“Yes. Sorry, Ms. Larsen, I was thinking. I’m sure it’ll turn up. You probably just left it somewhere, maybe last night?”
“I wonder… You know, I was at the shelter on Friday night, they invited me up for dinner. I wonder if…I’ll call and ask them.”
“Actually, Emily, I’m going over to the shelter first thing in the morning. Rather than bother them tonight, considering how busy they always are in the evenings, why don’t I just ask for you when I’m there, maybe take a look around to see if your wallet fell into the back of the sofa or something?” If the missing wallet was of any importance, the last thing Kate wanted was for its thief to be forewarned that she was coming.
“Would you? That’svery nice of you.It’s green, looks just like leather, with a gold clasp along the top. Jimmy gave it to me for my birthday three years ago.”
“I’m glad you’re keeping in touch with the shelter,” Kate said with elaborate casualness. “I saw Roz the other day myself, she was saying that she wished she could spend more time there.”
“Roz was there Friday, but she had to run. She asked Phoebe—you know, Carla’s secretary?—to give me a ride home, though, and she did, which was nice of her, it’s really out of her way. The insurance company is still dragging their feet over replacing Jimmy’s car.”
Kate made sympathetic noises, and then nudged Emily a little further down the evidence trail. “That explains why I couldn’t reach you—I didn’t want to call too late.”
“Yes, it was after eleven when we got home. I hated to have Phoebe come all the way down here, considering how busy she is, but the buses don’t run as much that late.”
“I see,” Kate said, afraid that she was beginning to.
“What did you want?” Emily interrupted Kate’s thoughts to ask.
“Sorry? Oh, you mean the other night. It was nothing, just clarification of a detail. We worked it out.” She wished the woman luck with getting the insurance company to replace the trashed car, and hung up before Emily could ask again about canceling the credit card.
Hawkin had paid and was standing near the door, so she waited until they were in the car to tell him what Emily Larsen had said.
“His credit card and her ID, both gone missing,” Hawkin mused. “What you might call thought-provoking.”
“Not much we can do about it tonight, though,” Kate said hopefully.
After a minute, to her relief, Hawkin nodded his head in agreement. They had been on the road for eighteen hours, since the San Jose people had made the connection between their hospitalized pedophile and the SFPD’s dead bodies, and Kate for one knew that her day was not over yet.
“That car was rented out to Jane Larsen at around ten a.m.,” Al noted. “We might find the same staff on duty that time tomorrow.”
“How ‘bout if I take you home, pick you up in the morning?”
“More driving for you—you could just drop me at the Hall, I’d use an unmarked.”
“It’s only twenty minutes to your place, Al, and not much farther in the morning.”
“Then I accept. Might even see Jani today, awake.”
The apartment Al shared with Jani, a professor of medieval history, and her teenaged daughter, Jules, was north of Jani’s work and south of his. Kate and he talked mostly about Jules on the short drive there, about her brilliance and her resilience in recovering from the traumatic experiences she had been through over the winter.
“I finally managed to call her the other day,” Kate told him. “It was good to talk to her. I told her we’d go bowling in a week or two.”
“She’d like that. She misses you. You know, the other day she told me she was thinking of writing to that bastard in prison. She didn’t say anything to you about it, did she?”
“God, no, she didn’t. She isn’t serious, is she?”
“ ‘Fraid so. She thought it might, and I quote, ”aid the healing process.“ I don’t know if she’s insane or incredibly well balanced.”
“Lee would tell you that at a certain point, the two are the same.”
“Thanks a ton. Meanwhile, what do I tell Jules?”
“Oh no, I’m not going to touch that one. You’re the dad here.” And then, for the first time and tentatively, she told him about Lee’s decision. “Lee wants to try for a child. She has an appointment at the clinic in a couple of weeks.”
“Hey,” Hawkin said warmly. “That’s great. Really great news.”
“Not news yet, just an intention, and if you’d keep it to yourself.” You’d think she’d get used to the invasions of the world into her private life, Kate thought to herself, but sometimes it felt like living in a house with glass walls, and all the world outside with rocks in hand.
“Sure. Can I tell Jani?”
“Of course—but let’s have Jules out of the loop for a while, okay? We can tell her when there’s something to tell.”
“I hope it all goes smoothly. Give Lee my best, would you?”
“God—I nearly forgot. Would you dial a number for me?”
Lee was still at Roz and Maj’s house, and sounded relieved to hear from her. Whatever the crisis was, Lee was already tired of it and glad of an excuse to leave. Kate told her she’d be there within forty minutes.
“I think Roz is off on one of her campaigns,” Kate told Al in explanation. “She gets involved in some cause or another and everything gets thrown up into the air until she loses interest. It’s kind of hard on Maj.”
“What is it this time? Handicapped parking permits for the meals-on-wheels delivery folk? City investments in anti-gay corporations?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
“Well, I hope you get some sleep. See you at nine? We can get some coffee on our way to the car place.”
“Jani still can’t stand the smell, huh?”
“You notice I didn’t have any tonight—I don’t like sleeping on the couch.”
Kate hoped this was not a sign of things to come.
She dropped Al off, made a U-turn in the quiet night street, and headed back north. When she pulled up in front of Roz and Maj’s house, the red Jeep was not on the street, and when Maj opened the door it was obvious that she’d been crying earlier in the evening. She seemed calm now, and so Kate ruthlessly extracted Lee from the troubled house; in truth, Maj seemed nearly as relieved at her departure as Lee was herself.
Kate settled Lee in the passenger seat, tossed the cuffed crutches over the back, and drove briskly away before Roz could arrive and precipitate them all back into the crisis. Lee drew a deep breath, blew it out with feeling, and let her head drop back against the headrest.
“Might be easier if you could charge them by the hour,” Kate offered by way of sympathetic opener.
“I love Roz,” Lee said tiredly, “but the woman can be a fucking maniac.
First Al, now Lee—two people who never cursed letting fly with easy obscenity, and both in the same day. A third one and San Francisco might well slip into the sea.
“What’s Roz got in her teeth now?”
“It’s that Indian girl again, Pramilla Mehta,” Lee said. “Roz has decided to link up in solidarity with a group in India that’s working to expose dowry deaths for what they are.”
Kate dragged her thoughts away from San Jose and back to the larger picture. “But I thought she was convinced that Laxman Mehta killed her? What can she do about him? He’s dead—our problem now, not hers.”
“She thinks the family encouraged him, maybe even drove him to it.”
“Christ. So what is she going to do?”
“Big picket lines in front of his company, and the city is looking into the contracts it has with him, thinking of canceling.”
“Well, that certainly sounds like Roz.”
“They’re also putting together a public memorial service for Pramilla.”
“Who is they?”
“I swear, Roz has half the organizations in Northern California involved. This is going to be big. Huge. And, I�
��m afraid, divisive. There’s a large Indian community in the Bay Area, and they’re all going to feel targeted, even those who have nothing to do with dowries. You know how it goes with ethnic groups, they all get jumbled together in the popular mind. Anyone wearing a turban is a follower of the Ayatollah; anyone with an Arab name sides with Saddam.”
“I know. But I’m sorry, babe, this all sounds like business as usual for Roz. Why is Maj so upset about it this time?”
“A combination of things. Maj’s not feeling very well, and the pregnancy is interfering with her own work. And the timing is bad, coming just when her work is going through a demanding phase, and Roz had promised to be more available for Mina. Plus that, Roz’s church is making noises about cutting back her funding—they say they’re paying her to be a parish priest, not a political organizer, and the congregation is being neglected. So there’s that worry as well. But I think what has Maj so concerned is the degree of Roz’s involvement. For some reason this girl’s killing has pulled all of Roz’s levers at once, and it’s making her a little crazy. That’s not a diagnosis, by the way,” Lee added, in a welcome breath of humor. “She’s out to make Pramilla Mehta a saint and a martyr, or at least a household name, and you know how good she is at playing the media game.”
Kate agreed: Roz was an artist at manipulating the media.
“But it takes a massive jolt of energy to get the PR wheels going, so she’s pulled out all the stops. Statements issued, photo ops, interviews on national television, in and out of the mayor’s office and the supervisors‘, phone calls to the governor and any senators she can get through to. The president has heard of her, and Oprah is interested.”
“So she’s running on empty, no food or sleep, and Maj is waiting for the crash.”
“You know, it really is an addiction, this kind of righteous campaign. When it ends, as it has to, the drop-off is a steep one.”
They had seen it before, but Maj had to live with it, and would be picking up the pieces at a time when she would be ill equipped to do so.
“Is there anything you can do?” Kate asked.
“Not really. You know Roz. If you try to shake some sense into her, it just makes you the enemy.”
“Hard on Maj.”
“Yes. And Mina is confused, too. But enough—it won’t help anyone if you and I get sucked in. What happened with your day?”
“We’re closing in,” Kate told her. She rarely went into detail with Lee on an active case, both from professional scruples and as a way of separating home from job, but this case in particular had developed so many prickly areas—from Roz’s presence in its periphery to the ambiguous righteousness of the feminist vigilante—that she did not know where to pick up the thread even if she wanted to. Better to let the tangled story sort itself out without Lee’s involvement, especially considering the hour. So it was merely, “We’re closing in,” and a few minor details before she threw down the distraction of Jules writing to her jailed abductor, which kept Lee happily chewing on that question until they were pulling up to their curb.
Chapter 23
I WAS BUSY, protested the young woman at the airport car rental agency. It was nine-twenty on Monday morning, and Britany Pihalik was still busy, fending off telephones, customers, and pushy cops all at the same time. Kate kept any mote of sympathy off her face, knowing that to appear implacable was in the end the quickest for everyone, and eventually the young woman gave in, turned her name card around on the counter, and led the two detectives into an empty break room. She offered them coffee, which they declined, took a can of diet Coke from the refrigerator for herself, and settled them at a table.
Kate handed her the printout with the name Jane Larsen circled on it. “What can you tell us about this woman?”
“I’d have to look it up—no, wait a minute. I remember her. It was the lady with the mangled card.” She gave them a perky look as if happy to have satisfied their curiosity and ready to get back to work now, and seemed mildly surprised that they had more questions.
“Could you tell us about her, please?” Hawkin asked.
“Nice lady, truly ugly hair, kind of stupid—her, I mean, not her hair. Though her hair was pretty stupid, too. Anyway, she hands me this credit card that looks like she fed it to a pit bull, said it’d fallen out of her purse and her husband ran over it with the car. But the computer took it, I didn’t even have to enter the numbers like we do sometimes when the magnetic strip is wrecked, so it was okay.”
“Did you take a close look at it?”
“No,” she said flatly, clearly thinking the question, to use her favorite word, stupid.
“Did she have any other form of ID?” Kate asked.
“Of course.” Ms. Pihalik obviously was getting no very high opinion of the police department. “We can’t let them rent a car without a valid driver’s license. She had one, I rented her a car, she left.”
“Was the name on the license Jane Larsen?”
“Yes. No. No, it was her middle name. Elizabeth, something like that. Maybe not Elizabeth, because it was something as, you know, dreary as Jane, and I remember thinking it was too bad she didn’t have at least one interesting name to choose from. But then she was pretty dreary herself.”
“Was the name Janet? Mary?” Headshakes, continuing through the suggestions of “Patricia? Cathy? Susan?” until Kate got to “Emily?” A headshake began, cut off by consideration.
“Emily might’ve been it. Yeah, that sounds right, I think it was Em-fly.”
Kate did not kiss her, although it was tempting. “You don’t have security cameras here, do you?” she asked. Unless they were hidden, Kate hadn’t seen any.
“Not inside. There’s some in the lot.”
“What did the woman look like?”
“Like I said, dreary. Dull. That ugly black hair—a really crappy dye job, might’ve even been a wig—and with these heavy glasses that were all wrong for her. Baggy clothes, like she didn’t want anyone to see her body, though it didn’t really look that bad to me. Little bit fat, maybe.” Coming from a broomstick like Britany Pihalik, Kate guessed that “fat” described anything more than three percent body fat.
“Height?” Kate asked. “Eye color?”
“Taller than me, three or four inches—and I had heels on, so she was maybe five, um, nine? ten? Big, like I said. Not really fat, I guess, just kinda, what? Chunky? Muscular, like. I don’t remember her eyes. They might have been blue, or brown.”
Helpful, Kate thought; at least they knew not to look at anyone with pink or purple eyes.
“Your machine didn’t make an actual impression of the card, did it?” Hawkin asked.
“Like one of those old back-and-forth machines with the what-you-call-it, carbons? No, it reads off the strip unless that’s been scrambled by the person keeping it in an eelskin wallet or putting it down next to a strong magnet. Then we have to key in the numbers by hand. But like I said, hers was okay.”
“Ms. Pihalik, the list you gave us yesterday was reservations and a few walk-ins. I’d like to see the actual final list of names taken from the credit cards themselves.”
“I’d have to ask about that. I don’t know if I’m allowed to give it to you.”
“Maybe we should check with your supervisor?” Hawkin gently suggested.
She look relieved. “Sure, just a minute,” she said, and went to the door to call in a taciturn young man not much older than she was, who wore a lapel pin declaring him to be Jim Tolliver. He heard their request, scratched for a moment at a flare of acne on one cheek, and then shrugged.
“I don’t know why not. But it’d be faster if you could just look at the screen instead of printing out everything.”
So Ms. Pihalik went back to her customers and Mr. Tolliver went to a free terminal, and while the detectives looked over his shoulder he scrolled through the previous day’s rentals until he came to larsen. But it was not jane; it was james. The card’s user might have hammered the S and the sec
ond half of the M into invisibility, but the computer was not fooled, and had Britany Pihalik not been so distracted, she might have noticed.
Mr. Tolliver seemed to think she should have, distraction of line-out-the-door customers or no distraction. He bristled in righteous anger, leaving Kate and Al to study the record. There was, however, little to see except that the signature had been close enough to pass at a glance.
As evidence, the faked car rental could have been more specifically damning, but there was no doubt that it constituted a solid piece of work. They had sat on it for too long, however, and could not justify the additional hours of going through the videotapes of the external security cameras in hopes of glimpsing a face. It was time to report in.
“REPORTING IN” QUICKLY E V O L V E D into “being called on the carpet.” The official disapproval of their independent tactics—from lieutenant, captain, and deputy chief, everyone, it seemed, but the chief of police and the mayor himself—was indeed balanced against the quality of the evidence they had dug up (in the minds and faces of their own people—Marcowitz was not so easily mollified), and by hanging their heads in meek (if mock) submissiveness while they continued to thrust out in front of them the tangible results of their borderline insubordination, they defused the wrath of officialdom to a tongue-lashing none of them took very seriously. When it was over, the higher ranks left, satisfied that the lieutenant could handle it from here.
However, Agent Marcowitz remained, sitting in a chair slightly removed from the police department personnel and saying nothing. The Man in Black (actually a dark charcoal, Kate noticed, and very nicely cut) dominated the meeting precisely by doing nothing, not even shifting in his seat, until the official reprimand had run its course. Then he uncrossed his legs, and the three remaining members of the SFPD turned to him as if for judgment.
“We agreed that you would keep me in the loop at all times,” he said.
“We phoned you as soon as we had something firm.” Kate’s protest sounded feeble even to her own ears; far better to have stayed silent.
“What do you propose to do now? If I may be allowed to ask.”
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