What Waits for You

by Joseph Schneider

  “Sorry?”

  “You said, ‘As outlined by Chief Comsky.’ What does that mean?”

  Jarsdel shifted in his seat. “I’m just referring to the format as I understand it. Experienced homicide detectives paired with, uh, qualified candidates.”

  “You say ‘qualified.’ That’s an interesting word to use, don’t you think? Do you know that Will Haarmann has been serving the Los Angeles Police Department three times as long as you? What does that say to you, qualifications-wise? Or did you think you were the only one smart enough around here to deserve a promotion?”

  Jarsdel saw the conversation wasn’t going anywhere good. “Sorry, sir. Guess I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care if my job’s waiting for me once this detail’s over.”

  “Don’t you understand physics?” Gavin’s expression was of the kind of disgust reserved for the willfully stupid.

  “Physics, Lieutenant?”

  “Yeah. Goddamned physics. You know, that tiny force that runs the whole universe. Don’t you understand it?”

  “I’m not sure I do. Not in conjunction with this issue.”

  “This isn’t just physics,” said Gavin, “it’s chemistry. So it’s all related. Do you know what entropy is?”

  “I’m not… I understand it’s a tendency toward chaos.”

  “Ha—no. That’s a huge misconception. Entropy is very simple. Very simple but also very misunderstood. It has to do with the distribution of energy. The universe prefers high entropy, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, it does. Greatest possible dispersion of energy. So basically if I have a light bulb hooked up to a power source—you follow me?—if I have this light bulb, then the power from that source goes to that bulb, right?”

  “I—”

  “But if I have, say, three bulbs hooked up to that same power source, what’s gonna happen? Is the electricity gonna go to just one bulb and not the other two? No. No, it isn’t gonna do that, right? It’s gonna go to all three equally, but dispersed, de-energized. Each bulb will be lit, yes, but dimmer than just one would be. That’s entropy.”

  Jarsdel’s gaze wandered up to the photo of Planck. Their eyes met. In context, the scientist’s hangdog expression seemed an attempt at commiseration. Insufferable, isn’t he? And you’ve only been here a couple minutes. Imagine what it’s like for me. I have to listen to him all day.

  “You wondering who that is?” demanded Gavin.

  Jarsdel’s attention snapped back to the lieutenant. “No, sir.”

  Gavin was disappointed, Jarsdel could tell. One fewer lecture to inflict upon a captive audience. “Entropy,” Gavin said, circling back around. “That’s what Dr. Varma was talking about, you know. I was probably the only person in the room that got that. Your concerns about your job, your job waiting for you, that’s ego—okay? And you’re not thinking about entropy, because you don’t understand physics. Hate to break it to you, but this is bigger than just you. We can’t afford to hold a spot open here while you’re on the task force. Because it’s our job to contain and funnel that destructive energy that otherwise would be spread out all over the city. Due to entropy.”

  Jarsdel nodded. “That makes sense.” He wanted out, and was willing to say anything if it meant Gavin would set him free.

  “And as far as that comment goes, the one where you said ‘as outlined by Chief Comsky,’ you’re in error there, too.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re in error because this situation goes way beyond any of Chief Comsky’s pet projects. You’re being loaned out on request of RHD’s captain, who got the go-ahead from the chief himself. That’s the chief of police, of the entire department, not just of West Bureau. You follow me?”

  Jarsdel tried to look thoughtful. “I certainly do. And I’ll keep entropy in mind, moving forward.”

  Gavin smiled. “I’m glad you said that. Because your responsibilities with Dr. Varma’s survey don’t end with this RHD gig. I still expect your cooperation with whatever she wants to pursue. You do your initial appointment with her yet?” Gavin asked.

  Jarsdel nodded. His scar had begun to throb, sending out waves of sickening pain.

  “Good, that’s a start.” He raised his hands, clapped them together once. “Thus concludes the meeting.”

  Back at his desk, Jarsdel gathered his planner and phone and tossed them in his briefcase.

  “Got everything?”

  He looked up to see Haarmann, arms crossed, his close-set eyes lit with naked delight.

  Jarsdel picked up his copy of Matter over Mind, threw it into the case, and faced Haarmann squarely.

  “Excuse me.”

  Haarmann waited a beat, then stepped out of the way. He made a grand, sweeping gesture in the direction of the station doors. “Take it easy, Dad. Make sure to stay regular.”

  Jarsdel strode past him and through the intake area, where he had to step over the extended legs of a sleeping arrestee. He pushed through the doors into the parking lot, squinting in the harsh sunlight, and double-clicked the unlock button on his key fob.

  He opened the passenger door, set his suitcase on the seat, then walked around the back of the car to the driver’s side. He grabbed the handle and swung the door open.

  Heat, bright and sudden, across his fingers.

  Jarsdel looked down, more confused than hurt. Then he saw the blood—great blooms of it, welling up fast. He flexed the joints and saw three little mouths open in his flesh. His index, middle, and ring finger. With grim fascination, he cupped them together. Blood began pooling in the crevices. When he had enough to fill a teaspoon, he spread his fingers apart, and could hear the fat drops hitting the ground.

  He dropped to one knee and examined the handle. A sliver of metal blinked in the sun. With his right hand, he pulled a pen from his pants pocket and prodded at it, but it didn’t move. Jarsdel bent lower and angled his head.

  Someone had stuck a razor blade to the back of the handle. Thick green goop, some kind of epoxy, held it in place. Perhaps a quarter centimeter of steel jutted from the underside of the molded plastic—not enough to be noticed, but certainly more than enough to do damage.

  Haarmann.

  Revenge for desecrating the arm-wrestling table.

  Jarsdel stood and examined his hand, tilting it back and forth in the saturated afternoon light. The cuts were deep.

  He looked around, expecting to see Haarmann and his goons leering at him from the station-house doorway, but no one was there. They were playing it smart. What about cameras? Surely there must be some surveillance on the parking lot.

  Yes, three cameras, each capturing a different angle of view. Anyone messing around his car would’ve been center stage, unmissable.

  He popped the trunk with his good hand and swatted the contents around. He found what he was looking for wedged behind the gas can: “Bag o’ Rags,” it said on the plastic sleeve. Inside were strips of cotton T-shirt cloth. They came in handy for wiping off dipsticks or cleaning up spills. He plucked several free and wrapped them around the weeping gashes, gripping them tightly, just to make sure he could. No severed tendons. And he still had sensation in the tips of his fingers, which was also good. At least the nerves were intact.

  He considered going back inside the station and asking to see that day’s surveillance footage, but he didn’t want to run into Haarmann while he was obviously injured. Instead, he slid into the driver’s seat and pulled away, making a left on Sunset before cutting across Highland, Western, and Vermont. Finally he arrived at Hollywood Presbyterian.

  The ED was packed. A nurse glanced at his hand and put him behind a constipated baby, a boy with an eraser up his nose, and a gardener who’d swung a machete into his own shin. Blood had soaked the man’s pant leg and the battered sneaker beneath, and he now left vivid red shoe prints across
the vinyl flooring whenever he went to peruse the waiting room’s meager stack of magazines. He didn’t like being fussed over—assured the staff he was fine and only there because his boss had forced him to come. He protested more loudly when the staff insisted he put a plastic bag around his shoe. In a modern retelling of Cinderella, an ED nurse knelt at his side, hazmat bag at the ready, trying to ensnare the dripping foot as the gardener insisted he wasn’t going to pay for this procedure, and that it was being done without his consent.

  Jarsdel got out his phone to check his email and pressed the home button. The screen stayed dark. He pressed it again, and when nothing happened he held down the power button. Five seconds, ten. Nothing.

  “Piece of shit,” he murmured. He held down both buttons at the same time.

  Still nothing.

  Jarsdel sighed, putting the phone back on his hip.

  He took eleven stitches in total and a bottle of Vicodin and paid for them out of pocket. His LAPD insurance would’ve covered everything, but he didn’t want there to be a record—didn’t want to have to explain what happened, which would’ve launched an investigation, which in turn would’ve given Haarmann even greater satisfaction. Besides, Jarsdel wanted his response—once he decided on it—to be a surprise.

  By the time he made it back to Hollywood Station, it was nearly six o’clock, the sun low and fat in the sky. Keeping his left hand in his pocket, he pushed through one of the old, swinging glass doors and approached the desk sergeant, Curran.

  “Hey, I’m wondering if you could help me. Looks like somebody keyed my car out there in the lot. You by any chance tell me how I can get the security footage going back to this morning?”

  Curran was puzzled. “What, out there? Where cops park?”

  “Yeah, if you can believe it. Guy must’ve just come right up and done it. Pretty stupid, with the cameras everywhere.”

  “Or pretty lucky. Those cameras went down this morning.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We haven’t had a feed for eight hours at least.”

  Jarsdel shook his head. He hoped he hadn’t heard correctly, that the real answer had been lost somehow. “I’m sorry, you’re saying we don’t have security cameras trained on our own parking lot? At the police station?”

  Curran’s eyes narrowed. “Now look. It’s not my fault they’re not working, so why’re you giving me shit?”

  “I’m just amazed we don’t have functional cameras to protect our own officers. Why’re they down?”

  “I don’t know. Started getting funky this morning. Some problem with the hardware. Embarrassing too, with that doctor—that security consultant or whatever—looking around the place.”

  “You don’t think it’s astonishing? Truly astonishing?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Did someone do something to them?”

  “I don’t know, Dad—like I said I got nothing to do with any of that.”

  “Okay,” said Jarsdel. “Don’t say that, please. That ‘Dad’ thing.”

  “Wasn’t it your partner who started it?”

  “Ex-partner.”

  Jarsdel marched back out to the parking lot and nearly sliced the fingers of his right hand before remembering to enter through the passenger side. He’d deal with the razor once he got home. A thought occurred to him then—what if Haarmann had put something on the blade? Feces or something, like they used to do with punji sticks? He got out of the car and bent down next to the driver’s side door, sniffing the handle.

  Nothing he could detect, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. He cupped his hands around the door handle and took a deep breath. A pungent smell, but more likely whatever chemicals made up the epoxy. Probably no feces, then, and they’d disinfected the wound pretty well at the hospital. Gave him a tetanus booster, too, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one.

  Haarmann. Goddamned Haarmann. How would Jarsdel answer this?

  His hand ached terribly, and he thumbed the cap off the bottle of Vicodin and dry-swallowed two of them.

  If he retaliated, he ran the risk of Haarmann catching him in the act and reporting him to Internal Affairs. Even if he got away with it, at least as far as the higher-ups were concerned, he might inspire an even more serious counterattack. Obviously Haarmann was already comfortable inflicting permanent physical injury. What would he do if Jarsdel gave him good reason to be angry?

  A squadron of geese passed overhead, honking as they went. To Jarsdel the sound had a kind of gloating, mocking tone about it. He reached for the door handle again, caught himself just in time, and went around to the passenger’s side. He scooted across to the driver’s seat, banging his knee on the gearshift as he went, and started the engine. As he backed out, he threw one last disgusted look up at the impotent security cameras.

  9

  The last time Jarsdel was at the Police Administration Building—or PAB—was during his promotional exams for the new Hollywood Homicide. The full details of the program hadn’t yet been disclosed, and Jarsdel believed he was simply submitting himself for detective. Six weeks later he’d been called back for interviews with Deputy Chief Cynthia Comsky, a polygraph examination, and finally a meeting with the police commission.

  Upon reentering the sleek concrete-and-glass facility, he remembered the surging anxiety and self-doubt he felt at those previous visits, and reminded himself he was now there on official business. More than that—he was on his way to Homicide Special, perhaps the most renowned department of murder police in the country.

  Robbery-Homicide Division—RHD—was located on the fifth floor. When he pressed the button, the elevator gave a faint purr, and he was there. Everything in PAB was like that—powerful and efficient, a monument toward the ideal of justice as a disinterested but immutable force.

  The halls were cool, hushed. When Jarsdel encountered other officers, he always found them moving quickly and speaking in low voices. He checked his email again for the room number, and found it a few doors down from the Robbery Homicide office. He was unhappy to see the shades were drawn. Was he late? He opened the door, knocking as he did so.

  Inside was an ovoid conference table, but only one of the seats was taken. A woman of perhaps fifty, wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt, thumbed absently at her phone. She wore her detective’s shield on a beaded chain around her neck, and the gun on her hip was a .38-caliber Colt six-shooter. She offered Jarsdel the barest glance before going back to whatever she’d been looking at.

  Jarsdel sat on the opposite side of the table and was about open to where he’d left off in Matter over Mind, but in came another new arrival. He was wiry and skittish and looked too young to be a detective, but he too wore a gold shield around his neck. He gaze flitted around the room as if he expected there to be more to see than just Jarsdel and the woman. Eventually he seemed satisfied and gave Jarsdel a nod before taking his seat.

  A man wearing a heavily starched white shirt came in, head down, scanning a few sheets of paperwork spilling out from a manila folder. He was dark skinned, his head a massive, gloriously smooth orb. He wore a thick but ordered mustache and a brown paisley tie.

  He pulled back a chair and sat. “LT’ll be here in a minute,” he said, without looking up from his work.

  No one answered, and the man didn’t seem to mind. He shuffled through his papers, took a sip from a giant red thermos, and checked something on his phone.

  The door to the conference room swung open once more. A tall, thin man stood there, looking concerned, either as if he wasn’t sure he was in the right place, or if he thought he might have just interrupted something. In one hand he carried an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag. His face was lined but handsome, and he had large, soulful eyes. He tried a hopeful smile.

  “Hey,” he said. “Don’t want to interrupt anything, but I thought I’d come by a
nd say a few words.”

  The man who’d entered a minute or so before, with the bald head and the mustache, turned around in his seat. “LT. Yeah, of course. We’re all here.”

  “I see that. All on time, of course. And I’m the late one.” The newest arrival picked a seat and dropped into it with a sigh. Jarsdel saw he wore a novelty tie—some kind of futuristic cityscape from the pages of an old comic. Saucer-shaped buildings and zipping spacecraft and crowds of jumpsuited astronauts wearing fishbowl helmets. It definitely wasn’t regulation, but Jarsdel supposed from a distance its sepia tones made it look sober enough.

  “First I’m gonna apologize. A few high-profile cases just came down the pike. The Creeper of course, yes, and thank God we’ve got you all on that. But there’s also a UCLA kid who got shot, and naturally she’s here on a student visa. Ecuadorean national. Jesus. It’s just, well—it’s everything you’d expect with something like that, with the State Department and consulates involved. And we got other stuff, too, of course. Not like your everyday homicides go on hold just ’cause we got a serial, right?”

  The woman who’d already been in the room when Jarsdel arrived raised her hand. “Excuse me. Are you the lieutenant? In charge of Homicide Special?”

  The man shrugged. “As much as such a thing can be a, you know, an in-charge kind of thing. I manage it, you could say. And I do so under the command of a far more capable and experienced colleague. And if you haven’t met Captain Tricia Coryell yet, you should all go introduce yourselves. Anyway,” he waved a hand, “yes, I’m Lieutenant Sponholz. But I would actually be really just fine with all of you calling me Ed. Plain old Ed.” He laughed, and clapped the dark-skinned man on the shoulder.

  “I can see this guy sitting here looking uncomfortable while I’m talking to you, so I kinda have to out him here. This is Detective Goodwin Rall. He’s a Detective III, so he’s senior in Homicide Special. And he is a man who cares very deeply for protocol. So I constantly have to tell him not to defend me, because he’ll actually tell people they’re not to listen to my requests to call me Ed, and that they have to stick with ‘Lieutenant’ or ‘LT.’ With all due respect to my super cop, you really can call me Ed.” He turned to Rall. “You picked up this do-or-die pecking-order stuff from Uncle Sam, right? Marines?”