The Day Before

by Liana Brooks

  Sam crossed herself, said a brief prayer to Saint Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost things. Jane lost not just her life but her name as well. Perhaps the saints and angels would get it back.

  Plus, she could honestly tell her mother she’d prayed this week. That should earn her a few brownie points.

  Agent MacKenzie’s accusing glare stopped her as she walked to her car. “You stopped looking.” His harsh whisper came out full of anger and hurt. “Why’d you close the case?” He was shaking again, but the stutter was gone.

  She waited in silence until Marrins left. “I saved both our careers. Marrins wanted Jane laid to rest, I made that happen. Like I told you, if we find something, I can reopen the case.” She hesitated as his eyes narrowed. “I promise, if we find proof Jane was human, I will find her killer. But right now, I’ve got to focus on a girl who might still be alive.”

  He stalked away, anger and exhaustion seeming to flow off him in competing waves.

  I know exactly how you feel, MacKenzie.

  CHAPTER 7

  A weapon in the hand of a civilian is like fire in the hand of a child: the end result will be a world in flames.

  ~ Minister of Defense on the antiweapons amendment to the Collective Constitution I1–2070

  Tuesday May 28, 2069

  Alabama District 3

  Commonwealth of North America

  Empty pill bottle in hand, Mac stumbled back to his room, mouth tasting of mint toothpaste and vomit. It was dark, he was tired—­there was a connection there, but he couldn’t name it. Weak yellow light from the parking lot cut through bent plastic blinds and fell on his rumpled, sweat-­stained sheets. He leaned on the door, trying to decide what he wanted more: a pounding headache or nightmares.

  The headache won.

  He kicked a pile of clothes near the bed, dislodging a long-­legged something that skittered away in silence. With no regard to his personal well-­being, Mac thrust a hand into the pile of discards, pulling out a shirt. It didn’t look familiar, but nothing did these days. The pills turned the past into a mist of colors and scents that no thought could penetrate. Little details slipped away, names, when he had a shower last, when he ate last, but it didn’t matter. He could work, and the rent got paid.

  But now the pills were gone. He’d cut the prescription dose in half, trying to stretch his supply until his refill came. Little good it did, leaving him in a limbo of fuzzy memories and disturbing dreams. The half dose meant other, stronger, memories crept back in. Memories that woke him screaming in terror.

  Mac rubbed his arm, not entirely sure what he’d dreamt about. There had been blood, and the smell of burning human flesh, and screams. Something about a baby. His hand twitched, grabbing air where a gun once sat in his holster.

  His memory was playing tricks on him again, reality and nightmare becoming a muddle of incoherent thoughts. He was still able to recall the face of the female agent who’d walked into the morgue soaking wet. Well, if not her face, enough detail that he could identify her again. And he remembered bones.

  Bones with circles.

  Mac stared at the peeling paint of the wall, trying to remember why the circles were important. He pulled on the shirt that didn’t smell any better than the rest of the room and trudged out the door. The morgue was three blocks away, and since it was a nice night, he’d walk and see if someone would try to mug him. It would be a welcome change.

  Mac only fumbled the lock once. The morgue door opened with a groaning protest, and cold air washed over him. An antiseptic floor bot blinked a green light at him, but it wasn’t programmed to do anything more than scrub floors. He shut the door to keep the bot from scrubbing the sidewalks and trudged down to his office. A narrow, rectangular window ran along the upper quarter of the wall, giving him a view of grass and the parking lot during the day. It wasn’t much, but the streetlight in the bureau parking lot next to the gentler light of the moon was more than enough to illuminate his mostly subterranean office.

  Closing the door, he stared at the stack of papers on his L-­shaped desk. He knocked them to the floor to reveal the hidden diagnostic screen. Piling anatomy texts three deep on top of the screen probably voided the warranty, but if the manufacturer hadn’t intended for the screen to be used as a desk, it shouldn’t have designed it to look like one. Mac found the ON button after two guesses and watched with curiosity as the machine started to warm up. Eighteen months in the hot purgatory of Alabama, and he’d never needed to do anything like this.

  This was work, the kind that required an actual functional brain.

  Mac pulled up the image of Jane Doe’s body lying akimbo in a field of wilted grass. Her right arm had been found several feet from the body, torn off but torn straight. Jane’s head had rolled to the side, attached with no teeth marks, which ruled out animals scavenging off the body before it was found. There were pieces of flesh strewn throughout the field, with slivers of metal and glass in them.

  Manipulating the image, Mac pulled Jane back together. Assuming everything had moved in a straight line . . . Her attached arm was up, her head turned, one leg was twisted up at an unnatural angle, and she was on her back. It wasn’t the position he expected a body to land when it was thrown out of a car, which was currently the best guess as to how Jane Doe found herself in the field.

  In a situation like this, he expected the body to land face-­first. Grab the arms and legs and toss, but that took two ­people. One person would drag the body. Mac stood, twisting his torso as he mimed carrying someone. A fireman’s carry would work. Jane’s head hanging over the killer’s back, then the killer hunched forward before throwing the body down. Jane would flop. And the leg? Maybe the killer kicked her.

  Pulling a notepad out of his desk, Mac started writing. If the body flopped, Jane was freshly dead. There was no sign of either rigor mortis or livor mortis. The body came in fairly clean, no bloating or smell, no insect growth. Mac scratched his head.

  That couldn’t be right, could it? The insects in Alabama were notorious for the rapid destruction of decaying bodies. That far from civilization, ants and vultures should have reduced the body to bone in a matter of days. Insect growth would have started within the first hour.

  Making a note to check for recent bruises, Mac pulled up his original file on the case and the notes from the police department.

  He skimmed over the data: found date, height, clothing . . . There. The pictures of the crime scene again showed Jane had been lying less than three feet from a large ant nest. Body showed no signs of insect infestation and was cold to the touch. The police department’s report had a question mark next to that.

  Jane died somewhere after being tortured, then she was tossed into a refrigerated truck that rapidly cooled her postmortem and dumped on the side of the road. Within an hour, the body was discovered. That sounded awfully convenient to him. But the man who found the body had a pickup truck with broken air-­conditioning, hardly the vehicle needed to move Jane.

  With a frown, Mac peeled back the layer of skin electronically, so he could look at surface wounds. The computer displayed a nightmarish bruise of purple and blue with slashes of white. The white areas were recent, unhealed, injuries. All the injuries faded to purple, then black the older they got. Jane was a mess of injuries. Mostly on her feet. A white handprint circled her right forearm, and her back was one giant smear of white. Just looking at that, he guessed she’d been hit from behind. Or thrown. He could see multiple scenarios. In one, someone tried to pull her to safety, bruising her arm. In the other, someone grabbed Jane and slammed her back against something hard.

  So what had Jane hit?

  Doing some basic math, he tried to figure out the force needed to throw someone, while holding their wrist, to sever their arm from the body. The answer eluded him, but a human amped up on drugs probably couldn’t do it alone.

  Frowning, he peeled
back the layers. The muscles looked good, strong and tight without much excess fat. Jane had been healthy when alive, up until the end, at least. There were early signs of malnutrition and muscle loss, but a month of torture would explain that. The bones told a different story than the skin. There was a fracture on the left ankle, maybe five years old and fully healed. Both shinbones showed signs of abuse, like Jane had been a runner. But the broken trauma he expected from the impact with something hard wasn’t there. The head was damaged, part of the skull collapsed, but the spine and the rest were fine.

  Mac rotated the image to focus on the spine and neck. A snapped spine would have twisted the body, but no. Impact on the left jawbone that shattered the side of her face, and nothing more. He zoomed in closer. Hairline fractures radiated out.

  He pulled back the focus and tried to trace the fracture. Once again, it seemed to confirm his initial thoughts: it looked like the bone had rippled.

  He shivered.

  Sunlight poured through the window as Mac massaged the knots out of his hunched shoulders. If he could just get the computer to spit out a list of possible matches. Something, anything—­no one went from birth to adulthood without leaving a trace. Dental work, bone fractures, somewhere in the system was Jane Doe. Someone knew her name. Someone knew why she was dead.

  He stared at the computer screen, willing the answer to appear. Searching the database by age range, gender, possible jobs . . . none of it worked. He deleted all the parameters. Start over. Try it another way.

  Try smashing my fist into the computer and see if that interfaces.

  Maybe not.

  Mac pulled up Jane’s file again. There it was, everything he had on her from DNA to fingerprints. He dumped it all into the search system. No parameters. Every single person, living, dead, or cloned would be checked against Jane’s record.

  The computer screen turned green. A little search box popped up in the corner: SEARCHING—­estimated time 216 hours.

  Fine.

  He turned off the screen and picked up the papers his boss, Harley, had dropped in his box when he strolled in this morning. There was one regional autopsy to review vids of because the case was being contested, and one house to be swept by a bureau agent.

  Why? When did the ME become the de facto crime-­scene tech? Oh, the joys of being a bureau agent. Mac packed his bag, shuffled through the drowning Alabama heat to his apartment, and drove across town to a brick house with pale green shutters, a hummingbird feeder hanging from the front porch, and a familiar gray Alexian Virgo he knew from the office parking lot outside.

  “Agent Rose?” Mac knocked on the open door as he stepped inside the house. The house was decorated with pictures of a cheerful family at various events from graduations to weddings, a Disharmonic Blitz poster with a ballerina in blood red, and Agent Rose, frowning at the contents of the fridge.

  She looked up at him. Quick elevator eyes, a downturn of the lips, and Agent Perfect slammed the fridge. “Rotted meat still in the marinade. Half a gallon of milk gone sour. There’s a note on the calendar about a date with someone named Lim next week, but otherwise no sign of Miss Chimes.”

  Mac looked around at the tidy house with just the finest layer of dust over every surface. “What am I looking for?”

  “A body?” Agent Rose said with a tight smile.

  “Where?” The house smelled clean.

  Agent Rose shrugged. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here to follow up the police walk-­through. Detective Altin is sending someone over in about an hour to clean up the fridge and do a walk-­through again with the girl’s sister. Sister dearest, a Mrs. Chimes-­Martin, showed up in my office yesterday, ranting and raving about bureau incompetence. She did file a missing person report, though, so at least I’m free to investigate.”

  He looked around the empty house again. “Is this a crime scene?”

  “Not officially, Melody Chimes was last seen at N-­V Nova Labs. Making this a possible crime scene.”

  “Foul play?”

  “You tell me. She works weekends as security at N-­V Nova Labs. Someone broke the windows, both the guards went missing. One was on record as leaving sick; Altin found his truck in the lake Friday. The other, our Miss Chimes, vanished without a trace. Supposedly on vacation with her family but apparently not.” She made a circling motion with her hand. “Go. Look around. See if you see anything I missed.”

  It took thirty minutes to tour the house with limited-­touch-­gloves-­only rules. Wet clothes were starting to mildew in the washer, pajamas lay carelessly on the bed, the radio still hummed in the study. “It looks . . .” Mac frowned. “It looks like she meant to come back.”

  “That’s what I think, too.” Agent Rose scowled like she had a personal vendetta against the house. “I just don’t see anything that suggests violence.”

  Mac made a noise of agreement as he studied one of the pictures, Melody Chimes in a green graduation robe and hat. “I . . . know her.” He blinked at the picture, a pretty girl in a shimmering green shirt twisting to smile at the camera as she ate dinner with a group of friends. He’d seen the face somewhere. A paper. What paper? Newspaper . . . No, not there. It wasn’t on the nets. It wasn’t . . .

  The memory of a similar picture on his computer nudged him. The same face, but beaten, smashed at high speed. “She’s dead. Impact trauma.”

  Agent Rose laughed. “What, you’re psychic now?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen her file in the Jane Doe case when I first got to District 3. We buried her a year ago.”

  More laughter. “Right. That’s great. Don’t try the jokes in front of the family.”

  “I’m serious!”

  Dark, cold eyes sobered him. “Agent MacKenzie, you need help. This is your first, last, and only warning. Get off the pills, and clean yourself up. I don’t give a bear’s tit what you do on your own time, but on bureau time, you stay sober.”

  “I am!” He stabbed a shaking finger at the picture. “That’s the JD that was here when I arrived. I’m . . . I’m almost sure.” Surety withered and died under Agent Rose’s hard stare. “Pretty sure.”

  “You need help.” Agent Rose walked to the far end of the small living room, apparently intent on studying pictures of a wedding.

  “I might be right.”

  The Look.

  “I . . . I want to check.”

  “You’re seriously suggesting that the JD you buried fourteen months ago is Melody Chimes?”

  Possibilities spun through his head. If he could just get it all sorted. Mac grasped at the obvious. “The search wouldn’t,” wouldn’t work, “wouldn’t show a minor. We looked for a woman age eighteen to twenty-­five.”

  “Melody Chimes isn’t twenty yet.” Agent Rose bit her lip, seesawing into believing him.

  “Standard search wouldn’t pull her up.”

  “A clone?”

  Mac looked back at the wall of photos. “Money.”

  “A shadow.” She moved again, not quite pacing. Just . . . wandering, looking at the photos in a thought-­filled silence. “Melody listed a dorm as her home address. This was the address her sister gave us.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to be found.”

  “Kill your owner, take their life?”

  “It’s possible.” He licked his lips. “If it was a clone, the lab has . . . had serious problems.”

  “Problems? A clone in a lab with government research is a security nightmare. It’s so illegal, you can get arrested for saying things like that.” She tugged on her ponytail in frustration.

  “It fits.”

  Barely . . . Hopefully she sees what I’m seeing.

  “That’s the problem.” Agent Rose sighed as she studied the pictures. “What sort of person can beat to death someone with their own face?”

  He took a shaky breath.
“Two Jane Does,” he whispered more to himself than her. Two unidentified women beaten to death. A memory fizzed at the edge of recall, similarities between the bone fractures, the placement of the facial impacts. Circles on the bone. “Can . . . can you authorize a reevaluation for the old case?” Agent Rose raised an eyebrow but dipped her chin in acknowledgment.

  A battered white car pulled in front of a bright pink Montero Sunlit. Mac let out a whistle of appreciation in spite of himself. A Sunlit. Those things cost more than the national debt of most wartime nations. Bells, whistles, AI, private highway usage—­­people who could afford that could easily afford a clone or three for their kid.

  “That’s Mrs. Chimes-­Martin and the PD,” said Agent Rose. “Keep your mouth shut. Contact me when you’ve looked at the paperwork. If you can find anything that links the old Jane Doe with Miss Chimes, I’ll file for reevaluation.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mac tried not to look like he was running for the door.

  “MacKenzie?”

  He froze in the doorway.

  “Don’t even think of touching the pills. If this goes to court, you need to be stone-­cold sober.”

  “I am . . .”

  The Look, again.

  “Roger that.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Picture a wave, it crests and collapses without losing anything. There is energy. So much energy! Time is much the same, choice creates energy, the energy crests into a wave of possibility, a thousand iterations rising, but in the end, the water returns to the ocean. The prime iteration is stable. In the end, all possibilities lead to our reality.

  ~ Student notes from the class Physics and Space-­Time I1–2071

  Wednesday May 29, 2069

  Alabama District 3

  Commonwealth of North America

  A lime-­green Sista’ Twista’ slid over the wet tabletop. “All the taste, none of the toxins,” Brileigh said as she slid into the chair beside Sam. She sipped her drink, eyes closed, and groaned. “See, right now I’m in a tropical paradise while the cabana man named Juan rubs my feet.”