The coroner opened the square doors to the cold storage units one by one and pulled out the trays on which the four corpses rested. They were all stored in body bags. She pulled down the zippers, revealing their heads, but of course, just looking at the investors’ faces wasn’t going to tell Harold much. He needed to inspect the state of their entire bodies.
But of course, he couldn’t just pull the bodies out of their bags with the coroner looking. And so Harold sent Fokine an eye signal.
“Oh, right.” Fokine turned to face the coroner. “Chief Smith asked us to check on the autopsy reports for the bodies. He told us to give you this note.”
The coroner frowned. “A paper note? I wasn’t informed of anything of the sort.”
“Maybe another coroner got the message about that. Could you check?”
She looked visibly confused and said to give her a minute as she left the morgue. They listened to the sound of her footsteps receding down the corridor, and then Fokine closed the door. It couldn’t be locked from the inside, so he pulled the platform cart over and used it to block the door.
Harold had to admit he was impressed at how smoothly their scheme had gone.
“Everything’s going to plan.” Fokine relaxed. “I’m surprised you came up with this.”
“It won’t take her long to call the other coroners and check. We need to hurry.”
Harold and Fokine split up, pulling out the trays the corpses were placed on. There weren’t enough trays for all of them, so they put them on the floor. Then they unzipped the body bags to exam the full state of the corpses.
The four investors, plus Banfield, had clear signs of postmortem lividity, but no outward injuries. Harold couldn’t detect any wounds on them except markings from their autopsies.
“If this was homicide, there’d be some kind of injury…” Fokine knelt in front of one of the bodies, inspecting it.
Indeed, there would have to be some kind of sign of assault. It was too soon to give up and jump to conclusions.
Harold tuned his optical device’s output, carefully examining the corpses of the four investors. He inspected every strand of hair, every pore on their skin. Before long, he could hear loud knocking from the entrance door—the coroner had come back sooner than expected.
“Hello?! Open the door! What are you doing in there?!”
He heard her aggravated shouting, but he couldn’t comply quite yet. The coroner was quite persistent and spent five minutes trying to force the door open until they at last heard her walk away with swift, indignant steps.
“She’s totally going to call for Smith.” Fokine rubbed his cheek. “We’re in for a good scolding.”
“Shall we claim the door was broken?” Harold asked jokingly, looking away from the bodies. “Don’t worry, I’ll talk things over so your position isn’t compromised.”
“Hey, I’ll feel guilty if you tell them this was all because of your malfunction.”
Harold hummed a noncommittal response and continued observing the corpses. But then he noticed something in one of the bodies’ left ankles. It was Brian Quine, the investor who’d died in Saint Moritz. Harold ran a finger over his skin there and felt something sticky cling to it.
Cosmetic concealer.
It had been applied over a small area of his pallid skin, which was why it had taken even Harold’s precise optical device some time to notice it. Harold thoroughly rubbed it off, exposing a spot-like bruise hidden underneath. He pressed on it with his finger, carefully scrutinizing the bruise. It wasn’t livor mortis but a blood clot that had formed under his skin.
This must have been what he was overlooking.
“What’s wrong?” Fokine, who was checking another corpse, noticed the change in Harold’s behavior. “Find something?”
“Yes. There’s a bruise on Quine’s left ankle. It’s from internal bleeding, not livor mortis.”
“What would cause a bruise like that?”
“I don’t know. Let’s check the other three.”
He and Fokine split up and checked the ankles of the other corpses. All of them, Banfield included, did indeed have a small bruise on one of their ankles, though not on the same leg. The fact that the bruises had been hidden with concealer implied malicious intent. A female coroner had inspected them before—had she used her makeup set to conceal the bruises? Either way, it was plausible she hadn’t decided to do so on her own.
“Since they went to the trouble of hiding it, it’s possible this had something to do with the investors’ sudden deaths. They were poked with a very thin needle…like a medical syringe, which caused this internal bleeding.”
“As far as I can see in their personal data, they have no history of hospital visits or drug use.”
Fokine checked the bruises while biting his bottom lip. Yes, all four of them. Even Banfield, who’d died from a viral infection and not a heart attack, had that bruise. The entire premise they’d been working under fell apart.
“This makes one thing very clear,” Harold said, wiping the concealer off his finger. “The investors didn’t die from heart failure. They were all injected with the chimeric virus.”
It wasn’t clear how Banfield had been infected, but the bruise meant it was safe to assume the pathogen had been injected directly into his bloodstream. The Alliance must not have anticipated the bureau finding out about the chimeric virus. The only reason they’d discovered it was because they had a bio-hacker, Hansa, provide them with a sampling kit on the scene of the crime. The average investigator wouldn’t have been equipped for that. Even if they had questioned the corpse’s body heat, they would have just followed protocol and sent it to forensics.
Back then, Harold hadn’t been operating under the assumption that the Alliance had infiltrated the bureau, so he’d blindly believed the autopsy reports.
“Do you think it’s possible the Alliance bribed the coroners to falsify the investors’ cause of death as heart failure?”
“That…might be a stretch.” Fokine furrowed his brows. “Six people died in different corners of the globe. That theory would mean the Alliance bribed the coroners in every bureau.”
“Yes. That’s probably what happened.”
Something Talbot had said during their confrontation with him in Farasha Island replayed in Harold’s memory.
“I’m surprised you got this far without investigating things on this scale.”
Farasha Island had been receiving funding from around the globe. Talbot had been able to use his position as a member of the Alliance to climb to the top of the IAEC. It wasn’t at all strange that the Alliance would have taken root on an extensive scale—and yet the methods they’d used here were quite bold.