Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  Four years before, while she was still in her first year with juvie, Ellen had arrested a thirteen-year-old named Rita Blandish for shoplifting at a gourmet food shop in North Beach. It was the second time in less than a week the manager had caught her at it, so he detained Rita in his office and called the police.

  She was a dark-haired little thing, vaguely pretty and still on the innocent side of puberty, and she was clearly terrified. She sat on the chair beside the manager’s desk, tears running down her face and her eyes wide with dread.

  While her partner sat with the manager and filled out the complaint form, Ellen took Rita outside to their car.

  Once she had the girl in the rear passenger compartment, which was as secure as any jail cell, Ellen climbed into the front passenger seat and twisted around to look at her prisoner through the clear plastic barrier.

  “What did you steal?”

  Immediately Rita began shaking her head, so fast she might have given herself whiplash.

  “I didn’t steal anything,” she almost shouted. “I was gonna pay for it.”

  Ellen made a sound that was just short of an exasperated laugh.

  “You know, you’re not going to do yourself any good by lying, so let me rephrase the question. What did you steal?”

  “Two cans of tuna fish.”

  Instantly Rita began to cry again, and Ellen was left to wonder why any little girl who hadn’t even had her first period yet would steal tuna fish. Candy, yes. Something fancy and expensive, sure. But not tuna fish.

  She couldn’t help herself. Ellen felt sorry for the little tyke.

  “You know, it isn’t going to be that bad,” she said. “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen last August.”

  And here it was October. As old as that.

  “Well, nobody’s going to assume that you’re a career criminal at thirteen. Have you ever been arrested before?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ll probably only get a little probation. And when you turn eighteen your juvenile records are sealed. It isn’t going to follow you through life.

  “So, why tuna fish?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you steal tuna fish?”

  Her question seemed to perplex Rita—not the question itself but why anyone would need to ask.

  “You can go a long time on a can of tuna fish,” she said.

  * * *

  A little investigating cleared up the mystery of why the nutritional value of tuna fish might be important. While Rita was enjoying her first dinner at the Juvenile Detention Center, Ellen drove over to the address Rita had listed as home. It was a down-at-heel apartment building in the Mission District, and Ellen had to phone the owner, whose number was conveniently listed in the entranceway above the mailboxes, before she could get into Number 105.

  There were the usual signs of recent human habitation—dishes in the kitchen sink, a sweater lying across the back of a chair in the only bedroom, et cetera—but the clothes closet contained only what one assumed was Rita’s meager wardrobe and the bathroom had been pretty well cleaned out. There was an empty box of Playtex tampons in the wastepaper basket, but no other sign that the apartment was inhabited by a woman old enough to be Rita’s mother, and evidence of any male presence was completely absent.

  The refrigerator and the kitchen cabinets were almost empty of food, which explained why Rita had been stealing tuna fish.

  At thirteen years old she had been left to fend for herself. What choice did she have except to steal?

  “Mom took off,” was the way Rita explained things, the next morning. She didn’t seem to regard it as anything like an unusual occurrence, so perhaps it had happened before.

  “When did she do that?”

  “Eight or nine days ago. I’m not sure. It was a Friday.”

  “Where did she go?”

  The only answer was a shrug.

  “What about your father?”

  But Rita just looked at her blankly, then said, “Mom had a lot of men friends.”

  In the end Ellen talked the gourmet-food-store manager into dropping the charges, and Rita was classified as an abandoned child. She was put into foster care.

  Nothing was ever again heard of her mother.

  Thereafter, Ellen kept a loose watch on little Rita, and it turned out to be a sensible precaution. At its worst, foster care was little more than a racket, and Rita’s first such home was pretty bad. Ellen got her out of that, and her second placement seemed to be a little better. At least, Rita wasn’t complaining.

  There was some trouble along the way, usually with boys or what passed among adolescents for recreational drugs. And then, the previous year, Rita simply disappeared.

  * * *

  And now she had turned up again, dead for probably a little less than twenty-four hours, crouched naked in a bathtub at the Marriot Hotel with a wide smear of dried blood trailing down the inside of her left leg from her anus.

  Her face was turned to the right, as if the killer had twisted her head around, perhaps for the pleasure of watching her death agony. Ellen had recognized her at once.

  It was too much. Ellen simply stood up and walked out of the room. When Sam followed her, he found her sitting on the corner of one of the twin beds, sobbing.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  It was a fair length of time before Ellen was able to answer him.

  “No, I’m not all right,” she said, her voice ragged. “I knew that girl from juvie.” Her shoulders hunched in a despairing shrug. “Sam, if ever there was a kid who didn’t get the breaks, it was her.”

  Sam gave her about two minutes to settle down, and then he shook his head.

  “We all get cases like that,” he said, wistfully. “I remember once…” And then his voice trailed off, as if whatever memory he was on the point of relating had suddenly engulfed him.

  When he spoke again, his voice was almost grim.

  “Ellie, very few people deserve to get murdered, but we’re homicide detectives, not social workers. Injustice is our stock-in-trade. Now get back in there and tell me what you see.”

  Ellen got up from the bed and did as she was told. She would be fine, she thought. Or at least okay.

  But she promised herself that Rita Blandish would have her revenge.

  * * *

  Then, last month, a man in North Beach had taken his car out of the garage, noticed a bad smell and opened the trunk. There he found the body of a woman who had lived directly across the street, a saleswoman named Kathy Hudson with no known boyfriends, reported missing by her mother the week before. Her throat had been cut, very carefully, so that it took a while for her to die. There was minimal blood in the trunk, indicating she had been killed elsewhere, and the man who owned the car had just that afternoon returned from a two-week vacation in the Philippines. No suspects, no leads, no useful physical evidence.

  Like everyone else, murderers sharpened their skills with practice, and both of these crimes were what Sam described as “quality work,” not the kind of slapdash performance you see in your garden-variety sex slaying. The odds of two such virtuosos operating in the same city at the same time were not very good.

  Ellen wasn’t alone in making the link, but at present the department was treating the two homicides as unrelated. The department did not want to admit even the possibility that there was a serial killer at large in the Bay Area because the news media would go straight overboard with it and that wouldn’t be good for public morale.

  Homicide—the Holy Grail of police work. It offered a panoramic view of all that was darkest in human character. Greed, lust and madness, in every possible permutation. From time to time it occurred to Ellen to wonder if she wasn’t a little mad herself to be so committed to it.

  Only her father understood. “Sometimes I almost envy you,” he had told her once. “Working with children, I hardly ever see the aberration played out to its logical extremity. I haven’t dealt with a fu
ll-blown sociopath since I was a resident.”

  “I’m only interested in catching them, Daddy,” she had told him. “I don’t try to understand them.”

  But he had smiled and said, “Oh yes, you do.”

  And now Mommy wanted him to give up his practice so that he would have more time to partner her at bridge. What she didn’t understand—what she could not see, no matter how or how often Ellen explained it to her—was that if she succeeded in badgering him into retirement he would die of boredom. He would never live to collect Social Security.

  Each of them, father and daughter, needed their work to keep life real.

  It was twenty minutes before the photographer came up from shooting the body. He was carrying a video camera in a shoulder sling, so that it was pressed between his chest and his right arm. He was very good. He faced the road and then turned his body to pan the crowd that had collected behind the police tape. He did it twice, looking up at the sky over their heads like a man trying to decide whether it would rain again. They never noticed.

  “How do you want ’em?” he asked, coming up next to her. “Stills or the movie?”

  “Can I get both?”

  The photographer shrugged. He was a short, compact man with a blond crew cut and a face suggesting that life had run out of surprises. He wore soiled jeans and a torn gray T-shirt. He looked about thirty-five.

  “You can have anything you want. You’ll get the disk this afternoon, but the stills won’t be before Tuesday. Shaw wants to do the post right away, so I’ll be busy with that. Sorry.”

  “The movie will be fine for starters. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  He took a stick of Juicy Fruit out of his pocket, peeled away the tinfoil, folded the gum in half and stuck it in his mouth, all without even glancing at Ellen.

  “I hate this fucking job,” he said, and strolled away.

  Sam came up to the top of the footpath and lit another cigarette. He had to step aside almost at once for a couple of young men in blue coveralls carrying either end of a stretcher. Strapped to it was a red blanket partially covering a dark gray body bag. The bag looked almost as if it were empty. The rear doors of the coroner’s van opened seemingly of their own will and the two men got the stretcher inside and pulled the doors shut behind them.

  “Show’s over. We can go home now,” Sam announced. He didn’t look happy.

  “Is it Our Boy?”

  “Oh yes. She was opened up in one stroke, breastbone to crotch. Then most of her insides were taken out, leaving her hollow as a gourd. Shaw won’t know for sure until he checks the free histamine levels, but he doesn’t think the injuries were postmortem. ‘Our Boy’ cut her to pieces while she was still alive.”

  2

  Sam drove their fisherman downtown for detailed questioning, and Ellen, on the perfectly reasonable assumption that for the time being the case belonged to Evidence and the coroner’s office, went home to her apartment to look after her domestic responsibilities.

  She was hardly inside the door when Sam phoned. Fingerprint identification had scored a direct hit. The victim’s name was Sally Wilkes, a twenty-three-year-old cocktail waitress from the Western Addition, whose death was important to the larger world only because she had recently filed a paternity suit against one George Feldstein, whose mother just happened to be the newly elected mayor of San Francisco.

  So the first priority of the police department, in the few hours before the newspapers learned that the dead body found along the Coast Highway came with a name, was to confirm that neither Her Honor nor young George had been personally involved in disemboweling the poor girl. Other, more senior inspectors were engaged in the delicate business of establishing that all important persons had alibis which held up.

  “We get to toss her apartment,” Sam announced. “I’ve still got a little to clear up here, so I’ll pick you up in about an hour.”

  “Sure.”

  Against an inside wall of Ellen’s living room there was a wire cage, about five feet high by three feet wide. The interior was crowded with ramps and platforms, and suspended like a hammock from the ceiling was a piece of heavy red cloth, about the size of a pocket handkerchief. There were various other objects inside, among them a shoe box half full of Ping-Pong balls.

  Ellen opened the cage door, about a foot square. With her fingertips she touched the red cloth, making it sway slightly.

  “Wake up, baby. Mommy’s home.”

  Instantly Gwendolyn, all fifteen inches of her, skittered weightlessly over Ellen’s hand and up her arm, and then draped herself around the back of her neck like a fur collar—in one of her rare flashes of wit, Ellen’s mother had once referred to Gwendolyn as “that animated fashion accessory.” Gwendolyn then occupied herself with a detailed inspection of Ellen’s left ear.

  Apparently oblivious to these attentions, Ellen went into the kitchen.

  “Would you like some breakfast?” she asked, getting a sandwich bag full of cut-up chicken out of the refrigerator.

  She sat down at the kitchen table and fed Gwendolyn pieces out of the bag as Gwendolyn clung to the lapel of her jacket, watching her every movement with small black eyes that glittered in her bandit’s mask.

  In was easy to overfeed her, so after a few minutes Ellen closed the bag.

  “Want to go play, baby?”

  Forty minutes later, with Gwendolyn asleep in her lap, Ellen heard her cell phone ring.

  “Five minutes?” Sam asked.

  “I’ll be outside.”

  * * *

  “A nice neighborhood for a gin slinger,” Sam observed as he pulled in by the curb at the very end of Sutter Street.

  And it was. The houses were Victorian and well kept up, some with ground-floor garages in a city where space and parking were always at a premium. It was home to the comfortable middle class, not a neighborhood where people expected to get murdered, at least not the way Sally had been.

  They walked back half a block until they came to the right street number. There was an open stairway leading to the second floor and two mailboxes bolted to the stucco beside the front door, which suggested that the house had been divided into two apartments. The name on the outside mailbox was “Wilkes.”

  “What do you say we go wake the people downstairs and ask them for a key?”

  Behind Sam’s back, Ellen grinned with mischief.

  Sam took off his hat with one hand and ran the other around the inside of the rim, as if adjusting its fit, and then carefully replaced it. Then he studied the front of the house, shaking his head.

  “Show a little consideration, girl. It’s Sunday morning.”

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to break in.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  By the time they reached the top of the stairway Sam had extracted from his billfold a thin iron rod, about six inches long with a slight curve at one end, which he held out to Ellen as if soliciting her admiration.

  “Time for your master’s examination.”

  “Sam, you’re my teacher and hero,” she said, accepting the lock pick.

  They were on the other side of the door within fifteen seconds.

  The air in the apartment had that dead, still quality of unoccupied space.

  Sam took a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket and glanced around as he slipped them over his huge hands. He was peering into the kitchen, the entrance to which was almost directly opposite the front door. There was a half-empty glass of some dark liquid on the drain board.

  “I don’t see any other dirty dishes,” Ellen said. She went into the kitchen, which was really only a corridor between the entry and the narrow L of the living room, which included a dining table. Standing beside the sink, she bent over the glass to smell its contents. “Root beer, if memory serves. Otherwise the place looks pretty clean. Maybe she was just in a hurry.”

  “Or maybe she wasn’t the one who was thirsty. I don’t see any lipstick on the rim, do you
? Bag the glass and mark it down for prints and saliva. Let’s hope whoever drank from it was a secreter.”

  “You think he could have grabbed her here? In her own apartment?”

  “It’s possible.” The crow’s feet around Sam’s eyes deepened as his face took on a suspicious cast. “Something about this place doesn’t smell right.”

  Ellen dutifully put on her own gloves, took a plastic bag out of her pocket, scribbled a note on the paper label affixed to the top of the bag, then put two fingers into the glass so she could pick it up without touching the outside and slipped it into the bag without spilling a drop. Then she set the glass back down on the drain board.

  They went into the living room, where there was a painting over the sofa, a seascape of the type sold at Costco for $49.95. There was also a television set on a metal stand and, in front of the sofa, a coffee table. In an ashtray on the coffee table was a brass key, about an inch and a half long.

  “I’m taking bets that fits the front door,” Ellen said. “Nobody leaves their house key lying around in their living room, and why isn’t it on a ring? He’s playing with us again.”

  “What do you mean ‘again’? He’s never stopped.”

  They hadn’t gotten very far down the hallway to the bedroom before Sam’s remark about the place not smelling right suddenly took on a ghastly aptness. Every homicide inspector in the world knew that odor and, with the discrimination of a connoisseur, could sniff it out from any other shade of putrefaction.

  Ellen noticed it first and stopped just in front of the bedroom door, which was standing ajar no more than half an inch.

  “It smells like about twenty-four hours.” She looked back at her partner and raised her eyebrows in a silent appeal to his judgment.

  “I make it less. Twelve to eighteen, no more.”

  There was no point in arguing. Sam’s nose was as good as any bloodhound’s.

  “But I know what you mean,” he went on, shaking his head. “It’s a little odd—a shade too pungent.”

  Without touching the knob, Ellen pushed open the door, expecting to find a bloodbath inside.