Night Work

Night Work

Laurie R King

Introduction

THE IMAGE ON THE wall was enough to give a man nightmares. It showed a woman of sorts, but a woman who would have made a playboy shrivel, given pause to the most ardent feminist, and had Freud scrambling to retract his plaintive query concerning what women wanted.

What this lady wanted was blood.

Her skin was dark, so deep a blue it seemed black against the crisp, bright, bloodred waves that splashed against her muscular calves. Around her hips she wore a belt strung with human hands that had been hacked off at the wrist; her neck was looped with a necklace of skulls. Her wild black hair made a matted tangle from which serpents peeped, and from her right ear hung a cluster of dry bones. Four arms emerged from her strong shoulders, in the manner of Hindu deities and the half-joking fantasy of busy mothers the world around, and all twenty of her dagger-long fingernails were red, the same bloodred as the sea around her. In her lower right hand she held a cast-iron skillet, wielding it like a weapon; her upper left grasped the freshly severed head of a man.

The expression on the lady’s face was at once beautiful and terrible, the Mona Lisa’s evil sister. Her stance and the set of her shoulders shouted out her triumph and exultation as she showed her tongue and bared her sharp white teeth in pleasure, glorying at the clear blue sky above her, at the pensive vulture in a nearby tree, at the curling smoke from the pyres of the cremation grounds on the hill nearby, at the drained, bearded, staring object swinging from the end of her arm.

She looked drunk on the pleasure of killing, burning with ecstasy at the deep hot lake of shed blood she was wading through.

And she looked far from finished with the slaughter.

She was Kali, whose name means black, the Indian goddess of destruction and creation. Kali, who kills in joy and in rage, Kali the undefeatable, Kali the mother who turns on her faithless children, Kali the destroyer, Kali the creator, whose slaughter brings life, whose energies stimulate Shiva to perform his final dance, a dance that will bring about the end of all creation, all time, all life.

Chapter 1

KATE MARTINELLI SAT IN her uncomfortable metal folding chair and watched the world come to an end.

It ended quite nicely, in fact, considering the resources at hand and the skill of the participants, with an eye-searing flash and a startling crack, a swirl of colors, then abrupt darkness.

And giggles.

The lights went up again, parents and friends rose to applaud wildly, and twenty-three brightly costumed and painted children gathered on the stage to receive their praise.

The reason for Kate’s presence stood third from the end, a mop-headed child with skin the color of milky coffee, a smile that lacked a pair of front teeth, and black eyes that glittered with excitement and pride.

Kate leaned over to speak into the ear of the woman at her side. “Your goddaughter makes a fine monkey.”

Lee Cooper laughed. “Mina’s been driving Roz and Maj nuts practicing her part—she wore one tail out completely and broke a leg off the sofa jumping onto it. Last week she decided she wasn’t going to eat anything but bananas, until Roz got a book that listed what monkeys actually eat.”

“I hope she didn’t then go around picking bugs out of tree trunks.”

“I think Roz read selectively.”

“Never trust a minister. Do you know—” Kate stopped, her face changing. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a vibrating pager, looked up at Lee, and shrugged in apology before digging the cell phone out of her pocket and beginning to push her way toward the exit and relative quiet. She was back in a couple of minutes, slipping the phone away as she walked up to the man who had been sitting on her other side during the performance and who was now standing at Lee’s elbow, watchful and ready to offer a supporting hand in the crowd. Lee’s caregiver spoke before Kate could open her mouth.

“What a pity, you’re going to miss the fruit punch and cookies.”

She rolled her eyes and said low into Jon’s ear, “Why it couldn’t have come an hour ago…”

“Poor dear,” he said, sounding not in the least sympathetic. “ ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.” “

“If I find you a ride, would you take her home?”

“Happy to. I’ll be going out later, though.”

“She’ll be fine.” Now for the difficult part. “Lee,” Kate began. “Sweetheart?” but groveling did not prove necessary.

“I’m sorry.”

“Liar,” said Lee cheerfully. “But you’ve been a very brave honorary godmother, so now you can go and play with your friends. That was Al, I assume?”

Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, were on call tonight, and in a city the size of San Francisco, a homicide was no rare thing. She nodded, hesitated, and kissed Lee briefly on the cheek. Lee looked more pleased than surprised, which Kate took as a sign that she was doing something right, and Kate in turn felt gratified beyond the scope of her lover’s reaction—their relationship had been more than a little touchy in recent months, and small signs loomed large. She stepped away carefully, looking down to be sure she didn’t knock into Lee’s cuffed crutches, and walked around the arranged folding chairs to congratulate Mina’s adoptive parents. They were surrounded by others bent on the same purpose—or rather, Roz was surrounded by a circle of admirers, this tall, brown-haired, slightly freckled woman who was glowing and laughing and giving off warmth like (as one article in the Sunday Chronicle had put it) a fireplace of the soul.

When she had read that phrase, Kate had wondered to herself if the reporter really meant that Roz was hot. She was, in fact, one of the most unconsciously sexy women Kate knew.

Kate hadn’t seen Roz in a couple of weeks, but she knew just looking at her, the way she gestured and leaned toward her audience, the way her laugh came and her eyes flashed, that Roz was involved in some passionate quest or other: She seemed to have grown a couple of inches and lost ten years, a look Kate had seen her wear often enough. Or it could have been from the fulsome praise being heaped on her by the other parents—all of whom, it seemed, had seen a television program Roz had been on the night before and were eager to tell her how great it had been, how great she had been. Roz threw one arm around the school principal and laughed with honest self-deprecation, and while Kate waited to get a word in, she studied the side of that animated face with the slightly uncomfortable affection a person invariably feels toward someone in whose debt she is and always will be, an ever-so-slightly servile discomfort that in Kate’s case was magnified by the knowledge that her own lover had once slept with this woman. She liked Roz (how could she not?) and respected her enormously, but she could never be completely comfortable with her.

Roz’s partner, Maj Freiling, stood slightly to one side, taking all this in while she spoke with a woman Kate vaguely remembered having met at one of their parties. Maj was short, black-haired, and—incongruously—Swedish; her name therefore was pronounced “my,” forming the source of endless puns from Roz. Most people who knew Roz assumed that her quiet partner was a nonentity whose job was to keep house, to produce brilliant meals at the drop of Roz’s hat, and to laugh politely at Roz’s jokes. Most people were wrong. Just because Maj spoke little did not mean she had nothing to say. She was the holder of several degrees in an area of brain research so arcane only half a dozen people in San Francisco had ever heard of it, and they in turn were not of the sort to be found in Roz’s company of politicians and reformers. It seemed to Kate a case of complete incompatibility leading to a rock-solid marriage, just one more thing she didn’t understand about Roz Hall.

Kate looked from one woman to the other, and gave up on the attempt to reach Roz. Maj smiled at Kate in complicity as Kate approached. Kate found herself grinning in return as she reached out to squeeze Maj’s arm.

“Thanks for inviting me,” she said. “I was going to come to the party afterward, but I got a call, and have to go. Sorry. Be sure to tell Mina she was the best monkey I’ve ever seen.”

“I will tell her. And don’t worry, your avoidance of our potluck desserts is in good company.” Maj glanced over Kate’s shoulder toward the door. Kate turned and saw a distinctively tailored and hatted figure sweeping out of the school cafeteria. The moment the door swung shut behind him, someone’s voice rose above the Babel with a remark about the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, the group of feminist vigilantes who had in recent weeks set the city on its ear with a series of creative and, Kate had to admit privately, funny acts of revenge. Just that morning the mayor had issued a statement to the press saying, in effect, “We are not amused.”

Kate smiled absently at the overheard remark and turned back to Maj. “That was the mayor, wasn’t it?”

Maj shrugged and gave her a crooked smile as if to apologize for a flashy display.

“I wondered whose car that was. Very impressive,” Kate told her. “Look, Maj, could you find someone who might be able to take Lee and Jon home? We only brought the one car.”

“We, on the other hand, always bring two, because Roz invariably finds someone she just has to talk to. I’d be happy to give them a ride, if they don’t mind waiting for Mina to stuff herself with cookies first.”

“I’m sure they won’t mind. Jon secretly adores Oreo cookies and— what are those Jell-O things called?”

“Jigglers,” Maj pronounced with fastidious disapproval, giving the word three syllables. Kate laughed and reached out again to pat Maj’s shoulder in thanks, waved to Lee, and hurried out of the school hall in the footsteps of Hizzoner to her own, lesser vehicle.

The western sky was still faintly light ahead of her as Kate drove down Lombard Street in the recently acquired and thoroughly broken-in Honda, which on the first warm day she owned it had declared itself to be the former property of a pizza delivery boy. She rolled down the window to let in the air of this April evening, clear and sweet after the drizzle earlier in the day, and wished she hadn’t let Lee bully her into giving up the motorcycle.

Kate loved San Francisco best at night. During the day it was an interesting city, decorative and lively and every bit as anonymous as a villain, or a cop, could ask for. But at night the city closed in and became intimate, a cluster of hills and valleys with the sea curled up against three sides of it. Sometimes, beneath the stars and the hum of traffic and the collective breathing of three-quarters of a million people, Kate imagined she could hear the city’s song.

The imagined song was a flight of fancy unlike Kate—or rather, unlike the image Kate had of herself—and a thing she had never mentioned to anyone, even to Lee. (Perhaps especially not Lee, an analytical therapist who tended to read far too much into small imaginings.) Like an old tune that had been recorded in a hundred ways, the song of the City could be smooth and sexy from the throat of a torch singer or ornate in a cappella, coolly instrumental or raunchy in rock. The city’s complex melody was never the same on two nights or in two places: Here it had a salsa beat, there the drive of rap held it, elsewhere it was transformed by the plink and slither of Chinese instruments and harmonies, in another part of town it had the raga complexity of Indian music. During those “only in San Francisco” times when the latest outrageous excess of the City by the Bay made the final, tongue-in-cheek segment on the national news—since the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement had come on the scene, for example—the song occasionally took on comic overtones, like a movie score preparing the audience for a pratfall. No matter the setting, though, it was the same song, the night song of the City of St. Francis, and it kept Kate Martinelli company as she crossed its streets to the scene of a crime.

Lombard Street’s garish blast of motel and cocktail lounge lights cut off abruptly at the wide gate that marked the entrance to the Presidio, and the clutter of buildings and phone lines gave way to trees and dignified officers’ housing. The Army was in the process of withdrawing from the base it had built here, the most gorgeous piece of open land left in San Francisco, but so far the untidy life of civilian San Francisco had been kept at bay, and Kate’s headlights picked out neatly trimmed lawn and ranks of dark barracks. Following the directions she had been given, she kept to the right. The road passed along the edge of a parking lot so huge it might have been a parade grounds, with three cars in it, before narrowing further to become a single lane between a wooden building and the madly busy but oddly removed freeway that led to the Golden Gate Bridge, and then Kate saw the gates to the military cemetery and a police car across the adjoining road, turning cars back. She showed the uniform her identification and drove on, headlights playing now across rows of gleaming white gravestones that stretched up the hill to her left, and then the City’s song took on a discordant note, like the warning of a minor chord in a suspense movie, with the appearance of a brilliant blue-white light thrown against the undersides of the trees around the next turn.

The stark glare rising before her in the night made Kate slow to a crawl before rounding the corner. What looked like two hundred people were scattered up the road before her, although she knew it could not be more than thirty at the most, and that included the reporters, who had come here on foot, dragging their equipment with them, from where they had been forced to leave their vans on the other side of the cemetery. She pulled to one side and parked among a wild assortment of official vehicles—park police and SFPD cruisers, ambulance and coroner’s van, half a dozen unmarked police cars—and a few small cars from personnel who had been called from home. Further along the curve of the road, kept at a distance by uniforms but making full use of their long-range lenses, television vans were already in attendance, hoping for a lead story for the eleven o’clock news. A uniformed patrolman was still in the process of wrapping yellow tape around the perimeter of the crime scene, using trees, a fence post, and a convenient street sign. Kate nodded at familiar faces among the cops, ignored the questions of the reporters on this side of the scene, and ducked under the restraining tape.

Al Hawkin was standing with his hands in his pockets watching the medical examiner at work, homicide bag on the ground at his feet. He turned when he felt his partner at his side.

“So much for an evening off,” he said by way of greeting.

“If you’d called an hour earlier you’d have saved me from the whole play.”

“Which one was that?”

“A school play, if you can believe it. You know Roz Hall?” He nodded; half the people in the City knew Roz Hall, to their pleasure or their fury, and occasionally both at once. “Well, she and her partner, Maj, adopted Maj’s niece last year, and asked Lee to be the godmother. The kid—her name’s Mina—goes to a private school that’s big on ethnic celebrations, and this was some complicated Indian story about gods and wars. Mina played a monkey. The mayor himself was there.” Hawkin’s eyebrows went up. “So, what do we have here?”

“The ME beat me here, so I haven’t had a chance to look. Called in by a jogger just after six-thirty—there’s a uniformed at the guy’s house. Seems to be a white male, no obvious signs of violence that the jogger could see, but then he only looked close enough to pass on the CPR before heading home for a phone. I’d say the vie looks to be about twenty-four hours old.”

“Funny place to have a heart attack,” Kate remarked. “And he wasn’t exactly dressed for jogging.” What they could see of the body, half hidden by the bushes at the side of the paving, was clothed in heavy, stained work boots and some sort of khaki pants. “And why on earth didn’t anyone spot it during the day? This is a pretty heavily used road.”

“Not as many people on foot as usual, because of the rain. It was getting dark, so the guy who found him figured it was safe to stop and have a pee, happened to stop here.”

There was a certain humor in the picture, which Kate turned over in her mind as they waited to be allowed access to the body. Al broke into her thoughts with a question.

“Why do you suppose he was dropped here? Other than it’s dark and you can see cars coming?”

Kate looked around, and she had to admit that it was not the first place she would have chosen for easy disposal of an inconvenient corpse. “If it’d been me, I’d have gone on down there,” she told her partner, nodding toward a cluster of dark buildings in the hollow of the hill. “There’s no gate across the access road, is there?”

“Nope. And the park guys say there wasn’t anything going on there last night, shouldn’t have been any traffic down there at all.”

Kate turned and looked in the other direction, up the hill. On the other side of the road, some brambles and trees rose up, then the fence that surrounded the cemetery. “You suppose they were aiming for the cemetery but missed? Maybe there were people in there, scared the perps off.” She herself had run through the Presidio when she was feeling ambitious, and knew the cemetery for a closed-in area with limited access and regular visitors; too likely to get trapped in there, and hard to explain a dead body missing its casket and mortuary van.

Eventually, the ME stood away and she and Hawkin moved into the glare of the portable floodlights to get a closer look at their dead white male.

Dead he clearly was, and Kate agreed that trying CPR on that darkened face with that swollen, froth-covered tongue protruding was not a cheering prospect.

“Strangled,” she said, pointing out the obvious.

“With something other than hands,” Al added as he lifted back the collar of the man’s plaid shirt. Something had torn into the soft skin of the throat, chafing it raw as it did its work.

The man had blunt features, cropped hair, and the coarse bloom of long-term alcohol use in his nose. His belly was big and soft although his chest and upper arms appeared muscular where his shirt had been pulled away by the paramedics. He wore a jeans jacket but cotton-polyester uniform trousers, and a belt with a buckle declaring the man’s loyalty to Coors beer.

“Are his hands tied?”

Al tugged at the inert shoulder, which showed signs that rigor mortis was passing off, to reveal the man’s thick wrists. They wore a pair of regulation police handcuffs identical to those in Kate’s bag. Neither of them commented on the cuffs, but Al held the man’s torso off the ground until Kate had removed a fat wallet from the hip pocket of the pants, then eased the body back down until it was lying as it had been when Kate arrived on the scene.

“Not robbery.” It was Al’s turn to point out the obvious. A gold band dug deep into the flesh of the man’s meaty ring finger, and in his wallet were eighty-two dollars, a stack of membership cards to video rental parlors, a credit card, and a California driver’s license that identified the corpse as one James Larsen, with an address in the bedroom community of South San Francisco. A working man’s address to match his clothes and his hands, and somewhat out of the ordinary for a San Francisco homicide victim.

They patted down James Larsen’s pockets with care, since the rubber gloves both detectives wore gave no protection against the myriad of sharp and potentially lethal objects people carried around. Kate found a ticket stub to an action movie dated three days before, six coins, a used handkerchief, and the wrapper from a stick of beef jerky. No keys. Al slid a hand into Larsen’s left-side jacket pocket and pulled out three cellophane-wrapped pieces of candy: a lump of hard butterscotch, a flattened square of striped coconut chew, and a squashed wad of something red and soft. Mr. James Larsen, it would appear, had had a sweet tooth.

Hawkin dropped the candies into an evidence bag and stood up to let the rest of the team move in. The photographer took a few close-ups to go with his earlier shots of the crime scene as it had appeared before anyone went near the body, and the Crime Scene officers bent to their labors. Kate and Hawkin walked over to where the techs were leaning against their van, the smoke from their cigarettes mingling with the tang of eucalyptus in the cool night air. All four city employees ignored the calls of the gathered news media as if it had been the noise of so many plaintive seagulls.

“Any idea when the autopsy’ll be?” Al asked them.

“Might be tomorrow, more likely the next day. The morgue’s pretty crowded.”

“Let me know.”

“But I can tell you now what they’ll find,” the man continued.

“Clogged arteries, a bad liver, and strangulation,” Hawkin offered.

“A taser.”

“What?”

“A stun gun, taser, whatever you call it. One of those things women carry. It wouldn’t have killed him, but whoever did this used one to put him down.” The tech threw his cigarette on the pavement and ground it under his heel, blithely contaminating the periphery of a crime scene, then led the two detectives over to the body. He squatted and pulled the plaid shirt back again from Larsen’s strong chest. “That’s a taser burn,” he asserted, pointing to a small red area, and looked up to catch their reaction.

There was none. Both detectives kept their faces empty, and Al merely said, “I suggest you keep that theory to yourself,” casting a quick glance over his shoulder at the waiting reporters, and allowed the process of removing the body to go on.

Still, Kate made a note of what the tech had said before she followed Al over to where they had parked their cars.

“It looked more like a bruise to me,” she said firmly, as if saying so would make a bit of difference. Her partner grunted. “And really, even if it is a taser—”

“We’ll know soon enough,” Al remarked, and walked over to give the reporters what little he could. Or would.

The taser, if the mark on James Larsen’s chest was not bruise, birthmark, pimple, or the growth of some exotic contagion, would create a problem, because that was how the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, that source of sly jokes at school parties and embarrassment to mayors and cops, began life: with a taser.

The reign of the Ladies (quickly shortened by an admiring public to the LOPD, although they referred to themselves as merely the Ladies) had begun back in late January, when a lowlife named Barry Doyle was acquitted of statutory rape. Belinda Matheson, aged fifteen years and ten months, had gone cruising with some friends with a borrowed ID that looked very like her (hardly unusual, since it belonged to her older sister) and declared her to be twenty-one. Doyle was twice her age, although his boyish features had a vague resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio, and the combination of his cute face, his clever flattery, and his illicit booze had landed the teenager in Doyle’s bed. Her parents, apoplectic with worry by the time Belinda dragged herself home the next afternoon, furiously pressed charges, but Doyle had a good lawyer and drew an inexperienced prosecutor who allowed a jury that was predominantly male and exclusively unmarried or divorced. The combination of testimony—that Doyle had been seen to check Belinda’s ID, reassuring himself that she was no minor; that she had looked to be the person on the license (this bolstered by a blowup photo of Belinda in adult makeup and upswept hair); and most damaging of all, that she was by no means an innocent (this last from an ex-boyfriend who showed great promise for stepping into Barry Doyle’s sleaze-covered shoes)—conspired to produce a verdict that had Doyle, owner of six adult video parlors and a topless bar that the jury knew nothing about, crowing his victory over the forces of “disgruntled feminists and other human rights fascists” right there on the courthouse steps—and announcing that he was in turn suing the Matheson family for the “emotional, financial, and professional damage” he had suffered through their “cold-blooded deception.” He ended his impromptu press conference by looking straight into the nearest television camera and declaring, “Fair’s fair, Belinda.”

Shortly before midnight that same day, following a wild celebratory dinner, Doyle vanished somewhere between his car and his front door. He was discovered eight hours later by morning commuters, quite alive if spitting with rage, stark naked and spread-eagled across the window of a building under renovation. His genitals had been dyed purple (as could be seen from the cars that were soon at a complete halt on the freeway) and the duct tape that suspended him from the window frame ripped most of the hair off his wrists, ankles, and face, but most shocking (and delicious) of all was the revelation that underneath the purple dye, he had been tattooed. The phrase I SCREW CHILDREN was now an indelible part of Barry Doyle’s equipment, until such time as he was driven to submit to the pain of eradication, and the note duct-taped to his backside put the cap on the episode: fair’s fair, dick.

—The Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement

Oh joy, oh ecstasy, on the part of all the world that had never flirted with the idea of bedding an underage girl. And oh the discomfort, oh the uneasy shriveling felt by all society’s members (so to speak) who had. A thousand duct-tape jokes bloomed on late-night television, the color purple took on a whole new significance, tattoo artists became the heroes (and the suspects) of the hour. The Ladies instantly overtook their predecessors in the Only-in-San Francisco category, the gay/lesbian/bi/ and-a-few-straights protest group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In three days the Ladies had half a dozen fan Web sites, twenty designs of T-shirts for sale around the city’s tourist sites (all of them purple), and a hundred jokes about how many Ladies it took to tattoo a man. (A representative answer: None at all, if he’s a true Dick.) Even Doyle’s friends began to forget that his name was Barry.

Since then, the Ladies had struck twice more. Their most visible action was when a billboard went up, again overlooking the freeway and this time only five hundred yards from police headquarters, showing the face of a prominent local politician superimposed on a male with a naked child in his lap (the politician took an immediate extended vacation, considered by all a sure admission of guilt). Taped to the billboard’s access ladder was a note saying:

NAUGHTYBOY.

—the Ladies

Their third strike was against a chronic flasher out in the Sunset, overcome by a taser-wielding duo and duct-taped, naked and face-forward, to embrace a metal lamppost on a very cold night. The note taped to his anatomy read:

BITDRAFTY?

—the Ladies

The official Departmental line, of course, was that vigilante actions of this sort were wrong, dangerous, and not to be tolerated. But there were as many cracks about frostbite within the walls of the Justice building as there were outside, and a cop only had to murmur the words “duct tape” to have the room convulsed.

Other actions had been attributed to the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, both in the Bay Area and across the state, but none were certain, since they lacked the hallmark humor. The police had no more idea who the Ladies were (or even if they were actually women) than they had in January. The obvious suggestion, that some of the “nuns” of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had decided to grow teeth, was investigated, but no links were found beyond the middle words in the two names and their clear common regard for irreverence. No fingerprints had been found on the duct tape, no identifiable evidence recovered from the crime scenes, the three notes were on paper sold by the ream in chain stores and generated by software and a computer and printer that half of the state could own. Even the billboard, as public an act as could be imagined, had been a fast strike involving prepainted sheets and wallpaper glue. All the police knew was that the Ladies struck at night, and that two of their actions had involved tasers.

And now a man with a possible taser burn on his chest lay dead.

Crime Scene agreed that, particularly as the rain seemed to have stopped for the night, it would be far better to leave the site until morning. Al arranged for the road to remain closed off and for the scene to be guarded from the depredations of the cameras, before the two detectives went to interview their only witness.

The jogger who had come across the body seemed to be just that, not the murderer returned to the scene to “discover” his victim. He even produced the stub from an airline boarding pass to prove that he had only returned that morning from a business trip. They thanked him and left, and then set off to the Larsen home, to make the announcement and see what they could see.

THE LARSEN ADDRESS WAS in South San Francisco, half an hour down the peninsula from the city and a different world. The big white letters on the hillside declared South San Francisco to be THE INdustrial CITY, a place dominated by San Francisco International and all the freight, crated and human, that the airport moved.

The Larsen house proved to be one of a thousand cramped stucco boxes thrown up after the war. Even in the inadequate illumination from their flashlights and one dim street lamp, the house showed every year of its half century. Weeds grew in the cracks of the walkway, the cover of the porch light had broken and been removed, and the paint was dull and beginning to peel. Al put his thumb on the bell, and after a minute of no response pounded on the door, but the house remained dark. A trip around the building with flashlights at the windows showed them merely the untidy interior of a tract house, so they split up, heading in opposite directions along the street to stop in at every house where lights still showed. When they met up again to compare notes, the information each had gleaned from the neighbors amounted to the same thing.

The Larsen family had lived here for at least ten years. James worked as a baggage handler at the airport, his wife, Emily, kept house. Their two kids were grown and moved away. His wife had recently left him, and the across-the-street neighbor he went bowling with, the only one who might possibly know where Larsen’s wife or kids were, was away on vacation, due back in three or four days. The one piece of information Kate could add concerned the Larsen car, a six-year-old Chevrolet sedan. DMV gave her the license number, and as they sat in the front seat of Kate’s car to write up their field notes, she put out a bulletin for the car. Then, since there was not a great deal more they could do at that time of night, and since there seemed to be no immediate reason to roust a judge out of bed to sign a search warrant, they went their separate ways through the dark and drowsing peninsula, and were both in their beds not so much after midnight.

A deceptively ordinary beginning to a far from ordinary case.

Chapter 2

ONE OF THE MEDICAL techs had talked. Either that, or the Chronicle reporter had a contact within SFPD who had heard the rumor, because the front page of the paper that Kate fetched from the flower bed the following morning had the story of the body found in the Presidio, an indistinct picture of Al Hawkin walking away from it, and the clear speculation that the death was linked with the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement. Kate cursed, told Lee that she wouldn’t be having breakfast, and while Hawkin was out checking on the progress of the crime scene search, Kate set off to hunt down the history of a victim.

James Larsen had a lengthy arrest record, though only two convictions: one for drunk-and-disorderly at the age of nineteen, and one five years before his death, for assaulting his wife. In the twenty-five years between those two convictions, Emily Larsen had been a regular visitor to the hospital emergency room, but had consistently refused to press charges. Only in recent years, when the law was changed to make spousal cooperation unnecessary for domestic violence prosecution, had Larsen been vulnerable.

Since then he had been careful. The police still came to his house every six or eight months, but they had not arrested him again until the end of February, when the beer binge that he had begun the day before fed into resentments real and imagined and was topped off by his anger over his favorite team’s defeat, leaving Emily bleeding onto the floor of the emergency room. He had been arrested and charged with attempted murder, and bail was placed too high for him to reach. Three weeks later the charges were reduced, to battery and assault, and a tired judge had sentenced him to time served, a year of probation, a hundred hours of community service, and marriage counseling. He then turned Larsen loose. Two weeks after that, a pair of SFPD homicide detectives were standing over his corpse.

Just before his release from jail, according to the neighbors, Emily had packed her bags and been driven off by a woman in a Mercedes; she had not been seen since. Or heard from: Emily’s few acquaintances did not know where she was, her sister in Fresno hadn’t spoken with her since early March, and their father, in a rest home near Fresno, neither knew nor was he interested.

When Emily Larsen had not shown up at her house the following morning, Kate had asked the phone company to preserve the records of the incoming calls for a few days, and then made out a request for a search warrant on the records for the Larsen phone. It was the previous month’s phone bill that gave the missing woman away. Four days before her husband was released from jail, Emily had made a telephone call to a lawyer’s office in San Francisco. Kate, working her way through the calls, heard the greeting “Law offices” and knew she’d found the wife. She identified herself, asked to speak with the partner who was representing one Emily Larsen, declined to be called back, and settled in with her heels on the desk to wait. She listened to the piano music of call-holding coming through the receiver, understanding that legal dignity required that a cop be made to wait. She’d done the same herself to lawyers. With the phone tucked under her chin, she sat tight and glanced through a stack of memos and Daily Incident Recaps that had been accumulating on her desk. The recaps, in addition to the usual list of attempted robberies, hit-and-runs, and sexual assaults, included the laconic description of assault by a chronic urinator who was proving a nuisance to passers-by—particularly those on bicycles. The memos included one decree (what Kate reckoned was the thirtieth such issued) that department personnel were not, under any circumstances, to make jokes about the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, or duct tape, or the color purple. Another memo was the announcement that an unknown group had been plastering up flyers seeming to advocate the extermination of all male children, which caused Kate to read it more closely and shake her head. She was looking at a third memo bearing a stern reminder concerning the cost to local supermarkets of the oversized plastic shopping carts favored by the homeless, when the music in her ear cut off abruptly and a woman’s voice spoke in her ear.

“Inspector Kate Martinelli?”

“That’s right.”

“Carla Lomax here. I believe we’ve met, at a fund-raiser for the teen shelter. I certainly know your name.”

And reputation, Kate thought. In fact, she’d counted on it. “Good, then you’ll know I’m not the bad guy here. I’m trying to reach one of your clients, Emily Larsen.”

“What makes you think—”

“She called this number on March sixteenth, a few days before her abusive husband was freed from jail. A day or two later, some woman came to the house and drove Emily Larsen away. Her husband has died. I need to talk with her.”

“What happy news.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That the bastard is dead. It makes my job a lot easier, and Emily’s life. Not that she will see it that way, poor thing, but truth to tell she would have gone back to him eventually, and eventually he would have killed her. Much better this way.”

“Urn.” In Kate’s experience, lawyers did not speak so frankly, certainly not to a cop. “Right. You are representing her, then? May I have her address, please?”

“I am representing her, yes, and I think it would be better if I continued to do so by asking you to come here to interview her in my presence. She’s living in a shelter, and it’s better if the residents don’t feel invaded. I could bring her to you, if you’d prefer, Inspector.”

Kate reflected for a moment before deciding that if the much-abused Emily Larsen had nothing to do with her husband’s death, it would not help matters to drag her downtown, whereas if she did, keeping the first interview away from police territory would give the woman a false sense of security that might come in useful later.

“I’ll come there,” she said. “What time?”

They agreed to two o’clock at Lomax’s law offices south of Market Street. Kate took her heels off her desk, brought the paperwork for that report and a couple of others up to date, and went home for lunch, a rare occurrence.

At two o’clock, while Al Hawkin was bracing himself for the first cut of the pathologist’s knife into the body of James Larsen, Kate rang the bell at the entrance of the anonymous building. As Kate thoughtfully eyed the dents and bashes in the surface of the stout metal door, the speaker set over the bell crackled to life, and the same secretarial voice she had heard before declared, “Law offices.”

“Inspector Kate Martinelli to see Ms. Lomax.” She lifted her face to the camera lens concealed in the reaches of the entranceway, and was buzzed in.

Half a mile north of this address, law offices meant marble, polished oak, smoked mirrors, abstract art, and a size-five receptionist with a daily manicure. Here it meant industrial-quality carpeting, white walls in need of a touch-up, museum posters in drugstore frames, and a size-six-teen secretary with short, unpainted nails on her skilled hands. She also had a waist-length braid keeping her graying brown hair in order, no makeup to speak of, skin too pale to have spent time out of doors, and a large basket of toys next to her desk. The woman fixed Kate with a gaze that had seen it all.

“Have a seat,” she offered, though it sounded more like an order. “Carla will be here in a minute.”

“That’s a good security setup,” Kate commented, remaining on her feet. “Do you have a lot of problems here?” SoMa was not the most crime-free part of town by any means, and that door had been the victim of at least one determined assault.

“It’s because we have security that we haven’t had problems.”

“Angry husbands?”

“And boyfriends and fathers. They pound away until the cops get here, making fools of themselves for the camera.” She glanced at the monitors with amused but slightly bitter satisfaction, and Kate, reflecting that the odds were high the woman had once needed the services of a women’s advocate lawyer herself, moved around the desk as if the glance had been an invitation. Peering over the secretary’s shoulder, she saw the displays of four security cameras. Two showed a small parking area; as Kate watched, a light-colored, boxy Mercedes sedan at least ten years old pulled through an opening gate on one screen and parked on one of a half-dozen spaces shown on the next. From the car stepped two women, the driver sorting through her keys as she approached the building until the all-seeing secretary pressed a button and freed the door.

Kate walked up and down for a few minutes, trying to get an impression of the law offices. Casual seemed to be the unifying decorative theme, beginning with the untidy forest of objects on the receptionist’s desk (two spindly plants; a flowered frame with the picture of a young girl; a delicate terra-cotta Virgin and Child; a figurine of an Indian goddess with a black face and golden crown; a three-inch-tall carved box representing a heap of cheerfully intertwined cats; a sprig of redwood cones; and a chipped coffee mug, stuffed with a handful of pens and pencils, that proclaimed “When God created man, She was only joking”). The works of art on the walls were similarly eclectic, with museum posters (Monet and Van Gogh) adjoining framed crayon studies (stick figures and box houses) and one competent and very original tempera study of a woman and two children, done with a deft hand in pleasing tones of green and blue. In the corner were the initials P W, and Kate was just thinking that Lee would like this when Carla Lomax came into the room to shake Kate’s hand and lead her back into the building. As Kate followed, she glanced into the other rooms. There looked to be a couple of other partners in the firm, neither of them at their desks. Between two unoccupied offices was a meeting room with a large round wooden table that took up so much of the floor space, it must have been assembled in the room. On the wall a striking black and white poster caught Kate’s eye, the blown-up photograph of a woman with a swollen mouth and two black eyes, a bandage on her scalp, and a cast on one hand, gazing tiredly at the camera. Underneath her image were printed the words, But he loves me. Kate wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a joke; if so, it was a bleak one.

Carla Lomax stepped into the next office, sat behind her desk, and waved Kate at a chair across from her. Again Kate remained on her feet. Two could play games in the world of legal give-and-take.

“I thought we might have a word before I bring Emily in,” Lomax told her. “Just so we’re in agreement here.”

“What is there to agree about?” Kate asked, half turned away from Lomax to study an attractive arrangement of framed photographs of the City at night, gaudy North Beach, Chinatown shimmering in the rain.

“Emily Larsen has just lost her husband. She does not need to be harassed.”

Kate took a step over to the next display of photos, an assortment of scenes from foreign countries: a woman in a market, brilliant colors in her shawl and a bowler hat on her head; three thin but laughing children playing in a street with a bicycle rickshaw behind them; a woman seated at a backstrap loom, a weaving of vibrant oranges, pinks, and greens emerging from the threads.

“These are nice,” Kate commented. “Where are they from?”

“Bolivia, India, and Guatemala.”

“Did you take them?”

“Yes,” the lawyer said. “Inspector Martinelli—”

“Ms. Lomax, how much criminal law have you done since you passed your exams?”

“Not a lot.”

“Mostly family law, right?”

“I know my law,” Lomax said, offended.

“I’m sure you do. But please, rest assured that so do I, and I don’t go around screwing with family members; it jeopardizes both my job and my cases. Let’s just bring Mrs. Larsen in and let me talk with her, and then I’ll let you both be.”

As Kate had suspected, Carla Lomax was more at home with the intricacies of divorce, child custody, and restraining orders than she was with Miranda rights and criminal investigations. The lawyer hesitated, but in the end she stood up and went to fetch Emily Larsen.

Kate continued to wander around the room, moving from the photos to a display of ethnic dolls and trucks on a low shelf (the better to distract the children of clients?), an impressive bookshelf of legal and psychological tomes, and finally a glass case containing female figures from all over—a grimacing Aztec goddess giving birth to the sun, a multiple-breasted female who looked vaguely Mediterranean next to a woman in wide skirts holding a pair of snakes, the Polish Black Virgin, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe. Prominently displayed in front was a crude dark-skinned figure six inches tall, with many arms, bare breasts, and a protruding tongue: wild-eyed and wild-haired, the figure wore a necklace of grinning skulls and held a decapitated head in one of her hands. Kate, nonplussed, could only wonder what Carla Lomax’s troubled clients made of their lawyer’s art collection.

The door opened and Carla came in with Emily Larsen, and Kate shook her hand and introduced herself, sitting down with the two women in a group of chairs and making remarks about the weather and traffic to put Emily at ease.

In fact, though, Kate was always uncomfortable around victims of chronic spousal abuse, those walking reminders of the vulnerability of women—particularly those weighed down with children. Intellectually, professionally, she fully understood that a person’s willingness to put up with abuse had its roots deep in childhood, when a groundwork of self-contempt and a deep sense of worthlessness was laid down, feelings that made it nearly impossible to stand up to bullying. As a person, however, as a woman, Kate felt primarily frustration and impatience, and even a tinge of completely unfounded revulsion, at their weakness, their willingness to crawl back like beaten dogs to lick the hand of their tormentor. When confronted by a woman who persisted in an abusive relationship, Kate inevitably found herself stifling the question, Why hadn’t the woman just hauled off and brained her husband with a skillet?

But then again, maybe this one had.

Everything about the recent widow in front of Kate was apologetic and unassuming, from her limp handshake to her slumped shoulders. The heavy frames of her cheap glasses nearly hid the washed-out brown of her eyes, her face was a pale contrast to the flat black of hair that showed gray at the roots, and the drab cotton dress that hung over her dumpy figure had been washed to the point of colorlessness. Kate began by expressing her sympathies over the loss of her husband; Emily Larsen responded by wincing, her eyes filling. Kate sighed quietly to herself.

“Ms. Larsen… Emily. I believe that Ms. Lomax has told you that your husband was killed, on Monday night or Tuesday morning? That he was murdered?”

Kate waited for a response from the woman before she went on, expecting either a meek nod or silent tears. What she saw instead made her sit back sharply, the usual string of questions cut short. A small grimace had puckered up Emily Larsen’s mouth—brief, but clear. Why on earth would the woman react to Kate’s words with disapproval? But what else looked like that? Could it have been an objection to the tasteless word “murder”? Kate wondered. She wished Al were here. With all her instincts set to quivering by that involuntary moue across the woman’s face, she would have to proceed very carefully.

“Were you and James separated, Mrs. Larsen?”

“A trial separation,” Emily admitted in a small voice.

“Your husband had a history of abusing you. Was that the main reason?”

“I was…yes.”

“You were afraid of him, I do understand. He hit you, didn’t he?”

Emily glanced at Carla, mouth open as if to protest, but she subsided and only nodded.

“Did he hit your kids as well?”

The woman looked up quickly. “Never. He wouldn’t. Jimmy’s— Jimmy was a good man. He loved us, he really did. He just… lost control sometimes.”

“When he was drinking.”

Another nod.

“Did you ever get the feeling that your husband was involved with someone outside the home?”

“Involved? You mean, like with another woman?” The very idea was enough to shake Emily Larsen in a way nothing else had.

Kate hastened to reassure her that her loving husband hadn’t been taking it elsewhere, so far as she knew.

“Not necessarily a woman. Gambling, maybe, going to the races, perhaps something mildly illegal that he wouldn’t have wanted you to find out about?”

“I really don’t know. There’s nothing I can think of, and Jimmy never went away much except to work and bowling and stuff. And someone having… you know, an affair, they always say they’re working overtime, don’t they?”

“Did your husband ever have money that wasn’t explained by his salary?”

“No,” Emily replied, reassured that Kate wasn’t about to spring a rival on her, but obviously bewildered by the questions. Kate let it go. A baggage handler behind the scenes at a busy airport might have opportunity for crime, but if Larsen had indulged in smuggling or rifling bags, he had kept it from his wife. Kate would try another tack.

“Mrs. Larsen, did your husband come up to San Francisco a lot?”

“No. He never did.”

“Never?”

“Except for the airport, of course, and to Candlestick or whatever they’re calling it now. He mostly liked football, but he’d go to baseball games if he could get cheap tickets. And if he was going to Oakland, he’d go through the City even if he came back around the Bay. To save on the bridge fare, you know? Jimmy hated to pay the fare.” Toll on the Bay’s various bridges was collected only one way, although as far as Kate knew, it was cheaper to pay it than to drive clear around the Bay. James Larsen may have been one who resented the fare enough to spend the gas money, and an hour longer on the road, to avoid paying it.

“So you have no idea what he was doing in the Presidio on Monday night?”

Emily shook her head, as much in wonder as to indicate a negative. “It seems a strange place for Jimmy to go.”

“Was he a golfer?” Kate asked desperately, thinking of the Presidio golf course—although Larsen had not been dressed for golf any more than he had been for jogging. Emily looked as if Kate had suggested nude sunbathing or jai alai, and told her no.

No drugs on the body, no unexplained cash, no extramarital entertainment on the side. Larsen’s death was proving more and more enigmatic. “Mrs. Larsen,” Kate said finally, “do you have any idea why someone would have wanted to kill your husband?” she asked, and for the second time Emily Larsen’s answer gave Kate a jolt. This time the woman looked directly into Kate’s face, her eyes theatrically wide.

“No. Of course not,” she said. “Who would want to kill Jimmy?”

She had all the guile of a child, her lie so blatant Kate couldn’t help glancing at the lawyer. Carla Lomax was sitting motionless in her chair, working hard at not reacting to her client’s words, but Kate had the distinct impression that the lawyer was as dismayed by Emily’s response as Kate was.

At that juncture Kate had two choices. She could press Emily Larsen until the woman came clean or broke down—or, more likely, until Lomax put a halt to it. If Kate knew what was going on, if she even had a clear suspicion of what lay behind Emily’s odd evasiveness, she would not hesitate to push, but there were times when it was better to pull away and go do some research, and all Kate’s instincts were telling her this was one of them. Find out who Emily Larsen was and what pushed her levers, and with that weapon in hand, come back and pin her to the wall.

Kate arranged an expression of openness on her face, and nodded as if in acceptance of the answer. “When was the last time you talked to Jimmy?”

“About, oh, a week ago?” She looked at Carla Lomax, who knew better than to give her an answer. “It was—oh right, it was last Tuesday. I called to let him know I was okay, and not to forget that the gas man was coming the next day to check a leak I’d smelled. We didn’t talk much. I asked him how he was and told him I was okay, and he said when was I coming home and I said I wasn’t, and then he started getting mad and so I just hung up on him,” she said proudly, and then spoiled the effect by letting out a sad, deflating little sigh halfway to being a whimper, and adding parenthetically, “I don’t even know if he stayed home to let the gas man in.”

“So you didn’t call your husband on Monday?”

“Oh no, I sure didn’t.”

“And you didn’t talk to anyone else who might have told him where you were? A neighbor, maybe? Or a friend you saw in the street?”

“I didn’t see anyone, no.”

“Where were you on Monday night, Mrs. Larsen?” Kate slipped the question in as if it had no more weight than the others, and Emily answered it before her lawyer could stir in her chair.

“I was staying at a shelter that Carla set up for me. I’m still there.”

“And did you leave at all, any time after, say, six on Monday night?”

“No, I don’t think so. No, I’m sure I didn’t—there was a meeting and then I stayed up talking to some people until, golly, near midnight.”

Kate slapped her notebook shut before Carla Lomax could voice an objection.

“We’d like to borrow the keys to your house, Mrs. Larsen. We need to do a search, to see if your husband may have had visitors or something. We won’t disturb anything, and we’ll be out of the way before you get back.”

Carla Lomax automatically began to protest Kate’s need for a warrant, but Emily, in a rare gesture of assertiveness, overrode her. “I really don’t mind, Carla. I think I’d rather they were in and out before I got there. Instead of standing there watching them go through his stuff, you know.”

Another indicator that Emily was more than she appeared, this ready grasp of the intrusiveness of a police search. Kate studied her thoughtfully as Emily took a set of keys out of her purse and handed the whole ring over to Kate. Kate wrote out a receipt for them and stood up to go.

“I’ll phone you later this afternoon,” Kate told the woman, “to make arrangements to get these back to you and let you know how things are going. Will you be at the shelter?”

“Oh. Well, I suppose I could meet you at the house, when you’re finished, if I can get a ride. There’s no reason not to go home now, is there?”

Looking at Emily Larsen’s bleak attempt at a smile, despite the woman’s deceptions Kate could have sworn that she was only now coming to realize that her husband was out of her life. “We have no objection to your returning there, if that’s what you’re asking, and I would be happy to arrange a ride if it would help. Thank you, Mrs. Larsen. Here’s my card, let me know if I can do anything for you. Ms. Lomax, could I have a word, please?”

Carla Lomax followed Kate out to the hallway, shutting the office door behind them.

“I’d rather not tell you the location of the shelter,” she began immediately, but Kate put up a hand to stop her.

“I wasn’t going to ask you, although I probably know already. What I wanted to say, Carla,” she said mildly, letting her gaze stray to a child’s drawing of a purple cat on the opposite wall, “is that your client seems to know more about her husband’s death than she was willing to say, and it might be a good idea for you to have a little discussion with her on the difference between not answering a question and obstructing justice. Before we get into the realm of actual perjury, that is.”

Kate gave her a smile as insincere as Emily Larsen’s declaration of ignorance, and left.

BACK AT THE HALL of Justice, Kate handed the Larsen keys over to Crime Scene, booted up her computer, and got to work. Hawkin came in an hour later sucking at a peppermint, his thinning hair giving off the aura of the lemon shampoo he habitually used after witnessing an autopsy. She asked him what the pathologist had found.

“Rigor might have been delayed by fat, might have been speeded by a struggle, but the internal temp confirmed time of death between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty Monday night. Cause of death strangulation. No obvious sign of drug use. So far absolutely zilch at the crime scene. Not even a tire track. Oh, and the tech was right, that was a taser burn on Larsen’s chest. Person or persons zapped him, cuffed him, tied a red cotton scarf around his neck, and pulled it tight. Exit one wife-beater.”

The lab work—blood, organs, fibers, and fingernail scrapings— would take days; there was no need for him to tell her that.

“Speaking of the wife,” Kate told him, “I think there’s something hinky about her.”

“Hinky?” Hawkin had gone to the coffeepot and paused in the act of holding the carafe up to the light to judge its drinkability. “What’s ‘hinky’ mean, anyway?”

“Odd. Strange. Out of whack. You know.”

“I don’t know. You’ve been watching that TV cop show again, haven’t you? You’re worse than Jules.”

“What’s wrong with the way Jules talks?” Hawkin’s brilliant teenaged stepdaughter was undeniably a handful, but Kate was very fond of her.

“Nothing, unless you want English. So, Ms. Larsen’s hinky. Would you care to elaborate?”

“I was about to, until you started going hinky on me. She looks like a typical Betsy Homemaker whose husband liked to slap her around on Friday nights, but she’s hiding something about the murder itself. I mean, I’d say she’s honestly sorry about his death, God knows why, but she’s more annoyed by the actual murder than horrified or in denial or any of the usual reactions. Plus that, when I asked if she knew who did it, she suddenly went all big-eyed and innocent. Even her lawyer thought it was weird.”

“Big-eyed and innocent like she did it, or like she knows who did?”

“I think she knows, or suspects anyway. She herself has an alibi— there was a meeting Monday night at the shelter, and after it broke up she sat around until nearly midnight talking. I’ve been trying to find out about her, but there’s not much there. She’s never been arrested, never even had a traffic violation.”

“People close to her?”

“I was just getting started on tracking down her family, but she doesn’t seem to have had any real friends. Not among the neighbors we talked to, anyway.”

“Doesn’t sound like the kind to know a couple of guys who’d be willing to bash the hubby for three hundred bucks. Still, you never know. See what you can find, and then tomorrow we can go back down and talk to the neighbors again. Those people across the street should be back by then.”

“So should Emily Larsen.”

“We can talk to her, too.”

They settled in for a session of keyboards and telephones. Hawkin was on the phone to James Larsen’s supervisor at the airport when he heard a sharp exclamation from Kate’s desk, and looked up to see a triumphant expression on her face. He finished the call and hung up.

“Was that a ‘bingo’ I heard?” he asked, scribbling a note to himself.

“My Catholic upbringing showing. Emily Larsen’s brother is one of your basic bad boys. Name’s Cash Strickland. In and out of trouble since juvy, just got out of prison in January for aggravated assault. The original charge was murder one, but he got off with a hung jury, and the DA took a plea instead of working through a retrial on the murder rap. Strickland’s on parole in San Jose.”

“Nice and close. Want to go talk with him tonight?”

Kate glanced at her watch. “The traffic will be hell, and I wanted to be home for an early dinner. Roz Hall and her partner, Maj, are coming over.”

“The minister and the monkey’s mother.”

“Right. In fact, I’d bet Roz knows about women’s shelters. Maybe I’ll pick her brains over dinner, see what she knows about one Carla Lomax, attorney-at-law.”

“Now, that ought to make Lee happy,” Al said dryly.

“Some casual, general conversation, that’s all.”

“Sure. Tomorrow, then. We can do Larsen’s neighbors on the way back. Want me to call Strickland’s parole officer?”

“I’ll do it—he’s a guy I knew when I worked down there. What do you think—make an appointment with Strickland, or sneak up on him?”

“I’d say talk to the PO, find out what he thinks. Of course, if you make a date with Strickland and he bolts, that tells us something, too.”

“True. What did the airport supervisor say?”

“He gave Larsen back his job when he got out, and Larsen lasted exactly one week before showing up drunk. The supervisor fired him.”

“All in all, not a great month for Jimmy Larsen,” Kate commented, and picked up the phone to call the parole officer assigned to Emily Larsen’s brother with the violent past, the brother whose life went far to explain his sister’s easy familiarity with arrest proceedings and the terminology of alibi and search.

Chapter 3

THE REAPPEARANCE OF A witness to one of Kate’s other cases delayed her, and in the end she was late anyway to Lee’s dinner party. Only a little, though, and by cutting the interview short and dodging through traffic in a manner that would have had Lee pale, she pulled up in her driveway only half an hour after she had said she would be home. Roz’s car was parked down the block, a bashed-up red Jeep Cherokee that still showed the signs of the rock face that her assistant pastor had misjudged the previous summer, driving through Yosemite with the youth group on a camping trip. Roz had no doubt found better use for the insurance check than paint repair.

Kate let herself in, settled for a quick scrub of the hands in lieu of a shower and a change of clothes, and slipped into the empty chair while the entree was still on the table. She glanced uneasily at Lee, and decided to opt for humor: she seized her spoon and twisted her face into a parody of winsomeness.

“Please, Mum, may I have some, too?”

Lee was not amused, but she relented enough to take Kate’s plate and fill it. Kate said hello to Roz and Maj, asked after Mina-the-monkey (who was two doors down the street at the moment, dining with a friend from school on the forbidden fare of fish sticks and chocolate cupcakes) and the baby (a seven-month lump under Maj’s dress, which a recent sonogram had revealed was to be another female addition to the all-woman household). She then dutifully turned to the other two places to greet Jon and his companion, a long-ago lover turned friend named Geoff DeRosa.

Kate had lived under the same roof as Jon for almost two years, and was occasionally struck dumb with wonder that in all that time she hadn’t murdered him. Yet. Jon had been a client of Lee’s in her previous life, before they had all become tied together by the bullet that nicked Lee’s spine, and he had expiated his guilt feelings over the minor role he played in leading a killer to her door by turning the tables and becoming, over Kate’s profound misgivings, his therapist’s caregiver. He was strong for his size, a necessary consideration in the early days of Lee’s care, and he worked cheap, an even more necessary factor. And if he drove Kate crazy with his continual presence, his endlessly mercurial relationships, and his deep devotion to bad music, he amused Lee, and in the end that was the most important consideration of all. Kate had grown to tolerate him, as she would have an irritating lapdog snuffling around the rugs; they occasionally even had moments of honest connection. Brief moments.

“I thought you were going to be out tonight,” she said to him, and then hoped she hadn’t sounded too disappointed. Jon took the question at face value.

“Later. Geoff has tickets for the opening of Song.”

“A new play?” she asked around a mouthful of still-warm scalloped potatoes.

“You haven’t heard of it?” Jon sat back in amazement, an emotion every bit as real as the one manufactured by Emily Larsen. Kate chewed politely and waited for the rest. “You will hear about it soon—the Bible bashers are up in arms. It’s bound to be in the paper in the morning. Probably even the TV news.”

“And why is that?” she prompted obligingly.

“Because it’s from the Good Book itself. They’ve taken the Song of Songs and set it to music and dance.”

Light began to dawn. “I suppose it’s X-rated?”

“What else would be the purpose?” Jon answered, fluttering his eyelashes and murmuring in a dramatically throaty voice, “ ‘Oh, comfort me with apples.” “ Geoff giggled in appreciation.

“You know,” Roz broke in, “there’s actually a long tradition of using the Song of Songs for what you might call bawdy purposes. The early rabbis had to pass an injunction against singing it in alehouses. It is pretty dirty.”

“I don’t remember it as being dirty,” Kate objected. Her own childhood Catholicism was long lapsed, but the idea of using the Bible to make a smutty play tweaked some vestigial nerve, leaving her mildly affronted. Roz took her objection as a request for further enlightenment, and went on with her lesson in Bible studies.

“The Song is generally regarded as symbolic of God’s love for His people, but in fact it’s probably an adaptation from a royal marriage-slash-battle ritual. Capture your bride and then screw her.”

“Ooh,” Jon trilled. “Kinky.”

Lee ignored him, and asked Roz, “Are you serious?” It was not always easy to tell with Roz, but the woman shrugged.

“It’s part of what I’m working on in my thesis,” she said, a trifle defensive—as Lee had once commented, Roz tended to hide her academic side like a dirty secret. She had been working on a Ph.D. for the last few years, in addition to being a full-time ordained minister in an alternative church composed mostly of gay and lesbian parishioners and spending long hours as unpaid advocate for a long list of causes. Maj referred to these, half despairingly, as her partner’s Campaigns.

“I have heard that the production is gorgeous,” Maj commented, since the academic discussion seemed to have reached a dead end. Geoff, it seemed, knew one of the costume designers, which was how he got opening-night tickets and an invitation to the party afterward. Roz, hearing this, declared that she had been looking for someone to help out with a church play, and before anyone quite knew how, she had bullied Geoff into bringing his designer friend by the church the next day to talk about some volunteer work, and then Maj stepped in even more firmly and diverted the conversation into a discussion of the various ethnic dance techniques and costumes used in Song, while Kate dedicated herself to her plate; both enterprises ran empty more or less simultaneously.

Kate cleared the plates, set some coffee to brew, brought in the glistening fruit tarts Lee had made for dessert, laughed at jokes and told one of her own, and began to feel a part of her relax a fraction under the sheer normality of an evening spent among friends. Maybe she wouldn’t ask Roz about Carla Lomax after all.

When the tarts had been reduced to a few crumbs and Jon and Geoff had left for Song, Kate laid a fire in the fireplace. The four women took their cups (herbal tea for Maj) and moved to the sofas. Kate carried Lee’s cup, waited until her lover had settled herself and tucked the cuffed arm crutches out of the way, and then handed Lee the coffee and sat down beside her. Maj eased herself into the overstuffed cushions across from them, and sat back into Roz’s encircling arm, just as Lee was settling back against Kate, giving a little sigh of satisfaction that sent a brief electrical shiver up Kate’s spine that was as powerful as lust, but more cerebral: hope, perhaps.

“Do you mind if I put my feet up on the table?” Maj asked. “I know it’s rude, but my midwife tells me it helps my circulation.”

“Of course not,” Lee said. “Can we get you a pillow or something?”

“No, this is fine.” Maj reached out and turned a magazine facedown before she threaded her bare feet, covered in thick black stockings that reminded Kate of rest homes, out over the low table and onto the magazine. She balanced her cup and saucer on her protruding belly, and grimaced self-consciously. “It’s not all fun,” she commented. Indeed, once Kate focused on her, Maj did not appear her normal collected self. She looked pale, even wan, and had not had her usual appetite at dinner.

“Seven more weeks,” Roz said, rubbing her partner’s arm by way of encouragement; Maj appeared more depressed by the remaining time than encouraged.

“I was very impressed to see the mayor the other night,” Kate told Roz. “Don’t tell me you have him making points?”

“God, no. It’s part of his PR, going to school things. Keeping in touch with the community and all that. Someone suggested this because of the school’s high test scores and great ethnic balance, that’s all.”

Kate could well guess who that someone had been, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if points had indeed entered the mind of that savvy politician. Of both savvy politicians—Roz was well on her way to becoming a force to be reckoned with, and beyond the borders of the city, or even the state. She looked to be the gay equivalent of what Cecil Williams had become for the African-American community, a charismatic voice, reasonable yet devoutly committed, San Francisco’s representative lesbian.

Roz simply had everything going for her. She was articulate, deeply committed, passionate in her causes but capable of choosing reason over rhetoric, communication over in-your-face confrontation. Despite her relatively moderate public stance and her willingness to compromise, there was no doubt whatsoever where she stood. Even the most radical of gay rights advocates admitted her to their fold, and she had been instrumental over the last few years in engineering seemingly impossible agreements between opposing sides. Enormous of heart, possessed of a cutting intelligence, charismatic, articulate, and tireless, Roz was, in a word, compelling, and Kate was no more immune to her charm than anyone else. Including the mayor, who had once called Roz the nicest woman he’d ever been stabbed by.

Kate had only met Roz a year before, in the course of an investigation that took her to Berkeley’s so-called “holy hill,” the site of a number of theological seminaries. Roz had been wearing her clerical collar and her guise as a late-blooming grad student, and only some months later did Kate discover that Roz and Lee had, as they say, history.

Lee had known Rosalyn Hall for years, since grad school at UC Berkeley, in fact, where Roz was doing a master’s degree and Lee a Ph.D., both in psychology. The two had worked together, discovered a shared passion for Eastern religion, and had taken off to India and Nepal for six weeks, during which trip they had been, briefly, lovers. Two such dominant personalities were not a comfortable match, however, and they had parted—as friends, although from what Lee did not say about that parting, and her manner when she did not say it, Kate had the impression that some dark happening lay at the parting’s roots. Roz was not all cleverness and light.

Long years later, when Kate came across the cleric and Lee was still struggling against the bullet’s shattering effects, Kate, thinking only that a minor resumption of Lee’s counseling work might be therapeutic, had all unknowing encouraged Roz to reach out to the injured woman. By the time Lee told her of the old relationship with Roz, Kate (who was not a detective for nothing) was not too surprised. Nor was she too worried, since she could also read the signs that the affair was long over.

Besides, everyone she knew was in love with Roz, even those who were not in lust with her. Even straight people—hell, even those who hated Roz loved her. She was not only charismatic, she was even good to look at; although she was hardly fashionably slim, her tall, voluptuous shape and wide shoulders gave the impression of a serious swimmer gone slightly to seed (actually, she had never been much of a swimmer). Her shiny brown hair had just enough wave in it to overcome Maj’s amateur haircuts, her dark eyes were large and long-lashed enough to compensate for her habitual avoidance of makeup. Increasingly in recent months, when television broadcasts needed a spokesperson for a gay perspective, they had begun to call on Roz; when the papers printed a shot of the opening of a center for gay, lesbian, and bisexual teenagers or the ground breaking of a crisis center, Roz’s face looked out at the reader; when the governor put together a task force on lesbian and gay parenting, Roz was on it. That the mayor of San Francisco had appeared at Mina’s school play was no mere happenstance.

So no, Kate was not jealous—or rather, she was honest. Jealous, yes, a little. But hell, if Roz Hall had asked her to bed, she’d probably have gone too.

Roz had not asked. Instead, when Kate had been injured during a case the previous winter, while Lee and Jon were both away, it was Roz’s concerned face Kate saw from her hospital bed, Roz’s red Jeep that drove her home at her release, and Roz’s longtime partner, Maj, who brought Kate food and comfort and just the right amount of companionship to keep her going. The two women were now family, closer to Kate than any of her blood relatives, and if Kate sometimes felt like a poor relation bobbing in the wake of a glamorous star, well, Roz had a way of making one feel that even poor relations were good things to be. After all, even presidents had blue-collar cousins.

Kate relaxed back against the soft sofa pillows, looking with affection at their guests. The talk had circled back to Mina and her seven-weeks-to-go sister-to-be, and half of her attention was on that. The other half drifted back to the Larsen murder, which seemed to be progressing on as straightforward a path as investigations ever did, but which nonetheless niggled at the back of her mind.

One of the things she had to find out, she decided, was what Larsen was doing in the Presidio parklands at that hour. Emily had not been able to think of anything that would have taken her husband there, and neither could Kate. A trap, maybe. Perhaps Crime Scene’ll come up with something in the Larsen house, she thought, and then woke to the fact that Roz was talking to her.

“Sorry,” she said, sitting upright to demonstrate her attentiveness. “I was miles away.”

“Difficult case?”

“Puzzling,” she conceded. Good manners required that she answer, but she could hardly go into the details of an active case. This was a problem she’d faced countless times over the years, however, and she had become skilled at the diversionary side-step in conversation. “I was thinking about this interview I had today with an abused woman. I just… it continually amazes me, what women will put up with for the sake of security.”

“Oh, that’s not fair,” Lee protested. “It’s not even true, to call it security. They often live in a constant state of fear.”

“So why do it? Because the known, however awful, is better than the great unknown?”

“Sometimes it is,” Roz broke in. “Especially when there are children, and no other family or friend to lean on. We’re a terribly solitary culture, you know. It’s not easy to find a support network in modern society, especially if you’re a woman who already feels humiliated by being someone’s punching bag. Self-respect is a luxury, and sometimes all these women can afford is pride, that they won’t admit failure.”

There was nothing in Roz’s face or voice to show that her words were anything but general; nonetheless, Kate eyed her with the uneasy sensation that there was some underlying message there for her alone. Roz’s next words confirmed it, and the evenness of her gaze.

“We all do this, to some degree, even if we’re not in an actively abusive relationship. We let ourselves be shoved into a corner, humiliated, used, and abandoned, and then when our partner turns back to us, in the joy of reunion we forgive.”

A memory swept into the room, so vivid in the space between Roz and Kate that it seemed to quiver visibly in the air.

It was a scene from the previous December, a few days after Kate’s release from the hospital to her cold and empty house. The morning had been taken up by one of her blinding headaches, legacy of a suspect’s eighteen-inch length of galvanized pipe. In the afternoon Kate had wakened from a drugged sleep, stumbled into the bedroom she and Lee had shared until Lee’s cruel and abrupt departure in August, and at the sight of the antique Wedding Rings patchwork quilt on the bed, she was seized by a rage so powerful it felt as if the spasm of migraine had finally invaded her mind.

She had not heard Roz letting herself in downstairs. She only became aware of her visitor when Roz was standing in the doorway, looking down at Kate where she sat on the floor, surrounded by the ten thousand shreds of faded cotton fabric and cotton batting that had been a quilt. Kate paused in her methodical and heavily symbolic destruction, saw in Roz’s face the full, calm knowledge of precisely what she was doing, and then erupted into tears, wracked by hard, painful sobs of fury and despair that were wrenched out of her abandonment and betrayal. Her headache reawoke and her eyes and throat were seared raw, but Roz held her and rocked her, more maternal and comforting than Kate would have imagined possible.

They had never spoken of it after that day, and Kate had occasionally wondered if Roz had told Lee, but at that moment, sitting in front of the fireplace with their coffee cups and their partners, Kate saw that Roz had said nothing to anyone about the depths of the despair that Lee’s leaving had visited on Kate. The sanctity of confession held, Roz’s eyes said, even for the pastor of a church without confessionals.

The memory, and the knowledge, flashed between them in the blink of an eye, an instant of complete communication that Kate had only ever known in the intimacy of an interrogation room, with a suspect on the edge of a very different sort of confession, or a bare handful of times with Lee. The memory puffed away and vanished, leaving Kate disconcerted, and depressingly aware that she was even more deeply indebted to Roz Hall than she had thought. She cleared her throat and reached back urgently for the tag end of the conversation they had been having.

“Forgive, sure,” she said. “But only so many times. These women, though, their forgiveness is pathological.”

Roz, still holding Kate’s eyes, nodded. “True. We are told to turn the other cheek in offering up our humility. We are not told to go on doing it indefinitely.”

“Or told to put a club into the hand that slaps us. There was this picture on the wall in one of the law offices, that showed a woman who’d had the crap beaten out of her, all black-and-blue and bandages, with the caption ‘But he loves me.” And you know, that’s exactly what the woman I was interviewing said, that the husband who’d been beating her for years and years was, I quote, “a good man’ who ‘loved us.” “ To Kate’s relief, Roz’s attention finally shifted.

“Love and rage,” Roz said thoughtfully. “They’re never that far apart, are they?”

This time, the brief reaction that shot through the room reached across the other diagonal: Lee and Maj both twitched, almost imperceptibly. A faintly ironic smile played briefly over Maj’s mouth before she wiped it away with a sip of her tea. Roz did not seem to notice anything, since she was now exploring an idea, a frown of thought between her eyebrows.

“That’s more or less what I’ve been doing in the thesis, looking at how in the Old Testament you see God as creator, nurturer, loving mother/father, and protector, yet also as judge and executioner, enraged at a wayward people and on the verge of destroying them completely.”

“Is it linked with the male/female imagery?” Lee asked her. Anyone who had been in Roz’s circle for more than a few days was made quickly aware of the Bible’s references to God’s femininity, the metaphors of childbirth and child rearing used to describe the Divine. The God known by Roz Hall both begot and gave birth, and Roz was not about to let anyone forget it. Even a certain homicide cop was familiar with that bit of theological interpretation.

“You’d think it would be, wouldn’t you?” Roz answered. “That in the passages referring to childbirth, God would be the loving mother, and in the God-the-father passages there would be judgment and wrath, but it’s not that simple. The two go hand in hand, just like the ancient Near Eastern goddess figures that switch between love and destruction at the drop of a hat. It may have something to do with agricultural fertility— that floods bring destruction and life at the same time, that fruit and grain ripen at a time of year that appears dead.”

They had gone far indeed from the subject of Emily Larsen, and all three of Roz’s unwilling audience cast around desperately for a diversion. Kate got there first.

“Still, I doubt that someone like the woman I talked to today thinks of her husband as particularly divine. I think she’s too busy praying that he comes home in a good mood.”

It took Roz precisely two seconds to pause, blink, and make the shift from academic theoretician to pastoral counselor.

“Most of what I do in the group sessions is to drive home a dose of hard reality. I teach these women to say to themselves, ”My partner won’t change; it’s up to me.“ But I make sure they add, ”I have the support of my friends.“ ”

“Sounds like a mantra,” Lee said. “ ‘Every day in every way I’m getting freer and freer.” “

“Change your mind, change your life,” Roz agreed.

“If their husbands don’t catch up with them first,” Kate added darkly.

“There is that. And sometimes it’s so obvious they’re in danger, and they’re so oblivious, it’s all I can do not to take them by the collar and try and shake some sense into them.”

“You might be talking about Emily Larsen. I don’t suppose you’ve met a woman by that name at one of the shelters?”

Roz reflected for a moment. “There is a client named Emily in the one on West Small Street, but I don’t know what her last name is. We don’t use surnames in group sessions, or even in one-to-one counseling, so unless I’m involved with the paperwork, I usually don’t know their full names.”

“Her husband’s name was James, or Jimmy.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh dear. That’s her. Black hair, glasses? She’ll be crushed, I’m afraid. She must have said his name fifty times during the session on Monday. Classic. I must go see her.”

“So you were at the shelter on Monday night?” Kate asked, trying to sound casual but aware of Al Hawkin’s sarcasm, and of Lee at her side.

“Leading a group therapy session. I’m there two or three times a week. The director’s a good friend.”

Half the city was Roz’s good friend. “How late—I’m sorry, Roz, it’s not very nice to ask you for dinner and then question you, but the woman’s husband was killed on Monday and it would save me having to hunt you down tomorrow to ask these questions. Can you tell me how late you were there?”

“I don’t know. Fairly late.”

“You got home at five after twelve,” Maj offered with mild disapproval.

“So I must have left the shelter about eleven-forty-five. The group session is from seven until about nine, and I stayed on to talk with Emily for maybe an hour before I left. Are you looking for an alibi?”

“Oh, Emily Larsen’s clear,” Kate told her—the literal truth, if skipping over some of the details. “We’re just looking for information, filling in the gaps, you know? Was she with you the whole time, then?”

“Not the whole time, no. When the session ended I had to talk with someone who was needing advice fairly urgently for a friend, a neighbor I think, who’s in an ugly situation—the neighbor’s an Indian girl, from India, I mean, barely more than a child by the sound of it, who was brought here in an arranged marriage—can you believe it? In San Francisco in this day and age? The child’s in-laws disapprove of her, and it’s beginning to escalate into physical abuse. The woman who came to me is worried, and I had to talk to her about the girl’s options, whether or not to just call the police, or to turn it over to Child Protective Services, who would involve the school district and a dozen other agencies. Anyway, I was with her for about half an hour, forty-five minutes, and then I went back to Emily.”

“So you were inside the whole time?” Kate asked, her voice as casual as if she were asking for the cream. Lee was not fooled, however, and shot her partner a hard look. Roz looked slightly uncomfortable, which was a hidden satisfaction to Kate, but she answered readily.

“No, not inside. We were outside in Amanda’s car.”

“Did you see anybody leave after the group session?”

Roz saw where the questions were going, and relaxed a degree. “A couple of people left, sure. Carla Lomax and her secretary, Phoebe, and a woman named Nikki. There might’ve been someone else, I can’t remember.”

“If you think of anyone, let me know. What about Carla Lomax, Emily’s lawyer? Do you know her? I gather she got Emily into the shelter in the first place.”

“We’ve worked together from time to time, but I can’t say I know Carla well. Good woman, very committed.”

Lee sat forward on the sofa and firmly nudged the conversation away from Kate’s professional interest in Emily and James Larsen. “What about that Indian girl? Is there anything you can do about her, unless she’s underage? The Indian community tends to be pretty closed to outsiders, doesn’t it?”

“Even more than the Russians, and I thought they were tight-lipped. You’re right, I can’t do anything direct, but there are people who can, and it’s just a matter of digging them out and tightening the screws.” She looked, for a moment, oddly fatigued, and her laugh was a bitter one, full of long experience of hopeless causes. “You wouldn’t believe how Machiavellian I can be if I have to. I listen to the right-wingers and then to the left, and I agree with all the extremists to their faces. I eat shit and ask sweetly for the recipe. I even learned how to bat my eyelashes at men, if you can imagine that.”

Kate glanced at Lee, to see what she was making of this, and saw a look of wary compassion on her lover’s face.

“And when she has eaten the shit,” Maj added in her slight, precise Scandinavian accent, “she comes home and breaks the furniture in a rage.”

“I do not!” Roz protested.

“Only once,” Maj allowed. “And I hated that chair anyway.”

“God, it must be exhausting,” Lee broke in. “Conflict resolution’s the hardest job in the world.”

“Isn’t it just?” Roz agreed. “You know, more than once when I’ve been sitting in a room with two people, each of whom thinks the other is a monster of depravity, I’ve found myself fantasizing about just cracking their skulls together, or locking the two of them up together until they promised to treat each other like human beings. They wouldn’t even have to agree with each other, just be polite and listen.”

Kate was reminded of the notice that she had read while she was sitting with the phone under her chin, waiting for Carla Lomax to come on the line. “Have any of you seen that flyer somebody’s been putting up on phone poles, suggesting that mothers should be required to insert a poison capsule under their sons’ skin at birth?”

“What?” Lee said, shocked.

“Yeah. The idea is, if the boy gets out of hand as an adult, society could just trigger the capsule and deal with him. Shut him down.” It was not, she realized belatedly, a topic a pregnant woman might be eager to discuss. Maj didn’t wince, exactly, but she seemed to retreat slightly into herself. Lee, of course, caught it and moved to soothe, but before she could knock Kate’s comment out of the air with a remark about the weather, Roz picked up on it.

“God, people are nuts,” she was saying. “We have this friend whose lover left her because the baby she was carrying turned out to be a boy, and she couldn’t take the conflict of raising a male child. I mean, men are half the human race. Who better to change the way they do things than lesbian mothers?”

“Nurture overcoming nature,” Lee said in agreement.

“The irony is painful, isn’t it?” Roz went on. “In developing countries they’re aborting thousands of fetuses every month because they’re girls and amnio followed by abortion is cheaper than coming up with a dowry, while at the same time in the West women are aborting babies because they’re males and they don’t want to deal with the problem of raising a male feminist. I mean, I’m all for the right to choose, but not over something petty. It’s… obscene.”

“Abortion has to be chosen with care,” Lee agreed, uneasily going along with a topic she was interested in but keeping one eye on Maj. “There are always consequences. Sometimes it takes years for them to manifest, but they’re there, and it’s irresponsible to pretend they’re not.”

“You know,” Maj said, going back to Kate’s original remark to show that it did not bother her fragile, hormonally ravaged pregnant self, “the whole anti-male paranoia just gets to me. I wouldn’t mind if this baby were a boy. You can’t just say that men are violent, period. It isn’t their sex that condemns men to brutality, it’s their history.”

“It’s not men I mind,” Lee noted. “It’s mankind I can’t stand.”

“Hey,” Kate objected, straight-faced. “Some of my best friends are males.”

Their laughter was interrupted by the doorbell, and Kate went to let in Mina, being dropped off by the neighboring friend’s mother. While the mothers chatted briefly, Lee got out an antique globe puzzle that had belonged to a great-aunt and showed Mina how it worked. When the mother left and with Mina in the room, the evening’s talk slid on to less loaded matters than abortions and the iniquity of men.

Before long, however, Mina abandoned her attempt at reassembling the various layers of the globe. She wandered over to sit on the sofa beside Maj, who put out an arm and drew the child in to her. Almost instantly, Mina’s eyelids began to droop, and her thumb went briefly into her mouth before she remembered that she was too old to suck her thumb.

“You tired, sweet thing?” Maj asked her. Mina’s head nodded against her adoptive mother’s shoulder. “Me too,” Maj said. “Can you help your fatty ma up?” With Mina pulling (and Roz behind her adding an affectionate but only half-joking shove), Maj maneuvered herself upright and waddled off to use the toilet for the fourth time that evening. Roz bent down and picked up Mina, who snuggled happily into her other mother’s arms and fitted the top of her head into the hollow of Roz’s chin. Roz’s arms went around the child with fierce affection, and by the time Maj came out of the bathroom, Mina’s legs were limp in sleep. Lee watched the family leave with envy in her eyes.

Chapter 4

LEE LOCKED UP BEHIND their guests and came back to the living room, moving in the careful rhythm of footsteps alternating with the tap of the rubber crutch ends that was such a contrast to her brisk, firm step of two years before. Kate was already seated at the dining table, pulling folders out of her briefcase, and Lee hesitated.

“Will it bother you if I watch the tape of that TV program Roz was on? I didn’t get a chance to see it earlier.”

“ ‘Course not. This is just paperwork, to keep me from getting too far behind. Was there any coffee left?” she asked, pushing back her chair.

“I think so. You want me to—?”

“You sit. You must be tired from cooking. Can I put that in for you?” Kate gestured to the tape sitting on top of the television set. At Lee’s thanks, she fed it into the player, carried the controls across to Lee, and stooped down to gather up the scattered pieces of the globe puzzle that Mina had abandoned, putting them on the low table in front of the sofa. When she came back from the kitchen with her coffee, Lee was on the sofa putting the world together and Roz was on the television preparing to set it aright.

The program was a panel discussion on, according to the sign in front of the moderator, women and religion in the 21st century. Kate had missed the introductions of the first two women, a nun with Hispanic features and light blue habit followed by a tall woman with long blond dreadlocks and a patchwork blouse. Roz was the third (Roz in a navy jacket and green shirt, with the white square of her pastor’s collar dominating her image). The fourth was a black Lutheran pastor, also in a collar, and the last panelist was described as a “neopagan follower of the goddess.”

“Any particular goddess?” Kate asked.

“All of them,” Lee explained.

“Who is the second woman?”

“A practitioner of wicca.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s a witch.”

“Oh. Right.” Kate watched for a minute, then settled down determinedly at the table with those two staples of a cop’s life, coffee and paperwork. She listened with half an ear to the far-ranging discussion, which ran the gamut from child care to radical feminist theology and from counseling a congregation’s menfolk to raising the inner Feminine. This last exercise seemed to be the prime interest of the witch and the goddess worshiper, and their descriptions of the empowering energies— which they called “raising shakti”—by chanting the name of Kali or Durga during the act of sex had Roz looking interested, the nun looking fastidious, and the poor Lutheran minister looking as if she might stand up and flee. Lee chortled at the moderator’s attempts to keep the subject a little closer to the audience’s sense of reality, until finally Roz took pity on the woman and stepped in to bring the topic back to a more manageable track.

“I think what my colleagues are saying is that women have an immense source of inner power, a strength and energy we rarely tap into, because from childhood we are taught to keep it closed inside, even to deny its very existence.” This was not at all what her colleagues had been saying, and Roz knew it, but she ruthlessly overrode their attempts to interrupt; Roz had the ball now, and she intended to run with it. “Because the energy—the shakti—is so tightly repressed, when it does find an outlet, it tends to blow, to erupt as rage. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what happens in the Indian stories about the goddess Durga—or Kali, who personifies Durga’s wrath: she gets drunk on battle, goes insane when she is finally released to shed blood. Which should, as myths are meant to do, make us stop and think: If we as women ever decided to stop being patient and forgiving and nurturing, to decide that it’s time to begin with a clean slate, it might well feel to men as if Kali had been loosed. It’s been said that if womankind ever truly sets her mind to freeing the shakti within, the blast of accumulated rage will scorch the earth.”

She was good, Kate had to admit, mixing together lessons in women’s psychology and Eastern theology but in a tone of light conversation, and managing to subtly correct the goddess worshiper at the same time. “Do you suppose that last remark of hers was actually a quote?” she wondered aloud.

Lee shook her head. “Not for a minute. That’s a patented Roz Hall trademark, issuing a pronouncement as if it’s some sage’s wisdom. You’ve got to love the woman.”

The moderator certainly did, and the Lutheran pastor. The nun stepped smoothly in when Roz paused for breath and made a remark about pacifism and Christian forgiveness, and the discussion rapidly shot off onto the question of whether a feminist could be a Christian, and vice versa.

Kate pulled her attention away from Roz Hall’s passionate espousal of the cause of feminist churchgoers and stuck her nose back into her reports, and although the tape ended before her work did, she had enough of her paperwork out of the way to feel justified in putting it back into her briefcase and turning off the lights as soon as Lee’s going-to-bed noises had died away in a last gurgle of water through the old pipes.

But the evening stayed with her, and behind the televised discussion of women’s rage lay that look Roz had given her, a look that said none of them were all that far from being an Emily Larsen.

Not even Kate.

THE NEXT MORNING KATE was in the kitchen with the morning Chronicle gathering crumbs beneath her plate, bent over a review of Song that was tied (as Jon had predicted) to a front-page report on the right-wing Christian protest outside the theater, when she heard the sound of a key in the front door, and looked up to see Jon breezing through. He was singing, some cheery and inane song of an early sixties girl group, and Kate’s heart sank. The door to his basement apartment closed on his chirpy lyrics, and Lee came in, her eyebrows up into her hair.

“Was that what I thought it was?”

“I’m afraid so,” Kate answered.

Jon was in love again.

Every three or four months during the entire time he had lived with them, Jon would meet The One. For a couple of weeks he would drive his housemates crazy with golden-oldie love songs, long murmuring telephone conversations rising from his rooms in the basement, and a return to girlish giggles and dramatic bouts of despair over his appearance, his clothes, and his lack of a future. More than once Kate had longed to shoot him.

The aftermath of these great passions would almost have been a relief, had he not been so pathetic and their guilt over feeling relieved so strong. He faded before their eyes into a small man with a brave mustache, who dove back into his increasingly unnecessary labors for Lee, cooking elaborate meals, urging his charge out so he could drive her all over creation, redoubling his efforts in the men’s choir and the gym and the volunteer work in the hospice.

No, all in all, Jon Samson singing love songs was not a sound guaranteed to gladden the hearts of his housemates.

Kate kept her mouth firmly shut. Lee was the one who bore the brunt of Jon’s moods, since she was around him all day and Kate was not. And Lee was the one who had to decide if and when she was ready to do without his services, not Kate. So Kate said nothing, just stuck her coffee mug in the dishwasher, kissed Lee goodbye, and strapped on her gun to go to work.

WHEN EMILY LARSEN OPENED the door to Kate and Al Hawkin two hours later, Kate almost did not recognize her. Her hair, though still a dull black, had been professionally styled and the gray roots were gone. She also wore a defiant if amateurish splash of makeup on eyes and mouth, and her caricature housekeeper dress had been exchanged for slimming khakis and a flowered blouse. More than exterior changes, however, were the set of her shoulders and spine and the way her eyes met theirs without flinching. She stepped back to invite them inside, and was speaking before she had shut the door behind them.

“I’m really glad you came by this morning. Here, come on back to the kitchen, I’ve got some coffee on.” The house was tidier than it had been when they had shone their flashlights through its windows on Tuesday night, although Emily had not been able to do anything about the wear on the shag carpeting and flowered upholstery. The design sense of the residents leaned more to framed photos of children than to paintings, the living room had no fewer than three large arrangements of fake flowers, and one corner was haunted by a four-foot-long black ceramic panther with a chipped ear. The dust of print powder still lay over everything, and the house smelled unoccupied. “Can I take your jackets?” Emily was saying. “No? Well, sit down, I’ve got a confession to make.”

To a police officer, the word confession has a fairly specific meaning, but the lighthearted way Emily Larsen said it did not encourage Kate to reach for her notebook to take down her words, and Al showed no sign of wanting to stop the woman and read her her Miranda rights. Instead they sat with their coffee cups on the Formica table in front of them and waited.

“I wasn’t very up-front with you yesterday, Inspector Martinelli. You knew that, didn’t you? Carla told me what you said, but I had to, well, mislead you, like, until I was sure what was goin‘ on.

“You see, I’ve got this brother, he’s three years older than me, and he has this really bad temper, you know? And I was scared that he’d gotten piss—that he’d gotten PO’d with Jimmy and… done it to him. I couldn’t reach Cash until last night—that’s my brother’s name, Cash—I couldn’t get ahold of him to ask him if he’d… had anything to do with Jimmy’s death. I didn’t really think he did, you know, but he has a record, and he and Jimmy had a… an argument a while back, so I knew you’d think… well, not you personally, but the police, you know? But anyway, I talked with him and he told me it wasn’t him. And he has a good alibi, too. He was in an AA meeting until eleven. So that’s okay, then. I mean, Cash has done some really stupid things in his life, but at least this isn’t one of them.”

“We’ll have to speak with him, though, Ms. Larsen,” Al told her.

“Of course, he said you would. He works for a company, they clean offices at night. He said he’d be home in another hour, if you want to see him. Do you want his address? He lives down in San Jose.”

“Thank you. However,” Al continued, “the fact remains that someone killed your husband, and did so not in his usual surroundings. Someone either kidnapped your husband and took him to San Francisco, or else arranged for him to be there. The phone company’s tracking down the last incoming call he had, but we also need to have a word with your postman about any mail he might have delivered.”

“Oh. Sure. I mean, would you like me to ask him about it?” “That’s okay, Ms. Larsen,” Al told her gently. “We’ll take care of it.”

FOR SOME REASON, KATE had been anticipating a hulking bruiser of an ex-con, a younger, fitter version of James Larsen, but the man who opened Cash Strickland’s door and invited them inside was not even as tall as his sister, and equally round-shouldered. The man’s explosions of temper must be rooted in his resentment at the world’s treatment of him rather than in any habitual aggressiveness; from his hangdog look, he might as well have been wearing a hit me sign pinned to his back.

Still, alcohol combined with chronic resentment made for a volatile mix, and both detectives kept one eye firmly on the ex-con as they introduced themselves and entered his apartment. Their free eyes flicked over the sparsely furnished room, and Al stuck his head into the adjoining rooms to be sure there were no unfriendlies waiting behind the shower curtains. Strickland knew what Al was doing, and waited politely until Al had made his reconnaissance before offering them seats on the thrift-store sofa and plastic chairs. A well-thumbed Bible lay on the coffee table beside a couple of folded newspapers. On one wall hung what Kate had seen advertised as a “sofa-sized oil” depicting a tree-shrouded lake; on another Strickland had thumbtacked up the poster of a mewing kitten on a tree branch, with the inspirational caption “All God’s Creatures Need a Hand.”

“You’re here about Jimmy, aren’t you?” he asked them.

“That’s right, Cash,” said Hawkin.

“Em told me you’d been askin‘ her questions. I hope to God you don’t think she had anything to do with it. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“No, she has an alibi for Monday night. She seems to think you do, too.”

“I was at my AA meeting. Had dinner with my sponsor, helped set up the chairs at about seven-thirty, maybe seven-forty-five, stayed at the meeting until it finished about ten. I helped clean up afterward. Came back here, changed my clothes, got to work at eleven.”

“Anybody see you come home?” Hawkin asked. Not that Strickland could have driven to San Francisco and back in an hour, but leave no stone criminal unturned was Hawkin’s motto.

“Couple of my neighbors were sitting outside havin‘ a smoke and a brew. Guy in two-thirty-four—his wife won’t let him smoke inside ’cause of the kid,” he explained.

“Tell me about your brother-in-law,” Al requested.

“Jimmy?” Strickland said, surprised that the questions about his alibi were over already. “What do you want to know?”

“What kind of a person was he?”

“He was a—” The reformed convict caught himself. “He was an awful man. Real horrible to my sister. More times than I can count I told her to leave him, take the kids and get away, but she wouldn’t do it. I mean, any man that’d do that to a woman. You know he used to hit her?”

“We are aware of that. And that your sister finally left him just before he got out of jail this last time.”

“None too soon.”

“Do you know who would want to kill him?”

“I will admit to you that it passed through my mind, a couple of times when I was a drinking man. Not now, though. But I don’t know enough about him to know who else there might be. Somebody he punched in a bar, maybe?”

“Did he get into fights, then?”

“No, not really. Saved it for his wife. Only time I saw him get into a fight with someone his own size was when he was giving Emily a hard time in a restaurant and this other drunk started callin‘ him names. Coward and stuff. So Jimmy punched him, they both fell over each other, and that was the end of it. Kinda funny, at the time. Now I have to say it was just pathetic.”

Strickland’s self-consciously pious remarks should have struck a note somewhere between comical and suspicious, but for some reason they sounded more dignified than anything else, perhaps even a touch brave. Kate was surprised to find herself hoping that Strickland was one reformed drunk who stayed that way, and even Hawkin’s final questions were more gentle than a cop normally put to a recent ex-con.

Strickland gave them his sponsor’s name and phone number, telling them that the man was expecting their call. When they were through, he showed them to the door.

“I hope you catch whoever did it,” Strickland admitted reluctantly. “Jimmy was a no good—well. But Emily loved him, and if he’d got sober, who knows?”

Kate wished Cash Strickland luck when they left, and Hawkin shook his hand.

Strickland’s AA sponsor and alibi provider was an undeniably upright citizen. He even owned his own insurance business, and although he freely admitted that he had a record for drunk driving, he had been sober now for twelve years and four months, and had acted as sponsor for Cash since the man had asked him at a meeting back in early February.

Cash Strickland’s alibi stood, as did that of his sister, Emily, leaving Kate and Al with empty hands and facing the fact that they would have to begin from scratch, as if the days between the murder and walking out of the San Jose insurance office counted for nothing.

Until, that is, the phone company came across with the address for the final call to have reached the Larsen telephone.

It had been placed from a phone located on the wall of a laundromat six blocks from Carla Lomax’s law offices.

And two blocks from the women’s shelter that had given refuge to Emily Larsen.

Chapter 5

“I COULD JUST ARRIVE on their doorstep,” Kate said to Carla Lomax over the phone. “I do know where the shelter is. I’m trying to be cooperative about this and talk to the director first, but if the only choice you give me is between waiting until I can dig up the name and phone number on my own or just driving over there and asking, then I’m sorry, I’d rather not waste my time.”

“These women are in a very fragile state, Insp—”

“Carla, look. I’m not unsympathetic; I’m prepared to keep my voice down; I’m even willing to leave my male partner out of it. But it’s going to happen, with or without your help. I have a job to do.”

“Okay. Let me have your number. I’ll ask her to call you.”

“I’ll give her five minutes, and then I’m going to leave this phone and climb in my car. You have my number.”

A sigh came over the earpiece as the lawyer admitted defeat. “The director’s name is Diana Lomax.”

“A relative?”

“Cousin. She’ll call you.”

They both hung up at the same time.

Kate sat reading departmental memos for three and a half minutes before her phone rang.

“This is Diana Lomax,” said a hoarse voice at the other end. “Carla tells me you want to come to the shelter and interview the residents.”

“Anyone who was there on Monday night, yes.”

“Carla said you have the address. Just don’t come in a marked police car.”

“I won’t,” Kate assured her, but the phone had already gone dead.

The building that housed the temporary residence for abused women and their children might have been chosen by the same eye that picked out the Lomax law offices. It, too, was anonymously like its neighbors, in a street busy enough that a few more cars would go unremarked but not so filled with traffic that a stranger would go unnoticed. Its hedges were trimmed back, the walkway had strong lights, the front door was solid and fitted with a sturdy dead bolt lock, and the glass on the ground floor was shatterproof, just in case.

The woman who opened to Kate’s knock was enough like Carla Lomax in stature and the color of her skin and hair that Kate knew it had to be the lawyer’s cousin, but whether or not the two women had once resembled each other could no longer be determined, for the face this woman wore was not the one she had been born with. Her nose had been comprehensively flattened and badly reset, a scar bisected her left eyebrow, and the two halves of her lower face were asymmetrical. Long ago something had bashed her face in, breaking her jawbone, knocking out teeth, and leaving her with the rasping voice Kate had heard on the telephone. Put together with her chosen employment as director of a women’s shelter, it seemed unlikely that an industrial accident or car crash had been responsible for so brutally rearranging her features.

Kate put out her hand instead of her badge, and after a brief hesitation, the woman took it. Once inside the door Kate flipped out her identification. Diana Lomax glanced at it, then led Kate toward the back of the house.

“We had six women in residence on Monday night,” she told Kate without preliminary, speaking over her shoulder. “Four of them are still here. Of the two who left, one went back to her husband, down near Salinas, the other—but of course you know about Emily.”

The walls of the narrow hallway they had been passing through were broken by four doors, all closed, each with its own hand-lettered sign: chapel and office on the right two, meeting room followed by training on the left. At the back of the house the hall opened up into a light, cheerful room the width of the house, a combination kitchen and dining room that was obviously the center of the shelter. Half a dozen children sat at a table along one wall with homework or crayons, washed in the sweet light of the low, late-afternoon sun, while three women were preparing a meal at the counter space under a window at the back and two adolescent girls laid plates and silverware at another table. Kate’s stomach growled at the scents of dinner.

Diana went over to where the women were working and spoke quietly to a woman chopping tomatoes. The woman looked up at Kate, her face going pinched with a deep-rooted, habitual fear. Diana rested her hand on the woman’s arm and said something else. The woman nodded, dried her hands, and followed in Diana’s comforting shadow.

Going back through the central hallway, Diana opened the door marked office, standing back to encourage her charge to go in, and let Kate bring up the rear. Kate was not surprised to find Carla Lomax already sitting in the room, dressed in a gray-blue suit and looking every inch the lawyer.

“Crystal,” Diana said, “this is Kate Martinelli. She’s with the police department, and she’s looking into a death that took place Monday night. It’s nothing to do with you, and you don’t have to talk with her if you’re not comfortable with it, but she would appreciate it if you could help her with a few questions. Kate, this is Crystal Navarro.”

Kate wondered if the director spoke to all the residents as if they were rather slow children, or if Crystal was simply a bit stupid. Perhaps she’d better keep her own words basic, just in case.

“Hello, Crystal, good to meet you. Sorry to interrupt your dinner. This’ll only take a few minutes.”

Crystal did not respond, except to hunch her head more deeply between her shoulders.

“Let’s sit down,” Kate suggested. Crystal looked less like a threatened turtle when she was seated, but her thin hands began twisting each other, over and over.

“There was a meeting here Monday night, Crystal. A group therapy session, do you remember?” The woman nodded. “Do you know what time it ended?”

Crystal shot a glance at Diana Lomax, then at Carla, to see if this might be a trick question. When neither of them reacted, she sat up a little straighter and said, addressing her hands, “ ‘Bout nine.” The words were said with a strong Southern twang.

“Do you remember who was here?”

Again the nervous consultation, and again she spoke to her twisting fingers, frowning slightly. “There was about ten of us, I think. Me and Tina, Joanne, Emily, Carmelita, and Sunny. Then there was you two.” Her gaze came up to touch on the Lomax cousins. “And Roz, of course. And I think Phoebe might’ve been here, but I’m not sure. And wasn’t there someone else? Oh, right, Nikki was here for a while and then she had to go.”

Without drawing attention to the notebook in her hands, Kate made surreptitious note of the names while asking the next question; she would ask Diana about them later.

“What were you talking about?”

“Just stuff, you know? I told ‘em about looking for a job—I’m a dental assistant, or I used to be, once ’pon a time. And the others talked about this ‘n that. Like, Tina’s boy was acting up in school, and somepin’ he said to her sounded just like it might’ve come out of his daddy’s mouth and she was all in a bother, thinkin‘ that he was gonna come out like his daddy, and she didn’t know if she wanted to shoot herself or shoot him. And then somebody said somepin’ about just tyin‘ him up with duck tape and everbody laughed and joked for a while. You know, about them Ladies who’re goin’ around duck-tapin‘ naked guys to phone poles and stuff?” Kate nodded to indicate that she knew who the Ladies were, and that the joke was getting a bit tired. “Well, anyway. And then Emily talked a whole bunch—I remember that, ”cause it was the first time she’d said more’n two words. And Joanne. She was having problems with her ADC checks.“

“What did Emily talk about?”

“Her husband. He sounds a real shit house, pardon my French, but she said she was thinkin‘ about giving him another chance. Stupid, really stupid.”

“Was it?”

“Oh, God.” Crystal went so far as to raise her eyes to Kate for a moment. “I mean, look. One thing we know here are men. Talk about denial—she figured he was gonna change, just because she’d moved out for a couple of weeks. Men like that never change. They just wait.”

It was a voice of experience speaking, and Kate had seen enough domestic violence, had in her uniform days separated enough bloody, screaming couples, not to argue with her assessment of the Larsen situation. As Carla Lomax had said, James Larsen would have gotten his wife back, and he would have put her in the hospital, if not the morgue.

“So you finished around nine. Did everyone leave then?”

“Oh, no. Nikki, like I said, she was gone, and Carla. And yeah, Phoebe must’ve been here, ”cause I remember she left with Carla. But the rest of us had a cuppa tea in the kitchen and made the kids’ lunches for the next day. Roz was around, with somebody who came in at the end— I didn’t know her. That Roz,“ she said wistfully, ”she’s really somepin‘, isn’t she? Has a knack for makin’ you feel good about yourself. Like you’re bigger’n you really are. Important, almost. But anyway, then that woman left and Roz came back in and sat in the meeting room with Emily. They were still there when I went off to bed.“

“What time was that?”

“Maybe ten-thirty? I had a bath and I was in bed before eleven, so yeah, ”bout ten-thirty.“

“You said Roz came back in. She had left for a while then, with this woman?” The Lomax cousins stirred simultaneously, the inevitable response to that question from the police, but Crystal did not see any import in it, and after a moment’s consideration, she answered.

“I think so. I think the two of ‘em just went outside to talk, in the woman’s car maybe. It’s sometimes hard to get much privacy here. Which is fine,” she hastened to add, looking at the shelter director. “I like havin’ company, and it’s sure great for the kids. But if you’re wantin‘ to have a quiet talk with someone, it’s best to step outside.”

Kate nodded her understanding. “How long were they out there?”

“Oh, I dunno. Half an hour maybe? By the time Roz came back in, all the cups’d been washed and put away. She joked about havin‘ good timin.

Kate consulted her notes. “So other than Roz and her friend, and Nikki, Carla, and Phoebe” (Phoebe; wasn’t that the name of Carla’s secretary?), “did anyone else leave the house, even for a little while? Maybe disappear and then come back a while later?”

“They could’ve, I guess,” Crystal said doubtfully. “People was comin‘ and goin’—they always are. Emily I know was in the kitchen till Roz came and got her, and the rest of us were there. Joanne may have gone up to check on her kids—she usually does—but I think I’d‘ve heard if someone went out. But I’m not real sure. Sorry.”

“Oh no, don’t be sorry. That’s very helpful.”

“Was that all you wanted, then? I should go get my kids ready for bed.”

“Yes, thank you. If you think of anything else, give me a call, here’s my card. And—good luck with the job hunt.”

When Crystal had left, Kate turned to the Lomax cousins. “Do you know who this woman was who came and got Roz?”

“No,” Diana said, “but it was someone she knew. Roz is— Do you know Roz, Roz Hall?”

“I do, yes. She told me she’d been here, in fact.”

“I should have guessed,” Diana said. “Everyone knows Roz. Anyway, this woman stuck her head in the door and Roz spotted her, and told her she’d be out in a bit.”

“Did you get the impression that this was a prearranged visit, that Roz was expecting her?”

“No, she was surprised to see her.”

“Can you tell me about the other women Crystal was talking about?”

“Tina, Joanne, and Sunny are still here, you can talk with them if you like. Carmelita Rosario is the one who went back to her husband. You know the word marianismo‘! The woman’s half of machismo, submission to the man’s superiority. Remove marianismo and the man—but that isn’t what you want to know,” she interrupted herself, causing Kate to wonder what it was about this case that seemed to demand that everyone involved make speeches. Perhaps Roz was contagious? Diana went on. “Carmelita went home. Nikki Fletcher was a resident for about five weeks until she found an apartment and moved out last Wednesday. She drops in almost every day, just to stay in touch and to have us tell her that she can do it. Was that all?”

Kate looked over her notes and came up with another name. “Phoebe?”

Carla answered this time. “You met Phoebe at my office—Phoebe Weatherman. She’s my secretary.”

“Was she once a resident here?” Kate asked. That might explain the woman’s deep respect for security measures.

“Not this one, but she was in a shelter for a while, yes.”

“She seems very competent.”

“Not everyone who ends up in a shelter is from the unemployable dregs, Inspector,” Diana said coldly.

“I didn’t think they were,” Kate told her, unintimidated. “Still, women with marketable skills tend to have more options than those without. And often savings accounts as well.”

“Some women who come here do need more time than others,” Diana admitted. “We give them training and help them with anything from bus schedules to taxes. And true, others find jobs quickly and move out. But any woman can find herself a victim, Inspector Martinelli. It only takes one bad turn to end up in an ugly place.”

“Roz Hall,” Kate asked in an abrupt return to the earlier topic. “How often does she come here?”

“It depends. She used to be here all the time when we first opened up, but since then she’s been appointed to a couple of commissions and she can’t get free as much. And then she’s trying to finish her Ph.D. thesis, and leave a little space for Maj. You know her partner, Maj?”

“Well enough to have dreams about her tiramisu.”

At that both Lomax cousins laughed. Diana said, “How many potluck dinners have been planned just because of Maj’s desserts? God knows how either of them are going to have time for their baby. But they’ll manage. Especially Roz. She always does—though I don’t know where that woman gets her energy.” Kate smiled, having wondered the same thing herself. “Anyway, some weeks Roz is only here two or three times, sometimes half a dozen. She does come regularly on Mondays and Thursdays for the group sessions, but other than that, it’s whenever we need her. Or if she happens to be nearby, she’ll stop in for a few minutes, have a cup of coffee, see how things are going.”

“Fine. Can we see one of the other residents now? Tina?”

“She’ll be with her kids. How about Sunny?”

“Sunny will do.”

But Kate learned nothing from any of the other three residents, nothing but the details of life as a woman struggling not to be a victim. Joanne was gay and her abuser a woman, but the language of violence was the same for all, and by the time she finished her interviews, Kate felt the need for a strong drink. Instead she dropped her notebook into her pocket and rubbed her face.

“Don’t you just despair sometimes?” she asked, more a rhetorical musing than a question, but Diana eyed her from her broken face, and then she nodded.

“All the time, Inspector Martinelli. All the time.”

KATE DROVE THE DEPARTMENT unmarked car through streets thick with freeway-bound traffic to the Hall of Justice. As the light faded outside and the honks and squeals of frustrated commuters drew to its peak, she typed up the report of the interviews, found them every bit as unsatisfying as she had thought at the time, and went looking for Al Hawkin. Sometimes it helped to toss around ideas. This time it didn’t. They went home, to try for a fresh view of things in the morning.

Things in the morning began with the news that the Ladies had struck again overnight, in another park, this time with a middle-aged drunk who was giving his girlfriend hell for some imagined infraction involving their neighbor. He had slapped her, hard; she had set out for a friend’s house a few blocks away with him on her heels, shouting and threatening. When she got to the friend’s house, she realized gratefully that he had dropped off her trail. In the morning it was found that he had dropped out of the world for a few hours.

Taser, again; duct tape, again, against a splintery tree this time rather than a frigid metal light post. And they had added a twist: the note was attached to his bare buttocks with Superglue. The emergency room told him the glue should wear off in a few weeks. Before they scrubbed the paper portion off him, the police had photographed the note in situ. It read:

BENICE.ORELSE.

—the Ladies

WHEN KATE REACHED HER desk, she found a note saying that James Larsen’s car had been found, parked on a street in the Mission and stripped down to its chassis. She rounded up Hawkin and they went out to look at it. The old Chevy sedan hadn’t been much to look at to begin with, and it had sat on the street for four days; no one had seen who left it; there were no keys and a million prints, most of which no doubt belonged to the kids who had liberated the car’s radio, battery, and the rest. They arranged to have it towed off for closer examination, on the stray chance that Larsen had been transporting drugs in the trunk or had himself made his final journey inside it, and spent a few fruitless hours asking questions in the neighborhood, but it was a community of blind people when it came to seeing who had driven up and abandoned the car there with its doors unlocked.

They then set off on the entertaining task of trying to trace the cuffs that had been used to restrain Larsen. The number of shops selling that particular brand of regulation police handcuffs in San Francisco was astonishing, even to Kate, who thought she had seen it all. In each of the shops she ended up going through the same ritual, fending off the shopkeeper and customers who found the idea of an actual live, badge-wielding cop on the premises too titillating for words. She was only grateful that she wasn’t wearing a uniform, or she might never have been allowed to escape without putting half the city in cuffs, for their own entertainment.

Aside from the car and the cuffs, the investigation had become simple slog, contacting those of Larsen’s family and acquaintances whom they had not reached earlier and going back over the phone bills and financial records. The preliminary lab report came through during the afternoon, telling them that Larsen’s last meal had been two or three hours before his death and had probably been a fast-food bacon-cheeseburger and fries. There was no trace of drugs on his clothes, in his blood, or in his history. Emily Larsen showed no signs of making a run for it, no one else in sight had any particular reason to kill him, and there had been no whiff of connections to shady business deals, outright crime, sleeping with someone’s wife, or any of the other customary reasons for knocking someone off.

This one looked to sit on the shelf gathering dust for a long time, Kate thought. Al agreed.

“One thing might be worth doing, though,” he suggested.

“That phone in the laundromat?”

“Yeah, but it’ll have to be about the same time the call was placed in order to do any good.”

“You weren’t doing anything tonight, were you, Al?”

“I’m already too late for dinner. I should probably call Jani and let her know not to wait up.”

While Al made his worn apologies to his new wife and stepdaughter, Kate phoned Lee and agreed to bring home mu shu pork and kung pao shrimp. The three of them ate in the dining room of the old house on Russian Hill, looking out over the squat presence of Alcatraz and the ferries going to and from Sausalito, and with the descent of night, the long string of white lights stretching the length of the Bay Bridge. They had some coffee and talked of nothing in particular, and at eight-thirty Kate and Al returned to the car and pulled away from the curb to nose their way back into the city.

Kate parked across the street from the laundromat. On the back wall of the brightly lighted space, between a dryer the size of a compact car and a machine that dispensed tiny cartons of soap powder and fabric softener, there stood a telephone, a call from which may have brought James Larsen out to his death. The laundromat stood in the middle of a busy block. Next door was a bustling Mexican restaurant that seemed to do as much take-away business as table service. Across the street was a record store, a coffeehouse, a late-night bookstore, and a Chinese restaurant. Plenty of people around to witness a person making a call, standing beneath the harsh blue light of a couple dozen fluorescent strips, but no one to notice.

No patron of the laundry admitted to having washed her clothes there on Monday night. The woman in charge of watching the machines snapped irritably that she was too busy folding clothes in the back for the drop-off trade, and that the damn phone was a pain in the neck, she and her husband were thinking of having it pulled out or replaced with one of those new models that people couldn’t call in on, and no, her husband had not been there on Monday. The two detectives thanked her and went back onto the street.

The staff in the Mexican restaurant, most of whom had been working Monday night, had also been too busy to notice any particular individual going in or out of the laundromat. The bookstore owner had seen a bearded Rastafarian using the phone for quite a while on Monday, in a conversation of escalating anger that ended with the man bashing the receiver down, kicking a wheeled laundry cart in passing, knocking over a menu board for the restaurant next door, and shouting his way down the street, though the bookseller thought it happened closer to ten, and Kate, while dutifully noting the story, could not summon much enthusiasm for the theory that a furious dreadlocked African-American had tempted James Larsen to drive from his home to San Francisco on Monday evening.

At ten o’clock, the businesses started shutting and the patrons of the laundromat staggered off with their bulging plastic sacks of clean clothes.TheMexicanplaceseemedprepared togoondishing up menudo and enchiladas until dawn, and at eleven, a pair of weary detectives went in and ordered bowls of soup at one of the back tables.

“Well, gee,” said Kate. “That was sure fun.”

“Lots of hot leads,” Al agreed glumly.

There had been nothing of the sort, merely blank looks accompanying shakes of the head alternating with polite (or not-so-polite) incredulity that they might be expected to remember a person (male or female? white, black, brown, or striped?) making a telephone call from the back of a busy laundromat five days before.

It had been worth doing, but neither of them was surprised at the lack of results. That was how the job went.

Which meant turning back to the victim and his wife, looking for some little thing that wasn’t right. Tomorrow.

“How’s Jani?” Kate asked him. “And Jules?”

“Jules is great. Maddening, but great.” Hawkin stirred the vegetables in his soup with close attention, and then his mouth twitched in a crooked smile. “Jani’s even greater. She’s pregnant.”

“Al! How fantastic. When is she due?”

“November sometime. We just found out the other day.”

“I’m so happy for you, Al. You are happy, I take it?”

“Oh, yeah. Nervous, I guess—I’ll be retired by the time he’s playing high school football. Or she.”

“All the more free time to volunteer as a coach. You don’t know what it is yet?”

“Jani doesn’t want to.”

“How did Jules react?”

“She’s been great. Embarrassed a little, I guess—I mean, parents don’t go around making babies, how gross. But underneath that, she’s excited too.”

“I must call her, see if she wants to go bowling or something. God, Al, you’re a lucky man.”

“Don’t I know it. Has Lee said anything—”

His question was cut short by the insistent beeping of the pager in his pocket, followed seconds later by Kate’s. Al went into the empty laundromat to use the telephone that had been the cause of the outing, while Kate paid the bill and took advantage of the restaurant’s toilet. When she came out of the restaurant Hawkin was leaning against the side of the car.

“Seems to be our week for dumped bodies,” Al told her. “This one’s out near the Legion of Honor.”

Anonymously dumped bodies were the hardest of all murders to solve. They were usually drug-related, there were rarely any witnesses around, and the forensic evidence was generally scarce—most often the victim’s pockets were empty, which made identification hard and in some cases impossible. No detective liked a John Doe, but there were any number of them on the books, going back years. Some would never be solved.

Again Kate’s car took her from city lights into tree-shrouded darkness. This time the lights were along Geary Boulevard, and the dark set in more gradually, eased by the orange glow of the parking area across from the Legion of Honor and the cool lights that turned the museum’s pillars into a sort of stripped-down Versailles. The stone lions watched the playing fountain and preserved the facade of civilization; then the road turned downhill and the night closed in.

High fog rode the treetops and obscured the upper reaches of the world’s most famous bridge, transforming it into a mere string of lights held up by stubby towers. A clot of fog settled across the roadway and then swept on, and when it lifted, they saw the cluster of official vehicles.

The coat Kate had worn for the relatively mild night down in the center of town was completely inadequate against the damp gale rising up from the sea. The yammer of voices and radios could not drown out the heavy pounding of the surf and the noise of the wind ripping through the cypress and pine trees. A foghorn groaned on and off; a nearby eucalyptus crackled with the brisk passage of air. Kate could also hear a noise like sobbing—but it was sobbing, from the backseat of a cruiser where a pair of teenagers huddled. Al went over to the car and had a brief word with them, which caused a brief renewal of wailing that died down again as the boy did his best to comfort his increasingly tiresome girlfriend. Love, Kate reflected, never did run smooth.

Fortunately, this body hadn’t been stripped. The victim, like James Larsen, even had his wallet. At first glance, it was about the only thing the two men had in common. At first glance.

MATTHEW BANDERAS HAD BEEN a fit and successful thirty-two-year-old man who had given a lot of attention to his appearance.

Now he was lying in a heap at the side of the road like a sack of discarded garbage, down the hill from the Legion of Honor museum, where he had been found by the two teenagers out to enjoy the solitude, the lights of the bridge, and each other. Matthew Banderas wore a suit that had cost more than James Larsen made in a month, with another month’s salary on his feet. Two years’ worth of Larsen salary was parked a short distance up the road, with a vanity plate reading matman. There was not even any physical resemblance between the two men: Banderas was little more than half Larsen’s age, and had it not been for his surname, Kate would have taken him for Italian or perhaps half-Greek, for his skin was only faintly swarthy, his expensively styled hair thick and Mediterranean black. Nothing at all like Larsen.

Except that Matthew Banderas had a pair of police handcuffs on his wrists.

And a taser had left its mark on his flat stomach, just below the rib cage.

And he had been strangled to death.

In the left-hand pocket of his expensive jacket Kate found a wrapped chocolate bar, still soft with the fading warmth of Banderas’s body. She dropped it into an evidence bag, and held it up thoughtfully.

Hawkin watched as Banderas was loaded up into the van, and rubbed his chin unhappily. “This is not good,” he said. “This is really not good.”

Kate could only nod. The moment she had seen the handcuffs she knew they were in grave trouble. They were now dealing with a serial killer, which aside from its own urgency would mean complicated, painstaking work under the full cacophony and glare of a media circus. She stood and shivered as she looked out over the Golden Gate, at the dark sea that lay between the heights occupied by the museum and the Marin headlands on the northern shore, and she became aware of the first gathering of news reporters on the crest of the road behind them.

“I’m surprised the TV cameras aren’t here already,” she said bitterly, “Guess it’s too late for the eleven o’clock news.”

Hawkin heard the dread in her voice, and knew all too well the reason for it. From the day they had been made partners, he new to the City and she new to the job, they had been faced with one high-profile case after another: the world-famous artist Vaun Adams, the renowned lesbian radical Raven Morningstar, Al’s own stepdaughter’s kidnapping—all made national, even international headlines. By now the press had only to hear the name Martinelli and they came baying. More than once she had thought about changing her name, coloring her hair, and going back into uniform for a nice anonymous foot patrol beat. She figured, though, that if she did she would be sure to stumble on Jimmy Hoffa’s skeleton, or the president of the United States shooting up in an alley.

“Look,” Hawkin said abruptly. “You don’t need this. Let me get one of the others in on it.”

It was tempting, very tempting, but after a minute Kate shook her head. “It’s too late. I’m already involved—they won’t leave me alone.”

“Sure they will. I can ask—”

“Al? Leave it. I can’t let them rule my life.”

“Okay,” he said. Both of them knew he had enough authority to shift her off the case; both knew he would do so if things got too crazy. He signaled that the techs could bag up the body and take it away. As he and Kate turned to look at the two teenagers in the back of the police cruiser, the boy trying to act manly as he comforted his girlfriend, whose endless whimpering was getting on everyone’s nerves, Hawkin said, half to himself, “I don’t know whether to hope this guy Banderas has a history of wife beating, or hope he doesn’t.”

MATTHEW BANDERAS DID NOT have a history of spousal abuse.

Matthew Banderas had a history of rape.

Chapter 6

THE MURDER MADE THE papers in the morning, but although the articles speculated on the possible links between this victim, James Larsen, and the lighter pranks of the LOPD, they did not yet have the key link of the criminal history of the two murdered men. It would only be a matter of time, however, and with that knowledge riding on their necks, the two detectives threw themselves at the case. Early on Saturday morning they met up in the Hall of Justice, to get the search warrants under way and to track down their latest victim’s past.

Banderas had only been arrested once, shortly after his twenty-sixth birthday. For that he had stood trial, been found guilty, and served just under three years. The light sentence had been a result of his plausibility on the stand, and was further reduced by his spotless behavior in the low-security prison. Still, neither detective believed that the one rape was his only instance of aberrant behavior.

“How many rapists do you know who started when they were in their mid-twenties?” Kate asked Al skeptically, and indeed, when they began to dig, they found that Banderas had been closely investigated for three other rapes since his eighteenth birthday, all of them let go by a lack of evidence the district attorney found adequate enough for conviction. The one time he had been caught was seven and a half years before.

Hawkin shook his head. “He was a very clever boy. He took souvenirs—the victim’s underwear—but he either destroyed them or hid each one. Assuming he was behind all of these.”

In addition to the three for which Banderas was chief suspect, there was a whole string of unsolved rapes, three of them clearly related by place, time, and technique, two others with more tenuous links. Eight times over the last seventeen years some unidentified predator had waited for a lone woman to come out of a convenience store at night, forced himself into her car at gunpoint, driven to some dark place, raped her, and left her naked, bound, and missing her underwear. He always wore a mask and gloves.

None of the series had taken place while Banderas was incarcerated.

“Why didn’t anyone catch this bastard?” Kate asked incredulously.

“No forensic evidence, and you can’t lock a guy up on a similar MO. The one conviction, the woman bit him on the face and the mask came off. She identified him at the trial. But because he didn’t finish up like he usually did—he dumped her out in the hills, didn’t take a souvenir, didn’t tie her up—there wasn’t much point in going for the whole series. And he wore a condom, so there wasn’t even any DNA.”

Only two of the unsolved rapes had taken place since Banderas came out of prison. As Hawkin had said, the man was cautious.

“He never hurt any of the women beyond the rape. Though that’s bad enough,” he hastened to say, “but even a couple of the victims said he was ‘polite.” Seems to me a strange way to describe a guy who’s just raped you.“

“Do you suppose he’d have let the next woman to see his face go free?” Kate asked him.

“Not if it cost him another spell in prison. But someone has taken that choice out of his hands and put the problem on our desk.”

“So you think there’s someone out there taking care of the bad guys?”

“Doesn’t it look like that to you?”

“No chance of a copycat?”

“The taser and cuffs were described in the paper, but they all just said ‘strangled’ without giving details. And they certainly don’t have the candy in the victim’s pockets. I wouldn’t have even thought of it as evidence with Larsen, but with this victim, it looks like it is.”

“Banderas didn’t really look the sort to carry a chocolate bar in the pocket of an expensive suit, true, but I don’t know that I’d count it as a clear mark of a serial.”

“We’ll see.”

“Christ, I hope not,” Kate said fervently. Two was quite enough, and she’d just as soon leave a question rather than have a third body to confirm Al’s theory. However, the question was further complicated just before noon when the preliminary results from the Banderas car search came up with an empty insulin pen, found in the back of the glove compartment, with no name on it of either patient or pharmacy. They had planned on searching the Banderas apartment later that afternoon, but with the possibility that a diabetic had been found in the possession of a chocolate bar, they called Marin to let them know that the SFPD was serving a search warrant in their jurisdiction, put on their coats, and left.

Banderas had lived in a condominium north of Mill Valley, a modern apartment complex filled with successful young singles and childless couples where both partners worked. Parking was in a three-story garage connected to the buildings by walkways, not outside the apartment doors, and the Banderas apartment was near the complex’s entrance; none of his neighbors would ever know when he was home or not.

His apartment was unrevealing, the living quarters of a bachelor who ate out a lot and brought work and women home. There was an assortment of exotic condoms in the table beside the bed, a stack of the classier kinds of frozen dinners in the freezer, and a set of copper cook-ware that looked as if it had never been used. He wore expensive clothing, with a flashy taste in suit lapels, shirt collars, and neckties, and owned five more pairs of shoes as expensive as those he had died in, plus an assortment of loafers and athletic shoes. The paintings on the wall were splashes of bright color that did not mean much of anything except that he knew walls needed to have them, a painting in the bedroom showed a well-endowed naked blond woman either making love with or struggling beneath a clothed man, and he owned a lot of very hard-core pornographic videos, some of them violent, with one player in the living room and another in the bedroom. The room did not have a mirror on the ceiling, but the place looked as if Banderas might have thought of it.

Kate stood with a copy of a video entitled She Really Wants It in her hand and called to her partner in the next room, “Al, do we have to like this guy?”

“No, Martinelli. So far as I know there’s no law yet that says we have to like our victims.”

“Good thing,” she told him, and went back to work.

The most interesting discoveries, however, were those the search team had already found in the bathroom. Two different discoveries, actually, although the detectives could have predicted the presence of a pouch of fragrant leaves and a small vial of white powder, with the attendant paraphernalia for marijuana and cocaine. The other find was even more interesting: a small machine for testing blood sugar, used by diabetics, and two disposable needles in the wastebasket. There was also a multi-use insulin pen like that found in the car, only this one was half full and had Banderas’s name on the pharmacist’s label.

Matthew Banderas had indeed been a diabetic; a diabetic who died with a candy bar in his pocket.

Professionally, Banderas was a computer man, in software sales. Going by the bank statements in his desk drawer, he was good at his job. Kate copied down the telephone number for the company, and its Santa Rosa address.

The last incoming call had been from a woman, who had left a message on the answering machine. A series of messages, in fact. Her name was Melanie, and she had started out teasingly inquiring where he was and ended up, five messages and six hours later, just plain mad. “Damn it, Matty, where are you?” her voice demanded, and the phone went dead. Hers were the only calls, beginning at 8:32 Friday night, ending at 3:14 Saturday morning. By the last one, Melanie had been more than a little drunk.

One of the apartment’s two bedrooms had been made over into an office, with boxes of forms and sample disks, three computers, and two filled filing cabinets. Kate flipped open the man’s laptop, Al pulled a chair over to the filing cabinets, and silence fell.

Half an hour later they were startled by a deep male voice in the next room saying in a plummy English accent, “There is a visitor at the door, sir.” Kate was out of her chair with her gun in her hand before she realized what she was doing; Al was on his feet almost as quickly. They both stared at the door expectantly, and Al said in a loud voice, “We are the police; please identify yourself.”

There was no response, not even the sound of startled movement. Kate held her gun up and edged toward the study door, where she popped her head out briefly for a cautious glance at the living room. There was no one visible. She opened her mouth to make her own demand, and another voice came, this time that of a woman, sultry and slow.

“Open up the door, you sweet thing, you.”

Puzzled now, Kate looked at Al, and the two of them made their way cautiously into the living room, checking out every nook and broom closet in the intervening space. Bedroom, bath, and kitchen were cleared, and they stood in the living room between the black leather sofa and the huge gilt-framed mirror, waiting. When a voice came for the third time—this one a smarmy-sounding male with a heavy French accent declaring, “Eh, beeg boy, you have a fren‘ at ze door”—Kate whirled and nearly shot out the speaker next to the front door before she finally registered the mechanical quality of the sound. A fourth voice sounded immediately on the heels of the stage Frenchman (this one a Southern belle drawling “Hey there, honeybun, there’s somebody here to see y’all”), and then a fifth, which was the same English butler’s voice they had first heard. The pounding started as the person with a finger on the voice-doorbell got tired of waiting.

“Matty,” a woman’s voice called. “Matty, come on! I know you’re home, your lights are on. And don’t tell me you’ve got them on some kind of timing device, I’m just going to stand here with my thumb on the bell until you get sick of these goddamn voices and—”

It wouldn’t take long to get sick of the cycle of announcements, Kate thought. Under the repetition of the four voices, coming from a box next to the door where clever-boy Banderas had adapted the normal chimes to a high-tech version of a doorbell, Kate slid her gun away and pulled open the door, to find herself face-to-face with a gorgeous, polished young woman who could have been a fashion model, dressed in skintight jeans, a low-cut and extremely well-filled top that did not quite reach a very shapely navel with a gold ring in it, a black leather bomber jacket, and shiny high-heeled boots that she might well have bought from one of the shops that Kate had gone into inquiring about recreational handcuffs. All she needed was a whip in her hand, but in truth, she seemed quite unconscious of the dominatrix overtones in her attire. She might have been a six-year-old dressing up in net stockings, makeup, and a miniskirt for Halloween, having not the faintest idea why it was incongruous.

As this was going through Kate’s mind, the woman was in turn staring at her, looking surprised at first, then suspicious and resentful until finally, taking a closer look at Kate’s undistinguished form and uninspired trousers and shirt, surprise again took precedence.

“Where’s Matty?” she demanded.

“Matthew Banderas?”

“Yeah. Of course Matthew Banderas, this is his house. Who the hell are you?”

Kate pulled her ID out of her pocket and showed it to the young dominatrix. “You’re a friend of Mr. Banderas?” she asked.

“Yes, I am. Where is he?”

“Come in please, Ms., um—?”

“Melanie Gilbert. Where’s Matty? What’s happened to him?”

“I’m very sorry, Ms. Gilbert, but Mr. Banderas was killed last night in San Francisco.”

“What? Oh, no.” The woman gaped at Kate, looking astonished but not teary. She scarcely noticed Kate’s hand on her elbow, gently but firmly drawing her inside to the leather sofa. “Oh, poor, poor Matty. I can’t believe it. What happened?”

As soon as she was safely inside and the door shut behind her, Kate let go of the slim, leather-jacketed arm. Gilbert was not exactly devastated to hear of her friend’s death, Kate was relieved to see. Telling loved ones was hard; telling friends and acquaintances, once they were past the initial shock of it, often led to interesting pieces of information being shaken out of the tree of knowledge.

“Can I get you a glass of water, Ms. Gilbert?” Kate asked. She had never known why this was the traditional means of offering support; the times she had received shocks the only drink she’d wanted was alcoholic and preferably bottomless. Still, it did give the woman a chance to gather herself together, while allowing Kate to look as if she cared, and in this case let Al Hawkin sit down beside Matthew Banderas’s girlfriend with the heaving breasts and the demure navel ring. This was one female who would respond more readily to the masculine touch. At which Al Hawkin was an expert.

Al gave the young woman a minute to sip her glass of room-temperature, chlorinated water before asking her in a gentle voice, “Ms. Gilbert, can you tell me how you know Matthew?” Formality combined with the intimacy of the victim’s first name, Kate noted, and the emphasis on the relationship, not (yet) the more pertinent facts such as time and place.

“I’m an actress,” she told them. “I met Matty when I was doing a job for his company last year, acting in a piece of film that they wanted to use in their software. I’m really not sure how they do it, something about feeding the film into their computers and using it from there. I think they were using it to demonstrate some editing software they were developing, or something. Anyway,” she continued, relieved that these technical details were out of the way without any questions from her audience, “that’s when I met Matty, when he came by the set one day to watch. We went out to dinner afterward, and, well, you know.”

“What was your relationship with Matthew?”

“My relationship? I loved Matty, or at least I more or less did; anyway, I liked him a lot. I slept with him, if that’s what you mean, but we never lived together.”

Hawkin considered his next question carefully before deciding to ask it. “Did you know that Matthew spent three years in prison for raping a woman?”

“Matthew?” Her pretty face twisted in disbelief. “No, you’ve got the wrong man. In fact, you probably have the wrong man entirely—Jesus, Matty’s gonna flip when he gets home and finds you here.”

“Ms. Gilbert, I’m sorry. Unless Matthew had a twin brother who was carrying Matthew’s ID, your friend is dead.”

Melanie Gilbert pulled back from the edge of the hysterical thoughts she had been about to succumb to, and studied Hawkin’s craggy features. She gave a small sigh, and slumped down into the black sofa. One melodramatic tear ran slowly down her cheek, and her chest heaved impressively.

“Matty? A rapist? God. You really are sure?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she said, and then in a different voice, one that suddenly recognized the implications, she said, “Oh. Oh my God. Rape? Did he hurt her? I mean—”

“No. Kidnapping and rape, but not battery.”

“But still. Shit, I was sleeping with a rapist. How could I not—jeez, that’s so creepy. I feel like throwing up.”

Kate suddenly had enough of the sexy young actress’s attempt to find out how she ought to be feeling, and stood up to go to the kitchen and find the coffeemaker. She suddenly realized that they hadn’t stopped for lunch, that she was tired, hungry, edgy, and depressed, and was fed up with this young airhead with the twinkle of gold in her navel who was trying to talk herself into being shocked when she was really more than half titillated. Al Hawkin’s voice went on as Kate found a gleaming gold French press coffeemaker, a bag of Italian roast coffee (pre-ground, for which Lee would have deducted points), and instead of a kettle, an attachment on the sink that dispensed near-boiling water. Kate spooned grounds into the coffeemaker and ran steaming water on top, and while she waited the requisite couple of minutes for the grounds to subside, she leaned against the tiled counter listening to the conversation in the next room.

“Ms. Gilbert, did you ever hear Matthew say anything about being harassed or threatened, either here or at work? Receiving letters or phone calls, anything like that?”

“No, I don’t think so. Matty never talked much about work, though I know that his new boss is a real bitch. And, hey—somebody at work keyed his car back near Christmas, left a really nasty scratch. And there was somebody here in the apartments that kept stealing his parking place, but since they’re not really assigned or anything, he couldn’t do much about it.”

“He never found who scratched his car?” Gilbert shook her head. “What about the argument over the parking place? Did it ever escalate? Did the two of them ever have words about it?” Scratched paint, territorial disputes—murders were committed every day for even stupider reasons.

“I don’t think so,” Gilbert repeated. Still, Hawkin dutifully got from her what little she knew about the intrusive neighbor, which was little more than he, she, or it drove a red Porsche (she pronounced it Porsh, and said that Banderas had pointed it out to her) and lived somewhere upstairs (which she had gathered by a rude gesture Banderas once made in the vague direction of the offender’s apartment).

“So he knew whose car it was?”

“Oh yeah. I mean, he never told me her name, but he knew who she was.” Then Gilbert added thoughtfully, “But you know, they might of had a fight after all, ”cause the last couple weeks the Porsche hasn’t been in his spot, and when I said something about it to Matty, he just kind of nodded his head but he seemed, like, satisfied. You know?“

The coffee, pre-ground or not, smelled intoxicating, so Kate shoved down the handle, poured three cups, and carried the tray back into the living room. Melanie declined, saying virtuously that she had given up coffee, which was bad for the skin.

Kate nodded, took a large and satisfying swallow from her cup, and asked where Banderas bought his coke.

The actress blushed and tugged her cropped shirt down, covering a fraction more of her admirably flat stomach and revealing a little more of her round breasts. (Implants, or one of those push-up bras? Kate speculated. Or could those possibly be natural?) “What do you mean?” Gilbert said, trying for innocence.

“We found the cocaine in the bathroom cabinet. I wondered if you knew where he got it, if he was in the habit of buying it in San Francisco. We’re not interested in prosecuting him for it, and I’m sure you had nothing to do with it. I just wondered if you happened to know if he bought it locally, or in the City?”

“Urn. Should I, you know, talk with a lawyer or something?” asked this child of the television age.

“We’re not interested in your drug use, Ms. Gilbert, or even Matthew’s. Only in knowing if there might have been some drug-related reason for his being out near the Legion of Honor last night.”

“Where’s that?”

“You know that art museum on the cliff out near the ocean?” Kate offered. “Lots of high school classes go there.”

The pretty face cleared. “Oh yeah, I remember that place. Sculptures and things, I think.”

“That’s the place.”

“And that’s where Matty was? At the museum?” From the sound of her voice, it was not a place she connected with her boyfriend’s lifestyle.

“Nearby. The museum itself was shut.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Unless he was meeting someone there. But I wouldn’t have thought he went there to score. He usually— that is, I think there’s someone, um, local.”

In the apartment complex, Kate interpreted; what a surprise.

Melanie Gilbert had nothing much more to add to their scant pool of knowledge. She had never seen another face to Banderas, never glimpsed a brutal or violent side to him: he had always been polite to her, even when drinking or doing coke. She confirmed that he was a diabetic, with “all kinds of things” he couldn’t eat, and that she had never known him to consume anything as sweet as a bar of chocolate, even when he had been smoking dope. She did not know the names of any of Banderas’s previous girlfriends, and thought his family was in Southern California somewhere, though she had never met any of them.

Hawkin then circled back to the topic of the Banderas rape charge, asking as delicately as possible about the man’s sex habits. The young woman protested that there had been nothing at all kinky about Matty, but the vehemence of her denials indicated that some questioning note had sounded in the back of that pretty head, and she was beginning to doubt herself. It was something that needed going into more closely, but not, thankfully, by two visiting SFPD homicide investigators. Hawkin had reached the same conclusion, and let the topic go, to Melanie’s obvious relief.

“And you’re sure, Ms. Gilbert, that Matthew wasn’t receiving any threatening phone calls or letters, anything like that?”

“No. Well, he did have a few wrong numbers, rude people in the middle of the night, things like that. Who doesn’t?”

“Recently?”

“Last week. Do you think that could have been… whoever?”

“We’ll try to find out, Ms. Gilbert. Well, I don’t know that we need to keep you any longer today. Could we have a phone number, in case we need to ask you anything else?”

She gave them a list of numbers: her home number and her cell phone, her agent’s number and his cell phone, and was trying to think of anyone else besides her sister and her ex-husband when Al plucked the paper from her fingers and shooed her out the door. When it had closed behind her, the two detectives looked at each other.

“Whew,” said Al.

“That woman’s in the wrong business,” Kate agreed. “She’d make a fortune with a whip in her hand. Those boots alone would have a masochist squirming.”

“You think she…does?”

“I strongly doubt it. Her face looks like a schoolgirl’s. Mixed signals, you know? I think it’s just her idea of fashion.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed, Martinelli.”

“Not my kind of thing, Al,” she said evenly. Still, as she turned back to the Banderas files, she couldn’t help wondering how Lee would look with a ring in her navel…

ONE DAY PROVED TO be all they had before media hell broke loose. Sundays were generally a slack day for news, but the morning paper had the Banderas murder screaming across the front page:

SECONDSEXPREDATORKILLED

The article beneath the headline reviewed the full details of the Larsen and Banderas murders, only this time the reporters had both men’s history of crimes against women. The use of tasers to overcome the two men underscored the possible link with the “feminist vigilante group,” the LOPD, with which tasers were now firmly linked in the popular imagination. An adjacent article bore the eye-catching heading HATE crimes classification asked, and Kate read with growing amazement that a delegation of “prominent businessmen” had been to see the mayor the previous afternoon, asserting that since the Ladies’ attacks and the two murders had all been aimed exclusively at heterosexual males with light skin, the attacks should be classified as hate crimes and pursued with all the commitment that the City had come to demonstrate in its prosecution of gay bashing.

Kate put the paper on the kitchen table for Lee’s bemusement and left for the Hall of Justice, where she finished filling out as best she could the highly detailed VICAP forms for the FBI, asking if they had any crimes on the books that fit the profile of abusers, tasers, handcuffs, and including the possible link of candy. As Kate was reading it over, wondering if there were any more blank spaces she could fill, the telephone rang.

“Seen the paper?” Hawkin asked without preliminary.

“It tells everything except who done it,” she noted. “Why didn’t they call and ask for a comment?” It was the usual way reporters notified the cops that a story was coming, in the recognition that cooperation worked better in the long run, but there had been no such message waiting for them when they stopped in at the Hall of Justice the night before.

“New girl,” Hawkin answered. “Gung ho. We’d better get up to the condos early before the place is under siege. Meet you at the Hall, or at your place?”

“Why don’t you swing by here? Give me a chance to answer some of the messages.”

“Fine. See you in a bit.”

The messages were mostly from the media, and a few clearing up details in the Larsen case. Kate placed another call to the desk sergeant in Marin, suggesting that someone from the department might want to join them for an exchange of notes before the news reporters added “lack of interdepartmental communication” to their string of gibes. She left various numbers for the Marin detective to call her back, then trotted for the elevator.

The Marin detective rang them back when they were halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Inspector Martinelli?” the voice said. “Sergeant Martina Wiley here.”

“Hello Sergeant, thanks for calling me back.”

“I can guess what you want to talk about. I’m over here talking to a woman who lives upstairs from the Banderas apartment. I think you might want to join me.”

“Er. Do you have any idea what kind of car she drives?” Kate asked. There was silence for a minute as Wiley gave this odd question her consideration, then Kate heard the receiver being half muffled and through the barrier Wiley’s voice asking, “What kind of car do you have?” Kate could not hear the answer, but Wiley supplied it. “A red Porsche.”

“Okay,” said Kate with satisfaction. “What apartment are you in, Sergeant?”

“Number three-fourteen.”

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

The woman in apartment 314 did not look the type to drive a flashy car. Nor did the modern furnishings fit with the small woman dressed in jeans, a vastly oversized sweatshirt, fuzzy slippers, and plaster. The last item covered her left arm from knuckle to elbow, and half a dozen stitches had recently been removed from the still-swollen cut on her left eyebrow. That whole side of her face was yellow-green with fading bruises and she held herself stiffly, either from fear of causing pain, or from fear itself.

Kate and Al introduced themselves to Martina Wiley, who had answered the door with the air of a family friend and then took them across to the breakfast nook to meet the woman.

“This is Rachel Curtis,” she said. “Rachel, these are two detectives from San Francisco, Kate Martinelli and her partner, Al Hawkin. They’re investigating the murder of your neighbor Matthew Banderas.”

Rachel Curtis flicked a glance at Kate and then Al, but kept her attention on the woman who had taken on the role of savior. Kate was distracted for a moment by the contrast between the cop and the victim, who might have been handpicked to illustrate the word opposites. Wiley was big, black, strong, and bristling with intelligence and energy. Curtis was about five feet tall and thin to the point of anorexia, with dark brown chin-length hair, pasty white skin, glasses, and no more energy than yesterday’s pasta.

Kate shook herself mentally, and sat down in a chair across from the battered woman.

“Rachel was beaten and raped eleven days ago,” Wiley told them bluntly. “She never saw her attacker, didn’t recognize his voice. She was stopped in a parking lot by a man with a gun and a mask, who put a pillowcase over her head and drove her away. He raped her, dragged her out of the car, kicked her four or five times, and walked off.”

Kate and Al looked at each other, and Kate cleared her throat. “Did he say anything at all?” she asked the woman. Slow tears had begun to dribble down Rachel’s battered face, which Kate imagined had happened more or less continuously for the last week and a half.

“He said, ”Hold it‘ when I got to my car and then, “Get in the passenger seat.” And then later, when he’d… Afterward, he told me not to move. Then he smashed the windows of the car and banged it with something hard, and after that it went quiet. I was lying on some rocks or sticks that were hurting me, and it was cold, so when nothing happened for five or ten minutes I figured he’d gone so I started to sit up and pull the thing off my head and then he was there shouting and kicking me. I curled up again and put my arms around my head, and he stopped, and then after a minute he told me not to move at all, and if I did he’d kill me. And then he said something about nothing being mine, and that was all. I must’ve laid there for at least an hour, but when I finally pulled off that pillowcase he was gone and my car was there. The tires were flat and all the glass was gone and the body smashed up, but he left the key and I could get one of the doors open, so I drove to the nearest road and found a gas station and a phone.“

“What do you think he meant by nothing being yours, Ms. Curtis?” Al Hawkin asked. He had taken care to remain, literally and figuratively, in the background. Some rape victims could not stand being around men for a while, others found men more comforting than their possibly judgmental sisters. Rachel Curtis seemed oblivious of pretty much everything outside of her misery and Martina Wiley, and looked at him uncomprehendingly. Al tried again. “Can you try and remember his exact words?”

“They were, ”You don’t own anything,“ or, ”You don’t own everything.“ Yes, I think it was that: ‘You don’t own everything, you bitch.” And then I heard glass break again. I think he was smashing the headlights.“

“I see,” Hawkin said, and he did. They thanked the woman, apologized for bothering her, and walked with Martina Wiley out onto the third-floor covered walkway, where they could talk away from the victim’s ears.

“Sounds like Banderas?” the sergeant asked them. “I looked up his sheet after I saw the paper this morning.”

“Or a close copycat,” Kate agreed.

“So what was that question about the car?”

“It would appear that Ms. Curtis had the nerve to park in Matthew’s favorite though officially unreserved spot. His girlfriend said that he and Rachel may have had an argument over it about two weeks ago, after which he seemed to be, in her words, like, satisfied.” “

“Some argument,” Wiley mused, looking down three floors at the unimaginative condominium garden. “And now Banderas is dead. Are you thinking Rachel could’ve pulled it off? Because I can’t see what she has to do with your other case, assuming there is a link. And besides, look at her, she’s a basket case. I mean, she might’ve shot him if you’d put a gun in her hand, or run him down if she saw him walking down the street, but from what I heard, it wasn’t exactly like that, was it?”

“It certainly was not,” Kate told her. “If—and we don’t have any evidence so far except the record both victims have of crimes against women—if this killing is related to the murder of James Larsen, then this woman couldn’t have done it. Not with that arm and those injuries.”

“So you’ve maybe got somebody picking off the bad guys. Well, honey, better you than me. Personally, I’d be real tempted to look in the other direction for a while, maybe even offer a few names and addresses of my own, you know? Hey,” she said more seriously, “that was a joke. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”

But it had not been completely a joke, all three of them knew that, because any cop who had held a badge for more than a few months well understood the urge for a more simple and direct form of justice than the law could provide. Retribution, vigilante justice, call it what you would, it was a deep and powerful temptation, every so often when a known villain was finding a crack to fall through.

Well, here were two men who had run out of hiding places. And two detectives who had the job of finding the person or persons who had taken on the role of judge and executioner.

They talked for a few minutes with Wiley, the easy cop talk of a shared language and similar view of the world.

Wiley was more than interested to hear of Melanie Gilbert’s reticence over her lover’s bedroom habits, and promised to pass on the word to their sex crimes detail that an interview there might be of value. Sure, Banderas was dead, but clearance rates were law enforcement’s bottom line, and the statute of limitations on that string of rapes was by no means expired.

Two young women carrying expensive tennis rackets came out of a door on the other side of the courtyard, talking loudly and happily until they glanced over and saw the three police detectives. Kate wondered idly if Rachel Curtis had been a happy tennis player two weeks ago.

Martina Wiley seemed to read her mind. “Rachel will be all right. She’s a strong person who’s been knocked for a loop by this, but I think she’ll find her anger in a couple more days, and that’ll help. I worked sex crimes down south before coming here,” she explained. “You get to have a feel for how people will react.”

“I hope you’re right,” Kate told her.

“We’ll see. Good to meet you two. I’ll be talking to you soon.” They shook hands and, thus dismissed, Kate and Al made their way down the stairs, dodging a man with a bicycle coming up, a man with a dog going down, and the postman with an Express Mail envelope, special Sunday delivery, also heading up the stairs.

They let themselves back into the Banderas apartment. It smelled unoccupied already, of dust and stale air despite the lingering scent of yesterday’s coffee, and would in a few days be cleared for removal of the victim’s effects by his family. Kate had wanted to check a couple of the files in his laptop, but before she had gotten any further than booting it up, someone pounded on the door, bypassing the winsome-voiced doorbell for the sake of directness.

Kate opened it to Martina Wiley. She was holding an opened Express Mail envelope in her rubber-gloved hands, the envelope they had seen in the postman’s hand five minutes before.

“It’s for you,” said Wiley. She carried it over to the dining table and, using the tips of her gloved fingers, she turned the envelope over above the table to allow a folded piece of paper to fall out. Touching only the extreme corners, she pulled it open, and they read:

Be strong, Rachel Curtis, it was not your fault. He will bother no woman again.

—a friend

“Oh, shit,” said Kate.

Al Hawkin, looking over her shoulder, could only agree.

Chapter 7

INVESTIGATING THE LIFE OF the dead man took up the rest of that day and several of the following. The department in Los Angeles sent someone to notify the Banderas family of the death, and on Sunday evening a brother flew up to identify the body and make funeral arrangements, and to begin the process of clearing out the apartment. The brother was a devout and conservative born-again Christian, a lay preacher in his church, and was so offended by his black-sheep brother’s video collection that he had to arrange for the complex’s gardener to come in and remove it from the premises. Some of them were a little rough even for the gardener.

The videos offered them a tentative and theoretical link with the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, since the group’s first victim, Barry Doyle, sold several of the same titles, but credit card receipts at catalogues and video places closer to home accounted for most of them, and the frail link dissolved.

The note received by Rachel Curtis was duly transported to the lab, which told them precisely nothing: dropped in a mailbox in Oakland, the stamp wetted by bottled water rather than someone’s revealing saliva, by a person wearing gloves, on paper produced by the ton, both paper and printer different from that used by the Ladies on their victims. They spent a fruitless hour debating why, if the two murders were linked, Emily Larsen had not received a note, telling her that she was safe. Was the murderer’s technique becoming more refined? Or was it simply that Emily knew who her abuser was, and would know that she was now safe, but Rachel, who had known only a faceless rapist, did not?

They did not find what had called Banderas away from his date with Melanie to end up at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. He had crossed the Golden Gate Bridge just at dusk, when the tollkeeper took his money and reminded him cheerfully to turn on his headlights, and he flipped her the finger before laying rubber in his acceleration. Not that he seemed to be in a rush; he was just being a jerk, she said, adding philosophically, people were, some of them.

Two people might have seen Banderas enter the park around the Legion. One elderly woman, cursed with failing night vision and hurrying to get home before full dark, thought she might have seen the flashy Banderas car parked next to a light car, white or tan, but it was neither of the two makes she knew—Volkswagen and Volvo—although it was closer to a Volvo sedan in shape. And it might have been light blue, or that metallic gray.

The search went on, their steps continually dogged, or preceded, by reporters covering the same ground.

It was all very frustrating and grueling and normal, and Kate dragged herself home each night worn-out but unable to sleep. Finally on Tuesday, trudging through the front door to yet another warmed-up meal, Lee met her in the front hallway with a pair of running shoes in her hand.

“You going jogging, love?” Kate asked, dredging up a joke.

“No, you are.”

Kate moved around Lee and began to unload herself of what felt like a hundred pounds of briefcase, handbag, Beretta with its holster and two magazines, handcuffs, and assorted loose folders, heaping them precariously on the small many-drawered desk next to the stairs. “Not tonight, Lee. I’m tired.”

Lee had somehow moved around to block Kate from the rest of the house. She held out the shoes, practically shoved them into Kate’s chest, and said, “Go.”

“Oh Christ, Lee, don’t do—”

“Go. Now.”

Kate glared at her determined lover, slapped the drawer shut on her holstered gun, snatched the shoes out of Lee’s hand, and stormed angrily upstairs to change into shorts and sweatshirt. Several slammed drawers and loud curses later she pounded resentfully down to the main level and out of the house into the cold night air. The crash of the heavy front door was probably felt by the next-door neighbors.

Red-faced and too worked up to bother stretching, Kate shot down the precipitous side of Russian Hill, in and out of the illumination from the streetlights, moving at a rate that risked a mighty fall. With the luck of the mad, her feet managed to miss the patches of loose gravel and the raised edges of paving stones, the passing cars were always just through the crossings or else down the block, and the clots of people and the dog-walkers were always on the other side of the street.

Gradually, as her resentment cooled and her muscles warmed, she found her pace, and in the end she ran a lot farther than the original spiteful six blocks she had intended. She circled around the base of Russian Hill and came up the steep wooden stairs of Macondray Lane, at the top of which she stopped, bent over with her hands on her thighs to catch her breath. She cooled off by jogging slowly down Green Street and doing some belated stretches, and when she reached her front door, she was considerably more rested than when she had started out.

She paused in front of her door to pick a frail pansy from Jon’s windowbox, carried it through to the kitchen, presented it wordlessly to Lee, and then put her arms around her partner. The two women stood in the silent embrace, wrapped up in each other, restored. It was Lee who moved first to break it off, by murmuring Kate’s name with a question attached to it.

“Yes?” Kate responded into the hollow of Lee’s throat.

“My love, you really, really stink.”

“I know,” Kate said. “I know,” and she went off to luxuriate in a long, hot shower.

Dinner was not reheated leftovers. Dinner was a more or less vegetarian stroganoff with red wine, eaten by candlelight. Kate had not realized how starved she was until her plate was empty—for the second time. She drained her glass, sat back in her chair, and closed her eyes, feeling the hum of satisfaction running through her very bones.

Of course, she was fully aware that underlying the entire string of events from the moment she had come in the door was that ominous little phrase, “Honey, we need to talk.” She had been neglecting Lee, and at a time when there were issues standing between them, issues that would rapidly calcify if left to themselves, requiring major demolition efforts later.

But Lee was right, and Lee was good, and Kate would not force Lee to do it all herself. Besides which, she did want to talk to Lee.

Talking to Lee had become a high priority in Kate’s life, ever since the long, lonely months of fall and winter when she had feared she was losing her beloved. Talking, and laughing and loving and just being with her, and if it cut into the hours Kate could spend working a case, it also seemed to make her more rested, more what Lee would call “centered,” and with that came increased efficiency in her working hours. So Kate told herself, at any rate, and so she would believe.

It had been eight months before, at the end of summer, when Lee had left her, pushing Kate away in a particularly brutal manner. Kate thought it final. Instead, with the new year came a glimmer of hope, shining through a hellish and highly personal case involving the kidnapping of Al’s stepdaughter Jules, and when that case came to an end, miraculously Lee was still there.

A new Lee, a different Lee from the wounded, angry, and confused person who had fled north to her aunt’s island on the Canadian border. This was closer to the strong and purposeful woman Kate had first met, but with a depth and stability that only the profoundly damaged attain. Lee had all but died, and then over the next two years she had been reborn. Kate did not yet know just what her lover had become, or what their relationship would become. All she knew was that Lee still chose to be with her; the rest of it would find its way.

“God, that was good,” Kate said with a sigh. “Would you marry me?”

“I’m already married to you,” Lee pointed out.

“Would you marry me again, then? Maybe if we do it twice, you won’t need to do anything drastic like running off to your Aunt Agatha’s to get my boneheaded attention.”

“That isn’t exactly why I did it,” Lee protested.

“No, but that was one of the results.” Kate pulled her napkin off her lap and dropped it onto the table, pushing her chair back and walking slowly around the table toward Lee. “You have my attention, my complete attention, and nothing but my attention.” At the last word she reached Lee. Bending down, she slipped one arm behind her lover’s back and one under her knees, and picked her up. The romance of the gesture was undermined by the involuntary grunt of effort she let out and the way she staggered across the room, accompanied by Lee’s giggling shrieks of alarm and protest. At the sofa, Kate stumbled and, although Lee did end up on the cushions, Kate fell on top of her in a tangle of limbs and a brief crack of skulls.

They disentangled themselves and sat for a minute, rubbing their heads and recovering their breath.

“So much for romance,” Kate grumbled. “I think I have a hernia or a slipped disk or something.”

“Poor dear,” Lee cooed, and took Kate’s head in her hands to kiss her bruise. The kiss lingered, and moved down to the lips, and suddenly Kate sat up.

“This is where Jon comes in,” she said warily. “Where is he?”

“I told him if he didn’t take the night off and go away, I’d fire him.”

Kate reflected ungratefully that if he did walk in now, the momentary embarrassment would be well worth the result, and then Lee was kissing her and she thought no more for some time.

When they lay still beneath the inadequate cover of the sofa’s throw blanket and the candles on the table were beginning to gutter out, Lee asked Kate, “What was that glance that went between you and Roz the other night?”

“Ah. I should have known you’d see it. It’s kind of embarrassing. You know that quilt of yours I said the dry cleaner’s ruined? It wasn’t them, it was me. One day during the winter I was just sitting there and I… I just felt this tremendous… anger rise up. I just felt so pissed off at you, so I… destroyed it. Childish, I know, and stupid. I’m really sorry—it was such a beautiful thing, and I know how you loved it. But the point is that Roz happened to walk in on me.”

“I see,” Lee said, and from the way she said it, she truly did. “I’m sorry.”

“No apologies,” Kate said firmly. “It happened, it was both our faults, it’s over.”

The last candle flared wildly a handful of times and went out, leaving them in the dim light filtering in from the kitchen.

“And you,” Kate said. “What was that look that went between you and Maj?”

Lee shifted, would have sat up but Kate held her, and she subsided stiffly, then relaxed again.

“It was something Roz had just said about love and rage. Roz had a terrible childhood, I think. She never told me directly, but from things she said in passing over the years, I gather that she had one of those mothers who enjoys ill health while manipulating everyone with her weakness, coupled with an emotionally destructive and often absent father. Both of them alcoholics, and Roz an only child. So although she has built herself a gorgeous, strong, competent persona, when it slips, there’s a lot of pain and anger underneath. Maj and I are two of the few people who have seen it.”

Much as Kate would have enjoyed hearing the gritty details of the golden girl’s dark side, she had no right to ask, and Lee would very probably not tell her if she did. So Kate just pulled Lee to her feet, handed her the crutches, and gathered up their discarded items of clothing so as not to give Jon evidence of their activities when he came in.

Mind and body now restored to an equal state of tiredness and satisfaction, Kate followed her partner’s slow progress up to their bedroom, where she slept very well indeed.

ON THE SURFACE, the murders of James Larsen and Matthew Banderas were linked, by method and by the glaring fact that both men had been multiple offenders—Larsen against his wife, Banderas against a number of women. Still, surface links were often misleading. Which meant that nothing could be assumed, that painstaking detective work was the only option, both now in looking for someone to arrest as well as far down the line when court testimony loomed.

Every neighbor in the condo complex was interviewed, briefly or in depth. The members of the health club Banderas belonged to, his coworkers, his brother, the guys at the bar he frequented, all were noted, all were asked the necessary questions. On Monday morning, Kate tried to track down Banderas’s “real bitch” of a boss, but she was out of town, at a conference in Cincinnati until Wednesday. Kate left her number, and turned to the other interviews on her schedule.

Wednesday morning Janice Popper surfaced, back from Cincinnati but pleading a burden of accumulated work too deep to fit in an interview with the police. She suggested Friday, Kate countered with some very mild hints about the possibility that the police were capable of just showing up that afternoon regardless of Popper’s work, and in the end they compromised on Thursday afternoon. Popper’s voice came over the line as brisk to the point of coldness. She made no pretense at being upset over her employee’s death; made no bones about the fact that she had neither liked nor much respected him.

“Frankly,” she told Kate, “I think he would’ve quit before too much longer. Either that, or I’d have been forced to fire him. Oh, he was good enough at his job, but he was one of those men who just can’t deal with having a woman giving him orders. He’d alternate between trying to flirt and trying to treat me as one of the guys—you know, a dirty joke to see what you’ll do and then getting all righteous if you don’t laugh. I didn’t know about his history until I’d been here a couple of weeks, and it made sense. It also made me very nervous, wondering what he’d do if he got angry at me. I know that if he’d shown up at my house one night, I sure as hell wouldn’t have let him in. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”

Kate thanked the woman for calling back, and went back to typing up the endless reams of reports and interviews that constitute investigative work. Half an hour later, her phone rang. She picked it up, thinking it would be another reporter wanting a quote (although interest was beginning to wane, thank God).

“Martinelli,” she said brusquely.

“Kate? Oh, God, I’m glad I—oh, Kate, I don’t know what—”

“Who is this?” Kate demanded. Her voice cut through the woman’s panic like a knife.

“Roz. This is Roz. Oh, Kate, look. I really need you. Need to talk to you, I mean. Can you—”

“Roz, what is it? Has something happened to Maj—or the baby?”

“No, no,” she snapped impatiently, as if Kate were being rather stupid. The cool annoyance made a startling contrast to her agonized voice an instant before. “It’s really too much to go into on the phone. Can you come here?”

“Now? Where are you?”

“At the church. Kate, can you come?”

Kate stifled a sigh.

“Okay, Roz. Let me just finish what I’m doing and I’ll be there within an hour.”

“Thanks,” she said, and hung up. Kate stared at the phone, wondering what would reduce calm, competent Rosalyn Hall to a state of gibbering rudeness.

It was not panic—Kate saw that the instant she walked into the church office fifty minutes later. She had never before seen Roz Hall consumed by fury, so she did not at first recognize the body language of the people in the outside office as fearful, merely seeing the tension in their faces and the apprehension in the white-eyed glances they cast at the closed door. A raised voice in monologue came from Roz’s office, and Kate paused to ask the young man sitting at the desk marked (humorously, Kate hoped) secretary if she could go in.

“If you really want to,” he said ominously.

“What’s happened?”

“Oh, she’ll tell you,” he replied.

One of the cluster of women in the other corner muttered, “You mean there’s someone in the City who hasn’t heard yet?” The comment sparked a flare of nervous and quickly damped-down laughter. Kate marched over to the closed door, rapped on it briskly and, without waiting for permission, turned the knob and walked in.

Roz Hall stood bent over the telephone on her old wooden desk, wearing her clerical collar, a suit that meant business, and a clenched look of absolute rage. She jerked upright at Kate’s unceremonious entrance, dragged her fingers through her hair, and barked into the phone, “Never mind. I’ll take care of it myself,” before slamming it down on the base.

Roz glared down at the quivering phone for several intense seconds. Then, with an enormous effort, she gathered up the energies that were racing through her and turned them on Kate—who very nearly stepped back under the impact of Roz’s concentrated outrage until the minister suddenly and unexpectedly smiled, and all the murderous antagonism in the room flipped back on itself and slipped away into its box. Kate even caught herself smiling back, and wondered at the ease with which Roz had switched off the stream of fury in full spate to invite Kate instead to join her in a little self-deprecating humor.

Machiavellian, Roz had described herself? Oh, no—Machiavelli had nothing on Roz Hall.

But still Kate smiled, in uncomprehending but true sympathy, and Roz shook her head at herself and said, “What time is it? Not even four? God, I need a drink. Join me?”