And so I sat in the cell, and folks browbeat me about the murder.
Still, all that talk about sin and guilt got me wondering if maybe, possibly, I could've done it in my sleep. It's not unheard of. In fact, I was on my way to confessing that when brother Xei handed me a little gadget through the bars of the cell. He said Doc left it there for me, in case there was an emergency.
He hadn't helped me in ten years, so I just tossed it aside and didn't pick it up again until I got bored of sitting in that dark prison cell for two days.
Twenty four hours later, I saw a black man outside my cell. He said he was the Doctor, and he had sort of metamorphosed like a butterfly a couple times, and that's why he was bald and kind of looked like someone related to my math teacher.
I didn't believe him at first, but he showed me the flashlight thing and told me those old jokes that weren't funny, and I knew it was him. That and the ridiculous accent.
I told him about the Dalek, and he was like, "So?" And he was about to leave.
I told him about how good a friend Dee was, and I just broke down, sobbing about loving your enemies and I forgave him for leaving me here so many years ago.
That changed his mind. Somehow he got that flashlight thing to open my cell, and he had everyone assemble in the main dining hall. Even the director of the place, Zirubi, was there, her blue skin seeming to turn pink with annoyance. You could tell she didn't want to be there. All four of her arms were crossed over her chest.
After introducing himself, Doc set about trying to defend my innocence. He told them I'd never seen a Dalek before I came here, and that I cried when she died. But then sister Nifrah said they were tears of remorse, and everyone started arguing with each other.
"Why discuss this any further?" Nifrah was saying. "She had sins in her former life that were never accounted for. There are many times in the good book where God used evil people to execute his judgment, like the Philistines." I always thought the green woman looked like a dragon ready to bite someone's head off, but now I saw fins popping out of the sides of her neck, and she was hissing and rattling like that spitter dinosaur in Jurassic Park. I think they said those folks are called Celeryians, but they sure don't look like vegetable eaters.
Racwaya took my defense. "Does your bible have a correct translation of Luke 13, or does the concept of all of us equally deserving wrath not exist in your language?"
And then everyone was yelling again.
At last Doc blew a strange whistle that hurt everyone's ears, telling everyone the place was on lockdown until he found the murderer.
Scooter reminded him it was a monastery in the middle of a desert, which seemed to embarrass him, then he was off to the crime scene.
Or what was left of it.
There had already been a funeral and some cleaning in the last few days I'd been imprisoned, so there wasn't much evidence to be had. I asked Doc if he could travel back in time to see who did it, but he said if he could do that, he could just as well prevent the murder, and that the rocks they made the building of were a rare mineral that he couldn't get to with the blue box, and he had to park outside the door in the sand.
So, we had Dee's ashes, my knife with dried blood on it, Dee's things, and not much else. The trash is always incinerated, so that was a dead end, too. The Doctor used a device to sift through it, but the waste from the last few days could have easily blown across the whole desert by now. I've taken shuttles across that thing. If there's something lost out there, it's gone.
We had no security cameras, because it was assumed we all knew the Almighty was watching us, or at least the Heavenly Sponsors (if you believed the apocrypha), so I didn't even have that to prove my innocence.
Doc left the monastery for awhile, coming back with a sort of crime kit, and he was spraying stuff on the walls and floor like people do on TV, but it was better than that, because it left little vapor trails that showed which direction the blood went.
Then he got out a magnifying tool, and he was staring at blood and dirt and bits of hair.
It turned out the murder weapon had no fingerprints on it, just a couple splotches that could easily have come from a glove. The hair he found could have come off the type of Neswis yak robe that everyone wears, and we all had visited that room from time to time, so we couldn't really rule anyone out.
He searched the other rooms.
The Naxwam Complex, named after the planet, is a simple building, beautifully reflecting our simple lives. The place is three stories tall and shaped like a cinder block, its rooms arranged in a square, with a giant domed garden on the southeast end.
Dee's room was upstairs. It had a ramp leading up to it because her kind of Daleks can't fly. Her room was right in between mine and the showers I have to wait all day for my turn to use.
The archives and a library are across from the bathrooms, and they're always a disorderly mess, a task I'm frequently assigned to handle due to my not being so good at the phones or cooking.
The painting studio is on the other side of the library, and everyone else's bedrooms are arranged along that square between that room and Dee's. That's a total of eight rooms (minus Dee's), but they're packed in there pretty tight, each only about the size of a janitor's closet.
On the south end above the stairs was the office Nifram used to handle the business accounts, and a giant storage room where they kept spare robes and other clothing, along with desert suits and historical artifacts.
The main floor is wider, with a big mess hall, a kitchen and a walk-in freezer filled to the brim with the same old Legrors, Vibutis, Ehketas and Rimsops we've been eating for months. After awhile, it all starts tasting like lard and old chicken mixed with Waffle Crisp cereal. Baekvu tries to jazz them up, but it only makes it harder to stomach. It's become customary for me to fast from the stuff until I'm absolutely starving.
Behind one wall of the mess hall, on the west side of the building, we have the bone chapel, and our Stellar Soul Searcher, Heart To Heart call center, where the sinner repents, the dying call in for prayers, and lonely astronauts bore us to sleep.
Scooter's office is in the southwest corner of the complex, in between the technology room and the choir loft/recording studio. The walls appear to be soundproofed, and we often find Scooter in there, snoring on his leather couch.
The choir loft gives us a breathtaking view of the garden/hydroponics jungle, so I love singing there.
Our music has thousands of fans, which would be kind of scary if we weren't a team in a monastery out in the middle of nowhere. We beam the music out to some computer thingy, folks donate alien money to listen, and we use the money to order deliveries of machine parts, plant seeds, food and medical supplies.
The basement doesn't have much of anything but dungeons (I heard this place used to be a castle), a clothes washer and drier, and a giant water tank that piped in moisture from the desert to add to our supply. Where the moisture comes from is a mystery, but it collects so we can water the plants and take a shower.
I almost died one time when they served me the toadstools that grew around the tank with a side of Legror, but Nifra injected me with something so I could eat them after that, if I wanted to. Considering how bad they taste, I wouldn't call that a blessing.
The laundry was between my jail cell and the lower level of the hydroponics area. Not the best place for all that electronic equipment with all that moisture and all, no matter what anyone says about "ninety percent reclamation."
Lacmed has to fix parts on that thing just about every week, and sometimes we're left doing it by hand for a month or two while someone slowly shuttles the parts out to us.
Four people (I use the term loosely) were officially upstairs during the time of the murders, or said they were. The first two were Xei and Zirubi.
Xei said he was in the art room creating an illuminated manuscript at the time.
Zirubi, being the Martha that she is, was busy keeping the prayer line in business, which the computer records also show.
Then there was me, busily filing away papers, and poor Dee, of course.
Things didn't look good for my case. File sorting isn't that complicated a task, and they looked at me suspiciously when I said I napped and made paper airplanes when I thought no one was looking. That, and staring at alien sex books that shouldn't even exist in our library. Nobody liked me when I mentioned *that.* The only thing that kept me from going back to the dungeon was the lack of fingerprints, and the fact that Xei was right next door to me with a similarly weak cover story.
I told my accusers and the Doctor that I never once saw Zirubi sitting in her office during the time of the murder, and had walked past there twice to go to the bathroom, but I had only passively glanced through her window, so her story still held up.
I didn't deny that Xei was where he said he was. I could hear the scratches and brush strokes in the dead quiet. Everyone else was downstairs.
Welbac the alien wolfman, Fornarv the "Ood", and Nifrah were on the phones, Lacmed was cleaning the mess hall, mopping and such, Baekvu was preparing the next meal, Scooter was either studying scripture or snoring away in his office, and Racwaya was out tending the plants.
Baekvu said he as finishing chores in the kitchen at the time of the murder, and he was going to help Dee with a mechanical problem when he found her on the floor.
As Doc was reviewing their stories, quite a few of the facts stopped matching up.
Xei didn't stay in the art room the whole time. He went downstairs for some diarrhea medicine.
Zirubi's computer log, it turns out, can show activity even if you're not in the room.
The cook went upstairs to use the bathroom to take some "medicine" he was hesitant to explain. He's blind, but he has killed with sonar before. The guilt of it was what drove him here.
Lecmed couldn't have been that busy mopping and cleaning, the mess hall hadn't been that dirty, and the chapel had been dusted the day before. Even the claim about being busy with prayer wasn't that convincing. He could have prayed while stabbing Dee.
Scooter's door was closed, but he knew all the secret passageways nobody else did, and had all the keys, so the fact nobody saw him proves nothing.
Nifrah's story didn't hold up, either, because the call center is a volunteer organization and everyone takes their breaks whenever they want. Fornarv said Nifra didn't stay on the phone the whole time, but she said he had cataracts and he'd been sleeping, and he'd left the room for a drink occasionally. It was hard to tell who was right.
Only Wolfy's alibi seemed legit, because Doc could search his player log at Ecatlo World and was able to get a minute by minute accounting of every single activity he'd done for his gaming guild. He had the scores to prove it. He didn't even go to the bathroom once. It's too bad he was too busy playing to tell us anything about what Nifrah was doing.
Racwaya was by herself with no witnesses, and the chef admitted he had a box of particle free gloves, which just happened to be open during the time of the interrogation. Doc found that the outer lip of the box was green, indicating that it had been opened too recently, but there still remained a possibility that someone had thrown the old box into the incinerator.
Baekvu said that Racwaya had allergies to banopit particles, and he had just brought up the subject the other day, which he excused by saying he had noticed her getting sick before. I couldn't see my best friend murdering Dee, but I couldn't see myself murdering her in my sleep either. Anything was possible.
It was time for the kit again.
As he was searching Dee's room for the second time, he discovered a shiny little pin tucked away beneath a dresser. "Who does this belong to?"
Nifrah said it was hers, that she was cleaning Dee's shell the day before the murder, and it fell off and rolled under the bed.
Doc asked her if it rolled back out and got caught under a dresser, and then I knew something wasn't right. She tried to explain it away by saying Dee's shell was magnetized, but magnets don't pick up that type of metal.
"You can't prove that has anything to do with the murder," she said.
I thought it suspicious for someone to be saying that kind of thing, but I couldn't prove she was wrong. The Doctor just silently pocketed the thing and stepped out to look at the rest of the building.
He checked the hallway outside Dee's room, finding a trail of blood residue leading to the bathroom. How the killer got in there without having to wait in line is beyond me.
He checked the area inside, but it's a high traffic area, so it didn't tell him anything.
He checked the art room and found evidence of Xei's "tummy problems", which led to Xei telling us a little too much information. He also tested the place I had been doing paperwork, but it didn't tell him anything.
The kitchen was a high traffic area, so was the call center.
He disappeared into the garden for a few minutes, and I was left by myself, glumly staring at a crowd of scowling faces. I suddenly felt all alone again, rejected by all my closest friends. I broke down and started crying and couldn't stop until Racwaya hugged me and told me about Jesus some. But I could tell even she thought I was the killer.
By then Doc had returned from his little expedition, telling me the plants looked good, but they could have been spruced up after the murder, so he wouldn't rule anything out. He went on with his search.
When Doc checked Scooter's office, he found evidence of something, but it was for the wrong type of sin. The only stains he found in that room were on the couch, and there was someone else's underwear stuck between the cushions. Scooter and Nifrah had been sleeping together, which would have been okay had they gotten married first. Obviously, the two had been too busy doing *that* to murder Dee. Before that story came out, I never knew that aliens could blush.
He returned to the kitchen, examining the boxes of gloves. Doc said that gloves leave particles, or seam marks if it's leather. His conclusion was that someone was not wearing gloves, which left him with the dilemma of how someone managed a murder with no fingerprints.
Well, that was that. The other places weren't occupied at the time of Dee's murder. For a long time, Doc was stumped, but then he noticed me tracing my fingers across a dusty sill, and he got an idea in his head.
"Quick!" says he. "Everyone gather around, and find me some ink!"
When someone asked, he said it was craft time, but Doc hardly ever plays around. What he ended up doing is taking everyone's fingerprints in the guise of "finger painting lessons." A fine work of art it was, too. None of them looked remotely similar. And then we found the sad awful truth. Racwaya didn't have fingerprints!
"Yedalt's don't have fingerprints," the Doctor said. "But they do have points on each hand, splotches which surface in times of great anger or stress, as they are doubtless doing right now."
Oh, it was so sad. One of my dear best friends, for a time, the only friend I had in this stuffy old place, and she did it.
"Yes, it was me," Sister Racwaya said.
"Why?" I asked her. "Why did you do it?"
"Why? Why! I've had to live with my pain and keep it bottled up inside for ten years! All on account of her wicked people!" And she started saying all this stuff about how Daleks killed her family and how she tried to put it away all those years, but she just couldn't take it anymore. She said she prayed and prayed but she kept having nightmares about the deaths and then she started planning, telling herself she'd protect future generations from their menace. It just made me sick.
For a long time, nobody spoke, then Sister Nifrah said "We still forgive you. Our Lord commands it. But trust is a thing not easily recovered."
To this sister Racwaya says "Yes, yes. I know." And she walks off into the desert.
Nobody ever saw her again. I'm pretty sure she died, killed by her own unforgiving heart.
After that, life went back to being somewhat normal. I pray with folks from other planets, I do chores, I sing, I do the Jesus thing. I used to resent the Doctor for leaving me here, but now I believe I'm actually grateful. Despite a few bitter moments, the years I've spent here at the order have been the best years of my life, and I wouldn't want to trade them for anything in the...universe.