I shook my head. “No. The cockpit was broken into.”

Ernie frowned. “Well, maybe it was one of the crew, trying to make it look like it wasn’t one of the crew.”

God save me from amateur detectives. “I checked. They all had alibis—and none of them had a motive, of course.”

Gargantuan made a harrumphing sound. “What about the original version of Megan?” he asked.

“Already gone. They normally euthanize the biological original immediately after making the copy; can’t have two versions of the same person running around, after all.”

“Why would anyone kill someone after they transferred?” asked Gargalian. “I mean, if you wanted the person dead, it’s got to be easier to off them when they’re still biological, no?”

“I imagine so.”

“And it’s still murder, killing a transfer, right? I mean, I can’t recall it ever happening, but that’s the way the law reads, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s still murder,” I said. “The penalty is life imprisonment—down on Earth, of course.” With any sentence longer than two mears—two Mars years—it was cheaper to ship the criminal down to Earth, where air is free, than to incarcerate him or her here.

Gargantuan shook his head, and his jowls, again. “She seemed a nice old lady,” he said. “Can’t imagine why someone would want her dead.”

“The ‘why’ is bugging me, too,” I said. “I know she came in here a couple of weeks ago with some fossil specimens to sell; I found a receipt recorded in her datapad.”

Gargalian motioned toward his desktop computer, and we walked over to it. He spoke to the machine, and some pictures of fossils appeared on the same monitor he’d been looking at earlier. “She brought me three pentapeds. One was junk, but the other two were very nice specimens.”