No matter what we want to believe, we cannot change the past. We can change the world around us, but our own personal histories never change. I can’t undo what I did ten years ago. Going back and stopping my younger self doesn’t change my history, it only splinters the world’s future.
~ excerpt from Thoughts on Einselection by Saree Tong I1—2076
Wednesday March 26, 2070
Florida District 8
Commonwealth of North America
Iteration 2
Sam walked the perimeter of the conference room, trying to see the individual details of the paintings collected from Henry’s storage unit instead of seeing them as a whole. The problem was that they were a cohesive whole. Ordered by the dates on the back, the large paintings created a complete cityscape that bled from futuristic metropolis to decaying wasteland in a faded rainbow of colors.
Mac propped his feet on the table and leaned his chair back on two legs. “This is a mess.”
“We’ll tag them as evidence and store them later.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“They’re paintings, Mac, not windows into another world or glimpses of the future.”
“Wanna bet money on that?”
She looked over her shoulder and glared at him. “There’s a connection here. Miss Doe did not wind up in this iteration—in my car—by accident. Henry had the answer to how she got here. If we have a How and When, we might find a Why. Once I have a Why, I’ll have the killer.”
“I’m glad to see you let the reckless-driver thing drop,” Mac said.
They’d argued about the case over dinner, and again after their morning run. Life would be so much less complicated if the deaths weren’t tied together, but neither she nor Mac was a believer in coincidences. Not anymore. “I’m not ruling out reckless driver yet. But I’m thinking more about timelines at the moment, trying to figure out who saw what when.”
Mac tapped his pen on the table. “Did you get the sheriff to confirm he’d seen Edwin’s pirate at the cemetery?”
“Not yet. I’m waiting for him to call me back.”
There was a knock at the conference-room door, and Agent Edwin shuffled in, sidling past the art blocking the main door. “Good morning?” He looked around the room in confusion.
“How’d your bedtime reading go?” Sam asked, nodding to Henry’s notebook that Edwin had in his hand.
“Um.” Edwin scratched his head. “There is nothing in here that you are going to want to hear.”
“Really?” She raised an eyebrow.
Edwin shrugged. “It’s nonsense. Just ramblings about dreams and calculations for things that don’t exist. It’s . . .”
“Nonsense?” Sam offered. Edwin nodded. “Henry wasn’t insane,” Mac said.
“You wouldn’t get that from his journal.” Edwin slid the book across the tabletop to Mac. “He wrote in pen on dead-tree paper, which gives you a hint of where his mental state was.”
Mac frowned in confusion. “He liked vintage style?”
“He was paranoid,” Edwin said. “People who don’t use electronics are always paranoid that someone is after their secrets. But the thing is, there are no secrets in here. He was documenting his nightmares. All you can glean from this is that Dr. Troom needed to see a therapist.”
“What did he dream about?” Sam asked.
“Dying.” Edwin shrugged.
“We got that from skimming it,” Mac said. “What else did you see?”
“Notes on convergence events and decoherence. Sounds physics-y, but it was just scribbled in the margins. I thought they were partial notes from a lab project.”
Mac flipped the book over onto the surface of the smart table and did something. A moment later, a picture of sine waves weaving in and around each other appeared on the conference-room screen. “This drawing appears on multiple pages,” Mac said. He touched his screen and enlarged the picture. “Look here, where multiple sine waves hit the same point on the graph? Troom called it a Convergence Event.”
Sam sat down and pulled her own tablet out. “All right. So what’s a Decoherence Event according to Henry? Is that when these iterations pull apart?”
Mac flipped through the pages. “Doesn’t look like it. He has the timelines moving apart labeled as an Expansion Event.”
Edwin sighed. “The first two pages have drawings and the word ‘decoherence,’ ” he said as he took a seat at the table. “It made my head ache,” he added with a guilty look at Sam.
She shrugged. “Physics wasn’t my best class either.”
“It doesn’t make any sense!” Edwin said in frustration. “Time is linear. It moves forward. You don’t just have multiple timelines.”
“It’s the Many Worlds Hypothesis,” Mac said. “The theory that anything that can happen does happen in some variable universe. Dr. Emir called them iterations of time, and that’s the school of thought Henry was working from.”
“What I don’t get is why,” Sam said. “He knew this theory killed Emir, so why go and try to re-create the past mistake?”
Edwin and Mac both stared at her as if she just grown a second head.
“What am I missing?”
“Why does anyone try to re-create a scenario?” Mac asked. “Why does your brain replay embarrassing scenes from high school at 3 A.M.? Why do you go to the place you went on your first date on the anniversary of the day you broke up?”
Sam shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You do it because you want to change something. Emir created the machine to pass messages, to stop tragedies like terrorist attacks. Marrins wanted to use the machine to change the nationhood vote. Troom . . .” Mac shrugged. “What one event do you think he wanted to change the most?”
Sam bit her lip as the truth slowly took shape. “Emir’s death. If Henry could have changed one thing, that would have been it, right? To go back and save his mentor?”
“He had everything he needed,” Mac said.
Edwin cleared his throat. “So, the bullet? From the original crime scene in Alabama? Are you saying Dr. Troom was shot with his mentor?”
Mac raised an eyebrow and shrugged in a sort of what-else-is-there? way. “It fits the facts.”
Sam pushed her tablet across the table in disgust. “The backlash of the machine’s collapsing would have created enough force to cause the lab explosion.”
“Lots of little electrical fires as the collapsing time wave short-circuited the tech in the room. Friction burns.” Mac shook his head. “Cause of death? Arrogance and stupidity.”
“Stupid idiot. What makes anyone think messing around with time travel is a good idea?” Sam frowned at Henry’s notebook like it was about to bite her.
“Most people make mistakes,” Mac said. “They have things they want to undo.”
She reached for her tablet and made a mark next to Henry’s name. Case closed. “Fine. Henry was an idiot. This will be super fun to explain at the next district meeting.”
“It’s all classified,” Mac said. “What are the chances they won’t ask too many questions?”
“Poor.” That was not a day she was looking forward to. Director Loren hadn’t gotten to his current position by not asking questions. Her fists clenched at the thought of the fight they were likely to have.
Edwin cleared his throat. “Um. I’m going to go see if the lobby has any donuts left. You want some?”
“Chocolate glazed,” Sam said.
“Anything but cake donuts or strawberry frosting,” Mac said, as Edwin hurried away. “Did we scare him?”
“Maybe a little.” She sighed. “This doesn’t feel right, you know?”
“Of course it doesn’t—you didn’t get to lock up the killer. A murder case where the shooter was dead before the shooting is not something they cover in the academy textbooks.”
“It’s more than that.” Sam stood and started pacing past the paintings. “I feel like . . . I’m working the wrong case, maybe? That I’m looking at this and seeing the wrong thing. Like in Alabama. A break-in didn’t quite make sense, but we ran with the idea because there was no other explanation.”
Mac rested his elbows on the table. “You think we’re missing a bigger crime?”
“Not a crime, a threat. This is a threat,” Sam said, gesturing to the paintings. “There’s something here. Bits and pieces, and I put the puzzle together wrong.”
She stared at the paintings of Alabama. “There was this book when I was a kid with this fuzzy blue guy scared of the monster on the last page. You turned the pages, and at the end, the guy is standing alone.”
“Is this a ‘you have nothing to fear but fear itself’ thing?” Mac asked
“More of an existential thing. Only you can destroy you. You are the real monster.” Sam walked toward the gray landscape.
“And you bring this up because?”
“Because this was a story. Emir was trying to tell a story with his painting. We know how this story ends.” She stopped in front of the first gray portrait of Iteration 1. “It’s the story of Sam, and, spoiler alert! Sam dies.”
“A Sam dies,” Mac said. “One possible you.”
“Jane died. I died. Then I died again. In, what? Three years? Two? A car crash is better than torture, but I’m still dead. Can you hear the clock going ticktock? I’m going to die, sooner rather than later. I know how. I know where. I’ve got a good guess as to why, but I’m missing the who.”
“Spoiler alert, Sam: everyone dies! That’s what ‘THE END’ means. Life isn’t Happily Ever After and riding off into the sunset. Life is death. You die. I die. We all die. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you die knowing you did something.”
“What I want to do is find my killer and put him in the ground. I feel like raging against the dying light.”
“Well. Good. Juanita Doe is a homicide, let’s solve it. It’s one more death in the ten thousand.”
“The what?”
“Every life is ten thousand deaths. You’ve never heard it before?” Mac asked. Sam shook her head. “You exist because of death. People who lived and died and in between had children who lived and died as your ancestors. All the plants and animals you consume. They die so you can live. Ten thousand deaths, and the goal is to make your death one of the ten thousand that brings a new and better life to the world. ”
Sam frowned. “Ten thousand? That sounds low. If we’re talking about every lettuce leaf or grain of rice, ten thousand barely covers a week.”
“It’s a poem. It’s meant to be metaphorical.”
“Terrible poem. That’s going to bother me, you know. Instead of wondering about sodium content of my dinner, I’m going to wonder how many trees I’ve killed before they could grow because I’m eating almond slices. Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
“We have a problem,” Edwin said as he slammed the door open.
“No donuts?” Mac asked.
“There’s a guy who sent a thing to the news saying he killed you, ma’am,” Edwin said as he gulped in air.
“A guy sent a thing?” Sam raised an eyebrow.
Edwin waved his hand. “A video thingy? It’s playing on the channels downstairs, and the office phone keeps ringing. There’s a news crews outside!”
Sam shut her eyes. “Of course there is.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Edwin asked.
“I’m going to go down and hold a press conference. I’ll tell everyone I’m not dead. And then I’m going to schedule a meeting with the regional director and explain this.”
“Does the regional director have the security clearance for this?” Mac asked.
“He’s going to have to get that expedited.”
There was quite the crowd outside when Sam arrived. Traditional camera people and reporters were vying for spots with the automated media bots, all creating a ruckus that would put a rowdy preschool to shame. The head of the WIC office glared at Sam and told her the CBI was not invited to this year’s Christmas party. Sam just adjusted her blazer and painted on a sardonic smile.
She stepped out into the sunshine, briefly wishing she were home in Toronto, and raised her hand. “Quiet down please. Thank you. Thank you for responding so promptly. Our field office had just received the news of the death threat when the junior agent noticed you gathering.” She didn’t add that a flock of vultures had more decorum. Saints and angels knew she’d gotten an earful after snapping at a reporter during the trial last summer in Alabama. “Now, if we can do this in an orderly fashion, I’d like to answer your questions and get back to work. Let’s not waste the taxpayer’s time. First question?”
A woman in a red blouse raised her hand at a fraction of the speed of light. “Mandy Martin, Channel 9 news. Is it true that your car was in an accident this morning?”
“Yes,” Sam said. “My vehicle was taken from the repair shop by an unidentified woman. She was subsequently in a fatal hit-and-run accident. The police are working with the CBI to identify the driver of the other vehicle.”
A man crowding his way to the front jumped in as she took a breath. “Agent Rose, is it true that you are a clone?”
She raised both her eyebrows. “No. Are you from Channel 2?”
“Stach Christel, Channel two evening news, in-depth reports on everything you need to know,” the reporter rattled off in a single breath. “You were accused of being a clone a few months ago. Do you still deny it?”
“I do. My blood work was made public and tested by independent labs,” Sam said, teeth grinding together as she smiled.
Another hand. “Richone Lawley. Agent Rose, was the woman killed in the hit-and-run this morning your shadow?”
“No,” Sam said. “I don’t own a shadow. I don’t support cloning though I do continue to openly support clone rights and equality. The victim of this morning’s accident has yet to be identified, but we will be doing genetic testing.”
“What about the man who claims to have killed you?” another reporter shouted. “Do you know who he is?”
Sam took a deep breath and smiled beatifically. “I haven’t had a chance to watch the video sent to the news stations, but this”—she held up a packet of manila folders—“is the current death-threat log for this bureau office for the year. Three months into the year, and this is our seventeenth death threat. All of them are fully investigated. We invite the public to help us. To that end, copies of the death threats will be sent to every media outlet in the district. Citizens are invited to review the files and report their findings to the bureau. Additionally, since this is a hit-and-run accident, the county has offered a five-thousand-dollar cash reward—nontaxable—to anyone with a tip that leads to the arrest and conviction of the other driver.”
There was a buzz in the crowd, and the reporters called in to their station executives.
Mandy Martin’s hand raised again. “Agent Rose, does the bureau have a record of events like this happening before?”
“Hit-and-run accidents or car theft?” Sam asked. She shook her head. “The bureau is aware of similar incidents, but there’s no known record of someone’s targeting and killing bureau agents with vehicular trauma.” At least not to her knowledge. People hunting bureau agents hadn’t ever been something she felt the need to study.
“Agent Rose, why were you targeted?”
“You’d have to ask the man trying to kill me I’m afraid. His motives are a mystery to me. If he’d like to turn himself in so we can discuss his concerns, I am more than willing to sit down and speak with him.” Sam held up her hand. “One last question, please. The rest of your concerns can be directed to the field office and will be responded to in a timely fashion.” Poor Edwin. She probably owed him dinner for putting him on phone duty.
“Agent Rose—Fellis Marr of Channel 7 news. My station can find no record of a felon named Nialls Gant on the public record. Is there a reason his record is not public? Is it true what they’re saying on social media, that Gant is a government agent? Is this the start of a political coup in Florida?”
Sam really wished she’d had the time to watch the blasted video before she’d come to the conference. But, that was politics. You lied and you smiled. She smiled. “To the best of our knowledge, Nialls Gant is an alias. The bureau has no information on him. The bureau welcomes citizens to send us information that they have. If the bureau finds information that the public needs to know, we will make it accessible through the usual media channels.”
She tried not to think of the last time the bureau had updated the regional Web site. Probably not since the last round of budget cuts in ’68. She’d have to pull out the handbook on bureau transparency to see what she was actually allowed to share. Usually, it was just enough information to keep the public asking questions and not enough to let them form vigilante mobs.
With a final smile, she retreated to the air-conditioned bliss of the office building. She didn’t relax until she was in the elevator headed upstairs, but even then, she felt like she’d painted a bull’s-eye on her back. Someone wanted her dead, and now she knew his name.
“That . . . that . . .” Gant struggled to find the proper term for Detective Rose.
“Starts with a B,” Donovan said. “Ends with an ITCH.”
“No, she’s more than a common street cur.” Gant’s lip curled in a sneer. “She’s a disease. A plague. A destroying angel from the pits of hell. How, in the name of rational thought and humanistic endeavor, did that woman survive? How did she get through the machine? I thought if she left at a different point in time, she’d go somewhere else.”
“Maybe she followed straight after and landed somewhere in the city instead of the swamps,” he said as he pulled out a knife and rag.
Gant rolled his eyes. “Impossible. Even if she had, how did she find us?”
Donovan finished wiping down the knife blade he was polishing. “Probably followed the same lead we had. There’s one way back home. Detective Rose can’t want to stay here any more than we do. The window’s closing. We want out. She wants out. We’re all after the same thing. We’re bound to cross paths.”
“We did cross paths,” Gant reminded him. “Violently.” He stalked back to the other end of the motel suite and flicked the TV on. The local news stations had been playing variations of Detective Rose’s interview all morning. The navy blazer was a ghastly dull color on her, but it made her blend in. The reporters nattered on in English. Detective Rose responded in kind. It was a carjacking gone wrong. Someone had stolen her car. She was uninjured. No, they had no leads. They didn’t know who Nialls Gant was.
They didn’t know who he was! Nialls Gant, the man who was the focus of the nation’s largest manhunt. His had been the trial of the century! For weeks, he had dominated the headlines. He’d commanded the attention of everyone from the northern territories to Tapachula. How dare the media act as if they’d never heard of him! As if he’d never been born.
Cold fingers of dread curled around his spine, raising gooseflesh on his arms. “Donovan?”
“Eh?”
“This place, this period of history, were we born here?”
Donovan shuffled, moving his gear around. “Who knows? Probably.”
“Probably isn’t an adequate answer. You said you knew how the machine worked.”
“I do. I got it to turn on, didn’t I?”
Gant closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten. In Greek. Then Swahili. “Understanding how to turn a machine on is not the same as understanding how it works. Turning a doorknob isn’t the same thing as picking a lock!”
“You okay?” Donovan moved in front of the TV with a serious frown. “Why does it matter? We’re leaving here.”
“We left our own time and came here instead of going back to the day before I committed my crimes, which was—if you recall—the original intent of this expedition.”
Donovan shrugged, his shoulder holster sliding as he did. “Who cares? It was a miscalculation. No one’s chasing us.”
“Detective Rose is chasing us.”
“Nah, we’re chasing her. The bimbo on the TV doesn’t have a dime on us. She doesn’t know us from God Himself.” He kicked the TV so sparks flew as the glass cracked. “Enough of this. We’re getting the machine, and we’re leaving. You’re still with me, aren’t you, Gant?”
Gant looked coldly at his erstwhile partner. “Naturally.”
“Then gear up. I’m tired of listening to people speak English all the time.”
Sam tossed Henry Troom’s day planner on her desk. There were still several notebooks retrieved from his apartment to read over, plus the reams of paper found in boxes at the storage unit. Edwin had given up on the notebook and passed it off to Mac.
Crossing her arms, she laid her head on the desk. Poor Henry. It must have seemed like such a clever idea. He already knew how the machine worked. Controlling it was a matter of math. With the right formula, he was able to calculate when and where he needed to turn on a machine to connect to the morning of July 4, 2069, behind the lab. Going back to save Dr. Emir probably made perfect sense. Troom controlled every variable.
Except the gun.
The real shame was that if Troom had used the stupid machine the way Emir intended, he wouldn’t have been at risk at all. He would have sent a paper airplane through to his past self and warned him. Told him to call Dr. Emir or the police.
No, that wouldn’t have worked . . . because she’d ignored those messages.
The guilt still ate at her.
Emir had called in the wee hours of the morning. He’d been on the phone minutes before he died, and she’d done nothing. Fear had kept her locked in place. She liked to think it was a sensible fear.
Chances were good that if she had driven out to the lab before dawn that day, she would have been just as a dead as Emir. Marrins was a senior agent who was both racist and sexist. He wouldn’t have let her walk away. But the choice still haunted her. Maybe it had haunted Henry, too. Only he’d had the guts to try.
Sam poked her computer. Theoretically, the calculations could be done backward. She knew when and where Henry had gone, so she should be able to calculate where he’d started the journey, but the math wasn’t adding up.
The door to her office swung open as someone knocked.
“You’re supposed to knock, then enter, Mac.” She put her head down.
“Funny you knew it was me,” he said. There was the sound of one of the cheap metal chairs from the front office being dragged across the floor.
“Everyone else knocks and waits for a response.”
He snorted in amusement. “That’s great for them. I have a question for you, purely bureau business. Have you ever taken advanced physics?”
“No.” She lifted her head. “Why?”
Mac tossed the journal on her desk. “Agent Edwin gave up before he got to the good parts. Does that handwriting look familiar?”
Sam turned the journal around and read over the notes made in purple pen. “That’s . . . my handwriting? What in the name of the saints is going on?” She flipped the pages. “How much is there?”
“Quite a few pages.”
“But . . . how? Why? Why would anyone mimic my handwriting?”
The look he gave her suggested sarcasm without saying anything.
Sam blinked. “You think this is my writing?”
“It probably belongs to the Jane Doe with the purple shirt,” Mac said. “She’s a variation of you. An iteration of you, I guess.”
She read over the notes again. “What is a stabilizing core?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Iterations . . . half of this is gibberish.”
Mac’s smile was one of fatigue but not quite defeat.
“Tell me you have good news.”
“Come on up to the conference room. Edwin and Clemens have cooked up a plausible theory.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Is it going to lead to the end of this madness?”
“It’s sort of like a road map on how to get there.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, where X marks the apocalypse.”
“You need to work on your pep talks, MacKenzie.”
Ivy looked up as laughter echoed through the hall. Agent Rose and Agent MacKenzie walked in, joking about something, their eyes never leaving each other. She sighed. One day someone’s eyes would light up when they saw her. And not with greed as they realized what she was and mentally priced out her body parts at a chop shop.
“So,” Agent Rose said, “I hear you two have solved the Grand Unification Theory? Ready to share?”
“It’s not quite particle physics,” Edwin said. “But Officer Clemens has linked almost everything together.”
All eyes were on her. “I’m not sure how much of this will hold up in court,” Ivy said hesitantly. Agent Rose didn’t move to stop her, so she went on. “Dr. Troom’s journal shows two set periods of time.”
“Arguably three,” Edwin said.
“You wouldn’t win that argument,” Ivy said. At least he wouldn’t win it with her. “The journal starts with very basic notes about how the machine could work, what might be needed to contact other iterations, and a detailed list of his dreams. Dr. Troom seemed to believe that he wasn’t dreaming so much as witnessing the end of an iteration.” She nodded to Edwin, hoping he’d help.
He nodded. “Troom made notes of three major kinds of events: expansion, decoherence, and convergence. During expansion, the iterations break apart. During decoherence, they collapse into each other. During convergence, the iterations run parallel . . . struggling for dominance.”
Agent Rose and Agent MacKenzie both looked perplexed.
Officer Clemens tried to think of an analogy that would work. “Think of a hundred particles of light racing in a sine wave, up and down, up and down. Each color of light travels at a different speed or wavelength. Some particles reach higher or dip lower along the wave pattern. But at some point, they overlap. That’s what we think timelines are doing. Each iteration is traveling at its own pace, but sometimes they run parallel, and we have a convergence. The woman who died in the car wreck had to cross over during a convergence event,” Ivy said.
Agent Rose nodded. “All right. That’s a start, I guess. So are we still in a convergence event? Does that mean Mr. Gant from the TV crossed over with her? And, should we be expecting more intrusions from the other iteration?”
Ivy shook her head. “I can’t say for certain. It’s possible.”
“How possible?” Agent MacKenzie asked.
Ivy shrugged and looked at Edwin. “Better than seventy percent? Maybe?”
“The convergence points are, according to the notebook, very narrow windows in time. Sometimes the overlap lasts a few hours, sometimes only for minutes.”
“How long was the convergence that brought Juanita over?” Agent MacKenzie asked.
“Dr. Troom didn’t leave the calculations in his notebook. His notes say that every convergence is followed by either further expansion or destructive decoherence. There a formula for calculating the events, and he was predicting a catastrophic decoherence. The loss of multiple iterations.”
“That made him have bad dreams?” Agent Rose took a seat at the table.
“More like a redundant memory,” Edwin said. “The dreams were real events of other iterations that had failed. Troom was tracking them.”
Agent MacKenzie sat down across from Agent Rose. “Is there a patron saint of nightmares?”
“Saint Raphael,” Agent Rose said without looking up, “but I don’t think he’s going to help us. If every dream for every person is a failed iteration . . .”
“No,” Ivy said, shaking her head, “that’s the thing: It’s only for certain people. There are notes on einselected nodes: individuals or events that exist in every iteration. They’re kind of like glue, or the bond between iterations. I don’t know if Dr. Troom even understood the concept fully. But he considered himself to be einselected.”
“Was that ego talking?” Agent Rose asked.
“Possibly,” Ivy conceded, “but it doesn’t really matter in the end. The theory Agent Edwin and I came up with is a lot simpler than that.”
Edwin bounced in his seat a little. “You’re going to like this.”
She smiled, too. “All the equations require a location code to operate from. So I started breaking down all the numbers the way I did with the phone numbers, and I found a pattern.”
Agent Rose didn’t look like she appreciated any of this, but she motioned for Ivy to continue.
“The machine only operates predictably at a certain geographic location. You need starting longitude and latitude to calculate a destination. For Dr. Troom to calculate the precise arrival in another iteration during a convergence, he had to know his exact starting location.”
Agent Rose’s face lit up with a fierce smile. “Tell me you have those coordinates.”
Ivy held up the strip of paper she scribbled her calculations on. “Longitude and latitude of where Dr. Troom operated his first machine. It’s somewhere in the swamps.” Not her favorite place in Florida, but it made sense in a way. People didn’t go out to the swamps for fun anymore. Hunting wasn’t allowed, and the touristy airboat tours were restricted to set stretches of waterway. If someone wanted to get up to less-than-legal shenanigans, the deep swamp was the place to go.
“Which is how Nealie and Connor got involved,” Edwin said. “They must have bumped into Troom at some point.”
Ivy held up a hand. “There was also a second set of coordinates that match the longitude and latitude of the lab. We think Juanita Doe crossed iterations, possibly with Mr. Gant, possibly following him. She wanted to go back,” Ivy said. “She worked with Dr. Troom to rebuild the machine. There was one in the swamp, then a second he used at the lab.”
Agent Rose frowned. “Why two machines?”
Ivy and Edwin both shook their heads.
“We don’t know yet,” Edwin admitted. “Although there are a couple of notes about a stabilizing mechanism. Something that could control the energy of the machine.”
“Let me guess,” Agent Rose said, rubbing her temples. “No control, and the machine explodes?”
“That’s possible,” Edwin said. “Though Troom hypothesized that a stabilizing mechanism wouldn’t be needed under certain circumstances.”
Agent Rose quirked her lips into a bitter smile. “I think it’s safe to say he proved that hypothesis wrong. Mac, can you and Edwin check out the swamp location?”
“You don’t want to come get dirty with us?” Agent MacKenzie teased.
“Not particularly, no. Officer Clemens, thank you for your help.”
Ivy hesitated. “There is one more thing.”
Agent Rose quirked an eyebrow up in question. “Yes?”
“I tracked down Sheriff Gardner since he wasn’t returning your calls. He’s staying at home. I drove by and knocked on his door, but he yelled at me. He’s very, very drunk.”
“I would be too if my kid had just died,” Agent MacKenzie said.
Agent Rose wrinkled her nose. “I think it might be more than that. Ivy and I will go over and talk with him. Call me when you get back from the swamps.” Rose gave her a calculating look. “Do you have a tac vest?”
“A . . . a bulletproof one?” Ivy shook her head. “Why would I need one?”
“Standard-issue for bureau interactions like this. You never know when someone will get violent.” Her lips pressed into a thin frown.
“And because I think we’ll need it.”
It had never occurred to Sam that she hated being the passenger in the car. As Ivy took another left-hand turn faster than Sam felt was safe, she had ample time to reflect on why she was always behind the wheel. Being the driver gave her control. And the clone’s driving gave her more near-death experiences in fifteen minutes than she’d had in her entire life . . . and she’d already died twice.
Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the seat belt, and Ivy slammed on the brakes. “When did you learn to drive?”
“When I became a city drone,” Ivy said calmly. “They gave us cars and a training video, and we worked it out on a dirt lot.”
Sam quickly reviewed her saints, trying to remember who the patron saint of drivers was. St. Frances of Rome, wasn’t it? Or was there another one for race-car drivers?
“Are you okay, Agent Rose?” the officer asked, maybe catching on that Sam was nervous.
“Have you ever considered professional race-car driving?”
“No, ma’am,” she said as she took another turn at qualifying speeds.
Sam closed her eyes and whispered a prayer. “You missed your calling in life.” She snapped her fingers.
“What?”
“St. Richard,” Sam said. “He’s the patron saint of NASCAR.”
Ivy hit the brakes and slowed to something closer to the speed limit. “My driving isn’t that bad.”
Sam looked over at her.
“Not all of us drive like old ladies!”
With a guffaw of laughter, Sam turned to look out the window. “Some of us are able to see the speed-limit signs as we go past and actually follow the law.”
“What is the point of flashing blue lights and sirens if I don’t get to use them?”
“You aren’t,” Sam pointed out.
Ivy shrugged. “I don’t need to. Everyone is at work or school.” The car slowed some more. “Is that better?” There was a note of beaten uncertainty in her voice that Sam didn’t like.
“Your driving is fine,” Sam lied. “I was teasing.” Ivy’s insecurity was worse than taking a turn on two wheels.
“We’re here,” Ivy said. “The blue house on the left.”
Sam looked at the overgrown, winter-browned grass with a frown. The gutter was sagging, and a weather-beaten flyer for a local pizza place fluttered in the door handle. “Are you sure?”
Ivy nodded. “He forgot his running shoes at work once, and my commanding officer made me run them over.”
“I didn’t picture him as a runner.”
“He’s not. He wears the same pair of running shoes in every morning, and it’s been the same pair for at least three years. It’s all for show.”
That seemed an apt summary of Sheriff Gardner. More politician than policeman. More sycophant than politician.
Sam walked up to the door and knocked. There was a crash inside, followed by a man’s cursing.
“Sheriff Gardner?” Sam called out. “Sheriff? Are you all right?”
Silence.
“Sheriff, it’s Agent Rose from the bureau.” She knocked again, louder this time. “Do I have permission to enter?”
Ivy closed the distance behind her. “Maybe we should wait.”
“He might have hurt himself. Our first duty is to protect the citizens, no matter what part of the government we work for. We exist to keep people safe.” She reached for the doorknob. As she touched it, the door was wrenched inward with violent force.
Sheriff Gardner stood in front of them, wearing a stained white tank top, wrinkled uniform pants, and reeking of alcohol.
Sam tried not to judge him.
She failed miserably.
“Sheriff? How are you doing?”
“Get off my property,” Gardner said through clenched teeth.
“I will,” Sam promised with a smile. “I just need to ask you a few questions. First, did you see your son, Jamie, at Dolores’s grave on March nineteenth? That would have been last Wednesday.”
The sheriff’s eye twitched. “I know what day it was.” Sam waited. The sheriff looked away. “You saw Jamie.” His body language gave everything away. She’d seen the same hunched shoulders and guilty look on her father’s face when he sobered up and realized what she’d given up to take care of him.
Gardner turned away.
“I need to know what happened,” Sam said. “Did you fight? Did he argue with you?”
Gardner’s shoulders hunched inward. “I gave him a car.”
That . . . was not what she expected.
“I was trying to make things right. Get him a good life.” He shook his head. He turned around, face contorted with anger and sorrow. “I got a bonus last year. Enough to send Jamie to college like Dolores wanted. She always said he was smart.”
“He was very smart,” Sam said. “Got good grades. Won a poetry contest, I think.”
Gardner peered back into the gloom of the house, avoiding eye contact.
Sam scanned the room trying to guess what had Gardner’s attention. The TV was off, the house covered in empty beer bottles and frozen-food containers. There was movement in the far corner, an old electric picture frame playing through a series of dated photos. Sam couldn’t see the faces, but the clothes were a good twenty years out of style: Mango-orange and sunset-pink dresses were visible. She made an educated guess. “You loved your wife, didn’t you, Sheriff Gardner?”
“Of course I did!” His nose scrunched as he tried not to tear up. “Tried to. We were fighting even before Jamie was born. She had moods. Liked to sulk for days. Wouldn’t talk to me sometimes because she was mad. It was worse after he was born. Doctor said it was postpartum depression maybe.”
“And when he was diagnosed, she was worse,” Sam guessed.
Gardner shook his head and sighed. “There was a recession. I couldn’t get a job that paid enough, and she wasn’t ever happy. I thought it’d be better just the two of us. I could keep her happy, and she wouldn’t have to worry about him. Jamie’d be safer. That’s what I told myself.”
Ivy walked up beside Sam, frowning. Sam shook her head.
“Sheriff, what did you and Jamie talk about when you saw him?”
Gardner shrugged. “Math. Physics. He said he thought it was really interesting. He was always like that, getting hyperfocused.”
“And you were already planning to pay for his schooling, so that was good.” Her suspicion that the sheriff had killed his estranged son was rapidly falling apart. “You bought him a car?”
“A cheap one, to get around town in. A 2060 Alexian Essence. Blue. Dolores’s favorite color was blue, and it was the right price.
Cheap. “What did Jamie say he was going to do after that?”
“Go home, pick up some things, then he had class that afternoon. A fourth-quarter pickup class on intro to college life or something like that. He would have been on campus early. Except, I don’t know if he made it. The cemetery opens at five in the morning. I was there first thing. We talked. We bought that car off the lot at eight. By noon, I was getting a call someone had found him washed up on the beach.”
Sam looked over at Ivy. “Mac said they found tire tracks near the swamp. Did we ever find out what kind of car it was?”
Ivy shook her head.
“Go call it in and see if Mac has an answer.” She watched Ivy walk back to the car before turning to the beleaguered sheriff. “Is there any other information you can give me? Names of friends? Someone else your son might have seen that day?”
“No.” Gardner shook his head. “We weren’t . . . He didn’t talk about his life. We didn’t talk much ever except when I was drunk and yelling. He had the boys out in the woods, but I don’t know who he knew in town. High school friends, I suppose.”
“All right,” Sam said. “We’ll see if we can trace the car.”
His eyes went wide. “Wait. I have . . . I have a picture. The guy who sold us the car . . .” He stumbled into the house and attacked the disaster inside. Empty take-out boxes tumbled off the coffee table in an avalanche. Gardner grabbed a flimsy piece of shiny paper. “Here. The dealer took this.” He shoved the photograph at Sam.
The picture showed Gardner in a dark brown suit two sizes too tight and old enough to be the one he wore to Dolores’s funeral. Jamie stood next to him, hair pulled back in a ponytail, jeans ripped, T-shirt faded and stained. Around Jamie’s neck was a knotted scarf of . . . “Is that plastic?”
“Trash he picked up,” Gardner said. “Plastic bags and whatnot that wound up on the beach. He made scarves out of them. Sold them as ‘upcycle couture’ at the farmer’s market during the summer. I used to patrol there just so I could check on him.”
Mac had said Jamie was garroted, probably with a plastic bag found at the scene. Jamie had been wearing the murder weapon all along. “Can I take a picture of this?”
Gardner nodded. “Will it help?”
“If I can track down where your son’s car was, I can find where he was killed. Once I find that, I’ll have some evidence.” She pulled out her phone and took a picture that she sent to Mac, Edwin, and Ivy. “I’m sorry for your loss, Sheriff. You’ll be the first person I call when I find out who did this.”