Final Disposition (36 page)

      Cellars nodded silently.

      “She’s pretty … I can see why you guys were jealous of each other.”

      Cellars blinked.

      “What … how would you know that? 
I
don’t even know what Jody looks like.”

      “You didn’t look at your evidence list, did you?”

      “What … you mean the list at the end of that first report?  No, I was going to go through it after I read the ‘A’ addendum report, but I got distracted ... as you may recall.”

      “Item number twenty-two,” Marcini said, reaching for the first CSI report that Sutta had tossed aside in favor of the addendum.  “A portrait and easel that you found in the middle of Bobby’s cabin basement.”

      She showed Cellars the reference number on his list.

      “Okay, so there was a portrait of someone at the scene —?”

      “— that you also took a crime scene photo of,” Marcini said as she flipped through to the end of the report.  “See, check out the color thumbnails.  Eight to a page, so you can’t see a lot of detail; but you can certainly tell that she’s pretty.”

      Cellars stared at the small photo of a portrait of very attractive young woman with dark hair who was wearing a low-necked blouse with some kind of pendant resting between her partially-exposed full breasts.

      “Yes, I agree, she does look pretty,” Cellars said.

      “But you don’t remember her?”

      He shook his head.  “No, not at all.”

      Marcini stared at Cellars for a long moment. 

      “So are you?”

      “Am I what?”

      “Still in love with her?”  Marcini asked in what Cellars thought was an incredibly … neutral … voice.  No inflection at all that he could detect.

      Cellars stared directly into her eyes and said: “I honestly have no idea.”

      “How can that possibly be?” Marcini asked, emotion flooding her voice now.  “How can you be so in love with someone that you were willing to face a nightmare-bitch like that a third time, but now —”

      Marcini blinked.  “Wait a minute.  That’s right, you couldn’t have known that she was the nightmare-bitch the third time either, because you didn’t know about the shape-shifting until —”

      “Bobby’s long shot, at the very end,” Cellars nodded.  “Reading between the lines again, I couldn’t have figured out her shape-shifting capabilities until I actually saw her do it — right before the shot.”

      “But you had to have figured out the other part — what Allesandra was looking for — before you and Bobby finally met each other at his cabin,” Marcini argued.  “I mean, why else would the nightmare-bitch agree to meet the two of you together — and then try to negotiate an exchange for Jody — if she didn’t think you had what she wanted?”

      “It does make sense that I would have found whatever it was she wanted before I went back to Bobby’s cabin that last time,” Cellars agreed, “but the trouble is, I haven’t the slightest idea where I was — or what I was doing — during that time interval, and my report doesn’t say.”

      “There’s a lot of stuff your report doesn’t say,” Sutta commented as he tossed the ‘A’ addendum onto the table.

      “Such as?” Cellars asked.

      “That goddamned dog, for example,” the pathologist groused.  “You casually mention in your first report that you dropped the carcass of a dog off at my Morgue, along with the supposed body of your friend Dawson that we never did find … and then you never bother to mention the fact that Bucky sent it over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Forensic Lab in Ashland, so that I wouldn’t accidently find out about it.”

      “But you obviously did?” Cellars commented.

      “Bucky confesses on a regular basis, especially if I start asking the right questions,” Sutta said with a shrug.  “She claims it’s good for her soul, but I think she’s just angling for a pay raise.  Anyway, I get the impression that Bucky’s initiative to send that dog over to the Ashland Lab helped you solve some minor part of your investigation; so I figure that’s just one more reason you owe me another bottle of expensive wine, even if you didn’t consider the event important enough to put in your report.”

      “I’m not clear on why you should be rewarded for Bucky’s initiative, much less on how getting Bobby’s dead dog to some wildlife crime lab helped me solve the case,” Cellars commented.  “Just how do you figure that all came about?”

      “How should I know?” Sutta growled, “I told you, I don’t do dogs.  Hell, I wouldn’t have even have know about the damned thing in the first place if Ann hadn’t mentioned it at our weekly lunch meeting.”

      “Ann?”

      “Dr. Ann Tsuda, the veterinary pathologist over at the Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab.  She told all of us at the table how she thought she was going to have to thaw some Malamute out before she could do a necropsy for you; but then she got lucky and found the necklace wrapped around the dog’s neck.”

      Cellars and Marcini’s heads both snapped up.

      “Necklace?” Cellars eyebrows furrowed.

      “What
kind
of necklace?” Marcini asked, saying the words slowly.

      “How the hell should I know?” Sutta frowned.  “I know little or nothing about jewelry, and care even less … but now that you mention it, I think she said it was some kind of precious rock or —

      “Stone?” Cellars and Marcini whispered the word in unison.

CHAPTER 28

      Five minutes later, Cellars and Sutta were standing behind Marcini in the Clinic’s Instrumental Chemistry Lab.  She had laid the four stones Cellars had collected and marked out on a piece of cotton gauze, and was carefully examining them under a low-power dissection microscope.

      Next to the microscope, on separate pieces of gauze, were the two thin green cylinders.  And further over on the table surface were the small manila envelopes containing Cellar’s recovered bullets from the three shootings, and the larger envelopes containing the digital x-ray photos Sutta had taken of Cellar’s head and Allesandra’s entire body.

      One by one, she moved each of the four stones into the artificial-light-illuminated view-field of the scope, examining all sides of each stone first under 10x and then under 20x magnification.  Finally, she slid the piece of gauze out from under the microscope and looked up at the two men.

      “Well, they’re certainly not
identical
in size or shape,” she said carefully.  “But if they weren’t all marked with unique item numbers, you’d have a hard time telling them apart.  They’re all irregular ovoid shapes — longer circumference in the center than at the two ends by approximately 60 millimeters — with what appears to be the same rough, mottled granite-like surface.  The one marked number one has a small chip at the end missing … but other than that, it appears very similar to the other three.”

      “Thus supporting the theory that Allesandra and the shadows
are
all the same thing … whatever that thing is,” Sutta commented.

      “So what are we looking at in terms of these stones, some kind of extraterrestrial camouflage?” Cellars asked.

      “Possibly,” Marcini shrugged.  “When you look down at them from five-to-six feet away, all you see are unremarkable rocks.  It’s only when you have several of them together, like we have here, that you notice the incredible similarity.”

      “But they can’t
just
be stones,” Cellars argued.  “From what we know — or at least what we think we know — they’ve got to have some kind of regenerating capability.  Circumstantial evidence tells us that Allesandra turned into one of these stones about ten days ago when she was ‘killed’.  But then she managed to reappear at Lisa’s apartment today knowing all about me … presumably because something was done to her recovered stone.”

      “Unfortunately, that theory assumes these four stones are exactly the same as the ones you described in your CSI reports,” Marcini reminded.  “But the only reference we have to them in your evidence list is item twenty-one, which you described as ‘glass fragments and stone.’  Not much help there.  And, according to the thumbnail sheets, you only took one ‘overall’ shot — and no close-ups — of that item … so we really can’t tell.”

      “But, even if they were the same, going from a human-sized entity to a small stone and then back to human entity size again — by some kind of incredible compression and expansion process — just doesn’t make any sense,” Sutta pointed out.  “If that
was
the case, these stones would have to weigh at least a hundred pounds apiece … and they clearly don’t.”

      “So what are they, then, some kind of structural blue prints for the reconstruction?” Marcini asked.

      “They have to be more than that,” Cellars argued.  “Allesandra clearly remembered me and Bobby when she showed up at Lisa’s apartment and went after us.  How could she possibly do that if her actual memories weren’t a part of the data storage and regeneration process?”

      “Actually, the whole thing sounds like a great interstellar travel technique,” Sutta commented.  “It makes sense that going out planet-hopping would have to be a pretty dangerous occupation; especially if these creatures keep running into nasty game-players armed to the teeth with thumbs and tools like us
homo
sapiens
.  That being the case, you can see why they’d want to have some way of getting back home more-or-less in one piece and with their memories intact.  I know I certainly would.”

      “That whole idea sounds pretty good to me, too, right about now,” Cellars agreed.

      “And that would explain why those shadows you described in your CSI reports went to so much effort to retrieve those stones,” Marcini said.  “It’d be like retrieving their dead comrades from a battlefield, only a much more crucial process because they’re not actually dead; just in some kind of suspended … animation?”  She glanced down at the four stones uneasily.

      “Which begs the obvious question: how are they reanimated?” Sutta said.  “And, more importantly, is it something that we could do … accidently or otherwise … in the process of examining them?”

      “I hope the hell not,” Marcini muttered.  “I never want to see that bitch-nightmare again under any circumstances … much less in this lab room.”

      “There’s something I don’t understand —” Cellars started to say, and then caught himself when he saw the bemused expressions on Marcini’s and Sutta’s faces.  “Well, okay, there are a
lot
of things I don’t understand about this entire situation,” he corrected, “but one of the most confusing things — at least from my point of view — is the data storage issue.  How can you possibly accumulate the huge amount of data that you’d need to restore someone’s body structure and memory within some kind of crude rock or stone matrix?   I mean, just in terms of basic physics — rules I assume they have to follow just like us — that doesn’t seem scientifically possible.”

      “Maybe it’s not really a stone … it just looks like one on the outside?” Sutta suggested.

      “Can we make that determination here?” Cellars asked, looking at Marcini, who shrugged uneasily.

      “We have an XRF — an X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer — that would give us most of the basic elemental composition,” she said, “but I’m not sure what that would tell us in terms of three-dimensional crystalline structure … nor am I sure that I want to be bombarding these things with high-energy x-rays,” she added.  “Like Dr. Sutta suggested, we really don’t know how these things work in terms of regeneration … and we sure don’t want to find out the hard way.”

      “Amen to that,” Sutta muttered.

      “Hey, did you hear what I just said?” Marcini demanded, staring at Cellars … who was now tapping his fingers of his right hand against the table surface, his eyes staring out in distance.  Then, suddenly, he blinked ... and then smiled.

      “Good old frontal lobes,” he said as he started to rummage through the pile of smaller envelopes on the table.

      “Are we talking frontal lobes, in general … or yours in particular?” Marcini asked curiously.

      “They’re really amazing structures when they’re not whining and complaining,” Cellars went on as if he hadn’t heard the question.  “Like to multi-task — figure things out behind the scenes — while you’re busy doing all the other shit.”

      “Okay,” Marcini said agreeably, giving Sutta a quick glance, “I’m sure a lot of people think they have a direct conversational relationship with their brain … probably the vast majority of my moderately delusional patients included, now that I think about it.  So, did I happen to hit you a little too hard with that right cross to the jaw a few minutes ago?”

      “It was a little over the top, but I’ll live,” Cellars said with a shrug.  “On the other hand, you can make it up to me by taking a look at these bullets under that dissection scope.”

      “Assuming that I actually
want
to make up anything at all, what would I be looking for?” she asked conversationally as she took the three coin envelopes out of Cellar’s hand.

      “The bullets in these envelopes are expanded nine-millimeter hollow-points, which means their hollowed-out tips started expanding — spreading apart and folding backwards — the instant they struck something solid.  Then they kept on expanding out — creating very sharp copper edges that sliced and scooped whatever material the bullets were traveling through — as the bullet continued to penetrate and spin … until they ideally came to a stop inside the target I was aiming at.  All of which means you’re going to need a small pair of clean needle-nosed pliers to bend those sharp edges forward a bit so that you can see what’s trapped underneath,” Cellars explained.

      Marcini cocked her head, seemed to think about the general concept for a few seconds, and then got up out of her chair, walked over to a small wooden cabinet, and came back to the table with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, a bottle labeled ‘ISOPROPYL ALCOHOL’ and several packs of sterile gauze.