Days of Atonement Read online

  “Good bust,” he said.

  “Yeah, jefe. Good bust.” Cipriano hesitated. “Loren,” he said, “remember what happened to Roberts. He was just doing what everyone did. But the rules changed.”

  Loren was puzzled. “Yeah?” he said.

  “The rules are changing. Just try and remember that, okay?”

  Hesitation fluttered in Loren’s mind as he watched Cipriano drive away.

  Hell, Cipriano was probably just working too hard.

  He went to his office and started on his report.

  Two hours later, Eloy Esposito appeared in the door and knocked on the frame. He grinned from over the neck brace. “Chief?” he said.

  “I thought I’d run over to Lupe’s Chili House and get something to eat. You want me to get you something?”

  “Sure.” That would make a change from the awful food at the Sunshine, anyway. Loren reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill.

  “Mexican plate, coffee.”

  “Got it. Would you mind watching the phones and the radio while I’m out?”

  “No problem.”

  Stretching, Loren moved to the front desk. He looked down the end of the dull white hexagonal corridor tile, through the glass doors to the Federal Building on the plaza. One of the hallway’s six-foot-long fluorescent lights hummed and flickered overhead. The police radio buzzed with officers returning to patrol from dinner. Loren made notes in the log at each report.

  The 911 line rang. Loren picked it up.

  “Atocha Emergency.”

  “They’re at it again.” The old lady’s voice seemed vaguely familiar, but Loren couldn’t place it.

  “Who are at what, ma’am?”

  “Is that you, Loren?”

  “Yes.”

  “ATL, that’s who!” The voice was indignant. “They’re firing their laser beams again!”

  Loren recognized the voice at last. Mrs. Mickelsson, the widow of a Riga Brothers truck driver whose brakes had given out hauling copper ore up the two-and-a-half-percent grade of the Atocha pit, and who had been run over by his own twelve-foot left front tire as he baled out of the cab.

  “What are they doing with their lasers, exactly?” Loren asked.

  “Trying to control my mind! I can hear their voices in my head!”

  Loren winced at her volume. “I see.” He held the phone a little farther from his ear. “Have you been taking your medication, Mrs. Mickelsson?”

  “It makes me feel funny.” Mumbling.

  “You know that medication makes you immune to the mind-control lasers, don’t you, Mrs. Mickelsson?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You’re going to have to take your medication, okay? And I’ll call ATL and tell them to shut the lasers off.”

  There was a lengthy, dismayed silence. “Do I really have to take my pills?”

  “Yes, you do. But I’ll have them shut off the lasers, too, okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll do ’er.” She seemed cheerful again.

  Loren made a note to have someone stop by her house later, just to make sure she was okay.

  Sometimes the old people called just to have someone to talk to. And when others saw flying saucers finally showing up at the UFO field east of town, or angels towering over the City-County Building, or when the demons that lived in the drainpipes got too noisy, they called 911 to get some action.

  Most of the time it was best just to humor them. They didn’t hurt anybody with their visions.

  After the mind-control laser alarm, there were no disturbances. No drunks, no fights. Maybe the anger had blown itself out the previous night.

  Loren’s heart leaped at the sound of a metallic crash from outside. Someone’s car had just hit something. He stood up, began to move around the desk.

  One of the two fluorescent overhead tubes winked out. Loren moved forward in the reduced light.

  The glass doors banged open. Loren’s heart leaped again. October wind fluttered papers on the desk.

  A dead man walked through the door.

  Loren stared, heart pounding, in a moment of horrified recognition. Fear poured like ice water through his veins.

  The man was in his twenties. He wore blue jeans, scuffed brown cowboy boots, and a pale blue yoked western shirt with metal collar tabs and pearl buttons. The left side of his chest was soaked with blood.

  The man stumbled and fell. Loren ran forward.

  The man had fallen on his face. There was a pale circle on the man’s right rear jeans pocket. The round can of Copenhagen stowed therein was partially dislodged, half out of the pocket. Loren knelt and turned the man over. There was blood on the hexagonal tile where he had lain. A string of half-clotted blood drooled out of the man’s mouth.

  “Loren. Goddamn. Help me, Loren.”

  The voice was a strangled whisper. Loren reached for him, tried to check vital signs, tried to remember what the Red Cross paramed had told him to do in lifesaving class years ago. The skin was clammy and pale. The chest rose as the man tried to breathe. He made drowning sounds.

  “Hang on. We’ll get help,” Loren said.

  The man stopped breathing. Hands clutched frantically at Loren’s arms, his shoulders. The eyes were yellow and terrified.

  The police had been equipped with little plastic tubes that they were supposed to use while breathing for victims, so that they wouldn’t have to expose themselves to blood and maybe get HIV. Loren didn’t have one with him.

  He was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

  Loren bent down and pressed his mouth over the man’s mouth, pinched off his nostrils with one hand. He exhaled fiercely into the man’s mouth. He had to fight against great resistance to pump air into him. Blackness beat with feathered wings against Loren’s vision as he battled whatever was filling the man’s lungs. The victim’s chest rose.

  Loren straightened, gasping for breath. Lights flashed behind his eyes. The man’s chest hung there, the lungs full, refusing to empty.

  Loren reached out, pressed down on the man’s stomach. Dark blood fountained from the victim’s mouth. It was full of little bubbles.

  The man’s eyes were glazed. His arms moved limply. Loren wanted to scream in frustration.

  He couldn’t think of anything else to do but keep trying to breathe for the other man. He bent, pressed his mouth to the man’s mouth again. Blood slicked his lips. Loren tried not to think of AIDS and tried to breathe out. The man’s lungs refused to expand.

  Loren fought till blackness swarmed into his vision, until he could feel himself passing out from lack of air, and then he leaned back, tasting blood, gasped for air, and watched the man die.

  “Jesus, what happened?” Eloy walked through the open door. There was a paper bag of takeout Mexican food in his hands. “There’s a car all— oh, shit.”

  “Call the hospital,’’ Loren said. Hopelessness swirled in his mind. It was too late, he knew.

  Eloy’s heels slipped on the blood and he made red heel marks as he ran for the radio. The red stuff was getting over everything.

  A few minutes later the ambulance parameds— Bag ’n’ Drag, as the police called them— made a pronouncement of DOA. They didn’t take the body away yet because there was still police stuff to do with it. Begley had been called in from patrol and stood around in case someone gave him something to do. His new partner, Quantrill, was keeping people away from the car out front. Everyone went to elaborate lengths to avoid stepping in the vast seeping puddle of blood. Eloy knelt over him, brow knit as he looked at the face.

  Loren watched the procedure, leaning against the wall. His heart was still intermittently thrashing against his ribs, as if it were changing gears from high to low and back again. Loren tried to will it into obedience.

  Eloy rose. “You knew the guy, Chief?”

  “Randal Dudenhof. I grew up with him.” A rancher, Loren knew. Good ole boy, a jack Mormon. His wife was named Violet and had been two years behind Loren in h
igh school.

  He called me by name, Loren thought.

  Eloy squinted at the corpse. “Doesn’t look that old.”

  “He’s not. He’s . . .” Speech trailed away as Loren’s mind, unable to quite absorb what had just happened, did another quick disconnect. He tried to find another track.

  Procedure. What happened next?

  “Get the camera,” he said. “It’s in my office, on the shelf behind my desk.”

  Eloy’s heels ticked on the tile as he walked away. Chain of evidence, Loren thought.

  When things got confusing, you could always fall back on procedure.

  He stepped closer to the body, knelt down. He unbuttoned the shirt and carefully pulled it away from the left side, then the right. There was an entrance wound on the left side, under the arm, but no exit wound was visible. Loren turned the front pockets inside out. There was nothing in them but lint. No ID.

  Loren looked down into the dead man’s glazed eyes. All thoughts of procedure flittered away like swallows.

  He called me by name. He asked me for help.

  “Dudenhof, Chief?” Ed Begley was looking at the body, a puzzled look on his face. “Did Violet Dudenhof have a kid?”

  “No,” Loren said.

  Begley’s puzzled look didn’t go away. “There’s a shot-up car outside. You want to look at it?”

  Loren found himself reluctant to follow this suggestion. He rose from his crouch possessed of a dreadful certainty what he would find beyond the glass doors. A canary-yellow 1956 T-bird, waxed and buffed and polished, with whitewall tires and matching yellow leather upholstery with little red stripes . . .

  The car was a gray BMW. Quantrill was keeping a lounging crowd of spectators at a healthy distance. The car had been run over the curb and into the cast-iron streetlamp near the police entrance. The driver’s door had two bullet holes in it and the rear window had been starred by another bullet. It looked as if there were gallons of blood in the driver’s seat and on the floor, a trail of red splotches leading to the door. The man had known right where to drive when he got himself shot and wanted to report a crime.

  Funny he didn’t drive himself to the hospital, though.

  At least it wasn’t the yellow T-bird. But still the cold horror that hummed in Loren’s bones did not recede.

  An ATL jeep was parked across the street. Two men in bulky, tailored custom jackets watched the proceedings through gold-rimmed Ray-Ban shooting glasses.

  Loren felt their eyes centered like gun sights between his shoulder blades. He turned to Quantrill. “Who was the last guy to take the crime scene course at the Albuquerque academy?” Loren asked.

  “Buchinsky.”

  “Go inside and call him. I don’t want to mess up on procedure. It’s been too long since we had a homicide where we didn’t know right away who did it.”

  “Except for the guy in the car.”

  Loren thought about it. “That was different. Go call Buchinsky.”

  “He’s on medical leave.”

  “Fuck his medical leave.”

  Loren stood outside the splash of blood on the pavement and peered into the BMW. There were probably a couple bullets rolling around inside, but he didn’t want to search the car until he got every print off it that he could.

  He straightened, feeling those Ray-Bans on his back. He looked around, seeing the crowd of spectators, the familiar and half-familiar faces. His eyes froze on a stranger, a bearded, barrel-chested man in a turban, tie, and long-sleeved sport shirt.

  Probably a terrorist, Byrne had said.

  Bullshit. Probably a tourist. Or an elk vampire.

  He had the feeling, though, that if he called William Patience at ATL Security he would discover who the man was and where he was staying. An obvious anomaly like that would be the sort of thing the guys in the chocolate Blazers would investigate as a matter of routine.

  Eloy appeared in the doorway. “I couldn’t find the camera, Chief. Where did you say it was?”

  It was only then that Loren remembered he’d taken the Pentax home last Fourth of July to take pictures of Katrina and Kelly on the church picnic. It was sitting in his closet back home.

  “Never mind. Use the video camera the feds bought us.”

  “I don’t know that we got any portable memory, Loren. I used up the last card documenting our recovery of Aldrich’s tools.”

  Loren turned to him. “Go down to the Rexall and buy some, then!” he said. “Get a receipt and I’ll have our weasel of a mayor reimburse you, okay?”

  Eloy opened his mouth, then closed it. “No problem, Chief,” he said.

  He went to the back of the car and looked at the license plate. It was a custom New Mexico vanity plate and read DELTA E.

  Loren’s mouth went dry. He looked at the ATL jeep and suddenly the security goons’ presence made sense. He had no idea what DELTA E could possibly mean, but it sounded like the sort of thing that someone who worked at the Advanced Technology Laboratories might have on his car.

  He took out his notebook, wrote the letters down, walked back into the hallway. He’d run the number through the LAWSAT link with the Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Santa Fe and find out who the car belonged to.

  He looked down at the body again. Cold crept through his bones.

  Randal Dudenhof. It was Randal right down to the can of Copenhagen snuff in the back pocket.

  One of the parameds approached him, a tall young woman with horn-rim glasses and long brown hair pinned neatly at her nape with a tortoiseshell clip. She had a big leatherette notebook and was filling in information. “What did you say the patient’s name was?”

  Loren looked at her. “John Doe.”

  The medic’s eyes widened. “I thought you said—”

  Loren could feel dried blood flaking off near his mouth. “It couldn’t be Dudenhof,” he said.

  The woman was persistent. “But you said—”

  “Randal Dudenhof died almost twenty years ago. He was headed home to his ranch after drinking too much bourbon at the Happy Steer Steak House and he skidded on the black ice and drove his yellow Thunderbird off the Rio Seco bridge on Highway 103. The steering column speared him through the chest. I watched him die.”

  The paramed looked at him for a long moment, then shrugged and turned away.

  Loren looked at the body again.

  He knew me. He called me by name.

  It was Randal, all right.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Two mumbling ten-eighteens were pulled out of a police cruiser and hauled off to jail. Despite scrapes, skinned knuckles, and freely bleeding noses, dusty gimme caps were still plastered firmly to their disordered hair.

  Drunks, Loren thought, don’t stop beating each other up just because somebody else got himself killed.

  “Hey, Chief.” Buchinsky’s voice. “Found something.”

  Loren bent and crawled into the BMW’s back seat. Buchinsky grinned up at him and held up a slug in fingers stained with flaking blood. It was a semi-wadcutter pistol round, the crimping still clear around its base, deformed from having hit the back window and then the back of the passenger seat. The metal casing, shattered in the impact, showed bright gleaming fragments around the dusky core of the bullet.

  Loren could smell a faint powder residue.

  “Funny size,” he said.

  “Bigger than nine-millimeter.”

  Loren took the bullet from Buchinsky’s fingers and peered at it. “Not a .45, either. It’s got to be a .40, or eleven-millimeter.”

  “Not many people have guns of that caliber. Not around here.”

  Loren rolled the bullet between his fingers, then gave it back to Buchinsky. “Bag it,” he said.

  “There’s gotta be another round in here.”

  “We’ll find it.”

  The evidence thus far, besides the corpse and the bullet, consisted of a crumpled bag from Dunkin’ Donuts, a small packet of Heinz ketchup, an empty V-8 vegetable drink can, a c
ontainer that once held a McDonald’s quarter-pound hamburger, and a whole lot of bloody footprints. Otherwise, it looked as if the car had been cleaned recently.

  Loren reached under a seat, and a bolt of pain went through his lower spine. Thirty years of walking with a heavy pistol on one hip had done things to his hip placement and his lower spine. He clenched his teeth and backed out of the BMW and straightened, pressing the heel of one hand into the small of his back. As he rose he gazed straight into the angry, resentful glare of Buchinsky’s wife, Karen, the blond, narrow-faced woman who wanted her husband to be a truck driver in Albuquerque. Loren’s gaze moved over the crowd of onlookers. The man with the turban had gone. Loren hitched up his gun belt and turned back to his work.

  The ATL jeep was still there. The two occupants were eating takeout Mexican food out of cardboard trays.

  The shiny, waxed surface of the gray car was covered with grainy black fingerprint powder. The car had been washed fairly recently and there weren’t many prints on the outside, though the inside had come up with a fair number of latents, including what Loren figured were those of children.

  Timothy Jernigan’s children, presumably.

  Timothy Jernigan was the owner of the BMW and the DELTA E vanity plate, the name brought up a few seconds after the LAWSAT queried the New Mexico DMV. Jernigan lived in Vista Linda, and was presumably connected in some way with Advanced Technology Laboratories.

  Loren would have been knocking at his door long since if he hadn’t had to supervise the car search.

  A Fury cruiser pulled up, and Cipriano jumped out. Loren could see anger in his face.

  “There’s a homicide and you don’t call me?” Cipriano demanded.

  “I wanted you to get some rest.”

  “Shit, man.” He scratched his neck furiously. “I had to hear about it from my wife, and she heard about it from her mother on the phone.”

  “We don’t know anything yet. I would have called you if there had been anything for you to do.”

  “When there’s a homicide in this town, I want to know about it.”

  Loren sighed. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I should have called even if it was to let you know that nothing was happening. Tell you what.” He looked at the assistant chief. “How about I put you in charge of the crime scene? That’ll give me a chance to brace the guy who owns this car.”