“Negative,” said the autopilot. “The heat sink has not sufficiently cooled.”
“Can you evade?”
“Negative. The aggregate of five M-23 processors compensates for my navigation protocols. Sir, if you engage manual controls, you will survive an additional two hundred and twelve seconds, due to the rather random and unpredictable nature of human free will. A most interesting subject, sir.”
“No time for that. What if I use the escape launch?”
“You will not evade the blast radius. If you jettison now, sir, you will still be fifteen seconds short of the outer edge of the radius.” The autopilot paused, then spoke again. “The Syndicate requests contact.”
“Granted!”
The screen blinked into life in front of Janklow’s seat. The face swam into focus.
“Rest assured of our apologies, Janklow,” said the face. “By now, you should be aware of your outcome.”
“What the hell are you doing?” growled Janklow.
“Our newest probability modeling indicates the most secure and cheapest method of completing your job is to blow up your ship. We value cost-efficiency. I trust you will understand the logic of our decision. After all, it is merely business.”
“Terminate!” snapped Janklow.
“Transmission terminated, sir,” said the autopilot.
“Come with me,” said Janklow. He grabbed Francesca by the arm. She tried to pull away, but her slight strength was no match for him. He hurried her down the passageway to a hatch. It slid open at the touch of his hand.
“Buckle up,” he said, shoving her at a padded seat. “Quick.”
“What’s going on?” she stammered.
“You’re getting off this ship. You’re not going to understand most of what I say right now, but you will later. Trust the autopilot. It’ll fly the ship and, if you ask, it’ll teach you how to fly it yourself. I’m going to start a download of my memory into the escape launch’s processor. The download’s gonna be interrupted mid-stream, but hopefully it’ll be enough information to keep you alive. Sorry about all this, kid. I gotta go do some flying.”
Janklow strode back to the hatch.
“Hey, steward! Get in here. You take care of her now, you got me?”
The steward rolled through the hatch. “Yes, sir.”
“Boot up your defense sub-routines. Keep her alive. She's your primary now.”
“Very well, sir.”
Janklow paused, and then took off his watch. He tossed it through the hatch. It slid across the floor and stopped at Francesca’s feet.
“Put that on, kid,” he said.
The hatch hissed shut. Francesca picked up the watch, and then something slammed her back into her seat. The stars blurred outside the window. She could barely breathe due to the pressure against her chest.
“Escape velocity in three, two, one – escape velocity reached,” said the autopilot. “Twenty seconds to terminal edge of blast radius.”
Space hurled by. Strange stars, promising a strange future. She gripped the arms of the chair. The watch was hard and cold in her fist. The sky was so dark. But then it bloomed white in a sudden, savage sheet of fury that blew across her sight like a violent sunrise. The little ship shuddered and bucked in the onslaught.
“Seventy percent loss to rear shields,” said the autopilot calmly. “Heat sink at capacity. All other systems stable.”
Somewhere behind Francesca, the steward made a quiet noise that sounded oddly like crying. A light blinked on the console.
“Activate, madam?” said the autopilot. It waited politely for her.
“I suppose so,” she said hesitantly. “Whatever. Alright.”
Janklow’s voice sounded from the console. “I guess you made it, kid. And I guess I didn’t. This is just my memory talking now. That’s alright. I've had it coming for years. First off, I’m sorry about your planet. The Syndicate wanted it blown up.”
“The Earth?” she said.
“Yeah, well, we can talk about that later. More important, we need to keep you alive for now. The Syndicate’s out to get you. Don’t ask me why. Something to do with their probability modeling. Probability modeling is junk science, if you ask me. It’s when you try to get as smart as God and figure out the future. Can’t say it always works, but I think it’s gonna come true for them this time. I’m not sure who the Syndicate is. They were just a client. But we’re gonna find out.”
“This Syndicate,” she said, struggling to keep up with him. “You say it blew up the Earth?”
“Uh, well, yeah.”
“All of it?”
“Global thermonuclear war, kid. Mutually assured destruction. It’s pretty comprehensive.”
She blinked. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Finally, she managed a whisper. “Then let’s find this Syndicate. Find every single one of them.”
Janklow’s voice chuckled on the console. “Good. I hoped that’s what you’d say. That’s what I call satisfactory completion. We'll make the future come true for them. Let's give it a shot, kid.”
Francesca settled back into her seat. She fastened the watch onto her wrist.
“Okay,” she said, her lips trembling a little. “What do we do now?”
“I would advise visiting Centaurus Prime, madam,” said the autopilot. “You will require a proper ship and supplies. Your watch contains all necessary bank information. You are, if I may say so, rather wealthy now.”
“And after that?”
“Wherever you wish to go, madam. It is an excessively large universe.”
She took a deep breath. “Alright. Let’s go.”
THE BOY IN THE GARDEN
“Take a look through that.”
The file landed on Tom Dulaine’s desk with a thud. He looked up. Grimes stood in the doorway, his face impassive.
“What about the Marcioni case?” said Dulaine.
“Shelve it for now.”
“Two weeks, Grimes. Two more weeks and I’ll have him high and dry.”
“Well, this is priority now. Orders from the top.” The door closed and Grimes was gone.
Dulaine opened the file. There wasn’t much in it. A folder of news clippings. Some trial transcripts. Police reports with crime scene photos that made even his cynical stomach turn. The analyses of various psychologists. And a hand-scribbled note from the director of the Midwest bureau. Get on this. Now! The words were underlined.
He read through the news clippings. There were fourteen of them. The first one seemed somewhat unusual, but not unusual enough to warrant halting his bank embezzlement case. Three billion dollars gone without a trace. Marcioni’s trail vanishing across the border in Juarez.
Dulaine sighed. He read the second clipping and then the third. His interest sharpened, despite his irritation. Something turned over uneasily in the back of his mind. It did not take him much time to finish the articles. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the wall. Part of his job involved finding patterns. Patterns of crime, of deviant behavior that manifested in statistics that could be quantified, qualified and then predicted.
There was a deeper pattern here, beneath the obvious ones. There had to be. There always was. He rifled through the clippings and re-read several of them.
The Wichita Times. March 6, 2010.
Helen Osgood, 53, of Topeka, was charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder on March 5 in Shawnee County Court. Osgood, a widowed homemaker and mother of three, pleaded not guilty even though security camera footage showed the extent of her crimes. On the morning of February 28, Osgood marched into the Planned Family Health Clinic in Topeka. Armed with a tire iron, Osgood bludgeoned to death Dr. Sringh Patel, clinic nurse Maria Salazar, as well as patient Heidi Conroy, who was seven months pregnant. Law enforcement officers arrived to find Osgood attempting to cut the fetus from Conroy’s dead body.
The Wichita Times. April 18, 2010.
Javier Rodriguez, 41, of Wichita, was charged with multipl
e counts of first-degree murder on April 17 in the Sedgwick County Court. Rodriguez, a plumbing contractor and father of two, pleaded not guilty to all charges on account of temporary insanity. In the evening of March 29, while driving home from work, Rodriguez stopped at the north suburb branch of the Consolidated Health Clinics Network. Witnesses say he walked in with a shotgun and forced Dr. Gemma Perry to deliver the infant daughter of patient Rashida Furnish. The patient, as records later indicated, was at the clinic in order to undergo an abortion. After the delivery, Rodriguez murdered both Perry and Furnish, as well as two attending nurses, with shotgun blasts to the head. When law enforcement arrived, they found Rodriguez walking out of the clinic with the baby wrapped in a blanket.
The Wichita Times. May 24, 2010.
Sandra Blaine, aged 75, Lulu Johnson, aged 77, and Dorothy Mueller, aged 81, all residents of Crown Heights Retirement Community of Wichita, Kansas, were all charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder as well as two counts of kidnapping in the Sedgwick County Court on May 23. In the afternoon of May 12, the three perpetrators left the Good Luck Bingo Hall on Washington Street and drove to the Planned Family Health Clinic in downtown Wichita, making a brief stop at Walmart to purchase duct tape and kitchen knives. After arriving at the clinic, the perpetrators murdered Doctors Charles Crosby and Maura Sullivan, as well as one nurse, Wendy Fewes. They then proceeded to murder two patients, as yet unnamed, after which they cut the living fetuses from the bodies. The three perpetrators made their getaway in Blaine’s car. Their whereabouts were unknown for the next two hours, after which they were apprehended at a health food store in west Wichita, when a clerk phoned 911 due to being alarmed by the presence of “three dazed and bloody elderly women.”
The news clippings were basically all the same. Apparently random perpetrators with no known connections to the victims. All the murders were at health clinics and involved medical personnel and patients about to undergo or undergoing an abortion. All the murders were unusually brutal in nature. An obvious pattern, but the data didn’t lend to predictions other than what sort of person might get murdered, where, and how. Not a clue about who might commit the crime.
Dulaine tapped his pencil thoughtfully on his note pad and considered. He fed the dates of the occurrences into his computer. The computer hummed and then blinked up a graph onto the screen. The dates fell into a pattern. He stared at the results, blinked, rechecked them.
Grimes was on the phone at his desk. Dulaine waited just inside the door. The conversation was one-sided and all Grimes uttered was a succession of yeses, nos and noncommittal grunts. He hung up, slamming the phone down into its cradle.
“What is it?” he snapped.
“Besides the similarities of medical locations and unusually vicious murders,” said Dulaine, “there are two other distinct patterns.”
“And?”
“The time between each event. There were two months between the first two. But the number of days has been steadily decreasing between each subsequent event after that. They’re getting closer and closer together.”
“How many days between the most recent?”
“Forty-one days. If there’s another event, according to this pattern, it’ll happen soon.”
“And the second pattern?”
“I’d define it as the relative success of each event. The first ones were just murder. Murder and attempted kidnapping of the fetus. The recent ones are murder and successful kidnapping. No one’s figured out what happened to the fetuses in those cases.”
“They’re probably ending up in the same place,” said Grimes.
“Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t. Look, the puzzling thing is that there’s no logic to who the killers are. A bunch of elderly women, a successful plumber, two teenage pizza delivery guys. They have nothing in common. Whatever this is, this isn’t a gang.”
“White supremacists?” said Grimes darkly. “Christian fundamentalists? Anti-abortionists?”
“Two of the elderly women are black. The plumber is a lapsed Catholic, and one of the other murderers, a suburban housewife, had an abortion herself two years ago.”
“Maybe she was feeling guilty.”
“So she walks in and hacks off the head of a sixteen-year old girl seven months pregnant? Takes apart a doctor with all the finesse of a muleskinner? I don’t think so.”
“Well, the chief wants answers and so do I. Get cracking, Dulaine.”
He drove out to Holywell Penitentiary after lunch. The day was dusty with sunlight and summer. The prison was fifteen miles off the highway, down a potholed road. The guard at the gate signed him in and he parked his car behind the administrative wing. The warden fingered Dulaine’s ID card gloomily.
“I applied to the bureau,” he said. “Right out of the Army. Didn’t make it past the first interview. Not that I mind now. It’s safer here. Things don’t happen in a prison. Time just creeps by here. Nothing changes. It’s different for you folks on the outside.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Dulaine. The hallway they stood in smelled of regret and melancholy.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just my lunch talking. I’ve got indigestion.”
Javier Rodriguez was waiting for him in a small, windowless room relieved only by two chairs and a metal table bolted to the floor. The man’s wrists and ankles were heavy with shackles. He stared up at Dulaine, his eyes full of panic.
“You gotta believe me!” he said, his voice trembling. “I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me. I wouldn’t do that sort of thing! You talk to my wife. She’ll tell you!”
“Security camera footage, multiple eyewitnesses, the twelve policemen first at the scene – they all have their story to tell. But let’s forget all that for the moment, Mr. Rodriguez. What do you remember about the seventeenth of April?”
“Nothing! I can’t tell you nothing! I go to work, I was doing an install, a water heater, then I drove home. Only, only…” Here, Rodriguez stopped, his mouth working but silent.
“Only what?”
“Only… You gotta believe me! I woke up on the stairs of that – that place. There was blood on my hands. I was holding a baby and there were police everywhere.” His voice rose, threatening to crack. “They were yelling at me, ready to shoot me. Me! I’ve never hurt anyone in my life! And that baby…”
“What about the baby?”
“Just looking at me, sweet as can be. I’ve got kids of my own, mister! I’ve got kids of my own.”
Rodriguez’s head slumped. Tears rolled down his face.
Lulu Johnson, aged 77, sat waiting for Dulaine in another room down the hall. Her skin was a deep coffee color and her hair was whiter than sun-bleached cotton. The manacles looked enormous around her fragile wrists. She smiled up at Dulaine.
“Well, now,” she said, “a visitor sure is appreciated. Back home, most days, I make a point of dropping in on a neighbor or two. But Sundays, now that’s when you come to my house. Go to church, fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits, homemade iced tea steeped on the back porch with sunlight and mint. You just drop on by one of them afternoons, might find Preacher Ames over with his wife. Surely make for nice visiting.”
“Mrs. Johnson,” said Dulaine, “if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“Young man, of course I don’t mind. Life is all about questions and you’re bound to have your fair share.”
“Yes, ma’am. I have a few. The afternoon of May the twelfth, do you remember what happened that day?”
“Clear as a bell. Why, I won sixty-five dollars at bingo. I near jumped out of my skin when the caller said B-3. I hollered bingo at the top of my lungs. Sixty-five dollars! Sandy and Dot didn’t win a dime.”
“I’m sure that was nice for you,” said Dulaine.
“Of course, I spent it all when we stopped at Walmart. They had a special on kitchen knives. Nineteen ninety-five for an eight-inch cleaver. You can’t beat that sort of pricing, young man. Frugal, that�
��s me. You can just bet I was tickled pink to pay nineteen ninety-five for a cleaver. A good cleaver’ll take the head right off a chicken with one whack. Have you ever whacked the head off a chicken, young man?”
She smiled brightly at him.
“I can’t say that I have,” said Dulaine.
“Comes right off. Just like that doctor’s head. Course, he didn’t run around like a chicken does. Dot had more trouble with the nurse, but that’s to be expected.”
“And why’s that?” said Dulaine. A headache was forming behind his eyes.
“Arthritis. Her wrists get swollen something fierce.”
“I see. Now, tell me about the babies, Mrs. Johnson. What happened to the babies?”
“Oh, the babies! I just love babies. The cutest boy and girl you ever did see. The girl was the spitting image of her mother. Adorable! Not even minutes born, but she stared up at me like she knew exactly who I was. The sweet little dear.”
“But what happened to the babies? What happened after you drove away with them?”
Lulu Johnson tilted her head to one side and looked at him, smiling.
“Why, they flew away, young man. They just flew away like little birds.”
It was night when Dulaine drove back to the city. The dashboard lights were a comforting, gentle glow in the darkness. He gripped the steering wheel and gazed blindly ahead. The headache threatened to derail his thoughts, but he ignored it. The old lady was clearly crazy. The court psychologist had said as much in his report, but seeing was definitely believing. She seemed to remember more than Rodriguez, but she was insane. The plumber probably wasn’t, but he was either an incredible actor or he was suffering from an odd sort of amnesia. An amnesia that only blotted out a couple of hours in one day.
Friday dawned with grey skies and rain. The rain streaked down Dulaine’s office window, whispering against the glass as if it had secrets to tell him. He distilled the facts of the murders down into numbers, demographic statistics and psychological curves. He did comparative analyses between the incidents and every other murder case in the agency’s digital library. He went down into the archives and spent a dusty couple of hours reading through every abortion related incident on file: bombings, murder, arson.
The Model Universe And Other Stories Page 5
