Night work (2 page)

The stark glare rising before her in the night made Kate slow to a
crawl before rounding the corner. What looked like two hundred people
were scattered up the road before her, although she knew it could not
be more than thirty at the most, and that included the reporters, who
had come here on foot, dragging their equipment with them, from where
they had been forced to leave their vans on the other side of the
cemetery. She pulled to one side and parked among a wild assortment of
official vehicles--park police and SFPD cruisers, ambulance and
coroner's van, half a dozen unmarked police cars--and a few
small cars from personnel who had been called from home. Further along
the curve of the road, kept at a distance by uniforms but making full
use of their long-range lenses, television vans were already in
attendance, hoping for a lead story for the eleven o'clock news.
A uniformed patrolman was still in the process of wrapping yellow tape
around the perimeter of the crime scene, using trees, a fence post, and
a convenient street sign. Kate nodded at familiar faces among the cops,
ignored the questions of the reporters on this side of the scene, and
ducked under the restraining tape.

Al Hawkin was standing with his hands in his pockets watching the
medical examiner at work, homicide bag on the ground at his feet. He
turned when he felt his partner at his side.

"So much for an evening off," he said by way of greeting.

"If you'd called an hour earlier you'd have saved me from the whole play."

"Which one was that?"

"A school play, if you can believe it. You know Roz
Hall?" He nodded; half the people in the City knew Roz Hall, to
their pleasure or their fury, and occasionally both at once.
"Well, she and her partner, Maj, adopted Maj's niece last
year, and asked Lee to be the godmother. The kid--her name's
Mina--goes to a private school that's big on ethnic
celebrations, and this was some complicated Indian story about gods and
wars. Mina played a monkey. The mayor himself was there."
Hawkin's eyebrows went up. "So, what do we have here?"

"The ME beat me here, so I haven't had a chance to look.
Called in by a jogger just after six-thirty--there's a
uniformed at the guy's house. Seems to be a white male, no
obvious signs of violence that the jogger could see, but then he only
looked close enough to pass on the CPR before heading home for a phone.
I'd say the vie looks to be about twenty-four hours old."

"Funny place to have a heart attack," Kate remarked.
"And he wasn't exactly dressed for jogging." What
they could see of the body, half hidden by the bushes at the side of
the paving, was clothed in heavy, stained work boots and some sort of
khaki pants. "And why on earth didn't anyone spot it during
the day? This is a pretty heavily used road."

"Not as many people on foot as usual, because of the rain. It
was getting dark, so the guy who found him figured it was safe to stop
and have a pee, happened to stop here."

There was a certain humor in the picture, which Kate turned over in
her mind as they waited to be allowed access to the body. Al broke into
her thoughts with a question.

"Why do you suppose he was dropped here? Other than it's dark and you can see cars coming?"

Kate looked around, and she had to admit that it was not the first
place she would have chosen for easy disposal of an inconvenient
corpse. "If it'd been me, I'd have gone on down
there," she told her partner, nodding toward a cluster of dark
buildings in the hollow of the hill. "There's no gate
across the access road, is there?"

"Nope. And the park guys say there wasn't anything going
on there last night, shouldn't have been any traffic down there
at all."

Kate turned and looked in the other direction, up the hill. On the
other side of the road, some brambles and trees rose up, then the fence
that surrounded the cemetery. "You suppose they were aiming for
the cemetery but missed? Maybe there were people in there, scared the
perps off." She herself had run through the Presidio when she was
feeling ambitious, and knew the cemetery for a closed-in area with
limited access and regular visitors; too likely to get trapped in
there, and hard to explain a dead body missing its casket and mortuary
van.

Eventually, the ME stood away and she and Hawkin moved into the
glare of the portable floodlights to get a closer look at their dead
white male.

Dead he clearly was, and Kate agreed that trying CPR on that
darkened face with that swollen, froth-covered tongue protruding was
not a cheering prospect.

"Strangled," she said, pointing out the obvious.

"With something other than hands," Al added as he lifted
back the collar of the man's plaid shirt. Something had torn into
the soft skin of the throat, chafing it raw as it did its work.

The man had blunt features, cropped hair, and the coarse bloom of
long-term alcohol use in his nose. His belly was big and soft although
his chest and upper arms appeared muscular where his shirt had been
pulled away by the paramedics. He wore a jeans jacket but
cotton-polyester uniform trousers, and a belt with a buckle declaring
the man's loyalty to Coors beer.

"Are his hands tied?"

Al tugged at the inert shoulder, which showed signs that rigor
mortis was passing off, to reveal the man's thick wrists. They
wore a pair of regulation police handcuffs identical to those in
Kate's bag. Neither of them commented on the cuffs, but Al held
the man's torso off the ground until Kate had removed a fat
wallet from the hip pocket of the pants, then eased the body back down
until it was lying as it had been when Kate arrived on the scene.

"Not robbery." It was Al's turn to point out the
obvious. A gold band dug deep into the flesh of the man's meaty
ring finger, and in his wallet were eighty-two dollars, a stack of
membership cards to video rental parlors, a credit card, and a
California driver's license that identified the corpse as one
James Larsen, with an address in the bedroom community of South San
Francisco. A working man's address to match his clothes and his
hands, and somewhat out of the ordinary for a San Francisco homicide
victim.

They patted down James Larsen's pockets with care, since the
rubber gloves both detectives wore gave no protection against the
myriad of sharp and potentially lethal objects people carried around.
Kate found a ticket stub to an action movie dated three days before,
six coins, a used handkerchief, and the wrapper from a stick of beef
jerky. No keys. Al slid a hand into Larsen's left-side jacket
pocket and pulled out three cellophane-wrapped pieces of candy: a lump
of hard butterscotch, a flattened square of striped coconut chew, and a
squashed wad of something red and soft. Mr. James Larsen, it would
appear, had had a sweet tooth.

Hawkin dropped the candies into an evidence bag and stood up to let
the rest of the team move in. The photographer took a few close-ups to
go with his earlier shots of the crime scene as it had appeared before
anyone went near the body, and the Crime Scene officers bent to their
labors. Kate and Hawkin walked over to where the techs were leaning
against their van, the smoke from their cigarettes mingling with the
tang of eucalyptus in the cool night air. All four city employees
ignored the calls of the gathered news media as if it had been the
noise of so many plaintive seagulls.

"Any idea when the autopsy'll be?" Al asked them.

"Might be tomorrow, more likely the next day. The morgue's pretty crowded."

"Let me know."

"But I can tell you now what they'll find," the man continued.

"Clogged arteries, a bad liver, and strangulation," Hawkin offered.

"A taser."

"What?"

"A stun gun, taser, whatever you call it. One of those things
women carry. It wouldn't have killed him, but whoever did this
used one to put him down." The tech threw his cigarette on the
pavement and ground it under his heel, blithely contaminating the
periphery of a crime scene, then led the two detectives over to the
body. He squatted and pulled the plaid shirt back again from
Larsen's strong chest. "That's a taser burn,"
he asserted, pointing to a small red area, and looked up to catch their
reaction.

There was none. Both detectives kept their faces empty, and Al
merely said, "I suggest you keep that theory to yourself,"
casting a quick glance over his shoulder at the waiting reporters, and
allowed the process of removing the body to go on.

Still, Kate made a note of what the tech had said before she followed Al over to where they had parked their cars.

"It looked more like a bruise to me," she said firmly,
as if saying so would make a bit of difference. Her partner grunted.
"And really, even if it is a taser--"

"We'll know soon enough," Al remarked, and walked over to give the reporters what little he could. Or would.

The taser, if the mark on James Larsen's chest was not bruise,
birthmark, pimple, or the growth of some exotic contagion, would create
a problem, because that was how the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement,
that source of sly jokes at school parties and embarrassment to mayors
and cops, began life: with a taser.

The reign of the Ladies (quickly shortened by an admiring public to
the LOPD, although they referred to themselves as merely the Ladies)
had begun back in late January, when a lowlife named Barry Doyle was
acquitted of statutory rape. Belinda Matheson, aged fifteen years and
ten months, had gone cruising with some friends with a borrowed ID that
looked very like her (hardly unusual, since it belonged to her older
sister) and declared her to be twenty-one. Doyle was twice her age,
although his boyish features had a vague resemblance to Leonardo
DiCaprio, and the combination of his cute face, his clever flattery,
and his illicit booze had landed the teenager in Doyle's bed. Her
parents, apoplectic with worry by the time Belinda dragged herself home
the next afternoon, furiously pressed charges, but Doyle had a good
lawyer and drew an inexperienced prosecutor who allowed a jury that was
predominantly male and exclusively unmarried or divorced. The
combination of testimony--that Doyle had been seen to check
Belinda's ID, reassuring himself that she was no minor; that she
had looked to be the person on the license (this bolstered by a blowup
photo of Belinda in adult makeup and upswept hair); and most damaging
of all, that she was by no means an innocent (this last from an
ex-boyfriend who showed great promise for stepping into Barry
Doyle's sleaze-covered shoes)--conspired to produce a
verdict that had Doyle, owner of six adult video parlors and a topless
bar that the jury knew nothing about, crowing his victory over the
forces of "disgruntled feminists and other human rights
fascists" right there on the courthouse steps--and
announcing that he was in turn suing the Matheson family for the
"emotional, financial, and professional damage" he had
suffered through their "cold-blooded deception." He ended
his impromptu press conference by looking straight into the nearest
television camera and declaring, "Fair's fair,
Belinda."

Shortly before midnight that same day, following a wild celebratory
dinner, Doyle vanished somewhere between his car and his front door. He
was discovered eight hours later by morning commuters, quite alive if
spitting with rage, stark naked and spread-eagled across the window of
a building under renovation. His genitals had been dyed purple (as
could be seen from the cars that were soon at a complete halt on the
freeway) and the duct tape that suspended him from the window frame
ripped most of the hair off his wrists, ankles, and face, but most
shocking (and delicious) of all was the revelation that underneath the
purple dye, he had been tattooed. The phrase I SCREW CHILDREN was now
an indelible part of Barry Doyle's equipment, until such time as
he was driven to submit to the pain of eradication, and the note
duct-taped to his backside put the cap on the episode: fair's
fair, dick.

--
The Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement

Oh joy, oh ecstasy, on the part of all the world that had never
flirted with the idea of bedding an underage girl. And oh the
discomfort, oh the uneasy shriveling felt by all society's
members (so to speak) who had. A thousand duct-tape jokes bloomed on
late-night television, the color purple took on a whole new
significance, tattoo artists became the heroes (and the suspects) of
the hour. The Ladies instantly overtook their predecessors in the
Only-in-San Francisco category, the gay/lesbian/bi/ and-a-few-straights
protest group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In three days
the Ladies had half a dozen fan Web sites, twenty designs of T-shirts
for sale around the city's tourist sites (all of them purple),
and a hundred jokes about how many Ladies it took to tattoo a man. (A
representative answer: None at all, if he's a true Dick.) Even
Doyle's friends began to forget that his name was Barry.

Since then, the Ladies had struck twice more. Their most visible
action was when a billboard went up, again overlooking the freeway and
this time only five hundred yards from police headquarters, showing the
face of a prominent local politician superimposed on a male with a
naked child in his lap (the politician took an immediate extended
vacation, considered by all a sure admission of guilt). Taped to the
billboard's access ladder was a note saying:

NAUGHTYBOY.

--
the Ladies

Their third strike was against a chronic flasher out in the Sunset,
overcome by a taser-wielding duo and duct-taped, naked and
face-forward, to embrace a metal lamppost on a very cold night. The
note taped to his anatomy read:

BITDRAFTY?

--
the Ladies

The official Departmental line, of course, was that vigilante
actions of this sort were wrong, dangerous, and not to be tolerated.
But there were as many cracks about frostbite within the walls of the
Justice building as there were outside, and a cop only had to murmur
the words "duct tape" to have the room convulsed.