Night work (13 page)

"It certainly was not," Kate told her.
"If--and we don't have any evidence so far except the
record both victims have of crimes against women--if this killing
is related to the murder of James Larsen, then this woman
couldn't have done it. Not with that arm and those
injuries."

"So you've maybe got somebody picking off the bad guys.
Well, honey, better you than me. Personally, I'd be real tempted
to look in the other direction for a while, maybe even offer a few
names and addresses of my own, you know? Hey," she said more
seriously, "that was a joke. Let me know if I can do anything to
help."

But it had not been completely a joke, all three of them knew that,
because any cop who had held a badge for more than a few months well
understood the urge for a more simple and direct form of justice than
the law could provide. Retribution, vigilante justice, call it what you
would, it was a deep and powerful temptation, every so often when a
known villain was finding a crack to fall through.

Well, here were two men who had run out of hiding places. And two
detectives who had the job of finding the person or persons who had
taken on the role of judge and executioner.

They talked for a few minutes with Wiley, the easy cop talk of a shared language and similar
view
of the world.

Wiley was more than interested to hear of Melanie Gilbert's
reticence over her lover's bedroom habits, and promised to pass
on the word to their sex crimes detail that an interview there might be
of value. Sure, Banderas was dead, but clearance rates were law
enforcement's bottom line, and the statute of limitations on that
string of rapes was by no means expired.

Two young women carrying expensive tennis rackets came out of a door
on the other side of the courtyard, talking loudly and happily until
they glanced over and saw the three police detectives. Kate wondered
idly if Rachel Curtis had been a happy tennis player two weeks ago.

Martina Wiley seemed to read her mind. "Rachel will be all
right. She's a strong person who's been knocked for a loop
by this, but I think she'll find her anger in a couple more days,
and that'll help. I worked sex crimes down south before coming
here," she explained. "You get to have a feel for how
people will react."

"I hope you're right," Kate told her.

"We'll see. Good to meet you two. I'll be talking
to you soon." They shook hands and, thus dismissed, Kate and Al
made their way down the stairs, dodging a man with a bicycle coming up,
a man with a dog going down, and the postman with an Express Mail
envelope, special Sunday delivery, also heading up the stairs.

They let themselves back into the Banderas apartment. It smelled
unoccupied already, of dust and stale air despite the lingering scent
of yesterday's coffee, and would in a few days be cleared for
removal of the victim's effects by his family. Kate had wanted to
check a couple of the files in his laptop, but before she had gotten
any further than booting it up, someone pounded on the door, bypassing
the winsome-voiced doorbell for the sake of directness.

Kate opened it to Martina Wiley. She was holding an opened Express
Mail envelope in her rubber-gloved hands, the envelope they had seen in
the postman's hand five minutes before.

"It's for you," said Wiley. She carried it over to
the dining table and, using the tips of her gloved fingers, she turned
the envelope over above the table to allow a folded piece of paper to
fall out. Touching only the extreme corners, she pulled it open, and
they read:

Be strong, Rachel Curtis, it was not your fault. He will bother no woman again.

--
a friend

"Oh, shit," said Kate.

Al Hawkin, looking over her shoulder, could only agree.

INVESTIGATING THE LIFE OF the dead man took up the rest of that day
and several of the following. The department in Los Angeles sent
someone to notify the Banderas family of the death, and on Sunday
evening a brother flew up to identify the body and make funeral
arrangements, and to begin the process of clearing out the apartment.
The brother was a devout and conservative born-again Christian, a lay
preacher in his church, and was so offended by his black-sheep
brother's video collection that he had to arrange for the
complex's gardener to come in and remove it from the premises.
Some of them were a little rough even for the gardener.

The videos offered them a tentative and theoretical link with the
Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, since the group's first
victim, Barry Doyle, sold several of the same titles, but credit card
receipts at catalogues and video places closer to home accounted for
most of them, and the frail link dissolved.

The note received by Rachel Curtis was duly transported to the lab,
which told them precisely nothing: dropped in a mailbox in Oakland, the
stamp wetted by bottled water rather than someone's revealing
saliva, by a person wearing gloves, on paper produced by the ton, both
paper and printer different from that used by the Ladies on their
victims. They spent a fruitless hour debating why, if the two murders
were linked, Emily Larsen had not received a note, telling her that she
was safe. Was the murderer's technique becoming more refined? Or
was it simply that Emily knew who her abuser was, and would know that
she was now safe, but Rachel, who had known only a faceless rapist, did
not?

They did not find what had called Banderas away from his date with
Melanie to end up at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. He had crossed
the Golden Gate Bridge just at dusk, when the tollkeeper took his money
and reminded him cheerfully to turn on his headlights, and he flipped
her the finger before laying rubber in his acceleration. Not that he
seemed to be in a rush; he was just being a jerk, she said, adding
philosophically, people were, some of them.

Two people might have seen Banderas enter the park around the
Legion. One elderly woman, cursed with failing night vision and
hurrying to get home before full dark, thought she might have seen the
flashy Banderas car parked next to a light car, white or tan, but it
was neither of the two makes she knew--Volkswagen and
Volvo--although it was closer to a Volvo sedan in shape. And it
might have been light blue, or that metallic gray.

The search went on, their steps continually dogged, or preceded, by reporters covering the same ground.

It was all very frustrating and grueling and normal, and Kate
dragged herself home each night worn-out but unable to sleep. Finally
on Tuesday, trudging through the front door to yet another warmed-up
meal, Lee met her in the front hallway with a pair of running shoes in
her hand.

"You going jogging, love?" Kate asked, dredging up a joke.

"No, you are."

Kate moved around Lee and began to unload herself of what felt like
a hundred pounds of briefcase, handbag, Beretta with its holster and
two magazines, handcuffs, and assorted loose folders, heaping them
precariously on the small many-drawered desk next to the stairs.
"Not tonight, Lee. I'm tired."

Lee had somehow moved around to block Kate from the rest of the
house. She held out the shoes, practically shoved them into
Kate's chest, and said, "Go."

"Oh Christ, Lee, don't do--"

"Go. Now."

Kate glared at her determined lover, slapped the drawer shut on her
holstered gun, snatched the shoes out of Lee's hand, and stormed
angrily upstairs to change into shorts and sweatshirt. Several slammed
drawers and loud curses later she pounded resentfully down to the main
level and out of the house into the cold night air. The crash of the
heavy front door was probably felt by the next-door neighbors.

Red-faced and too worked up to bother stretching, Kate shot down the
precipitous side of Russian Hill, in and out of the illumination from
the streetlights, moving at a rate that risked a mighty fall. With the
luck of the mad, her feet managed to miss the patches of loose gravel
and the raised edges of paving stones, the passing cars were always
just through the crossings or else down the block, and the clots of
people and the dog-walkers were always on the other side of the street.

Gradually, as her resentment cooled and her muscles warmed, she
found her pace, and in the end she ran a lot farther than the original
spiteful six blocks she had intended. She circled around the base of
Russian Hill and came up the steep wooden stairs of Macondray Lane, at
the top of which she stopped, bent over with her hands on her thighs to
catch her breath. She cooled off by jogging slowly down Green Street
and doing some belated stretches, and when she reached her front door,
she was considerably more rested than when she had started out.

She paused in front of her door to pick a frail pansy from
Jon's windowbox, carried it through to the kitchen, presented it
wordlessly to Lee, and then put her arms around her partner. The two
women stood in the silent embrace, wrapped up in each other, restored.
It was Lee who moved first to break it off, by murmuring Kate's
name with a question attached to it.

"Yes?" Kate responded into the hollow of Lee's throat.

"My love, you really, really stink."

"I know," Kate said. "I know," and she went off to luxuriate in a long, hot shower.

Dinner was not reheated leftovers. Dinner was a more or less
vegetarian stroganoff with red wine, eaten by candlelight. Kate had not
realized how starved she was until her plate was empty--for the
second time. She drained her glass, sat back in her chair, and closed
her eyes, feeling the hum of satisfaction running through her very
bones.

Of course, she was fully aware that underlying the entire string of
events from the moment she had come in the door was that ominous little
phrase, "Honey, we need to talk." She had been neglecting
Lee, and at a time when there were issues standing between them, issues
that would rapidly calcify if left to themselves, requiring major
demolition efforts later.

But Lee was right, and Lee was good, and Kate would not force Lee to
do it all herself. Besides which, she did want to talk to Lee.

Talking to Lee had become a high priority in Kate's life, ever
since the long, lonely months of fall and winter when she had feared
she was losing her beloved. Talking, and laughing and loving and just
being with her, and if it cut into the hours Kate could spend working a
case, it also seemed to make her more rested, more what Lee would call
"centered," and with that came increased efficiency in her
working hours. So Kate told herself, at any rate, and so she would
believe.

It had been eight months before, at the end of summer, when Lee had
left her, pushing Kate away in a particularly brutal manner. Kate
thought it final. Instead, with the new year came a glimmer of hope,
shining through a hellish and highly personal case involving the
kidnapping of Al's stepdaughter Jules, and when that case came to
an end, miraculously Lee was still there.

A new Lee, a different Lee from the wounded, angry, and confused
person who had fled north to her aunt's island on the Canadian
border. This was closer to the strong and purposeful woman Kate had
first met, but with a depth and stability that only the profoundly
damaged attain. Lee had all but died, and then over the next two years
she had been reborn. Kate did not yet know just what her lover had
become, or what their relationship would become. All she knew was that
Lee still chose to be with her; the rest of it would find its way.

"God, that was good," Kate said with a sigh. "Would you marry me?"

"I'm already married to you," Lee pointed out.

"Would you marry me again, then? Maybe if we do it twice, you
won't need to do anything drastic like running off to your Aunt
Agatha's to get my boneheaded attention."

"That isn't exactly why I did it," Lee protested.

"No, but that was one of the results." Kate pulled her
napkin off her lap and dropped it onto the table, pushing her chair
back and walking slowly around the table toward Lee. "You have my
attention, my complete attention, and nothing but my attention."
At the last word she reached Lee. Bending down, she slipped one arm
behind her lover's back and one under her knees, and picked her
up. The romance of the gesture was undermined by the involuntary grunt
of effort she let out and the way she staggered across the room,
accompanied by Lee's giggling shrieks of alarm and protest. At
the sofa, Kate stumbled and, although Lee did end up on the cushions,
Kate fell on top of her in a tangle of limbs and a brief crack of
skulls.

They disentangled themselves and sat for a minute, rubbing their heads and recovering their breath.

"So much for romance," Kate grumbled. "I think I have a hernia or a slipped disk or something."

"Poor dear," Lee cooed, and took Kate's head in
her hands to kiss her bruise. The kiss lingered, and moved down to the
lips, and suddenly Kate sat up.

"This is where Jon comes in," she said warily. "Where is he?"

"I told him if he didn't take the night off and go away, I'd fire him."

Kate reflected ungratefully that if he did walk in now, the
momentary embarrassment would be well worth the result, and then Lee
was kissing her and she thought no more for some time.

When they lay still beneath the inadequate cover of the sofa's
throw blanket and the candles on the table were beginning to gutter
out, Lee asked Kate, "What was that glance that went between you
and Roz the other night?"

"Ah. I should have known you'd see it. It's kind
of embarrassing. You know that quilt of yours I said the dry
cleaner's ruined? It wasn't them, it was me. One day during
the winter I was just sitting there and I... I just felt this
tremendous... anger rise up. I just felt so pissed off at you, so
I... destroyed it. Childish, I know, and stupid. I'm really
sorry--it was such a beautiful thing, and I know how you loved it.
But the point is that Roz happened to walk in on me."