The Art of Detection Read online

  “Was that the Marin Coroner’s van outside?” Al asked, although the question was more Why is Marin here? than it was Was that Marin? Williams had no problem picking up the real question.

  “They’d already answered the call when my supervisor said she wanted to bring San Francisco in. Marin was here, too, of course. I think they were a little pissed. But Sandstrom got out a map and said the body was within five hundred feet of the county line or something, so it could as easily be yours as theirs.”

  “How on earth does she figure that measurement?” Kate asked in amazement. They were a couple of miles from the shoreline of San Francisco.

  “Seems the San Francisco limits run up to the Marin shore, not halfway across the Gate. Personally, I think we’re more than five hundred feet from the water here, but I’m not about to argue with my boss.”

  “So why is Marin’s coroner here instead of our ME?”

  “The coroner got here before they’d called you in, didn’t seem necessary to have two officials dragged out on a Saturday to pronounce death. And these guys agreed to transport the body over to you rather than dragging your guys over. Overtime, you know? So how’s it been?”

  Williams and Hawkin spent a minute in small talk, which Kate listened to with half an ear—Williams was apparently married, his wife expecting their second in the summer, and there was a mutual friend named Pat they needed to catch up on—while she watched Crime Scene go about their business.

  The man, who was indeed Lo-Tec Freeman, glanced up at Kate and nodded his recognition, but did not interrupt his work. He wasn’t singing today, not even humming, and Kate wondered if his companion acted as a damper. The woman was new, to Kate anyway, a Hispanic woman in her thirties.

  They were both dressed in white jumpsuits, working over a pair of bare feet. It looked as if they had finished the initial photographs and sketching, and were looking for any evidence on the body itself before it was moved. Their equipment was stacked along the wall in two neat piles, one for tools and supplies they might need but had not yet used, the other made up of tools they had finished with and the packaged evidence they had gathered. From the distribution of tools, they had all but finished with the room for a while, and were focused in on the body.

  The room was a windowless cement box that had once been whitewashed, although time and damp had peeled off most of the finish; stalactites were beginning to form in one corner. The graffiti on the walls was all old, several messages dated before Kate was born; in the wall opposite the entrance was an opening to a small room or corridor. The air smelled of damp concrete, mildew, gasoline exhaust, and spoiling meat. Kate could only hope Crime Scene didn’t keep them standing around for too long.

  Williams and Al had come to a pause in their conversation, so Kate asked, “What’s through there?”

  In answer, Williams called to the two Crime Scenes, “You mind if we go take a look?”

  “We’re finished in there,” Lo-Tec said.

  Williams pulled his four-cell Maglight from his deep jacket pocket and led them around the perimeter of the room, keeping near the walls. He switched on his light as they came to the opening, and led them into the darkness.

  He stopped when they were free of the glow from the room, and played his flashlight beam down what proved to be a corridor with openings on either side. “I love this place, the headlands. I’ve talked my way into every one of the batteries, volunteered some time with the cataloguing and repairs, so even though I’m not one of the interpreters, I can give you a decent tour.

  “Even a single gun like DuMaurier requires a fair amount of support space,” the amateur guide began. “For the personnel you need latrines, a mess, even bunks for when the men and officers are here for an extended period. You need a dry magazine for the powder—that’s always well covered with reinforced concrete and earth, in case the enemy shoots back—and rooms for storing the shells. You need a plotting room, a tool room, a guard room, a connection to the roads for deliveries. The two small rooms directly ahead of you are the latrines—one for the men, the smaller one for the officers. Those rusty bits of metal in the walls are where bunks were hung, for long shifts when the barracks were too far away. Those tracks in the ceiling are for moving the shells to the guns, and there would have been other rails in the floor, for the trolleys that carried the powder canisters out to the gun. That door in the front wall is where they kept the generator. A couple of the rooms I have no idea what they were used for, and there’s a puzzling piece of tunnel under the floor that seems to come out somewhere on the hillside—where, I don’t know. It may have been an emergency exit, in case of fire between the men and the exit, but there’s no knowing now because it’s half collapsed and I haven’t been able to find anyone suicidal enough to go down it and find out where it comes out.”

  “But these areas are completely unused now?”

  “Battery Wallace is used for dry storage, mostly machines and equipment someone might need someday if the park ever gets funding for a complete restoration job. An old telephone exchange, a Nike guidance system, vacuum tubes by the score. They’ll never get funding, of course, but it doesn’t cost much to keep the things dry, just in case. However, as you can see, Battery DuMaurier is too run-down to store anything in—the road’s overgrown, the last time the electricity failed they just disconnected it from the mains, and it hasn’t even been fitted with one of the unbreakable padlock housings the doors on the other batteries have. One of these days, there’ll be an earthquake or a big storm and the first visitor the next morning will find it gone. It’s a matter of priorities,” he said apologetically. “As you might imagine, the headlands runs on two dimes and a lot of volunteers.”

  Kate didn’t think he needed to explain the trials of budget constraints to a pair of cops. She said, “What was the first room used for?”

  “The room where the vic was found? That I’m not exactly sure about, since there aren’t any identifying fixtures in it. Most likely it was used as the staging area, to unload stuff going in or out, a place for the men to wait out of the rain during exercises—the gun itself was out in the open until the late Thirties. Carts or trucks would unload material just outside.”

  “But it hasn’t been used since World War Two?”

  “Before that. Seems that when they looked at it with an eye to casemating it like Wallace, they decided that the extra weight would just push it off into the sea. Since it was only a single gun anyway, in the end they just pulled it out and concentrated on Wallace and the others. You seen enough here?”

  Hawkin asked, “Did Crime Scene find anything back here?”

  “Nothing. No fresh prints, no blood spatter, no blunt objects thrown into corners. They even looked down that tunnel I told you about, but they could see old spiderwebs and so they stopped.”

  With a last play of the beam along the surrounding walls, he switched it off and they headed back to the glare of the lights.

  The two Crime Scenes were still about their labors, and mere detectives had to stand and wait.

  “He’s not as ripe as I expected,” Kate said to Williams. “The guys who found him must have good noses if they could tell he was dead by the smell.”

  “It was stronger when I first got here. I think having the door open has cleared it out, and of course there’s the stink of the generator.”

  “How’d they see him, do you think?” Hawkin asked. The room had no lights, and even if it was fully open, the door was fifty feet from both ends of the tunnel and would only have let in a dim illumination.

  “One of them had a flashlight. He thought they might get the chance to look into dark places on the tour they were going with later that morning.”

  At last, Lo-Tec, who had been working with his back to them, turned on his heels and said, “Okay, you can approach, just keep clear of the flags,” and made a notation in his notebook. Kate and Al followed Williams to the bundle of cloth and flesh.

  The body was curled up on its side in
the middle of the room, bare feet nearest the entrance, wearing an incongruously bright silk dressing gown over dignified cotton pajamas. The garments had been tucked into place, although one half of the silken belt trailed along the ground. There was something awkward about the man’s arms: Instead of being drawn up to his chest, as they would if he had simply laid down here and died, the left one, underneath him, was wrenched up at an angle that would have been uncomfortable for a living man, and the right one had flopped away, its palm tilted.

  The man appeared to be in his fifties, six feet or more in height and, beneath the bloat of death, thin enough to give a doctor cause for alarm. His mousy brown-gray hair was thin but worn long, covering the dressing gown’s collar. His mouth was open slightly, revealing a glimpse of teeth that appeared good, if stained. His nose was large, his fingernails clean and neatly trimmed, and he’d died needing a shave. They couldn’t see the color of his eyes, but his skin, despite the tints of putrefaction, was clearly that of a Caucasian.

  Kate squatted down, careful to keep her hands close to her chest—all CSIs were touchy about evidence transfer, but Lo-Tec made it a religion. She squinted at the exposed skin of the ankles, seeing on their undersides the dark tints of livor mortis, which meant that he had laid in this position since the blood became fixed there, eight or so hours after death. If he’d been moved here, it had been early on. The man’s bare feet showed no signs of dirt, grass stains, or even dust: If he’d walked here, someone had taken his shoes. She stood and let her eyes travel upward. An inch-long silver cylinder on a chain lay on top of his chest, the engraving visible but from this distance illegible. She could also see the sign of violence: a clot of blood darkening the hair above his right temple.

  “Was the medical necklace arranged like that?” Hawkin asked.

  “No,” Williams told him. “The Coroner spotted it and pulled it out of his clothes. You know both of these people?” he asked.

  Lo-Tec answered, although the question had been directed at Al and Kate. “We know each other. I don’t think you’ll have met Maria, though. Alonzo Hawkin, Kate Martinelli, SFPD; Maria Warbeck.” He had not taken his eyes off the invisible mark he was trying to lift from the floor. Maria, however, finished depositing an insect into an evidence container and looked up, saying, “Hey.”

  “Find anything interesting?” Kate asked.

  “All kinds of stuff in here, but nothing that looks promising.” To Kate’s surprise, the woman then stood up, although from the way her spine cracked when she stretched, it was less a desire to be friendly than the need to get out of her cramped position. Still, it indicated not only that she was unintimidated by her boss, but that she was willing to talk.

  “They got in by prying off the padlock?”

  “Looks like,” she said. “Big padlock, but the screws holding the hook down had disintegrated. Sea air, you know?”

  “So whoever brought him here knew what he’d find. He was brought here already dead, I understand?”

  The new CSI nodded. “Coroner thought he’d been here about a week, but going by the bloodstains on his clothes, he’s been moved a couple times. I’d say he didn’t land here until maybe twenty-four hours after death.”

  “Really?” Kate asked, trying not to sound dubious.

  “The left arm of his bathrobe has blood on it, as if his arm was under his head while it was bleeding, which it isn’t now. And hypostasis may suggest that he’s been in this position all the time, but if you look closely, you can see faint traces of an earlier angle, as if he lay on his back for two or three hours before finally being put on his side like you see him now. But whoever brought him here had a struggle to move him; lots of bumps and postmortem contusions. I’d say he’d gone pretty thoroughly stiff before he was brought here, probably in the trunk of a car. You may be looking for someone with a recent back strain,” she added with a grin.

  “A perp strong enough to manhandle a stiff body up from the road.”

  “Which would narrow the field considerably, except that we found some marks outside that might be wheelbarrow tracks. However, they’re nearly invisible, and could be from anything.”

  “They’re probably from a bike,” said Lo-Tec Freeman. It sounded as if they’d already had an argument about this.

  “Probably,” Maria agreed cheerfully.

  “Even then,” Hawkin commented, “shoving a wheelbarrow up all that way would be a job and a half.”

  “Probably pulled it behind him,” Maria said. “But as you say, still work. And he got the body out of the car somehow, although this guy must weigh one sixty, sixty-five.”

  “And there’s no sign of dragging?” Kate asked, hoping it didn’t sound like a suggestion that Crime Scene might have overlooked anything.

  “In the hallway, we didn’t find anything detailed enough to lift, other than the possible wheelbarrow or bicycle. Outside in the open, there’s been too much rain to leave us anything. Inside here, the floor looks like it was wiped, probably with a towel. We haven’t found much to lift. Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ve taken soil samples, in case it comes to matching the ground to a wheel somewhere. And of course once we unwrap him in the lab we’ll see what he has to tell us. Maybe the perp left hairs across the middle by a fireman’s carry.”

  “Any idea why someone would want to stash a dead body here?”

  “None whatsoever,” the woman replied with a grin that said, Not my job, thank God, and bent down again to her work.

  Chris Williams waited while the two San Francisco detectives looked the scene over, then led them back outside the battery, where the noise of the generator dropped enough to carry on a conversation. He waved at the men of the Marin Coroner’s office. The two disentangled themselves from the picnic table and grabbed their equipment, pushing past the detectives impatiently. Kate noticed Hawkin glance surreptitiously at his watch, and realized that this was the second time he’d done so.

  “You need to be somewhere, Al?”

  “Not really. Maya has a thing, I told her I might not be able to make it.”

  “I don’t know that there’s a lot more we can do here. Is there, Chris?”

  “Your CSI will be here for another hour or so, and since my supervisor made me Incident Commander, I’ve got to hang on here. After we’re finished, though, I’d like to go with you to do the notification, if you don’t mind. I could give you a call and you can meet me there, if you like?”

  Kate turned to her partner. “Al, why don’t you go on back and I’ll hang out here until Chris is ready to go—let me just come with you and fetch my bag.”

  Williams spoke up. “If you want to leave anything here, you can have the ranger on duty down there stick it in my car. I gave him the keys.”

  “Nah,” said Al, “I’ll just call and tell Jani I’m going to be late. It’s only a meeting about a school trip in the spring.”

  “Al, look, Chris and I can do the notification, and he can take me home afterwards.”

  “You sure?”

  “Why not? I may even be back in time for Nora’s homemade pizza.”

  “I’ll be thinking of you as I grind my way through the raw vegetables.”

  “Jani still have you on the low-fat diet, huh?”

  Her partner’s look was eloquent, although as she watched him set off down the hillside, she had to admit that the minor heart scare he’d had the previous year had done him a lot of good. He was in better shape than when she’d first met him, what was it, a dozen years ago?

  The younger, fitter, more conventionally good-looking man at her side was also watching Hawkin’s steady progress down the hill, and he now said, “Must be great to work with a man like him.”

  “He’s been a good partner,” she agreed; sometimes she and Al acted like an old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences.

  “You know, he’s one of the reasons I’m a cop. My first year in the criminal justice program down in LA, when I was thinking that this whole cop thing wasn�
�t for me, he came to speak to one of the classes. This would have been maybe fifteen, sixteen years ago. He was just such a…solid person, I decided to stick with it. I think maybe I wanted to be like him when I grew up.” Williams was grinning when he said it, but Kate thought it was not altogether a joke. Once she’d made it past the initial intimidation factor, she’d wanted to grow up to be like Hawkin, too.

  “Anything I can do to lend a hand?” she asked.

  “Nah. I’m just here to oversee, when they quit we can go.”

  “Okay. You mind if I go down and talk to the Park rangers? Not taking statements, just to get a feel for the place.”

  “Help yourself.”

  “I’ll watch for you in the parking area. Which car is yours?”

  “Dark blue Jeep.”

  “Honk if you don’t see me,” she said, then launched herself down the hill in Hawkin’s footsteps. To her chagrin, her progress was no more nimble than her partner’s had been.

  SHE found her pet ranger, Dan Culpepper, down in the parking area, patiently explaining to a hiking couple that no, they could not let their three large dogs race around unleashed, tormenting the wildlife. He nodded in sympathy with their plaints, agreeing that it was a pity that modern life did not allow for all the traditional freedoms, and gently mentioned that the fines were considerable, although if they agreed to keep the animals leashed, he would not write up a ticket this time. Grumbling but fatalistic, the pair tugged on the nylon that attached them to a couple hundred pounds of dog, and staggered off in their wake.

  “Squirrels have rights, too,” Kate commented.

  Dan grinned at her, looking like a schoolboy, and said, “I didn’t think that was quite the argument to use with them. Talking about the fines is usually more effective.”

  “Still, interesting job you have. From homicide to leash laws in one morning.”

  “And by this afternoon it’ll be drunks falling in the lagoon; never a dull moment. Something I can help you with?”

  “I just thought I’d take a look at the place. Living in San Francisco, I know all about the Presidio, but this is mostly a patch of hillside I see from the other side of the bridge. You have a YMCA conference center here, and year-round housing?”