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  Night Work

  ( Kate Martinelli - 4 )

  Laurie R. King

  Laurie R. King, creator of San Francisco homicide detective Kate Martinelli, has been praised byThe New York Times Book Reviewfor her "taut pacing...air of menace...superb characters." Now the author of A Grave Talent (winner of the top mystery awards on both sides of the Atlantic), To Play the Fool, and With Child continues the series with a crime novel as disturbing as it is riveting.

  After her last harrowing case Kate is more than ready for routine police work and a newfound serenity with her longtime lover, Lee, and their circle of close friends. Until one night when her pager summons her to a scene of carefully executed murder. Half-hidden in a clump of bushes lies a well-muscled corpse, handcuffed and strangled, a stun gun's faint burn on his chest and candy in his pocket. The only person who might have wanted airport baggage handler James Larsen dead, it seems, is the wife he repeatedly abused--who recently left him for a women's shelter. But her alibi is airtight, her physique frail, and her attitude less than vengeful. Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, are stumped. Then a second body turns up--also zapped, cuffed, strangled...and carrying a chocolate bar. It is that of Matthew Banderas, a software salesman convicted of one rape, suspected of many more. Yet, despite the newspaper headlines, Kate and Al can establish no personal link between the victims and cannot rule out coincidence. But in the midst of an unpromising investigation, Kate has another cause thrust upon her by her friend, feminist minister Roz Hall. Investigators have already called it an accident, but Roz is convinced the young Indian bride was actually murdered--and when Roz takes up a crusade, no one can deny her. As Kate wrestles with the clash between her personal and professional lives, a third killing draws her and Al into a network of pitiless destruction that reaches far beyond San Francisco, a contemporary-style hit list with shudderingly primal roots. Winner of the Best First Crime Novel Award from both the Mystery Writers of America and the British Crime Writers' Association for the first book in the Kate Martinelli series,A Grave Talent, Laurie R. King has created a body of work that transcends genre classification and has fully broken out into the mainstream, novels which have the intensity and depth of superb literary work, spiced with harrowing suspense. Winner of the Best First Crime Novel Award from both the Mystery Writers of America and the British Crime Writers Association for the first book in the Kate Martinelli series, A Grave Talent, Laurie R. King creates novels that have the intensity and depth of superb literary work, spiced with harrowing suspense.

  Night Work

  Laurie R King

  Introduction

  THE IMAGE ON THE wall was enough to give a man nightmares. It showed a woman of sorts, but a woman who would have made a playboy shrivel, given pause to the most ardent feminist, and had Freud scrambling to retract his plaintive query concerning what women wanted.

  What this lady wanted was blood.

  Her skin was dark, so deep a blue it seemed black against the crisp, bright, bloodred waves that splashed against her muscular calves. Around her hips she wore a belt strung with human hands that had been hacked off at the wrist; her neck was looped with a necklace of skulls. Her wild black hair made a matted tangle from which serpents peeped, and from her right ear hung a cluster of dry bones. Four arms emerged from her strong shoulders, in the manner of Hindu deities and the half-joking fantasy of busy mothers the world around, and all twenty of her dagger-long fingernails were red, the same bloodred as the sea around her. In her lower right hand she held a cast-iron skillet, wielding it like a weapon; her upper left grasped the freshly severed head of a man.

  The expression on the lady’s face was at once beautiful and terrible, the Mona Lisa’s evil sister. Her stance and the set of her shoulders shouted out her triumph and exultation as she showed her tongue and bared her sharp white teeth in pleasure, glorying at the clear blue sky above her, at the pensive vulture in a nearby tree, at the curling smoke from the pyres of the cremation grounds on the hill nearby, at the drained, bearded, staring object swinging from the end of her arm.

  She looked drunk on the pleasure of killing, burning with ecstasy at the deep hot lake of shed blood she was wading through.

  And she looked far from finished with the slaughter.

  She was Kali, whose name means black, the Indian goddess of destruction and creation. Kali, who kills in joy and in rage, Kali the undefeatable, Kali the mother who turns on her faithless children, Kali the destroyer, Kali the creator, whose slaughter brings life, whose energies stimulate Shiva to perform his final dance, a dance that will bring about the end of all creation, all time, all life.

  Chapter 1

  KATE MARTINELLI SAT IN her uncomfortable metal folding chair and watched the world come to an end.

  It ended quite nicely, in fact, considering the resources at hand and the skill of the participants, with an eye-searing flash and a startling crack, a swirl of colors, then abrupt darkness.

  And giggles.

  The lights went up again, parents and friends rose to applaud wildly, and twenty-three brightly costumed and painted children gathered on the stage to receive their praise.

  The reason for Kate’s presence stood third from the end, a mop-headed child with skin the color of milky coffee, a smile that lacked a pair of front teeth, and black eyes that glittered with excitement and pride.

  Kate leaned over to speak into the ear of the woman at her side. “Your goddaughter makes a fine monkey.”

  Lee Cooper laughed. “Mina’s been driving Roz and Maj nuts practicing her part—she wore one tail out completely and broke a leg off the sofa jumping onto it. Last week she decided she wasn’t going to eat anything but bananas, until Roz got a book that listed what monkeys actually eat.”

  “I hope she didn’t then go around picking bugs out of tree trunks.”

  “I think Roz read selectively.”

  “Never trust a minister. Do you know—” Kate stopped, her face changing. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a vibrating pager, looked up at Lee, and shrugged in apology before digging the cell phone out of her pocket and beginning to push her way toward the exit and relative quiet. She was back in a couple of minutes, slipping the phone away as she walked up to the man who had been sitting on her other side during the performance and who was now standing at Lee’s elbow, watchful and ready to offer a supporting hand in the crowd. Lee’s caregiver spoke before Kate could open her mouth.

  “What a pity, you’re going to miss the fruit punch and cookies.”

  She rolled her eyes and said low into Jon’s ear, “Why it couldn’t have come an hour ago…”

  “Poor dear,” he said, sounding not in the least sympathetic. “ ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.” “

  “If I find you a ride, would you take her home?”

  “Happy to. I’ll be going out later, though.”

  “She’ll be fine.” Now for the difficult part. “Lee,” Kate began. “Sweetheart?” but groveling did not prove necessary.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Liar,” said Lee cheerfully. “But you’ve been a very brave honorary godmother, so now you can go and play with your friends. That was Al, I assume?”

  Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, were on call tonight, and in a city the size of San Francisco, a homicide was no rare thing. She nodded, hesitated, and kissed Lee briefly on the cheek. Lee looked more pleased than surprised, which Kate took as a sign that she was doing something right, and Kate in turn felt gratified beyond the scope of her lover’s reaction—their relationship had been more than a little touchy in recent months, and small signs loomed large. She stepped away carefully, looking down to be sure she didn’t knock into Lee’s cuffed crutches, and walked around the arranged folding chairs to con
gratulate Mina’s adoptive parents. They were surrounded by others bent on the same purpose—or rather, Roz was surrounded by a circle of admirers, this tall, brown-haired, slightly freckled woman who was glowing and laughing and giving off warmth like (as one article in the Sunday Chronicle had put it) a fireplace of the soul.

  When she had read that phrase, Kate had wondered to herself if the reporter really meant that Roz was hot. She was, in fact, one of the most unconsciously sexy women Kate knew.

  Kate hadn’t seen Roz in a couple of weeks, but she knew just looking at her, the way she gestured and leaned toward her audience, the way her laugh came and her eyes flashed, that Roz was involved in some passionate quest or other: She seemed to have grown a couple of inches and lost ten years, a look Kate had seen her wear often enough. Or it could have been from the fulsome praise being heaped on her by the other parents—all of whom, it seemed, had seen a television program Roz had been on the night before and were eager to tell her how great it had been, how great she had been. Roz threw one arm around the school principal and laughed with honest self-deprecation, and while Kate waited to get a word in, she studied the side of that animated face with the slightly uncomfortable affection a person invariably feels toward someone in whose debt she is and always will be, an ever-so-slightly servile discomfort that in Kate’s case was magnified by the knowledge that her own lover had once slept with this woman. She liked Roz (how could she not?) and respected her enormously, but she could never be completely comfortable with her.

  Roz’s partner, Maj Freiling, stood slightly to one side, taking all this in while she spoke with a woman Kate vaguely remembered having met at one of their parties. Maj was short, black-haired, and—incongruously—Swedish; her name therefore was pronounced “my,” forming the source of endless puns from Roz. Most people who knew Roz assumed that her quiet partner was a nonentity whose job was to keep house, to produce brilliant meals at the drop of Roz’s hat, and to laugh politely at Roz’s jokes. Most people were wrong. Just because Maj spoke little did not mean she had nothing to say. She was the holder of several degrees in an area of brain research so arcane only half a dozen people in San Francisco had ever heard of it, and they in turn were not of the sort to be found in Roz’s company of politicians and reformers. It seemed to Kate a case of complete incompatibility leading to a rock-solid marriage, just one more thing she didn’t understand about Roz Hall.

  Kate looked from one woman to the other, and gave up on the attempt to reach Roz. Maj smiled at Kate in complicity as Kate approached. Kate found herself grinning in return as she reached out to squeeze Maj’s arm.

  “Thanks for inviting me,” she said. “I was going to come to the party afterward, but I got a call, and have to go. Sorry. Be sure to tell Mina she was the best monkey I’ve ever seen.”

  “I will tell her. And don’t worry, your avoidance of our potluck desserts is in good company.” Maj glanced over Kate’s shoulder toward the door. Kate turned and saw a distinctively tailored and hatted figure sweeping out of the school cafeteria. The moment the door swung shut behind him, someone’s voice rose above the Babel with a remark about the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, the group of feminist vigilantes who had in recent weeks set the city on its ear with a series of creative and, Kate had to admit privately, funny acts of revenge. Just that morning the mayor had issued a statement to the press saying, in effect, “We are not amused.”

  Kate smiled absently at the overheard remark and turned back to Maj. “That was the mayor, wasn’t it?”

  Maj shrugged and gave her a crooked smile as if to apologize for a flashy display.

  “I wondered whose car that was. Very impressive,” Kate told her. “Look, Maj, could you find someone who might be able to take Lee and Jon home? We only brought the one car.”

  “We, on the other hand, always bring two, because Roz invariably finds someone she just has to talk to. I’d be happy to give them a ride, if they don’t mind waiting for Mina to stuff herself with cookies first.”

  “I’m sure they won’t mind. Jon secretly adores Oreo cookies and— what are those Jell-O things called?”

  “Jigglers,” Maj pronounced with fastidious disapproval, giving the word three syllables. Kate laughed and reached out again to pat Maj’s shoulder in thanks, waved to Lee, and hurried out of the school hall in the footsteps of Hizzoner to her own, lesser vehicle.

  The western sky was still faintly light ahead of her as Kate drove down Lombard Street in the recently acquired and thoroughly broken-in Honda, which on the first warm day she owned it had declared itself to be the former property of a pizza delivery boy. She rolled down the window to let in the air of this April evening, clear and sweet after the drizzle earlier in the day, and wished she hadn’t let Lee bully her into giving up the motorcycle.

  Kate loved San Francisco best at night. During the day it was an interesting city, decorative and lively and every bit as anonymous as a villain, or a cop, could ask for. But at night the city closed in and became intimate, a cluster of hills and valleys with the sea curled up against three sides of it. Sometimes, beneath the stars and the hum of traffic and the collective breathing of three-quarters of a million people, Kate imagined she could hear the city’s song.

  The imagined song was a flight of fancy unlike Kate—or rather, unlike the image Kate had of herself—and a thing she had never mentioned to anyone, even to Lee. (Perhaps especially not Lee, an analytical therapist who tended to read far too much into small imaginings.) Like an old tune that had been recorded in a hundred ways, the song of the City could be smooth and sexy from the throat of a torch singer or ornate in a cappella, coolly instrumental or raunchy in rock. The city’s complex melody was never the same on two nights or in two places: Here it had a salsa beat, there the drive of rap held it, elsewhere it was transformed by the plink and slither of Chinese instruments and harmonies, in another part of town it had the raga complexity of Indian music. During those “only in San Francisco” times when the latest outrageous excess of the City by the Bay made the final, tongue-in-cheek segment on the national news—since the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement had come on the scene, for example—the song occasionally took on comic overtones, like a movie score preparing the audience for a pratfall. No matter the setting, though, it was the same song, the night song of the City of St. Francis, and it kept Kate Martinelli company as she crossed its streets to the scene of a crime.

  Lombard Street’s garish blast of motel and cocktail lounge lights cut off abruptly at the wide gate that marked the entrance to the Presidio, and the clutter of buildings and phone lines gave way to trees and dignified officers’ housing. The Army was in the process of withdrawing from the base it had built here, the most gorgeous piece of open land left in San Francisco, but so far the untidy life of civilian San Francisco had been kept at bay, and Kate’s headlights picked out neatly trimmed lawn and ranks of dark barracks. Following the directions she had been given, she kept to the right. The road passed along the edge of a parking lot so huge it might have been a parade grounds, with three cars in it, before narrowing further to become a single lane between a wooden building and the madly busy but oddly removed freeway that led to the Golden Gate Bridge, and then Kate saw the gates to the military cemetery and a police car across the adjoining road, turning cars back. She showed the uniform her identification and drove on, headlights playing now across rows of gleaming white gravestones that stretched up the hill to her left, and then the City’s song took on a discordant note, like the warning of a minor chord in a suspense movie, with the appearance of a brilliant blue-white light thrown against the undersides of the trees around the next turn.

  The stark glare rising before her in the night made Kate slow to a crawl before rounding the corner. What looked like two hundred people were scattered up the road before her, although she knew it could not be more than thirty at the most, and that included the reporters, who had come here on foot, dragging their equipment with them, from where they had bee
n forced to leave their vans on the other side of the cemetery. She pulled to one side and parked among a wild assortment of official vehicles—park police and SFPD cruisers, ambulance and coroner’s van, half a dozen unmarked police cars—and a few small cars from personnel who had been called from home. Further along the curve of the road, kept at a distance by uniforms but making full use of their long-range lenses, television vans were already in attendance, hoping for a lead story for the eleven o’clock news. A uniformed patrolman was still in the process of wrapping yellow tape around the perimeter of the crime scene, using trees, a fence post, and a convenient street sign. Kate nodded at familiar faces among the cops, ignored the questions of the reporters on this side of the scene, and ducked under the restraining tape.

  Al Hawkin was standing with his hands in his pockets watching the medical examiner at work, homicide bag on the ground at his feet. He turned when he felt his partner at his side.

  “So much for an evening off,” he said by way of greeting.

  “If you’d called an hour earlier you’d have saved me from the whole play.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “A school play, if you can believe it. You know Roz Hall?” He nodded; half the people in the City knew Roz Hall, to their pleasure or their fury, and occasionally both at once. “Well, she and her partner, Maj, adopted Maj’s niece last year, and asked Lee to be the godmother. The kid—her name’s Mina—goes to a private school that’s big on ethnic celebrations, and this was some complicated Indian story about gods and wars. Mina played a monkey. The mayor himself was there.” Hawkin’s eyebrows went up. “So, what do we have here?”

  “The ME beat me here, so I haven’t had a chance to look. Called in by a jogger just after six-thirty—there’s a uniformed at the guy’s house. Seems to be a white male, no obvious signs of violence that the jogger could see, but then he only looked close enough to pass on the CPR before heading home for a phone. I’d say the vie looks to be about twenty-four hours old.”