“So Vaccaro had a suspect?”
Delehanty clamped his jaw tight. “That’s what they said. I sweat bullets to make the detective squad. It took me four years. Another two years to make lead investigator. I reworked all the interviews. But nada. At that point nothing would have worked but an eyewitness. I needed a snitch.”
Jarrett shook his head. “And now, after all these years, you propose to be your own snitch?”
“That’s all I’ve got,” Delehanty growled. “It’ll work. Look, we’ve got a T.O.D. I pop up just before. I’ll give myself a safety margin, okay? I’m wired for sound. I’m wired for sight—three or four little mini-cams stuck to the buttons on my uniform. I catch him in the act, just as he’s raising the knife. I’m an eyewitness, and I’ve got video backup that even a defense attorney from hell couldn’t refute.”
Jarrett made a tent out of his fingertips. “Time travel’s expensive, Lieutenant. The department’s not going to go for it by a long shot. It would open a huge can of worms.”
Delehanty knew he was losing him. “I’ll pay for it myself,” he said stubbornly. “I’ve got my retirement savings. And my pension.”
“You could lose both if this blows up. Can you afford that?”
“It won’t blow up.”
Jarrett leaned forward. “Have you thought this through, Lieutenant? You see a murder in progress. You’re a cop. Do you try to stop it? But you’re not a cop in that timeline, are you? Your lieutenant’s badge is no good there. Are you acting extra-legally? The only badge around belongs to a rookie cop named Delehanty who doesn’t have a clue about what’s going down. And what if you don’t try to stop it? Are you culpable? In that timeline or this one?”
Delehanty tried to speak, but Jarrett went on relentlessly.
“And then what? Say you do stop the murder. You come back to the here and now as a witness to a murder attempt that took place elsewhen.”
Delehanty stood up, his face turning livid. “You can go to hell, Jarrett!” he said.
The client waiting room at Alternatives Associates was small, spare, and brightly lit. There was a low coffee table displaying an assortment of the latest magazines, and an antique oak sideboard bearing a steaming coffeepot and a tray of pastries.
Delehanty had been sitting there for over an hour, his temper steadily rising. The tech assigned to him, a tall, skinny fellow with a prominent Adam’s apple who had introduced himself as Roy Hendricks, had popped in several times to offer apologies and explanations in an incomprehensible geek patois with phrases like “O-region” and “CTC harmonic.”
He shifted uncomfortably on the couch. He was wearing the parade uniform that he trotted out every now and then for public events, and it had grown a little tight over the years. The tiny cameras that festooned his chest were almost invisible unless you looked closely at the buttons. His service pistol, a 9mm Glock, was in a holster at his hip, and he had a tiny Beretta backup gun concealed in one sock. He wished he had a cigarette, but people didn’t do that anymore.
He looked up as the door opened and Hendricks stuck his head in, a self-satisfied expression on his face. “We’ve got the CTC tunnel anchored at the destination site,” he said. “It’s just about where you want it. We can activate the site and put you through any time you’re ready.”
Delehanty got to his feet. “What do you mean, ‘just about?’” he rumbled dangerously.
“We got lucky. Within a minute or two of where you wanted.”
“I thought you fellows could scan back and forth till you pinpointed it,” Delehanty said.
“Uh, that’s not exactly the way it works,” Hendricks said. “Particularly with trips to the more recent past. It’s a little hard to explain in layman’s terms.”
Delehanty held on to his temper. “You’d better show me,” he said.
Hendricks led the way to a yawning space that once might have been an auditorium for corporate sales meetings. The slightly sloping floor was dotted with workstations manned, or rather womaned, by green-smocked technicians tending consoles. One long wall was crowded with oversize monitor screens, most of them blank or showing only flickering colors. At spaced intervals was a row of enclosed booths connected to heavy-duty cables. Half-way down the hall Delehanty could see a man in a Roman centurion’s costume, complete with helmet, sword, and shield, being ushered into a booth by a technician. He was surrounded by a covey of handlers who were seeing him off, competing to give him last-minute instructions.
“The Crucifixion’s a popular site,” Hendricks explained.
He led Delehanty over to one of the nearer booths. The monitor screen behind it showed a horrifying scene, frozen in time.
Delehanty’s heart stopped. The scene was familiar, yet not familiar. It was Vaccaro’s off ice as he had seen it that night thirty years ago. But Vaccaro was not yet the bloody corpse he had walked in on. He was sitting behind his desk, partially obscured by the huge man in the disposable plastic raincoat who was pinning him against his chair with one hand and positioning the other hand, the one with the knife in it, sideways to slash him across the throat. The raincoat evidently was what he used for his splatter suit.
“That’s cutting it too close,” Delehanty said. “I need another ten, fifteen seconds to stop him, yell a warning, tackle him if I have to.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you. The next resonance point isn’t till four days earlier.”
“That’s no good. I need to catch him in the act.”
“What about four days later?” Hendricks said helpfully. “I’ve got another harmonic of the fundamental then that might work.”
Delehanty didn’t know what he was talking about, but he could understand the “four days later.”
Almost, he was tempted, but he shook it off. He remembered the ambiguous interview with Jarrett. “Forget it. Even if I could track the guy down four days later, cold trail and all, the evidence would be even more tainted than simple chain of evidence from a split-off reality. Vaccaro’s dead in this timeline. I’m not going to leave a corpse in that one.”
“I’m trying to explain . . .”
“Try harder.”
Hendricks took a deep breath. “Do you know anything about music, Lieutenant?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just bear with me.” The tech’s tone was condescending, and Delehanty held his resentment in check.
He considered the question. “I tried out for trumpet in my high school band. I wasn’t any good at it.”
“But you knew what the valves were for?”
“I guess. Where is this going?”
“I’ll try an analogy. Once upon a time brass instruments didn’t have valves. You could only play the harmonics of the fundamental, whatever that happened to be. There were F horns, E flat horns, and so forth. Down at the bottom of the scale, the notes you could play were far apart. A low F, say, then the C a fifth above, then nothing but another F an octave above the original. But as you get higher in the scale, the notes get closer and closer together. When you get to the upper register, you’ve got something close to a diatonic scale, with only a few missing notes. Even so, if a composer wanted a horn solo or harmonies that were outside the box, he might score the piece for two pairs of horns, say one pair in F and one pair in E flat. That way they could toss the tune between them. Do you follow me so far?”
“Sort of.” That wasn’t quite true, but Delehanty wanted Hendricks to get to the point.
“There was also something called a crook, a lengthening piece that the player could insert to change the key of the horn itself, but we don’t need to go into that.”
“Praise all the saints,” Delehanty muttered, rolling his eyes ceilingward, but Hendricks never noticed, and sailed blithely on.
“The point I’m trying to make is that there’s an analogous phenomenon in time travel. We can’t travel to the very near past—say a year or two—at all. We don’t know why. Perhaps the quantum tunnelin
g would get too crowded. Perhaps the Universe would have trouble with causality and would be unable to split. Thirty years is beginning to be within the practical limit. A hundred years is even better. Two hundred is better still. By the time you get to two thousand—” He nodded toward the centurion, who was waving good-bye to his friends. “—there’s no problem at all.”
Delehanty was starting to get interested in spite of himself. He could imagine the chaos that would ensue if there were thousands of people clamoring to go back in time a day or a week to play the stock market, or a year or two to repair a romance or reverse a bad business decision, not understanding that the benefits would go, not to them, but to an alternate self in an alternate universe that they themselves had created just by going back in time.
“I guess,” he said slowly, “this resonance gizmo is a good thing. Like what the case load in police work would turn into if every petty burglary, every stolen car, could be investigated by going back a day to verify the complaint. The whole system would break down.”
Hendricks nodded approvingly. “You’ve got it, Lieutenant. It’s amazing, the number of supposedly intelligent people who don’t get it. Just the other day I had the CEO of a banking conglomerate come in, wanting to reverse a decision he’d made the day before. I couldn’t make him understand that in this world he was stuck with his decision. He probably wouldn’t have been able to reverse it in his alternative world either. His previous self would probably get him arrested as an imposter.”
Delehanty’s eyes went to the suspended image on the wall monitor. Maybe he’d have enough time if he moved fast. He’d materialize just behind the killer. The knife was still poised, its deadly arc not yet begun. The man would be startled by his sudden appearance. He’d begin to turn around. Maybe he’d be able to snap the cuffs on him before he realized what was happening.
He turned to Hendricks. “Okay, Roy,” he said. “Ship me to the past.”
It was hot and stuffy in the booth, and he fidgeted while Hendricks fiddled interminably with a hand-held keyboard. He loosened the Glock in its holster, unclipped the handcuffs from his belt, and planned his moves. Finally Hendricks gave him a thumbs up through the glass and stabbed theatrically at the keys.
It still caught him by surprise. Suddenly he was in the picture he’d just been staring at. A slight difference in floor levels made him stumble. The puff of warm air must have warned the killer. Impossibly quick for his bulk, the man in the plastic raincoat whirled around and lunged just as Delehanty was yelling, “Freeze!”
He swung the heavy handcuffs left-handed and rapped the man across the knuckles to deflect the knife. The momentum of the thrust carried the knife sideways to swipe Delehanty’s other hand, making him drop the gun.
Then the man, still charging, slammed bodily into Delehanty and knocked him to the floor. Delehanty found himself helpless on his back, the Glock out of reach, while his assailant drew back the serrated blade for a slash across the throat.
Blindly, he reached for the backup gun hidden in his sock. It was a tiny Beretta, smaller than the palm of his hand, but it packed a .25 caliber wallop. He had taken it from a drug dealer years ago—or rather years from now—but he had never used it before. His hand was slippery with his own blood, but he managed to clamp his fingers convulsively around the grip and get a thick finger through the trigger guard. There wasn’t time to aim. He swung the pistol up and snapped off three quick shots in succession.
The man toppled in slow motion, pinning him down with dead weight. The knife clattered to the f loor. Delehanty waited for a moment, getting his breath back, then rolled the body off him and struggled shakily to his feet.
Behind the desk, Vaccaro was staring at him, his eyes huge in an ashen face. “Is he . . .”
“As a doornail,” Delehanty said. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Vaccaro.”
“Is it . . .”
“The Roast Beef Slasher,” Delehanty said. “None other.”
His hand was dripping blood and hurt like hell, but all the fingers seemed to be working all right.
Vaccaro was getting his composure back. His eyes took in Delehanty’s uniform and badge. Uniforms hadn’t changed much in thirty years, but the badge number might not have made sense.
“You look familiar, Lieutenant,” Vaccaro said. “Have I met you before?”
Delehanty didn’t answer. He knew what was going to happen next.
The door burst open and his younger self rushed in, his gun drawn.
That was a little different. He hadn’t drawn his gun back then, and he hadn’t investigated Vaccaro’s off ice till some minutes from what was now, because he hadn’t heard any gunshots. The killer was gone. In this here and now, the Universe had already begun to split. Delehanty began to understand on a more visceral level what Hendricks had been saying during his preliminary briefing when he’d been droning on about the Universe growing another branch or something. He remembered Hendricks’s little joke: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
The young Delehanty was standing over the corpse, his gun still drawn. Delehanty mentally nodded his approval. He’d always been a careful cop.
“Holy mother of God!” the young Delehanty said, leaning forward to inspect the wounds. There were three closely spaced bullet holes in the center of the chest. Blood had smeared the reverse side of the transparent raincoat the slasher had donned to protect his clothes.
He turned his attention to his older incarnation, his brow furrowing. Delehanty saw that he still hadn’t put away the gun. Now he was taking in Delehanty’s uniform and badge number, and, with a deepening frown, studying Delehanty’s face.
“Yeah, that’s right, I’m you,” Delehanty said. “Thirty years later.”
A conflict between disbelief and recognition was going on in young Delehanty’s face, a conflict that recognition finally won. But his voice was neutral as he said, “You’d better hand over the gun, Lieutenant.”
Delehanty nodded. “We always went by the book.”
He found a plastic evidence bag in his pocket, sealed the blood-soaked Beretta in it, and handed it over.
His younger self seemed to relax then. He holstered his own gun and said, “You mean that thirty years from now, I’ve still only made lieutenant?”
Delehanty glanced at the corpse. “I was held back because I made a nuisance of myself over the Roast Beef Slasher. You’ll do better.” He forced himself to keep any pain out of his voice as he added, “And by the way, you can stop having second thoughts and marry Mary Margaret. You won’t be sorry.”
The color was returning to Vaccaro’s face. In a voice that was still shaky, he said, “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“Time travel,” Delehanty said. “Time travel is going on.”
He could see by the uncomprehending expression on Vaccaro’s face that the assistant D.A. didn’t have the faintest notion of what he was talking about. He might have noticed the resemblance between the two cops in front of him, but he probably assumed that they were family—father and son or perhaps uncle and nephew. There was a lot of that in the department.
Vaccaro remembered that he was supposed to be in charge and reached for the phone. “I better get someone from homicide in here right away. And someone from the M.E.’s off ice. And a forensics team.”
He paused to look at Delehanty’s lieutenant’s uniform. “And probably it’d be a good idea to get Internal Affairs involved at the start. In the end they’ll be the ones who determine if it was a good shoot.”
Delehanty spread an interposing hand over the phone. “Not just yet, mister D. A. We’ve got some talking to do first.”
It had been over an hour since Delehanty had shot the Slasher. The corpse was still sprawled in front of Vaccaro’s desk. They’d all been careful not to touch it. The day shift wasn’t due to arrive for some time yet, but they couldn’t keep things on hold much longer.
Vaccaro poured the three of them another drink from the b
ottle of rye he’d produced from his bottom desk drawer. “So you’re him?” he said to Delehanty for about the twentieth time.
“Yeah, and you’re dead,” Delehanty said. “I know it’s hard to grasp. I didn’t arrive till too late. They never caught the so-called Roast Beef Slasher.”
“I can tell you who he is,” Vaccaro said. He referred to the papers spread across his desk. Delehanty recognized some of them. They came from the same case file he’d been poring over some thirty years in the future, only now they weren’t brittle with age.
“His name’s Roderick Chombly. He’s head carver at an upscale steak house called the Bon Boeuf. You know, one of those expense account places with a stainless steel cart that rolls up to your table and a snooty guy in a white chef’s hat carves to your order. Maybe you know it.” He gave Delehanty a questioning look. “Or maybe it doesn’t exist thirty years from now.”
“It’s still there,” Delehanty said.
“I was going to nail him in the morning,” Vaccaro said ruefully. “I graphed all the alibis and finally found the contradiction that Homicide needed to break him and his cosuspects down.”
“Co-suspects?” Delehanty said, his interest tweaked.
“Yeah. Some of the kitchen help at Bon Boeuf used to go out after hours and drink the night away together. Six or seven of them. You know, a couple of line cooks, a dishwasher, one of the runners, a bus boy—like that. Half of them were illegals. The high and mighty carver wasn’t too proud to go out drinking with them once in a while. We questioned all of them. Routine. You know that. Chombly must have scared the hell out of them. Told them that the cops were going to pin the Slasher murders on one of them, they didn’t care who. That they all had to stick together, give each other mutual alibis, or one of them would go down. The illegals were especially vulnerable. So were the guys with the prison tattoos. They didn’t want to be looked at twice.”
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