Galaxy Man

by Mark Wayne McGinnis

  At the controls, Gallic circled around the odd-looking compound, comprised of three small, one-story farmhouses; a massive—open on three sides—corrugated metal garage for big farm vehicles; a dated, old-fashioned, red barn; and a sprawling, factory-like structure, surrounded by large, fenced-off pens. Each pen contained cattle numbering in the hundreds. Near the farthest farmhouse, Gallic spotted Tori’s star-cruiser. Coming in low, he noticed cow heads turn up as the Hound descended.

  * * *

  As Gallic strode toward the small, lime-green farmhouse, he saw Tori seated on the front steps, leading upward to a timber, wraparound porch. Leaning back, her eyes closed, she appeared to bask in the warm morning sunlight.

  Without opening her eyes, she greeted, “Buenos días, el jefe.”

  “I’m not your boss . . . I take it you talked to Danbury.”

  She squinted a look his way. “This one is bad, Gallic. I’m actually really glad to see you. Fucking creeps me out.”

  Gallic, glancing about the surrounding property, asked, “Where is everybody?”

  Tori rose to her feet, patting dust off her bottom. “You look like shit . . . you get into it with someone?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Everyone’s at the big yearly Muleshoe festivities,” she said. “What we’d regard as the county fair. Only this one is close to a thousand miles away, and huge, like on a totally unheard-of scale. Place called Shredder. Ranchers buy and sell stock, make arrangements for breeding, that sort of thing. And there’s a big rodeo there too, I guess. I’ve never been. Not really my thing.”

  “So . . . what? We have a mother and daughter living here, watching over things while everyone else headed off to Shredder?”

  “That’s my guess,” Tori said.

  “Shows us once again that the killer is keyed into community life . . . to the goings on locally.”

  Tori silently nodded.

  “Guess we should get at it then,” Gallic said. “Need help with the equipment?”

  “Nah . . . it’s already piled up, right inside the door.”

  “You take a look at the scene?”

  Again, Tori nodded. She seemed reluctant to head inside.

  “Who reported the murders?” Gallic asked, becoming a little perturbed that he needed to spoon-feed her questions.

  “No one. The eldest son tried calling his mom last night. Not able to reach her, he dialed into the home’s integrated video-com system. He saw the crime scene then called D-22. He’s en route. Should be here anytime now.”

  “I’m going in, take a look-see . . . hang-loose out here for a few minutes, okay?”

  “Disposable booties and gloves are in the top satchel inside. Hey, I’ve got a boatload of forensic data to go over with you . . . that pertain to the previous murders.”

  Apparently, Danbury hadn’t been bullshitting him, since he was getting the kind of access he needed to move these cases along. “One thing at a time,” Gallic said. Moving past her on the stairs, he noticed vomit, lying off to the right.

  “I told you . . . it’s a bad one,” she muttered apologetically.

  Chapter 30

  Frontier Planet, Muleshoe — Derringer Township.

  Gallic stood in the dark foyer of the small farmhouse and briefly wondered how many similar foyers he’d be required to stand in before the murderer was finally caught. Once gloved and bootied up, he closed his eyes and—going through his standard ritual—let the house, the horrendous atrocity waiting inside, silently speak to him. And then it was there. He could sense the killer’s particular presence—like a distinctive smell—that went far beyond the already encroaching death scene odors within the old timber home.

  Gallic’s ComsBand began to vibrate. Tapping the small screen, he accepted the incoming communiqué. The projected 3D image of Phil took shape before him.

  “Hey man . . . heard about the latest. You want me there . . . on the scene?”

  “Who’d you hear about it from?” Gallic asked.

  “Your old boss. A memorandum went out to all the Frontier Marshals. You, apparently, are now the man.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just that the central arbiter’s licensing office has put you in charge of the rest of us lowly field marshals. Apparently, you now hold the same authority as a field D-22 DCI.”

  Danbury must have thought he was doing Gallic a favor, when he actually was not. Gallic much preferred to work below the radar—and the less responsibility, the better. But he’d have to deal with that later. “Where are you right now?”

  Phil, giving him a sheepish look back, said, “I’m out about fifteen minutes from your coordinates. I headed off in your direction as soon as I heard the report.”

  Gallic was pleased to hear that. The three of them were hardly the resources needed, but working together, perhaps they could pull off a miracle and catch this killer. “See you when you get here,” he said, closing down the connection. Turning around, he saw Tori, heading in through the front door.

  “Let’s do this,” she said, putting on a stoic face. Gallic waited while she pulled on fresh gloves and then booties, almost losing her balance in the process. Next, she opened up the equipment cases.

  “I’m going to check out the scene. Go ahead and deploy the AFDS to start scanning the house,” Gallic said.

  “Copy that,” she said.

  Leaving Tori to do her work, Gallic proceeded forward into the house. A fairly typical ranch-style layout, it had a hallway off to the left. Heading off to the bedrooms, he immediately noticed the murder scene here was different from both the Johnson’s and the Bower’s. Noting substantial quantities of blood, where the two hallways converged, there were smeared drag marks. This was where one, possibly both, killings took place. He stepped over the gore and continued on. Entering into the attached kitchen-family room, it soon became evident that one of the two victims hadn’t died in the hallway. A fight had ensued here. Smears of blood were all around—the walls, countertops, furniture, and on the floor. Which victim fought back? The mother? Both? The kitchen table, now turned over, was lying on its side. Virtually every piece of furniture in the room was thrown about, out of position. A framed photograph, which Gallic surmised was a family portrait, hung off-kilter on the wall. Smiles, frozen in time, were on the faces of a young mother and father. Two school-aged children, perched on their parent’s laps, seemed to be staring back at him. The boy looked to be several years older than the girl. Gallic let his eyes drift down to the floor. The mother and daughter, lying there, were older now, by four—maybe five—years. On the wall opposite the slanted portrait were several rust-colored, goopy lines of text.

  The Curz are always watching. They make sure we don’t see. Only they have true sight. I am blind. I am blind. I am most useful when I can’t see.

  Gallic stood aside as the AFDS drone unit hovered into the room before backing into the adjoining hallway, where he found Tori waiting.

  “Did you see the blindfold?”

  Gallic nodded, another aspect of the scene that was in contrast to the others. While the mother’s eyelids were visibly nailed shut, the daughter’s eyes were covered over with a blindfold. The fabric material looked like silk, or maybe satin. Although both victims’ faces appeared to be wiped clean, an errant trickle of blood ran down the daughter’s right cheek. Gallic would bet any odds that her eyelids, too, were nailed shut beneath the blindfold.

  “Look at this room. Look at Shelly’s . . . the daughter’s . . . knuckles.”

  Gallic stepped up closer, staying out of the way of the hovering drone. Her knuckles were scraped, had a residue of blood on them. He wasn’t sure if it was hers, or the killer’s. He noticed the girl’s lips were set in a thin, straight, white line. She’d died defiant.

  “The mother, her name’s Corianne . . . Corianne Millhouse.”

  He thought of the very first killings—the two victims who also fought back. Clair and Mandy Gallic had not gone quietly. Study
ing the young girl, lying below him on the floor, her one hand was extended out—holding onto her mother’s. “Good for you, Shelly . . . I hope you hurt the son of a bitch.”

  Gallic gestured toward the entertainment wall, with its built-in interactive media interface—used for making video calls—as well as providing home security. Although it didn’t have the latest technology, it possessed enough for the son to log in then confront what must have been a most horrific sight.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Tori asked.

  “That there may be footage of the actual crime in real time?”

  “It’s a possibility. These units are always on . . . always watching . . . recording. The killer, though, would need to erase the cloud backup. That takes time . . . and a certain level of tech skills.”

  “Bring the unit back with you to D-22. Rip it right out of the wall, if you have to. You’ll need to get the login, from either the husband or the son,” Gallic said.

  Tori stepped away from a long streak of blood splattered on the floor. “All in all, we should get some good trace evidence from this scene . . .”

  “Yeah . . . well, it’s high time you share both the autopsy and scene evidence reports from the Johnson and the Bower crime scenes,” Gallic said.

  “I told you I had that for you. Orders came down from above to do that, and I have them in the cruiser,” Tori replied.

  The AFDS, on completing its crime scene scans, whizzed past Gallic, undoubtedly seeking its open equipment case and putting itself back into slumber mode. Gallic knelt next to the body of Cori Millhouse and gently lifted her head. Turning it to the side, he wasn’t surprised to find the same carved initials there made with the point of a nail:

  TCW

  Raised voices outside were now making their way into the house. Gallic and Tori stared at each other, mystified. “I’ll check whoever that is . . . so go ahead and get the other forensic drones deployed . . . then get the bodies prepped for transport,” Gallic told her.

  Exiting the front door, Gallic saw Phil desperately straight-arm a younger man, attempting to stop him from entering the house.

  “Get out of my way! I need to get in there! My mother . . . my sister . . . they’re . . .”

  Gallic guesstimated the young man to be around sixteen or seventeen. Eyes red and puffy, he was half-heartedly fighting back, already wise to what lay beyond the front door, having viewed the carnage.

  Phil shot Gallic a quick expression that read, I’ve got this! “The father’s here, too,” he said.

  Gallic spun around and found the man in the portrait running toward them. He, too, looked devastated. With raised palms, now facing outward, Gallic said, “Hold on there, Mr. Millhouse. You and your son cannot go in there. This is an active crime scene.”

  The man hardly noticed Gallic. Silently staring up at the house, at the closed front door, his face wore a sorrowful, pleading, stricken expression.

  Chapter 31

  Frontier Planet, Muleshoe — Derringer Township.

  Within the hour, no fewer than eight spacecrafts descended upon the Millhouse ranch. First to arrive were the processing plant supervisors, along with some ranch-hand crews, returning from Muleshoe festivities over in Shredder. Next was the media, arriving in three big network production vessels. No sooner landed, reporters—with their assemblage of hovering video drones—also hurried toward the crime scene.

  In addition to sectioning-off certain areas, using old-fashioned crime scene tape, Phil first configured then deployed a small army of his own perimeter sentry drones. They buzzed around—lights flashing and occasionally squawking—when the sealed-off boundaries were crossed. They were annoying but effective in keeping the wrong people away from the cordoned-off areas—namely, those wanting unauthorized access to the Millerton home.

  Gallic and Tori set up a marshal’s station, situated within the ranch’s ginormous corrugated equipment enclosure. The largest piece of equipment—something called a herd transport—pretty much looked like a flat-topped flying saucer. Its top, covered with dirt, was encircled by a five-foot-tall metal rail fence. The total circumference of the thing was roughly the size of a small city block. Easily, a hundred head of cattle could be ushered into the pen, and then later transported to other parts of the ranch, or to other ranches with new pastureland.

  Next to the herd transport, Gallic and Tori were now interviewing the two surviving Millerton’s. After close to an hour of inquiry, both father and son seemed nearly incapable of coping any further. They needed time to start the grieving process; come to terms with the fact that their lives would never be the same. Gallic, who could relate better than just about anyone, kept his personal, tormented past to himself. From the answers to queries they’d received thus far, it was clearly evident neither had anything to do with the murders. Even so, certain questions had to be asked and ComsBand recordings made and logged.

  “Again, no one out of the ordinary has been around here lately?” Gallic asked.

  “No. I’ll ask the employees when . . .” he couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “We’re almost done here, Mr. Millerton. What can you tell me about any association you, or your wife, may have had with a group called the Curz?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Gary replied, and looked at his son. “Thom?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “How about prior to her meeting you . . . maybe years ago? Recall anything familiar your wife was involved with?”

  Gallic glanced again at his ComsBand, vibrating pretty much non-stop over the last hour. Contact attempts from Allison Tillman, Superintendent Danbury, and, most recently, Lane. They’d all have to wait.

  “I don’t know . . . maybe. I seem to remember she was involved in something weird. Hell . . . it was twenty years ago. It’s hard to think right now. Wait! She dated someone before me who . . . was a real piece of work. In the military, though not a soldier, he was a scientist, or a bio-engineer . . . something like that. Came up with new ways to kill people using certain technology. Anyway . . . I remember Corianne saying something about him being a zealot of some sort. They’d fought about it. Its principles . . . whatever that religion or cult was, she really hated. That was what drove her away from him.”

  “Do you remember his name? Where this took place? Any further details would be very helpful.”

  “It was definitely on Earth, either in New York or Los Angeles. She once lived in both cities . . .”

  Gallic, noting Gary Millerton was pretty close to an emotional breaking point, knew he’d have to wait; arrange a follow-up session in a few days.

  “Um . . . Mr. Millerton . . . do you and your son have a place to stay, somewhere away from your ranch?” Tori asked.

  The distraught man stared in the direction of his small, lime-green farmhouse. “This is our home.”

  “I don’t want to stay here, Dad. Not with mom and Shelly gone. And I don’t ever want to come back here again. I hate it here . . . I fucking hate it here.”

  Gary put a reassuring hand on his son’s shoulder. “We’ll have Jordan, a ranch hand here, take us over to Rawhide. I have a sister there. Christ! She doesn’t know she’s just lost her niece and her sister-in-law! Oh God.”

  Another few minutes passed before Tori finally got Gary and Thom settled into an older spacecraft—perhaps Jordan’s, the ranch hand Gary spoke of. Gallic watched as the small ship lifted off and faded high into the nighttime sky.

  Leaving the large equipment shed, Gallic found Phil still keeping the media at bay. As directed, Phil was not saying a word about the double murder, only that a full press release would be forthcoming from Superintendent Bernard Danbury, D-22, probably within the next twenty-four hours.

  “Gallic . . . I’m heading back to Lorraine B, if that’s okay,” Tori said, as they walked together toward her cruiser, where within, in the now-lowered temperature cargo section, the two Millerton bodies were stored.

  “Let me give you the files,�
� she said, opening up the front driver-side hatch. She leaned inside for several moments before retreating out with a fist-sized core-dome unit. About the size of a fist, the small, self-contained device was supposedly impregnable and capable of transmitting and receiving data from anywhere in space. As long as it was within line-of-sight of distant starlight, it could communicate. The unit, with a virtually unlimited storage capacity, was standard issue for all D-22 personnel—to accumulate and protect active case files. Hacking today was so commonplace, even by reputable corporations, that it was expected. But a core-dome unit had never, reportedly, been hacked.

  “It’s all here—even more than you are aware of, Gallic. Information you weren’t cleared to see once you’d left the department.” Tori looked hesitant about adding something more.

  “Just spit it out, Tori.”

  “There are details about your case . . . I mean Clair and Mandy’s murders. Back then, DI Portsmouth, Southerland, and Stone were each assigned some aspect of the case. Believe it or not, it consumed them. After you left, those murders tore a hole in the department far beyond anything you can imagine.” Placing the surprisingly heavy device in Gallic’s palm, she kept hers lying atop it. “Each one ran down countless leads . . . leads that inevitably led nowhere. Here now is everything. Everything you’ve wanted for three years. I truly hope it helps.” Tori, on pulling her hand away, self-consciously stuck her hands into her uniform’s pockets.

  “Thank you, Tori.” What else could he say, really wanting to tell her he needed this data three years ago. Perhaps, then, those six additional murders committed in frontier space would have been avoided. But he didn’t. She was only a young kid and right out of the academy at the time. “Do me a favor . . . get the bodies back to D-22 and come right back. I want you here, working on the case full-time. We’re going to crack this thing . . . I can feel it.”