The Amsterdam Chronicles: Def-Con City Trilogy Part 1 Read online

  The covered corpses of Carola Munk, Frank Brandsma, Geoffrey Downes, and George de Graaf lay on separate tables next to each other. Harry Ribb stood next to Jim Conver.

  "Like I mentioned on the phone, we've got two more bodies that at first glance died under normal circumstances, but looking deeper, that's not the case. Along with that, we had an unwelcome visitor here last night."

  Conver pulled back the sheets on Carola Munk and Frank Brandsma lower body to reveal their legs from the knee down. He turned both their left legs showing the back of their calfs. There was a mark on the skin roughly ten centimeters long and four centimeters wide on each leg.

  "A bit unusual and hardly noticeable but I'd say they were exfoliated."

  "What?" Ribb gasped.

  "It means?'

  "I know what it means," Ribb interrupted. "But why?"

  "I think somebody broke in to take a sample."

  "A sample?" Harry lifted up the sheet on Geoffrey Downes body to reveal his open chest cavity.

  "He could have taken a sample from just about any organ within the body and you would never have noticed a thing. Why would someone exfoliate the skin?"

  "No idea at this point of time. But I would have missed it if something else had not of caught my eye."

  "What?"

  "The waste paper bin." Conver went over to a small stainless steel desk in the corner of the room and lifted up a small sterile plastic bag with a towel paper in it. "At the end of the day all the bins are cleaned out. This was in the bin this morning when we arrived."

  "Okay," Ribb glanced up at the ceiling. "Do you have any CCTV cameras in here?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  "All right. We will check for fingerprints everywhere, and unknown DNA on the paper towel."

  "I can carry that out here," Conver replied.

  "If you don't mind I would like to leave it to our forensics team. We can immediately see if anything shows up in our database. We will also check cameras covering the entrance and exits of the building. Maybe we can pick up someone there."

  "I think it could be an inside job," Conver said. "Whoever it was knew exactly where the keys were to open the door. They knew their way around."

  "Great. That will make work of sorting through the hours of people coming and going in the building a lot more fun."

  "What sort of tests are you running on the bodies?"

  "Everything we can think off, right down to the molecular level."

  "Any ideas on the actual cause?"

  "You have to ask yourself how do you develop a congenital heart defect overnight. But that doesn't beat our friend we finally managed to bring in yesterday." Conver removed the sheet covering a large rectangular bath on the floor to reveal Raemon Dort.

  "That is so strange' Ribb said, then bent down to get a closer look. He was about to touch the substance in the bath, when he suddenly froze, and turned to Conver.

  "Can I, is it safe?"

  "Go ahead, it won't make much difference. We've got all the material we need, and yes it's safe." Ribb reached down and touched the thick jelly substance. Ribb felt a chill run down his spine.?

  Chapter Seventeen