Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Let’s talk hypothetical case, okay?”

  “Let’s.”

  “Let’s say John Smith has been killed, okay? And is declared dead and buried. And then at some subsequent point John Smith turns up having been murdered. Is it legally possible to prosecute someone for killing John Smith?”

  She thought for a moment. “John Smith was killed, and he turns out to have been murdered? You’d have to prove that the death wasn’t accidental, probably exhume the body for tests, then prove that the killer did it.”

  “No. You mis— you don’t understand me. John Smith’s death, his first death, really was accidental. His second death was murder.”

  “You’re right. I don’t understand you.”

  Cutty swirled in Loren’s mind. He tried to make himself speak clearly. “He was killed twice, see . . .”

  “Okay, I see. It wasn’t really John Smith who died the first time. Somebody else died in his place.”

  “That’s not what I . . .”

  “You’d have to exhume the first body and prove that it wasn’t John Smith. Then prove the second body was John Smith, then connect the killer to the murder.”

  Loren contemplated this action. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s complicated.”

  “Unless of course you just found the killer standing over the second body with a smoking gun in his hand. Then it doesn’t much matter who the dead man was.”

  “I think my chances of that just went out the window.”

  “You’re talking about John Doe, aren’t you?”

  “I can’t really say.” For a moment he could taste Randal Dudenhof’s blood again. He took a long swallow of scotch.

  “You’ve found out who he was.”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

  “I’m the A.D.A., remember? We’re on the same side.”

  “It would sound too crazy.”

  Another pause. “You’re not sounding exactly rational right this minute, you know.”

  Jernigan’s head floated in front of his eyes. “Probably not.”

  “Have you been drinking or something?”

  “I’ll have to try to get him on the other two murders.”

  “What?” Sheila’s voice echoed painfully in his skull. “What other two murders?”

  “The train crash. You haven’t heard?”

  “You mean the maglev?” Disbelieving.

  “Somebody sabotaged it. Two people were killed, maybe more.”

  “And the same person did it as killed John Doe? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “I’m not telling you anything, Sheila.”

  “Loren, we’ve got to talk about this. If you’ve got evidence, the D.A. and I can help you build the case. This shouldn’t be haphazard, Loren. We can’t allow any holes in this one for some smart shyster like Axelrod to drive through.” Enthusiasm brightened her voice. “This isn’t just some stupid robbery, this is the big time! A major technological innovation, a multi-million-dollar demonstration project, destroyed by some psychotic! If we can nail who did it . . .”

  “Bye, Sheila.” Loren hung up, drank the last of his scotch, decided to get some more.

  He padded into the kitchen. Debra looked at him.

  “You think the dead man was Dudenhof, don’t you?”

  “I can’t get it out of my head.” Loren opened the cabinet and reached for the Cutty Sark.

  “You know it’s impossible. The man who got shot was young. Dudenhof would be as old as we are.”

  Loren savored the bite of the Cutty, then poured himself some more. “I know,” he said.

  She reached out, put a hand on his arm. “It can’t be Dudenhof, Loren.”

  Loren shrugged off her hand. “Randal was my friend, dammit!”

  Debra frowned. “No, he wasn’t.”

  Loren returned the bottle to the cabinet.

  “Loren,” Debra said, “you were always down on him. You always talked about how he was a drunk and gambler and ran around on Violet.”

  Loren headed toward the phone. “I’ve got to make some phone calls. Maybe Ross is still at the jail.”

  “You didn’t like him, Loren!” Insistently. “Will you remember that?”

  The jail was number six on the dialer. Ed Ross answered, and Loren told him about Axelrod refusing the Cisneros plea bargain. Then he called the front desk down at the station and got Quantrill, who had replaced Eloy as the swing shift came on line, and told him the same thing.

  He hung up. Debra, avoiding his glance, had opened the oven and was bringing out a casserole dish filled with costillas, southwestern spareribs cooked in red chile sauce. The casserole dish crashed as she let it fall to the top of the stove.

  “Soup’s on. We’ve also got refritos and rice.”

  “You know,” Loren said, “maybe we could go down the Line later and go dancing.”

  She leaned back against the sink and crossed her arms. She still wasn’t looking at him.

  “Better sober up first,” she said.

  “I’m not drunk,” Loren said. “I’m just sick of all the dead people crossing my path lately.”

  She finally turned to him. “The train crash? I overheard your conversation with Sheila.”

  “One of my witnesses died. My only witness, I should say. Piece of metal cut his head off.”

  Her eyes softened as she absorbed this, as she realized what he’d seen that afternoon. “And you think the accident was deliberate.”

  “Somebody parked a truck across the tracks. That’s deliberate enough.”

  “You think you know who?”

  “Knowing and proving are different things.”

  Debra accepted that. “Help yourself to dinner,” she said. “I’ll tell the girls.”

  “Another phone call first.”

  Debra went into the back. Loren could hear her knocking on doors. He looked up Paul Rivers in the online directory and pressed the send button. A voice answered on the second ring.

  “Is this Paul Rivers?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Loren Hawn. I’m chief of police down in Atocha.”

  “I know who you are.” There was a little pause. Loren could hear a television sportscast in the background: announcer shouting, crowd roaring. He scores! someone yelled.

  “What do you want?” Rivers asked.

  “I need some information.”

  “I’ve been instructed not to cooperate with you unless you subpoena me.”

  “Who’s gonna know? I just want to get some information about that chickenshit boss of yours.”

  Rivers thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “It would get back to him.”

  Loren’s family was returning to the kitchen. He took his mobile phone the other way, toward the bedroom.

  “Something else might get back to him,” Loren said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I hear,” closing the bedroom door, “that Patience has offered a hundred bucks to anyone informing him about any ATL employees who visit Connie Duvauchelle’s whorehouse.”

  Loren heard a heavy sigh. Then the background ball game shut off.

  “What do you want to know?” Resignedly.

  Loren grinned to himself. It had been Rivers in the photo with Begley on Connie’s wall. “How many people are on duty at one time?”

  “Two uniformed guards at the gate. Another two at the maglev station. One person monitoring the radio, back gates, and cameras from the control desk headquarters. His supervisor. The supervisor’s usually Patience on the day shift. Two people in jeeps are cruising the perimeter fence from the inside. Another two patrol the neighborhood, the town, and so on.”

  “What do the people patrolling the town look for?”

  “Anomalies. New people. Things that shouldn’t be there. The boss got this idea from the Special Forces about counterinsurgency patrols in a district— his idea is that if we hang around long enough, we’ll know the town’s normal behavior patterns, so that if they change sud
denly, we’ll know something’s up.”

  “Like everybody in town is gonna start reading our copies of Marx some night, put on our black pajamas, take our AKs out of hiding, and go slipping through the wire?”

  “I guess,” Rivers said. “It didn’t make much sense to me, either. But then that’s the boss. What he learned in Special Forces is gospel.”

  Loren got out his notebook. “Who was on duty Friday night?”

  “Me. I was cruising the town with John Jacobs.”

  “I think I saw you. I was out front of Holliday’s after a fistfight.”

  “Yeah. I remember checking out all the cop vehicles.”’

  “Who was supervisor that night?”

  “The boss himself. There were a lot of guests on the facility and he wanted to be on hand.”

  “Who else?”

  “Lemme think.” Rivers gave a cough. Loren heard the clink of ice on glass, the sound of sipping. “Jim McLerie on the control desk. Vinnie Nazzarett and Carl Denardis on perimeter patrol. Karen Denton and Chris Bietrich on the front gate. Bernie Patton and Paul Shrum on the maglev gate. Cosmo Vann was at the LINAC looking after the guests.”

  “Cosmo?”

  “It’s his given name.”

  “And Nazzarett on the perimeter.” Writing it all down.

  “You know him?”

  “I arrested him this afternoon.”

  “Oh, yeah. You did.” Rivers seemed to find this amusing. “That must have really pissed him off.”

  “He didn’t seem very happy. What happened Friday night?”

  “We got an alert notice around 2100 hours. Patience came on the radio and wanted us to check out the exterior perimeter. There was an intruder, he said, and he wanted us to check the fences and find out if there were any holes in them.”

  “Were there any?”

  “No.” Ice clinked over the phone again. Loren took it as a hint and sipped some of his scotch.

  “Was there an intruder?” Loren’s nerves gave an expectant hum.

  “Apparently it was just a drill,” Rivers said. “After we cruised a bunch of back roads for five hours and checked all the fences at least three times, Patience had us stand down, and the new shift came on.”

  New shift. Including the two men who’d watched Loren cut dead cats from A.J. Dunlop’s car.

  “Did the alert specify where the intruder was?”

  “No.”

  “Or who found him?”

  “No. But if there was an intruder, he would probably have been found by Denardis and Nazzarett. They were the ones patrolling inside the fence.”

  The hum was stronger now. The Cutty Sark was tasting more and more like victory. “What would they have done with him then?”

  “Taken him to Security HQ and held him there.”

  “So the people at HQ, Patience and what’s-his-name, McLerie, would have known about it.” Looking at his notes.

  “I guess.”

  “And anyone else?”

  “Not necessarily.” Ice rattled again and Rivers sipped noisily. “The gate guards and Cosmo Vann would have been on alert, but they might not have seen anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Have any rumors got out?”

  “I haven’t been on duty all weekend. But if it was just Denardis, Nazzarett, and McLerie, then forget it.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re the boss’s asshole buddies, that’s why.” Alcohol had clearly done away with Rivers’s worry about what would get back to his boss. “They think he’s Jesus fucking Christ and walks on water.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Nazzarett was Marine Force Recon. Denardis was Army Airborne but flunked out of drop school. McLerie’s some kind of charismatic Christian who thinks the world is gonna end any day now, and he wants to have lots of automatic weapons around him in case he’s not picked up during the Rapture.”

  “You should show him the UFO field.”

  “I have. He didn’t think it was funny.”

  “Any of these guys actually see action anywhere?”

  Rivers gave a laugh. “You kidding? We had one genuine combat veteran in the group, Crace, an older guy who’d been in Iraq. The boss just loved the guy at first, worshiped the ground he walked on. But it turned out that Patience was disappointed by Crace. Man kept talking about what the war was really like, how totally fucked it was from start to finish. It didn’t fit Patience’s expectations at all. He wanted some kind of heroic John Wayne bullshit. So Patience got Crace shuffled off on the grounds that he admitted smoking marijuana back when he was in college.”

  “Smoking dope?” Loren figured he might as well encourage the man’s attitude. “Who didn’t, back then?”

  “Yeah! I sure as hell did, but I was smart enough to lie about it on the forms. And I read up on how to beat the polygraph and was able to ace that part.” Rivers giggled. “That poor son of a bitch Crace was honest. That’s all. Patience gave him something called a lateral transfer to another ATL facility in Texas, but the poor jerk probably ended up with a janitor’s job.”

  “What you’re telling me,” Loren said, “is that ATL Security is run by this crazed hard-core control-freak puritan with an inflated sense of his own importance, a whole lot of frustrated military ambition, and no goddamn common sense at all.”

  Rivers whooped with laughter. “That’s our boy!” he shouted.

  “And he’s assisted by a bunch of disciples who are just as much misfits as he is, and who accept his orders like they came from Mount Sinai.”

  Rivers’s laughter rollicked on.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” Loren said.

  The laughter stopped abruptly. “What d’you mean do? I’m not doing anything!”

  “Sure you are. You’re getting me a list of who was on duty on Friday through today.”

  “You want me to spy for you?” Rivers was outraged.

  “Of course I do.” Reasonably.

  “Hey, man! This ain’t nice!”

  Loren put slashing blades into his voice. “I don’t give a shit for nice!” he barked. “I just want the fucking names, okay? And I want them by tomorrow.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “That’s what I want, Rivers. You can check in early tomorrow and get a look at the rosters. That’s all I ask.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “You know what I want done. It’s your damn job to figure out how to do it, and do it by tomorrow. Otherwise it’ll be a lateral transfer to a job shoveling shit in Texas with your old buddy Crace.”

  Loren hung up before Rivers could bleat a reply. He carried the portable phone back into the kitchen, put it on its cradle, and sat at the table with his family.

  He had ATL’s personnel logs for the weekend, but they conceivably could be doctored in some way. Whatever Rivers found out would just be a bonus.

  He helped himself to some ribs, saw they were too hot to eat as yet, and reached into his pocket for the scribblings he’d taken from Jernigan’s Panaboard. He turned to his elder daughter. “Here,” he said. “You’re taking math classes. Can you make any sense out of this?”

  Katrina scanned the pages, eyes widening. “We don’t have any of this in Algebra II, Daddy,” she said. “Honest.“ She handed the pages back across the table.

  Loren looked at her. “Do you know what t stands for?”

  Katrina shrugged. “Sure. It stands for time.”

  Cold certainty settled in Loren’s bones. In spite of all the scotch, he’d never felt more sober.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I thought.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The phone blew Loren’s dream away like a prisoner from the cannon’s mouth. Loren’s hand snatched out to seize the phone, then he rolled out of bed and reached for his clothes with the other hand. At some point subsequent to this he actually managed to wedge his eyes open.

  “We got Fucking Big Idiots all over town, Chief.” It was one of Loren’s patrolmen, Al S
anchez. “They’re in their blue jackets and everything.”

  The Fucking Big Idiots, alias FuBar 1, a/k/a Fan Belt Inspectors, were known to the general public as the upright, uncorruptible, ace investigators of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  “Fuck.” Loren tugged on trousers. “Where?”

  “East Robin between Copper and Estes. And somewhere out on North Plaza, I’m not sure about the cross street— that’s what I heard, anyway.”

  “That first one is right in my neighborhood.”

  “They’re setting up to bust somebody. They won’t say who.”

  “Assholes.” Reflexively. “Assholes.”

  There were all sorts of reasons to dislike the FBI— their smug, insufferable superiority, their reliance on informants and technology instead of footwork, their high-handed appropriation of any case that might give them good publicity. All fine reasons. What Loren hated about them was the way their ops sliced through all the established networks in his town, pushed the locals around without knowing who any of them were or how they stood in relation to one another, ignored the holistic terrain in which Loren and his neighbors lived. They were outsiders: they slammed into Loren’s town in the dead of night, carried his neighbors away, left people like Loren to deal with the consequences.

  Debra was blinking at him through dream-fogged eyes. Loren gestured for her to go back to sleep and glanced at the clock. Five-thirty. Outside there was full darkness. The hot Mexican wind was still burning the night.

  By the time he got into his clothes and drove the three blocks to East Robin it was clear that the feds’ operation, whatever it was, was over. Loren’s headlights revealed the street blocked off with sawhorses. A dozen men were standing around, dressed alike in blue baseball caps and flak jackets worn beneath blue nylon jackets with FBI in large gold letters on the back. They were relaxed, smoking or sipping coffee out of paper cups, their job over. Some of them propped semiautomatic snipers’ rifles on their hips, each equipped with tubelike gray light-enhancement scopes for use at night.

  Loren stopped his car in the middle of the street and snapped on his bright lights. Federal men winced and held up their hands to shade their eyes. Loren got out of his car, adjusted his gun, walked up to the nearest group. The wind tore at his jacket.