A Snitch in Time

Donald Moffitt

Time travel, even with limitations, could be very useful in law enforcement. Or could it?

* * * *

The station house was quiet at that hour. A gray dawn was just beginning to creep around the edges of the window shades, but otherwise the only light in the room came from the goose-necked desk lamp that was casting a yellow pool of illumination on the case file in front of him.

Lieutenant Francis Patrick Delehanty drained the last cold dregs of his coffee and tossed the paper cup in his wastebasket to join its fourteen predecessors. He lit another stale cigarette, crumpled the empty pack, and stared wearily at the case file.

There wasn’t much in it. Most of the evidence had disappeared thirty years ago. The doorknob rattled and the night duty officer, an old cop named Flaherty, poked his head in. “Morning, Lieutenant. You’re kinda early, ain’tcha? The morning shift isn’t due till...”

He stopped as he saw all the old yellowing reports spread out across the desk. “You pulled another all-nighter, din’t you, Lieutenant?” he said reprovingly.

“My retirement’s only ten days away,” Delehanty said. “I promised myself I’d get the bastard before I left.”

“The Roast Beef Slasher?”

“Don’t call him that!” Delehanty said sharp-ly. Then, at the hurt look on Flaherty’s face, “Sorry, Tim. I guess I’m just edgy.”

“Give it up, Lieutenant. They ain’t caught the guy in the last thirty years, they ain’t gonna catch him in the next ten days. Leave it to one of the young hot shots. Maybe something’ll come in that’ll reopen the file. Take up golf. Go fishing. Enjoy your retirement.”

“Not while that bastard is still walking around, laughing at us! The cold case squad worked on it for ten years, before the department told them to drop it. The rest of the caseload was suffering, the chief said. It was affecting the homicide clearance rate. Too much time was being wasted on a case that was going nowhere.”

Flaherty said placatingly, “You could take the crime book home with you. A lot of retired cops do that with an old inactive file that bugs them. You know, make it a kind of hobby, keep you occupied.”

Delehanty slammed a fist down on the desk, making Flaherty jump. “Hobby is it? The hell with that! I’m going to nail the son of a bitch while I’m still a cop!”

The deputy prosecutor’s name was Jarrett. He was a neat, contained man in his forties with an advanced case of male pattern baldness and a crop of blue stubble starting to show through what was probably his second shave of the day. Delehanty had done business with him before. They were on pretty good terms.

“I’m not asking for your blessing,” Delehanty said. “I’m just sort of, you know, sounding you out to get the lay of the land.”

Jarrett pursed thin lips. “It could be complicated,” he said. “There’s connection of evidence. That’s different from connection of inference. There’s all sorts of time-travel laws. There’s your own liability in two different jurisdictions in two different realities. Why don’t you tell me what exactly we’re talking about?”

“Listen, you remember the slasher case from about thirty years ago involving an assistant D. A. named Vaccaro?”

Jarrett thought a moment. “It was before my time, but yeah.”

“The press called him the Roast Beef Slasher. Forensics determined that the weapon in the Vaccaro murder and the related cases was something like a serrated steak knife with a two-pronged tip. His signature was a slice of roast beef left at the scene. To top it off, DNA analysis showed bovine blood mixed in with the victim’s, like the knife hadn’t been cleaned. Vaccaro was working at his desk, pulling an all-nighter, when he was killed. He was on to something, and the killer knew it. Unfortunately, Vaccaro’d been blabbing to the press. He had something that would nail one of the suspects, but he wouldn’t say what it was, even to the detectives working the case—said he’d tell them when he was ready for them to make an arrest. But he never got to tell them. Whatever it was, it was in the murder book, and half of that was ripped out, including all the interview transcripts.”

“What’s your interest in this, Lieutenant? Thirty years ago you would hardly have been a member of the homicide squad working the case.”

Delehanty nodded. “I was just a rookie patrolman. But I was the one who walked in on the murder scene. I’ll never forget it. There was blood everywhere. I sounded the alarm and they searched the building. But the killer was gone. With the transcript of his own interrogation. He must’ve slipped up somehow, and Vaccaro stumbled onto some contradiction in his alibi.”

“So Vaccaro had a suspect?”

Delehanty clamped his jaw tight. “That’s what they said. I sweat bullets to make the detective squad. It took me four years. Another two years to make lead investigator. I reworked all the interviews. But nada. At that point nothing would have worked but an eyewitness. I needed a snitch.”

Jarrett shook his head. “And now, after all these years, you propose to be your own snitch?”

“That’s all I’ve got,” Delehanty growled. “It’ll work. Look, we’ve got a T.O.D. I pop up just before. I’ll give myself a safety margin, okay? I’m wired for sound. I’m wired for sight—three or four little mini-cams stuck to the buttons on my uniform. I catch him in the act, just as he’s raising the knife. I’m an eyewitness, and I’ve got video backup that even a defense attorney from hell couldn’t refute.”

Jarrett made a tent out of his fingertips. “Time travel’s expensive, Lieutenant. The department’s not going to go for it by a long shot. It would open a huge can of worms.”

Delehanty knew he was losing him. “I’ll pay for it myself,” he said stubbornly. “I’ve got my retirement savings. And my pension.”

“You could lose both if this blows up. Can you afford that?”

“It won’t blow up.”

Jarrett leaned forward. “Have you thought this through, Lieutenant? You see a murder in progress. You’re a cop. Do you try to stop it? But you’re not a cop in that timeline, are you? Your lieutenant’s badge is no good there. Are you acting extra-legally? The only badge around belongs to a rookie cop named Delehanty who doesn’t have a clue about what’s going down. And what if you don’t try to stop it? Are you culpable? In that timeline or this one?”

Delehanty tried to speak, but Jarrett went on relentlessly.

“And then what? Say you do stop the murder. You come back to the here and now as a witness to a murder attempt that took place elsewhen.”

Delehanty stood up, his face turning livid. “You can go to hell, Jarrett!” he said.

The client waiting room at Alternatives Associates was small, spare, and brightly lit. There was a low coffee table displaying an assortment of the latest magazines, and an antique oak sideboard bearing a steaming coffeepot and a tray of pastries.

Delehanty had been sitting there for over an hour, his temper steadily rising. The tech assigned to him, a tall, skinny fellow with a prominent Adam’s apple who had introduced himself as Roy Hendricks, had popped in several times to offer apologies and explanations in an incomprehensible geek patois with phrases like “O-region” and “CTC harmonic.”

He shifted uncomfortably on the couch. He was wearing the parade uniform that he trotted out every now and then for public events, and it had grown a little tight over the years. The tiny cameras that festooned his chest were almost invisible unless you looked closely at the buttons. His service pistol, a 9mm Glock, was in a holster at his hip, and he had a tiny Beretta backup gun concealed in one sock. He wished he had a cigarette, but people didn’t do that anymore.

He looked up as the door opened and Hendricks stuck his head in, a self-satisfied expression on his face. “We’ve got the CTC tunnel anchored at the destination site,” he said. “It’s just about where you want it. We can activate the site and put you through any time you’re ready.”

Delehanty got to his feet. “What do you mean, ‘just about?’” he rumbled dangerously.

“We got lucky. Within a minute or two of where you wanted.”

“I thought you fellows could scan back and forth till you pinpointed it,” Delehanty said.

“Uh, that’s not exactly the way it works,” Hendricks said. “Particularly with trips to the more recent past. It’s a little hard to explain in layman’s terms.”

Delehanty held on to his temper. “You’d better show me,” he said.

Hendricks led the way to a yawning space that once might have been an auditorium for corporate sales meetings. The slightly sloping floor was dotted with workstations manned, or rather womaned, by green-smocked technicians tending consoles. One long wall was crowded with oversize monitor screens, most of them blank or showing only flickering colors. At spaced intervals was a row of enclosed booths connected to heavy-duty cables. Half-way down the hall Delehanty could see a man in a Roman centurion’s costume, complete with helmet, sword, and shield, being ushered into a booth by a technician. He was surrounded by a covey of handlers who were seeing him off, competing to give him last-minute instructions.

“The Crucifixion’s a popular site,” Hendricks explained.

He led Delehanty over to one of the nearer booths. The monitor screen behind it showed a horrifying scene, frozen in time.

Delehanty’s heart stopped. The scene was familiar, yet not familiar. It was Vaccaro’s off ice as he had seen it that night thirty years ago. But Vaccaro was not yet the bloody corpse he had walked in on. He was sitting behind his desk, partially obscured by the huge man in the disposable plastic raincoat who was pinning him against his chair with one hand and positioning the other hand, the one with the knife in it, sideways to slash him across the throat. The raincoat evidently was what he used for his splatter suit.

“That’s cutting it too close,” Delehanty said. “I need another ten, fifteen seconds to stop him, yell a warning, tackle him if I have to.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you. The next resonance point isn’t till four days earlier.”

“That’s no good. I need to catch him in the act.”

“What about four days later?” Hendricks said helpfully. “I’ve got another harmonic of the fundamental then that might work.”

Delehanty didn’t know what he was talking about, but he could understand the “four days later.”

Almost, he was tempted, but he shook it off. He remembered the ambiguous interview with Jarrett. “Forget it. Even if I could track the guy down four days later, cold trail and all, the evidence would be even more tainted than simple chain of evidence from a split-off reality. Vaccaro’s dead in this timeline. I’m not going to leave a corpse in that one.”

“I’m trying to explain . . .”

“Try harder.”

Hendricks took a deep breath. “Do you know anything about music, Lieutenant?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Just bear with me.” The tech’s tone was condescending, and Delehanty held his resentment in check.

He considered the question. “I tried out for trumpet in my high school band. I wasn’t any good at it.”

“But you knew what the valves were for?”

“I guess. Where is this going?”

“I’ll try an analogy. Once upon a time brass instruments didn’t have valves. You could only play the harmonics of the fundamental, whatever that happened to be. There were F horns, E flat horns, and so forth. Down at the bottom of the scale, the notes you could play were far apart. A low F, say, then the C a fifth above, then nothing but another F an octave above the original. But as you get higher in the scale, the notes get closer and closer together. When you get to the upper register, you’ve got something close to a diatonic scale, with only a few missing notes. Even so, if a composer wanted a horn solo or harmonies that were outside the box, he might score the piece for two pairs of horns, say one pair in F and one pair in E flat. That way they could toss the tune between them. Do you follow me so far?”

“Sort of.” That wasn’t quite true, but Delehanty wanted Hendricks to get to the point.

“There was also something called a crook, a lengthening piece that the player could insert to change the key of the horn itself, but we don’t need to go into that.”

“Praise all the saints,” Delehanty muttered, rolling his eyes ceilingward, but Hendricks never noticed, and sailed blithely on.

“The point I’m trying to make is that there’s an analogous phenomenon in time travel. We can’t travel to the very near past—say a year or two—at all. We don’t know why. Perhaps the quantum tunneling would get too crowded. Perhaps the Universe would have trouble with causality and would be unable to split. Thirty years is beginning to be within the practical limit. A hundred years is even better. Two hundred is better still. By the time you get to two thousand—” He nodded toward the centurion, who was waving good-bye to his friends. “—there’s no problem at all.”

Delehanty was starting to get interested in spite of himself. He could imagine the chaos that would ensue if there were thousands of people clamoring to go back in time a day or a week to play the stock market, or a year or two to repair a romance or reverse a bad business decision, not understanding that the benefits would go, not to them, but to an alternate self in an alternate universe that they themselves had created just by going back in time.

“I guess,” he said slowly, “this resonance gizmo is a good thing. Like what the case load in police work would turn into if every petty burglary, every stolen car, could be investigated by going back a day to verify the complaint. The whole system would break down.”

Hendricks nodded approvingly. “You’ve got it, Lieutenant. It’s amazing, the number of supposedly intelligent people who don’t get it. Just the other day I had the CEO of a banking conglomerate come in, wanting to reverse a decision he’d made the day before. I couldn’t make him understand that in this world he was stuck with his decision. He probably wouldn’t have been able to reverse it in his alternative world either. His previous self would probably get him arrested as an imposter.”

Delehanty’s eyes went to the suspended image on the wall monitor. Maybe he’d have enough time if he moved fast. He’d materialize just behind the killer. The knife was still poised, its deadly arc not yet begun. The man would be startled by his sudden appearance. He’d begin to turn around. Maybe he’d be able to snap the cuffs on him before he realized what was happening.

He turned to Hendricks. “Okay, Roy,” he said. “Ship me to the past.”

It was hot and stuffy in the booth, and he fidgeted while Hendricks fiddled interminably with a hand-held keyboard. He loosened the Glock in its holster, unclipped the handcuffs from his belt, and planned his moves. Finally Hendricks gave him a thumbs up through the glass and stabbed theatrically at the keys.

It still caught him by surprise. Suddenly he was in the picture he’d just been staring at. A slight difference in floor levels made him stumble. The puff of warm air must have warned the killer. Impossibly quick for his bulk, the man in the plastic raincoat whirled around and lunged just as Delehanty was yelling, “Freeze!”

He swung the heavy handcuffs left-handed and rapped the man across the knuckles to deflect the knife. The momentum of the thrust carried the knife sideways to swipe Delehanty’s other hand, making him drop the gun.

Then the man, still charging, slammed bodily into Delehanty and knocked him to the floor. Delehanty found himself helpless on his back, the Glock out of reach, while his assailant drew back the serrated blade for a slash across the throat.

Blindly, he reached for the backup gun hidden in his sock. It was a tiny Beretta, smaller than the palm of his hand, but it packed a .25 caliber wallop. He had taken it from a drug dealer years ago—or rather years from now—but he had never used it before. His hand was slippery with his own blood, but he managed to clamp his fingers convulsively around the grip and get a thick finger through the trigger guard. There wasn’t time to aim. He swung the pistol up and snapped off three quick shots in succession.

The man toppled in slow motion, pinning him down with dead weight. The knife clattered to the f loor. Delehanty waited for a moment, getting his breath back, then rolled the body off him and struggled shakily to his feet.

Behind the desk, Vaccaro was staring at him, his eyes huge in an ashen face. “Is he . . .”

“As a doornail,” Delehanty said. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Vaccaro.”

“Is it . . .”

“The Roast Beef Slasher,” Delehanty said. “None other.”

His hand was dripping blood and hurt like hell, but all the fingers seemed to be working all right.

Vaccaro was getting his composure back. His eyes took in Delehanty’s uniform and badge. Uniforms hadn’t changed much in thirty years, but the badge number might not have made sense.

“You look familiar, Lieutenant,” Vaccaro said. “Have I met you before?”

Delehanty didn’t answer. He knew what was going to happen next.

The door burst open and his younger self rushed in, his gun drawn.

That was a little different. He hadn’t drawn his gun back then, and he hadn’t investigated Vaccaro’s off ice till some minutes from what was now, because he hadn’t heard any gunshots. The killer was gone. In this here and now, the Universe had already begun to split. Delehanty began to understand on a more visceral level what Hendricks had been saying during his preliminary briefing when he’d been droning on about the Universe growing another branch or something. He remembered Hendricks’s little joke: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

The young Delehanty was standing over the corpse, his gun still drawn. Delehanty mentally nodded his approval. He’d always been a careful cop.

“Holy mother of God!” the young Delehanty said, leaning forward to inspect the wounds. There were three closely spaced bullet holes in the center of the chest. Blood had smeared the reverse side of the transparent raincoat the slasher had donned to protect his clothes.

He turned his attention to his older incarnation, his brow furrowing. Delehanty saw that he still hadn’t put away the gun. Now he was taking in Delehanty’s uniform and badge number, and, with a deepening frown, studying Delehanty’s face.

“Yeah, that’s right, I’m you,” Delehanty said. “Thirty years later.”

A conflict between disbelief and recognition was going on in young Delehanty’s face, a conflict that recognition finally won. But his voice was neutral as he said, “You’d better hand over the gun, Lieutenant.”

Delehanty nodded. “We always went by the book.”

He found a plastic evidence bag in his pocket, sealed the blood-soaked Beretta in it, and handed it over.

His younger self seemed to relax then. He holstered his own gun and said, “You mean that thirty years from now, I’ve still only made lieutenant?”

Delehanty glanced at the corpse. “I was held back because I made a nuisance of myself over the Roast Beef Slasher. You’ll do better.” He forced himself to keep any pain out of his voice as he added, “And by the way, you can stop having second thoughts and marry Mary Margaret. You won’t be sorry.”

The color was returning to Vaccaro’s face. In a voice that was still shaky, he said, “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Time travel,” Delehanty said. “Time travel is going on.”

He could see by the uncomprehending expression on Vaccaro’s face that the assistant D.A. didn’t have the faintest notion of what he was talking about. He might have noticed the resemblance between the two cops in front of him, but he probably assumed that they were family—father and son or perhaps uncle and nephew. There was a lot of that in the department.

Vaccaro remembered that he was supposed to be in charge and reached for the phone. “I better get someone from homicide in here right away. And someone from the M.E.’s off ice. And a forensics team.”

He paused to look at Delehanty’s lieutenant’s uniform. “And probably it’d be a good idea to get Internal Affairs involved at the start. In the end they’ll be the ones who determine if it was a good shoot.”

Delehanty spread an interposing hand over the phone. “Not just yet, mister D. A. We’ve got some talking to do first.”

It had been over an hour since Delehanty had shot the Slasher. The corpse was still sprawled in front of Vaccaro’s desk. They’d all been careful not to touch it. The day shift wasn’t due to arrive for some time yet, but they couldn’t keep things on hold much longer.

Vaccaro poured the three of them another drink from the bottle of rye he’d produced from his bottom desk drawer. “So you’re him?” he said to Delehanty for about the twentieth time.

“Yeah, and you’re dead,” Delehanty said. “I know it’s hard to grasp. I didn’t arrive till too late. They never caught the so-called Roast Beef Slasher.”

“I can tell you who he is,” Vaccaro said. He referred to the papers spread across his desk. Delehanty recognized some of them. They came from the same case file he’d been poring over some thirty years in the future, only now they weren’t brittle with age.

“His name’s Roderick Chombly. He’s head carver at an upscale steak house called the Bon Boeuf. You know, one of those expense account places with a stainless steel cart that rolls up to your table and a snooty guy in a white chef’s hat carves to your order. Maybe you know it.” He gave Delehanty a questioning look. “Or maybe it doesn’t exist thirty years from now.”

“It’s still there,” Delehanty said.

“I was going to nail him in the morning,” Vaccaro said ruefully. “I graphed all the alibis and finally found the contradiction that Homicide needed to break him and his cosuspects down.”

“Co-suspects?” Delehanty said, his interest tweaked.

“Yeah. Some of the kitchen help at Bon Boeuf used to go out after hours and drink the night away together. Six or seven of them. You know, a couple of line cooks, a dishwasher, one of the runners, a bus boy—like that. Half of them were illegals. The high and mighty carver wasn’t too proud to go out drinking with them once in a while. We questioned all of them. Routine. You know that. Chombly must have scared the hell out of them. Told them that the cops were going to pin the Slasher murders on one of them, they didn’t care who. That they all had to stick together, give each other mutual alibis, or one of them would go down. The illegals were especially vulnerable. So were the guys with the prison tattoos. They didn’t want to be looked at twice.”

Delehanty nodded. “I get the picture.”

“Chombly said he’d help. Must have coached them to a fare-thee-well for the dates of every one of the murders. He must have graphed them himself. So they all alibied each other. And of course Chombly put himself in the mix.”

That explained to Delehanty why he had never been able to figure it out. There were too many missing pages in the murder book. He’d had to try to reconstruct it from the detectives’ original notes when they still existed, assemble individual reports that made an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.

“The thing was, all the other interviewees had a second, legitimate, alibi for at least some of the murders, and ironically, police work could verify those. But all of Chombly’s alibis depended on him being out drinking with the group. Do the math. It was a slam dunk.”

“You had bigger fish to fry,” Delehanty said. “My reconstruction showed that you were looking at Bon Boeuf’s owner at the time, a guy named Ottorino. He was mob connected. He ended up with cement overshoes a few years from now.”

“He was a natural suspect,” Vaccaro agreed. “The first victim was a restaurant critic who panned Bon Boeuf. It was a really vicious review. It got a lot of play. And business fell off. At first the murder was thought to be mob related. But then there was another murder with the same M.O.—that media hippie who made such a big splash with his vegetarian cookbook, Bum Steer. Said he was crusading on behalf of innocent animals. He was found with a slice of roast beef in his mouth. That got the media’s attention. Next one was a woman. The one with a cooking show called ‘Mom’s Kitchen.’ Made fun of what she called snobbish cuisine, but didn’t mention Bon Boeuf by name. The roast beef in her mouth was garnished with truffles. By then we were investigating every steakhouse in town. What narrowed it down was the victim from the expense account crowd who always made a big deal out of ordering the house salad and poking fun at his carnivorous peers. He wasn’t anybody important, and he didn’t affect the bottom line. That made the motive more personal.”

“Well, you got your man,” Delehanty said. “And you’re alive.”

“It would have been nice to have gotten a trial out of it,” Vaccaro said wistfully.

“And you,” Delehanty said to his younger counterpart, “are going to be the hero cop. It’ll be your prints they find on the Beretta, after all. You brought down a killer. You saved the life of the assistant D. A.—your career’s all roses from here on out. Thirty years from now, you’ll be an assistant chief.”

“And what do you get out of it, Lieutenant?” Vaccaro said.

“I get to close my case,” Delehanty said. “That piece of garbage on the floor is walking around, free as a bird.” He tapped one of the tiny cameras on his chest. “I’ve got the evidence I need to send him on a one-way trip to eternity.”

“But I’m alive,” Vaccaro said.

“Not in my world. Haven’t you been listening to anything I said?”

Delehanty was beginning to feel sorry for Roy Hendricks with all the time-travel clients, including himself, who listened and listened and nodded at the briefings, but still didn’t quite grasp the concept.

Vaccaro was still trying to make sense of what had happened, and he shifted to more comfortable territory. “And you say that time travel’s going to be invented about twenty years from now, and it’s going to become, like, a regular industry?”

“If everything goes on schedule,” Delehanty said.

Vaccaro shook his head in disbelief. “Sort of like the travel industry?” he offered.

“It’s not exactly like taking a vacation in Jamaica, Counselor. But there are plenty of customers with the money. Serious scholars studying some historical event and maybe tweaking it to see, say, what would happen if you screwed up the Norman Conquest by sabotaging the boats, or invented the horse collar a few centuries earlier. They’re still trying to get a tenth symphony out of Beethoven and another play out of Shakespeare. I heard there was even some rich guy who commissioned one of the Dutch masters to do a portrait. That was a mistake. The portrait had no intrinsic value in his own timeline—the one I come from—because the art dealers decided it didn’t meet the test for provenance. What time travel is chiefly good for is bringing back information. Music is information. The written word is information. Scientific information isn’t quite the same thing, because we already know what Newton or Galileo had to offer.”

Vaccaro’s eyes were glazing over, but he struggled gamely to keep up. “And criminal evidence is information,” he said triumphantly.

“You’ve got it, Counselor,” Delehanty said. “As far as I know, this is the first time timetravel’s been used in police work.” He remembered Hendrickson’s caveat and debated with himself how much to tell Vaccaro. “It’ll probably never be common in our profession, because there are problems—both technical and legal.”

“Legal ramifications?”

Delehanty immediately regretted saying too much. He had given Vaccaro something to chew on in an area that the assistant D.A. was all too familiar with. Delehanty had seen it before, and he dreaded it. He could acutely picture all the niggling legal ramifications starting to churn around in Vaccaro’s brain as he started to think about his career.

Vaccaro reached for the phone. “I’m afraid I’ll have to detain you, Lieutenant. Just a formality till we get this sorted out.”

Delehanty was all too aware of what would happen if Homicide burst in. He reached into his pocket for the return button that Hendricks had given him. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He remembered what Hendricks had told him about equalizing his mass allowance, and snatched a little brass gewgaw on Vaccaro’s desk that looked as if it weighed about the same as the Beretta. It was a gift shop statuette of Lady Justice, with the blindfold, the sword, and the scales. It was the one he had on his own desk, a souvenir he’d filched from the evidence box.

He had time to turn to the young cop he once had been and say, “Don’t worry. He won’t be nuts enough to tell a wild tale about a man from the future saving him from the Slasher. The prints on the Beretta will turn out to be a match for yours. So will the blood on it. Have a good life, kid.”

He pressed the button. The last thing he saw was Vaccaro returning the phone to its hook.

In a blink, he was back in the booth. Roy Hendricks was still giving him a farewell thumbs up on the other side of the glass. Hendricks’s other hand was still poised above the keyboard that he’d tapped a gigasecond earlier, before the preprogrammed return algorithm kicked in.

He stepped out of the booth. “What happened to your hand?” Hendricks said.

“Didn’t you see it?” Delehanty said, and then stopped. Of course Hendricks couldn’t have seen it. Time didn’t pass at the same rate at both ends of the tunnel, or CTC, or whatever the correct jargon was.

And of course Hendricks, geek that he was, had to overexplain it.

“No, if we could do that, we wouldn’t have to physically travel through time; we’d be able to watch it, but then, of course, you wouldn’t open an alternate world line by your presence. The viewable events at your end were compressed into a quantum moment that disappeared when you pinched off the navigable portion of the CTC loop. . . .”

Delehanty wasn’t listening. He was looking down at the other end of the hall, where the man dressed as a Roman centurion was emerging from his booth. His cloak was tattered, he’d grown a beard, and he looked awful. Lord only knew how many months he’d been gone. He looked like he’d had a hard time of it at the Crucifixion; probably gotten himself in trouble.

He followed Hendricks back to the off ice to do the paperwork, clutching the little statuette of blind justice. He smiled crookedly. His trip to the past was going to cost him most of his savings, but it had been worth it. Justice would be done.

“Fiat justitia ruat caelum,” he murmured to himself, remembering the Latin they’d taught him at Saint Agnes.

“What? What did you say?” Hendricks said.

Delehanty looked him in the eye. He might not speak geek, but he had his own jargon.

“Let justice prevail though the heavens fall,” he said.

“I could charge you with manslaughter,” Jarrett said. “If this office’s jurisdiction extended to another past.”

“Come off it, Counselor,” Delehanty said. “It was self defense, pure and simple.”

Jarrett wasn’t going to make it easy. “And when it comes to that, in their jurisdiction they had every right to charge you with impersonating an off icer, carr ying an illegal firearm, and otherwise throw the book at you.”

“I kind of got that impression,” Delehanty said.

“And in this here and now, you’ve violated any number of statutes regulating time travel. And so has Alternatives Associates. I might look into that.”

“Let’s talk about justice, not legal quibbles. You saw the tapes I brought back.”

“I did indeed. They’re not from our past. They’re inadmissible as evidence.”

“Chombly’s guilty as sin and you know it.”

“There’s not a judge in town who’d issue you an arrest warrant. Or a prosecutor who’d take the case.”

“You want to play hardball? I can do that too. I have enough to go on to reopen the file. I can take Chombly in for questioning, break him down. Break down the so-called witnesses who gave him his alibi. Legitimize the case from a fresh perspective. A prosecutor who’s running for mayor isn’t going to get any votes by interfering with an investigation of a serial killer. Especially when the media gets hold of my tapes.”

“You’d leak the tapes? I warn you, Lieutenant . . .”

Delehanty was almost too angry to speak. “Wise up, Jarrett. You could be a hero instead of the dear public’s next punching bag.”

He got up and left.

He was facing Chombly for the second time. The man who had tried to kill him—either a week ago or thirty years ago, depending on how you looked at it—was still big and ugly. He sat across from Delehanty, his thick wrists handcuffed to the stanchion on the steel table, his meaty forearms shaved and covered with kitchen scars. He’d acquired jowls and put on about thirty pounds since Delehanty had last seen him, but he still looked active and dangerous.

Right now he was complaining about the handcuffs.

“Take them off me,” he said in his Limey accent. “You have no call to cuff me like this. You don’t even have enough to arrest me.”

“The cuffs stay on, Roderick,” Delehanty said. “You and I know there’s enough on you to give you a shot of happy juice that’ll send you to that barbeque pit down below where the grill master with horns and a tail will roast you till you’re well done.”

“I don’t know where you got those fake pictures that you got splashed all over the papers and the tube, but they won’t fly. I know they’re fake because I was . . .”

He cut himself off as he realized that he was about to incriminate himself.

“Go on, Roderick,” Delehanty said. “You were about to say?”

“You think you’re smart, Delehanty. But you don’t have anything you can use as a confession, and you’re never going to get one.”

“I don’t need a confession, birdbrain. I’ve already gotten four of your kitchen buddies to recant. We’ll just start from scratch and retry you.”

“You can start from wherever you want. Wherever you end up, my lawyer just has to use the old poisoned fruit argument.”

“You’ve got a lawyer do you?” Delehanty had hoped to delay that. He hadn’t read Chombly his rights, and he had managed to get the current colloquy classif ied as an interview rather than an interrogation.

“Bloody right I do, and as soon as he shows up, I’m out of here.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to keep after you till I bring you down. I’m making you my life’s work, Chombly.”

Chombly gave him a stare that made Delehanty glad of the handcuffs. “It was tried before, chum. But you know that, don’t you? A stubborn bloke like you who wouldn’t let go. Stuck in his thumb, poor man, but never got a chance to pull out the plum.”

“Keep going, Chombly. You’re doing fine.”

Chombly was worked up enough to let something slip again, but at that point the door flew open and the lawyer stormed in, a harried uniform trying to keep up with him. Delehanty knew the lawyer, a sharpie named Farley who took on a lot of high-value cases and was good at turning his scumbag clients into victims.

He didn’t bother to look at Delehanty. He scowled furiously at Chombly and said, “Have you been keeping your mouth shut like I told you, Roderick? No, you haven’t, have you?”

Then he turned his glare on Delehanty and said, “I want those cuffs off him, Lieutenant! Now!”

There was someone outside the door with a flashlight. Delehanty looked up from his paperwork and saw that it was Flaherty, making his rounds.

“Pulling another all-nighter, Lieutenant?” Flaherty said, stepping inside.

“Just getting the case in order for Judge Wendell,” Delehanty told him. “She’s going to stick her neck out. If I can make sure Her Honor’s judicial derriere is covered, she’ll issue the arrest warrant in the morning.”

“Is that what did it, the publicity?” Flaherty said, gesturing at all the newspapers spread out around the off ice. The one on the chair next to the desk had a giant headline that screamed:

ARREST IMMINENT IN 30-YEAR-OLD MURDER CASE

“Her Honor can sniff the prevailing winds,” Delehanty said. “She knows when an irresistible force is headed her way.”

“Well, you pulled it off, Lieutenant.”

“Not quite, Tim. Not till tomorrow. Not till he’s in a holding cell, trussed up for Thanksgiving.”

“You making the bust yourself, Lieutenant?”

“You bet. But I’ll share it with the dicks I have with me.”

“That’s big of you, Lieutenant. It’ll look good in their personnel f iles.”

“Big of me, hell. I want all the muscle with me I can get. I killed the guy once. I’m not sure I could do it again. He scared the hell out of me.”

“Well, you take care, Lieutenant.”

“I will, Tim.” He looked down at the binder he was preparing for the judge, then looked up again. “Who’s on tonight?”

“Diaz. He got called out on a nuisance complaint, but I’ll keep an eye on things till he gets back.”

He gave Delehanty a worried look, then left, making a point of being sure the door clicked behind him on the way out.

Delehanty worked without interruption for the next hour. He thought he was making good progress, methodically neutralizing all the quibbles the judge had raised earlier that day, when a tiny metallic noise made him look up. The doorknob was turning slowly, a fraction at a time.

He reached for his pistol; it was awkward in a sitting position, and he wasn’t quite fast enough. The door shot open with a force that banged it against the wall, and a bulky figure in a plastic raincoat was hurtling toward him at an improbable speed.

Delehanty had time to get his gun halfway out of its holster. He saw Chombly’s angry face looming over him, and then a hamlike mitt was pinning him against the chair while a shiny blade darted toward his throat. There wasn’t time enough for it to hurt.

The Department VIPs and the media were gone, and Flaherty and Jarrett pretty much had the cemetery to themselves. The rows of folding chairs under the canopy and the black funeral bunting would be taken away later. The gray sky was quiet now and rid of the police choppers that had done the flyover and the television choppers that had hovered over the ceremony till they’d been chased away.

They walked over to the burial plot together. It was banked with flowers and wreaths. Flaherty took off his hat, and after a moment Jarrett did the same.

“Did you know him well, Officer Flaherty?” Jarrett said.

“We grew up in the same neighborhood,” Flaherty replied. “Went to Saint Agnes together. Graduated from the police academy the same year. He made it to lieutenant and would have gone even farther if he hadn’t annoyed the brass. I never got any farther than beat cop. I guess I didn’t have the stuff. How about you? All the bigwigs left. How come you’re still hanging around?”

“I guess I feel a little guilty about giving him a hard time,” Jarrett said. “But maybe if I’d been able to talk him out of that obsession of his, he’d still be alive.” He put his hat back on. “It’s ironic that after hunting a murderer for thirty years, his quarry got him. “

Flaherty picked up a flower and tossed it into the grave. “It’s the other way around. Diaz and I caught Chombly in the act. No ifs, ands, or buts. He’s headed for a one-way trip to the death chamber. You might say that in the end, Lieutenant Delehanty got his man.”

Copyright © 2010 Donald Moffit