CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Patience’s scenario played itself out just as he had described it. Loren left the Jernigans’ house with only the five photocopies from the Panaboard folded in his breast pocket. Mrs. Jernigan and the children were left with the Presbyterian pastor. Loren drove to Atocha and found Cipriano taking a brown briefcase out of the big walk-in safe. Cipriano heard Loren coming in, turned, held out the case.
“I’ve been calling you all afternoon. Looks like Jernigan plugged the guy, after all. His pistols got found in the wreck.”
Loren looked at him. “Do you believe that?”
Cipriano looked dubiously at the case in his hands. “You got some reason not to believe it?”
“Where was it found? Just lying in the wreckage, right? Like maybe we were meant to find it? And who sabotaged the train?”
“Eco-terrorists, somebody was saying. People who didn’t like Torrey’s game ranch.”
“I think Patience and his goons did it. Because Jernigan was on his way to visit Cantwell and spill what he knew about the John Doe murder. And it’s my working hypothesis that Patience did that killing, too.”
Cipriano thought for a moment. “That’s pretty wild, jefe,” he said. “You got evidence for any of that?”
“Jernigan passed the Shibano test on the night Doe was killed— and that’ll show positive if you’ve used a firearm in the last few weeks, and do it no matter how many times you wash your hand. Primary traces penetrate most clothing, so wearing gloves wouldn’t help. And Jernigan’s wife says that his alibi was cooked up with Patience’s help.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean Patience did it.”
“Why would he help Jernigan establish an alibi if he weren’t covering his own ass, too? He and one of his other men killed Doe and then pulled the train sabotage to cover it up. Think about it. The ATL people are the only people around here who would know how to sabotage that train. It wasn’t done by just parking a truck across the tracks. They had to disable a whole sensor array.”
“Can I sit down for a minute, jefe? I gotta think about this.”
“Sure.”
Cipriano put the briefcase on Loren’s desk, took one of the old wooden seats under the BUY AMERICAN sign, and stuck his legs out. Loren sat behind his desk and reached for the briefcase. “This been dusted for fingerprints?” Loren said.
“Yep. Not a one.”
“Isn’t that a little suspicious?”
“It shows that if the guy was a killer, he was careful to clean his gun.” Cipriano frowned and stared at his boot tips, “Jefe, I got a problem with your scenario.”
“Shoot.”
“If Patience did the killing, why did Jernigan agree to help him cover it up? If he was so goddamn innocent.”
“Maybe Patience threatened him.” Loren opened the briefcase and took out a green plastic box. Inside the box were a brace of pistols and spare magazines. He hefted a pistol and sniffed at the barrel, smelling only gun oil. He dropped the magazine and pulled the action back and looked down the barrel. Clean as a whistle.
“He coulda gone to the D.A. and got protection,” Cipriano said.
“That’s the part I’ve got to work on. Something happened at ATL between Friday night and Saturday night. Once I find out what it was, it’ll explain everything.” He picked up the dropped magazine and popped one of the bullets out. Black fingerprint powder marred the gleaming brass: .41 caliber, Blazer brand.
“There’s a messenger waiting for that gun in my office, jefe,” Cipriano said. “I’m sending it to the lab in Albuquerque. We should have news by tomorrow noon.”
Loren let the action snap shut, put the gun in its box, then in the briefcase. It was a cheap case made of brown leather, with a little brass clasp. He looked at it for a moment, then reached into his bottom drawer for the phone book. He looked up the Jernigans’ number and called it. Sondra Jernigan answered.
“Mrs. Jernigan? This is Loren Hawn again. I’m sorry to bother you, but did your husband own a brown briefcase?”
“No.”
“Thin leather, like a document case. Brass clasp.”
“Nothing like that.”
“Thank you.” He put the phone down and looked at Cipriano. “She says not. Patience’s guys planted the case for us to find.”
“She also says her husband didn’t have a gun. If she never saw the gun, it would only be logical that she wouldn’t see the case he kept it in.”
“How d’you beat the Shibano test?”
Cipriano thought for a moment. “The guy was a scientist. Maybe he knew enough chemistry to neutralize the test.”
Irritation griped at Loren. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“I’m just saying what Patience would say. Or Little-Eddie-the-mayor. Your theory ain’t got no proof, jefe.”
“Could he beat the Shibano test on such short notice? We gave him the test just a couple hours after the shooting. With all the bullets fired into the car, his hand and arm should have been covered with gunpowder traces. Even if he was wearing gloves.”
“Like I say, he was a scientist. Ask another scientist if the test can be beaten.”
“Okay. I’ll get on the LAWSAT and query the FBI lab in Washington.”
“That messenger’s waiting, jefe.” Rising from his chair.
Loren handed the guns to Cipriano. Cipriano put the case under his arm and left the room. Loren dialed the front desk.
“Begley checked in?”
“Yeah, Chief. He’s sitting here waiting for Quantrill to bring his car in. We’ve been shooting the shit.”
“Send him this way, will you?”
“Can do, boss.”
Begley appeared in the door, a blond shock of hair hanging in his pale blue eyes. He brushed it back with a freckled hand. Loren remembered seeing him grinning on Connie Duvauchelle’s wall. At least he hadn’t been in uniform when the picture was taken.
“You wanted to see me, Chief?”
“Sit down for a sec. I wanted to ask you about the guy you know who works for ATL.”
Begley rearranged his gun, flashlight, and baton, then sat. “Paul Rivers? What about him?”
“What’s his job, first of all?”
Begley shrugged. “He works for their security service. Plainclothes, not a gate guard. Cruises the town, the perimeter. Escorts VIPs, that kind of thing.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Saturday afternoon. We went dove hunting.”
“How’d you do?”
“We each got about a dozen.”
“A good afternoon. Do you know whether he was on duty later?”
“No. I was, but he said he was going out on the Line for some fun.” Begley frowned. “That’s kind of funny, though. He was supposed to have the day shift on Saturday, so on Friday night I borrowed his springer spaniel so that I could go hunting by myself, but he called me early Saturday morning to tell me he’d been taken off the day shift and he could join me.”
Loren absorbed this news with quiet triumph. Something had happened on Friday night to change everybody’s plans.
“Did he say anything about what happened on Friday night?”
“There was some kind of alert or something. I remember he was cruising the town and caught a squeal about closing off the facility, and he was ordered to come out and patrol the perimeter in his jeep to look for intruders. But they lowered the alert level at midnight and he went off shift and went to bed.”
“Did he see anything on the perimeter?”
“Not even a cow.” Grinning. “You heard that story?”
“Yeah.”
“It drives Patience crazy. He thinks Luis Figueracion or somebody is playing practical jokes on him. Hoisting cows over the fence with cranes or something. And people rag him about it, and that really pisses him off.”
“I bet.” Loren thought for a moment. “How unusual was that Friday night alert?”
“Patience is always coming up with some chickenshit drill or other. Paul really hates it. He thinks Patience is a walking anus.”
“Do the other security people agree with him?”
“Paul has to be careful who he talks to. Some of the guys think Patience is God. The rest just think he’s a pain in the ass.”
“Do you know if Paul’s on duty right now?”
“Day shift all this week.”
“So he’d be home later.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thank you. I’ll call him and ask him a few things.”
“He’s real friendly, Chief. I’m sure he’d be happy to answer your questions.”
We’ll see, Loren thought. After I arrested three of his cuates.
Begley left and Loren used the LAWSAT antenna to log on to FBI LAWNET and posted a message on a bulletin board on “Ask Dr. Zarkov,” the forum run by the New Jersey blood-spatter expert. In addition to handing out arcane criminalistics information, Zarkov filled his bulletin board with bizarre pathology trivia and an endless round of gruesome morgue jokes. Loren posted a message asking whether or not there was a known way of beating the Shibano test. It was after 1700 hours in Jersey, so he wouldn’t get the answer till the next day.
He logged off and stared for a moment at the old gray walls. They killed my witness, he thought. My witness and some guy who wasn’t even connected with the case.
Anger simmered quietly in his blood.
I had Vlasic’s arm in my hand!
Patience had to be out of control. A rogue. His superiors couldn’t have endorsed any of this.
Then he thought about John Doe’s body disappearing and wondered who had authorized that.
He wondered who was in charge at ATL. And whether that person knew what this was about.
How well had Patience covered himself?
He thought about Jernigan’s head sneering out from its nest of crumpled metal, and remembered pink-faced Vlasic nodding at him politely as he got on the maglev.
He remembered the convict’s head butting up against his nose in the fight at the Ringside. The way heat lightning seemed to roll across his stunned brain while his cornerman screamed at him to get his head down and cover up.
Randal Dudenhof, lying on the yellowed old tile with foamy blood pouring from his mouth.
No. Not Randal. John Doe.
Keep this, he thought, at a level somewhere near sanity.
He needed a drink. He locked his office and checked out and headed home. The house was full of the warm scent of cooking chiles, garlic, and onions. The girls were in their rooms doing homework and Debra was on the phone. Loren got a bottle of Cutty Sark out of the liquor cabinet— a Christmas present from Bill Forsythe, he remembered— and poured himself three fingers. He dropped two ice cubes in the glass and took it into the living room. He sat in front of the dead television set and let the drink scald its way down his throat.
Bits of bodies floated through his thoughts.
Loren took the five sheets of Jernigan’s writing out of his breast pocket and looked at them. The incomprehensible mathematics danced hopelessly in front of his eyes.
Debra got off the phone and started work in the kitchen.
John Doe’s death played itself out in Loren’s mind. He remembered the taste of the slippery blood in his mouth.
Randal’s blood.
The Cutty was fire in his veins.
He lurched out of his chair and went to the phone. He got Sheila Lowrey’s name up on the liquid-crystal directory and pressed the Dial button.
“Lowrey.” As if she knew it was business.
“Sheila. This is Loren.”
“You got what you wanted, Loren. Your little thugs are going to trial.”
Loren tried to concentrate. “Who?”
“Wasn’t that what you called about? I talked Castrejon into trying to plea-bargain Cisneros and his friends, but Axelrod turned us down flat. He didn’t even consult his clients, just refused the offer.”
“Castrejon tried to plea-bargain?” He hadn’t thought the D.A. would actually follow Sheila’s advice.
“Axelrod is going to try to nail your balls to the courthouse door, my friend. That’s the only way he can save Medina and Archuleta. To make it an issue of your character and fitness.”
Loren licked his lips, tried to get his mind on track. “Castrejon really thinks we should plea-bargain, huh?”
“Yeah. Because just before the clerk’s office closed this afternoon, Axelrod showed up with a civil suit and official complaint from Cisneros and from Mack Bonniwell and A.J. Dunlop’s dad about the way you beat up their kids. You’ll probably get the subpoenas tomorrow.”
Probably delivered by one of my own men, Loren thought.
“I hope this makes you happy, Loren,” Sheila said.
Castrejon tried to plea-bargain. Loren’s mind spun as he tried to think about it.
Maybe Castrejon had been right. And Loren had other things to worry about now that he had three murders to concern himself with.
“I can arrange for them to plea-bargain,” Loren said. “If you really think that would be best.”
“What? How?”
Sheila’s voice turned suspicious. “Loren, what the hell are you up to? You could get us in a lot of trouble here.”
“No trouble will result,” Loren said. “But what I called you about is something different.”
“Okay.” Still dubious. “What other bad news have you got?”
“I wanted a legal opinion,” Loren said, “on whether it’s possible to prosecute a person for the murder of someone who’s already been declared dead.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, cautiously, “Could you make this a little more clear?”
“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 suddenly, 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.”