Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“Fuck,” said Sergeant Cameron softly. It was a prayer, of sorts.

The ambulance roared away with the father in the back. The rescue workers began the slow process of extricating the bodies.

“There’s a baby,” Dar said dully.

Lawrence and the CHP men around them turned their attention his way.

“I saw this family just a couple of days ago in the Los Angeles Medical Center,” said Dar. “They had a baby with them. Somewhere there’s a baby.”

Cameron nodded to one of the CHP men, who began talking on his portable radio.

Lawrence, Dar, and Paul Cameron walked around to the back of the flattened Pontiac.

“Oh, goddammit,” said the sergeant. “Goddamn them. Goddamn him. Goddamn them.”

In the flattened trunk of the Firebird, Dar could see three sandbags and two fully inflated spare tires, still on their rims. A buffer for absorbing the shock of a rear-ending. Standard swoop-and-squat protection. A capper’s guarantee to his recruited squat-car drivers that there would be no real injuries on their shortcut to big insurance payouts and riches in los Estados Unidos .

Dar turned abruptly and walked farther into the grass of the roadside.

“Dar?” called Lawrence.

Dar kept his back to the accident scene. He took a card out of his wallet and his Flip Phone out of his shirt pocket.

She answered on the second ring. “Olson here.”

“Count me in,” said Dar. He cut the connection and closed the phone.

Sydney Olson seemed to have taken over the entire basement of Dickweed’s Justice Center. She had at least five more assistants working at an equal number of new computers and six more phone lines; her operation had spilled over from the single old interrogation room to the observation room behind the one-way glass, into two more unused interrogation rooms, and even out into the hallway where the male secretary now screened visitors. Dar wondered if the prisoners in the holding cells at the far end of the long corridor and their sullen guards were the only ones left in the basement not involved in this expanding empire.

The meeting started precisely at 8:00 A.M. on Friday morning. A long folding table had been set up in Syd’s main office. The map of Southern California still took up most of the blank wall, but Dar noticed that there was an extra red pin—standing for a swoop-and-squat fatal accident—on the I-15 just outside the San Diego city limits, a new green pushpin where Esposito had died at the construction site, and a second yellow pin—a Dar assassination attempt—right on the hill in San Diego. Half a dozen more yellow pins still waited at the side of the map.

This was a serious operational meeting: neither Dickweed nor the local DA had been invited. Dar was surprised to see that Lawrence and Trudy had been.

“What?” said Lawrence when he saw Dar’s quizzical expression. “You expect us not to be in on this?”

“Besides,” Trudy had said, bringing Lawrence a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the big urn near the door, “the NICB is paying us.”

Jeanette Poulsen, the attorney representing the National Insurance Crime Bureau, looked up and nodded at this.

While Syd was connecting her laptop computer to a projector, Dar looked at the other people taking their places at the table. Besides Larry, Trudy, and Poulsen from the NICB, there was also Tom Santana—sitting at Syd’s right—and Santana’s boss at the State Division of Insurance Fraud, Bob Gauss. Next to Gauss was Special Agent Jim Warren, and across the table from the FBI man sat Captain Tom Sutton from the CHP. The only other law enforcement officers present were Frank Hernandez from the San Diego detectives’ bureau and a man whom Dar hadn’t met before—a quiet, middle-aged, accountant-looking type whom Syd introduced as Lieutenant Byron Barr from the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division. Both Captains Hernandez and Sutton gave Barr the kind of suspicious, malignant squint that police reserve for all Internal Affairs officers. Syd kept it sharp and succinct, saying flatly that Lieutenant Barr was there because there was overwhelming evidence that some plainclothes detectives in the LAPD were involved in this conspiracy.

Dar saw Hernandez and Sutton exchange quick glances and nods. He interpreted this as Oh, well, the LAPD, yeah, sure. Fuck ’em.

“All right,” said Syd, turning off all lights save for her computer and projector. She had a remote in her right hand. “Let’s get started.”

Suddenly the white screen at the far end of the table was illuminated with a color photograph of the pile of Mercedeses on the flattened Firebird.

“Most of you are aware that this accident occurred yesterday morning on the I-15 just beyond the city limits,” Syd said softly.

More photos. The cars being lifted off. The driver being extricated. The bodies. Dar realized that these were Lawrence’s photos, taken with his regular Nikon as they viewed the wreck, then scanned and sent to Syd via e-mail. The focus and detail were very clear.

“The only survivor of the crash was the driver, Ruben Angel Gomez, a thirty-one-year-old Mexican national with a temporary U.S. driver’s license. His wife, Rubidia, and their children—Milagro and Marita—all died in the collision with a jackknifed car carrier under lease to the San Diego dealership of Kyle Baker Mercedes.”

The close-up photos of the dead children clicked by. Syd stepped into the light of the projector. “There was a baby—seven-month-old Maria Gomez. We found her late last night in the care of a neighbor in the apartment complex where the Gomezes were living. Social services has taken charge.”

Syd stepped back. The photos showed the trunk of the Firebird. She did not have to explain to this audience what the sandbags and extra wheels meant.

“Mr. Gomez is in critical but stable condition,” said Syd. “He underwent two operations yesterday and still hasn’t regained consciousness long enough to talk to investigators. At least this was the last I heard this morning…”

“He’s still out of it,” said Captain Frank Hernandez. “I called over there ten minutes ago. Keeps calling for his kids. They had to sedate him again. We have a Spanish-speaking uniformed officer there waiting for him to come out of it, but so far nothing.”

“Is he in protective custody?” asked CHP Captain Sutton.

Hernandez shrugged. “To all intents and purposes,” he said.

Syd went on with her briefing. The projected computer image now displayed a flow chart, in pyramidal form. The bottom dozen boxes were filled with the photos of the four Gomezes involved in the crash, Richard Kodiak, Mr. Phong—the man who had been impaled on the rebar—Mr. Hernandez—an earlier swoop-and-squat victim—and other faces and names, most of them Hispanic. The second tier of boxes in the pyramid included photos of Jorgé Murphy Esposito, Abraham Willis—an attorney also known to be a capper, who had died in a suspicious auto accident recently—and well-known Southern California injury-mill cappers: Bobby James Tucker from L.A., Roget Velliers from San Diego, Nicholas van Dervan from Orange County.

Above the cappers were several empty boxes over the word Helpers. Above that another long row labeled Doctors. Above the doctors’ row, there were several empty frames labeled Enforcers. At the top of the pyramid were three boxes—two empty and one with a photo of Dallas Trace.

Dar saw the San Diego police captain and the CHP officer react with visible amazement. The others in the room, including Inspector Tom Santana, Special Agent Warren, Bob Gauss from the Insurance Fraud Division, and Counselor Poulsen from the NICB seemed to be in on the news. If Lawrence and Trudy were surprised, they did not show it.