The Day Before

by Liana Brooks

  Five minutes later, she poked her head into the room again while wearing tiny black running shorts and a running bra that did nothing to flatten her chest. “Let’s go, Mac.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He sat straight up.

  Her head reappeared. “Did you just ‘Yes, ma’am’ me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He rolled into a sitting position and stripped his shirt off with a weak grin. He was sick, not dead, and he’d have to be dead to ignore a body like that flouncing in front of him.

  Agent Rose’s eyes narrowed. “I’m going to make you pay for that.”

  “You can’t kill me,” he pointed out. “They’d miss me at work.”

  “Not until tomorrow.”

  He dressed quickly and chased after Rose. “What do you mean not until tomorrow?”

  “You have today off, and tomorrow you don’t go back until you’ve had a physical.”

  “I get a sick day for a hangover?”

  Rose tied her hair back in a ponytail. “You think you’re hungover?”

  “It sure feels like a hangover. My head aches, my stomach is in knots, my tongue tastes like I spent an hour licking the alley behind the bar.”

  “Ewww! I don’t even want to know how you could possibly know what that tastes like.” Her nose scrunched in the cute way only pretty girls could manage.

  “What happened to me?”

  “Medicine mix-­up. You weren’t looking so good, but the EMT Altin brought over said you’d survive.”

  He tied his shoes and tried to piece together facts with the flashes of memory from the night before. “Why did Altin come over?”

  “Because I asked him to.”

  “Why not just take me to the ER?”

  She whistled for her dog and put a harness on him. “Because the nearest after-­hours clinic is an hour away, and Altin isn’t. I wasn’t sure what an hour’s drive would do. And if you needed to go to the hospital, you were going in a patrol car, not mine.”

  “Gee. Thanks.”

  She handed the leash to him. “Ready to go?”

  “Um . . .”

  Rose opened the door. Warm morning air swirled around his feet. “Let’s go running. Come on, Hoss!”

  Before he could get a handle on what was happening, Agent Rose was sprinting down the gravel drive, and Hoss the monster dog was dragging him behind. They jogged half a mile before Rose stopped for stretching and push-­ups. Standing on one foot as she pulled the other back, she smiled at him like a maniac. “Race you to the lake, MacKenzie?”

  He shook his head. It was already over seventy outside, steamy warm and smelling of magnolia blooms. “Let’s go take a shower.”

  “If you’re hot, you can jump in the lake.”

  “No . . .”

  She leaned over to look him in the eye while he stretched. “Come on, MacKenzie, you’re not going to let a girl beat you?” And then she was running again. “Are you?” she shouted over her shoulder.

  Hoss barked once before trying to run after her. They went another mile before Mac let go of the leash so he could stop and empty his stomach again.

  Rose caught the dog and kept running. He trudged back to the house in defeat. He was out of the shower and staring at the cupboards trying to find food when she came home, glowing like the Greek Goddess of Running.

  She beamed at him. “Good job this morning! You made almost two miles. I thought you’d be dead by one.”

  The tension in his shoulders eased. “Really?”

  “In this heat? The first time I tried running in an Alabama, I made it less than a mile. Give it a month or two, and you’ll be able to race me to the lake.” She grabbed an apple from the counter. “Not beat me, but race me.”

  He smiled. “Maybe.”

  She winked. “There’s the positive mental attitude you need. Call in sick and enjoy your day off.”

  Mac called the office as soon as Rose left for the day.

  “Coroner Harley, it’s MacKenzie.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “Terrible,” he said honestly. “Those pills you found weren’t my regular meds.”

  “So I heard,” the older man said. “Agent Rose was kind enough to call in and let us know what happened. The interns have been playing pranks all month, but this one went too far. I don’t think they meant anything by it, but I don’t find this kind of thing funny.”

  “Neither do I,” Mac said as he collapsed onto his worn green couch. It was still damp, but it smelled cleaner than before.

  “I’m writing them both up. I’d have ’em both in county lockup if I could. But Daddy’s got money and threatened to lawyer up unless I could provide evidence they’d done it.”

  “And the security cameras still aren’t working?” Mac guessed.

  “You know it. Good news though, I had them clean your office,” Harley said. “I realized you didn’t get a new computer when we upgraded the rest of the labs.”

  “Don’t worry about it, the one I have runs fine.”

  “No, no,” insisted Harley. “You need an upgrade. Since you were out today, I’m having the tech ­people set up your new computer.”

  Mac groaned quietly. “You don’t need to, sir.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  Except for all the files he was losing. “Did you have them make a backup file?”

  “We’re using the one from Friday, just like always.”

  “What about the work I did yesterday?”

  “I have the autopsy for the bridge case.”

  Mac bit his lip—­he couldn’t remember if he’d saved any of the autopsy data Rose had wanted or not. “That’s good. Do you know what the interns gave me?”

  “Both of them are denying everything, but I think someone said it was a dose of fluphenazine hydrochloride. Nasty stuff.”

  “An emetic?”

  “No, an antipsychotic. Overdoses usually end in cardiac arrest. Saw it once when I was in college. The nurse overdosed a patient by accident, didn’t realize he’d been given his evening meds already. It makes ­people drowsy sometimes. If we’d released him on schedule, he would have wrecked his car, and we’d never have known. As it was, he fell asleep and had a heart attack. If we hadn’t been testing his blood levels for something else, we never would have caught it. Honest mix-­up, but deadly.”

  “Remind me to thank the interns when I get back.” His stomach flipped with delayed fear.

  “Now, now, Agent, play nice. They’re just kids. They don’t know what this stuff can do.”

  “I’m surprised they found the pills at all.”

  “The city gave me a full kit of medicine when I went out with the rescue workers. I’m guessing they grabbed the pills out of it when I wasn’t looking.”

  Mac wondered if that was a subtle dig at him for looking at the bodies Thursday. The interns weren’t the only ones sneaking around without Harley’s permission.

  “Take it easy,” the coroner advised. “By the time you get back, I’ll have everything under control.”

  Mac swore as he hung up the phone. The last few hours in the lab were a blur. He remembered reaching for a pill out of habit, but they weren’t there. A breeze bent the oak tree outside as he searched for a recollection of what had happened next. There had been the empty pill bottle, then Harley coming in, and he’d stammered through a lame excuse so he could run off with the data pad. Then Harley had given him some pills. Big, fat, bitter pills—­a drug the old coroner seemed all too familiar with.

  It was the perfect setup for murder. Harley slipped him the pills, Rose took him home and quietly let him die. Except she hadn’t . . . so whose game was she playing? He needed his lab and to find out if the files linking Jane Doe to Agent Rose had vanished without a trace, along with the autopsies of Melody Doe and Mordicai Robbins. That would at least let
him make an educated guess about who was doing what.

  Mac reached for his shoes. Screw sick days. He could sleep in when he was dead. I expect that could be any day now. . .

  CHAPTER 18

  Our very existence is threatened by these dissidents. They would have you believe we are at war. We are not the warmongers, we are the guardians. We are the ones defending our world from the annihilation of free agency.

  ~ Press brief from Colonel Aina’s I1–2073

  Wednesday June 19, 2069

  Alabama District 3

  Commonwealth of North America

  Sam pushed away from her desk, rubbing her neck and wishing for an insane gunman to drop through the ceiling and take her hostage. Anything to distract her from checking insurance claims against the district records. There was a tap on the wall.

  She jerked her head up. “Agent MacKenzie? Are you all right? You look . . . deflated.” There were corpses in the morgue who looked better. His pale skin was flaccid, but his eyes weren’t bloodshot. Mother Mary have mercy, she thought, he looked bad high.

  Who knew sober could be worse?

  “Where have you been? Did you go to the hospital?” His truck was missing when she returned from work on Thursday, and Marrins had kept her buried with busywork for the past week. Hunting down her erstwhile roommate hadn’t been a priority. “You should have called if they were going to admit you.”

  “Can . . . Can we talk?” he asked in a hushed voice. His hands trembled.

  “What about?”

  “The . . . Jane. Jane Doe.”

  Sam nodded. “Sure. I’m going to lunch. We can talk there. Let me close my files up real quick.”

  Marrins’s door opened, and Charlie the Plastic Skull bounced off the wall in front of a startled MacKenzie. “Give that to the coroner on your way down!” Marrins shouted.

  Rolling her eyes, she closed the computer down. “A real winning personality,” she told MacKenzie, faking a smile. “He’s been throwing it at ­people all week. If you accidentally lost it in the Dumpster on the way to Harley, I’d consider it a national ser­vice.”

  MacKenzie didn’t crack a smile.

  She dropped Charlie on the secretary’s desk as they walked past. “This is for the coroner, courtesy of Agent Marrins.” She ignored the dirty look Theresa gave her and kept walking. “Mac, seriously, are you all right? You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t.”

  “Were you at the hospital?”

  “No. Office.”

  She gave him a stern look. Whatever the reasons, he looked ready to collapse. “How about we walk over to the café?” He nodded and plodded after her, a reluctant puppy on a leash. “Talk, MacKenzie. What were you working on?”

  “The autopsies. Mordicai Robbins and the . . . the Jane Does.”

  They stepped out into the swamp of June in Alabama. “Weather control, is that too much to ask for?” she muttered. “Lower the humidity here about 20 percent, that’s all I’m asking.” Her suit jacket, so perfect for staying warm in the air-­conditioned office, was suddenly three times too thick for comfort. She took it off, catching MacKenzie’s stare as she did. “What?”

  He shook his head, turning to look at the hibiscus blooming along the sidewalk. “Sorry.”

  “Focus. Tell me about the autopsies.”

  “Harley took my computer Thursday morning.” Mac sounded angry. “All the work I’d done on Melody Doe and Mordicai Robbins was erased. Both bodies were cremated.”

  She whistled softly. “That was fast.”

  “Too fast, but I had a backup copy on my data pad. I’m not sure if Harley knew that or not when he ordered the hard drive wiped.”

  Sam took a deep breath. At least the outside smelled better than her overchilled office. “I don’t think he would have erased the data if he didn’t—­it’s too valuable to lose.” When Mac didn’t respond, she switched topics. “Did you hear about the arrest yesterday? Altin wasn’t happy, I heard all about it because Marrins was dodging his calls again. Someone said they saw the guy’s car out by the labs the night of the break-­in. It’s not much to go on, but I guess it’s a start.”

  “They let the kid go an hour ago.” Mac sighed and sat.

  Sam waved to a waitress as she took her usual seat on the patio outside the Peach Blossom Café. The self-­serve screen popped up in the center of the table, and Sam entered her order from memory. “How’d you find that out?

  “Harley told me. We got into a fight. I told him the evidence didn’t back up the arrest. The kid’s nineteen, works a night shift at the cinema, and was at work when the lab was broken into. Same alibi for the time of death. The only reason they took him in was that Officer Holt has tried to arrest him twice for breaking the noise ordinance in her neighborhood—­he likes to turn the radio up when he drives home—­but the charges never stuck.”

  Sam rolled her eyes. “Sometimes I think Altin is the only competent person on the force.” A flower petal drifted across the menu screen, and she flicked it away. “I hate to ask, but do I have an alibi?”

  Mac nodded. “About the time someone shot Mordicai Robbins’s throat out, Detective Altin was at your house getting a signature to exhume Melody Doe.”

  “That’s nice.” She relaxed a little. “Do you know what you want?” MacKenzie shook his head, so she doubled the order: two thick turkey sandwiches with fruit salads on the side. Mac sat with his hands clasped, leaning on his knees and avoiding her gaze. Sam leaned back. “So. I guess you didn’t want to see me about the Melody Doe case. What did you want to talk about?”

  He looked across the street at the small grove of trees that were optimistically dubbed the city park. “This is a mess.”

  “The city? The case? The state of the nation? I need more to go on if we’re going to have a conversation.” A waitress brought out two glasses of pink lemonade. Sam sipped hers, and waited for Mac to come around to the conversation.

  Mac sighed. “Melody Doe is an exact DNA match for Melody Chimes. No clone marker. Everything matches the latest DNA record of Melody Chimes.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Wannervan Security did a full DNA scan when she signed on in October of last year.”

  “But in October 2068, Melody Doe was decomposing in peace in a mass grave.”

  “That’s the first problem.”

  “What’s the second?”

  Mac kicked a chair at their table, glaring at the park like he held a personal grudge against trees and ground his teeth.

  “Mac?” Sam prompted, trying not to sound amused.

  “I pulled up Jane Doe’s files while I was running some scans on Melody Doe.”

  “So?”

  “The trauma patterns to the bones match.”

  Sam set her cup down with exaggerated care. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Both women were killed by the same thing. I think Jane was hit harder, but I don’t know what hit her.” He pulled out an efile on his small computer. “This . . .” Mac shook his head, obviously arguing something with himself. “This is Jane.” The suicide from May popped up on the screen.

  The waitress stepped out with their lunches. “Thank you, Autumn,” Sam said, reading the girl’s name tag. She took a bite of her sandwich, swallowed, and nodded at the screen. “Let’s see Melody.” Mac hit a few buttons, and Melody Doe appeared, the fracture pattern on the skull was highlighted. “Okay, I see what you’re saying, but it still doesn’t work.”

  He frowned at her.

  “All this says is that both women were hit in a similar way. That’s not enough of a connection. Melody wasn’t—­” She caught the word “tortured.” This was a public place, after all. “Melody wasn’t treated the same way as Jane. They weren’t the same age. They don’t show the same abuse. You need more of a c
onnection if you want to tie them together. The same weapon doesn’t make this a serial-­killer case.”

  MacKenzie held his sandwich with reverence, venerating but not eating. “What about both being dead women with identical genetic matches to living ­people? No clone markers.”

  Sam raised her eyebrows. “That could do it. You found a name for Jane?”

  He nodded. “Eighty percent accuracy. There are a few differences, but there’s also a five-­year age gap between the two.”

  “That takes care of the other 20 percent.” She took another bite. “Okay. Give me the name.”

  MacKenzie put his sandwich down and tapped at the screen. Another window opened next to the body, a file.

  Sam turned the screen to read . . . Her name. Her file.

  All the little things she’d noticed the first day and dismissed as quirks of genetic drift were there. Physical similarities listed next to those of Jane Doe’s with little blue tick marks.

  Check.

  Check.

  Check.

  Sam smoothed her hands over her skirt. “Why . . . why don’t we walk? Grab your sandwich.” She dumped MacKenzie’s lunch into his hands, grabbed her own sandwich, and dropped their plates off at the cleaning station tucked behind an oleander bush. She didn’t wait for him but knew he was following. “This way.” Her high heels clicked on the hot sidewalk as they crossed the empty street to the small park surrounding city hall in the center. MacKenzie was right behind her, juggling food and computers.

  She took a deep breath. “If this is a joke, MacKenzie, it’s not funny. Not at all.”

  MacKenzie set his computer on a stone bench. “It’s not a joke.” His breath was ragged. “I . . . I . . . stopped. Everything. No pills. No nothing. I’m sober. You wanted to know where I’ve been the past six days? This is where. When the search results came up, I thought I was hallucinating. I’ve rerun the data.”

  “I’m not questioning your sobriety, you bastard,” she hissed. “I’m questioning your conclusion. Are you honestly suggesting that this woman was my clone?” She glared at him, nails digging into the stone bench.