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 d
oesn'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 the 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?”
Bear the roots in mind,
You, the dark one, Kali,
Awesome power.
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.
Kate was not aware of sliding her gun out of its holster, but somehow it was in her hand as she moved briskly down the concrete drive and rounded the corner of the house, and then the world blew up in her face.
Twin shrieks of pain and terror soared above the breathy whump of exploding gas
oline. Without thought Kate hit the hard ground rolling, and felt more than saw the expanding cloud flash over her head and puff out, leaving at its source a dancing pond of flames from which two figures trailed streams of fire. Mehta's arm was alight to his elbow, but he was already pulling off his dressing gown and beating at the flames with it. At his feet, wavering in the heat, lay a compact black shape that a part of Kate's mind registered as a taser.
Mehta was up and out of danger, but not Roz. She was lying with her legs deep in the very hottest part of the flames, writhing feebly and trying with a clear lack of coordination to pull herself away. Her trousers were burning and her cries of terror and pain seemed to fill the air. Kate's gun went into its holster as she ran to grab Roz under the arms to drag her back from the worst of the flames, but the fire followed them, loath to let its prey go, and Roz still burned. Casting around desperately for something to smother the flames, Kate spotted the mildewy cushions of the lawn furniture; she snatched them up and threw them over Roz; the stubborn flames hesitated, then billowed up again around the thick pads. It was a nightmare, this heaving tangle of flowered cushions and squirting blue fire and flailing limbs, and as Kate jerked off her jacket to beat at the fire, an exquisite pain wrapped around her left arm, and she beat on until at last the fire on Roz flared and died out.
Roz's high-pitched mewls of agony were audible even over the dying roar of the flames, but then Mehta's voice came shouting, taut with pain and what might have been rage but Kate knew was in truth fear.
“What are you doing? That madwoman attacked me, she tried to burn down my sleeping house, let her burn, she ought to—”
His voice strangled at the sight of Kate's drawn gun. “What are you doing?” he said again, openly afraid now.
“You brought her here to kill her, you bastard. Set her on fire like you did Pramilla, knocked her helpless first like you did with Laxman. You thought we'd count your brother's murder as just one more of the series. Was it a million dollars your father left him, or was it maybe a little more? Peter Mehta, you are under arrest for the murder—”