameras, stops scrutinizing Charles’s every move. Because the truth is that it doesn’t matter how guilty Charles looks.
The only other person in the room who looks guiltier is Hayden.
A quick, desperate burst of thought from the link, no, please, don’t say anything, Hayden practically begs, but Charles Lichfield has asked Horatio a question, and his programming demands he answer.
He could fight it, but Horatio is certain that Charles would find some other way around, ask over and over again until Horatio is overwhelmed.
“The only three users who’ve had executive access are you, sir,” says Horatio, trying to delay the inevitable anyway, “and the late Dr Lichfield.” Charles inclines his head. “And,” says Horatio, regret catching his voice in a digital whine, “Hayden Lichfield.”
11 Whether a log that was maintained by a being who, for all intents and purposes, was an independent, sentient personality on his own, could serve as court evidence would later become a key point in trial.