"Uh, Seamus. Bye."
    "We have your measurements, I'll be sending some things out to your base," Molly said. "Seamus, just wait here a minute." She followed me to the cafe door. "He does seem like a nice young man, but he doesn't seem like your type. How are things between you and that nice Mr. Sutton?"
    "Who?"
    "The other member of your team, the tall, rugged-looking one," she winked.
    I broke my own recent record for blank looks. "Paul?!"
    "Oh, you're on a first-name basis, excellent."
    "Well yeah, we're teammates. We might get killed together someday."
    "How romantic!"
    I couldn't figure out where to begin in setting her straight, and finally decided that I should take my chance at escape while I had it. "Um, I really have to go, Molly. See you at poker night."
    "Bring that Captain Sutton of yours," she called.
    I headed down to police headquarters and a world more familiar to me.
    "Let me see if I have this, you want me to find a 'coroner of the paranormal'?" Reilly asked with raised brows.
    I shrugged. "That's what Scott said. I think if we can just find a coroner who's prepared to deal with possible paranormal activity. We'll be standing by, of course."
    "Well, if you recall, we've already had the walking dead."
    "This is true. Is that guy still working here?"
    "Yeah. I think he's the perfect person to call."
    "This time we can warn him ahead of time."
    He picked up the phone, dialed. "Dr. Armani, please? Hi, Liam. We got a special truckload of stuff coming in we want you to take a look at. Yeah, I know you're a coroner, we don't usually use the word truckload. No, no, I'm serious on this one. Some stuff Scott's bringing down. Walking dead. Liam? Liam? Hello? Ah, good, you got the phone again. He should be here in about forty minutes. Great, we'll meet you down here." He hung up. "He told me to bring a shotgun."
    "If it makes you feel better."
    "Are you able to affect the walking dead?"
    "We're gonna find out," I replied cheerfully.
    "Wonderful."
    "They are organic." Just dead. "Might be a useful experiment. I was able to affect Xyrgoth."
    Eventually the wrecker appeared with the truck and its gruesome cargo in tow. It was a fascinating autopsy. Of course, it's also the only one I've seen, unless you want to count a couple of Javelin's victims. I was a little queasy about it at first, but that soon wore off. Reilly had a loaded shotgun, as promised, but the "stuff" as he had called it didn't seem inclined to get up again.
    According to Dr. Armani, the bodies in the truck had been dead—drowned—between two and four weeks, but were quite well preserved. He was skeptical of Scott's account of having seen them move, given the degree of rigor and lack of any sign that the limbs were capable of independent movement; the joints were completely inflexible when he tried to manipulate them.
    "I can't find anything here that would lead me to believe there was anything uncommon about this," he shrugged. "Other than the fact that you claim you saw them walking, which I admit is uncommon. As near as I can tell, someone put a half dozen drowned corpses inside a truck and drove it into the water. But these guys certainly drowned a little while ago, not within the last four hours."
    He went back to work for while, methodically examining and recording. With six bodies, this took a while, and it was a couple hours later when he looked over at the three of us. "Remember how I said I couldn't find anything odd? Scratch that. Of the six bodies, three of them are the exact same height. The other three are the same height as each other. Body organs are weighing the same. Identical."
    "Two sets of identical triplets? The probabilities are a little low," Scott concluded. "I'd be happier to think that somebody was raising dead clones. Sorry," he added to me.
    "Don't mention it," I muttered. Needless to say, this development makes me very unhappy.
    We seem to have multiple versions of two men in their late forties, one 6' 1", the other 5' 5", who died by drowning several weeks ago.
    "What did they drown in?" Scott asked Liam.
    "Salt water."
    The robot gave Talon a call to have him check to see if Chandler's house had reappeared, but he's apparently still out of town, and we don't know any other magicians who might be able to tell us what these guys were doing up and about. The coroner assured us that he'll pass on any additional findings he came up with, and that he'll be asking for assistance from the FBI, but it seems we've come to a dead end for now. He seemed distressed by the entire situation, the impossibility of what Scott had witnessed. We were blase.
    Raising the dead sounds like this mysterious Victor person. Sets of identical triplets sounds like... well, them. I'm not sure what to think.

August 13, 1987

Additional information came in on the autopsies, which we went over at the team meeting this morning. The "salt water" the men drowned in turned out to be a saline solution, not seawater. The bodies were saturated with some preservative chemical. Lovely.
    The FBI concluded that they had been immersed in the chemical for the past five years, and drowned two weeks ago. If they had any more thoughts on the matter, they didn't include them in the report. The bodies haven't been identified yet, but they're working on it; I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. Unfortunately, they don't have a real magical lab there, so there was no way to run whatever tests that would have involved.
    I wonder how long it takes to grow a clone. This is making it hard for me to sleep again. And I'd been doing so much better lately.
    With our permission, Dr. Armani wanted to dispose of the corpses in as complete a way as possible—just in case. Before we did that, Scott suggested we get Caduceus to take a look at them; perhaps they could tell if the men had been genetically modified, cloned, what have you.
    "They are in the mood to do us a favor, I suppose," I shrugged. And it would be more information on Caduceus itself, which I remain more than a little interested in.
    On the same topic, by the time the cops had reached the "abandoned" theater everything the zombies hadn't taken away was gone. The truck turned out to be a stolen and repainted U-Haul.
    "So what else has been going on guys, other than the fact that you seem to think we have a walking dead scenario?" Reilly asked. "Not that I'm doubting you," he added to Scott.
    "Dawn and I are going to Houston next month," Phoenix Talon spoke up. "My old advisor, Professor Kandel, is gonna to try to determine her variance level. I think my work with the Blood Boards is going very well. They've all got jobs. But I think the Alley Cats are kinda the criminal replacement for the Blood Boards; they're definitely a problem that we have to take of. I think me and the boys can take care of it, but I just want to let you know, especially since their leader appears to have some kind of superpowers."
    "We'll certainly be ready to back you up," I assured him.
    "What kind of superpowers?" Scott wanted to know.

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