Blood Ties (3 page)

Ellen wasn't alone in making the link, but at present the department was treating the two homicides as unrelated. The department did not want to admit even the possibility that there was a serial killer at large in the Bay Area because the news media would go straight overboard with it and that wouldn't be good for public morale.

Homicide—the Holy Grail of police work. It offered a panoramic view of all that was darkest in human character. Greed, lust and madness, in every possible permutation. From time to time it occurred to Ellen to wonder if she wasn't a little mad herself to be so committed to it.

Only her father understood. “Sometimes I almost envy you,” he had told her once. “Working with children, I hardly ever see the aberration played out to its logical extremity. I haven't dealt with a full-blown sociopath since I was a resident.”

“I'm only interested in catching them, Daddy,” she had told him. “I don't try to understand them.”

But he had smiled and said, “Oh yes, you do.”

And now Mommy wanted him to give up his practice so that he would have more time to partner her at bridge. What she didn't understand—what she could not see, no matter how or how often Ellen explained it to her—was that if she succeeded in badgering him into retirement he would die of boredom. He would never live to collect Social Security.

Each of them, father and daughter, needed their work to keep life real.

It was twenty minutes before the photographer came up from shooting the body. He was carrying a video camera in a shoulder sling, so that it was pressed between his chest and his right arm. He was very good. He faced the road and then turned his body to pan the crowd that had collected behind the police tape. He did it twice, looking up at the sky over their heads like a man trying to decide whether it would rain again. They never noticed.

“How do you want 'em?” he asked, coming up next to her. “Stills or the movie?”

“Can I get both?”

The photographer shrugged. He was a short, compact man with a blond crew cut and a face suggesting that life had run out of surprises. He wore soiled jeans and a torn gray T-shirt. He looked about thirty-five.

“You can have anything you want. You'll get the disk this afternoon, but the stills won't be before Tuesday. Shaw wants to do the post right away, so I'll be busy with that. Sorry.”

“The movie will be fine for starters. Thanks.”

“Don't mention it.”

He took a stick of Juicy Fruit out of his pocket, peeled away the tinfoil, folded the gum in half and stuck it in his mouth, all without even glancing at Ellen.

“I hate this fucking job,” he said, and strolled away.

Sam came up to the top of the footpath and lit another cigarette. He had to step aside almost at once for a couple of young men in blue coveralls carrying either end of a stretcher. Strapped to it was a red blanket partially covering a dark gray body bag. The bag looked almost as if it were empty. The rear doors of the coroner's van opened seemingly of their own will and the two men got the stretcher inside and pulled the doors shut behind them.

“Show's over. We can go home now,” Sam announced. He didn't look happy.

“Is it Our Boy?”

“Oh yes. She was opened up in one stroke, breastbone to crotch. Then most of her insides were taken out, leaving her hollow as a gourd. Shaw won't know for sure until he checks the free histamine levels, but he doesn't think the injuries were postmortem. ‘Our Boy' cut her to pieces while she was still alive.”

 

2

Sam drove their fisherman downtown for detailed questioning, and Ellen, on the perfectly reasonable assumption that for the time being the case belonged to Evidence and the coroner's office, went home to her apartment to look after her domestic responsibilities.

She was hardly inside the door when Sam phoned. Fingerprint identification had scored a direct hit. The victim's name was Sally Wilkes, a twenty-three-year-old cocktail waitress from the Western Addition, whose death was important to the larger world only because she had recently filed a paternity suit against one George Feldstein, whose mother just happened to be the newly elected mayor of San Francisco.

So the first priority of the police department, in the few hours before the newspapers learned that the dead body found along the Coast Highway came with a name, was to confirm that neither Her Honor nor young George had been personally involved in disemboweling the poor girl. Other, more senior inspectors were engaged in the delicate business of establishing that all important persons had alibis which held up.

“We get to toss her apartment,” Sam announced. “I've still got a little to clear up here, so I'll pick you up in about an hour.”

“Sure.”

Against an inside wall of Ellen's living room there was a wire cage, about five feet high by three feet wide. The interior was crowded with ramps and platforms, and suspended like a hammock from the ceiling was a piece of heavy red cloth, about the size of a pocket handkerchief. There were various other objects inside, among them a shoe box half full of Ping-Pong balls.

Ellen opened the cage door, about a foot square. With her fingertips she touched the red cloth, making it sway slightly.

“Wake up, baby. Mommy's home.”

Instantly Gwendolyn, all fifteen inches of her, skittered weightlessly over Ellen's hand and up her arm, and then draped herself around the back of her neck like a fur collar—in one of her rare flashes of wit, Ellen's mother had once referred to Gwendolyn as “that animated fashion accessory.” Gwendolyn then occupied herself with a detailed inspection of Ellen's left ear.

Apparently oblivious to these attentions, Ellen went into the kitchen.

“Would you like some breakfast?” she asked, getting a sandwich bag full of cut-up chicken out of the refrigerator.

She sat down at the kitchen table and fed Gwendolyn pieces out of the bag as Gwendolyn clung to the lapel of her jacket, watching her every movement with small black eyes that glittered in her bandit's mask.

In was easy to overfeed her, so after a few minutes Ellen closed the bag.

“Want to go play, baby?”

Forty minutes later, with Gwendolyn asleep in her lap, Ellen heard her cell phone ring.

“Five minutes?” Sam asked.

“I'll be outside.”

*   *   *

“A nice neighborhood for a gin slinger,” Sam observed as he pulled in by the curb at the very end of Sutter Street.

And it was. The houses were Victorian and well kept up, some with ground-floor garages in a city where space and parking were always at a premium. It was home to the comfortable middle class, not a neighborhood where people expected to get murdered, at least not the way Sally had been.

They walked back half a block until they came to the right street number. There was an open stairway leading to the second floor and two mailboxes bolted to the stucco beside the front door, which suggested that the house had been divided into two apartments. The name on the outside mailbox was “Wilkes.”

“What do you say we go wake the people downstairs and ask them for a key?”

Behind Sam's back, Ellen grinned with mischief.

Sam took off his hat with one hand and ran the other around the inside of the rim, as if adjusting its fit, and then carefully replaced it. Then he studied the front of the house, shaking his head.

“Show a little consideration, girl. It's Sunday morning.”

“Then I guess we'll just have to break in.”

“That's the idea.”

By the time they reached the top of the stairway Sam had extracted from his billfold a thin iron rod, about six inches long with a slight curve at one end, which he held out to Ellen as if soliciting her admiration.

“Time for your master's examination.”

“Sam, you're my teacher and hero,” she said, accepting the lock pick.

They were on the other side of the door within fifteen seconds.

The air in the apartment had that dead, still quality of unoccupied space.

Sam took a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket and glanced around as he slipped them over his huge hands. He was peering into the kitchen, the entrance to which was almost directly opposite the front door. There was a half-empty glass of some dark liquid on the drain board.

“I don't see any other dirty dishes,” Ellen said. She went into the kitchen, which was really only a corridor between the entry and the narrow L of the living room, which included a dining table. Standing beside the sink, she bent over the glass to smell its contents. “Root beer, if memory serves. Otherwise the place looks pretty clean. Maybe she was just in a hurry.”

“Or maybe she wasn't the one who was thirsty. I don't see any lipstick on the rim, do you? Bag the glass and mark it down for prints and saliva. Let's hope whoever drank from it was a secreter.”

“You think he could have grabbed her here? In her own apartment?”

“It's possible.” The crow's feet around Sam's eyes deepened as his face took on a suspicious cast. “Something about this place doesn't smell right.”

Ellen dutifully put on her own gloves, took a plastic bag out of her pocket, scribbled a note on the paper label affixed to the top of the bag, then put two fingers into the glass so she could pick it up without touching the outside and slipped it into the bag without spilling a drop. Then she set the glass back down on the drain board.

They went into the living room, where there was a painting over the sofa, a seascape of the type sold at Costco for $49.95. There was also a television set on a metal stand and, in front of the sofa, a coffee table. In an ashtray on the coffee table was a brass key, about an inch and a half long.

“I'm taking bets that fits the front door,” Ellen said. “Nobody leaves their house key lying around in their living room, and why isn't it on a ring? He's playing with us again.”

“What do you mean ‘
again
'? He's never stopped.”

They hadn't gotten very far down the hallway to the bedroom before Sam's remark about the place not smelling right suddenly took on a ghastly aptness. Every homicide inspector in the world knew that odor and, with the discrimination of a connoisseur, could sniff it out from any other shade of putrefaction.

Ellen noticed it first and stopped just in front of the bedroom door, which was standing ajar no more than half an inch.

“It smells like about twenty-four hours.” She looked back at her partner and raised her eyebrows in a silent appeal to his judgment.

“I make it less. Twelve to eighteen, no more.”

There was no point in arguing. Sam's nose was as good as any bloodhound's.

“But I know what you mean,” he went on, shaking his head. “It's a little odd—a shade too pungent.”

Without touching the knob, Ellen pushed open the door, expecting to find a bloodbath inside.

There was an unmade double bed, a night table with a tiny, elaborately feminine lamp, still switched on, a stereo system in one corner, a chest of drawers with another television set resting on top. The folding doors to the closet stood open and clothes and underwear littered the floor. The room was a mess, but there were no signs of violence.

“It's coming from there,” Sam said, pointing to the bathroom door, which, like the door to the bedroom, was just slightly ajar.

Ellen was closer. The room was tiled in lime green, right up to the ceiling. It was very hot in there. There was a small sink, a toilet and a bathtub with a pink plastic shower curtain drawn closed. She used the barrel of a ballpoint pen to move the curtain aside.

Collected around the drain of the bathtub were viscera—lungs, liver, intestines, the whole show, by now almost black with clotted blood. Presumably all this had once belonged to Sally Wilkes. Her heart lay at the center of the twisted mass, as if on display.

Ellen could feel her own heart pounding in her ears, and the sweat was breaking out under her clothes. Nothing in two years with Homicide had prepared her for this.

But she had to keep it from Sam. For Sam she had to be the Ice Queen, or she was in the wrong business.

He came in for his own look. She glanced at him quickly, but his face displayed no particular emotion. He might have been checking the mail.

“So that's why,” Sam announced casually. “No body, just guts.” He raised his eyes to the light in the ceiling. “And just to make it extra nice for everybody, he left the heat lamp on to speed up the process of decay.”

Suddenly he gave Ellen a wary, sideways glance. “Are you okay, girl?”

“Sure. Fine.” She showed him a fast, insincere smile.

Suddenly she felt as if she were ready to start sobbing.

“Okay then. Now tell me what you see.”

She was back to being a detective, which somehow made it less terrible.

“She wasn't killed here,” Ellen said, surprised and relieved that her voice didn't sound shaky. “There'd have to be blood all over the place.”

“Unless he washed the walls down.”

“No.” Ellen ran a gloved finger over the tile and showed her partner the faint traces of dust she had picked up from the grout. “Nobody's done this bathroom in a week.

“You still think he grabbed her here?”

“No.” In the crowded bathroom, Sam allowed himself a slight shrug. “He wouldn't do that and then come back. Think of the risks. He grabbed her somewhere else. He had to have supposed she wouldn't be missed for a while, not until well after she was dead. He killed her, took the key from her handbag and let himself in.

“But our masters knew enough to worry that the next stray corpse might be hers. Who filed the missing persons report?”

Sam looked at his watch, as if knowing the right time would help him remember.

“Her lawyer. Sally missed an appointment. So when he couldn't reach her within the prescribed twenty-four hours, he phoned in a missing persons report. He probably also got to thinking it wouldn't be bad publicity.”