“I’m not sure what you are getting at, sir,” Cabot said.
“Three men died on R & R, right? So they couldn’t have reported for duty when their leave ran out. Only they found these guys last week, and none of our ships have reported anyone missing.”
“Someone must have reported in their place,” Cabot said. “Spies?”
“Worse,” I said. “Assassins.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
By prewar standards, St. Augustine qualified as an emerging world. The planet had a fledgling banking system, a global government, and a world market. The Avatari had knocked out the planet’s mediaLink during their invasion; but other than a lack of communications services, the planet of St. Augustine had all the amenities.
St. Augustine had three continents and twenty-five cities, each of which had a police department manned by MPs. It did not take long to determine that the various law-enforcement groups did not share information among themselves.
“Bodies found in other cities?” asked the commander of the Petersborough police—a lowly ensign on loan from one of our ships. The Petersborough Police Department consisted of seven officers and thirty-five enlisted men, an unsatisfactorily small count, especially considering that Petersborough was the capital city of St. Augustine.
“Yes,” I said, and I repeated my question, “Have you heard anything about dead clones turning up in other cities?”
“I …I haven’t, sir. Nothing,” he said.
We stood in the morgue, three occupied body bags lying on tables before us. I had come with my entourage, and the ensign had come with his as well. It made for a crowded room.
“Perhaps you could get one of your men on the horn to find out,” I suggested.
“Yes, sir.” He turned to one of his men and communicated his orders without speaking. The man saluted and left, making the room one body less crowded.
“Do you have information on any of these men?” I asked the ensign. “Names? Units? Which ships they came from?”
“No, sir.”
Pushing my way through the crowd, I approached the first bag and opened it far enough to reveal the head and face within. The mess that stared out at me did not look like a clone. Its skin was the purple of a fresh plum. The face was moon-shaped, a fat blue tongue poking out between black lips. The hair was the correct color— regulation cut and the right shade of brown.
Seeing the body, a few of the men in my entourage groaned. Sailors …They were not as used to dealing with death as Marines.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He drowned,” said the ensign.
“Are you sure he’s a clone?” asked Admiral Cabot. He looked pale, his eyes locked on the corpse’s flat doll’s eyes. “He doesn’t look like a clone.”
The ensign looked back into the crowd. Obviously not seeing the person he wanted, he called, “Andy, can you come in here? Tell the general what you told me.”
Unlike everyone else in the room, Andy was a natural-born, probably a local doctor pressed into performing forensic medicine. He was a short man with fiery orange hair and heavily freckled skin. He looked at the body, then at the ensign, then settled his gaze on me. “He was three days dead when he washed up.”
“Are you sure he was a clone?” Cabot repeated.
Andy nodded up and down like a horse, and said, “Oh, he’s a clone, there’s no doubt about that. I ran a tissue sample. I checked his teeth, too. You can always tell by the teeth.” He reached down and squeezed the corners of the dead man’s mouth, making the lips open in a puckered smile.
“Jeez,” Cabot hissed. “Show some respect.”
“Respect.” The word hung in the air as the examiner unzipped the body bag farther, revealing open incisions in the cadaver’s throat, chest, and gut. I wondered if it was possible to respect a body and run an autopsy at the same time.
“We drained a quart of water from his lungs,” the examiner said.
“So he died of natural causes?” asked Cabot.
In my mind, “natural causes” meant a heart attack or kidney failure. Death by drowning seemed no more natural than eating poison or having an underground garage cave in around you.
“We didn’t find anything to suggest he was murdered if that’s what you mean.”
“How about this one?” I asked, taking a step toward the next table. I opened the bag enough to reveal the badly deformed face. Great pains had been taken to clean this corpse, but the skin around the cheeks looked like melted plastic. Bone showed through his skin along the top of his forehead. Despite all of the wreckage to the rest of his face, the man’s undamaged eyes stared up at the ceiling.
What was left of the dead man’s hair had been singed and turned to wire. If he’d had any facial hair, the fire had burned it away. The merely blackened strip of skin along the point of his chin reminded me of a beard.
Hoping to demonstrate his command of the situation, the ensign said, “This one died in a fire.”
“Yes, I see that,” I said. “One man drowns and the next one burns. St. Augustine is a dangerous planet.”
“Actually, he died of asphyxiation,” the examiner said. “It’s fairly common. Most people choke on the smoke long before the fire gets them.”
“Did you find anything to suggest—” I started.
“Foul play? Murder? It’s hard to tell,” said the examiner. He probed the skin along the cadaver’s throat with his fingers. “No broken bones; but on a body like this, burning can hide contusions and abrasions.” He pulled one of the man’s hands free of the body bag, holding it up by the wrist for me to get a closer look. “There’s not much we can get from this. His hands could have been cuffed or tied together before he died, and we wouldn’t know, not when the body is this badly burned.”
“That’s very convenient,” I observed.
“We didn’t find any cuffs or rope at the scene,” the ensign said.
“Have you investigated the cause of the fire?” I asked.
“We haven’t looked into it, sir.”
“Maybe you’d better get someone on that,” croaked Cabot, his face pale and clammy.
“Yes, sir.” The ensign hesitated, then said what Cabot should have known. “Um, sir, I don’t have anyone with that kind of MOS.”
Investigating arson was not a typical “military occupation specialty,” and none of the local MPs had any experience in that field. These guys knew how to break up street fights and how to haul drunken sailors to the brig. The Navy trained them to handle “drunk and disorderly” conduct, not forensics and crime-scene investigations.
“Tell me about this one?” I asked, moving to the last of the corpses.
“He didn’t die of natural causes. Someone snapped his neck,” the examiner said as he opened the bag.
The dead man had a startled expression, his glassy eyes open so wide they looked like they might roll out of their sockets. His skin was the color of curdled milk, and a familiar set of bruises ran along the base of his jaw. He’d died like Admiral Thorne—somebody had twisted his head around until the spinal column broke.
“Ensign, why weren’t we notified about this?” one of the lieutenants from my entourage demanded. He sounded outraged.
“We were notified,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant whispered. He sounded contrite. Perhaps he had read my mind …more likely my expression. I was tired of seeing the officers in my entourage grandstanding.
“Lieutenant, come here,” I said, making no attempt to hide my annoyance.
He came over, his steps short and tentative. He reminded me of a pet dog being called over to a scolding.
Normally, I simply ignored fools, but in this case I made a point of reading the lieutenant’s name tag. When
