“A twin? Or a clone?”
“According to the records, Douglass had no immediate fam
ily.”
“Well, if both Douglasses are dead, then it can’t be a shapeshifter at work. Those revert to their natural forms when they die, so at least one of them has to be a clone. Right?”
“Perhaps. But nothing in this whole mess is what it seems, so maybe we’ve also found a shapeshifter who does not revert.” He rubbed his head, then pulled his car keys from his pocket and handed them to her. “Go back to the hotel and get some sleep. I’ll make arrangements to get Mary transferred to a safe house and then go talk to Finley.”
She took the keys from him, her fingers touching his only briefly, yet they sent an electric charge through his entire body. A charge reflected briefly in her eyes.
“What about our discussion?” she said softly. “And my brunch?”
“I’ll meet you at the hotel around four this afternoon and drive you to Wetherton’s. We can talk on the way. We’ll have to do that rain check on the apology lunch after all.”
Sam nodded and glanced into the room, as if to reassure herself Mary was okay, then walked away. He watched her for a few seconds, then started making arrangements to secure Mary.
—
“How’s the examination coming along, Finley?” Gabriel asked as he strode into the lab.
Finley cleared his throat and slid his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose with a gloved finger. “Well, this is certainly an interesting situation. Two identical bodies, both chopped into pieces, one a younger version of the other.”
Gabriel stopped at the end of one of the tables and examined the two sets of remains. The two women would definitely have been physically identical if not for the deeper age lines around the face of their original victim. “The cuts on the younger version appear to be from a sharp instrument.”
“They are. It appears she was strangled before she was sliced apart.”
“You’ve done DNA testing?”
“Yes. The younger one is the clone. It would seem Kathryn Douglass was planning to skip the whole ‘age gracefully’ idea.”
No real surprise, given Douglass’s name had been on Kazdan’s list. “She wouldn’t be the first woman in the world to resort to surgery to do that.”
“This is a little more extreme than plastic surgery.”
“Yes, but it’s not exactly the first time we’ve seen this. There’s Wetherton, for a start.” Although Wetherton’s reasons for transplanting into a clone seemed to be more about avoiding disease than gaining a younger body. “Any idea where the clone was murdered?”
“Not yet. Though there’s no evidence at Douglass’s that the clone was murdered there.”
“No.” And no reason for Douglass to want her clone dead, either. Not if she’d paid the sort of money Wetherton had to get a new body.
Gabriel studied the table containing the torn-apart remnants of humanity, then added, “There aren’t many shifters who would have the strength to tear apart someone like that.”
Finley sniffed. “Most cats could, but what we’re dealing with here is a bear shifter. And it’s one big bear, I can tell you.”
Gabriel raised an eyebrow, amused by the comment. “Most bear shifters are big.”
“Think brown bear, and add half the size again.”
That was one big mother of a bear. “How can you be sure?”
“I measured the distance between the claw slashes left on the woman’s back.” Finley hesitated, then added, “It looks like he shifted while they were…um…making love. Nasty stuff.”
Especially for Kathryn Douglass, Gabriel imagined. The differences between the anatomy of a human male and that of a bear would in itself have caused a lot of pain and damage. Probably even have torn her up fairly badly. “Anything else?”
Finley shook his head. “We’ve collected semen samples, of course. I’ll do a search of both our database and the government’s to see if there’s a match.”
Gabriel nodded. Most criminals these days had DNA samples taken as a matter of course, but it had taken a lot of years to implement the procedure thanks to the civil rights activists. Which meant, of course, that the database was not only constantly being updated, but also only reliable when it came to criminals caught in the last ten years.