Blood Avatar

by Ilsa J. Bick

  Garibaldi allowed for a small, indulgent smile. “As I said, it happens that we had an inquiry about a missing person from a representative of the legate’s office in the planetary capital of St. Cameron. This man’s missing . . . no, he’s not even due back to Slovakia until the day after tomorrow. But his family’s worried, says he’s been out of touch.”

  “Or he didn’t check in,” Ramsey suggested.

  “In any event, Youssef is the name that’s come up, and if it’s an alias . . . well, we want to coordinate with our Slovakia office about whether to become formally involved.”

  “So what do you want us to do in the meantime?” Ketchum ground out. “Pick our teeth, or our noses, or what?”

  “Continue with your investigation.” Garibaldi moved to punch out. “We’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  Ketchum was pissed. Ramsey let him rant then said, “Hank, I’ve dealt with the Bureau. They’re not bad. They’re just not cops. They do intelligence, and they like running all that computer stuff that’ll just drive you buggy. If the Bureau’s smart, they’ll let you do your people.”

  “And if they’re not?” Ketchum scowled. “They don’t have to worry about elections.”

  “Deal with it when the time comes. Speaking of which . . .” Ramsey checked his watch. “We still got about four, five hours before anyone wakes up in Slovakia. So let’s get moving, go see the cut. Then we start shaking a couple trees and see what falls out.”

  13

  1400 hours

  The tree clinched it.

  Gabriel had disobeyed orders. He’d gone to work early, just to have something to do. Work didn’t help as much as he thought it would. Once he was home again, he scrolled up the door to a modular shed behind the house, got his bicycle, and headed to the cemetery. Had to do it anyway, right? Anyway, the exercise would do his leg some good, keep it limber.

  The cemetery was quiet. Always was. That’s why his Handler had chosen this for the meet. After stashing his bike in a clump of evergreens, he checked the mausoleum. His guns, the plinker and 720, were still there. He wore a lightweight parka with extra-large pockets, so he checked the safeties, then zipped each weapon into a separate pocket. He left the walking stick. No graceful way to get that back to town.

  As he slid the mausoleum’s back panel into position, he was already planning. He had a number of stashes, places where he squirreled away supplies and weapons: a boat in a cove forty klicks west of the trestle; another on a small nubbin of island past Cameron, if he ran east.

  His leg started to nag when he was halfway up the hill. He pushed on, crested the hill and then turned back. Whoever had been here had an excellent view.

  But they don’t know it was me, otherwise the police would’ve come by now.

  But who were they? There’d been too much movement for just one person, so who? Kids? Maybe—he’d tripped over a bike. So where would they hang out around there? Then, as soon as he turned his back on the cemetery and scanned the tall grass to the left, the grove of maples ahead to right, he remembered: the tree house. Of course. That damned tree house.

  He let memory guide him, and eventually found the tree. But he also found something else: the bike, smeary with blood, a ribbon of ripped khaki cloth tangled in the biggest sprocket. His blood, his trousers. He reached to rip the cloth out of the sprocket then pulled back. Fingerprints. Couldn’t touch the bike. Hell, he already had. What to do? Get the blood off, yeah, but he had to get it home. Even if he did, that didn’t solve anything.

  Parents don’t like it when a kid loses his bike. They notice things like that.

  If he only knew whose bike . . . Maybe a clue in the tree house. When he was a kid, he used to leave all sorts of junk up there.

  The wooden steps were still nailed to the tree, but they looked old and dry. Some of the steps had wide fissures where the wood had split. He put his good foot on the first step, then gingerly let the step take his weight. He climbed, slowly, with cautious, circumspect movements. Even so, climbing was harder than he remembered, and his right leg throbbed. Six meters up, he heard that peculiar squeal that stressed wood makes and then the step shattered beneath his left foot. For a dizzying second, he flailed, slipped, snagged the palm of his right hand on a nail head. He came down hard on his right foot as the nail ripped his skin, said, “Shit,” and then hugged the tree, waiting for his vertigo and a sudden lurch of nausea to go away. His right leg flared, and he had half a mind to give the thing up. But he kept going, saw the lip of the tree house coming up, grabbed a branch and boosted until he caught the edge with his stomach and then heaved himself the rest of the way.

  “Son of a . . .” He was sweating like a Javan warty, and his hand . . . A ribbon of red bisected his lifeline. More problems; more bandages. He’d forgotten that tetanus shot, too. More things to do.

  The floor of the tree house was strewn with detritus: candy wrappers, the petrified core of an apple; comic books; a greasy Black Knight Six playing card. He checked the date of a comic book. Last summer. So, maybe, whoever saw him wasn’t in the house. The interior of the house was scarred with carvings, the graffiti of bygone ages incised by a thousand jackknives and mini-lasers over a score of years:

  BT ♥ NS

  School sux

  Life sux

  Julie sucks

  A smile ghosted his mouth. Kids. Was the one he’d done . . . now where was that? He was scouring the wood when he heard something. He froze.

  The rustle of grass. Voices. And one word, very distinct: “Troy.”

  14

  1445 hours

  “This guy’s in pretty good shape, for a crispy critter,” Amanda Slade said, peering through a pair of hexaglass eyeguards. Other than a pair of brown sertalene surgical gloves and the glasses, she was hospital baby blue from tip to toe: blue puffy cap for her hair, scrubs and booties. She stood over a steel autopsy table fitted with gutters. Although the table was long enough to accommodate an adult, the victim’s body occupied a lipped metal tray about the size of schoolkid’s desk. A mike hooked over her right ear and linked via infrared to a holorecorder suspended over the autopsy table.

  She was midway through the autopsy and had already removed what was left of the breastplate as well as the heart and lungs en bloc. She’d flayed the heavily carbonized heart, and, in contrast to the coal black exterior, the tissue inside was a dull leathery brown and looked almost artificial, like a plastic cast.

  Ketchum said, “Where’s the necklace and that ring?”

  “In back with the rest of his stuff,” Amanda said. “I’ll send everything down with the body when I’m done. You can look at them later if you want.”

  “Jesus,” Ramsey said. “This looks like what happens with a roast chicken if you forget to take out the heart and gizzard.”

  “That’s exactly what it’s like. Even if we didn’t already know about the head shot, I’d say this guy was dead before the fire. There’s no evidence of tracheal charring, nothing in the lungs, no soot anywhere along his bronchial tree.”

  “Here’s what I don’t figure.” Ketchum scratched the back of his head. “Most fires like this get set to destroy evidence. But that’s stupid here, right? I mean, it’s kind of hard to miss that bullet hole.”

  “But what if the fire was set to destroy something else?” Amanda asked.

  Ramsey and Ketchum looked at each other. “I never thought of that,” Ramsey said.

  Ketchum grunted. “Might be something to that. Question is . . .”

  “Yeah,” Ramsey said. “What was in the car?”

  * * *

  “It gets weirder than that. I think someone took a shot at him with another gun first.” She retrieved another tray with the excised breastplate and waited until Ramsey and Ketchum crowded around. “See here?” Amanda used a long metal probe as a pointer. “On the sternum and the fourth and fifth left ribs. There’s pitting in the bone.”

  “Meaning?” Ramsey asked.

  “It lo
oks like what you see when someone’s hit with a shotgun. Except, here, there are no pellets, no buckshot. Might have been something else, though I don’t know what. Sometimes people have pacemakers and the batteries explode, but the damage pattern isn’t right and his heart’s intact.”

  “A shotgun?” Ketchum frowned. “You hit someone with a shotgun in the chest, you’re gonna pretty much kill ’im. Makes the shot to the head kind of irrelevant.”

  “Unless they wanted to direct our attention to the head shot. Maybe the killer figured that was so obvious we’d chalk up the chest to the fire.”

  “Any way to tell which came first, the shotgun or the head shot?” Ramsey asked. When Amanda shook her head, he looked at Ketchum. “Well, this leaves two possibilities. Either we’ve got one guy and the sequence of chest shot and then a covering head shot, or we’ve got two guys.”

  Ketchum made a face. “I don’t like that.”

  “Which one?”

  “Either. Toting two guns around is overkill. Like our boy likes the guns because he likes guns. Besides, why use a shotgun first and then have another guy follow up at close range with another gun? Youssef was probably on the ground already, either dying, or close to it. Head shot’s over the top.”

  “Wait, wait,” Amanda said. “I’m no expert on shotguns, but aren’t those the kind of weapons used at a distance?”

  “Depends,” Ketchum said. “Why?”

  “There’s lots of fire damage here, no question. But not so much that I can’t see the blast pattern. This pattern is stellate, star-shaped, as if there were explosive gases, like what you’d see with a shotgun blast that plowed into the sternum. The gases expand laterally, conducted under the tissues in a starburst pattern. So I think this person was close, except . . .” She paused.

  “What?” Ramsey asked.

  “There’s also not enough damage. You hit someone with a shotgun blast to the chest, the lungs and heart ought to be shredded. There’s some lung damage, sure, but it’s not enough, and like I said, the heart just got cooked from the fire.” She screwed up her face, like she’d just smelled something awful. “Still, I’d swear this looks like a contact wound. What’s the range for a shotgun?”

  “Maximum range for a conventional shotgun is about forty-five, fifty meters,” Ketchum said. “But if you’re aiming to take someone out at distance, you’re going to use a sniper rifle not a shotgun. If he was ambushed while he was driving, then the shooter was going after a moving target. That’s darned hard to do with a shotgun, and if you were going to use one, there’d sure as heck be pellets.”

  “He’s right,” Ramsey said. “Plus, to get that distribution, even if we assume that the guy was driving, you’d have to blast him through the windshield. But then we ought to see blast patterns in what’s left of the face and neck, not his chest.”

  They all thought about that a moment. Then Amanda gasped. “What?” Ramsey asked.

  “Oh, I am so stupid,” she said. Stripping off her gloves, she crossed to a far aluminum counter and riffled through evidence pouches. “I can’t believe it.”

  “What?” Ramsey asked again.

  She came up with a pouch and hurried back. “Remember at the scene I said he was positioned kind of funny? He was angled with his feet in the passenger wheel well, like he was lying down. But how would the blast do that? Unless he was sleeping and someone popped the car door, or shot him straight through the glass, he’d be sitting behind the wheel.” She held up the clear pouch. Inside were fragments of what looked like wood chips, or old dice. “This guy had to be killed outside his car.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because of his fingers,” she said. She opened the pouch and gently retrieved a spread of bones. “I haven’t sorted these yet, but I know these are finger bones. But see here”—she tweezed up one fragment, then another—“these fingers were broken.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Torsion injuries. The fractures aren’t clean breaks. Some are spiral and some are straight, greenstick breaks. The spiral breaks are torsion injuries. You only get those if you take the finger and actually twist it until it breaks. The greenstick breaks are from someone bending the fingers back until they broke.”

  “What about torture?” Ketchum asked.

  “Maybe,” Amanda said. “But couple this with the body’s position, and I think this guy was already stiff from cadaveric spasm before whoever killed him put the body back in the car.”

  “I’ve seen that,” Ramsey said. “You get to a scene and you swear the guy’s been dead for hours. Only our ME says cadaveric spasm’s rare.”

  Amanda shrugged. “Rare doesn’t mean never. Usually, cadaveric spasm happens when the victim’s in some kind of struggle. His muscles get oxygen-depleted, then he dies, and the normal rigor process is bypassed. For whatever reason, our guy went into cadaveric spasm, and his fingers were broken after he died. The only reason you do that . . .”

  “Is to get at something he’s got in his hand,” Ramsey said.

  “Something the killer worried might be used for identification,” Amanda said. “Or a weapon. Find a weapon, and we’d know Youssef didn’t come up for the scenery.”

  * * *

  Ramsey said, “So Youssef’s expecting trouble. Probably, he’s got a weapon. But whatever happens, it happens outside the car—either at the scene, or someplace else. Then the killer rolls the car off the road and detonates a bomb to make sure the fire’s hot enough to destroy the body, or whatever’s in the car.”

  “You’ve still got a problem,” Amanda said. “The killer drives out there, but how does he get away? He just torched the car. So either someone followed him in another vehicle, or he’d hidden one not too far away.”

  “We should get in touch with the crime scene people, have them expand their search radius,” Ramsey said. “See if they can find tire tracks, bike or turbo treads, hover air-blast patterns, stuff like that.”

  “Worth a shot,” Ketchum said.

  * * *

  Ketchum left to call the crime scene people, and Amanda started with the abdomen. “Stomach’s still got food in it. I’d say he ate not more than an hour or two before he died. Not a large meal. More like a snack or something.”

  “Can you tell what he ate? Might give us a clue where he was before he died,” Ramsey said.

  “Well, it’s hard to say. Everything’s cooked, except . . .” She plucked something out that was small, shriveled and dark, about the size of a pea. “Voilà.”

  “Looks like a rat turd.”

  “Not unless he was desperate. It’s a raisin. I can do a couple of other tests, see if there’s gluten or something in there. That would tell us if he had bread or something like that.” She dropped the raisin into a vial, sealed it.

  “Like the man said, worth a shot.”

  * * *

  Ramsey never liked when MEs cracked a skull. Never got used to it, and it wasn’t any better this time around even if Amanda didn’t have much of Youssef’s face to peel back. He looked away when she revved up the bone saw. The thing sounded like a dentist’s pneumatic drill.

  When she’d cut a bone cap, she removed the cap then lifted the brain out of the cranial vault. This brain wasn’t runny or pink but like a very large, toasted walnut. After weighing the brain, Amanda flipped the organ over to get a good look at the frontal lobes, glancing now and again up at a shimmering green 3-D holograph of the brain in situ. “Okay, shot was close proximity, no exit wound—this is where your bullet entered the brain,” she said, indicating a deep brown, puckered splotch that looked like very old clot. After a few minutes of gentle dissection, she dropped something that rattled against the sides of a molded aluminum basin. “And there’s your bullet.”

  The bullet was scorched with heat and had blossomed, mushrooming into jagged petals. “Twenty-two hollow point,” Ramsey said. He pinched the bullet between the index finger and thumb of his gloved right hand. “See, here’s the mark from the firi
ng pin, and you can see where it’s grooved. Ballistics people ought to be able to track down the make, and match the bullet to the murder weapon, if we find it.” Then he thought of something. “What are you going to do about DNA?”

  Amanda blew out. “I’ll take some from the organs and soak the bones to extract some DNA. I can use a phenol-chloroform solution for separating protein from the nucleic acid, then do a hot start PCR.” At his mystified expression, she said, “The thing with bone is the calcium. Calcium messes up the DNA, so you have to separate the calcium first. Then, to make copies, you use hot start where you prevent Taq polymerase from working by heating . . .”

  She’d lost him after two sentences, but her face was so animated, he just liked looking at her. He hadn’t felt that in, well, a long time.

  “. . . And amplify only the region of DNA I need to make enough to run for an identification match. He’ll have banked his DNA for identity and future medical purposes, and we’ll know who he is for sure. But if that doesn’t work, I can try mitochondrial DNA and . . . Detective? You with me?”

  Ramsey nodded. “All the way.”

  * * *

  “One more thing: Our guy’s got a couple of dental anomalies that really might help.” She called up an anterior to posterior, green glowing 3-D of Youssef’s skull. “Look at the teeth. See, here, here, and . . . here.”

  Ramsey had seen enough dental 3-Ds to know how enamel, dentin and nerve root appeared on scan. But Youssef had what looked like long tent stakes driven into his gums in—he counted—seven teeth. “Is that something inside the teeth?”

  “Dental posts for false teeth. I’m no forensic odontologist, but a post is made to order. The way a post is shaped can tell you where the dentist trained. Then you’ll know who Youssef really is—or maybe what alias he used when he got the posts done.”

  “Can you take out one of these posts?”

  “Well, that’s specialty work, and I might damage something but . . .”