Star Trek Corps of Engineers: Ghost

by Ilsa J. Bick

  Stern waited a beat. “Well, don’t keep me in suspense; I’m all atingle.”

  Lense pushed past the jibe. “Preston Strong. The snip-chips match those in the Academy database. Strong was in Jennifer’s apartment. Ten to one, they were…involved.” (Talking about Jennifer having a love affair made her feel a little ooky, like a teenager grossed out by her parents having sex.) “Clearly, Strong was there.”

  Stern stared at her a moment. “Okay,” she said, drawing the word out. “But having a love affair—if they did—isn’t a crime. Blood on a knife isn’t evidence of a crime. For all you know, they had a single meal together and he gave himself a boo-boo. That could’ve happened a long time ago. Did you happen to do an age determination analysis?”

  Lense’s cheeks flamed. “I…uh…” She took a deep breath. “No, I didn’t even think about it.”

  “I won’t take that as evidence of how well you listened to my lectures. I suppose you also didn’t consider that your mother, whom you haven’t seen in a very long time, might’ve developed some interests—say, in gourmet cooking—that she hadn’t shared with you. Unless you’ve got something more, Commander, you’re wasting my time.”

  “But…the flowers, the water in the vase, and that perfume…Jennifer never used perfume.”

  “Oh, please. I have African violets that would be thrilled if I glanced at them occasionally, but they’re not dying. And you don’t seriously expect me to comment on the perfume, do you? I can’t tell you the number of gifts I’ve gotten over the years that end up as doorstops. So?” Looking from one to the other. “That’s it?”

  Lense had a crazy moment where she wanted to blurt out: Well, there was this guy standing outside Jennifer’s apartment and you know he looked a little bit like Strong…

  “Well, there are some irregularities in the apartment’s transporter logs. Faulwell had to break an encryption code to retrieve them.”

  Faulwell picked up the thread. “They show that Dr. Almieri beamed in twelve days ago, the date she was supposed to arrive. But she also beamed out once more—four days before her body was discovered.”

  That got Stern’s attention. “That’s impossible. The autopsy places Dr. Almieri’s death at ten days ago. You made a mistake.”

  “I don’t think so. I double-checked, ran a diagnostic, and the computer’s right on the money. Thing is, the destination coordinates weren’t recorded. Just the logs. What’s even odder is that she rematerialized within minutes.”

  Lense said, “The time is weird, too. Around three A.M. Most people are asleep then, not beaming wherever.” She didn’t mention that she hadn’t gotten to bed until after three; didn’t seem relevant.

  And speaking of which: Where was Duren?

  Stern said, “So you’re saying she was beamed out then back in within a few minutes?”

  “It’s like someone snatched her for a brief instant then put her right back. So, at least as far as the computer is concerned, Jennifer was alive four days ago—and somebody had to know the code for her privacy shield because it was up when they found the body.” When Stern didn’t answer, she said, exasperated, “Don’t you see? If they were involved, Strong would have the code.”

  “Not necessarily. I don’t know about you, Commander, but I’m not in the habit of handing out my codes to a pretty face.” Stern turned to Faulwell before Lense could respond. “Here’s what bugs me: an encrypted computer lockout to protect transporter logs? Logs just tell you when and for how long. Virtually useless. Was there anything else?”

  Lense jumped in. “The rest was wiped.”

  “Wiped?” Stern repeated.

  “Yeah…uh, yes,” Faulwell said—and, bless him, he didn’t glance her way. “Wiped.”

  Lense said, “Whoever wiped the computer probably didn’t know about the logs. But I’ll bet you money it was Strong.”

  “They don’t make money anymore,” Stern muttered. She stared into her coffee mug as if searching for an answer then looked up. “All right, I’ll bring a team to your mother’s apartment. Depending on what we turn up, then we’ll see about Strong…Don’t.” Stern silenced Lense with a look. “Don’t push me, Commander. I’m impressed, but I’m not that impressed. Before I haul anyone in, we get something more substantive.”

  It was the best she could hope for. “Okay, so when do we leave?” As Stern opened her mouth, Lense said, “You owe me. You’re looking again because I found something, not you guys.”

  “I remind you that we guys are on active duty. You’re on maternity leave.” A thin smile played on Stern’s lips. “I think we can scrounge up another tricorder somewhere.”

  Faulwell pulled Lense aside as Stern set off to gather her team and equipment. “You going to tell me why you lied?” he said. His voice barely registered as more than a whisper. “Yeah, the files were wiped, but what about the ghost files?”

  “I didn’t lie,” Lense said, stubbornly. “I just didn’t mention them.”

  Faulwell exhaled an exasperated laugh. “A sin of omission…”

  “Isn’t necessarily omission if we don’t know what they mean. Can you think of a logical reason why Jennifer would use encryption and create a ghost file of every transport’s pattern buffer comparison points?”

  “So maybe we know that whoever beamed in is the same person who beamed out? Okay, that might be something. But why not tell Stern?”

  “Because they make Jennifer looks nuts. I mean, transporter logs and pattern buffer comparison points, who would ever…” She trailed off then experienced a sudden mental flash, like the brain equivalent of a flare grenade. “Unless…the comparison points are different somehow. Maybe that was the only message Jennifer could think of to leave because she knew that kind of information would be overlooked. You just said it: logs like that are useless. Unless…”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless the patterns aren’t exactly the same.”

  “The freshest concentrations of skin oils and sloughed epidermis are on the hairbrush,” the tech said, tapping on a tricorder, “and the perfume bottle. Elasticity changes in skin cells indicate a probable window of about seventy-two to ninety-six hours.”

  They were standing in Jennifer’s bedroom: Lense, the tech, Faulwell, Stern. Another tech worked the rest of the apartment. “Four days,” Lense said, feeling vindicated. “Not ten. Four.”

  Stern’s face was a cipher. But the tech nodded. “Except here’s the kicker: There are two sets of prints on the bottle. One set—palm, all five fingers—is definitely Almieri’s. The other…I don’t know. We got what looks like a partial thumb and index finger around the neck of the bottle, like someone pinched it up.” He demonstrated, grasping the neck of the bottle between his own dermal-screened fingers. “The patterns are weird, like…denticles.”

  “Which are?” Faulwell said.

  “Scales.” Stern tapped her own tricorder. “But that perfume’s manufactured on Gil’Tarkna by an amphibious species with dermal denticles.”

  “Oh,” Lense said, oddly disappointed. Damn, thought that’d be something.

  “Bingo.” The tech gestured toward the scented candle on the dresser. “Carbon deposition indicates that the candle was also lit about four days ago.”

  Now we’re cooking… Holding up a tricorder, Lense pointed to the night table. “I got something here. Double-check me on the cellular elasticity of these skin cells on the books and the pencil. You see that?”

  Both the tech and Stern scanned. Then Stern frowned. “That’s weird. The cells here date as progressively older. Those on the pencil are oldest of all.”

  “So?” Faulwell asked. He’d been hanging at the periphery. “Elizabeth found it under the nightstand. Probably been sitting there for a while.”

  Before Stern could respond, a shout from the other tech came from the kitchen. “Hey! You guys better get in here.”

  They trooped into the kitchen. “What you got?” Stern asked.

  “Iron.” The second tech, a redhea
d named Coburn, waved her tricorder over the kitchen table then turned to the wall immediately behind, her tricorder inscribing a wide, sweeping arc. “More here: iron, albumin, fibrinogen, prekallikreins, Factor seven…”

  “Blood,” Lense said.

  “Beaucoup.” Coburn readjusted her tricorder, and then it started making a low hum.

  A very faint greenish-blue penumbra shimmered into view, widening and brightening first as discontinuous flecks and short stripes like hyphens.

  Then Stern said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Blue-green stellate splashes on the wall at eye level, with smears and thin tongues of luminescence that pooled along the baseboard and kitchen floor. Higher, above the splashes, a jagged series of fine, drippy arcs cascading in an erratic tracery along the wall for three-quarters of its length, the arcs farthest from the table diminishing in height and length.

  Because the pump was failing.

  Coburn turned off the hum, and the luminiscent splashes faded. But they’d all seen enough. “Arterial spray,” Lense said. She looked at Stern. “Someone died here.”

  “Yeah, and I know who.” Stern was grim. She held up her tricorder. “Preston Strong.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “That can’t be,” Lense said. “If this is Strong’s, then…”

  “Who’s that guy at the Academy?” Stern looked over at Coburn, who checked her tricorder then nodded. “Double-checked and confirmed. Snip-typing doesn’t lie. And I just got off the horn with the Academy communications officer. As far as anyone knows, Strong’s not on-campus.”

  It seemed superfluous to point out that they needed to find Strong—or whoever he was. Then Lense thought of something. “Holy cow. SNPs only measure a limited number of polymorphisms, right?”

  “So?”

  “So that means you don’t go through the whole genome at a pop. You don’t need to for ID purposes. But what if whoever’s masquerading as Strong knew that and so made sure that only the relevant portions of DNA that would be tested matched what would be seen if the real Strong had given the sample?”

  “I’m lost,” Faulwell said.

  Stern said, “SNP typing—single nucleotide polymorphism typing—looks at predetermined portions within the genome. That’s constant across law enforcement, Starfleet, or any other agencies requiring DNA for ID purposes. Otherwise, the process just gets too cumbersome and then there are the privacy issues. The kicker is if you wanted to masquerade as someone else and you knew that only specific portions of the genome had to match, you might beat the typing, but it’d be tough. You’d almost have to be wearing a second skin. It’s what we do to deep-cover agents who infiltrate the Romulan Empire or whatever.”

  Faulwell frowned. “I thought red blood cells didn’t contain DNA.”

  “Mature erythrocytes don’t,” Stern said. “But other cells in blood do. That’s what we test when we do blood. The thing is—” she looked at Lense—“how do we get a sample from Strong now without tipping our hand? Presuming we find him, that is.”

  The baby chose that minute to roll over and thump her liver—funny how Lense just hadn’t been as focused on the baby’s every scrunch and squiggle, not with so much else claiming her attention—and, absently, Lense put a hand at the angle of her hip. Something crackled in her maternity top, and she frowned. Wondered: Wha…?

  Then she remembered.

  She fished out the monogrammed envelope—the one Strong had licked. “We’re in business.”

  The entire group clustered in a lab a floor down from Stern’s office. They all stared at a wall-mounted screen that held two split-screen images of DNA, with sets of numbers assigned to segments of varying lengths.

  Faulwell threw up his hands. “Somebody explain this to me, please? What am I looking at?”

  “A very good imposter, if you ask me,” Stern said, and then tipped her head at Lense. “That was pretty darned slick, thinking of saliva for DNA. Wouldn’t have caught this any other way.”

  Lense acknowledged the compliment with a nod of her own. Turning to Faulwell, she said, “In a nutshell: We looked at the entire genome for complementarity. Perfect matches ought to line up and light up. But here, here…down here,” she pointed, “there are some very long gaps in the DNA we extracted from epithelial cells in Strong’s saliva.”

  Coburn chimed in. “The more we’ve sequenced and hybridized—matched up and compared with what we’ve got on file, and the samples we’ve got from the kitchen—the more gaps we find. It’s as if whoever copied the DNA did so just enough to fool standard identification techniques.”

  “Okay,” Faulwell said. “So what’s in the gaps?”

  Stern grunted. “Dunno. Novel nucleotides, maybe enantiomorphs…It’s like we got this sack of marbles, but we only know that about a tenth are blue because that’s the only color we can test for. You take out all the blue marbles, you get left with this.” She waves a hand at the screens. “Junk. Meaningful probably, but junk we can’t quantify. But one thing’s for sure. Strong isn’t Strong anymore.”

  Coburn said, “It gets better. Almieri’s autopsy samples? When we hybridized the entire genomes, we found gaps. Not as long but proximate to the telomeric caps.”

  Faulwell rolled his eyes. “Hello. Linguist here. What?”

  Lense was surprised that she had a smile left. “Telomeres are regions of highly repetitive DNA capping every chromosome. They protect against degradation, making it impossible for DNA to be copied all the way to the end of every strand.”

  “I didn’t know that. I always thought when DNA got copied, everything was duplicated.”

  “Nope,” Stern said. “It’s as if the Celestial Committee for the Design of the Human Genome figured out that every biological system makes mistakes: snips out too much here, takes too much there. Telomeres are one of nature’s failsafes.”

  Coburn said, “We compared the autopsy samples to the hair follicles Dr. Lense found on Almieri’s hairbrush. There, these gaps don’t appear at all.”

  “I get it,” Faulwell said. “That means Almieri’s DNA was also altered but over a very specific period, right?” When Coburn nodded, he said, “Can you tell when?”

  Stern shrugged. “Impossible to say with any certainty. We found skin cells on that Vulcan harp; they match the DNA from her hair follicles, and we know when she got the harp because she logged it in. Academy policy with gifts. So we know that the samples from the harp predate those on the hairbrush. But here’s the kicker: the hairbrush? The DNA’s less than two weeks old.”

  “Meaning that her DNA was altered between the time she returned from Drura Sextus and when she died,” Lense said. With everything that had happened, she knew: Jennifer had been murdered.

  And she had a hunch as to when and how. That fleeting transport in and out: There had to be something there she could get her fingernails under.

  Now, if only Julian would confirm.

  Aloud, she said, “What about Darly’s samples?”

  “Ah.” Coburn cleared her throat. “I was getting to that. Darly’s samples are missing.”

  “What?” Stern’s tone had gone deadly. “You do mean they were misplaced.”

  “No, ma’am. I mean they were taken.”

  “And you were going to get to this—?” Stern’s combadge chose that minute to beep.

  “T’Var to Stern.”

  Stern banged open a channel—hard enough to leave a bruise, Lense figured. “This better be good news, Chief.”

  “Alas, I regret that we have been unable to locate Dr. Preston Strong anywhere on the Academy grounds. Livilla Darly is also unaccounted for.”

  Stern cursed. “Tell me you’re getting together an entry team. I feel like kicking in a couple doors.”

  “As we speak. We will be ready for transport to Dr. Strong’s residence momentarily. Did you wish to attend?”

  “You’re damned right.” She gave Lense a fierce look. “This time, you don’t get to come.”

  “But…�
�

  “No buts.” Stern was already marching for the door. “We clear it first, then you can come. Because like it or not, Commander, you’ve got a little passenger onboard I’m not taking any chances with.”

  As it happened, Stern’s caution was unnecessary.

  When Stern and T’Var’s security team bypassed Strong’s privacy shield and broke into the locked apartment, they did not find Preston Strong. Or Livilla Darly.

  They found, instead, Han Duren. The counselor had been strangled.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Phasic degradation: There’s absolutely no doubt. It’s small, though, so small you’d normally overlook it.” A pause. “Elizabeth, stop pacing. I’m getting dizzy.”

  “I can’t help it, I’m anxious. And you took your sweet time. Where were you, Julian? No, never mind.” She waved the question away. “Doesn’t matter. But you see it, right? I’m not imagining things?”

  “No, but…how did you think of it?”

  “It was the only thing that made sense.” Lense’s skin prickled as she recalled Duren’s ravaged, blood-engorged face in the morgue: those bulging eyes with their whites starred with blood-red petechial hemorrhages, his features contorted in his final agony. The garrote was so fine and filamentous the wire had sawed through flesh, severing arteries and cutting through Duren’s trachea and esophagus. There was blood everywhere, and the cut was so deep that Lense could see the dull gleam of tendon and bone. The poor man had been nearly decapitated.

  She blinked away from the image. “Stern’s team found evidence of a particle phase shift indicative of transporter activity but no log of a transport in or out.”

  “So?”

  “Well, that’s when it hit me—those ghost files Jennifer encrypted of pattern buffer comparison points gave me the idea of looking at Jennifer’s DNA, and that’s when I found it. I just wanted to make sure I’m not seeing things.”