Darwin's Blade (13 page)

The camera view panned right and all at once there was a reflection in a wall of mirrors: Lawrence—all 250 pounds of him—in a ragged sweatshirt, gym shorts, bare legs, knobby knees, and tattered sneakers. He was wearing a fanny pack, had a kerchief tied around his brow Rambo-style, and was sporting a pair of oversized, heavy-framed sunglasses. The reflection seemed startled and then Lawrence looked himself up and down in the mirror for a long moment before moving into the main exercise room.

“Shit,” said Lawrence softly from behind the couch.

“Where's the camera?” asked Syd. “In the glasses?”

“Part of the glasses' frame,” said Trudy. “Tiny little lens, hardly bigger than a rhinestone. The fiber-optic cable runs down to the recorder in his fanny pack.”

“Where's the wire…” Syd began, and then said, “Oh.” Lawrence's reflection was turning away from gazing at himself and now she could see the “sunglass cords” which hung down behind Lawrence's neck, disappearing under the collar of the sweatshirt.

They watched in real time as Lawrence joined the exercise group, standing one mat directly behind Ms. Dibbs. There was no sound, but one could imagine the music blaring its beat as the group began its warm-up exercises. Ms. Dibbs squatted, thrust, kicked, did jumping jacks, and ran in place quite nicely for a totally disabled person. She had taken her own sunglasses and scarf off and her face was quite clear in the mirror that faced the exercise group. The group leader was a woman in spandex tights, and the thong running between the muscled hills of her buttocks was also very visible in the mirror. Also visible—amidst all the women in black Lycra—was Lawrence hopping, squatting, huffing, and swinging his arms, always a beat or two behind Ms. Dibbs and the rest of the squadron. He was still wearing his sunglasses, of course.

“Are you asking my advice on this for legal reasons?” said Syd.

“Yes,” said Trudy, holding the VCR remote in her right hand as if ready to pull it away if Lawrence lunged for it.

“Well, you've obviously got the goods on her,” said Syd, “but you can't use it if this is a private recreation facility. It would be as illegal as videotaping her on a trampoline in her own backyard.”

Trudy nodded. “It's a city exercise facility. Public property.”

“And you cleared it with the manager there?”

“Yep.”

“And the class is open to anyone in the community?”

Trudy looked up at the video where Ms. Dibbs and the entire group of buffed-up young women had dropped into a quick squat, arms straight ahead of them. In the mirror, Lawrence tried to follow suit, almost lost his balance, pinwheeled his arms, and gained the squat just as the rest of the group hopped up and began more leg kicks. The video was in black and white, but Lawrence's face in the mirror was darkening, sweat stains beginning to appear through the thick sweatshirt cotton.

“I don't see any problem then,” said Syd. “You can show this to the court and jury as long as it isn't edited.”

“
That's
the problem,” Trudy said, and began fast-forwarding through the tape.

Lawrence made a growling noise behind them.

After the set of exercises was over, Lawrence's point-of-view camera slogged slowly into the mirror-lined hallway and swooped down on a drinking fountain. The camera picked up his reflection as he wiped his mouth, removed the glasses for a second, showing his feet, and then set the camera lens back in place as he mopped his cheeks and forehead with the kerchief. He was pouring sweat.

“He should have left then,” said Trudy in a monotone.

Lawrence growled, “It wouldn't have been polite. And I paid for the entire session. And I wanted to show Ms. Dibbs working out for the full hour.”

“Well,” said Trudy, “you did.” She increased the fast-forward to high speed. The workout became a frenzied thrashing of Lycra-clad arms and legs, buttocks thrusting, thighs rippling—and several beats behind all this near-erotic sweaty female motion, the reflected image of the overweight, mustached man in sunglasses earnestly trying to keep up, breathing through his mouth now, his face so dark that the camera was showing the constant reddening without the benefit of color. Still in fast motion—three more breaks, three more trips to the drinking fountain. Then the fourth and final break before the end of the tape. The digital readout showed that the class had been exercising for forty-eight minutes.

The women broke ranks. Some ran in place during the break. Some chatted in groups. Ms. Dibbs was one of the runners. Lawrence, in subjective-camera, trudged out to the hallway again, there was a flash of reflection of him at the water fountain, sweatshirt now living up to its name, totally soaked through, face so dark that it looked like he was going to bust a blood vessel, and then the camera turned away from the drinking fountain and the exercise room, down the mirrored corridor, through a door marked
MEN
…

Syd started laughing.

“OK,” yelled Lawrence from the dining room. “You can turn it off, Trude. They get the idea.”

Trudy put it into fast-forward again. The camera seemed to rush at one of the urinals, looked down while gym shorts were tugged out of the way, then the view shifted to the tiles above the urinal, then down, then up again, then down, the final flips and tucking away, over to the sink, Lawrence's reflection in the mirror, still wearing the Jack Nicholson shades, the time-readout still flicking away in ghostly digital numbers, then back to the exercise room for the last few minutes of exercise. He followed Ms. Dibbs out to the parking lot. The claimant seemed invigorated by the workout and almost skipped to her Honda. The camera seemed to be lurching dangerously, once pausing by a fencepost where Lawrence's hand came into view, hanging on for support.

Syd was still laughing. “Nothing…nothing personal,” she managed to say, raising her voice so Lawrence could hear in the kitchen, where he had retreated beyond the dining room.

“You see the problem,” said Trudy.

Syd was rubbing her cheeks. “You can't edit video shown in a courtroom,” she said, her voice shaking in its attempt to stay steady. “It's all or nothing.”

“I goddamn
forgot,
” yelled Lawrence from the kitchen.

“You can do it over,” said Dar.

“We think Ms. Dibbs has made Larry,” said Trudy.

“Lawrence,” came the voice from the kitchen. “And
you
can damn well do it over, Trudy.”

Trudy shook her head. “I was the one who took Ms. Dibbs's statements. It looks like this is it.”

“Well…” began Syd.

“I'd use it,” said Dar. “Counting the van surveillance tape, it's almost an hour before we get to the…X-rated part. I don't think the jury or the claimant's attorneys will let you show that much. They'll want to shut it off as soon as possible.”

“Yeah,” agreed Syd. “Just put it in the record that there's another forty minutes of tape or whatever. I think you're safe.”

“Easy for you guys to say,” came Lawrence's voice from the kitchen.

Syd caught Dar's eye. “If we're going to get all the way up to Julian and your cabin by nightfall, we should get going.”

Dar nodded. On his way out, passing through the kitchen, he patted Lawrence on the back. “Nothing to be ashamed of, amigo.”

“What do you mean?” growled the big man.

“You washed your hands after,” said Dar. “Just like our mommas taught us. The jury will be proud of you.”

Lawrence said nothing but was staring daggers at Trudy now.

Dar and Syd climbed into the Land Cruiser and headed for the hills.

D
ar and Syd took Highway 78 from Escondido into the wooded mountains, stopping in the little town of Julian for dinner before going on to the cabin. Julian had once been a small mining town and now it was an even smaller tourist town, but the restaurant Dar chose served better than decent food in ample amounts for a decent price and had no large bar, so even on a Friday evening it was not filled with boisterous locals. The owner knew Dar and showed them to a table in a bay window of what had been the main parlor of an old Victorian home. The place served good wine. Syd knew the pros and cons of the vintages, she chose a bottle, and they shared an excellent merlot over conversation.

The conversation itself surprised Dar. Over the years he had become a master at subtly turning the focus on the other person; it was amazing, really, how easily people could be steered into talking about themselves for hours on end. But Chief Investigator Sydney Olson was different. She responded to his questions with a brief summary of her years with the FBI and an even briefer description of her failed marriage—“Kevin was also a special agent, but he hated fieldwork and that was all I wanted to do.” Then she hit the ball back in his court.

“Why did the NASA review board fire you when you told them that some of the
Challenger
astronauts had survived the initial explosion?” she asked, holding her wineglass in both hands. Her nails, Dar noticed, were short and unpolished.

He gave her what Trudy had once called his “Clint East-wood smile.” “They didn't fire me,” he said. “They just replaced me quickly before I could put anything in writing. At any rate, I was just a junior member of the support staff for the real review board.”

“All right, then,” said Syd, “tell me how you
knew
that some of them had survived the explosion only to die after the fall.”

Dar sighed. He saw no way out of some exposition. “Are you sure you want to talk about this over dinner?”

“Well,” said Syd, “I suppose we could discuss poor Mr. Phong getting rebarred right out of the cab of his Isuzu van, but I'd rather hear about the
Challenger
investigation.”

Dar did not comment on her use of “rebar” as a verb. He explained briefly about his doctoral work in physics.

“Shaped plasma events?” said Syd. “As in explosions?”

“Precisely as in explosions,” agreed Dar. “They didn't really understand much about the dynamics of plasma wave fronts in those days because the analytical use of chaos mathematics—what they call ‘complexity theory' today—was in its infancy.”

“So you became an expert on chaos at the wave end of explosions?” said Syd.

“And other extremely high temperature events, yes,” said Dar.

“Is there much demand for that sort of expertise in the job market?”

Dar sighed and set his wineglass down. “More than you can imagine. Shaped charges was the ‘in' thing in armaments at the time. Ask the Iraqis in their Russian tanks after the American sabot round penetrated eight inches of armor and detonated in a shaped explosion.”

“I don't suppose they're around to ask,” said Syd.

“No.”

“So you joined the National Transportation Safety Board,” she said. “With your Ph.D. it sounds like you were overqualified.”

“Unfortunately,” said Dar, “there are more plasma events in commercial aviation than we like to think about. And it takes some training to work backward in deductive steps because the dynamics of the explosion itself have to be completely understood.”

“Lockerbie,” said Syd. “Or TWA Flight 800.”

“Exactly,” said Dar.

The waiter came by and cleared their plates. When their cups of coffee arrived, Syd said, “So that got you to the higher echelons of the NTSB and that put you on the staff of the
Challenger
Commission. So how did you know that they survived the explosion?”

“I didn't
know,
” said Dar. “At first. It's just that I was more aware of how resilient the human body is in explosions. Most explosions are like leaps from tall buildings—it's not the fall that kills you…”

“It's the sudden stop at the end,” supplied Syd.

Dar nodded. “The actual blast is not necessarily damaging to a human body that is restrained as tightly as the astronauts were in their couches. They're strapped in tighter than a NASCAR driver, and you see the horrific wrecks those guys walk away from.”

Syd nodded. “So you think the poor teacher and some of the others survived that horrendous main fuel tank explosion?”

“No, not the teacher,” said Dar, and even after all these years he felt the twinge of sadness. “She and another astronaut were on the lower deck, directly in the force of the blast. They probably died very quickly if not instantly.”

“NASA made a point of saying that they all must have died without knowing what hit them,” said Syd.

“Yeah. The whole country was in shock. That's what we all wanted to hear. But even in the first hours after the explosion, it was apparent from video and radar of the falling debris that the main crew cabin—the upper deck, so to speak—had stayed intact through the whole two-minute-and-forty-five-second fall to the water.”

“An eternity,” muttered Syd, her eyes becoming cloudy. “And you said that you
know
…”

“PEAPs,” said Dar.

“Peeps?”

“Personal egress air packs. Essentially they're tiny little oxygen bottles that the astronauts use in case of sudden depressurization. They weren't wearing space suits, remember…The
Challenger
Commission made that recommendation after studying the tragedy. That's why John Glenn and all the others who've flown since have gone up in space suits, just like the early astronauts…”

“But these PEAPs…?” Syd's voice was very small and held none of the voyeuristic thrall that Dar had heard in so many people's tone when discussing fatal accidents.

“They recovered them from what was left of the main cabin,” said Dar. “Actually, they recovered almost all of the shuttle. They rebuilt it in pieces on wood and wire frames just like we do airliners after the fact…but anyway, yes. Five of the PEAPs had been used…two minutes and forty-five seconds' worth. The exact time from the explosion until impact on the ocean.”

Sydney closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she said, “Couldn't that have been some sort of automatic thing…”

Dar shook his head. “The PEAPs had to be activated manually. In fact, the command pilot couldn't turn his own on without help. The astronaut behind him—the other woman aboard—would have had to loosen her harness straps and lean forward to turn his on from behind. And his had been used.”

“My God,” said Sydney.

They drank coffee in silence for a minute.

“Dar…” she began.

Dar could not remember if she had used his first name before, but he suddenly noticed it now. Her tone was different.

“Dar,” said the chief investigator, “all this stuff about me coming to the cabin to protect you. All the eyebrow waggling back at Lawrence and Trudy's. You need to know that I'm not—”

“I know you're not,” began Dar, a bit irritated.

Syd held up her hand. “Please, let me finish. I'm telling you up front that I'm not looking for a romantic liaison and I'm certainly not looking for a roll in the hay. I like joking with you because you've got a sense of humor drier than the Borrego Desert, but I'm not going to play games.”

“I know—” Dar began again, but again she silenced him with a raised palm.

“I'm almost through,” Syd said very quietly. No one was at the nearby tables, and the waiter was far across the room. “Dickweed really did want to bring you up on vehicular manslaughter charges…”

“You're shitting me,” said Dar. “Even after seeing the videotape?”

“
Because
of the tape,” said the chief investigator. “It was the kind of case that even an asshole like Dickweed could win. Obvious road rage…”

“Road rage!” said Dar, angry now. “Those were Russian mafia hit men. They found their automatic weapons in the goddamn wreckage. And besides, this whole ‘road rage' phenomenon is a load of crap, you know that, Olson. There's not a higher percentage of traffic-related assaults today than there was two decades ago—”

Syd used both palms now to calm him. “Yes, yes…I
know
that. Road rage has everything to do with how the news anchors enjoy the alliteration and almost nothing to do with facts. But Dickweed might still have brought charges just because road rage is a popular topic these days and it would have got him TV coverage…”

“Road rage,” muttered Dar, sipping coffee so as not to say what he felt about the assistant district attorney and his political ambitions.

“Anyway,” continued Syd, “I sold them all on using you as…well…as bait in uncovering this larger fraud ring that the state has been after. Dickweed and his boss saw that as an even bigger media plus than a road rage trial. But it meant that you either had to be kept under constant surveillance or protective custody…”

“Or be watched by you,” said Dar.

“Yes,” said Syd. She sat in silence for a long moment. Then she said, “And I know about the Fort Collins crash.”

Dar just looked at her. Part of him was not surprised—she had access to a hell of a lot of background dossiers, and his background would be important for her to check on in her ongoing case, but another part of him curled up in pain at the mention of something he never spoke about to anyone.

“I know it's none of my business,” Syd said, her voice even softer than before, “but it said in the report that you were actually called to the scene of the crash. How could that be? How could they have done that?”

The muscles around Dar's mouth twitched an imitation of a smile. “They didn't know that…that my wife and baby were on that flight when it went down. Bar…my wife had planned to come back from Washington the next day, but her mother had recovered faster than anyone expected. She just wanted to get home a day earlier.”

There was a silence, broken by loud laughter from the bar. A young couple walked by on their way out. They were holding hands.

“You don't have to talk about it,” said Syd.

“I know,” said Dar. “And I haven't. Even to Larry and Trudy, although they know the basic facts of it. But I'm answering your question…”

Syd nodded.

“So that's it—my wife and the baby were supposed to arrive the next day…but they boarded this earlier flight—a 737 that went nose first into a park on the outskirts of Fort Collins.”

“And you were called,” said Syd.

“I was on the NTSB GO-team that staged out of Denver,” said Dar, his voice without emotion. “We covered any crash in a six-state region. Fort Collins is only about seventy miles from Denver.”

“But…” Syd began, and stopped. She looked down at her coffee cup.

Dar shook his head. “That was my job…looking at plane wrecks. Luckily, someone in the Denver office got a first look at the flight manifest and noticed my wife's name. They notified my team's supervisor only about half an hour after I got to the scene. But there wasn't much to see anyway. The 737 went in nose-first. The crater was almost twenty feet deep and sixty feet across. There was a lot of the usual crash detritus—shoes, always many shoes, a burned teddy bear here and there, a green purse—but most of the human remains had to be retrieved by archaeologists.”

Syd looked up. “And it's one of the few accidents that the NTSB didn't solve…didn't find a clear cause for.”

“One of four, counting TWA 800,” said Dar softly. “Wind shear was suspected…and the FAA recommended changing certain control connections to the rudder of the Boeing 737s after that…but nothing seemed to explain such a sudden and complete loss of control. When they came to get me, I was actually interviewing a teenaged girl who lived in the apartment building right next to the park—a hundred feet shorter and the casualty list would have been doubled—and this girl said that when she looked out her fourth-floor window, she could see the faces of the people in the plane…upside down as the 737 augered in. The faces were quite clear because it was just after dark and the people had their reading lights on…”

“Stop, please,” said Syd. “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I brought it up.”

Dar was quiet for a moment. He felt as if he were returning from somewhere far away. He looked at the chief investigator and realized with a shock that she was crying. “It's all right,” he said, stifling the impulse to pat her hand where it lay on the white tablecloth. “It's all right. It was a long time ago.”

“Ten years isn't a long time,” whispered Syd. “Not for something like that.” She turned toward the window and wiped away the tears with two angry swipes of her hand.

“No,” agreed Dar.

Syd looked back at him and her blue eyes seemed infinitely deep. “May I ask one thing?”

Dar nodded.

“You didn't resign from the NTSB and move out to California until almost two years after that crash,” she said. “How could you…stay? Continue doing that work?”

“It was my job,” said Dar. “I was good at it.”

Sydney Olson smiled very slightly. “I've read your whole file, Dr. Minor. You're still the best accident reconstruction person in the business. So then why do you work primarily with Stewart Investigations? I know you're fairly well off and don't need a huge salary…but why Lawrence and Trudy?”

“I like them,” Dar said. “Larry makes me laugh.”

They arrived at Dar's cabin just after sunset, twilight hanging in the soft summer evening air like a muted tapestry. The cabin sat by itself up a half mile of gravel road, south and east of the town of Julian, on the very edge of the Cleveland National Forest. Its view looked down broad meadows and across great valleys of grass to the south. Above and behind the cabin, the ponderosa pines and Douglas fir grew thicker, ending in a rocky ridgetop.