A werewolf among us

large yellow headlights burned three hundred feet above the valley floor.
    St. Cyr turned and looked at the dead girl one last time.
    She had not moved, even though he would not have been surprised to find her position changed.
    Nonsense.
    He bent and pulled her lids closed, one at a time, holding them down until they remained in place. It was a small gesture. He had not known the girl well enough to feel sorry for her, but since she had lost her classic beauty to the wicked tines that had torn her open, he felt that the least she deserved was a bit of dignity when the strangers started pouring in.
     

FIVE: A
Policeman and a
Girl
     
    The federal police, with the aid of their limited-response robotic helpmates, spent more than four hours going over the suite, the corpse, the balcony, and the lawn immediately below the balcony. St. Cyr was convinced, after watching them sift and analyze even the dust in Betty's room, that they were not going to turn up anything worthwhile. In the first five minutes of the investigation they had discovered four animal hairs alien to the human body—three of them in the bloody wound and one under Betty's right thumbnail. Ten minutes more, and a mobile robotic lab had definitely matched them with the wolf hairs found on the previous corpse. After that discovery, they were all wasting time. It was almost as if every possible clue had been removed by the killer—who had then planted the four hairs especially for them to find. This one thing. No more.
    The Inspector Chief assigned to the case was named Otto Rainy, a plump little
man whose quick, pink hands were forever pressing his hair back from his face.
He looked as if he had not gotten a haircut in six months, though more because
he neglected his appearance than for any reason of style. His clothes were rumpled, his shoes unpolished, the cuffs of his coat frayed badly. He was, despite his appearance, a thorough investigator, careful with his questions, probing. St. Cyr doubted that he missed much.
    "Cyberdetective," he said, first thing, when he approached St. Cyr.
    "That's right."
    "Does it really help?"
    "I think so."
    "Government isn't so sure about them, though," Rainy said. "No one has issued a ban on them, of course. But if the fedgov really trusted them, the word would have come down long ago for every copper on every world to hook up soonest."
    "The government usually is a couple of decades behind science—behind social change, too, for that matter."
    "I suppose."
    "What have you found?"
    Rainy wiped at his hair, pinched the bridge of his nose, wiped at his hair again. His blue eyes were bloodshot and weary. "Nothing more than those four damn hairs."
    They were standing at the end of the side corridor that lead to Betty Alderban's room. The others, huddled outside the half-open door to the death scene, had ceased to talk among themselves. No one was crying any longer, either.
    St. Cyr said, "Theories?"
    "Only that it must have gotten to her on the balcony."
    "From the lawn?"
    "Yes."
    "How far is that from the lawn—thirty feet?"
    "Thirty-five."
    "Climb it?"
    "No handholds," Rainy said. He brushed angrily at his hair now, as if he could feel it crawling purposefully toward his eyes, as if it were a separate, sentient creature. "And no hook or rope marks on the balcony rail."
    "Suppose the killer didn't come over the balcony rail, though. Just suppose that he walked right in through her door."
    "We've already investigated the possibility," Rainy said, hair-wiping. "Each member of the family has a vocally-coded lock to insure his privacy and, as Jubal said after one of the earlier murders, 'to increase his sense of creative solitude.' "
    "Teddy can open those doors," St. Cyr pointed out.
    "Oh?"
    'You didn't know?"
    "No."
    "He uses a high-pitched sonic override to operate the mechanism."
    "You think his tone could be duplicated?"
    "All that anyone would need to do," St. Cyr observed, "is hang around with a tape recorder and wait for Teddy to serve someone breakfast in bed, record the tone for later use."
    Rainy thrust both hands in his pockets with such measured violence that it was only good fortune that kept him from ripping his fists through the lining. He seemed to be making a conscious effort not to smooth down his hair. "You talk as if our man must be a member of the family."
    "That seems most likely."
    "Yes, it does. But what in the world would any of them have to gain by it?"
    "Hirschel, for instance, has the