The Art of Detection

by Laurie R. King

  The paving appeared to launch its traffic directly out into the gray-green water far, far below. Kate gulped, but before their tires actually took to the air, the track shifted to the right, maintaining its tenuous hold on solid ground, although the thin metal guardrail seemed more suggestion than protection. The roadway was a trickle of asphalt laid along the edge of the world, set with long, wavering striations of close-growing weeds, green lines horribly suggestive of the inevitability of the earth’s surrender to the sea; in some of the bends, the green cracks resembled the tracings on a topographical map, accompanied by an alarming dip on the ocean side of the road. Kate would have clung to the landward side, but Hawkin blithely followed the shortest route, aiming directly for the gathering of cracks. A gust of wind scrambled up the cliffs and shook the car, testing its hold on the asphalt. Kate shut her eyes.

  “Hope to God you had your brakes serviced recently,” she said, her voice tight.

  “Been meaning to have them looked at,” Hawkin mused, pumping his foot a little to imitate brake failure.

  “Funny man,” she said grimly, and fixed her eyes with determination on the hills to her right.

  The earth here was red where exposed, the plants gray nearest the cliffs, greener now that they were retreating a little from the hungry bays and inlets. Bushes grew low along the cliffs, stunted by the constant blow from the sea, but here and there sprang odd clumps of trees, as if small, random patches of woodland had been preserved from the saw. Ancient metal doors surrounded by equally worn concrete were set into the hillsides, remnants of a race of particularly warlike hobbits. Traces of fog played with the shoreline, filling the westernmost trees for a moment, then dissipating. They could hear a foghorn not far away.

  Finally nearing a few buildings, what passed on the headlands for civilization (Kate tried to silence her shuddering breath of relief), they saw a very cold-looking Park ranger huddled into a folding chair. At their appearance, she uncrossed her arms and rose stiffly.

  Hawkin left his window up, pressing his badge against the glass. The pinched face looked disappointed and nodded for them to continue, then she pulled a hand out of her pocket to make a rolling gesture at the window. Hawkin lowered it a few inches; a wave of frigid air poured in.

  “I wonder, would you mind reminding them that I’m still up here? I haven’t had a break in three hours. I could really use a cup of coffee and a toilet.”

  “I’ll let them know.”

  “Thanks. Have a good day,” she added with an automatic professional good cheer, and went back to her chair.

  In a minute they were looking at a collection of nondescript buildings that would need considerably more funds to make them resemble anything other than the old Army barracks they were. The sign announced it as a YMCA conference center: Kate could only hope the place was less dismal in the spring and summer.

  Hawkin steered to the left, up the hill past a couple of mysterious semicircular concrete artifacts and a sign directing walkers to the Point Bonita lighthouse, and at last they came to the center of activity. Another Park ranger, this one looking not quite as cold as the woman before him, bent to look at Hawkin’s badge, then pointed them to a spot at the end of an untidy line of cars, some official, some civilian. He had been standing and talking with a dozen or so men, women, and children, all of them dressed for the weather, but he left the residents behind and walked after the car, and was waiting when their doors opened.

  “Morning,” he said with the same chronic cheerfulness the woman ranger had shown. “You’re here to look at our body?”

  He might have been offering sightseers a glimpse of a rare visiting bird or excavated whale skeleton. Kate half expected to be handed an explanatory flyer.

  “Inspectors Hawkin and Martinelli, SFPD,” Hawkin supplied, retrieving his heavy coat from the car’s backseat and fighting the wind for possession of its flying sleeves. Kate, in the lee of the car, had an easier time of it, but once hers was buttoned, she immediately wished she’d brought a second to go over it. And maybe worn ski pants instead of khaki trousers—the sun was out for the moment in this slice of the headlands, but the fog was a stone’s throw out to sea and the clammy air sliced right through garment and flesh, going for the bone. She pulled her knit hat down over her ears and raised her voice to Hawkin.

  “That looks like Lo-Tec’s car.” The incongruous cheery green classic Porsche parked between a Marin County coroner’s van and the SFPD crime lab van could only belong to the SFPD’s crime-scene inspector, Lawrence Freeman, known with affectionate irony as Lo-Tec, for his addiction to cutting-edge technology. Lo-Tec was small, neat, gay, hyperefficient, and prone to singing softly as he worked, usually Fifties tunes to which he invented his own words. “Traces of Love, On the Sheets,” was a classic, published on his website.

  “The Park crime lab consists mostly of a drying room,” Al commented. “They’d have called either us or Marin in for this.”

  “And speaking of which, are you taking your binder?”

  The leather binder, containing notepad and various forms, was a statement of authority at a crime scene. Taking it would be tantamount to saying they were going to need it.

  “Maybe we should leave them here for the time being, until we’re sure.” Kate nodded, and slammed the door: It didn’t do to appear grabby.

  It felt odd to be approaching a murder scene with nothing in her hand, but Kate buried her gloved hands in her pockets, feeling the small spiral notebook she’d stuck there, and trudged after Hawkin.

  The path wound up the grass toward the top of the hill; halfway up they were intercepted by yet another ranger, older than the others they’d seen. He strode along the hillside from an angle, putting out his hand as he came up to them.

  “Dan Culpepper,” he said, pumping Al’s hand with vigor. “Park Police Patrol—I was the responding officer this morning, though the investigator’s here now. He asked me to bring you up.”

  “Al Hawkin, Kate Martinelli,” Al supplied. “SFPD.” Dan transferred his powerful grip to Kate’s hand.

  “Crime Scene’s here?” Kate asked when she had retrieved her squashed fingers.

  “They’ve been here for hours. In fact, I think they’re nearly finished.”

  “When was the body found?”

  “First thing this morning, a little after eight. Two guys here for the Bunkers tour at ten were poking around the emplacement and noticed that the padlock was broken. They opened the door, saw the body, one of them stayed here to make sure nobody disturbed it while the other came down to the visitor’s center to phone it in. I got the call, checked it out, and kept control of the scene until the supervisor got here—that’s Diana Sandstrom. Inspector Williams arrived about twenty minutes later, and your Crime Scene people just after that. The Marin coroner came, and half the people with scanners in the county—everyone from the sheriff to the local dog-walker—wanted a look. Your photographer’s been and gone, and the supervisor.”

  “How much has the site been disturbed?” asked Al apprehensively.

  “Very little—I put up tape first thing, called in backup, didn’t let anyone in at all, and none of my people did, either, so it was clean when Diana got here. Ranger Sandstrom, I mean. She sure didn’t let anyone through except for Williams and the coroner. And I don’t think the guys who found it did anything other than look in and see the body. They said they could tell from the smell that the guy was beyond help. They just went in far enough to make sure it was a human being and not a sea lion or something, then left.”

  “A surprisingly sensible reaction,” Hawkin commented.

  “I know. Second World War vets, you know—we get a lot of them, particularly for the Nike missile site tours. I guess once you smell a dead body, there isn’t much doubt about it the next time it happens.”

  That was very true. Still, both cops made silent mental notes to look at the vets, since people who “discovered” bodies in odd places were often the people who had put them there
in the first place.

  “If they could smell the body in this weather, it’s been here a while,” Kate noted. “Any idea why he wasn’t found earlier?”

  “It’s been miserable and cold since Sunday, and this time of year we don’t get a lot of traffic through here anyway, except if there’s a nice weekend. The people at the conference tend to stick close to the buildings when it’s wet. Even the people with dogs keep closer to the parking lot when it’s stormy. Off the cuff, I’d say that if the body was here last Saturday, someone would have noticed it. For sure they’d have seen if the door was standing open. People just can’t resist a half-open door.”

  They had been climbing steadily for a quarter mile or so, and were now not only out of breath (two of them, at least) but also high enough to see past the nearby hills. The obliging ranger, aware of their breathing but too polite to mention it even obliquely, paused as if doing so was a regular part of the tour. It might even have been, considering what met their eyes when they obediently turned around to look: magnificent orange bridge, its cables rising and swooping to meet the incongruously forested landscape of the Presidio on the south side of the Golden Gate. Behind the dark vegetation rose the bright white sprawl of the city—low residences along the many hills of the city, high-rises jostling for air in the downtown area to the left. A cloud of sailboats dotted the water inside the bridge, while a ship piled with shipping containers pushed its way out to sea. A multicolored parade of minuscule cars scurried across the bridge; the hillside where they stood felt very far from the world.

  A person tended to forget, Kate reflected, living among San Francisco’s high-rise valleys and natural hills, that the city was a major port on the edge of a vast continent. Most commercial shipping had shifted across the Bay to the container-cargo derricks of Oakland and Alameda, but the port, along with the Sacramento River that led up toward the gold fields, was the reason the city existed. Standing here, with the panorama of Bay and city spread out at their feet, the reminder was powerful.

  “You have got one gorgeous place to work,” Kate told Dan.

  “Yeah, this is a real hardship post,” the ranger agreed with a grin.

  “A miracle the developers didn’t grab it when the Army stepped out,” Al said. “Can’t you imagine what a view like that would bring?”

  “It was a very close thing, like with the Presidio,” Dan told them. “Although that’s going to have to pay for itself. With any luck, this’ll be kept natural.”

  “It’s almost enough to restore your faith in the world,” Al said, not even sounding very sarcastic.

  “You might say that the view is what attracted the Army in the first place—a strategic attraction, of course, not an aesthetic one: Between these guns and the Presidio, the entrance to the Bay was pretty thoroughly covered.”

  “This is a gun, what do you call it, emplacement, then?” Kate asked.

  “Right. DuMaurier was more or less contemporary with Battery Wallace and, other than being smaller, is similar in layout. That’s Wallace on the hill over there—those two openings in the hillside? The battery fills the entire hillside between them. There aren’t any guns there now, of course, just their settings. You can see Battery Alexander just north of Wallace—Alexander had mortars—and Smith-Guthrie and O’Rourke with four guns each beyond that. Closer in is Mendell, just along the cliffs.”

  Kate studied the decrepit sprawl of concrete that was Battery Mendell, stretched out along the cliffs and exposed to the elements, then glanced at the gray faces of the double guns of Battery Wallace on the next hill inland from where they stood. Wallace resembled an enormous frog, two elongated concrete eyes set into a wide, green face, its mouth shaped by one long building of the conference center at their feet. She did not bring up her fanciful image, merely said, “Wallace seems to have stood up to the sea air a lot better.”

  “What you see dates only to the Thirties, when Wallace was casemated and covered. Again like DuMaurier, in fact, although DuMaurier only had a single gun, a twelve-inch breech-loading rifle. The only single gun in Fort Barry, in fact.”

  “What is that mushroomy thing on the other side of Mendell?”

  “That’s a base-end station, used for triangulating fire. They’re located all up and down the coast. And those concrete half circles you passed where you parked? Cisterns, for the lighthouse. There’s also a number of submerged structures used to keep an eye on the mine-fields laid out in the shipping lanes. To say nothing of the miles of tunnels and storage facilities, most of them falling apart and a real hazard—those doors we check all the time. All of this, as you can well see from here, is harbor defense. Around the time of the gold rush, the powers that be back in Washington noticed that San Francisco was the key port of the entire West Coast, and the cannon they had at Fort Point and Fort Mason wouldn’t go far to repel a determined enemy. So they started putting in bigger and bigger guns, on both sides of the Golden Gate and on Alcatraz, cutting edge all the way, until eventually the distances covered became so enormous that it was actually counterproductive, since nobody wants to keep a warhead right on top of the city limits. After Nike missiles became obsolete, harbor defense moved back a bit, like to Nevada. But for the better part of a hundred years, nothing could get into the Bay without being watched by a lot of men with their fingers on some very big triggers. Metaphorically speaking,” he added. “Cannon don’t have that kind of triggers.”

  “There’s nothing up here but the gun emplacement, then?” Hawkin, having caught his breath, was less interested in history than in the case at hand.

  “Right, just Battery DuMaurier,” Dan said. And because he seemed incapable of bypassing an opportunity for educating his public, he added, “All the guns have names, usually given to commemorate a soldier—base commander, Great War hero, that sort of thing. DuMaurier is usually understood to have been a Civil War general, but in fact, the name was that of the first base commander’s beloved horse.”

  The two detectives eyed the ranger for a moment, but he was looking over the view, and continued, unaware of their skepticism.

  “We’ve got emplacements on the headlands from the Endicott era, beginning in 1891, to the 1940s. The Nike missiles went in during the Fifties. The early structures are like Mendell, mostly open-air, but by the end of the First World War it became obvious that airplanes were the way of the future, and nobody wanted to sit out in a gun emplacement that might as well have had a giant flashing arrow pointing to it. So they brought in a lot of dirt to cover them with—which, as you can tell, various tree seeds were happy to find—and those emplacements built afterwards were harder to spot from the air.”

  Kate tried to think if the West Coast had ever been directly attacked, other than the rumors of Japanese submarines. In the end, she asked.

  “There was one gun fired at a British ship,” Dan told her, “back at the end of the nineteenth century. Missed, of course, since the guns weren’t moveable, so the crews had to more or less hope a ship would drift in front of the flight path. But the ship moved on, so they claimed success.”

  With that note of martial absurdity, the ranger seemed to think he had delivered enough of a lecture for this point on the tour, and turned to resume the trek uphill.

  “Oh,” Al said in the direction of the ranger’s broad back, “I nearly forgot. Your woman back there along the road? She said she needed a coffee break and a toilet. Looked pretty cold.”

  “Damn, I forgot all about her—normal routine is shot pretty much to hell today. Thanks for telling me, I’d better go spell her. Here, you see where everyone’s been walking?” He pointed at the continuation of their route, well to the side of the worn soil of the official path. The damp grasses lay thoroughly beaten down by the passage of many feet. “Just follow that path, okay?”

  “Sure, we’ll be fine,” Al told him. The ranger trotted easily down the hill, quick and surefooted despite the slick grass. The two detectives watched him go, then turned their backs on the view and c
ontinued up the hill toward the stand of misshapen trees growing in the disturbed soil around a gun.

  Yet another ranger waited at the top of the hill, making Kate wonder if there was anyone left to lead a tour. She stood near a solitary wooden picnic table, on which sat two men with Marin County logos on their jackets. The two Coroner’s men were trying hard not to shiver in front of the pretty young ranger, who was wearing a jacket adequate for Arctic service.

  “You the San Francisco detectives?” she greeted them cheerfully as they signed the logbook.

  “That’s right,” Al told her.

  “Inspector Williams is waiting for you, just in there.”

  She gestured toward an opening in the hillside, a dark concrete maw whose square opening was set with the foot-high words BATTERY DUMAURIER. The gray concrete echoed with the roar of a generator, set at the far end of the tunnel into the hillside. Halfway down, the generator’s cord led through a door that was standing open a crack, bright light spilling from around its edges. Al shone his flashlight along the doorframe, where a mighty padlock dangled uselessly, connecting a hasp to one end but not the other. The frame had been dusted, but from the evenness of the powder, it did not look as if Crime Scene had lifted any prints. Al pushed gently at the door, and they stepped into the gathering of death professionals.

  At the increase in sound from the door, the four people inside looked around. The nearest, the only one in uniform, moved briskly to intercept them, slowing when Al flipped open his badge. The two kneeling on the floor turned back to their tasks, but the fourth, a man in jeans and a nice warm-looking fur-lined bomber jacket, rose from his squat against the wall and came to the door.

  “Hey, Al,” he said, shaking Al’s hand, “I was glad it was you on call. Chris Williams,” he said to Kate.

  Kate shook the man’s hand and offered her name in exchange.

  “Come on in and let’s shut this door so we can hear ourselves think. We won’t be long, Crime Scene’s just finishing, but I wanted to keep the body here so you could see it.”