Future Americas

by John Helfers

  I waited. He had an idea. He just hadn’t gotten to it.

  ‘‘Our guy in the theater wasn’t in any DNA database,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s something new we’ve been seeing with corpses. Even though we have an extensive database, a disproportionate number of the dead we’re finding don’t show up in it. And there’s been chatter that someone has found a way to temporarily alter the DNA of discarded cells—like sloughed skin cells or hair or blood—so that the DNA is masked.’’

  ‘‘And that would take little machines,’’ I said.

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ he said.

  ‘‘And what if those machines were attacked inside a human body?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘The body would fight back,’’ he said, ‘‘only it would do so on a cellular level. Which could lead to the kind of death we saw as the immune system tried to jettison the offending material and as the body fell apart.’’

  I shuddered.

  But Callan sounded intrigued. ‘‘It would happen too rapidly for our man to do anything about it.’’

  ‘‘But he tried.’’

  ‘‘He tried.’’

  ‘‘And the spray?’’ I asked. ‘‘Could you tie it to the fluids in the room?’’

  ‘‘If I look at things other than the DNA,’’ he said. ‘‘Maybe a peptide sequence or, hell, an old-fashioned blood type analysis. We might be able to find out a lot of things about this guy.’’

  ‘‘So you think this is possible?’’ I asked.

  He studied me for a moment. ‘‘I hope not,’’ he said. ‘‘But if it is, I’ll wager you money that whoever developed it, developed it in those research bays in Steffie’s lab.’’

  ‘‘She wouldn’t have allowed it,’’ I said. ‘‘She tried to do good in her own way.’’

  ‘‘She wouldn’t have known,’’ he said. ‘‘She rented out those research bays when her own scientists weren’t using them. All she stipulated was that whoever used them didn’t use them to manufacture illegal drugs or designer diseases.’’

  ‘‘And this wouldn’t be either,’’ I said slowly.

  He shook his head. ‘‘It would just be a way to short-circuit the entire basis of the modern criminal justice system.’’

  I let out a shaky breath. ‘‘Which it nearly did here.’’

  ‘‘Thank God for dinosaurs,’’ Callan said.

  ‘‘Let’s not congratulate ourselves yet,’’ I said. ‘‘First we have to prove that I’m right.’’

  It didn’t take long.

  While Callan was comparing the spray to the fluids to the body, DeAndre was interviewing employees of Steffie’s empire. Everyone had been given a company-wide day off.

  The medical staff was ordered not to take in new patients the day before, and security was told that there’d be an upgrade so their services wouldn’t be needed.

  Steffie supposedly ordered the empire-wide day off, but she probably hadn’t. The employee who did was her second in command, a man named Harrison Jalneck,who also—by no coincidence at all—was in charge of the research bays, and whose bank accounts had been filling up for the past five years.

  Of course, those bank accounts were now clear and Jalneck was on some small Caribbean island that, also not coincidentally, had no extradition.

  But he had left the day he’d issued the company-wide day-off order, and hadn’t been around when Steffie and the other women had died.

  It was clear why Steffie had died; she had obviously been suspicious of the changes in her empire and maybe even had realized that something was going horribly wrong. She probably confronted Mr. Researcher—maybe before Jalneck left (we’d have to do more investigating to know this part for certain)— and she probably told him to pack his things.

  Which was when he decided to field test his research. Smart man that he was, he figured making it look like a spree killer focused on sex would deflect the investigation, particularly when there was no evidence that modern crime scene techs could read. They’d take the visuals at face value, and assume someone hated Steffie’s sex business.

  The escorts died first. Then Steffie. She’d been killed away from her office, maybe near one of the escort’s apartments and carried back in.

  When Mr. Researcher had been posing her, he sneezed or wiped his nose, not realizing that just a tiny bit of spray had landed on the wall beside Steffie’s body. He finished the pose, then realized he was feeling ill and hurried to the operating theater, just like we posited.

  And there, while trying to remove the virus he’d accidentally infected himself with, he died.

  Horribly.

  Which was still probably too good for him.

  Because we did find traces of his research in one of the bays. He’d been working with a partner—a partner who might have watched him die from the operating theater, a partner who most assuredly had access to that virus.

  A partner who was probably already selling it to the highest bidder.

  All of that became Homeland Security’s problem. They took charge the moment they realized that any criminal investigation anywhere in the world could be compromised. The panic in the law enforcement community was unbelievable.

  Too many offices—as in most of them—ran the way ours did, with the crime scene guys in charge, their little machines and their data analysis the last word on what happened at any scene.

  The fact that they had been rendered useless here and Callan and I had not only solved the crime, but we had identified a seemingly unidentifiable corpse, had made us heroes.

  But what no one really realized was that Callan and I had rescued ourselves. Neither of us had saved enough for that mandatory retirement—especially if we were going to live another thirty years.

  We needed our salaries, but we also wanted some respect, a few more perks to our jobs, and a lot more time to ourselves.

  We have been taken out of the field, and we have gone into ‘‘investigative training,’’ a re-education program that is now mandatory for everyone connected with Portland law enforcement.

  We’re teaching them how to use their brains as well as their scientific equipment, showing them that the evidence talks even when it doesn’t show up on some tiny computer screen.

  And because of the high profile nature of Steffie’s death, our reputations have grown. We’ve been put on loan to police departments all over the nation.

  Callan and I get to travel in our old age—at the government’s expense.

  And I do mean old age, in the best sense of the word. Old the way our great-great grandparents were old. The patriarchs, the elders, the ones who were revered for their knowledge as well as their longevity.

  No one rolls their eyes at us any more.

  Although a few people ask at every seminar why that moment in the alley was so important to me.

  Callan says they’re probably too young and too healthy to understand my explanation, but I tell them anyway.

  It was my worry that I had somehow infected my arm in that disgustingly dirty alley that changed things for me. I thought, for a moment, of bacteria and then I watched the blood well out of the scrape, cleaning the wound, and I didn’t think about it again until I woke up after my three-hour nap and looked at my arm, seeing not an infection, but a scab protecting the wound as it healed.

  Most people nowadays donâ�
��™t let their wounds scab. They see someone and get instant healing.

  So they don’t understand how scabs work. How they cover an opening and make sure nothing harmful gets inside.

  Like that fine mist of blood over that little paint chip. The mist acted like a scab, preventing that manufactured virus from getting in.

  I like to say when I teach that the spray looked like my scab, but it didn’t. It was just the way that the mind—the human mind—makes the occasional odd connection.

  When I was young, we called that connection intuition, and we valued it, even when we couldn’t explain it.

  Intuition defies certainty while embracing it.

  And that I don’t explain to my new students.

  I doubt they’ll ever really learn it. But I’m trying to give them the tools.

  Because the other thing my age has taught me is this: Nothing remains the same. Whatever system works now won’t work in the future. And that system will eventually fail, too.

  The most prepared person is the one who is flexible, who can work through any situation.

  Or at least survive it.

  Until something better comes along.