Luther was sitting at a microscope, examining a tissue sample, when Dan entered the green-tiled lab. He looked up and grinned when he saw who was visiting him. ‘Danny boy! Did you use those tickets I gave you?’
For a moment, Dan didn’t know what the pathologist was talking about, but then he remembered. Luther had bought two tickets to a debate between G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary, and then something had come up to prevent him from going. He had run into Dan in the hall a week ago and had insisted that Dan take the tickets. ‘It’ll raise your consciousness,’ he had said.
Now, Dan fidgeted. ‘Well, I told you last week that I probably couldn’t make it. I asked you to give the tickets to someone else.’
‘You didn’t go?’ Luther asked, disappointed.
‘No time.’
‘Danny, Danny, you’ve got to make time for these things. There’s a battle raging that’ll shape our lives, a battle between those who love freedom and those who don’t, a quiet war between freedom-loving libertarians and freedom-hating fascists and leftists.’
Dan hadn’t voted — or even registered to vote — in twelve years. He didn’t much care which party or ideological faction was in power. It wasn’t that he thought Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, were all screwups; they probably were, but he didn’t really care, and that wasn’t the reason for his stubborn political indifference. He figured society would muddle through regardless of who was in charge, and he had no time to listen to boring political arguments.
His main interest, his consuming interest, was murder, which was why he had no time for politics. Murder and murderers. Some people were capable of the most unthinkable brutality, and he was fascinated with them. Not those killers who were obviously lunatics. Not those who killed in mindless fits of rage or passion after being subjected to understandable provocation. But the others. Some husbands could kill their wives without remorse, merely because they had grown tired of them. Some mothers could kill their children, just because they no longer wanted the responsibility of raising them, and they were without grief or even a sense of guilt. Hell, some people out there could kill anybody at all for any reason, even for trivial reasons like being cut off in traffic; they were amoral sociopaths, and Dan was never bored with them or with their aberrant psychology. He wanted to understand them. Were they mentally ill — or throwbacks? Were only certain people capable of cold-blooded murder when there was no element of self-defense involved, or were these killers a special breed? If they were special, wolves in a society of sheep, he wanted to know what made them different. What was missing in them? Why were compassion and empathy unknown to them?
He didn’t entirely understand his intellectual fascination with murder. He did not have a particularly ruminative or philosophical bent — or at least he didn’t think of himself in those terms. Perhaps, working day after day in a world of violence and blood and death, it was impossible not to grow philosophical with the passage of years. Maybe most other homicide cops spent a lot of time contemplating the dark side of human potential; maybe he wasn’t the only one; he had no way of knowing; it wasn’t the kind of thing most cops talked about.
In his case, of course, perhaps his need to understand murder and the murderer’s mind was related to the fact that both his brother and sister had been murdered. Maybe.
Now, smelling strongly of alcohol and vaguely of other chemicals used in the pathology lab, smiling up at Dan, Luther Williams said, ‘Listen, Danny, next week there’s a really terrific debate between—’
Dan interrupted him. ‘Luther, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to chat. I need some information, and I need it right away.’
‘What’s the big hurry?’
‘I gotta pee.’
‘Look, Danny, I know politics bores you—’
‘No, really, it isn’t that,’ Dan said with a straight face. ‘I actually gotta pee.’
Luther sighed. ‘Someday the totalitarians will take over, and they’ll pass laws so you can’t pee unless you have permission from the Official Federal Urinary Gatekeeper.’