Night Work

“No thanks.”

“Coffee then. Grab a seat.” She circled her desk, reaching out in passing to give Kate’s arm a quick squeeze that managed to express apology, affection, and gratitude all at once, and walked out the door. Kate pulled a chair away from the desk, and as she was lowering herself into it, she glanced out into the next room and saw Roz with her arms around the “secketary,” wrapping him in a long hug. After a long minute, she released him and went to the others, giving each of them the benediction of her embrace. The level of tension in the building plummeted, the faces started to beam again.

When each person had been given a hug, Roz stood back. “I’m sorry, everyone. I’m a bitch and I don’t deserve your help. Look—why don’t you all go out and have something to eat? I don’t know if it’s lunchtime or dinnertime, but you must need something after the kind of day I’ve put you through. Just stick the answering machine on and get out of here. And Jory, would you be a dear and put on a fresh pot of coffee before you go? Thanks. All of you.”

She hit just the right note to let her acolytes know that she was okay, that they were safe, and that whatever problems they had been facing would resolve themselves. Tight mutters gave way to relieved chatter, and Roz came back in and walked over to a cabinet.

“Have a seat, Kate. You sure you don’t want something stronger than coffee?”

Kate shook her head at the proffered bottle. Roz splashed a generous amber inch in the bottom of a glass, tipped it down her throat in a single gulp, and shuddered as it hit. After a moment she poured another inch in the glass, capped the bottle and put it away, and took her drink over to the three tall filing cabinets that stood shoulder to shoulder against the wall. With a minimum of searching she pulled out a well-filled ma-nila folder, handed it over to Kate, and then dropped into a comfortable chair across from her guest, who sat waiting for an explanation before committing herself to the folder.

Roz took a sip from her drink, put it on the low table between them, and reached up irritably to peel off the stiff clerical collar. She dropped the curling tongue-depressor shape of white plastic onto the table, loosened the collar of the shirt itself, and sat back with a sigh, rubbing her throat with her eyes shut. It was all done so naturally, Kate couldn’t tell if Roz even knew it was deliberate, this clear declaration that although the lesser beings in the outer office could be given a pat and dismissed as the worshipers they were, Kate was to be considered a near-equal.

A near-equal she wanted something from.

“Do you remember last week I told you about an Indian girl?” Roz asked.

Kate thought back; a week ago at dinner, it seemed like a lot longer. “Someone came to talk to you about the situation while you were at the women’s shelter,” she remembered. “Amanda something.”

“Yes. The Indian girl died last night. They’re treating it like an accident, although her husband has a history of violent behavior.”

“Roz, what are you talking about?” Kate asked sharply.

“He burned the child to death,” Roz said, her face as bleak as her voice. “It’s done all the time in India, and now they’ve done it here. Look at the file, Kate. It’s all there.”

Now Kate looked at the folder, which bore the label Bride Burning. It consisted of clippings from newspapers and magazines, most of them foreign, and a number of journal reprints and articles downloaded from the Internet. Kate picked out one at random and read the brief account, written in oddly stilted English, of a sixteen-year-old bride from the Punjab district of India who brought to her marriage a dowry of what to American eyes seemed a peculiar assortment of goods, including a color television, a sewing machine, and a motor scooter. She went to live with her new husband’s family two hundred miles from her village, under the same roof as his parents, his brother’s family, two unmarried brothers, and a younger sister.

Eight months later the bride was showing no signs of pregnancy, the television was on the blink, and her in-laws were demanding that the dowry be increased by three hundred rupees and a refrigerator. The girl’s parents had gone heavily into debt to pay for the wedding and the agreed-to dowry; they would be very lucky to pay off what they already owed before they died, and could afford no more.

Shortly after her first anniversary, the bride was dead in a “kitchen accident” involving spilled fuel from the cook stove and a match. The groom’s parents were arrested, tried, and found not guilty due to lack of evidence.

That was not the end of the story, either. In a final, macabre twist that, had Kate not been a cop she might not have believed, two years later the groom was offered his dead bride’s younger sister in marriage. The girl’s family was forever “besmirched” (the article’s evocative word) by their daughter’s death, and could not hope to find a clean husband for the girl who remained. The groom was reported to be thinking it over while the prospective new wife’s family decided if its dowry might stretch to a refrigerator.

The whole story sounded fantastic to the point of absurdity, from the motor scooter dowry to the blithe assumption that the dead woman’s own sister might be willing to walk into this nightmare. Kate had been a cop long enough to have seen a little of everything, but this tale stretched credibility.

However, there were other such stories in the file—a dozen, fifteen, twenty-five sets of names, places, and “accidents,” Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and otherwise, from lower-, middle-, and upper-class families. It was appalling.

“Jesus,” Kate said finally. “This sounds like something out of the Dark Ages.”

“It’s terrifying, isn’t it? An indication of the complete and utter insignificance of women, just a burden to everyone. And the frightful irony of women oppressing women. But you know, I do honestly love India. I’ve been there half a dozen times and I’m only beginning to see the country. I love the place, the people, the way it opens my eyes and my heart to go there. Is your coffee okay?”

Kate hadn’t even noticed its arrival. She picked up her mug obediently and took a swallow. It was not hot, but it helped take the taste of those articles out of her mouth.

“And I detest the country as well,” Roz went on. “The people can be so incredibly rude, and gracious at the same time. They can be cruel and hateful, greedy and so affectionate.

“They call India the meeting place of opposites, and it’s true—extreme opposites, too, not the watered-down sorts of contrast we have in this country. There are the Jains, who wear masks and sweep ahead of themselves as they walk so they don’t cause harm to so much as an ant, while at the other extreme there’re these robbers who live in the hills and come down to murder and pillage, and they make movies about them, have fan clubs, everything. And of course every so often there’s a paroxysm of religious-slash-cultural hatred and a few thousand people are slaughtered.

“God, don’t get me started on India,” she said, although in truth Kate had been wondering how to get her stopped. “The ironies would make you howl. A people that worships a warrior-goddess, a religion that clearly says the main god is completely helpless without feminine energy, a country that has had a woman prime minister when we can’t even get one as a vice president, at the same time allows children of seven and eight to be married off, aborts female fetuses right and left, and sees six or eight thousand dowry deaths a year. Ten thousand? More—who knows?

“I’m sorry, Kate—you’re wondering what on earth I’m rattling on about. What I’m trying to say here is that we now have a bride burning in the city of San Francisco, a city you have sworn to protect. What are you, as a police officer, going to do about it?”

Kate was tired, overworked, and unconvinced, and she had no desire to sit at the receiving end of Roz Hall’s histrionic ire.

“Roz, enough with the drama, okay?” she chided. “I don’t work at City Hall. If you have evidence of a homicide—evidence, not suspicion—let me see it, and I’ll pass it on to whoever’s in charge of the case.”

Roz’s head snapped up and she fixed Kate with a look that for an instant had the hardened cop beginning to quail, just as the church members in the other room had done. Roz was a woman magnificent in her rage, her eyes glittering with it, her hair seeming to crackle around her head. Kate half expected sparks to come from her fingertips and smoke from her ears, and she moved quickly to placate this particular warrior-goddess.

“Roz, my friend, please. I’m just a cop. If someone killed a girl in this city then, as you said, it’s my job to put them behind bars. Ninety-nine percent of the time, if someone is murdered, there’s evidence. If this death is being dismissed as an accident, then of course I’ll ask for a closer look. But I do need to know why you think this girl was killed. Other than the fact that a lot of women on the other side of the world are killed by their husbands’ families,” she added.

Reason succeeded where honest emotion would have had Roz reaching for her Rolodex to summon lawyers and tame media moguls into battle. The waves of brute energy subsided, helped by the slowing effects of the drink. “Right,” said Roz, making an effort. “So, what do you need to know?”

Kate reached into her pocket and drew out her notebook and pen. “We could start with her name,” she suggested.

Chapter 8

THE GIRL HAD BEEN born Pramilla Barot a little less than sixteen years before in a small village on the border of Rajasthan and Gujerat, the disastrous third daughter of a struggling farmer and his hardworking but increasingly ill wife. When Pramilla was seven, her mother died giving birth to a son. The farmer, although he had been very fond of his wife, considered it a fair trade.

His first daughter made a successful and gloriously inexpensive marriage to a young schoolteacher with radical ideas, who declared himself willing to take the girl with only the bare minimum of dowry, and that to stay in the hands of his new wife. None of the wedding guests actually approved of this bizarre notion (although in truth it was closer to ancient dowry traditions than it was to the modern interpretation of dowry as little more than payment to any family willing to take a daughter off her father’s hands). Secretly, however, all the fathers were more than a little envious of how easily Barot had gotten off, and all the mothers were more than a little softhearted at the romance of the thing.

So it was that Barot embarked on the marriage arrangements of his second daughter with mixed feelings, knowing how easy it could be, but fearing that karma would come around and kick him in the teeth.

It did so, with a vengeance. The young man identified by the astrologer as an ideal match looked good enough on paper, as it were (although Barot was not exactly literate), but when his family got into the act, Barot felt as if he’d clasped a basket of boa constrictors to his chest.

They squeezed. Oh, not at first—oh no. Only when arrangements were in their final stages, when the first gifts had been exchanged and everyone knew the chosen date, did the boy’s harping mother flex her muscles and bare her teeth. The television chosen was not big enough for her fine son. The kitchen stove Barot was providing was inadequate. The rupees must be increased to cover the expenses they were incurring.

Pulling out was impossible. The girl would be marked as having been tried and found wanting, rejected by one man and therefore of questionable value to the rest. Barot’s future in-laws were careful never to drive their demands so high he was forced to withdraw entirely, but they upped the ante in stages that made him gulp, and tear his hair, but in the end submit.

The alternative, after all, was to be burdened forever with an unmarriageable daughter.

The marriage took place, the demands continued after the wedding parties returned to their homes, but by vast good fortune (and a vast number of expensive pujas at the temple) the bride quickly became pregnant, and to the joy of everyone except perhaps the groom’s mother (who had had her eye on a video player), she gave birth to a son.

Demands ceased, Barot took a deep breath at last—and looked at his fourteen-year-old Pramilla.

There was simply no money for her to get married. If Barot managed to raise it, he and his noble young son would starve. She was a pretty little thing, to be sure, and as bright and as helpful to her menfolk as a father could ask, but there was still no money.

There were offers, yes. A neighbor with an unfortunate facial deformity that made his speech nearly impossible to comprehend was willing to take the girl with only a small dowry. And a farmer in the next village was looking for a pretty young wife, but he was of a lower caste, and besides, Barot had heard talk about the man, and was too fond of his third daughter to feel easy about handing her over to a man who had not only gone through three wives already (all of whom had died of unfortunate accidents) but was older than Barot himself.

So Barot went to see his cousin and the cousin’s wife, who between them seemed to know everything and everyone between Jaipur and Delhi. It was the wife who came up with the idea of the advertisement in the Delhi Post. When Barot saw the sorts of advertisements the marriage column offered, he despaired, as it was full of girls with university degrees and professional training, but his cousin pointed out that he had little choice, and it was worth the investment as a gamble. The three of them together decided on the wording.

Pretty young light-skinned village girl, hardworking, traditional, and respectful, no dowry but ideal for the right man.

Barot could see that even his cousin’s wife had grave doubts about the chances of a response, but she had to admit that the advert was honest, and that in a market bristling with nursing certificates and BA hon degrees, it had the advantage of its own simplicity. And Pramilla did have skin as light as a farmer’s daughter could hope for. Maybe, just maybe, there was a rich man out there (or another schoolteacher with radical ideas) who valued a cowlike, hardworking girl of a respectable caste over an educated potential troublemaker with her own money.

There was.

To everyone’s astonishment, three weeks later a letter came, on a piece of paper with a letterhead engraved on it, bearing a stamp from the United States of America.

They read it at the house of Barot’s cousin. The cousin’s wife read it to them, stumbling over the more unfamiliar English words and translating tentatively as she went.

The letter in its magnificent crisp typescript was from a man who called himself Peter Mehta. He was the Chief Executive Officer (a vastly impressive phrase) of a company with branches in Bombay, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (magic names all) whose business was not specified but was quite patently successful.

Mehta had seen Barot’s advertisement in the Marriages Offered section of the Delhi Post that was flown in to his office in San Francisco several days a week. He was looking for a bride for his younger brother, Laxman, acting as the family representative since their parents were both dead. Laxman was a boy of simple tastes, according to the letter, and both brothers preferred a traditional arranged marriage to the haphazard dangers of the American system. If the girl’s family was willing to have their daughter emigrate to America, would they please send a photograph, details of the girl’s life and accomplishments, and a signed letter from the village health worker to the effect that she was healthy and capable of bearing children.

The letter was couched in terms both more flowery and less direct than that, but all parties involved knew what was meant. She needed to be certified a virgin, she had to be shown to have the normal complement of eyes, ears, and teeth in a more or less pleasing arrangement, and they wanted something in writing that said who she was. Normally, a marriage broker or convenient uncle would take care of this, but the family seemed to have no relatives in the area, and they wanted assurance that their investment would reach them in an acceptable manner. Otherwise they would have to ship her home again, and the “no dowry” phrase had already established that Barot would be unable to reimburse them for the transportation costs.

Barot held the pristine white sheet of paper in his trembling, work-roughened fingers, examining the bold signature of the Chief Executive Officer as if it were the stamp of a god. Salvation was at hand; Pramilla was saved from the clutches of a freak or a wife-beater; he and his son would not starve. And America—unbelievable! The land of golden opportunity had opened up, reaching out to a dusty village in Rajasthan, for surely this would mean that when Pramilla’s brother was grown to be a man, her husband, this godlike Laxman Mehta who was younger brother to an American Chief Executive Officer named Peter, would reach out again to bring the boy into the fold of his extended family.

It was only the cousin’s wife who had doubts. Barot was from a good caste, granted, but the Mehtas were much higher. What did they want with a girl like Pramilla, when they could have someone both higher and with a degree? And San Francisco was so very far away, and Pramilla so young. Who knew this family of Mehtas? Was there no one here to speak for them?

But her protests, admittedly mild, went unheard, for Barot and his cousin and the entire village were filled with joy and excitement. Even Pramilla herself was speechless with the thrill of it (for she had known of the two other suitors hovering in the wings of her father’s vision, and had shuddered at both of them).

The photographer was summoned from the next town, arriving with his heavy ancient camera and a choice of three grubby saris for the occasion. Pramilla yearned for the white sari heavy with silver thread, but the cousin’s wife disapproved, saying it would make her look as if she could afford a dowry after all, and besides, the white would make her skin look much too dark even with rice powder. So she chose the sari with small sprigs of blue flowers on it, and dusted Pramilla’s face and arms with the powder, and pronounced herself satisfied with the result.

Pramilla was fourteen and a half years old, and looked twelve in the picture that landed on Peter Mehta’s desk two weeks later. He grunted, felt a brief regret that he was not himself in need of a luscious young bride, and passed it over to Laxman for approval—unnecessary, perhaps, but this was America after all, and there was no reason to be too medieval about this.

Laxman blushed and nodded, and the arrangements went ahead.

One thing the bride’s father had asked (with fawning trepidation in his ornate phrases, and at the firm suggestion of the cousin’s wife), and that was whether the wedding might not take place in India, preferably in Jaipur or, if that was not convenient, then Delhi—although the writer of the letter could fully understand if the Mehtas were to find this impossible, and it was only asked by the love Barot felt for this his last and most precious jewel of a daughter.

Actually, visa arrangements were vastly simpler if the wedding took place outside the United States and the bride could be introduced as a fait accompli. It would mean fiddling with the date on her birth certificate, but Peter knew a man in Pune who was good at that sort of thing. No, it would not be a problem, and would all in all be preferable to deal with the matter in India. He even sent three third-class rail tickets, so the bride’s family could accompany her.

It was a full, no-expenses-spared Hindu wedding, with shamiana tents in the garden of the second-best hotel in Delhi, a white horse for the groom and rented jewelry for the bride, music until the early hours, and even some fireworks to light up the neighborhood and wake the restless beggars sleeping at the hotel gates. Barot was frankly terrified by Peter Mehta and had to fight down a sudden impulse to thrust Pramilla into the arms of the Chief Executive Officer who would soon be her brother-in-law and run away, but his first view of the younger brother, Laxman, brought with it a wave of relief mixed heavily with guilt.

Relief because the lad was more than presentable, he was beautiful, long-lashed as a cow, slim as a young Krishna, and he looked not much older than his bride. He was older, Barot knew that, twice Pramilla’s age, but he looked very like a young boy, white-faced and plucking at the front of his white silk kurta pajamas—more like a farm boy than a hard-driving company director, and infinitely more suited to Pramilla. And Barot knew guilt because he suspected that Pramilla was not really being given the man she deserved, but an immature boy who might never become anything else. All through that long day and night the farmer kept casting glances at the boy who would take his daughter, and in the end he decided that there was definitely something wrong with him. Not greatly so—he wasn’t a drooling idiot by any means, just… slow.

His cousin’s wife, who had come with him instead of Barot’s young son, agreed with his assessment, and managed to take the young bride aside for a private conversation at which phrases such as “patience” and “a loving heart” and “you will need to be your husband’s backbone” played a part. The earnest advice confused Pramilla somewhat, but lodged in her heart, and her “auntie” assured herself that the child would find them there and remember them when the time came. She patted the child’s cold hand and told her to remember that even the great god Shiva was nothing without the energies of his wife, Shakti; as she put it: “Shiva is shava [corpse] without shakti” (shakti being, Kate remembered from Roz’s television panel, both the word for energy and the name of the goddess). Pramilla nodded dutifully and went back to take her place beside her pale, silent boy-husband.

The marriage might never have been consummated had Pramilla waited for Laxman to make the first move. Indeed, it was not consummated in the five days they spent in Delhi, waiting for Peter to finish his business and for the authorities to come through with her travel papers. But once on the airplane, sitting in the roaring, rattling, utterly foreign compartment surrounded by poisonous smells, incomprehensible voices, and a husband who, though exceedingly beautiful, acted nothing like the filmi husbands she had seen on the flickering screen in her village, or even her neighbors’ husbands, Pramilla Mehta watched in something close to terror as the sprawl of Delhi fell away beneath the wings of the plane, and the girl of not yet fifteen years began quietly to weep.

Had she plotted for days, she could not have come up with a better way of making the boy at her side cleave to her. He had spent the last week not far from tears himself, and twice had succumbed to them after the unsatisfactory nightly ritual of going to this pretty stranger’s bedroom, sitting rigidly on the edge of her bed and making attempts at conversation in a language she could barely understand, and retreating again having done nothing but briefly touch the back of her hand, once.

But now she was the one in tears, this delicate, precious, daunting, sweet-faced young goddess, and without even pausing to consider his action, he reached out and took her hand. In response she sobbed aloud, and his heart simultaneously broke and swelled up in manly pride that at last he had found a role he could step into, even if it was only that of comforter.

Sleeping and awake, they held hands all the way to San Francisco.

IT WAS NOT EASY after that, and Pramilla was often in tears, but at least she had the vague comfort of knowing that her sorrows were those of all young wives, home in the village or here in this new country, and that she had only to endure and life would, in the end, sort itself out. Peter’s wife, Rani, playing the part of mother in the family (and indeed, she was nearly old enough to be Laxman’s mother), was hateful, even cruel, but that after all was what mothers-in-law were. She refused to speak Hindi with the newcomer, pretending that she did not understand the peasant girl’s rural accents; she pinched Pramilla’s arm when the girl put the spoons in the wrong place or failed to peel the vegetables to her satisfaction; worst of all from Pramilla’s point of view, Rani encouraged her own children (who were not actually all that far from Pramilla’s age) to mock her and treat her as a rather stupid family pet. And Laxman… Her husband was not a simple person to be with, since he seemed to know that he had something missing and was short-tempered because of it. He lost patience with her at the slightest irritation and occasionally shouted and sometimes slapped her, and bed was never easy, since she did not seem able to be anything but dry and tight against him. Still, even that was a thing that her knowledge of village marriages had prepared her for, and she soon folded away her picture of filmi romance as an outgrown (if never actually worn) garment.

So Pramilla Mehta went her way in the New World, walking a tightrope between an inadequate and easily frustrated husband and an oppressive mother-in-law figure, with no friends or family or even familiar surroundings to bolster her. Tens of millions of women had done the same, and like them, Pramilla could have been happier, but at least she had the degree of contentment that comes when one’s expectations are met.

The precarious balancing act held for precisely five months, until one evening when Rani, annoyed at some problem with a plumber and angry at Peter for working such long hours, pointed out with a voice that cut flesh that Laxman and ‘Milla had been married for nearly half a year, why wasn’t the girl pregnant?

All four Mehtas ended up in a shouting match, which broke apart only when Peter slammed out of the house, Rani turned her wrath on Pramilla, and Laxman retreated from the scene. Later that night he came to his wife’s room expecting her to sniffle and cuddle and comfort him by her need for his manly comforting. Instead Pramilla, still smarting from Rani’s cruel words and her own fresh, sharp fear of childlessness, turned on him and demanded furiously why he, her husband, had not been a real man and stood up for her against his brother and sister-in-law.

Laxman went berserk. He hit her and screamed at her, forced himself on her, and then collapsed in a storm of teary self-recrimination, kissing her bruised face and saying over and over how she must never again make him do that.

She never did. In the seven months that remained to her, she was always careful, around him and around Rani (who conceived and miscarried what would have been her fifth child).

The only outlets to Pramilla’s spirit were the daytime television programs, which taught her English with their simple plot lines and filmi dialogue, and brief, uncertain conversations with a woman who lived down the street and seemed to know everything that was going on in Pramilla’s life with Laxman.

Her name was Amanda, and she was a being even more exotic to Pramilla than the people on the daytime television programs. She acted more like a man than any woman Pramilla had ever known, allowing her arms and legs to go bare—not like a prostitute, which was what many of these women looked like, but like the castes of women who carried stones and bricks to building projects, chattering loudly and ignoring their veils—or like the pictures of women athletes Pramilla had seen, strong and brazen. Pramilla couldn’t understand why men weren’t afraid of Amanda; she looked as if she would pull out a sword or a club at any moment, like Kali. She certainly frightened Pramilla, she was so overflowing with Western ease and power, and she fascinated Pramilla, because she was as strong and confident as Peter. Her independence was… godlike.

They met at the local market, where Pramilla was puzzling over a display of unfamiliar greenery. A bare, browned arm snaked past her to snatch up a head of curly purple leaves, and paused to shake it under Pramilla’s nose.

“Great stuff,” said the voice attached to the arm. “You ever try it?”

Pramilla glanced around to see if this stranger might not be speaking to someone else, then looked up into a face as sunburnt and roughened as that of a road-mender. She was as without manners as one of the road gangs, too, bluntly informal in that way that was both offensive and secretly appealing. Pramilla came up with a phrase her sister-in-law had used on a similar occasion. “I beg your pardon?” she said, but it did not come out the same way as Rani said it, and this Western woman took it as an invitation.

“Purple kale, it’s called,” she continued cheerfully. “Fry it for just a minute with butter and garlic, it’s gorgeous and healthy, too.”

Pramilla’s English was sufficient to gather that the woman was telling her a recipe, although it sounded remarkably bland and nearly raw. Pretty, though, if the purple stayed in the leaves. Perhaps she could convince Rani to try it.

“Amanda Bonner,” the woman said, and put the brown hand out at Pramilla. Very gingerly Pramilla extended her own fingers, allowing them to be clasped briefly and released.

“My name is Pramilla Mehta,” she recited.

“Pramilla. What a beautiful name. You live down the block from my parents, I think. I’ve seen you on the street.”

“Parents, yes.”

“Sorry—I’m talking too fast, aren’t I? Can you understand my English?”

“Understand, yes. I do not speak good. I hear the television, when they talk slow.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Seven, eight month.”

“Is that all? Did you know any English when you came?” Amanda asked, sounding surprised.

“Some little. Hallo, goodbye, Tom Cruise, Superman.” Pramilla shrugged her narrow shoulders gracefully.

“Well, I wouldn’t have thought TV could have much to offer, but it obviously works for you. Do you watch the soaps?”

Pramilla knew that word from Peter’s disparaging remarks. “Yes, and cooking shows, news, cartoons. Game shows are too fast. They make me tired.”

Amanda laughed, showing a lot of white teeth. “They make me tired, too, and I was born here. Your English is very good, though. You must practice.”

Pramilla grimaced. “I have to. No one will speak anything else.” Laxman knew little Hindi, Peter pretended he knew none, and Rani treated the language as something only an Untouchable would speak. It was English or go hungry.

“Immersion English, huh?” Amanda said and, seeing Pramilla’s confusion, changed it to, “We have a saying: Sink or swim.”

“I know,” said Pramilla a touch grimly. “I know.”

Chapter 9

“YOU GOT ALL THIS from Amanda—what’s her name?—Bonner?” Kate asked, since Roz seemed to have come to a pausing place.

“Most of it. Some of it I asked Pramilla herself.”

“You met her, then?”

“I did. On Thursday night, in fact, the day after I mentioned her to you. Sweet little thing, looked about twelve years old, but quite bright and nobody’s fool. Amanda thought she might listen to a woman who was also a priest.”

“Listen to what?”

“Advice. Amanda thought the girl—I ought to call her ‘y^oung woman,” but it’s hard to think of such a child that way. Amanda thought she was being abused by her husband and his family, and she wanted me to encourage Pramilla to get out before she found herself with a broken arm, or worse. When I heard the details of the story, I thought the ’or worse‘ all too likely. That file on bride burning is something I’ve been compiling for years, and when I saw the situation—a young bride far from her own support group, married over a year and not pregnant, with signs of escalating violence like the bruises on her arm where someone had grabbed her, hard—I became extremely concerned. I was right, but I wasn’t concerned enough. I should have dragged her out of that house. Or gone there and made a stink to let them know someone was watching. I will never forgive myself that I did not.“

“Roz, there’s a mountain of guilt out there if you want to crawl under it. And you’re not even sure it wasn’t an accident, are you? Those damn garments they wear, I should think they’re massively dangerous around open flame, all that loose silk waiting to catch on fire.”

An odd expression took over Roz’s features, memory wrestling with an unwillingness to relinquish the self-blame. “She didn’t like cooking over electricity. She told us that. They had to buy her a little kerosene stove because it was closer to what she was used to. She could cook squatting on the floor.”

Kate said nothing, merely meeting Roz’s eyes and nodding. The door behind them opened briefly and shut again; she became aware that the temporary silence in the outer office had given way again to voices and movement. The church members had returned from their dinner and were awaiting the next commands of their beloved leader.

She closed her notebook and clipped the pen over the cover. “I’ll make some calls, let whoever caught the case know that there’s some question about it. And I’ll try to have a look at the autopsy report myself.”

Roz opened her mouth—to object, Kate knew, to the proposed noncommittal investigation—but was cut short by the door again, this time with a voice asking if Roz was nearly finished, because if so, that call that Roz had been waiting for…

Kate took advantage of the interruption to make her escape, but she was followed out the door by Roz’s voice, calling, “Talk to Amanda, Kate. Hey, Jory? Give Kate Amanda Bonner’s phone number, would you? I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Kate—and thanks.”

Roz obviously intended for Kate to leap right onto the case’s back, may even have intended for Kate to phone Amanda Bonner from the office, but Kate was tired and hungry, so she went home.

Lee was in the kitchen making tantalizing smells to the sound of a classical guitar CD. Kate slipped up behind the cook’s back and put her arms around Lee, just holding her, until Lee remembered that something on the stove was about to become inedible (if not burst into flames) and she unwrapped Kate’s encircling arms, gently but firmly.

“Jon’s out again?” Kate asked, going to the cupboard for a couple of wineglasses.

“In and out. Sione has the night off, so they’re going to a movie.”

“Sione being…?”

“The dancer. From Song. Kate, you have been home this last week, you have heard about this.”

“The dancer, right.” The cause of Jon’s falsetto renditions of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” and other gems of the fifties and sixties. “How much longer is Song running?” she asked. It seemed a safe question, and relevant as well, particularly if it was a traveling show and the current love of Jon’s life was going off with it.

“Two and a half weeks, I think. Jon wants to know what night we want tickets for.”

“You want to go?”

“Sure. It sounds wild.”

“Okay. Well, the first part of the week should be safe, I’m not on call nights until Wednesday.”

“Monday or Tuesday, then. Would you mind if we made a group of it and asked Roz and Maj? I mentioned it to Roz the other day and she said she could easily have someone take her group session at the shelter, if it needs to be Monday. Or do you think we’ve seen too much of them lately?”

“Never too much, they’re good people,” said Kate easily. She did, in truth, think that they’d been seeing an awful lot of them recently, between one thing and another, but if it made Lee happy she could put up with it. She put the full glasses next to Lee’s spoon rest and stood behind her lover, wrapping her arms again around Lee’s waist. “What about dinner before, or after? There’s that good Chinese place not too far from there.”

“Great. You want garlic bread?”

“With Chinese?”

“With this minestrone, you fool. Tonight.”

“I’d rather have you.”

Lee turned in Kate’s arms and said, half purring, “You can have both, you know.”

“Not at the same time. Too messy. Beans and stuff all over the place.”

Lee drew back and pursed her lips in thought. “We could work on it.”

“I don’t want to work on anything, I’m taking the night off. When is Jon coming home?”

“Any minute,” Lee murmured regretfully into Kate’s hair.

“Then the garlic bread now,” Kate said briskly, and disentangled herself to go and set the table.

Jon did indeed come in a few minutes later, humming a tune Kate remembered from the long-ago summer her periods began—positively modern by Jon’s standards. At least he wasn’t singing out loud.

Still, she braced herself for the other symptom of Jon’s love life, which was an inability to talk about anything without dragging The One’s name into it. A complaint about the garbage cans would trigger the observation that “Bryce was into recycling before curbside bins came”; a comment about kung pao chicken would bring forth the information that “Jacksen’s allergic to chilis.”

So when Lee said to Jon that they were going to try for Song on Monday or Tuesday, Kate braced herself for Sione’s name in some form, but it didn’t come. Jon merely nodded and said that would be great, he was sure they’d love the show.

She looked at him closely, but could see no sign that the affair had run its course already. He seemed pleased with the soup, happy to talk about anything or nothing—indeed, he seemed content, a word that had never before applied to Jon Sampson, who, though he was not clinically bipolar, tended to the extremes in his moods. Finally Kate couldn’t stand it.

“So, Lee tells me you have a thing with one of the Song dancers.”

He beamed at her, a simple, uncomplicated look of delight. “Sione Kalefu. He’s so great. He’s talented, intelligent, he even has a sense of humor. And he’s flat-out, drop-dead gorgeous—like a young Polynesian Mick Jagger, if you can picture it.” Kate tried, and failed. “In fact, when I told him that, he said that yeah, he’d often thought that when he retired he’d run a gay bar and call it Memphis.”

Kate looked at him blankly, waiting for the explanation. Punch line, rather, judging by the expectant sparkle in his eyes.

“All right,” she said. “I give. Why ‘Memphis’?”

“What’s the first line of ‘Honky-Tonk Women’?”

Kate thought about it for a minute, and then felt her lips twitch. Jon threw back his head and laughed and Lee, who had heard this before, nonetheless snorted. “Oh, God, Jon, that’s terrible,” Kate protested, then began to laugh as well.

He cleared the dishes away, doing a bump-and-grind to the accompaniment of the nine-syllable phrase Jagger made out of “honky-tonk women,” then he grabbed up his coat and took himself and his suggestive lyrics out the door to his Polynesian paramour.

“Well,” pronounced Kate in the ensuing silence. “At least it’s a change from ‘Mrs. Brown you’ve got a loverly daughter’ in bad Cockney.”

“Or ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to’ a la Lesley Gore.”

“Remember the time Bryce bought him those Timberland hiking shoes and we heard Nancy Sinatra for a week?”

“Oh, please don’t remind me. They’re all the sorts of songs that lodge in the back of your brain and circle around and around at three in the morning.”

“Haw-aw-aw-aw-aw-nky-tonk women,” Kate brayed.

They set the dishwasher going and went to bed early that night.

And were awakened when Jon came in at two in the morning, singing quietly to himself a half-familiar tune, the chorus of which came into Kate’s mind as she was drifting off again: “Goodness gracious, great balls of fire.” She fell asleep with a smile on her face.

IN THE DARK OF the night, while Kate had slept the sleep of the just and the overworked and Jon found joy in a pair of brown arms, the Ladies struck again. Kate sat and read all about it in the morning Chronicle. This time their attack involved the torching of the shiny, new, phallic-shaped car of a man who had been seen slapping his wife around in the park across the street. She had gone across to fetch their son from an afternoon soccer game, become involved in a conversation with the other mothers, and not been at her place in the kitchen when he arrived home from work. He went looking for her and literally dragged her home. The note the fire department found duct-taped to the fence near the burnt-out wreck read:

YOUTOUCHHER,WE TORCHYOU.

—the Ladies

The reporter did not think much of the theory that the second verb was a typographical error. Kate folded the paper and threw it on the floor, thinking that it was time she just stopped reading anything that came before the comics.

“I went to see Roz yesterday,” she told Lee, taking a bagel from the toaster and reaching for the jar of Maj’s blackberry jam. “Just in case I wasn’t busy enough, she called me and thought I’d like to look into another suspicious death.”

“The Indian girl?”

“You know about her?” Kate asked in surprise.

“Maj called to warn me that Roz was setting off on another Campaign. I figured she’d drag you into it.”

“I don’t know how draggable I am at the moment. These last two cases are going to eat up a lot of hours.”

“Kate, if Roz wants you to do this, you know you’re going to end up doing it. Easier to admit it now and get on with it.”

“I thought the woman was supposed to be writing her doctoral thesis,” Kate complained. “Why isn’t she doing that, or painting the baby’s room, or starting a bookmobile service for the homeless, or something?”

“She’s probably doing all of them,” Lee said, adding darkly, “I used to have that kind of energy.”

“You never had that kind of energy. You just never slept.”

“That’s true. Not like now.”

“God no, you do nothing but snooze. Must be up to, what—six hours a day? Lazy pig.”

Lee stuck out a purple, crumb-covered tongue, a childish gesture that pleased Kate inordinately because there had been so few of them in the two years since Kate’s job had cost Lee so dearly. The two women sat across the table from each other grinning like a pair of schoolgirls, and Kate’s heart swelled in joy and pride and the precious nature of what they had and she picked up Lee’s hand and kissed the palm.

“Sweetheart?”

“Yes, my Kate?”

“Back in…” No, not Back in the had time, although that was how Kate thought of it. “Last year, you said you wanted to have a baby. I… overreacted, because I didn’t think you were ready. Physically. I mean, you were barely walking. And more than that, because I wasn’t ready. I just want to say that if you still feel the same way, and if the doctors think you won’t, I don’t know, blow any fuses, then I’m willing to go into it with you.”

Lee’s head was drooped so far that Kate couldn’t see her face, so she had no warning when Lee’s shoulders began to heave silently. Kate’s hand tightened on Lee’s in distress.

“Lee, love, what is it? Don’t cry, I only meant—”

Lee’s head shot back and her free hand slapped down hard on the table, and Kate realized belatedly that her lover was laughing uncontrollably.

“What?” she demanded. “What?”

Lee shook her head and spluttered, “ ‘Blow any fuses’? Oh God, Kate, the technical language. The subtle grasp of medical terminology you’ve picked up—”

Both relieved and affronted, Kate retrieved her hand and her dignity.

“I can’t seem to do anything right,” she said plaintively, which made Lee laugh even harder. So Kate took herself back to the relatively simple business of tracking down killers.

Chapter 10

BEFORE SHE BUCKLED DOWN to her own caseload, however, Kate dutifully dug up the detective in charge of investigating Pramilla Mehta’s death. Tommy Boyle had caught the call, so Kate left a message to have him phone her, and went back to her report.

Or she tried to go back to her report. She became increasingly aware of a small, dark woman, little more than a child, standing quietly in the corner of her vision, waiting with the self-effacing patience that had characterized her whole short life, and may have led to her death. Try as Kate might, she could not ignore the girl, and when Boyle came into the Homicide room with a question on his face, she abandoned the paperwork with even more gratitude than such an interruption usually earned.

“Want a cup of coffee?” she offered, already on her feet.

“Sure,” he said.

Kate had known Boyle for a couple of years, but not well, and they happened not to have actually worked a case together. He was a red-haired, green-eyed man with Hispanic features and brown skin, who had impressed Kate as a person interested mainly in getting on with his work; when in a group, he tended to be seen with his nose in a sheaf of case notes or a book on forensics. She liked him, but didn’t know him well enough to know how to approach him on what could be taken as a touchy business, intruding on another’s investigation. Kate spooned coffee grounds into the machine and tried to put together a question that wouldn’t sound either nuts or pushy, and in the end gave it up.

“It’s about that burn victim you caught Tuesday night. Pramilla Mehta.”

“What about her?”

“You haven’t written it off as an accident, have you?”

“Of course not. Haven’t even got the path report back yet.” He waited for her to tell him why she was interested.

“You know the name Rosalyn Hall?”

“Rosalyn—you mean Roz Hall, that minister? Oh jeez. Is she involved in this?”

“I’m afraid so. She thinks the husband did his wife.”

“The husband’s a true flake,” he offered in agreement.

“Thing is, Roz is convinced that this is an American incident of bride burning, which they get a lot of in India.”

“People in India burn their brides?” he asked dubiously. “I heard of widows throwing themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre, but I always thought that was old women. And isn’t it illegal there now? There was something about it in a novel I once read,” he added, as if to explain away his knowledge.

“I think that’s a different thing. This is young brides. They have this complicated system in India with the bride’s family giving a dowry to the groom’s family—not just money, but stuff like motorbikes and kitchen appliances—and if the groom’s family is greedy and demands more, and doesn’t get it, they sometimes get pissed and kill the bride. Especially if there are also no babies.”

“That sounds insane.”

“I know. And Roz may be off her rocker and be seeing demons in the dark, but on the off chance she’s on to something, I told her I’d make sure it’s treated like a possible homicide, not just a domestic accident.”

Boyle narrowed his incongruous emerald eyes at her. “It sounds like she’s a friend of yours.”

“Longtime acquaintance,” she admitted, repressing a twinge of guilt at her disloyalty. “You probably know how she works. She’s a politician, she goes to someone on the inside to get things done. So she came to me, and to get her off my back I told her I’d make sure it was being done right. One thing the department does not need is Roz Hall raising a stink about due process.”

“God no. Sure, you go ahead and tell her we’re handling things right.

But you might also tell her that I don’t appreciate anyone telling me how to do my job.“

“I’ll be sure to mention it. When I saw who had caught the case, I knew it’d be done by the book. What did the scene look like? If you don’t mind my nosiness.”

“Pictures should be ready this afternoon. It was messy—burnings always are. As to whether we’re looking at a homicide or not, I couldn’t right off tell whether she fell into the stove or the stove fell onto her, if you see what I mean. There was accelerant in either case—it was one of those portable kerosene cook stoves—and there wasn’t a whole lot of her left to look at. The whole house nearly went up.”

“Why didn’t it?”

“The family was home. The sister-in-law was working in the main kitchen, and she saw—”

“They have two kitchens? Must be a mansion.”

“Oh no, it’s just that they had a separate cooking area in the garden, a shack really—no building permit, of course—where the girl, Pramilla, was working. Sort of what my grandmother would have called a summer kitchen, very sensible in a climate like Fresno, or I suppose India.”

“I see. Um. Have you talked with the arson investigator?”

“Not yet. I left him there with Crime Scene, taking a million measurements. He said he’d get back to me. I’ve got to leave it to him; I’m supposed to be partnered with Sammy.” Sammy Calvo, the department’s most politically incorrect detective, who suffered (along with everyone around him) from chronic foot-in-mouth disease, was currently out with the shingles, one of those complaints that seemed like a joke to anyone who had never lived with it. She stifled the flip remark that it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy; Boyle presumably was friends with his partner, to some extent at least.

“Would you like a hand with this one?”

“I could use it,” he admitted. “But I wouldn’t have thought that you need to go around drumming up business.”

“I’ve got the two actives, a handful of cold ones, and I’d be happy to give you a couple of hours’ follow-up on this one.”

“Right, then. I have to be in court all day—do you want to give the ME and the arson investigator a call this afternoon, see what they have? You might even go see them, if you have the time.” It being a recognized fact of life that the physical presence of an investigator was harder to ignore than a voice on the phone.

“I’ll stop by if I can, pick up their reports. Anything to keep Reverend Hall off the chief’s back,” she told him. The machine on the counter had stopped gurgling, so Kate poured them each a cup of coffee and they went back to their desks.

One of those jobs came to her, saving her trekking across the city. Amanda Bonner phoned and said that Roz Hall (at the very mention of whose name Kate was beginning to develop a wince) had told her to call and tell Kate what she knew. Kate hesitated, decided that Boyle would be happy enough to hand the preliminary interview over to her, and told Bonner to come down. She was there within half an hour.

Kate could well imagine that a teenager out of village India would find Amanda Bonner an impressive figure. She herself found Bonner impressive. Six feet tall, a hundred sixty pounds of very solid bone and muscle, she made Kate feel short, pale, flabby, and ineffectual. Her hand was dry and callused when she shook Kate’s office worker palm, and she shed her jacket in the warmth of the small interview room to reveal sculpted muscles beneath a tank top. Kate might have tagged her as a bodybuilder, but Bonner just dropped into a chair with no hint of arrangement or posing except that when she leaned forward to talk with Kate, the top of her shirt fell away from her chest, giving Kate a glimpse of unfettered breasts that were surprisingly generous, with a sprinkling of freckles and a tan that appeared to go all the way down. Kate averted her eyes and sat down firmly in her own chair, pulling up a businesslike notebook and pen to take the woman’s statement.

As Roz had told Kate, Bonner had met Pramilla Mehta over a head of purple kale in the supermarket. She had seen the Indian girl numerous times before that, since Amanda’s aging parents lived on the same block as the Mehtas and Amanda stopped in almost every day to shop and cook and generally check up on them.

“It’s a pretty ritzy area, you know. The Mehtas are about the only ethnic people there—aside from the gardeners and cooks. A beautiful young girl wearing a salwar kameez and a dozen silver bracelets sticks out.”

“What was your relationship with Pramilla Mehta?” Kate asked.

“Friendship, basically. Older sister stuff. If you’re asking if I slept with her, the answer is no. Frankly, she wasn’t my kind. For one thing, she was straight—or at least, she was too young and confused to think about being anything else. Personally, I prefer the strong, confident type. Don’t you?”

Now Kate was certain that the gaping shirt had been no accident, though she kept her face as straight as Pramilla’s orientation. It happened often enough, women flirting with her, since everyone in the city who read a paper or watched the news knew who and what Kate Martinelli was. All she could do was ignore it, as she had a dozen times before. No different, really, from a straight male cop with a female witness coming on to him. Amusing, but she mustn’t show that; a smile would either offend or be taken as an encouragement.

“How did you communicate with the girl?” Kate asked. “I thought she didn’t speak much English.”

“I’ve traveled all over the world, and had a lot of experience in talking to people whose language I don’t speak. It’s mostly a matter of not being embarrassed about making a fool of yourself with sign language and asking for words. And besides, Pramilla understood a lot, and as soon as she realized that I wasn’t going to make fun of her like her family did, she relaxed and could speak a lot better than when she was worried about getting it right.”

“But I would expect that a lot of what you understood about her life was reading between the lines,” Kate suggested.

“That’s true. And I’m sure I read some of the more subtle things wrong. But then, that happens even between people who speak the same language, doesn’t it?”

“Did she tell you that her husband hit her? In so many words?”

“One day she had a bad bruise on her cheek. I asked if Laxman had done it, and she nodded.”

“Nodded, or shrugged?”

“That sort of Indian wag of the head. It means, ”Oh yes, but never mind.“ ”

It could mean any number of things, thought Kate to herself. “And the other abuses? You told Roz that Peter’s wife, Rani, pinched her.”

“And slapped her a couple of times. It’s fairly traditional in families like that to find a younger relative imported as a servant—or an older one, which the Mehtas have as well. Slave is more like it, because they aren’t usually paid wages, just given a bed and food. Pramilla at least had Laxman’s allowance.”

“Have you met Laxman?”

“Not directly. I’ve seen him a couple of times, once with her in the market telling her what to buy, and once when they were getting off a bus. He was carrying this tiny parcel, a pie or something in a bakery box, and he got off first; she was behind him with this great armload of string bags of vegetables and two grocery bags, and she stumbled coming down the steps and nearly dropped the lot. He just shouted at her—in Hindi so I couldn’t understand the words, but it was obvious that he was giving her hell. Then he walked away leaving her to carry the rest.”

“What did you do?”

“What did I do? Nothing.” Bitterness crept into Bonner’s voice. “Pramilla had made it clear that it only made more problems for her when I tried to interfere. If I’d seen Laxman actually hit her, I would have stepped in, called the police, the whole nine yards. But since I didn’t, I thought it would be better for her if she made the decision to leave him. She had my number, she knew I would come to her any time of the day or night. I even gave her a hot-line number, in case she wanted to talk to someone who understood better than I.”

“Understood… ?”

“Her situation and her language. But as far as I know, she never called. Not then, anyway.”

Kate lifted her eyebrows in a question. After a minute, Bonner reluctantly dredged up the rest of it. “I think she may have tried to call me, just before she was killed. I was out shopping for my parents, and when I got home there was a hang-up message on the answering machine. Nobody there, and when I tried to do that star sixty-nine thing to call back, it wouldn’t go through. And then that afternoon when I went to take the groceries to my folks, there were all these police cars down the street. I can’t help but wonder…”

“Yes,” Kate said. “Well.”

Had Pramilla Mehta been religious? Kate wondered as she walked Amanda Bonner to the elevator. Would she have said that fate— karma—kept her friend Amanda from being there when she needed her? And what about her death; would a fifteen-year-old girl agree that death was nothing, reincarnation all? Or was that a Buddhist conceit, not a Hindu one?

Assuming, of course, that the hang-up call was from Pramilla. The Mehta phone records would tell, although it would not be a kindness to confirm Amanda’s fears. Maybe she’d just let it go.

JUST AFTER MIDDAY, Kate and Al drove up to talk with Matthew Banderas’s boss, Janice Popper. The software company was in an uninspired strip of businesses just off the freeway, clean and tidily landscaped and working hard to appear both cutting-edge (a modern tangle of sculpture out front) and reassuringly stable (thick carpeting in the entrance foyer). They identified themselves to the receptionist, who picked up the phone and announced their arrival. Popper came out of the back and greeted them, ushering them back to her office with a declaration that Kate had heard dozens of times before in similar circumstances, although she freely admitted that very occasionally it was true.

“I don’t think I can help you much,” Popper told them. “I didn’t really know the man.”

“That’s fine,” Hawkin said, settling into his chair across the desk from her and presenting her with a genial smile. “We just need to be thorough. Let’s see. You’ve only had this job a few months, is that right? Did you work for the company before that, or were you hired from outside?”

“Nine weeks now, and I was headhunted. Brought in from outside. That may have been one of the problems, with Matthew, that is. He applied for this position, although he wasn’t really qualified. His experience was almost exclusively in sales, not general administration.”

Janice Popper was a small, thin woman with a number of nervous habits involving her fingers, which made Kate wonder if she’d recently given up smoking and had to find something to do with her hands. Right now she was tugging irritably at the sleek dark brown hair that fell along her jawline, trying to tuck it behind her ear—without success, as it was about half an inch too short to stay tucked—and adjusting her titanium-framed designer glasses as if they were bothering the bridge of her nose.

“When did you find out about his criminal record?” Al asked her.

“My second week here. I never had a proper handover because the guy who did this job before me had a heart attack and wasn’t up to briefing me, and personnel records were secondary to active contracts and ongoing negotiations. It took me a week or so to get my feet under me, begin to get a handle on the shape of the company. After that I started taking appointments with personnel, people with problems or urgent suggestions, wanting transfers or raises, that kind of thing. Most of them, of course, just wanting a chance to size up the new boss and make an impression. Banderas came in around the middle of that week, maybe Thursday. I always have my secretary give me a file on an appointment so I know something about them—single or five kids, war veteran or university graduate, anything like that. Nothing confidential you know, just background. So I open the file for my ten o’clock or whatever it was and see that Matthew Banderas was on record as a sex offender. I left the door wide open during that appointment, I can tell you.”

“You said you had decided to fire him?” Hawkin asked.

“Not for that,” she quickly said. “I’d have no right to fire him for a past offense, either legally or ethically, no matter how uncomfortable it made me feel. No, he was falling down on his job. The sales numbers just weren’t coming in, and numbers are the bottom line. We work by salary plus commission, and we couldn’t afford to pay somebody who wasn’t bringing it in.”

“But he’d been okay before you came?”

“Not really. He’d been slipping for some months.” She paused, choosing her words. “I ran an analysis on his sales, trying to track it down, thinking I might help him out. I found that almost all of his successful sales contacts were men.” She shook her head. “There’s just too many women in charge of buying to write off that whole side of the market.”

“He alienated women buyers, then?”

“Somehow, yes.”

“Any way of finding out how?”

“I wouldn’t want to ask them directly, if that’s what you’re saying. It’s hardly a great sales technique, to remind buyers that you had a rep who was not only a prick but a rapist to boot, who on top of that managed to get himself murdered.”

“On the other hand,” Kate suggested, “it might clear the air if one of your female sales reps had a few woman-to-woman talks with people who turned Banderas down. Might get across the message that it wasn’t going to happen again.”

Popper sat still for a moment, staring at Kate and thinking. Her right hand came up to tuck the uncooperative lock behind her ear, and she nodded.

“You may be right. We’ll run a trial, and tell you what—if I find anything out about Matthew, I’ll pass it on to you.”

“One other thing,” Hawkin said, interrupting the forward shift in her body’s position that presaged their dismissal. “Who else knew about Banderas’s history?”

“I have no idea. No, really—I don’t,” she insisted. “I would guess that either everybody knew, or nobody. It’s the sort of thing that tends to spread, but I haven’t been here long enough to develop my own network within the company, and I’ve been too damn busy to ask around about him. Why don’t you talk to my secretary—she’s been here forever.”

Both times Popper had said the phrase “my secretary,” she had looked as if she were biting into something unpleasant, leading Kate to suspect that the secretary had been inherited with the job, and that Popper was none too pleased about it. She was probably temporarily dependent on the woman—and the woman’s own “network” of knowledge and contacts—but somehow Kate thought that would not continue for long.

The woman in the outer office was pale, slow-moving, spoke with a trace of Texas in her voice, and was at least a decade older than her thin new boss with the nervous fingers.

“Oh, indeed,” she told them. “Everybody knew. Everybody that mattered, that is. I made sure the new girls all heard, just so they wouldn’t accept rides from Mr. Banderas, if you see what I mean. Not that he ever seemed to look close to home—as far as I know he never gave any of the girls here so much as a glance—but I thought it was good to be careful.”

“Did you tell anyone outside of work?”

“I may have mentioned it to two or three friends,” she replied stiffly, “but I wouldn’t have told them his name.”

“Has anyone ever contacted you, inquiring about Banderas?”

“No.” And, her prim expression added, she would not have told them had they asked.

Hawkin thanked her in his warmest fashion, which made no impression at all on her disapproval. As he and Kate left, he glanced at his watch.

“Too late for lunch?” he asked, sounding hopeful.

“Didn’t you eat?”

“I had a late breakfast. I don’t really eat breakfast at home these days. Jani turns green if she’s around anything but dry cereal and herb tea before noon. Morning sickness—though I don’t know why they call it that, since it lasts most of the day.”

“Let’s go eat, then.”

It was coffee that Al seemed to crave even more than food, since Jani’s hormones had abruptly found the merest whiff of the stuff instantly nauseating. He seized the cup as soon as the waitress had filled it, drank half of it down, and sat back with a sigh of contentment.

“Is Jani okay other than morning sickness?”

“She’s fine. She’s even gaining a little weight, though I don’t know how since she never seems to eat. She went in yesterday and heard the baby’s heartbeat. Said it sounded like a bird’s.”

“I’m glad for you both. For all of you.”

“Jules said to say hi, by the way. So,” he said in an abrupt change of subject, “how do we tie these two bastards together?”

Two men who lived their lives miles apart, both literally and figuratively, brought together by the means of their deaths.

“Could it be a coincidence, that they both had a history of abusing women? A more or less random stalker?”

Al was shaking his head, not so much in disagreement as an expression of bafflement. “What’re the odds? A blue-collar baggage handler in his fifties who beats his wife in South San Francisco and a young hotshot software salesman with a bachelor pad and a habit of raping strangers?”

“We need to take a closer look at Matty’s victims. Maybe one of them has a brother who works at the airport.”

“Be nice.”

“Hey. Things happen sometimes.”

“I’ll hold my breath,” Al said sourly.

“We’re going to need to do all the airport interviews again, as well as follow-ups with all the people who worked with Banderas or lived near him,” said Kate, making notes.

“The women, for sure.”

“What about handing some of it over to what’s-her-name—Wiley? She seemed good.”

“If you think you can talk her into working with us instead of going it on her own, sure. She struck me as a one-man show. One-woman show.”

Til talk to her.“

“If she’s available this afternoon, you could drop me back at the software place, I could get started on those.”

“Might be better tomorrow,” Kate said. “I need to be back in the City before five. I’ve set up a couple of interviews on another case and I’d like to clear them up.”

“What case is that?”

“It’s something I’m helping Boyle with, while Sammy’s out.” And as their lunch arrived and they both dug in, Kate told her partner the sad story of Pramilla Mehta, concluding, “It’s probably just an accident, her silk skirt brushing against the kerosene stove. Like that woman in the camper van last winter.” One of San Francisco’s sizable population of transients, this one not strictly homeless although the roof over her head was attached to wheels, had been cooking up what investigators had originally suspected was a batch of drugs but had turned out to be supper, when either the stove malfunctioned or she had stumbled into it. The woman did not die, but she had spent many weeks in the burn unit wishing she had.

“And this is Boyle’s case?”

“He caught the call. I had a word with him this morning, told him I’d make a few phone calls for him.”

Hawkin knew his partner too well to be fooled by her casual tone. He fixed her with a stony eye. “How are those headaches of yours?”

“They’re fine, Al. No problem.”

He did not believe her. “See if you can get someone else to give Boyle a hand. You’re going to be too busy to do it justice.”

“I’m kind of committed, Al. And, I promised Roz Hall I’d look into it.”

“Roz Hall? What’s that woman got to do with the case?”

“That’s just it: I’d rather she didn’t have anything to do with it. She’s convinced that Pramilla’s death is a case of bride burning. I thought if I stepped in, it’d keep her from going on a crusade with the papers.”

“Martinelli, you only have so many hours in the day.”

“If things get too crazy, I’ll ask you to explain that to Roz.”

“Want me to write her an excuse slip, like I do for Jules?”

“Let’s not go overboard on this fatherhood thing, okay, Al?”

Chapter 11

“HOMICIDE,” THE PATHOLOGIST SAID to Kate, peering happily up at a set of X rays. “No doubt. See all that stuff just behind her right ear? Compression fracture. Made by something long and thick, like a piece of half-inch metal pipe or a fireplace poker, but not the sharp edge of the masonry hearth she was found next to. Nope, no way. Wrong angle, too. She’d have had to fall out of the sky onto it—with her arms at her sides—to get that angle of blow. She was hit, arranged, and set alight.”

“Homicide,” the arson expert declared, tapping lugubriously on the precise lines of his sketch. “The evidence is consistent with a scenario whereby the victim was rendered unconscious, the kerosene stove was raised and propelled across her supine form, then set alight. Note the path of the accelerant: Had she fallen directly into the stove, one would expect to see the deepest burns nearest the area onto which the kerosene spilled—the arm and upper torso had she hit the stove that way, along with a fan along the path of the spill. However, instead of that we see the body lying at approximately a right angle to the spill, and underneath it. In other words,” he said, relenting, “she went down, then the stove went down but perpendicular to her fall. And before you ask, yes, she could conceivably have moved after the fire began, and repositioned herself, but considering the head injury I would say she was unconscious when the fire started.”

“Murder,” Kate said to Al, tossing the file temptingly onto the car seat next to him. “Somebody whacked her, laid her out to make it look like she’d hit her head on some bricks, and then kicked the stove over to burn the place down. Actual cause of death was smoke inhalation, but she’d have died of the burns or the head injury.”

“Murder,” repeated Hawkin, putting away the photographs they had picked up from the lab and taking up the file portrait of the victim, angling it to catch the fading light. “A pretty little thing. She doesn’t look much older than Jules.”

“She wasn’t. That’s the photo her father had taken back in India when Peter Mehta’s inquiry letter first arrived. She was about fourteen.”

“Mail-order brides, in this day and age. So who did it?”

“The husband sounds borderline retarded with a temper that’s had the police out twice, the sister-in-law’s a stone bitch, and Peter Mehta himself is a businessman who looks for results. And the girl wasn’t pregnant a year after he’d bought her for his brother.”

Hawkin shook his head, dropped the photo back into the file, and slipped his half-glasses into his breast pocket. “You still want to get involved with this?”

“I told Boyle I’d give him a few hours, like this business of getting the reports while he’s in court, and I’ll go along with him to the Mehta house this evening. I know we’ve got Larsen and Banderas, but that’s it at the moment. That gangbanger case is solved, we’re just waiting for him to show his face again, and there’s not a hell of a lot more I can do on last month’s drug dump. It’s dead.” This was closer to outright lie than exaggeration: a homicide detective was never without work. Still, the urgency of open cases varied considerably, and in recognition of this unhappy fact of life, Hawkin did not challenge her.

“Just don’t let that Hall woman give you a hard time about it, okay?”

“She’d give me a harder time if I ducked out of it.”

“ARE YOU SAYING THE girl was murdered, Inspector Boyle?” Peter Mehta asked in disbelief. It was an hour later, and he reached over and turned on the desk lamp as if to throw light on more than their faces. The window in his study fell instantly black.

Mehta was not what Kate had expected of a man who bought his brother an underaged wife from an Indian village. She wasn’t quite sure what exactly she had expected, but it wasn’t someone so very…

American. His features were Indian, yes, and his clothes slightly more formal than she imagined the usual Californian executive wore at home. And the house itself was somehow ineffably foreign—the air scented with exotic spices instead of the usual stale coffee and air freshener, the furniture larger and ever-so-slightly more opulent, the colors more intense. Like the difference between a plain black dress on a skinny woman and a designer dress on a fashion model; hard to say where the difference came in, but it was clearly there.

Even Mehta’s voice was faintly foreign as he addressed Tommy Boyle and, at his side as silent partner, Kate. Not so much an accent, she decided, as the feeling that his parents might have had accents. A rhythm, perhaps, that became more pronounced under stress. Such as now.

“Is that what you are telling me, Inspector? That the death of my brother’s wife was a murder?”

“It looks that way, Mr. Mehta,” Boyle told him.

“My God. And in my own home. Who would want to do something like that?”

“Did you have any visitors during the day, that you know of?”

“I am certain my wife would have told me. She is not in the habit of letting strangers into the house while I am away.”

“But friends?”

“Women friends, sometimes, yes. But hers, not the girl’s. She was allowed only to invite friends while I was home. We had a small problem once with Laxman becoming disturbed by one of her visitors, and so she saw her friends in the evenings and weekends, or out of the house.”

“And you were not at home that day, Mr. Mehta?”

“It was this time of evening—no, a little earlier. We had not yet eaten dinner, but yes, I was home. Having a drink here in my study while my wife cooked.”

“And your brother?”

“Upstairs in his room. At least, he came down from there when… I saw him come down the stairs when I came through the house to show the fire department where to go.”

“And the children?”

“The younger ones were in their rooms, watching television. My son Rajiv was at the kitchen table doing his homework. He was the first to see the fire, and he shouted at my wife. She ran in here to get me, and I telephoned 911. But I told all this to a dozen people the other night.”

“We’re just confirming our notes, Mr. Mehta. Do you mind if we take a look at the place where Pramilla died?”

“Yes, certainly. You were here the other day, were you not?” he asked, looking from Boyle to Kate and back again. “Forgive me, there were so many people here, the police and the fire department…”

“I was here, yes. Inspector Martinelli was not.”

“Of course. Please, come this way.”

Mehta led them out of the office, which was just inside the front door, and back through the house, past a formal dining room and an adjoining closed door that gave off the fragrance of exotic spices and the mundane sounds of running water and dishes clattering. Mehta paused to switch on the lights, and a garden sprang into view. They stepped out of a sliding glass door onto a brick patio surrounded by a patch of lawn and some unimaginative shrubs. Patio and lawn were scattered with heavy cast-iron garden furniture, a child’s tricycle, several dismembered dolls, and a soccer ball. A door with a curtained window in its upper half stood to their right, an entranceway to the breakfast area and the kitchen beyond.

In sharp contrast to the fragrant kitchen, the garden stank of smoke and wet ashes and a faint trace of burning flesh, a smell which no one who had worked with a charred corpse ever forgot. Yellow crime scene tape was festooned around the shrubs, everything in sight had a thick coating of gray ash, and one whole half of the garden looked as if it had been through a hurricane, the plants flattened, smaller flowers uprooted by the force of the fire hoses. Kate circled around a chaise lounge with mildewing cushions and stepped down from the bricks onto a concrete driveway that ended abruptly at the source of all this devastation, the remnants of the burnt-out shed where the child-bride Pramilla Mehta had died.

It looked to have been a shoddy structure compared to the substantial bulk of the house, and it had burned fast and hot—judging by the heavy charring on the wooden fence ten feet away that had nearly gone up as well. A pan that looked like a shallow wok lay buried under the fallen roof, and a set of three metal kitchen canisters lay flattened, either by heat or under the boots of the firemen. Preservation of a crime scene was never high on the fire department’s list of priorities.

“This was a sort of outdoor kitchen, as I understand it?” Kate asked Mehta.

“I had it built for her,” he answered. “Two women in a kitchen is not always easy, and my wife, Rani, complained that the girl was becoming difficult. Always underfoot, wanting to use the stove to cook her own food—although she was not a good cook and it was not necessary, as the family eats together. In the interest of harmony, we needed a separate area for the girl.”

“Why didn’t you build a proper structure? Why a plywood shed with a kerosene cook stove?”

Mehta sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I must have been asked that question fifty times in the last few days, to the point that I now ask it of myself. The insurance people are the most insistent, and the building inspectors. I can only say that it seemed a logical idea at the time, to put up a strictly temporary structure—it was a kit, from a gardening supply shop—and furnish it the way the girl was used to. She came from a very poor background, the sort who cooks over a cow dung fire and dreams of the day when she could have a kerosene cook stove and a refrigerator proudly displayed in the living room with a doily across the top. I wasn’t about to have an open fire out here, and I didn’t want to run electricity into a shed, but I thought the stove a safe compromise. The entire project was my brother’s suggestion, in fact, and it did serve to calm the waters. Until this.”

“We’d like to speak with your brother, Mr. Mehta,” Boyle told him.

The man sighed again, more deeply than before, and turned back to the house. “Are you finished out here, Inspectors? Because I need to talk to you about my brother before you see him.”

Kate cast a last glance at the collapsed walls and the black, flattened shrubbery that surrounded them, rendered even more unearthly by the strange shadows cast by the garden spotlights. She and Boyle turned to follow Mehta back inside. The curtain on the kitchen door fell back, but not before she had caught a glimpse of a plump woman in a garish orange sari, watching them. Peter’s wife, Rani, no doubt.

Back in the study Mehta sat again behind his broad mahogany desk, leaving them to choose between the two uncomfortable chairs on the other side, chairs whose seats were slightly lower than Mehta’s. Boyle sat down, but Kate chose instead to stand, leaning up against the window frame with the light behind her and in a place that required Mehta to crane his neck around to see her. Two could play the one-upmanship game, and Kate had taken a dislike to Mehta, particularly the way he kept referring to Pramilla not by name, but as merely “the girl.

“What do you have to tell us, Mr. Mehta?” Tommy Boyle asked. He and Kate had talked over everything Roz and Amanda had told her, and she had in turn been given the details of his preliminary interview with Mehta the night of Pramilla’s death. Now it was time to get down to details.

“My brother was too upset the other night to talk to you,” Mehta began. “I made him take his sleeping pill early to calm him down, and he is still most disturbed. The doctor is quite concerned, in fact. I want to stress that interviewing him is not… how shall I say this? Not like interviewing other men.”

“Are you telling me there’s something wrong with your brother, Mr. Mehta?” Boyle asked bluntly. Roz had said there was, but it was best to hear it from the source.

“Yes,” Mehta said with equal frankness. “There is something wrong with my brother. Laxman is more or less retarded. I have been told it was due to our mother’s advanced age when she was pregnant with him, although it may have been a brief problem during the birth that affected him, but in either case he was starved of oxygen during a vital time, and it damaged his brain. He functions, he communicates, he can even read and write and do basic math, but he will never hold more than a low-scale job, and on his own he would never marry a woman with more wit than a ten-year-old.

“In India, caring for people like my brother would be easier. There may be fewer facilities, but more… flexibility, shall we say, and people willing to work for a pittance. But Laxman and I are both American citizens. We were born here, have lived here all our lives. Our mother was a pretty traditional Indian woman in some ways, and always dressed in a sari, but she made certain we spoke only English in the home, and she raised us, as well as she could, as Americans.

“She died six years ago, when Laxman was twenty-three. He missed her enormously—still does; he’s never really gotten over her death. So Rani and I decided that the best solution was to bring him a kind of substitute mother, you might say: a wife. Their children… any children Laxman fathers will be normal, you understand; we were not being irresponsible. And from the wife’s point of view, a village girl, even a bright one, wouldn’t have the same expectations of a husband as someone who had grown up in a city. The girl we found was ideal. A little young by American standards, I realize, but not by Indian ones.

“And it seemed to work well at the beginning. Oh, the very beginning was a little rocky, but as soon as we got back here they settled in nicely. The girl was so quiet you hardly knew she was here, and Laxman seemed very fond of her. He found her soothing, began speaking a little more Hindi to her, dressing in kurta pajamas instead of jeans. I was very pleased, and God knows things went smoother, both here and at work, where Laxman had been trying to do jobs he couldn’t possibly handle and creating untold difficulties for me. If only she’d gotten pregnant.”

“That created a problem? They hadn’t been married all that long.”

“I didn’t care one way or another. I have two sons and two daughters, so the family as a whole didn’t need Laxman’s sons. Frankly, I’ve had enough of babies and unsettled nights, and I knew that if they had children, the burden would end up on Rani’s back, and mine.

“But my wife is more traditional, and thought it was unfortunate that the girl didn’t catch.

“Understand, Inspector, that there was nothing wrong with my brother physically. His brain may not be too hot, but once he understood what the equipment between his legs was for, he went at it with an enthusiasm that other men would envy. I had to speak with him about the need to keep a closed door between them and others, especially the children.”

Boyle’s face gave away nothing, but Kate wondered why the apparently urbane Mehta felt the need to flaunt his brother’s skills in such detail, verging on crudeness. Perhaps they were meant to think that he shared his brother’s prowess? She had the urge to match his crudeness and ask whether Laxman and Pramilla had gone around fucking like rabbits, just to see how he reacted, but before she could say anything, Boyle mildly noted, “A man can be virile but sterile, Mr. Mehta. Although I’m sure you know that.”

“Of course,” he admitted, though not looking pleased. “I merely tell you because you need to understand what the girl was to Laxman. He was very fond of her, but she also changed. When she first came she was all sweetness and docility, giving her husband and his family the proper respect, but later, and especially recently, she became more difficult. She was learning English, and was very arrogant about it. She showed it off in front of Laxman and Rani—she would correct her husband and sister-in-law when they made a mistake, as if to point out how clever she was. She made inappropriate friendships with women in the neighborhood—”

“How were they inappropriate?”

“The women… they were not Hindu, to begin with, not even Indian, and one of them was divorced. Not the sort of friendships a proper young girl, a girl with family responsibilities, ought to cultivate. There was, for one thing, no supervision when men were present, which upset my brother greatly when he found out. I realize this is a part of the American custom, but it is unacceptable to a good Indian family.”

“She was becoming American?” Boyle suggested.

“She was becoming irresponsible, neglecting her husband and her household duties to Rani. The outdoor kitchen was a way of encouraging her to be an independent woman, a wife and future mother, while at the same time strengthening her ties to her own past and her people.”

It all sounded pretty sordid to Kate, a very small step from slavery, but again she tried to push her own feelings down. Still, she could not suppress them completely, and they added an edge to her own question.

“You said it was your brother’s idea to give Pramilla a traditional Indian kitchen. Are you telling me now that he was behind this fairly subtle… manipulation, shall we say, of his wife?”

Mehta shifted in his chair to look at her. “Of course not, not directly. But retarded though he might be, he is not insensitive. I think what he actually said, following a tiff between the two women, was, ”She misses the smell of dung fire.“ I talked with Rani, and between the three of us we came up with the kitchen compromise. It wasn’t permanent, you understand. I could see that everyone would be much happier if Laxman and his wife had their own establishment. It is the Indian way to have all the family living together, but it is not always the best. No, when the girl had been mature enough to take care of a house and her husband, they would have moved out. In fact, I had my eye on a place down the street that was about to come on the market. It would have been ideal, close enough that we could keep an eye on them, but far enough away that they could stand on their own. Without the girl, though…”

Kate suddenly found the man’s resolute avoidance of the name “Pramilla” unbearably irritating, on top of all his other ideas and assumptions. She pushed herself away from the window and said, “I think we should talk to Laxman now, if you don’t mind.” She said it in her cop voice, those tones of bored authority that made gangbangers drift reluctantly away and drunks subside, and it worked on the Chief Executive Officer of Mehta Enterprises. He removed himself from the barrier of his desk and led the two detectives back through the house, this time passing through the dining room, down another hallway, and up some stairs to a door. He knocked and opened it without waiting for an answer.

The suite of rooms Kate entered was a self-contained apartment whose occupant had far stronger ties to the Indian subcontinent than did the people downstairs. The air smelled of sandalwood incense and curry, and the walls were hung with garish prints: Krishna and his big-breasted milkmaids, the elephant-headed Ganesha, and Hanuman, the monkey god (which reminded Kate of Mina’s antics on the school stage the week before). Gold thread shot through the heavy drapes and the sofa upholstery. The living room was blessed with at least six shiny brass lamps, and every horizontal surface—tables, shelves, the top of a huge television set, a pair of brightly colored ceramic stools from China, and the corners of the floor itself—was laden with objects, most of them shiny, and a few of them expensive, a couple of them beautiful, all of them looking newly acquired. One corner had a delicate triangular table set up with a sinuous statue of a maternal-looking figure, with the ash of incense and some wilted marigolds at its base. Pramilla’s household shrine, most likely.

All in all, the apartment looked as if the contents of a large knick-knack shop had been moved here in their entirety.

As they entered, Peter Mehta had glanced through an open doorway into what resembled a staff lunchroom, with a small table, two chairs, a half-sized refrigerator, and the basic necessities for producing hot drinks and warming leftovers. Finding it unoccupied, he led them into the knickknack shop of a living room before going to another door, which he opened, making a brief noise of impatience or irritation before stepping inside. Kate followed, and caught her first sight of Laxman Mehta.

Her first impression was of a small boy waiting in his bedroom for his parent to fetch him for some dutiful event such as a dinner at Grandma’s. He sat fully dressed but for his shoes, perched at the end of a neatly made bed with his hands between his knees, looking at nothing. His brother bent over him and gave his shoulder a gentle shake.

“Laxman,” he said. “Mani, come on, don’t sit here all day. You’ve missed both tea and dinner, and Rani even made samosas for you. And look, there are two people here to talk to you, Inspector Boyle and Inspector Martinelli. They’re with the police. Come on, Mani, it’s time to move along.”

The boy on the bed, whom Kate knew to be nearly her own age, roused himself and nodded. When he stood up it was with the slow deliberation of an old man, and Kate recognized the symptoms instantly: Laxman Mehta ached with grief.

His brother seemed oblivious, merely chattering his encouragement in a way that made Kate think that if she were not there, he would be considerably more brusque. Peter Mehta clearly found his brother a burden.

But a gorgeous burden, Kate saw. Even face-to-face, Laxman looked closer to twenty than thirty, his skin clear and unlined, the only sign of his recent tragedy the stance of his back and shoulders and a certain sunken distraction around his eyes. Although the distraction might be chronic, she reminded herself. Both Peter and Roz’s informant had indicated that he was retarded.

As a decorative object, though, this male was extraordinarily beautiful. His long black eyelashes over those dark limpid eyes would make a poet croon, the creamy hairless skin on his face cried out to be touched, and unlike his stocky brother, Laxman was blessed with a slim, almost adolescent body that promised innocence and strength. If even a lesbian like herself felt the stir of his beauty, she could only assume that there were places in town where this man’s presence would cause a riot. Half the men in the Castro would fling themselves at his feet while the other half were turning their backs in despair. He, however, would notice none of it—which was part of his attraction. He was quite oblivious of his own beauty. His family must have kept him under close wraps, and breathed a sigh of relief when he was safely married off.

Physically, at any rate, the farmer’s daughter could have found herself with a less acceptable husband.

Kate stepped aside to allow the three men to return to the living room, but also so that she could take a closer look at the bedroom. The single bed was narrow, the walls stark and almost without decoration. It was austere compared with the collections in the main room, but there was a door beside the bed, and she took two quick steps over to it, and opened it into something out of a maharajah’s harem. She had thought the living room was ornate, but this was a jewel box, packed to bursting with a thousand gaudy baubles, carved figures of lithe tigers and entwined couples, armfuls of silk flowers thrust into maroon and cobalt vases, two gilt-framed mirrors on the flocked wallpaper, a lace canopy over the bed and a heavily embroidered cover on it. The two silk lamp shades on either side of the bed had what appeared to be genuine pearls dangling from the lower rims. One of the lamps was on, but so low that the streetlight outside cast shadows through the delicate filigree of the magnificent carved screen that covered the window. Even dimly lit, however, the room’s impression was quite clear. Kate backed off, closing the door quietly, discomfited by the sheer raw sensuality of the room. There was no doubt which bedroom the couple had slept in.

She found Boyle and the Mehta brothers in the diminutive kitchen. The room had no cooking facilities aside from a microwave oven and an electric kettle, which Peter was filling with water at a bar sink too narrow to hold a dinner plate. He put the kettle on the counter and switched it on, and Kate had it on the tip of her tongue to ask Mehta why he had not converted this room to a proper, if small, kitchen, when she glanced at Laxman’s bereaved face and let the question subside for the moment.

Peter set four cups and a packet of tea bags on the sink and then turned to his brother.

“Laxman, these people would like to talk to you about, well—”

“Pramilla,” said Laxman, and raised his lovely eyes to Kate. “You want to talk about my wife and the way she died, because you’re policemen and that’s what the police do when a person dies, they talk to the family.”

“Laxman watches a lot of television,” Peter offered in explanation. Kate nodded and she and Boyle sat down in the chairs across the table from the boy-man. The tiny room was very full of people.

“All right, Mr. Mehta,” Boyle began, “tell—”

“I’m Laxman. Mr. Mehta is my brother.”

Both detectives found themselves smiling. “Okay, Laxman. Tell me, how do you think Pramilla died?”

“I killed her,” Laxman said. Their smiles died a sudden death and Peter nearly dropped the teapot he was holding.

“Mani!” he exclaimed. “What are you saying? Oh, I knew this was not a good idea.”

Boyle put out a hand to shut him up, and said to the beautiful young man across from him, keeping his voice even and gentle, “How do you mean, you killed her?”

“They all said I would if I hit her again, because I’m really very strong and she’s so tiny. She was so tiny, I mean. So I didn’t hit her and I didn’t, even when she made me so angry with her teasing, but they said I would kill her and she’s dead now, so I must have done it. I don’t remember, but I must have.”

“Did you hit her a lot, Laxman?”

“Three times. Three different times, I mean. I hit her one time when she made me mad by turning off the television. And the second time was when she… she was angry and she called me names. I hit her two or three times then, I don’t remember exactly. And then the last time she was teasing me because she’d been talking with some other men and I didn’t think that was right and I told her so and she laughed! She laughed at me and so I hit her and… and hit her. That time I made her bleed really bad and it scared me, and she cried and I told her I’d never do it again because if she did have a baby I didn’t want her to lose it. So then I promised I would hit other things if I got mad, so I wouldn’t hit her. And I did that twice. Once I punched a hole in the wall. I hurt my hand.”

They looked at him, and he looked back at them. Finally Boyle cleared his throat. “On the afternoon Pramilla died, Laxman? What were you doing?”

Laxman gave Boyle a flat stare, not really seeing him, and Kate thought he had either not understood the question or was zoning out (was he on drugs, prescription or otherwise?), but after a minute his eyes focused again. “She was making me panir pakharas. They’re my favorite. I was angry at her in the morning—not real mad but a little—and she went out and bought something.” He stood up abruptly and walked out of the room, coming back with a small Chinese figure of a boy leading a water buffalo, which he put on the table in front of Kate. “She said she bought it because it was like me, and she was going to make me the pakharas so I would be happy. And I was, until I heard the sirens stop in front of the house and people shouting. And I haven’t been happy since. I don’t think I ever will be again.”

Kate looked down at the crude little figurine, alone in the center of the table, and it occurred to her that Pramilla could easily have meant not that the boy in the statue reminded her of Laxman, but rather the lumbering beast who was being led. If the latter, then the girl had possessed a sharp sense of humor. Kate could well believe that this dull-witted man could have been driven to fury until the girl relented and made him his pakharas.

“She smelled bad,” Laxman added suddenly.

“Who,” Boyle asked. “Pramilla?”

“She was burned up and they wouldn’t let me see her, but she smelled awful. Rani said that’s how our people at home make funerals, by burning, but I don’t like it. It’s terrible.”

“I agree, Laxman, it’s not very pleasant. Tell me, Laxman, what did you do while Pramilla went out to cook the, er…?”

Laxman regarded the detective blankly, as if he hadn’t heard the question. It seemed to be a part of his thinking process, however, because after a minute he said, “She went to cook the pakharas. Cheese pakharas. I tried to watch my television programs, only I couldn’t because I was still angry, and so I had a hot bath like she said to do when I got mad, it would make me feel better. And it did. So I went back to the TV. And then the sirens came.”

“Laxman, did you happen—” Kate started to ask, but this time Laxman was not listening, and went on with his thought.

“She was good to me, and she was so pretty, and her hair smelled so sweet and her skin was soft. I miss her so much. If she came back I’d never be angry at her ever again. But she’s dead and horrible and now I’ll never be happy again.” And with that he dropped his head onto his arms on the tabletop and began to sob as extravagantly as a child.

Embarrassed, Peter abandoned the tea he was trying to make and awkwardly comforted his howling brother. Kate glanced at Boyle, and could see in his face the agreement that they were not about to get a lot more out of either Mehta tonight. Boyle thanked Peter and Laxman in a loud voice, and they left.

They halted at the foot of the stairs.

“Do you want to try talking to Mrs. Mehta?” Boyle asked.

Kate shrugged. “We could try, and come back later with a translator if her English is too bad.”

They found Rani Mehta in the kitchen with three of the children. A boy of about thirteen was sitting at the table with a stack of books: the eldest, Rajiv, no doubt. A girl of about six or seven occupied the chair across from him; in front of her was a row of naked dolls with frayed hair, some of them missing various limbs. She had two of them in her hands, carrying on a loud conversation for them concerning, Kate thought, swimming pools. The third child was of uncertain sex until it turned and they could see the gold loops in her ears. She was seated on the floor whining in a manner that indicated she had been there for quite a while, and that she had no real hope of being rescued anytime soon. Rani was crashing some pans into the sink, talking loudly in some jerky language that Kate thought might be Hindi. She did not seem to have an adult audience, but after a minute an elderly, stoop-shouldered woman came in from the next room with a couple of bowls. She stopped dead in the doorway and said something to the woman at the sink, who spun around as if she was being attacked. The two female children went silent in surprise, and even the oblivious Rajiv looked up from his books and blinked.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Mehta,” Kate said with a smile. “We’ve been talking with your husband and Laxman, and I wonder if we might have a word with you before we go. I’m Inspector Martinelli, this is Inspector Boyle.”

Rani did not answer, but glanced across at the older woman as if in need of reassurance.

Boyle took a couple of steps over to where the boy was working. “Math?” he asked.

“Algebra,” confirmed the boy.

“You must be Rajiv,” Boyle said. “You’re, what—thirteen?”

“Twelve,” the boy corrected him shyly, looking pleased, and Kate recalled that Boyle had kids of his own.

“Does your mom speak English, Rajiv?”

“A little.”

“She probably has trouble when she’s surprised like this. Would you mind telling her what Inspector Martinelli said?”

Rajiv spoke to his mother, but even in translation their greeting did not seem to reassure her much.

“Rajiv, whenever there’s a death like that of your aunt, we need to get a very clear idea of what was going on around the time she died. Could you ask your mother to tell us what—”

“You not bother the boy,” Rani interrupted. “Rajiv, take your sisters upstairs.”

“Just a minute, Rajiv,” Boyle said as the boy obediently began to gather his books. “You were here, weren’t you, that night?”

Rajiv nodded.

“Right here?”

Another nod.

“You were the first one to see the fire?”

Nod.

Kate walked over to glance out of the window beside the boy. From where he was seated, only the back half of the garden shed was visible— the fire would have been well and truly under way before he had seen it.

“Did you see anyone near your aunt’s cook shed a little while before you saw the fire?”

“I was working,” Rajiv told them. Having seen the boy’s powers of concentration, Kate could well believe that a troop of mounted police could have ridden through the backyard without disturbing the scholar from his books.

“Go now, Rajiv,” his mother said firmly, and waited while all three children left the room before she drew herself up to face the invading police.

Rani Mehta was a formidable woman, not tall but with rolls of brown flesh at the edges of her brilliant orange sari and its short flowered underblouse. She wore her hair in a heavy bun on the back of her head and had a dozen solid silver bracelets on her wrists like shackles. The red marriage mark on her forehead looked like a bleeding sore. Her features were heavy, her teeth strong and white, and she had a black mole on her face next to her nose. Not for the first time, Kate speculated about the attraction that the lithe young Pramilla might have had for her brother-in-law.

They discovered that the woman’s understanding of their questions was pretty close to complete, and Kate recalled from someone’s statement that Pramilla was accustomed to having the television on all day. Probably Rani did as well, which might also explain the paradox of her relatively clear understanding coupled with the difficulty she demonstrated in putting together an English sentence: A person does not generally carry on a two-way conversation with the TV.

“Mrs. Mehta,” Boyle went on, “could you tell us please what you were doing that afternoon?”

“I cook,” she said, looking down her slightly upturned nose at Kate as if understanding that this was a woman who neither cooked nor cared for children. “I made mutter panir and dhal and kaju kari and brinjal and two chatnis, and I was cooking the parathas when I heard Rajiv shout. I ran to get my husband in his room. He went to look, and then he call the fire.”

“Do you know what Pramilla was doing in the cooking shed?”

The fat rolls shrugged. “Cooking. She take panir—cheese—to make pakharas. I say leave some for the mutter panir, she leave small piece. I think, oh well.”

The colloquial expression sounded odd in the heavy accent, but neither detective smiled.

“What do you think happened, Mrs. Mehta?”

The woman pushed out her lower lip and gave a small eyebrow shrug. “I think she spill the hot oil into the fire. Pakharas is not for foolish girls to make.”

“The, um, pakharas are cooked in hot oil?”

“Boiling oil,” she said with relish. “Very boiling.”

“I see. Well, thank you, Mrs. Mehta. We may want to speak with you again tomorrow, but we’ll let you get on with your work.”

Rani dried her hands on a towel and accompanied them to the front door—less, Kate thought, as a polite gesture than to ensure they did not poke into things on their way out. They thanked her again, and heard the lock turn behind them as they went down the front steps.

Boyle had driven, and would drop Kate home. As he put the car into forward, he said, “That woman is really something.”

“She must have hated Pramilla the minute she set eyes on her. And to have the girl under the same roof as her husband. She might be a great cook and the mother of his children, but she was never a beauty.”

“But Laxman loved the girl. Temper or no, he loved her.”

Kate agreed; that bedroom shouted aloud the man’s devotion, heaping beauteous objects on his wife. Yes, Laxman’s extravagant grief had been real enough. However, love went hand in hand with violence, as anyone who worked a domestic homicide could testify, and especially with the jealous knowledge of Pramilla’s illicit conversations with other men riding in his mind. Grief in and of itself was no proof that Laxman’s had not been the hand that knocked the girl down, any more than his disgust at her charred body could prove that he had not in rage or confusion or childish petulance splashed her with kerosene and set her alight.

No proof at all.

Chapter 12

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Jimmy Larsen and Matty Banderas rode squarely in the center of Kate’s sight, with Pramilla Mehta—who was, after all, Boyle’s case—firmly pushed slightly off to one side, while on the periphery of her vision lurked all the other still-open cases, haunting the corners of her mind like so many cobwebbed gargoyles. A call from Janice Popper revealed that Matthew Banderas had made a pass at the manager of a software store, and when she had canceled their purchase contract, he had threatened to tell everyone that she was a lesbian. She just laughed and told him to go ahead, since it happened that she was. The woman also told Popper that she had been receiving an unusual number of wrong-number, dark-of-the-night phone calls and two whispered obscenities on her answering machine. None, incidentally, since Matthew Banderas had died.

One high point was a phone call from Martina Wiley, sounding like a cat at the cream. She practically purred as she told Kate that a rather firm interview with Melanie Gilbert had given them some prime hints not only about the Banderas sex life, which had been far kinkier than Gilbert had been willing to admit at first, but also led to a storage locker in Novate It was currently being gone over with the finest-toothed combs in the Crime Scene repertoire, but it looked to be where Matty had stashed his rape souvenirs. His victims, and the police departments across the Bay Area, would begin to sleep more soundly.

On the Larsen homicide, a follow-up series of interviews at the airport turned up a fellow baggage handler who had run across Jimmy Larsen in a bar, and remembered Larsen mentioning sleep problems due to a strange woman calling in the middle of the night to hassle him. About what, he hadn’t said, just that he was tired and fed up, but didn’t want to leave the phone off the hook in case Emily phoned (his wife, he had hastened to tell his co-worker, was just off visiting her father, and would be home soon).

Kate worked long hours over the weekend, trekking south to the airport to question airport personnel, north of the bridge to talk to computer programmers, and closer to home to listen to the bereft and guilt-plagued Amanda Bonner.

On Monday, Kate had scheduled a few hours off to go with Lee, Roz, and Maj to see Song. They were to meet Jon there, and after the performance they would finally meet Sione, and have a late dinner together. However, the day’s lack of any real progress meant a reluctance to call it quits, and at six o’clock Kate was still at her desk. When the phone rang, she knew who it would be before she picked it up, and indeed, Lee’s voice came strongly over the line, demanding to know when Kate was planning to appear.

“I’m leaving in two minutes, honest,” Kate pleaded, scribbling her signature on one report and reaching for the next.

“No, you’re not. You are leaving right now.”

“Yes, right now. As soon as I finish the—”

“Kate.”

“Okay. I’m leaving. That’s the sound of my desk drawer you hear. It’s closing. I’m out the door.”

“Now.”

In three minutes Kate actually was heading out the door when she was greeted by the startling sight of a slim woman being viciously assaulted by a burly man in the hallway right outside the homicide division, while a group of police officers, uniformed and plainclothes, looked on in nodding approval. Kate came to a sharp halt, then realized that the woman was actually a cop, and the man as well, and that the hard blows they were practicing were more noise than contact.

“What’s this?” she asked a vice detective she had worked with on a couple of cases.

“Decoys. They’re going to troll the parks tonight, see if we can get a bite from the LOPD when he starts slapping her around.”

“Nice,” she said. The woman of the antagonistic couple she now recognized as a patrol officer who had been twice commended for bravery, who had a black belt in some arcane form of martial art, spent her free time producing intricate oil paintings that sold for a small fortune, and loved life on the streets so much she refused to take the exams that she feared would move her up and behind a desk. At the moment, she looked remarkably like a suburban housewife.

“Makes for a change from playing a dealer or a hooker,” the man from vice commented. Kate had to agree.

On the way home, however, she had time to reflect on the assumptions behind the scene she had witnessed. Without a doubt, fear was growing among the men of the city—ironic, that those normally most secure in the streets at night were those who were feeling an unaccustomed discomfort in the hours of darkness. The City’s night life was suffering, its all-important tourist trade threatened, and if the quiet night streets made life easier for those responsible for patrolling them, the economic dip added to the fears felt by half the population meant that the pressure was on. At times like these, Kate was very glad she was not one of the brass.

Kate came through her front door at a trot, shedding equipment and clothing as she went, aware of Lee’s disapproval floating up the stairs and following her into the shower. Kate’s clothes were laid out for her, black silk pants and blouse with an elaborately embroidered vest to go on top. The shoes were as close to heels as she would wear, her hair was too short to worry about, and she even took thirty seconds to swipe some makeup across her eyelids. All terribly civilized, Kate thought, trotting down the stairs again and out to the street, where Lee waited in the passenger seat of Kate’s car, pointedly studying her watch.

“You look delicious,” Kate told her, kissed her, and turned the key in the ignition.

Mollified, either by the compliment or by the speed with which Kate had dressed, Lee’s irritation subsided. They were going out for the evening, and Kate could feel Lee decide that she’d be damned if she would let even her own righteous indignation get in the way of pleasure.

Lee did look delicious in a shimmering gold blouse and loose white crepe pants. Jon wore velvet, Maj looked as majestic as a sailing ship, and Roz, though she swept in late, puffing and apologetic, was dressed in festive formality rather than a power suit and minister’s collar.

The night before, Kate had braved Lee’s study to refresh her memory of the Song of Songs, that Old Testament book attributed to Solomon (he of the many wives) that she remembered as being endearingly erotic, filled with odd descriptions of breasts like gazelles and cheeks like pomegranates. Lee had apparently had the same idea, because the Bible lay open on her desk. Kate sat down to read. Ten minutes later she closed the soft leather covers, vaguely disquieted. Erotic, yes, but some of the passages were also puzzling, others almost troubling. Perhaps, she thought, Roz was right, that more than the words had changed when the Bible was rendered into English. Certainly a reader was left with the distinct impression of various translators along the way tidying up and applying generous quantities of whitewash, and that underneath their quaint images lay a fairly explicit picture of ancient sex.

In Song, the whitewash had been pretty thoroughly scrubbed away.

When the women entered the small theater to take their seats beside Jon, the lights were dim, the buzz of anticipation damped down under the sensation that the performance was already beginning—as indeed it was, for on a platform raised up over the right side of the stage sat three figures dressed in white. They perched there motionless, their heads bent, but the audience was very aware of them and incomers took to their seats with hushed conversation and wary glances upward. Kate looked at the program and saw that the two main characters would be “Lover,” played by someone called Kamsin Neale, and “Beloved,” the part played by Sione Kalefu.

The set, as Maj had said the other night at dinner, was striking. Black dominated, punctuated by draped lengths of intensely colored net fabric, gold and ruby and lapis curtains against the dark. Some were supple, drifting and changing colors with the currents of air. Others were static, rigid as frozen flames leaping up from the stage to disappear into the hidden heights. The small overhead spots picked them out as clouds of sheer color, some of which sparkled as if they had been sprinkled with finely ground rubies and emeralds and sapphires. The set was both stark and sumptuous, empty and powerful.

The seats gradually filled, the anticipatory hush intensified, and the three figures crouched on the raised platform might have been statues. Finally came movement, as five black-clad men and women filed across the stage from the right, came down the short flight of steps on the left that led to the orchestra pit, and took up a peculiar variety of instruments: oboe, viola, drums and an assortment of bells and percussion objects, an electronic keyboard, and a sitar. They spent a few minutes tuning this unlikely chamber orchestra, the weird atonality of the notes mingling slowly until a sort of music came out, and then the instruments fell silent, and the audience slowly became aware that at some point the actors had entered the stage.

Song was a story, much more of a narrative than what Kate had read in Lee’s black Bible. The two main characters, who in the original had been heterosexual lovers, were in this production both profoundly androgynous, to the extent that it took Kate a good twenty minutes to decide that Lover, the big muscular one dressed in reds and oranges, was played by the woman Kamsin, while the slim, dark, pursued character in blue— Beloved—was actually Jon’s new friend Sione.

The viola began, to be joined a short time later by a throaty voice from the seated trio above, reciting the words of the Song of Solomon. “O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth,” the voice murmured, and the two dancers began to move slowly around each other, becoming acquainted, flirting, moving apart, glancing back at each other, until finally they came together in an exploratory embrace. Lee’s fingers crept into Kate’s in the dark, caressing palm and wrist, playing under the silken cuff of Kate’s blouse. Kate shivered at the scrape of Lee’s nail, and could feel Lee beside her smiling into the dark.

Other dancers swirled onstage and off: Beloved’s disapproving brothers, Lover’s friends, but each time the pair shook the others loose and returned to their increasingly passionate self-absorption. “Black am I, and beautiful,” chanted the three narrators. “Sustain me with raisin cakes, strengthen me with apples, for I am faint with love.” Beloved’s brothers stormed in, angrily trying to separate them, but the two lovers slipped behind a cloud of glowing red voile, and were safely lost in each other again.

The dancing grew more intense, the music wilder. To a quickening beat, the pair on the stage caught up lengths of crimson and cobalt gauze that swirled about them, first concealing, then revealing (and going far to explain the production’s X rating). The flurry of colors came to a climax in a rush of atonal music, and then breathlessly subsided. The spotlights dimmed on the entwined figures, the voices grew to drowsy murmurs. (“When the day breathes out and the shadows grow, turn to me, my love, like a buck, like a young stag on the mountains.”)

The lights fell further, until the stage was dark and utterly silent. The silence held for a dozen or more heartbeats, broken only by a cough from the audience, and then a faint light flickered and grew off to the right, a beam that illuminated a section of wall and a single figure, lying alone in a heap: Beloved. Sione stirred, stretched languorously, and then rose, looking around with growing agitation for Lover. The distraught figure snatched up a small lamp, using it to search the room, and then burst through an opening in the prop wall and directly into the arms of a troop of uniformed guards. The voices identified them as “guards of the city, armed and trained against the terrors of night,” but instead of protecting (and indeed, though clothed in khaki, one of them bore a startling resemblance to the burly cop Kate had seen at the Hall of Justice, preparing to “beat” his “wife” as bait for the night’s avenging Ladies), the guards seized Beloved, began to laugh and pluck at the diaphanous blue garments. The voices for Beloved pleaded with the guards, asking them to say if they had seen Lover, but the guards merely laughed, and reached out, until Beloved twisted away from them and escaped.

Immediately, Lover appeared from offstage. Beloved flung “herself” at the strong figure, who wrapped strong arms around Beloved and snatched “her” away into a room. The two lovers embraced, but the note of the oboe, which had dominated the scene with the guards, remained, quiet and disquieting, in the background of the scenes that followed.

The reunited lovers, surrounding themselves with armed and uniformed soldiers of their own, retreated in safety and triumph to an enclosed garden, a womblike bower of shimmering green where they sang and danced and fed each other morsels of fruit until the night grew up to hide them, and silence fell.

For a second time, lamplight flared in the dark; again the solitary figure reached for Lover, and again set out to search; and this time, too, the five guards were waiting. But unlike the first harassment, Beloved did not slip away. In utter, appalled silence the audience gaped as the khaki-clad figures brutally tossed the slim blue one back and forth between themselves, accompanied by the oboe, the sitar, and the panicky heartbeat drum of the tabla. The harsh whispers of the narrators and the inarticulate cries of Sione punctuated the texture of sound:

The guards found me

They who patrol the city.

the narrators sang.

They hit me.

They hurt me.

They stripped me.

The guards.

Over and over the last four lines were chanted, faster and faster. The guards sprouted gray and black and khaki veils, and Beloved sank down beneath a swirl of obscuring darkness; one slim blue arm emerged in protest from the huddle, and was overcome. One by one the guards detached themselves and stormed offstage, boots beating on the floorboards, leaving behind them a half-nude figure, heaped up beneath a drift of drab cloth.

After a while, a stir came from the wings, and in washed a flock of five giggling girls wearing the brightest of colors who emerged startlingly, almost painfully from the dark. The abused figure pushed laboriously upright, and made an effort to rearrange hair, pull together clothing, and pluck away the gray and khaki shrouds. The girls came up, laughing and teasing, to inquire where Lover had gone; Beloved asked them, in a hoarse, faltering voice, if they would help look for Lover. Completely oblivious of their friend’s suffering, the five colorful figures danced and primped and gossiped about Lover’s charms, speculating teasingly about where Lover might have gone, and with whom. Desperately, Beloved reached up to seize an apricot-colored skirt, and cried out:

I beg you, girls of Jerusalem,

If you find my love,

What will you tell him?

Tell him…

(Beloved’s voice drifted off, and the five girls paused, paying attention at last and waiting for their companion to continue. Finally, the distraught figure in blue climbed slowly upright, swayed, straightened, and continued.)

Tell him.I am sick with love.

With that phrase, in swept Lover, as heedless of Beloved’s distress as the girls had been, and flung strong arms around half-bare shoulders. Beloved cried out, in pain or in pleasure, but then to cover it up, began again to praise Lover, to flirt and act the coy and lighthearted one. All the while the oboe continued to sound its plaintive note, while the audience wondered when Lover would wake up to the realization that something was desperately wrong, would find out what had taken place and rise up in fury to take revenge on the guards.

Night fell again on the embracing couple, with no moment of revelation. The third lighting of lamps came, and a figure lying alone on the stage. This time, however, it was not the slim figure of Beloved who woke alone, but the strong one, Lover, waking alone in the warm and flickering light. But before Lover could do more than sit up and glance about, rubbing a sleepy eye in puzzlement, Beloved erupted back onto the stage, whirling like a dervish, like a small blue tornado, leaping and shouting over the quick beat of the music and holding up some object before her in triumph and adoration. Only when the dance brought Beloved to the very front of the stage, dropping down on both knees to face them, did the audience see clearly the object being held up: a dagger, gleaming silver and stained with blood. Beloved lifted it high, shouting in exultation, paused a moment with it in both hands, then drove the shining knife into the boards of the stage before whirling around again to face the still-seated Lover.

You are beautiful

said Lover, sounding a bit dubious.

You are as lovely as Jerusalem,

You are…

You are…

You are terrible,

(Lover whispered, drawing back from Beloved, as the realization struck)

Terrible as an army with banners.

Turn your eyes away

they disturb me.

But…

But your hair…

Your hair flows

like a flock of goats

spilling down the side of Mount Gilead.

Torn between these sudden, conflicting visions of Beloved, Lover shifted away while at the same time holding one hand outstretched.

Who is this that comes like the dawn

Fair as the moon,

Bright as the sun,

Terrible as an army with banners?

Beloved rose and walked slowly over to Lover, leaving the bloody knife quivering in the stage, and then solved Lover’s dilemma by dropping down, knee to knee, and bringing their mouths together in a kiss.

“Love is stronger than death,” chanted the voices as the light dimmed over the embracing couple. “Passion fiercer than hell, it starts flaming…”

The last thing to be seen on the stage as the light dimmed was the dagger, silver and red in the narrow spotlight.

“WHOA,” SAID KATE UNCERTAINLY when the clapping had eventually died and the curtain calls ended.

“My God,” exclaimed Roz. “That was superb. Dramatically and theologically, to say nothing of psychologically. And the virgin’s dance with the dagger! I wouldn’t have thought—”

“Virgin?” Kate asked in disbelief. “You think that girl was meant to be a virgin after all that?”

“Not virgo intacta” Roz said dismissively. “The warrior-virgin, a goddess archetype. What an interpretation—straight out of Pope.”

Kate was completely lost. She could not begin to imagine what the pope could have to do with this particular version of the Song of Songs, but she could see that Roz was not about to pause and explain. She looked as exultant as the man/woman on stage had been, her eyes dark with several kinds of arousal, the enthusiasm coming off her in waves.

Kate knew her well enough to see that there would be no rational explanations until her passion had subsided—at which time there would probably be more rational explanation than Kate actually wanted. Still, Roz was a pleasure to watch, and her excitement was contagious.

Then the pager in Kate’s pocket began to throw itself about furiously, if silently. Lee heard her exclamation of disgust, turned to look at her, and diagnosed the problem in an instant.

“You’re being buzzed?”

In answer Kate fished the little thing out and shut it off. The number it displayed was that of Al and Jani, and she could only squeeze Lee’s hand in apology, turn her over to Jon yet again, and (because she was not on call and Lee had pointedly refused to bring her own cell phone) go searching for a pay phone. She stood in the lobby with one finger pushed against her free ear and the receiver jammed up to the other, half shouting to be heard above the departing audience.

“Is that Jules? Oh, Jani—hi. Al paged me. What? I can’t— He’s where? Hold on just a second.” She fished out a pen and a scrap of paper. “What was that address again? Okay. Right. But we’re not on call, did he tell you why they called us? It’s who? Oh, Christ. God damn it. Oh, I’m sorry, Jani. Thanks for the message, I’ll probably get there before he does. Say hi to Jules for me.”

Kate hung up and stood for a long moment with her hand still tight around the receiver, her eyes shut. Fury and confusion and dread all pushed at her, and useless self-criticism, but above all came sorrow, for the loss of such a thing of beauty.

Laxman Mehta had been found in an alley behind a bar in the Castro.

Dead.

Strangled.

And wearing handcuffs.

Chapter 13

THE FADING COLORS AND images of the dance she had just seen jostled in her mind with the reality of what Kate was seeing. It was night here, too, the alley dark and filled up with flitting, shifting shadows, and there were the uniformed guards of the city’s peace, moving about the alley as if it was a narrow stage depicting gritty, urban life. Her imaginary song of the city was as ominous as any of the oboe’s notes, and the setting considerably uglier. All it needed was a bloody knife sticking out of the alleyway.

Kate shook her head to clear it of fantasy. No knife here, no theological speculation about virgin goddesses, no costumes and beautiful sets. Just brutal death, and a crowd of people. The ops center seemed to have pulled out all the stops on this one, and called in everyone from foot patrol to the lieutenant. Most of the personnel were standing around with nothing to do, since a scene had to be worked in sequence. Press photographers snapped away at the teams leaning against the wall and laughing, and she sent a uniform over to have the technicians take their waiting out of sight. Then Kate went forward to look at the body.

A person would never know that this had been a beautiful male creature. (“Black am I, and beautiful” echoed in Kate’s ears in painful contrast to the swollen-tongued, dark-faced figure at her feet.) Between the distortion and suffusion of the strangulation and the postmortem trauma of being (apparently) dragged and kicked, the only thing Laxman Mehta looked like was dead.

She did not even bother to pull back the remains of his shirt to look for a taser burn. It was possible that an experienced pathologist in a brightly lit morgue would be able to pick out the difference between one slightly red area and another, but Kate couldn’t, and certainly not in a dark alley.

The flash of cameras and a raised chorus of voices from the street made her look around to see Al Hawkin letting himself through the screens Kate had ordered put up. Nothing like a body behind a Castro district leather bar to pique the interest of readers over their morning coffee.

“You must’ve driven like a maniac,” she greeted Al.

“Got lucky with traffic. Was the press here when you arrived?”

“Yeah, but the foot patrol had them under control. No scene contamination except for the guys who found him.”

“Talked to them yet?”

“They’re inside with the patrol. I told him to get them some coffee. Kitagawa caught this one. I guess he’s the one who called you?”

With the possibility of a serial killer on their hands, word had been spread throughout the Bay Area that any dead male who had been strangled, showed taser marks, or had a history of abuse against women should be brought to their attention. She and Al had decided to keep the tenuous link of candy in the victims’ pockets to themselves for the moment. Leaks were all too common, and it was good to sit on one mark of the killer—if mark it was.

“Yeah. I told him we’d assist. He said he’d get Crime Scene started here, then go tell the family and seal the guy’s rooms until they can get over there.” Al dropped his voice further. “You look at the pockets yet?”

“The ME did. Didn’t find any candy exactly, but he found a little plastic bag of something that looked like seeds and stuff.”

“Seeds? Like sensemilla, you mean?”

“More like caraway or something—and some little colored thingies mixed in with it. Like those sprinkles you put on top of kids’ birthday cakes, you know?”

Al shrugged his shoulders. “Doesn’t sound much like caramel chews and chocolate bars to me, but we’ll see what the lab says. Are they about finished here?”

“I think so.” Kate signaled that the body could be bagged and taken away, and walked with Al toward the kitchen entrance of the bar. “Al, one thing. You didn’t meet him, but that was one gorgeous young man when he was alive.”

“Why, Martinelli, I didn’t know you cared.”

“I’m not interested, Al, but I’m not blind. I remember thinking at the time that he’d cause a riot in a place like this.”

A stranger might be excused from thinking there was already a riot going on inside. It occurred to Kate that the insulation in the walls and windows must have cost a pretty sum; from the outside all she had heard was the muffled hum of a beehive with an underlying thudding sound of a beating heart. Inside, Al had to shout in her ear to be heard.

“Is Kitagawa still here?”

“He’s gone to notify the family,” she shouted in return. “He said he’d bring back a photo.”

The bar was just what the Christian Right had in mind when it referred to the hellfire sins of San Francisco, Sodom-by-the-Bay. Had one of their straight-ace photographers made it inside the door, he could have shot a random roll that would have scared the socks off Middle America and made them join in fervent prayer for an earthquake along the San Andreas Fault.

Kate, though, had no problems with the place. Were it not for the stink of sweaty males with booze and controlled substances oozing from their pores, she might even have enjoyed it, if for nothing more than the display (using the word in more than one sense) of black leather fashions and the impressive creativity of the human male when it came to threading sharp metal objects through parts of his anatomy. Put one of those gigantic car-lifting magnets in the ceiling and switch it on, she reflected, and half the men here would slap up against it, spread-eagled like flies on a windshield.

“What are you grinning at, Martinelli?” Al yelled in her ear. She just shook her head and pushed forward toward the bar.

There were two men working, expertly banging down full glasses and change with one hand and scooping up empties and money with the other, bantering at the top of their lungs with the customers and singing occasional snatches of music with the recorded cacophony belting out of the speakers. Kate, the only woman in the place as far as she could see, leaned against the corner of the polished wood and waited for the nearer bartender to approach. When he did, she flipped open her badge holder to identify herself and in one smooth movement the man’s hamlike hand shot out and folded the ID shut and back into her palm before anyone noticed it.

He leaned across the bar at her. “You want to shut the place, Martinelli, or you want to talk to me?”

Kate drew back to study his face and realized that she knew him—or at least, she’d met him. She thought.

“Dimitri?” The man who had passed through her kitchen some months before, working on some project with Lee and Jon, had left her with the impression of a retired wrestler in a tweed jacket, not this slab of muscle glued into a garment that was more than half missing. He had also been lighter by about six ounces of surgical steel, some of which Kate had to deduce by the shapes of the hoops and bumps under the sleek leather. He grinned at her with perfect white teeth and pulled up the top of the bar to let himself out. Nodding amiably at Hawkin behind Kate’s shoulder, the bartender paused to swat a willowy figure on one half-protruding and nicely shaped buttock and, when his victim whirled around, Dimitri jerked his thumb in the direction of the huge mirror in back of the bar. The shapely man extricated himself from his companions and made for the service side of the bar, leaving Dimitri to push his way through the crowded room with Kate and Al Hawkin on his heels.

The office was also heavily insulated, and a relief. He waved them to a tight circle of half a dozen chairs and continued on through a narrow door, leaving it ajar so he could talk.

“You’re here about that boy in the alley?” he called to them.

“You know anything about it, Dimitri?”

“Only that two of my customers stepped out for a breath of air and had the shock of their lives. Your nice patrolman took them home, by the way—one of them couldn’t stop crying and began to need his asthma inhaler. I have their address for you.”

The sound of running water stopped, followed by a soft pop followed by a slick rubbing noise. Dimitri came out, drying his face in a towel and smelling of deodorant. Kate made the introductions, she and Al both shook the man’s nice clean hand, and then he dropped into a chair, swiveling it around to open a tiny refrigerator at his knee. He pulled out a bottle of mineral water, offered them a drink (which both refused), and unscrewed the cap to empty half the bottle down his throat in a series of muscular gulps.

“Sorry,” he said when he came up again for air. “Gets hot in there. What can I do for you?”

“Do you know the man who was found in the alley?”

“I didn’t go look at him, just saw him for a second from the kitchen door before I was shoved back inside, but he didn’t look familiar. Do you know who it was?”

“His name was Laxman Mehta.”

“Indian? No, I think I would’ve noticed an Indian. We don’t get too many in here—they tend to be a little… conservative.”

“You’d certainly have noticed this one. Five six, slim, soft brown skin, long eyelashes, high cheekbones. Like a doe on two legs. Looked about sixteen, was actually in his late twenties.”

Dimitri raised his eyebrows. “I couldn’t have missed the effect he would have had on the place.”

“You don’t think he was in here, then?”

“Was he into the leather scene?”

“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t even think he was gay.”

“A waste,” Dimitri commented.

“Are you the owner here, Mr… ?” Hawkin spoke up, trying for the Russian’s surname, but defeated before he began. A massive arm waved away the attempt.

“Nobody can say my last name. That’s why I chose it—I was born Travers. Call me Dimitri. And yes, I’m the owner—or, me and the bank anyway.”

“Are you here most of the time?”

“Six days a week, opening to closing. We’re shut Sundays. Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy.”

Hawkin peered at the man to see if he was serious, and decided he was joking, but Kate vaguely remembered that Dimitri had been a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Hawkin continued. “And you didn’t hear anything in the alleyway? Sounds of a fight, say, or a car engine?”

“I was out there earlier, dumping the garbage, and after that things got busy. And before you ask, no, he wasn’t there when I went out.”

“When would that have been?”

“Let’s see. Definitely after six ‘cause the news I watch was over, but before six-fifteen. Can’t get closer than that.”

Kate checked her notes: The first call to 911 had come in at 8:42. She’d been buzzed about forty-five minutes later, and it was now nearly tomorrow.

“Do you get many women in here?” Kate asked without much hope. Whether they were LOPD Ladies or simply women, a female would stand out in Dimitri’s.

“Did you see many? Oh, we get a few, mostly they drop in on a dare, sometimes they come in with friends. They don’t stay. And I don’t remember any tonight.”

“Can you give us a list of your customers’ names, Dimitri? Anyone who would have been here between six and eight-thirty?”

“God, you don’t ask for much, do you? You know, the best thing would be to come back tomorrow night and ask them yourselves. Weekdays like this, my guys tend to be regulars, especially that early in the evening. Then I could give you some names, they could give you others, you’d get a more complete list.”

“You don’t mind having your… patrons questioned?” Al asked him.

“I stopped your partner flashing her badge because this time of night’s an entirely different crowd, and they won’t have heard about the killing yet. By tomorrow they’ll all know, and even if your man wasn’t gay, he sounds pretty enough that a passing gay-basher would have assumed he was. You’ll find my customers’ll be willing to help, especially the early crowd. They’re more, I suppose you could call it family-oriented.”

“ ‘Family-oriented,” “ Al repeated.

“Do you have a problem with my place of business?” demanded the big man, his eyebrows coming together. “Because if so, maybe it’d be better if Martinelli came back alone.”

“Problem? No, I don’t have any problems with your bar or its clientele. It just seems so…” Al paused to consider his word, while Dimitri’s shoulders bulged menacingly and Kate prepared to duck. “So old-fashioned.”

Dimitri’s muscles deflated comically. “So what?”

“Quaint, I suppose. I mean, you almost expect to be issued a towel at the door.”

He blinked blandly at Dimitri, who finally decided that his leg was being pulled, and gave a great bellow of laughter. He slapped Al affectionately on the shoulder, nearly shooting him off the chair.

“ ‘Old-fashioned,” “ he said, chuckling. ”I like that. But yeah, you know, a place like this really is about as close to the old bathhouse energy as you’re going to get in this day and age. You could say I’m helping my people find their roots.“ He laughed again, hugely amused, and Kate and Al left him to a contemplation of his quaint and old-fashioned leather-bound and metal-studded customers.

The two detectives paused on the bar’s back step to look over the taped-off alley, waiting for the light of day to search for its forensic secrets. After a minute Kate snorted.

“God, Al, I thought you were going to insult that guy and I’d have to peel you off the wall. ”Quaint,“ yet.”

“Well, sure. Places like this are so nineteenth-century, they’re positively archaic. Wealthy male aristocrats with a taste for being spanked go to private clubs where they can dress up in uncomfortable clothing and masks for a bit of anonymous fun and then go home to their regular lives. Hell, the Victorians even invented the nipple ring.”

Looking at the side of his face in the half-light spilling into the alleyway, Kate could not tell if he was making a joke or if he meant it.

In either case, it was an interpretation of leather bars that had never before occurred to Kate, and she made a mental note to try it out on Lee. And Jon.

Chapter 14

DIMITRI’s TWO CUSTOMERS HAD seen nothing and no one when they set off on their shortcut through the alley, except for Laxman’s body, which they nearly stepped on. The men were a longtime couple, a month past their tenth anniversary, and the younger one, the one gripping the asthma inhaler as a talisman, had never seen anything like it before. His older partner seemed more resigned, certainly less shocked, which made sense when he told them that he had spent two years as a medic in Vietnam.

They had not noticed anyone out of the ordinary in the hour or so they had been in Dimitri’s, and certainly no women. The older man thought he had seen a car drive out of the end of the alley, something boxy and light in color, but he couldn’t swear to it because just then his partner had stumbled and screamed at what lay at his feet. When asked, they worked out a list of who had been there at the same time. Many of the names were less than helpful, since they consisted of nicknames like Studly and Dragon (for metalwork and a tattoo, respectively), but Dimitri would no doubt be able to translate them, and the task cheered the asthmatic up considerably.

Kitagawa called them to say that Peter Mehta was too upset to talk to them that night and that his wife had already taken her sleeping pill and gone to bed. Kitagawa had reluctantly agreed to return the next day, and wondered if Kate and Al considered a watch on the house necessary. They decided it was not. In the meantime, Kitagawa would take the photograph of Laxman he had gotten from Peter and leave it to be copied overnight, to help their neighborhood canvass.

When they got back to Dimitri’s they found that even the media had packed up their cameras and returned to their beds, leaving the Castro to its family-oriented residents and the few late-night denizens whose voices echoed down the thinly populated streets as they walked off beneath the street lamps, leaving behind that remnant of a free-and-easy, pre-AIDS past called Dimitri’s.

“You want a bed?” Kate asked her partner, who was looking at a forty-minute drive home. Plus, with the Laxman killing, it was time to upgrade the task force: an early-morning meeting had been called, a long-overdue gathering of all the disparate law enforcement individuals concentrating on the series of killings, including the feds. Al would want to be alert for that, and had taken her up on such offers a number of times before, since marrying Jani and giving up his apartment in San Francisco. He even kept a clean shirt and a razor in the guest room.

“I don’t know. Jani worries.”

“Send her an e-mail, or fax.” This too had been done before, to let Jani know where he was without waking her.

“Yeah, I guess I could. Thanks.”

He followed her across town to the silent house on Russian Hill, joined her in a sandwich and some unfocused and low-voiced conversation in the kitchen, and then they both fell into their beds for the luxury of five unbroken hours of sleep.

The two detectives dressed with care in the morning, checking shirt-fronts for old stains and hair for stray tufts. They walked into a room which held one lieutenant, one captain, one secretary, Detectives Boyle and Kitagawa from Homicide and Deaver from the LOPD task force, a large pot of fresh coffee, a plate of doughnuts, and an unknown figure whose reputation preceded him, the local FBI agent Benjamin Marcowitz. He was known as Marc to his very few friends, Benny to his numerous enemies, and the Man in Black to most of the people who worked with and for him, both for his habitual choice of dark suit and for his resemblance to a slimmer, younger Tommy Lee Jones in the movie of that name.

Kate had never seen an FBI agent who more precisely resembled thecaricaturestraight-faced,straitlaced,clean-cut malein thesuit.

All he needed was a coil of wire emerging from his ear to complete the picture. Marcowitz’s handshake was the least expressive touch of flesh she had ever experienced: It might have been a leather glove filled with sand.

Despite first impressions, however, he was not as bad as he might have been. At this point, he made clear, he was prepared to run a more or less parallel operation, concentrating on the national search for similar killings and on providing manpower, backup, and coordination for the SFPD. He was, in a word, altogether too reasonable, and the locals eyed him warily.

To Kate’s astonishment, a brief smile appeared on his face, then vanished. “In the past,” he told the room, “the Bureau has generated a lot of ill will by its tendency to take over cases that might be better handled by the local police departments. We’re actually better used in assistance, on regional cases. I don’t want to get grabby, and I’ll do my best to give you anything we come up with. I hope that works the other way, as well.”

Eyebrows were raised at this innovation of an FBI running interference instead of carrying the ball, but it was a nice thought.

In a short time, decisions were made and responsibilities divided up. Having three teams of detectives related to this one case meant tying up practically the entire SFPD homicide detail, and once the tasers brought in the Ladies task force as well, it was clearly time to sort things out. Kitagawa had taken the Laxman Mehta call, but Pramilla’s death— which was Boyle’s case—was clearly a consideration, and over them all was the possible link with Al and Kate’s serial. At the end of the meeting it had been agreed that, in order to streamline matters, Al and Kate would be the primaries on this one, with Kitagawa and Boyle feeding them information so as not to do everything twice and with Marcowitz kept up-to-date so that, if the time came for the feds to take what he called “a more active role,” there would be no delay. The FBI, in the meantime, would turn its mighty mind to the problem of the Ladies, although whether it would give them what it found was anyone’s guess. Kitagawa, on the other hand, was the very essence of cooperation, having printed off multiple copies of his notes from the night before (typically enough, typed neatly and thoroughly legible), including the brief preliminary interview with Peter Mehta. Laxman’s rooms on the upper floor had been sealed off for them, and for the crime scene team, if necessary.

The morning was fairly thoroughly gone by the time Kate and Al drove off through a light rain to interview Peter Mehta. Speaking over the rhythm of the windshield wipers and the blowing defogger, Al said, “You’ve met Mehta; how do you want to handle him?”

“He’s definitely a man’s man. You’d better start on the questions, I’ll jump in when it’s time to make him uncomfortable.”

“Thought of anything else I should know?” They had spent a couple of hours, not only that morning but the night before, reviewing what Kate knew of the case and its chronology. She thought about what she had already told him, and what she had not.

“Did I mention the thought that there could have been something between Peter and Pramilla? Not that I have anything concrete, just my naturally suspicious mind. She was very pretty and he’s very full of himself. At the very least, he found her attractive.”

“Jealous of Laxman, you think?”

“Who in turn may have picked up on it, and bashed his wife. Just something to keep in mind. Of course, there’s also the fact that Laxman resented his wife’s talking to men on one of her outings. It was the cause of one of his beatings. It could have led to him doing her in.”

“Which would make it very likely that Laxman was one of our Ladies’ serials. Was there anyone in particular that she was ‘talking to’?”

“It’s on my list of things to find out. I thought I’d give Amanda Bonner a call later today.”

“What about Mehta’s wife, Rani? Did you get the sense that she suspected something between her husband and her sister-in-law?”

“She’s a puzzle. Far too much of a wife-and-mother for me to get much out of her, and her English isn’t good enough to get much subtlety out of it. If there was something—if—she’d be aware of it. How could she not be, all under the same roof? But I will say that according to Roz’s material on bride burning, it’s usually the mother-in-law—which in this case would be Rani—who is most involved in dowry harassment.”

“Really?”

“Ironic, isn’t it? So much for the solidarity of the oppressed.”

When they arrived at the Mehta house, they discovered that it would have been redundant to park a uniformed at the curb: The place was awash with media. They had to push their way through to the two uniforms who were trying to keep the reporters out of the rosebushes. Three women in rain parkas carrying hand-lettered signs reading children are NOT FOR MARRYING walked back and forth in front of the next-door neighbor’s house, which was as close as they could get to their target. Al mounted the front steps and, before pushing the doorbell, asked the uniformed how it was going.

“Oh, fine sir. It was a little crazy about an hour ago when he came out to talk to the reporters, but some of ‘em left after that. Wish it would rain harder.”

“You mean Mehta? He made a statement?”

“Yes sir. Right here on the steps. I had some job keeping them from following him inside afterward.”

“What did he say?”

“That he and his family were being ‘hounded,” that was his word, by a bunch of women who had no understanding of Hindu customs or sensitivities. That was more or less what he said.“

Hawkin glanced at Kate grimly. “Did he name names?”

“Not directly. Although he had a quiet word with one or two of the reporters, I didn’t hear what he told them.”

“I guess there’s nothing we can do about it now. Anything you need out here?”

“We’re going to be going off in a while, they’ll send replacements.”

“Okay. Well, thanks.” He rang the bell and, after the peephole darkened momentarily and the locks were slid noisily back, they stepped into the besieged Mehta house and followed Peter Mehta into his study.

Kate introduced Al Hawkin, and then as they had agreed, she sat down and faded into the background. “Mr. Mehta,” Al began. “Could you please tell us what happened last night?”

“What do you mean, ”what happened‘? My brother was killed, is what happened. Foully murdered and his body left in a—a corrupt and disgusting place, and his murderer walks the streets of San Francisco with impunity.“

Kate suppressed a tug of amusement at Mehta’s flowery language. She was well aware that many of the city’s ethnic minorities tended more toward histrionics when confronted with tragedy than did the Anglo-Saxons (she herself, after all, came from an Italian family), although she was mildly surprised at the dramatic response of Peter Mehta, who previously had seemed as American as they came. Apparently his American skin was thin in places. He was on his feet now, pacing the carpeted floor of his study, his hands playing restlessly over his lapels, buttons, the backs of furniture, and each other.

“Sir,” Al was saying patiently, “we need to question everyone who came in contact with your brother last night.”

Mehta came to a halt and turned to Hawkin, affronted. “You would question me?” His lilting accent was stronger now, such was his perturbation.

“We are questioning everyone, sir. Now—”

“My wife? You would question her?”

“Yes, when we’re fin—”

“And the children, perhaps? Will you question my son Indrapal who is not yet two years old concerning the foul murder of his uncle? Why are you not out there searching for these female animals who are killing the men of our city? Why do you come and torment the suffering family? This is intolerable!”

“Sir,” Hawkin said sharply. “Each death must be treated individually. Even if your brother’s murder is related to someone else’s, it is distinct. You’re a sensible man, Mr. Mehta. Surely you can see that we have to begin at the beginning, to trace your brother’s last movements, and to do that we have to question the people who were closest to him. Do you have any objections to that?”

Abruptly, Mehta subsided. “No,” he said, and retreated to his chair behind the desk. “No, of course I don’t. I’m just… It is all most upsetting. I was fond of my little brother. He was not an easy person, but I did my best to love him and care for him. And now this. Achcha,” he said, and then drew himself together. “You wish to know where we were last night. I worked in this study until eleven o’clock. My wife worked in the kitchen with the servant, Lali, and then Lali left and Rani put the children to bed at nine o’clock. She was asleep by the time I went up, and I was asleep myself twenty minutes later. I did not see Laxman all evening, although his lights were on. They usually are.”

“Do you know why your brother was in the Castro district last night? Was he meeting a friend, perhaps?”

“My brother had no friends. He had his family, and until a week ago he had his wife.”

“I understand that he and his wife were very close.”

“He worshiped her,” Mehta declared fiercely, although Kate thought that was not exactly the same thing.

“Do you think your brother killed his wife?” Al asked bluntly. Too bluntly, because Mehta turned his swivel chair around to look out the window at the slowing rain.

“I don’t want to think that, no,” he said after a while.

“But you think it possible?”

Mehta did not answer. Hawkin left it for the moment.

“When did you last see your brother?”

“In the afternoon, I went up to his rooms to see if I could persuade him to come down and eat dinner with the family. He had not done so since the girl died.”

“You mean he stayed up in his rooms all the time?”

“During the day.”

“But at night… ?”

Mehta gave a deep sigh. “I do not know, but I think he went out at night. My wife thought she heard him come in early one morning, and two days ago I found the front door unlatched when I went out for the newspaper.”

“Where would he go?”

“My God, who would know? He had no friends, he didn’t drive. Where is there to walk to here?”

Kate could have listed half a dozen late-night hot spots less than half an hour from the house by foot, including Dimitri’s leather bar, but neither she nor Al chose to enlighten the man. Instead, Hawkin asked him, “Did your brother have his own phone line?”

“No, just an extension of the family line.”

“Would you have heard an incoming phone call during the night?”

“Of course.”

“In that case, I’ll need to see a printout of the calls made on your number since your sister-in-law died.” It would save another round of search warrant forms if Mehta were willing to provide the records—but he was already nodding in agreement.

“I’ll ask the phone company for one.”

“What about phone calls this last week, Mr. Mehta? Any threatening calls, hang-ups, wrong numbers at strange hours?”

Mehta nodded vigorously. “Two. We had two after Pramilla died.” He was using her name now, Kate noted. “Women, both of them. I hung up on them. And told my wife and children not to answer the phone, to let the answering machine take it. There have been a lot of hang-ups on the recorder.”

The two detectives were silent for a minute, wondering if they ought to have known, if they should have put a tracer on the line as soon as they had a man fitting their profile of victim. Could they have foreseen the threat to Laxman Mehta, and prevented his death? Or would they have had to be psychic to guess?

“Your brother’s income, Mr. Mehta,” Al asked. “Did he have his own bank account, charge cards, ATM card, that sort of thing?”

“As I told your colleague, Laxman was mildly retarded. He could handle simple cash transactions—he was actually pretty good with numbers—but the concept of money was beyond him. I handled all money matters for him, gave him a cash allowance to spend at the market. He enjoyed shopping for clothes, and for knickknacks at the tourist shops. Anything bigger, I went with him to purchase.”

Something in the phrase “handled all money matters” snagged at Kate’s attention, and she thought she ought to clarify this. “Do you mean that Laxman had money of his own? Or was he dependent on you?”

“Of course he was dependent on me,” Mehta said impatiently. “You met him, you saw the problem.”

“Financially, I mean, Mr. Mehta. Did your brother have any money of his own?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. Our father wished to be fair, so he left a small portion of his estate in trust for Laxman.”

“How does that work, to have money in trust?” she asked innocently, to see how he would respond.

Mehta picked up a gold pen from his desk and fiddled with it, put it down and picked up a small bronze figurine. “The money is there, in an account and stocks, and the income goes into another account that is jointly in my name with that of Laxman. Theoretically, he could have drawn from it, although he could not have touched the capital.”

“And you were the, what do they call it, executor?” Al stepped in to resume the questions. Kate had no doubt that her partner knew perfectly well what the word was.

“I was. Am, since I am also the executor for Laxman’s estate.”

“And now that he is dead, who inherits?”

“Inspector, I really don’t know why—”

“Just answer the question please, Mr. Mehta.”

“My brother was killed by… by terrorists, and you sit here questioning me about my financial affairs?” Mehta spluttered indignantly.

“We can find out easily enough, Mr. Mehta.”

“My children,” he told them furiously. “My four children will inherit their uncle’s estate. Mani’s nephews and nieces.”

“Although it will, I assume, be in trust for them until they reach the age of twenty-one? Isn’t that how such things usually work?”

“It is.” The terse response showed that Mehta well understood the implications a suspicious detective might place on the transfer of money, but there was no hesitation in his answers. “At the time my eldest reaches twenty-one it will be legally presumed that my wife and I are having no more children, and Mani’s estate will then be divided equally between however many there are.”

“Until then, you are in charge of your brother’s estate?”

“Yes.”

“And how much money is actually involved?”

Mehta’s eyes came up to meet Hawkin’s. “In the vicinity of a million dollars. Depending on the state of the stock market, you understand.”

Hawkin nodded sympathetically, as if the recent downswing in stock values had inconvenienced him as well. “Mr. Mehta, are you sure there was no such provision in your father’s will, that Laxman should inherit the money at the age of twenty-one?”

A muscle in the line of Mehta’s jaw jumped, once, and he picked up the pen again as if thinking deeply.

“He did inherit, didn’t he?” Al prompted.

“No! For heaven’s sake, Inspector, Laxman was already twenty-two when our father died. There was no question of his inheriting. Unless,” Mehta continued in a slow and reluctant voice, “circumstances changed.”

“Those circumstances being…?”

“Our father was trying to be fair, especially to any children Laxman may have had. The doctors told him that any children Laxman might have would be normal, that his mental condition would not be passed on.

“So Laxman would have inherited if Pramilla had children?”

“Not Laxman. Our father knew he couldn’t manage more than a few dollars on his own.”

“Mr. Mehta,” Al said, his voice showing impatience for the first time, “if you are refusing to tell us what financial arrangements your father made concerning your brother, then say so. Don’t assume I won’t find out the details on my own. With a homicide like this one, I can easily get a warrant, and your lawyer will be required to tell me. Everything.”

That final threat got to Mehta. He exhaled, and put down the pen. “My brother had inherited the money the day he married. I was still a signator on the account, and I had planned on using some of it as a down payment on die house down the street for him and his wife. I did not tell Laxman at the time, because it would have confused him.”

“And Pramilla?” Kate asked coldly.

“What about her?”

“Did she know that her husband was in himself a wealthy man, not just a person living off his brother? Or did you not want to confuse her, either?”

“You make all this sound so sinister,” Mehta complained. “The girl was a peasant. She could barely read, couldn’t speak a word of English when she came here. I wanted to give her a chance to grow up, to learn about her position and her responsibility. Tell me what you would have done, Inspector. Would you have told a fifteen-year-old, virtually illiterate village girl that by writing her name on a piece of paper, she could have anything she wanted? Any clothing in the shops, any flashy car, a house she couldn’t begin to care for? Would you?”

Al and Kate just looked at Mehta, and Al asked if they might speak with his wife.

Today Rani Mehta was squeezed into a hot pink sari with a blue and pink underblouse, and she stood quivering with barely suppressed outrage at the invasion of her home. Her husband stood at her shoulder while she was being interviewed, asserting that her English was not good enough to have her interviewed on her own. Even without the language problem she was not a helpful witness. She resented their presence in her house almost as much as she had resented the presence of her childish brother-in-law and his increasingly difficult (and undeniably pretty) young wife, and her answers through her husband’s translation were brusque and unhelpful. Eventually they let her go and told Mehta that they were ready to see Laxman’s apartment.

The ornate rooms, in the absence of the people who had created them, looked merely tawdry. The boy-and-buffalo figurine stood on the mantelpiece over an electric fireplace, in poignant juxtaposition with an ornately framed photograph of Pramilla and Laxman in their wedding finery, both of them looking very young and rigid with terror. Kate contemplated the arrangement for a long time, and found herself wondering what on earth the village girl had made of this glowing electric imitation fire, the thick off-white carpet, the man to whom she had given over her future.

They found nothing in the apartment. Aside from a sunken patch of wallboard behind a hanging, which Mehta told them was where Laxman had driven his fist in a tantrum, there was no sign that any act of violence had taken place in the rooms, no bloodstains, no sign of dragging on the carpets, not even any disarray. They could find no indication of why Laxman had left the house that night, no telephone numbers scribbled on pads by the phone or balled-up messages in the wastebaskets. The redial button on the only telephone in the rooms connected with an answering machine and a woman’s voice announcing, “Hi, this is Amanda’s machine,” which Kate recognized as that of Amanda Bonner. As Bonner had suspected, she had been Pramilla Mehta’s last call. Kate broke the connection before the tone could sound.

They finished the search, thanked Peter Mehta, and went back out into the rain. Outside the house, the press had thinned out somewhat, and the three placard-wielding women had moved their demonstration over in front of the Mehta house. The two detectives nodded to the uniformed police on guard, told the reporters that they had no comment, and strode briskly down the block to where they had left the car.

“That’s a fair amount of money involved,” Kate noted as she pulled away from the curb.

“Even with those troublesome market swings. You think it was only a million?”

“Not for a minute.” Any interrogator recognized instantly the look of open candor that accompanied an outright lie.

Kate made a mental note to dig out the truth of the Mehta finances. It was never good to assume that, with the family of a victim, the first interview was anything more than reconnaissance. They would return after Laxman’s autopsy results and preliminary lab work were in.

“We also need to know if Laxman might have got ahold of some money on his own. Sold a statue, pawned a wristwatch, something of that sort. He understood money enough to know that you can buy or sell things, and if he watched a lot of TV it’s the kind of thing he might’ve seen and copied. Even if he was thick as two bricks.”

“We also need those phone records.”

“Ask Peter and his wife separately if Laxman had any mail. Postman might remember, too.” Al was thinking out loud. “Even the kids in the house. But the big question here is, if this is the work of the serial, how’d the killer find out that Laxman hit his wife sometimes, that he may have been responsible for her death?”

Kate took a deep breath. “Roz Hall knew. Amanda Bonner told her, and if Roz knew, anyone in the City could have known.”

“That doesn’t narrow things down much.”

“God,” she said, “if you’d planned it, you couldn’t have come up with three more different victims.”

“James Larsen, Matthew Banderas, and Laxman Mehta. Affirmative action murders,” Al said with heavy irony. “The United Nations of victims.”

“Taking political correctness to an extreme,” she agreed.

“You’d think there would be a few chronic husband-beaters available as well, hiding in the woodwork. Balance things out a little.”

Black humor was one thing; this was becoming bleak. Kate asked, dropping the joke, “You’d say this is definitely a woman thing, then? Standing up for her—or their—downtrodden sisters, revenging their mistreatment and, in Pramilla’s case, death?”

“Taking back the night in a big way,” Al commented dryly. “I can’t see any other link, can you? Nothing but the history of the victims and their violence toward women. I think we’ve got a vigilante. Or a group of them.”

“The Ladies?”

“I just don’t know. Might be them, but it feels different—someone inspired by them, a sort of copycat. What do you think?”

“I agree—it doesn’t have at all the same flavor. But then it’s pretty hard to inject duct-tape humor into a murder.”

In a different voice, Al said, “The press is going to have a field day with this.” He was, Kate knew, repeating his offer to let her step quietly out of the way.

“Well,” she said, having none of it, “we’ll just have to keep one step ahead of them, won’t we?”

Chapter 15

IT WAS JON, oddly enough and in a roundabout way, who gave them the break they needed.

After the morning drizzle, the sky cleared and the weather took one of those odd warm turns that spring sometimes comes up with in San Francisco, to fool the gray city’s inhabitants into thinking they live in sunny California. Late Wednesday afternoon, after a day spent in a stuffy building with pathology reports and the interviews of a couple dozen of Dimitri’s clientele, in endless phone calls and meetings with a dozen stripes of law enforcement, the migraine that had been lurking in the back of Kate’s skull all week finally found an opening, flowering in the long, irregular hours and the stress of the entangled cases. She spent a solid half hour on the telephone with Amanda Bonner, who could think of no possible male object of Pramilla’s affections, or even fantasies, although she spun out the potential candidates, all the men Pramilla had met in Amanda’s presence, until Kate felt like telling the woman that a simple no would have done it and slamming the phone down. Instead, she was polite, and thanked her, and hung up softly. Unfortunately, Hawkin came in just as Kate was tipping the tablets out into her palm.

“You told me the headaches were okay,” he accused.

“They were. Are. This is just a normal one, not like before.”

“Sure. Go home, Martinelli.”

“I’m fine, Al.”

“Martinelli, we can’t afford to have you on your back for a couple of days. You go home now and do nothing related to the case, or I’ll call Lee and the department doctor, in that order.”

Either one would be a problem, involving hours of explanation and concealment. Better to capitulate.

“Okay. I’ll go. See you in the morning.”

“I’m going to check with Lee tonight to make sure you’re not working,” he warned her.

“Christ, Al, don’t be an old woman.”

“Now I know you’re sick. You’d never use an insult like ‘old woman’ if you were in your right mind.”

Kate laughed in spite of herself. “All right. I promise not to do any work until tomorrow morning, if you promise not to call Lee to check up on me.”

“Deal,” Al said, and Kate switched off her computer.

Two years ago—even six months ago—Kate would have tackled all the cases on her desk head-on, throwing herself into seventeen-hour days fueled by fast-food meals washed down with gallons of coffee, seeing everyone, doing everything, refusing help and rest as signs of weakness.

However, there was nothing like nearly losing your lover—first her life and then her presence—and then getting your brains scrambled by a kid with a length of galvanized pipe to give you a sense of perspective. The headaches that had pounded through her skull much of the winter had indeed faded, but today was proof that they were not gone, just lurking in the synapses, a menace waiting for stress and overwork to open the door again. Al was right: If she made herself eat properly, sleep adequately, and take a few hours off now and then, she would have a better chance of lasting to the end. As Lee had said, some cops operated under the conviction that they were a victim’s only hope, but those cops tended not to make it to retirement in one piece. Kate had proved herself, more than once; now it was time to settle in for the long run.

So she went home.

First thing in the door, Kate did something she’d been intending for what seemed like weeks: She phoned Jules. Conversation with that precocious young woman did nothing for Kate’s headache, but it distracted her from business and made her feel as if she’d accomplished something with the day. After half an hour of chat about Jules’s social life (i.e., boys) and a project she was doing on human psychology, they made a vague date for an outing. When she had hung up, Kate continued through the house and opened the French doors into what Lee optimistically referred to as a garden, with the thought of pulling weeds, or scrubbing mildew, or just sitting mindlessly in a folding chair, basking in the warmth of the late-afternoon sun.

It was an unexpected hour of respite, what Roz might call a gift of grace, and Kate stood in the overgrown backyard, drawing in deep breaths of the mild, oxygen-rich April breeze and wondering why no painter ever managed to capture the colors in the skies of approaching dusk, when she decided that what she really wanted to do was pollute that sweet evening air with the smoke of charcoal briquettes. Lee made a phone call and sent Jon off to the market while Kate dug out the little barbecue grill, scraped off the accumulated gunk from the previous summer, and fired it up, first to sterilize the metal surface, and then to lay on it the marinated skirt steaks and the slabs of ahi tuna. Soon she stood with a beer in one hand and a two-foot-long turner in the other, enjoying both the fantasy of suburbia and the brief holiday from the cases. After all, everyone had to eat sometime, even homicide detectives, and ahi took less time to cook than sitting in a restaurant waiting for food. And, she realized, at some point in the last hour, her headache had shriveled up and crept away.

Jon came out of the house onto the small brick patio, carrying two salads and some plates. He was followed by Sione, lithe and graceful even when burdened by a tray piled high with bread, drinks, and silverware, a checkered tablecloth draped over his left forearm, and a folding chair clamped under his right armpit.

Lee retrieved the chair from under his grasping elbow and quickly draped the cloth over a small tiled table that really should have been scrubbed first. Sione politely ignored the table’s gray scurf of city dirt and dried mildew and set about transferring the contents of his tray onto the cheerful cloth.

He and Jon were talking about their afternoon, laughing easily and brushing against each other from time to time. Kate found herself smiling, and raised her gaze to the darkening bay, her thoughts going to another young couple. Laxman and Pramilla Mehta had been two individuals every bit as beautiful as Sione Kalefu, caught up in an arranged relationship that had twisted into something dark and deadly. Jon asked her something, and she blinked.

“Sorry?”

“I wanted to know if you thought I would swagger like that if I wore a carpenter’s apron.”

“Swagger like what?”

“Kate, hello? Where are you? I took Sione downtown to whistle at the construction workers, and he noticed how the guys with the carpenter’s belts walk. I said it’s just the weight of the things; he says it’s attitude.”

“Could be either. Patrol cops walk the same way.”

“Ah,” Jon sighed. “Men in uniform.”

They giggled together like teenaged girls. Spring is in the air, thought Kate with a sudden sour twinge in her gut. Like pollen, and love, and babies.

Meat and fish cooked, salads and bread distributed, the quartet bent over their food in the soft evening light. Roz and Maj were coming over shortly, bringing Mina and one of Maj’s luscious desserts—if Roz didn’t get called away, if Kate’s beeper didn’t go off, if the earth didn’t move beneath their feet.

In the meantime, they would behave as if they were normal people who lived in a world where such interruptions never occurred. Kate forced herself to eat slowly, to push away the very possibility of the telephone from her mind, to make jokes as if she had all the time in the world, to listen to Lee’s easy conversation with Sione about how a Polynesian boy from Tahiti came to be dancing with a New York—based troupe in San Francisco.

As they listened to his story, told in a melodious half-French accent that even without the rest of the package would have explained Jon’s infatuation, it struck Kate how different the young man was from Jon’s usual lovers, who tended to be white-collar professionals with gym memberships and identity problems. Sione was as colorful and exotic as a tropical bird, and as comfortable with himself. Jon’s attitude, too, was a different thing this time, affectionate rather than admiring, relaxed where he was usually so concerned with making an impression. He and Sione had only known each other a couple of weeks, but they seemed old friends. All in all, thought Kate, a very hopeful state of affairs.

“Who wrote Song?” Lee was now asking. “That business you do with the knife, for example—that’s not in the Bible. Is it?”

“Oh, no.” Sione smiled, an expression as slow and sure as his movements or his low voice. “Song began several years ago, when I first came to New York. One of the dancers in our studio, Dina Moreli, was attacked by a man she thought she knew well. A friend, he had been. Dina trusted him, and he raped her.

“She was unable to dance afterward, not just because of the injuries, but because she could not bring herself to go on stage. To trust her audience, you see? She couldn’t work for a long time, two years or more. She came to the studio twice a week, but other than that she stayed inside her apartment and became a hermit. She did dance on her own, and she tried to write a journal of what had happened to her. She also spent a lot of time reading books she had always meant to read. I suppose she thought that her time away from work should not be a complete loss.

“One of the books she took up was the Bible. But the more she read, the angrier it made her, what she called ‘man’s inhumanity to woman.” The story of the man entertaining important visitors who gives his concubine to a drunken mob to abuse and kill, so as to save his guests. Or Tamar, the young widow who dresses up as a prostitute and seduces her own father-in-law to force her husband’s family to undertake their responsibilities toward her. Jephthah’s daughter, nameless even as a sacrifice. And the Song of Solomon, where a young girl out looking for her lover falls into the hands of a group of soldiers, is raped, and then, when she finds her lover again, is forced by her own needs and by his assumptions to act as if nothing had happened.

“That is not exactly how the Bible describes it, but as you probably know, interpretation depends on the eye of the reader, and the experience of being raped changed Dina’s way of looking at the world. It explains why she wrote the dance the way she did, exaggerating the abuse of the guards but also giving Beloved the power to strike back, not only against her attackers, but against the need to hide her rape from Lover.”

The doorbell punctuated his last sentence and Jon started to rise, but Kate waved him back to his seat. She took a tray of dirty plates to the kitchen, pausing to switch on the already-filled coffeemaker, then went to let in Roz, Maj, and Mina. The two adults were carrying containers, and Mina’s arms were wrapped around a bunch of bananas the size of her chest. Shutting the door, Kate asked, “Will we need bowls or plates?”

“Bowls,” said Maj. “Big ones.”

“Everyone’s outside on the patio, I think it’s still warm enough. I’ll bring some bowls and utensils.”

Maj had brought the makings for very high-class banana splits: homemade ice cream yellow with egg yolk and speckled with vanilla bean, bitter chocolate sauce, crumbled pralines, and creme anglaise, with maraschino cherries for the top and delicate, brittle rolled cookies for the side. This was what Jon referred to as cuisine amusante, or gourmet junk food, and it succeeded completely in defeating the nice, healthy dinner they had eaten. In no time at all, the only things left were a few cherries and some cookie crumbs. The evening sky had shifted from blue through rose to dusky lavender and finally to no color at all, and they sat in easy companionship and admired the quarter moon riding low against the city. Eventually, it was getting too cool to sit outside, and they moved in for coffee. Mina asked for the globe puzzle again, and Lee obediently fetched it for her to dismantle.

Roz wanted to talk about Song, and Sione repeated for her benefit the history of the production.

Roz was thrilled. She sat forward on the edge of her seat as if she could pull theological and psychological truths out of the dancer by force.

“Beloved submitting to her lover’s expectations and his lack of sympathy,” she declared, “is just like all the women who fail to report rape, even now. And in a patriarchal society, when the woman’s purity reflects directly on her menfolk, she wouldn’t dare tell him—look at those poor women in Muslim countries who get murdered by their brothers for daring to shame the family by getting themselves raped.”

Maj offered another interpretation. “You don’t think Beloved is simply afraid that if she tells Lover she was attacked, he would go after the guards and be beaten up himself, or killed? That she’s protecting him?”

Roz waved away her partner’s suggestion impatiently. “ ‘Tell him I am sick with love,” Beloved says. She’s hiding her injuries because she knows that if she doesn’t, he’ll be so put off by her lack of purity that he’ll leave her.“

“Interesting, isn’t it,” Lee commented mildly, “that we call Beloved ‘she’ and Lover ‘he’ even though the players were reversed?”

Sione, dressed in khakis, loafers, and a fleece pullover and showing not the least sign of transvestism or gender bending off the stage, smiled.

“As it is written, the parts could be played by either sex, but the director had the two of us at hand, and thought it was more interesting this way. ”A piquant touch,“ one of the reviewers said.”

“But why Beloved’s rage?” Roz demanded. “Why did Moreli decide to have Beloved come in with the bloody knife and then settle back into business as usual with Lover? Is that her idea of happily ever after?”

Maj spoke up. “I’m sure it’s your old friend the warrior-virgin, Roz love. Even if Dina Moreli didn’t have that figure consciously in mind when she wrote the interpretation—after all, that’s what an archetype is, a powerful upwelling from the unconscious. Women’s shakti, like those women on the panel called it.”

“Oh,” Lee broke in, “I meant to tell you how much I enjoyed that program. I taped it and watched it the other night.”

Roz glanced involuntarily at Kate, looking uncomfortable, and Kate wondered in amusement which of the statements Roz had made during the discussion was embarrassing her in hindsight. Roz turned back to Sione.

“But where did that interpretation come from? Did she just pull it out of thin air?”

Sione shrugged apologetically. “I do not really know why Dina wrote it that way. I am only the dancer, not the person who created it. But,” he added, seeing Roz’s impatience, “are Beloved’s actions not, after all, what people do? When driven to uncharacteristic acts, do not most people then fade back into the obscurity of their daily lives?”

Roz opened her mouth to argue, caught Maj’s eye, and then threw out her hands with a smile. “I’m sorry, I realize it isn’t your dance. It’s just that it’s so precisely what I’ve been working on for my dissertation, the juxtaposition of love and rage. And I find it exciting to come across an intelligent and sympathetic interpretation of a biblical text. So many people pretty things up and make them so sweet you want to vomit. Or they go the other direction and dismiss the whole thing as the tool of an oppressive patriarchy.”

“You would see it somewhere in between?” Sione asked dutifully. Maj made a noise and rolled her eyes, but Roz ignored her partner.

“Religion is passion,” the minister of God declared passionately. “The Bible is our document as well as theirs, and it holds all the human experience of fear and love and despair and terror and revenge, of power and the rights of the powerless. It is a paradigm of human behavior. Its theology is one of liberation, and not just in the hands of Latin American Marxism.”

Sione was starting to look bewildered, Jon bored, and Lee stirred and objected mildly, “There is a lot of ugly stuff in the Bible, Roz; you have to admit that.”

“Precisely. Because there’s a lot of ugly stuff in daily life, and pretending there isn’t doesn’t make it so. Life isn’t a fairy tale; the good guys sometimes lose. Hell, even fairy tales aren’t pretty except in twentieth-century America. The original Grimm tales—have you ever read them? Grim’s the word. Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t rescue her granny, she finds her chopped up, bottled, and hanging in the smokehouse.”

“Roz!” Maj protested, looking over to where Mina was kneeling, concentrating on the thick plastic shapes that Lee was fitting together for her. Roz started to bristle, but Sione got in first with a distraction.

“I have always thought that Christianity and left-wing politics were poor bedfellows, which has been a sorrow to me, because the church of my childhood was such a place of joy, full of big women in white hats singing full-throated to the heavens.”

Roz was nodding her head before he finished his sentence. “It is a terrible pity that the right wing has laid exclusive claim to the Bible, so inextricably that it seems impossible to reject the one without the other. But to do so only gives them a victory. It’s not their Bible, and the fact that I claim the same Holy Book makes the Right angrier than anything else I can do. If I rejected their religion entirely I would simply be another poor lost heathen in need of their prayers. By declaring myself a Christian, by knowing the Bible better than most of them do, I became a maddening enigma. And I mean literally maddening: Twice I’ve had men try to rip off my collar.”

“And she regularly gets threatening letters,” Maj told them.

“You never said anything about threats,” Kate said sharply. “What kind—”

“Kate,” Roz interrupted her, shooting a stern glance sideways at her partner. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Why the hell not? You have to take threats seriously these days. There are a lot of nuts out there.”

“You think I don’t know that? Of course I take them seriously, but I don’t want you to get involved. One of your colleagues knows all about the problem.”

“But—”

“Kate, please. Unless one of them actually carries out his threat, it’s not going to be your job.”

“For Christ sake, Roz, that’s not at all funny.”

Lee spoke up as well. “Roz, please don’t joke about this. It isn’t fair to the people who care about you.”

“Sorry, sorry. Anonymous letters come with the territory, and although I assure you that I take the nuts seriously, I have to say that I find the whole subject tedious, and can we please talk about something else?”

“The threats to your immortal soul are much more worrying,” Maj commented, sounding considerably more amused than worried. She explained, “Roz seems to be a regular sermon topic at that grotesque church that tries to quote ‘heal’ gays and dykes.”

Roz laughed aloud. “The last one was in retaliation for an article I’d written and they had obviously not bothered to read, about Hitler claiming to have been a Christian.”

“Did he?” Jon asked, interested.

“I have no doubt that he thought of himself as a good Christian leader.”

“Like those maniacs who bomb abortion clinics, killing to save lives,” Jon agreed. “They’re mostly right-wing Christians. The guy who runs that Web site giving the names and addresses of abortionists that’s little more than a hit list—he calls himself a man of God.”

“We humans have a deep need to justify our behavior, especially the more extreme acts,” Lee commented, pausing in fitting the boot of Italy into the Mediterranean. “We drag God in to stand at our side, even if we have to bend reality to do it.”

“Poor old God,” Jon said. “Must be frustrating having everyone claim your support. Like Albert Einstein being dragged in to advertise everything from Coke to computers.”

“God definitely needs a press agent,” Lee said. Sione was looking ever more puzzled.

“Issuing statements to clarify policy,” Roz agreed.

“Headline: God says, ”I do not support Pat Robertson,“ ” Lee joked.

“God announces: ‘Only gay feminists of color admitted to heaven,” “ Maj suggested.

“God unveils heavenly affirmative action plan: One percent Christian Right to be admitted, qualified or not,” Roz contributed.

The jokes escalated, the intellectual content plummeted, and a couple of minutes later Lee, seeing Sione looking worried and Mina positively alarmed at this incomprehensible adult descent into hilarity, leaned over and spoke to Kate.

“How about some more coffee, hon? Kate?” Lee reached out and put her hand on Kate’s knee, bringing her back to the present from some far-off place.

“Huh?” Kate said, blinking.

“Could you put on another pot of coffee?”

“Sure,” she said, and went off to do it.

Her mind was not on the chore, however. In fact, she had heard nothing of the discussion and joking, nothing after Jon’s mention of the abortion clinic murders, an offhand remark that had sent a small tingle rising up in the back of Kate’s mind, the kind of sensation that carries the phrase, “Listen to me.”

Hit list. Web site. Maniac. Listen.

Kate listened, and speculated in a state of distraction while the coffee was made and drunk, and the dishes were cleaned, and Jon and Sione left to feed Sione’s recently adopted Siamese kitten. She helped gather up Maj’s empty containers and walked with them out to Roz’s car. The night sky was still clear, a rarity in the city of fog, and mild enough that none of them wore a jacket. Maj opened the Jeep’s rear door and took the bowls from Kate, who leaned against the passenger door and addressed herself to Roz’s backside, emerging from the back of the car while she buckled Mina into the car seat.

“There were three women with picket signs in front of Peter Mehta’s house yesterday morning. You know anything about that?”

“I know that they’ve moved on to his place of business. Much more visible. Can you scoot back a bit, honey?” Roz asked, which Kate assumed was addressed to the child in the car seat.

“It’s an interesting question, isn’t it, how much we allow immigrants to keep the customs of their birth country,” Kate noted. “When we have laws to the contrary. Like the conservative groups who refuse to send their kids to public schools.”