When an iteration of reality collapses what happens? Some would imagine that the people populating the alternate timeline die. That theory defies the basic laws of the conservation of energy. Recall what I have said about the wave: everything must come back to the prime iteration when we hit the event horizon. During past decoherence events, everyone has experienced the dissonance of two realities colliding. A dying node briefly inherits the conscience of the dominant iteration, recalling things that are to come. The memories of our shadow selves become dreams and nothing more.
~ Student notes from the class Physics and Space-Time I1–2071
Thursday June 13, 2069
Alabama District 3
Commonwealth of North America
Mac chewed his nails as his chair swiveled back and forth in front of the dim computer screen. Damn her for putting him in this situation. He looked plaintively at the ceiling. “God—if there is a God—I could use some help here. A sign. Something to tell me that helping her isn’t the worst thing I could do.”
No choir of angels or neon flashing sign manifested a divine will of any kind.
Sighing, he picked up the efile with the report on Jane Doe . . . aka, Samantha Lynn Rose the second. A clone working for the bureau was an even bigger security threat than a clone working for N-V Nova Labs.
Sam needed to be dealt with.
A rapid clone test would work if she were an age-advanced clone, but a good black-market-clone operation would have ways around that. Getting the lab in Atlanta to do a test for Verville traces meant getting a second signature. If Rose was a clone, getting her signature was the next best thing to committing suicide. If he went to Marrins, the test would never happen. The senior agent would accept the computer search and turn Sam over to bureau.
They’d would kill her.
He dropped the efile on his desk again and went back to chewing his nails. The bureau would euthanize Agent Rose after interrogating her with techniques that would make old Guantanamo look like a spa in comparison. She wasn’t human, but she looked human. She sounded human.
The memory of her stripping off a wet shirt made him feel all too human. She was nice to him, but nice wasn’t an excuse. He swore again.
There had to be another way.
“MacKenzie?” Harley leaned around the corner, a cloud of cheap cologne following him. “I’m going to lunch, you want anything?”
“No, thanks.” Mac shook his head and avoided eye contact with the older man.
“Okay. I’m going to the grill. Be back in an hour or so, cover for me if someone calls. You know what traffic is like on that end of town.”
“Yes, sir,” Mac said, as the senior coroner shuffled off to the Bon Temps Grill . . . and golf course. The morgue doors slammed shut with a leaden thud. With one final curse for God, the universe, and everything else that had conspired to bring him to this point, he grabbed his dissection equipment and went to find Melody Doe.
There were two interns sitting in the small break room between his office and the bodies he wanted to inspect. He shoved his efile into his lab-coat pocket and faked a smile. “Hey, what are you guys doing?” Keeping to his normal pattern of behavior and ignoring them would have been safer, but Mac doubted they’d had enough experience with espionage to be concerned.
They still looked at him bug-eyed, as if they couldn’t believe Mac could form full sentences. One said, “Eating lunch.”
“Coroner Harley just left,” he said in a casual, hinting tone that would have worked on any military recruit. The interns just stared. “We’re getting another busload of bodies from the coast tonight. Since we’re going to work after hours, why don’t you boys go take a long lunch?”
That did it. Their eyes lit up at the promise of sunshine. “Can we?”
“Just be back before three. Harley keeps a one o’clock tee time on Thursdays.”
“Right,” one of the interns said. “But he’ll be back once he realizes the course is flooded.”
“There’s a TV and alcohol. He’ll be gone for at least two hours.”
The interns looked at each other and shrugged. “This is real chill of you.” The younger man patted Mac on the back as he hustled out.
Mac leaned his head against the cold walls of the morgue as the interns ran off. He was going to get court-martialed for this. Lose his citizenship. All for a pretty pair of brown eyes.
And amazing legs. Truly stellar stems. Can’t forget those.
“I’m hopeless,” he muttered, walking into the cold room. The smell of chilled antiseptic wash hid the odor of delayed decay as he rolled out the remains of Mordicai Robbins and plugged his data pad into the scanner to download. Then he went searching for Melody Doe and found her in the walk-in freezer with a dozen bodies that had washed out of their graves during the storm.
Melody had been pretty in life, he knew that from the pictures, but looking at her now . . . He shivered and reached for a pill bottle that wasn’t there. His hand clenched into a fist.
He should have just handed Marrins the evidence. Called it a day. Gone home, or gone house hunting. Anything but this. Memories of the desert, heat, and blood blurred into reality as he looked at Melody Doe’s fractured skull. With shaking hands, he wheeled her gurney into the scanner box, hit the right buttons, and hurried down the hall to dry heave in the comfort of his office.
Eyes watering, throat burning, he frantically pushed aside piles of junk to find his pills. There had to be one somewhere.
The morgue door slammed. A belch echoed through the halls. Harley couldn’t be back already, could he? Maybe the golf course was flooded.
Pushing unsteadily to his feet, Mac dropped the search for pills and stumbled toward the cold room. He’d have to make do with incomplete scans or call the whole thing off.
Harley’s footsteps echoed behind him.
Mac sped up, barreling into the cold room with a controlled skid.
Mordicai Robbins was unhooked and halfway to his storage spot when the heavy doors swung open. Warm air from the hall swept into the room, with the scent of Harley’s cheap cologne.
Mac slammed Mordicai into place and wrenched open the walk-in freezer. Grabbing hold of the nearest gurney, he pushed it in front of him as if he were merely checking the graveyard rejects and not digging into a case that wasn’t his.
Harley stood by the door, arms crossed. “Whatcha doing?”
“Ah, just making sure we send the right bodies back. I thought you, um, wanted them checked?” His tongue deserted him as memories of Afghanistan assailed him. There was blood. So. Much. Blood.
Harley eyed Mordicai’s locker for a moment, then grunted. “Right. You get lunch yet?”
“Um, n-not yet.” He slid the gurney he’d grabbed into the scanner next to Melody Doe and took the efile from its dock. Scan complete. “I, um, sent the interns to lunch just now,” he added. Mac hesitated in front of Melody’s body, unsure if he should pull her out of the machine for the coroner to see.
“You okay?” Harley asked.
Mac jerked his head in a nod. “It’s just, I’m waiting on my refill. All these bodies . . .” Weren’t bothering him nearly as much as they had a month ago.
A heavy hand landed on his shoulder. With a painful squeeze, the coroner shook him. “Lemme handle it. You go sit in your office. I can clean this up.”
His hand slipped to the efile; he had what he needed. “Sure. Sure. Thanks.”
“Not a problem.”
Retreating to his office, Mac turned off the light and rested his head on a pile of old forms. Sunlight streamed in through the ground-level window. He could see the parking lot, Agent Rose’s office window . . . and Agent Rose, stepping out of her car, wearing a perfect navy skirt on her perfect tan body. For a moment, his ghosts fell silent. There had to be a mistake.
There was no point to planting a clone in the bureau unless they were primed to do something, to feed information to someone. But there was nothing in District 3 anyone could possibly want.
Except for the lab. And a CBI senior agent who would rather write Jane Does off as clones than open murder investigations. No wonder Sam wound up as a target. Young and eager to please, she was just the kind of person they didn’t want. Whoever they were.
And with a cushy promotion, the clone-Sam could do even more. Muddle more investigations. Destroy evidence when a politician was replaced. A whole conspiracy to destroy the country was blooming in front of him, and he didn’t want to stop it because the little soldier had finally woken up from a five-year nap.
“MacKenzie?” The office door opened with a squeal of protest. Harley squatted beside his chair. “You doing all right, son? I saw that girl—she was in a powerful bad way. Not a pretty sight. Why don’t you take off early?”
Mac sat up. “I’d like that.”
“I’m sure you would.” Harley picked up a pill bottle from Mac’s desk. It rattled with toxic relief. “Take a couple of these on the way out. You’ll sleep better.”
He took the bottle gratefully and dumped a pill in his hand even as Harley walked away. The bitter aftertaste made him gag. The taste was off, and he idly wondered what the expiration date was on these meds. Rolling the second pill between thumb and forefinger like a worry bead, he pulled up Agent Rose’s file again, his mind wandering down the tunnel of depression. Too many people had died because of his mistakes already. He couldn’t let Sam be a victim. But she was dead already. He spun in his chair.
Agent Rose was dead . . . maybe. The woman he knew as Sam was a clone . . . maybe. The answers were there dancing just outside his reach. If he could shake the fog. Ghosts of dead men stared at him from the darkness of his own mind. Fallen friends waiting for him to make that last, fatal mistake. And he was running out of time.
Mac shook his head. He had to buy time. Had to get sober.
Had to . . .
Had to . . .
He frowned in confusion at the pills. Had to get off the pills. Five years of living with his head in a fog so he could forget one cold morning in February of ’64. Five years of twelve pills a day. Five years of barely remembering his own name, forgetting to eat, losing everything. He bit his lip, tasted blood.
He couldn’t think like this. Couldn’t think with his head in the fog. Couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do. Trembling, he walked out of the morgue, dumping the pills onto the lawn.
Agent Rose looked across the parking lot at him.
Mac swore under his breath. Wiping a cold hand across his mouth, he flicked the pill bottle into the grass. Her eyes followed the fall of the bottle.
If looks could kill. “Agent Rose, hi.” Mac tried for cheerful and wound up sounding desperate.
“I was looking for you.” She crossed her arms and glared at him. “MacKenzie?”
Mac shook his head. “Sorry. I’m . . . I’m not feeling well.”
She glowered at the pills in the grass. “Where did you find those?”
“Harley had some extras.”
“I see.” Agent Perfect was not happy.
He was shaking. Mac rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I had one. Just the one. And I feel . . . I feel nauseous.” Exceptionally nauseous, he realized. Burning-in-the-heat-ready-to-pass-out nauseated.
“You look it,” she said, sounding disgusted. So judgmental . . . but who is she to judge? At least he was real.
Then again, what’s “real . . .”
“Why don’t you let me drive?”
Mac nodded. The world was spinning around him, but he could focus. And focusing on Agent Rose was no hardship. He giggled.
“What?” She pulled him up and helped him steer his unruly feet toward her car.
“The world revolves around you.” He laughed and fell into the backseat.
“Does it now?” She tilted her sunglasses down so he could see her eyes.
He sighed. “God, you’re beautiful.”
“Save your prayers for later, Mac. Where’d you get those pills?”
“From . . . from my office.” He frowned. “Harley helped me find them. I left . . . left the bottle there, because of the prescription number.”
“Just the bottle?”
Mac battled his memory. He remembered the empty bottle, he’d left it on the edge of his desk so he could call in the refill. “It was empty. But it’s not.”
Agent Rose patted his knee. “Stay right here.” She walked off and came back with the bottle, a couple of pills, and grass clippings on her knee. “Pull your legs in.”
He groaned when the car started. Agent Rose’s hand came into view with two small orange pills, just like the ones he’d been taking over the weekend. He gulped the fruit-flavored medicine down. “Feel worse,” he groaned. “Mixed . . . shouldn’t mix.”
“I know. Just don’t die on me before we get to the house. I think you’re in for a bad night.”
Mac heartily agreed.
Sam barely managed to get MacKenzie into his room. He was feverish to the touch and shaking, but still somewhat responsive. Time for phone calls.
“Altin here.”
“Altin, it’s Rose. I have some pills of suspicious origin, and I need to get them tested.”
“Is this a bureau thing?”
“I don’t know. I asked MacKenzie to do some autopsies for me. At lunchtime, he was fine, this afternoon he’s—” She heard MacKenzie throwing up in his bathroom. “It looks like the flu—fever and vomiting—but I don’t know a virus that hits this fast. He found some pills in his office, thought they were his, and took them.”
“What sort of pills does Agent MacKenzie do?” Altin’s asked with polite menace.
“Do,” she thought. Not “take.” That seems about right.
“He’s currently addicted to Orange Sun breath mints.”
“Say that again?”
She smiled in spite of herself. “It’s a long story. Anyway, he takes five to six breath mints a day from a regular medicine bottle. It’s all placebo. I knew there would be some withdrawal symptoms, but that’s not what this is. Mac said he remembered emptying this bottle. Then Harley handed him a bottle. And now he’s delirious.”
“Where are you?”
“My house. MacKenzie’s apartment was caught in the flood, so he’s renting the back room.”
“I didn’t see a back room.”
“No one sees the back room. It’s on the other side of the mudroom, and everyone thinks it’s a closet.”
“Give me thirty minutes. If he gets worse, head for the emergency room.”
“I will.” Sam set the bottle on the kitchen counter and went to check on Mac. He lay on the floor outside the bathroom, curled in a fetal position. “Any blood?”
There was a faint whisper, “No.”
She sat on the floor beside him. Training had never covered this situation. “Do you get poisoned often?” sounded like a pickup line from a cheesy goth sitcom. “How do you feel?” was too trite. He shivered, and she rubbed his back gently, trying to think of something to distract him from the agony. “Did you get the autopsies done?” Brilliant, Samantha, absolutely brilliant. You are never going to win a Partner of the Year award.
“Yes. Harley . . . Harley came.” Mac coughed and groaned. “Told him I was working on the graveyard bodies.”
“Did he believe you?”
“I don’t . . .” He unrolled and rushed to the bathroom again. Sam went to fetch a towel and a fresh bar of soap. MacKenzie gave her a weak smile when he came back. “Thanks.”
“Go shower. I have Altin coming over with one of his lab monkeys. We’ll see what he says about the pills.”
Sam was waiting at the door when Altin’s patrol car pulled up with a younger man in the passenger seat. “Sorry about the after-hours call,” she said, holding the screen door open. “I locked Hoss upstairs. Mac is in the back room.”
Altin nodded, not looking convinced. “This is Vik Zhoundroff, one of our EMT boys.”
Sam couldn’t tell if Vik was eighteen or thirty-eight; he had blond hair, blue eyes, and the high cheekbones she’d learned to associate with Slavic ancestry. He would probably look like a teenager until he was ninety. “Nice to meet you, Vik.” She held out a hand. “Agent Sam Rose, CBI.” She nodded to the kitchen. “I’ll show you the pills. He’s still alertish, so I didn’t want to make a hospital run.”
“ ‘Ish’?” Altin asked.
“He’s talking, but I think he’s hallucinating. But then again, it’s Mac. So I can’t tell.”
Vik picked up the orange prescription bottle from the table. “What’s he taking pills for?”
“If I had to guess, PTSD,” Sam said, crossing her arms. It wasn’t her story to tell, but Altin was scowling, so she went on. “He was USA army, before they joined the Commonwealth. From what Mac says, he saw some rough stuff overseas.”
Altin raised an eyebrow. “Army?”
“Yeah.”
“I never would have picked that out. He’s so quiet.”
Sam shrugged. “Well, he has been on heavy antidepressants for about five years.”
Vik fished out one of the pills. “This is fluphenazine. One of the older antipsychotics. We use them at the hospital as a bridge drug when we have to change medications. It’s not something you can take long-term.” He dropped the pill back in the bottle. “I actually don’t think they prescribe these anymore.”
“So how’d it wind up in Mac’s office?” asked Sam.
“Never mind how—why is a better question.” Altin looked at Vik.
The EMT shook his head. “A fatal dose is over twenty milligrams. The pills are ten each.”
“He said he took one, but he usually takes two pills in a pop.” Sam said. “I saw him dumping pills in the grass and went over to ask what was going on. He was having trouble walking and looked feverish.”
“You can give him a small dose of antihistamine,” Vik said, “but only if he starts scratching at his skin. Otherwise, it should wear off in a day or so.”
“Does he still have the other drugs in his system?” Altin asked Sam.
“I don’t know. They were antidepressants—how long do those stay after you stop taking the drugs?”
“Days to weeks, depending,” Vik said. “The drugs could interact. Maybe. I wouldn’t suggest mixing them.” Sam looked at him, and he must have noticed the I-could-have-came-up-with-that look she was giving him. He shrugged. “That’s the best I can do, considering the lack of info.”
“Can we take these?” Altin shook the bottle.
“Be my guest,” Sam said.
The detective put the pills in his pocket, but then frowned. “Are you reporting this?”
“I’m doing that right now.”
“But he’s bureau, so I’m not the one to report to.
Sam shook her head. “Mac works for the coroner’s office more than the bureau, so it does fall under your jurisdiction. I believe him that the bottle was empty. Someone planted the fluphena-whatever in his office. I don’t see how this could be a mistake.”
Altin nodded. “What was MacKenzie working on?”
“This morning I asked him to do those autopsies you asked about. I’m not sure what else Harley had him doing, probably grunt work, identifying bodies found after the hurricane.”
“The cases this morning could stir up trouble,” Altin said, picking his words with care.
“Trouble enough to kill an ME over? There are a lot of things I’ll believe, Altin, but telepathic serial killers isn’t one of them. There’s no way anyone outside the coroner’s office knew which case Mac was working on today.”
Altin gave her a pointed look.
Sam shook her head. “No. There’s no one like that in the bureau.”
“Like what?” Vik asked in confusion.
She pressed her lips together, uncertain of how much of Sunday’s conversation about MacKenzie she wanted the EMT to know about.
Altin waved her off. “I know what you think, Rose. But every day this looks more and more like an inside job. Dead bodies do not dump themselves. And strange pills don’t appear in bottles without help.”
In Mac’s room, the shower turned on. At least he was still alive. Sam turned to the detective. “If you think this is an inside job, you better start watching your back, Altin. I’m not the only one on this case.”
“That a threat, Rose?”
“You know it’s not. Out of everyone, I’m the only one with an alibi for today. But if you think someone at the bureau is doing this, take a good look in the mirror. You’re the lead on this case. If anyone should be worried, it’d be you and Marrins. I’m small potatoes.”
Altin nodded. “I’m going to talk to Marrins in the morning, just in case. I’ve known him for years, and his heart’s not that good—he’s pretty discreet about it, but he takes pills all the time, too.” This was news to Sam—Marrins definitely didn’t eat like he had a heart condition. “You and MacKenzie can handle these sudden shocks,” Altin continued, “but if this same joker dropped these pills in Marrins’s desk we’d have a dead senior agent in this district.”
Sam nodded with grim understanding. “Tell him to turn on his home security, too. He lives alone. Whoever murdered Robbins will see Marrins as an easy target.” She walked them out, then double-checked the lock on her new back door. Somehow, she didn’t think she’d sleep easy.