Zana turned away from the door. Whatever happened in that room now was in Alan's hands, and if there was anyone who could calm down Peet, it was his... Elder. She still wasn't sure about the humans' system of hierarchy, and whenever she resolved to pick up her studies, some new catastrophe came crashing down on them, and she forgot about it again.

"Thank you for calling me," she said to Rogan. "Instead of..."

"I heard that Olman bid on him," Rogan said, watching her with an unreadable expression. "He wouldn't be thrilled if I'd shot his next acquisition."

"That's your reason?" Zana asked, shocked.

"I just saved your prize human, Alta," Rogan drawled. "Shouldn't you be more appreciative?"

Zana exhaled heavily. "I was against this deal. I'm still against it."

"Ah. Sorry if I misjudged you." With a last glance through the door's little window, Rogan turned away and sat down at a workbench. "But I doubt Olman will let you get out of that deal again."

Zana followed him to the workbench, and took the blood-soaked handkerchief from his hand. "Let me have a look... that'll need stitches. I'm so sorry, Rogan... Dehni... he's... his former owner didn't treat him very well..."

It was her standard excuse for Peet's erratic behavior, but Zana felt that this safety net was getting more and more threadbare. They would have to address this... once they were out of Sapan.

Well outside of Olman's reach. And Urko's. It seemed they were collecting enemies, not shedding them.

She had to focus on their more immediate problems. "Were you able to learn anything?"

Rogan took the handkerchief from her and pressed it against his cheek again. "Not really. He told me it was dark, and he couldn't see who was attacking him, and afterwards, he was already feeling the effects of the drug, so he wasn't able to call for help." He nodded towards the door. "Maybe his friend can get a bit more out of him."

"But now there's no doubt that someone is producing and distributing Blaze here," Zana said, feeling equally triumphant and unnerved.

"We've been aware of that for a while now," Rogan said, sounding slightly annoyed. "We just never found any evidence, and that hasn't changed." He spread his free arm. "A mysterious attacker that vanished into the night. That's not exactly a lead you can follow."

This had to be so frustrating. How did Rogan not lose all motivation in his job? Zana nibbled at her lip, thinking about the bottles in her handbag.

"What about that drug kitchen in the woods that Dehni showed you?" she asked. "Dehni told me everyone was gone, but couldn't you find at least traces of what they did there?"

Rogan inhaled slowly, and averted his gaze. "The doctor is still looking into it, but..." He tiredly rubbed his eyes with his free hand. "I've been told to stay away from this case. I just brought a murderer in, I 'shouldn't try to grab more nuts than fit in my hand'."

The quotation marks were clearly audible. Zana raised a brow. "Who said that?"

Rogan's smile was completely mirthless. "My boss."

Zana remembered Felga's notes about Olman's deal with the prefect. Of course - if the prefect was already in the tycoon's pocket, the lower ranks wouldn't have any qualms to accept a piece of the cake, either.

She propped her hands on the table and leaned forward until her face was only inches away from the guard's. "If there was any doubt in my mind that Olman is the mastermind behind the whole affair, it's gone," she said in a low voice. "Even if Vilam killed Felga, Olman was behind it - Felga was the only one who cared enough about this valley to even try to expose him. Think about that, Rogan - one ape in the whole valley, who wasn't a coward."

She straightened, still watching his face.

Rogan scowled. "I said nothing about dropping the case."

Zana allowed herself a slight smile. "I'm glad I didn't misjudge you then."

"It doesn't mean that anything will come from it, other than me losing my job," Rogan warned her.

"I'm glad you're willing to take that risk," Zana said softly.

Rogan huffed a laugh. "Well, if things go sideways, I can always take my old friend up on his offer, and go down south to join General Urko's city police."

Zana felt her smile growing tense. "Let's hope that won't be necessary. This valley urgently needs a good officer."

Rogan lazily knocked a fist against his chest and bowed in his seat. "My, my, Alta," he purred. "Who'd have thought you could also say nice things to a man?"

"Well, my compliments are not for free," Zana retorted dryly. "They have to be earned."

Rogan's smile grew calculating. "In that case, I'd like to put a few more sembles into my account, ma'am..."

Zana bit her lip to choke the nervous laughter rising in her throat. Who'd have thought this could be so much fun? "Well, in that case," she said casually, "I wanted to talk to Levar about that court case Felga was planning against him."

Rogan frowned. "Why do you want to talk to him again?"

Zana sat down beside him. "Because Felga wrote in her notes that Levar swore to her that he had found the drugs in Vilam's possession somewhere. There's a lead for you, officer!"

"Then I should be the one questioning him, not a civilian." The moment of levity was gone; Rogan was frowning, all police officer again.

"But would he talk to you? He thinks you don't believe him anyway, what with that complaint against him for using Blaze by, supposedly, Felga, and a dead Felga on his property. He thinks you took the easy way out."

Rogan wasn't convinced. "All the more reason he should be happy I'm giving him a chance to redeem himself. I can offer him a deal, you can't."

"I can tell him that he can make a deal with you, but first we need to get him to talk at all!" Zana hesitated; then she put her hand on his arm.

She was surprised at the heat beating against her palm. She and Galen had been sleeping in separate beds for so long, she had almost forgotten how nice it was to touch a man...

Focus!

"Levar doesn't see me as his enemy," she said. "That's the big advantage I have over you, Rogan. Let me talk to him first - I'll tell you everything anyway. And if I can convince him to accept that deal you offer, you have your first true witness in this case."

Rogan rubbed his face, staring straight ahead. Zana waited, her hand still on his arm. She wasn't sure if she left it there because she knew he liked it... or because she liked it.

Best not to probe this thought too deeply. "There's something else."

She half expected another flirtatious glance, but the look he gave her was wary. Guard instinct, probably. "What else?"

Zana took a deep breath. Presenting her evidence had felt much more triumphant in her imagination. "I can prove that Vilam uses Blaze. If nothing else, that will convince Levar to talk to me. And I'm talking of real evidence, not... gossip."

"Blazes, that one really irked you, didn't it?" Rogan murmured. "I didn't mean to offend y..."

"I found two bottles of Blaze in Vilam's desk," Zana said hastily, before her courage left her. "And I, I secured the evidence."

Rogan stared at her.

Zana stared back, her heart pounding against her ribs.

Rogan blinked and slowly moistened his lips. "You found... how did you get to Vilam's desk?"

"I picked the lock to his office," Zana confessed.

"You picked the lock," Rogan repeated.

Zana nodded.

Rogan rubbed a hand over his mouth. Then he rose and wandered to the other end of the room.

"You picked the lock to Vilam's office," he said, staring at the wall before him. "Went to his desk, rummaged through his desk, discovered... whatever, and, what, stuffed it into your handbag and climbed out of the window?"

"No, the door was still open," Zana said meekly.

"Cesar!" Rogan groaned.

"Now you have something to show for, when the chief or the prefect try to take you off the case," Zana argued.

Rogan whirled around. "Something to show for? I have a case of breaking and entering that you just confessed to, and unlawfully obtained stuff that I can't use in court, or did you think of forging a search warrant while you were polishing you lock picks?"

His anger rolled around Zana like thunderclouds, making her feel hot inside her fur, hot and choked. Her evidence, her daring... it had been for nothing. Worse, it had made Rogan's job more difficult, and Levar's chances of being cleared of the accusations more dire. She hadn't helped - she had meddled, like an over-zealous matron with too much time on her hands, trying to fill the emptiness in her life with other people's concerns.

The bottles in her handbag were blessedly silent; if she moved now, they'd clink against each other, and confirm Rogan's accusations. So she just shrank into the wall, and said nothing.

Rogan glanced at her face, and stopped mid-sentence. "This is all my fault," he said with a deep sigh. "I encouraged you, I kept you in the loop... I know you wanted to help, Alta. But for the love of the Mothers, don't. You'll just endanger yourself. If that old fool had stumbled upon you in that office of his, he could've harmed you."

Zana could've told him that Vilam had stumbled upon her, and how she had made sure he wouldn't harm her, but she felt too mortified to say anything.

She was saved from a reply by Junior, who burst into the tack room with such force that the door crashed against the wall and bounced back. At any other time, Zana would've felt annoyed by the younger guard's penchant for dramatic entrances, but this time, her shoulders sagged with relief, as Rogan's scorching attention swiveled away from her.

With two long strides, he had crossed the room and now loomed over Junior, who immediately broke into a furious mutter.

Zana saw Rogan stiffen; then the turned around and Zana felt herself pinned down once more under his fierce glare. "Did anything else happen there that I should know of?"

She opened her mouth, but it took her a moment to form words. "Anything else?"

Rogan turned up his palm. "Anything you hadn't mentioned yet?"

The feeling of an impending thunderstorm returned; the air seemed too warm, too heavy. "I, I... Vilam did stumble over me," Zana confessed. "I told him that you and my husband knew where I was, and that you'd come looking for me if I wasn't back within an atseht."

Rogan was still watching her, his face unreadable. "And then?"

Zana tried to take a deep breath, and found that she couldn't. "I told him he'd better come to you and confess his crimes, because you were on to him anyway."

"And then?"

Zana shrugged, nonplussed. "Nothing. He let me go." She looked from him to Junior, and a clammy feeling settled in her gut. "Something happened... to him, right?"

"They found his body in one of his racer's kennels, down at the stadium," Rogan said grimly.

For a moment, her head felt so dizzy that Zana had to grab the edge of the bench she was sitting on, grateful that she was sitting right now. "Mothers!"

Vilam was... had he been on his way to the watch to confess, as she had told him? Had one of Olman's goons been sent to stop him? But how had Olman known?

Or had Vilam been stupid enough to try and convince the tycoon to come clean, too?

"Are you sure that nothing else happened between you and Vilam last night?" Rogan asked, and Zana thought she could hear a tinge of despair in his voice.

With a jolt, she realized that Rogan was grasping for a reason not to arrest her for the murder of Padraman Vilam. After she just had presented herself as the most likely candidate - motive, means, and opportunity.

"I swear I had nothing to do with his death," she said, and rose. The bottles clinked in her bag as her thighs brushed against it. "You accused me of meddling, Rogan, and you were right, and I'm deeply sorry I made your life more difficult by it. But my meddling attempted to find evidence, so that you could arrest the true culprit and bring him to court! I tried to serve the law, not take it into my own hands."

Rogan stared her down for another moment. Then he turned away abruptly, slapped Junior's shoulder and murmured something. Junior nodded and left, not without a last glance over his shoulder that shot daggers to Zana.

"Stay here," Rogan said. "Take your humans, and go back to your inn, and stay there, Alta. For the love of the Mothers, stay away as far as you can from any future crime scene."

He left without looking back.

Zana stepped out of the watch house, and into a fiery sunset that spilled an ember glow over every roof; against all expectations - and his better judgment, as Rogan had made clear - she had still been allowed to talk to Levar about the bottles of Blaze the kennel owner had found in his rival's possession. Rogan's decision had told her a great deal about the state of the investigations; by now, the constable had to be harbouring grave doubts about Levar's guilt, but was as empty-handed as she was, unable to present a more probable culprit.

They were grasping at straws, while the days were running out for Levar. And with Vilam...

She hadn't had time yet to come to grips with that latest development. Vilam had been her main suspect. The suspect. And now he was dead.

If she didn't manage to find something against Olman, Levar would be dead, too.

And Olman would own Peet.

The day had fled again, while she had been cooped up with a shocked and enraged Levar. He hadn't known anything about an impending court appointment - that much at least Zana had been willing to believe. It had taken her a long time before Levar had been able to focus on her questions again. He had been genuinely rattled.

"I can't believe she'd do this to me!" he had repeated over and over again.

Zana was still not sure if the complaint had really been written by Felga, but she had no idea who else could have done it - who else could have known about the drug in Levar's possession, except for Vilam himself, and he wouldn't have wanted to draw attention to the matter, at least not before Levar would've used it to blackmail him, which Levar had emphatically denied.

"I hadn't made up my mind about what I was gonna do with the stuff," he had told her. "I had been half of a mind to go to the police with it myself, I mean, I finally had evidence that he had been killing off my racers!"

"Then why didn't you go?" Zana had wanted to know, wondering if Levar knew more about 'unlawfully acquired evidence' than she had.

Levar snorted. "Because nothing would've come of it. Chief Tugal isn't interested in stirring up trouble at the racetracks. He doesn't want to spoil Olman's fun."

Olman. No matter where Zana started to lift the covers, in the end she always found him under them. The only thing she was certain of was that he hadn't been the one behind the attack on Peet - Olman wanted him alive, to use him for Mothers knew what.

Levar had just shrugged when she had asked him about Vilam's supplier. "How would I know? They didn't supply me. I found it in his locker, which isn't the smartest place to hide it, but Vilam isn't the smartest guy to begin with."

After Vilam had found his locker empty, he had probably decided that it would be safer to store the drug on his own, heavily guarded premises - only to have her raiding his desk, Zana had thought wryly. And whatever he had done next to protect himself, had killed him instead.

She hadn't told Levar about his rival's death. That was something Rogan would do, or not do, whatever he deemed necessary. Zana had to worry about other things.

Vilam had been found by a groom, lying behind one of his racers' kennels - much like Felga, come to think of it. He had shown no outward signs of injury, and he hadn't been strangled. Zana suspected that he had been injected with Blaze, the same way the unknown attacker had tried to kill Peet.

So had it been the same attacker? Two assaults in one night, with the same method, pointed strongly in that direction. But what was the connection between Peet and Vilam? Vilam must have gone straight to the tracks after her little speech about making confessions and negotiating deals. Had he run into his killer by accident, or had they planned on meeting there anyway?

But if that killer had been the one to attack Peet with Blaze, did that mean that Vilam hadn't been the only one to terrorize the kennel owners? Maybe Olman had more than one brute in his employ... maybe the internal rivalry was meant to improve the performance of his enforcers. And of course, you always had a backup if one of them suddenly discovered his conscience, as Vilam had found out.

And then there was the similarity of the placement of the bodies between Vilam and Felga. But maybe that was just a coincidence - if you killed someone on a racetrack, there was a high probability that the fight had just happened to take place in the kennel section.

Still... three murders - if everything had went according to plan - three murders in half a moon, in a small community... Zana couldn't believe that the citizens of Sapan had suddenly all gone on a murder spree. It had to be the same person. Which meant that Halda had been right from the beginning: Levar was innocent.

"Alta! I heard about your human! Is the poor thing alright?"

Zana blinked and jerked her gaze up from the cobblestones. As if her musings had conjured her out of the evening air, Halda stood at the corner of the bakers' and the butchers' street, her hands deep in the pockets of her robe, the dying sun lighting her fur into a crimson halo around her face. Her voice was muffled by the plum-colored scarf she had wrapped around her neck and chin to shield herself against the chilly air.

Zana shivered and wished she had thought of wearing her woolen scarf, too. The temperatures had dropped sharply over the last few days. But Junior had made it so urgent... and it had been urgent, with Peet out of his mind...

"He's recovering," she said. "But the whole affair has shaken him quite a bit."

Halda quickly crossed the distance between them. "I can imagine,"she said. "And I heard about Vilam... I have a good idea who's behind that - Olman."

Zana silently agreed with her, but after the disaster with Rogan, she didn't want to give Halda any more fuel - if Halda went and got herself killed, like Vilam had done, just because she had run her mouth... that would be something she would never forgive herself.

"Why would Olman, of all people, kill Vilam?" she hedged. "He's the president of the racing commission, the races are his favorite pastime, and Vilam's racers were part of his entertainment."

"To cover his tracks," Halda hissed. "He killed Vilam so that Vilam couldn't talk to the police and tell them who ordered him to kill Felga... and then he tried to kill your racer to make it look as if a maniac was killing everything that moves on the racetrack!"

"That... sounds a bit far-fetched," Zana said slowly. Spoken out loud, it did sound more fantastic than it had in her own mind.

Halda grabbed a fistful of her robe, and brought her face close to Zana's. "Think about it!" she whispered urgently. "Felga had devoted her whole life to bringing Olman down for what he had done to her family. And then she began to investigate Olman's drug business... the racing was just a convenient front for that! So she had to die, and Olman sent Vilam, because Vilam was neck-deep in debt with him! And when Vilam got cold feet, Olman had him killed off, too, and had your human attacked, to make it look as if Vilam had surprised its attacker, and had been killed in the scuffle. It all fits together!"

"But why would Olman have killed and injured all those other racers before that?" Zana asked, desperately trying to get Halda off that train of thought.

Halda impatiently waved her question away. "That hadn't been him, that had been Vilam, to punish the other owners who didn't obey his orders when he tried to fix a race. It was just convenient for Olman to use that same method, to hide his tracks when he killed Vilam!"

"Alright, it sounds logical," Zana admitted, except that Olman wouldn't target a human he had offered to buy for thirty thousand sembles, but Halda couldn't know that, and Zana wasn't inclined to tell her about Galen's blunder. The less people knew about it, the better. "But we don't have a shred of evidence for your theory."

"And we'll never have," Halda said darkly. Zana wished she'd let go of her robe.

"Felga had been trying to nail Olman for his misdeeds ever since we left school," Halda continued. "No, even before that! She once even applied for a summer job at his office, trying to find evidence for his shady deals! It took them a full moon to catch on to that and kick her out, and Olman still managed to wiggle out! He's buying everyone, Chief Tugal, the prefect, the judges at court... if you wait for some piece of evidence to turn up miraculously, you'll wait until The Tree has Died."

Zana took a step back, forcing Halda to release her. "Then it's hopeless," she said. "Poor Levar."

"He wouldn't be the first one to suffer for Olman's sins," Halda said grimly. "We can't let that happen, Alta! After Felga and yes, even Vilam, he'd be the third ape to die because of that baboon!"

Zana frowned. "What do you mean, we can't let that happen? Without evidence, we can't do anything!"

Halda leaned in closer. "Then we just have to... find... some evidence," she whispered. "Something that even Olman can't wiggle out of."

It took Zana a moment to understand what Halda was suggesting. "You can't be serious," she gasped. "That'd be.. that'd be..."

"That'd be justice!" Halda snapped. "Olman needs to be stopped! Now that he started to kill off people who offend him, do you think he'll stop again, on his own? He's tasted blood, Alta, he's a danger to all of Sapan!"

"Then we'll have to tell Rogan..." Zana said weakly.

"As if that boy would even try," Halda scoffed. There was a light in her eyes that Zana hadn't seen there before - hatred. "He'd tell you that he can't do anything without evidence, he wouldn't even order Olman to come to the watch house for questioning! And if he dared, Tugal would kick him out so hard you'd hear his boot meeting Rogan's butt from here to Letema valley!"

She shook her head. "This needs to end now, Alta, and you and I are the only ones who can do it. We're the only ones who can save Levar's life, and serve justice... for poor Felga. I'm sure she'll rest easier with the Mothers if she'd know that her nemesis finally had to pay for what he'd done to her family."

It's not justice you want, Zana realized as she stared at the little woman before her. It's revenge.

"Maybe you're right, Halda," she said quietly. "But this is a serious matter, and I... I have to think about it. And... and about what kind of evidence would suffice even for a court that is in Olman's pocket."

She took another step back and forced a smile on her lips. "I'll let you know what I've come up with first thing in the morning. I promise."

Halda nodded tightly. "I'll be at the office of our charity." She sighed. "My charity. I still think of it as mine and Felga's charity..."

Zana stared after her as she turned away and hurried down the darkened street. She hadn't wanted to let that thought take form in her mind, but the light in Halda's eyes had reminded her of someone.

And it frightened her to the bone.