The Great Escape Chapter 15, Part 8 of 11

The Great Escape
Chapter 15, Part 8 of 11

Danielle and Roger found the police station in the East Causeway between a pawnshop and a launderette. Here, they met the Constable of Capella Spaceport.

Arthur Jeffries was a hassled man in an ill-fitting blue uniform, sitting at a grubby table buried beneath stacks of papers, open boxes, tablets, and hand scanners. Behind his messy desk was a steel safe with peeling paint. A well-used coffee maker sat on top. There were projector screens with scrawled handwriting and a water cooler against the other wall. There was no jail, but there were a few rough-looking couches where drunks could sleep off the night's excesses. Ominous scratches on the legs of the couches suggested that some drunks had needed to be handcuffed in place.

"Excuse me, Sir?" Roger spoke from the doorway. "Can you help us?"

"That depends on what you want," the Constable answered from behind his stack of papers, not bothering to look up. His voice was a growl from over-work rather than a bad temper.

"We're in search of a missing person," Danielle said. "Her name is Yumi Takahashi."

A young woman's voice made him look up.

"Can't you just search for her on the 'net?" he asked. "Everyone's got a presence on the 'net."

"Not Yumi. She disappeared a year or so ago. She was last known to be on Capella."

Jeffries sighed and pushed the document he was working on to one side. He grabbed a nearby keypad and said:

"Spell her name for me."

Danielle did so, and he picked the letters out with a forefinger, angrily poking the keypad as if it was the computer's fault he had too much work to do. Capella's database quickly revealed its secrets, but Jeffries was unhappy. He sighed again.

"Who reported her missing?" he asked.

"No one, officially," Danielle said, "not yet."

He looked up at her again.

"So, who are you?"

It was an aggressive question, but Danielle answered patiently.

"I'm Danielle Harcourt, and this is my husband, Roger. We're friends of Yumi's family and said we'd find out if she's still here."

"Friends of Miss Takahashi, are you?"

He sounded suspicious.

"Yes," said Roger firmly.

"Look, I can't give you any information without authorization. We have the right to privacy on Capella."

"I have a letter of attorney from Yumi's father."

She flipped the document from her communicator to his computer. He glanced at it, saw the Japanese jurisdiction, and said:

"That's no good here without authorization."

"Who can authorize it?" she asked.

"A judge."

"So where can we find a judge?"

"Nearest judge is on Earth."

"Have you no legal authority here at all?"

"We have a Justice of the Peace."

"Well, can we see him?"

"No, because she's at work. She's the headmistress of our school. She sees cases in the evenings and at weekends. You'll have to wait in line."

"What about a Clerk of the Court?" Roger suggested.

"He visits once a week, making his rounds of the outworld settlements. You missed him by a day."

Roger thought Danielle was doing very well to keep her patience.

"Look," Roger said: "all we want to know is when Yumi left Capella."

"And I can't give you that information without a proper court order."

Constable Jeffries added more softly:

"I'd love to help you, just to get a break from this paperwork, but the law's clear. I can't give out
private information until your document is authorized."

Roger turned to Danielle and whispered:

"Could your dad pull some strings? He must know someone in authority."

"I could ask him, but I'm not sure he'd have time to do anything before we'd left here anyway."

"So, what can we do?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "We should just give it up and get on with our honeymoon, but I don't want to leave it so unresolved."

"I know," Roger said. "I feel the same."

"There is one thing we can do," Danielle said, somewhat uncertainly.

"It's not to do with Yumi directly, but Ezra told me about a girlfriend who lived on Capella called Vesta. I was always pestering him about any girlfriend he might have, so I learned a lot about her. However, I don't think anything came of the relationship because he spent his last day here with Yumi instead of Vesta, but maybe she still lives here. If so, she might have some information."

"All right, let's do it."

Constable Jeffries had returned to his paperwork but grudgingly looked up again when
Danielle addressed him.

"Excuse me? Do you know a woman on Capella called Vesta? She's tall with dark red hair and green eyes. Very pretty and always elegantly dressed."

"Vesta, you say?"

"Yes. She'd be about thirty now, I'd guess."

"It sounds like someone I know, but her name's not Vesta, and she doesn't look thirty. Who's this Ezra?"

"My brother. He's a planetary prospector who visits Capella often. Vesta is or was his girlfriend."

"A prospector?" Arthur Jeffries said, smiling: "and he used to visit this girl?"

"Yes," said Danielle, defiant in the face of the Constable's amusement. "Who is someone you know like her?"

Jeffries had a wide grin now.

"Her name is Hestia."

"That's her," said Roger confidently. "Does it infringe your privacy laws to tell us where she lives?"

"Yes, but I can tell you where you can usually find her. There is no law against that. It's common knowledge she hangs out in the Goat and Chariot pub about eight blocks clockwise along the Causeway. The barman there will tell you when he next expects her. Good luck!"

As Danielle and Roger left to take the moving pavement to the pub, Constable Jeffries grinned to himself once more; then, he frowned as he brought up Yumi's details on the screen again.

He made a call, waited, got transferred, and waited some more until:

"Yes, I know she's busy," he growled into the communicator. " Could you please let me speak to her?"

A few minutes later, he reached the person he wanted, who listened to his explanation and agreed.

"Sending the document over now. Thank you, Ma'am."

Waiting for her reply, he sat tapping his finger on the desk, thinking, making up his mind. His computer pinged, so he checked the screen. He made one more long call, nodded to himself at the end, then grabbed his jacket and followed Danielle and Roger to the pub.

Hestia sat alone at a table in the Goat and Chariot with a computer tablet, a folder of printed documents, and a frown. None of the tables near her was taken, though there were a dozen people, primarily young women, in the alcoves surrounding the small dance floor in the corner.

The bar was a metallic semicircle opposite the entrance. The bearded barman, who wore a vibrant green flowery shirt, looked bored.

A few people wandered in and out of the pub. Sometimes, a man would come in alone, buy a drink while he consulted the barman, and then make his way to the corner where the girls were and leave with one of them.

From the entrance, Danielle and Roger saw a gorgeous young red-headed woman at a window, as far from the music as possible. Ignoring the uninterested barman, they went straight over to Hestia's table.

"Excuse me, are you Hestia?" Danielle asked.

The woman looked up and quickly scanned their faces.

"I don't do couples," she said, dismissing them and returning to her tablet.

"What?" Danielle asked.

"Try the girls in the corner," Hestia said without looking up. "One of them will accommodate you."

Danielle turned to look toward the corner of the bar. The girls there were beautifully made-up, very attractive in slutty revealing clothes. They sat silently around the table, looking as bored as the barman.

"Oh, gosh! They're. Roger, this can't be Vesta. Besides, she's too young."

"It's her," he said with confidence. He addressed himself to Hestia.

"Excuse me, Ma'am? My name is Roger, and this is my wife, Danielle. We believe you're a friend of Danielle's brother, Ezra."

"Ezra?"

She sounded vacant or cautious.

"Show her a photo, Danielle."

Danielle projected an image from her communicator onto the tabletop. It was her brother and herself on the day he said goodbye before leaving for Capella. Hestia looked closely at the photo and then at Danielle and saw no reason to protect Ezra.

"I know Ezra very well. He's one of my favorite customers. How is he?"

"We don't know," Danielle said, ignoring the word 'customer.' "We've not seen him in more than a year. You may have seen him more recently than us."

"Really? He got himself lost, has he? Where was he headed?"

"Samothea."

"Oh! Poor Ezra! He was such a gentleman. Such a good customer. Always so polite and clean. I never haggled about the price or asked for anything kinky. What a shame!"

There was no question now about what Hestia meant by calling Ezra her 'customer,' but Danielle was more shocked at her lack of compassion and sense of priorities.

"We're not ready to mourn him yet, Ma'am," Roger said.

That made Hestia look at him and realize what she'd been saying.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I've been rude and thoughtless. My excuse is that I'm preoccupied at the moment."

She pushed her tablet and file aside, placing them face-down.

"Please, sit down. I hope nothing's happened to Ezra. Tell me how I can help."

Mollified by her sincerity, they sat down. Hestia was as charming as she was gorgeous, with an easy, gracious smile and genuine concern in her beautiful green eyes.

"I wanted to meet you," Danielle said, "because I thought you were Ezra's girlfriend. He often mentioned how beautiful you were. He didn't do you justice."

"You're very sweet. Are you Ezra's sister? I remember him talking about you. He was always so proud. What did he used to say? You were the youngest woman ever to graduate in your science."

"Youngest woman PhD in Hyperspace Engineering, actually, and please stop talking about him in the past tense."

"You're right. Never give up hope."

"I won't. However, I don't think you can help us regarding Ezra," Danielle said.

"I'm sorry."

"But you might help us find the woman with whom he spent his last day on Capella. Her name is Yumi. This is her photo."

"I don't recognize her ..." Hestia said, yet a memory stirred in the back of her mind.

"But I think I recall the last time I saw Ezra. Hmm? Yes, that's it!" Hestia exclaimed.

"Ezra came to see me here, but I already had a customer. It was a real shame because Ezra was sorry. Ezra is a favorite of mine. He's always considerate, letting me finish first, you know."

Danielle cleared her throat.

"Yes, well," Hestia collected herself. "Ezra was having a drink with someone. It might have been this girl. Then, he took her on a tour of the space station. That's all I remember. Is there a problem contacting her?"

"She's gone missing. It's a long story, but her family asked us to find out what we can do about where she's gone."

"So why seek me out?" Hestia wondered.

"That was for me," Danielle admitted. "I wanted to meet Ezra's girlfriend, just to talk to someone who knows him, to remind me of him."

"I understand. Sorry, I'm not quite what you expected."

"It's all right."

It wasn't all right, but once past the shock, Danielle was warming to Hestia, though she didn't like hearing what a good customer Ezra was. Then she remembered:

"By the way, Roger, how come you were so certain that Hestia was Vesta?"



To be continued