Buried Deep Read online

  “The skeleton?” Batson’s voice rose. “It’s not insignificant. It’s going to cause a major incident that I hope will only impact Sahara Dome. I hate to think about what’s going to happen to the human-Disty relationship on the rest of Mars.”

  “See what I mean?” Scott-Olson said. She crouched again and started working at the sand, making sure she was still recording. “Already you’ve forgotten the center of the case.”

  He stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “This woman,” Scott-Olson said. “She was someone once. And she ended up here, probably murdered.”

  “You know that?” he asked.

  She let out a sigh of impatience. Usually Batson wasn’t slow. Usually he had some compassion for the victim.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know it for sure. But think about it, Petros. She’s dead. If I’m right, she was hidden here. Someone either waited until she decomposed, which in this atmosphere had to take a while, or cut the flesh off her bones, or boiled the skin away.”

  He grimaced and turned away from the exposed skeleton. “Why would someone go to that kind of work?” he asked. “Why not just bury the dead body in the construction site and leave?”

  “I don’t know,” Scott-Olson said. “But I can tell you we’re going to have a hell of a time with this case.”

  Batson cursed. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

  He had no real idea. He’d never had a case that put him at odds with the Disty. She had.

  She had barely survived it.

  She wondered if she would survive this one, as well.

  Two

  Aisha Costard already hated Mars. She hadn’t been in Sahara Dome for more than two hours, but those two hours felt like two weeks.

  Her seat companion on the passenger shuttle from Earth had warned her. He’d said that Mars induced claustrophobia in people who had lived their entire lives on Earth. He’d said that to Earthlings, Mars was the most inhospitable planet in the Alliance.

  He’d been talking about the buildings. He hadn’t even mentioned the Dome.

  Costard had been in a Domed environment only once before, the only time she’d been off Earth. She’d worked a summer-long dig sponsored by Glenn Station University on the Moon, looking for twentieth-century space travel artifacts, and finding very few.

  The Dome hadn’t bothered her then. But Glenn Station’s Dome had a visible ceiling. It wasn’t compressed by buildings that were little better than square nests which rose to the sky. Rabbit warrens. Ant tunnels.

  She could think of a thousand comparisons to this place, none of them pretty, and none of them places she ever wanted to be.

  And that didn’t count the recycled air, which smelled faintly of rotting vanilla, or the strange Dome lighting, which was thin and yellow. The light actually reminded her of some historic Earth buildings that still ran early twentieth-century electricity. This place had the same feeling of unreality, as if she had stepped into an antique, badly lit photograph.

  Her guide, a slender young man who had picked her up at the space port, acted like he was afraid of her. He didn’t want to carry her bags, even though she needed his help—she had brought a lot of equipment, uncertain what she would need here. Her clothes were the lightest thing about her.

  He had steered her into a small cart attached to the back of his cart. He then drove through the rabbit warren/ant tunnels that Sahara Dome dwellers thought of as streets. By the time the carts stopped in front of a normal-sized building, Costard was lost.

  The ceilings were very low inside the building. If Costard reached up, she could touch them—something she couldn’t normally do on Earth. She had a medium build, and she stayed in shape because she never knew where she was going to end up. She kept her black hair short and her clothing practical, although she really wasn’t sure what practical was here on Mars.

  She slung her clothes bag over her shoulder and carried her equipment case. The guide carried two other kits, holding them as far away from his body as he could. He walked past several pasty humans in uniform and the large front desk, with its glowing digitized warning to Sign In.

  The corridor branched, one part leading toward the back of the building, the other part leading to a flight of stairs. Her guide went down, taking the stairs cautiously, as if they were dangerous.

  She followed, her shoes clanging on the metal. She hadn’t expected metal here. She hadn’t expected anything here.

  What she knew about Mars could be placed in a three-page pamphlet, and two of those pages would have been wrong.

  Had she known, when she accepted this job, that she would feel so out of place right from the start, she might have referred it to someone else.

  Then she smiled. She was lying to herself. The Sahara Dome authorities had appealed to her professional vanity. They had contacted several forensic anthropologists, all of whom recommended her for this job. At the time, everyone thought that she could do the work in her lab at the University of Wisconsin.

  It wasn’t until she told the authorities that she needed the actual bones that things became complicated.

  The guide reached the bottom of the stairs, pulled open a door, and held it for her. Cooler air hit her, mixed with the faint scent of human decay and disinfectants. Morgue smells were apparently the same on Mars as they were on Earth.

  Oddly enough, the odors calmed her. She walked through the door, saw the familiar coolers stacked against the right wall, several examination tables made of the same silver metal as the ones in the morgues she’d worked in on Earth, and in the back wall, five odor hoods dominating the square stations where remains were often boiled clean of their flesh to prepare them for certain kinds of examination.

  A woman so thin that she looked like a strong wind would snap her in half stood near one of the empty tables. She wore a smock over a pair of dark pants and a matching blouse. Her hair, a mousy brown, rose in spikes along the top of her head, but had been buzzed away from the sides and ears. She would have looked like a teenager if it wasn’t for the frown lines that ran beside her generous mouth.

  “Dr. Costard?” The woman came forward, holding out her hand. “I’m Sharyn Scott-Olson. I’m so glad you could come.”

  Costard shifted her bag on her shoulder before taking the other woman’s hand. It was dry and rough, almost leathery. In comparison, Costard’s own hand felt moist and much too soft, as if she hadn’t had much of a life at all.

  “I’m still a little stunned to find myself on Mars,” she said.

  “Aren’t we all?” Scott-Olson took Costard’s kit, then nodded at the guide. “You can leave her equipment here. Has he taken you to your hotel yet?”

  That last was directed at Costard. “No. We came directly from the space port.”

  “You must be tired. And famished.” Scott-Olson set the kit next to the door. The guide was putting the others down carefully, as if he were afraid they would break. “Get us a couple of sandwiches, Nigel. Whatever Dr. Costard wants—unless you want to go to the hotel.”

  Costard was tired enough that Scott-Olson’s way of holding a conversation—half with her and half with the guide, Nigel—was beginning to confuse her.

  “I’m not hungry,” Costard said. She was too stressed to eat. “I’d like to see the skeleton first. I had time to sleep on the shuttle.”

  Although it was interrupted sleep. First because her seatmate snored, and then because the attendants insisted on waking everyone up for meals. Costard would have liked to have slept through the entire ordeal, but apparently that wasn’t allowed. People had to have a lot of water when they traveled in an artificial environment, and one way of encouraging the right amount of liquid was making sure everyone had plenty of food.

  “Great,” Scott-Olson said. “I was hoping you’d take a first look. We’re getting all sorts of flack from the Disty Government. We’ve managed to hold them off until you got here, but they’re getting impatient.”

  “I d
on’t release findings until I’ve done a complete evaluation,” Costard said.

  “I just need a timeline question answered,” Scott-Olson said. “We need to know how long the body was in the soil.”

  “I won’t be able to tell you that until I do a soil analysis as well as examine the corpse.” Costard’s head was starting to ache. She knew there would be political issues—she’d been informed of that from the beginning—but she hadn’t expected them to crop up so quickly.

  “You don’t need me then?” Nigel asked, his reedy voice sounding curiously tentative in the large space.

  Scott-Olson grinned at him. “I always need you, Nigel, but I can’t pay you for the overtime. So I guess you’re free to go.”

  He nodded at Scott-Olson, but couldn’t meet Costard’s gaze. He slipped out the door and ran up the stairs.

  Scott-Olson shook her head as she watched him leave. “Poor kid. He signed on for an intersession internship at the SDHPD, and ended up here. Who knew a person could be that squeamish?”

  “SDHPD?” Costard asked.

  “Sahara Dome Human Police Department,” Scott-Olson said. “We’re acronym happy around here. You’ll get used to it.”

  Costard hoped she wouldn’t be here long enough to get used to anything. “Human Police Department. That’s a curious designation. Does that mean the Disty have one?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Scott-Olson said. “Normally, in a case like this, we’d work in tandem with them, but they won’t come near this place, not right now.”

  “Why not?” Costard asked.

  Scott-Olson waved a thin hand. “It’s too complicated. Let’s just look at our mystery woman and then we can get you to the hotel.”

  “All right,” Costard said. She set her bag down beside the kits, then stretched. Her muscles ached from the heavy equipment, the long time she’d spent in the shuttle, and the unusually cramped seating in that cart.

  Scott-Olson walked around the tables to the left wall. She pulled open a drawer that had been painted the same color as the wall, so that it wasn’t even noticeable until she touched it.

  Costard followed her. As she got closer, she saw a rib cage floating above the drawer’s edge. The rib cage was a burnt orange.

  By the time she reached the drawer, she could see the whole skeleton. The entire thing was orange. There was no smell of decay, just a faint dusty odor, as if the skeleton had been stored in a box for a long period of time.

  Costard examined the bones without touching them. The skull itself was small, relatively polished, and even surfaced. The breastbone had become a single bone, so the victim was an adult, but the spinal column hadn’t fused and showed no sign of the elasticity tampering that Costard often saw in elderly corpses. There were parturition scars on the pelvis.

  “She’s had children,” Costard said.

  Scott-Olson nodded. “I didn’t try to determine age. I took a little bone marrow so that I could ID her, but aside from taking her from the site and bringing her here, that’s all I’ve done.”

  “Do you know who she is?” Costard asked.

  Scott-Olson shook her head. “I had to apply to the Alliance database. Most of our idents are done by chip or nuclear DNA. We almost never have to use mitochondrial DNA.”

  That caught Costard’s attention. Nuclear DNA came from living cells or cells that hadn’t had a lot of time to decay. “Don’t get a lot of old corpses?”

  “Most of the dead around here are locals. People don’t come to Sahara Dome except on business, and if they’ve traveled, they have an identi-chip in their shoulder or hand, somewhere easy to find. I usually use that and, yes, because of the Disty, we don’t get many old corpses.”

  “What do the Disty have to do with it?” Costard asked.

  “They can’t tolerate death,” Scott-Olson said. “They’ll ferret out a corpse faster than anything. The old ones we get are usually in the human section, where the Disty rarely travel.”

  Costard frowned. She’d been around a lot of strange death traditions, but almost all of them were human. She had some training in alien physiologies—she had to in order to rule out alien bones at an Earth death site—but she had almost no interactions with alien cultures.

  “She’s an amazing color,” Costard said.

  Scott-Olson nodded. “I’m guessing it came from the soil.”

  Costard touched the edge of one of the bones, rubbing her thumb and forefinger across the surface. Still surprisingly strong, although there was some flaking. But the color had embedded into the bone itself.

  “It came from whatever she was stored in. But you told me she might have been moved,” Costard said.

  “She was moved,” Scott-Olson said. “Corpses mummify here. Someone placed the skeleton there.”

  “And you have soil samples from the site?” Costard asked. She moved her fingers away from the skeleton. Poor thing. The woman hadn’t been much taller than Costard in life. And she had children, which meant that once upon a time she’d had a family, someone who cared about her.

  Someone who missed her when she disappeared.

  “I have soil samples, video of the site, stills, and air composition as well as odor tracking as we slowly brought her out. The crime scene unit has the blade of what we would call a back-hoe—the Disty have their own name for the damn thing, and it is slightly different—as well as some of their equipment. We could have had all of it. I doubt they’ll ever touch it again.”

  Costard looked at her. Scott-Olson was staring at the skeleton too. “You’re going to have to explain the Disty death thing to me.”

  “Believe me,” Scott-Olson said. “I will.”

  “First things first,” Costard said. “We’re going to have to test the soil and see if it colored her bones. We’ll have to figure out her age and her identification. And we’ll have to figure cause of death, unless I’m missing something obvious.”

  “She has a lot of scratches and cuts in the bones,” Scott-Olson said. “But I’m not sure if they’re postmortem. I’m not sure how she became a skeleton, whether the flesh was cut off her or not. I assume so, since the killer left enough connective tissue so that the bones are still attached to each other. I could have figured some of this out, but since you were coming, I thought I’d leave it to the expert.”

  Costard appreciated that. Bone work was her specialty. Medical examiners didn’t specialize in anything except the various forms of human death.

  “How much time do I have to complete the work?” Costard asked.

  “The faster you get it done, the better,” Scott-Olson said. “The Disty won’t go near the death site. More than a thousand are temporarily homeless, and they’re getting angrier as each day goes by.”

  “A thousand homeless?”

  “They cram into these buildings like you wouldn’t believe. I’m probably underestimating. And that really doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Disty are going to assign blame for her death if we don’t.”

  “Figuring out who killed her isn’t my job,” Costard said. “I can tell you how she died, and how long she’s been dead—roughly anyway—and help you identify her, but that’s all I can do.”

  “I know,” Scott-Olson said. “But we need those things before we find her killer.”

  Costard had never heard an M.E. sound so unrealistic before. “You might never find her killer. You do know that, right?”

  “We have to find her killer,” Scott-Olson said. “Or the Disty will do it for us.”

  “I thought you said they don’t like death. They investigate it?”

  “Not like we do. And their ideas of justice aren’t the same as ours either.”

  Costard felt cold. “Are you saying they’ll just pick someone at random?”

  “No, although that might be better.”

  “What will they do, then?” Costard asked.

  “They’ll blame us.”

  “Humans?” Costard asked.

  Scott-Olson shook her head. “You, me, any
one involved in the investigation.”

  “Legally, they can’t do that,” Costard said.

  “Legally, they can do what they want,” Scott-Olson said. “Mars is Disty territory. I thought you knew that.”

  “But you have your own law enforcement,” Costard said, not sure she understood this correctly.

  “It’s a courtesy,” Scott-Olson said.

  “They’ll kill you?” Costard asked.

  “It’s a risk,” Scott-Olson said. “We’ve touched the body. We’ve been contaminated by it. We’re useless to them.”

  Costard felt a surge of anger. Someone should have told her. “I think I’ll just take the next shuttle to Earth. I am not volunteering for this.”

  “It’s too late,” Scott-Olson said. “You already have.”

  Three

  Miles Flint stood in the back of the press conference room in Armstrong’s Police Headquarters. He made sure he was close to the door, so that he could duck out quickly if he had to. A year after he quit the force, he had no longer felt a part of it. Now he felt like a complete outsider.

  He had his arms crossed and his back pressed against the wall. Several other people stood next to him, many of them focused on their multimedia equipment. A few spoke softly, narrating the events for viewers who couldn’t attend.

  Ahead of him, a sea of blue Armstrong Police uniforms filled the room. They were present because this wasn’t just a press conference, it was also a ceremony—a ceremony that had surprised Flint as much as it surprised its intended victim, Noelle DeRicci.

  DeRicci sat at the edge of the stage, her legs crossed, her hands resting comfortably in her lap. She wore a skirt-and-blazer combination with chiffon accents, making her seem very stylish. Her dark hair, which once had touches of gray, now had streaks of black in its professional cut. She even wore some makeup, something the old DeRicci—the woman who had once been Flint’s partner back when he was a detective—would have scorned.

  Still, she was the same woman, brash, brilliant, and insecure. When she had mounted the stage, she had scanned for him, then smiled when she saw him.