She went to the directory for the local police and did not find him listed. Her nose twitched. She did a scan for him and found that he had been promoted to lieutenant and sent to run a detective squad in Lakfan, a city on another continent of Klinshai. Did everyone involved in this mess leave town?
     "Krovenza," she said to the intercom. He appeared within seconds.
      "Yes, Lady Krenda," he said.
      "I need to be briefed on current police administrative procedures. Scanning the records, I notice that Rethic Kovalig was promoted to Lieutenant a few tendays ago and sent to Lakfan. Go get him for me. He has a new perspective on the procedures and that's what I need. He used to live here, and will no doubt want to take the chance to visit with old friends overnight, so arrange for him to have a place to stay. Express my thanks to his captain for letting me borrow him, and give my personal regards to his wife and assure her that her husband is in no trouble."
     "Very well, Lady Krenda," he said, looking at his watch. "I suspect it will be early this afternoon before I get back, being that this is an administrative summons." If the matter was urgent, he'd be sent for no matter what he was doing. As Krenda didn't want to make an issue of it, Kovalig would need time to attend to the responsibilities of leadership.
     "As soon as practicable, but give him time to put his squad into the hands of his sergeant," she said. "And give him my personal congratulations on his promotion. Explain that this is why he was selected, because he's good enough to earn a command and new enough that he hasn't accepted the existing procedures as they are and still has ideas to improve them."
     "As you say," Krovenza said, taking his leave.
      Now, where is Toravis? She checked his trial records again. Yes, he had been sent to a mining colony to spend the rest of his life at hard labor. I want to talk to him, so where is he? She checked and noticed the abbreviation for a planet in a far sector. Calling up that planet, she found that it was a somewhat unusual mining colony, being one the Empire had regarded as not particularly productive. They had turned over the planet to the Seltorians two years ago. They wanted you way out of town, she laughed, but who are they and why did everyone around this case have to disappear? She checked for his status. Dead. Suicide two days after he got there. Her nose twitched. That's convenient.
Meanwhile, back to the tavern. She called up all of the files for that night, and spent the next hour watching the patrons at each of the tavern's 42 tables, seeing if any of them reacted in an unusual way, or pre-reacted to something they might have known was going to happen. There was really nothing out of the ordinary. Half of the tables were occupied by subject race or foreign patrons, including a table of Seltorians. She knew nothing about the insectoid allies from another galaxy, and found them vaguely creepy because they were so alien. Even the Hilidarian dragons, technically non-humanoid reptiles, were not so strange as the Seltorians. Lyrans didn't even get a thought; they were just humanoids with fur. She watched the Seltorian table, before and after the fight, to see if there were anything unusual, but decided that she had about as much chance of understanding Seltorian body language as she did understanding Tholians.

        What she did notice was that Lieutenant Bressica was quick to reach the side of her commanding officer, grabbed his torn throat with her bare hands, and was screaming for help. The medics had to pull her off of the colonel in order to determine that he had already died. Something there, she thought as her nose twitched. She's not a warrior, maybe she just has the usual amount of compassion any woman has for anyone hurt. Maybe.
       "Lady Krenda," the secretary said over the intercom, "Lieutenant Krovenza is in the building with Lieutenant Kovalig. They will be here momentarily.
    "Send them to my office, both of them," she said.
      The two arrived a minute later. Kovalig was stiffly formal, having probably met a paladin of either rank only once or twice in his career. Krovenza was acting bored (which meant he was trying to pay attention while disappearing into the background).
      "How can I help you, Lady Krenda?" he asked after reluctantly taking the chair she motioned him toward.
"By being discrete, and honest," she said calmly. "You're not in trouble, but there is something of a mystery in one of your cases, and I want to ask you what happened. I need the truth, all of it, no matter what is and isn't in the official file. I've been a detective for longer than you have, and I know that the official file is sometimes the polite version of a messy situation."
       "I understand," he said, swallowing hard. It was suddenly obvious to him that he was not here to discuss administrative police procedures, which was a shame, as he had wanted to suggest some improvements to the way things were done. It was also obvious that he was about to say things ‹ about something, he wasn't sure what ‹ that he had been told to never mention to anyone. But lying to an imperial paladin was never a good career move.
       "Regarding the death of Colonel Khost," she began. "It is obvious to me that some things were left out of the file. I have no doubt that these are innocent, unimportant things, mere distractions and confusing non-issues. Nevertheless, the file is on my desk and I want to put these issues aside and let the case stay closed. Can you help me?"
       "I am at your service," he said.
       "I read the file, as I said. What is not in it?"
       "You understand that a full investigation was done," he said. "That the matters omitted from the file were not important to the case, and might have been awkward for certain parties."
        "I suspected that much," Krenda said. "Go on."
        "Colonel Khost," he began slowly and evenly, swallowing hard again as if deciding if there was any way to avoid where this conversation was about to go. "Colonel Khost was having an affair with Lieutenant Bressica. I don't know if he was in love or just having a passing fancy, but she was clearly in love with him. Office romances are not uncommon, of course, and two officers working late on stressful matters sometimes ... find relief from the stress in ways they really should not. Lieutenant Bressica is half of the age of Colonel Khost and his wife. She was no doubt enchanted by his worldly maturity, impressed by his intellect."
      "Not the first time that happened," Krenda said. Thirty years ago, she had been "the other woman" in an affair with a married man twice her age. Stupid mistake, she said to herself. At least I walked away without making a mess of it.
      "They spent a lot of time together," Kovalig said. "Not out of the ordinary for co-workers, so nobody thought much of it. They often had dinner together, and sometimes they would arrange to work late in the office by themselves. When they had dinner, they were always leaning over to speak in hushed tones, but as they were military intelligence, nobody thought anything of it."
      "What about Major Dorav?" she asked. "Did he often have dinner with them?"
      "Yes, at least half of the time," Kovalig said. "He provided cover, flying as the colonel's wingman. He was either the most clueless idiot in the GRU or he was deliberately covering up his boss's indiscretions. I couldn't decide and it didn't matter. The GRU wouldn't let me talk to him more than once. The colonel and Lieutenant Bressica would get all warm and cozy and he was there to convince anyone who looked their way that it was just three colleagues at dinner instead of what it was."

     "You said Khost was married?" Krenda asked.
     "Yes," Kovalig said, "to the grandniece of Count Keressik. She made it very clear that it was bad enough for her husband to get killed in a bar fight and she was not going to be humiliated by her husband's affair. Lieutenant Bressica was sent off planet and my understanding is that the GRU is arranging her marriage to an officer who will be a father to the colonel's baby."
      "Soshe was pregnant?" Krenda asked.
       "So I was told, in confidence," Kovalig said. "Please understand that the case was fully investigated. There was no indication that Mrs. Khost hired someone to kill her husband, and no indication that the colonel planned to ask for a divorce. I don't believe he even knew about the baby, assuming there is going to be one. There was no connection between the Dunkar and Mrs. Khost. I was absolutely and honestly convinced that this was just a stupid bar fight between two drunks. You can perhaps understand that the colonel was not just defending the virtue of a co-worker, but was protecting his own territory."
        "I suspect that would have made no difference," Krenda said with a smile. "He no doubt would have defended her with equal fervor in either case. Did the GRU know about it?"
        "If they didn't know before he died, they found out very quickly afterward. I suspect that Lieutenant Bressica confessed to some other woman in the GRU, who coordinated a cover-up. The ESS sergeant who reviewed the case never said a word, but it was clear to me that he knew about the affair. For what it's worth, I was absolutely convinced that both the GRU and ESS had done a thorough investigation, and that if Khost had been murdered due to something about his work, that they would have not held back, not for a moment, noble relative or not. But once they were convinced that it was nothing more than a bar fight, they wanted the file closed as quickly as possible without a lot of cluttering details or irrelevant issues."
       "No doubt you are right," she said. "You did your duty, Detective Lieutenant Kovalig. You solved the case, and kept the irrelevant details from embarrassing anyone who didn't deserve it. I am going to ask you to remain in the capital for a day or so while I finish up my investigation. You're not a prisoner, but a guest. Lieutenant Krovenza will see to it that you are quartered in the best accommodations. Consider it a night in a fancy hotel as a reward for your discretion. I assure you that, assuming you told me the truth and all of it, you're in no danger and are not waiting for punishment. We do have a quite wonderful chef here, and I'll make sure you're served a dinner fit for a prince."
       "Very well," he said, trying as hard as he could to believe her words, but seriously wondering if he would be executed within the hour. Lieutenant Krovenza escorted him out.
       "Well, that explains why the investigation was so short," she said to herself. I can let the nobility have their little secrets.
       "It doesn't explain what the Dunkar was doing."
Krenda started reviewing the conversations of Khost and Bressica, focusing on the times they ate alone or the times when they ate with others but leaned together to talk in whispers. She heard a lot of pillow talk, and some shop talk. She also found quite a few times where an obviously intoxicated (from the video) Colonel Khost was speaking clearly and coherently to his girlfriend in hushed tones. Only pretending to be drunk.
       She found that one of the most common bits of shop talk between the two lovers was not about the Tholian enemy that their section supposedly focused on, but about their Seltorian allies. They were clearly puzzling out things about Seltorian production rates at their mining colonies, things they could not get to add up. What the Seltorians were telling the Klingons was matching up nicely with whatever the Seltorians knew that the Klingons knew, and wasn't matching at all with things that the GRU and Khost were certain that the Seltorians did not know they knew.
     So, she thought to herself, our one all-Klingon GRU section investigating the Tholians is really investigating our Seltorian allies? That would be dangerous. Allies never, ever, liked being spied on or even investigated. It wasn't only rude, it was likely to blow up in their faces into an international incident.