Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Which of them had done it? Which of them knew?

  Loren hitched up his gun, approached the bridge, and carefully slid down the steep slope of the concrete abutment and into the arroyo. He hit bottom and a little jolt of pain went up his back.

  The train, partly hanging over him, seemed enormous, far larger than when he had actually ridden in it. The gray-on-red ATL symbol hovered in the air. There was a strange burning-plastic smell: parts of the train had been heated on impact and partly melted. Shattered polycarbon struts had fired black splinters into the walls of the arroyo. Loren slogged to where the sheriff’s deputies were trying to cut into the front car. A carpet of glass shards below Loren’s feet reflected the diamond-hard light of the high desert. Directing operations was Shorty Lazoya’s brother Ramón, another tall man, potbellied, not as frail or myopic as his older brother.

  “How many?” Loren asked.

  “At least one. We can’t really tell. ATL says not many, because the shift hadn’t ended yet.”

  “Got any ID?”

  “Not yet. All we can see in that mess is an arm and some bits of clothing.”

  “No pulse in the arm, right? Shit.” Loren looked over his shoulder at one of Patience’s men, standing silhouetted on the edge of the arroyo.

  “We didn’t find anyone in the truck,” Ramón said.

  “I didn’t think you would. Who was first on the scene?”

  “Some of the ATL guys.”

  “Which ones?”

  Ramón shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Loren looked over his shoulder again. Patience had been late bailing his men out of jail: that meant he had been setting this up. They would have had to steal Torrey’s truck, bring it here, drive it across the desert to park it across the tracks. Presumably they would have also had to disable some sensors on the bridge so as not to trigger the automatic safeties that would have ordered the train to brake.

  That would have taken hours. Which meant this wasn’t a reaction to Loren’s arrest of Patience’s men: this had been planned in advance.

  He wondered how Patience had made John Doe’s body disappear.

  Patience had to have known that Jernigan was going to see Oliver Cantwell. And he would have known that Jernigan was taking the maglev to work, since his BMW couldn’t have been cleaned yet.

  “We’re in.” The deputy crawling out of the wrecked car looked a little green.

  “Let me see,” Loren said. “I think I know this guy.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Loren bent to peer into the hole the cutters had made. He knew he’d have to be careful of the sharp bright edges of metal left by the cutters.

  The metallic smell of death came from inside. Loren remembered the stench hitting him in the face as blood fountained from Randal Dudenhof’s mouth. The T-bird had crashed just a quarter mile from here, plunging off the auto bridge.

  Many years ago. But the smell was the same.

  Wary of sharp edges and broken glass, Loren carefully inserted his upper body into the hole. The interior seats had been jammed together but hadn’t broken. Two of the seats were tilted so as to be braced against one another and form a tunnel. Loren could see an arm in a blue wool jacket propped on the end of the seat. A large gold cuff link closed a white cuff with a subdued red stripe. Loren put his weight on his elbows and shimmied forward.

  The arm was not attached to a body. The smell was very bad. The person to whom the arm had once been attached was about four feet away, sandwiched between his seat and a razor-edged tangle of metal. The face was covered with blood and Loren had to look at it a long time before he recognized it.

  Loren backed out of the tunnel dragging the arm behind him. He dropped it onto a white plastic body bag that the Bag ’n’ Drag had already laid out on a stretcher.

  “His name is Vlasic,” Loren said. He took in air, let it go. “He’s a physicist. He liked to ride the train back and forth because it helped him think.”

  Ramón got out his notebook and frowned into it. “How d’you spell it?”

  “Don’t know.” The hydraulic cutters went back to work.

  The dangling train made crackling noises as it swayed slightly in the wind. Loren kept looking up to see the ATL people standing silhouetted on the edge of the arroyo. Hopelessness oppressed him. He knew he needed to do something, but he couldn’t think what.

  He looked up as Cipriano slid into the arroyo, his heels leaving black marks on the slanted white concrete of the abutment. “I talked to Sam Torrey,” Cipriano said. “He didn’t know his truck was missing till I told him. They finished cropping the antlers this morning and just left the truck sitting out by one of their pens. It was out of sight of the main building, and anyone could have taken it.”

  “We’ll dust for fingerprints,” Ramon said.

  Vlasic’s body was carried out, laid in the body bag, zipped out of sight. There was a hydraulic hiss, then a crash as the cutters chopped out a big piece of metal.

  “Oh, man,” said a deputy. “Number two.” He turned and, with an air of mild concern, vomited cleanly onto the sand.

  Loren walked around the hanging car and saw Timothy Jernigan’s bearded head resting on the ragged silver piece of metal that had decapitated him. It hadn’t sliced cleanly but at an angle, and one ear and part of a jaw were gone. Jernigan’s lip was curled in an uncharacteristic sneer of defiance. The rest of the body was not visible, and not likely to be for some time. The metal here was crumpled like an old piece of newspaper.

  “Recognize him?” Ramon asked.

  “Never seen him before,” Loren said. His heart was pounding in his chest. Urging him to run.

  Loren turned and walked over the antler-strewn sand to the concrete abutment. His shoes made frantic scraping noises as he scrambled up it, sounds like the pawing of a trapped animal. He made it to the top and stood for a moment, trying to catch his breath.

  “Jefe?” Cipriano’s voice. “You going someplace?”

  Loren turned and looked down at him. “Not much to be done here,” he said.

  Cipriano looked dubious. “You want me to hang around and, you know, look after stuff?”

  Meaning, Loren knew, keep the sheriff’s posse from hopelessly fucking up any evidence.

  Loren didn’t think there was going to be any evidence.

  Well. Maybe there’d be something in Jernigan’s briefcase.

  “Fine,” Loren said. “Do that. I’ll be in touch.”

  Loren began the walk back to his car. William Patience stood on the brink of the arroyo, his face impassive behind his Ray-Bans. Nazzarett stood with him, arms folded, his jaw working on a piece of gum.

  Loren passed them by without saying anything. He could feel Patience’s contemptuous gaze on the back of his head. Probably Patience thought he was running from the sight of blood.

  Maybe he was.

  He got in his car and drove to Vista Linda. Besides a couple of chained bicycles, the Jernigans’ other car, the New Yorker, was the only vehicle in the maglev parking lot. Sondra Jernigan sat behind the driver’s seat, waiting. Loren parked next to her and saw her sour look of distaste as she looked at him. He knocked on her window. She rolled it down, blinking as the hot wind blew grit in her face. She was wearing a gray suit, ready to visit the lawyer.

  “Mrs. Jernigan?”

  “What do you want?” The voice was hostile.

  “I’ve got some news for you. About your husband. Can I get in the passenger seat?”

  She looked at him coldly while weighing her decision, then decided she was tired of having dust blown in her face, closed the window, leaned across to open the passenger door. Loren walked around the car, opened the door, hitched his gun around, and sat.

  Sondra Jernigan was looking at him. One finger tapped impatiently on the steering wheel.

  Get it over with, Loren thought.

  “There’s been a crash on the maglev,” he said. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband has been killed.”


  She stared at him as if he’d just made a joke in ghastly taste. Loren could smell her expensive perfume.

  “Do you understand what I just told you?” he asked.

  Her eyes flickered away, then back. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’ve just come from the site.”

  She looked away again. She shifted her body to face squarely forward in the car, put both hands on the wheel. Ready to drive away.

  “They said there were so many safety devices,” she said. Her voice trailed away.

  “It was sabotage,” Loren said. “Mr. Jernigan was murdered.”

  Her expression didn’t change. Her blunt fingers slid lightly up and down the steering wheel. Mentally driving away from it all.

  “I think someone wanted to stop him from talking about the murder the other day. They must have known he was going to talk to a lawyer.”

  She didn’t think to ask him how he knew. She turned toward him. “Somebody . . . killed him?”

  “Another man died, a man named Vlasic who happened to be on the train. The saboteurs didn’t care who got killed, so long as Mr. Jernigan was stopped.”

  Sondra Jernigan considered this. “Vlasic? Kazimierz Vlasic?”

  “I guess.”

  She sighed, looked away again. “Poor man.” Said in a small voice.

  “Can you help me, Mrs. Jernigan?”

  She didn’t answer. Loren’s mouth was dry. He tried to summon saliva, then words.

  “Can you help me, Mrs. Jernigan? Can you tell me about the man who was killed the other day?”

  She didn’t say anything, just looked forward at the little train stop. As if she were expecting the maglev any second. A fat tear rolled out of her eye, traveled unnoticed down her face, fell with a pattering sound onto her suit jacket. She gave a long, extended sigh.

  “It happened at the lab,” she said. “Tim wouldn’t tell me any of the details.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  Another long, long sigh, breath hissing out of her till there was none left. For a moment she forgot to breathe at all, then she took in air. Slowly, the same way she’d let it out. “He was scared. That’s all I knew. He said that the cover story, the story about the car being stolen from out of the driveway, that the security people at the labs invented that. It didn’t happen.” She looked at him. Tears tracked down her face, streaked her gray suit. “He’s really dead?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “He was going to talk to the lawyer.”

  “I know. That’s why they killed him.”

  If he kept repeating it, maybe it would make sense to her.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Just that he was scared. That you’d scared him. I don’t know much else. He spent Saturday morning and afternoon, and Sunday too, on the phone in his study. And last night, too, after he came home from work.”

  “Do you know who he was talking to?” He’d have to check the phone company.

  “No. Except that I— I heard an argument on the phone with Dielh.”

  “Joseph Dielh.”

  “Yes.” She licked her lips, tasted her own tears, seemed vaguely surprised.

  “Is Dielh in town?”

  She shook her head. “He’s in D.C. Tim was on the phone with him. Tim was in his study, though, and I didn’t hear the words. The door was shut. I just heard him raising his voice.” She took a long breath, let it out again in another long, long sigh.

  “Can you remember anything?”

  “No. Yes.” She blinked tears. Her voice had a little whimper in it. “He said that something— the t-thing— was sym— symmetric?— in the calculations. No, in the equations.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “No. It wasn’t t-thing, it was something else. T-axis. I only remember it because he kept repeating it.”

  “Can you remember the exact words?”

  She screwed up her eyes as she tried to remember. Tears fell. “ ‘The t-axis is symmetric in the calculations.’ No, in the equations. Then he repeated the word ‘symmetric’ several times. And he said, ‘We didn’t appreciate that.’” And—and—” She reached in her jacket pocket for a tissue, found one, wiped tears away. A keening sound broke from her.

  “What else?”

  “He just kept saying, ‘We didn’t appreciate it.’” She keened again, holding the tissue to her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

  Everything she had told him, Loren realized, was hearsay. Inadmissible. Unless it could be read as a dying declaration, and a friendly judge conceivably could rule favorably in that instance.

  Still. It confirmed things.

  “Did he have any paperwork at home that might have anything to do with this?”

  “Maybe on the computer.” Wailing.

  “May I see it? Can I drive you home?”

  She didn’t answer, but she opened her car door. Loren got out of the New Yorker, locked the door, walked around to the Fury. Sondra Jernigan sat in the passenger seat, weeping silently. Loren drove her home.

  By the time he pulled into the driveway, negotiating around a candy-apple-red kid’s bicycle, the crying jag was over. She wiped away a few last tears, sniffed, pushed her hair back out of her face. Ready to face the kids.

  The younger one, Max, was sitting cross-legged in front of the television. He was eating a sandwich. A stern-voiced male on the holoset was telling him how he’d sworn to use his powers only in the cause of justice.

  Sondra Jernigan stood in the entryway for a moment, blinking down at her boy. Loren pictured Debra in the same situation, trying to figure out a way to tell Kelly and Katrina.

  Loren told himself to stop thinking such things.

  “Your husband’s office?” Loren prompted.

  “Oh. Yes.” Patting her hair nervously.

  A series of explosions punctuated the television show. Sondra Jernigan led him to the office. Middle Eastern music boomed from one of the back rooms, presumably where the other boy, Werner, was amusing himself. The whiteboard occupied an entire wall, still filled with arcane formulae drawn in different-colored ink. Loren recognized the Delta t’s and Delta E’s and nothing else. He looked at it doubtfully.

  “I suppose I could copy that down.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s a Panaboard.”

  She went up to it, pressed a button. A full-color photocopy of the whiteboard’s contents hissed quietly out a slit in the board’s base. She pressed another button and the whiteboard screen scrolled horizontally, bringing more calculations into view. She made another copy.

  Made by Panasonic, Loren saw. Hot damn.

  There were seven screens in all, of which five had writing. Sondra made copies of each, then handed them to Loren. He folded them and put them in his breast pocket.

  “You know,” Loren said, “you might want to call your minister. You’re Presbyterian, aren’t you? He’s experienced at breaking news like this to children and family members. Or I could call the police chaplain.”

  Who was Rickey, Loren thought. He tried to picture Rickey here, babbling intently about miracles in his Susquehanna accent.

  She blinked for a moment. Performing the automatic task on the Panaboard, she had been able to momentarily forget what had happened on the maglev. Now she had to switch tracks again, back to the one that led to tragedy. “That’s a good idea,” she said.

  “Would you like to call? There’s a phone here, I see.”

  “Sure.”

  Jernigan’s office was very neat. Einstein still grinned from atop his bicycle. Loren looked in the wastebasket first, saw only a few crumpled memos of the “dentist 12:30” type. Searching the desk, Loren found nothing but unused memo pads and a pile of canceled checks held with a rubber band. Apparently Jernigan did a lot of his work in his head or on the whiteboard. Loren opened the fake-Victorian rolltop and looked at the compact little computer that sat inside. He pressed the power button. Behind him, the widow
looked up a telephone number and pressed keys on the phone.

  The computer came up. Loren seated himself in front of it and called for the directory. Einstein smiled at him sunnily.

  Alphabetic chaos swarmed before his eyes. What the hell was GAGESYM.NABEL? And that was one of the more understandable ones— most were on the order of VoTACH.EMISH3. There were even file names that featured letters in the Greek alphabet.

  He’d have to copy everything the computer had on the hard drive. He started looking for flash memory or blank DVDs, both of which he found in one of the desk’s little cubbyholes.

  Maybe, he thought wearily, he could just borrow the computer for a while. He turned to ask Mrs. Jernigan and saw she was still on the phone to her minister. Tears were rolling down her face again.

  He was about to turn back when there was a loud hammering at the door. Loren’s heart turned over. He jumped to the window, saw one of the chocolate ATL jeeps parked by the curb, and quickly pulled back.

  He seriously considered for a moment whether or not to draw his gun. Maybe they’d come to finish the job.

  Not likely, he decided. They’d have to kill the whole family.

  But still.

  He reached for the telephone, took it from Mrs. Jernigan’s hand. She looked at him with surprise.

  “Pastor?” he said. “This is Police Chief Hawn. Could you do me the favor of hanging up right now, dialing 911, and asking for police backup to Mrs. Jernigan’s house in Vista Linda. Tell them that I need assistance right away. The address—?”

  He looked up. Sondra Jernigan’s face was drained of color. Tears still hung on her face. “328 Hawking,” she said.

  Loren repeated the address just as William Patience appeared in the door. Nazzarett hovered behind him, as did the younger child, Max. Both ATL people were carrying cardboard boxes.

  “What are you doing here?”

  There was no inflection at all in Patience’s voice.

  “Making sure no more people connected with my murder case get killed,” Loren said.

  Patience absorbed that without comment, without even a flicker of expression. He put the box down on one side of the door, straightened. “We’re here to secure Mr. Jernigan’s papers and effects,” Patience said. “To determine whether there is anything that affects the national security.”