Micro

He hadn’t even known moonbows existed. Here they were, travelers in a dangerous Eden. It would be just his luck to be stuck in Eden with Karen King, of all people. He found himself glancing at her. Well, she was beautiful, especially in the moonlight. Nothing seemed to keep Karen down for long, nothing seemed to defeat her. Karen King made a good partner for an expedition, even if they didn’t get along personally. She did not lack courage, that was for sure. It was just too bad her personality was so unruly, so contrary. He drifted off, and woke later to find that Karen had fallen asleep against him, her head nestled on his shoulder, breathing gently.

Chapter 31

Beretania Street, Honolulu 30 October, 4:30 p.m.

It’s strange.” Dorothy Girt, senior forensic scientist with the Honolulu Police Department, kept her eyes focused on the eyepieces of a Zeiss binocular microscope. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She stood up, and Dan Watanabe sat down at the microscope. They were in an open area subdivided by lab benches. The benches were stocked with testing equipment, imaging equipment, microscopes, computers. He adjusted the eyepieces, and focused.

At first, he saw…a small object with a metallic look.

“How big is it?” he asked.

“One millimeter.”

It was somewhat larger than a poppy seed. But it was a machine. Or looked like one.

“What the hell…?” he said.

“My feeling, too.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Fong’s office,” Dorothy Girt said. “The evidence team dusted the office for prints. They lifted this object on a print tape, from a window near the lock.”

Watanabe changed the focus, and moved his gaze up and down the object. It was damaged; it appeared to be crushed, and was covered with a dark, tarlike material. The object vaguely resembled a vacuum cleaner, except that it had something that looked like a fan on it. Fan blades inside a housing. A little bit like a jet engine. There was a long, flexible neck, a gooseneck, and at the end of the neck two sharp, flat metal pieces stuck out.

“It must have fallen out of somebody’s computer,” he said.

Dorothy Girt was standing next to him, leaning on the lab bench. She straightened up. “Does a computer have knives in it?” she said quietly.

He looked again. What he had thought were two flat pieces of metal coming off the gooseneck now looked more like blades. Crossed daggers, gleaming, at the end of a flexible arm. “Do you think…?” he began.

“I want to know what you think, Dan.”

Watanabe turned the zoom knob. He went down into the view, deeper and deeper, magnifying the daggers. They became precision instruments, forged and polished. Each blade reminded him of a tanto, a Japanese dagger used by samurai. There was some kind of dark, dirty material smeared on the blades. And then he saw the cells. Dried red blood cells. The cells were mixed with fibrin.

“There’s blood on it,” he said.

“I had noticed.”

“How long are those blades?”

“Less than half a millimeter,” Girt answered.

“Then it doesn’t work,” he said. “The victims bled to death from cuts up to two centimeters deep. The cuts opened their jugulars. These blades are far too small to cut somebody’s throat. It’s like trying to kill a whale with a pen knife. Can’t do it.”

They both were silent for a moment.

“Except at birthdays,” Watanabe added.

“Excuse me, Dan…?”

“You’re wrapping a birthday present. You cut the paper with…?”

“Scissors.”

“Those blades are scissors,” he said. “They could have snipped large wounds in the victims.”

He began scanning the device, searching for identifying marks-a serial number, a printed word, a corporate logo. He found nothing of the sort. Whoever had built the device had not put on identifying marks, or had carefully erased them. In other words, whoever had made the device didn’t want it to be traced.

He said, “Did the autopsies turn up any more of these devices? In the wounds, in the blood?”

“No,” Girt said. “But the examiners probably wouldn’t have noticed them.”

“What’s the status of the bodies?”

“Fong was cremated. Rodriguez got buried. John Doe is in the fridge.”

“He needs a second look.”

“Will do.”

Watanabe stood back from the microscope and put his hands in his pockets, and began to walk up and down the lab. He frowned. “Why was the device found on a window? If it came out of a body, how did it get to the window? How did it get into the body in the first place?” He returned to the microscope, and studied the little device’s fan-like housing. Whoa-it was a propeller. “My gosh. This thing could fly, Dorothy.”

“That’s speculative,” Dorothy Girt said dryly.

“It could swim in blood.”

“Possibly.”

“Can you recover DNA from the blood that’s stuck on the device?”

A prim smile. “I can get DNA from a flea’s sneeze, Dan.”

“I’d like to see if the blood on the device matches any of the victims’ blood.”

“That would be interesting,” Dorothy Girt said, her cynical eyes brightening a little.

“They make small robots,” he murmured.

“What, Dan?”

He stood up. “Nice work, Dorothy.”