Delehanty nodded. “I get the picture.”
“Chombly said he’d help. Must have coached them to a fare-thee-well for the dates of every one of the murders. He must have graphed them himself. So they all alibied each other. And of course Chombly put himself in the mix.”
That explained to Delehanty why he had never been able to figure it out. There were too many missing pages in the murder book. He’d had to try to reconstruct it from the detectives’ original notes when they still existed, assemble individual reports that made an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.
“The thing was, all the other interviewees had a second, legitimate, alibi for at least some of the murders, and ironically, police work could verify those. But all of Chombly’s alibis depended on him being out drinking with the group. Do the math. It was a slam dunk.”
“You had bigger fish to fry,” Delehanty said. “My reconstruction showed that you were looking at Bon Boeuf’s owner at the time, a guy named Ottorino. He was mob connected. He ended up with cement overshoes a few years from now.”
“He was a natural suspect,” Vaccaro agreed. “The first victim was a restaurant critic who panned Bon Boeuf. It was a really vicious review. It got a lot of play. And business fell off. At first the murder was thought to be mob related. But then there was another murder with the same M.O.—that media hippie who made such a big splash with his vegetarian cookbook, Bum Steer. Said he was crusading on behalf of innocent animals. He was found with a slice of roast beef in his mouth. That got the media’s attention. Next one was a woman. The one with a cooking show called ‘Mom’s Kitchen.’ Made fun of what she called snobbish cuisine, but didn’t mention Bon Boeuf by name. The roast beef in her mouth was garnished with truffles. By then we were investigating every steakhouse in town. What narrowed it down was the victim from the expense account crowd who always made a big deal out of ordering the house salad and poking fun at his carnivorous peers. He wasn’t anybody important, and he didn’t affect the bottom line. That made the motive more personal.”
“Well, you got your man,” Delehanty said. “And you’re alive.”
“It would have been nice to have gotten a trial out of it,” Vaccaro said wistfully.
“And you,” Delehanty said to his younger counterpart, “are going to be the hero cop. It’ll be your prints they find on the Beretta, after all. You brought down a killer. You saved the life of the assistant D. A.—your career’s all roses from here on out. Thirty years from now, you’ll be an assistant chief.”
“And what do you get out of it, Lieutenant?” Vaccaro said.
“I get to close my case,” Delehanty said. “That piece of garbage on the floor is walking around, free as a bird.” He tapped one of the tiny cameras on his chest. “I’ve got the evidence I need to send him on a one-way trip to eternity.”
“But I’m alive,” Vaccaro said.
“Not in my world. Haven’t you been listening to anything I said?”
Delehanty was beginning to feel sorry for Roy Hendricks with all the time-travel clients, including himself, who listened and listened and nodded at the briefings, but still didn’t quite grasp the concept.
Vaccaro was still trying to make sense of what had happened, and he shifted to more comfortable territory. “And you say that time travel’s going to be invented about twenty years from now, and it’s going to become, like, a regular industry?”
“If everything goes on schedule,” Delehanty said.
Vaccaro shook his head in disbelief. “Sort of like the travel industry?” he offered.
“It’s not exactly like taking a vacation in Jamaica, Counselor. But there are plenty of customers with the money. Serious scholars studying some historical event and maybe tweaking it to see, say, what would happen if you screwed up the Norman Conquest by sabotaging the boats, or invented the horse collar a few centuries earlier. They’re still trying to get a tenth symphony out of Beethoven and another play out of Shakespeare. I heard there was even some rich guy who commissioned one of the Dutch masters to do a portrait. That was a mistake. The portrait had no intrinsic value in his own timeline—the one I come from—because the art dealers decided it didn’t meet the test for provenance. What time travel is chiefly good for is bringing back information. Music is information. The written word is information. Scientific information isn’t quite the same thing, because we already know what Newton or Galileo had to offer.”
Vaccaro’s eyes were glazing over, but he struggled gamely to keep up. “And criminal evidence is information,” he said triumphantly.
“You’ve got it, Counselor,” Delehanty said. “As far as I know, this is the first time timetravel’s been used in police work.” He remembered Hendrickson’s caveat and debated with himself how much to tell Vaccaro. “It’ll probably never be common in our profession, because there are problems—both technical and legal.”
“Legal ramifications?”
Delehanty immediately regretted saying too much. He had given Vaccaro something to chew on in an area that the assistant D.A. was all too familiar with. Delehanty had seen it before, and he dreaded it. He could acutely picture all the niggling legal ramifications starting to churn around in Vaccaro’s brain as he started to think about his career.
Vaccaro reached for the phone. “I’m afraid I’ll have to detain you, Lieutenant. Just a formality till we get this sorted out.”
Delehanty was all too aware of what would happen if Homicide burst in. He reached into his pocket for the return button that Hendricks had given him. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He remembered what Hendricks had told him about equalizing his mass allowance, and snatched a little brass gewgaw on Vaccaro’s desk that looked as if it weighed about the same as the Beretta. It was a gift shop statuette of Lady Justice, with the blindfold, the sword, and the scales. It was the one he had on his own desk, a souvenir he’d filched from the evidence box.
He had time to turn to the young cop he once had been and say, “Don’t worry. He won’t be nuts enough to tell a wild tale about a man from the future saving him from the Slasher. The prints on the Beretta will turn out to be a match for yours. So will the blood on it. Have a good life, kid.”
He pressed the button. The last thing he saw was Vaccaro returning the phone to its hook.
In a blink, he was back in the booth. Roy Hendricks was still giving him a farewell thumbs up on the other side of the glass. Hendricks’s other hand was still poised above the keyboard that he’d tapped a gigasecond earlier, before the preprogrammed return algorithm kicked in.
He stepped out of the booth. “What happened to your hand?” Hendricks said.
“Didn’t you see it?” Delehanty said, and then stopped. Of course Hendricks couldn’t have seen it. Time didn’t pass at the same rate at both ends of the tunnel, or CTC, or whatever the correct jargon was.
And of course Hendricks, geek that he was, had to overexplain it.
“No, if we could do that, we wouldn’t have to physically travel through time; we’d be able to watch it, but then, of course, you wouldn’t open an alternate world line by your presence. The viewable events at your end were compressed into a quantum moment that disappeared when you pinched off the navigable portion of the CTC loop. . . .”
Delehanty wasn’t listening. He was looking down at the other end of the hall, where the man dressed as a Roman centurion was emerging from his booth. His cloak was tattered, he’d grown a beard, and he looked awful. Lord only knew how many months he’d been gone. He looked like he’d had a hard time of it at the Crucifixion; probably gotten himself in trouble.
He followed Hendricks back to the off ice to do the paperwork, clutching the little statuette of blind justice. He smiled crookedly. His trip to the past was going to cost him most of his savings, but it had been worth it. Justice would be done.
“Fiat justitia ruat caelum,” he murmured to himself, remembering the Latin they’d taught him at Saint Agnes.
“What? What did you say?” Hendricks said.
Delehanty looked him in the eye. He might not speak geek, but he had his own jargon.
“Let justice prevail though the heavens fall,” he said.
“I could charge you with manslaughter,” Jarrett said. “If this office’s jurisdiction extended to another past.”
“Come off it, Counselor,” Delehanty said. “It was self defense, pure and simple.”
Jarrett wasn’t going to make it easy. “And when it comes to that, in their jurisdiction they had every right to charge you with impersonating an off icer, carr ying an illegal firearm, and otherwise throw the book at you.”
“I kind of got that impression,” Delehanty said.
“And in this here and now, you’ve violated any number of statutes regulating time travel. And so has Alternatives Associates. I might look into that.”
“Let’s talk about justice, not legal quibbles. You saw the tapes I brought back.”
“I did indeed. They’re not from our past. They’re inadmissible as evidence.”
“Chombly’s guilty as sin and you know it.”
“There’s not a judge in town who’d issue you an arrest warrant. Or a prosecutor who’d take the case.”
“You want to play hardball? I can do that too. I have enough to go on to reopen the file. I can take Chombly in for questioning, break him down. Break down the so-called witnesses who gave him his alibi. Legitimize the case from a fresh perspective. A prosecutor who’s running for mayor isn’t going to get any votes by interfering with an investigation of a serial killer. Especially when the media gets hold of my tapes.”
“You’d leak the tapes? I warn you, Lieutenant . . .”
Delehanty was almost too angry to speak. “Wise up, Jarrett. You could be a hero instead of the dear public’s next punching bag.”
He got up and left.
He was facing Chombly for the second time. The man who had tried to kill him—either a week ago or thirty years ago, depending on how you looked at it—was still big and ugly. He sat across from Delehanty, his thick wrists handcuffed to the stanchion on the steel table, his meaty forearms shaved and covered with kitchen scars. He’d acquired jowls and put on about thirty pounds since Delehanty had last seen him, but he still looked active and dangerous.
Right now he was complaining about the handcuffs.
“Take them off me,” he said in his Limey accent. “You have no call to cuff me like this. You don’t even have enough to arrest me.”
“The cuffs stay on, Roderick,” Delehanty said. “You and I know there’s enough on you to give you a shot of happy juice that’ll send you to that barbeque pit down below where the grill master with horns and a tail will roast you till you’re well done.”
“I don’t know where you got those fake pictures that you got splashed all over the papers and the tube, but they won’t fly. I know they’re fake because I was . . .”
He cut himself off as he realized that he was about to incriminate himself.
“Go on, Roderick,” Delehanty said. “You were about to say?”
“You think you’re smart, Delehanty. But you don’t have anything you can use as a confession, and you’re never going to get one.”
“I don’t need a confession, birdbrain. I’ve already gotten four of your kitchen buddies to recant. We’ll just start from scratch and retry you.”
“You can start from wherever you want. Wherever you end up, my lawyer just has to use the old poisoned fruit argument.”
“You’ve got a lawyer do you?” Delehanty had hoped to delay that. He hadn’t read Chombly his rights, and he had managed to get the current colloquy classif ied as an interview rather than an interrogation.
“Bloody right I do, and as soon as he shows up, I’m out of here.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to keep after you till I bring you down. I’m making you my life’s work, Chombly.”
Chombly gave him a stare that made Delehanty glad of the handcuffs. “It was tried before, chum. But you know that, don’t you? A stubborn bloke like you who wouldn’t let go. Stuck in his thumb, poor man, but never got a chance to pull out the plum.”
“Keep going, Chombly. You’re doing fine.”
Chombly was worked up enough to let something slip again, but at that point the door flew open and the lawyer stormed in, a harried uniform trying to keep up with him. Delehanty knew the lawyer, a sharpie named Farley who took on a lot of high-value cases and was good at turning his scumbag clients into victims.
He didn’t bother to look at Delehanty. He scowled furiously at Chombly and said, “Have you been keeping your mouth shut like I told you, Roderick? No, you haven’t, have you?”
Then he turned his glare on Delehanty and said, “I want those cuffs off him, Lieutenant! Now!”
There was someone outside the door with a flashlight. Delehanty looked up from his paperwork and saw that it was Flaherty, making his rounds.
“Pulling another all-nighter, Lieutenant?” Flaherty said, stepping inside.
“Just getting the case in order for Judge Wendell,” Delehanty told him. “She’s going to stick her neck out. If I can make sure Her Honor’s judicial derriere is covered, she’ll issue the arrest warrant in the morning.”
“Is that what did it, the publicity?” Flaherty said, gesturing at all the newspapers spread out around the off ice. The one on the chair next to the desk had a giant headline that screamed:
ARREST IMMINENT IN 30-YEAR-OLD MURDER CASE
“Her Honor can sniff the prevailing winds,” Delehanty said. “She knows when an irresistible force is headed her way.”
“Well, you pulled it off, Lieutenant.”
“Not quite, Tim. Not till tomorrow. Not till he’s in a holding cell, trussed up for Thanksgiving.”
“You making the bust yourself, Lieutenant?”
“You bet. But I’ll share it with the dicks I have with me.”
“That’s big of you, Lieutenant. It’ll look good in their personnel f iles.”
“Big of me, hell. I want all the muscle with me I can get. I killed the guy once. I’m not sure I could do it again. He scared the hell out of me.”
“Well, you take care, Lieutenant.”
“I will, Tim.” He looked down at the binder he was preparing for the judge, then looked up again. “Who’s on tonight?”
“Diaz. He got called out on a nuisance complaint, but I’ll keep an eye on things till he gets back.”
He gave Delehanty a worried look, then left, making a point of being sure the door clicked behind him on the way out.
Delehanty worked without interruption for the next hour. He thought he was making good progress, methodically neutralizing all the quibbles the judge had raised earlier that day, when a tiny metallic noise made him look up. The doorknob was turning slowly, a fraction at a time.
He reached for his pistol; it was awkward in a sitting position, and he wasn’t quite fast enough. The door shot open with a force that banged it against the wall, and a bulky figure in a plastic raincoat was hurtling toward him at an improbable speed.
Delehanty had time to get his gun halfway out of its holster. He saw Chombly’s angry face looming over him, and then a hamlike mitt was pinning him against the chair while a shiny blade darted toward his throat. There wasn’t time enough for it to hurt.
The Department VIPs and the media were gone, and Flaherty and Jarrett pretty much had the cemetery to themselves. The rows of folding chairs under the canopy and the black funeral bunting would be taken away later. The gray sky was quiet now and rid of the police choppers that had done the flyover and the television choppers that had hovered over the ceremony till they’d been chased away.
They walked over to the burial plot together. It was banked with flowers and wreaths. Flaherty took off his hat, and after a moment Jarrett did the same.
“Did you know him well, Officer Flaherty?” Jarrett said.
“We grew up in the same neighborhood,” Flaherty replied. “Went to Saint Agnes togethe
r. Graduated from the police academy the same year. He made it to lieutenant and would have gone even farther if he hadn’t annoyed the brass. I never got any farther than beat cop. I guess I didn’t have the stuff. How about you? All the bigwigs left. How come you’re still hanging around?”
“I guess I feel a little guilty about giving him a hard time,” Jarrett said. “But maybe if I’d been able to talk him out of that obsession of his, he’d still be alive.” He put his hat back on. “It’s ironic that after hunting a murderer for thirty years, his quarry got him. ”
Flaherty picked up a flower and tossed it into the grave. “It’s the other way around. Diaz and I caught Chombly in the act. No ifs, ands, or buts. He’s headed for a one-way trip to the death chamber. You might say that in the end, Lieutenant Delehanty got his man.”
Copyright © 2010 Donald Moffit
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Short Stories
Some of Them Closer
Marissa Lingen
Some adaptations are harder than others, but one finds ways....
Coming back to Earth was not the immediate shock they expected it to be for me. It was something, certainly, but I’d been catching up on the highlights of the news as it cascaded back to the ship on our relativistic return trip, and I never knew the island where we landed, when we left home twenty of our years ago and a hundred of theirs, so I expected it to look foreign to me, and it did. The Sun was a little more yellow than on New Landing, the plants friendlier.
But I never thought of myself as an Earther. Even with the new system, hardly any of us do. I thought of myself as from Montreal. Quebecoise. Canadian, even. But Earther? No. I am far more provincial than the colonists whose home I built will ever be.
I flew into the new place instead of Dorval. It looked like Dorval used to. It looked nearly exactly like Dorval used to, and I had a twinge of discomfort. The floors were curiously springy, though, which made me feel like something was different, and that was reassuring. There isn’t an Old Spacers’ Legion or anything like that to meet people like me coming in from off-planet—they did that on the little Brazilian island where we landed—but there was a department for Cultural Integration, meant for people traveling from elsewhere on Earth. They assigned me to a representative of the government, who greeted me in a French whose accent was nearly my own. To my ear it sounded more English, with the round vowels, but even with the new system I thought it might be rude to say that to a Quebecoise.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11 Page 26
