The Day Before (5 page)

 

CHAPTER 5

What is “I”? Who is “Me”? These are abstract concepts with no meaning beyond the limited definitions society grants them. The belief in “Self” ' is as dangerous to the welfare of the Collective as the belief in gods.

~ Excerpt from
The Oneness of Being
by Oaza Moun I1–2072

Friday May 24, 2069

Alabama District 3

Commonwealth of North America

S
am pulled into the bureau parking lot and stopped in front of the morgue, where Agent MacKenzie sat on the curb. “Get in,” she said through the rolled-­down window. “I want to get out of here before Marrins notices that I'm missing. I'm supposed to be doing background checks today.”

The perpetual
eau de morgue
that hung around MacKenzie like swamp gas climbed into the car with him.

“I was thinking about the Verville traces last night. Isn't the absence of the Verville a good argument for a black-­market clone?”

He rubbed a shaking hand through shaggy brown hair—­probably dislodging a whole colony of lice—­and sighed. “Jane is . . . was . . . in her thirties.”

The car switched on with a soft hum and swish of liquid cells coming to life. Cold air seeped between the seats as she pulled out of the parking lot. “You keep saying that like it means something.”

“Jane would have been about ten when the clone-­marker law of 2048 was passed. When she was born . . .” MacKenzie stared off into space for a moment. He shook himself. “When Jane was born, the United States wasn't . . . wasn't even a signer of the United Charter. The United dollar wasn't the basis for currency in the western hemisphere, and cloning was in its infancy. ­People weren't cloning shadows for possible organ transplant in forty years, they were cloning . . . replacements.”

Sam turned off the main highway. “So, she was an expensive clone?”

“Replacements. Children lost t-­to tragedy, kidnapping.” MacKenzie shrugged in a forlorn way. ­“People don't . . . didn't talk about them.”

“Kid goes missing, mom and dad go traveling, kid comes back,” Sam filled in. “I've heard about it, but she could still be a clone. The same laws apply. Even if she predates the clone marker, something will show up on the Verville traces. That was part of the law, too: every cloning technique tried, used, or hypothesized needed a test on file.”

MacKenzie shook his head. “Early clones were . . . th-­they didn't last long. Twenty years, twenty-­five. The first clones are already . . . dead.”

“I checked that. There are clones that predate 2048.”

“Not black-­market clones. They cut corners. Do things so the clones age faster. It . . . it makes finding the Verville traces hard.”

She glanced at him, trying to keep her anger in check. Nothing was ever easy. But they all had jobs to do, and
his
was to find those markers.

The car chimed, and a red phone light blinked. “Ambassador Pinuela-­Rose,” the car announced as it slowed automatically to compensate for driver distraction. A little yellow light blinked on the outer rim of the side-­door mirrors to indicate that the driver had taken a call and was distracted. It was one of those little safety features that Sam could have lived without if law allowed.

“Rose here,” Sam said in her best I'm-­working-­keep-­it-­quick voice.

“Samantha.” Her mother's voice filled the car. “You haven't called me in over a week.”

In the seat next to her, Agent MacKenzie turned to the window, doing his best impression of a rock. It was almost as convincing as his impression of a human.

“Work problems,” she said, keeping it vague. MacKenzie gave her a strange look; he probably thought he was her work problem.
He's not too far off the mark.
Sam turned the phone volume down and the AC up, so it blasted his head.
Subtle-­hints-­r-­us.

“It's Friday, I expect you'll be at Mass tonight?”

“That's my plan,” she lied, snapping a quick glare at MacKenzie to keep him quiet. “Mom, this isn't a good time for me. Can we talk later?” She put as much emphasis on the word later as she could.

Her mother tutted. “I'm traveling this weekend. Embassy receptions and a new general to meet. I'll call again on Monday to straighten your schedule out. There's a D.C. visit coming up in my schedule if no one cancels again, and I want you to be there.”

“Washington, D.C., isn't really driving distance from Alabama. The Commonwealth is a little bit bigger than Europe.”

“Samantha, darling, that wasn't a request. I will send my itinerary to you on Monday when everything is finalized. Be good. Go to Mass and confession.”

“Yes, Mother. Good-­bye, Mother.” Sam hung up and rolled her eyes. “Sorry.”

MacKenzie didn't acknowledge her.

“All mothers are nags, right?” she tried again.

“Don't know. I haven't talked to mine in five years.”

Sam felt a twinge of guilt. “Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't realize she was dead.”

“She's not.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence. She parked the car next to the open field. The sad, sun-­bleached evidence flags waved in the faint breeze, marking where pieces of Jane had been found. “Here we are, Jane's penultimate resting place.”

MacKenzie climbed out of the car and scanned the field with a frown. “Here?” He pointed at the open field in confusion.

“Yes, here.” Sam stepped into the field, ready to do the tour. They walked the perimeter. The ground was hard from weeks without rain and showed no evidence of recent activity. No tire tracks. No footprints. For all the world, it looked like Jane Doe had dropped from the open sky.

“This . . . this doesn't fit,” MacKenzie said with a shake of his head.

While the ME stumbled around, Sam knelt to get a ground view of the scenery: bare field, pine trees, oak, and scrub on the hazy edges, wildflowers wilting and going to seed in the heat, a glint of metal on the ground. She reached under a spiky weed for the glint. Just in time, Sam remembered she was at a crime scene. “There's something here. Go get my evidence kit from the backseat.”

MacKenzie fetched her bag from the car and handed it over. Using a green flag to mark the spot, Sam picked up a silver ring with her tweezers and dropped it into the evidence bag. It was delicate and pretty, something a woman would wear.

The silver ring shone in the sunlight. “Did Jane wear a ring?” Sam peered closer, she'd had a ring like it years ago. She'd lost it in one of the moves after college.

MacKenzie frowned at her. “Um . . . ?”

“Was there a tan line on her fingers? Is there any reason to think this is hers, or is this something we should be trying to pin on a suspect?”

He turned away, dodging the bag. “I-­I have to check.” He looked around the field in confusion. “Jane was frozen after death. She . . . when she showed up at the lab, the decomposition was slowed, but still fairly advanced.” He frowned at the field as if personally offended by the Alabama sawgrass.

She tucked the evidence bag in her kit with her gloves and shrugged. “So they brought her to the dump site in a refrigerated truck?”

“Yeah . . . probably.” Now he was staring at the cloudless sky.

Sam craned her neck to look up. Maybe he was looking for aliens, you never knew with his type. “Missing something?”

“Trees. Jane's face. Her head was crushed postmortem, like she'd run into a wall or been thrown into something. I'm still doing reconstruction.” He sighed. “Jane Doe was tortured, over days. Strangled by ropes, and hands. Killed, I don't know how. Frozen. Crushed. Arm torn off.”

“She had to fall somewhere. Her face was crushed by an impact of some kind.” She studied the empty sky with renewed interest. “There are some trees near the stream over there where the truck driver found her arm and hand.” She pointed out the copse of pines to MacKenzie. “The rest of the body was in the middle of the field, but we didn't find rope or anything.”

“Plane?” he guessed.

“That's what I thought originally. The only case I've seen with that kind of facial trauma was a parachute accident we looked at in the academy, but the nearest airport is over forty miles away. It's a major metro airport, high-­security, no baggage allowed. Strictly commuters to Atlanta and Birmingham.”

“Crop duster?”

“No crops in this area, this whole place is marked for natural renewal through 2107. No planting, farming, gardening, or harvesting of biological materials allowed.” Sam raised an eyebrow at his impressed expression. “What? I did do my homework after I read the full autopsy.”

“Sport diving?”

“Skydiving?” Sam shook her head. “I haven't heard about anything like that out here, but I can check to see if there are any companies that use this area.”

They walked through the field twice more in search of more clues, but their hopes were in vain. Discouraged, they retreated from the baking heat to the cooler confines of the car.

“I see three possibilities,” Sam said as she turned the car on and started driving back to town. “The most likely is that Jane Doe was killed by someone she knew, they dumped her, and they are the only ones who would have reported her so, no missing person file. Domestic dispute is the top of my list. There may have been elements of bondage play.”

MacKenzie stared out the window. “No.”

“It's a possibility.”

“No evidence of rape.”

“Maybe her husband was a psycho killer. It's happened before. The second variation there, which you keep trying to rule out, is that Jane is a clone. Her owner didn't want her, and she was dumped. Or maybe we're looking at a case of heavy self-­aggression: if you can't commit suicide, you can kill your clone. The ultimate-­sacrifice style of thing.”

“Killing a clone is not the ultimate sacrifice,” MacKenzie cut in vehemently.

Sam looked over at him. His face was white, and his jaw clenched.
Message received: no-­fly zone.
“Right. Sorry. Moving on.” She waited to see if he would relax. Mackenzie did, a tiny bit, and she nodded. “Scenario three, Jane isn't listed as a missing person because no one knows she's missing yet but her killer. Maybe she was the artistic type who liked to hike through the hinterlands, and her family wasn't expecting her back for a few weeks.”

“Doesn't fit the timeline,” MacKenzie said with a shake of his head.

“What was the time of death?”

The ME shifted in his seat. “Hard to determine. She was a . . . a prisoner for over a month.”

“Over a month? How much over a month?”

“From the rate of healing and the sores? Maybe . . . maybe three months? Maybe a little less.”

“So Jane went missing in February?”

Agent MacKenzie nodded.

Sam crossed herself. “Missing for three months changes things a little. I suppose Jane could have moved, then gone missing during or just after the relocation. Her old friends wouldn't be looking, and there would be no one locally to sound an alarm.”

MacKenzie shrugged.

“There were no hits on her dental records?”

“Not in the public files.”

“You have third-­degree clearance—­check the private citizens, government workers, and run a check on missing-­presumed-­dead from around when Jane was born. I'd hate for this to turn into another Torture House case, but it's looking like we can't rule it out.” She chewed on that for a minute. “Marrins will start salivating. He'd love a big case like that.”

And he'd scoop it from me in a heartbeat, leaving me a case shy of getting out of here.

“There's . . . there's another option,” MacKenzie said in a quiet voice.

“Mmm?”

“Jane could have been replaced. She was muscular, real . . . real fit. A soldier, maybe. Or . . . or law enforcement. The muscles were”—­he moved his hands as if trying to twist something—­“were right. The wear on her bones was right.” He stopped, and Sam waited for his brain to catch up with his tongue. “She could have been killed and replaced with a clone.”

Sam made a face. “That's just disgusting. Wouldn't someone notice?”

“A well-­trained shadow? No. No . . . Jane could be . . . be the woman we have in the morgue and h-­have a shadow running around as . . . as her.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Really? I think you've been reading too many science-­fiction books.”

“It's happened.” He rubbed a hand across his face. “There was the Elendorf Securities case back in '64, and at least two intelligence agents targeted . . .” Mac faltered as he looked up at her. “What?”

“How do you know this?”

“The Elendorf thing was all over the news. It sounded like a soap opera, ‘CEO's son replaced him with clone to keep stepmother number four from getting near his trust fund.' Someone threatened to make a movie about it. How did you not hear about it? ”

“I meant, how did you know about the intelligence agents?”

Mac shrugged. “I talk to ­people.”

“It's still sounds far-­fetched.”

He shrugged. “We tried to match Jane to a missing person, and we couldn't. If a shadow stole her identity, we're searching in the wrong pool for our fish.”

“Fine, let's rule out the shadow theory. Run Jane's profile through the census database. If she's still alive, I'll convince the judge to keep the case open and get a warrant for a DNA sample. And MacKenzie,” she said, as they pulled up in front of the morgue, “get off the pills.”

He started guiltily and nodded.

S
am turned the ring, still in the bag, so it caught the light, and she could read the inscription again. “
Soyez fidèle à les petite choses, parce-­qu'il est dans lui que ta force restais
.” Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. A quote from Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta.