1.
The carpet in front of the stairs, where the body had come to rest, was spotless, a nice, soft, beige color. There was a lot of beige in the room, it was the standard for campus faculty accommodations and Lamar Torel hadn't added many personal touches to the living room. No photographs, no paintings, no books or magazines.
"I prefer reading on my padd - I'm not one of those nostalgic types. Frankly, I can't see the romance in heaps and heaps of paper and dust, do you?"
The only sign that anyone actually lived there was a jacket tossed over the sofa. That's where he'd left it when they came in after dinner.
"How about a bit of music?"
It was still playing. Sarah Vaughan singing "Come Rain or Come Shine, a small pause, then the first notes of "Mean to Me." Oh, you've been mean, Lamar Torel, you've been mean to Tora, and look at you now.
"Actually, I spend most of my time upstairs, in the study. Do you want to come up? It has a great view of the pond. I had to walk over corpses to get this place."
His expression when he saw her face. His laugh, loud and unashamed, asserting his irresistible charm.
There weren't any books in the study either, of course. Instead, the shelves displayed a series of diplomas, sports awards from Lamar's own university days, and his collection of heart stones.
"You have to venture pretty deep into the Fire Caves to get these. I was terrified the first time I did it, but afterwards it gets sort of addictive."
The fearless explorer, the big strong man. Moving close to her, breathing heavy, his hands searching for a place to land.
Killing a person doesn't have to be a very tumultuous act, at least not outwardly. Tora knew how to kill a person with minimal waste of time and energy. The problem came afterwards. There were logistics involved in killing.
A lifeless body is big and unwieldy and never easy to dispose of. Back at the camp she had taken advantage of the desert: a body dumped in the dunes would be eaten clean away in a matter of days, hours even, if a sandstorm formed, and they formed often. People disappeared there every day, and what did it matter? Another prisoner gone meant more food for the rest of them and less work for the guards. A win-win situation for everyone.
But a respected professor of linguistics, somewhat of a local celebrity on account of his athletic feats as a student and his manly good looks, on a university campus not 50 kilometres from Jalanda City, that was a different matter. This was the real world. Civilisation. Close-clipped lawns, painstakingly planted flowerbeds which were color coordinated. There would be inquiries, questions, police investigations. They would want to know what happened. They would use their instruments to sweep the place, and they would find out she had been here, and then they would find the body, of course they would, and they would use their instruments on it and they would find fingerprints, or hair, or some other minuscule but unequivocal proof of her guilt.
Tora considered the situation. It was still early, no one would miss Lamar until he was due at class next morning. There was plenty of time to devise a satisfactory solution to her problem.
So, hiding the body was not an option. Could she make it disappear by some other means? There were acids that could dissolve flesh in a matter of seconds. There were weapons that could disintegrate anything in the blink of an eye. Could she get her hands on any of those in the next six hours? Probably not. Stupid Ziyal had refused to take even the most basic precautions, she had no weapons, no planned escape routes. "I'm here to learn. I'm here to start a new life. I won't need any of that. All that is in the past."
Fool. Doe-eyed, naive fool.
If she couldn't hide the body, and couldn't make it disappear, the only option left was to leave it right there where it had fallen from the study, down the stairs into the living room. All anyone knew (and this, a lot of people knew, it was a small campus and there wasn't very much to talk about), was that professor Lamar Torel and Tora Ziyal had gone out on a date. They had been seen in a little restaurant in the town near campus, sampling their traditional Bajoran cuisine with a touch of the avant garde. After listening to some jazz in a student café nearby (plenty of witnesses there too), they had walked back to the campus through the forest. But no one had seen them after that. No one had seen Ziyal accept his invitation to come up to his apartment, but why would she deny it? Yes, she had been there. The fingerprints? Well, yes, she had touched him and he had touched her. She was an adult woman, after all. But things didn't go very far, because she didn't know him that well yet, and because he was a gentleman.
Except for his fingers, thick suddenly, and hot, his hand travelling up and down her leg, up and down.
"Do you like the music? Her voice is so sensual, don't you think?"
There would always be doubt. But could there be more than that? Yes, sir, yes, Mr. Police Investigator, he had a couple of drinks. No, I didn't, I don't like the taste. I never drink. Certainly I wouldn't mind a blood test, anything to help.
The only prints they would find would be on his neck, and only upon very close examination could they find that the pressure exerted was a bit too heavy for the kind of sweet caresses appropriate to a first date, and that the angle of his neck fracture didn't match with the angle of the stairs he'd supposedly fallen down. But wouldn't the investigators want to concentrate on the much more obvious concussion, the broken vertebrae and the high concentration of alcohol in his blood?
Tora hated to rely on such a ridiculous thing as hope, but there it was. Under the circumstances, it would have to do. Her job was to make sure that these circumstances never presented themselves again. From now on, no matter where they went or how safe it seemed, they needed to have their bases covered. Ziyal needed to learn her lesson.
And they would need to move. Soon.