Forever Magazine - December 2016 Read online

  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 beside 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.

  And as she looked at Gumiela’s office, which took up much of the upper floor, DeRicci knew she would never achieve privacy like this. She wasn’t political enough. Some days she felt like she was one infraction away from being terminated.

  Most days, she didn’t entirely care.
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  Andrea Gumiela, on the other hand, was the most political person DeRicci had ever met. Her office was designed so that it wouldn’t offend anyone. It didn’t have artwork on the walls, nor did it have floating imagery. The décor shifted colors when someone from outside the department entered.

  When someone was as unimportant as DeRicci, the walls were a neutral beige, and the desk a dark woodlike color. The couch and chairs at the far end of the room matched the desk.

  But DeRicci had been here when the Governor-General arrived shortly after her election, and the entire room shifted to vibrant colors—the purples and whites associated with the Governor-General herself.

  The shift, which happened as the Governor-General was announced, had disturbed DeRicci, but Gumiela managed it as a matter of course. She was going to get promoted some day, and she clearly hoped the Governor-General would do it.

  “Make it fast,” Gumiela said as DeRicci entered. “I have meetings all afternoon.”

  Gumiela was tall and heavyset, but her black suit made her look thinner than she was—probably with some kind of tech that DeRicci didn’t want to think about. Gumiela’s red hair was piled on top of her head, making her long face seem even longer.

  “I wanted to talk with you in person about that woman we found in the Ansel Management crate,” DeRicci said.

  Gumiela, for all her annoying traits, did keep up on the investigations.

  “I thought Rayvon Lake was in charge of that case,” Gumiela said.

  DeRicci shrugged. “He’s not in charge of anything, sir. Honestly, when it comes to cases like this, I don’t even like to consult him.”

  Gumiela studied her. “He’s your partner, Detective.”

  “Maybe,” DeRicci said, “but he doesn’t investigate crimes. He takes advantage of them.”

  “That’s quite a charge,” Gumiela said.

  “I can back it with evidence,” DeRicci said.

  “Do so,” Gumiela said, to DeRicci’s surprise. DeRicci frowned. Had Gumiela paired them so that DeRicci would bring actual evidence against Lake to the Chief’s office? It made an odd kind of sense. No one could control Lake, and no one could control DeRicci, but for different reasons. Lake had his own tiny fiefdom, and DeRicci was just plain contrary.

  “All right,” DeRicci said, feeling a little off balance. She hadn’t expected anything positive from Gumiela.

  And then Gumiela reverted to type. “I’m in a hurry, remember?”

  “Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” DeRicci said. This woman always set her teeth on edge. “The woman in the crate, she was killed with a hardening poison. For a while, Broduer thought she might have been put there to contaminate the food supply, but it was the wrong kind of poison. We’re okay on that.”

  Gumiela raised her eyebrows slightly. Apparently she hadn’t heard about the possible contamination. DeRicci had been worried that she had.

  “Good . . . ” Gumiela said in a tone that implied . . . and . . . ?

  “But, I got a list from him, and sir, someone is dumping bodies in those crates all over the city, and has been for at least a year, maybe more.”

  “No one saw this pattern?” Gumiela asked.

  “The coroner’s office noticed it,” DeRicci said, making sure she kept her voice calm. “Ansel Management noticed it, but the owner, Najib Ansel, tells me that over the decades his family has owned the business, they’ve seen all kinds of things dumped in the crates.”

  “Bodies, though, bodies should have caught our attention,” Gumiela said. Clearly, DeRicci had Gumiela’s attention now.

  “No,” DeRicci said. “The coroner got called in, but no one called us.”

  “Well, I’ll have to change this,” Gumiela said. “I’ll—”

  “Wait, sir,” DeRicci said. “They didn’t call us for the correct legal reasons.”

  Gumiela turned her head slightly, as if she couldn’t believe she had heard DeRicci right. “What reasons could those possibly be?”

  “The dead are all clones, sir.” DeRicci made sure none of her anger showed up in the tone of her voice.

  “Clones? Including this one?”

  “Yes, sir,” DeRicci said. “And they were all apparently slow-grow. If they had been considered human under the law, we would have said they were murdered.”

  Gumiela let out an exasperated breath. “This woman, this poisoned woman, she’s a clone?”

  “Yes, sir.” DeRicci knew she only had a moment here to convince Gumiela to let her continue on this case. “But I’d like to continue my investigation, sir, because—”

  “We’ll send it down to property crimes,” Gumiela said.

  “Sir,” DeRicci said. “This pattern suggests a practicing serial killer. At some point, he’ll find legal humans, and then he’ll be experienced—”

  “What is Ansel Management doing to protect its crates?” Gumiela said.

  DeRicci felt a small surge of hope. Was Gumiela actually considering this? “They have sensors that locate things by weight and size. They believe they’ve reported all the bodies that have come through their system in the last several years.”

  “They believe?” Gumiela asked.

  “There’s no way to know without checking every crate,” DeRicci said.

  “Well, this is a health and safety matter. I’ll contact the Armstrong City Inspectors and have them investigate all of the recycling/compost plants.”

  DeRicci tried not to sigh. This wasn’t going her way after all. “I think that’s a good idea, sir, but—”

  “Tell me, Detective,” Gumiela said. “Did you have any leads at all on this potential serial before you found out that the bodies belonged to clones?”

  DeRicci felt her emotions shift again. She wasn’t sure why she was so emotionally involved here. Maybe because she knew no one would investigate, which meant no one would stop this killer, if she couldn’t convince Gumiela to keep the investigation in the department.

  “She worked as a nanny for Luc Deshin,” DeRicci said. “He fired her this morning.”

  “I thought this was that case,” Gumiela said. “His people probably killed her.”

  “I considered that,” DeRicci said. “But he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of firing her if he was just going to kill her.”

  Gumiela harrumphed. Then she walked around the furniture, trailing her hand over the back of the couch. She was actually considering DeRicci’s proposal—and she knew DeRicci had a point.

  “Do you know who the original was?” Gumiela asked.

  DeRicci’s heart sank. She hadn’t wanted Gumiela to ask this question. DeRicci hadn’t recognized the name, but Lake had. He had left a message on DeRicci’s desk—a message that rose up when she touched the desk’s surface (the bastard)—which said, Why do we care that the daughter of an off-Moon crime lord got murdered?

  DeRicci then looked up the Mycenae family. They were a crime family and had been for generations, but Sonja herself didn’t seem to be part of the criminal side. She had attended the best schools on Earth, and actually had a nanny certificate. She had renounced her family both visibly and legally, and was trying to live her own life.

  “The original’s name is Sonja Mycenae,” DeRicci said.

  “The Mycenae crime family.” Gumiela let out a sigh. “There’s a pattern here, and one we don’t need to be involved in. Obviously there’s some kind of winnowing going on in the Earth-Moon crime families. I’ll notify the Alliance to watch for something bigger, but I don’t think you need to investigate this.”

  “Sir, I know Luc Deshin thought she was Sonja Mycenae,” DeRicci said. “He didn’t know she was a clone. That means this isn’t a crime family war—”

  “We don’t know what it is, Detective,” Gumiela said. “And despite your obvious interest in the case, I’m moving you off it. I have better things for you to do. I’ll send this and the other cases down to Property, and let them handle the investigation.”

  “Sir, please—”

  “Dete
ctive, you have plenty to do. I want that report on Rayvon Lake by morning.” Gumiela nodded at her.

  DeRicci’s breath caught. Gumiela was letting her know that if she dropped this case, she might get a new partner. And maybe, she would guarantee that Lake stopped polluting the department.

  There was nothing DeRicci could do. This battle was lost.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, not quite able to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  Gumiela had already returned to her desk.

  DeRicci headed for the door. As it opened, Gumiela said, “Detective, one last thing.”

  DeRicci closed the door and faced Gumiela, expecting some kind of reprimand or so type of admonition.

  “Have you done the clone notification?” Gumiela asked.

  Earth Alliance law required any official organization that learned of a clone to notify the original, if at all possible.

  “Not yet, sir,” DeRicci said. She had held off, hoping that she would keep the case. If she had, she could have gone to the Mycenae family, and maybe learned something that had relevance to the case.

  “Don’t,” Gumiela said. “I’ll take care of that too.”

  “I don’t mind, sir,” DeRicci said.

  “The Mycenae require a delicate touch,” Gumiela said. “It’s better if the notification goes through the most official of channels.”

  DeRicci nodded. She couldn’t quite bring herself to thank Gumiela. Or even to say anything else. So she let herself out of the office.

  And stopped in the hallway.

  For a moment, she considered going back in and arguing with Gumiela. Because Gumiela wasn’t going to notify anyone about the clone. Gumiela probably believed crime families should fight amongst themselves, so the police didn’t have to deal with them.

  DeRicci paused for a half second.

  If she went back in, she would probably lose her job. Because she would tell Gumiela exactly what she thought of the clone laws, and the way that Property would screw up the investigation, and the fact that people were actually dying and being placed in crates.