Simons did not take his eyes off Hobbes. “Ray, get inside,” he said.
Ray the doorman was nonplussed. “Now, now. Reverend Hobbes, where are your stones, sir? The ones that he who is without sin is allowed to cast?”
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” spat Hobbes. “I know you, Daisley. Servant of the evil one.”
“Hey, the evil one pays scale and has a great benefits package. Now if you two want to start a riot, you’re both going about it the right way. But despite our differences, we all believe in making love, not splitting skulls, right? Remember the sixties? All you need is love. Incidentally, Reverend, where were you in ’62?”
Jinnah looked at Ray Daisley, the doorman, in a new light. He’d looked like a whipped puppy while Jassy was dissing him. Now he stood between these two driven men and tried to kid them out of a potentially violent confrontation. Simons visibly relaxed and even managed a wan smile. “Ray, you’re crazy,” he said, turning to go.
Hobbes went to lift his megaphone to his mouth, then found Daisley’s hand on his arm.
“Enough, Reverend. For the love of the kids, enough.”
Jinnah was amazed. The words were pleasant enough but carried a distinctly menacing undertone. Suddenly, he realized why Daisley was Simons’s gatekeeper.
“Please. I’m asking politely, Reverend. I would add that the police are on their way.”
“We answer to a higher authority,” said Hobbes.
But Jinnah noted that the Reverend still turned away, waving his megaphone over his head at his God Squad. “The Lord’s work has been done here tonight, friends! Let us go and sing His praises in purer air.”
Jinnah watched as the God Squad fell in behind Hobbes and marched off singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Daisley stood still at the foot of the steps, watching them go, grinning. Jinnah looked over at Saleem. Consumed with guilt, he saw the boy’s wide eyes watching Hobbes and his crew march off. How could he expose his son to danger like that?
“You okay, son?” he said, voice heavy with concern and conscience.
“Wow! That was wild!” Saleem exclaimed. “Do those guys show up every time?”
Jinnah stared at his son, uncomprehending. “Saleem, I risked my life to save you from being trampled underfoot, lost a pound of heart tissue dragging you to safety, and I have aggravated my meningitis, every symptom of which I am now suffering, and you’re telling me you enjoyed that?”
It was Saleem’s turn to look at a loss. “Does this mean I can’t catch the last set?”
To his credit, Jinnah considered it for an instant. Then the image of Manjit swam up before him like a Yaksha, a divine demoness who would lure him into the forest, only to slay him.
“Saleem, I gave you a job to do tonight. Did you actually ask anyone about Andy Gill or Thad Golway?”
“I was going to,” Saleem whined. “But the music was kinda loud and I was dancing and —”
Jinnah was not angry, just resigned. He had tried to take a shortcut to the truth and in murder cases that seldom worked. One needed to emulate Sadhu’s Kirat Karna to solve a slaying. He put an arm around his son’s shoulders and steered him towards the stairs.
“Consider the ride home your severance package, son,” he said.
Chapter Four
“Y’know, I can count the number of reporters who come in here in a year on one hand,” said the police clerk.
Caitlin Bishop smiled her best cream-fed smile. In front of her was the holy grail of cop reporters: the filing cabinet that held all of the affidavits supporting search warrants. It was public knowledge, but only to the few initiates on the beat who knew of its existence, safe behind the counter in the records room, the domain of the police clerk, who seemed almost grateful for the attention. He hovered close — too close — by her shoulder.
“Y’need a hand or anything?” he asked.
Caitlin’s smile was considerably cooler as she assured the police clerk she knew her way around the filing system. Jinnah himself had taught her. The police clerk muttered something about being only too willing to help if she needed anything and subsided into his chair. Caitlin made sure he was at least pretending to work before turning her attention to the information before her. What did she expect to find? She didn’t know exactly, but if it helped her get ahead of Jinnah it was worth it. Her wake-up call that morning had come courtesy of her producer, Ian, screaming about Hakeem’s exclusive plastered on the front page of the Tribune. Caitlin hated getting beat. She especially hated getting beat by Jinnah.
Her fingers flipped through files; two weeks, three weeks; four weeks … here. She kept her face carefully neutral as she scanned the document. Affidavit supporting an application for a search warrant. Sponsoring officer: Sergeant C. Graham. Certain activities known to me, occurring at public property adjacent to the intersection of Main and Terminal Streets, city of Vancouver….
“Holy shit!” Caitlin’s eyes bulged out as she read the bottom of the document. She glanced nervously back at the police clerk, but he was, thankfully, on the phone and hadn’t heard her astonished oath. She composed herself and pulled the file out of the cabinet, laying it in front of the police clerk.
“Do you think you could copy this for me, please?” she asked in a voice as saccharin as Jinnah’s coffee.
The clerk put his hand over the phone, solicitous. “Find what y’needed?” he said, taking the file from her.
Caitlin Bishop smiled her best 18 percent milk fat smile.
* * *
It was a short walk from the records room to the main lobby. The brief wait for the elevator to the third floor seemed to take an eternity, so did the momentary hesitation shown by the clerk behind the Major Crime counter. But it was actually a very, very short time before Caitlin Bishop found herself sitting across from Graham, studying the policeman’s face as he opened the file she had handed him, waiting for his reaction when he flipped to the final page. He didn’t disappoint her. It wasn’t much, just a slight raising of the eyebrows, but that was worth a thousand screams of anguish and denial from other interview subjects. Graham’s face, however, was a cipher as he turned his eyes on Caitlin.
“So what do you want from me?” he asked, voice neutral.
“You could start by explaining how Thad Golway’s name got onto the affidavits supporting the warrant.”
“Judges kinda like to know who’s swearing out the affidavit. They’re picky that way.”
“The names are supposed to be deleted from the document once they’re put in the public files. To protect the informants.”
That hit a bit close to home. Graham simply nodded as he tried to calculate the damage to the case, the department, to himself.
Caitlin fired another shot into the silence. “If Thad was working for you, what was he doing on the street? And who else might have been looking through these papers and found the same information?”
“You can check with records — they keep a list.”
“And they could guarantee that no one even slightly pissed off they’d been ratted on didn’t go in there or send someone a little more respectable looking to have a glance at the public record?”
Graham couldn’t, but he certainly wasn’t going to admit it. It had been a bastard of a morning, what with Jinnah’s bloody Yakshas story and Superintendent Butcher reaming him out for being so stupid as to try to manipulate the media. Now this. How hard could it be, to sever a name from a document?
“Extremely unlikely,” he lied. “It’s just a clerical error, that’s all. It’s been known to happen.”