In the dark the driveway seemed longer. The trees knit together over my head, and the reflections in the puddles were like a net stretched out between the clearing and the house. When I got to the end of the drive, I stopped, but there wasn’t anything to see or hear. When I stepped into the moonlight in front of the house, I could see that the door to the sheep’s apartment was open.
There was blood on the doorknob, all right. Thinking of Angwine, I wiped at it with my sleeve, but it had dried. The light was off in the apartment, so when I entered the little doorway, I had to grope around for the knob on one of the floor lamps. The first thing I saw was my hand; it was smeared with red just from touching the lamp. When I looked away from my hand, I almost knocked over a chair getting farther away from the thing I was standing practically on top of.
Someone had messed that sheep up bad. Someone had pretty much turned that sheep inside out. She was lying splayed on the blood-drenched carpet, and there were little pieces of her spread out nearly to the four corners of the room. A stomach-curdling stench rising from the carcass told me the lower intestine had been opened. My hand went reflexively to my forehead before I thought of the blood on it, and I printed my brow with sticky red. I backed away to lean against something and hit my head against the ceiling.
I looked at the corpse again, forcing myself to try to find something meaningful in the way the killing had been done, but I couldn’t concentrate. The dug-out cavity was like a maze that led my eyes against their will again and again to the mutilated black-red heart. I didn’t have what it took to search that maze for clues, so I turned off the light and went outside.
I went over to the main house and tried the handle, but the door was locked. Suddenly spooked, I put my hands in my pockets and jogged down the driveway back towards Daymont. I made it to my car without being seen, and drove out of the hills and down into Berkeley.
I must not have been paying much attention to where I was going, because I cruised right into a checkpoint cordon on Alcatraz Avenue. Before I knew what was happening the inquisitors had the whole block cut off from the flow of traffic. Blinding light shone into my car. I could hear a dog baying somewhere, frightened by the sirens of the inquisition.
There was a knock on the window of my car. I kneaded the blood off my forehead with my thumb and rolled the window down to see two helmeted inquisitors brandishing riot wands and flashlights. The one closest to my car leaned down and said: “Hand me your card and your job license.”
I dug the two chits out of my pocket and handed them over without saying anything; The inquisitor gave them to his partner and put his face farther into my car. I slumped back in my seat, but he was still too close.
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” I said.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Just driving around.”
“He’s a private dick,” said the other one. “Conrad Metcalf.”
“Just driving around, eh? You on a case?”
I must have been trembling. The image of the slaughtered sheep kept replaying itself before my eyes, and for an irrational minute I imagined they knew, and that the cordon had been set up expressly to bring me in. “Nope,” I said.
“Forty points,” said the other one. “That’s pretty low.”
“That’s what I said to the guy who left me that way,” I said.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“If we called your name into the Office, what would we find out?”
“Try it and see.”
“I think I will,” he said. “Pull over to the side and turn off your motor.”
I did what he said, and sat in my car watching the checkpoint proceed while I waited for the guy to access my file. The boys worked the cars over pretty carefully, opening a few up, rifling through trunks and glove compartments. They ran a lot of karma through the decoder and shook their heads reproachfully before handing back the cards. At one point a bunch of them got together and strip-searched a brunette in the back of her car. It was a fairly standard operation. I’d seen more than a few in my time that were worse.
After a while the two guys came back to my car and gave me my card and license. The first one was smiling cryptically. “Your file’s up for review,” he said. “Unavailable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Good luck, pal. Nice knowing you. Move along.”
“Unavailable?”
“I said move along.”
They opened up the barricade and I drove through.
CHAPTER 14
I HAD AN AWFUL SENSE OF FOREBODING GOING UP IN THE elevator, but when I got to my apartment, everything was the same, almost eerily so. Angwine had fallen asleep on the couch in the same spot he’d been in when I left. The lights were on and there was tinny music drifting out of the radio. I reached over and shut it off, and took my drink from the shelf and brought it with me into the kitchen. The ice had melted, but I didn’t care.
I thought over my options. My fingerprints were all over the Testafer house, and I’d been cordoned coming out of the hills by the checkpoint boys. Assuming Testafer hadn’t done the killing himself, he’d be coming home and raising quite a fuss any minute now. It was probably in my best interests to get hold of the Office and tell them what I knew before they came asking. If Angwine had really shaken his tail, I might pick up some much-needed points of karma by putting them onto him. It certainly couldn’t hurt. It was time to cash in a few chips just to keep this game running smoothly—hell, just to keep it running at all.
I stood in the doorway and watched Angwine snore. I felt sorry for him but I didn’t feel guilty. There was nothing more I could do than what I was doing. He was the type of guy who once upon a time would have slipped between the chinks, back when the world still had chinks to slip through. The way it was now, his type didn’t stand a chance. In fact, it didn’t look too good for my type either. But I didn’t have any regrets. I turned off the lights on Angwine and brought my drink into the bedroom.
I sat on the edge of the bed and called the Office and asked for Morgenlander. The girl at the other end said he wasn’t in the building. I asked for Catherine Teleprompter and got the same answer. When I told her I wanted to report a murder, she informed me that she would be tracing the call. I said I was surprised she hadn’t already, and she didn’t say anything at all, just switched me to another line. The voice on duty was a male inquisitor voice with a weary, skeptical air.
“You want to report a murder,” he intoned.
“That’s right. An evolved sheep was killed. I found the body.”
“That’s not a murder,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Private Inquisitor Metcalf. I’m working on the Stanhunt killing, and I think the two are probably connected.”
“Where did this happen?”
“In a private house in El Cerrito.” I recited the address.
“Where are you now?”
“At home.”
There was a minute while the inquisitor played with his monitor. I could hear his fingers tapping.
“Conrad Metcalf,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You’d better come in, Metcalf. No, sit tight, and I’ll send a man over. Don’t leave your apartment. We’ll come to you.”
“Sounds nice, but I’ve got other plans. Thanks anyway.”
“I’m suspending your license,” he said. “Stay in your apartment.”
“Sorry. We’ll have to make it some other time. Tell Morgenlander he can leave a message on my home number.”
I put the squawking receiver back on the hook and finished my drink. I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it. The Office was about to throw a blanket over the case, and I had to have that conversation with Phoneblum before they did.