Mace Windu walked into the Senate Rotunda. He never enjoyed the mandatory debriefs with the Senate Security Council – they were best described as cross-examinations – but he did enjoy having funding for stopping the Separatist war crime machine and medical care for the clones. Force knew they deserved better.
Not that Mace would be able to provide that, since his shuttle had been delayed by a Separatist attack on their convoy just before they jumped to hyperspace, and he'd had to take the shuttle because the 91st would be going to Sriluur without him. At least the 91st would have Eeth Koth as Jedi support. Mace would waste half the day here, most of it in retaliation for the scheduling issue despite the fact that he'd informed the Senate about it immediately.
He'd tried to sleep on the shuttle, but had abjectly failed. As a result, he had a colossal headache and everything, the Force included, had a veneer of unreality around it. He'd survived hostile negotiations on less, but he wasn't looking forward to the Security Council's interrogation.
Mace rounded a corner and collided with something. For a moment, he sat on his haunches on the ground, wondering whether he'd overestimated his ability to deal with his sleep debt or whether he'd been exposed to some Separatist hallucinogen.
"Uh. Are you okay?" Anakin Skywalker asked from in front of him.
At least he hadn't collided with a permanent fixture; that would be embarrassing. "The journey was surprisingly arduous," Mace said as he rose. He straightened his robes. "The Security Council will hopefully be brief."
Anakin looked at him oddly. "Didn't you – I guess you didn't. The Senate threw a stink about the delay so the Council had to send me instead."
Oh thank Force, Mace thought as soon as he processed the word instead. His mental image of Anakin added a shining halo to go with the pretty curls. "How did it go?"
Anakin made a face. "I don't understand how you can do it," he said. "I swear they're all completely insane."
Had Mace felt like a responsible Council member he'd have reprimanded Anakin on showing such disrespect in a place full of ears, but as it was, he was too busy being relieved at not having to face the Security Council to care. "Practice and sheer force of will. I'm sure you'll get there eventually."
Anakin made a face, but didn't try to squirm out of the responsibility forevermore. Mace gave an approving nod as he followed Anakin back to the landing platform and let himself fantasize about his own bed.
"Master Jedi!" a voice called behind them.
Turning around revealed a Senator from some Mid Rim world whose name Mace had forgotten, strategically unimportant and its representative not sitting on any council of note. "Senator," Mace greeted him levelly.
"I am glad to have caught you," the man started as Mace wracked his brain for the man's name. "You might recall the situation in our sector-"
Abruptly, a panel in the wall came loose, flying at the Senator. Mace saw it all a moment before it happened: the panel making contact with the Senator's pant leg, followed by the Senator spasming and falling down dead. Like double vision, reality caught up with the Force before Mace or Anakin could interrupt it.
The Senator didn't smell too charred. Anakin knelt next to the corpse, hopefully doing something useful; Mace called over the Coruscant Guard and kissed his fantasies of a nap goodbye.
"That's interesting," Anakin said. He glanced in Mace's direction and took whatever expression might've been on Mace's face as invitation to continue. "See, there's a semipaired magnocouple on the inside of the panel. If its pair came past they would be attracted to each other, so that explains why the panel ripped off."
Commander Fox arrived with a pair of troopers Mace didn't recognize and shooed off the crowd that had begun to gather. They set up a perimeter and called in forensics. Anakin kept shooting worried glances Mace's way.
"Should we take this to Commander Fox's office?" Anakin asked after one such glance.
"That would be for the best," Mace replied, recognizing the offer to get Mace out of the public eye before he joined the Senator on the floor.
They kept up a conversation – well, Anakin kept up a conversation with Commander Thire – on the way to the Coruscant Guard office. Mace felt the surrounding universe as a ringing in his ears and did his best to wear a neutral expression and do breathing exercises.
Mace found himself automatically sitting down in Fox's chair the moment they arrived in Fox's office. The plastoid desk looked remarkably comfortable. He decided he could risk resting his face on it just for a moment...
He woke up on his back on a couch of some sort. Coruscant, still, and the Force told him he hadn't moved much.
"In case you're wondering, you slept for 15 hours," Anakin said.
Mace turned and saw him sitting on a rickety chair in what was still an office of the Coruscant Guard, though not the same one Mace had fallen asleep in. The sunlight had morning's golden cast as it lit Anakin's hair and gently bathed his face so that he looked like some idealized portrait of himself.
Mace was interrupted from his musings by his stomach growling. "Do you have breakfast?" he asked.
"I have a muffin and tea is brewing. The bathroom's to the left of the door."
Mace mumbled a thanks and went to relieve himself. His robes were slightly crumpled, but as a Jedi, he wore the same things every day anyway, and the robes would straighten out after a while of wear. He splashed water on his face and felt almost like a human again when we rejoined Anakin.
"How is the investigation going?" he asked as he pulled out a chair. The smell of fresh tea wafting in the air was an instant comfort.
Anakin winked as he pushed out a datapad to go with the muffin. "We found the murder method. The master half of the semipaired magnocouple was on Senator Gorrd's shoe, and when he walked close enough, the other half ripped off the panel it was attached to. Fox's men found a few other panels that had a semipaired magnocouple affixed to the inside. There are almost certainly more."
Mace poured fresh tea for himself and took a bite of the muffin – brillaberry; his favorite. He gave himself a moment to savor the taste. "But that would not be enough to kill him."
"The panel was covered in electropaint – which really should've been caught in inspections – and the Senator's staff did laundry with some sort of conductive detergent. So when the electropaint hit the pant leg, it caused an electric shock that was just large enough to short out the Senator's pacemaker."
Mace felt a headache build up already. "So we're looking for someone who could do maintenance on Senate property and had access to the Senator's shoes."
"Yes." Anakin poured himself some tea as well and looked at Mace through his lashes. There was something going on there that Mace should probably figure out, but the Senator's death would come first. "The Coruscant Guard has a shortlist of two suspects. The profiles are on that datapad."
"They're sure it's a single conspirator?" Mace idly asked as he opened the files.
Anakin shrugged. "They found two people who had maintenance clearance for the Senate Rotunda who'd also been subcontracted to Senator Gorrd's apartment at 500 Republica."
Kogon Borth and Esari Thora were both Human men of around thirty years of age with all the necessary qualifications and the most boring personnel records Mace had come across in his entire life. Considering their place of employ, it made sense, but having seen a great many personnel files in his time the fact these two didn't have so much as a parking ticket between them was its own sort of noteworthy.
"When will they be brought in?"
"Fox has them sitting in empty interrogation rooms already. He said he wanted to wait for you, but I think he just wants to make them sweat."
Mace finished the muffin and his cup of tea. "I suppose we should be present for the interrogation. The victim was a Senator, after all."
Fifteen minutes later, Mace was staring down Kogon Borth over a table while flanked by two troopers from the Coruscant Guard. Anakin was a mere Knight and thus hadn't been the target of Fox's pleading, so he had the privilege of observing from behind a one-way transparisteel pane instead of having to ask questions.
"Name and profession," Mace began, trying not to acquire another headache.
"Kogon Borth. I do maintenance in the Senate Dome." He squirmed. "Master Jedi, is something wrong?"
"Have you done maintenance for Senator Gorrd's household at 500 Republica?"
Borth blinked. "Maybe? I don't really know which senator lives where." Mace gave him the apartment number. "Oh, that place. I think I fixed the air filtration."
"Have you done maintenance for any Senator's laundry droids?"
"No."
"When did you last do maintenance on the-" Mace consulted the provided datapad "-Cresh-priority access panels of the entry walkways or of level 62?"
"I would have to check the logs. Not recently. The Cresh-priority panels generally don't need opening."
"What is your opinion on Senator Gorrd?"
"I don't think we met." Borth shrugged. "I didn't think anything about him, I guess." He frowned. "Wait, is that the Senator who died?"
Mace didn't reply. He tapped Borth more closely with the Force, then said, "You may go."
Borth rose with suspicion but let himself be escorted out by the troopers. He was innocent. A slightly anticlimactic end to his interrogation, but Fox's troopers would debrief him to the extent necessary.
Esari Thora's interrogation went much the same way, though the man was jittery just from being in the same room as a Jedi. Nonetheless, he too was not lying when he said he hadn't met Senator Gorrd, and Mace didn't detect any emotions that guilty suspects usually had, nor the general absence of emotion that characterized the truly remorseless.
"Look," Fox said once Thora had been sent on his way. "I appreciate your Jedi powers, but this is a Senator that died. If I don't hand over a guilty party, they'll be out for my hide." Anakin fidgeted next to him.
"I understand, and we'll help you find them," Mace said. "If this is a two-person affair, then the guilty parties become harder to find, but they should still-"
"Unless it's the maintenance supervisor," Anakin unhappily said. "She'd have to have access to all the panels and no-one would bat an eye if she dropped in on someone doing maintenance in the Senator's household."
Which would enable her to drop off items for a willing conspirator, or sabotage the equipment herself. "Call her in," Mace said. "We would have to speak to her next in any case."
The maintenance supervisor was a slight woman by the name of Ganthe Allick, middle-aged and with a coloration that spoke of some recentish non-human ancestry. She had a knobbly nose, slightly asymmetric features, and a twitch at the corner of her thin lips. The dominant feature of her face, though, was the eyes, which were two sizes too large for the rest of her features.
"Hello, Skywalker," she said with a flat calm that caught Mace's attention.
"Hello, Lady Allick."
"I assume this is about Senator Gorrd's death?"
"It is."
Allick nodded to herself. "I bought myself a bottle of sparkling when I heard the news."
There was no way this would not end up being a headache, even if Anakin's face scrunched up in confusion in a manner Mace couldn't help but find cute. "And why would that be?" Mace asked.
"Because he was gone." Allick blinked her over-large colorless eyes. "He asked me out, just under a year ago. I declined. He did not lick his wounds or let matters be, but rather harassed me without repose. Now he will never do so again."
"Couldn't you have reported him?" Anakin asked plaintively.
"You killed him," Mace said.
"I did report him. No-one believed me – he was handsome and I am not, why would I catch his eye?"
"But it doesn't work like that," Anakin objected.
Allick's lips pulled into a vague facsimile of a smile. "Tell that to the sentient resources department. But no, even if they'd believed me, they could not have gotten him to stop. At best he would have gone after someone else. Have you seen the turnover rates for his office staff? The only way I could stop him was by killing him."
Anakin let out an exasperated sound. "You could've gone to someone else! You can't just kill people because you feel like it!"
Allick shrugged. "I know they would not have helped. So I added conductive material to his detergent shipments, and processed wall panels so they'd come off when he walked past and give him an electric shock large enough to short circuit his pacemaker. Putting the master semipaired magnocouple in his shoes was the hardest part, but I managed when he cornered me when I was working on the floor access hatches. After that, it was only a matter of time."
"So you confess that you and you alone killed Senator Gorrd?" Mace asked.
"Yes," Allick replied, making eye contact and harboring no regrets whatsoever.
"Ganthe Allick, you are under arrest for premediated murder," Commander Fox said. "Hold out your hands in front of you and make no sudden movements."
Allick let herself be arrested and was led to the holding cells with her head held high. Fox muttered something about paperwork and excused himself, leaving Anakin and Mace alone in the room.
"Was she your friend?" Mace gently asked. Probably not, given Skywalker rather than Anakin, but-
"More of an acquaintance?" Anakin replied. "I've seen her around a lot, and we occasionally talked shop before the war." He sighed. "I wish she'd gone through the proper channels."
Had there been a padawan present, this would've been an excellent opportunity for a discussion on the necessity of systems and what to do when someone fell through the cracks. As Anakin was a knight with a padawan of his own, Mace squeezed his shoulder. "Your disappointment is understandable. Let yourself feel it so that you can let it go."
"It could always have been worse, I guess," Anakin said noncommittally.
"The closer one is, the worse. An acquaintance one is disappointed by. Someone one thinks one knows, like a friend or a lover, will bring with a sense of betrayal."
"I don't suppose being single and friendless is the recommended way of handling this?" Anakin asked with a self-deprecating smile on his face.
There was much too much to unpack there and this was not the venue, so Mace chose to match Anakin's levity. "Single?" Mace raised a brow. "I would've thought you'd have a horde of women slavering over you."
"Well, women haven't worked out for me really." Anakin shrugged. "I actually decided to branch out into men."
Mace considered what to do with this hint. Then Anakin had the audacity to wink at him, as if to ensure Mace had no way of plausibly disclaiming knowledge of the hint, and Mace couldn't help but sigh internally as he slotted it into place with the rest of Anakin's recent actions. "Would you like to meditate with me, then?" he asked, because he was a Jedi Master, and he'd tread carefully. Even if Obi-Wan had let slip that Anakin was quite the talented masseur and Mace's shoulders were still stiff from Geonosis.
"With pleasure," Anakin smugly said and opened the door with the Force. "I know a nice spot in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. I believe you'll like it."
Mace shook his head and followed him out. They'd meditate together at the Temple and see whether the Force forecast good or ill, and then act accordingly. In the meanwhile, Mace would fantasize about a nice massage. And perhaps a proper nap.