Prodigal Son Read Online Free PDF Page A

named Randal and have gone into the world before him. If ever he, too, went into the world, he would be given a last name.
    In the tank, before consciousness, he’d been educated by direct-to-brain data downloading. Once brought to life, he had continued to learn during sessions of drug-induced sleep.
    He knows nature and civilization in their intricacies, knows the look and smell and sound of places he has never been. Yet his world is largely limited to a single room.
    The agents of Mercy call this space his billet, which is a term to describe lodging for a soldier.
    In the war against humanity—a secret war now but not destined to remain secret forever—he is an eighteen-year-old who came to life four months ago.
    To all outward appearances, he is eighteen, but his knowledge is greater than that of most elderly scholars.
    Physically, he is sound. Intellectually, he is advanced.
    Emotionally, something is wrong with him.
    He does not think of his room as his billet. He thinks of it as his cell.
    He himself, however, is his own prison. He lives mostly within himself. He speaks little. He yearns for the world beyond his cell, beyond himself, and yet it frightens him.
    Most of the day he spends with crossword puzzles, immersed in the vertical and horizontal patterns of words. The world beyond his quarters is alluring but it is also…disorderly, chaotic. He can feel it pressing against the walls, pressing, pressing, and only by focusing on crosswords, only by bringing
order
to the empty boxes by filling them with the
absolutely right
letters can he keep the outer disorder from invading his space.
    Recently, he has begun to think that the world frightens him because Father has
programmed
him to be afraid of it. From Father, he has received his education, after all, and his life.
    This possibility confuses him. He cannot understand why Father would create him to be…dysfunctional. Father seeks perfection in all things.
    One thing gives him hope. Out in the world, and not far away, right here in New Orleans, is another like him. Not one of Father’s creations, but likewise afflicted.
    Randal Six is not alone. If only he could meet his equal, he would better understand himself…and be free.

CHAPTER 7
    AN OSCILLATING FAN riffled the documents and case notes—held down by makeshift paperweights—on Carson’s desk. Beyond the windows, an orange sunset had deepened to crimson, to purple.
    Michael was at his desk in the Homicide Division, adjacent to Carson’s, occupied by much of the same paperwork. She knew that he was ready to go home, but he usually let her define the workday.
    “You checked our doc box lately?” she asked.
    “Ten minutes ago,” Michael reminded her. “You send me out there one more time, I’m going to eat a get-small mushroom and just
stay
in the doc box until the report shows up.”
    “We should’ve had the prelim autopsy on that floater hours ago,” she complained.
    “And I shoulda been born rich. Go figure.”
    She consulted photos of cadavers in situ while Michael watched.
    The first victim, a young nurse named Shelley Justine, had been murdered elsewhere and dumped beside the London Street Canal. Tests revealed the chemical signature of chloroform in her blood.
    After the killer rendered her unconscious, he killed her with a knife to the heart. With exquisite precision he removed her ears. A peptide profile found no elevated endorphin levels in the blood, indicating that the surgery occurred after she was dead. Had she been alive, the pain and terror would have left telltale chemistry.
    The second victim, Meg Saville, a tourist from Idaho, had also been chloroformed and knifed while unconscious. The Surgeon—the press’s name for him—had neatly sawed off Saville’s feet.
    “If he’d just
always
take feet,” Michael said, “we’d know he was a podiatrist, and we’d have found him by now.”
    Carson shuffled the next photo to the top of the stack.
    The first two victims had been