Shattered

ill.
        “Anything on the Pulham situation?”
        Hoval leaned against the wall, remembered the blood, pulled away and checked for stains. But the wall here was clean. He leaned back again, uneasy, a chill coursing along his spine. “We think we have something,” he told the technician. “It might have started at Breen's Cafe back at the interchange.” He summarized what they had learned from Janet Kinder, the waitress who had served an unnamed oddball his lunch Monday afternoon. “If Pulham went after the man-and it looks more and more like he did-then our killer is driving a rented van on his way to California.”
        “Hardly enough data for you to put out an
APB
, is there?”
        Hoval nodded glumly. “Must be a thousand Automovers going west on I-70. It'll take weeks to go through them all, trace the drivers, winnow it down to the bastard that did it.”
        “This waitress give a description?” the lab man asked.
        “Yeah. She's man-crazy, so she remembers these things well.” He repeated the description they had gotten from the waitress.
        “He doesn't sound like a left-wing revolutionary to me,” the lab man said. “More like an ex-marine.”
        “There's no way to tell these days,” Ernie Hoval said. “The SDS and some of these other crazies are cutting their hair, shaving, bathing, blending right in with your decent average citizens.” He was impatient with the sallow man and did not want to pursue the subject; quite obviously, they were not on the same wavelength. He leaned away from the wall and looked once more into the bloody bedroom. “Why?”
        “Why this? Why'd he kill his own family?
        “Yes.”
        “He's very religious,” the technician said, smiling again.
        Hoval didn't get it. He said so.
        “He's a lay preacher. Very dedicated to Christ, you know. Spreads the Good Word as much as he can, reads the Bible for an hour every night… Then he sees his boy going off the deep end with drugs-or at least pot. He thinks his daughter's got loose morals or maybe no morals at all, because she won't tell him who she's dating or why she stays out so late. And the mother took up for both the kids a little too much. She was encouraging them to sin, as it were.”
        “And what finally set him off?” Hoval asked.
        “Nothing much. He says that all the little day-to-day things mounted up until he couldn't stand it any longer.”
        “And the solution was murder.”
        “For him, anyway.”
        Hoval shook his head sadly, thinking of the pretty girl lying on the bathroom floor. “What's the world coming to these days?”
        “Not the world,” the slim man said. “Not the whole world.”
        

    Eleven
        
        It was a hard rain, a downpour, a seemingly perpetual cloudburst. The wind from the east pushed it across high Denver in vicious, eroding sheets. It streamed off the peaked black-slate roofs of the four motel wings, chuckled rather pleasantly along the horizontal sections of spouting, roared down the wide vertical spouts, and gushed noisily into the drainage gratings in the ground. Everywhere, trees dripped, shrubs dripped, and flat surfaces glistened darkly. Dirty water collected in depressions in the courtyard lawn. The hard-driven droplets shattered the crystalline tranquility of the swimming pool, danced on the flagstones laid around the pool, flattened the tough grass that encircled the flagstones.
        The gusting wind brought the rain under the awning and into the second-level promenade outside of Doyle's room. The moment he closed the door, locking Colin inside, a whirlwind of cold water raced along the walkway and spun over him, soaking his right side. His blue work shirt and one leg of his well-worn jeans clung uncomfortably to his skin.
        Shivering, he looked southward, down the longest stretch of the walkway, to the courtyard steps at the far end. The shadows were deep. None of the rooms had light in them; and the weak night lights on the promenade were spaced fifty or sixty feet apart. The night mist complicated the picture, curling around the iron awning supports and eddying in the recessed entrances to the rooms. Nevertheless, Doyle was fairly sure that there was no one prowling about in that direction.
        Thirty feet to the north, two rooms beyond their own, another wing of the motel grid intersected this one, forming the northeast corner of the courtyard