But why? The Modhri didn't kill just for the sick fun of it. Had Lorelei known something the Modhri didn't want getting out? Had she been another Spider agent like me, someone the Spiders had neglected to tell me about?

Or was it something to do with her sister? The sister on New Tigris, the girl Lorelei had said bad people were trying to find?

"Well?" Kylowski prompted.

"Well what?" I countered, stalling for time while I tried to think. To me, what had happened here was now obvious. Lorelei had shot and killed the first walker, but had been nailed with snoozers before she could take out his companion. The Modhri, rightly guessing that her gunshot wouldn't go unnoticed or uninvestigated, had had the second walker obliterate the dead man's polyp colony, lest an autopsy discover it. He'd then created the same damage to Lorelei's head to make it look like ritual murder or a psycho killer.

But knowing the truth was one thing. Talking about it was something else. The galaxy at large was unaware of the Modhri's existence, let alone his plans and ambitions and techniques, and for the moment those of us in the know wanted to keep it that way. "Okay, so maybe friend was too strong a word," I added. "Either way, there was a third person on the scene."

"Obviously," Kylowski said. "That still leaves us with the question of why he took the time to do all this. Especially since multiple thudwumper shots draw a lot more attention than just one or two."

"I can't answer that," I said, which was perfectly true if slightly misleading.

"Yeah," he said. "You always load your guns with thudwumpers?"

"I load them with snoozers, like my permit specifies," I said. "It doesn't take a criminal mastermind to change clips."