The legal repercussions of what has come to be known as the “Rexburg Incident” show how, despite the incessant claims of autonomy by the members of the Sovereign States Compact, when federal resources are needed to address unanticipated crises, independence and self-sufficiency take a temporary backseat to access the bounty of Federal largesse.
– excerpt from “The Costs of Genetic Research”, The Institute for Public Funding Accountability
Sheriff Spaulding tapped the keyboard and transmitted the latest budget adjustment requests off to the County offices, reviewed the monthly arrest and crime stats, and approved two vacation requests. He paused and rubbed his burning eyes. Coming back to the office after dinner had pros and cons: no distractions, he could wear anything he wanted, and he had the office almost to himself except for the occasional night shift staff, but this wasn’t how he liked to spend his evenings. A movie or dinner with Peach would be much better. It was late, and he was tired, and he hadn’t heard anything yet from Vargas about the murder investigation.
As if summoned, he heard the outer door of his office open, and he looked up at Deputy Ben Davis.
“Hey, Ben. Did you get everything squared away out at Cyrus’ place yesterday?”
“Yessir. After Rusty picked up the body, I took off.”
“He went down to Pocatello last night?”
Davis shook his head.
“He stashed him at Eckersell’s. He’ll go down tomorrow.”
“Hmm. Okay. Did Larry get out there?”
Larry Muller was the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney, and Spaulding always gave him an early call, something else his predecessor had been criticized for not doing.
Davis shook his head again.
“Nope. He talked to Vargas and said he was tied up with the Commissioners on some zoning thing.”
Spaulding frowned. Muller almost always went out to the scene in person to get a sense of where the case was headed. “So, what did you see out there?”
Davis stood straighter to give his report.
“No sign of forced entry, body in the kitchen, looks like shot in the head three times, close range. The place looked tossed, but no obvious theft that I could see. I just did a real quick initial survey.”
“Did Vargas go through the rest of the house?”
Davis hesitated.
“Yeah, but he mostly focused on the kitchen. That’s where Cyrus was.”
“Huh. Did he agree with your assessment about no burglary?”
Davis shrugged.
“He didn’t say. Mostly he yelled at me to not screw up his crime scene and go get him stuff from his car.”
Spaulding tried to hide his irritation. In a small department, every opportunity to develop and cross-train junior staff had to be maximally utilized, and murder scene investigations didn’t happen very often in their community. This was another bad habit held over from Charlie Zimmer’s tenure.
“Okay. Well, write up what you saw, and I’ll include it with his report.”
“Yessir. Uh, you sure Vargas won’t mind?”
Spaulding chuckled and shook his head.
“No, he won’t mind, trust me. But I’ll let him know I told you.” The young deputy appeared unconvinced. “Look, I know he’s a pain to deal with, but he doesn’t mean any harm. He certainly doesn’t mind having other people help do his work.” That elicited a small smile and the Deputy eased a bit. “How’s everything else going?”
Ben Davis resumed his wariness. “Good, sir. Everything’s fine.”
Spaulding noted the defensiveness. “Good to hear it. What, another month left? As soon as you come off restriction, there’s another drug task force coming up. They need some folks to run surveillance, maybe some undercover work. Want in?”
Davis straightened up and nodded, still wary. “Yessir, I would.”
Spaulding nodded. “Okay, I’ll keep you posted. Pocatello is running it with the State Police. You’ll be the only one from our agency. It’ll be good experience. I just have to make sure we don’t have too many other guys out while you’re down there.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Spaulding waved a hand. “Go home, go to bed. I’m getting out of here too.”
Davis started to turn toward the door, then stopped and gestured at Spaulding’s old Ricks College football sweatshirt, stained and faded. “Did you play ball there, sir?”
Spaulding looked down at the Viking logo and nodded. “Back in the day. We were good, too.”
Davis face lit up. “Yeah?”
“Won the WSFL my junior year. Went to the Dairy Bowl. We lost. Great season, though.”
“I wanted to play college ball. Snow was after me, but my folks didn’t want me to leave. If we still had football here…” Davis shook his head. “That’s why I didn’t go on to college right away.”
“You played for Madison?”
“Yessir.”
“So did I.”
Spaulding gave a sympathetic smile. Small town high school football glory, nothing like it. Some of his buddies played with him at Ricks, and two came with him into the Army. One lost to an IED in Iraq, the other an ambush in Afghanistan. Intrusive memories of explosions and mangled bodies bubbled up, always lurking. He pushed them aside.
“Well, I heard you’re doing well in those criminal justice classes. Keep up the good work. It’ll help with your next promotion board.”
Davis nodded, then headed out.
He’s a good kid, Spaulding thought. Maybe a little rash, but his head’s in the right place. He just needed a little mentoring, something that was sorely lacking before Spaulding’s arrival. He’ll straighten out.
Chapter 26
For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
Michelle lay in bed in the motel room, listening to the sounds of morning activity in other rooms. She’d stayed up late, looking further into the McJames Institute, the founder, their studies, the remarkable results, a small network of schools across the country and abroad. Many decades of credibility. One thing she picked up on, this location, though almost twenty years old, had very little footprint. Following up on Ashley’s cryptic remark yesterday, she also found almost nothing about the Research Lab, an interesting data lacuna, but didn’t pursue it further. A task for later, maybe a side project.
She drove to the school and sat with Adam during breakfast, feeling good about saying goodbye before heading back to Chicago. Michelle knew she needn’t have worried about jinxing things by packing her bags at the motel. Once again, Adam placidly ate his Cheerios, then, unprompted, cleaned up his tray and put the dishes and silverware in the proper receptacles while Michelle watched proudly.
She walked with him to the back of the cafeteria where the line to go to activities formed. Ashley approached.
“Still thinking about heading back?” Ashley asked.
Michelle shrugged. “Seems like he’s ready for me to leave him for a while,” her voice cracking.
Ashley reached out and gave her hand a squeeze. “There’s no rush. You can stay and visit as long as you like.”
Michelle wiped her eyes. “I don’t know. I think I should head back today. Things seem to be going so well. He just fits right in.”
Ashley beamed at Adam. “Yes, he’s really dropped right into the routine, like he’s always been here. A perfect fit.”
Michelle’s eyes went up to the mural on the wall, the ubiquitous puzzle theme painted in various forms around the walls, and thought of Adam, with his unique personality and skills, like another piece of the puzzle.
“You know your way out?” Ashley asked as she headed to the classroom with Adam.
“Sure do. Thanks again.”
Just outside the cafeteria, Michelle took a deep breath, feeling an uncharacteristic lightness, and she noticed again the complete absence of her little lump, the Shank Citrus Scale still at a zero for the first time in a long while.
She passed the classroom where she’d seen the kids working on their painting project the other day and glanced through the door. The pictures of the creatures and the eyes drew her attention. She ducked into the room.
The grid of papers was almost complete, with only a few scattered holes, an almost finished puzzle. She stopped and stared at the jumble of black and white lines, splashes of paint, daub marks, criss-crosses and swirls, sensing a pattern that was just out of reach, on the edge of perception. She stepped forward and stared at the papers, then stepped a back a few paces and cocked her head, squinting.
Like one of those computer generated three dimensional stereogram pictures that require unfocusing your eyes to see, the image emerged, gradually at first, then with a sudden rush, fusing into a coherent perception. An eye, the edge of a head or face, a brow, a nostril – it came together in dizzying three-dimensional relief. A close-up of an animal head. She kept at it, looked away, looked back, now more clear, the markings on each paper, each individual rectangle, fading to invisibility, blending into a larger whole, itself a part of a larger object. Now that it fused into a coherent image, she couldn’t unsee it. Definitely a part of a head, some kind of creature, vaguely familiar.
Then she saw it: the plastic dinosaur Adam stole on the way out from the store in Wall. It stood alone on the table near where the boy in the wheelchair sat, painting the individual pictures composing the superficially incoherent pixilated montage. She walked over and picked up the toy, scrutinizing it. She held it up and turned it slowly, then saw the angle matching the perspective of the pictures, a perfect close-up of a quarter profile of the tyranosaur’s head.
She felt a brief wave of vertigo grasping the complexity of the task. Which student had the perspective on the toy, which translated into the image? What role did each person play? Michelle thought about the little girl shuttling between the two boys, the boy in the wheelchair with the paint brush, the tall boy at the wall directing the placement. And what did Adam’s toy mean in all this? Her wonder mixed with pride that Adam was now part of such a special group, and warmly welcomed. She returned the toy to its place, and headed for the exit.
In the lobby, Michelle stopped to respond to her trilling phone, smiling at the ID on the screen.
“Jonah!” she said, sitting down on a small couch in the lobby.
“How’d you like to expense the whole trip?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve got a job for you.”
Michelle’s heart fell. “Not the Indian thing?”
“No, it’s a murder, out your way. Seems someone got himself killed. Just saw it come across, recognized the location. You’re near Rigby, right? Looks like it’s just down the road. Go take a sniff around, get me a story, then fill out your paperwork.”
“Well, I was getting ready to, y’know, come home,” Michelle responded tentatively.
“You want to get paid? Just do a little snooping around, give me a couple of paragraphs, then come on back. Everything cool with your brother?”
“Yes, it’s great. He really likes the school, and everyone here is very nice. Smartest thing I ever did. So, what’s the story?”
“Some guy found a fossil, made a stink about it, then he winds up dead. Sounds fishy. Check it out. Look, at the very least it’ll keep you busy and you can stay a while longer with your brother.”
“What’s the hook?”
“He’s dead! Murders are always interesting,” Jonah opined with a basso chuckle.
“What’s my angle?”
“Make one up. I trust your judgment.”
“You know I don’t know a soul out here. Am I stealth, or bulldozer?”
Jonah laughed. “Now, what do you think that license you worked so hard for is good for? You can do whatever you want! You are steward of quality information, a footsoldier in the disinformation wars. Root out the facts and give me a good story, a true story, about how the world really works out there.” He concluded with another hearty chuckle.
Michelle knew his flippancy concealed a devotion to the ethics of their profession, to root out the truth amidst all the noise with unfettered access to databases. It also gave her access to the legal and physical protections to shield her from the violent retribution so many of her profession fell prey to. The plague of AI spoofing feeding political unrest demonstrated the need for good human journalists to mediate the flow of information, fully recognizing the limited human capacity to comprehend a rapidly changing, complex world.
“You’re a prince, Jonah.”
“Anything for you, princess. Make me proud. File coming to you right now.”
***
Not long after she started working, Jonah demonstrated his erudition, sitting in his office underneath the huge framed black and white picture of the old Comiskey Park. He leaned back in his big leather chair, hands interlaced behind his head, unselfconsciously revealing huge sweat stains in his armpits.
“You’re a macrophage, a neutrophil.”
Michelle gaped at him, still overwhelmed by her new responsibilities, fresh out of college, listening and watching more than speaking. He smiled at her confusion.
“C’mon, what did you take at that school? Don’t tell me you don’t know some biology. Your old man is right, you shoulda gone to Notre Dame.”
“And listen to other students talk about my dad? No way. Northwestern was better anyway. That’s where I met you, remember?”
He smiled at her flattery and continued his lecture.
“We are society’s immune system, and you are one of the white blood cells that goes out and attacks the infection. In today’s world, bad information is like cancer, it mutates and sneaks into the system, causes problems. We root out the bad information, bring it to light. Just like old Hobbes talked about.” He cocked an eyebrow, waiting for her to respond. Now she was terrified, completely lost.
“Oh, now don’t tell me they didn’t make you read Hobbes at that place? Leviathan, society as an organism, battling the kingdom of darkness, all that. Nothing?” He shook his head, smiling. “We all play our part. Individually, we may only see a small piece, but all of us together? We’re the nervous system and the immune system of our fragile, fucked up democracy. God knows where we’d be if we hadn’t gotten our act together after the ‘20’s.”
This is what she came to love about the man, the contradictions between the intellectually promiscuous scholar and the foul-mouthed, mercurial dictator who would berate a subordinate for even the most trivial failing with an explosion of expletives.
“The what, where, who, that’s the easy stuff. It’s why puts money in your pocket. People always want the why. But just remember: there’s never just one.” Jonah was a professor of human nature, of digging beneath the superficial, to grab the reader, keep ‘em coming back for more.
“We tell stories, but they have to be true. But here’s the thing: there’s never just one truth. Remember Lippman. You gotta make it true, AND make it sell.”
***
An icon flashed on the screen. There was Jonah’s file, as promised, holding all the recent local coverage of the murder and some basic stats on the victim. Cyrus Link, age 58, farmer, divorced, two adult children, long moved away. She scanned the articles quickly, looking for interesting details. A fossil? Of what? A quote from a professor at Idaho State University, another from a paleontologist in Wyoming.
Oh shit.
Danny Spaulding, Jefferson County Sheriff. There he was, a file photo, the same guy from the Daisy. She remembered his look, her evasiveness.
He’s not going to believe me now, why I’m out here. I’ll put off talking to him for a while.
She flipped through the rest of the file, then closed it up, smiling.
This is enough to get started.
She relished the feeling of testing the air for scent, back on the hunt again. Once she had a clearer idea of what she was looking for, she’d unleash her databot hounds to flush more leads. She tucked her device into her bag and waved at the receptionist as she left the building.
Michelle smiled to herself thinking about Jonah as she walked to her car. A delivery truck pulled up to the front, the driver distracted, checking something on a screen. A grey car pulled out from behind the school and approached, blocked from exiting by the truck. Michelle stopped at the curb to let it pass, smiling at the driver and waving him on. She locked eyes with the man inside and her hand froze. The car halted to wait for the truck, and Michelle got a good look at the driver. Her brow furrowed.
It can’t be.
The man stared ahead, then sped off as the truck pulled forward. Michelle was sure she knew that face, the dark stranger from the bar back in Chicago. She held her hand up to shade her eyes, watching as the car entered the main road and accelerated east into the morning sun.
Robert Wack 