Most of the park had been prairie. Here and there, ash still lay on the ground. More new signs said THIS HAPPENED 12,000,000 YEARS AGO, TOO. There was a visitors’ center—how could you have a state park without a visitors’ center? And then there was a trail down to what the people at the center called the rhinoceros barn: a structure with open sides and a corrugated-iron roof. It showed the fossils that had accumulated at a waterhole when the supervolcano blew all those millions of years ago.
“They moved some of these to the university’s museum in Lincoln,” Bryce said quietly. “I saw them there.”
Susan nodded. “Yes, you’ve said so.”
Bryce turned to a man in khakis, a work shirt, and a drill sergeant’s hat: a park employee. “Will somebody twelve million years from now make a park around a waterhole all crowded with cattle and sheep?”
The man blinked. He smiled a slow smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit, sir,” he said after a moment’s thought. Yes, he was an employee, all right; otherwise, he never would have called anyone a good fifteen years younger than he was sir.
One of the skeletons of a female rhino had within it the tiny skeleton of an unborn baby. Looking at the splendidly preserved bones, Bryce wondered whether some far-future archaeologist would make a similarly amazing find. Then he wondered what the far-future archaeologist would look like. Not like a man, chances were.
He and Susan slowly walked the path in the barn. It was only sixty or seventy feet, but there were a lot of bones and plaques explaining what kinds of bones they were. At the end, Susan asked, “Now what?”
“Now we start back to Wayne,” Bryce answered.
She sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She sighed again. “Well, what else can we do?”
Colin Ferguson set his bike in the rack outside the San Atanasio station, then chained and locked it. This should have been, and was, one of the safer places in town to stash a bicycle. All the same, more than one here had walked with Jesus—or with Jesús, or with Eric, or with Terrell—in the past few months.
A reporter from the South Bay Daily Breeze waylaid him just inside the door. The desk sergeant sent a silent apology with his eyebrows. Colin raised one back, as if to reply What can you do? The reporter said, “Congratulations on your promotion, Captain Ferguson.”
“Thanks—I guess,” Colin answered. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”
The guy chuckled, so he knew what Colin was talking about, which surprised Colin a little. Then the man asked, “How do you feel now that they’ve finally appointed a new chief for the San Atanasio PD?”
“Glad. Relieved,” Colin said sincerely. “It will be good to get back to normal, if we can.”
The reporter made him regret the last three words, asking, “How likely do you think that is? With the cloud of Chief Pitcavage hanging over the department, and with all the lawsuits springing from it—”
“You have to ask the lawyers about that.” Colin did his best to head the eager young man off at the pass. “Me, I’m just a cop. I want to do cop things. Today, paying a call on Chief Williams is number one on the list.”
“Do you think you can ever be ‘just a cop’ again, Captain Ferguson? Won’t people always think of you as ‘the man who caught the South Bay Strangler’?”
That was a disconcertingly clever question. Colin didn’t like reporters who asked such questions; they made it harder for him to think of the whole breed as twits. “I guess people will look at me that way,” he answered. “But it’s not how I look at myself, and it had better not be, or I’ll have a tough time with my job. Now you’ve got to excuse me, ’cause I really do have to meet with Chief Williams in about five minutes, and he’ll probably throw me off the force if I show up late.”
The reporter’s thumbs danced on his iPhone as he texted his story to the Breeze. It was a Web-only paper these days, and had been since not long after the eruption. With power so erratic in the L.A. area, a Web-only paper was a lot like one of Schrödinger’s kitties: you couldn’t tell whether it was alive or dead on any given day till you looked.
Colin escaped down the hallway. He nodded to a couple of cops and a clerk who walked past. They all nodded back, which he appreciated; he’d had a rugged time here after Chief Pitcavage killed himself and before Lucy Chen found that the late chief was the Strangler.
No spiderwebs hung from the door to the chief’s office, but not many people had gone in there since the days right after Pitcavage swallowed his pills and fastened the bag over his head. Colin wondered whether the new chief had hired an exorcist before moving in. Well, that was Williams’ worry, not his. He hadn’t taken the job even when they tried to hand it to him on a silver platter. Along with getting Kelly to marry him, he figured that was one of the smarter things he’d done lately.
He knocked on the door. It was thick and soundproofed, but he heard the “Come in” from the other side all the same. He turned the knob.
“Chief Williams?” he said when he walked in. The door shut behind him with a click.
“That’s me.” Malik Williams stood up behind his desk and held out his hand to Colin. The chief was an African-American man of about fifty. His shaven head shone under the fluorescents in the ceiling. He wore a thin salt-and-pepper mustache. He was big, six-two or so, and in solid shape; when he was a kid, he might have played linebacker at a Division II school.
As Colin shook hands with him, he also noted the desk. It was a new one—or rather, an old one: an ordinary cop’s desk, brought out of storage. It replaced the special oversized one Chief Pitcavage had used. Sitting behind that humongous flight deck, Pitcavage had had an easy time intimidating anybody who came in. Maybe Malik Williams didn’t want to. That would be nice. Or maybe he hoped to be seen as not wanting to. That also wouldn’t be so bad. From everything Colin had heard, the new chief was no dope.
“Have a seat.” Williams waved to the chair on Colin’s side of the desk. It was also an ordinary job. Well, so was the one in which the new chief sat down. It wasn’t a leather-upholstered throne like the one in which Pitcavage had ensconced himself. More symbolism.
“I’m damn glad to have you here,” Colin said. The chair creaked under him as he shifted his weight. So did the one on the other side of the desk. Chief Pitcavage’s expensive model would never have dared to make such uncouth noises.
“I’m damn glad to hear you say that,” Williams answered. His voice was a resonant baritone, with only a vanishing trace of accent to show his origins. He went on, “I don’t think I could do this job if you didn’t have my back.”
“That’s nice of you, but I don’t believe it for a minute,” Colin said. “Sitting in your seat, you’ve got the weight of the department behind you. Anybody dumb enough to bump up against you would find out how much weight that was, and in a hurry, too.”
Chief Williams smiled. His teeth were white and perfect enough to belong to a TV anchorman; either he was very lucky or he’d had them fixed. “Anybody’d think you’ve been a cop for a while,” he remarked.
“Guilty,” Colin admitted. “Can I throw myself on the mercy of the court?”
“Maybe this once. After that, things go back to business as usual.”
“Good,” Colin said, which made one of the new chief’s eyebrows rise toward the hairline he didn’t have. Colin explained: “Like I was saying to the Breeze reporter out front a few minutes ago, nothing would make me happier than getting back to normal.” If I ever can. He kept that to himself, not that Williams wouldn’t get it whether he said it or not.