‘Traitors to the Nation’, Dossiers Claim
Rose was acquainted with the agents who had prepared those dossiers. Two were clowns; she had thought that the other six were good men. Now they were buried in the depths of Headquarters or testifying before a federal grand jury. One and all, they had messed their britches.
Screw that. Just do your job.
The first sign of happy times along the highway was a single-vehicle set of peel-out marks. Sixty yards further on, deep truck-tire gouges marred the right shoulder. In the blink of an eye, a second pair of smudges like strokes of artist’s charcoal extended for thirty feet. A half-mile beyond that, multiple curving conga lines of laid-down rubber—some parallel, some crossing—played with the divider for a hundred yards. Those tracks ended at an overturned and battered big rig trailer.
Patrol officers were stationed to flag drivers through the single open lane. At this hour of the morning there was almost no traffic.
Botnik steered the Econoline to the side of the road, parking behind a gray Suburban marked with Arizona’s rising sun. As Rose stepped out and stretched, the young agents pulled aluminum cases from the rear of the van. Botnik introduced her to three Department of Public Safety officers. Lieutenant Colonel Jack Gerber, the Deputy Director of Criminal Investigations, had been dispatched from Phoenix along with two analysts. They had been waiting at the scene for three hours. Remarkably they were still willing to pretend not to be teed off.
Gerber was a tall lean man in his late forties with straight black hair and a brown boyish face lacking any trace of a beard. Multi-racial, Rose judged: American Indian, Anglo, and some black. America’s future. His eyes were brown and his large fingernails curved around the upper half of each fingertip, rounded and neatly manicured.
Rose walked with Gerber and Botnik back along the highway and studied the scene from the beginning of the skid marks. Gerber was explaining what little they knew. ‘The chase must have begun about ten miles back. Patrolman Porter queried the truck’s RFLM—Radio Frequency License and Manifest transponder—and got a bogus authentication. When the truck’s driver ignored his lights and siren and the truck failed to respond to Cop Block, the patrolman became aware he might have a situation. We get a lot of drug traffic. Patrolman Porter was an excellent officer, very keen on his job.’
All cars and trucks in the U.S. were now required to have Cop Block. A patrol car could radio a coded signal that slowed and then shut down the engine. Workarounds were illegal and the fines were expensive, plus real jail time.
The rig had jackknifed and the trailer had flipped and twisted the truck along with it, corkscrewing the rear frame and tires a quarter turn. The International 9200 had then split off from the trailer and skidded on its side for fifty-two yards, leaving a broad scrape of paint and sidewall rubber and lots of fresh gray grooves in the asphalt. The trailer’s rear doors had sprung open and about a third of the contents had tumbled out, depositing a trail of white boxes along the road, most of them intact.
They were all inkjet printers.
Rose held back an urge to request that the trailer and the boxes be marked off and tested by a HAZMAT team. Too early and too obvious, a tipping of her hand. She had yet to bring out her WAGD—pronounced Wag-Dee, for Wright Assay Germ Detector—a biohazard analyzer the size and shape of a large Magic Marker. She carried two in her coat pocket. Some in the field called the WAGD the Death Stick. Others had corrupted the acronym to ‘We’re All Gonna Die.’
One of the white boxes had ripped open. She pulled back a flap and bent to peer inside. The printer had fallen out of its foam packing. Its top had broken off, exposing the metal tracking bars and ribbon cables within. The cartridge wells were empty.
‘We’re still not sure what happened after that,’ Gerber said. ‘Porter must have been ahead of the truck when it flipped—it’s our procedure to park behind an accident and switch on all lights, to warn traffic. At around eight p.m., the officer was shot three times. He had not called in the wreck, and he did not call in his situation. He must have been surprised. We think there was another man, perhaps hiding in the trailer. The officer did manage to get off two shots. Neither of them hit the truck.’
‘Patrolman Porter’s Infodeck—when did it last make its uplink?’
‘Seven forty-one,’ Gerber said. ‘Nothing unusual. He was at the Bluebird Tall Stack, a truck stop. You passed it on the way here.’
‘We did,’ Rose said.
The reflecting tape between the lighted mobile cone barriers flapped in the early morning breeze. A patrolman waved through a small silver Toyota. It drove slowly around the scene, well clear of the rippling tape, its middle-aged female driver goggling.
Colonel Gerber was being straightforward and professional, and for that Rose was grateful. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a WAGD, hiding most of it in her palm and up her sleeve, then swiftly uncapped it, bent over the open printer box, and ran the moist gel tip along the inside and across the printer carriage. She capped and pocketed the device, then moved on with Gerber.
Twenty yards further on, the patrol car was a blackened shell hunkered on the right shoulder and facing the wrong direction—east. It had been set on fire with gas siphoned from its own tank. The patrol car’s tires had burned to the steel belts. Melted aluminum traced shiny rivers down to the roadside gravel. Whatever onboard data—video, officer commentary, the contents of the patrol car’s orange box—that had not been transferred by satellite link from the car’s Infodeck had been destroyed.
A small grass fire had been extinguished by a quick light rain minutes after the wreck.
The officer’s body had been found on the north shoulder of the road, ten yards from the burnt-out patrol car. The body had been removed by the Pima County Medical Examiner but a silver marker line still recorded its outline. A rain-diluted smear of blood pointed in the direction of the cruiser, about thirty feet away.
In the center of the outline, a small spherical projector sitting on a hammered peg threw out grainy patterns of blue and red light.
‘Glasses?’ Rose asked.
Gerber offered a pair from his pocket. She unfolded the temple pieces and slipped them on. The officer’s body came into clear view, frozen in place and lit all around by multiple strobes. Legs straight, arms limp and angled.
‘The body was moved before we got here,’ Gerber said.
She walked around the projector and stooped. Patrolman Porter’s body looked perfectly solid against the black pavement. Had he been closer to the cruiser, he would have burned. Someone dragged him across the highway. A bystander? The killer?
Why have empathy for a dead or dying cop?
Projectors were good but the emotional assault of seeing an actual corpse always heightened her senses. Death so close, injustice everywhere. Still, the photographer had done a good job. The 3-D image was clean and sharp. In a few hours, no doubt, the ME and the CID would merge their data and she could call up the same projection and see a reconstruction of the officer’s stance, the lines along which the slugs had traveled, his reaction to the force of tons of accelerated mass hitting his shoulder, his chest, his neck.
The FBI evidence techs had fanned out along the road and were busy taking pictures, checking the interior of the truck’s cab, scraping paint and rubber off the road, setting up survey poles and lasers, repeating much of what Gerber’s people had already done.
‘You still haven’t told me why the feds are interested in a few hundred gray-market computer printers,’ Gerber said. ‘Obsolete models, too.’
‘We’re curious where the truck was going. Whether it had any escorts.’
Gerber flipped his hand at the International. ‘There’s no driver log, no valid license, no bills of lading or any of the records required for interstate transport. The truck seems to have been modified in Mexico and driven across state