If people wondered why Sigmund chose to spend so much of his time visiting ARM squad rooms, they didn’t ask. The truth was pathetic. He was substituting secondhand camaraderie for lost love. Someday, he’d get past it. Sigmund told himself there was more to his roaming than that. For one, shifting around helped to obscure his surveillance of Beowulf Shaeffer. Bey hadn’t worked a day on Earth, at least not legally, in three years. Tax records would have shown it. What the Puppeteers had paid Bey to explore the core (the last money he had gotten from General Products, Sigmund was almost certain) was long gone. Carlos was wealthy enough, but there were no signs he had transferred anything to Shaeffer, and Sigmund couldn’t imagine Bey accepting money from that source. If Bey couldn’t father his own children, he would tanj well support them. Nor was the happy family surviving on Sharrol Janss’s money. Sharrol had never had much money or been paid much, and she’d stopped working when Louis was born.
