Carlisle checked his answer unit. No one had called. He realized that he was turning into a recluse, but he seemed to have no inclination to do anything about it. He poured himself a stiff drink and dropped into the old leather armchair. It had been a long depressing day. He was weary of the continual madness and worn out by a world that was run by bigoted thugs. There was a frozen dinner in the icebox and dirty dishes in the sink. He also had no inclination to do anything about them. He flicked on the TV. It would be a suitable background to his internal gloom. There was a deacon show on the screen. Handsome, dedicated young dekes kicked down the door of a Hollywood mansion and stormed into the dark interior. There were pentagrams on the purple walls, and the cult that was getting busted consisted, in the main, of well-developed young women in skimpy leather nun habits that showed off a lot of thigh. It was the usual propaganda nonsense that passed for action adventure. Carlisle could remember when detectives had been the heroes of TV fantasy. He sighed and flipped the channel. He needed a girlfriend, but that was yet another thing about which he seemed unable to do anything. Next up was Roone Nelson.
"… so let's us ask ourselves, my friends: Do we want to see a return to those heathen days when our popular entertainment was provided by drug addicts and sexual deviants and our children aped Godless barbarians? Jesus has time and again demonstrated…"
Carlisle quickly flipped again. He did not give a rap what Jesus had time and again demonstrated. He was sick of goddamn preachers. He hit the Ten O'Clock Good News. A family of heretics had been killed by the Border Patrol. A Fort Worth woman's sight had been restored by the direct intervention of God and Larry Faithful. There was some local coverage of the riot on Eighth Avenue. Most of it was patently phony footage of steadfast riot police holding the line against ravening mobs of hideous and diseased inner city subpeople from the depths of some suburban nightmare. He flipped on. Disgust was becoming a way of life. An antique rerun of Little House on the Prairie got short shrift, as did the quiz show Catch It and Keep It. TBS was running an Audie Murphy festival, and he settled on that. The green and magenta of decaying technicolor added a tint of unreality to the TV twilight.
He wanted off this damn case. It was a pain in the ass to have to work so closely with the deacons. He needed to get back to real crime. He would take the robbery detail. Hell, he would even go back on vice. Busting hookers and pillrollers was preferable to the current nonsense. There was too much weirdness attached to terrorism. There was the constantly looming threat of politics, and that brought him right back to the deacons again. Not that anyone was going to let him go anywhere. The hunt for the Lefthand Path was going so badly that it was starting to feel like an albatross he was doomed to carry around his neck for the rest of time. There was something a little spooky about the case itself. Carlisle distrusted the way that this latest bunch of terrorists had come right out of nowhere. There should have been some kind of whisper somewhere, an informant, something. They were efficient and apparently well funded. He was not the kind who immediately jumped to the conclusion that all evils were hatched in the dark Satanic mills of Moscow, Damascus, or, at the very least, Montreal, but it did seem that they might be controlled by a foreign power. Even the name bothered him. Most terrorists went for initials, or else the people's this or the revolutionary that. There was a mystic ring to the name 'Lefthand Path' that smacked of a slick, twenty-first-century magic. It was as though they had given considerable thought to hitting the Fundamentalists right where they lived. It had to be assumed that more of such thinking would come into play if the campaign continued. The official fear was that they would escalate from bombing to political assassination. Privately, he would not have minded that at all. At least cops would not be getting blown up. It might not be a bad idea if politicians and preachers got shot up. It would certainly introduce a measure of reality into their lives.
He got up to pour himself another shot. He spent a moment looking out of the window. A thick fog was descending on the city, smothering the lights and blanketing all life out there in a cloud of gray invisibility. The fog was very fitting to his mood. It was also probably a health hazard. People who believed that Jesus would be along at any minute to put everything to rights did not spend either time or money in protecting the environment. With Judgment Day and the Rapture just around the corner, such heavy industry as still remained was free to pollute to its heart's content. Acid rain had been one of the very first issues that had pushed Canada toward the waiting arms of the Russians. Carlisle shook his head. Was the country never going to wake up to these religious maniacs and put a stop to their antics?
He knew he ought to go to bed. There was no reason to assume that tomorrow would be anything but another bitch of a day. The trouble was that he was in that state of wide-awake exhaustion that made sleep impossible. His shoulder holster was sticking into his ribs. He unhooked the harness and took it off. He paused and looked at the holstered pistol. More than one cop had taken that way out when it had all seemed too much. He half smiled and hung the rig over the back of one of the straight-backed chairs in the dinette. He was not that far gone yet. Maybe after another couple of shots and another half hour of Audie Murphy, he might be ready to doze.
Winters
Winters regarded the phone as if it were a venomous snake. He had only been at his desk for a matter of seconds before it rang. Someone must have been watching the monitors, waiting for him to come in. He nervously picked it up.
"Winters."
"I want you for an internal investigation."
It was Sommerville, his immediate superior. The words made Winters' stomach turn to ice.
"I beg your pardon."
Sommerville laughed. He had the knack of making a laugh sound cold and threatening. "It's not you that's being investigated. Not yet. I want you to help conduct one. This morning. It won't take very long. You'll be able to go back to doing nothing about the Lefthand Path after lunch."
Winters made his voice absolutely neutral. "I understand. Who's the subject of the investigation?"
"A CA called Cynthia Kline. She was apparently riding in a police car last night when it was attacked by rioters. The two officers were killed, but she survived. She claims that she blew away one of the rioters with an officer's guns. I figure she's on the level, but I want you to run her through her story."
Winters could scarcely believe it. He was going to get to interrogate Cynthia Kline. "Am I to conduct this interview on my own?"
"Of course not. Rogers and Thomas will be with you. She's on ice in interview room F. I suggest you access the statement that she gave to the PD last night. Read it and then go talk to her. There's to be no rough stuff. You understand?"
"I understand."
When Winters looked over the statement, he found it to be much as Sommerville had described. Reading between the lines, he guessed that the dead cops had been a couple of damned fools who had gone on a kill spree that had blown up in their faces. The one in the passenger seat had gotten out of the car to chase down some riot suspects. They had jumped him, taken his riot gun, and killed him. They had killed the driver as he got out of the car to help. Kline, who was also out of the car, had managed to grab the driver's shotgun and blast one of them. After that, she had radioed for help. Winters wondered if they had all been drinking.
Rogers and Thomas were waiting for him outside the interview room. Rogers was a fast-track junior deacon who did nothing to conceal the fact that he was on the make. Thomas was older and no high flier. He plodded but rarely stumbled.