by Paula Guran
Great, she sent. How do we investigate food contamination like that?
That’s your problem, Detective, Broduer sent back, somewhat primly. I’d suggest starting with a search of records, seeing if there has been a rise in deaths in vulnerable populations.
Can’t you do that easier than I can? She sent, even though she knew he would back out. It couldn’t hurt to try to get him to help.
Not at the moment, he sent, I have a job to do.
She nearly cursed at him. But she managed to control herself. A job to do. The bastard. She had a job to do too, and it was just as important as his job.
This was why she hated working with Broduer. He was a jerk.
Well, she sent, let me know the type of poison first, before I get into that part of the investigation. You said there were five, and only one could contaminate the food supply. You think that’s the one we’re dealing with?
I don’t know yet, Detective, he sent. I’ll know when the testing is done.
Which will take how long?
He shrugged. Not long, I hope.
Great, she sent again. She wanted to push him, but pushing him sometimes made him even more passive/aggressive about getting work done.
Well, you were right, she sent. I didn’t like it. Now I’m off to investigate even more crap.
Um, not yet, Broduer sent.
Not yet? Who was this guy and why did he think he could control everything she did. She clenched her fists. Pretty soon, she would tell this idiot exactly what she thought of him, and that wouldn’t make for a good working relationship.
Um, yeah, he sent. There’s one other problem.
She waited, her fists so tight her fingernails were digging into the skin of her palm.
He looked down. I, um, misidentified your woman.
You what? He had been an idiot about helping her, and then he told her that he had done crappy work? This man was the absolutely worst coroner she’d ever worked with (which was saying something) and she was going to report him to the Chief of Detectives, maybe even to the Chief of Police, and get him removed from his position.
Yeah, Broduer sent. She’s, um, not Sonja Mycenae.
You said that, DeRicci sent. Already, her mind was racing. Misidentifying the corpse would cause all kinds of problems, not the least of which would be problems with Luc Deshin. Who the hell is she, then?
Broduer’s skin had turned grey. He clearly knew he had screwed up big time. She’s a clone of Sonja Mycenae.
A what? DeRicci rolled her eyes. That would have been good to know right from the start. Because it meant the investigation had gone in the wrong direction from the moment she had a name.
A clone. I’m sorry, Detective.
You should be, DeRicci sent. I shouldn’t even be on this investigation This isn’t a homicide.
Well, technically, it’s the same thing, Broduer sent.
Technically, it isn’t, DeRicci sent. She’d had dozens of clone cases before, and no matter how much she argued with the Chief of Detectives, Andrea Gumiela, it didn’t matter. The clones weren’t human under the law; their deaths fell into property crimes, generally vandalism or destruction of valuable property, depending on how much the clone was worth or how much it cost to create.
But, Detective, she’s a human being . . .
DeRicci sighed. She believed that, but what she believed didn’t matter. What mattered was what the law said and how her boss handled it. And she’d been through this with Gumiela. Gumiela would send DeRicci elsewhere.
Gumiela hadn’t seen the poor girl crying and begging for her life in front of Deshin. Gumiela hadn’t seen the near-perfect corpse, posed as if she were sleeping on a pile of compost.
Wait a minute, DeRicci sent. You told me about the poisoning first because . . . ?
Because, Detective, she might not be human, but she might have been a weapon or weaponized material. And that would fall into your jurisdiction, wouldn’t it?
Just when she thought that Broduer was the worst person she had ever worked with, he manipulated a clone case to keep it inside DeRicci’s Detective Division.
I don’t determine jurisdiction, she sent, mostly because this was on the record, and she didn’t want to show her personal feelings on something that might hit court and derail any potential prosecution.
But check, would you? Broduer sent. Because someone competent should handle this.
She wasn’t sure what “this” was: the dead clone or the contamination.
Just send me all the information, DeRicci sent, and let me know the minute you confirm which hardening poison killed this clone.
I’ll have it soon, Broduer sent and signed off.
DeRicci leaned back in the car seat, her cheeks warm. She had gone to Luc Deshin for nothing.
Or had she?
Which Sonja Mycenae had Deshin fired that morning? The real one? Or the clone?
DeRicci let herself out of the car. She had to talk to Gumiela. But before she did, she needed to find out where the real Mycenae was—and fast.
Deshin wasn’t certain how to tell Gerda that Sonja had been a plant, placed in their home for a reason he didn’t know yet.
He wandered his office, screens moving with him as he examined the tracker he had placed in Sonja. Then he winced. Every time he thought of the clone as Sonja, he felt like a fool. From now on, he would just call her the clone, because she clearly wasn’t Sonja.
So he examined the information from the tracker he had placed in the clone’s palm the moment she was hired. She hadn’t known he had inserted it. He had done it when he shook her hand, using technology that didn’t show up on any of the regular scans.
He wished he had been paranoid enough to install a video tracker, but he had thought—or rather, Gerda had thought—that their nanny needed her privacy in her off time.
Of course, that had been too kind. Deshin should have tracked the clone the way he tracked anyone he didn’t entirely trust.
Whenever the clone had been with Paavo, Deshin had always kept a screen open. He’d even set an alert in case the clone took Paavo out of the house without Gerda accompanying them. That alert had never activated, because Gerda had always been nearby when the clone was with Paavo. Deshin was grateful for that caution now. He had no idea what serious crisis they had dodged.
He was now searching through all the other information in the tracker—where the clone had gone during her days off, where she had spent her free time. He knew that Koos had been, in theory, making sure she had no unsavory contacts—or at least, Deshin had tasked Koos with doing that. Now, Deshin was double-checking his head of security, making certain that he had actually done his job.
The first thing Deshin had done was make certain that the clone hadn’t gone to the bad parts of town. According to the tracker, she hadn’t. Her apartment was exactly where she had claimed it was, and as far as he could tell, all she had done in her off hours was shop for her own groceries, eaten at a local restaurant, and gone home.
He had already sent a message to one of the investigative services he used. He wanted them to search the clone’s apartment. He wanted video and DNA and all kinds of trace. He wanted an investigation of her finances and a look at the things she kept.
He also didn’t want anyone from Deshin Enterprises associated with that search. He knew that his investigative service would keep him out of it. They had done so before.
He had hired them to search before he had known she was a clone. He had hired them while he was waiting for his attorney to look at the footage he had given that detective. With luck, they’d be done with the search by now.
But he had decided to check the tracker himself, looking for anomalies.
The only anomaly he had found was a weekly visit to a building in downtown Armstrong. On her day off, she went to that building at noon. She had also been at that building the evening Deshin had hired her. He scanned the address, looking for the businesses that rented or owned the place. The building had
dozens of small offices, and none of the businesses were registered with the city.
He found that odd: usually the city insisted that every business register for tax purposes. So he traced the building’s ownership. He went through several layers of corporate dodges to find something odd: the building’s owner wasn’t a corporation at all.
It was the Earth Alliance.
He let out a breath, and then sank into a nearby chair.
Suddenly everything made sense.
The Earth Alliance had been after him for years, convinced he was breaking a million different Alliance laws and not only getting away with it, but making billions from the practice. Ironically, he had broken a lot of Alliance laws when he started out, and he still had a lot of sketchy associates, but he hadn’t broken a law in years and years.
Still, it would have been a coup for someone in Alliance government to bring down Luc Deshin and his criminal enterprises.
The Alliance had found it impossible to plant listening devices and trackers in Deshin’s empire. The Alliance was always behind Deshin Enterprises when it came to technology. And Deshin himself was innately cautious—
Or he had thought he was, until this incident with the clone.
They had slipped her into his home. They might have had a hundred purposes in doing so—as a spy on his family, to steal familial DNA, to set up tracking equipment in a completely different way than it had been done before.
And for an entire month, they had been successful.
He was furious at himself, but he knew he couldn’t let that emotion dominate his thoughts. He had to take action, and he had to do so now.
He used his links to summon Ishiyo Cumija to his office. He’d been watching her for some time. She hadn’t been Koos’s second in command in the security department. She had set up her own fiefdom, and once she had mentioned to Deshin that she worried no one was taking security seriously enough.
At the time, he had thought she was making a play for Koos’s job. Deshin still thought she was making a play for Koos’s job on that day, but she might have been doing so with good reason.
Now, she would get a chance to prove herself.
While Deshin waited for her, he checked the clone’s DNA and found that strange clone mark embedded into her system. He had never seen anything like it. The Designer Criminal Clones he’d run into had always had a product stamp embedded into their DNA. This wasn’t a standard DCC product stamp. It looked like something else.
He copied it, then opened Cumija’s file, accessed the DNA samples she had to give every week, and searched to see if there was any kind of mark. His system always searched for the DCC product stamps, but rarely searched for other examples of cloning, including shortened telomeres.
Shortened telomeres could happen naturally. In the past, he’d found that searching for them gave him so many false positives—staff members who were older than they appeared, employees who had had serious injuries—that he decided to stop searching for anything but the product marks.
He wondered now if that had been a mistake.
His search of Cumija’s DNA found no DCC product mark, and nothing matching the mark his system had found in the clone’s DNA.
As the search ended, Cumija entered the office.
She was stunningly beautiful, with a cap of straight hair so black it almost looked blue, and dancing black eyes. Until he met Cumija, he would never have thought that someone so very attractive would function well in a security position, but she had turned out to be one of his best bodyguards.
She dressed like a woman sexually involved with a very rich man. Her clothing always revealed her taut nut-brown skin and her fantastic legs. Sometimes she looked nearly naked in the clothing she had chosen. Men and women watched her wherever she went, and dismissed her as someone decorative, someone being used.
On this day, she wore a white dress that crossed her breasts with an X, revealing her sides, and expanding to cover her hips and buttocks. Her matching white shoes looked as deadly as the shoes that she had used to kill a man trying to get to Deshin one afternoon.
“That nanny we hired turns out to have been a clone,” Deshin said without greeting.
“Yes, I heard.” Cumija’s voice was low and sexy in keeping with her appearance.
“Has Koos made an announcement?” Deshin asked. Because he would have recommended against it.
“No,” she said curtly, and Deshin almost smiled. She monitored everything Koos did. It was a great trait in a security officer, a terrible trait in a subordinate—at least from the perspective of someone in Koos’s position.
Deshin said, “I need you to check the other employees—you, and you only. I don’t want anyone to know what you’re doing. I have the marker that was in the cloned Sonja Mycenae’s DNA. I want you to see if there’s a match. I also want a secondary check for Designer Criminal Clone marks, and then I want you to do a slow search of anyone with abnormal telomeres.”
Cumija didn’t complain, even though he was giving her a lot of work. “You want me to check everyone,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Start with people who have access to me, and then move outward. Do it quickly and quietly.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Report the results directly to me,” he said.
She nodded, thanked him, and left the office.
He stood there for a moment, feeling a little shaken. If the Alliance was trying to infiltrate his organization, then he wouldn’t be surprised if there were other clones stationed in various areas, clones he had missed.
After Cumija checked, he would have Koos do the same check, and see if he came up with the same result.
Deshin went back to his investigation of the building the clone had visited regularly. He had no firm evidence of Earth Alliance involvement. Just suspicions, at least at the moment. And regular citizens of the Alliance would be stunned to think their precious Alliance would infiltrate businesses using slow-grow clones, and then disposing of them when they lost their usefulness. But Deshin knew the Alliance had done all kinds of extra-legal things to protect itself over the centuries. And somewhere, Deshin had been flagged as a threat to the Alliance.
He had known that for some time. He had always expected some kind of infiltration of his business. But the infiltration of his home was personal.
And it needed to stop.
Ethan Broduer looked at the information pouring across his screen, and let out a sigh of relief. The hardening poison wasn’t one of the kinds that could leach through the skin. He still had to test the compost to see if the poison had contaminated it, but he doubted that.
The liver mortis told him she had died elsewhere, and then been placed in the crate. And given how fast this hardening poison acted, the blood wouldn’t have been able to pool for more than a few minutes anyway.
He stood and walked back into the autopsy room. Now that he knew the woman had died of something that wouldn’t hurt him if he came in contact with her skin or breathed the air around her, he didn’t need the environmental suit.
Hers was the only body in this autopsy room. He had placed her on her back before sending the nanobots into her system. They were still working, finding out even more about her.
He knew now she was a slow-grow clone, which meant she had lived some twenty years, had hopes, dreams, and desires. As a forensic pathologist who had examined hundreds of human corpses—cloned and non-cloned—the only difference he had ever seen were the telomeres and the clone marks.
Slow-grow clones were human beings in everything but the law.
He could make the claim that fast-grow clones were too, that they had the mind of a child inside an adult body, but he tried not to think about that one. Because it meant all those horrors visited on fast-grow clones meant those horrors were visited on a human being that hadn’t seen more than a few years of life, an innocent in all possible ways.
He blinked hard, trying not to think about any of it. Then he stopped be
side her table. Lights moved along the back of it, different beams examining her, trying to glean her medical history and every single story her biology could tell. Now that it was clear the poison which killed her wouldn’t contaminate the dome, no one would investigate this case. No one would care.
No one legally had to care.
He sighed, then shook his head, wondering if he could make one final push to solve her murder. Detective DeRicci had asked for a list of bodies found in the crates. Broduer would make her that list after all, but before he did, he would see if those bodies were “human” or clones.
If they were clones, then there was a sabotage problem, some kind of property crime—hell, it wasn’t his job to come up with the charge, not when he gave her the thing to investigate.
But maybe he could find something to investigate, something that would have the side benefit of giving some justice to this poor woman, lying alone and unwanted on his autopsy table.
“I’m doing what I can,” he whispered, and then wished he hadn’t spoken aloud.
His desire to help her would be in the official record. Then he corrected himself: There would be no official record, since she wasn’t officially a murder victim.
He was so sorry about that. He’d still document everything he could. Maybe in the future, the laws would change. Maybe in the future, her death would matter as more than a statistic.
Maybe, in the future, she’d be recognized as a person, instead of something to be thrown away, like leftover food.
The Chief of Detectives, Andrea Gumiela, had an office one floor above DeRicci’s, but it was light years from DeRicci’s. DeRicci’s office was in the center of a large room, sectioned off with dark movable walls. She could protect her area by putting a bubble around it for a short period of time, particularly if she were conducting an interview that she felt wouldn’t work in one of the interview rooms, but there was no real privacy and no sense of belonging.
DeRicci hated working out in the center, and hoped one day she would eventually get an office of her own. The tiny aspirations of the upwardly mobile, her ex-husband would have said. She couldn’t entirely disagree. He had the unfortunate habit of being right.