The Art of Detection Read online

  “We have what are called park partnerships—the Y conference center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Marine Mammal Center, the Discovery Museum—nonprofit organizations with interests that overlap those of the headlands. And that need cheap housing.”

  “Now that coastal defense takes place in Nevada and the Army doesn’t need the barracks.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How many people live here, full-time?”

  “In the whole park? Gee, let’s see. Maybe eighty or ninety. Most of those work for one of the nonprofits.”

  “And the conference center, how often is that used?”

  “Constantly. There’ll be some group or another in there more than three hundred days a year.”

  “And the park hours?”

  “It’s an open park. The visitor center’s only open during the day, of course, but we never shut.”

  “And there’s no guard shack, to check people in and out.”

  “No.”

  Kate began to see the problem.

  “No gates.”

  “No. Well, there’s a gate at the top of the one-way section along the cliffs, but anyone can come in through the tunnel, around the clock.”

  “And you probably don’t have any closed-circuit cameras on the roads.”

  “Nope.”

  “And this close to”—Kate thought maybe she shouldn’t use the word civilization—“the Bay Area, you don’t have problems with vandals?”

  “Oh, some, sure. But we do have night patrols, and if anyone hears something they call us. That’s the advantage of live-ins. I admit, we have had a few problems with full-moon skateboarders, down the cliff road.”

  Kate felt herself go pale. “Kids ride skateboards down that road? At night?”

  “Sometimes they use bicycle headlights strapped to their helmet. They’ll have a buddy drop them at the top and drive around to pick them up at the bottom. Or sometimes they’ll break the lock, that doesn’t happen often, it’s too much work. They only get one or two runs in before someone calls us.”

  She suppressed a shudder, and pulled her mind back from the sensation of flying out over a cliff in the moonlight.

  “Tell me about Battery DuMaurier.”

  “Actually, DuMaurier was the only single gun to be established in Fort Barry, a part of the expansion in—”

  Kate interrupted. “What I’m wondering is, why was the body left in that particular spot? I’d have said it’s hardly the first place that springs to mind.”

  “That’s for sure. If you want to leave a body here, Wallace is closer to the road, Alexander is more private, Mendell doesn’t even have padlocks to break. Maybe it was just the challenge?”

  Great, thought Kate. A killer with a quirk. “As far as you know, there haven’t been other bodies found there?”

  “We’ve had deaths in the park, sure. Heart attacks mostly. But specifically DuMaurier? Not that I know of.”

  Still, Kate told herself, you never know: They might do a five-minute search through the records and find that the tall, skinny man in the pajamas had been chief suspect in an assault at Battery DuMaurier two years before or something, and this would turn out to be the assault victim’s revenge and statement. Stranger things had happened.

  Kate thanked her informant and wandered off to look over the remains of Fort Barry. Forty minutes later the faint echo of a car horn reached her where she stood on the windy bluff overlooking the ocean. She looked back at the parking area, saw the figure standing beside the blue Jeep, and waved a wide response before starting back along the crumbling concrete of Mendell.

  When she reached the car, she found Lo-Tec Freeman and his new partner packing up their kits and Williams leaning against the Jeep, talking to Dan. As she came up, the Park CIB detective stood away from the car and shook hands with the ranger, saying, “I’ll be back Monday to look over the records. Thanks a lot.”

  “Happy to help. Have a good weekend, you two.”

  “Ready?” Chris asked Kate.

  “Sure. You got everything?”

  “Such as it was. We put another padlock on and sealed the door, but I don’t think there’s much there. However, I had a call from Hawkin to say that he had someone dig into the records, and it looks like maybe Gilbert lived alone.”

  “You want to go anyway?”

  “Oh yeah, just wanted you to know that we might not have to break the news to anyone. Al also asked me to tell you that he’d talked to your lieutenant, but you’re to phone him, too, when you’re finished at the house.”

  It did cheer the drive back across the bridge, thinking that they might not have to face the whole shock-and-grief process, and that it would only be a matter of finding what the house could tell them.

  And when they had eventually followed the young woman from the security company through the front door, what the house had to tell them was that, from gas lamps to icebox, its master had been a bizarrely committed devotee of a character of detective fiction.

  TWO

  Lee, you know anything about Sherlock Holmes?”

  Kate was sitting in the room with the flocked wallpaper, talking on her cell phone, a scrap of technology that felt like some intrusion from another universe. Still, Gilbert’s wicker chair was surprisingly comfortable, and the usual sounds made by Crime Scene—voices, footsteps—were oddly soothing in the otherwise empty house.

  “Sherlock Holmes? A self-medicating bipolar with obsessive-compulsive tendencies,” said the psychotherapist. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing, just that our victim seems to’ve had a serious thing for the man.”

  “My sweet, you do know that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character?”

  “Not too sure this guy did. You should see his place.” Kate stood up to look at another drawing like that concealing the door alarm, but this one showed a single man holding a flower in one hand, and behind it was nothing but a patch of wall. She sat down again.

  “That’s where you are?”

  “Yeah. I just wanted to let you know that I may be late for pizza. We’re waiting for the vic’s lawyer to come, he says he has the combination to the safe, but he wouldn’t give it to us over the phone.”

  “That’s okay, we’ll save you some. Will you be back for bedtime?”

  “Absolutely.” Even if it meant she had to borrow Williams’s car to drive across town and back just to tuck Nora in; she’d only missed a handful of bedtimes in the last three years.

  “I’ll let her know. Say hi to Al for me.”

  “He went back already—there was a school event he needed to be at.”

  “Okay, well, have fun with the pipe and violin.”

  “And you with the pizza.”

  As she flipped the phone shut, a voice said, “Sorry about your dinner.”

  She turned around in the chair, to see the Park detective running his gaze methodically along the shelves. He had gloves on, as she did. Lo-Tec had found no particular reason to think this was a crime scene, but still.

  “It’s nothing. But if we’re still here at eight, I’m going to need to leave you alone for a little while. I like to say goodnight to my daughter.”

  “Her name’s Nora?” he asked. “I heard you say something to Hawkin about Nora’s pizza.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s a nice, old-fashioned name.”

  “A variation on her mother’s name—Leonora.”

  Chris turned around with a puzzled look on his face. “She’s adopted, then?”

  “Oh, no. Lee—my partner—is her biological mother.”

  “Ah,” he said, understanding at last. “Sorry.”

  Sorry for the misunderstanding, Kate translated, not sorry that she was a lesbian. It was somewhat surprising that he hadn’t already known who (and what) she was, and encouraging to think that the name Kate Martinelli no longer produced instant flags of alarm in people’s minds. Her last bout with infamy had been several years earlier; with any luck, the next would b
e a long time coming. She stood and dropped her phone into her pocket.

  “Finding anything of interest?”

  “The whole place is weirdly fascinating—you know that antique telephone actually has a dial tone? But not a lot of paperwork—it must all be in the safe.”

  They had found the safe in the third-floor office, but the woman from the security service did not have its code. When the photographer finished with the desk, Kate went back upstairs to make a methodical search through it for any record of Philip Gilbert’s family. She found no trace of them, but she did spot a letter from a law firm across the Bay in Oakland, something to do with establishing a nonprofit foundation. She called the number on the stationery, listened to the recording, then dialed the number it referred her to in case of emergency. It took her some time to convince the answering service to hunt the lawyer down, but when she had done so, her cell phone rang in barely two minutes.

  “This is Tom Rutland,” said the voice, which bristled with a lawyer’s inborn suspicion. “My service said you were trying urgently to get in touch with me.”

  Kate thanked him for calling her back, and explained that she had found his name on a letter addressed to a person whose death was under investigation.

  “Who is that?” he said, as if she might be trying to put one over on him.

  But when she said the name Philip Gilbert, Rutland went silent.

  “Mr. Rutland? Is Philip Gilbert your client?”

  “God. Philip? What happened?”

  “All I can tell you is the death is under investigation. At the moment, I’m in his home trying to find the name and location of his next of kin.”

  “He doesn’t really have family. I can’t believe it. Are you sure it’s him?”

  “He had a medical necklace and his doctor confirmed his general appearance. We’ll need someone to identify him, when we can find the family.”

  “He doesn’t…You say you’re in his house? How did you get in?”

  “A neighbor gave us the name of his security company. Mr. Rutland—”

  “I think I better come over there. I’m his executor, I’ll bring you what information I have. I’m at home in Berkeley, I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr.—”

  But Rutland’s mind was made up, and if he really wanted to spend his Saturday afternoon driving across the Bay, Kate wasn’t going to bar the door against him. She asked him if he had the code to the safe, and he said he’d bring it with him.

  She closed the phone, looking distractedly at a framed photograph of Philip Gilbert with a television actor who had played Sherlock Holmes: Gilbert was a head taller, thinner of nose and sparser of hair, and looked more the character than the professional did.

  She was looking at the photograph, but she was thinking about lawyers. Helpful lawyers were a rare breed, in her experience, and she’d never come across one willing to drop everything for a dead client—foot-dragging was an entire section in the bar exam. Too, Tom Rutland’s reaction to the news had been more personal than professional, with his voice going tight, his thoughts distracted.

  She called to Williams that they were going to have a visitor, and returned to her search.

  The desk itself contained a minimum of paper, mostly paid bills and catalogues from auction houses all over the world. The answering machine held eleven messages, most of which sounded like business, since the callers left their full name and numbers and had invariably phoned during weekday work hours. The only exceptions were the second and seventh calls, both left by the same English voice, identifying himself merely as “Ian.” Ian’s first message had come at 8:21 the previous Monday morning:

  “Philip, this is Ian. God, man, this is really something, but honestly, you can’t be serious. Can you? Anyway, give me a ring on my mobile.”

  Then at 7:49 Thursday evening he had called again:

  “Philip, I don’t know if you got the message I left the other day, but do ring me when you get a chance. I’ll be back the first of the week, but call me any time. I need to talk to you about this before it goes any further.”

  Williams made note of the names, numbers, and times they had been left. The earliest one was the previous Sunday, January the twenty-fifth, the latest yesterday, Friday the thirtieth.

  They also found Gilbert’s keys, to the house and to the Lexus parked up the block. They were in a small bowl on the back of the desk, a bowl that, going by the scratches and nicks in its surface, was where they usually lived. Kate picked them up curiously. “Don’t you think it’s odd to keep your house keys up on the third floor?”

  “Maybe he has another set downstairs.”

  But if he did, they couldn’t find them. Maybe he had left in a hurry, and couldn’t be bothered climbing upstairs to get the keys; hence the unturned dead bolt on the door.

  Kate happened to be looking out of the window when a brand-new, glossy black BMW purred past the house, searching for a parking space. It found one up the block, and a vigorous, thickset man in his forties got out, dressed in expensive designer jeans, leather loafers worn without socks, and a gleaming black leather bomber jacket over a shirt printed with a sort of Balinese design, carrying a slightly less pristine leather briefcase in his hand. The entire package read: lawyer called in on his day off. His hair was carefully styled to hide the fact that it was going thin on top, and the tan of his face in winter testified to either a Mexican holiday or hours on the slopes. One hand jabbed his controls at the car, which responded with a flash of lights. Kate heard him call a greeting to the rose pruner across the street as she opened the door to let him in.

  “Inspector Martinelli? Tom Rutland. Sorry to make you wait for me.” He didn’t sound in the least sorry; still, in spite of her instant antagonism it was all Kate could do not to reach out and caress the sumptuous leather of his jacket. His casual day-off shirt was either silk or heavy rayon, and just under the fold of the collar was a small pin that read “221B.” He had no goggle marks around his eyes: Mexico, not ski slopes.

  “No problem,” she replied easily, standing back to let him in. “This is Inspector Williams, from the Park Police.”

  Hands were shaken, then the lawyer arranged his face into a suitably mournful set, lowered his voice, and said, “I was shocked to hear of Philip’s death. He was a friend, as well as a client. What happened? Not an automobile accident—I saw his car outside.” He directed his question to Williams, and Kate allowed the Park Service man to answer.

  “No,” Williams said. “Mr. Rutland, there appears to be a possibility that Mr. Gilbert was murdered.”

  “Murdered? Philip? A break-in, oh God, I told him he should upgrade that alarm system of his—”

  “We’ve found no signs of a break-in, Mr. Rutland, and his body was found elsewhere.”

  “Then, what?”

  “As I said, it’s under investigation. Were you friends?”

  “Murdered?” Rutland repeated, working to get his mind around the idea. Clearly, the lawyer’s practice did not embrace a lot of criminal law.

  “You say you were friends?” Williams prompted. This time, to effect.

  “Yes. Not close friends, but I suppose about as close as Philip had. The kind of friendship that, when he needed to consult me about something, he’d schedule it for late morning and when we finished we’d go for lunch. Mostly I saw him at a dinner group we both belonged to. I’d be seeing him next week. I’ll have to tell the others about it. Christ, it’s hard to believe.”

  “Mr. Rutland, do you know of any business Mr. Gilbert might have had in the parkland just north of the Golden Gate Bridge?”

  “What, on Point Bonita? Not that I know of. He isn’t—wasn’t—much of an outdoorsman.”

  To say nothing of the fact that he was in his pajamas, thought Kate.

  “Why?” the lawyer asked. “Is that where he…where you found him?”

  “Yes,” Williams answered, “although it would appear that he died
elsewhere.”

  “Murdered. Jesus.”

  “It is only a possibility,” Williams reminded him. “Is there at least some family?”

  “He has a cousin somewhere in the Midwest, two nieces in Texas, an ex-wife in Boston. I don’t think he was close to any of them. If it’s someone to identify the body you need, I could do it.”

  “Thank you. In the meantime, if you could let us have the family’s names and phone numbers, we’ll at least need to talk to them.”

  “I didn’t bring that information with me. I’ll put it together for you when I get back, and e-mail or fax it to you. But I did bring a copy of the will, I figured you’d need me to go over it with you.”

  “That was very thoughtful.”

  Rutland looked around, as if realizing for the first time that they’d been standing in the gloomy entranceway all this time. “You want to go up to the study, where there’s light?”

  “Um, let me just check if the room’s clear.” Kate left Williams and the lawyer downstairs and trotted up to stick her head inside the door to the study. “The lawyer’s here, has some papers he wants to go over. How long until we won’t be in your way?”

  “We’re pretty much finished in here. Lots of prints, a drinking glass and an ashtray, nothing else obvious. You want me to collect all the stuff in the desk?”

  “Let’s go over it first, see if there’s anything there.” Anything like a threatening letter or evidence of a crime, but she didn’t think Philip Gilbert had been a white-collar crime lord. “Mostly I’d just like Tamsin to record the safe when we get it open, then as far as I’m concerned, you guys can go.”

  Kate went back downstairs and said to the lawyer, “We can go up now.” She held out her arm to indicate that he could lead the way, and he did.

  “You seem to know the house fairly well, Mr. Rutland,” Williams commented as they trooped upstairs.

  “Sure. I’ve been here a lot, for business and the occasional dinner.”