Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  There was an unmade double bed, a night table with a tiny, elaborately feminine lamp, still switched on, a stereo system in one corner, a chest of drawers with another television set resting on top. The folding doors to the closet stood open and clothes and underwear littered the floor. The room was a mess, but there were no signs of violence.

  “It’s coming from there,” Sam said, pointing to the bathroom door, which, like the door to the bedroom, was just slightly ajar.

  Ellen was closer. The room was tiled in lime green, right up to the ceiling. It was very hot in there. There was a small sink, a toilet and a bathtub with a pink plastic shower curtain drawn closed. She used the barrel of a ballpoint pen to move the curtain aside.

  Collected around the drain of the bathtub were viscera—lungs, liver, intestines, the whole show, by now almost black with clotted blood. Presumably all this had once belonged to Sally Wilkes. Her heart lay at the center of the twisted mass, as if on display.

  Ellen could feel her own heart pounding in her ears, and the sweat was breaking out under her clothes. Nothing in two years with Homicide had prepared her for this.

  But she had to keep it from Sam. For Sam she had to be the Ice Queen, or she was in the wrong business.

  He came in for his own look. She glanced at him quickly, but his face displayed no particular emotion. He might have been checking the mail.

  “So that’s why,” Sam announced casually. “No body, just guts.” He raised his eyes to the light in the ceiling. “And just to make it extra nice for everybody, he left the heat lamp on to speed up the process of decay.”

  Suddenly he gave Ellen a wary, sideways glance. “Are you okay, girl?”

  “Sure. Fine.” She showed him a fast, insincere smile.

  Suddenly she felt as if she were ready to start sobbing.

  “Okay then. Now tell me what you see.”

  She was back to being a detective, which somehow made it less terrible.

  “She wasn’t killed here,” Ellen said, surprised and relieved that her voice didn’t sound shaky. “There’d have to be blood all over the place.”

  “Unless he washed the walls down.”

  “No.” Ellen ran a gloved finger over the tile and showed her partner the faint traces of dust she had picked up from the grout. “Nobody’s done this bathroom in a week.

  “You still think he grabbed her here?”

  “No.” In the crowded bathroom, Sam allowed himself a slight shrug. “He wouldn’t do that and then come back. Think of the risks. He grabbed her somewhere else. He had to have supposed she wouldn’t be missed for a while, not until well after she was dead. He killed her, took the key from her handbag and let himself in.

  “But our masters knew enough to worry that the next stray corpse might be hers. Who filed the missing persons report?”

  Sam looked at his watch, as if knowing the right time would help him remember.

  “Her lawyer. Sally missed an appointment. So when he couldn’t reach her within the prescribed twenty-four hours, he phoned in a missing persons report. He probably also got to thinking it wouldn’t be bad publicity.”

  They both stared down at the mess in the tub.

  “Well, the killer didn’t bring all that back here in his pocket,” Sam continued. “What do you suppose a full set of guts weighs? Twenty pounds? Maybe thirty? I suggest we look around for a garbage bag.”

  They found it in the toilet. All they had to do was lift the lid. The sides of the bowl were smeared with blood.

  “I suppose prints would be too much to hope for.”

  “Probably.”

  Sam made an impatient gesture with his left hand.

  “Enough is enough,” he said. “Let’s go back to the car and phone it in. Let Forensics take this place apart and, besides, I could use some fresh air.”

  Outside it was still Sunday morning. Their footfalls were reassuringly noisy on the wooden stairway. Across the street a lawn sprinkler was running.

  Ellen stayed outside while Sam got in the car to use the phone, which reminded her that she had to phone Mindy to tell her she couldn’t make it for lunch. Mindy would understand. Mindy was a lawyer in the district attorney’s office, so she had broken a few lunch dates herself.

  Listening to the sound of the lawn sprinkler, Ellen wondered why anyone would water their lawn when it had rained last night, and then it occurred to her that the system was probably controlled by a timer. The people who owned the house might even still be asleep, unaware that their sprinkler was running, or that it had rained last night or that their neighbor had been disemboweled. When they found out they would feel a thrill of fear and talk about it for a month, but it wouldn’t really touch them. Murder only existed in the newspapers.

  The art of modern living was not to care.

  Only, she didn’t want to learn to be that hard. In civilians it was just a species of emotional shallowness, but for cops it was an occupational disease. She didn’t want to become one of those for whom it was all just an intellectual game, who could look at a corpse like it was a gum wrapper someone had dropped on the sidewalk. Sally Wilkes might not have been every mother’s dream, but that didn’t entitle anybody to cut her up like a chicken. Sally Wilkes needed an avenger.

  That was stupid. Ellen knew it was stupid and still felt it and was ashamed of feeling it, but she had felt that way ever since finding Rita Blandish in a hotel bathtub. This particular series of murders had slowly evolved into her personal crusade, which was not only stupid but unprofessional. Ellen realized she was a little off the rails on this one, but it didn’t seem to matter. It came down to her gut feeling that it would be impossible for her to remain icily objective and still contrive to be a human being.

  Maybe after they caught their killer she would be entitled to feel any way she wanted. Maybe.

  She watched Sam through the windshield as he talked on the car phone, wondering if he really was unmoved by the sight of a woman’s insides lying at the bottom of her bathtub, knowing she would never find out.

  Finally he hung up and came outside again, slamming the driver’s side door with a trace more force than was absolutely required. He leaned against the hood and watched the sprinkler running on the other side of the street. Then, after maybe thirty seconds, he lit a cigarette.

  “Our man has made his first mistake,” he said finally. “The autopsy is still going on, but the word is they recovered semen samples from Sally Wilkes’ body.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake? We can type him now. If we ever catch him, his DNA will buy him the Needle.”

  “We were meant to find it, Sam. It was raining last night, remember? And she was wearing her panties. Which do you think is more likely, that our killer wanted to be sure the rain wouldn’t give her a douche or that he was concerned for her modesty?”

  Sam pursed his lips slightly, which meant that he saw her point. “By that logic, then the glass in the kitchen was left behind deliberately. And if it yields a usable saliva sample, it’ll match up with the semen.”

  “That’s right. And if the panties didn’t do the job, he’s given us a backup. He wants us to have his DNA.”

  “And the glass will check clean for prints.”

  “He knows what he’s doing, Sam.”

  “Then he’s very weird, even for a guy who likes to carve up waitresses.”

  “Yes, he’s very weird.”

  * * *

  The discovery of Sally Wilkes’ internal organs meant virtually a second autopsy. And because their villain seemed to have such a wonderful sense of fun, Forensics would even have to cross-check tissue samples to make sure they really were Sally Wilkes’ internal organs and not some other lucky girl’s. It would be the middle of the week before the reports were ready, and in the meantime the investigation would have to subsist on such tidbits as Dr. Shaw felt inclined to dispense through his subordinates.

  While they waited for the evidence team to show up
Ellen had a chat with the elderly couple who lived downstairs and, as expected, owned the duplex. They hadn’t heard anything, and they hadn’t seen any strangers around. They didn’t seem to like their tenant very much and didn’t seem surprised when they were told she had been found dead that morning.

  What really offended them was hearing that the apartment would be sealed.

  “Was she killed up there?”

  “We don’t think so,” Ellen replied, hoping she wouldn’t have to tell them about what was in the upstairs bathtub. “But we have reason to believe the murderer may have been on the premises, so it’s a possible crime scene.”

  “Well, how long will it have to be empty?”

  “Hard to say. A few months at least.”

  “It’s the last time we ever rent to a single,” the woman said, clutching her bathrobe around her as she sat on the sofa in her living room, glaring at her husband as if he were somehow responsible. They were probably in their seventies, but both of them looked frail and bleached out. Even their eyes seemed colorless. “Singles are worse than people with young kids.”

  Outside, technicians from Evidence were busy unloading a blue van and preparing for their assault on the walkup.

  “We can go now,” Sam announced, his face as empty of expression as a dish towel. “As you know, I’m allergic to fingerprint dust.”

  * * *

  Since it was Sunday, and also Sam’s turn to buy, they had lunch out of the vending machines on the third floor of police headquarters. Ellen had a bag of corn chips and coffee. Sam was the only person she knew who was actually prepared to eat the sandwiches.

  “What is it today?”

  Sam spread open one corner of the sandwich and looked inside, shaking his head. “The label says salami, but I’m not certain.

  “Tell you what, if I volunteer to do some phoning around, will you write the sheets?”

  “Sure. Give me your notes on the guy who found her.”

  The arrangement in Homicide was that partners had adjoining desks and one computer, each little constellation changing owners from shift to shift. The computer was always on the junior partner’s side.

  You filled out form sheets. There was an arrest sheet, an interrogation sheet, a search sheet, a properties sheet. It was endless. Ellen always did the sheets. She was the junior partner and she could type.

  Meanwhile Sam checked in with the Men’s Club, that vast network of drinking buddies and guys in this or that department who owed him favors or just liked to gossip about whatever case or semipublic scandal was on at the moment. Ellen had her own list of contacts, but it was nothing compared with Sam’s. There was hardly anything in Official San Francisco that Sam either didn’t know or couldn’t find out about. All he needed was to shut himself up in the lieutenant’s deserted office and get on the phone.

  Just shy of an hour later he came back into the duty room, closing the lieutenant’s glass door behind him.

  “Word is the mayor’s boy is clear,” he said, falling heavily into his chair. “Sally Wilkes died between four and six yesterday afternoon, and young George spent all day yesterday on a charter boat out on Monterey Bay with about two dozen of his most intimate friends. Afterwards they had a long and boozy dinner together. The party broke up about an hour before Sally was discovered.”

  “Well now, isn’t that a relief.”

  “Not for us. Her Honor still wants the board cleared with all possible dispatch. She isn’t going to be happy until somebody is sitting in a cage for this, somebody she doesn’t know and never heard of. I don’t suppose I can blame her.”

  “What else did you find out?”

  “You were right about that drinking glass.”

  “The one from the apartment?”

  Sam nodded. “It was clean of prints.”

  “What about the saliva?”

  “They won’t know until tomorrow.”

  “What else? I know that look, Sam. It means you’re saving the best for last.”

  “Shaw doesn’t think our victim was raped.”

  From the tone of his voice he could have been announcing the weather. Of course, nothing surprised Sam, not even impossibilities.

  “You mean he thinks it was consensual?”

  “I mean he thinks there was no sex. At least, nothing that you or I would describe as sex.”

  “How the hell could Shaw know something like that?”

  Sam leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind the back of his neck. Then he raised his shoulders in a theatrical shrug.

  “The guy’s probably done three or four hundred rape murders in his time. God alone knows how many semen samples he’s swabbed up in the last twenty years. I guess he knows the difference. Besides, it was stated as an impression, not a fact. Shaw thinks the semen was introduced into her vagina after death, and by some means other than the customary blunt instrument. In plain English, Our Boy didn’t screw Sally Wilkes.”

  3

  The shift ended at four o’clock, and Sam went home to his wife and their three dachshunds in Daly City. It was about a quarter after four by the time Ellen finished her case notes and climbed into the elevator. When the doors opened on the ground floor she almost bumped into the photographer who had worked the crime scene that morning.

  “Looks like I nearly missed you,” he said, holding out to her a padded shipping envelope about half an inch thick. “The video, remember? I promised I’d get it to you this afternoon.”

  “Yes, thanks.” Ellen accepted the package and noticed warily that the man had changed into a pair of clean slacks and a tan sport coat over a blue dress shirt. She also thought she detected a whiff of lime aftershave.

  “Listen, if you’re off work maybe you’d feel like some dinner…”

  He smiled hopefully, but Ellen shook her head.

  “I can’t, sorry. I’ve got my folks coming in. In fact I’m already late.”

  “Oh, well, another time then.”

  “Yes, fine. Another time.”

  He went with her as far as the police garage in the basement. His name, as it turned out, was Ken, and he seemed like a nice guy. He even waved to her as she drove off.

  “Why the hell did I do that?” she asked herself, out loud, as she waited in her Toyota for the light to change on Market Street. “Why the hell…?”

  Because her folks weren’t coming in. Her folks were an hour down the Peninsula, in Atherton, and, aside from her father’s furtive visits to have lunch with his little girl, they only came up to use their season tickets to the symphony. About four times a year they would all get together around the family dinner table for a couple of hours so Ellen and her mother could misunderstand each other, but tonight wasn’t one of those occasions.

  So why, might one ask, hadn’t she taken Ken up on his offer of hot food and maybe a few laughs? He wasn’t bad looking, not precisely Johnny Depp but not bad. He even displayed symptoms of being a nice guy. Just dinner and a few laughs and, maybe, if they struck a few sparks … After all, this wasn’t high school. He didn’t have to be the love of her life. How long had it been since she’d done anything like that?

  Too long. She couldn’t remember exactly, which in itself was a bad sign.

  There were times when she felt the job was swallowing her whole. Sam had warned her. Even Daddy had warned her. “The work becomes a substitute for life, even an escape from life. Life is full of complicated choices. By comparison, the work is simple. And it doesn’t matter what the work is—psychiatry, catching murderers, writing advertising copy. It becomes a place to hide that we call “dedication.”

  * * *

  Ellen’s apartment was over a hardware store near the Embarcadero. She had lived there ever since joining the force. It was convenient and it was cheap. However, the one time her parents had come to visit her they had left their Mercedes parked out on the street and had come out to find it stolen.

  “Just explain to me why you have to live in a neighborhood like this,”
her mother had asked her as they sat downtown in the waiting room at Grand Theft Auto, watching her father fill out the report forms.

  “It’s what I can afford.”

  “But it’s so dangerous! You could be raped. You could be killed!”

  “Mother, I’m a trained police officer. I carry a gun and I know how to use it. Believe me, I can look after myself.”

  “Your father is so worried about you. He’d be so happy if you’d just let him buy you one of those lovely apartments near Telegraph Hill…”

  Silence.

  And of course he would have been. Her parents were far from poor and they loved her. Just a nod and she could have found herself sitting in a two-bedroom palace with a view of Alcatraz.

  But she had paid her own tab ever since graduating from college, and she meant to keep it that way.

  As much as anything, it was a question of personal integrity, almost a gift she had given herself. Other, quite ordinary people managed to get through life without being umbilically connected to rich relatives in Atherton. Sam, for instance, hadn’t inherited anything from his parents except a taste for olives in his lasagna. Being able to get by on one’s own practically defined being a grown-up.

  By contrast, Ellen’s mother had never stopped being her father’s little girl. Even in ordinary conversation with her own daughter, she still referred to him as “Daddy”—not “your grandfather,” but “Daddy,” since the day she was born her guardian and protector, her shelter against the storms of life. She remained his little girl, even now, eleven years after his death. After all, that was what wills and trust funds were for.

  Thank you, no. Ellen loved her parents, but she didn’t want to depend on them.

  So she lived over a hardware store near the Embarcadero.

  Actually, she liked her apartment. It was convenient and roomy and the landlord, who was the owner of the hardware store and the handy type, would come on an hour’s notice to fix her garbage disposal. She liked the Chinese family who lived next door, whose children, to the intense embarrassment of their grandmother, were always after her to tell them stories about her cases—most of the time she made up the stories; the kids, two boys, ages eight and ten and very well behaved, could hardly imagine a crime more sinister than jaywalking.