Foundation (28 page)

He perused it at length.

“
It was signed by Adam Peterson, my retired predecessor. Since the issue was invalid, I delete it.”

“
What was the cause of death in the former report?”

Again, Diggs consulted his pad.

“
Staving-in of the frontal bone of the skull. It’s a frequent injury in head-on car crashes, but it doesn’t say here how it happened ... Why—”

Diggs couldn’t finish, he and his begonias were gone in a second.

Trumaine dialed again.

“
Call for Adam Peterson.”

At once, the thumbnails of various Petersons appeared on the screen, along with their professions. With his forefinger, Trumaine stroked the link that said:
FORENSICS - RETIRED.

Again, the monitor blinked:
CALL SENT.

This time, a huge, spotless-white hall flooded with sunlight appeared—it was the peaceful meditation area of a large spa.

Here and there, mostly old fellows sat on mats, silently focused on using their diaphragm to inhale and exhale. Beyond them, past a full-length window surrounding the hall, about fifty or sixty more wizened men and women could be seen, wearing white sweatsuits. They followed the moves of their instructor, bowing and rising and flexing their arms and extending and folding them back, and then again turning and again bowing, endlessly exercising their frail bodies, looking like reeds bending docilely under a gently blowing breeze ...

That vision of absolute peace and communion had a hypnotic effect on Trumaine. In fact, he almost jumped when the thin, smiling face of Peterson appeared on the screen.

He was possibly over eighty and his lips were slightly curved in the benevolent smile old people often have on their faces.

“
Adam Peterson? The Peterson who used to work for the department of police?” asked Trumaine.

The old man nodded his head.

“
It’s me,” he said.

“
I’m Detective Trumaine, investigating the death of Aarmo Jarva, the scientist. I take you probably heard about it.”

“
I have,” said the man in a little voice. “How can I help you, young man?”

“
I need you to recall something for me. It happened some time ago—about five years ago, when you signed the death certificate of Jarva’s wife, Raili. Do you remember?”

Trumaine wondered if the old man had heard him, since he stood where he was, as if he had frozen; he didn’t even blink.

Trumaine was about to ask the same question again, when Peterson spoke.

“
I’m getting old,” he said. “Very old. I have to cope with the many inconveniences of my age. Amnesia is one of them, I’m afraid. Some will tell you that being able to forget is the greatest blessing—I say it’s a curse.”

Again, he didn’t say anything for a while, then he shook his head.

“
I don’t remember the woman, but if you say I have issued the document, it certainly must be so.”

He curled his lips in a little, helpless smile.

“
You must remember something. Think again, it was an accident, possibly a car accident. The woman hit her head and died.”

Peterson squinted, trying very hard to come up with the faintest memory. A minute or so went by, when a flash of recognition brightened the depths of his eyes.

“
I seem to recall something ... It
was
a car accident. The car must have skidded off the road, crashing into the Jersey barrier ...”

The flash went off in Peterson’s eyes.

“
I remember the accident—I’m afraid I can’t remember the woman.”

“
It can’t be gone!” growled Trumaine.

“
I’m sorry, I’d really like to help you, young man, but amnesia is getting the best of my brain ...”

Peterson shifted uncomfortably on his feet, as if standing tired him.

“
Please, try again,” pleaded Trumaine. “An innocent might have been charged unjustly for murdering the Jarvas—that one memory of yours could save her!”

Again, Peterson shook his head cluelessly and shrugged then, after a moment, he simply asked:

“
Why don’t you ask Benedict? I’m sure
he
remembers ...”

It came out from him like that, without racking his brain, without thinking. As if the memories inside him weren’t really gone, but locked away in a cracked crate, and all he could glimpse were only bits of them, as disjointed fragments.

Trumaine’s eyes went wide at hearing this.

“
You mean Benedict? Noah Benedict? Credence’s supervisor? What has he got to do with all this?”

Peterson frowned, then pouted. He leaned his head to the side like a short-circuited automaton.

“
Didn’t he arrive first on the accident scene?”

“
Benedict was there and he saw the accident? Do you mean he actually saw Raili dead or dying? Did you see them both on the accident scene? Is this what you’re telling me?” Trumaine asked frantically. “If you have seen both of them, how come you remember Benedict but you can’t remember Raili Jarva?”

But the glint in Peterson’s eyes was gone. The crack that had opened briefly inside him, leaking that one bit of information, had sealed again. The good-hearted smile returned on his face and he was again the old, likable man with amnesia.

“
There’s a lot of interesting questions, young man,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t got the answers ...”

Trumaine bolted from the spaceport entrance, unaware that his baggage was in the belly of the Neptune and that she was flying well past twenty-five thousand miles per hour toward the rendezvous point where Credence’s believers would have picked her up and, without the tiniest jerk, delivered her safely to another point in the universe, in a galaxy so far removed even the most powerful telescope could barely glimpse.

He motioned for a taxi; one promptly swooped down from the parking area and wheeled alongside the curb, stopping right in front of him.

Trumaine jumped in, sitting in the back.

“
Where to?” asked the driver.

“
To the civic prison, quickly!”

The taxi peeled away, drove back toward the spaceport exit and was lost in the traffic in less than a minute.

The civic prison was a modern, translucent prism of glass. Its polished walls were coated with thin layers of liquid crystals which, when the feeblest electric field would run through them, would align with each other, behaving like the slats in a venetian blind.

By increasing or decreasing the strength of the field, the slats would rotate, intercepting the sunlight and delivering just the right amount of light that was required in the various environments, shutting the blinds at noon and letting them open in the early morning or when the sky was overcast. Light sensors automatically changed the angle of the blinds during the day, so that every room in the building would receive the same amount of light throughout all day.

When the sun was gone and the evening fell, the reverse would happen, and the prison would turn into a shiny finger of light.

The civic prison wasn’t like that just for the fancy of the architect who had designed it; it was meant to be both incitement and warning for all, civilians and inmates. For the criminals, to see from within what they had lost—the freedom and the right of the righteous man. For the righteous man to look at from without—to see what was in store for him and anyone who dared to challenge the law.

The taxi stopped in front of the polished steps of the prison entrance.

Trumaine slid his credit card in the slot embedded in the rear seat, then, with a nod to the driver, he left.

The driver glanced through the windshield at the detective as he bounded upstairs and finally disappeared inside the prison, then he too left.

Trumaine’s blue badge shone brightly from his hands. Along with his ID card, it was guarantee enough for the day sergeant to let him into the prison. More, there wasn’t any restriction or special binding on the prisoner he wanted to see, so the officer made no objection at the detective’s request—he pushed a button on the console on his desktop, summoning the guard that would lead Trumaine to cell 5422.

Faith’s detainment cell was on the fifth floor. As the glass elevator rose through the levels of the prison, Trumaine could see the many cubicles and the inmates that occupied them.

They weren’t anything like the cramped, damp and dirty equivalent of the centuries past, it was ages since the law had ruled that every cubicle should host only one inmate. The cubicles were champions of cleanness and efficiency and in most case they looked more like small meditation environments than means of coercion. In fact, many of the detained fellows sat at the center of their rooms, their legs crossed and their palms opened upward on their knees, in the yoga stance of “the Lotus,” self-analyzing themselves, hopefully going over what their life before imprisonment had been, thinking about whatever evil they had done, possibly striving for change and redemption.

As the elevator kept going, Trumaine saw that the guard accompanying him wasn’t carrying any weapon at all. It wasn’t necessary; in the unlikely case an inmate would try to break through, the glass partitions that formed the level block could be moved around at the turn of a switch, sealing entire areas like watertight compartments, preventing any breakout.

The elevator arrived on the fifth floor and stopped with a soft jolt and a hiss. As the doors opened, the guard preceded Trumaine to the level reception, where another guard stood, looking more a high-tech hotel concierge than a warden.

The two guards conferred for a moment, then the latter pushed a button on his console and a second series of crystal doors slid open in front of Trumaine, letting him past.

The unarmed guard led him through the maze the level was, moving along the seemingly endless rows of glass cubicles. At long last, they arrived at a branch in the corridor; a large, purple number hung on the wall, reading:
54.
Below the section number, two smaller numbers showed the subsections that would be found further down that branch: from
00
to
50
.

The guard motioned Trumaine over; he would wait for him there.

Trumaine walked on, keeping an eye on the small subsection numbers marking the cubicles as he passed them.

At last, number
22
came up, on the left side of the corridor. Beyond the transparent wall, a young woman rested on a stool, her back to the world, apparently doing nothing but staring absently past the cubicle window into the distant horizon.

Trumaine knocked on the slab, but Faith didn’t seem to hear, or didn’t want to.

He shifted to the speaker embedded in the partition wall and spoke into it.

“
I need to talk to you,” he said softly.

He must admit he had been a bit harsh with Faith lately, not without a reason, of course. But now that he knew that she might be innocent, he felt guilty for how he had treated her.

Again, Faith gave no sign of having heard, she just kept looking away.

“
Faith ...”

“
Go away,” she said in an embittered whisper.

Trumaine studied her; while in modern prisons inmates weren’t beaten, bullied or mistreated anymore, all the same, the sudden deprivation of freedom often resulted in a severe shock.

From where he stood, Trumaine couldn’t see if there was anything wrong with Faith—she probably hated him for having thrown her in.

Trumaine sighed. Again, he spoke into the speaker, talking to Faith’s back, trying to soften her.

“
Raili Jarva’s first death certificate wasn’t issued by mistake, was it?”

Faith didn’t move, didn’t say anything.

Trumaine went on talking to the wall, suddenly surprised at his own words.

“
Because Raili Jarva died two times ...”

This time, Faith shuddered slightly.

“
Didn’t she?”

Faith turned her head slowly; her eyes were swollen and flushed from long crying. They pierced him with the squashing weight of unfairness. They weren’t just accusing eyes, they were the distressed, despairing eyes of someone who felt betrayed in the deep of her heart.