Crude power that forges a balance
Between hate and love.
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 Tray-nor 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 understand-able—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 p
oster 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.
She keeps us from being what we long to be;
Tenderness withers under her iron laws.
We may hold her like a lunatic, but it is she
Held down, who bloodies with her claws.
“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.”