Darwin's Blade (15 page)

“It happened the last time I tried to fire the gun,” said Dar even more quietly. “The only time that weapon ever misfired.”

Syd stood holding the shell and looking at Dar for a long moment before setting it down under the windowsill. “That shell is still dangerous, you know.”

Dar raised his eyebrows.

“I know from your file that you were in the Marines…in Vietnam. You must have been very young.”

“Not so young,” said Dar. “I'd already graduated from college by the time I enlisted and was sent over there in 1974. Besides, there wasn't much for us to do that last year except listen to bits of the Watergate hearings on armed forces radio and go around the countryside picking up the M-16s and other weapons that the ARVNs—the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, our team—were dropping as they ran away from the North Vietnamese regulars.”

“You graduated from college when you were eighteen,” said Syd. “What were you…a prodigy?”

“An overachiever,” said Dar.

“Why the Marines?” asked Syd.

“Would you believe it was out of sentiment?” asked Dar. “Because my father had been a Marine in the real war…World War II?”

“I believe that he was a Marine,” said Syd, “but I don't believe that's the reason you enlisted in that service.”

Correct,
thought Dar. Aloud he said, “Actually, it was partially to get my service out of the way and get back to the States for graduate school, and partially out of sheer perversity.”

“How so?” said Syd. She had finished her Scotch. Dar poured her another two fingers.

Dar hesitated and then realized that he was going to tell her the truth…sort of. “As a kid, I was obsessed with the Greeks,” said Dar. “The obsession lasted through college, even while I was pursuing a degree in physics. All of the liberal arts majors were studying ancient Athens—you know, sculpture, democracy, Socrates—while I was always obsessed with Sparta.”

Syd looked quizzical. “War?”

Dar shook his head. “Not war, although that's all the Spartans are remembered for. The Spartans were the only society I knew of that made a science out of the study of fear—they called it
phobologia.
Their training—which began at a young age—was all geared at recognizing fear,
phobos,
and defeating it. They even taught of parts of the body that were
phobosynakteres
—places where fear accumulated—and trained their young men, their warriors, to be able to put their minds and bodies in a state of
aphobia.
”

“Fearlessness,” translated Syd.

Dar frowned. “Yes and no,” he said. “There are different forms of fearlessness. A berserker warrior or a Japanese samurai caught up in mindless rage, or, for that matter, a Palestinian terrorist on a bus with a bomb, they're all
fearless
—that is, they don't fear their own deaths. But the Spartans wanted something more.”

“What could be better for a warrior than fearlessness?” asked Syd.

“The Greeks, the Spartans, called such fearlessness brought on by rage or anger
katalepsis,
” said Dar. “Literally, being possessed by a daemon—a loss of control by the mind. They spurned that completely. Their hoped-for
aphobia
was a completely…well, controlled,
minded
thing—a refusal to become absorbed and possessed, even in the midst of battle.”

“And did you learn
aphobia
in the Marines…in Vietnam?” said Syd.

“Nope. I was scared shitless every second I was in Vietnam.”

“Did you see much action there?” asked Syd, her eyes intent. “Your Marine Corps files are still classified. That must mean something.”

“It doesn't mean anything,” he lied. “For example, if I was a clerk typist and typed a lot of classified material, you wouldn't be able to get access to my files.”

“Were you a clerk typist?”

Dar held his Scotch glass in both hands. “Not all of the time.”

“So you saw combat?”

“Enough to know that I never wanted to see any again,” said Dar truthfully.

“But you're comfortable around weapons,” said Syd, getting to the point.

Dar made a face and sipped his whiskey.

“What kind of weapon were you issued in the Marines?” asked Syd.

“Some sort of rifle,” said Dar. He did not enjoy discussing firearms.

“Then an M-sixteen,” said Syd.

“Which all have a tendency to jam if not kept perfectly clean,” said Dar, a bit disingenuously. He had not been issued an M-16. His spotter had carried an accurized M-14—an older weapon, but one that shared the same 7.62 millimeter ammunition as the bolt-action Remington 700 M40 that Dar had trained with. And train he had—120 rounds a day, six days a week, until he was able to hit a mansized moving target at five hundred yards and a stationary one at one thousand.

He finished his Scotch. “If you're trying to palm a handgun off on me, forget it, Chief Investigator. I hate the goddamn things.”

“Even when the Russian mafia's trying to kill you?”

“They
tried
to kill me,” corrected Dar. “And I still think it may have been a case of mistaken identity.”

Syd nodded. “But you've handled weapons,” she persisted. “You were taught what to do if a shell misfired…”

Dar looked up at her. “Aim your weapon at a safe, neutral target and wait. It may still fire without warning.”

Syd pointed to the .410 shell. “Should we throw that away?”

“No,” said Dar.

They each had a final glass of Scotch and watched the fire. The bit of smoke that stayed in the room was aromatic, mixing with the smoky peat taste of the whiskey.

The tension of the earlier conversation had almost disappeared. They were talking shop.

“Did you hear about the directive from the last political appointee to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency?” asked Syd.

Dar chuckled. “Absolutely. The word accident is never to be used in any official reports, correspondence, and/or memos.”

“Doesn't that seem a little odd?”

“Not at all,” said Dar. A log broke and crumbled into embers and he glanced at it for a second before looking back at his guest. Syd's face appeared younger and softer in the firelight, her eyes as alive and intelligent as always. “You have to follow their chain of logic,” he said. “All accidents are avoidable. Therefore they shouldn't happen. Therefore the agency can't use the word accident—they don't exist. They have to circumlocute and say crash or incident or whatever.”

“Do you agree that all accidents are avoidable?” asked Syd.

Dar laughed heartily. “Anyone who's ever investigated an accident…whether it's the space shuttle or some poor schmuck who runs a yellow light and gets broadsided…knows that they're not only
not
avoidable, they're inevitable.”

“How so?” said Syd.

Dar looked at her. “They
happened.
The probability of the series of events that led up to the accident may each be a thousand to one, or a million to one, but once those events occur in the right sequence, the accident is one hundred percent inevitable.”

Syd nodded but did not look convinced.

“All right,” said Dar, “take the
Challenger
accident. NASA had become the careless driver who runs yellow lights. You get away with it once—five times—twenty times—and pretty soon you assume it's a natural and safe behavior. But if you keep driving, the odds of being hit by some other sonofabitch with the same intersection philosophy become almost one hundred percent.”

“How was NASA taking extra risks?”

Dar shrugged. “The Commission documented it pretty well. They knew about the O-ring problem—even the Crit-One severity of it—but didn't fix it. They knew that cold weather made the O-ring problem much worse, but launched anyway. They violated at least twenty of their own no-go guidelines because that teacher was on board, and they were feeling political pressure to get her launched into orbit so President Reagan could mention it in his State of the Union Address that evening. The odds caught up to them.”

“You believe in odds, then?” said Syd. “Do you believe in anything else?”

Dar looked at her quizzically. “Are you asking me a philosophical question, Chief Investigator?”

“I'm just curious,” said Syd, swallowing the last of her whiskey. “You see so many accidents, so much carnage. I wonder what philosophical framework you apply to it.”

Dar thought a moment. “The Stoics, I guess,” he said. “Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius and his ilk.” He chuckled. “The one time I ever felt political enough to drive to Washington and throw a brick at the White House was when Bill Clinton was asked what the most important book was that he'd read recently—and he said Marcus Aurelius's
Meditations.
” He chuckled again. “That love-handled mass of appetites…quoting Marcus Aurelius.”

“But what do
you
believe?” pressed Syd. “Other than a Stoic point of view.” She paused a moment and recited quietly, “‘To the rational creature, only the irrational is unbearable; the rational he can always bear. Blows are not by nature intolerable.'”

Dar stared at her. “You can quote Epictetus.”

“So would you say that's your philosophy?” repeated Syd.

Dar set his empty glass down and steepled his fingers, tapping his lower lip. The dying fire crumbled again and the embers glowed in their final brightness. “Larry's older brother, a writer who lived in Montana until his marriage broke up, came to visit several years ago; I got to know him a bit. Later I saw him interviewed on TV and he was asked about
his
philosophy; his novel was about the Catholic Church, and the interviewer kept pressing him on his own beliefs.”

Syd waited.

“Larry's brother—Dale's his name—was going through a rough patch then. In response to the question, he quoted John Updike. The quote went something like—‘I am neither musical nor religious; each time I set my fingers down it is without confidence of hearing a chord.' ”

“That's sad,” said Syd at last.

Dar smiled. “It was Larry's brother quoting another writer—I didn't say it's what
I
believe. I subscribe to Occam's Razor.”

“William of Occam,” said Syd. “What…fifteenth century?”

“Fourteenth,” said Dar.

“Maxim,” continued Syd. “The assumptions introduced to explain a thing must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

“Or,” said Dar, “all other things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one.”

“Rules out alien abduction,” laughed Syd.

“Area Fifty-one, kaput,” said Dar.

“Kennedy conspiracy shit…adios,” said Syd, her smile very wide.

“Oliver Stone, bye-bye,” agreed Dar.

Syd paused. “Did you know you're famous for Darwin's Blade?”

“For what?” said Dar, blinking in surprise.

“Some statement you made a few years ago—I think it was at the meeting of the National Association of Insurance Investigators.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Dar, putting his hand over his eyes.

“You had a corollary to Occam's Razor,” persisted Syd. “I think it went—‘All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity.' ”

“Which is stupidly obvious,” muttered Dar.

Syd nodded slowly. “No, I know what you were saying. It's like those guys in the pickup trying to crash that rock concert…”

Dar suddenly looked over at the box of files and stacks of Zip drives and floppy disks that still awaited them. “Maybe we've been looking for the wrong thing in our files,” he said.

Syd cocked her head.

“Maybe it's not my investigation of stupid accidents—even fatal ones—that drew someone's attention to me,” he said. “Maybe it's murder.”

“Have you solved a murder recently?” said Syd. “Other than the Phong swoop-and-squat, I mean.”

Dar nodded.

“And are you going to share it?” said Syd.

Dar glanced at his watch. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”

“You bastard,” said Chief Investigator Olson, but she said it with a smile. “Thanks for the Scotch.”

Dar walked her to the door.

Syd paused. Dar had the sudden, wild thought that she was going to kiss him.

“Sleeping up in my wonderful sheep wagon,” she said, “how will I know if the bad guys have come and you're in deep shit?”

Dar reached under a heavy coat on a wall hook and pulled down a bright orange whistle on a string. “It's for hiking, in case you get lost in the woods. You can hear this damned whistle two miles away.”

“Like a rape whistle,” said Syd.

“Yeah.”

“Well, if the murderers show up tonight, just whistle.” She paused and Dar could see a glint of mischief in her blue eyes. “You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?”

Dar grinned. The nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall had said the line to Humphrey Bogart in
To Have and Have Not.
He loved that movie.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just put my lips together and blow.”

Syd nodded and went up the path with her flashlight, blowing out each lantern as she passed.

Dar watched until she was out of sight.

S
yd came knocking early on Saturday morning, but Dar was already up, showered, shaved, and with coffee and breakfast ready. Syd ate bacon and eggs happily and refilled her coffee cup twice.

Before starting work, Dar took her on a long walking tour of the property: the ravine to the east with its abandoned gold mine, the stream that fed into the canyon, the small waterfall up the hill bridged by a fallen tree that looked too slick and mossy to cross, the rock slabs and boulders along the high ridge to the north, the stands of birch trees and acres of thick pine on the hillside just above the cabin, and the endless fields of grass in the valley below. All during the walk, Dar felt the same pleasure that had shocked him so much the night before—the strange
awareness
of Syd's physical self, the warmth of her smile, the glow that her tone of voice and laughter gave him.

Cut it out, Darwin,
he warned himself.

“I know this is a forbidden question between men and women anymore,” said Syd, stopping and looking straight at him, “but what are you thinking about, Dar? I can hear the gears meshing from two feet away.”

She
was
only two feet away. When Dar stopped, he almost surrendered to the urge to put his arms around her, draw her closer, set his face against the curve of her neck just beneath her ear, just where her hair curled onto her neck, just to breathe in her fragrance.

“Billy Jim Langley,” he said at last, taking half a step back.

Syd cocked her head.

Dar pointed to the south. “An accident I worked a year or so ago way back in the national forest there. Want to hear it? Want to solve it?”

“Sure.”

Dar cleared his throat. “OK—I was called out to the scene of a suspected homicide about five miles back in the woods there—”

“This isn't the murder you promised me last night, is it?”

Dar shook his head. “Anyway, a Mr. Billy James Langley, one of Larry and Trudy's CalState insureds, was reported missing a day after he should have returned from a fishing trip. The sheriff drove back toward Billy Jim's favorite fishing hole and found his pickup—a 'seventy-eight Ford 250—upside down in a creek. Billy Jim was inside. Drowned. It looked as if he had run off a little bridge in the darkness the night before and not been able to get out of the cab of the pickup in time. The coroner confirmed the time.”

“Where's the suspected homicide?” she asked.

“Well, when the coroner removed Billy Jim's body,” said Dar, “he pronounced the cause of death as drowning. But it seems as if Billy Jim had also been shot with a 22-caliber bullet…”

“Where?” said Syd.

“While driving his truck,” said Dar.

“No, I mean
where
on his body?”

Dar hesitated. “Once. In the…ah…groin area.”

“Testicles?” said Syd.

“One of them.”

“Left or right testicle?” said Syd.

“Do you think it matters?” said Dar.

“Doesn't it?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“Left or right?” said Syd.

“Right,” said Dar. “Can I get on with the story?”

They walked down the hill together.

“OK,” said Syd, “we have a Mr. Billy James Langley coming back from a fishing trip in the dark. Suddenly he gets shot in the right ball and—not surprisingly—is startled enough to drive his pickup into the creek and then drowns. Let me guess: no .22 rifle or pistol in the pickup?”

“Right,” said Dar.

“Entrance or exit holes in the truck?” said Syd. “It'd have to be a pretty flimsy pickup to let a .22 pass through, and Ford 250s aren't flimsy.”

“No entrance or exit holes,” said Dar. “Except in Billy Jim.”

“Windows rolled up?”

“Yeah. It was raining hard the night Billy Jim was driving out from his favorite fishing hole.”

“After dark, right?” said Syd.

“Right. About eleven
P.M.
”

“I've got it,” said Syd.

Dar stopped walking. “Really?” It had taken him two hours at the scene to figure it out.

“Really,” said Syd. “Billy Jim didn't have a .22 rifle or pistol along, but I bet he had a box of cartridges in the cab, right?”

“In the glove box,” said Dar.

“And I bet Billy Jim's headlights went off on the way out.”

Dar sighed. “Yeah—my guess was about a mile and a half short of the bridge.”

Syd nodded. “About how long it would take for the .22 cartridge to heat up and discharge,” said Syd. “I know those Ford pickups. The fuse box for the lights is right under the panel in front of the steering wheel. Your Billy Jim is driving along, the headlights go out, he can't keep driving in the rain but he wants to get home, so he pokes around, figures the fuse has blown…hunts around for something in the cab the right size to replace the fuse…A .22 cartridge fits perfectly…He drives on, not thinking about the cartridge heating up. And then it fires…”

“Well, I guess it wasn't much of a mystery after all,” said Dar.

Syd shrugged. “Hey, I'm starved. Can we have lunch before we tackle your real mystery?”

They made roast beef sandwiches for lunch, grabbed beers, and took them out onto the porch. The day was getting hot and they had long since doffed their denim jackets. Syd wore an oversized T-shirt with the tail out, to cover the holster on her hip. Dar wore a faded old black T-shirt with equally faded blue jeans and running shoes. The cabin itself was shaded by tall ponderosa pine and small birch, but the valley opening before them was bright with summer grass and willows, all seeming to ripple in the wind and heat haze. They sat on the edge of the high porch and dangled their legs.

Syd asked, “Doesn't all the death, pain, suffering you witness…investigate…weigh you down after a while?”

If she had asked Dar that question twenty-four hours earlier, he probably would have answered
I imagine it's a little like being a doctor. After a bit you become…not callous, that's not the word…but you have a perspective for it all. It's your job, right?
And he would have believed it. But now he was not so sure. Perhaps something
had
changed him over the past decade or more. All that he knew at this instant was that—contrary to all intentions and expectations—he would like to kiss Chief Investigator Sydney Olson on her full lips, press her back against the redwood deck, feel the softness of her breasts against him…

“I don't know,” he managed to say, chewing on his sandwich. He had forgotten her question.

The file was in a regular manila folder, was stamped
Closed,
and was at least three inches thick with documents. Dar set two wheeled chairs at his desk near the large CAD computers. Syd sat to his right as he laid out the documents in front of her.

“You see the date of the accident,” he said.

“Seven weeks ago.” Syd glanced down at the LAPD Traffic Collision Report. “East L.A.… a little far afield, weren't you?”

“Not really,” said Dar. “Some of these cases take me as far north as your neck of the woods…Sacramento and San Francisco…and even out of state.”

“Did the LAPD Traffic Investigation Unit call you in freelance on this one? I know both Sergeant Rote of the TIU and Detective Bob Ventura, whose name is on the investigation report here.”

Dar shook his head. “Lawrence was in Arizona working a case, so Trudy asked me to follow up on this. The client was the van rental company.”

Syd looked at the initial collision report. “A GMC Vandura…red. Small moving van?”

“Yeah. Read the reporting officer's statement.”

Syd read it aloud:

Syd quit reading and flipped through the next few pages. “All right,” she said at last. “We have this thirty-one-year-old male, Richard Kodiak, dead of head injuries. He and his roommate, Donald Borden, were in the process of moving from East L.A. to San Francisco when a female friend, Gennie Smiley, seems to have hit Mr. Kodiak straight on with the van and then, somehow, managed also to run over him with the van's right front wheel.” She flipped a dozen more pages. “Mr. Borden and Ms. Smiley sued the truck rental agency, stating that the brakes were inadequate and the headlights deficient—”

“Hence my involvement,” said Dar.

“—and they also sued the owners of the apartment building for not providing adequate lighting.” She flipped back twenty or thirty pages. “Ah…here it is in her statement…Ms. Smiley said that bad exterior lighting and poor rental truck headlights prevented her from seeing Kodiak when he stepped out in front of the van. They wanted six hundred thousand dollars from the van rental company.”

“And another four hundred thousand from the apartment building owner,” said Dar.

“An even million,” mused Syd. “At least they knew what their friend was worth.”

Dar rubbed his chin. “Mr. Borden and Mr. Kodiak had lived at that same address for two years and were universally known as Dickie and Donnie to their neighbors, shop owners, local restaurateurs…”

“Gay?” said Syd.

Dar nodded.

“Then who was Gennie?”

“It seems that Mr. Borden…Donnie…swings both ways. Gennie Smiley was his secret girlfriend. Dickie discovered them together…there was a row that lasted three days, according to the neighbors…and then Dickie and Donnie patched things up by agreeing to move to San Francisco.”

“
Sans
Gennie,” said Syd.

“
Sans
Gennie indeed,” said Dar. “But as a gesture of goodwill, she helped them pack up the van in preparation for moving.”

“At two forty-five
A.M.
on a rainy morning?” said Syd.

Dar shrugged. “Dickie and Donnie were two months in arrears on their rent. It seems they were skipping.” He turned on one of the twenty-one-inch CAD monitors and tapped out a code. “OK, here are some of the accident-scene photos as recorded by Sergeant McKay of the Traffic Investigations Unit.” An electronic version of the black-and-white photo appeared on the large screen. And another. And another.

“Uh-oh,” said Syd.

“Uh-oh,” agreed Dar.

One photo showed Mr. Kodiak's body lying in the middle of the street about thirty feet west of the main doors of the apartment building. The body was lying facedown to the east—head toward the van—and there were visible patches of blood and brain matter spilled in both directions. Another photo showed broken glass, a single shoe, shoe scuff marks, and body scuff marks directly in front of the apartment building's main doorway. Another photograph showed continuous, nonstriated skid marks running back almost to the turn from Fountain Boulevard some 165 feet east of the impact site. In all of the photos, the van was backed east of the point of impact, its own skid marks running at least thirty feet in front of it.

“Gennie backed up when she heard a noise and thought she may have hit something,” said Dar.

“Uh-huh,” said Syd.

“Donnie was the only witness to Dickie's death,” said Dar, pointing to the thick sheaf of statements. “He said that the two of them had been arguing. When Gennie arrived, they asked her to drive around the block and come back…”

“Why?” said Syd.

“Donnie said that they didn't want to argue in front of her,” said Dar. “So she came around the block, traveling about thirty miles per hour, according to her estimate. She didn't see Dickie, who had stepped off the curb, until it was too late to stop.” Dar ran the photos across the computer screen again and then froze on the widest shot. He turned on the second monitor and tapped up a program. A three-dimensional view of the same scene appeared, but this one was computer-animated.