The Double Human

by James O'Neal

  He shook his head. “It had been diluted by the rain by the time we got it. I don’t have the equipment to take such a washed-out sample. After your last lab submission, I was interested in what you dug up.”

  “And how’s this related to the new case?”

  “Look.” The lab tech held up an enlargement of a fingerprint.

  “So?”

  “This is the print I took off the wood you sent in the other night.” He brought up a screen on the computer. “Here’s a matching print in our database.”

  “That’s great, who is it?”

  “It was never identified.”

  “Why was it in the database?”

  “A murder. Neck injury just like yours. A girl named Mary Harris.”

  “No kidding.” Wilner could see the loop and swirls of the fingerprint and how both prints matched. “Who worked the case?”

  “It was the old Pompano police.”

  “Before UPF?”

  “Yep.”

  Wilner froze. “Wait a minute. How long ago?”

  “Forty-nine years ago.”

  “But that would mean…” Wilner trailed off.

  “And the same print shows up in a burglary case, two more murders and a car theft every few years until about eleven years ago.”

  “I wonder what happened to him eleven years ago.”

  “I have an idea,” said the tech.

  “What’s that?”

  “They shut down the Quarantine Zone about eleven years ago. I bet this cat lives down there.”

  Wilner nodded, knowing that’s exactly where his killer lived.

  ELEVEN

  Tom Wilner kept his voice under a shout as he leaned toward Johann Halleck. He knew the big man who was at least three hundred and fifty years old could take any punch Wilner tried to throw, but he was pissed and he wanted Johann to know it.

  “It has to be one of you. The fingerprint was at a crime scene almost fifty years ago and at a scene from this week. How do you explain that?”

  Johann shook his blond head. “Tom, you must calm yourself. I am not your enemy. I need time to figure this out as well.”

  “Your fingerprints are the same as humans, right?”

  Johann held up a big paw of a hand and shoved it in close to Wilner’s face. “Same as you. Whirls and loops, no two are the same.”

  Wilner took a breath and sat back on a stool. They were in a sports bar in the Eastern District close to Wilner’s house. “Could it be a Simolit?”

  “Anything is possible.” Johann’s accent bleeded through every comment. To Wilner it sounded German, but it was really a mix of the many countries Johann had lived in over his long life. Johann continued, “I thought they had all fled the district after our trouble. Certainly we killed several and Tiget Nadovich was blown to bits.”

  “Was he?” asked Wilner. “We never recovered his body.”

  “You saw the killer. Was it Nadovich?”

  Wilner shook his head. “No, I didn’t get a good look at him but it wasn’t Nadovich. As far as I can tell, all the Simolit family members fled the district. I think the killer came over from the Quarantine Zone. They could be living in an armed camp over there.”

  “They could, but I think I would’ve heard about it. I have many contacts in the zone and travel there frequently. I believe this will take more investigation. I will help in any way I can.”

  “Will you check with your family and see if they ever experienced anything like this before?”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll go into the zone and see what I can find out.”

  Johann grabbed his forearm. “Either way there is danger. You must be careful. This man is a killer.”

  Leonard liked that this girl, Darla, sat so close to him as he drove. He’d slipped her into the house he shared with his aunt and for a mere one hundred zone credits, spent the night engaged in adult games. This was a different kind of urge. One he could curb. He could get gratification from sex with women. And this woman in particular excited him. Her wild, uninhibited ability to satisfy him was a new feeling.

  When he was younger he thought that only the feeling of someone’s life draining away through their neck could excite him. It was nice to find other means of release.

  Darla lived in a house with another dancer from the Chaos Pit on the edge of the Zone River closer to the border.

  “How do you get to the club at night?” asked Leonard.

  She smiled that wide smile and said, “I can usually find someone willing to drive me.”

  “You have never driven a car?”

  “Nope. They closed the border when I was thirteen and then we couldn’t get gas. Men started doing me favors like driving me when I was fifteen so I never got the chance.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “South Dade County.”

  “You’re an American citizen, why didn’t you just go into the district?”

  “My brothers were all coming up on eighteen and my daddy didn’t want them fighting no rag-heads off in some desert so he decided to stay. Then my brothers were listed as fugitives from the draft and couldn’t go back. Now we all live down here in the zone except my brother Bobby. He moved to Canada with his wife. She was a Canadian citizen so they took him too.”

  “You ever hear from him?”

  “No, he was caught in the Winnipeg terror attack. He died of anthrax poisoning about a month later.”

  “They didn’t treat him?”

  “Canadians were treated first, then they ran out of medicine. Now my daddy hates Canada and the United States.”

  She pointed to the house as he chugged down the street at fifteen miles an hour.

  Leonard said, “You got neighbors on both sides of you.”

  “Yeah. Lotta people live over here.”

  Leonard pointed to an elderly black woman standing on the broken-down porch of an ancient wood house from before the turn of the century. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Mrs. Lolley. She’s crazy. She found some guy washed up in her backyard from the river. Been caring for him ever since. I ain’t seen him move once. He looks like a mummy, all bandaged up.”

  “How’s she feed him?”

  “I only seen him twice. He gives me the creeps. I don’t know what goes on over there.”

  As they pulled in front of Darla’s house, Leonard noticed a tall blond woman come out the front door. She had on a robe and waved to Darla, then climbed down the four stairs to the front yard and walked toward them.

  Leonard took in her long, muscular legs and shapely body.

  Darla said, “This is my roommate, Lisa.”

  Leonard smiled but couldn’t speak. He was hypnotized by one thing. Lisa’s long, graceful, lovely neck.

  Wilner had taken his own police car into the zone. Why not? He was on official business even though he was in a different country. It only took one wrong turn before he found Mari’s school.

  He admitted to himself that he was surprised at how nice the school and grounds looked. He had to get out of the frame of mind that everything and everyone in the zone was screwed up. He’d seen it on his last few trips down here. Things were organized. At least some things. People weren’t running wild in the street like the news would have you believe. They didn’t have warlords that controlled whole sections of the zone. They did have gangs, but from what Wilner had learned they were not much worse than some of the U.S. gangs and focused more on organizing and building than stealing and terrorizing.

  He parked his hive on the side of the street. A newer pickup truck and a steam-powered converted Cadillac were parked in front of him on the road. It wasn’t unlike visiting his children’s school in the district. He stayed on the decorative rock path that led from the street to the front of the small schoolhouse.

  He stepped through the wide main doors and was immediately greeted by an older woman.

  She assessed him for a moment before asking in English, “May I help you?”

>   “Mari told me she worked here.”

  The woman gave him a doubtful glance.

  He couldn’t keep from smiling at the small woman’s stern expression.

  “Really, she did. My name is Tom Wilner.”

  The woman said, “The policeman from the UPF.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “She’s been expecting you. One moment.” She motioned him to a chair in the corner of the greeting room and then hurried down one hallway.

  Wilner looked at the well-kept walls and floors, the plaques hung near the hallway looked like any other school’s boasts of academic and athletic achievements. Then, less than a minute after the first lady had left, Mari Saltis stepped in through the same hallway door.

  She smiled and held out her hand as she approached Wilner.

  “Hello, Detective.”

  “The lady who greeted me didn’t look like she liked me.”

  “Miss Kelbert? No, she’s just protective and I don’t get many visitors.”

  Wilner doubted that as he looked at her delicate face and beautiful, dark eyes.

  “Any new breaks, Detective?”

  He told her about his fear that the killer had escaped. By the time he was done, they had sat together on a small, low couch in the greeting room.

  “You knew about murders here. You said you had heard of two.”

  She nodded. “Not far from here. A woman no one could identify was stabbed in the throat and then about six months ago a waitress at one of the restaurants that has its own farm was found dead in the field behind the diner. She had been stabbed in exactly the same way. The people down here have been referring to him as ‘the Vampire.’”

  Wilner gave her time in case she wanted to say something else.

  She looked up at him and said, “The Miami Quarantine Zone is not like you think it is. I know the United States looks down on us like a bunch of savages, but life is dangerous whether you live in the district, Philadelphia or the Quarantine Zone.”

  “I agree.”

  “A killer like this would strike wherever he lived. It just happens that he lives in the Quarantine Zone.”

  “The difference is that someone would try and catch him in the district.”

  “People tried here too. It just didn’t work out too well.”

  “How so?”

  She hesitated, then told him a story as terrifying as the killings.

  TWELVE

  Leonard Hall had seen the cop’s new hive by accident. Although the new vehicle stuck out in the zone, he wouldn’t have even seen it if he didn’t need to go to the market near the girls’ school. He liked the way a couple of the teachers looked and didn’t mind some of the older students either.

  As he chugged down the street he saw the car from a block away. He thought it might be someone else, but as he slowed his old Honda he saw Wilner and the head teacher walk out of the front door. Incredible. He couldn’t control his wide grin. His heart raced as he felt a wave of excitement, even joy, wash over him. He had admired the teacher’s form for months, but hadn’t thought about making her one of his prizes. Now, if he could find her and the cop together, she was too tempting a target.

  The sight of the two of them had made him completely forget Darla’s roommate, Lisa. He could deal with her any time. He knew where she lived and where she worked.

  He followed the cop and teacher to see where they were going together and to find out why he was down in the zone. It had to be about the murders. He’d be disappointed if this cop had already given up on him.

  He stayed back until the hive pulled from the curb.

  Tom Wilner strolled next to her inside the old city hall of a town that used to be known as North Miami Beach. The building was run-down, but it was clear it had been used regularly since the creation of the Miami Quarantine Zone. Mari’s trim shoulder occasionally bumped his arm and he felt his heart pick up speed like he was a hormone-plagued teenager. It reminded him of his first girlfriend in tenth grade. He had taken her down to the beach in his hometown of Ocean Grove, New Jersey. She gave him a sense of shelter. Just a few stolen hours away from his father’s drunken abuse and his chores that seemed to never end. That day, when Anne Bocock reached down and grasped his hand, was as clearly burned in his memory as the battle of Bandar Abbas or the street fighting in Tehran.

  Now, with this beautiful woman telling the tale of the Quarantine Zone’s failed attempt at criminal justice, he realized how lonely he had been the past year and a half. Once Svala left him it took a year to reconcile that she was not coming back. Then, after his relationship with Shelby Hahn had developed, he learned the truth about her and her family. It wasn’t the fact that she was so different, she still had human emotions and sensibilities; it was the fact that she had lied to him. After the deceptions of Svala it was more than he could take. He missed a woman’s company.

  Mari let her hand sweep across the large, open chamber. “This is where they brought the suspect they captured after the first murder. He was just twenty and scared. His Jamaican accent making it difficult to understand all his frantic protests.”

  “Who identified him as the killer?”

  “That was the problem. Five members of a gang that used to call themselves the Marvel Men.”

  “That’s a weird name.”

  “It was after some old comic books. Now they call themselves the Zone Police. After what happened people didn’t want anything to do with them. So they changed their name and image. Now they patrol and collect ‘taxes’ to keep the order from the border to a little past here. They don’t even venture into the old city of Miami. Too rough for them down there.”

  “What happened at the trial?”

  “It wasn’t a trial. The crowd screamed about the way he killed the first woman and that he was why no one wanted to return to the United States. They thought this place was free of creeps that preyed on women.” She turned her dark eyes up to his face. “Which wasn’t true. At the time most people did want to go to the United States.” She looked out over the chamber again. “He denied any of the accusations. Then a judge, who was really a member of the gang, sentenced him to death. He was dragged out into the street and hung on the front entranceway to the building.”

  “What happened to convince people it was wrong?”

  “The next week another body showed up. Then people learned that the young man had been in an argument with the Marvel Men. It was the first and last trial the Quarantine Zone ever had. People started handling conflict immediately between one another.”

  “And you really like living here?”

  “I like the girls at the school. The residents are here to stay, no matter what the United States thinks. They need people who’ll do things like teach or nurse. You know we have a working hospital?”

  “I heard there was medical treatment down here.”

  “We have doctors from all over the Caribbean.” She turned toward him and put her hands on his arms. “We need real policemen to make us safe.”

  He felt the attraction and it wasn’t just on his side. It was like a magnet was pulling him. He leaned his face down, ready to feel her lips on his when a shout startled him. He jerked his head up and saw four men standing in the gallery above them.

  One man said, “What’s this, a visitor from the United States?” His Spanish accent was thick.

  Wilner reached for his gun under his jacket but a voice behind him said, “Don’t try it.”

  He turned and saw that a short, muscle-bound man held an old shotgun on him and Mari. There was nothing he could do.

  Johann Halleck liked this restaurant in the Northern Enclave. It was quite a ride in the hive he had recently purchased. Manufactured by General-Ford of the United States, it had the body of a larger Ford vehicle with the smoother engine and fuel efficiency of a General Motors product. The partnership had kept the two automakers competitive with the new carmakers from Asia and Africa.

  He took the old Interstate 95 past the former
town of West Palm Beach into an area he had only traveled to once before. The last visit was for the same thing.

  Per the treaty set out between the Simolits and Hallecks he was unarmed and counted on the honor of the man he was meeting to keep him unarmed as well. Bejor Simolit had hesitated to meet with Johann when he called after the talk with Wilner. He had told Johann that the family was looking into the circumstances of Radko’s death and there was a strong suspicion that Johann had played a part in it.

  Johann explained that he had a matter of mutual interest to both families and that he felt it was important to meet. Since Johann had never insisted on a meeting like this before, Bejor agreed and they found a mutually acceptable meeting site at a restaurant frequented by the few tourists that made it down this far into the state. It used to be that tourists chased the sunshine. Now the few that came were more interested in seeing what the state had become and how it was rebuilding after all the horror it had seen.

  The Northern Enclave had a sense of what Florida once was with some shopping and restaurants open and oceanside hotels operating. But the cool, wet weather and stark vista scared many away. Everyone was used to more of a domestic military presence but in South Florida, with the large contingent of National Guardsmen at the border, there was a constant reminder of how America had changed.

  The final and most significant blow to tourism was the breakdown in air travel. As terrorists focused more on airliners and as costs rose, the airlines looked to diversify in other transportation industries. Now Delta Railways was as big as the airline had once been. Except for the government, military and a few outrageously expensive charter airlines, the skies were empty of planes.

  Johann saw the restaurant called the Outpost and pulled into the nearly empty parking lot. A light spray of cool rain hit his face as he cut across the small lot into the one-story restaurant with a nautical décor. Nets and pier posts jutted up inside the building and old photos of fishermen and crab ships lined the walls.

  He immediately saw the de facto leader of the Simolit family in Florida sitting alone at a table in the corner of one of the dining rooms.