Blood
Ties
It
was his expression, rather than the words on the page, that conveyed to her the
significance of this discussion. Elizabeth Weir was a diplomat, and her
strengths lay in reading people, not nucleotide sequences. She had an advantage
in this case, because she knew her chief medical officer well. In nearly two
years of working together in Atlantis, and the months before that in
Upon
hearing his explanation, she understood the basis for his apprehension.
“You’ve
just discovered this?” she asked, handing the printout back across her desk.
“Which fits with what we know of the Ancients’ evacuation to Earth
from the Pegasus Galaxy during that time period.” Elizabeth folded her
hands on the desk, a habit she’d cultivated to present an air of interest. In
this instance it served to mask her anxiety. “I assume you believe that all of
this is interrelated?”
“That
I do. I didn’t come across my earlier data again until just recently, while making
some refinements to the retrovirus.” Carson paused a moment, his eyes flicking
out from Elizabeth’s glass walled office to the city’s control room, which was
minimally manned for the evening shift. His reluctance came as no surprise to
Elizabeth. No one was wholly comfortable with the next planned step of the
retrovirus project, but life in the Pegasus Galaxy had forced a kind of moral
shift on many aspects of the Atlantis expedition. She just hoped in the case of
Michael it wouldn’t come back to bite them.
The
doctor exhaled a disappointed breath. “At the time of the original research,
I’d been focused on isolating exactly what gave General O’Neill the ability to
use the Ancient database—to the exclusion of all else. I should have recognized
the importance of this other finding immediately.”
His
concerned expression remained fixed in place. “I probably ought to find that
more comforting than I do.”
Apparently
they were of the same mind. Rising and walking over to the glass wall,
Elizabeth crossed her arms and gazed out at the empty gate room. “I suppose
this adds a new wrinkle to the retrovirus study. As if we weren’t raising some
complicated ethical questions with it already.”
“In
a strange way, I’m more resolved to go forward with the project now.”
She
turned back to see
If
he could handle this new knowledge without undue alarm, then so could she.
Giving a single, sharp nod, Elizabeth said, “All right. Send me your report the
moment it’s finished. I’ll move up our regular check-in time with the SGC so we
can get this information to them as soon as possible. What, if anything, they
can do with it, I have no idea, but they need to know.”
“I’ll
have the report ready by morning. I’d also like to request that anyone
examining the Ancient database notify me immediately if any further references
to this topic, or to the Ancient responsible for the research, are found.”
Collecting the file, Carson stood and, attempting to roll the tension out of
his shoulders, started toward the door. “Can I assume you don’t plan to
participate in movie night? I think they’re starting in a few minutes.”
She
couldn’t suppress a wry smile. “I think I’ll pass. I have it on good authority
that Ronon got to choose tonight’s feature, and he’s
been working his way through the Rambo series. I blame John.”
“I’m
not sorry to miss it myself, then. Say what you will about our lads, at least
they’re predictable.”
“When they choose to be, anyway. Good night,
After
he had left,
Normally
she enjoyed the stillness at the end of the day, taking it as a sign that all
was well—or at least as well as was possible. Tonight she found herself feeling
unusually exposed to all the threats, both known and unknown,
that lurked beyond the silent gate.
She
wasn’t a scientist, and so she couldn’t see
What
Stepping out of her rental car, Rebecca Larance squinted through the glare of flashing red and blue
lights and breathed deeply, preparing herself for what she knew she would see
inside. Despite the early hour and freezing temperatures, the suburban street
was alive with the curious and the morbid. Death had visited here, and it was
the nature of humans to scrutinize it, as if they could gain some
understanding, perhaps a talisman against their own inevitable passing.
Based
on the number of vehicles parked haphazardly on the manicured lawn, most of the
Colorado Springs Police Department had arrived soon after the fire truck and
ambulance. Vehicles from the ME’s office were also here. Just one thing was
absent.
Rebecca
turned her attention to the house—small, neat, middleclass modern. Inside, it
would not be so neat, and the ME would probably be cursing. Determining the
cause of any death was rarely straightforward, but, like all puzzles, the evidence
could be pieced together, most often by reverse engineering a sequence of
definable events.
This
death, however, would defy that methodical, scientific approach, leaving the ME
with no option but to use phrases such as heart
attack due to an abrupt onset of
extreme senescence. The etiology
of the death would elude him, just as it had eluded others, because they lacked
the tools or understanding to chart the complete desiccation of the victim’s
body. The heart ceased to beat only because of advanced decrepitude. There was
no scientific explanation as to why.
Two
uniformed cops were belatedly securing the yard with canary yellow crime scene
tape. Several more were directing the inquisitive onlookers—most of whom were
dressed in sleepwear and bundled up in overcoats against the cold—to stand
back. Firemen were rolling hoses, packing away equipment they’d never used, and
climbing back into their trucks. In the near distance a car siren bellowed.
Rebecca absorbed the background noise of radios and conversations, a
Lilliputian dog yapping from a house across the street, and someone throwing
up. She glanced around and noticed a cop bent low between the house and a tree
strung with Christmas lights that had yet to be packed away. The forensics team
was going to love that: a rookie’s regurgitated takeout meal messing up their
crime scene.
Through
the glare and confusion, Rebecca saw more uniformed cops easing a visibly
distraught man toward a car, no doubt to be delivered to neighbors, friends,
family—anything to get him away from a site of inexplicable horror.
“Hey, you! Get
that car the hell out of here. This is a crime scene.”
And a fresh one at that. Rebecca could almost smell the lingering trace of the
perpetrator. She resisted the temptation to study the crowd. It would be
pointless; he wasn’t the type to take nourishment from the fear he engendered
in the living. Instead, she pulled her ID from the pocket of her blue leather
jacket and angled it so that the cop approaching her could see it in the light
from the lamppost. “Who’s in charge?”
The
cop looked her over once and turned a pointed gaze to her empty car.
“Contrary
to popular myth,” Rebecca added, “we don’t all wear black overcoats and travel
in a posse.”
“No!
I can’t leave! She…she...!”
The
cop’s attention was drawn to the distraught guy—victim’s husband, most
likely—being helped into the other vehicle. An agonized sob was cut short when
the car door was closed behind him. It was more than grief, Rebecca knew, but
an emotion that spoke of horror and something more…an edge of desperation
and…urgency? A childhood memory briefly mounted an assault, but her well-honed
defenses soon shut it down. Still, she watched the car drive away, vaguely
uneasy that she’d missed something.
“This way.”
With another look, this time frankly appraising, the cop led Rebecca up to the
front porch and announced her arrival to his clipboard-wielding partner. “FBI.”
“Feds, huh?”
The second cop, rumpled, weary-looking, and considerably older but clearly just
as disturbed by the situation, regarded Rebecca with a mix of suspicion and
relief.
Local
law enforcement didn’t much like it when the feds stepped on their turf,
despite—or perhaps because of—the numerous Denver police officers now assigned
full time to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. This crime, though, had
nothing to do with terrorism. Fundamentalism and terror, yes, but not terrorism
as the world currently defined it.
“Not
exactly,” she replied, trying to suppress a yawn with a rapidly expelled breath
that sounded like a sigh. “I’m a forensic psychiatrist. Your boss called my
boss after the second victim, so do me a favor, would you, Officer—” she
glanced at the nametag— “
“Okay,
Dr. Larance, but…look, this is a bad one. Really.” Even under the frosted yellow porch light,
What
was the standard for bad? When could someone say with any certainty that one
scene was worse than any other? It was all a matter of perspective. For her,
for an investigator, it depended on how much could be read from it. Bad was
when the body lay intact and clean, a dozen or more people having come
stumbling through. Worse was a DOA, the forensic evidence contaminated by
discarded items from EMTs and anyone else involved in
the failed attempt at first aid. Best was when the
patterns of the killer’s mind were still intact. Like now.
“I
appreciate the heads-up, Officer Wilson. Mutilated and set on fire in what
looks like a satanic ritual. Got it.” She lifted her
cell phone. “Welcome to the wonderful world of text messaging. Detective Ramirez and the ME inside?”
“Tell
them I’m here. I’d like to get a look in before the crime scene guys arrive and
start stomping all over the place.” With their sterile equipment and methodical
indifference, they would rapidly dissolve the subtle, persistent scent of fear,
and the equally subtle sense of satiation.
Pen
frozen mid-stroke,
“Kind
of ruins the atmosphere for me. You know what they say about profilers,” she
added with a conspiratorial grin.
A
familiar expression settled over his face; contempt born of ignorance, with a hefty
dose of good old-fashioned chauvinism thrown in. Rebecca didn’t come across it
too often, but there were still some old timers who lumped profiling into the
same category as Tarot card reading and crystal ball gazing, plus maybe a touch
of voodoo—the latter no doubt inspired by the occasional need to interpret
artfully macabre displays of human entrails.
Giving
no indication that he’d even considered her request,
Rebecca’s
patience was pretty much at an end. Enduring a transatlantic flight in a coach
class seat beside some guy whose philosophy of personal hygiene didn’t include
deodorant had been bad enough, but, to add to her misery, he’d had the most
vocal case of sleep apnea Rebecca had ever encountered. By the time she’d
cleared customs, collected her luggage, and gotten a taxi to her apartment in
D.C., she’d seriously entertained the idea of ignoring the order to get her ass
out to Colorado Springs. A hot shower and comfortable bed beckoned.
It
had been a nice fantasy, but the situation was escalating and the FBI only had
so many resources to go around. She’d had just enough time to swap the dirty
clothes in her suitcase for clean ones, call a cab—same taxi, same driver—and
head back to the airport.
She
was about to pull rank when a touslehaired detective
with a caffeine-deprived expression emerged from the front door. Ramirez,
presumably, had been dragged out of bed for this one. “You the profiler?” he
asked, shooting her a hopeful look.
Wilson,
who looked more like he’d been dragged out of a marriage, stopped writing and
looked up. “By the way,” Rebecca told him, “she’s not going to take you back,
so deal with it.”
“I’ll
take that as a yes,” Ramirez said, smirking.
Ignoring
“Jamie Cabal, thirty eight, engineer; three months
pregnant. Her husband, Logan, got
here about two minutes ahead of the fire trucks. Somehow he managed to keep it
together long enough to put out the fire with an extinguisher.” Ramirez’s
dark-eyed gaze slid from Rebecca’s and moved across the faces in the nearby
crowd.
“Don’t
bother,” Rebecca told him. “Not his style to hang around.” A couple of
television trucks had arrived and were setting up rooftop cameras, completing
the scene.
Ramirez’s
gaze returned to hers. “His? Witnesses in the D.C. cases all saw a woman.”
“That
was D.C. This is
Nodding,
Ramirez pulled his jacket closer, consigning the temptation to touch anything
to deep pockets. Rebecca did the same, mostly to reassure him. Forensics would
get nothing of substance from this, not because of ham-fisted cops or sloppy
procedures, but because there was little in the way of physical evidence to be
found. There never was in these cases, which was why she’d been called in.
“Was
it the badly ironed shirt, or the stain on
“Both, plus attitude and statistics. Divorce rate for cops in this neck of the woods is off
the charts.” Framed prints of Air Force planes lined the entryway walls. No
sign of kids. “Civilian engineer, huh?”
“The
Cabals worked for the military. Victim was a radar technician.” Ramirez stepped
into the living room. “Couch was on fire,” he added unnecessarily. “That
triggered the alarm.”
Either
the fire department was right around the corner, or—
“Fire resistant paint, according to the husband.”
Drapes
had been too far away to ignite, and the floor was tiled. Carpet was better in
some ways than tiles because it did not allow blood to spread; splatter
patterns remained fixed. Didn’t matter in this instance.
There was no blood, not even bodily fluids. Just a desiccated corpse with its
chest cracked wide open. Still, the residual malevolence was obviously creeping
out the youthful cop standing nearby. “Relax,” Rebecca assured him. “The perp got all he came for. He’s not coming back.”
The
cop exchanged nervous glances with Ramirez, who shrugged. On the floor, dressed
in the kind of disposable plastic suit that everyone present should have been
wearing, the ME was kneeling beside Jamie Cabal’s body, poking around inside
the open chest cavity like someone digging for treasure. Rebecca turned her
attention to the coagulated mass of chemical fire retardant, charred leather,
slimy balls of polyurethane—cushions, most likely—and a couple of indefinable
lumps mashed together in the middle of the room.
Although
accustomed to such sights, Rebecca had never entirely been able to inure
herself against the childhood terror this particular smell evoked. No matter;
it would not interfere with her job. It never had. “Lungs and liver are over
there, on the couch,” she observed, pointing. “Heart’s been souvenired.”
The
ME glanced up at her, his thick black eyebrows confined behind his protective
glasses, then sat back on his heels to get a better look at the couch. Using
the back of one latex-covered wrist to push his glasses further up a bulbous
nose, he began detailing what she already knew.
Rebecca
paid only scant attention to the ME’s familiar monologue. She’d heard it all
before, in several languages. Eventually he’d shut up, and then she could be
alone in the room, alone with the body, listening to the tale it had to tell.
For now, she examined the display.
Something
sharp—a single blade, not scissors—had been used to
slice into Jamie Cabal’s sweater, leaving the shoulders and sleeves in place
while the front had been torn away. The remains of a bra, flesh-colored, had
been pulled up; the upper abdomen had been sliced open with a single,
unhesitating cut that appeared surgically precise. The body itself otherwise
was intact, mouth open wide in a permanent silent scream, eyeballs bulging from
sunken sockets, the entire corpse neatly displayed inside a turquoise
spray-painted symbol on the pale patterned tiles.
“Very
controlled,” Ramirez said, spouting off a textbook interpretation.
It
was the same symbol every time. A slim isosceles triangle, its apex pointing
due south, bisected a pair of concentric circles. Between the circles was a
repeating set of geometric shapes: eight rounded chevrons and sixteen squares.
Rebecca
managed to ignore what sounded like a growing argument outside until
Looking
up and out between the half-drawn drapes, she saw shadows moving rapidly. Why
the hell was a SWAT team being deployed around the house?
Ramirez
had barely taken a step when a bunch of military goons in camouflage, helmets
and flak jackets came tearing inside through the front and back doors, P-90s
pouring light in the already well-lit room. Paying no heed to Ramirez’s stream
of invective and the ME’s demands to know what was going on, the troops swarmed
through the house, yelling ‘Clear’ from every room.
She
might have expected the military to poke their noses into this, but a special
ops team seemed a tad melodramatic, even for them. Then another man strode into
the room, sporting a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a slightly distracted
expression—and, most interesting of all, black Velcro patches where his unit
insignia should have been and nothing on his jacket to indicate his rank.
Ignoring Ramirez’s repeated demands for an explanation, no-rank G.I. Joe
brushed past Rebecca, took one look at the body and muttered, “Oh…great.”
His
tone told her he wasn’t altogether shocked. “And you would be?” Rebecca
demanded, pulling her hands from her coat pockets and planting them on her
hips.
Eyebrows
knitted, he barely spared her a glance. “I’m sorry, but this is a matter of
national security, which means that anything you’ve seen here—”
Rebecca’s
patience finally snapped. She barked out a laugh. “Oh, right. That’s a good
one. National security.” Hoping to tease out
information, she added, “You clowns don’t have any idea what’s going on, do
you?”
“I
know you,” Ramirez said to G.I. Joe. “You work with Colonel Carter—Sam Carter.”
Rebecca
could hear the resignation in the detective’s voice, but she wasn’t about to
fold so easily. “He got a name?” she asked, directing her question to Ramirez.
“Yeah.” Ramirez
sighed. “
“Dr.
Daniel Jackson,” the man elaborated. “Nice to meet you.
Sorry about this, but it’s like I said—”
“Actually,
it’s like I said,” Rebecca
interrupted. “I’m betting you don’t have a clue what’s happening here.” She
tugged her ID from her pocket and thrust it under his nose. “This is the
twelfth case in the U.S. alone, Doctor
Jackson. Then there’s the six in Europe, one in
That
popped his bubble of self-importance.
“And
to answer that question you’re just itching to ask, the only reason you haven’t
heard about those cases before now—” Rebecca snapped her ID wallet shut and
gestured through the windows toward the television vans— “is because the finer
details haven’t been leaked to the likes of them.”