Malefictorum

by Terri Osborne

  Corsi’s head fell forward. She swallowed hard, trying to force the emotion out of her voice. “Yes, Commander. I was just informed that he was dead on arrival.”

  After a long pause, Gomez said, “I’m sorry, Domenica.”

  Corsi’s voice hardened. “I’m going to start an equivocal reconstruction, Commander. Until I see evidence to convince me it isn’t, we’re treating this as a homicide.”

  Chapter

  2

  Corsi reached back and pulled her blond hair into a tighter chignon. Professional, must keep it professional. It doesn’t matter that your old mentor’s son died on your ship.

  Keep telling yourself that, Core-Breach, and you might believe it.

  “Connection established. Channel secured.”

  The sharp eyes of Professor Agosto Caitano stared at her from the viewscreen. There were a few more lines in his face, and there was more salt in his salt-and-pepper hair, but he still looked as distinguished as she remembered. “Domenica? Is something wrong?” he asked, his usually convivial voice taking a more cautious tone. “They pulled me out of a class.”

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” she began, schooling her features to be as emotionless as she could manage. “There’s been an incident here that concerns Ken.”

  A grim smile crossed the elder Caitano’s face. “You sound like some of his teachers in grade school. What happened?”

  Corsi licked her lips. No words came to her that would make this any easier. “Professor, sir, I’m not sure how to tell you this other than to just tell you. I’m very sorry to have to say this, but Ken has died.”

  The professor’s face fell. He took a few deep breaths. Finally, in a shaky voice, he said, “What happened?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that right now. The investigation is still at the classified stage.”

  He slowly nodded. “I—I understand. If someone did this to him, you’ll find him. I know you will.”

  I hope so, sir. Somehow, she managed to say, “I’ll do my best,” instead. “Professor, I hate to say it, but while I’ve got you on the comm, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, if I may.”

  “Anything I can do to help.”

  “We don’t have any concrete proof that he was attacked, but I have to investigate that possibility all the same.” She took a deep breath of her own. “Is there anything that’s happened recently that might have made someone want to get back at you or Ken for any reason? Someone who might have killed him as revenge?”

  His eyes went distant for a few seconds, and then snapped back. “I don’t know of anyone, Domenica. The last few months have been nothing but classes and remodeling our house. It has all gone smoothly. I’ll talk to Angelina. If she knows anything that might help—”

  “Thank you, Professor. As soon as I can tell you what happened, I will.”

  “Computer, initiate program Corsi Twenty-two.”

  “Program initiated. You may enter when ready.”

  The hololab doors slid open on Caitano and Deverick’s quarters, precisely as they’d been when Hawkins had taken the crime scene images just a day before.

  Okay, Corsi, time to figure out what you missed.

  “Now, access all log files from the crew quarters. Go back twenty-four hours. Replicator logs, personal logs, entry/exit logs, medical logs, whatever is available. Correlate those and extrapolate a re-creation of the events that transpired in this cabin. Begin with Caitano returning from his duty shift yesterday.”

  “Accessing.”

  While it worked, she took the time to further inspect the scene. As there was no actual evidence to contaminate, she picked up the bar of gold-pressed latinum and turned it over in her hands. As latinum was a liquid in its natural state, it was usually encased in gold whenever it was used in commerce. Her eye went over every curve, every recess of the ornately sculpted gold casing, looking for the maker’s mark—that one signature that would tell her where the bar was manufactured.

  Where is it?

  That alone was suspicious. No maker’s mark usually meant one of two things: either it had been stolen, and the mark filed off to keep it from being traced, or it was counterfeit.

  And counterfeit bars of gold-pressed latinum were few and far between. How could Caitano have come across it?

  “Corsi to Hawkins,” she said, tapping her combadge.

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “I want some more scans done on the bar of latinum. I’ve got reason to believe it might be counterfeit.”

  “Will do. Anything else?”

  “Not yet, Corsi out.”

  What’s taking the computer so long to correlate that information?

  As though it had read her mind, the computer finally said, “Extrapolated sequence of events is not comprehensive.”

  She looked around the room once again. It was time to test a theory. “That’s okay. Computer, run program.”

  The room’s virtual doors slid aside, and Caitano walked through. There were no signs of a holographic representation of Deverick. Not surprising, considering that he had been on his way to his duty shift at the time.

  Caitano walked over to the replicator and put in his request for dinner, instructing the machine to wait thirty minutes before executing. He then proceeded to walk toward the small doorway to the bathroom. It slid closed behind him. After a few moments of silence, the sonic shower began running.

  Okay, we checked the sonic shower for malfunction. Nothing. The autopsy report said there was indication of brain tissue in the blood. Lense thought something ruptured his eardrums, and then vibrated his brain to the point of resonance. If it wasn’t the sonic shower, what was it?

  “Computer, speed up re-creation to twice normal speed.”

  “Working.”

  The shower stopped, and the holographic Caitano walked at an almost comical pace out of the bathroom and over to the replicator. He ate dinner, then went into the bedroom and changed into the bedclothes he’d been found wearing. The computer must have used the autopsy report and figured he pulled out the bedclothes when he opened the drawer.

  He reached over, grabbed a padd from his shelf, and began thumbing through the contents. That looks like the one that had the Ferengi business journals on it.

  But, if it’s coming up in the log, that means the padd accessed the computer for an update at one point.

  He put that padd down and grabbed a second, putting a pillow between his back and the wall as he settled in to read. She watched as his eyes scanned each page, until he finally began rubbing his right temple.

  That one looks like the padd that had the novel on it.

  “Computer, resume normal speed,” she said, watching like a hawk for any indication of what might have caused the vibration in his brain. She couldn’t hear or see anything unusual.

  That was when he put the padd down, folded the covers back and got out of bed. He walked into the living room, and went right to the replicator. “Two aspirins and water,” he said. Strain was obvious in his voice.

  Aspirin? Why not just get something from sickbay?

  He gulped down the pills, and lifted the glass to his lips. Slowly, he walked back toward the bed. When he was even with the foot of the bed, he fell to his knees. The glass slipped from his hand.

  “Need help,” he whispered. His voice was growing weak as he said, “Commander Corsi?”

  How did the computer know he was trying to reach me and not thinking out loud?

  She heard her own voice saying, “Caitano? What is it?”

  He fell to the floor. From her vantage point at the foot of Deverick’s bed, she could see a faint trickle of blood begin to form at his ear.

  “Caitano?”

  Knowing that he’d lost the battle had been one thing, but the thought that he might have lost it while she was talking to him tore at her insides. She hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary before Caitano got up to get the aspirin. Corsi tried to force that feeling into a corner to dea
l with later, realizing that even being able to see it happen, she still wasn’t sure what caused the death.

  Chapter

  3

  “How’s it going, boss?” Vance Hawkins said as he walked into the security office.

  Corsi barely looked up from the readouts on her viewscreen. “Not good. The re-creation gave me a couple of leads, but nothing that looks like it could have caused the vibrations that Lense thinks happened.”

  Hawkins slid into the chair opposite Corsi’s narrow desk. “You’re kidding.”

  Shaking her head, she said, “He had a headache, got up, ordered aspirin from the replicator, and collapsed on the way back to his bed. It’s like something that nobody could hear or see caused his brain to start shaking and then burst about a thousand blood vessels at the same time. Our illustrious CMO has never even heard of something like that happening before, let alone seen it. Please tell me you had better luck.”

  Hawkins’s dark fingers ran over the padd in his hand. “You were right. The latinum was a counterfeit, but the scans of the two padds on the bed show thatt they’re both standard-issue. As for the DNA traces, both padds had traces we couldn’t localize.”

  That was unusual. There were only two ways that a DNA trace wouldn’t be identifiable. One would be if it were from a species that they hadn’t catalogued yet. The other would be if the creature that left them had been wearing something that hampered its ability to leave traces, like wearing gloves to keep from leaving fingerprints had been in the days before it was discovered that some alien races didn’t have fingerprints to leave behind. “What about the counterfeit latinum?”

  “Besides human, there were traces of Ferengi, Cardassian, and Bajoran DNA. There were also three other traces that we couldn’t match.”

  Corsi raised a blond eyebrow. “Three others?” Pressing the control to get a secure channel, she said, “Corsi to Lense.”

  “Yes, Domenica?”

  “I’m sending Hawkins down to you with three pieces that we need examined. We’ve got DNA traces that aren’t coming up in the database. I need to know if they’re for new species, or if someone’s trying to mask traces.”

  “Understood.”

  “Um, hi,” a tentative voice said from behind Hawkins. “You wanted to see me, Commander?”

  Signing off with Lense, Corsi saw Ted Deverick standing in her office doorway, his eyes riveted to the floor in front of his feet. His short, sandy blond hair was rumpled, as though he’d just gotten out of bed. He shifted his weight from one spindly leg to the other. She’d only seen him a couple of times since he’d come on board, but he’d looked better. “How’re you doing, Deverick?” she asked, genuine concern in her voice. “Settling in to the new quarters?”

  A bitter smile tried to work its way onto his face. “About as good as can be expected, I guess. Thank you for moving me.”

  “When was the last time you slept?” Hawkins asked. Corsi couldn’t help but wonder if he’d also noticed the exhaustion in the young crewman’s eyes.

  “Night before last. I keep wondering if what got Ken was really meant for me.”

  That piqued Corsi’s interest. She gestured for him to sit down. “Do either of you have any enemies who might try something like this?”

  Deverick sank into the other chair that faced Corsi’s desk. “Not that I know of,” he said. “I mean, I knew Ken pretty well from the Musgrave, but we’d both only been there about a year when we got transferred.”

  “What about before the transfer? Did he take any vacations?”

  Deverick shook his head. “Are you kidding? He was saving everything he could to retire on Risa. He didn’t leave the ship that often. I think the last time either one of us left before the transfer was an away mission near the Badlands. They actually found the Manning floating dead near a massive tachyon eddy. We got sent in on salvage.”

  Corsi and Hawkins exchanged a look. She remembered something in her history class about that being one of the first ships lost in the Badlands almost fifty years ago. Starfleet had always assumed that all hands had gone down with the ship. A derelict, however, brought in a whole new level of possible causes, up to and including possible influence by the aliens that lived in the Bajoran wormhole. “Nothing strange happened while you were in the Badlands? Did you see any signs that he might have been sick?”

  “No, ma’am. Nothing,” Deverick replied. “He was always making sure he was healthy. He went in for a checkup every six months, whether he needed to or not. He was in the gym every day. He always made sure he ate right. I bet he was probably in better shape than Captain Dayrit.”

  Corsi’s lips pursed. That certainly jibed with what she’d learned from the files sent over from the Musgrave.

  “Did he ever talk about anyone being mad at him? Someone who might have had a vendetta against him?”

  Deverick shook his head.

  Corsi cursed to herself. If there were no known enemies, and no foreign objects to point to, what was it?

  Hawkins leaned forward. “Ted, did you ever touch his padds, or maybe his bar of latinum?”

  The younger man’s expression turned even graver. “He almost broke one of my ships once. After that, we agreed that he wouldn’t touch anything of mine, and I wouldn’t touch anything of his.”

  “Those ships mean a lot to you?” Corsi asked.

  Deverick nodded. “I’m an engineer, Commander. Building and fixing ships is what I do. There’s a model of the Constitution-class Defiant at home that I built when I was twelve. I built both the Grayson and the Commonwealth.”

  “The which?” Hawkins asked.

  The young man turned sharp eyes on her deputy. “The two models in my quarters. They’re old pre-Federation explorer ships.” With a halfheartedly proud smile, he added, “My great-great-grandfather helped design the Grayson.”

  “You don’t happen to know why he kept the bar of latinum on his shelf, do you?”

  Deverick shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

  Corsi leaned back in her chair, sure this discussion was going nowhere. Deverick’s file was about as empty as deep space—no reprimands, no warnings, nothing. She didn’t even see a note for his and Caitano’s bickering over the models. If it didn’t get out of hand when his precious models were nearly broken, could Caitano have actually provoked him to an attack? Could he have done a time-delay attack so he might look innocent?

  Ultimately, all she could do was sigh. Too many questions, and too few answers. “Hawkins, get the evidence down to Lense. And see what she has on the glass, okay?”

  Chapter

  4

  As Corsi keyed the lock to her quarters, she was beginning to give a modicum of credence to the notion of a vast conspiracy by the universe in general to keep her from finding the murder weapon. She had finally settled on the three possible candidates, but no idea how it could have been done. None of the tests that had been run on either of the padds or the latinum showed any signs of something that could have caused vibrations in Caitano’s brain or a rupture in his eardrums.

  As the door slid closed behind her, the corner of the wooden box that contained her family’s heirloom fire axe caught Corsi’s eye as it peeked out from beneath the bed. She couldn’t help but think it was almost taunting her, sticking its tongue out like a spoiled child.

  She tried to look away from it, but it would only be a few seconds before it filled her vision once again. Taking a deep breath, she reached down and dragged the case from its usual home, sitting it on the foot of the bed so it could stare at her properly.

  What would her father think? The last time she’d seen Aldo Corsi, they’d made some sort of peace, but she still wondered how stable that peace was in reality.

  “Domenica? You okay?” Lense’s voice asked.

  Corsi turned to find her roommate standing in the doorway, a level of concern in the doctor’s expression that she couldn’t recall seeing outside of sickbay.

  “Yeah,” she said, her eyes going ba
ck to the axe. “I just need to know—”

  “What killed Caitano?”

  Corsi shook her head. “No. Well, yeah, eventually, but that’s not it.”

  She heard Lense sit down, judging by the distance, on her own bed. “Then what is it?”

  Corsi opened her mouth to speak, but for a few moments no words came. How could she explain it to Lense when she couldn’t even explain it to herself? Finally, she said, “I don’t know.”

  “You need to know something, but you don’t know what that something is?”

  Corsi pinched the bridge of her nose between her right index finger and thumb. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “Try me,” Lense said. “I’m not a counselor, but…”

  “I’d be dead about five times over now if you were,” Corsi said, an edge of sarcasm in her voice. She didn’t want to think about the way things might have gone over the years if the da Vinci had had a lesser CMO. Elizabeth Lense had saved her life, as well as the lives of her staff, on more than one occasion. Corsi had long ago discovered that having such an accomplished medic on the ship made doing her own job that much easier. She didn’t worry about bumps and bruises when she was on a mission, because she knew that Lense could fix just about any problem she might be able to come back with, so long as that problem wasn’t someone being dead.

  Lense sighed. “Okay, direct questions it is. How about telling me why you’re staring at that axe like it’s going to do a trick?”

  “I’m getting tired of dead ends,” Corsi reluctantly said. “I don’t know any more about how he died than I did when I walked into his quarters. Well, I do, but it’s not useful.”

  She could have sworn she heard the doctor laugh. She moved her eyes from the axe long enough to see a wry smile on her roommate’s features. “What’s so funny?”

  “Domenica, in all of the time I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you run out of options.”