Much as Kate would have enjoyed hearing the gritty details of the golden girl’s dark side, she had no right to ask, and Lee would very probably not tell her if she did. So Kate just pulled Lee to her feet, handed her the crutches, and gathered up their discarded items of clothing so as not to give Jon evidence of their activities when he came in.
Mind and body now restored to an equal state of tiredness and satisfaction, Kate followed her partner’s slow progress up to their bedroom, where she slept very well indeed.
ON THE SURFACE, the murders of James Larsen and Matthew Banderas were linked, by method and by the glaring fact that both men had been multiple offenders—Larsen against his wife, Banderas against a number of women. Still, surface links were often misleading. Which meant that nothing could be assumed, that painstaking detective work was the only option, both now in looking for someone to arrest as well as far down the line when court testimony loomed.
Every neighbor in the condo complex was interviewed, briefly or in depth. The members of the health club Banderas belonged to, his coworkers, his brother, the guys at the bar he frequented, all were noted, all were asked the necessary questions. On Monday morning, Kate tried to track down Banderas’s “real bitch” of a boss, but she was out of town, at a conference in Cincinnati until Wednesday. Kate left her number, and turned to the other interviews on her schedule.
Wednesday morning Janice Popper surfaced, back from Cincinnati but pleading a burden of accumulated work too deep to fit in an interview with the police. She suggested Friday, Kate countered with some very mild hints about the possibility that the police were capable of just showing up that afternoon regardless of Popper’s work, and in the end they compromised on Thursday afternoon. Popper’s voice came over the line as brisk to the point of coldness. She made no pretense at being upset over her employee’s death; made no bones about the fact that she had neither liked nor much respected him.
“Frankly,” she told Kate, “I think he would’ve quit before too much longer. Either that, or I’d have been forced to fire him. Oh, he was good enough at his job, but he was one of those men who just can’t deal with having a woman giving him orders. He’d alternate between trying to flirt and trying to treat me as one of the guys—you know, a dirty joke to see what you’ll do and then getting all righteous if you don’t laugh. I didn’t know about his history until I’d been here a couple of weeks, and it made sense. It also made me very nervous, wondering what he’d do if he got angry at me. I know that if he’d shown up at my house one night, I sure as hell wouldn’t have let him in. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”
Kate thanked the woman for calling back, and went back to typing up the endless reams of reports and interviews that constitute investigative work. Half an hour later, her phone rang. She picked it up, thinking it would be another reporter wanting a quote (although interest was beginning to wane, thank God).
“Martinelli,” she said brusquely.
“Kate? Oh, God, I’m glad I—oh, Kate, I don’t know what—”
“Who is this?” Kate demanded. Her voice cut through the woman’s panic like a knife.
“Roz. This is Roz. Oh, Kate, look. I really need you. Need to talk to you, I mean. Can you—”
“Roz, what is it? Has something happened to Maj—or the baby?”
“No, no,” she snapped impatiently, as if Kate were being rather stupid. The cool annoyance made a startling contrast to her agonized voice an instant before. “It’s really too much to go into on the phone. Can you come here?”
“Now? Where are you?”
“At the church. Kate, can you come?”
Kate stifled a sigh.
“Okay, Roz. Let me just finish what I’m doing and I’ll be there within an hour.”
“Thanks,” she said, and hung up. Kate stared at the phone, wondering what would reduce calm, competent Rosalyn Hall to a state of gibbering rudeness.
It was not panic—Kate saw that the instant she walked into the church office fifty minutes later. She had never before seen Roz Hall consumed by fury, so she did not at first recognize the body language of the people in the outside office as fearful, merely seeing the tension in their faces and the apprehension in the white-eyed glances they cast at the closed door. A raised voice in monologue came from Roz’s office, and Kate paused to ask the young man sitting at the desk marked (humorously, Kate hoped) secretary if she could go in.
“If you really want to,” he said ominously.
“What’s happened?”
“Oh, she’ll tell you,” he replied.
One of the cluster of women in the other corner muttered, “You mean there’s someone in the City who hasn’t heard yet?” The comment sparked a flare of nervous and quickly damped-down laughter. Kate marched over to the closed door, rapped on it briskly and, without waiting for permission, turned the knob and walked in.
Roz Hall stood bent over the telephone on her old wooden desk, wearing her clerical collar, a suit that meant business, and a clenched look of absolute rage. She jerked upright at Kate’s unceremonious entrance, dragged her fingers through her hair, and barked into the phone, “Never mind. I’ll take care of it myself,” before slamming it down on the base.
Roz glared down at the quivering phone for several intense seconds. Then, with an enormous effort, she gathered up the energies that were racing through her and turned them on Kate—who very nearly stepped back under the impact of Roz’s concentrated outrage until the minister suddenly and unexpectedly smiled, and all the murderous antagonism in the room flipped back on itself and slipped away into its box. Kate even caught herself smiling back, and wondered at the ease with which Roz had switched off the stream of fury in full spate to invite Kate instead to join her in a little self-deprecating humor.
Machiavellian, Roz had described herself? Oh, no—Machiavelli had nothing on Roz Hall.
But still Kate smiled, in uncomprehending but true sympathy, and Roz shook her head at herself and said, “What time is it? Not even four? God, I need a drink. Join me?”
“No thanks.”
“Coffee then. Grab a seat.” She circled her desk, reaching out in passing to give Kate’s arm a quick squeeze that managed to express apology, affection, and gratitude all at once, and walked out the door. Kate pulled a chair away from the desk, and as she was lowering herself into it, she glanced out into the next room and saw Roz with her arms around the “secketary,” wrapping him in a long hug. After a long minute, she released him and went to the others, giving each of them the benediction of her embrace. The level of tension in the building plummeted, the faces started to beam again.
When each person had been given a hug, Roz stood back. “I’m sorry, everyone. I’m a bitch and I don’t deserve your help. Look—why don’t you all go out and have something to eat? I don’t know if it’s lunchtime or dinnertime, but you must need something after the kind of day I’ve put you through. Just stick the answering machine on and get out of here. And Jory, would you be a dear and put on a fresh pot of coffee before you go? Thanks. All of you.”
She hit just the right note to let her acolytes know that she was okay, that they were safe, and that whatever problems they had been facing would resolve themselves. Tight mutters gave way to relieved chatter, and Roz came back in and walked over to a cabinet.
“Have a seat, Kate. You sure you don’t want something stronger than coffee?”
Kate shook her head at the proffered bottle. Roz splashed a generous amber inch in the bottom of a glass, tipped it down her throat in a single gulp, and shuddered as it hit. After a moment she poured another inch in the glass, capped the bottle and put it away, and took her drink over to the three tall filing cabinets that stood shoulder to shoulder against the wall. With a minimum of searching she pulled out a well-filled ma-nila folder, handed it over to Kate, and then dropped into a comfortable chair across from her guest, who sat waiting for an explanation before committing herself to the folder.
Roz took
a sip from her drink, put it on the low table between them, and reached up irritably to peel off the stiff clerical collar. She dropped the curling tongue-depressor shape of white plastic onto the table, loosened the collar of the shirt itself, and sat back with a sigh, rubbing her throat with her eyes shut. It was all done so naturally, Kate couldn’t tell if Roz even knew it was deliberate, this clear declaration that although the lesser beings in the outer office could be given a pat and dismissed as the worshipers they were, Kate was to be considered a near-equal.
A near-equal she wanted something from.
“Do you remember last week I told you about an Indian girl?” Roz asked.
Kate thought back; a week ago at dinner, it seemed like a lot longer. “Someone came to talk to you about the situation while you were at the women’s shelter,” she remembered. “Amanda something.”
“Yes. The Indian girl died last night. They’re treating it like an accident, although her husband has a history of violent behavior.”
“Roz, what are you talking about?” Kate asked sharply.
“He burned the child to death,” Roz said, her face as bleak as her voice. “It’s done all the time in India, and now they’ve done it here. Look at the file, Kate. It’s all there.”
Now Kate looked at the folder, which bore the label Bride Burning. It consisted of clippings from newspapers and magazines, most of them foreign, and a number of journal reprints and articles downloaded from the Internet. Kate picked out one at random and read the brief account, written in oddly stilted English, of a sixteen-year-old bride from the Punjab district of India who brought to her marriage a dowry of what to American eyes seemed a peculiar assortment of goods, including a color television, a sewing machine, and a motor scooter. She went to live with her new husband’s family two hundred miles from her village, under the same roof as his parents, his brother’s family, two unmarried brothers, and a younger sister.
Eight months later the bride was showing no signs of pregnancy, the television was on the blink, and her in-laws were demanding that the dowry be increased by three hundred rupees and a refrigerator. The girl’s parents had gone heavily into debt to pay for the wedding and the agreed-to dowry; they would be very lucky to pay off what they already owed before they died, and could afford no more.
Shortly after her first anniversary, the bride was dead in a “kitchen accident” involving spilled fuel from the cook stove and a match. The groom’s parents were arrested, tried, and found not guilty due to lack of evidence.
That was not the end of the story, either. In a final, macabre twist that, had Kate not been a cop she might not have believed, two years later the groom was offered his dead bride’s younger sister in marriage. The girl’s family was forever “besmirched” (the article’s evocative word) by their daughter’s death, and could not hope to find a clean husband for the girl who remained. The groom was reported to be thinking it over while the prospective new wife’s family decided if its dowry might stretch to a refrigerator.
The whole story sounded fantastic to the point of absurdity, from the motor scooter dowry to the blithe assumption that the dead woman’s own sister might be willing to walk into this nightmare. Kate had been a cop long enough to have seen a little of everything, but this tale stretched credibility.
However, there were other such stories in the file—a dozen, fifteen, twenty-five sets of names, places, and “accidents,” Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and otherwise, from lower-, middle-, and upper-class families. It was appalling.
“Jesus,” Kate said finally. “This sounds like something out of the Dark Ages.”
“It’s terrifying, isn’t it? An indication of the complete and utter insignificance of women, just a burden to everyone. And the frightful irony of women oppressing women. But you know, I do honestly love India. I’ve been there half a dozen times and I’m only beginning to see the country. I love the place, the people, the way it opens my eyes and my heart to go there. Is your coffee okay?”
Kate hadn’t even noticed its arrival. She picked up her mug obediently and took a swallow. It was not hot, but it helped take the taste of those articles out of her mouth.
“And I detest the country as well,” Roz went on. “The people can be so incredibly rude, and gracious at the same time. They can be cruel and hateful, greedy and so affectionate.
“They call India the meeting place of opposites, and it’s true—extreme opposites, too, not the watered-down sorts of contrast we have in this country. There are the Jains, who wear masks and sweep ahead of themselves as they walk so they don’t cause harm to so much as an ant, while at the other extreme there’re these robbers who live in the hills and come down to murder and pillage, and they make movies about them, have fan clubs, everything. And of course every so often there’s a paroxysm of religious-slash-cultural hatred and a few thousand people are slaughtered.
“God, don’t get me started on India,” she said, although in truth Kate had been wondering how to get her stopped. “The ironies would make you howl. A people that worships a warrior-goddess, a religion that clearly says the main god is completely helpless without feminine energy, a country that has had a woman prime minister when we can’t even get one as a vice president, at the same time allows children of seven and eight to be married off, aborts female fetuses right and left, and sees six or eight thousand dowry deaths a year. Ten thousand? More—who knows?
“I’m sorry, Kate—you’re wondering what on earth I’m rattling on about. What I’m trying to say here is that we now have a bride burning in the city of San Francisco, a city you have sworn to protect. What are you, as a police officer, going to do about it?”
Kate was tired, overworked, and unconvinced, and she had no desire to sit at the receiving end of Roz Hall’s histrionic ire.
“Roz, enough with the drama, okay?” she chided. “I don’t work at City Hall. If you have evidence of a homicide—evidence, not suspicion—let me see it, and I’ll pass it on to whoever’s in charge of the case.”
Roz’s head snapped up and she fixed Kate with a look that for an instant had the hardened cop beginning to quail, just as the church members in the other room had done. Roz was a woman magnificent in her rage, her eyes glittering with it, her hair seeming to crackle around her head. Kate half expected sparks to come from her fingertips and smoke from her ears, and she moved quickly to placate this particular warrior-goddess.
“Roz, my friend, please. I’m just a cop. If someone killed a girl in this city then, as you said, it’s my job to put them behind bars. Ninety-nine percent of the time, if someone is murdered, there’s evidence. If this death is being dismissed as an accident, then of course I’ll ask for a closer look. But I do need to know why you think this girl was killed. Other than the fact that a lot of women on the other side of the world are killed by their husbands’ families,” she added.
Reason succeeded where honest emotion would have had Roz reaching for her Rolodex to summon lawyers and tame media moguls into battle. The waves of brute energy subsided, helped by the slowing effects of the drink. “Right,” said Roz, making an effort. “So, what do you need to know?”
Kate reached into her pocket and drew out her notebook and pen. “We could start with her name,” she suggested.
Chapter 8
THE GIRL HAD BEEN born Pramilla Barot a little less than sixteen years before in a small village on the border of Rajasthan and Gujerat, the disastrous third daughter of a struggling farmer and his hardworking but increasingly ill wife. When Pramilla was seven, her mother died giving birth to a son. The farmer, although he had been very fond of his wife, considered it a fair trade.
His first daughter made a successful and gloriously inexpensive marriage to a young schoolteacher with radical ideas, who declared himself willing to take the girl with only the bare minimum of dowry, and that to stay in the hands of his new wife. None of the wedding guests actually approved of this bizarre notion (although in truth it was closer to ancient dowry traditions
than it was to the modern interpretation of dowry as little more than payment to any family willing to take a daughter off her father’s hands). Secretly, however, all the fathers were more than a little envious of how easily Barot had gotten off, and all the mothers were more than a little softhearted at the romance of the thing.
So it was that Barot embarked on the marriage arrangements of his second daughter with mixed feelings, knowing how easy it could be, but fearing that karma would come around and kick him in the teeth.
It did so, with a vengeance. The young man identified by the astrologer as an ideal match looked good enough on paper, as it were (although Barot was not exactly literate), but when his family got into the act, Barot felt as if he’d clasped a basket of boa constrictors to his chest.
They squeezed. Oh, not at first—oh no. Only when arrangements were in their final stages, when the first gifts had been exchanged and everyone knew the chosen date, did the boy’s harping mother flex her muscles and bare her teeth. The television chosen was not big enough for her fine son. The kitchen stove Barot was providing was inadequate. The rupees must be increased to cover the expenses they were incurring.
Pulling out was impossible. The girl would be marked as having been tried and found wanting, rejected by one man and therefore of questionable value to the rest. Barot’s future in-laws were careful never to drive their demands so high he was forced to withdraw entirely, but they upped the ante in stages that made him gulp, and tear his hair, but in the end submit.
The alternative, after all, was to be burdened forever with an unmarriageable daughter.
The marriage took place, the demands continued after the wedding parties returned to their homes, but by vast good fortune (and a vast number of expensive pujas at the temple) the bride quickly became pregnant, and to the joy of everyone except perhaps the groom’s mother (who had had her eye on a video player), she gave birth to a son.
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