“Best take advantage of the dry weather while we can,” Margot said when they’d unloaded the dogs from her van and headed out. “There’s supposed to be another storm coming in tonight or tomorrow morning.”
As usual, Kali scurried to keep up. Margot was several inches taller than Kali, with long, powerful legs. She was attractive in a highly “done” manner—a little too much makeup and layered hair with as much width and height as length—and surprisingly feminine in most respects, but Margot charged from point to point with an energy and focus that was decidedly male.
“Gosh, just look at that view,” Margot said. “So spectacular it almost hurts.”
They were hiking the Inspiration Point trail atop the Berkeley hills. Kali looked to the west, toward the broad panorama of San Francisco Bay. The recent rains had cleared the air, intensifying colors and shapes. It was almost as though she could reach out and touch the Golden Gate Bridge with her hand.
“It is amazing,” Kali agreed. “Especially on days like this.” The sun was low on the horizon, casting bands of purple and pink across the sky.
Kali slowed to drink in the beauty, but Margot pushed on ahead. Kali jogged to catch up. “How’s the novel coming?” she asked. Margot was writing what she claimed was a “very high concept” thriller, though Kali had yet to wheedle out of her any hints as to subject matter.
“Slowly.” Margot’s answer was always the same. And then she’d change the topic, as she did now. She chattered on about a new Johnny Depp movie, then slid into a discourse about global warming. Margot was, among other things, an active environmentalist.
“You’re awfully quiet today,” she said, turning to Kali. “Feeling under the weather?”
“It’s not that. It’s . . .” Kali couldn’t decide if she wanted to talk about Anne or not.
“Unpleasant, I can tell that much,” Margot said gently.
“Did you see the piece in today’s paper about the woman who was murdered?”
“The lawyer?”
Kali nodded. “I knew her. In fact, I was supposed to meet her for dinner the night she was killed.”
“Oh, my God. I’m sorry. It never dawned on me she might be a friend of yours.”
“We worked together at the DA’s office just out of law school. We didn’t see much of each other after leaving there, but recently we’d reconnected. We were even talking about sharing an office.” And now Anne was gone. Kali experienced a fresh pang of sorrow.
Margot touched Kali’s arm in a gesture of sympathy. “How terrible for you. It must be so upsetting.”
Kali swallowed against the rising tide of emotion inside her. Anne’s death was bad enough, and now there was the wrinkle of the yellow rose. Upsetting was only part of it.
“Did she practice criminal law?” Margot asked.
“Family law mostly. Divorces.”
Margot grimaced. “A lot of nastiness in that line of work.”
“Surprisingly, Anne loved it.”
“Takes a special kind of person, I imagine. Even good divorces, like mine, are painful.” Margot’s face darkened momentarily at the memory. “The newspaper said something about the Bayside Strangler trial. Isn’t that the guy who killed a bunch of women years ago?”
“Uh-huh. Anne and I both worked on that case. That’s how we met.”
“You worked on that case?” Margot untangled the set of leashes, which had become unmanageable as the four dogs pulled in different directions. Her hands were large, but her fingers were slender and delicate, capped with shiny nails of fire engine red. And jewelry. Today it was a ruby ring and a wrist heavy with jangling bracelets.
“I was just a worker bee. Owen Nelson was the chief prosecutor.”
“The same Owen Nelson who’s now running for governor?” There was awe in Margot’s voice.
“The very same. It was the Bayside Strangler case that really put him in the spotlight.”
“But you were right there, in the middle of it. A part of history, so to speak.”
Not the middle, thank God. The dead women and their families—they had been in the middle of it.
“There was a movie about it, wasn’t there?” Margot asked.
“Not a very good one, in my opinion. And not totally accurate either. There was a book, too. By a respected journalist. The book is much better.”
“The Bayside Strangler.” Margot squinted in thought. “I wasn’t living here then, but I remember reading about it. How many women did he kill?”
“Five, that we know of. But we only got convictions on two. Under the circumstances, even that was something of an accomplishment.”
“What do you mean?”
“The DA at the time recommended dropping the charges for lack of evidence, but the judge in the case wouldn’t do it.”
“Wouldn’t grant the prosecution’s own motion to dismiss charges?”
“Mostly it was politics, I think. The DA was worried about losing, both in court and in public opinion. He didn’t want to take the chance. But the judge thought the case needed to be heard.” Kali did a quick two-step to avoid stepping on a large slug making his way across the path. “It ended up being dumped in Owen Nelson’s lap, and he turned it into a personal victory. That was the case that cemented his reputation as a first-rate prosecutor.”
“Who’d the killer turn out to be?”
“Dwayne Arnold Davis. He was executed last month, right before Christmas. You probably read about the protests and last minute appeals.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar. That stuff doesn’t stick with me. I figure a guy like that deserves what he gets.” She handed Kali the jumble of leashes. “Here, can you hold this for a minute while I take off my jacket. What was this Davis like, some Hannibal Lecter clone?”
“No. He was married with a young kid. Taught junior high.”
Margot gave her an incredulous look. “You’re kidding?”
“Mild mannered and well liked. It came as a real shock when the investigation focused on him. There’s a whole cadre of people who still think he’s innocent.” Kali wasn’t one of them, though there’d been moments when she’d had her doubts. She’d put them behind her with his conviction, but now with Anne’s death and the seeming similarities, she was getting a queasy feeling in her gut.
“Were the victims people he knew?”
“Not really, but he did target them ahead of time. We were never sure how or why, but he’d single them out, then get to know them in some way. He’d collect information about them.”
“Stalking?”
“Sort of. Only the women weren’t aware of it. In retrospect, we learned that they’d had strange phone calls or missing mail. . . the sort of thing that happens to all of us and we don’t think too much of at the time.”
Margot gave a dramatic shiver. “Creepy.”
The creepiest part about it, Kali thought, was how normal Davis had seemed. “He dressed their bodies in revealing clothing and left them near trash cans.”
“Making a statement?”
“It certainly looked that way. Then he taunted the police with poems about their death.”
“A depraved son of bitch, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was.” And the fact that he’d sat through the entire trial with a smirk on his face only strengthened those sentiments for Kali.
“So how come he was only convicted of two of the murders?”
“A lot of mistakes were made in the investigation, and Davis’s attorney played on them in his defense.”
“Like the O.J. trial.”
Kali nodded. “There were no claims of flying DNA, but Davis did claim the police framed him by planting evidence. There were questions of valid search and seizure as well. And finally, the defense attorney was able to make credible hints about another suspect.”
Race had also been an issue with Davis, although it came into play mostly outside the courtroom. Davis was black; the victims and the detectives who worked the case were white. There’d been he
ated debate about whether Davis would have been a suspect at all if he’d been white.
A bicyclist passed them going the other way. Margot bit her lower lip and walked in silence for a few moments. “It must have been scary knowing a killer was on the loose.”
“It was.” The killings had started during Kali’s last year of law school. A young woman who worked as a nurse at Alta Bates Hospital. Kali remembered reading about her disappearance, the pleas of friends and colleagues who insisted she would never go off without telling someone. Then her car had been found by the estuary, and three days later, her body.
Suspicion focused on a man she’d been dating, but there was no hard evidence, and eventually the investigation moved from the front pages. Two months later it was a young professor at UC Berkeley, Kali’s own campus. Kali hadn’t known her—she was a professor of chemistry—but with all the talk among students and staff, the murder of Joanna Paget had taken on an almost personal dimension. But the real swell of panic had come when the police announced there were possible ties between the two murders. You could feel the fear in the air. Women didn’t go out at night unless they had to, and paired up for simple tasks like going to the store.
“It got so that you trusted no one,” Kali said. “Not the mailman, or the plumber, or even the grocery clerk who offered to carry your bags. And because rumor had it that the killer posed as a policeman, you couldn’t trust them, either.”
“I’m certainly glad they got the son of a bitch,” Margot said.
Kali nodded. But her skin tingled with dread all the same.
CHAPTER 8
Hamburger juice dribbled down Lou’s chin. He grabbed the wadded-up napkin next to his plate and mopped the mess before it could land on his shirt. Across the table from him, Keating speared a forkful of lettuce. Neatly. What kind of man chose salad over a burger? There were things about his partner Lou would never understand.
Bryce Keating wasn’t someone Lou would have chosen to work with if he’d had his druthers. Nothing like Harry his partner for nearly a dozen years. But Harry had retired to travel in his Winnebago, and Lou had been paired with Keating. “Think of it as mentoring,” the captain had suggested. More like playground duty, Lou sometimes thought.
Although Keating wasn’t exactly wet behind the ears.
He wasn’t a bad partner, either. Lou could have done a whole lot worse. At least Keating was male, which was a big plus right there. Especially now that the department was making such an effort to reach out to women recruits. Lou wasn’t sure he could have worked with a woman. And Keating was no slouch on the job. If anything, he went overboard in the other direction. He was from a different generation. Different planet, maybe. And he’d clearly watched too many action thrillers during his formative years. Saw himself as a hero for the new millennium, a crusader in the urban jungle.
“What do you think of the husband?” Keating asked. He was hunched over his salad, both muscled forearms on the tabletop, as if Lou might be tempted to snatch a slice of cucumber from under his nose.
“Too easy.”
“Too easy? Aren’t you the guy whose mantra is ‘don’t overlook the obvious’?”
Lou grabbed a French fry and chewed it thoughtfully. True, the husband hadn’t been as forthcoming as Lou would have liked. But the man had been reeling from the news of his wife’s death. Under the circumstances, you couldn’t fault him for being less than coherent.
“Why would he kill her?” Lou asked, though he knew as well as anyone that motives for murder were as elusive as dust.
“You’re asking me why?”
“You studying to be a parrot, Bryce?”
Keating ignored the jibe. “They were estranged, don’t forget. Right there that tells us they weren’t the happy couple Jerry Bailey made them out to be. A domestic dispute gets out of hand, the husband loses his temper, and next thing he knows, he’s crossed the line.”
“Except it doesn’t fit what we know of the crime. He’d have had to track her down. She was at work, going to meet a friend for dinner. Doesn’t strike me as a setup for a heat-of-passion killing.”
“Maybe his anger festered. Or he stopped by the office to see her and they got into it then.”
“It’s possible, I guess.” Lou signaled the waitress for more coffee. “You get anything from the secretary?” She’d come in to talk to them first thing that morning.
“Not really. She left the office Friday evening about six. Ms. Bailey was still there, working. There was nothing on her calendar except dinner with the friend, Kali O’Brien. And nothing unusual in her day, according to the secretary. She says Ms. Bailey was a respected lawyer”—here Keating made a face that conveyed his general distaste for attorneys—“well liked by clients, blah-de-blah. Handled mostly divorces, trusts and estates.”
“If she was any good, she probably wasn’t so well liked by her clients’ ex-spouses.” The waitress filled Lou’s cup and he gave her a nod of thanks, but she’d turned her back already.
“I thought about that, too. There was apparently one divorce that was particularly acrimonious.” He pulled a notepad from his pocket. “Jeff and Judy Mason. She got the kids, the house, a hefty support check, and a restraining order. Sounds like all he got was the shaft.”
Lou raised an eyebrow. “Could be that’s what he deserved.”
Keating shot him a look that Lou knew well. On this point, the line had been drawn in the sand from the day they’d started working together. Lou suspected it had something to do with Keating’s own divorce, though he never talked about it.
“Anyway,” Keating continued, “the secretary didn’t elaborate. Client confidentiality issues seemed to dawn on her partway through our conversation.” He speared the last tomato on his plate and pushed back from the table. “How’d the autopsy go?”
“Not my idea of a good time.” In all his years on the force, autopsies were one thing Lou had never learned to handle easily. What he had learned, though, was that it was important to be there. A paper report, no matter how detailed, was never as complete. Answers and explanations were easier to get on the spot.
“Nothing that’s going to help us find the guy,” Lou said. “But there was one surprise. She was pregnant.”
“Didn’t look it.”
“She was barely there, the doc says, but pregnant all the same.”
Keating’s face grew attentive. “Spells motive to me.”
“Maybe.”
“Give me an overview of the rest of it.”
Lou circled his coffee mug with his hands. “She was strangled. Some kind of cotton rope, the doc thinks. About a quarter of an inch in diameter. Maybe clothesline, but rough, not that plastic-coated stuff.” Her skin had been pale and unblemished, he remembered, making the purple band of bruising around her neck seem all the more abhorrent.
“Time of death?”
“Around ten p.m., give or take a couple of hours. With the rain and her body being dumped outside, it’s hard to say.”
Keating tapped his fingers on the tabletop. Fingers and feet, he had a habit of tapping them both. “Any signs of a struggle?”
“Nope. Looks like she was killed right off. No chafing on her hands or feet like she’d been tied up. No bruises or skin under her nails like she fought back.”
“What about the abrasions on her legs?”
“Postmortem. Probably when he was positioning the body by the dumpster.”
Keating stopped the finger dance. “Sexual assault?”
Lou shook his head. “And I checked with forensics. Not much in the way of trace evidence. Some blue acrylic fibers is all. On her skirt. And lots of litter around the dumpster, of course, which was no doubt there long before our guy showed up.”
“Doesn’t look like this one is going to untangle easily.”
“You’re right about that.” Lou hated cases like this, working from nothing. Trying to figure out who killed a woman everyone professed to love. He took another sip of coffee. “We
got a call from the DA this afternoon.”
“The big man himself?”
“Yep.”
Keating’s brow furrowed. “What did he want?”
“To know what we had on the Bailey murder. I guess the victim being a lawyer and all, he’s especially interested.”
Keating’s phone chirped. He pulled it from his belt, carried on a brief, monosyllabic conversation, then disconnected. “They found her car,” he said to Lou. “Near East Fourteenth. Stripped.”
“Tough neighborhood.”
“Maybe the lady had a drug habit.” Keating must have read Lou’s skepticism. “Happens more often than you’d think,” he added.
Keating had worked Vice before moving into Homicide. It was a turf he knew well, and a connection that frequently paid off in his current assignment. But the Bailey woman’s well-toned and athletic body made Lou think his partner was off base this time around.
“You going out there?” Lou asked.
“Why not? It may be that someone in the neighborhood has eyes.” Keating scooted back his chair. “Besides, it’s good to keep in touch with old friends.”
Informants, he meant. People who had their fingers on the pulse of criminal activity in the city. That was one of Keating’s strengths.
<><><>
Lou headed in the opposite direction from Keating, toward Anne Bailey’s office in downtown Berkeley. From the outside, the building was vintage sixties—a vertical cube of concrete and glass built with an eye toward cost rather than aesthetics. He entered the lobby and approached the security guard, a skinny young man who was busily flipping through a wrestling magazine. It wasn’t a high-security building, and Lou knew the man’s role was more information officer than guard, but his lackadaisical attitude irked Lou all the same.
Lou flashed his badge. The man didn’t exactly shoot to attention, but he closed the magazine and looked directly at Lou. That didn’t always happen these days. People were eager for a quick response from the police when they were the ones in trouble, but otherwise they were wary of authority.
Cold Justice (Kali O'Brien series Book 5) Page 4
