A werewolf among us

hour."
    "Good luck, sir," the master unit said.
     
    In the basement workshop some minutes later, Baker St. Cyr located a prybar in an open-front tool rack and used it to break into the cabinet in which Teddy kept the keys that he had shown Inspector Rainy and the cyberdetective only a few days before. The cabinet door was strong, and it screeched loudly as the lock tore loose and
it grated open over the jagged ruin. St. Cyr hesitated when he had it open, listening for some sound that would indicate the break-in had been heard. He did not know if the house computer monitored things like that. When two minutes had passed in agonizing silence, he decided that he was unobserved, and he began to read the tags on the keys, looking for those that he might be able to use.
    He found them and placed them on the counter below the cabinet, then forced the violated door shut again.
    This is all a useless endeavor.
    He looked at his watch and saw that he had fifteen minutes of his half hour left. He did not want to keep them waiting beyond that time, for he did not want anyone to go onto the fourth level to look for him.
    Five minutes later, he was done. He left the workshop carrying a paper sack full of interesting discoveries, crossed the garage, and stepped into the elevator shaft through the doors that he had forced open from the inside a short while ago. The shaft was lighted only by the glow that spilled through the open doors. The floor was only three feet below those lift doors on this last level, and he was able to use that minimal illumination to find the pair of parallel tracks on the righthand wall. It was on these that the lift rode; because the system was designed for horizontal as well as vertical movement, there were no cables to contend with. Standing on the thick lower rail, holding the sack in his left hand, he grasped the notched upper rail in his good right hand and began to laboriously work his way upwards.
    Teddy was waiting outside the door to the kitchen, where St. Cyr had left him. "Nobody tried to leave?"
    "No, Mr. St, Cyr." Teddy did not show any interest in the paper sack or its contents. "Do you want support in there, sir?"
    "Not yet. If you'd continue to guard the door, I'd feel as if my back was well covered."
    "Yes, sir."
    St. Cyr vocal-coded the door and went inside, made certain it shut completely behind him, and walked to the table, where he put down the sackful of evidence.
    Tina was sitting on the floor with the others again, her black hair fallen across her face like a mourning cloth. He supposed that if anyone here had it in him to mourn, it was Alicia. Still, the girl held that same mournful image in his mind. Dane also sat on the floor, Hirschel on a stool, Jubal and Alicia on matching white chairs. They almost looked, St. Cyr thought, like some medieval court—the king and queen above everyone else, the nobleman on the stool, the distant and unimportant cousins on the lowest level. They all watched him cross the room, put the sack down and seat himself on the table. Then, suddenly, as if realizing that he was not the one most to be feared, they looked furtively at one another, wondering… Only Tina made no attempt to read something sinister in the others' eyes; she stared at her hands, which were folded in her lap.
    "The proof?" Jubal asked.
    "Yes."
    "Who?" He sounded very old, and not at all cantankerous. He sounded as if he would rather not know who, would rather St. Cyr took the evidence away and never came back again.
    "I'll come to that in a moment," the cyberdetective said. "First, I want to tell you who I've suspected over the last several days and my reasons for not trusting each. That way, when I come to whom I now
know
committed those four murders, you'll understand that I've not made a rash decision."
    No one said anything.
    Sr. Cyr said, "I first suspected Hirschel."
    The hunter smiled. He looked like a wolf.
    Succinctly, the detective explained the circumstances under which he had first seen their uncle: the storm, the rider on the horse, the bloody heads of the two boar. "I recognized quite early that Hirschel was the one individual in this household most capable of violence."
    And still is.
    Not quite.
    St. Cyr continued: "Furthermore, he was basically an outsider who visited for a month or two every couple of years. Though the victims of the killer were his relatives, they were more distantly related to him than to any of you, perhaps distantly enough to be thought of