Karma Read Online Free PDF Page A

of their earlier lives. Was that violence gone or merely submerged by the lack of sleep?
    I stepped outside a minute and took several deep breaths of the damp November air. The devotees had gone now, and only the squeals from the radios broke the silence.
    Sometimes still, the world I worked in seemed unreal. Some of the male officers had dreamed of being cops for years, but not me. I had gone to college, bummed around Europe and met Nat. By the time Nat and I had married, he had been accepted in graduate school at Berkeley, and I had started looking for the perfect job.
    The search had dragged on. My family offered money. Nat’s family wrote about his working part-time. Nat began to suggest I was too particular, and I started to wonder if I was capable of finding any job.
    At that juncture, the patrol officer’s exam was announced—women and minorities encouraged. I took it without hope. When I passed, it surprised me. It surprised everyone. And when I started the job, kept it and actually found I did it well, the surprise took on a warm glow.
    But police work is hard on marriages, even the most stable and traditional, where wives are willing to wait up till shift ends and understand that overtime is part of the job. Nat had his own life at school, his own demanding hours. The strain was too great.
    Still, when the break came, it left a gaping hole.
    I was glad, now, when cases ran late.
    Taking a final breath, I turned back toward the ashram. A cry came from the darkness behind me.
    It wasn’t so much a cry as a howl, and it sounded like a baby. I shone my light to the left, across the grass and over the shrubbery. By the wall at the farthest point from both the temple and the ashram was a tepee, an Indian tepee!
    Had I not just left the ashram cells, the tepee might have looked strange, but in comparison with those narrow cubicles its ten-foot diameter seemed spacious. As I walked toward it, the cries grew louder.
    “Hello,” I said, trying to make my voice heard over the baby’s noise. “Hello!” Then I lifted the tepee’s flap and stared. Inside it looked like a suburban tract-house bedroom—down to the pink-and-white crib and the makeup mirror on the dressing table.
    “I’m Officer Smith,” I said to the woman who stood by the crib clutching the baby.
    “I don’t give a damn who you are. Go away.” She was in her early twenties, with long sandy hair, a tense set to her mouth and a sequin-trimmed cowboy outfit. It sparkled in the light. The baby was wrapped in a blanket, and all I could see were a few dark hairs.
    “There’s been a murder here.”
    “Yeah, don’t you think I know? You think it’s been silent tonight? Why do you think this kid’s screaming, huh?”
    At that, the baby started up again.
    I waited till the cries subsided a little. “Has an officer talked to you?”
    “Nah, they just tramped by.”
    “Okay.” I took out my pad. “Why don’t you start by telling me who you are?”
    She plopped the baby in the crib. “Look, I don’t want to start anything now. It’s after midnight.”
    I took a breath. “Like I said, this is a murder investigation. You don’t have a choice of answering or not. The only choice is how difficult you want to make it.”
    When she didn’t respond, I softened my voice and said, “It’s after midnight for me, too, you know.”
    Still she gave no reply. She glared, pulling her tweezed eyebrows tight over a pair of deep-set brown eyes. Her nose was straight, a bit too long, and her mouth pursed. She might have been attractive—not pretty—had her face not been scrunched up in anger.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Heather. Heather Lee.”
    “And your child’s?”
    “Preston Lee. I named him after a jockey. I like horses.” She aimed her glare at my face, waiting for my reaction. I displayed none.
    “And you’re one of Padmasvana’s devotees?”
    “A Penlop? Hell, no.”
    “Well, what are you doing here?”
    “I live here.”
    “I can see