Autopsy (Kay Scarpetta, #25)(56)

Shiny steel surfaces and fire-retardant white Nomex look spray-painted as if a paperweight filled with gory snowflakes has been shaken up, the wet blood sticking to whatever it hits. Then much of it flaking off, drifting, never settling when drying, and I can imagine what the air filters are like. Ruined, comes to mind.

“It would appear that both crewmates are deceased.” Anni states what couldn’t be more obvious, and she and Chip look braver than they must feel.

“Try not to bump into them.” I address the live feed on the data wall.

The inside of the orbiter lab is cramped quarters with plenty of hard objects and sharp corners.

“We don’t want to send them banging into you or anything else,” I explain.

The dead bodies may be weightless but they still have mass, and crashing into people and metal objects can do some real damage.

“We’ll move really slowly, trying not to disturb them,” Chip says, and there’s no scientific procedure or instrument that can help me reconstruct what happened.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to resort to rather primitive technology,” I warn the Situation Room.

No one is talking now, transfixed by the horror on the data walls.

MOST IMPORTANT IS KNOWING how and when they were injured, I tell my hushed audience around the table.

That’s going to be next to impossible under the circumstances. We’re able to do but so much without video or audio recordings. We have no real data to tell us where the crewmates were, and what they were doing when they were injured.

“There’s no point of origin, no bloodstain patterns that make sense,” I continue to explain. “Meaning I can’t retrace their steps so to speak, and I don’t see anything that’s telling me much so far, including where they died.”

Possibly it was inside the airlock they’d managed to reenter after their spacewalk, assuming it ever occurred, and there’s no evidence of it. Over time their bodies may have been displaced by currents of air. Ending up in the lab section, they drifted about, bumping into bundles of cables that run along a ceiling and walls crammed with computer racks and other hardware.

On countertops are refrigerator and freezer compartments, also 3-D laser bioprinters I recognize as the type used to create human tissue. It could be skin, bone, blood vessels, organs or limbs that have been seeded with human stem cells. The three-dimensional structures can be built without scaffolds in the absence of gravity, and to date there’s no way to escape it on Earth.

The best we can do is brief intervals aboard a Zero-G jet flying extreme parabolic profiles with astronauts, researchers and other scientists like me onboard. I know what it feels like to float, and what happens to fluids and other evidence in such conditions. Microgravity is disastrous for crime scenes but ideal for producing complicated organs and other soft tissue.

There could be other top secret orbiters besides Thor’s, a new kind of body farm where we create life instead of studying what death does to us. I’ve been aware of the technologies for a while. But I didn’t know the work was being done in space already, and it would seem Jared Horton didn’t make his getaway without raiding the store.

Every plexiglass container we’re seeing is empty, and there’s no telling what he absconded with while leaving a weightless trail. As Anni and Chip move around, we get glimpses of a human-made heart drifting along the ceiling like an escaped party balloon. The 3-D printed organ looks real enough although I doubt it’s fully functioning yet. The same with the kidney, the ear, and possibly a bladder wafting on loud blowing air, the fans never stopping in microgravity.

Otherwise, gases like everything else will float in place, carbon dioxide forming a deadly bubble around one’s head. That’s not what killed the crewmates. They didn’t asphyxiate as they exsanguinated, slipping into unconsciousness. They may have aspirated their own blood as it followed skin surface tension, creeping over the neck, the mouth, the nose like ectoplasm.

“I’m going to need you to check a few things for me,” I let Anni and Chip know, starting with the usual postmortem changes.

I tell them what to look for, and moving close to the female’s long-johns-clad body, Anni tries an unwilling arm. Rigor mortis is fully set, weightlessness having no effect on that. But there won’t be the telltale dusky discoloration caused by livor mortis, the settling of noncirculating blood due to gravity.

That would tell you if a body was moved after death, and in this case the answer is yes. In fact, the bodies haven’t stopped moving on the blowing air, and I haven’t a clue what position they were in originally.

“I need one of you to turn them very slowly so I can take a good look from every angle,” I explain.

“Wilco,” Anni says.

“While she’s doing that,” I tell Chip, “I’d like you to find the spacesuits they were wearing on their spacewalk.”

“They should be in the airlock.” He looks around to get his bearings. “Going there now, will tell you what I find.”

“I’d like to see for myself, please,” I reply.

“Copy. I’ll show you the suits on camera.” Changing his trajectory with the gentlest touch, he follows the lights along the blood-tinged ceiling.

Floating upright through a gory haze of particulate, he’s literally walking on air, passing through the galley with its Nomex bags of space food Velcroed and bungee-corded in place. He slings a left, gliding past exercise equipment that prevents muscle and bone from atrophying during long missions.