Night work (34 page)

"Late on Monday--yeah, I'm sure it was Monday,
first day of the week--or really Tuesday morning, I guess. After
Late Night
was over anyway. But Wednesday night was earlier, I was mopping the
rest rooms and he kept trying to track across where I'd just
mopped. Maybe nine, ten? Close to nine, I guess."

"But you yourself didn't hear or see anything?"

"Nah. Just the dog. Jeez, maybe he was trying to warn me, you
think? Maybe I should get him back from the pound. Problem is, I
don't know where I'm going to be. I don't suppose you
know... ?"

Kate shook her head and snapped shut the notebook she'd been
writing in. "We're from San Francisco," she told him.
"You're not our--our responsibility." She had
nearly said problem, which would have been the simple truth. Nobody
liked protecting a piece of slime like Traynor, though obviously they
had to. It was complicated by the question of his own potential as a
suspect of purveying kiddie porn, and how the authorities might take
the evidence that had fallen into their laps completely by accident and
in the course of a different case, and render that evidence both useful
and untainted by questionable means. One tangle, thank God, that she
and Al could walk away from.

Which they did. They said a thanks to the room in general, which
could be taken as being aimed at Traynor but which they all knew was
meant for the cop at his side, and left the battered pedophile to his
ambiguous future.

Chapter 20

AL WAS SILENT AS they passed through the sterile corridors of the
hospital, as he had been during the entire interview with Traynor.
"So, what do you think?" she asked him as she got in behind
the wheel of the car.

"I think that if I saw him walking that dog of his next to
Jules's school, I'd castrate the bastard myself with a dull
knife."

The sentiment and the mild obscenity were so unlike Hawkin that Kate
stared at his profile. He was not kidding. She opened her mouth to make
a joke about the effects of pregnancy hormones on the human male, but
then she noticed the hard clench of his jaw and decided that maybe
she'd let it pass. In her experience, limited though it was,
she'd found that pregnant women seemed to develop areas of
humorlessness. It appeared to be contagious to the partner.

She put the car into gear and began to thread her way out of the
hospital parking lot. "No security cams in the factory
building," she said after a minute. "That's too
bad."

"Have any of the victims on the hit list been black?" Hawkin asked in an abrupt non sequitur.

Kate thought about it. "I think some of the guys are. Yeah,
I'm sure there were half a dozen black guys--I remember at
least two of the photos. As for actual victims, the auto mechanic in
New York was black, I'm pretty sure."

"But none in the Bay Area."

"Larsen and the guy in Sacramento, Goff, were both Anglo, and
now Traynor. Banderas was Hispanic, but I thought he looked more
Mediterranean, Italian or Greek. Mehta was Indian, but again, pretty
light-skinned."

"Does that say anything to you?" he asked.

"Not really. Could be they're white women, like Traynor
thought, and they're either afraid of messing with black men or
else they figure it's not their business. Maybe they just
haven't gotten around to that community yet. On the other hand,
they could be black women out to eliminate their traditional
tormentors. I don't think we can make any assumptions, Al."

"What about methodology?"

"For our guys, or the list as a whole?"

"Both."

"I'd say that, countrywide, we're looking at two
or three different groups of killers: one here, one centered somewhere
between Georgia and South Carolina, and one farther up the East Coast.
The New York bunch are into quick, clean, distance kills with a
handgun. Unadorned executions. The Southerners may be more hands-on,
maybe use a taser like ours, or a gun to force their target into a car
before driving him into the woods to dump him. It's hard to know
exactly how long the groups have been working, since people vanish
every day, but if I had to guess I'd say it started about when
the Web site hit list came online in January."

None of this was new, and the FBI was probably miles ahead of them,
but their investigations worked best when they reviewed and explored,
over and over again, watching for unnoticed bumps and oddities in the
terrain. Most of the ideas they tossed around were not original, but
sometimes the patterns the ideas formed when they landed were.

"And our own ladies, or womyn-with-a-y. What about them?"

"Up close and personal, wouldn't you say?" she asked.

"Can't get much more intimate than strangulation, that's for sure. The very definition of hands-on."

"But they leave the bodies to be found, so there's no reason for the notes, other than the statement."

"The others are more, what would you call it--strictly
functional? Do 'em and leave 'em like the garbage they are,
whereas ours are a little bit angrier about their victims, and want the
world to know. Yes?"

"I agree. But what's the candy got to do with it?"

"Don't take it from strangers? Maybe one of the women
was raped and her attacker called her 'sweet' or
'sugar'? I'd say it's a pathological twist that
we won't know about until we find the perp. Or perps."

"Something obvious to her, or them, but personal?"

"Of course, if we find someone whose sister named Candy got
killed by a rapist, we might take a look," Kate suggested
facetiously.

"Or whose abusive husband owned a candy shop."

"I can see the search base getting dangerously cumbersome. And
you're the one in charge of computer searches," Al said,
beginning to sound a little happier about things.

"Actually, this sounds to me ideal for one of your
million-scraps-of-paper-tacked-to-the-wall approaches, Al. Much more
intuitive."

They were on the freeway now, the easiest way to get from the
hospital to the industrial area where Traynor had been attacked,
driving past shopping malls and residential sprawl through the
increasing traffic of a city before dawn. Near the airport, with an
approaching jet screaming overhead, the phone sounded in Al's
pocket. Al's end of the conversation consisted of a few grunts, a
yes, "San Jose airport" to identify their location, and
then he was reaching for his pen and notebook and scribbling an address.

"What was that?" she asked when he'd tucked the phone away again.

"The lab ID'd a fingerprint on the candy they found on
the stairway. Belongs to a woman with a conviction for drunk and
disorderly, lives in East Palo Alto. Hillman's looking into it,
thought we might like to tag along. Get off here and circle back to 101
north," he suggested, but she was already moving into the exit
lane.

The woman's name was Miriam Mkele, changed from Maryanne
Martin when she had gotten out of jail three years before, and if she
was either surprised or frightened when she opened the door to five
plainclothes detectives and two uniformed patrol, she did not show it.
She just stood in her doorway, six feet of proud African-American
woman, and raised her eyebrow at them. The local detective did the
identification, and after he had run through his own name and rank and
those of the two San Jose cops (Hillman and his partner, Gonsalves) and
the two San Francisco detectives (Kate and Al), he was running out of
steam and Mkele was looking, if anything, amused.

"And these two good boys, who they be?" she asked,
raising her chin briefly at the two uniformed officers. The East Palo
Alto man dutifully extended his introduction to include the uniforms,
who were acting as bodyguards more than anything in this rough area
just across the freeway from the intellectual elite of Stanford
University. East Palo Alto had one of the highest murder rates in the
United States; Miriam Mkele looked as if she had known many of the
victims, and held the hands of a fair number of the survivors.

"Do you people want to come in?" she asked.

"We'd appreciate it, ma'am," Al spoke up. "It's not getting any warmer out here."

Mkele looked him over, and looked up at the sky as if to judge the
attractive possibility of it beginning to rain on their heads, but the
clouds were light and high and the breeze cold enough to suck the heat
from her house, so she stepped back and the five detectives filed in,
leaving the two patrolmen to retreat to their car.

The small house was warm, in temperature and in emotional impact,
and scrubbed spotless beneath the signs of wear and tear. African
wood-carvings clustered along one wall, tribal masks hung on another,
the curtains were brightly colored block prints and the sofa scattered
with kente cloth pillows. Mkele closed the door, walked between them to
take up a position on the other side of the room, and, still standing,
crossed her arms.

"What you want?" she asked.

"These people have some questions about an attempted murder
that took place last night in San Jose, Ms. Mkele," the local man
explained.

"Do I need a lawyer?"

Hawkin pushed forward. "You're welcome to have one if
you'd feel more comfortable of course, but at this point
we're just trying to clear up a couple of questions. You are
under no suspicion of a crime." No more than any physically
powerful female would have been, Kate added silently.

Mkele nodded, a sign that he should continue.

"Your fingerprint was found on an object left at the scene,
possibly by the attackers. Just for the record, can you tell us where
you were last night?"

"What time?"

"Between nine P.M. and midnight."

"Worked until nine, came home and cooked a late dinner for some friends, and went to bed 'bout eleven-thirty."

Like a cop on the stand, Mkele did not volunteer any information beyond the bare question.

"Where do you work?"

"The Safeway on El Camino, just off the freeway."

"What do you do there?"

"I work the registers. Cashier. Smile and say thank
you," she said. Kate could not picture Mkele with a smile on her
face.

"Responsible job," Hillman commented.

"For an ex-con, you mean, dee-tective? I finished with the
life that drove me to alcohol. I worked three years cleanin' the
floors and stockin' the shelves to prove I was dependable, and
they trust me with money now, yes."

"Do you know--" Hillman was starting to say, but
Kate had been struck by a sudden thought and spoke over his voice.

"Ms. Mkele, do you still stock the shelves sometimes?"

The dark eyes studied her pensively, as
u
looking for the trick in the question. "No," she said.

Ah well, thought Kate, it was an idea, but Mkele spoke again.

"I do not gen'rally stock shelves at my own store.
There's a, what you call, hierarchy, you understand? And
I'm gonna be a manager one day, so it's not good for my
image to stock shelves. But sometimes I help out at other stores, and
then I do what is needed. In South San Francisco I even cleaned the
toilets once. Haven't done that since I got out."

"In the last few months," Kate asked, her voice taut
despite her effort to control it, "have you ever stocked one of
those self-service candy bins?"

Mkele put her head to one side, not so much searching her memory as considering.

"Was it on one of those pieces of candy that you found my
fingerprint?" she asked after a minute. Kate did not have to
answer; her silence gave her away. Shockingly, then, Mkele threw back
her head and laughed, long and richly, at the discomfiture on the faces
before her. "Oh, you poor people," she said at last.
"If I tell you yes, I may be lying so's to explain that
fingerprint, but if I tell you no, you are left with one great puzzle.
Well, I'm gonna tell you yes, as far as I can remember, I stocked
those bins twice in the last half year or so, once in Fremont, where I
worked in October, and the other in my own store just before Christmas
when three men were out sick and the shelves were bare in the evening.
I'd have to look up the precise dates."

That she did not expect them to believe her was clear in her stance
and the tip of her head. Kate figured the woman's alibi must be
ironclad, for her to so patently not care if they believed her or
not--although very possibly she would still show them an amused
defiance if she had no more to vouch for her than her own empty bed.
Kate found herself liking the woman, rare enough when it came to a
witness and a potential suspect, for her straight spine and her simple
ambitions and her willingness to take a stand here in this community of
little hope.

"Any chance you might have handled any of that candy any other
time?" she asked. "Maybe helping someone scoop some out, or
a bag spilling at the register, something like that?"

Mkele thought about it, and then shrugged her strong shoulders.
"I don't remember that happening, but it's not
impossible that it did. Things get busy, you know, "specially if
you're talking about as far back as Christmas. By the end of the
day you wouldn't remember
if
you fed a whole cow over the scanner."

Kate nodded, took a card from the pocket in her notebook, flipped
the book shut, and dropped it in her pocket. She stepped forward with
the card in her left hand and her right hand outstretched.

"Thank you, Ms. Mkele," she said. "Let us know
when you figure out those dates, or if there was any other time you
might have handled wrapped candies. We'll give you a call if
anything needs clarifying." Mkele looked at Kate, and at her
hand; then she reached out and took both card and hand.

The local man and Hawkin moved with Kate toward the door. The two
San Jose detectives hesitated but followed in the end, leaving Miriam
Mkele in command of her diminutive but colorful field of battle.