What Waits for You

by Joseph Schneider

  He shuffled in, shoulders hunched, gripping his doctor’s bag in front of him with both hands, the way a shy third-grader might carry a lunch box. Today’s tie was a length of dull maroon—no flying saucers or elliptical galaxies. It looked like a cut of liver.

  “This is one of those moments,” he said, “that isn’t really possible to deal with. Socially. I mean, with the tools we have. You’re all thinking what a pitiful sight this guy is. You know what happened, and you can’t think of what to say. Because you know there’s not a single sentence in the English language that can touch what I’ve gone through.”

  He stopped at the head of the table and set down his bag. “And then there’s me, on the other end of that, wondering what to say to you to put you at ease enough so as we can do our jobs. It’s a thorny thing, a very thorny thing.”

  Al-Amuli was fixated on his own lap. Mailander looked tired—or maybe just bored; it was hard to tell. Rall watched their commanding officer with stony resolve. Jarsdel, meanwhile, could find no comfortable place to rest his gaze. He didn’t want to look at Sponholz, but he didn’t want to seem as if he were ignoring him, either. His solution was to flit his attention from person to person. He was aware of a tightness in his face, a bunching of the muscles around his mouth that formed pocks and valleys in the otherwise smooth skin. He’d always done it when circumstances weren’t merely serious, but gravely so, and to not appear visibly concerned might be read as indifference. Since he was a boy, his dads had called it his “prune chin.”

  Sponholz brought out a brown paper evidence bag. All of the fields—date of collection, description, location, and so on—had been left blank. “In light of all this awkwardness,” he said, “I’ve decided on a few key things. First, I’ve decided to continue my compassionate leave. Accordingly, I’ll be permanently stepping down from this investigation. It’s an obvious conflict of interest, and I think Tricia just hasn’t had the heart to tell me yet, so I’m gonna save everyone the trouble and recuse myself.”

  He gestured at Rall with the evidence bag. “I hope Detective Rall here will be open to my serving as a kind of consultant, but that’s going to be the extent of my involvement from here on out. I don’t want a micron of this investigation tainted by any accusations whatsoever that my personal feelings muddied the absolutely stellar work of this team. What do you say, Goodwin? You’ll be reporting directly to the captain. And I’ll help whenever I’m needed.”

  Rall nodded. “Anything, sir.”

  “All right. Then I have got something. Don’t know if it’s legit, but could be a place to start.” He set the evidence bag on the table, then produced an iPad. “Got this about an hour ago. It hasn’t been to the lab yet, so again I can’t vouch for it a hundred percent. And we’ll definitely have to collect my own DNA for elimination, because I handled it without knowing what it was.”

  He pulled up an image on the screen, then held out the iPad for everyone to see. The item, presumably photographed on Sponholz’s desk, appeared to be a long strip of lined yellow paper, the kind that made up legal pads. It looked like it had been accordion pleated so it could be handled and transported more easily. Strange writing ran the length of the strip from one end to the other.

  Sponholz zoomed in and Jarsdel saw that it wasn’t one piece of paper at all, but perhaps a dozen, taped side by side. And what he’d first supposed was writing was in fact a series of holes punched in the shapes of letters. The black wood of Sponholz’s desk shone through the holes, making a stark contrast against the yellow paper.

  Rall read the words aloud. “‘Must kill or die.’”

  Al-Amuli looked stunned. “LT, how’d you get this?”

  “Must have come in with yesterday’s mail. Waiting for me this morning. Nothing exciting, just a plain business envelope addressed to Homicide Special. No return, of course.”

  “Was it written?” asked Mailander. “The address?”

  “Nope. Printed label.” Sponholz put the tablet away. “Looks like he was very careful about disguising his handwriting. Pretty clever with the hole punch. Haven’t seen that particular approach before. Anyway, I’m getting the note and the envelope over to Cal State for analysis soon’s we’re done here.”

  “Wait,” said Jarsdel. “If he printed the label, why go through all the trouble of punching out those holes? Why not just print out what he wanted to say? Would’ve saved a lot of time.”

  “Hell should I know,” said Sponholz, visibly annoyed. “And like I said, could be absolutely nothing. Could be a fake, could be some nut. But we’re still gonna treat it as real, see what comes up.”

  Al-Amuli was whispering something to himself and counting on his fingers. He nearly jumped out of his seat. “LT! Must kill or die. Thirteen letters.”

  Startled, Sponholz looked at the picture again. “I’ll be damned. Thirteen letters, thirteen pieces of paper. Well done, Detective.” He put away the iPad, then gently pushed the evidence bag in front of Rall. “Wish I had more to give you.”

  Rall took the bag almost reverently, bowing his head.

  “And that’s about it,” said Sponholz. “I wish all of you the best of luck, of course. It’s important we go forward as professionals, and not in a spirit of vendetta. He took my Amy, my sweet Amy, but that mustn’t throw us off our game. Which remains, as always, swift, dispassionate justice.”

  He picked up his valise and, without another word, exited the conference room. Everyone’s attention went to the evidence bag now in Rall’s custody. “‘Must kill or die,’” the big detective said. “Kill so you don’t die, huh? Well, you gonna die.”

  “Damn right,” said Al-Amuli. “Damn right. Direct to Jesus. Fuckin’ Q-sign.” He stuck his tongue out the corner of his open mouth, approximating the shape of the letter Q.

  “Everyone get some sleep,” said Rall. “Only got a month before Captain Coryell calls in her marker. Creeper solved, people. Solved by the end of summer.”

  18

  It was an odd little detail, probably insignificant, but it nagged at Jarsdel. It was too obvious to be deliberate—a confusion between two forms of statistical analysis so different that anyone would be able to spot it.

  Matter over Mind: Security Concerns from a Psychosocial Perspective. The bible of security solutions, one that tapped into the deepest recesses of our reptile brain. No advancements in technology or methodology would be able to circumvent Varma’s analysis, because her data was based on pure anatomy. We couldn’t escape our anatomy, couldn’t out-think it. We were bound by its limitations, and our limitations told a very predictable story.

  That was one reason he liked the book so much. It dispensed with theory and focused on what was actually there—the axons and glial cells shaping our deeply brilliant—and deeply flawed—gray matter.

  Twenty-five percent. That was the number she’d quoted. Missouri’s Elk River Penitentiary had allowed Varma to implement her program, and at an astonishing bargain of less than fifty thousand dollars. Before she’d arrived, the odds of being involved in a violent altercation were four out of a hundred, or four percent. A year later, that number had dropped to three out of a hundred. Three percent. Or, if you looked at it on an absolute scale, a one percent decrease. Hardly impressive. Statistically insignificant. But instead of a one percent drop, you could phrase it slightly differently.

  You could phrase it as a twenty-five percent drop.

  Yes, it was true that going from four to three was only a single step, one percentage point. But relative to four—well, a step down represented a whopping twenty-five percent difference. An extraordinary feat.

  Jarsdel had checked the numbers himself on the Bureau of Justice Statistics website. Elk River Penitentiary—a one percent drop, from four to three. Then Matter over Mind—twenty-five percent.

  It was too brazen an error to have been done purposely. Too easily uncovered by anyone who cared enough to s
pend a few minutes double-checking the figures.

  Then again, he thought, it was also the kind of statistical flimflam used every day to scare people into buying the latest gizmo or adopting fad diets. Unethical, yes, but technically—very technically—not a lie. And in a textbook stuffed with hundreds and hundreds of figures, why would anyone decide to investigate that particular one? The only reason he’d looked into it himself was because she’d asked him to back her up at the upcoming city council hearing, and he’d wanted printouts from the bureau itself as evidence of her successes.

  He picked up his phone and brought up Varma’s contact info. How would he phrase it? The only other time he’d spoken to her about her work had been with admiration. Maybe he’d lead in with that, something like “Hey, just going through your textbook again—man, it’s really something—and I noticed a tiny discrepancy.”

  Good enough. He touched the green telephone icon and waited.

  It was picked up on the third ring. Jarsdel heard several voices, then one—a man’s—calling for quiet.

  “Hello, who’s this?” The voice was familiar to Jarsdel, but he was hearing it out of context and couldn’t place it.

  “This is Detective Marcus Jarsdel, LAPD. Who’s this?”

  “Tully? Shit. What’re you doin’? Why’re you calling this number?”

  Now the owner of the voice was obvious. Jarsdel was annoyed. “Oscar? Why do you have Dr. Varma’s phone?”

  “Hey, seriously, why’re you calling this number? Why’re you calling it right now?”

  “Same reason anyone calls a phone number—trying to reach the person it belongs to. Could you put her on, please? And why do you have her phone? Is she even there?”

  “Hang on.” Morales yelled at someone to be quiet, then came back on the line. “Wait, so Tully, you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Alisha Varma’s dead. Now can you tell me why you were calling?”

  Jarsdel took the phone away from his ear and looked at the display. Later he wasn’t sure why he’d done that. Perhaps he’d been hoping to see that somehow he’d dialed the wrong number, or that he wasn’t on the phone at all and was simply imagining the whole thing.

  He read the display, saw Varma’s name, and raised the phone again. “Oscar, it’s me.”

  “I know it’s you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Her body was found in the underground garage of her apartment. I’ll ask again: why are you calling right now?”

  “I’m coming over.” Jarsdel hung up before Morales could argue.

  * * *

  Glass and blood were the first things he saw.

  How well they complemented each other—the tiny cubes of safety glass and the puddles of coagulating blood. A tableau of trauma. All that was missing was a body, and soon that too came into view.

  Alisha Varma’s eyes were open wide. Jarsdel read in them surprise, fear, and perhaps some amazement, as though she couldn’t believe what had happened to her. A plastic-handled steak knife, its blade smeared with red, lay nearby. He stared at the knife—such a small, cheap-looking thing. A flimsy dollar-store blade that would hardly make it through a lemon before it went dull. But it had done the job well enough here. A wound in her left shoulder and another on the same side near her sternum. That had been the fatal one, soaking her mint-green T-shirt and leaving puddles around the body as she struggled to live.

  She’d been found on the bottom floor of her apartment complex’s two-level underground parking garage. It was an older building, the kind with one of those ponderously slow swing-up gates. It would’ve been easy for someone to slip in, especially if a car had been exiting, the driver fixed on the busy street ahead.

  Jarsdel did a quick scan of that stretch of parking garage. Brightly lit, yes, but no cameras. Of course.

  Dr. Ipgreve, the medical examiner, stood off to the side taking notes. Jarsdel approached him.

  “Tell me everything.”

  Ipgreve glanced up from his work, irritated. “Hello to you, too, Detective. Didn’t know you were working this one.”

  “He isn’t.”

  Both men turned to see Haarmann. It took Jarsdel a second to recognize him out of uniform. The rookie detective filled out a navy-blue suit, his great bull neck straining the collar of his dress shirt. He looked like club security; all he needed was a coiled earpiece. Morales stood by his side, his face unreadable.

  “Why’re you here, Dad?” said Haarmann. “Things slow on Creeper, so you’re poaching?”

  Jarsdel looked at Morales. “Who did this?”

  “You first,” said his ex-partner. “Why were you calling before?”

  “Alone.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll talk to you alone.” He pointed at Haarmann. “Without him. Without the Cro-Magnon.”

  Haarmann looked delighted. Morales glanced at the patrol officer, then back at Jarsdel. He sighed. “Will, give us a few minutes.”

  “Sure.” Haarmann strolled off.

  “Okay, we’re alone,” said Morales. “Explain the phone call.”

  “I had a question for her.”

  Morales had his notebook out. “What was it?”

  Jarsdel was too drained to go through the whole mess with the Elk River stats. “Just a question. Technical question.”

  “About?”

  “Something from her textbook.”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “It was complicated.”

  Morales looked up. “You wanna go back and forth on this all night? Or is it you think I’m too dumb to process it?”

  “It’s nothing,” Jarsdel snapped. “I was curious about some figures she quoted.” He saw Morales still wasn’t satisfied. Fine. He wanted details? Jarsdel would give him details. “Had to do with the difference between relative and absolute risk.”

  Morales nodded, scribbling notes. “Like how to look at percentages.”

  Deflated, Jarsdel didn’t comment.

  “Why were you asking?”

  “I was supposed to attend a presentation she was gonna give to the city council.”

  “About what?”

  “It had to do with outsourcing CCTV camera feeds to a dedicated private security agency.”

  Morales stopped writing. He regarded Jarsdel with an expression of baffled amusement. “I don’t understand—what’s that got to do with you?”

  “Quite a bit, actually.” Jarsdel held up his stitched fingers. “Something like that might’ve caught the Cro-Mag sticking the blade to my door handle.”

  “So, what, you were gonna be like her backup at the meeting? The face of human tragedy to beef up her pitch?”

  “Her pitch didn’t need beefing up. It made good sense. But it’s not going to happen now, is it? Maybe you ought to look at people who would’ve been hurt by Dr. Varma’s proposed reallocation of city resources. This could go pretty high up.”

  Morales didn’t seem to hear him. Haarmann had wandered back. “Hey. I’m gonna check out the apartment. You wanna come?”

  “Yeah.” Morales put away his notebook and began moving off.

  “Wait, hang on,” said Jarsdel. “Who did this? What’s the working theory?”

  Morales stopped, shrugged. “Mugging gone wrong, I’d say.”

  “You would say.”

  “That mean something?”

  “Means as usual, you always go with whatever’s right in front of you.”

  Morales crossed his arms.

  “She was trying to make a difference,” said Jarsdel, “and she was succeeding. Maybe if she’d been around a year ago, we’d have had working cameras outside our own goddamn police station.” He locked eyes with Haarmann, who gave the faintest hint of a smile.

  “And I have a tough time,” Jarsdel went on, “belie
ving this was just a coincidence. Considering who she was.”

  “Okay,” said Morales. “So enlighten us. You think she was—what, assassinated?”

  “I think that not to consider such a scenario would be negligent. Willfully negligent.”

  “Let me give you some perspective, since you’re always so generous with yours.” Morales crooked a thumb at the body. “This wasn’t some civil rights leader, some martyr for a cause. This was basically a DOD lapdog who got a cushy consulting job. In other words, it’s not like the man took her out. She was the fucking man.”

  “She had a lot of enemies,” said Jarsdel. “Even if you don’t think she was worthy of them. I’m not saying it had to be a conspiracy, though. No. It could’ve been more prosaic. One of the vagrants she’d displaced settling a grudge.”

  “You’re saying one of those poor Skid Row zombies…” Morales began chuckling, actually chuckling, with the body just a few feet away. “You’re saying one of those skells down there decided to take her out? Like find out where she lived and black-ops her ass?”

  Haarmann also grinned at the idea.

  Jarsdel considered speaking with Ipgreve alone. Maybe there was a way to persuade him to pass along Varma’s autopsy results. But Morales and Haarmann were watching him, so it would have to wait.

  “You know,” he said to the two men, “this whole thing proves her right. Either way.”

  Morales and Haarmann just looked at him.

  “Because whether she’d spooked the wrong person and that got her targeted and killed—don’t make that face, Oscar—or…or she was simply a victim of random street crime, as you suggest. It doesn’t matter, because she was right.”

  “About what?” said Morales. “About crime being a bad thing? That’s really super. You oughta do PSAs with McGruff the Crime Dog.”

  “No,” said Jarsdel. “She was right that we needed her. That’s what I’m saying. That we needed her. That she was going to mold this world, city by city, into something better. Something we could live with.” He shook his head, disgusted. “McGruff. I love that. I love how you bring up McGruff. It fits so well with who you are. You know, you minimize. You minimize and you always try to find a way around everything, because you can’t handle having an actual feeling. Gotta keep that cynical shell nice and polished. Emotion beads on it like water and just rolls off.”