Decoherence (4 page)

“Anonymous email?” she said hopefully.

He leaned close to her ear. “Sam?”

“Hmmm?”

“You are not getting paid for this.”

“But . . .”

“And it's after nine.”

Her shoulders slumped. “I bet you're hungry.”

“Mmmhmmm.” His lips brushed the sensitive skin of her neck. “Come on, sweetheart. Let it go for a few hours. You know that cases don't get solved overnight. This is real life. Someone has to go knock on doors, pound the ground, sort through personal effects. Eventually, a link will appear if there is one. No crime is perfect. But sitting here and getting upset won't speed up the process.”

Sam let him tug her away from the computer. “You're right. You're perfect.” She squeezed his hand in thanks. “Do you still want shrimp?”

“We have leftovers from yesterday.” He kissed her, long and slow.

When she opened her eyes again, Mac was smiling.

“You said I was perfect.”

Sam laughed. “You already knew you were the most perfect man alive.”

“Did I tell you that you were perfect? Because, you are.”

“Does that make us the perfect ­couple?” She was going to kiss him again, but Bosco wiggled in between. She shot the dog an angry look.

“Want me to heat up the spaghetti from last night?” Mac asked as he kissed her temple and nudged the dog away with his foot.

“Not really,” she admitted. She smiled. “I'd rather strip you naked.”

“Oh?”

“You still have energy left? Or is it too late?”

Mac picked her up and spun her around. “It's never too late for us.”

 

CHAPTER 6

“Of all the possibilities I've seen, only the future remains a mystery.”

~ excerpt from the private journal Agent 5 of the Ministry of Defense I1—­2063

Day 186/365

Year 5 of Progress

(July 5, 2069)

Central Command

Third Continent

Prime Reality

L
ockers rattled and the building shook as Donovan's team jumped through time. The MIA was getting a workout this week. Futures were fracturing as the world government argued. Jump teams sent to ensure the future of humanity were leaving on an almost hourly basis, reacting to the splintered paths of probability.

Rose slammed her locker shut, avoiding the mirrored, chrome surface and the wraith's face she knew she'd see there. Lack of sleep was catching up with her. That, and the constant barrage of the war with time. She tugged her thinning hair into a tight ponytail and shoved away the memory of thick black waves curling over a face fat from luxurious living.

In other iterations, she was a pampered diva, a politician, a police officer, and a motivational speaker. She'd watched her other-­selves from a sniper scope and pulled the trigger without hesitation every time. Those Samanthas were a lie, the person she would be if she were willing to trade fame and luxury for the future of humanity.

Not even an option.

Metal rasped against metal as the MIA warmed up again. In the far corner, a locker painted matte black popped open.

With a curse, Rose crossed the room, then crossed herself. She believed in no god, unless feverish devotion to the math equations of time counted as a religion, but the motion of her hands touching forehead, heart, and shoulders was grounding.

The Locker of Doom rattled, the engraved plaque with the warning never to store anything here and the number 666 swung loose. Rose caught the plaque, rehung it, and glanced inside.

Silky black curls damp with blood obscured the face of a woman wearing a lacy canary-­yellow camisole. She'd been folded in thirds, legs tucked up close to her chest, and placed in the locker. This was exactly the sick sort of joke that she didn't have time for.

Automatically, her hand went to the comm unit hooked on her belt, then she hesitated. There was no one to call. Emir had ordered the police force out of Central Command four months earlier. The military police loyal to Central Command weren't equipped to handle an investigation, and they weren't allowed in the building anyway.

The closest thing to a detective who was available were the forensic techs who worked with the infiltration teams exploring new iterations.

Rose knelt, anticipating the first round of questions: Who was she, and where was she from? Brushing aside the hair so she could see the girl's face, she tried to match the deceased with anyone she'd ever seen. Elegant lines of a thin, aristocratic nose and high cheekbones—­one cracked by the force of a blow—­with skin the color of dark sandstone, and all unfamiliar. The woman could have been any of the millions of women in the world with the dominant genes for darker coloring. Smeared black eyeliner and gold eye shadow gave her away as a stranger, a victim from another timeline. There was no makeup in the Prime. Little wastes, that's what they were . . . paints and colors and brushes that served no purpose and squandered workers' time.

Emir would never authorize a tech to investigate. There was too much at risk right now and too good a chance that the dead woman had come from a now-­vanished iteration.

Rose closed Locker 666, shoving it shut and checking the lock. The murdered girl didn't belong here. Didn't belong to her.

Yet she felt the dreaded tug of curiosity and guilt. She was the Paladin, after all, a node who held the future together simply by existing. Paladins were meant to be champions who could see past the surface to the potential of a person. It sounded strangely unscientific the first time Dr. Emir had explained her role in the world. Math and physics she understood. Gravity was the same anywhere (or anywhen) on the planet. But intuition?

Her fingers lingered on the lock.

Intuition said this wasn't just an anomalous murder victim who had been picked up by the MIA's oft-­generated temporal cyclones. She wouldn't have been able to explain why she felt it, but this felt intentional.

She'd been on the team that had calculated where the temporal cyclones could appear in Prime, and all of those were sealed with black pillars. Their work had taken the bulk of a year because the calculations required working with complex equations. For someone else to do the math and find an unguarded touchpoint was unlikely, but the Locker of Doom had its name for a reason. Every so often, the temporal waves shifted just right, and everything in Locker 666 was pulled into another iteration.

Usually, the temporal cyclones brought back odd things. A lost sock, a patch of grass, a set of unfortunate koi from someone's pond. To the best of her knowledge, a temporal cyclone had never brought in a body. It wasn't impossible, of course. Her team had used the anomalies to infiltrate well-­guarded iterations before, then made every effort to prevent intruders from using the same manner of ingress.

She bit her thumbnail and looked back at the locker. Somewhere among in her infiltration gear she had a fingerprinting kit. No one would raise an eyebrow if she searched the massive database stocked with information from thousands of variations of history.

The building shook again, and as the locker rattled, the sound hollowed. Without looking, Rose knew the girl had been swept away, another piece of flotsam in the ocean of time. Her body perfectly hidden from all authority. Taken by time, and with her, time took Rose's chance to make a different decision.

She stood, studying the locker until she saw what her intuition had picked up before her conscious mind acknowledged it: blood drops on the outside of the locker. Jane Doe had been outside Locker 666. Child of another time though she was, Jane Doe had been here. Possibly even killed here.

She grabbed her travel kit from her locker and pulled out an evidence bag for the blood sample. Central Command probably didn't have the woman's files, so there was unlikely to be a way to look for a genetic match, but it didn't matter. Even when a timeline was destroyed, there were echoes.

Every crime left a trace.

Swabbing the sample, she cleaned the floor with a frown and marched out of the locker room. No one looking would see a change in her behavior, but it was there as she watched the techs run past. She saw the morass of humanity swirling around her and watched for the killer who hid in the crowd.

 

CHAPTER 7

“Only a law that treats everyone as equals has a right to be called a law at all.”

~ excerpt from a speech by Mississippi Governor Chantrell Norin I2—­2051

Thursday October 31, 2069

Florida District 18

Commonwealth of North America

Iteration 2

“A
nd this,” Dr. Runiker said with a ringmaster's flourish as he pulled the sheet off the body, “is another kind of corpse.”

“Looks Latina to me,” said one of the students with a laugh.

“Looks hot,” whispered his friend in a voice that made Ivy take a large sidestep away from the university biology students.

They were on an anatomy trip for class credit. She was there on a goodwill tour because no one else from the New Smyrna Police Department wanted to drive four hours. The fact that she was a Shadow—­a government-­owned clone freed from her master because of her gene donor's sudden death—­meant she was low person on the totem pole. It didn't matter that in January she'd be a legally recognized human being—­it was easier to remember that until then, she was just another corporate bot. She didn't let it faze her, though.
Better a grunt than property.

So here she was, unhappy about the babysitting assignment but knowing it could be worse. She looked at the bruised corpse, trying to guess what made it special.

Runiker waggled feathered eyebrows. “What makes this body unique?” he asked the crowd as if echoing Ivy's thoughts. “What makes her different than all the others.”

“Type of death?” one of the girls asked. She had a red kitten heels and a look that said I Am Going To Be Your Boss Someday. Very Type-­A—­and exactly the kind of person who would hate Ivy for existing.

Because clones like her took up valuable jobs. Or so the opposition argued. Ivy worked at the police station, and she'd never seen anyone offer to take her jobs, whether it was sorting through garbage looking for evidence or cleaning the drunk tank. Seemed to her that she was doing five jobs for a meager paycheck that went straight to her caseworker. But what did she know.

I'm just a Shadow.

Her pen bent in her fist.

“Wrong,” Runiker said. “This woman was beaten, probably in a case of domestic violence. Next guess?”

“Importance of the victim?” a baby-­faced boy asked.

Runiker pointed to him. “Close.”

“Identity?” Ivy said.

The doctor looked at her for the first time.

Ivy pointed to the corpse's feet. “No toe tag. She hasn't been identified, or if she has, her family is paying to keep her identity secret.”

Runiker inclined his head. “Thank you, er, is it Officer?”

“Officer Clemens, New Smyrna PD. And this lady is a Jane Doe.” Pride crept into her voice. She was solar at her job, better than good. She'd never been credited, and never allowed to work alone, but she was made with good genes, and she was doing more with her brain than her gene donor had ever considered trying. Although she didn't like to dwell on that thought. Her gene donor had died before she'd reached adulthood, and it was a little unfair to judge the child based on what Ivy had dug up on her parents.

Runiker clapped his hands. “Very good. All right—­who knows the procedure for handling an unknown body?” He held up a finger. “Don't help them, Officer. The students need to learn this.” There was a twist on the way he said students that made it sound like he meant to say humans.

Ivy buried the thought as another overreaction on her part. Her paperwork was all labeled
SHADOW
and even the most forward-­thinking ­people wound up having some innate bias against her clone status. Even if he'd meant the insult, there was nothing she could do, not for sixty-­one more days. When the Caye Law went into effect January 1, she'd be legally recognized as a human being. Until then, she was an oddity. A rich man's insurance against the untimely demise of his daughter. Subhuman.

A college student wearing a Violent Violets shirt under her knee-­length blue lab coat raised a hand. “We should check the missing person's database first.”

“No, but good guess,” said Runiker.

“Facial recognition for legal ID?” another student asked.

“No.”

“Fingerprints?” an exasperated voice asked from the back of the room. It was getting close to lunchtime, and the pampered children were losing their patience.

They'd never make it in the real world as doctors. Emergencies didn't care if you were hungry, or tired, or having a bad hair day. When the sirens screamed, you either could do your job hungry and tired, or you let someone get hurt because you failed. Ivy had never needed to learn that the hard way. This was her second chance at life, and her first chance to be more than an organ factory.

Runiker must have noticed his audience's impatience because he sighed. “Quick clone test first. If this is a clone, what do we do?”

“Toss it in with the rest of the trash!” said the boy who'd commented on the corpse's physical attractiveness.

Ivy scribbled his name down. That kid was either going to therapy or become a serial killer before the decade was out. And it never hurt to have her suspects lined up early.

She raised her hand. “As of January, even a clone will warrant a full investigation. Right now, most cities have a policy of checking out who damaged a clone. They can only be charged with littering”—­a fact that made her furious—­ “but someone willing to kill a clone will often escalate to murdering humans. It's not like you can tell the difference without a gene test.”

Runiker nodded. “Excellent. Thank you, Officer.” He checked his watch. “We will adjourn for two hours, so everyone can find some food. The cafeteria upstairs is open, and there is a shopping plaza down the street, where several food trucks park. I recommend the tacos. We'll resume at eleven thirty to watch an autopsy.”

Ivy stepped aside as the college students hurried away.

Runiker pulled the sheet over the dead woman's face and stripped his gloves off. “You support clone rights? That can't be good for career advancement in a small town. I'd think that, at least publicly, you'd support the Higgins Proposal. The whole ‘sentient but lesser' idea that clones aren't fully humans. Only publicly, of course. I'm sure very few clones who support Higgins's movement actually believe they're lesser.”

“I'm a clone,” Ivy said with a shrug. “And a good cop. I can't support Higgins without underperforming so the rest of my department looks good. If I do that, nothing will get done. One day, the police department will have to decide if they want to promote talent or bigotry.” By the time they got around to that, Ivy hoped to be gone. The Caye Law, and Agent Rose, meant she didn't need to settle for a second-­rate police department in a small town. There were better things in store for her.

She nodded to the dead woman. “Who's handling this case?”

“No one right now. She's from Tampa, and the CBI is still debating who has jurisdiction.”

“She really doesn't have any ID?” Ivy asked before realizing that's not what he'd said. “She has a clone marker?”

“No clone marker,” Runiker said. “But no ID, no matching fingerprints, no gene match on file. She's a ghost.”

“An illegal immigrant?” In Florida? “How?” She understood ­people crossing from Brazil into Panama on the Commonwealth's southern border, but Florida? The nearest foreign nation was across an ocean.

Runiker shrugged. “Could be an illegal immigrant, could be a black-­market clone, could be a kid raised off the grid by antigovernment types. Not everyone wanted to join the Commonwealth. Especially not down here in the South.”

“Yeah.” She'd heard all about that in August, when her personal hero was put through a public trial. CBI Agent Rose was the only clone working for the Commonwealth Bureau of Investigation, and she was everything Ivy aspired to be. When Agent Rose's district had been charged with corruption, the local news stations had accused her of everything from being in an incestuous relationship with her estranged father to plotting the murder of her senior agent. They'd buried the part of the story where the senior agent had plotted to undo the Commonwealth because he didn't want women of color taking his job.

They were good at burying things like that.

With a gloved hand, she lifted the sheet and peeked at the woman again. “She looks like she was going to a party. Look at the clothes.” The girl had done her makeup, dressed up like she owned the world, and now here she was, unnamed, in the morgue.

“I noticed,” Runiker said. “I'm not completely unsympathetic, you understand, but I can't do anything until the CBI releases her into the morgue's custody.”

“Would you mind sending me a copy of the autopsy if you get to do it?”

“Why?”

Ivy shrugged. “To read, I guess. I'm going to be a full officer in January. I might catch a case like this, help the CBI or something.” Like apply to the CBI and handle the case all on her own. “I figure I'll do better if I have something to study.”

“You read autopsies?”

She nodded.

“That's morbid. Even for me. And I'm a medical examiner!” Runiker shook his head. “But . . . whatever I guess. Sure, if I do the autopsy, I'll slip you a copy. As long as it's not classified. But don't expect anything. This lab is probably not going to be handling the case. They have their own ­people. I get the ones from obvious accidents and the hospital.”

“That's fine,” Ivy said. She replaced the sheet. “It's not a big deal.”

Runiker smiled. “Lunchtime?”

“Right. Thank you for your patience.”

“No problem.” He grinned sheepishly. “It's just that the line at the taco truck is long, and if you don't get there early, they run out of jicama.” He held the door to the locker room for her.

Ivy stashed her coat and lab shoes and switched to sensible sneakers before grabbing the tiny purse that had her walking-­around money and her city-­issued ID.

A noise in the morgue made her turn around. “Dr. Runiker?”

She pushed the door open. The lights were off, and no one said anything. Frowning, she let the heavy door swing closed until only a sliver of vision remained. She held still until the lights in the locker room shut off from lack of movement.

It was pitch-­black in the morgue, but it took her eyes a minute to adjust to the gloom. Someone was there. Tall, built like a club bouncer, and digging through the boxes of the victim's personal belongings.

She watched in silence as he pawed through several drawers before grabbing what he wanted and running off down the long hall to the loading docks.

Ivy pushed the door open, turned the lights on, and pulled on a latex glove before checking the drawer. It belonged to Jane Doe.

Someone had stolen her clothes.

Fuming at her own stupidity, Ivy wondered how she would explain to Dr. Runiker that someone knew who Jane Doe was. After all, who but someone who knew her would come and steal her clothes?