Friday 11:59 P.M.

 

Turner and Fenwick returned to the station. They sat with Molton in his office staring at the streetlights over the parking lot.

They drank hot coffee and gazed.

Finally, Fenwick asked, “So what are we investigating?”

Molton said, “Some members of the department are using these protesters as scapegoats, to expand the pool of suspects, to send you in wildly different directions. Maybe, somehow, getting you by killing them.”

Turner asked, “How could it be protesters?”

Fenwick asked, “Do they have the wherewithal to move evidence from crime scene to crime scene?”

Turner said, “It would require near perfect placement or a lot of luck.”

Molton added, “Or expertise which cops would have.”

Fenwick said, “If I was a smart protester killer, I’d do it the opposite way. Use the chaos in the police department to get away with murder.”

“But the planting of so much evidence?” Molton asked.

Turner said, “There’s skill involved. Protesters, some of them, know how to shoot high-powered rifles. So would, or could, a member of the CPD.”

Fenwick asked, “We’ve got infiltrators in the protesters. Are they acting as agent provocateurs?”

Molton said, “No evidence of that, yet.”

Turner asked, “What about the rumor we got that Chicago police gang-raped Shaitan?”

Molton said, “He didn’t report anything. Maybe he happened to be at a consensual orgy where absolutely no one knew who he was. Or it’s fake news.”

Fenwick said, “Or they all knew and wanted to fuck him until it hurt.”

Turner asked, “What’s going to happen to the protester’s tent city?”

Molton shrugged. “I have no idea.”

At their desks, exhausted as they were, they did an hour of paperwork. There was an odd comfort in the relentlessness of bureaucracy. They worked mostly in silence. The day had them both down. The humidity seemed to increase with each second they spent at their desks. Turner thought that the amount of relief the fans provided felt as useless as all the work they had done so far on the case.