William Bankier - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 103, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 625 & 626, March 1994

Duncan hesitated. “It would work,” Britt said. “Do you know any other way to flush out the killer, Duncan? I’ll listen, if you do.”

Hartley muttered, “There is no other way.”

Duncan was still not convinced. “But to drug-test an entire population — there’s no precedent for that in the entire history of arbitration! And it’s still a dangerous drug!”

Britt smiled wryly. “You didn’t seem too worried about that when we tested Verdoris and Kordan.”

The first arbiter was silent. Then: “I’ll agree to the announcement of planetwide testing. But if early testing doesn’t turn up Longstride’s killer—”

“Why don’t we put off deciding about that until the time comes?” Britt interrupted. “First things first.”

“How about it, Duncan?” Hartley asked. “Are we agreed?”

Duncan pressed his lips together. “Agreed.”

“ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR PEA-PICKIN’ MINDS?” Mother roared.

All three arbiters winced. “What’s wrong?” Duncan asked.

“You are actually going to use that nasty drug on innocent people — because you’re too unobservant to see what’s staring you right in the face?”

“Now wait a minute,” Hartley said angrily.

“I have never seen such sloppy work in my life,” Mother went on indignantly. “Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy! How many times have I told you that if a thing is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well?”

About thirty thousand, Duncan guessed.

Mother switched her mode of speaking; now she spoke slow-ly and care-ful-ly, so the dumb bunnies she was talking to could understand. “You don’t have to drug the entire populace. The answer is right there under your nose. Remember the man who cut the power at the Research Institute? Verdoris’s employee? The one who caused Longstride’s DNA cultures to be ruined. Remember him? Think hard, now.”

Duncan clenched his teeth. “What about him?”

“You never questioned him.”

Britt looked puzzled. “Is there some reason we should have? That was just one of several violent incidents that erupted after Longstride was killed.”

“Was it, now. Try thinking in sequence for a change. What was Kordan planning to do on the day Longstride died?”

Duncan slapped his forehead. “He was planning to take new tissue samples in for testing! The power disruption at the institute came before the horse was killed!”

“And you never even noticed that,” Mother said reprovingly. “As I said, sloppy. All right, then. First Longstride’s DNA is destroyed. Then Longstride himself is destroyed. Does that suggest anything to you?”

The three arbiters exchanged blank looks. Then Britt said: “Someone was trying to remove all traces of Longstride?”

A biomechanical sigh. “Now you’re on the right track. By the way, you didn’t tell me to access financial records, but I did anyway.” Mother paused for effect. “The fellow who cut the power at the institute was paid to do it. A nice sum was transferred to his account the day after the incident, and I traced the source of the transference. I know who paid him.”

The three arbiters waited expectantly. She just has to make us ask, Duncan thought. “Who, Mother?”

Mother took her time, milking it. “Dr. Glimm.”

“The vet?” Britt said. “But why would he...?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Mother said sweetly. “You can always threaten him with B-Aminosine.”

“We can always use B-Aminosine,” Hartley growled.

“That won’t be necessary,” Mother informed them. “The man knows drugs. Just let him see what you have in mind and he’ll talk. There’s one other thing — Longstride’s low sperm count. How many people knew about it?”

“Two,” said Hartley. “Kordan and Dr. Glimm.”

“Exactly. And Security supposedly had to use the threat of drug-testing to get Dr. Glimm to testify about it. So how did Security know to question him in the first place?”

“Ahhhh,” Hartley said. “He had to have leaked it. Kordan sure as hell wouldn’t have said anything. But why would Glimm want Longstride’s condition known?”

“As a cover story,” Duncan said suddenly. “Something else was wrong with Longstride — something so wrong that Dr. Glimm couldn’t even tell the horse’s owner about it. So wrong that the horse had to be destroyed.”

“At last!” Mother said with approval. “I was beginning to think you’d never get there. Well? What are you standing around here for? Get hopping!”

“Yes, Mother,” three voices said.

Mother was right. As soon as Dr. Glimm saw the medical team waiting in the judgment chamber, all the life drained out of him. He was caught and he knew it. Glimm shook his head when Duncan asked if they’d need the drug. The medical team quietly departed, leaving only Copely behind to listen with the arbiters.

“It was osteodisjunctus.” Dr. Glimm slumped down in a chair and stared at his feet. “Do you know what that is? It’s a horse-killer, the worst disease a horse can get. Absolutely virulent, absolutely unstoppable.”

“Longstride had osteodisjunctus?” Duncan asked.

“He was a carrier. I spotted an anomaly in his blood two years ago,” the veterinarian said. “But I didn’t know what it was — it didn’t match the known structure of the disease’s causative organism. It took me two years of off-and-on testing to identify it as a mutated form. And all that time Longstride’s infected sperm was being shipped all over the galaxy. If it ever got out that I had known for two years...” He shook his head sadly, leaving the thought unfinished.

So, he was protecting himself, Duncan thought; not Kordan, not Pirmacha’s reputation as a reliable source of disease-free horses. Himself. “There was nothing wrong with Longstride’s sperm count, was there?”

“Hell, no, it was as high as ever. He had years of stud service left in him. But I had to think of something to make Kordan stop breeding him.”

Mother spoke to the three arbiters. “You should have asked to see the sperm-count test results,” she said reprovingly. None of them answered her; just one more place they’d slipped up.

Britt had a question for the veterinarian. “How did you get hold of Verdoris’s electronic lock pick?”

“From my daughter’s home,” Glimm said. “I mentioned that she’s married to Verdoris’s son, didn’t I? I was visiting one day when he came in carrying his mother’s lock pick — something was wrong with his own and he’d borrowed hers. He happened to be wearing gloves and the thought occurred to me that her fingerprints must be on the pick. I simply took it when no one was looking.”

“And left it at the scene to incriminate Verdoris. Is that the same reason you bribed one of her employees to cut the power at the Research Institute?”

“Yes.” Miserably.

Duncan said, “Dr. Glimm, why so brutal a method of killing the horse? Surely a lethal injection would have been more humane.”

Glimm gave a humorless laugh. “And who would have been the first one to be suspected? No, I had to do it in a way to direct suspicion away from myself.” He was silent a moment, and then added: “Arbiters, you never knew Longstride. He was a magnificent animal, truly magnificent. Killing him was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. I felt as if I were cutting my own throat.”

And so you were. Duncan glanced at the other two arbiters. Britt and Hartley shook their heads; no more questions. It was time to pronounce judgment.

“Dr. Thorin Glimm,” Duncan said, “you are hereby sentenced to exile from Pirmacha for the rest of your natural life. If you ever attempt to return to Pirmacha for any reason whatsoever, you will be incarcerated for a period of time to be determined by a later tribunal. Moreover, all your goods and property are forfeit to Roj Kordan in partial recompense for the grievous harm you have done him. Do you understand the sentence?”