Night work (10 page)

This one looked to sit on the shelf gathering dust for a long time, Kate thought. Al agreed.

"One thing might be worth doing, though," he suggested.

"That phone in the laundromat?"

"Yeah, but it'll have to be about the same time the call was placed in order to do any good."

"You weren't doing anything tonight, were you, Al?"

"I'm already too late for dinner. I should probably call Jani and let her know not to wait up."

While Al made his worn apologies to his new wife and stepdaughter,
Kate phoned Lee and agreed to bring home mu shu pork and kung pao
shrimp. The three of them ate in the dining room of the old house on
Russian Hill, looking out over the squat presence of Alcatraz and the
ferries going to and from Sausalito, and with the descent of night, the
long string of white lights stretching the length of the Bay Bridge.
They had some coffee and talked of nothing in particular, and at
eight-thirty Kate and Al returned to the car and pulled away from the
curb to nose their way back into the city.

Kate parked across the street from the laundromat. On the back wall
of the brightly lighted space, between a dryer the size of a compact
car and a machine that dispensed tiny cartons of soap powder and fabric
softener, there stood a telephone, a call from which may have brought
James Larsen out to his death. The laundromat stood in the middle of a
busy block. Next door was a bustling Mexican restaurant that seemed to
do as much take-away business as table service. Across the street was a
record store, a coffeehouse, a late-night bookstore, and a Chinese
restaurant. Plenty of people around to witness a person making a call,
standing beneath the harsh blue light of a couple dozen fluorescent
strips, but no one to notice.

No patron of the laundry admitted to having washed her clothes there
on Monday night. The woman in charge of watching the machines snapped
irritably that she was too busy folding clothes in the back for the
drop-off trade, and that the damn phone was a pain in the neck, she and
her husband were thinking of having it pulled out or replaced with one
of those new models that people couldn't call in on, and no, her
husband had not been there on Monday. The two detectives thanked her
and went back onto the street.

The staff in the Mexican restaurant, most of whom had been working
Monday night, had also been too busy to notice any particular
individual going in or out of the laundromat. The bookstore owner had
seen a bearded Rastafarian using the phone for quite a while on Monday,
in a conversation of escalating anger that ended with the man bashing
the receiver down, kicking a wheeled laundry cart in passing, knocking
over a menu board for the restaurant next door, and shouting his way
down the street, though the bookseller thought it happened closer to
ten, and Kate, while dutifully noting the story, could not summon much
enthusiasm for the theory that a furious dreadlocked African-American
had tempted James Larsen to drive from his home to San Francisco on
Monday evening.

At ten o'clock, the businesses started shutting and the
patrons of the laundromat staggered off with their bulging plastic
sacks of clean clothes.TheMexicanplaceseemedprepared togoondishing up
menudo and enchiladas until dawn, and at eleven, a pair of weary
detectives went in and ordered bowls of soup at one of the back tables.

"Well, gee," said Kate. "That was sure fun."

"Lots of hot leads," Al agreed glumly.

There had been nothing of the sort, merely blank looks accompanying
shakes of the head alternating with polite (or not-so-polite)
incredulity that they might be expected to remember a person (male or
female? white, black, brown, or striped?) making a telephone call from
the back of a busy laundromat five days before.

It had been worth doing, but neither of them was surprised at the lack of results. That was how the job went.

Which meant turning back to the victim and his wife, looking for some little thing that wasn't right. Tomorrow.

"How's Jani?" Kate asked him. "And Jules?"

"Jules is great. Maddening, but great." Hawkin stirred
the vegetables in his soup with close attention, and then his mouth
twitched in a crooked smile. "Jani's even greater.
She's pregnant."

"Al! How fantastic. When is she due?"

"November sometime. We just found out the other day."

"I'm so happy for you, Al. You are happy, I take it?"

"Oh, yeah. Nervous, I guess--I'll be retired by the
time he's playing high school football. Or she."

"All the more free time to volunteer as a coach. You don't know what it is yet?"

"Jani doesn't want to."

"How did Jules react?"

"She's been great. Embarrassed a little, I guess--I
mean, parents don't go around making babies, how gross. But
underneath that, she's excited too."

"I must call her, see if she wants to go bowling or something. God, Al, you're a lucky man."

"Don't I know it. Has Lee said anything--"

His question was cut short by the insistent beeping of the pager in
his pocket, followed seconds later by Kate's. Al went into the
empty laundromat to use the telephone that had been the cause of the
outing, while Kate paid the bill and took advantage of the
restaurant's toilet. When she came out of the restaurant Hawkin
was leaning against the side of the car.

"Seems to be our week for dumped bodies," Al told her. "This one's out near the Legion of Honor."

Anonymously dumped bodies were the hardest of all murders to solve.
They were usually drug-related, there were rarely any witnesses around,
and the forensic evidence was generally scarce--most often the
victim's pockets were empty, which made identification hard and
in some cases impossible. No detective liked a John Doe, but there were
any number of them on the books, going back years. Some would never be
solved.

Again Kate's car took her from city lights into tree-shrouded
darkness. This time the lights were along Geary Boulevard, and the dark
set in more gradually, eased by the orange glow of the parking area
across from the Legion of Honor and the cool lights that turned the
museum's pillars into a sort of stripped-down Versailles. The
stone lions watched the playing fountain and preserved the facade of
civilization; then the road turned downhill and the night closed in.

High fog rode the treetops and obscured the upper reaches of the
world's most famous bridge, transforming it into a mere string of
lights held up by stubby towers. A clot of fog settled across the
roadway and then swept on, and when it lifted, they saw the cluster of
official vehicles.

The coat Kate had worn for the relatively mild night down in the
center of town was completely inadequate against the damp gale rising
up from the sea. The yammer of voices and radios could not drown out
the heavy pounding of the surf and the noise of the wind ripping
through the cypress and pine trees. A foghorn groaned on and off; a
nearby eucalyptus crackled with the brisk passage of air. Kate could
also hear a noise like sobbing--but it
was
sobbing, from
the backseat of a cruiser where a pair of teenagers huddled. Al went
over to the car and had a brief word with them, which caused a brief
renewal of wailing that died down again as the boy did his best to
comfort his increasingly tiresome girlfriend. Love, Kate reflected,
never did run smooth.

Fortunately, this body hadn't been stripped. The victim, like
James Larsen, even had his wallet. At first glance, it was about the
only thing the two men had in common. At first glance.

MATTHEW BANDERAS HAD BEEN a fit and successful thirty-two-year-old man who had given a lot of attention to his appearance.

Now he was lying in a heap at the side of the road like a sack of
discarded garbage, down the hill from the Legion of Honor museum, where
he had been found by the two teenagers out to enjoy the solitude, the
lights of the bridge, and each other. Matthew Banderas wore a suit that
had cost more than James Larsen made in a month, with another
month's salary on his feet. Two years' worth of Larsen
salary was parked a short distance up the road, with a vanity plate
reading matman. There was not even any physical resemblance between the
two men: Banderas was little more than half Larsen's age, and had
it not been for his surname, Kate would have taken him for Italian or
perhaps half-Greek, for his skin was only faintly swarthy, his
expensively styled hair thick and Mediterranean black. Nothing at all
like Larsen.

Except that Matthew Banderas had a pair of police handcuffs on his wrists.

And a taser had left its mark on his flat stomach, just below the rib cage.

And he had been strangled to death.

In the left-hand pocket of his expensive jacket Kate found a wrapped
chocolate bar, still soft with the fading warmth of Banderas's
body. She dropped it into an evidence bag, and held it up thoughtfully.

Hawkin watched as Banderas was loaded up into the van, and rubbed
his chin unhappily. "This is not good," he said.
"This is really not good."

Kate could only nod. The moment she had seen the handcuffs she knew
they were in grave trouble. They were now dealing with a serial killer,
which aside from its own urgency would mean complicated, painstaking
work under the full cacophony and glare of a media circus. She stood
and shivered as she looked out over the Golden Gate, at the dark sea
that lay between the heights occupied by the museum and the Marin
headlands on the northern shore, and she became aware of the first
gathering of news reporters on the crest of the road behind them.

"I'm surprised the TV cameras aren't here
already," she said bitterly, "Guess it's too late for
the eleven o'clock news."

Hawkin heard the dread in her voice, and knew all too well the
reason for it. From the day they had been made partners, he new to the
City and she new to the job, they had been faced with one high-profile
case after another: the world-famous artist Vaun Adams, the renowned
lesbian radical Raven Morningstar, Al's own stepdaughter's
kidnapping--all made national, even international headlines. By
now the press had only to hear the name Martinelli and they came
baying. More than once she had thought about changing her name,
coloring her hair, and going back into uniform for a nice anonymous
foot patrol beat. She figured, though, that if she did she would be
sure to stumble on Jimmy Hoffa's skeleton, or the president of
the United States shooting up in an alley.

"Look," Hawkin said abruptly. "You don't need this. Let me get one of the others in on it."

It was tempting, very tempting, but after a minute Kate shook her
head. "It's too late. I'm already involved--they
won't leave me alone."

"Sure they will. I can ask--"

"Al? Leave it. I can't let them rule my life."

"Okay," he said. Both of them knew he had enough
authority to shift her off the case; both knew he would do so if things
got too crazy. He signaled that the techs could bag up the body and
take it away. As he and Kate turned to look at the two teenagers in the
back of the police cruiser, the boy trying to act manly as he comforted
his girlfriend, whose endless whimpering was getting on
everyone's nerves, Hawkin said, half to himself, "I
don't know whether to hope this guy Banderas has a history of
wife beating, or hope he doesn't."

MATTHEW BANDERAS DID NOT have a history of spousal abuse.

Matthew Banderas had a history of rape.

Chapter 6

THE MURDER MADE THE papers in the morning, but although the articles
speculated on the possible links between this victim, James Larsen, and
the lighter pranks of the LOPD, they did not yet have the key link of
the criminal history of the two murdered men. It would only be a matter
of time, however, and with that knowledge riding on their necks, the
two detectives threw themselves at the case. Early on Saturday morning
they met up in the Hall of Justice, to get the search warrants under
way and to track down their latest victim's past.

Banderas had only been arrested once, shortly after his twenty-sixth
birthday. For that he had stood trial, been found guilty, and served
just under three years. The light sentence had been a result of his
plausibility on the stand, and was further reduced by his spotless
behavior in the low-security prison. Still, neither detective believed
that the one rape was his only instance of aberrant behavior.

"How many rapists do you know who started when they were in
their mid-twenties?" Kate asked Al skeptically, and indeed, when
they began to dig, they found that Banderas had been closely
investigated for three other rapes since his eighteenth birthday, all
of them let go by a lack of evidence the district attorney found
adequate enough for conviction. The one time he had been caught was
seven and a half years before.

Hawkin shook his head. "He was a very clever boy. He took
souvenirs--the victim's underwear--but he either
destroyed them or hid each one. Assuming he was behind all of
these."

In addition to the three for which Banderas was chief suspect, there
was a whole string of unsolved rapes, three of them clearly related by
place, time, and technique, two others with more tenuous links. Eight
times over the last seventeen years some unidentified predator had
waited for a lone woman to come out of a convenience store at night,
forced himself into her car at gunpoint, driven to some dark place,
raped her, and left her naked, bound, and missing her underwear. He
always wore a mask and gloves.

None of the series had taken place while Banderas was incarcerated.

"Why didn't anyone catch this bastard?" Kate asked incredulously.

"No forensic evidence, and you can't lock a guy up on a
similar MO. The one conviction, the woman bit him on the face and the
mask came off. She identified him at the trial. But because he
didn't finish up like he usually did--he dumped her out in
the hills, didn't take a souvenir, didn't tie her
up--there wasn't much point in going for the whole series.
And he wore a condom, so there wasn't even any DNA."