Night Work

“Customs or not, marrying off children is wrong.”

“So is allowing half the kids in the country to go without medical care. So is spending a million dollars for a missile to drop on civilians.”

Roz pulled her head out of the car and grinned at Kate. “Martinelli, we’re going to make a flaming liberal of you yet.”

“Roz, who did you tell about Pramilla Mehta’s death?”

Roz shut Mina’s door and stepped back so Maj could approach the passenger door. Kate too stepped away from the car.

“Why do you ask this, Kate?” Maj’s voice asked, but it was Roz’s gaze Kate held as she answered.

“Someone may have known that Laxman was being investigated for his wife’s death, and decided not to wait for the police. If we can narrow down the people who had that information, it might help us find his murderer. Roz knew of Laxman’s violence against his wife. Roz and Amanda Bonner.”

Maj answered before her partner could. “Roz knew. I knew. About eighty other people knew. And then whoever those people may have told.”

“Eighty people?” Even for Roz, that seemed like a lot of phone calls.

“I preached on it, Sunday morning,” Roz explained.

Kate winced. “Mentioning names?”

“Yes.”

And on Monday night, Laxman Mehta had been killed.

Maj reached for the passenger door, breaking the staring contest. Roz walked around the car to the driver’s side.

“It was good to see you,” Maj told Kate. “I hope you’re taking care of yourself.”

“Lee makes me.” To say nothing of her other partner, Al.

“She is looking so well.”

“She’s doing great.” Kate opened her mouth again to say something further about Roz’s threatening letters, and then closed it firmly. They were big girls, and neither of them naive.

“Shall we go, my Maj?” Roz asked. Mymy, her favorite pun on Maj’s name.

Maj leaned forward and gave Kate an affectionate kiss on the cheek. Both women got in and closed their doors, Maj with some difficulty, which indicated that the Jeep’s argument with the Yosemite rock face had damaged more than paint. The engine ground into life (something wrong under the hood as well—Roz’s pet mechanic must have left the congregation) and the red car slid off down the hill.

Kate stood for another minute with her face upturned to the faint impression of stars, then she went back inside, poured the dregs of the coffee into a cup, and took it upstairs, where she turned on the computer and then walked away from it, ending up on the small balcony off the guest room. Half an hour later Lee found her there, sitting and watching an overhead airplane rise up into the heavens.

“What are you doing?” Lee asked.

“Sitting.”

“You okay?”

“I am perfect,” Kate told her.

Lee came up behind her chair and leaned down to kiss her on the same cheek Maj had used earlier. She smelled of soap and toothpaste. “You turned the computer on. Are you working tonight?”

“You detective, you. Al thought I needed a night off, so I promised him I wouldn’t work until tomorrow morning.”

“So you’re waiting until midnight,” Lee diagnosed. She laughed.

“Tell me something,” Kate asked her. “Roz did something in India that gave you the creeps. What was it?”

Lee stood still for a moment, and then with a sigh she put her hands back through the cuffs of the crutches and shifted over to sit down on the narrow bench.

“I don’t really want to go into detail, but basically what happened was Roz disappeared from the hotel and went off to live with a group of dacoits for a few days. What we would call, I don’t know, a band of outlaws, I guess. Nasty people. Personally, I’ve always thought that she was given some powerful drug, a hallucinogen I’d say. She swore she wasn’t, but it was all pretty ugly, and it took a major effort to get her out of there, and out of the country without being thrown in jail.”

“I…” Kate shook her head. “I can’t picture it.”

“Completely uncharacteristic,” Lee agreed. “Which is why I decided she’d been given something. I’ve never known Roz to do drugs, other than that time. And at the end of it we were both more than a little uncomfortable around each other.”

“You’ve never talked about it?”

“Never. She may not even remember it, not in detail.”

“Thanks for telling me.” Though, Kate reflected, it was hard to know what, if anything, to make of this long-ago episode of youthful indiscretion. Except…

“I don’t suppose that there was one of the, what do you call them, dacoots, in particular?”

“Dacoits,” Lee corrected, the wicked smile on her face clear even in the dark. “And how did you guess?” She stood up, kissed Kate’s other cheek, and merely said, “I’m going to bed.”

“Okay, sweetheart,” Kate said absently. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

“Don’t work too late.”

Kate did work late—or rather, early, when a faint light in the east was bringing definition to the Bay and the northern shore beyond. Through the night, while the traffic fell silent and the streetlights dominated the darkness, while the sea haze coalesced into clouds and set the house’s downspouts to their musical tapping, Kate searched the tangled threads of the Web for three lonely names, and eventually, working backward from Roz’s Web site, using search engine and Web links, she found them.

“Womyn of the EVEning,” they called themselves, and their Web site began with a soliloquy on the night.

Eve was the first, a creature of the darkness, who with her apple freed her children from the tyranny of the Ruler of paradise. Eve, whose thirst for knowledge was so great, it changed humynkind. Eve, whose act was called shameful by males, who stands in pride and strength as the Mother of us all.

We, too, are creatures of the night. Night is a Goddess who wraps Her dark cloak around us, allowing us to become invisible as we work Her will. For too long, womyn has been invisible in the daylight, a being with no voice, no face, whose labors in the home are only seen if they are not done, whose birthing and raising of children is only noticed when she fails.

Males call us weak, males attack us with their stronger muscles, males try to convince us that the Night is a place of danger, that we must stay inside, lock our doors against the lurking, unseen threats of the dark.

Why do we believe this? In truth, for too many of us, it is the well-lighted home that places us in danger, the locked and bolted door that traps us and makes us vulnerable.

In truth it is the dark, all-concealing Night outside that will make us safe, Night’s dark cloak that shields us with invisibility. Our weakness and our fear shall become our strength and our weapon, until it is the male who hides in the light, cowering from womyn’s dark vengeance.

The night is ours, to do with as we please.

The dark is ours, to punish the evildoer.

Here are some of the males who would deny us our dark safety.

And then came the names.

GRITTY-EYED AND U N W A S H E D , Kate stumbled off and collapsed between the sheets for three hours, when she was dragged out of unconsciousness by a steaming mug and Lee’s voice.

“Your hair,” Lee purred into her lover’s ear, sinking her fingers into the matted brown tangle on the pillow. “ ‘Your hair flows like a flock of goats, spilling down the side of Mount Gilead.” “

Kate opened one eye to glare at the face of her partner, who was convulsed with hilarity at her own wit. “You woke me up to tell me that?”

“I woke you up to remind you that you have an appointment in Marin at eight o’clock.”

Kate looked at the clock, and then nearly knocked the mug out of Lee’s grasp as her own hand shot out for the telephone. She punched in the number, as familiar as her own, and then grimaced at the woman’s voice that answered.

“ ‘Morning, Jani,” she said carefully. “This is Kate. Have I missed Al?”

“He’s in the shower, Kate. Can I have him call you back?”

“Okay. I’m at home. It’s kind of urgent, Jani.”

“Isn’t it always?” Jani commented, and the phone went dead. Kate put her own phone down, wondering if she should read anything into Jani’s brusque dismissal, and if so, how much. She had seemed okay on the phone the other night, so maybe it didn’t mean anything.

“What’s wrong?” Lee asked, again holding out the mug. Kate took it gratefully, slurped off the top inch, and arranged a couple of pillows behind her head.

“Janididn’tsound veryhappy tohear me,”Katetold her.“I’d thought it was calming down with her, but maybe not.” Jani still held Kate to blame for the kidnapping of her daughter, Jules, while under Kate’s supervision just before Christmas. Since in Kate’s opinion Jani was right, she could hardly complain at the woman’s treatment of her. Still, it added a degree of tension to her partnership with Al that was sometimes awkward.

Lee, however, had an alternative explanation for the exchange.

“It’s probably her morning sickness. Didn’t you tell me she was about ten weeks along? She was probably just trying not to vomit into the receiver.”

“You think so?”

“I think it’s possible. You might check with Al before you get het up about nothing.”

“Is ‘het up’ a medical term, Doctor?”

“Definitely. New Age terminology meets the Victorian era.” Lee drew a deep breath, looking down at her hands, and Kate went instantly wary. “Sweetheart,” Lee began, “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night.”

Kate made no pretense at not knowing what Lee was talking about. There was only one subject at the moment that called for low voice and lowered gaze.

“About a baby?”

“Indirectly. Or rather, on the way to a baby. I’ve never really apologized properly for what I put you through last summer.”

“That’s not—”

“Let me say it. I treated you like shit. I made you crawl and then shoved you away, just to prove I could. And when I finally heard that you’d been hurt, nearly killed, it was like—oh, I don’t know. Like having a bucket of ice water dumped into my brain. All I could think of .was, if you’d died, you would have gone thinking that I wasn’t coming back. It was a shock, that idea, it made me feel… I can’t begin to describe how I felt,” admitted the articulate psychotherapist. “I think about it every day. And I am sorry. Mostly—” she held out a hand to stop Kate’s protest. “Mostly I’m sorry for what my actions did to us. You’ve been insecure about us ever since, which I can understand. But let me say, here and now, that I am not going anywhere. I love you, and I am staying here with you. If you can just think of the other as a sort of temporary insanity, I would be very grateful.”

Kate was not exactly proud of the memory of her own response to Lee’s abrupt exit, which had gone from drunken self-pity to reckless rage for weeks. She had not told Lee, would not tell her now, but merely took her lover into her arms and held her.

After a minute, Lee stirred. “Now we can talk about the baby thing. I’ve found an OB/GYN over in Berkeley who is willing to work with a disabled lesbian. I made an appointment for early next month. I’d like you to come with me.”

Kate smoothed Lee’s own unruly curls. “You’re very sure about this?”

Lee sat up again to meet her eyes, taking Kate’s hand. “I think I’m sure, if that makes sense. What I mean is, I want very badly to try, but if at any point along the way the difficulties become too major—if the doctor says absolutely not, if the insemination doesn’t take, if problems crop up—I will back off. You may need to remind me of that promise, by the way,” she said, her smile a bit lopsided. “If I’m becoming fixated, let me know. Loudly.”

“That’s a deal.”

“One more thing.”

“Only one?”

“At the moment. We haven’t talked about money.”

“We’ll manage.”

“A baby’s an expensive addition. And if we commit ourselves to in vitro, it gets really expensive. Plus, I can’t see myself working full-time, either before or after.” Her attitude was not simply one of warning Kate, but of leading up to something.

“So you want me to rob a bank?” Kate asked lightly. “Or are you and Jon cooking up a little computer fraud and you want a couple of tips?”

“Uh, no. I think I’ll avoid anything that would land one of us in jail. I hear they’re bad places to raise children. No, I was thinking that we might have to sell this house, move someplace cheaper.”

It was not entirely unexpected; in fact, it was a suggestion Kate had made any number of times over the years since Lee had inherited the property following the death of her authoritative and strongly disapproving mother, but it still sent a sharp pang of regret through her. Objectively speaking, it was worth a small fortune, but Kate had put herself into this house, her sweat and her commitment, and she loved it as she never thought she would love a mere building. She also knew without question that they were both well and truly spoiled for any lesser house they might find to replace it.

She kissed Lee and smiled at her. “I’ll miss the view of the Bay,” she said, and left it at that.

Al’s return call found her about to step into her own shower. She turned off the water and sat down on the toilet in front of the glowing bars of the ancient wall heater.

“Jani said you needed to talk.”

“Look, Al, is Jani okay with me?” she asked bluntly. “She sounded pissed off.”

“Jani?” Al’s surprise was all the answer she needed. “No, she’s not pissed off with you. With life in general, maybe, and with hormones and a dry cracker diet in particular, but she’s good with you.”

“I’m glad.”

“We’re both waiting for the second trimester to get under way. It usually settles down then.”

Hawkin the expectant father, Kate thought in amusement, and wondered idly if she and he would share hints and complaints when and if Lee was in Jani’s condition. The thought brought the entire possibility of Lee and a baby into abrupt focus, and for a long moment Kate sat naked on the toilet seat, bemused by the whole situation. Al’s growl jerked her to attention.

“Martinelli, is that all you phoned to ask?”

“No, Al, sorry. Didn’t get much sleep last night. Do you have a minute?”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay. Last night we had Roz and Maj over, and got to talking about religion and the conservative Right with their anti-gay programs and the bombing of abortion clinics. And then Jon mentioned that Web site that everyone was talking about when the doctor back East was shot, the Web site that lists doctors and clinic directors, their families and home addresses, all kinds of things nobody would want a nut to get ahold of.”

“The hit list.”

“Exactly.”

“Do I see where this is going?” Al asked slowly, and Kate knew him well enough to hear the excitement in his voice. She hugged herself to keep warm.

“You do. It took me forever, but I found one that is a kind of mirror image. It’s called Womyn of the EVEning—that’s w-o-m-y-n, and the e-v-e in evening is capitalized. It’s only been online since January, which may be why nobody’s heard about it. It isn’t one of those governmental lists, notifying residents they might have a sex offender as a neighbor. This one’s a list of suspects who are known to beat their wives, abuse kids physically or sexually, or rape women. Each guy is given a case history, his arrest and conviction record, and a list of the things he’s suspected of that he didn’t get taken down for because the courts weren’t able to prove anything further. You know the routine—tainted evidence, a withdrawn statement by a victim or witness, circumstantial evidence without direct corroboration, that sort of thing. There were a couple of plea bargains for lesser offenses. God knows where all their information came from, though it looks to me like somebody’s getting into things they shouldn’t.”

“Hackers?”

“Or an inside source.”

“How many on the list?”

“Two hundred fourteen names.”

“ What? In four months? Christ, Martinelli.”

“Makes you think, doesn’t it? It’s compiled by a woman who seems to be somewhere in Nebraska. People send her names, and if they match her criteria—that’s what she calls it—she adds them to the list, with their phone numbers and addresses. I’ve sent her an imaginary case, to see what she does with it, what kind of checks she runs.”

“Are any of our—” Al started, but Kate was already there.

“They’re all on it. All three.”

Al was silent, then said what was on both their minds.

“That takes it out of our hands for sure. Have you called Marcowitz yet?”

“My next call, after I talked to you.”

“The feds’ll be embarrassed that you found it first,” he said, pleased at the idea.

“I thought I might point that out, if they try to cut us out of the loop completely.”

“Blackmail, Martinelli? Not nice.”

“Just doing my job, Al.”

“Sure you are. Find anything else interesting on the list?”

“Don’t know about interesting, but there’s going to be a hell of a lot of work there. But Al? There are a bunch of connecting sites, things like legal information for victims, do-it-yourself PI work, how to go underground, that kind of thing. I haven’t been through all of them yet, but I had two interesting hits. One of them was a self-defense site that talked about, among other things, buying and using various kinds of taser.” Hawkin grunted in reaction. “The other—frankly, I don’t know what to think. Roz Hall’s church has a Web site two links away.”

Chapter 16

KATE HAD NOT BEEN inside Roz and Maj’s house since the previous Thanksgiving. It looked as if she was not about to enter it today, either, since there was no response to either doorbell or knuckles. She had thought she was early enough to catch them, and Roz’s red Jeep stood in the driveway, but the house was empty. Try again later.

She had her car door open when Maj’s boxy white BMW rounded the corner, lights on and wipers going against the morning drizzle. It signaled its turn to an empty street and pulled sedately into the drive. While Kate waited for the doors to open, she reflected that either cars were no indication of personality, or else a certain degree of incompatibility was no bad thing in a relationship: Whereas Roz drove a big, battered, once-flashy but still new vehicle that already had a dozen political stickers superimposed in layers on the back bumper, Maj stuck to the car she had bought new twelve years before, a car as immaculate and scrupulously maintained as its owner, which usually wore a single bumper sticker, scraped off and changed two or three times a year at Maj’s whim, its message either puzzling or humorous, if not both. Her most recent one, Kate noticed, declared that real women drive stick. The BMW, needless to say, had a manual transmission.

The car doors opened and the two women got out, followed by a large black dog, which shook itself damply, spotted Kate, and launched itself down the sidewalk toward her as if she was either a long-lost soul mate or a mortal enemy. Before Kate could decide between pulling her gun or a swift retreat into her car, Roz spoke sharply and the dog skidded to a halt, casting Kate a longing glance before it returned to Roz’s side.

“You’re up and around early,” Roz declared. “Were you looking for us?”

“I thought I missed you. I should’ve called first.”

“Maj just dropped Mina off at school and circled around to pick me up from my run. I don’t think you’ve met the newest addition—this is Mouton, also known as Mutton, or Mutt to his friends.”

“Mutt?”

“What can I say? It’s what he answers to.”

“Because he’s a mutt?”

“No,” said Roz, bending down to take the dog’s damp head between her hands and rub it vigorously back and forth. “It’s because he’s just an overgrown lamb,” she crooned at him, to his ecstasy.

Mutt was mostly black Lab with the addition of something from the fluffier end of the gene pool, and he did look a bit like a sheep. A wet, smelly, wriggling sheep who, when his mistress had released him, wanted nothing but to bound up into Kate’s arms but settled for washing the back of her outstretched hand with an enthusiastic tongue. Perhaps a black sheep, Kate thought, noticing Maj’s disapproving glance at the animal’s damp and sandy feet. How did one train a dog to wipe his feet at the door?

“He’s very nice,” she said obediently, though she’d never been much for dogs. “How long have you had him?”

“Couple of months. He belongs to a friend who moved back to England. She couldn’t stand the thought of locking him up for their six-month quarantine, so we sort of inherited him, unless she decides to come back. Mina adores him, and Maj approves of the way he forces me to get some exercise. Want a cup of coffee?”

“Love one.”

“Are you in a hurry?” Roz asked over her shoulder, her key in the lock. “If you’re not, I’ll jump in and out of the shower first so we don’t have to leave all the windows open. Mutt doesn’t mind my delicate fragrance, but human noses tend to twitch.”

“Shower ahead, there’s no rush.”

Mutt did have the manners to shake himself before entering the house, and he pounded up the stairs on Roz’s heels. Maj shook her head affectionately and led Kate back into the large, spotless, very Scandinavian-looking kitchen to put on a pot of coffee for Roz and Kate and a cup of herbal tea for herself and the baby. She moved more heavily these days, balancing against the weight in front, and Kate reflected that on the way over this morning she had seen four other pregnant women, at various places along the streets. Either half the city was pregnant, or she had babies on the brain.

“The smell of coffee doesn’t bother you?” Kate asked. Giving up coffee for nine months if Lee got pregnant was not an appealing thought.

“No,” Maj replied. “Should it?”

“My partner Al’s wife is pregnant and says that coffee makes her sick. I just wondered if it’s a common reaction.”

“Coffee doesn’t affect me. It’s odd things like chicken and celery that get to me.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“How’s my step-goddaughter? Over her monkey phase yet?”

“I wish. She found a book on Jane Goodall last week. Now she wants to go to Africa and live with the chimpanzees.”

“And you? Getting any work done?” A person tended to forget that Maj Freiling had a life out from the shadow of Roz Hall and the family structure, but that was partly due to the general uncertainty about what Maj’s job was. It was neither psychology nor brain surgery, but existed somewhere between the two, and seemed to consist of conversations with researchers on how people thought. She was, Kate knew, working on and off writing a book, which Lee had explained as having to do with sex-linked characteristics and gender role expectations, but that too was made up of apparently unrelated fragments rather than a unifying thesis. Today’s conversation was typical.

“Oh, yes,” Maj answered. “I came across an interesting man at San Francisco State who is looking at the complexity of our perception of a person’s voice, how we can judge sex and age, education and authority just by a few words over the telephone. He is working from an evolutionary viewpoint, the question of why a person’s voice perception is so capable of reading subtle clues, almost as much as visual perception. I am more interested in the consequences, but I am thinking of adding a chapter, or at any rate a few pages, on the subject. It is most distracting,” she added with a laugh, seeing that Kate was not following any of it. Her accent, almost nonexistent in everyday conversation, became more precisely European when she spoke about her work, Kate noticed, and wondered what message this voice perception carried.

They drank their hot drinks and talked about this and that, and then Roz came back in, her hair wet and Mutt’s nearly dry, to pour herself some coffee and a bowl of cereal.

“Want anything to eat?” she asked Kate, who declined the offer. “Well, let me fill up your cup again and we’ll get out from under Maj’s feet.”

Roz’s office was as untidy as the kitchen was neat, bookshelves sagging, a door-on-sawhorses set up at a right angle to a sturdy oak desk, both entirely buried in books and files and computer printouts. Roz walked around to the niche surrounded by desks and shelves and balanced her bowl and cup on top of a stack of folders. She waved Kate to the chair across from her and began to spoon up her breakfast.

“What have you found about Pramilla Mehta?” she asked around a mouthful of granola. “Can you prove yet that her husband killed her?”

“The investigation is, as they say, ongoing.”

Roz peered at her over the laden desk. “You can’t talk about it.”

Kate pulled a face. “It’s difficult. He was clearly mentally deficient, and possibly mentally disturbed. We’re having a profile put together, to see if he had a potential for violent outbursts followed by careful planning. I mean, we know he could be violent, but the cover-up is the question. I personally don’t think he did, but then I only met him once, and he wasn’t in very good shape at the time.” If Roz was either surprised or suspicious at Kate’s willingness to share information, she did not show it, but Kate knew that there would be no forthcoming information from Roz if Kate did not at least give the appearance of openness. And she had actually not given Roz anything that wasn’t in the papers.

Roz chewed for a minute and washed it down with a swallow of coffee. “I’ve had a word with the mayor and your chief of police last night, suggesting that the murder of Pramilla Mehta may need closer examination. It’s going to be a touchy subject—the Indian community is not going to be thrilled to be accused of the barbaric act of burning young brides—but at the same time we can’t ignore it. This’ll be a political hot potato.”

Kate gaped at her, unwilling to believe what she had just heard, but unable to put any other interpretation on it. “Roz, what the hell did you do that for? How do you expect us to carry out an investigation with a bunch of politicians sitting on our shoulders?”

“Are you angry?” Roz sounded puzzled, and Kate for a moment thought it might be an honest reaction. But no—it had to be an act; no one as well versed in the workings of the city as Roz Hall could fail to grasp consequences so innocently.

“Of course I’m angry. You shove the case into my hands and then, when two days go by without an arrest, you snatch it away and say that nothing’s being done. For Christ sake, Roz, I’ve got the FBI and a hundred reporters to deal with and now—you might have warned me you were about to drop City Hall on me as well.”

“I thought you could use the additional manpower,” Roz protested. “I told them you were doing the best you—”

“Christ, Roz, you know full well what this’ll involve. A string of meetings holding hands and explaining how we have to do it, hours and hours eaten up that could be better spent—” Kate realized that Roz was not paying any attention to her words, but was looking past her at the door. Kate turned in her chair and saw Maj’s apologetic face looking in.

“It’s Jory on the phone,” she said to Roz. “There’s a problem with the information packets for the meeting this afternoon. Something about copyright questions and the copy shop?”

Roz rubbed at her face in irritation and stood up. “I’m sorry Kate, I have to deal with this. I’ll be back in a minute.” She followed Maj out of the room, although there was a telephone on the desk, and closed the door. Kate too got to her feet and paced up and down the crowded room. She paused at Roz’s desk to glance at the books Roz was reading now, and found her usual wild assortment of titles: Evoking the Goddess; Awakening Female Power; When the Drummers Were Women. Kate reflected that the first time she’d met Roz, the minister had been holding an armful of odd titles. She smiled at the memory, and at a framed picture of Mina and Maj at the zoo, in front of the orangutan enclosure.

Roz was probably only trying to help, in her own heavy-handed way, Kate told herself. It was a pain, but not a disaster; hell, it might even mean she and Hawkin got some help with the scut work and typing.

Kate realized that the object on the desk in front of her was a bound copy of Roz’s thesis, firmly described on the front page as a “first draft.” It was titled “Women’s Rage and Men’s Dishonor: Manifestations of the Violent Goddess in the Hebrew Bible.” She opened it curiously to glance over what Roz was doing.

The brief introduction was relatively intelligible, as academic writing went. Roz seemed to be looking at ways in which the warrior-goddesses of the ancient Near East (Ishtar and Asherah Kate had heard of, though not Anat or Hathor), their stories, songs, and characteristics, welled up in the tales and ideas of the Old Testament. After a general introduction, however, the writing seemed to become more technical and heavily footnoted, sprinkled with Roman numeral references, foreign phrases, capitalized abbreviations, and words like Masoretic and Septuagintal. Lee might make sense of it, Kate thought, but for someone who hadn’t done any scholarly reading in too many years to count, it did not look like easy bedtime reading.

Thumbing through the thick document, Kate spotted a few pages that were not text. Some were reproductions of archaeological reports, alternating with pen-and-ink sketches and photocopies of photographs. One picture showed a sculpture of a female head and torso with glaring eyes, her sharp teeth pulled back from a grotesquely long protruding tongue, with a variety of objects in her four hands. The caption said “Durga,” and Kate figured she was an Indian goddess like Kali because of the multiple arms. Not a warm and friendly goddess, though. Even Mutton would hesitate to give those hands an affectionate tongue-bath.

The door opened and Roz came back in. Kate let the thesis fall shut and moved away so Roz could resume her place and her breakfast.

“Sorry, Kate, but Jory is not the most competent secretary I’ve ever had, and I have to have a report together by this afternoon. Look, I’m really sorry about going over your head. I just didn’t think.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kate heard herself saying. “I’m sure it’ll work out. Finish your breakfast, your granola will get soggy.”

“Granola never gets soggy,” Roz pointed out, taking up her spoon. “It’s like wood fiber, needs to go rotten before it gives up its cellulose. Did you come to see me about Pramilla Mehta? And what can I do—to help rather than hinder?”

“Just back off, and I’ll call if you can help. No, it’s not specifically about her, though it may have to do with her husband’s death. I wanted to ask, what do you know about a Web site called ‘Womyn of the evening’?”

Kate, watching Roz carefully, saw the wariness descend.

“I’ve heard of it,” Roz told her, which Kate decided meant that she knew the site but hesitated to admit it until she could see where this was heading.

“Your church’s site and that one are linked through a third site that gives information on self-defense for women. Dirty self-defense—eye-gouging, breaking eardrums, biting off various body parts.” She was being deliberately abrasive, but Roz did not react, merely responded.

“It’s a nasty world.”

“And attackers deserve to lose ears and penises, and habitual abusers deserve to be killed.”

“Is that what their Web site’s line is?” Roz said evenly. “If that’s true, I may have to ask them to sever the link with our church.”

“Roz, you can’t expect me to believe that there’s a Web site with a provocative name two steps away from yours that you haven’t visited.”

For a moment Kate thought that was precisely what Roz would assert, which meant that unless Kate could get a warrant to find what sites Roz’s computer had visited, and she could prove that only Roz used the computer, she might as well walk away now.

But Roz relented. “Yes,” she said. “I have glanced at the Web site.”

“I have three murders on my hands whose names were on that site. I’m not going to ask you why nobody happened to bring this to my attention, not at the moment anyway, but I’m troubled by the fact that the only link we’ve been able to find between two of the men is that Web site. A Web site that your church is closely tied to.”

Roz finally flared up. “Neither the church nor my own parish has anything to do with that list. You can hardly hold us responsible for the killing of three men just because we share a link on the Internet.”

“I don’t hold you responsible,” said Kate evenly. “But I think you should brace yourselves for when the media finds out about it.”

Roz half rose in her chair, putting both palms on the littered desk as if about to come over the top of it at Kate. “You wouldn’t. If you dare to leak any of this—”

“I won’t have to leak anything, Roz, you know that. It’s surprising that no enterprising reporter has come up with it already.”

“Kate, if I find that you—”

Kate’s composure abruptly snapped. “Don’t, Roz. Do not threaten me.”

They glared at each other over Roz’s life’s work, and in the end the minister gave ground before the cop. Her gaze wavered and Kate could see her decide that this was not the best way to handle the situation. Her hackles went down, her palms came off the desk and went back to her lap as she settled down in the chair. She even tried for a crooked smile.

“No. Sorry, I know you wouldn’t do that to me. God—you of all people wouldn’t turn a friend over to the media sharks. I apologize.”

“Actually, Roz, they may be the least of your problems. Because of the Internet aspect, the FBI is now going to take over a large part of this investigation. Al and I are still involved,” she added with satisfaction— Roz Hall was not the only skilled manipulator in the room—“but it’s out of our hands now. I’ll do as much as I can to run interference with them, but they’ll want answers, and if I can’t get the answers for them, they’ll come to you direct. One of the things they’ll ask you is, Do you know who submitted the names of James Larsen, Matthew Banderas, and Laxman Mehta to the Web site?”

“No,” Roz answered—too quickly, Kate thought.

“Would you tell me if you did?” Kate demanded.

“Probably not.”

“But you do know who has been responsible for the actions of the group known as the LOPD.” Kate made it a statement, and Roz did not try to deny it outright.

“I may have heard some rumors, but they are not connected with these deaths, Kate. I swear I do not think they are.”

“Give me their names, I’ll ask them. Myself, not just handing the names over to the feds,” Kate offered, but Roz was shaking her head before the sentence was finished.

“I can’t do that, Kate, I’m sorry.”

“You’re willing to play God, condemn to death men even the courts can’t? To be an accomplice?”

“I told you, I don’t know who put their names on the list, I don’t know who killed them.” This time Kate let the silence stretch out, until Roz gave way and broke it. “As for playing God, it works the other way, too. Even if I knew, it would be playing God to turn the killers in. If what you’re saying is true, they’ve chosen to become judges in a society that refuses to take that responsibility. I’d have to think long and hard before I could decide they were wrong.”

“Judge and executioner,” Kate pointed out.

“Judge and executioner,” Roz accepted. “The ultimate in responsibility.”

“I thought God wanted us to practice forgiveness.”

“There are times when God would have us practice justice instead.”

“Or revenge?”

“There are times to turn the other cheek, and times to get out the whip and overturn the tables of the corrupt in the Temple. This may be one of the second.”

“And you wouldn’t tell me who’s doing it.”

“If I knew, I would regard it as privileged information.”

“The FBI is going to turn you inside out.”

“They can try.”

“There are better causes to choose if you want martyrdom, Roz.”

“Not very many. Kate, my church does not have ritualized, formal confession like the Roman Catholics do, but if someone were to tell me of their involvement in this, as an ordained priest I would regard it as inviolable. To you or to the FBI.

“All of which,” she hastened to say, “is theoretical. Since I don’t actually know anything.”

“Tell me about your Ph.D. thesis.”

“My what?” Roz asked, thrown off balance by the abrupt change in direction.

“Your thesis. About women’s rage.”

Roz flushed, an interesting reaction. “In the Old Testament,” she said with force. “It’s largely about how the pre-Israelite goddesses influenced the developing cult of Yahweh. It’s a Ph.D. thesis, for Christ sake. You should know they never have anything to do with real life.”

Kate nodded as if Roz had actually told her something, and then abruptly stood up, thanked Roz, and left. She was not certain just what she had accomplished—other than severely disconcerting the woman behind the desk. Still, it was not easy to throw Roz Hall, and surely having done so counted for something.

Chapter 17

OVER THE COURSE OF that damp morning, the FBI’s information came dutifully in, as trickles or in undigested lumps. Five additional men on the Web site list that Kate had uncovered had died in the last few months, and several others were simply missing. Late in the afternoon came news of a cluster of three men, from Georgia up through the Carolinas, that gave Kate a nasty feeling, since all of them just disappeared from their daily lives into thin air. In one case a badly decomposed body had been found out in the woods by the first hikers of spring. It was suspected to be the missing man from South Carolina; DNA testing was under way.

Of the five known dead, three had clearly been murdered, two of those gunned down in New York a month apart by the same gun, and no suspects identified. There was one accident on the list (and reading the faxed report of the man’s blood alcohol level and the absence of skid marks or mechanical failure, Kate had to agree that he had simply passed out at the wheel and gone off the road and into a bridge support at high speed) and another man had committed suicide, but if the suicide was not actually assisted, his family swore he had been more or less driven to death’s door and handed a gun. For weeks before he had put a bullet in his head, the convicted child abuser had been the object of a barrage of letters, photos, and phone calls, threatening, taunting, and merciless. At home and at work, his colleagues and his neighbors included, the pressure had been unrelenting and around the clock. Until he killed himself.

In the three weeks since his death, his family had received nothing further.

The fifth death, the third confirmed murder victim, was close to home, both physically and in regards to their investigation. His name was Larry Goff, and he had died in Sacramento, less than three hours from downtown San Francisco, with strapping tape on his wrists.

Goff’s wife, Tamara, according to the Web site and the Sacramento detective Kate talked to, had been to the hospital emergency room five times in two years for treatment of chronic “accidents,” and had separated from her husband, with a restraining order in place. In early November, Goff was accused of kidnapping their two children—picking them up from school on a Friday afternoon and taking them for the weekend without telling his wife. He brought them back to her on the Sunday, and when arrested he claimed that she had given him permission, but the kidnap charges stood. He was granted bail, and the subsequent investigation had been wending its slow way through the court system when Tamara was found in her bedroom one morning in December, dead of an overdose of prescription pain pills. At the time of death, she had a fresh plaster cast on one arm and two broken teeth in the left side of her jaw. There was no indication of suicide, and nothing to show that she had been force-fed the pills. She was simply in pain, and she made a mistake.

Tamara’s sister claimed the children, and with the pending kidnap charge hanging over their father, the courts granted her temporary custody. Then two weeks later, a few days before New Year’s, Goff was found in a hotel frequented by prostitutes, bound, gagged, and strangled to death. His wallet and watch had been missing, though not his gold wedding band. Police investigators determined that he had been lured to the room by a woman the manager had not seen before, although he surmised her profession by her clothing. Once in the room, she and possibly an accomplice had overpowered Goff, killed, and robbed him.

“Do you have a copy of the autopsy report in front of you?” Kate asked the Sacramento detective over the phone.

“Sure. You want me to fax it to you?”

“That would be helpful. I’m looking for any red mark on the torso. A taser burn.”

A minute of silence broken only by distant voices and the sound of pages turning was ended with a “Nope. Don’t see anything like that here. There were some marks—you can see them in the photographs— but they looked more like immediately premortem bruising.”

“Okay. You haven’t seen anything else with that MO?”

“No, and we’ve been watching, since it’s such an oddity. I mean, how many hookers use strapping tape for bondage games? Hairy guy like Goff, he’d have little bald patches all over him. Imagine explaining that to your girlfriend back home.”

Kate had to laugh at the image.

“You’ll see when you get the photos that his beard’s kinda mangy looking. That’s from cutting away the tape. In fact, I heard about your duct-tape guys the other day, and I was going to call you—different stuff, I know, but close. Then something came up and I forgot about it.”

“That happens,” Kate said. Not to her, damn it, but she tried to keep the irritation from her voice; there was no point in alienating a colleague, particularly one who had a file she wanted to see. “Did you develop any suspects?”

“Nada. We thought at first it might be revenge, you know, since the wife died, but as far as anyone knew, Tamara had no contact with prostitutes, was never arrested, our informants had never seen her on the streets, so it wasn’t some friends doing a little payback. This was Tamara’s second marriage, so we looked at her first husband, just in case, but he’s out of the picture, happily remarried and living in Miami, no indication that he was away at the time of the murder. No brother or father around that we could find, not even a mother, though a friend of Tamara’s said there is one somewhere. The two kids are with Tamara’s sister now, she’s looking to adopt if she can talk the ex-husband in Florida into it. His wife doesn’t want them, and only one of them is his, the other’s Goff’s.”

Kate thanked the detective, and when the fax came through a while later she studied the face with the small blue eyes, trimmed beard, and dark mole on the left side of the nose, but neither the picture nor the report told her much. No sign of candy on the body, not in the report at any rate. She filed it away, and went back to her phone calls.

Of the 200 or so living (presumably living) members of the abuser’s hit list, by the end of the day, the team had succeeded in making contact with just over half. The others had either moved or had their phones disconnected, and the investigators were forced to wait for the local departments and regional agents to report back. Two of the deaths came to light in this way, but for most of the remaining names it would be days before the locals got a chance to check the individuals out and get back to them.

In the meantime, of the 127 men the team had found, men scattered from Key Biscayne to Seattle, nearly all said that they had received some form of threatening communication, and three-quarters of them had gotten a dozen or more letters, faxes, three a.m. phone calls, or anonymous e-mail messages. Due to their own legal entanglements, the men on the list were less likely than the general population to complain to the police, but a number of them had, although neither police nor telephone companies had been able to identify the anonymous senders. Even the e-mail had come from public computers in libraries and Internet cafes.

The Web site did prove to be operated by a woman in Nebraska, which struck Kate as incongruous, for some reason. Still, remote or not, Stella DeVries knew her rights and her high-powered lawyer refused to let her say anything aside from a public declaration that she had not advocated any act of harassment or violence, and that freedom of speech included listing the names of accused offenders with the disclaimer that they were innocent until found guilty in a court of law—which disclaimer was indeed prominently displayed on the Web site, albeit at the very end.

The entire Internet side of the investigation was now the property of the federal authorities, and Kate had no choice but to let other law enforcement agencies deal with Ms. DeVries and her well-prepared law team. Kate and Al could only walk around the edges and try to see how their cases tied in.

Finally, late that evening, Al laid his hand on Kate’s collar and dragged her away from her computer terminal to a late-night diner much beloved of the cops who worked out of the Hall of Justice. Kate’s back felt permanently hunched, her fingers crabbed into the typing position. She couldn’t remember when she had last eaten, or what.

They had been living on coffee for all that long day and craving a strong drink for the last half of it, so they both compromised and had a beer with their hamburgers. Kate swallowed deeply and closed her eyes in appreciation; following that brief vacation she sat forward and returned to work.

“I can’t believe how long it takes sometimes for things like this Web site to come to light,” she groaned.

“It’s only been up for, what was it, twelve weeks?”

“Closer to fourteen.”

“And there’s obviously a lot of personal support for the list, off-Web contacts that can’t be traced. All the Web site says is, Here’s the guy’s name and where he lives; here’s what he’s accused of; let him know how you feel. Nothing about murdering him or hounding him to suicide. I personally can’t see that there’s anything illegal about it. What’s the precedent, anyway? Can you get a restraining order against a Web site?” Hawkin wondered.

“Unless there’s a really clear link between a violent act and a Web site’s ranting, it’s hard to shut it down,” Kate reminded him. Al no doubt knew this, but he tended to push the electronic world as far away from his life as he could.

Their food arrived, hot and beautifully greasy, and they turned their attention to it. In a short time Kate was contemplating a few limp and lonely french fries and thinking that the hamburger really hadn’t been as large as it looked. The waitress, standing by the table as if summoned, asked if they wanted something else.

“Actually,” Kate told her, “I’d like the same again.”

“For me, too,” said Al. “And another couple of beers.”

The two partners sat without speaking, suspended between the points of work and companionship, hunger and satiation. When the second half of their meal came they ate and drank with an almost ritual slowness, and both sighed at the end.

“I didn’t realize I was so hungry,” Al said, sounding amused.

“What’s that phrase? My sides were clapping together like an empty portmanteau.” Kate belched demurely and pushed away the plate, leaving the trimmings of lettuce and orange slice. “Whatever a portmanteau is. So, Al. What do we do? Are these about to become the feds’ completely, or still ours, or what?”

“They’re still ours until they kick us off. The hit list is their business—we just uncovered it. You did. Though I wouldn’t wait for any more thanks than you’ve got.”

“I won’t. So it’s back to our very own trio of abusers.”

“And possibly what’s-his-name, Goff, in Sacramento.”

“Be nice to find out if anyone in the city has regular contact with Ms. DeVries and her list. You suppose the FBI will tell us?”

“I don’t think we should wait for that either.”

It was frustrating not knowing what information would come from the federal investigation-and frustrating to know that the feds might well solve all three murders in one day, by working them from the opposite direction.

“We go on as before?” Kate asked.

“Who knows? We might even get there first.”

“I suppose,” Kate said thoughtfully, “it doesn’t really matter where the killer—or killers—found out about their victims. I mean, they could have gotten the names out of newspapers and court reports, inside contacts in the hospitals and shelters, even just word of mouth. Man beats wife, the neighbors know. That seems to be the way the Ladies find their victims. Berry Doyle and the rest of the LOPD victims aren’t on the Web site.”

“But, who would respond to stranger’s troubles by killing the stranger’s abuser, or rapist? A lot of people might want to , but wanting is a long way from doing. Strangling an unconscious stranger isn’t a thing just anybody can do. Assuming, as we have been, that they are strangers.”

“I agree,” she said. “It takes someone with a major load of resentment and anger. Cold rage.” The word brought to Kate’s mind the troubling title she’d seen on Roz’s desk. “You know, Roz Hall’s Ph.D. thesis is on ‘women’s rage’ and something about violent goddesses. Maybe I should take a closer look at it.”

Hawkin cocked his head at the tone of her voice. “And at her?”

Kate rubbed her face tiredly. “I’ve been turning that over in my mind a lot, and I just can’t say what I think. She’s an obvious candidate, because she’s so involved in the movement here, but you know, I can’t see it, can’t see her working herself up to that kind of hatred. Still, God knows she’s a woman with a lot of sides to her. I think it may be time to ask some hard questions about her alibis for the nights involved.”

“Probably better if I do it. I’m not a friend.”

“Let me start, see what I come up with. I’ll hand it over to you if there’s not a conclusive negative.”

“Who else, other than her?”

Kate gazed off into the night street outside the diner, assembling her thoughts. “We tend to think of anger as a sudden thing, an eruption into violence that fades and is over, either permanently or until the next time.” Most of the homicides they dealt with were this way, either in the home fueled by alcohol and stress or on the street corner fueled by drugs, territoriality, and young male hormones. Hawkin nodded, and Kate went on. “Serial killers are something else, of course. They work either on voices in their heads or sexual impulses. Anger feeds into it, but it’s secondary.” Again Hawkin nodded, and Kate sat forward, laying her forearms out on the worn Formica table.

“Then there are the terrorists, mass or serial killers who tie their anger in with their intellect.” God, she thought uneasily; could I describe Roz Hall any more clearly? “For them, rage is channeled through political action; their personal resentments and injuries, all their personal histories are given meaning by what they do. Revenge is taken not on the individual soldier who beat you up or the guy from the other side who blew up your little sister with a pipe bomb, but on all of ‘them,” the whole group that soldier or the bomb-thrower represent.“

“Sounds like you’ve talked this over with Lee,” Al commented.

“No.” He looked up at the tight, brief negative, and she had to explain. “I can’t go into this without making Roz a part of it, and Lee and Roz are close. They were lovers, a long time ago, and Roz has done an enormous amount in bringing Lee back to life. We owe her a lot. I owe her. They’re family.”

“I don’t know that Roz has anything to do with these murders—like I said, I can’t believe she does. But I think she has either knowledge or at least her suspicions. She talked about the inviolability of confession in a way that sounded… potential. As if nobody had come to her yet to confess, but she thought they might. And the subject matter of her thesis shows she’s been thinking about the idea of women’s anger for a while.”

“Terrorism, like Peter Mehta said. Against abusers.” Hawkin sounded more thoughtful than dubious.

“Selective terrorism. Although if they could come up with a way to eliminate large numbers of abusers at one throw, I doubt that they’d hesitate.” Kate thought of the flyer advocating poison pills for male babies, triggered at the first sign that the boy was becoming abusive.

“Terrorists generally go for publicity,” Al objected. “Why haven’t they sent in a manifesto to Channel Five or the New York Times?”

“Maybe they thought they’d see how many they could get away with before it came out and the abusers started to watch their backs.”

Hawkin took a thoughtful bite of his elderly orange slice. “So, not one vigilante, but ‘they.” How many do you see here?“

“I suppose it could be one person.”

“Male or female?”

Kate started to answer, then closed her mouth and thought for a minute. “You know, we’ve been thinking of this as a woman’s thing, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be a man. Someone who lost a sister, maybe, or whose daughter was raped. God,” she said with a laugh, “wouldn’t that be ironic? Woman’s revenge carried out by a man.”

“Sensitive New Age guy goes overboard.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Now you’re writing newspaper headlines?”

“I may need a second job to support the new kid. But you were saying it could be one, or—?”

“If it’s a single individual, a woman, she’s got to be strong enough physically to handle a man the size of James Larsen, and with an immensely strong personality that could plan and carry out a series of methodical murders without falling apart.”

“Either that or she’s nuts.”

“Either that or she’s nuts,” Kate agreed. “But even that is a form of strength. If it’s a group, on the other hand, I’d say it has to be a small one, probably no more than two or three. Like you said, finding a person who could help you commit murder in cold blood wouldn’t be that easy. Anything but a very tight group, you’d have someone who talked or bragged or fell to pieces with remorse.”

“I agree. But finding them through the Web site is no longer our business. Unless, of course, we happen across the bigger picture in our own investigation.” Hawkin scratched his bristly jaw and shoved back his chair. “Time to go home, Martinelli. Get your beauty sleep, give Lee a back rub, sing Gilbert and Sullivan karaoke with Jon.”

Kate too got to her feet. “You make it sound so attractive, Hawkin.”

They sorted out dollar bills for the waitress, and went their separate ways.

When Kate got home she found the lights turned down and the house’s other residents asleep. She also found a package waiting for her on the table in the hall, an oversized mailing envelope containing something the shape and weight of a box of typing paper. Clipped to the end of the envelope was a note in Lee’s writing that said:

Roz came by with this tonight, said she had the impression that you wanted to see it so she printed you a copy.

Hope you’re not going to try to read it in bed.

—L.

It was a box of typing paper, or 487 sheets of it, anyway, unbound. On the first page was the title.

women’s rage and men’s dishonor: manifestations of the violent goddess in the hebrew bible

Chapter 18

KATE HAD NO INTENTION of settling in to read 487 pages of turgid doctoral prose, not after the day—the string of days—she’d had. She made herself a cup of decaf coffee that was mostly hot milk and sat at the kitchen table with the massive piece of work to glance through it, more so she could tell Roz she’d done so than from any great interest.

Two and a half hours later she suddenly realized that if she didn’t go to bed soon, she would not be going to bed at all. Once she had decided to skip over the lengthy footnotes with their detailed discussions of opposing points of view and debates of the subtle meanings of words and objects, the text moved right along. Indeed, instead of the usual dry technical language employed by every thesis Kate had ever seen, Roz wrote in straightforward, even lyrical English prose that drew the reader on, and in, as if this was a popular work designed to inspire a general audience. Why was she surprised, Kate asked herself; everything that damn woman set her hand to was compelling, why not her doctoral thesis?

Like most nominal Christians, and most enthusiastic believers as well, Kate had never given much thought to what came Before Christ. Oh sure, the Old Testament had been around before the New, which explained its complexity and seeming lack of unifying theme, but before the Old Testament there were what? Patriarchs and Canaanites and goatherds and things, wandering dimly through the desert.

In Roz’s hands the Bible came alive, revealing itself as a document of the human spirit with roots reaching far back into the history of humankind, before the stories were written down, back to an age when high-tech weaponry was made out of bronze, and even stone.

The name Baal appeared on page three, abruptly calling to mind Kate’s long-ago Sunday School classes taught by the tightly girdled Miss Steinlaker. The priests of Baal, it had been (and for an instant Kate was back in that drafty church classroom with Miss Steinlaker looming over her, smelling of chalk, perfume, menthol cigarettes, and the musk of unwashed clothing). The priests of Baal had lit something on fire, hadn’t they? Or perhaps had failed to do so. Kate blinked, and the classroom vanished, and Roz was explaining that Baal was a Canaanite storm god, a young warrior deity about whom hymns were written down on clay tablets, describing Baal as the Rider on the Clouds. Then a thousand years later the Israelites came out from Egypt and settled in the land, and soon they, too, were speaking of their God as a young warrior heaving thunderbolts across the sky, calling Him “Rider on the Clouds.”

It was not stealing, Roz explained firmly, and it should not be thought that the people Israel were trying to change their God’s nature or attach other gods to His coattails in a sort of religious corporate takeover bid. It had to do with framing a language of theology, using the images and descriptions of others to more richly describe the wonder of the one true God’s majesty and complexity.

If this was so, Roz then asked rhetorically, what of the images and language that described the unique actions and characteristics of the goddess figures so common in the ancient Near East, Anat and Asherah, Ishtar and Inanna? Were they simply condemned as idolatry, as the Prophets would have us believe? Or did their poetry and songs, their epithets and personalities, resonate so strongly in the minds of the people that, despite the goddesses’ inextricable connection with the forbidden fertility cults and their obvious antithesis to the masculine figure of Yahweh, God of Israel, some of their nature survived in Him, some of the goddesses’ stories became adopted and adapted by the people Israel?

This question came a bare twenty pages into the document, and amounted to Roz’s introduction, laying the groundwork for the thesis itself.

The thesis being that Yahweh did indeed come to incorporate certain characteristics of a group of Near Eastern goddess figures whom Roz classified as Warrior Virgins—virginity, as Roz had mentioned the night of Song but had been too distracted to explain, being for divine beings not indicative of physical innocence but rather a state of proud independence from males, of not being defined by their male consort.

As role models for women set on taking back the night, these goddesses were a fearsome bunch. Take the verses illustrating the goddess Anat:

Heads roll about like balls,

hands fly up like locusts,

like a swarm of grasshoppers, the warriors’ hands.

Anat ties the heads as a necklace,

she fastens the hands around her waist…

Her soul swells up with laughter,

her heart bursts with joy. Anat’s soul is joyous

as she wades to her knees in the blood of soldiers,

to her thighs in the gore of warriors.

No, thought Kate, Miss Steinlaker had never told her Sunday School class about this.

There was the goddess Inanna, who aside from being a goddess of fertility was also a fearsome warrior:

In the mountain stronghold that holds back homage,

the very vegetation is cursed, The city’s great gates,

O Inanna,

you have burnt to ash.

Its rivers run with blood,

the people cannot drink.

Then came the Indian goddess Kali, a close cousin to the virgin warriors of the Middle East, who lived in the cremation grounds, ate pieces of the bodies, and wore a necklace of human heads and a belt decorated with severed hands. She was followed by a description of the bloodthirsty Egyptian Hathor, appeased only by a great flood of red beer poured across the land like the blood she takes it to be. The Mesopotamian Ishtar called down a raging storm on humanity until they floated like dead fish on the sea, and the Greek Demeter condemned the earth to bare sterility to revenge the abduction and rape of her daughter.

Why do people think of goddesses as wide-hipped, large-breasted, loving bringers of fertility? Kate wondered uncomfortably. These women were terrifying.

Kate went to pour herself a glass of wine, looked at the rich red liquid in the glass, and dumped it down the sink, taking instead a shot of nice safe amber brandy from the cooking supplies. She continued reading, about revenge and wrath and the sheer joy of killing, and she winced when she came to Roz’s description of Kali:

She is young and beautiful, old and haggard, dark-skinned as a blow in the face of the pale, high-ranking Aryan castes, savage and loving and utterly enamored with bloodshed. Kali is created by the great goddess Durga for the express purpose of conquering a monster able to kill any man who comes up against him—but not, it turns out, any woman. Kali glories in death, decorates herself with pieces of her victims, and allows no man supremacy, not her enemies, not even her consort, who lies beneath her in intercourse. She is the advocate and protector of India’s poor, India’s acknowledgment that inside every woman lurks a force of immense power that, when loosed, exults in the destruction of men, that longs to trample even the most beloved of males underfoot, to wade in his blood and eat his carcass.

Sweet Jesus, Kate reflected, taking a large gulp of the brandy, what must Roz’s thesis supervisor be making of this? And did Roz need to be quite so graphic, even loving, in these descriptions of gore and destruction?

Perhaps that was the point: that even an ordained minister with a pet dog named Mutt, a weekly salary, and a mortgage could feel that urge, primal and terrible.

With a convulsive shudder Kate shoved the entire thesis together and back in its box. She felt trapped by a visualization of what this group of vigilantes—selective terrorists—could do if they took this stuff seriously. Would they begin gutting men next, instead of a nice tidy strangulation? Hacking off body parts for Kali to wear? or—Christ!—eat?

She drained her glass, considered and rejected a refill, and, knowing she’d never get to sleep with those images crowding into her mind, went in to the television. An old movie, she decided—if she could find one without gore, abuse of women, or a woman taking revenge. Which left out Jon’s collection of Bette Davis films, and half the suspense movies. She was faced with Jon’s musicals or Lee’s science fiction, and whereas the latter often involved wholesale slaughter, the former induced in Kate the very desire to commit it that she was trying to avoid. Even Men in Black had a downtrodden woman whose husband gets his due. To say nothing of reminding her of Agent Marcowitz.

In the end she fed an old Peter Sellers Pink Panther movie into the player, and fell asleep on the sofa before it was through.

BY THE CLEAR LIGHT of a far too early morning, it was difficult to justify the night’s heebie-jeebies as anything but overwork and an overactive imagination. After all, none of the corpses had been mutilated and there was no sign of escalation into mass slaughter. The Ph.D. thesis Roz was writing might have some link with the hit list victims, but it was, as Roz herself had said and Kate had to admit, an academic investigation, not a vigilante manifesto.

Still, Kate could not shake the image of the warrior-goddess wading in a pool of men’s blood, that “immense power that exults in the destruction of men” loosed on the world. (How did Song put it? “Lovely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.”) Kate did not want to read the rest of the pages, but she knew she would, and that night, after a day spent in painstaking and excruciatingly slow telephonic investigation, she picked up the typescript again, warily.

It appeared, however, that the worst of Roz’s flight of fancy (if that was what it was) had been confined to the beginning, and the author now set about demonstrating just how the worship of goddess figures might have been transferred over to the cult of Yahweh. Roz took a passage in the Gilgamesh epic where the goddess Ishtar “cries out like a woman in travail” bemoaning her destruction of her people, for “are they not my own people, whom I brought forth?” and compared it with Yahweh’s cry “like a woman in travail” in the Book of Isaiah. She then set about building on the common theme throughout the Old Testament (which Roz consistently called the Hebrew Bible) of God’s wrath overflowing, the furious arm of a vengeful God turned against his faithless people, only to be drawn back before complete destruction could descend.

And this is the point, Roz asserted, at which God and goddess are one, that God’s love—often using a word based on the Hebrew for womb—is love “as of a mother for the child of her body.” God could no more destroy his—or her—people than a mother could cease to love a child she had given birth to.

All very heavy stuff, and although Kate didn’t exactly feel a headache coming on, she found herself hoping that she would, so she would have an excuse to stop reading. It soon became obvious, however, that the bulk of the tome’s latter half was made up of the highly technical material of pure thesis, heavily footnoted, concerned with alternate translations, parallel meanings, the problems of something called a hapax legomenon (whatever that was), and the minutiae of dating texts and text fragments. Kate leafed through page after page of typescript studded with what looked like three different alphabets, one of which was Hebrew. Some of the footnotes in this section took two or three pages to work themselves out, and Kate made no attempt at following any of it, relieved that it was nearly over.

Then, at the very end, after the bibliography in fact, an additional and still-rough chapter had been appended. After a moment Kate realized that it was the result of the Song performance they had all seen the other night, the interpretation of the Song of Songs that had so excited Roz. “Pope,” it seemed, was not the Roman pontiff but one Marvin Pope, who had developed the idea of a link between the Indian Kali and the Canaanite Anat, both of whom took vast joy in spilling blood, both wearing belts of hands and necklaces of skulls, both being absolutely essential, in spite of their murderous tendencies, to the continuation of the universe. Or rather, precisely because of their tendency to give vent to murderous bouts of rage, for without Anat’s fury, Baal the storm god could not bring the life-giving rains and the land would go sterile; without Kali, Shiva’s dance that heralded both the end and the beginning of time would fail.

Kate felt as if her head was about to explode. She scratched her scalp hard with her short fingernails, wondering why she was wasting so many hours on this airy-fairy nonsense that she hadn’t a chance of fully understanding. It was pointless—after all, wasn’t pointless one synonym for the word academic?—but she could not shake the feeling of a connection here. She could smell it coming off the paper in front of her, faint and evocative but there.

But how? And where?

One more possible victim had been added to their list during the day. A resident of King City, a few hours’ drive into the Central Valley south of San Francisco, had disappeared five weeks ago and been found last week in a brushy area frequented by coyotes and half a dozen other kinds of scavengers. About all the pathologist could tell was that the man had been strangled. Whether he’d been zapped by a taser or once had a candy bar in his pocket was anybody’s guess. He was, however, a wife-beater, and his name was on the hit list, along with his address and phone number.

Quite a number of other men on the list had admitted to receiving harassing calls and letters. The majority assumed at first that the team’s call was yet another one, so the people wielding the phones had learned to speak fast, firmly, and with blatant if not entirely genuine expressions of sympathy in order to avoid hang-ups.

Two men thought they were currently being stalked, one in Huntsville, Texas, the other in Reno. Seven had been attacked already, either personally or by something being thrown at, splashed against, or painted onto their houses. One man had seized on the suggestion of a taser-wielding attacker that one of the less experienced members of the team had let slip, but further interviews made it fairly clear that he was more than a little unbalanced and would have taken up the mention of alien abduction with equal enthusiasm.

Five men had disappeared completely, seven had moved but been in communication with family or friends, and three names were either mistakes or jokes or complete fabrications—one of them Kate’s suggested addition to the list, a hardened but exceedingly wily child-abuser by the name of Al Martini. That had appeared during the afternoon, causing a few minutes of near-hysterical levity on the part of the frustrated and overworked team, bent over their terminals.

Kate decided enough was enough, said good night to Al and the others, and took herself home. Lee was still awake, and called down the stairs as Kate was unloading her burden on the hallway table.

“That you, Kate?”

“What’s left of me.”

“Would you give Roz a call? I told her that if you were in before eleven, you would.”

“What does she want?”

“She didn’t say.”

Kate seriously considered ignoring the request, but in the end she did phone Roz’s number, bracing herself for another demand from Roz: an illicit look at someone’s file, perhaps, or a request to be on a panel in Washington, D.C. But to her surprise, Roz did not seem to want anything, only to know if Kate had had a chance to glance at the manuscript, and if she had any questions. Kate rubbed her forehead wearily, grateful that telephones did not have viewers, and told her that no, she did not.

Kate then climbed the stairs to bed, and to Lee, and then to sleep.

To jerk awake at 3:09 the next morning with the phone shouting at her, and Al’s voice on the other end of the line.

Telling her there had been another one.

Only this one was still alive.

Chapter 19

“DETECTIVE’S NAME IS HILLMAN,” Hawkin told her in the car on the empty freeway headed south down the peninsula. “Ever meet him?”

“No. He must be after my time in San Jose.”

“Sounded competent, but a little irritated that the feds are all over him.”

“I can understand that. Are they taking it over?”

“No. Just getting in his way at the moment.”

“What’d he say about the MO?”

“Two attackers, a taser for sure, regulation handcuffs, they had a scarf around his throat before they were interrupted. Didn’t wait around to finish him off, just ran. Cops didn’t see them go, they went out the other side of the building.”

“What about the candy?”

“Ah. Marcowitz hadn’t gotten around to mentioning that to him. I asked Hillman to look, and to keep it under his hat, both that I’d asked and if he found any. He called me back just before you picked me up, to say they’d found a handful clear at the other entrance. One print— they’re running it now.”

“A print? That’s great,” said Kate, meaning it profoundly. Any small thing to break the back of this increasingly scary case was fine with her. “Who’s the vic?”‘

“Guy named Traynor, Lennie Traynor. A true creep. Makes Larsen and Banderas look like Citizen of the Month, gives Mehta a run for the stupid prize.”

“What does he do, murder grannies?”

“Plays with kids,” Hawkin said succinctly. They drove in silence through the night.

LENNIE TRAYNOR, BOTH IN history and in the flesh, was the sort of creature guaranteed to make a cop bristle. Knowing he’d probably been abused as a child himself didn’t help; both of them—particularly Hawkin, with an adolescent stepdaughter at home and a baby on the way—saw him sitting in the hospital bed and felt a quick urge to grind him underfoot and finish the assailants’ job. Traynor felt their instantly suppressed contempt, and cringed further. That too did not help.

Traynor had one felony conviction behind him, for raping a thirteen-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome, and a string of other charges, two of which had been plea-bargained down to misdemeanors. He had been driven out of two communities unwilling to harbor a sex offender before he landed in an industrial area of San Jose with few families, and found an employer who was happy enough to hire the unhirable, on the cheap and no questions asked. Traynor worked as a janitor in a small assembly plant for low-tech computer parts, and was given a dank room in exchange for doubling as night watchman.

His nocturnal lifestyle undoubtedly contributed to his crawled-out-from-under-a-rock appearance, but all in all, the police faced with his problem wished that he had stayed under his rock, or died there quietly.

Instead, unlikely as it seemed, Traynor had been lucky. Bashed, taser-zapped, and half strangled he might be, but he was alive, and as he told his story for what must have been the dozenth time, it became obvious that only luck had saved him.

Traynor’s job was literally half his life. His commitment ran from six at night to six in the morning, day in and day out. He was free to take days (or rather, nights) off with prior arrangement, but he had only done so a handful of times in the three years he’d worked there, and his two-week annual holiday was more often than not cut short by boredom.

His sole forms of entertainment, it seemed, were the walks he took every morning when his shift had ended and the cyber-crawls he indulged in on his top-of-the-line computer system. His declarations of healthy exercise and intellectual curiosity were dismissed by Kate and Al, as they had been by every investigator who had stood in the room before them, but whether or not he logged on to child pornography sites was not currently their concern. It was the walks they were interested in, the long wanders in the surrounding housing developments during the hours when children were walking to school or waiting for buses.

He’d been seen, and recognized, three and a half months before, and for the third time a group of concerned parents began to organize a neighborhood against him. Mothers pointedly shepherded their children to the school gates, petitions were drawn up, the kids began to watch for him. So he retreated, and for six weeks had stayed in his cave.

Things quieted down, and Traynor lay low, and interest waned. He bought an elderly dog from the pound to keep him company, a quiet dog that slept most of the day and was content with walks around the weed-lined parking lot. After a while, though, when Traynor judged that interest had moved on, he snapped the dog’s leash on, piled him into the car, and drove him a few miles away for a daily walk—at the hour when the neighborhood was waking and its bright and freshly scrubbed children were going off to school.

Had the dog been more lively or appealing, Traynor might have gone his way in peace for a good long time. The dog, though, was as scruffy and unkempt as its owner, and a few weeks later one mother who jogged in the mornings was talking to another mother at a parents’ meeting, and his identity came out.

There was nothing against him but distaste and profound apprehension, no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing, but a sex offender was required to register with the police in a new area, and although he was not proposing to move into the neighborhood, he was frequenting its sidewalks.

It might well have died down, given time. After all, Traynor had a car, a twelve-hour day, and all the residential neighborhoods of the Bay Area at his command. However, in the midst of it a young girl disappeared from her home two miles from Traynor’s factory, and even though he had a firm alibi for the time (three of the factory workers had seen him walking the dog in the parking lot) and even though the police quickly determined that the girl was a runaway (the diary entry she left might have been ambiguous, but the story she told her best friend was not), Traynor had already been put in the spotlight. Two days later his name was on the Web site hit list. Letters began to arrive, notices went up on phone poles throughout the area, and pickets set up outside the gates. Phone calls came, so that when the task force team had reached him the day before, he thought it another one and cut them off hastily. His increasingly nervous boss gave him two weeks’ notice, one of the factory workers who had four children put a brick through Traynor’s windshield, and shrill voices were raised in the City Council meeting.

Then the night before, a few minutes short of eleven-thirty, a pair of black-clad figures wearing hoods and gloves broke into the factory with a pair of bolt cutters. They ambushed Traynor on his rounds, stunned him with a taser, slapped handcuffs on his nerveless wrists, and prepared to throttle him with a length of red silk. Unfortunately for them, but to the dubious benefit of Traynor’s life, they assumed that the night watchman was the sum total of security at the factory, and on their way in the door tripped an old but still efficient silent alarm. One of Traynor’s assailants heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, looked out the window, and saw the patrol car responding to the alarm. The two intruders fled with their job half complete, although the blow one of them dealt Traynor’s head, either with a boot or the abandoned bolt cutters found nearby, added to the bad gash he had sustained in his original fall, nearly did him in.

So here he lay in his hospital bed in the small hours of the morning, a victim no one had the least scrap of sympathy or indignation for, his lank and thinning hair half shaved off to mend the two scalp wounds, black of eye, hoarse of voice, and trying hard to maintain the moral superiority of the assault victim under the cold, knowing stares of hospital staff, police, and the dread FBI. Even his fingers were repellent, thin white tentacles plucking nervously at the sheets, and Kate found herself wondering what had happened to the only true victim here, the poor dog.

She realized that Traynor had come to the end of his well-practiced narrative and‘ was waiting for questions with resigned apprehension. Hawkin had his back to the room, looking out of the third-floor window, apparently leaving it up to her.

“Do you have any idea who they were, Mr. Traynor?” she asked, but he was shaking his head before the question was over.

“They could have been anyone. Just that they were women.”

“How do you know that, Mr. Traynor?”

“How do I…? You mean, how did I know they were women?”

“Yes,” she said with exaggerated patience. “Their voices, their bodies, did they smell of feminine hygiene spray, what?”

The pasty face went pink with embarrassment. “I… well, the way they moved, I guess. And their clothing was not so heavy I couldn’t tell, er—

“That they had breasts and hips?”

His blush deepened at her blatant reference to a woman’s body; he nodded, studying his hands.

“What about their voices?”

“The only thing they said—the only thing I heard them say—was when I was already half unconscious. I heard the word ‘cops,” and then the pressure went off my throat and after that I passed out. I suppose when they hit my head.“

“Just the one word?”

“Nothing else. Their silence was… scary. Unearthly. Just some grunts while I was… I was screaming, I’m afraid, as soon as I had my voice back, asking them why they were doing this. Begging them to stop. They never said a thing.”

For the first time Kate was aware of a faint brush of compassion for Lennie Traynor, but it did not last long. Instead, she pressed him for details about the two figures.

One, it seemed, had been taller and stronger than the other, and it had been this taller person who was in charge. She (if she it had been) had come at him with the taser in hand and had handled him like a rag doll, flipping his stunned body over and wrenching his arms back for the bite of the handcuffs. It had been her black hood looming over him when he found himself faceup again, she who whipped a silken billow of dark red out of a pocket and wrapped it around his throat, she who tightened and twisted and began to fade from view as the oxygen ceased to reach his brain.

“What was the hood like?” Kate asked.

“Black. One of those knitted ski things.”

“So it had eyeholes?”

“I saw her eyes, yes.”

“What color were they?”

“Brownish, I guess.”

“Mr. Traynor, you were looking into her eyes while she was trying to kill you. Surely you remember what color they were.”

“Light brown. Lighter than yours. Maybe hazel?”

“And the skin color around them?”

“She was white, not black. Maybe a light Hispanic. Not Asian, anyway.”

“Makeup?”

“No,” he said, not sounding at all certain.

“Perfume?”

“Unh-uh. She smelled like sweat.”

“Bad? Like she hadn’t washed in a while?”

“No. Sweat like she’d been exercising. Fresh. Not stale or strong.”

Not a nervous sweat, then, the smell of fear that Traynor had been giving off since they entered his room.

“About how tall was she?”

“I went over all this with the others,” he protested feebly, his hand coming up to touch his bruised throat.

“Nearly finished. How tall?”

“Taller than me—but then, dressed all in black and standing over me, she seemed bigger than she was, I think. I was only facing her for a second or two, but she still seemed a little taller than me. Maybe a couple of inches. I’m five seven.”

Brown-eyed Roz Hall stood five feet ten, Kate’s traitorous mind got in before she ruthlessly turned it to other things.

“Mr. Traynor, were you aware of people hanging around the factory at night, telephone calls, that kind of thing?”

He looked at her as if she were raving. “It’s been nuts around here the last few weeks. I told you about the picketers and the—”

“I mean single people, not groups of protesters. A car parked across from the entrance, say, or the dog barking at the darkness.”

“Maybe. I don’t know, I’ve been kind of jumpy.”

“What did you think you saw?”

“Well, Popeye—he’s my dog, or he was until I took him back to the pound over the weekend. Anyway, he was showing the strain about, oh, maybe a week ago. I’d be sweeping up or doing my rounds and he’d be whining at the door to get out or getting under my feet. Drove me crazy.”

“What night was this?”

“There were a coupla nights. Monday maybe? And then not the next night, he slept like usual, but again on Wednesday.”

“What time would it have been?”

“Late on Monday—yeah, I’m sure it was Monday, first day of the week—or really Tuesday morning, I guess. After Late Night was over anyway. But Wednesday night was earlier, I was mopping the rest rooms and he kept trying to track across where I’d just mopped. Maybe nine, ten? Close to nine, I guess.”

“But you yourself didn’t hear or see anything?”

“Nah. Just the dog. Jeez, maybe he was trying to warn me, you think? Maybe I should get him back from the pound. Problem is, I don’t know where I’m going to be. I don’t suppose you know… ?”

Kate shook her head and snapped shut the notebook she’d been writing in. “We’re from San Francisco,” she told him. “You’re not our—our responsibility.” She had nearly said problem, which would have been the simple truth. Nobody liked protecting a piece of slime like Traynor, though obviously they had to. It was complicated by the question of his own potential as a suspect of purveying kiddie porn, and how the authorities might take the evidence that had fallen into their laps completely by accident and in the course of a different case, and render that evidence both useful and untainted by questionable means. One tangle, thank God, that she and Al could walk away from.

Which they did. They said a thanks to the room in general, which could be taken as being aimed at Traynor but which they all knew was meant for the cop at his side, and left the battered pedophile to his ambiguous future.

Chapter 20

AL WAS SILENT AS they passed through the sterile corridors of the hospital, as he had been during the entire interview with Traynor. “So, what do you think?” she asked him as she got in behind the wheel of the car.

“I think that if I saw him walking that dog of his next to Jules’s school, I’d castrate the bastard myself with a dull knife.”

The sentiment and the mild obscenity were so unlike Hawkin that Kate stared at his profile. He was not kidding. She opened her mouth to make a joke about the effects of pregnancy hormones on the human male, but then she noticed the hard clench of his jaw and decided that maybe she’d let it pass. In her experience, limited though it was, she’d found that pregnant women seemed to develop areas of humorlessness. It appeared to be contagious to the partner.

She put the car into gear and began to thread her way out of the hospital parking lot. “No security cams in the factory building,” she said after a minute. “That’s too bad.”

“Have any of the victims on the hit list been black?” Hawkin asked in an abrupt non sequitur.

Kate thought about it. “I think some of the guys are. Yeah, I’m sure there were half a dozen black guys—I remember at least two of the photos. As for actual victims, the auto mechanic in New York was black, I’m pretty sure.”

“But none in the Bay Area.”

“Larsen and the guy in Sacramento, Goff, were both Anglo, and now Traynor. Banderas was Hispanic, but I thought he looked more Mediterranean, Italian or Greek. Mehta was Indian, but again, pretty light-skinned.”

“Does that say anything to you?” he asked.

“Not really. Could be they’re white women, like Traynor thought, and they’re either afraid of messing with black men or else they figure it’s not their business. Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to that community yet. On the other hand, they could be black women out to eliminate their traditional tormentors. I don’t think we can make any assumptions, Al.”

“What about methodology?”

“For our guys, or the list as a whole?”

“Both.”

“I’d say that, countrywide, we’re looking at two or three different groups of killers: one here, one centered somewhere between Georgia and South Carolina, and one farther up the East Coast. The New York bunch are into quick, clean, distance kills with a handgun. Unadorned executions. The Southerners may be more hands-on, maybe use a taser like ours, or a gun to force their target into a car before driving him into the woods to dump him. It’s hard to know exactly how long the groups have been working, since people vanish every day, but if I had to guess I’d say it started about when the Web site hit list came online in January.”

None of this was new, and the FBI was probably miles ahead of them, but their investigations worked best when they reviewed and explored, over and over again, watching for unnoticed bumps and oddities in the terrain. Most of the ideas they tossed around were not original, but sometimes the patterns the ideas formed when they landed were.

“And our own ladies, or womyn-with-a-y. What about them?”

“Up close and personal, wouldn’t you say?” she asked.

“Can’t get much more intimate than strangulation, that’s for sure. The very definition of hands-on.”

“But they leave the bodies to be found, so there’s no reason for the notes, other than the statement.”

“The others are more, what would you call it—strictly functional? Do ‘em and leave ’em like the garbage they are, whereas ours are a little bit angrier about their victims, and want the world to know. Yes?”

“I agree. But what’s the candy got to do with it?”

“Don’t take it from strangers? Maybe one of the women was raped and her attacker called her ‘sweet’ or ‘sugar’? I’d say it’s a pathological twist that we won’t know about until we find the perp. Or perps.”

“Something obvious to her, or them, but personal?”

“Of course, if we find someone whose sister named Candy got killed by a rapist, we might take a look,” Kate suggested facetiously.

“Or whose abusive husband owned a candy shop.”

“I can see the search base getting dangerously cumbersome. And you’re the one in charge of computer searches,” Al said, beginning to sound a little happier about things.

“Actually, this sounds to me ideal for one of your million-scraps-of-paper-tacked-to-the-wall approaches, Al. Much more intuitive.”

They were on the freeway now, the easiest way to get from the hospital to the industrial area where Traynor had been attacked, driving past shopping malls and residential sprawl through the increasing traffic of a city before dawn. Near the airport, with an approaching jet screaming overhead, the phone sounded in Al’s pocket. Al’s end of the conversation consisted of a few grunts, a yes, “San Jose airport” to identify their location, and then he was reaching for his pen and notebook and scribbling an address.

“What was that?” she asked when he’d tucked the phone away again.

“The lab ID’d a fingerprint on the candy they found on the stairway. Belongs to a woman with a conviction for drunk and disorderly, lives in East Palo Alto. Hillman’s looking into it, thought we might like to tag along. Get off here and circle back to 101 north,” he suggested, but she was already moving into the exit lane.

The woman’s name was Miriam Mkele, changed from Maryanne Martin when she had gotten out of jail three years before, and if she was either surprised or frightened when she opened the door to five plainclothes detectives and two uniformed patrol, she did not show it. She just stood in her doorway, six feet of proud African-American woman, and raised her eyebrow at them. The local detective did the identification, and after he had run through his own name and rank and those of the two San Jose cops (Hillman and his partner, Gonsalves) and the two San Francisco detectives (Kate and Al), he was running out of steam and Mkele was looking, if anything, amused.

“And these two good boys, who they be?” she asked, raising her chin briefly at the two uniformed officers. The East Palo Alto man dutifully extended his introduction to include the uniforms, who were acting as bodyguards more than anything in this rough area just across the freeway from the intellectual elite of Stanford University. East Palo Alto had one of the highest murder rates in the United States; Miriam Mkele looked as if she had known many of the victims, and held the hands of a fair number of the survivors.

“Do you people want to come in?” she asked.

“We’d appreciate it, ma’am,” Al spoke up. “It’s not getting any warmer out here.”

Mkele looked him over, and looked up at the sky as if to judge the attractive possibility of it beginning to rain on their heads, but the clouds were light and high and the breeze cold enough to suck the heat from her house, so she stepped back and the five detectives filed in, leaving the two patrolmen to retreat to their car.

The small house was warm, in temperature and in emotional impact, and scrubbed spotless beneath the signs of wear and tear. African wood-carvings clustered along one wall, tribal masks hung on another, the curtains were brightly colored block prints and the sofa scattered with kente cloth pillows. Mkele closed the door, walked between them to take up a position on the other side of the room, and, still standing, crossed her arms.

“What you want?” she asked.

“These people have some questions about an attempted murder that took place last night in San Jose, Ms. Mkele,” the local man explained.

“Do I need a lawyer?”

Hawkin pushed forward. “You’re welcome to have one if you’d feel more comfortable of course, but at this point we’re just trying to clear up a couple of questions. You are under no suspicion of a crime.” No more than any physically powerful female would have been, Kate added silently.

Mkele nodded, a sign that he should continue.

“Your fingerprint was found on an object left at the scene, possibly by the attackers. Just for the record, can you tell us where you were last night?”

“What time?”

“Between nine P.M. and midnight.”

“Worked until nine, came home and cooked a late dinner for some friends, and went to bed ‘bout eleven-thirty.”

Like a cop on the stand, Mkele did not volunteer any information beyond the bare question.

“Where do you work?”

“The Safeway on El Camino, just off the freeway.”

“What do you do there?”

“I work the registers. Cashier. Smile and say thank you,” she said. Kate could not picture Mkele with a smile on her face.

“Responsible job,” Hillman commented.

“For an ex-con, you mean, dee-tective? I finished with the life that drove me to alcohol. I worked three years cleanin‘ the floors and stockin’ the shelves to prove I was dependable, and they trust me with money now, yes.”

“Do you know—” Hillman was starting to say, but Kate had been struck by a sudden thought and spoke over his voice.

“Ms. Mkele, do you still stock the shelves sometimes?”

The dark eyes studied her pensively, as ü looking for the trick in the question. “No,” she said.

Ah well, thought Kate, it was an idea, but Mkele spoke again.

“I do not gen’rally stock shelves at my own store. There’s a, what you call, hierarchy, you understand? And I’m gonna be a manager one day, so it’s not good for my image to stock shelves. But sometimes I help out at other stores, and then I do what is needed. In South San Francisco I even cleaned the toilets once. Haven’t done that since I got out.”

“In the last few months,” Kate asked, her voice taut despite her effort to control it, “have you ever stocked one of those self-service candy bins?”

Mkele put her head to one side, not so much searching her memory as considering.

“Was it on one of those pieces of candy that you found my fingerprint?” she asked after a minute. Kate did not have to answer; her silence gave her away. Shockingly, then, Mkele threw back her head and laughed, long and richly, at the discomfiture on the faces before her. “Oh, you poor people,” she said at last. “If I tell you yes, I may be lying so’s to explain that fingerprint, but if I tell you no, you are left with one great puzzle. Well, I’m gonna tell you yes, as far as I can remember, I stocked those bins twice in the last half year or so, once in Fremont, where I worked in October, and the other in my own store just before Christmas when three men were out sick and the shelves were bare in the evening. I’d have to look up the precise dates.”

That she did not expect them to believe her was clear in her stance and the tip of her head. Kate figured the woman’s alibi must be ironclad, for her to so patently not care if they believed her or not—although very possibly she would still show them an amused defiance if she had no more to vouch for her than her own empty bed. Kate found herself liking the woman, rare enough when it came to a witness and a potential suspect, for her straight spine and her simple ambitions and her willingness to take a stand here in this community of little hope.

“Any chance you might have handled any of that candy any other time?” she asked. “Maybe helping someone scoop some out, or a bag spilling at the register, something like that?”

Mkele thought about it, and then shrugged her strong shoulders. “I don’t remember that happening, but it’s not impossible that it did. Things get busy, you know, ”specially if you’re talking about as far back as Christmas. By the end of the day you wouldn’t remember if you fed a whole cow over the scanner.“

Kate nodded, took a card from the pocket in her notebook, flipped the book shut, and dropped it in her pocket. She stepped forward with the card in her left hand and her right hand outstretched.

“Thank you, Ms. Mkele,” she said. “Let us know when you figure out those dates, or if there was any other time you might have handled wrapped candies. We’ll give you a call if anything needs clarifying.” Mkele looked at Kate, and at her hand; then she reached out and took both card and hand.

The local man and Hawkin moved with Kate toward the door. The two San Jose detectives hesitated but followed in the end, leaving Miriam Mkele in command of her diminutive but colorful field of battle.

Chapter 21

DISMISSING THE TWO PATROLMEN to resume their centurion duties, the detectives moved off to safer ground, a twenty-four-hour coffee shop next to the freeway. Its garish color scheme, Kate had read somewhere, was specifically designed to discourage customers from lingering over their coffee.

It worked on five plainclothes cops as well as it did on the sales reps and the families heading for Portland or Los Angeles. They discussed briefly the odds that Mkele had been lying to them and that she was somehow involved, decided that they had no evidence either way, divided up the tasks of checking up on her story, and in twenty minutes they were out the door.

In the parking lot Hillman, the older of the two San Jose detectives, took Kate aside in that helpful and avuncular manner that always made her jaw clench.

“Look, Martinelli,” he began, “we weren’t actually finished with Mkele.”

“No? We had her answers, and she said she’d call us back with the other information.”

“She’s an ex-con. You have to push them. Always.”

“Thanks for the tip, Hillman, but let’s see if she comes across before we go back and push her around.”

“It’s just that you really can’t be friendly with a witness, especially a shady one. Like that business with the handshake—what if she’d refused to shake? You’d have looked like an idiot.”

“Well, Hillman, I guess I don’t mind looking like an idiot. Better than actually being one. I’ll let you know when she calls.” Kate stood her ground and waited for Hillman and the others to get into their cars and drive away. Al leaned against their car with his face turned away, so none of them but Kate knew that he was grinning at the exchange.

When the others had left, Al went back inside to phone Marcowitz from a ground line, for the added security. When he came out of the restaurant, Kate watched him closely, trying to guess what the Man in Black had said, but Al just walked along, head down either in thought or in well-concealed anger.

“Well?” she asked when he was sitting beside her.

“They’re doing the interviews.”

“Ah. Well, we knew they’d take over eventually. What does he want us to do? Type up their field notes?”

“Not quite that bad. I told him I wanted to take another look at the Traynor crime scene, he said fine.”

Kate suspected that it had not been quite such a simple exchange, but she would not argue. She started the car and, without discussing the matter, took the entrance for the freeway north and drove for three miles. She then exited, circled under the freeway, and resumed the trip heading south, back toward San Jose. After a mile, the sign for the Safeway market where Mkele worked came up on the right, readily visible from all lanes in both directions, instantly accessible from an exit two hundred yards from the front doors. Kate kept her foot on the accelerator, saying only, “I assume we don’t need to see the inside of the store.”

“We could stop off and pick up some milk on our way home,” Hawkin answered. “If curiosity gets the better of us.” From the sound of his voice, that was not likely.

The factory where Lennie Traynor worked, lived, and had nearly died was a seedy three-story cement-block cube dropped into a parking lot. It was half a mile from the flight path of the low-flying jets, whose exhaust had deposited black shadows on every upper surface. All the grimy-windows on the lower floor had bars on them, and a scattering of boarded-over windows on the upper floors testified to the accurate aim of the local throwing arms. Traynor’s room was on the southwest corner of the top floor. The metal fire escapes on two sides did not appear to have been extended down or even greased in decades, which meant that entrance by Traynor’s attackers had to have been through the doors.

A new chain hung on the metal gate that a San Jose officer opened for them. The original chain, with its cut link and the lock still attached, was in the San Jose lab for comparison with the bolt cutters. Kate drove through the gate and around the cube to pull in near the five unmarked and two patrol cars that were parked at the side entrance. She flipped her badge at the uniformed who popped out of the door; the woman nodded and stepped back inside.

Traynor’s two black-clad attackers had jumped him as soon as he came out the side door on his rounds, firing the taser into their victim’s back and then, as soon as he dropped, cuffing him and hauling him back through the door. He had fallen onto the edge of the step, giving him the scalp wound that left drops and smears up the steps and through the doorway, each drop now flagged and numbered for the police photographs. In two places, feet had stepped into drops of blood, and the lab was working on identifying the shoe by the scraps of track left on the worn linoleum.

Traynor’s keys had been found on the floor near where he lay, dropped there after his attackers let themselves in. Their mistake had been in assuming that Traynor had not set the alarm as he came out through the door: The alarm set itself automatically every time the door was closed, and sounded in the local precinct house if it was not coded off within ninety seconds. The relatively sophisticated system had been installed eight years earlier at the insistence of the insurance company when intruders had snuck in twice while the night watchman was off in the grounds. It had been a pain in the neck of the local patrol under previous night watchmen, but Traynor never once forgot to code it off, and the police had not responded to the factory alarm since he had taken over.

Al paused on the doorstep and looked across the parking lot at the chain link, razor-wire-topped fence and the street beyond.

“They must’ve been watching him, to get his rounds down,” he said. “Just not close enough to see him punch in the code. From a car down the street it’d just look like he was slow in putting the key in the lock every time.”

Kate looked up at the inadequate bulb in the fixture overhead, and agreed: At night, the subtle shift in the arm movements of a man, particularly one wearing a heavy jacket and seen from the back, would not be easy to catch.

They walked through the open door and into a familiar world of crime scene investigation, flags and chalk marks and swags of yellow tape. Fingerprint powder added its grime to all the likely nearby surfaces, but it didn’t look as if the intruders had left behind any prints except that of Miriam Mkele on the cellophane wrapper of a piece of butterscotch. Traynor’s keys had given up only his own prints, smudged in places by their rubber gloves.

Traynor had been dragged inside less than ten feet, just far enough to get the door closed, leaving him well away from the window. Blood from his scalp had formed a pool the size of a man’s hand in the place where he had lain until the paramedics arrived. Although two shoe-prints outside held out some hope as belonging to the invaders, the inside evidence had been tracked and smeared into uselessness during the urgent process of saving Traynor’s life. Crime Scene personnel had done their best with sketches and photographs and evidence bags, but truth to tell, a nice cold, obviously dead corpse that everybody stayed well away from was much easier to work with; here, the most they could hope for was that somewhere down the line they would find traces of Traynor’s blood on a suspect’s shoes.

Kate stood and read from the rough report she’d been given, comparing the statements of Hillman and the reporting officers with the scene before her. Everybody seemed to agree that Traynor had been dragged into the office, turned onto his back, had a length of red silk, light but strong and measuring fifteen by forty-nine inches, twisted around his throat. The state of his fingernails and the marks his boot heels had left on the floor showed that he had been conscious enough to struggle, but there was no doubt he would have succumbed had not the local patrol car happened to be bare minutes away when the alarm call came, and had one of the attackers not happened to see the marked car approaching. The attackers had fled, pausing only to kick Traynor or bash him with the bolt cutters (in petulance, or rage, or a last attempt at quick murder?) before escaping down the hallway toward the main doors. No breach of the fence had been found, so it was assumed the black-clad would-be killers had slipped back out through the ill-lit parking lot and the wide-open gate while the patrol officers were busy discovering Traynor. One of the patrol officers noted that he had glimpsed a very clean, light-colored, late-model four-door compact parked on the street a couple of blocks away, noticeable because it was an incongruity in the area, and that when he had driven past the spot after processing the Traynor crime, the car was no longer there.

Kate and Al walked away from the relative bustle of the office where the attack had taken place, through the echoing factory building. The owner had closed the place for a couple of days to reassure the workers that he cared, not so much for Traynor but for the safety of his fellow employees. The two San Francisco detectives traced the route of the two attackers where they had raced through the lower floor, taking a couple of wrong turns that resulted in knocked-over equipment and piles of paperwork and indicating that they did not know the building from within. The intruders had finally reached the double glass doors that faced the street. There one of them had paused to fling a handful of nine mixed, cellophane-wrapped candies back into the entrance hall and across the receptionist’s desk. Now a scattering of flags showed where they had landed: mostly on and under the desk, where they might well have been overlooked as something the receptionist had dropped had Hawkin not specifically asked Hillman about them.

The attackers had left no prints; they had made a careful surveillance of their victim’s habits; and they knew that there was a backup escape route, if not its exact path.

“They’re careful,” Al said, voicing Kate’s thought.

“What about that car?”

“San Jose’s out canvassing the neighborhood, to see if anyone in the area saw it. And they’ll stick up a notice board if they don’t get anything, see if some passerby remembers it.”

“Pretty anonymous vehicle,” Kate remarked.

“You think deliberately?”

“If I were knocking off a guy, I sure wouldn’t leave my own car around the corner.”

“Rental, then? Clean, white, four-door?”

“Worth a try, don’t you think?”

“The feds probably thought the same,” Hawkin said repressively.

“Well, I guess we’ll find out as soon as we start asking, if there’s been someone ahead of us.”

“You want to begin with the airport? Biggest car rental around, I’d have thought. Of course, we’d more or less have to tell Hillman what we were doing, it being his patch. And Marcowitz, of course.”

“Of course. But maybe we shouldn’t waste his time until we’ve finished.”

“That’s what I like about working with you, Martinelli,” her partner said with satisfaction. “It’s the meeting of true minds.”

With FBI involvement, any line of inquiry on the part of the local forces ought to be directed by the feds. If, however, the local cops didn’t get around to mentioning some ongoing piece of their investigation while it was actually being pursued, well, that was understandable— sometimes you had to go back and dot the i’s and cross the’t‘s later. And if they happened to find something that contributed to the case, and managed to run it down before returning to their desks and dutifully reporting in, any official reprimand would be more than balanced by their own satisfaction—and that of their departmental colleagues. Especially if that contribution was large enough. Solving the crime and getting killers off the street was obviously the main goal, and they would not do anything deliberately to compromise that, but it was always nice when the overworked and under-equipped locals pulled off something the big guys couldn’t.

So their slow and circuitous route back to the Hall of Justice took them into virtually every car rental place on the peninsula. Most of the agencies said, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, that they would draw up a list of cars matching their description and which had been out the night before, and who had rented them, and get the list to them in a day or so. The two biggest agencies at San Francisco International, though, were both highly automated and eager to help, and both offered to provide a printout. And no, there had been no one else around asking for that information in the last day.

They drove out to the airport and picked up both lists, added them to the growing stack, then retreated to a nearby restaurant to replenish their energies with a drippy hamburger for Al and a blackened chicken salad for Kate. They spread their papers out to look them over as they ate.

It was a daunting pile, even for detectives well used to paper chases. There were hundreds, thousands of white four-doors for hire in the peninsula, and most of them were in circulation. Some of the lists were handwritten and half legible; others gave every car in the agency regardless of make and color and left it up to them to decipher the identifying code. Some of the lists went back weeks; one was dated for April, but of the previous year.

Kate sighed, turning over the cold remnants of her fries with her forefinger, and decided to phone home. She got up to use the toilet, tried the public phone, found the line busy, and came back to find Hawkin digging into a huge construction that seemed to be equal parts chocolate and whipping cream. She ordered a double espresso for herself and thumbed disconsolately through the stack of papers.

“This is hopeless,” she began to say, when simultaneously her beeper went off and her eye snagged on a name. The name had to be a coincidence, if an odd one, and the number on the pager display was her own. Still, she tugged the piece of paper out to mark the place before she went back to the pay phone.

Annoyingly, the number was again busy. She hung up, waited half a minute, and tried again. This time Lee had it on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi babe, it’s me. I got your page—I tried to reach you myself ten minutes ago. What’s up?”

“When are you coming home?” Lee’s voice sounded either tired or stressed, and Kate’s fingers whitened on the receiver.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Just—” Lee bit off a sharp demand, and went on with deliberate calm: her reasonable therapist’s voice. “I just need to know when you’ll be back.”

“I could be there in forty minutes, less if Al lets me stick the flasher on. What do you need?”

“It’s not that urgent, I’m just trying to organize something and it was stupid to make arrangements for a ride if you were about to walk through the door, is all. You sound like you’re occupied.”

“I am, but it’s nothing urgent. I’ll drop Al at the—”

“Kate, stop. It’s fine. It’s just that Jon is out with Sione and I hate to beep him, but Maj called up all in a dither about something Roz is doing, so I told her I’d go over and hold her hand. It’s nearly Mina’s bedtime, or she’d come here. I could get the Saab out, but I know that—”

“Lee, no, that’s a really terrible idea. I’ll be home in half an hour, surely it can wait that long?”

“No, no, I don’t want you to break off, I only wanted to know if you happened to be about to drive up any minute. I’ll call a cab.”

“Promise me you won’t try to drive?” Lee hadn’t driven a car since she had been shot, and although her legs were stronger, their reaction time was undependable. On city streets, in city traffic, it would be criminally foolhardy.

“I promise.”

Maj in a dither didn’t sound like anything worth breaking speed limits for; indeed, considering the frequency of Roz’s passionate causes, it didn’t even sound like something worth missing her coffee for.

“But Maj is okay?” she asked Lee, just to make sure.

“Oh yeah, I’m sure she is. Just upset.” Lee herself sounded calmer, and Kate’s grip on the phone relaxed.

“In a dither, huh?”

“Completely ditherized. What does that word mean, anyway? How’s your day going?”

“I’m playing tag with some evidence the FBI might think I should have turned over to them, hoping it gives me some meaning. Doesn’t look like it, though.”

“Another productive day.”

“That’s how it goes. But I met a woman who could be a poster girl for the black and beautiful campaign, whose goal in life is to manage a Safeway store.”

Lee, after a silent moment, asked, “Have you been drinking?”

“Iced tea, I swear.”

“Is Hawkin with you?”

“Yes, Mother.”

At that Lee finally laughed. “Yeah, right—why I should trust him to keep you in line I can’t imagine.”

“You’re sure a cab is okay, hon?”

“Cost a fortune, but I’ll let Maj pay half.”

“How long do you think you’ll be with her?”

“Couple of hours. Less if Roz shows up—I won’t stick around for that stage of the conversation, thank you.”

“Okay. Well, if I’m back in town before—what does that make it, eleven?—I’ll call there, give you a ride home.”

“If it’s convenient, that’d be great. Don’t work too hard.”

“Never.”

“Sure. Why don’t I tell Roz to just chill out, while I’m at it?” But she chuckled as she said it, and they talked about nothing in particular for another minute or two before they hung up and went their separate ways.

Back at the table Kate finished her tepid espresso in one quick swallow, then reached out and pulled the puzzling sheet from its neighbors. She turned it around and laid it in front of Hawkin, tapping the name that had caught her eye.

“Don’t you think that’s odd?” she asked him.

He looked down at the name and his eyebrows went up. He nodded his head slowly.

A white car had been rented the previous morning to a woman named Jane Larsen.

Chapter 22

“DID JAMES LARSEN HAVE a sister?” Kate asked her partner.

“We’ve never come across one.”

“I don’t know which I like less, the idea of coincidence or the thought of some seventy-five-year-old avenging mother on the scene. Talk about Disgruntled Ladies.”

“Do you have Emily Larsen’s phone number with you?”

Kate didn’t, but she got it from information, and Emily answered, the noise of canned television laughter in the background. Kate identified herself, asked how she was doing, and then asked her question.

“No,” Emily said, sounding confused. “Jimmy never had a sister. He has a brother who lives back East, Philadelphia I think, but we haven’t heard from him in years.”

“Is the brother married?”

“Not that I knew of. Jimmy always said Danny was too mean to get married.”

“Do you have his last address, Ms. Larsen?”

“I have an address, sure, but like I said it’s really old. We haven’t even gotten a Christmas card from him in maybe five years.”

“It’ll have to do.” The telephone went down and Kate was treated to several minutes of laugh track and manic gabbling before it was picked up again. Emily gave her an address and phone number, and Daniel Larsen’s full name, and then asked Kate the inevitable question.

“What do you want to know this for?”

“Oh, a woman with the same last name has popped up in a related matter. Probably nothing. Thanks for your help, Ms. Larsen.”

“Any time. Say, while I have you on the line, can I ask you something?”

“What’s that?”

“Do you need to report when a credit card’s missing?”

The question dropped into Kate’s mind with the slow electric tingle of discovered evidence. “Is this one of your credit cards we’re talking about?”

“It was Jimmy’s. I mean, I could sign on it, but he didn’t want me to have my own in case I used it. I forgot all about it until the other day when the monthly bill came and I realized the card wasn’t with his other stuff that I got back, and when I went looking for it I couldn’t find it.”

“Did he usually carry it with him?”

“I guess.”

“Is anything else missing?”

“Oh heavens,” she said with a little laugh, “I’m losing all kinds of things. The therapist I’m seeing says it’s a common sign of stress, to lose things.”

“What have you lost?” Kate’s voice remained light, but it was an effort.

“All kinds of things,” Emily repeated, beginning to sound embarrassed. “I brushed my hair in the guest bathroom and forgot, so I couldn’t find my brush for two days. I left my housekeys in the market, talk about stupid, I had to go back for them. Now it’s my whole wallet. I can’t think where I could have left that. Isn’t that silly? Hello? Inspector, are you there?”

“Yes. Sorry, Ms. Larsen, I was thinking. I’m sure it’ll turn up. You probably just left it somewhere, maybe last night?”

“I wonder… You know, I was at the shelter on Friday night, they invited me up for dinner. I wonder if…I’ll call and ask them.”

“Actually, Emily, I’m going over to the shelter first thing in the morning. Rather than bother them tonight, considering how busy they always are in the evenings, why don’t I just ask for you when I’m there, maybe take a look around to see if your wallet fell into the back of the sofa or something?” If the missing wallet was of any importance, the last thing Kate wanted was for its thief to be forewarned that she was coming.

“Would you? That’svery nice of you.It’s green, looks just like leather, with a gold clasp along the top. Jimmy gave it to me for my birthday three years ago.”

“I’m glad you’re keeping in touch with the shelter,” Kate said with elaborate casualness. “I saw Roz the other day myself, she was saying that she wished she could spend more time there.”

“Roz was there Friday, but she had to run. She asked Phoebe—you know, Carla’s secretary?—to give me a ride home, though, and she did, which was nice of her, it’s really out of her way. The insurance company is still dragging their feet over replacing Jimmy’s car.”

Kate made sympathetic noises, and then nudged Emily a little further down the evidence trail. “That explains why I couldn’t reach you—I didn’t want to call too late.”

“Yes, it was after eleven when we got home. I hated to have Phoebe come all the way down here, considering how busy she is, but the buses don’t run as much that late.”

“I see,” Kate said, afraid that she was beginning to.

“What did you want?” Emily interrupted Kate’s thoughts to ask.

“Sorry? Oh, you mean the other night. It was nothing, just clarification of a detail. We worked it out.” She wished the woman luck with getting the insurance company to replace the trashed car, and hung up before Emily could ask again about canceling the credit card.

Hawkin had paid and was standing near the door, so she waited until they were in the car to tell him what Emily Larsen had said.

“His credit card and her ID, both gone missing,” Hawkin mused. “What you might call thought-provoking.”

“Not much we can do about it tonight, though,” Kate said hopefully.

After a minute, to her relief, Hawkin nodded his head in agreement. They had been on the road for eighteen hours, since the San Jose people had made the connection between their hospitalized pedophile and the SFPD’s dead bodies, and Kate for one knew that her day was not over yet.

“That car was rented out to Jane Larsen at around ten a.m.,” Al noted. “We might find the same staff on duty that time tomorrow.”

“How ‘bout if I take you home, pick you up in the morning?”

“More driving for you—you could just drop me at the Hall, I’d use an unmarked.”

“It’s only twenty minutes to your place, Al, and not much farther in the morning.”

“Then I accept. Might even see Jani today, awake.”

The apartment Al shared with Jani, a professor of medieval history, and her teenaged daughter, Jules, was north of Jani’s work and south of his. Kate and he talked mostly about Jules on the short drive there, about her brilliance and her resilience in recovering from the traumatic experiences she had been through over the winter.

“I finally managed to call her the other day,” Kate told him. “It was good to talk to her. I told her we’d go bowling in a week or two.”

“She’d like that. She misses you. You know, the other day she told me she was thinking of writing to that bastard in prison. She didn’t say anything to you about it, did she?”

“God, no, she didn’t. She isn’t serious, is she?”

“ ‘Fraid so. She thought it might, and I quote, ”aid the healing process.“ I don’t know if she’s insane or incredibly well balanced.”

“Lee would tell you that at a certain point, the two are the same.”

“Thanks a ton. Meanwhile, what do I tell Jules?”

“Oh no, I’m not going to touch that one. You’re the dad here.” And then, for the first time and tentatively, she told him about Lee’s decision. “Lee wants to try for a child. She has an appointment at the clinic in a couple of weeks.”

“Hey,” Hawkin said warmly. “That’s great. Really great news.”

“Not news yet, just an intention, and if you’d keep it to yourself.” You’d think she’d get used to the invasions of the world into her private life, Kate thought to herself, but sometimes it felt like living in a house with glass walls, and all the world outside with rocks in hand.

“Sure. Can I tell Jani?”

“Of course—but let’s have Jules out of the loop for a while, okay? We can tell her when there’s something to tell.”

“I hope it all goes smoothly. Give Lee my best, would you?”

“God—I nearly forgot. Would you dial a number for me?”

Lee was still at Roz and Maj’s house, and sounded relieved to hear from her. Whatever the crisis was, Lee was already tired of it and glad of an excuse to leave. Kate told her she’d be there within forty minutes.

“I think Roz is off on one of her campaigns,” Kate told Al in explanation. “She gets involved in some cause or another and everything gets thrown up into the air until she loses interest. It’s kind of hard on Maj.”

“What is it this time? Handicapped parking permits for the meals-on-wheels delivery folk? City investments in anti-gay corporations?”

“I don’t know. Yet.”

“Well, I hope you get some sleep. See you at nine? We can get some coffee on our way to the car place.”

“Jani still can’t stand the smell, huh?”

“You notice I didn’t have any tonight—I don’t like sleeping on the couch.”

Kate hoped this was not a sign of things to come.

She dropped Al off, made a U-turn in the quiet night street, and headed back north. When she pulled up in front of Roz and Maj’s house, the red Jeep was not on the street, and when Maj opened the door it was obvious that she’d been crying earlier in the evening. She seemed calm now, and so Kate ruthlessly extracted Lee from the troubled house; in truth, Maj seemed nearly as relieved at her departure as Lee was herself.

Kate settled Lee in the passenger seat, tossed the cuffed crutches over the back, and drove briskly away before Roz could arrive and precipitate them all back into the crisis. Lee drew a deep breath, blew it out with feeling, and let her head drop back against the headrest.

“Might be easier if you could charge them by the hour,” Kate offered by way of sympathetic opener.

“I love Roz,” Lee said tiredly, “but the woman can be a fucking maniac.

First Al, now Lee—two people who never cursed letting fly with easy obscenity, and both in the same day. A third one and San Francisco might well slip into the sea.

“What’s Roz got in her teeth now?”

“It’s that Indian girl again, Pramilla Mehta,” Lee said. “Roz has decided to link up in solidarity with a group in India that’s working to expose dowry deaths for what they are.”

Kate dragged her thoughts away from San Jose and back to the larger picture. “But I thought she was convinced that Laxman Mehta killed her? What can she do about him? He’s dead—our problem now, not hers.”

“She thinks the family encouraged him, maybe even drove him to it.”

“Christ. So what is she going to do?”

“Big picket lines in front of his company, and the city is looking into the contracts it has with him, thinking of canceling.”

“Well, that certainly sounds like Roz.”

“They’re also putting together a public memorial service for Pramilla.”

“Who is they?”

“I swear, Roz has half the organizations in Northern California involved. This is going to be big. Huge. And, I’m afraid, divisive. There’s a large Indian community in the Bay Area, and they’re all going to feel targeted, even those who have nothing to do with dowries. You know how it goes with ethnic groups, they all get jumbled together in the popular mind. Anyone wearing a turban is a follower of the Ayatollah; anyone with an Arab name sides with Saddam.”

“I know. But I’m sorry, babe, this all sounds like business as usual for Roz. Why is Maj so upset about it this time?”

“A combination of things. Maj’s not feeling very well, and the pregnancy is interfering with her own work. And the timing is bad, coming just when her work is going through a demanding phase, and Roz had promised to be more available for Mina. Plus that, Roz’s church is making noises about cutting back her funding—they say they’re paying her to be a parish priest, not a political organizer, and the congregation is being neglected. So there’s that worry as well. But I think what has Maj so concerned is the degree of Roz’s involvement. For some reason this girl’s killing has pulled all of Roz’s levers at once, and it’s making her a little crazy. That’s not a diagnosis, by the way,” Lee added, in a welcome breath of humor. “She’s out to make Pramilla Mehta a saint and a martyr, or at least a household name, and you know how good she is at playing the media game.”

Kate agreed: Roz was an artist at manipulating the media.

“But it takes a massive jolt of energy to get the PR wheels going, so she’s pulled out all the stops. Statements issued, photo ops, interviews on national television, in and out of the mayor’s office and the supervisors‘, phone calls to the governor and any senators she can get through to. The president has heard of her, and Oprah is interested.”

“So she’s running on empty, no food or sleep, and Maj is waiting for the crash.”

“You know, it really is an addiction, this kind of righteous campaign. When it ends, as it has to, the drop-off is a steep one.”

They had seen it before, but Maj had to live with it, and would be picking up the pieces at a time when she would be ill equipped to do so.

“Is there anything you can do?” Kate asked.

“Not really. You know Roz. If you try to shake some sense into her, it just makes you the enemy.”

“Hard on Maj.”

“Yes. And Mina is confused, too. But enough—it won’t help anyone if you and I get sucked in. What happened with your day?”

“We’re closing in,” Kate told her. She rarely went into detail with Lee on an active case, both from professional scruples and as a way of separating home from job, but this case in particular had developed so many prickly areas—from Roz’s presence in its periphery to the ambiguous righteousness of the feminist vigilante—that she did not know where to pick up the thread even if she wanted to. Better to let the tangled story sort itself out without Lee’s involvement, especially considering the hour. So it was merely, “We’re closing in,” and a few minor details before she threw down the distraction of Jules writing to her jailed abductor, which kept Lee happily chewing on that question until they were pulling up to their curb.

Chapter 23

I WAS BUSY, protested the young woman at the airport car rental agency. It was nine-twenty on Monday morning, and Britany Pihalik was still busy, fending off telephones, customers, and pushy cops all at the same time. Kate kept any mote of sympathy off her face, knowing that to appear implacable was in the end the quickest for everyone, and eventually the young woman gave in, turned her name card around on the counter, and led the two detectives into an empty break room. She offered them coffee, which they declined, took a can of diet Coke from the refrigerator for herself, and settled them at a table.

Kate handed her the printout with the name Jane Larsen circled on it. “What can you tell us about this woman?”

“I’d have to look it up—no, wait a minute. I remember her. It was the lady with the mangled card.” She gave them a perky look as if happy to have satisfied their curiosity and ready to get back to work now, and seemed mildly surprised that they had more questions.

“Could you tell us about her, please?” Hawkin asked.

“Nice lady, truly ugly hair, kind of stupid—her, I mean, not her hair. Though her hair was pretty stupid, too. Anyway, she hands me this credit card that looks like she fed it to a pit bull, said it’d fallen out of her purse and her husband ran over it with the car. But the computer took it, I didn’t even have to enter the numbers like we do sometimes when the magnetic strip is wrecked, so it was okay.”

“Did you take a close look at it?”

“No,” she said flatly, clearly thinking the question, to use her favorite word, stupid.

“Did she have any other form of ID?” Kate asked.

“Of course.” Ms. Pihalik obviously was getting no very high opinion of the police department. “We can’t let them rent a car without a valid driver’s license. She had one, I rented her a car, she left.”

“Was the name on the license Jane Larsen?”

“Yes. No. No, it was her middle name. Elizabeth, something like that. Maybe not Elizabeth, because it was something as, you know, dreary as Jane, and I remember thinking it was too bad she didn’t have at least one interesting name to choose from. But then she was pretty dreary herself.”

“Was the name Janet? Mary?” Headshakes, continuing through the suggestions of “Patricia? Cathy? Susan?” until Kate got to “Emily?” A headshake began, cut off by consideration.

“Emily might’ve been it. Yeah, that sounds right, I think it was Em-fly.”

Kate did not kiss her, although it was tempting. “You don’t have security cameras here, do you?” she asked. Unless they were hidden, Kate hadn’t seen any.

“Not inside. There’s some in the lot.”

“What did the woman look like?”

“Like I said, dreary. Dull. That ugly black hair—a really crappy dye job, might’ve even been a wig—and with these heavy glasses that were all wrong for her. Baggy clothes, like she didn’t want anyone to see her body, though it didn’t really look that bad to me. Little bit fat, maybe.” Coming from a broomstick like Britany Pihalik, Kate guessed that “fat” described anything more than three percent body fat.

“Height?” Kate asked. “Eye color?”

“Taller than me, three or four inches—and I had heels on, so she was maybe five, um, nine? ten? Big, like I said. Not really fat, I guess, just kinda, what? Chunky? Muscular, like. I don’t remember her eyes. They might have been blue, or brown.”

Helpful, Kate thought; at least they knew not to look at anyone with pink or purple eyes.

“Your machine didn’t make an actual impression of the card, did it?” Hawkin asked.

“Like one of those old back-and-forth machines with the what-you-call-it, carbons? No, it reads off the strip unless that’s been scrambled by the person keeping it in an eelskin wallet or putting it down next to a strong magnet. Then we have to key in the numbers by hand. But like I said, hers was okay.”

“Ms. Pihalik, the list you gave us yesterday was reservations and a few walk-ins. I’d like to see the actual final list of names taken from the credit cards themselves.”

“I’d have to ask about that. I don’t know if I’m allowed to give it to you.”

“Maybe we should check with your supervisor?” Hawkin gently suggested.

She look relieved. “Sure, just a minute,” she said, and went to the door to call in a taciturn young man not much older than she was, who wore a lapel pin declaring him to be Jim Tolliver. He heard their request, scratched for a moment at a flare of acne on one cheek, and then shrugged.

“I don’t know why not. But it’d be faster if you could just look at the screen instead of printing out everything.”

So Ms. Pihalik went back to her customers and Mr. Tolliver went to a free terminal, and while the detectives looked over his shoulder he scrolled through the previous day’s rentals until he came to larsen. But it was not jane; it was james. The card’s user might have hammered the S and the second half of the M into invisibility, but the computer was not fooled, and had Britany Pihalik not been so distracted, she might have noticed.

Mr. Tolliver seemed to think she should have, distraction of line-out-the-door customers or no distraction. He bristled in righteous anger, leaving Kate and Al to study the record. There was, however, little to see except that the signature had been close enough to pass at a glance.

As evidence, the faked car rental could have been more specifically damning, but there was no doubt that it constituted a solid piece of work. They had sat on it for too long, however, and could not justify the additional hours of going through the videotapes of the external security cameras in hopes of glimpsing a face. It was time to report in.

“REPORTING IN” QUICKLY E V O L V E D into “being called on the carpet.” The official disapproval of their independent tactics—from lieutenant, captain, and deputy chief, everyone, it seemed, but the chief of police and the mayor himself—was indeed balanced against the quality of the evidence they had dug up (in the minds and faces of their own people—Marcowitz was not so easily mollified), and by hanging their heads in meek (if mock) submissiveness while they continued to thrust out in front of them the tangible results of their borderline insubordination, they defused the wrath of officialdom to a tongue-lashing none of them took very seriously. When it was over, the higher ranks left, satisfied that the lieutenant could handle it from here.

However, Agent Marcowitz remained, sitting in a chair slightly removed from the police department personnel and saying nothing. The Man in Black (actually a dark charcoal, Kate noticed, and very nicely cut) dominated the meeting precisely by doing nothing, not even shifting in his seat, until the official reprimand had run its course. Then he uncrossed his legs, and the three remaining members of the SFPD turned to him as if for judgment.

“We agreed that you would keep me in the loop at all times,” he said.

“We phoned you as soon as we had something firm.” Kate’s protest sounded feeble even to her own ears; far better to have stayed silent.

“What do you propose to do now? If I may be allowed to ask.”

“The videotapes of the rental lot need to be gone over, the car found and checked for prints.”

“I’ve already sent agents to get that under way.”

“Traynor’s own history needs to be looked into, in case this is the work of one of his victims, parents at the school, that kind of—”

“We are assisting Detective Hillman with that line of inquiry.”

“Which leaves the interviews of our own pool of suspects here.”

“Suspects.”

“Possible suspects, should I say? Nothing on any of them except opportunity.”

“And an agreement with the philosophy of the group calling itself the Ladies.”

“What philosophy? That some men are lowlifes and need to be stepped on? I don’t know too many people who would disagree, cops included.”

“Alibis,” Marcowitz merely said, a cool word to let the air out of her heated digression.

“We were told that your people were taking over there. That’s why Al and I took the time to go hunting down the car.”

“The preliminary interviews are under way. I understand you yourself give Rosalyn Hall an alibi.”

“That’s right. I talked with her on the phone at about ten-forty Saturday night.”

“Did she phone you?”

“I phoned her, returning her call. On her home number, not her cell phone,” she added before Marcowitz could ask.

“Any reason to think she was actually at home when she took it?”

With an effort, Kate reined in her patience. “I heard the dog—all right, I heard a dog,” she corrected herself before he did. “But no noises to indicate she wasn’t at home. I suppose it’s conceivable that she had the call forwarded to her cell number, but the delay in ringing is usually noticeable. Does she have call forwarding on her home phone?”

Marcowitz did not bother to answer. “What had she called you about?”

“Nothing, really. Just to ask if I’d gotten a manuscript she’d left at the house, and to talk about how things were going. Just conversation.”

“At twenty minutes to eleven?”

“Roz is a night owl.”

“So she arranged for you, a friend and investigating officer, to give her an alibi on the night a man was attacked, wanting only to talk about her Ph.D. thesis.”

Put that way, the call sounded far too convenient for words, but Kate could only shrug and say, “It’s awfully elaborate. And shaky. How could she know when I would call?”

“It wouldn’t matter when you called, would it? If she was home at ten-forty, and she left immediately after you hung up, granted she would have to move fast, but she could conceivably have been present at the Traynor assault. The silent alarm was triggered at eleven twenty-seven.”

“Barely. And she didn’t know I was going to call, she wouldn’t have had any reason to wait around at home.” Unlikely did not make an alibi, and they all knew that, but Kate had done what she could. “Have you talked with Roz, or Maj?”

“I had another agent take their preliminary statements. Maj Freiling was not cooperative, and Reverend Hall seemed more interested in making a speech. My colleague decided to suspend the interviews for the time being, thinking that if a second attempt has similar results, we can bring them in for questioning.”

“I’d be very careful about that,” Kate warned him. “Roz Hall is a woman of considerable influence—I wouldn’t try to mess with her unless you’ve got a warrant in your hand. Which I don’t think you’re going to get, at this point. And dragging in Maj, who is seven months’ pregnant, could be even worse. You could find yourself knee-deep in lawsuits.”

Marcowitz might not have heard her, for all the reaction he showed. “There is one thing I had hoped you might help us with, Inspector, until you went incommunicado on us. Statements must be taken from the residents of the women’s shelter run by Diana Lomax, and she strongly requested that you be the one to take them, having been there before.”

“I’d be happy to.”

“I will accompany you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

“The women in there are very uncomfortable when men invade their private space,” she objected. “It really would be best if-—”

“I will go with you.”

“Don’t you at least have a woman agent you can send instead?” she suggested, trying not to plead.

“They are busy, I am not, and you need backup. Either I go with you, or Inspector Hawkin and I will do it ourselves.”

“Two men, yeah, that’d be great. Okay, but you have to let me do the talking, and if Diana Lomax refuses, then we wait for one of your women agents. When do you want to go?”

“Now.”

“Right now? I—” Kate stopped, and shrugged. “Okay. Just let me make a couple of calls first. Five minutes?”

Only one call proved necessary, since Lee was home so Kate didn’t have to hunt down Jon.

“Hi, babe,” she said. “I thought you guys’d be out shopping,” that having been the plan when Kate left the house that morning.

“Finished early, we got some gorgeous little artichokes that I’m fixing right now.”

“Hell. Will they be okay cold?”

“You’re going to be late,” Lee said in resignation. “Well, if you get a chance, give me a call later, let me know when you’ll be getting in.”

“I’ll try, but don’t wait up for me. Things may drag on.”

“You astonish me,” Lee said sarcastically.

“I try. Enjoy the artichokes. Love you.”

“Me too you.”

They hung up together and Kate looked up to see Marcowitz standing iron-spined ten feet away, having heard every word.

“Shall we go?” he said.

Kate responded by taking her holstered gun from her desk drawer, putting on gun and jacket, and following him to the elevator and the parking lot. He was driving.

Marcowitz did not ask for directions, and did not need them. He drove with watchful confidence, although as far as Kate knew he had only been in San Francisco a couple of months. She considered asking the Man in Black a question about his background, then decided against it, and sat in silence.

He pulled up near the shelter, put on the parking brake, and then said something that had Kate open-mouthed in astonishment.

“Before we go in,” he told her, “I just wanted you to know that my mother was beaten to death by her boyfriend when I was twelve. Just in case you don’t think I’m sympathetic to the women who come to a shelter.”

Without waiting for a response, he got out of the car and started walking toward the group home. Kate scrambled to follow.

“I’m sorry,” she said inadequately when she had caught up with him.

“I didn’t tell you that as a play for sympathy,” he said stiffly. “Merely so you know where I’m coming from on this.” And he turned and pressed his finger on the doorbell, then stepped back so that her face would be first at the door.

The shelter was bustling; that was apparent even on the wrong side of the sturdy door, with the children inside working off a day shut up in classrooms, their voices raised and bodies racing. One of them answered the bell, and Kate leaned forward to speak to the small face, only to have the door slammed on her nose. The sounds of an altercation arose from inside, which after a minute Kate decided was an older child giving the younger door-opener hell for a lack of caution.

She and the FBI agent waited as the shouts moved off and relative silence fell, and Marcowitz was putting out his hand to ring the bell again when a single adult set of footsteps approached. The locks clattered and Diana Lomax stood before them, thunderclouds of disapproval on her brow.

“Hello, Ms. Lomax,” Kate said. “This is agent Marcowitz of the FBI. Sorry, but we need to ask the residents some questions.”

“This is not a good time.”

“It won’t take long.” I hope, Kate added under her breath.

“All right, if you absolutely have to. But the agent can wait outside.”

“I’m afraid that won’t do,” Marcowitz said, firmly but without the body language of the affronted male, remaining behind Kate instead of pushing forward and crowding his targeted foe with raised shoulders. Kate couldn’t help giving him points for his reasonableness, and even Diana Lomax seemed to think again.

“Okay,” she said finally. “But you’ll have to stay in my office. I won’t have you intruding on the privacy of the residents.”

“Fine,” he said, and she then let them in, locking the front door behind them before leading them down the hall to the office. Before Kate went through the door, she glanced ahead into the kitchen, source of a rich fragrance of Italian herbs, and spotted Crystal Navarro standing before a huge bowl of lettuce and tomatoes, looking in alarm at their passing. Kate raised her hand as a greeting, and followed Lomax and agent Marcowitz through the door marked office.

“May I ask what this is about?” Lomax demanded as soon as the door was shut. Marcowitz took his time in perching on the arm of the sofa, where he crossed his arms in a display of authority that Kate knew from experience left his right hand just inches from the butt of his gun, and met Lomax’s angry gaze.

“Three nights ago while she was here for dinner, Emily Larsen’s wallet disappeared from her purse.” He paused for reaction, of which there was none. “Yesterday the identification taken from that wallet was used in the commission of a crime.”

Lomax waited, then asked, “Is that all?”

“It’s enough to tie this shelter to three murders and one attempted murder.”

Lomax stood without moving for a long moment, then reached for the phone on the desk (Marcowitz’s hand twitched, but he did not draw his gun). She dialed seven digits, and said to whoever answered, “Inspector Martinelli is in my office with evidence that links the shelter to a series of murders. I think Carla should be here.” She waited for the response, said “Thanks,” and then hung up.

She did not seem very upset, concerned rather than worried. She left her hand on the telephone for a minute as she stared unseeing into space, then gave herself a shake and walked around the desk to sit in her chair. Had she pulled open a drawer and reached inside, Kate knew that the agent would have drawn on her, but she merely played with a pen that lay on top of the desk and chewed at her lip. Kate shifted on her feet near the door, and Lomax’s eyes immediately came up.

“I don’t know if I need a lawyer or not while I’m talking to you, but Carla will want to be here, just in case. Do you two want a cup of coffee or something while we’re waiting?”

Before Marcowitz could refuse, Kate said, “That’d be nice.”

“Crystal’s in the kitchen, she’ll show you where the cups are. I have to ask you not to question her, however.”

“Nothing more urgent than where to find the milk,” Kate agreed with a smile. No reason not to keep this friendly. Marcowitz might doubt, but Kate knew, as surely that the sun was going down outside the house, that Diana Lomax would not produce a gun—or cause others to produce theirs—in a house filled with her women and children. Marcowitz was safe on his own, and in the few minutes they had before Carla Lomax arrived with her legal objections, Kate might nose something out. Ignoring her temporary partner’s glare and keeping her voice and stance as casual as she could, she said, “Marcowitz, you want anything?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Kate paused at the door to ask Diana, again with great care to be offhand, “You mind if I take a look around? I didn’t really get a chance to see it the other day.”

To her surprise, Lomax nodded. “Sure, look around. Not in the residents’ rooms, though. Not without a warrant.”

If they’d had enough evidence to back up a warrant, the FBI man wouldn’t be sitting on the arm of the sofa. A missing wallet would only made a judge laugh. But being given permission to roam opened the place up—not to a full search, perhaps, but to a close scrutiny. She ducked out of the room and did actually go into the kitchen for coffee, keeping one eye on the hallway the whole time so she could see if the office door opened, but it did not, and Kate nonchalantly thanked Crystal before going back up the hall to look into the other three rooms that opened off it.

Leaving the kitchen, the office was the first room on her left. She turned to the door directly across the hall from it, marked training, and found behind it a tiny windowless room with two long folding tables, two computers (one so old she wondered if it was compatible to anything at all), and an electric typewriter. If this was the shelter’s sole job training, she decided, it was a miracle that any of the residents found employment.

The next room, behind the sign meeting room, was much larger. Although it, too, had no outside windows, since the building was attached to neighbors on both sides, it did have a piece of stained glass set into the end wall that separated it from the entrance foyer. The pseudo-window, combined with several airy watercolor prints on the pale green walls, added to the impression of space, and the room’s random assortment of love seats, armchairs, backless hassocks, and a couple of wooden rocking chairs were arranged against the walls in a wide circle around an oval braided rug that reminded Kate of her grandmother. Kate didn’t need the disproportionate number of tissue boxes to tell her this was the room used for group therapy. It was functional but comforting, the color and prints on the wall so similar to those in Roz’s church offices that they might have been chosen at the same time.

Kate went back out into the hallway, checked the office door to be sure it was still closed and silent, glanced into the entrance vestibule with its hodgepodge of outdoor clothing, children’s equipment, message board, and stairs leading up to the bedrooms, then reached for the fourth doorknob, the room adjoining the office. She turned the knob, and stepped into the shelter’s chapel.

This was no ordinary chapel, however, with an altar at one end and pews all in a row. This one looked more like a teenager’s bedroom, had the teenager been tidy and interested in religion and spirituality instead of handsome actors and rock bands.

The wall to Kate’s right represented more or less the Roman Catholic faith. Its central figure was the Virgin Mother rather than a bleeding Christ, but the steadily burning candles in tall amber glasses were those of Kate’s childhood, and the inspirational pictures pinned up all around the Virgin were those she remembered from Sunday school and from the edges of her mother’s dresser mirror. Sayings, scraps of prayer, and biblical quotations fluttered gently in the air rising off the candles, and on the floor at the Virgin’s feet stood a large pottery bowl spilling over with small pieces of paper, folded or crumpled into thumbnail-sized wads. Feeling far more guilty than any police investigator should, she glanced at the empty doorway before reaching for one of the scraps. Thank you Mother for Rebecca’s math grade, she read, and on another, Please help me get the job in your Son’s name we pray. She put them back and stood up to study more closely the offerings and exhortations around the Virgin. The simple name Mary, written on a three-inch-square yellow Post-it and heavily decorated with an elaborate green vine with purple and lavender flowers, had been stuck to the wall over the Virgin’s halo like a miniature illuminated manuscript. Other Post-its, torn-off squares of typing paper, and wide-lined sheets from children’s schoolbooks had quotes ranging from reassurance that God notes the sparrow’s fall to the command (which reminded Kate of her recent discussions with Roz, and which seemed remarkably inappropriate in a shelter for battered women) If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Around the bowl of prayer-wads, offerings had been laid, many of them floral and either wilted or artificial. They were interspersed with coins, a cross-stitched bookmark, and a string of lumpish beads made of the bright oven-baked plasticine that Kate recognized from Jon’s experiment with Christmas ornaments. It was all sweet and rather pathetic, and Kate turned away to see what else the room contained.

Four backless benches of polished oak had been arranged in an open square in the center of the room, facing the four walls. The Virgin Mary’s shrine wall was to the right of the door; the wall with the door in it bore only a plain wooden cross with a tall candle in front, dignified and simple to the point of starkness. The left-hand wall, across the room from the Virgin, was mounted with a deep wooden shelf about six feet wide, roughly three feet off the floor. On the shelf was propped a painting done on cheap canvas-board, a crudely done landscape of hills, trees, and river, with an angel flying in the clouds over it. The angel did not appear aerodynamic nor the landscape very probable, but there were half a dozen other pictures leaning against the wall to choose from, and Kate put her empty cup down on one of the benches and went to flip through them. They included an intricate mandala, a Star of David, the enlarged photograph of a tropical island, and three framed prints: a Berthe Morisot mother and child, an old-fashioned painting of children splashing in a river, and a famous Eva Vaughn study of three children, the original of which Kate had actually seen in the artist’s studio. She greeted it like a friend and thought about putting it up in place of the nonaerodynamic angel, but resisted the temptation.

This left the fourth wall, which was completely concealed by a heavy, dark red velvet curtain that stretched from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. She pulled the left edge away from the wall, saw that there did indeed seem to be something other than blank wall behind it, and found a curtain pull. She tugged at the cords, the drapes obediently parted, and then Kate was stumbling back, badly startled.

For a brief but intense moment, she thought that she was being attacked by a wild woman with blood on her teeth. She could almost smell the blood, splashed around the woman in a pool, and then the hallucination faded, leaving her to gaze in mingled amazement and horror at the image before her.

The painting on the wall was enough to give a man nightmares. It showed a woman of sorts, but this was a woman who would have caused a playboy to shrivel, would have given pause to the most ardent feminist, would have had a Freudian rapidly retracting that plaintive, worn, masculine query concerning what women wanted.

For what this lady wanted was blood.

And had it, as Kate could well see. The deep blue, larger-than-life female was wading through a lake of the stuff, splashing it around, looking drunk with it. Kate recognized her instantly as the subject of Roz’s thesis, Kali with the necklace of skulls and the belt of human hands, laughing her terrible pleasure at the decapitated head she held up in one of her four arms, a bearded face with blue eyes and a mole next to his nose, which seemed oddly familiar to Kate. Gentle Jesus meek and mild would be eaten alive by the goddess, and Kate could understand why the curtain normally hid her from view.

There were not as many prayers and thanks offerings in the two bowls attached to her wall, either, clear indication that Kali was a bit strong for most of the women who came here to free themselves from a battering relationship. It would take most women some time to get in touch with this degree of anger.

But if that was so, then whose slips of paper were these? They read only Thank you Kali Ma and Be with us, and were for the most part printed anonymously. Marigolds lay in Kali’s thanks bowl, mixed with a few still-fragrant narcissus, a child-sized glass bracelet, a gold wedding band, and a Polaroid snapshot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

And right at the bottom, uprooted by Kate’s curious forefinger, a lump of cellophane-wrapped butterscotch.

Chapter 24

KATE SNATCHED HER HAND out of the bowl as if she’d been burned, but she scarcely had time to contemplate the awful implications of contaminated evidence before a noise came from behind her back. She whirled around, her hand plunging of its own accord toward the butt of her gun, but she froze when she saw the cluster of women in the doorway.

Diana Lomax stood just inside the room, taken aback at Kate’s sudden reaction. Behind her stood Crystal Navarro and a couple of the other residents, with two young children. Crystal and the children had quite obviously never seen the painting of Kali, because all three were gaping at it, bug-eyed.

“Blessed Jesus!” Crystal blurted out. “I didn’t know them curtains had anything—”

“Who did this?” Kate demanded of the shelter director.

“Did what?” Diana asked in confusion.

“That… thing on the wall. Who painted it?”

“That? It is a bit strong, isn’t it? One of our volunteers asked if we—

“Who. Painted. It.” Kate leaned forward, and Diana took a step back.

“Phoebe Weatherman. Carla’s secretary?”

“We’ve met,” Kate told her, not entirely accurately. “When did she paint it?”

“Not very long ago. January, maybe? Yes, it must have been just after the first of the year, because her daughter-in-law Tamara was killed by her second husband just before Christmas. Phoebe loved Tamara like a daughter, far more than she loved her own son.”

“Tamara.” A woman of that name had appeared somewhere in the history of this convoluted case. Who… ?

“Yes. Tamara Pickford. A lovely, lovely person. She was one of our first residents, nearly seven years ago. That’s when Phoebe began to get involved,” she added.

“Phoebe,” Kate repeated, and revelation opened in her mind like a flower. Phoebe Weatherman, a physically strong woman with a figurine of Kali the Destroyer on her desk, who four months ago had been handed a whole world of pain, cause enough to hate the entire male sex. Phoebe Weatherman, always in the background—how did the Womyn Web site put it?—cloaked in invisibility? Who was more invisible than a dowdy secretary? What better disguise for a vengeful goddess to assume?

And that bearded head… “What was Tamara’s husband’s name?” Kate asked sharply. She became aware of Agent Marcowitz looking over the heads of the women, alert but not knowing yet what had happened.

Diana thought for a minute before shaking her head. “It was her second husband and I don’t remember…” Then she turned to crane her head at the hallway, looking past the women at a figure who stood just out of Kate’s line of vision, near the front vestibule. “Carla?” she called. “What was the name of Tamara’s second husband?”

An instant of silence fell over the gathering, and then came a voice, clear and pregnant with meaning.

“His name was Lawrence Goff,” Carla Lomax said, and took a step forward so she could meet Kate’s eyes.

That was why the face on Kali’s decapitated head looked familiar: Larry Goff, the December victim, killed in a Sacramento hotel by a woman dressed as a prostitute.

“Marcowitz,” Kate began to shout, Stop her, Marcowitz, but she got no further than his name before the knot at the door flew apart in several directions at once. Crystal Navarro had abruptly realized that the two young children were staring in fascination at the naked, brutal, blood-soaked painting on the wall, and over their loud protests she seized their shoulders to force them out of the room. A split second later, Carla Lomax grabbed a couple of the women, shoved them hard at Marcowitz, and ordered, “Keep him here.”

And then the lawyer turned and fled.

The women rose up in fierce obedience against the agent, protecting their advocate against this unknown male oppressor in the suit, just as Crystal’s two small charges came smack between them, and the hallway burst instantly into a welter of struggling, shouting man, women, and children. Kate lunged for Carla, came face-to-face with her cousin instead, and spent five critical seconds wrestling with Diana before need overcame caution and she flipped the director hard into the pile of shrieking, outraged women (Marcowitz ending up on the floor beneath them all) and waded through legs and over backs and out of the chapel doorway. The front door had opened and slammed shut again before Kate had made it into clear hallway; Carla’s back was disappearing around the corner by the time Kate worked the automatic door latches and flung herself into the shelter’s front yard.

Kate scrambled after the lawyer, who had kicked off her heeled shoes to sprint along the pavement in her stocking feet. It quickly became apparent that Lomax had spent more hours running the hills of the city than Kate, and many more than Marcowitz, somewhere in the rear. Kate wasted no breath in shouting; she merely ran, chin down and arms pumping, gaining slowly and painfully, risking cars’ bumpers at crowded street corners, dodging kids with basketballs and homeless women with shopping carts, pounding along the sidewalks to the shouts of protest and anger and the encouragement of a pair of enthusiastic prostitutes on their way to work who whooped and shouted, “You go, girl!” as the two women flew past.

Where the hell was a cop when you needed one? she cursed silently. Or the goddamn FBI? And why would good citizens ring 911 when the neighbors had a loud party but not when a plainclothes cop was trying her damnedest to run down a suspect?

The end came in a flash, more than half a mile from where it began. Carla chose a street thick with commute-hour crowds, where she lost ground breaking through the pedestrians as surely as if she had been breaking trail through deep snow. She felt Kate closing behind her, shot a glance behind and saw her pursuer too close, and shot to the right to risk a desperate leap in front of a moving bus that would have cut Kate off had Carla made it.

She did not. The bus was traveling slowly, but the inexorable force of it hurled the lawyer into the air to smash against the side of a parked car. She lay draped across the hood for a moment, then melted down onto the ground and lay still.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Kate’s breath had almost returned to normal, Marcowitz had summoned uniformed cops from all over the city, the paramedics had forced their way into the center of the chaos, and Carla Lomax was still alive. Unconscious, and so she remained. Kate stayed with her until the lawyer was taken through the doors of the operating room, and then she paced up and down in the sterile corridor while the surgeons worked.

The corridor was where Hawkin finally caught up with her. They’d spoken a number of times in the four hours since Kate had found herself standing over Carla Lomax’s still form, and she was quite aware of the case going on in her absence, but the dull meaty thud of the bus hitting Carla’s body, the inarticulate cry and the uncoordinated flail of limbs had dominated every intervening moment.

“How is she?” were Hawkin’s first words.

“Broken bones, her spine is okay, but there’s cranial swelling. They’re trying to relieve it—she’s been in there a couple of hours. No idea what damage there might be, probably won’t know for a day or two.” She ran a hand through her short hair, feeling suddenly as if taking a step, even speaking, would be more effort than she could face. Hawkin saw it and pushed her into a nearby plastic chair. She shook her head in despair. “If I’d just up and shot her she might be in better shape.”

“If you up and shot her, she might be dead,” he pointed out. “How’s your blood sugar?”

“What?”

“Food. Lee told me to tell you that lunch was a long time ago.”

She tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “I want to crawl onto that gurney and go to sleep. Have somebody put a sign on me so they don’t roll me into the OR and cut something off, would you?”

Instead, he bullied her to the hospital cafeteria, a place that dispensed calories and caffeine around the clock. When she was looking less gray, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheaf of at least fifteen message slips. She groaned.

“I’ve been through them,” Hawkin hastened to say. “I made some of the calls while I was waiting to see the Man in Black. Most of them are routine, though you might like to know that Miriam Mkele phoned, to tell you that she might’ve handled a bag of spilled candies at the register the first week of February, a Wednesday or Thursday. What that tells us I don’t know. The only thing I couldn’t deal with were the ten calls from Peter Mehta. I phoned him back but he didn’t want to talk to me, so I said you’d get to him when you could. He said any time no matter how late, but since that was a couple of hours ago he’s probably left half a dozen more messages by now.”

“You get what it was about?”

“R02 Hall.”

“Shit.”

“She’s called a news conference tomorrow morning, told Mehta that she intends to tell the world that he and his whole community burn brides.”

Kate put her aching head in her hands, feeling the dry sandwich she’d just eaten turning to stone in her stomach, and feeling the world begin to whirl slowly around. While she’d been busy stamping out one flare-up, behind her back a volcano had begun to swell. “Shit,” she said again. “Lee must be going nuts. Do you want me to call Mehta? What time is it, anyway? Midnight?”

“Not quite. It’s eleven-fifteen.”

“I was sure my watch had stopped. I want to stay around until she comes out of surgery.”

“Do you need to wait here? Or we could go see Mehta, then come back and check on her? He said he’d be up late.”

“Oh hell, there’s nothing I can do here. Let’s go. But look, what did Crime Scene find at the shelter?”

“No prints on the candy, sorry to say, except the edge of your finger. But the Kali painting was definitely done by Carla’s assistant, Phoebe Weatherman. And Weatherman’s house is full of the same kind of pictures.”

Kate’s brain began sluggishly to move. “She was also active in the shelter—she was there for a while the night James Larsen was killed. And she fits the description of Traynor’s bigger attacker. And even the woman who rented the car—with a black wig and glasses…”

“Anyway,she’sskipped—I’vejustcomefrom herplace,Crime Scene’s taking it apart now. There’s a warrant out for her. Her daughter-in-law, name of Tamara Pickford, wasn’t actually killed by her ex-husband. She died of—”

“An accidental overdose of pain pills, after her husband violated a restraining order and left her with a broken arm and a smashed jaw. I remember from the report on Goff. Damn it all, anyway. Phoebe Weatherman,” Kate said. “Set off by her daughter-in-law’s death. Why the hell didn’t her name come up in the Goff investigation reports?”

“A very convoluted set of name changes—Weatherman is the woman’s third name since she gave birth to the child who was first husband of Tamara Goff-formerly-Pickford-formerly-Lopes.”

“It wasn’t Roz, then, after all.” She did not know how she felt about that, probably wouldn’t know for some time, but even then she was aware that the relief she felt was heavily colored with shame, and that she would not be able to look at Roz Hall for a long time without being aware of it.

“Certainly she wasn’t directly involved in Traynor’s attack,” Al confirmed. “She’s been far too visible the last few days.”

“Thank God for small favors.”

“That doesn’t mean she isn’t in there somewhere,” he warned.

“Oh, she’s involved somewhere, even if it’s only planting the idea of a vengeful goddess into Phoebe’s mind. Or Carla’s. And she knows it, or suspects it. I wonder if that’s why she’s gone after the Mehtas with such a passion. Denial and guilt and the feeling that if she wasn’t involved, she should have been? God knows. I’ll have to ask Lee,” she said, completely unaware of her identification of Lee with the Almighty.

“You stay here,” Hawkin told her. “I’ll round up a uniform to babysit Lomax if she comes out of surgery before we get back.”

“Expecting a confession, Al?” Her voice was bitter; he glanced at her sharply, but said nothing.

Considering Carla Lomax’s condition, the uniformed guard was probably a waste of the taxpayers’ money, but she was there as much to keep camera lenses out as to keep Lomax from escaping, and Kate suspected she would earn her pay. They gave her their various numbers, she promised to pass the information on to any replacement guard, and Kate and Al left her to it. Halfway to the elevators, the two detectives came to a dead halt. Diana Lomax was emerging from the steel doors, deep in conversation with several supporters, among them Maj Freiling. Kate could see the coming confrontation, and she quailed.

“I can’t face them, Al,” Kate told him in something close to despair.

“So don’t,” he said simply, and took her arm to steer her back down the other way, up and down a lot of stairs, and eventually through the still-crowded emergency room (more dormitory for the area’s homeless at this hour than it was hospital) to the parking lot.

“Where the hell did I leave my car, anyway?” Kate asked Al. “Oh yeah, Marcowitz drove to the shelter, so it’s still at the lot. You’ll have to drive me by so I can fetch it. Ah, hell; what am I thinking about? The hospital doesn’t need me to watch over Carla Lomax. Let’s go and pat Mehta’s hand, and then you can take me home and I’ll see if I can get Lee to talk Roz out of her news conference, and then we’ll all get twelve hours’ sleep and live happily ever after.”

“If that was an offer of your guest bed,” Al said, “thanks, but I think that tonight I need to be in my own. I can drop you by your house, or the lot.”

“The lot, thanks. Is there any reason to go by the shelter, or the two women’s houses?”

“Marcowitz has his teeth into those.”

A vivid and surreal image floated through Kate’s tired mind, of the strong, shiny teeth of the Man in Black sunk deep into the front corner of a trim little cottage. She shook her head to clear it.

“Did he say anything to you about what happened at the shelter?”

“Not much, just enough so it was obvious he feels he screwed up.”

“He did. We both did.” And Carla Lomax was paying the price.

Kate half hoped they would find the Mehta house dark and silent, allowing them to pass by to their waiting beds, but such was not to be. All the outside lights were glaring and the downstairs windows were lit up, including Mehta’s front study. The two detectives sighed simultaneously, and got out of the car.

The moment they set foot on the walkway, the front door flew open, revealing an unshaven, uncombed Peter Mehta, dressed in a dark jogging suit and carrying a heavy stick in his right hand. They froze.

Hawkin cleared his throat. “Mr. Mehta, would you please put down your club?”

The man in the doorway looked at the object in his hand and reached down to prop it in the corner. The two detectives resumed their journey up the walk and into the house. Mehta began speaking rapidly before the door was shut.

“That madwoman! You must do something about her. This is America—she has no right to torment my family. I will buy a gun to protect my wife and children! You have to make her stop.”

Kate put a hand on his arm, which surprised him into sudden silence. Wondering vaguely if she’d violated some cultural taboo, she removed her hand and used it to gesture toward the man’s study. “Shall we talk, Mr. Mehta?” she asked in a calm voice, and when they were all settled, she took out her notebook, although she doubted she would be writing anything in it—or if she did, that she would be able to decipher it in the morning.

“Now, Mr. Mehta, can you tell us what this is about?”

“She threatened me, my family.”

“Who threatened you?”

“That Hall woman who calls herself a minister and her minion, the—what is the word?—dyke who led little Pramilla astray. Amanda something, and some other woman, and my God, the press! But mostly the Hall woman. She said she would burn us as little Pramilla was burned.” It was “little Pramilla” now, Kate noted, not “the girl.” The belated affection soured her stomach even further.

“That’s a very serious charge, Mr. Mehta,” Al said.

“It was in the newspaper. They did not name her, but it was what the voice told me on the telephone, that she would do to us what happened to Pramilla. Look,” he demanded, “I have lost my sister-in-law, and then my own brother. Killed by those—those harridans, I have no doubt. Do I need to arm myself—or even take my whole family back to India, to escape their wrath? You must protect us.”

It was difficult to separate Mehta’s honest distress from his dramatic excesses and the unfortunate humor his increasingly singsong accent brought along; still, they had no choice but to take him at face value, at least for the moment. Kate asked if she could borrow his telephone to make the necessary arrangements.

“We’ll have the house watched tonight and during the day tomorrow. Ms. Hall is due to speak with the press in the morning, but I’ll see if we can reach her before then, ask her to tone down her remarks until we’ve had a chance to look into her accusations. Now,” Kate said firmly, holding her hand up to stem his protest, “we can’t stop her from speaking to reporters, any more than we tried to stop you. If I try to force her, it will only make matters worse.” Mehta subsided, grumbling to himself at the innate unfairness of the American system, protecting the criminals and leaving a man to protect his family alone.

Kate felt suddenly flattened by exhaustion, and she snapped, “Mr. Mehta, we’ve just spent a very long day cleaning up after a bunch of vigilantes who thought the same thing. If we hear you’ve gone out and bought a gun, I for one am going to be really unhappy.”

“No, no, I did not mean that. I do not want a gun—what do I know of guns but that children find them and shoot each other? I will let your officer do his work, and hope only that you will talk some sense into the madwoman.”

Kate winced at the description of a woman she still thought of as a friend, but she didn’t argue with it. She didn’t want to argue with anyone else, wanted only to tumble over onto Mehta’s sofa and pass out, but she had to stay rational until they could turn him over to the uniformed officer.

While Al and Mehta walked around the house and checked the doors and windows, Kate used Mehta’s phone a second time to call the hospital. Carla was out of surgery, her condition critical but stable, whatever that meant. She hung up and wandered around the office, suspecting that if she sat down she’d fall asleep. The books on Mehta’s shelves looked unread, there because a man’s study needed a lot of hardcover spines. Many of them were in some squiggly alphabet, and some of them were on India and Indian art. That reminded Kate of a question she’d carried around for days now, so when Mehta came back she asked him.

“Does your family…” How did one ask this? Kate wondered. “Do you worship the goddess Kali, Mr. Mehta?”

“Of course not,” he said, sounding affronted. “Only the… lower castes worship Kali. And tribals.”

The outcasts and the marginalized. The invisible ones again.

“Well, do you know anything about her worship?”

“Only in general. I have never been to one of her temples, if that’s what you mean, never witnessed a sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice? What, like animals?”

“Goats most usually, smaller animals and birds for the poorer people.”

“Do you by any chance know if they’re strangled?”

“What, the animals?” Mehta said, his voice rising in protest at the question.

“Yes, the goats and such.”

He took a deep breath, and said primly, “I believe their throats are cut.

“But I thought Hindus were vegetarians?”

“They don’t eat the animals.” Mehta was now frankly appalled, even more offended than he had been at the idea of his family worshiping this dark goddess. Kate just looked at him, wondering if his answers would have made sense if she weren’t so damned groggy, and then doggedly backtracked to where she had begun.

“I just asked about her worship because I was wondering if candy was a usual offering to Kali.”

“Candy?”

She was beginning to regret that she’d asked. “Yes, pieces of candy. Chocolate, hard sweets, that kind of thing.”

“I have never heard of that, although I suppose one could offer anything to a god, and foodstuffs are commonly used. Ghee—melted butter—is often used to anoint… objects of spiritual energy. But I have never heard of pieces of candy.” Kate started to tell him thanks and it was not important, but he was not through. “Now if you’d asked me about Candi,” he said, giving it a different pronunciation, “that I could help you with. Candi is another name for the goddess Kali, what you might call another manifestation of the primary goddess Durga. Hindu mythology is a little complicated,” he said, sounding apologetic.

“Yes,” murmured Kate. “So I understand.”

“Do Indians eat candy, Mr. Mehta?” Al asked.

Mehta looked puzzled at this bizarre conversation, but he answered readily enough. “Yes, we eat candy—at least, the children do, when their mother lets them. In India there is little chocolate, because of the heat, you know, but we have many sweetmeats made from milk and nuts, and using fruits and vegetables. Very rich, but actually not bad for you. Would you like to try some? My wife buys it in Berkeley.”

Kate would have demurred, but Hawkin said yes, he would be interested, and there seemed to be nothing else to do while they waited for the patrol officer, so Mehta, polite if uncomprehending, led them back to the kitchen and took out several clear plastic deli boxes filled with soft squares, white, orange, and a bilious pink color.

“Burfi,” he said, offering them a square of mealy and cloyingly sweet white stuff that tasted like perfume. “Carrot halwa, and almond burfi. And there are also gulab jaman and jelabis, which my wife makes sometimes, but I would call those desserts or pastries, not candy.”

Kate was having trouble with the substance in her mouth, but Hawkin swallowed hard and said thickly, “What about those little assorted seeds and stuff?”

“Seeds? You mean saumf? Not candy, no. You might call it a snack, I suppose, though I’d say it’s more a breath freshener.” He rummaged through another shelf and came out with a packet of loose seed mix with colored specks, apparently identical to the little bag of seeds Laxman had carried in his pocket. “Americans don’t tend to chew things, other than gum, but we chew betal, which makes one spit, or saumf, which doesn’t. Chewing or not chewing is a cultural difference.”

“But it’s not candy?”

“Not by any stretch of the imagination, Inspector.”

Their strange questions had woken his curiosity, but they did not choose to enlighten him. The patrolman arrived a minute later, and they left, reassuring Mehta, hit by a sudden return of anxiety, that they would do their best to deflect Roz Hall. They turned the house over to the uniform and settled into their car, with Hawkin behind the wheel.

Kate, oddly, felt less tired than she had. That burfi or whatever it was had been sweet enough to raise the blood sugar of a corpse; maybe the department should lay in a supply for those long night shifts.

“So the candy is a pun,” she mused, “an offering of Kali to Kali. And that was very interesting about the seedy stuff not being candy, to his mind anyway.”

“But would Carla and Phoebe have known it wasn’t an Indian kind of candy?”

“They know about Kali.”

“That doesn’t mean they know Indian culture.”

“True,” she agreed, and sat motionless in the moving car. Outside the windows, the city’s night song came to Kate’s ears, muted and atonal, unpleasant and as jangled as her nerves. After a few blocks, she said, “I’ll ask Lee to call Roz first thing in the morning, see if she can persuade her to lay off Mehta. If there’s anyone she’ll listen to, it’s Lee.”

“It’d be nice to be able to stop her without having to put a gun to her head,” Hawkin said. Kate was not sure he was actually joking.

At the parking lot beneath the perpetually laden freeway, Kate’s car started immediately, to her relief, and it seemed to drive itself up the silent streets to die old house on Russian Hill. The house was still and quiescent when she let herself in, the entrance and hallway lights the only bulbs left burning. She phoned the hospital again, which gave her no changes, and then, hating the world, the city, and her job in that order, Kate set the alarm for six A.M., less than four hours away, stripped her clothes off into a heap on the floor, and crept into the blessed shelter of the bed.

Lee woke up and turned over, nuzzling into Kate with a questioning noise in the back of her throat and then an actual question.

“Is everything okay?”

Kate, realizing that she could trade a few minutes now for a longer sleep in the morning, shifted around to put an arm around Lee.

“I need you to do something for me, sweetheart. Did you know Roz has called a press conference in the morning about the Mehta family?”

“God, do I ever. Maj was on the phone most of the evening.”

“Well, there may not be anything that any of us can do, but Roz might just possibly listen to you.” Lee started to protest, but Kate pushed on. “Carla Lomax and her secretary were the ones behind those murders. We haven’t actually arrested either of them, because Carla ran in front of a bus while I was chasing her and is still in recovery and Phoebe’s disappeared, but they will be charged with Larsen and Banderas for sure, as well as a man in Sacramento and probably in a few days Laxman Mehta, although the investigation’s still going on. Oh yes, and the attempted murder of a guy named Traynor in San Jose.”

Lee was fully awake now. “God, Kate, that’s—what, five assaults? Why? And what does Roz have to do with it?”

“They began with straightforward revenge, it looks like, and from there decided to become vigilantes. And I believe that the reason Roz is so hot to get Mehta is that she knew, on some level, that the two women were involved in something. I think we’ll find that she introduced them to the idea of the goddess Kali as a feminist avenger, and they ran with it. Sweetheart, blackmail her, for my sake. Play on her guilt, her responsibility for twisting those two women. Even if it’s not true, it’ll make her slow down and think. Yes, love,” she said over Lee’s protests, “I know it’s unscrupulous and unfair and everything else, but Roz is about to set loose a tornado on the city that’ll make it nearly impossible to investigate the Mehta case with any hope of conviction, and might well drive the Mehtas back to India and out of our jurisdiction. And you can tell her that, too, if she’ll shut up about it; tell her anything, just so she gives me time.”

Kate felt as if her voice was at the end of a dim corridor, echoing and growing fainter, but she waited until Lee had agreed to try, agreed to reach Roz early in the morning, before she let herself go. The last thing Kate said before sleep claimed her was, “Could you change the alarm clock to eight?”

Chapter 25

IT WAS NOT EIGHT, she saw, it was twenty past seven, and it was not the alarm, but the telephone.

“Martinelli,” she croaked into the receiver.

“It’s me, love,” Lee’s voice said into her ear, “I thought you should know that I just got to Roz’s house and she isn’t home. We’re heading over to the church; I’ll ring you back as soon as we find her.”

“You blessed among women,” Kate said, already on her feet. “I love you.

“I know you do. Now go have a shower.”

Kate’s shower lasted perhaps ninety seconds and then she was pulling on clothes over her still-damp skin and running a comb through her wet hair. She trotted downstairs and had just poured herself a cup of very stale coffee when the phone rang again.

“Roz’s secretary said that Roz phoned Peter Mehta at about quarter to seven this morning. They had a short talk and then she just drove off, about five minutes ago.”

“Okay. She may have gone over there for a private talk, a little last-minute conflict resolution.” It would be like Roz, but it made Kate uncomfortable to think of Roz facing the furious Peter Mehta by herself. “Look, I think I’ll run by there, see if I can get her to leave him alone. You stay put, I’ll phone you when I find her.”

“There’s coffee in the—”

“Got it. ”Bye.“

She took one large swallow of the hot greenish substance and abandoned the cup.

The Mehta house was about ten minutes away on a good day. Kate made it in eight, charging up the hills and squealing around the corners, and even managed to punch in Hawkin’s pager number at an unavoidable red light to leave a message.

Still, Roz had gotten there first. Her Jeep was in the driveway but there was no sign of her, or of Mehta. Kate eyed the drawn drapes, and decided that she did not really want to be in there alone with an angry man who met police officers at the door with a club in his hand—the memory of the last time she had ventured into an unknown situation with minimal backup was all too clear in her mind and on her scalp. Feeling a little abashed, she put in a call for assistance, but did not wait for the patrol car to arrive.

The doorbell brought no immediate response, nor did a heavy fist on the door. If the family heard her, they probably thought she was just an early reporter. She eyed the sturdy wood briefly before deciding that, even if she could think of an excuse, her shoulder would shatter before the door budged, so she headed around the house toward the remembered kitchen door, where she might well find the family at breakfast, Roz with a cup of coffee in her hand, beaming at them all in her inimitable friendly manner, creating reason and compromise out of angry divisiveness as she had so often done.

The gate in the high wooden fence was latched. Kate cursed under her breath, made sure her gun was secure in its underarm holster, and scrabbled up to pull herself over. She paused to peer over before committing her heel to the fence top, lest Mehta be standing there with his club—or a shotgun—but the empty driveway stretched out along the wall of the house to end at the burnt-out patch that had been Pramilla’s kitchen, and her pyre. Kate continued pulling herself up, and over, and landed on the other side only slightly bruised and winded.