A Felony of Birds by Harris Tobias	The Greer Agency by Harris Tobias	Assisted by Harris Tobias	Hold The Anchovies by Harris Tobias
Alien Fruit by Harris Tobias	Peaceful Intent--Stories of human/Alien Interaction by Harris Tobias	CHRONON--Time Travel by Harris Tobias	The Stang by Harris Tobias

A Crime of Passion

by Harris Tobias

A Crime of Passion

Detective Nicholas “Nick” Jacobson looked over the crime scene one last time.  He never got used to it even after 27 years as a homicide detective. The depths of human depravity still shocked and repulsed him. The blood, the smell, the bodies, it wasn’t something he would ever get used to.

This scene wasn’t much different than a hundred others he’d worked. A man and a woman in bed together, clothes strewn all around the small motel room. Three bullets in the man and three in the woman. It looked like your typical crime of passion. Jealous husband or wife bursts in on the scene and dispatches them both. Six shots, in and out, no witnesses. 

The victim’s names were Jeffery Lyons and Samantha Detweiler. The obvious suspects were either spouse. Either Maryann Lyons or Harvey Detweiler. The problem was that both suspects had iron clad alibis for the time the crime was committed. Maryann Lyons was at the gym with her two best friends and Harvey Detweiler was at a board meeting from 2 to 4 in the afternoon. The coroner said the time of death was between 2 and 3 in the afternoon.

In the old days, it would have taken hundreds of hours of careful forensic analysis to generate new leads and new suspects. These days there was no such thing as no eye witnesses. Thanks to our understanding of time as a particle/wave phenomena, any solid object contained a record of everything that ever happened in its line of sight. Fifty years ago, when the chronon was first discovered, it took the equivalent of a laboratory’s worth of computing power to extract an object’s time line. These days all it took was a portable Chronon Projector, or CP to show us what ever the walls or the furniture saw.

The CP made Jacobson’s job pretty easy. He didn’t need to track down and interview witnesses. Eye witness testimony was generally worthless and inherently unreliable anyway. What the room “saw” was much more reliable and fully admissible in court. Nick Jacobson sighed and removed the CP from its case. He connected the screen to the processing unit and looked for a spot on the wall that would have had a good view of the crime. He decided on a place behind the bed, facing the door. He attached the PC’s sensors to that spot and adjusted the dial to record. He watched as the screen revealed the time from the present moment backward in time to the crime itself. He watched himself enter and leave the room in reverse. It was like watching a movie backwards. He checked his watch, it was after six. He had four hours to wait before he could watch the crime being committed. As the chronon record unfolded in real time, Jacobson settled in for a long wait.

Jacobson was used to waiting. Modern crime detection was all about waiting for the time line to unfold. The screen showed the empty motel room and the two bodies lying dead. He checked his watch. An hour before the crime would be revealed, the screen went blank. Jacobson rewound the recording to the point before the end. A masked figure entered the room and with a paint roller proceeded to paint the walls. That was the strange smell he’d noticed, fresh paint. That effectively eliminated the walls as witnesses. The new paint covered up the old paint’s timeline. Jacobson would have to start all over again. He could try a piece of furniture or one of the pictures on the wall. Human bodies were no good, too soft. The same with drapes and fabric, You couldn’t get a clear image off of them.

Jacobson checked his watch. It was almost 10 o’clock. He would have to start all over again only this time he’d have to wait almost eight hours. He placed the PC on the headboard and pressed record. It was going to be a long night.

Read more stories by this author

A Felony of Birds by Harris Tobias	The Greer Agency by Harris Tobias	Assisted by Harris Tobias	Hold The Anchovies by Harris Tobias
Alien Fruit by Harris Tobias	Peaceful Intent--Stories of human/Alien Interaction by Harris Tobias	CHRONON--Time Travel by Harris Tobias	The Stang by Harris Tobias

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