Night Work

by Laurie R. King

  Why do people think of goddesses as wide-hipped, large-breasted, loving bringers of fertility? Kate wondered uncomfortably. These women were terrifying.

  Kate went to pour herself a glass of wine, looked at the rich red liquid in the glass, and dumped it down the sink, taking instead a shot of nice safe amber brandy from the cooking supplies. She continued reading, about revenge and wrath and the sheer joy of killing, and she winced when she came to Roz's description of Kali:

  She is young and beautiful, old and haggard, dark-skinned as a blow in the face of the pale, high-ranking Aryan castes, savage and loving and utterly enamored with bloodshed. Kali is created by the great goddess Durga for the express purpose of conquering a monster able to kill any man who comes up against him—but not, it turns out, any woman. Kali glories in death, decorates herself with pieces of her victims, and allows no man supremacy, not her enemies, not even her consort, who lies beneath her in intercourse. She is the advocate and protector of India's poor, India's acknowledgment that inside every woman lurks a force of immense power that, when loosed, exults in the destruction of men, that longs to trample even the most beloved of males underfoot, to wade in his blood and eat his carcass.

  Sweet Jesus, Kate reflected, taking a large gulp of the brandy, what must Roz's thesis supervisor be making of this? And did Roz need to be quite so graphic, even loving, in these descriptions of gore and destruction?

  Perhaps that was the point: that even an ordained minister with a pet dog named Mutt, a weekly salary, and a mortgage could feel that urge, primal and terrible.

  With a convulsive shudder Kate shoved the entire thesis together and back in its box. She felt trapped by a visualization of what this group of vigilantes—selective terrorists—could do if they took this stuff seriously. Would they begin gutting men next, instead of a nice tidy strangulation? Hacking off body parts for Kali to wear? or—Christ!—eat?

  She drained her glass, considered and rejected a refill, and, knowing she'd never get to sleep with those images crowding into her mind, went in to the television. An old movie, she decided—if she could find one without gore, abuse of women, or a woman taking revenge. Which left out Jon's collection of Bette Davis films, and half the suspense movies. She was faced with Jon's musicals or Lee's science fiction, and whereas the latter often involved wholesale slaughter, the former induced in Kate the very desire to commit it that she was trying to avoid. Even Men in Black had a downtrodden woman whose husband gets his due. To say nothing of reminding her of Agent Marcowitz.

  In the end she fed an old Peter Sellers Pink Panther movie into the player, and fell asleep on the sofa before it was through.

  —————

  By the clear light of a far too early morning, it was difficult to justify the night's heebie-jeebies as anything but overwork and an overactive imagination. After all, none of the corpses had been mutilated and there was no sign of escalation into mass slaughter. The Ph.D. thesis Roz was writing might have some link with the hit list victims, but it was, as Roz herself had said and Kate had to admit, an academic investigation, not a vigilante manifesto.

  Still, Kate could not shake the image of the warrior-goddess wading in a pool of men's blood, that “immense power that exults in the destruction of men” loosed on the world. (How did Song put it? “Lovely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.”) Kate did not want to read the rest of the pages, but she knew she would, and that night, after a day spent in painstaking and excruciatingly slow telephonic investigation, she picked up the typescript again, warily.

  It appeared, however, that the worst of Roz's flight of fancy (if that was what it was) had been confined to the beginning, and the author now set about demonstrating just how the worship of goddess figures might have been transferred over to the cult of Yahweh. Roz took a passage in the Gilgamesh epic where the goddess Ishtar “cries out like a woman in travail” bemoaning her destruction of her people, for “are they not my own people, whom I brought forth?” and compared it with Yahweh's cry “like a woman in travail” in the Book of Isaiah. She then set about building on the common theme throughout the Old Testament (which Roz consistently called the Hebrew Bible) of God's wrath overflowing, the furious arm of a vengeful God turned against his faithless people, only to be drawn back before complete destruction could descend.

  And this is the point, Roz asserted, at which God and goddess are one, that God's love—often using a word based on the Hebrew for womb—is love “as of a mother for the child of her body.” God could no more destroy his—or her—people than a mother could cease to love a child she had given birth to.

  All very heavy stuff, and although Kate didn't exactly feel a headache coming on, she found herself hoping that she would, so she would have an excuse to stop reading. It soon became obvious, however, that the bulk of the tome's latter half was made up of the highly technical material of pure thesis, heavily footnoted, concerned with alternate translations, parallel meanings, the problems of something called a hapax legomenon (whatever that was), and the minutiae of dating texts and text fragments. Kate leafed through page after page of typescript studded with what looked like three different alphabets, one of which was Hebrew. Some of the footnotes in this section took two or three pages to work themselves out, and Kate made no attempt at following any of it, relieved that it was nearly over.

  Then, at the very end, after the bibliography in fact, an additional and still-rough chapter had been appended. After a moment Kate realized that it was the result of the Song performance they had all seen the other night, the interpretation of the Song of Songs that had so excited Roz. “Pope,” it seemed, was not the Roman pontiff but one Marvin Pope, who had developed the idea of a link between the Indian Kali and the Canaanite Anat, both of whom took vast joy in spilling blood, both wearing belts of hands and necklaces of skulls, both being absolutely essential, in spite of their murderous tendencies, to the continuation of the universe. Or rather, precisely because of their tendency to give vent to murderous bouts of rage, for without Anat's fury, Baal the storm god could not bring the life-giving rains and the land would go sterile; without Kali, Shiva's dance that heralded both the end and the beginning of time would fail.

  Kate felt as if her head was about to explode. She scratched her scalp hard with her short fingernails, wondering why she was wasting so many hours on this airy-fairy nonsense that she hadn't a chance of fully understanding. It was pointless—after all, wasn't point- less one synonym for the word academic?—but she could not shake the feeling of a connection here. She could smell it coming off the paper in front of her, faint and evocative but there.

  But how? And where?

  One more possible victim had been added to their list during the day. A resident of King City, a few hours' drive into the Central Valley south of San Francisco, had disappeared five weeks ago and been found last week in a brushy area frequented by coyotes and half a dozen other kinds of scavengers. About all the pathologist could tell was that the man had been strangled. Whether he'd been zapped by a taser or once had a candy bar in his pocket was anybody's guess. He was, however, a wife-beater, and his name was on the hit list, along with his address and phone number.

  Quite a number of other men on the list had admitted to receiving harassing calls and letters. The majority assumed at first that the team's call was yet another one, so the people wielding the phones had learned to speak fast, firmly, and with blatant if not entirely genuine expressions of sympathy in order to avoid hang-ups.

  Two men thought they were currently being stalked, one in Huntsville, Texas, the other in Reno. Seven had been attacked already, either personally or by something being thrown at, splashed against, or painted onto their houses. One man had seized on the suggestion of a taser-wielding attacker that one of the less experienced members of the team had let slip, but further interviews made it fairly clear that he was more than a little unbalanced and would have taken up the mention of alien abduction with equal enthusiasm.

&nb
sp; Five men had disappeared completely, seven had moved but been in communication with family or friends, and three names were either mistakes or jokes or complete fabrications—one of them Kate's suggested addition to the list, a hardened but exceedingly wily child-abuser by the name of Al Martini. That had appeared during the afternoon, causing a few minutes of near-hysterical levity on the part of the frustrated and overworked team, bent over their terminals.

  Kate decided enough was enough, said good night to Al and the others, and took herself home. Lee was still awake, and called down the stairs as Kate was unloading her burden on the hallway table.

  “That you, Kate?”

  “What's left of me.”

  “Would you give Roz a call? I told her that if you were in before eleven, you would.”

  “What does she want?”

  “She didn't say.”

  Kate seriously considered ignoring the request, but in the end she did phone Roz's number, bracing herself for another demand from Roz: an illicit look at someone's file, perhaps, or a request to be on a panel in Washington, D.C. But to her surprise, Roz did not seem to want anything, only to know if Kate had had a chance to glance at the manuscript, and if she had any questions. Kate rubbed her forehead wearily, grateful that telephones did not have viewers, and told her that no, she did not.

  Kate then climbed the stairs to bed, and to Lee, and then to sleep.

  To jerk awake at 3:09 the next morning with the phone shouting at her, and Al's voice on the other end of the line.

  Telling her there had been another one.

  Only this one was still alive.

  Anguish is always there, lurking at night,

  Wakes us like a scourge, the creeping sweat

  As rage is remembered, self-inflicted blight.

  What is it in us we have not mastered yet?

  “Detective's name is Hillman,” Hawkin told her in the car on the empty freeway headed south down the peninsula. “Ever meet him?”

  “No. He must be after my time in San Jose.”

  “Sounded competent, but a little irritated that the feds are all over him.”

  “I can understand that. Are they taking it over?”

  “No. Just getting in his way at the moment.”

  “What'd he say about the MO?”

  “Two attackers, a taser for sure, regulation handcuffs, they had a scarf around his throat before they were interrupted. Didn't wait around to finish him off, just ran. Cops didn't see them go, they went out the other side of the building.”

  “What about the candy?”

  “Ah. Marcowitz hadn't gotten around to mentioning that to him. I asked Hillman to look, and to keep it under his hat, both that I'd asked and if he found any. He called me back just before you picked me up, to say they'd found a handful clear at the other entrance. One print—they're running it now.”

  “A print? That's great,” said Kate, meaning it profoundly. Any small thing to break the back of this increasingly scary case was fine with her. “Who's the vic?”

  “Guy named Traynor, Lennie Traynor. A true creep.

  Makes Larsen and Banderas look like Citizen of the

  Month, gives Mehta a run for the stupid prize.” “What does he do, murder grannies?” “Plays with kids,” Hawkin said succinctly. They drove in silence through the night.

  Lennie Traynor, both in history and in the flesh, was the sort of creature guaranteed to make a cop bristle. Knowing he'd probably been abused as a child himself didn't help; both of them—particularly Hawkin, with an adolescent stepdaughter at home and a baby on the way—saw him sitting in the hospital bed and felt a quick urge to grind him underfoot and finish the assailants' job. Traynor felt their instantly suppressed contempt, and cringed further. That too did not help.

  Traynor had one felony conviction behind him, for raping a thirteen-year-old girl with Down's syndrome, and a string of other charges, two of which had been plea-bargained down to misdemeanors. He had been driven out of two communities unwilling to harbor a sex offender before he landed in an industrial area of San Jose with few families, and found an employer who was happy enough to hire the unhirable, on the cheap and no questions asked. Traynor worked as a janitor in a small assembly plant for low-tech computer parts, and was given a dank room in exchange for doubling as night watchman.

  His nocturnal lifestyle undoubtedly contributed to his crawled-out-from-under-a-rock appearance, but all in all, the police faced with his problem wished that he had stayed under his rock, or died there quietly.

  Instead, unlikely as it seemed, Traynor had been lucky. Bashed, taser-zapped, and half strangled he might be, but he was alive, and as he told his story for what must have been the dozenth time, it became obvious that only luck had saved him.

  Traynor's job was literally half his life. His commitment ran from six at night to six in the morning, day in and day out. He was free to take days (or rather, nights) off with prior arrangement, but he had only done so a handful of times in the three years he'd worked there, and his two-week annual holiday was more often than not cut short by boredom.

  His sole forms of entertainment, it seemed, were the walks he took every morning when his shift had ended and the cyber-crawls he indulged in on his top-of-the-line computer system. His declarations of healthy exercise and intellectual curiosity were dismissed by Kate and Al, as they had been by every investigator who had stood in the room before them, but whether or not he logged on to child pornography sites was not currently their concern. It was the walks they were interested in, the long wanders in the surrounding housing developments during the hours when children were walking to school or waiting for buses.

  He'd been seen, and recognized, three and a half months before, and for the third time a group of concerned parents began to organize a neighborhood against him. Mothers pointedly shepherded their children to the school gates, petitions were drawn up, the kids began to watch for him. So he retreated, and for six weeks had stayed in his cave.

  Things quieted down, and Traynor lay low, and interest waned. He bought an elderly dog from the pound to keep him company, a quiet dog that slept most of the day and was content with walks around the weed-lined parking lot. After a while, though, when Traynor judged that interest had moved on, he snapped the dog's leash on, piled him into the car, and drove him a few miles away for a daily walk—at the hour when the neighborhood was waking and its bright and freshly scrubbed children were going off to school.

  Had the dog been more lively or appealing, Traynor might have gone his way in peace for a good long time. The dog, though, was as scruffy and unkempt as its owner, and a few weeks later one mother who jogged in the mornings was talking to another mother at a parents' meeting, and his identity came out.

  There was nothing against him but distaste and profound apprehension, no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing, but a sex offender was required to register with the police in a new area, and although he was not proposing to move into the neighborhood, he was frequenting its sidewalks.

  It might well have died down, given time. After all, Traynor had a car, a twelve-hour day, and all the residential neighborhoods of the Bay Area at his command. However, in the midst of it a young girl disappeared from her home two miles from Traynor's factory, and even though he had a firm alibi for the time (three of the factory workers had seen him walking the dog in the parking lot) and even though the police quickly determined that the girl was a runaway (the diary entry she left might have been ambiguous, but the story she told her best friend was not), Traynor had already been put in the spotlight. Two days later his name was on the Web site hit list. Letters began to arrive, notices went up on phone poles throughout the area, and pickets set up outside the gates. Phone calls came, so that when the task force team had reached him the day before, he thought it another one and cut them off hastily. His increasingly nervous boss gave him two weeks' notice, one of the factory workers who had four children put a brick through Traynor's windshield, and shrill voices were r
aised in the City Council meeting.

  Then the night before, a few minutes short of eleven-thirty, a pair of black-clad figures wearing hoods and gloves broke into the factory with a pair of bolt cutters. They ambushed Traynor on his rounds, stunned him with a taser, slapped handcuffs on his nerveless wrists, and prepared to throttle him with a length of red silk. Unfortunately for them, but to the dubious benefit of Traynor's life, they assumed that the night watchman was the sum total of security at the factory, and on their way in the door tripped an old but still efficient silent alarm. One of Traynor's assailants heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, looked out the window, and saw the patrol car responding to the alarm. The two intruders fled with their job half complete, although the blow one of them dealt Traynor's head, either with a boot or the abandoned bolt cutters found nearby, added to the bad gash he had sustained in his original fall, nearly did him in.

  So here he lay in his hospital bed in the small hours of the morning, a victim no one had the least scrap of sympathy or indignation for, his lank and thinning hair half shaved off to mend the two scalp wounds, black of eye, hoarse of voice, and trying hard to maintain the moral superiority of the assault victim under the cold, knowing stares of hospital staff, police, and the dread FBI. Even his fingers were repellent, thin white tentacles plucking nervously at the sheets, and Kate found herself wondering what had happened to the only true victim here, the poor dog.

  She realized that Traynor had come to the end of his well-practiced narrative and was waiting for questions with resigned apprehension. Hawkin had his back to the room, looking out of the third-floor window, apparently leaving it up to her.

  “Do you have any idea who they were, Mr. Traynor?” she asked, but he was shaking his head before the question was over.

  “They could have been anyone. Just that they were women.”

  “How do you know that, Mr. Traynor?”