CisLuna_Hard-boiled Police Procedural_Murder Mystery Read online

  Yes, this stiff was peculiar. They usually come with blood, or at least some of it. This one didn’t have any.

  * * *

  We commandeered an operating room in sick bay for the autopsy. Flight Surgeon Tom Martin had volunteered for the honors. He spoke into a microphone at the end of a gooseneck that hung from the ceiling. Primitive, now that I think about it. I’d heard this station was old, launched up to CisLuna from LEO back in 2074. Monica stood at the victim’s head assisting. I wandered around bugging everyone with my usual dumb questions.

  “Victim’s Name: Jessica Maloney. Caucasian female. Age 35. 173 cm. Weight 50 kg. Hmm… 4.5 kg less than her last physical, four months ago.” He mopped his brow with a towel and tossed it onto the stainless steel table at his side. “That would be consistent with a complete loss of blood, Mr. Stone.”

  The doc picked up a scalpel, poised it over the victim, then put it down to mop his brow again.

  “Did you know her?” I asked.

  “She was a colleague.”

  “Not a friend?”

  “Different shifts. Our paths didn’t cross much. I knew her from reviewing her medical notes mostly.” He took a deep breath. “But to your point, yes, I did know her.”

  “You want I should send for a coroner, say, from another station?”

  “No!”

  He seemed apologetic for raising his voice.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to apprehend her killer,” he said, his voice now resolute.

  “Think that’s the cause of death?” I asked, changing the subject. “She just bled out?”

  “Maybe. Her body displays no sign of a struggle. She may have been heavily sedated while she was being drained. Or she may have already been dead.”

  “And by draining her blood, the murderer drained a lot of evidence with it,” I said.

  “Whoops, puncture wounds.” Monica rolled the victim’s head to the right and pointed at them with her index finger.

  Martin bent to get a better look. “Two of them about 3 cm apart. They’re very faint. Just above the clavicle along the common carotid artery.”

  “Why two in the same artery?” I asked.

  “Maybe the murderer missed with the first one?” Monica asked.

  “One way to find out,” Martin said. He began a shallow incision along the neck. A moment later the carotid artery was exposed, showing two clear puncture wounds.

  “Could the first jab have gone all the way through? Made the perp think he missed?” I asked.

  Martin stuck a gloved finger under the artery and pulled it out exposing the underside. “Doesn’t appear so.”

  “Check the top of her head,” I said. “If he drained her from the neck only, there should be bruising at the top of her head.”

  Monica canted the victim’s head up and parted the hair.

  “No bruising,” she said. But I’ve got several more puncture wounds.”

  Dr. Martin leaned over to examine the site.

  “The carotid artery extends over the top of the skull. The bastard seems to have more than a passing competency with human anatomy,” Monica said.

  “Yes,” Martin said. “This was not just some casual phlebotomist. They only tap veins. Tapping an artery requires the skills of a doctor.”

  Monica turned the victim’s head further to the side exposing the back of the neck and a faint crescent of indentations.

  “Are those teeth marks?” I asked.

  “Gentlemen, we appear to have a vampire in our midst,” Monica said.

  Chapter Four

  “There a place a guy can get a drink around here?” I asked Monica. It had been a long day. “I just need to spin down a bit before I turn in.”

  “Albert’s. It’s not much but it’s close by.”

  Albert’s turned out to be a bit more than ‘not much.’ The ceiling was made of tiled monitors that combined their images to show the Moon spinning in real time. Pretty cool. You could make out all the craters. The rest of the bar had some kind of faux-wood paneling and faux-wood flooring. I’d figured out that ‘faux-wood’ was the local euphemism for nanocellulose. Everything on this crate was made out of nanocellulose—tensile strength of aluminum, stiff as Kevlar®, and strength-to-weight eight times better than stainless steel. Einstein had been overbuilt in LEO to withstand the constant impact of space junk, and now she depended on that same armor to shield her crew from the ten-rem annual radiation levels of cislunar space. She was Logan ‘Mack’ MacGregor’s brainchild. Mack was as close to royalty as you could get in SpaceCorp and I was sitting across a faux-wood table enjoying a nightcap with his lovely wife.

  I ordered a Scotch and Monica got an Armagnac—Albert’s was nothing if not well-stocked. Neither of us said anything while we waited for the drinks. I looked at the ceiling display so I wouldn’t have to make conversation. After the waiter put them on the table, I tried to pay only to discover that like everything else in SpaceCorp, booze was free, subject to rationing, of course. We clinked our glasses and each took a sip. I was having a hard time not staring at her. She cast her eyes down at her drink and shifted in her seat. I thought she was going to get up and leave, but she didn’t.

  “You flashed your wedding band at me earlier.”

  “Did I?”

  “‘Sorry. I wasn’t checking you out. It’s what I do when I go into crime-scene-investigator mode. All on or all off.”

  She said nothing, just gave me a half smile.

  “So where’s your husband?”

  “He’s down on the surface.”

  “The Moon?”

  “Earth. He commutes a lot.”

  More silence.

  “What do you do up here when you’re not crime-fighting?” I asked.

  That got a smile.

  “I’m trying to turn my rodent lab into a primate lab.”

  “Rats transmogrified into monkeys?”

  That got a laugh.

  “No, I’ve spent the last ten years genetically modifying rats so they’d be resistant to the 70-odd rems of radiation they’d encounter on a trip to the stars.”

  “You’re gonna send rad-hard rodents to the stars! How’re you gonna pull that off?”

  She looked at me warily. “You know much about DNA?”

  I nodded. “Got a working knowledge of it from forensics… we rely on it a lot for identification.”

  “So you know all DNA is equally prone to damage from radiation?”

  “I do now.”

  “And as far as we know, all organisms are capable of repairing that damage, it’s just that some are way better at it than others.”

  “Okay, I didn’t know that either.”

  “The keys to our research are two micro-organisms, Deinococcus radiodurans and Thermococcus gammatolerans, that are better than all others at rapid DNA repair. Are you sure this conversation is spinning you down?”

  “Actually, it is.” I held up our two glasses up to signal the bartender for a refill. “It’s completely taking my mind off the dead woman.”

  “Okay,” she went on. “By isolating the genetic repair mechanisms of those two organisms and splicing it into the human genome and somehow getting it to express itself, we should eventually be able to engineer a rad-hard human. Just like we did with our rats.”

  “Whoa! Did you say rad-hard human? You’re doing this on people?”

  “Not initially. I’ve got three pairs of Pan troglodytes due here in a month.”

  “Pan what?”

  “Pan troglodytes. They’re the common chimp you see in zoos. We’re going to use the lessons learned on rats to turn their offspring into a radiation resistant versions of their parents. They’ll be a new species, Pan astra, stellar chimps.”

  “And then you’re going to do the same thing to people. Everybody up here is going to be rad-hard?”

  “Hell no! Backfilling all the DNA in all the cells of your body with the radiation repair gene is too much of a stretch. We’ll select certain couples who wan
t their children to be voyageurs. We’ll modify the DNA in their fertilized eggs.”

  “So these future space farers will be born of normal humans?”

  “Initially. Later they’ll procreate with themselves. They’ll be a new species. Homo galacticus. Unable to breed with humans ever again. They’ll be galacticans.”

  “Born that way.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if they don’t want to go to the stars?”

  “They won’t be forced to. We’ll have lots to pick from.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re building a new class of space station designed for permanent positioning in the Main Belt Asteroids. In time, these new stations will become completely self-sufficient. Initially, they’ll be located here at CisLuna. As we fill them up with galacticans, they’ll move to the Belt.”

  This was bugging me. “But what if they don’t want to move to the Belt?”

  “As I said, they won’t have to. They could stay here at CisLuna where they’re born. Or they could even go to Earth and live among humans.”

  “Won’t they be ostracized?”

  “You won’t be able to tell them from regular people. They’ll just be shorter by 20 or 25 centimeters. Perfectly proportioned. We’ll be using genes from Pygmies to constrain their height. We’re not inducing dwarfism.”

  I looked around the bar. We were alone except for the bartender washing glasses. “I keep thinking you’re going to bust out laughing and yell, ‘April Fools!’”

  She didn’t even smile. “It’s no joke. We’re doing this. It’s gonna happen.”

  I leaned across the table and stared hard at her. “A new species of human. A galactican?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, I can see why you’re doing it up here. Earthside, you’d be burned at the stake by the religious right, not to mention the anti-eugenics types.”

  “Yup.”

  “But why a new species? Aren’t there advances in shielding? I gotta say this sounds like eugenics.”

  “It’s not eugenics. It’s a necessity for survival. Where we’re sitting right now, the ambient external radiation is about 10 rems per year. We can and do shield for that, so you’re safe here so long as you stay inside. However, we have to keep a close eye on shuttle pilots like Patty. If she rems out and can’t find a new indoor job to transition into, she will be Earthbound. A groundie.

  “Interplanetary space is about 25 rems ambient. Worse if you venture close to the gas giants—they’ll fry you in an instant. We could shield for 25 rems but we’d take a huge mass hit in the process. You know about mass fractions?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Wet mass over dry mass. A typical interplanetary ship would come in around eighteen. That means if you add a kilogram of dry mass—structure, shielding, food, people—you have to add eighteen kilos of propellant.

  “We’re planning to have permanent colonies in the Main Belt Asteroids—galacticans who are born there, live their lives there, and die there. Asteroids will be critical for stores replenishment when we arrive at distant stars, far more important than so-called habitable planets. It’s a lot easier to lasso an ore-rich asteroid than descend into a planet’s gravity well, hunt for ore deposits, dig or excavate for that ore, refine it, and haul it back up to an orbiting space station or star ship.

  “But the biggest argument for Homo galacticus is interstellar space where the ambient radiation is 70 rems per year. Homo sapiens wouldn’t survive. And shielding for a trip to the stars would be an impossible mass hit. Magnetic shielding is a mass hit plus a power hit. So the bottom line is either create Homo galacticus or stay home.”

  “How long do you figure that will take?”

  She shrugged. “Fifty… hundred years, maybe. That would be for a population to colonize the asteroids.”

  “So you’ll probably never meet a real walking, talking Homo galacticus.”

  “Oh, I’ll meet them, the first batch anyway. But they’ll be children, not fully engineered for space. There’s more to engineering a galactican than radiation resistance.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like we don’t need a population of football linebackers. Robots do the heavy lifting on a space station, so something the size and build of the Pygmy I mentioned would be more suitable—about 30 cm shorter than your linebacker. And we’d like them to be naturally sterile so they don’t overpopulate their space stations—if reproduction becomes necessary, we’ll make them temporarily fertile with hormone injections.”

  I had a thought. “How many people know about what you’re doing?”

  “I don’t know. Management is informed. I’d say most of the crew and staff on Einstein are aware of it. We don’t make a big secret of it. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud here, but what if the killer is some religious type who thinks what you’re doing is immoral? Say he’s deranged like religious types can be sometimes.”

  “Why kill a flight surgeon?”

  “Terrorism? The victim was popular, pretty. Her death would get a lot of attention. Eventually Einstein would be facing a recruiting problem.”

  “Eventually? You think this won’t be the last murder?”

  “That’s possible,” I said.

  Awkward silence while I looked at her and she looked at her drink, swirling the liquid around with her finger. Finally, she licked her finger, looked up, and said, “Well, the killer’s given one part of the research a higher priority.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Imagine you’re on a starship five years from home and five years from your destination. Population somewhere between 500 and a 1000. Violent behavior crops up in response to… to… whatever. Anyway, if the males start squaring off into rival gangs, the chaos could compromise the entire mission.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. You’re gonna need cops. Like Masters at Arms in the old navies.”

  “Probably. Or we could genetically engineer a galactican population that does not resort to violence the way humans and chimps do.”

  “Violence is a gene?”

  “Partly. There are a number of genes—MAO-A, CDH13, and some others—that set up a predisposition for violent behavior. If the subject also had a stressful childhood, say they were abused, they often become criminally violent.”

  “Can’t you screen for that during recruiting?”

  “Yes, but there are a lot of contributing factors. For instance bonobos, Pan paniscus, aka pygmy chimps, are non-violent compared to chimps and humans. They settle their differences with sex. They are also female dominant—opposite of chimps. And they do not exhibit sexual dimorphism—where males are larger and stronger than females. These could be good features for a crew stuffed into the cramped confines of a star ship for ten years.”

  “A matriarchy.”

  “Yes, but not an extreme one like, say, hyenas. I don’t want one gender lording it over the other. I’d like a society genetically engineered for equality.”

  I snickered. “Sorry. I keep picturing a crew of chimps running a starship.”

  “Galacticans are gonna be people. At least they will be when I get done with them. Meanwhile, I’m going to order three pairs of bonobos for evaluation.”

  I was silent a moment as I cradled my jaw in my palm.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking you’ve given me two motivational leads for our killer. First, we could have some loony up here who’s trying to torpedo your research for the sake of fundamentalist religious or anti-eugenics views. That one’s probably a long shot given how many loose screws this killer has, But I’ll check it out. Second, in any small society with free love, like you appear to have on Einstein, somebody is bound to feel marginalized. That’s a much likelier motivation. Except for the blood thing—that’s just strange.”

  She downed her drink and I thought she was getting ready to leave so I changed the subject to stall her.

  “You seem pretty f
it.”

  “Mui Thai,” she said with a shrug.

  “You any good?”

  “I don’t compete any more. Just enough to take the edge off. You?”

  “What?”

  “You seem pretty fit yourself.”

  “Weights and treadmills. Pretty boring.”

  “No martial arts?”

  “Used to box in the Army. Wasn’t very good.” I bent my nose over to show how it had been broken. She bent her broken nose back at me. We both laughed. Then there was that awkward silence again.

  “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to ask me?” she asked.

  “Okay.” I took a drink of Scotch, then leaned toward her. “You don’t think this killer is a—”

  She tilted her head toward me, eyebrows raised. “Seriously? That’s what you really wanted to ask me?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean I did a lot of homicide in the Army. Saw a lot of creepy shit. But this is straight outa some B-grade horror movie, especially being on a space station. Anyway, it would help my mental stability if I knew my partner didn’t believe in space vampires.”

  She laughed. “Oh, I’m your partner now?”

  “Why not? I could deputize you, if you want. Find you a little badge maybe.”

  “Do I get a gun?”

  “A gun? Sure, same as me. You point your finger at the bad guy and say ‘bang.’”

  “What about the rest of the security force? Wouldn’t they make better partners than me?”

  “Not really. They’re security types, not even an ex beat cop in the whole bunch, much less a gumshoe. Meanwhile, you got two things I’m gonna need to crack this: brains and a lab.”

  I downed my Scotch and stood up smiling at her.

  “That mean you’re spun down enough?” she asked.

  “I got what I came for!”

  “Whoa, there, Trigger! I didn’t say I’d do it.”

  I sat back down. “Let me tell you how this is going down. First, this isn’t a one-off. Creepy shit like this almost always means a serial killer. That means we’re in a race—we gotta catch him before he drains his next victim.”

  “Him? You think it’s a man?”

  “Serial killers are usually men. But you’re right, there’s an outside chance it’s a woman. Second, before I turn in tonight, I’m gonna file a report. At the end of the report, I’m gonna say I think it’s a serial killer and that we need more security—with fire arms—and a full ten-person investigative team up here.”