Detective Marisol Achebe (Human)

The case was eleven days old, weighed about four kilograms, and was hers.

That last part mattered more than she was going to say aloud in a bureau where Detective Inspector Albercombe's compliance queue was famous two decks in every direction. The referral had come down through the Senior Sergeant with the annotation suitable for development, which is how a bureau says boring to somebody it is being kind to, and it read exactly as boring as anything that has ever fallen off the bottom of that queue: a dry-stores discrepancy in the Deck 7 galley. Flour. Cooking oil. Root vegetables. Once, inexplicably, a tin of a spice nobody on the deck could pronounce, which the steward's report had valued at almost nothing and Achebe had privately valued higher, because a thief who takes the worthless thing is a thief whose shopping list you should be reading more carefully.

The difficulty was not the evidence. The difficulty was the reporting. The steward's first loss report said four kilograms a week. His second said two, with a note that the first had probably overcounted. His third proposed, in the defeated tone of a man asking you to agree with him, that the galley's scale might want recalibrating, and would the bureau prefer to close the matter pending that. Every statement he gave was a smaller statement than the last. Witnesses usually grow their stories. Hers was shrinking, and she did not yet have a word for what that meant.

Her interview technique was the one she had learned at home, from the best interviewer she knew: sit still, say nothing, and let the other party talk themselves into a decision. It worked on everyone in the galley except the steward, who could not be waited into saying more because more was the direction he was walking away from. So she canvassed the regulars instead, morning by morning, and on the fourth morning she reached the table nearest the warm-air vent, where the author sat — the one whose books about Smart Pets got read to half the children on the habitat, including, at one remove, to a rabbit who had opinions about none of it.