Night Work

by Laurie R. King

“How do I …? You mean, how did I know they were women?”

  “Yes,” she said with exaggerated patience. “Their voices, their bodies, did they smell of feminine hygiene spray, what?”

  The pasty face went pink with embarrassment. “I … well, the way they moved, I guess. And their clothing was not so heavy I couldn't tell, er—”

  “That they had breasts and hips?”

  His blush deepened at her blatant reference to a woman's body; he nodded, studying his hands.

  “What about their voices?”

  “The only thing they said—the only thing I heard them say—was when I was already half unconscious. I heard the word ‘cops,’ and then the pressure went off my throat and after that I passed out. I suppose when they hit my head.”

  “Just the one word?”

  “Nothing else. Their silence was … scary. Unearthly. Just some grunts while I was … I was screaming, I'm afraid, as soon as I had my voice back, asking them why they were doing this. Begging them to stop. They never said a thing.”

  For the first time Kate was aware of a faint brush of compassion for Lennie Traynor, but it did not last long. Instead, she pressed him for details about the two figures.

  One, it seemed, had been taller and stronger than the other, and it had been this taller person who was in charge. She (if she it had been) had come at him with the taser in hand and had handled him like a rag doll, flipping his stunned body over and wrenching his arms back for the bite of the handcuffs. It had been her black hood looming over him when he found himself faceup again, she who whipped a silken billow of dark red out of a pocket and wrapped it around his throat, she who tightened and twisted and began to fade from view as the oxygen ceased to reach his brain.

  “What was the hood like?” Kate asked.

  “Black. One of those knitted ski things.”

  “So it had eyeholes?”

  “I saw her eyes, yes.”

  “What color were they?”

  “Brownish, I guess.”

  “Mr. Traynor, you were looking into her eyes while she was trying to kill you. Surely you remember what color they were.”

  “Light brown. Lighter than yours. Maybe hazel?”

  “And the skin color around them?”

  “She was white, not black. Maybe a light Hispanic. Not Asian, anyway.”

  “Makeup?”

  “No,” he said, not sounding at all certain.

  “Perfume?”

  “Unh-uh. She smelled like sweat.”

  “Bad? Like she hadn't washed in a while?”

  “No. Sweat like she'd been exercising. Fresh. Not stale or strong.”

  Not a nervous sweat, then, the smell of fear that Traynor had been giving off since they entered his room.

  “About how tall was she?”

  “I went over all this with the others,” he protested feebly, his hand coming up to touch his bruised throat.

  “Nearly finished. How tall?”

  “Taller than me—but then, dressed all in black and standing over me, she seemed bigger than she was, I think. I was only facing her for a second or two, but she still seemed a little taller than me. Maybe a couple of inches. I'm five seven.”

  Brown-eyed Roz Hall stood five feet ten, Kate's traitorous mind got in before she ruthlessly turned it to other things.

  “Mr. Traynor, were you aware of people hanging around the factory at night, telephone calls, that kind of thing?”

  He looked at her as if she were raving. “It's been nuts around here the last few weeks. I told you about the picketers and the—”

  “I mean single people, not groups of protesters. A car parked across from the entrance, say, or the dog barking at the darkness.”

  “Maybe. I don't know, I've been kind of jumpy.”

  “What did you think you saw?”

  “Well, Popeye—he's my dog, or he was until I took him back to the pound over the weekend. Anyway, he was showing the strain about, oh, maybe a week ago. I'd be sweeping up or doing my rounds and he'd be whining at the door to get out or getting under my feet. Drove me crazy.”

  “What night was this?”

  “There were a coupla nights. Monday maybe? And then not the next night, he slept like usual, but again on Wednesday.”

  “What time would it have been?”

  “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.

  She cannot be cast out (she is here for good)

  Nor battled to the end. Who wins that war?

  She cannot be forgotten, jailed, or killed.

  Heaven must still be balanced against her.

  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. Hill-man'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 woodcarvings 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 if 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.

  Put the wild hunger where it belongs,

  Within the act of creation,