Night Work Read online

  Roz chewed for a minute and washed it down with a swallow of coffee. “I've had a word with the mayor and your chief of police last night, suggesting that the murder of Pramilla Mehta may need closer examination. It's going to be a touchy subject—the Indian community is not going to be thrilled to be accused of the barbaric act of burning young brides—but at the same time we can't ignore it. This'll be a political hot potato.”

  Kate gaped at her, unwilling to believe what she had just heard, but unable to put any other interpretation on it. “Roz, what the hell did you do that for? How do you expect us to carry out an investigation with a bunch of politicians sitting on our shoulders?”

  “Are you angry?” Roz sounded puzzled, and Kate for a moment thought it might be an honest reaction. But no—it had to be an act; no one as well versed in the workings of the city as Roz Hall could fail to grasp consequences so innocently.

  “Of course I'm angry. You shove the case into my hands and then, when two days go by without an arrest, you snatch it away and say that nothing's being done. For Christ sake, Roz, I've got the FBI and a hundred reporters to deal with and now—you might have warned me you were about to drop City Hall on me as well.”

  “I thought you could use the additional manpower,” Roz protested. “I told them you were doing the best you—”

  “Christ, Roz, you know full well what this'll involve. A string of meetings holding hands and explaining how we have to do it, hours and hours eaten up that could be better spent—” Kate realized that Roz was not paying any attention to her words, but was looking past her at the door. Kate turned in her chair and saw Maj's apologetic face looking in.

  “It's Jory on the phone,” she said to Roz. “There's a problem with the information packets for the meeting this afternoon. Something about copyright questions and the copy shop?”

  Roz rubbed at her face in irritation and stood up. “I'm sorry Kate, I have to deal with this. I'll be back in a minute.” She followed Maj out of the room, although there was a telephone on the desk, and closed the door. Kate too got to her feet and paced up and down the crowded room. She paused at Roz's desk to glance at the books Roz was reading now, and found her usual wild assortment of titles: Evoking the Goddess; Awakening Female Power; When the Drummers Were Women. Kate reflected that the first time she'd met Roz, the minister had been holding an armful of odd titles. She smiled at the memory, and at a framed picture of Mina and Maj at the zoo, in front of the orangutan enclosure.

  Roz was probably only trying to help, in her own heavy-handed way, Kate told herself. It was a pain, but not a disaster; hell, it might even mean she and Hawkin got some help with the scut work and typing.

  Kate realized that the object on the desk in front of her was a bound copy of Roz's thesis, firmly described on the front page as a “first draft.” It was titled “Women's Rage and Men's Dishonor: Manifestations of the Violent Goddess in the Hebrew Bible.” She opened it curiously to glance over what Roz was doing.

  The brief introduction was relatively intelligible, as academic writing went. Roz seemed to be looking at ways in which the warrior-goddesses of the ancient Near East (Ishtar and Asherah Kate had heard of, though not Anat or Hathor), their stories, songs, and characteristics, welled up in the tales and ideas of the Old Testament. After a general introduction, however, the writing seemed to become more technical and heavily footnoted, sprinkled with Roman numeral references, foreign phrases, capitalized abbreviations, and words like Masoretic and Septuagintal. Lee might make sense of it, Kate thought, but for someone who hadn't done any scholarly reading in too many years to count, it did not look like easy bedtime reading.

  Thumbing through the thick document, Kate spotted a few pages that were not text. Some were reproductions of archaeological reports, alternating with pen-and-ink sketches and photocopies of photographs. One picture showed a sculpture of a female head and torso with glaring eyes, her sharp teeth pulled back from a grotesquely long protruding tongue, with a variety of objects in her four hands. The caption said “Durga,” and Kate figured she was an Indian goddess like Kali because of the multiple arms. Not a warm and friendly goddess, though. Even Mutton would hesitate to give those hands an affectionate tongue-bath.

  The door opened and Roz came back in. Kate let the thesis fall shut and moved away so Roz could resume her place and her breakfast.

  “Sorry, Kate, but Jory is not the most competent secretary I've ever had, and I have to have a report together by this afternoon. Look, I'm really sorry about going over your head. I just didn't think.”

  “Don't worry about it,” Kate heard herself saying.

  “I'm sure it'll work out. Finish your breakfast, your granola will get soggy.”

  “Granola never gets soggy,” Roz pointed out, taking up her spoon. “It's like wood fiber, needs to go rotten before it gives up its cellulose. Did you come to see me about Pramilla Mehta? And what can I do—to help rather than hinder?”

  “Just back off, and I'll call if you can help. No, it's not specifically about her, though it may have to do with her husband's death. I wanted to ask, what do you know about a Web site called ‘Womyn of the EVEning’?”

  Kate, watching Roz carefully, saw the wariness descend.

  “I've heard of it,” Roz told her, which Kate decided meant that she knew the site but hesitated to admit it until she could see where this was heading.

  “Your church's site and that one are linked through a third site that gives information on self-defense for women. Dirty self-defense—eye-gouging, breaking eardrums, biting off various body parts.” She was being deliberately abrasive, but Roz did not react, merely responded.

  “It's a nasty world.”

  “And attackers deserve to lose ears and penises, and habitual abusers deserve to be killed.”

  “Is that what their Web site's line is?” Roz said evenly. “If that's true, I may have to ask them to sever the link with our church.”

  “Roz, you can't expect me to believe that there's a Web site with a provocative name two steps away from yours that you haven't visited.”

  For a moment Kate thought that was precisely what Roz would assert, which meant that unless Kate could get a warrant to find what sites Roz's computer had visited, and she could prove that only Roz used the computer, she might as well walk away now.

  But Roz relented. “Yes,” she said. “I have glanced at the Web site.”

  “I have three murders on my hands whose names were on that site. I'm not going to ask you why nobody happened to bring this to my attention, not at the moment anyway, but I'm troubled by the fact that the only link we've been able to find between two of the men is that Web site. A Web site that your church is closely tied to.”

  Roz finally flared up. “Neither the church nor my own parish has anything to do with that list. You can hardly hold us responsible for the killing of three men just because we share a link on the Internet.”

  “I don't hold you responsible,” said Kate evenly. “But I think you should brace yourselves for when the media finds out about it.”

  Roz half rose in her chair, putting both palms on the littered desk as if about to come over the top of it at Kate. “You wouldn't. If you dare to leak any of this—”

  “I won't have to leak anything, Roz, you know that. It's surprising that no enterprising reporter has come up with it already.”

  “Kate, if I find that you—”

  Kate's composure abruptly snapped. “Don't, Roz. Do not threaten me.”

  They glared at each other over Roz's life's work, and in the end the minister gave ground before the cop. Her gaze wavered and Kate could see her decide that this was not the best way to handle the situation. Her hackles went down, her palms came off the desk and went back to her lap as she settled down in the chair. She even tried for a crooked smile.

  “No. Sorry, I know you wouldn't do that to me. God—you of all people wouldn't turn a friend over to the media sharks. I apologize.”

  “Actually, R
oz, they may be the least of your problems. Because of the Internet aspect, the FBI is now going to take over a large part of this investigation. Al and I are still involved,” she added with satisfaction— Roz Hall was not the only skilled manipulator in the room—“but it's out of our hands now. I'll do as much as I can to run interference with them, but they'll want answers, and if I can't get the answers for them, they'll come to you direct. One of the things they'll ask you is, Do you know who submitted the names of James Larsen, Matthew Banderas, and Laxman Mehta to the Web site?”

  “No,” Roz answered—too quickly, Kate thought.

  “Would you tell me if you did?” Kate demanded.

  “Probably not.”

  “But you do know who has been responsible for the actions of the group known as the LOPD.” Kate made it a statement, and Roz did not try to deny it outright.

  “I may have heard some rumors, but they are not connected with these deaths, Kate. I swear I do not think they are.”

  “Give me their names, I'll ask them. Myself, not just handing the names over to the feds,” Kate offered, but Roz was shaking her head before the sentence was finished.

  “I can't do that, Kate, I'm sorry.”

  “You're willing to play God, condemn to death men even the courts can't? To be an accomplice?”

  “I told you, I don't know who put their names on the list, I don't know who killed them.” This time Kate let the silence stretch out, until Roz gave way and broke it. “As for playing God, it works the other way, too. Even if I knew, it would be playing God to turn the killers in. If what you're saying is true, they've chosen to become judges in a society that refuses to take that responsibility. I'd have to think long and hard before I could decide they were wrong.”

  “Judge and executioner,” Kate pointed out.

  “Judge and executioner,” Roz accepted. “The ultimate in responsibility.”

  “I thought God wanted us to practice forgiveness.”

  “There are times when God would have us practice justice instead.”

  “Or revenge?”

  “There are times to turn the other cheek, and times to get out the whip and overturn the tables of the corrupt in the Temple. This may be one of the second.”

  “And you wouldn't tell me who's doing it.”

  “If I knew, I would regard it as privileged information.”

  “The FBI is going to turn you inside out.”

  “They can try.”

  “There are better causes to choose if you want martyrdom, Roz.”

  “Not very many. Kate, my church does not have ritualized, formal confession like the Roman Catholics do, but if someone were to tell me of their involvement in this, as an ordained priest I would regard it as inviolable. To you or to the FBI.

  “All of which,” she hastened to say, “is theoretical. Since I don't actually know anything.”

  “Tell me about your Ph.D. thesis.”

  “My what?” Roz asked, thrown off balance by the abrupt change in direction.

  “Your thesis. About women's rage.”

  Roz flushed, an interesting reaction. “In the Old Testament,” she said with force. “It's largely about how the pre-Israelite goddesses influenced the developing cult of Yahweh. It's a Ph.D. thesis, for Christ sake. You should know they never have anything to do with real life.”

  Kate nodded as if Roz had actually told her something, and then abruptly stood up, thanked Roz, and left. She was not certain just what she had accomplished—other than severely disconcerting the woman behind the desk. Still, it was not easy to throw Roz Hall, and surely having done so counted for something.

  Out of destruction she comes to wrest

  The juice from the cactus, its harsh spine,

  And until she, the destroyer, has been blest,

  There will be no child, no flower, and no wine.

  Over the course of that damp morning, the FBI's information came dutifully in, as trickles or in undigested lumps. Five additional men on the Web site list that Kate had uncovered had died in the last few months, and several others were simply missing. Late in the afternoon came news of a cluster of three men, from Georgia up through the Carolinas, that gave Kate a nasty feeling, since all of them just disappeared from their daily lives into thin air. In one case a badly decomposed body had been found out in the woods by the first hikers of spring. It was suspected to be the missing man from South Carolina; DNA testing was under way. Of the five known dead, three had clearly been murdered, two of those gunned down in New York a month apart by the same gun, and no suspects identified. There was one accident on the list (and reading the faxed report of the man's blood alcohol level and the absence of skid marks or mechanical failure, Kate had to agree that he had simply passed out at the wheel and gone off the road and into a bridge support at high speed) and another man had committed suicide, but if the suicide was not actually assisted, his family swore he had been more or less driven to death's door and handed a gun. For weeks before he had put a bullet in his head, the convicted child abuser had been the object of a barrage of letters, photos, and phone calls, threatening, taunting, and merciless. At home and at work, his colleagues and his neighbors included, the pressure had been unrelenting and around the clock. Until he killed himself. In the three weeks since his death, his family had received nothing further.

  The fifth death, the third confirmed murder victim, was close to home, both physically and in regards to their investigation. His name was Larry Goff, and he had died in Sacramento, less than three hours from downtown San Francisco, with strapping tape on his wrists.

  Goff's wife, Tamara, according to the Web site and the Sacramento detective Kate talked to, had been to the hospital emergency room five times in two years for treatment of chronic “accidents,” and had separated from her husband, with a restraining order in place. In early November, Goff was accused of kidnapping their two children—picking them up from school on a Friday afternoon and taking them for the weekend without telling his wife. He brought them back to her on the Sunday, and when arrested he claimed that she had given him permission, but the kidnap charges stood. He was granted bail, and the subsequent investigation had been wending its slow way through the court system when Tamara was found in her bedroom one morning in December, dead of an overdose of prescription pain pills. At the time of death, she had a fresh plaster cast on one arm and two broken teeth in the left side of her jaw. There was no indication of suicide, and nothing to show that she had been force-fed the pills. She was simply in pain, and she made a mistake.

  Tamara's sister claimed the children, and with the pending kidnap charge hanging over their father, the courts granted her temporary custody. Then two weeks later, a few days before New Year's, Goff was found in a hotel frequented by prostitutes, bound, gagged, and strangled to death. His wallet and watch had been missing, though not his gold wedding band. Police investigators determined that he had been lured to the room by a woman the manager had not seen before, although he surmised her profession by her clothing. Once in the room, she and possibly an accomplice had overpowered Goff, killed, and robbed him.

  “Do you have a copy of the autopsy report in front of you?” Kate asked the Sacramento detective over the phone.

  “Sure. You want me to fax it to you?”

  “That would be helpful. I'm looking for any red mark on the torso. A taser burn.”

  A minute of silence broken only by distant voices and the sound of pages turning was ended with a “Nope. Don't see anything like that here. There were some marks—you can see them in the photographs— but they looked more like immediately premortem bruising.”

  “Okay. You haven't seen anything else with that MO?”

  “No, and we've been watching, since it's such an oddity. I mean, how many hookers use strapping tape for bondage games? Hairy guy like Goff, he'd have little bald patches all over him. Imagine explaining that to your girlfriend back home.”

  Kate had to laugh at the image.

 
; “You'll see when you get the photos that his beard's kinda mangy looking. That's from cutting away the tape. In fact, I heard about your duct-tape guys the other day, and I was going to call you—different stuff, I know, but close. Then something came up and I forgot about it.”

  “That happens,” Kate said. Not to her, damn it, but she tried to keep the irritation from her voice; there was no point in alienating a colleague, particularly one who had a file she wanted to see. “Did you develop any suspects?”

  “Nada. We thought at first it might be revenge, you know, since the wife died, but as far as anyone knew, Tamara had no contact with prostitutes, was never arrested, our informants had never seen her on the streets, so it wasn't some friends doing a little payback. This was Tamara's second marriage, so we looked at her first husband, just in case, but he's out of the picture, happily remarried and living in Miami, no indication that he was away at the time of the murder. No brother or father around that we could find, not even a mother, though a friend of Tamara's said there is one somewhere. The two kids are with Tamara's sister now, she's looking to adopt if she can talk the ex-husband in Florida into it. His wife doesn't want them, and only one of them is his, the other's Goff's.”

  Kate thanked the detective, and when the fax came through a while later she studied the face with the small blue eyes, trimmed beard, and dark mole on the left side of the nose, but neither the picture nor the report told her much. No sign of candy on the body, not in the report at any rate. She filed it away, and went back to her phone calls.