“I guess you’re going to do what you’re going to do—use the law to bludgeon the little guy.”
Rivka pursed her lips. Wrinkles appeared on her forehead as she assumed her contemplative face. “We use the law to protect people. You have not been bludgeoned, but should you be found guilty and the law calls for it, you will feel its full weight. The law is a framework in which civilized societies function. Don’t ever forget that. One of you violated the law, and then one or more of you murdered your brothers. We will find who did it. There are other points of law, but I don’t wish to bore you with technical details. Understand that you and your brothers, as you call them, are in a very dark place. The more we shine the light on you, the more we see.”
She waved at the guard in the hallway to take this version of Gregar away.
“We’ll be in touch.” She smiled as he walked away, his expression no longer neutral.
Once he was gone, Jael started slow-clapping. “You used the law to bludgeon him without actually threatening him. Bravo, sister!”
“You bludgeoned that smug look right off his face,” Buster remarked. They took turns clapping her on the back.
Grainger thanked the technicians as the group departed. The senior jurist remained silent, having watched the proceedings to make sure that Opheramin law was upheld. The Magistrates had made it clear that she was no longer in control. She realized that once she had called for help, she had passed the buck.
Maybe it had been her naiveté, having never referred a case to the Federation for adjudication. Deep down inside, she didn’t want this case. It was troubling, and after all, Opheramin was a peaceful planet...
“Imagine what you could have accomplished if you’d interrogated him while in the form of a werewolf!” Chi whispered.
“You can talk while you’re changed?”
“Well, no,” Chi stammered.
Rivka didn’t bother to reply. She wanted to get back on board the frigate and dig into the report Ankh had sent, as well as look into the analysis of the brain scans. On the bus, she never once looked up from her datapad. The others looked out the window, taking in their surroundings. Red and Lindy watched for threats, cradling their railguns to bring them comfort and peace of mind.
Red and Lindy bracketed their Magistrate since she was studying and oblivious to everything around her. The other Magistrates left her alone.
“What’s your ship’s name?” Buster asked.
“Does it need a name?” Grainger replied with a shrug.
“Of course it needs a name!” Jael remarked. “I call mine Starseeker’s Chariot.”
“Your boat used to be a druggie’s personal yacht. It’ll hold one person comfortably, and you see it as a chariot?” Chi couldn’t figure out how the name fit.
“Yes. That is the correct name. What do you call yours?”
“Doomsayer’s Deathride,” Chi shot back.
“Bullshit.” Jael looked down her nose at him.
“Okay. It’s called Red Corvette. Don’t judge me.”
“That is all I’m going to do.”
“No. I don’t have a name, and I don’t think I need one. The frigate is hull number sixty-nine.” Grainger tried not to smirk as he hurried into the ship. Jael rolled her eyes, and Chi and Buster groaned.
Rivka remained oblivious.
Once in the ship, Red put Rivka at a table with a comfortable chair before conducting a quick search of the ship. Lindy stood guard until the outer hatch closed and she received the thumbs-up.
The other Magistrates gathered around Rivka.
“Oh, jeez,” she grumped. “Ankh wants to talk us through the data.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Rivka chuckled. “Coffee for everyone!” she declared and headed for the galley. No one offered to help, and she didn’t need it. She brought five mugs back.
“Can’t you just order him to send the data?”
“No,” Rivka answered. “My crew are all volunteers. We work as a team. No one is giving anyone orders.”
Red snorted.
“I heard that!” Rivka pointed at him. He attempted his best innocent face. “And no one gives Ankh shit. He’s one of the best in the universe at what he does. He may be a big-headed but tiny alien, but he’s on my team. I will beat the living shit out anyone who gives him grief.”
Grainger looked at her from beneath a single raised eyebrow.
“If I can’t do it, I’ll have Red and Lindy do it. Your ass will be beaten, so don’t cross that line.” Rivka looked from face to face, unconvinced that they were going to play nice. “Fuckers,” she added for emphasis.
Nods suggested they would try.
Rivka handed out the coffee and brought up the main screen. Ankh’s face appeared. It was live, but it could easily have been a single image. Ankh’s expression was blank, and he didn’t move.
“Thanks for the analysis, Ankh. Can you give us the executive summary up front and then maybe we can ask questions to fill in the blanks?” Rivka asked hopefully.
“No,” he replied simply. “Let me start with the Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms. There are approximately ten million in the human genome. Ninety percent of these will be identical from one human to another. Needless to say,” Ankh started.
But you’re going to say it anyway, Rivka thought, joining her fellow Magistrates in taking a long sip of coffee.
“In the clones, there is well beyond a ninety-nine percent match. In fact, each of the DNA samples, including those from the two bodies in the morgue, were exactly the same, except in the minute area where they were different. There, each of the five was different. No single marker identified one of the five as more human than the others. All five are distinctly human.
“So I continued with the short tandem repeats, which were, expectedly, inconclusive. Since the SNP data was complete, I looked at the mitochondrial DNA to build an exact sequence. Despite their similarities, I expected to see differences deep within the strands.”
Ankh stopped, and Rivka froze mid-sip. “Did we lose the connection?”
“No,” Ankh replied.
“So what’s your conclusion?” Rivka wondered.
“There are five clones.”
“None of them is human?” Grainger blurted.
“All of them are human,” Ankh replied.
“Is one more human than the others?” Rivka prodded.
“No.”
“You’ve been a great deal of help, Ankh. Thank you! So, from what I hear you saying, we haven’t found the human from which these five were cloned.” Rivka crossed her arms as she started to descend into thought.
“I assume the original donor is dead.”
The Magistrates focused on Ankh’s face.
“What makes you say that?” Grainger asked.
“Because the cloning process in this instance, which included background data from the case file, suggests that it is a destructive technique using significant quantities of source material from the donor’s organs. Namely, brain matter and internal organs.”
“So you didn’t need to do the analysis of their DNA at all?” Grainger’s expression soured as he asked the question. Rivka bit her lip to keep from laughing.
“Human genome analysis is fascinating. I’ve been able to compare the samples to other human data that R2D2, the research and development unit, maintains. Fascinating.”
Rivka purposefully took a slow sip of coffee, hiding her face behind her mug.
“Thank you, Ankh. You have been spectacular, and your information most enlightening. We have to go and lay down the law. I’ll be home soon.” Rivka quickly tapped her pad to turn off the screen and cut the signal.
“He couldn’t have started with that?” Grainger asked.
“I told you,” Rivka said. “But does it matter as much as the data he shared? I have it all here. I also have a quick brief on dealing with clones.”
“Of course you do,” Chi said. “That changes things.”
“Not really,” Rivka said, which stopped the others in their tracks. “We still have a murderer to find. We were always going to have to adjudicate the future of the clones, but now we don’t get to chuck the original human into the hoosegow. Shame. That being said, who ran the cloning process if it wasn’t the original guy? Maybe we have someone new to look for.”
Chapter Six
Immediately following Ankh’s revelation, they made a trip to the morgue and then to the scene of the crime. “Why didn’t we do this first?” Chi asked.
“Because this stuff will keep. Perps will keep changing their story, the more time you give them,” Rivka replied. She’d been the one who insisted on interrogating the suspects first. Grainger had agreed with her logic.
When they reached the morgue and looked at the bodies, they got no additional insight. Rivka spent a total of five seconds examining the dead. She focused her attention on the one who conducted the autopsy, which on Opheramin, wasn’t a doctor but a scientist. Still called a coroner, he talked about the details of the wound and made a guess as to how it could have been made.
“Blunt object from behind,” Grainger surmised. “Same for both.”
The scientist deflated with the simplification. “Pretty much.”
“Same method for both suggests a single perp, but what if the perps were identical clones?” Rivka pondered. “What about motive and opportunity?”
Rivka looked from one face to the next, but no one could answer. They’d read the investigative reports, but nothing had stood out. For Rivka, it wasn’t what stood out, but the overall picture. It wasn’t a single smoking gun, but an entire story. Too often there was a single clue that tied the suspect to the crime.
And then there were cases like this where none of it made sense. They were all guilty of something, but maybe none of them were.
“Why?” Rivka asked.
“There can be only one?” Grainger quoted from one of his favorite movies.
“Maybe it is as simple as that,” Buster replied, fully engaged. Chi nodded, looking like he wanted to say something.
“Cheese Blintz? Come on, man, out with it,” Grainger encouraged.
“The three in custody have gone to great lengths through their evasion to conceal the truth. To me, that suggests they are guilty. We can’t catch them in a lie since they’ve said nothing, which was wise on their part. They don’t need to incriminate themselves. As you so astutely pointed out before we started, we need to convict the guilty using evidence.”
“And we still don’t have any of that,” Buster said. “I read the file. The fact that all five of them have identical fingerprints jumped out at me. How is that possible?”
“Beau?” Grainger asked his datapad.
“I would have said that it is not possible, but I will revise my opinion based on current evidence.”
“That wasn’t much help,” Jael remarked. “Shall we explore the crime scene?”
“Beau, can you have the legal authorities meet us there to give us access, please?”
“I am contacting them now.” The group waited for a full minute before Beau returned. “They will be there when you arrive.”
“I don’t know how you do it, but I like it. You are the epitome of efficiency, Mister Beau.”
“Thank you. I—” Grainger cut him off and stuffed the datapad into his coat.
“Shall we?” He motioned for the others to lead the way. As usual, Red was the first one out the door.
The two-story set of rooms was within an apartment complex. It looked more like a laboratory than a home, considering the sterility of the environment. Everything that was painted was white, and the majority of the tables were stainless steel. A small corner was splashed with the brown of a couch, two recliners, and the reflection from an inactive video screen.
“Hard to believe that two murders happened in here.” Rivka walked slowly through the area, looking at the outlines on the floor where each body had lain. “They didn’t find a weapon.”
“The case file was glaringly devoid, yes,” Grainger said as if answering a question. Rivka had been making a statement as she thought out loud. “Any thoughts, people?”
Chi walked through the area. “We’ve seen plenty of dead bodies in our day,” he started as he examined the way the person had fallen. He looked at his datapad for pictures of the scene and studied the autopsy notes. And then he returned. “Their heads hit something.”
“Of course their heads hit something,” Jael said.
“What I mean is, as opposed to something hitting their heads. The momentum was generated by the head moving to impact a stationary object.”
“Why didn’t the autopsy say that?” Jael asked skeptically.
Rivka speculated on the answer. “This is a peaceful planet. They don’t see these kinds of things here.” She closed her eyes as she turned to face different parts of the room. In her mind’s eye, she tried to recreate the events, imagining the bodies first and then moving backward through time. The timelines diverged rapidly.
“They weren’t killed here,” she said. Everyone nodded. The coroner had also noted that in his report. “Did someone carry the bodies through the hallways of the complex? I doubt it. Spread out,” Rivka told them. “I’ve sent the three-dimensional image of the object or surface shaped like the wound.”
The others accessed their datapads. Chi and Buster went upstairs. The others stayed on the first level. It didn’t take long.
“Here,” Chi called over the railing into the open area below. The Magistrates headed up the stairs with Lindy close behind. Red stayed in the apartment’s open doorway, looking out, not in.
There was an office with desks upstairs, but only a single grossly oversized bed. Jael said what everyone was thinking. “That’s pretty creepy.”
Chi pointed to the decorations on the bed’s footboard. “Could have been any one of those.”
The four protrusions were round, about half the size of a human head. “Why didn’t their investigators find this? It’s almost a gimme.”
“Peaceful planet. The investigators were probably distraught at seeing the violence. Look at us. We’re immune to it.”
Buster and Chi made big eyes at each other. “I’ve done far worse,” Bustamove declared.
“Which of us hasn’t?” Grainger asked softly. Even Rivka nodded slowly.
“Back to the crime. Are we certain that all five were in here?”
“Yes,” Grainger replied.
“Then all three are complicit, no matter which one was pounding heads,” Chi suggested.
“Odd that both would be in here and die in the same way. What’s the chance of that? Suggests it was deliberate,” Jael offered. She gave Rivka a broad smile.
“Teeth,” Rivka said.
“What? I brushed.”
“Not you. The perps. What if there’s a senior clone? One who was made off-planet somewhere and then made the other four? That senior clone would be the one who would be guilty of cloning the others. They talk strangely, did you see that? They never showed their teeth, except that third one. He was more than happy to show his pearly whites. Back to the morgue.”
The others followed Rivka as she hurried out. Grainger ordered the bus to stand by. Rivka started to run.
Red saw her coming and signaled for her to fall in behind him. He jogged slowly down the hallway.
“What’s the rush?” Chi whispered.
“I don’t know,” Buster replied.
“It is kind of exciting, don’t you think? Cracking the crime to mete out Justice!” Jael declared.
“That’s what we do every day,” Buster said.
“Not like this,” Grainger admitted. “I would have already sent the three suspects to Jhiordaan. None of us do it like this, except for her.”
“I like her way. Slower, but I like it.” Jael nodded as she trotted after the big man carrying the railgun.
When they reached the bus, Rivka took the seat behind Red and hunche
d over her datapad. “Beau, please connect me to Doctor Toofakre on Federation Border Station 7.”
A happy face appeared, his mask pulled down past his chin.
“Rivka! To what do I owe the pleasure? Or maybe I missed a lunch engagement, and you’re going to arrest me.” He looked alarmed, but only for a moment as Rivka chuckled.
“No. I need some dental forensics. Can you describe genetic conditions for teeth that would get fixed, but still could leave the same dental pattern?”
“You’ve come to the right man. To answer your question, yes.”
She waited, but he didn’t say anything else. She knew the image hadn’t frozen because he blinked slowly and regularly.
“Well?”
“Well, what? I answered your question. Was there something else?”
“What are the genetic conditions?”
“As you have demonstrated, that is a completely different question. Precision in language, Magistrate, as you’ve lectured me.” Tyler smiled but continued quickly after seeing the look on Rivka’s face. “The first thing that comes to mind is amelogenesis imperfecta. The enamel doesn't form properly, resulting in teeth that are misshapen, stained brown, and often painful to the patient. They come in this way from birth due to a genetic abnormality.”
“I suspect they weren’t misshapen in a way that needed to be corrected since the dental patterns are identical in the five that we are examining.”
“It’s quite impossible for five people to have the exact same dental pattern,” the dentist said, shaking his head.
“Not if they’re identical clones, but only one had his teeth cleaned up, if I had to fathom a guess, and that would not have carried over to the others.” Rivka looked somewhere else, already thinking ahead until Tyler waved from the screen to get her attention. “And consider this privileged information as part of an ongoing investigation. Tell no one or I’ll have to kick your ass.”
Doctor Toofakre’s mouth opened, but she cut him off before he could speak. She looked up and smiled. “Got you.”
Grainger met her gaze. “You owe him a nice dinner and maybe a short getaway on a pleasure moon somewhere.”
Judge, Jury, & Executioner Boxed Set Page 44