I can do this. Ben concentrated on detached calm as the windswept surface of Kavan expanded rapidly beneath the vessel. I can face this.
“You okay, Ben?”
“I’m fine.”
“Think cop. Just keep thinking cop.”
It was a lot less desolate than Ben recalled. The season had moved on, and the ground was covered in different plants, tussocks of tiny star-shaped red flowers with amber spikes for leaves. Shevu set the geo-survey droid to explore and drill some convincing core samples, just in case, and they walked the course-the CSF’s slang for revisiting a crime scene and pacing out distances and angles in the hope of getting fresh insight. They stood at the location where Mara’s StealthX had been found, looking for inspiration.
“Jacen must have landed here in his StealthX, “said Shevu. “His was signed out from the GAG hangar during the relevant time frame, and we know your mother called Hapan ATC to say she knew he was in the area. So unless he switched vessels, we’re looking for traces of that special Tibanna isotope.”
“Cilghal’s team did the sweep.” Ben had covered every angle. He was sure of that, but he wanted to be wrong and for an unforeseen forensic revelation to emerge. “StealthXs kick so much of it around on takeoff that traces were spread over five hundred meters. If Mom landed hers anywhere near Jacen’s, which is likely if she was going after him, then she wiped out his isotope footprint.”
“Just checking.”
“Let’s do the tunnels.”
It was the hardest thing of all, but Ben thought cop as Shevu advised, and saw only what was in front of him, not what might have taken place there. Cilghal had found traces of blood on rubble that had fallen from a collapsed ceiling, as if it had hit someone below, but it had been too degraded by the energy of blasterfire to identify its source. It might even have been his mother’s.
The sequence of events seemed clear, though. Someone-at least two people-had fought their way through the tunnels, causing huge damage. Some was blasterfire, and some showed no signs of its cause, which Ben guessed might have been massive Force pushes. It’s you, Jacen, I know it, we all know it, but I have to have hard evidence. Shevu looked more and more exasperated as he rescanned walls and floors, shaking his head as he looked at the readouts. The crime scene was months old.
“I think that’s all we’re going to get, “said Ben. “Let’s go.”
“No, I’m not done, “said Shevu.
“I’ll try another route. You don’t have to…”
“If I just wanted him for murder, I’ve already got a case with real live witnesses-Lieutenant Tebut. I’m doing this for you, Ben. YOM need to know for sure.”
Did Mara Skywalker’s death matter more than Patra Tebut’s? It did to Ben, and he felt a little guilty about having so many resources to throw at his search for justice. He knew nothing about Tebut-whether she had a family and what they might be going through now, or even what story her next of kin had been told to explain her death. He reasoned that he was doing it for her, too, and all the beings who’d died because of Jacen, even Boba Fett’s daughter, criminal or not.
I should have known what he was then. I should have known when I sat outside that interrogation room and heard Jacen kill her.
“You’re right, “said Ben. “We keep going.”
They were back outside now. The sky was filling with clouds, threatening to spit light rain. Shevu went off to pace the distance from the StealthX’s last known location-seeing the terrain through Jacen’s eyes, he said-and Ben concentrated on his datapad again.
It was hard to ignore the image of Mom. He thought of all the things he’d never had the chance to say to her, and magnified the picture so that the screen showed a close-up of her face. The injuries were fresh; if only she’d gouged a chunk out of Jacen with her nails, then there’d have been tissue to match with his, but Cilghal had said her wounds were peppered with dust as if bricks had hit her in the face.
As Ben gazed at her image, he could have sworn it shifted slightly, as if something was wrong with the datapad’s display.
The screen reflected a short-lived shaft of sunlight. Ben angled it slightly to see better. And then his mother’s face on the screen really did move, reflected from behind him, and he gulped in a silent gasp of air as he spun around and she was there, right there, looking straight into his eyes. She was a touch away from him. She looked just as she had in life, but bathed in a haze of faint blue-white light like a faulty hologram. She smiled, a little sad frown of a smile but a smile nonetheless, and buried the fingers of her right hand in her thick red hair to yank at it. Still smiling, she held out torn strands as if to drop them into his hands. Ben couldn’t make a sound: he cupped his palm to catch the hairs but nothing fell, and suddenly she was walking slowly away from him. He tried so hard to yell at her to stop, to wait, to talk to him, to come back, that he loved her so much, but she kept on walking, and all he could say was, “Love you…”