Tony stayed up all night reading. All-nighters were common on Gibbs' team thanks to the man's near obsession with solving cases and catching the bad guys quickly, so Tony was used to them. He couldn't even resent the all-nighters - much - when they resulted in arrests and, later, convictions.
Tonight - or, rather, last night, Tony corrected as he stood and stretched muscles that had tightened up from too long in one position- had also resulted in a solution to the mystery he'd been brought here to investigate, and he was looking forward to closing this case, if not to getting back to his regularly-scheduled life.
He put that thought aside firmly and turned to the bathroom. For a spaceship - no, starship, though the difference was lost on him - Enterprise had surprisingly large rooms, bathrooms included. Tony had expected something like he'd find on board a cruise ship or aircraft carrier, but had been pleased to find that his cabin was about double that size, split into a sitting area and a sleeping area, and the en suite bathroom was still efficiently laid out, but he could stretch his arms wide and his fingertips did not touch the walls.
Which meant that the shower - sonic shower, and how cool was that? - was actually large enough for him to turn around in without banging his shoulders against the sides.
He stripped off his clothes and put them in the refresher. By the time he finished his shower, they'd be cleaned and ready to put on again, and that was the one piece of technology he'd encountered so far that he hoped he lived to see invented.
The sonic shower turned out to be depressingly efficient at getting him clean, but it lacked any of the features that made taking a water shower relaxing. There was no hot water raining down on his muscles, giving a mini-massage as he soaped himself up even as it provided the white noise of drops splashing against the shower floor. Heck, there was no soap, even, and that was weird as hell.
He finished the shower quickly, automatically reaching for a towel only to remember that he wasn't actually wet, and moved to the sink to shave and brush his teeth - two activities that were remarkably similar to what he was used to.
Finally, he dressed in his freshened-up clothes and ordered coffee from the replicator, happily ordering hazelnut creamer to be added to it. Okay, maybe the 'fresher wasn't the only thing he hoped would be invented in his lifetime.
Tony took a swallow of coffee and finally checked the time. The chronometer - because clock wasn't futuristic enough, Tony thought wryly - read 0922.
He'd been surprised to find that Enterprise kept a normal 24-hour schedule until his background reading last night revealed that, like America had dominated aviation after the Second World War, Earth had dominated spaceflight and exploration after its initial encounters with aliens that weren't Roswell gray.
Still, Enterprise's 24-hour day meant that Tony could be reasonably certain that most people were awake as he was. Another swallow of coffee, and he headed for the door.
His escort this morning was a tall youngish man with carrot-top hair and a deep tan. "Good morning, sir."
"Morning," Tony replied. "Back to my temporary office, please, and then would you ask the captain to arrange for the ambassadors to meet with me - as a group - sometime today? He might want to include a security team, too."
"Of course, sir," the young man - an ensign, if Tony had figured out the rank markers correctly - responded, and gestured Tony down the corridor.
Tony was re-reading one of the articles he'd found during his search last night when the door slid open and the ambassadors started streaming in. Behind them, a handful of men and women in red uniforms followed. Finally, Kirk and Spock came in and the door closed behind them.
"Good morning," Tony offered with a smile. "If I could ask you a favor? Sit where you sat before, as if I were Ambassador Gav."
Minutes later, they were all seated, Sarek to his left, the ambassador from Coridan Prime to his right, and the others in seats that matched the information he'd gleaned from interviewing them.
"Thank you," he said, adjusting the PADD in front of him and idly wishing for a stack of papers in its place. He put the thought aside and regarded each ambassador in turn. "And thank you for cooperating with my investigation - which has now concluded."
That caused a bit of a stir and, across from him, the ambassador that reminded him of the Tick - Shras of Andoria, he thought - leaned forward to rest his forearms on the table as he asked, "Does that mean you've found the killer?"
"I'm not certain," Tony said, prevaricating just the tiniest bit. He thought he knew for sure, but he had no evidence to support that conclusion. Thus, this gathering, during which he hoped to get the killer to confess. "Which is why we're here - a few more questions ought to clear the matter up entirely."
"However we can be of assistance, Agent DiNozzo," Sarek said. "It is only logical to conclude the investigation as quickly - and accurately - as possible, so that we may return to our business and Gav's family may begin their rituals for the dead."
"Ask your questions, Agent," Daoud said.
"During my interviews with each of you," Tony said, "I had the impression that most of you disliked Ambassador Gav - but along the lines of annoyance, rather than outright anger or rage. Would you agree with that assessment?"
The collective shifting in seats answered the question as clearly as any verbal response, but Tony needed the verbal acknowledgment to convince them of the conclusion he'd reached.
"Ambassador Daoud?" Tony prompted. "Would you explain your feelings for - or impressions of - Ambassador Gav? And I'll ask each one of you to do the same."
What followed was almost like a group therapy session as, hesitantly at first, Daoud expressed her personal dislike of the man - "But he was a great ambassador for Tellar, and we shouldn't overlook or forget that," she concluded - and one by one, the other ambassadors offered similar sentiments.
Sarek, with what Tony had come to learn was Vulcan courtesy, said only that he appreciated Gav's direct speech, though he had suggested more than once that Gav needed not be as loud as he often was. "But that is the Tellarite way," Sarek said in conclusion.
"And that's where I'm stumped," Tony said. "During an investigation, we look for whoever had the means to kill the victim, the opportunity to do so, and a motive - a reason - for killing. The truth about this investigation is that any one of you could have gotten the means, and every one of you had the opportunity to do so."
He waited out the small storm that announcement caused before giving them all a wry look. "Please don't think it's hard to drop a bit of poison into someone's food. You all had the opportunity, but," he added to cut off another protest, "I don't see that any of you had motive."
"Despite the litany of complaints you just heard?" Kirk asked.
"Yep," Tony replied. "Nobody sounded angry enough to kill - and the reading I did on Tellarite relations with the Federation supports that. Everyone knows they're brash and loud-mouthed - plain spoken, if you prefer - and everybody appears to accept it. Further, I didn't find any records of any personal disputes with him since you've all been aboard the Enterprise. So I'm convinced none of you had a motive to kill him."
"What does that mean?" Tapani, the Purple People Eater, asked. Tony didn't think her slight adjustment in how she sat was meant to draw attention to her well-displayed cleavage, but who knew how aliens thought?
He kept his eyes firmly on her face as he answered, "It means we - I - have to think a little sideways. Out of the box, if you will."
"Humans are frequently at their best when they do so," Spock observed. "To what conclusions has such thinking led you?"
Tony looked up at Spock when he answered, "That Gav wasn't the intended target."
The storm his announcement that they all had opportunity to have poisoned Gav paled in comparison to the tempest this announcement brought. Only Sarek sat serenely in his chair, the slightest tightening of his eyebrows over his nose the only suggestion that he was mulling over Tony's words - or had even heard them at all.
"Who was?" Kirk's voice cut across the din. "Do you know?"
"Either Ambassador Sarek or Ambassador Bimaderi." Tony let those words fall into the sudden silence.
"How can you possibly know that?" Ambassador Karash - Coppertone - demanded.
Tony offered him a small smile. "Where were you sitting on the night Gav died?"
"Right here!"
"You're sure? Absolutely sure?" Tony asked. "That you were in that chair, and not, say, the one immediately to your right? Or left? Given that all the walls are the same bland gray, are you sure?"
Karash opened his mouth, then closed it again, puzzlement crossing his expression as he sat back in his chair, almost disappearing from view as he did. After a long moment, he said quietly, "No. I'm not absolutely sure."
Tony let that admission rest for a moment before he cleared his throat. "And that's what I spent last night doing - reading up on each of you individually and each of your worlds, trying to figure out who the real target was."
"I can think of no logical reason for anyone to attempt to kill me," Sarek said, his tone as neutral as if he were offering a weather forecast.
"Neither can I," Tony said and turned to Ambassador Mahesharav Bimaderi of Coridan Prime. "Which means you were the intended target."
"Me?" Bimaderi stared at him, eyes and mouth both almost comically wide with shock. "But who-?"
Shock turned to anger and he turned to his fellow Coridan ambassador sitting next to him. "Varaza! Why?"
"You know why," Varaza Makul snarled back. "I'm just sorry I didn't get another chance!"
Then the red-uniformed security team were closing in to secure Makul - Tony supposed he shouldn't have been surprised that handcuffs were still used in the future - and lead him out of the room.
"It would've been nice," Tony said as mildly as he knew how, though his voice carried in the sudden silence, "if one of you had mentioned that Coridan Prime and Coridan III are still in the middle of a centuries-long civil war."
Kirk looked embarrassed, almost ashamed, and most of the ambassadors seated around the table echoed the expression in varying degrees. Only Sarek and Spock kept their expressions neutral.
"It did not appear relevant," Sarek said, and Spock said, "Would that knowledge have changed your investigation?"
"We'll never know for sure," Tony replied. "But probably. When I work a case with my team, we do intense background searches on the victim and any potential suspects. Something like the Coridan civil war would've turned up immediately, and I might've asked how the two ambassadors got along with each other as well as with Ambassador Gav."
"What made you believe Gav wasn't the intended target?" Ambassador Daoud asked.
"A memory of a movie I saw a long time ago," Tony said. "It's called Sparkling Cyanide, and it's based on a book of the same name by Agatha Christie."
Kirk frowned. "I've read a lot of her work, but I don't remember that one."
"It didn't feature Poirot or Marple or even Tommy and Tuppence as the detective," Tony said. "But it had a similar circumstance - one person sitting at a round dinner table dies by poisoning. In the movie, the detective is sitting at a round table with a few other characters. He suddenly asks if they have a telephone directory. Everyone at the table gets up to go inside, but he stops and says he was wrong about his idea. He sits back down at the table one seat over from where he had been sitting, and the others orient themselves on him."
"Just as we did when you asked us to treat you as if you were Gav," Purple People Eater said.
"Exactly." Tony offered her a brief smile. "I'd gotten up from the dinner table with Captain Kirk and Commander Spock, and that scene flashed across my memory. So I spent last night researching Ambassadors Sarek and Bimaderi."
Kirk winced. "And discovered the civil war."
"Exactly. From there-" Tony gave a one-shoulder shrug. "I won't say it was easy, but it did become clear fairly quickly."
"We are grateful for your assistance, Agent DiNozzo." Daoud offered a smile that was warmer than any he'd seen from her so far. "And on behalf of the Federation, I apologize for pulling you from your life to solve our case."
"Happy to help," Tony returned, surprised to realize it was true. He might not remember much about this visit to a starship, but he was glad to have had the opportunity to see what the future would bring.