Darwin's Blade

5 “E is for Ticket”

“We’ve only known each other a couple of hours,” said Syd, “and already you’ve lied to me.”

Dar looked up from where he was grinding coffee beans at his kitchen counter. They had grabbed a bite to eat at the Kansas City BBQ—Syd’s suggestion, she said she’d been staring at it from the Hyatt for two days and just the sign made her hungry—and then he’d driven her up to his old warehouse building in Mission Hills. He’d parked his Land Cruiser at his spot on the open ground floor, just a huge, dark room with a maze of pillars, and they had taken the large freight elevator—the only elevator in the building—up to his sixth-floor apartment.

Now he just looked at her as she wandered through the living area between the tall bookcases that delineated areas in the loft.

“So far I’ve counted…what?…about seven thousand books,” continued Syd, “no fewer than five computers, a serious sound system with eight speakers, and eleven chessboards, but no TV. How do you watch your soaps?”

Dar smiled and spooned ground beans into the filter. “Actually, the soaps usually come to me. It’s called ‘taking statements from witnesses or victims.’”

Chief Investigator Sydney Olson nodded. “But you do have a TV somewhere? In the bedroom, maybe? Please say you do, Dar. Otherwise I’ll know I’m in the presence of the only real intellectual I’ve ever met outside of captivity.”

Dar poured water into the coffeemaker and turned it on. “There’s a TV. In one of the storage closets over there near the door.”

Syd cocked an eyebrow. “Ah…let me guess…the Super Bowl?”

“No, baseball. The occasional night game when I’m home. All of the play-offs and the Series.” He set mats on the small, round kitchen table. Bright light came in through the eight-foot windows.

“Eames chair,” said Syd, patting the bent wood and black leather chair in the corner of the living-room area where two walls of bookcases came together. She sat in it and put her feet up on the wood and leather ottoman. “It feels comfortable enough to be a real one…an original.”

“It is,” said Dar. He set two white, diner-type mugs on the tablemats and then poured coffee for both of them. “You take cream and sugar?”

Syd shook her head. “I like James Brown coffee. Black. Rich. Strong.”

“Hope this suffices,” said Dar as she reluctantly got out of the Eames chair, stretched, and came over to join him at the kitchen table.

She took a sip and made a face. “Yeah. That’s it. Mr. Brown would approve.”

“I can make a new batch. Weaker. Saner.”

“No, this is good.” She turned around to look back across the room and into the other areas of the loft that were visible. “Can I play chief investigator for a minute?”

Dar nodded.

“A real Persian carpet delineating your living area there. A real Eames chair. The Stickley dining room table and chairs look original, as do the mission-style lamps. Real artwork in every room. Is that large painting in the open area there opposite the windows a Russell Chatham?”

“Yeah,” said Dar.

“And an oil rather than a print. Chatham’s originals are selling for a pretty penny these days.”

“I bought it in Montana some years ago,” said Dar, setting his coffee down. “Before the big Chatham stampede.”

“Still,” said Syd and finished her mental inventory. “A chief investigator would have to conclude that the man who lives here has money. Wrecks an Acura NSX one day but has a spare Land Cruiser waiting for him at home.”

“Different vehicles for different purposes,” said Dar, beginning to feel irritated.

Syd seemed to sense this and turned back to her coffee. She smiled. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m guessing you’re about as interested in making money as I am.”

“Anyone who discounts the importance of money is a fool or a saint,” said Dar. “But I find the pursuit of it or the discussion of it boring as hell.”

“Okay,” said Syd. “I’m curious about the eleven chess boards. Games being played on all of them. I’m only a duffer at chess—I know the horsie from the castle thingee—but those games look like they’re master level. You have so many chess master friends drop in that you need multiple boards?”

“E-mail,” said Dar.

Syd nodded and looked around. “All right, that wall of fiction. How are those books shelved? Not alphabetically, that’s for damned sure. Not by publication date, you’ve got old volumes mixed in with new trade paperbacks.”

Dar smiled. Readers always gravitated to other readers’ bookshelves and tried to figure out the system of shelving. “It could be random,” he said. “Buy a book, read it, stick it on the shelf.”

“It could be,” agreed Syd. “But you’re not a random kind of guy.”

Dar sat silently, thinking of the chaos mathematics that had made up the bulk of his Ph.D. dissertation. Syd sat silently studying the wall of novels. Finally she muttered to herself, “Stephen King way up on the upper right. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood a couple of shelves below, still on the right. To Kill a Mockingbird on the second shelf from the bottom. East of Eden way the hell to the left over by the window. All of Hemingway’s crap—”

“Hey, watch it,” said Dar. “I love Hemingway.”

“All of Hemingway’s crap on the bottom right shelf,” finished Syd. “I’ve got it!”

“I doubt it,” said Dar, feeling his feathers ruffled again.

“The bookcase is a rough map of the United States,” said Syd. “You shelve regionally. King’s up there freezing his ass off near the ceiling in Maine. Hemingway’s down there near the floor heating vent, comfortable in Key West…”

“Cuba, actually,” said Dar. “Impressive. How do you shelve your novels?”

“I used to do it according to the relationship between the authors,” she admitted. “You know, Truman Capote right next to Harper Lee…”

“Childhood friends,” added Dar. “Little, weakling Truman was the model for Dill who visits every summer in Mockingbird.”

Syd nodded. “With the dead authors it worked all right,” she said. “I mean, I could keep Faulkner and Hemingway the hell apart, but I always had to keep moving the live ones around. I mean, one month Amy Tan’s tight with Tabitha King, and the next thing I read, they’re not talking. I was spending more time reshelving my books than I did reading, and then my work started to suffer because I was frittering away my days worrying if John Grisham and Michael Crichton were still good buddies or not…”

“You’re so full of shit,” Dar said in a friendly tone.

“Yep,” Syd agreed, and lifted her coffee mug.

Dar took a breath. He was enjoying himself and he had to remind himself that this woman was here because she was a cop, not because of his devastating charm. “My turn,” he said.

Syd nodded and sipped.

“You’re about thirty-six, thirty-seven,” he said, starting with the riskiest territory and rapidly moving on. “Law degree. Your accent’s fairly neutral, but definitely devoid of back east. A little midwestern left in the corners of your vowels. Northwestern University?”

“University of Chicago,” she said, and added. “And I’ll have you know that I’m only thirty-six. Birthday just last month.”

Dar went on. “Chief investigators for even local district attorneys are some of the best enforcement people around,” he said softly, as if to himself. “Former U.S. marshals. Former military. Former FBI.” He looked at Syd. “You were in the Bureau for what? Seven years?”

“Closer to nine,” said Syd. She got up, went to the coffeemaker, and came back to pour them both more of the thick, black stuff.

“Okay, reason for leaving…” Dar said, and stopped. He did not want to make this too personal.

“No, go ahead. You’re doing fine.”

Dar sipped coffee and said, “That glass-ceiling sexism thing. But I thought the Bureau was getting better.”

Syd nodded. “They’re working on it. In ten more years, I could have been as high as a real FBI person could get—right under the political crony or career pencil-pusher that some president appoints as director.”

“Then why did you leave…” Dar began, and then stopped. He thought about the nine-millimeter semi-auto on her hip and the quick-release holster. “Ahhh, you enjoy enforcement more than…”

“Investigation,” finished Syd. “Correct. And the Bureau is, after all, about ninety-eight percent investigation.”

Dar rubbed his cheek. “Sure. And as the state’s attorney’s chief investigator, you get to investigate to your heart’s content and then go kick the door in when it comes time.”

Syd gave him a dazzling smile. “And then I get to kick the felons who were hiding behind that door.”

“You do a lot of that?”

Sydney Olson’s smile faded but did not disappear. “Enough to keep me in shape.”

“And you also get to run interagency task forces like Operation SouthCal Clean Sweep,” said Dar.

Her smile disappeared instantly. “Yes,” she said. “And I’d be willing to bet that you and I share the same opinion of committees and task forces.”

“Darwin’s Fifth Law,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Any organism’s intelligence decreases in direct proportion to the number of heads it has,” said Dar.

Syd finished her coffee, set the mug carefully on the mat, nodded, and said, “Is this Charles Darwin’s law or Dr. Darwin Minor’s law?”

“I don’t think that Charles ever had to sit on a committee or report to a task force,” said Dar. “He just sailed around on the Beagle, getting a tan while ogling finches and tortoises.”

“What are the rest of your laws?”

“We’ll probably stumble across them as we go along,” said Dar.

“Are we going to be going along?”

Dar opened his hands. “I’m just trying to find this movie’s plot. So far it’s fairly formulaic. You’re setting me up as bait, hoping that the Alliance will sic more mafia killers on me. But you have to protect me. That must mean you’ll be staying within sight twenty-four hours a day. Good plot.” He looked around his living room and in toward the dining area. “Not sure where you’ll sleep, but we’ll think of something.”

Syd rubbed her brow. “In your dreams. Darwin. The San Diego PD will be sending extra patrols by at night. I was supposed to take a look at your living arrangements and give a…quote…security-wise sitrep…end quote, to Dickweed.”

“And?” said Dar.

Syd smiled again. “I can happily report that you live in an almost abandoned warehouse where only a few units have been converted to condos or lofts. There’s no security on the stairways…unless you count sleeping migrant winos as guards. There’s little light and zero security on the ground floor where you park your Sherman tank of a sport utility vehicle. Your door’s all right—reinforced, with three good locks and a police bar—but these windows are a nightmare. A blind sniper using a rusted Springfield without a scope could take you out. No drapes. No shades. No curtains. Are you a closet exhibitionist, Dar?”

“I like good views.” He stood and looked out the kitchen window. “From up here you can see the bay, the airport, Point Loma, Sea World…” He trailed off, realizing how unconvincing he sounded.

Sydney joined him at the window. He caught a faint whiff of some scent she was wearing. It was nice—more like the woodsy smell of the forest near his cabin after a rain than heavy perfume.

“It is a beautiful view,” she said. “I need to call a cab and get back to the Hyatt so I can make some phone calls.”

“I’ll drive you…”

“The hell you will,” said Syd. “If this is going to be a buddies movie, you’ve got to shelve the chivalry right up front.” She used the kitchen phone to call a cab.

“I thought you weren’t going to be protecting me twenty-four hours a day,” said Dar. “How can it be a buddies movie?”

Syd patted him consolingly on the shoulder. “If the snipers don’t get you and the Russian mafia doesn’t cut your throat in that killing ground you call a parking area and the crackheads don’t kill you just for the hell of it, then phone me the next time Stewart Investigations calls you out on an interesting case. Officially we’ll be looking for patterns of collision and accident insurance fraud.”

“Unofficially?” said Dar.

“Well, I guess there is no ‘unofficially,’” said Syd, hitching up her heavy purse and walking to the door. “Dickweed’s given me some office space in the courthouse. I’d officially appreciate it if you’d drop in there tomorrow morning so we can decide how we’re going to check through your case files.” She jotted her number on a card. “And maybe I’ll get a glimpse of something that will explain why our late friends in the former Mercedes thought you were worth taking out.”

“They probably confused me with some other guy who owns an NSX and didn’t pay his gambling debts at the MGM Grand,” said Dar.

“Probably,” said Syd, turning back toward him and the apartment as they got to the door. He unlatched it. “How many books do you have in here, Dr. Minor?”

Dar shrugged. “I quit counting after six thousand.”

“I probably owned that many once,” said Syd. “But I gave them all away when I became a chief investigator. Travel light, that’s my motto.” She stepped into the hallway and pointed a finger at him. “I’m serious about you dropping in at the office tomorrow and then calling me as soon as you get a good case call.” She handed him one of her cards with her Sacramento office number written on it and her pager number. The San Diego courthouse office number was penciled in.

“Sure,” said Dar, studying her card. It was an expensive one but did not give a home phone number. “But remember, you asked for it.” He looked up. She had already walked away and disappeared out of sight around the bend in the corridor, heading for the freight elevator. Her soft-soled shoes had made almost no noise on the concrete floor.

“You asked for it,” Dar said again and went back into his loft.

“Olson here,” answered her sleepy, almost drugged-sounding voice after the fifth ring.

“Rise and shine, Chief Investigator,” said Dar.

“Who is this?” Sydney’s sleepy voice ran the last two syllables together.

“How soon we forget,” said Dar. “It’s one forty-nine A.M. You said you wanted to come the next time I was called out on a case. I’m dressed and ready to go. I’ll give you five whole minutes before I pick you up in front of the Hyatt.”

There was a pause. Dar could hear her breathing softly. “Dar…you remember that I said an interesting insurance case. If this is some jackknifed eighteen-wheeler out on I-5—”

“Well, you know, Chief Investigator Olson,” said Dar, “you never really know if something’s interesting until you go look and see. But Larry’s going, too, and he rarely asks me to meet him at a site.”

“Okay, okay,” mumbled Syd. “I’ll be outside in five minutes.”

“Four minutes now,” Dar said, and hung up.

The highways were relatively empty as Dar took surface streets over to the 5 and then north past La Jolla.

“Have you heard of La Jolla Joya?” said Dar as the washes of light from the sodium vapor highway lights moved across his windshield and both their faces.

“Sounds like a stripper’s stage name,” said Syd, still rubbing her cheeks to wake up.

“Yes,” said Dar, “but actually it’s the San Diego area’s newest rock concert venue. It’s in the hills west of the highway up here…actually it’s closer to Del Mar, but I guess the Del Mar Joya didn’t have quite the same ring.”

“It doesn’t have much of a ring as it is,” said Syd. Her voice carried the fatigue of someone who had been working eighteen-hour days.

“True. But that’s where we’re headed. Concert’s probably over by now, but there’s at least one dead body there.”

“Stabbing?” said Syd. “Some Hell’s Angels thing like Altamont? Or just someone crushed when the herd stampeded?”

Dar grinned despite himself. “We wouldn’t get called for either of those. See, the city ordinances kept cracking down on rock concerts at their usual stadiums and venues—especially the heavy-metal ones—and—”

“Who’s headlining tonight?” she interrupted.

“Metallica,” said Dar.

“Oh, goody,” said Syd with precisely the same enthusiasm as someone who’s just been told he has to take a barium enema.

“Anyway,” continued Dar, “a would-be superpromoter bought these hundred and sixty-two acres of scrub gully and fenced it all in. It’s sort of an arroyo, plenty of room for parking out front, stage on the flat area, and a gentle hill running up until it’s just trees and cliffs. He put in lights, stage, sound towers, and three thousand seats, and there’s a nice grassy hillside for umpty-thousand others who want to sit on blankets or whatever. They added a lower fence to keep people off the back twenty acres or so, the woods, after their first concert. Some older patrons complained of fornication going on back in the darkness.”

“Which the complainers would have to have sought out with night-vision goggles in order to see,” said Syd.

“Yeah. But the promoter thought it would still be safer to separate the audience area from the woods and the rock cliffs. That’s why Larry and Trudy’s client called them.”

“They’re on retainer for the promoter?”

“No.”

“For the insurance company that covers the concert liability?”

“No.”

“For Metallica?”

“No.”

“I give up,” said Syd. “Whose ass are we rushing out to cover?”

“The fence company’s,” said Dar.

Most of the concert patrons were leaving as Dar drove the Land Cruiser up the dusty ditch against the traffic flow to get to the concert area. Metallica had long since bussed itself to wherever Metallica dwells when not on stage, but a few score dazed, sleepy, and doped fans still milled around in front of what had been the bandstand. Dar saw the emergency lights at the far rear of the arroyo and headed that way. A California Highway Patrol officer stopped them at a gate in the low fence that separated the grassy seating area from the fornication woods, looked over their credentials in the beam of his six-battery flashlight, and then waved them through.

The emergency vehicles—several CHP cars with their flashers going, two ambulances, a sheriff’s car, two tow trucks, and a full fire truck—were gathered at the narrow end of the V of the arroyo. Douglas firs rose thirty and forty feet here, hiding the stars and the top of the cliffs. In the cone of the cruiser spotlights and emergency lights, Dar could see the smashed remnants of an upside-down pickup truck, an older Ford 250 from the looks of it. He parked the Cruiser, pulled a powerful flashlight from the backseat, and he and Syd walked toward the lights, identifying themselves twice more to get past groups of officious cops and bands of yellow accident-scene tape.

Lawrence walked over to them.

“Damn,” said Dar. “How’d you beat me here?”

Lawrence smirked under his mustache. “Not so hot now without your NSX, are you?”

“Syd, you remember Larry Stewart from this morning’s meeting?” said Dar.

“Lawrence,” said Lawrence. “Good evening, Ms. Olson.”

“Hi, Lawrence,” said Syd. “What do we have here?”

Lawrence blinked in happy surprise for a moment and then said, “Belaboring the obvious, one hellaciously smashed Ford F 250. Driver dead. Was ejected through the windshield and thrown approximately eighty-three feet. I paced it off, so the number’s not exact.” He pointed his own flashlight toward a mob of people standing and crouching around the corpse of a man at the base of a tree.

“He drove into the cliff face in the dark?” said Syd.

Lawrence shook his head. Suddenly a CHP officer joined them.

“Sergeant Cameron,” said Dar, surprised. “You’re far from home tonight.”

“Well, if it isn’t the Mercedes-killer,” said Cameron to Dar. He touched his cap in Syd’s direction. “Howdy, Ms. Olson. Haven’t seen you since the L.A. task force meeting last month.” Cameron hooked his thumbs in his belt until the leather creaked. “Yeah, well, I was moonlighting here—working crowd security—and just as the concert was ending, someone found this mess.”

“Anyone hear it happen?” asked Dar.

Cameron shook his head. “But that doesn’t mean much. During a Metallica concert, with those speakers and amplifiers cranked up, you could set off a Hiroshima-sized tactical nuke back here and nobody would’ve heard it.”

“Alcohol?” said Lawrence.

“We can see about ten empty beer cans in the smashed passenger compartment of the pickup,” said Cameron. “There are another eight or nine thrown free…like the driver.”

“Could he have driven into the cliff wall?” asked Syd.

Lawrence and Sergeant Cameron both shook their heads at the same time. “See how the truck is mashed down?” said Lawrence. “The thing fell from up there.”

“It drove over the cliff?” said Syd. “From above?”

“It would have to have backed over to end up in this position,” said Dar. “That’s why the driver was thrown west…toward the concert. The truck landed tail first—you can see how it crumpled—and ejected the driver like a cork out of a champagne bottle before the cab crushed.”

Sydney Olson walked closer to the crushed pickup truck and watched as an emergency crew finished attaching two cables from the two tow trucks to the undercarriage. “Stand back,” called one of the CHP officers, “we’re gonna lift it.”

“You have pictures?” Dar asked Lawrence.

Lawrence nodded and patted his Nikon. “This is going to be the interesting part,” he said very softly.

“What is going to be…” Syd began, and then said. “Oh, my God.”

Beneath the wreckage of the pickup truck was the body of a second man. His head and right arm and right shoulder had been smashed almost flat. His left arm was broken in a compound fracture that looked as if it had happened before the flattening. He was wearing a T-shirt but was naked from the waist down—or rather, his pants were bunched around his ankles at the top of his work boots. A dozen searchlights and flashlights were trained on the corpse and Sydney Olson said, “Oh, my God” again.

The man’s legs and exposed torso were scratched in a hundred places. There was a folding knife open and protruding from his thigh. The wound had bled heavily. The man had the end of a length of clothesline tied clumsily around his waist and there must have been a hundred more feet of the clothesline lying on and around the body. Worst of all, three feet of a thick branch—a holly branch—protruded from the corpse’s rectum.

“Yes,” said Dar. “Interesting.”

Photographs and measurements were taken. The police officers and rescue workers milled and discussed, discussed and milled. The medical examiner and a county coroner both pronounced the man dead. This was a relief to some of the onlookers. Debates raged as to how exactly this accident had played itself out.

“No one has a fucking clue,” whispered Sergeant Cameron.

“This is crazy,” said Syd. “Like some satanic cult thing.”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Dar. He went over to talk to the fire fighters. Five minutes later they had moved the long fire-truck ladder and extended it to the top of the cliff, invisible through the branches to the onlookers below. Darwin, Lawrence, and two of the CHP officers clambered up the ladder with powerful flashlights. Five minutes after that, they scrambled down the ladder—all except for Dar, who stayed twenty-five feet up and waved at the fireman at the controls. The ladder swiveled into the thick tree branches, taking Dar with it, and he ducked the heavier boughs and shined his flashlight back and forth.

“Here,” he called at last.

Syd squinted up, but could not make out what Dar was touching and then photographing. Lawrence was looking through small binoculars he had pulled from a flap pocket of his safari shirt.

“What is it?” asked Syd.

“It’s the guy’s underpants caught on a branch,” said Lawrence. “Sorry,” he added, offering her the binoculars. “Want to look?”

“No, thanks.”

Fifteen minutes later, the discussions were over, the bodies were being put in body bags and carried by stretcher to separate ambulances, and everyone seemed satisfied. Lawrence walked back to the Land Cruiser with Dar and Syd. His Isuzu Trooper was parked just beyond Dar’s truck.

“All right,” said Sydney Olson, sounding slightly irritated. “I don’t get it. I couldn’t hear you talking to the officers. What the hell happened here?”

Both men stopped walking and started talking at the same time. “Go ahead,” said Dar. “You tell the first part.”

Lawrence nodded. His large hands opened and gestured as he started the explanation. “Okay, basically, these two guys drank their eighteen or twenty cans of beer and tried to crash the concert. No tickets, but they knew about an old fire road and decided they could come in the back way after dark. But the back way is fenced by our client. A ten-foot-high wooden fence up there.”

Syd stared back toward the cliff and the darkness. They were lifting the smashed pickup onto a flatbed truck now.

“They accidentally drove through the fence?” she said, her voice thin.

“Uh-uh,” said Lawrence, shaking his head. “They backed the pickup right against the fence and the driver—a skinnier guy—boosted his pal over. But it was real dark up there, and when the bigger guy went over, he found that it was a thirty-foot fall. So he came crashing down through those tree branches…”

“And that killed him?” said Syd.

Lawrence shook his head again. “Naw, he hit a big branch about forty feet up. That was probably when he broke his arm. The branch had snagged him by his undershorts and part of his belt.”

“He still didn’t realize how high he was,” added Dar. “Looking down in the dark, he could see the tops of the shorter trees and probably thought they were bushes that would break his fall.”

“So he cut himself out of his shorts,” said Lawrence.

“And fell another twenty feet,” said Syd.

“Yeah,” said Lawrence.

“But that didn’t kill him,” said Sydney, speaking in a tone that suggested she now knew that she was the straight man.

“Nope,” said Lawrence. “That just scratched him up something terrible as he fell through the branches. Plus that was also when his own knife was jammed three inches into his thigh and that holly branch got rammed up his ass. Pardon my French.”

“And then what?” said Syd.

“Dar, you figured it out first,” said Lawrence. “Why don’t you tell the finale.”

Dar shrugged. “There’s not much more. The driver could hear his friend crying in agony down there. He realized what a drop it must have been. The big guy’s screams of pain must have been drowned out somewhat by the Metallica concert, but the driver knew he had to do something.”

“So he…” prompted Syd.

“So he took the length of old clothesline that was lying in the back of the pickup, threw it down to his friend, and told him to tie it securely around his waist,” said Dar. “That’s my guess. Actually, it wouldn’t have been that easy or succinct. There would have been a lot of drunken shouting and cursing and crying going on, but the bigger guy wrapped the line around his middle twice and tied it off with a granny knot, while the skinny guy tied the other end of the rope securely to the rear bumper of the F250.”

“And then…” said Syd.

Dar tilted his head as if the rest was obvious. It was. “Well, our skinny driver was very drunk and very rattled. He accidentally put the truck in reverse, gunned it, drove backwards ten feet through our client’s high fence—the tire tracks up there speak for themselves—and dropped backwards forty-some feet onto his buddy, catapulting himself eighty-five feet out through the windshield in the process.”

“E-mail me your report in the morning and I’ll write the official version and send it to our client,” said Lawrence.

“I’ll have my analysis to you by ten A.M.,” said Dar.

Sydney shook her head. “You do this for a living?”