Night Work Read online

  This one looked to sit on the shelf gathering dust for a long time, Kate thought. Al agreed.

  “One thing might be worth doing, though,” he suggested.

  “That phone in the laundromat?”

  “Yeah, but it'll have to be about the same time the call was placed in order to do any good.”

  “You weren't doing anything tonight, were you, Al?”

  “I'm already too late for dinner. I should probably call Jani and let her know not to wait up.”

  While Al made his worn apologies to his new wife and stepdaughter, Kate phoned Lee and agreed to bring home mu shu pork and kung pao shrimp. The three of them ate in the dining room of the old house on Russian Hill, looking out over the squat presence of Alcatraz and the ferries going to and from Sausalito, and with the descent of night, the long string of white lights stretching the length of the Bay Bridge. They had some coffee and talked of nothing in particular, and at eight-thirty Kate and Al returned to the car and pulled away from the curb to nose their way back into the city.

  Kate parked across the street from the laundromat. On the back wall of the brightly lighted space, between a dryer the size of a compact car and a machine that dispensed tiny cartons of soap powder and fabric softener, there stood a telephone, a call from which may have brought James Larsen out to his death. The laundromat stood in the middle of a busy block. Next door was a bustling Mexican restaurant that seemed to do as much take-away business as table service. Across the street was a record store, a coffeehouse, a late-night bookstore, and a Chinese restaurant. Plenty of people around to witness a person making a call, standing beneath the harsh blue light of a couple dozen fluorescent strips, but no one to notice.

  No patron of the laundry admitted to having washed her clothes there on Monday night. The woman in charge of watching the machines snapped irritably that she was too busy folding clothes in the back for the drop-off trade, and that the damn phone was a pain in the neck, she and her husband were thinking of having it pulled out or replaced with one of those new models that people couldn't call in on, and no, her husband had not been there on Monday. The two detectives thanked her and went back onto the street.

  The staff in the Mexican restaurant, most of whom had been working Monday night, had also been too busy to notice any particular individual going in or out of the laundromat. The bookstore owner had seen a bearded Rastafarian using the phone for quite a while on Monday, in a conversation of escalating anger that ended with the man bashing the receiver down, kicking a wheeled laundry cart in passing, knocking over a menu board for the restaurant next door, and shouting his way down the street, though the bookseller thought it happened closer to ten, and Kate, while dutifully noting the story, could not summon much enthusiasm for the theory that a furious dreadlocked African-American had tempted James Larsen to drive from his home to San Francisco on Monday evening.

  At ten o'clock, the businesses started shutting and the patrons of the laundromat staggered off with their bulging plastic sacks of clean clothes. The Mexican place seemed prepared to go on dishing up menudo and enchiladas until dawn, and at eleven, a pair of weary detectives went in and ordered bowls of soup at one of the back tables.

  “Well, gee,” said Kate. “That was sure fun.”

  “Lots of hot leads,” Al agreed glumly.

  There had been nothing of the sort, merely blank looks accompanying shakes of the head alternating with polite (or not-so-polite) incredulity that they might be expected to remember a person (male or female? white, black, brown, or striped?) making a telephone call from the back of a busy laundromat five days before.

  It had been worth doing, but neither of them was surprised at the lack of results. That was how the job went.

  Which meant turning back to the victim and his wife, looking for some little thing that wasn't right. Tomorrow.

  “How's Jani?” Kate asked him. “And Jules?”

  “Jules is great. Maddening, but great.” Hawkin stirred the vegetables in his soup with close attention, and then his mouth twitched in a crooked smile. “Jani's even greater. She's pregnant.”

  “Al! How fantastic. When is she due?”

  “November sometime. We just found out the other day.”

  “I'm so happy for you, Al. You are happy, I take it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Nervous, I guess—I'll be retired by the time he's playing high school football. Or she.”

  “All the more free time to volunteer as a coach. You don't know what it is yet?”

  “Jani doesn't want to.”

  “How did Jules react?”

  “She's been great. Embarrassed a little, I guess—I mean, parents don't go around making babies, how gross. But underneath that, she's excited too.”

  “I must call her, see if she wants to go bowling or something. God, Al, you're a lucky man.”

  “Don't I know it. Has Lee said anything—”

  His question was cut short by the insistent beeping of the pager in his pocket, followed seconds later by Kate's. Al went into the empty laundromat to use the telephone that had been the cause of the outing, while Kate paid the bill and took advantage of the restaurant's toilet. When she came out of the restaurant Hawkin was leaning against the side of the car.

  “Seems to be our week for dumped bodies,” Al told her. “This one's out near the Legion of Honor.”

  Anonymously dumped bodies were the hardest of all murders to solve. They were usually drug-related, there were rarely any witnesses around, and the forensic evidence was generally scarce—most often the victim's pockets were empty, which made identification hard and in some cases impossible. No detective liked a John Doe, but there were any number of them on the books, going back years. Some would never be solved.

  Again Kate's car took her from city lights into tree-shrouded darkness. This time the lights were along Geary Boulevard, and the dark set in more gradually, eased by the orange glow of the parking area across from the Legion of Honor and the cool lights that turned the museum's pillars into a sort of stripped-down Versailles. The stone lions watched the playing fountain and preserved the facade of civilization; then the road turned downhill and the night closed in.

  High fog rode the treetops and obscured the upper reaches of the world's most famous bridge, transforming it into a mere string of lights held up by stubby towers. A clot of fog settled across the roadway and then swept on, and when it lifted, they saw the cluster of official vehicles.

  The coat Kate had worn for the relatively mild night down in the center of town was completely inadequate against the damp gale rising up from the sea. The yammer of voices and radios could not drown out the heavy pounding of the surf and the noise of the wind ripping through the cypress and pine trees. A foghorn groaned on and off; a nearby eucalyptus crackled with the brisk passage of air. Kate could also hear a noise like sobbing—but it was sobbing, from the backseat of a cruiser where a pair of teenagers huddled. Al went over to the car and had a brief word with them, which caused a brief renewal of wailing that died down again as the boy did his best to comfort his increasingly tiresome girlfriend. Love, Kate reflected, never did run smooth.

  Fortunately, this body hadn't been stripped. The victim, like James Larsen, even had his wallet. At first glance, it was about the only thing the two men had in common. At first glance.

  Matthew Banderas had been a fit and successful thirty-two-year-old man who had given a lot of attention to his appearance. Now he was lying in a heap at the side of the road like a sack of discarded garbage, down the hill from the Legion of Honor museum, where he had been found by the two teenagers out to enjoy the solitude, the lights of the bridge, and each other. Matthew Banderas wore a suit that had cost more than James Larsen made in a month, with another month's salary on his feet. Two years' worth of Larsen salary was parked a short distance up the road, with a vanity plate reading MATMAN. There was not even any physical resemblance between the two men: Banderas was little more than half Larsen's age, and had it not been for h
is surname, Kate would have taken him for Italian or perhaps half-Greek, for his skin was only faintly swarthy, his expensively styled hair thick and Mediterranean black. Nothing at all like Larsen.

  Except that Matthew Banderas had a pair of police handcuffs on his wrists.

  And a taser had left its mark on his flat stomach, just below the rib cage.

  And he had been strangled to death.

  In the left-hand pocket of his expensive jacket Kate found a wrapped chocolate bar, still soft with the fading warmth of Banderas's body. She dropped it into an evidence bag, and held it up thoughtfully.

  Hawkin watched as Banderas was loaded up into the van, and rubbed his chin unhappily. “This is not good,” he said. “This is really not good.”

  Kate could only nod. The moment she had seen the handcuffs she knew they were in grave trouble. They were now dealing with a serial killer, which aside from its own urgency would mean complicated, painstaking work under the full cacophony and glare of a media circus. She stood and shivered as she looked out over the Golden Gate, at the dark sea that lay between the heights occupied by the museum and the Marin headlands on the northern shore, and she became aware of the first gathering of news reporters on the crest of the road behind them.

  “I'm surprised the TV cameras aren't here already,” she said bitterly. “Guess it's too late for the eleven o'clock news.”

  Hawkin heard the dread in her voice, and knew all too well the reason for it. From the day they had been made partners, he new to the City and she new to the job, they had been faced with one high-profile case after another: the world-famous artist Vaun Adams, the renowned lesbian radical Raven Morningstar, Al's own stepdaughter's kidnapping—all made national, even international headlines. By now the press had only to hear the name Martinelli and they came baying. More than once she had thought about changing her name, coloring her hair, and going back into uniform for a nice anonymous foot patrol beat. She figured, though, that if she did she would be sure to stumble on Jimmy Hoffa's skeleton, or the president of the United States shooting up in an alley.

  “Look,” Hawkin said abruptly. “You don't need this. Let me get one of the others in on it.”

  It was tempting, very tempting, but after a minute Kate shook her head. “It's too late. I'm already involved—they won't leave me alone.”

  “Sure they will. I can ask—”

  “Al? Leave it. I can't let them rule my life.”

  “Okay,” he said. Both of them knew he had enough authority to shift her off the case; both knew he would do so if things got too crazy. He signaled that the techs could bag up the body and take it away. As he and Kate turned to look at the two teenagers in the back of the police cruiser, the boy trying to act manly as he comforted his girlfriend, whose endless whimpering was getting on everyone's nerves, Hawkin said, half to himself, “I don't know whether to hope this guy Banderas has a history of wife beating, or hope he doesn't.”

  Matthew Banderas did not have a history of spousal abuse.

  Matthew Banderas had a history of rape.

  The violent one

  Whose raging demands

  Break down peace and shelter

  Like a peacock's scream.

  The murder made the papers in the morning, but although the articles speculated on the possible links between this victim, James Larsen, and the lighter pranks of the LOPD, they did not yet have the key link of the criminal history of the two murdered men. It would only be a matter of time, however, and with that knowledge riding on their necks, the two detectives threw themselves at the case. Early on Saturday morning they met up in the Hall of Justice, to get the search warrants under way and to track down their latest victim's past.

  Banderas had only been arrested once, shortly after his twenty-sixth birthday. For that he had stood trial, been found guilty, and served just under three years. The light sentence had been a result of his plausibility on the stand, and was further reduced by his spotless behavior in the low-security prison. Still, neither detective believed that the one rape was his only instance of aberrant behavior.

  “How many rapists do you know who started when they were in their mid-twenties?” Kate asked Al skeptically, and indeed, when they began to dig, they found that Banderas had been closely investigated for three other rapes since his eighteenth birthday, all of them let go by a lack of evidence the district attorney found adequate enough for conviction. The one time he had been caught was seven and a half years before.

  Hawkin shook his head. “He was a very clever boy. He took souvenirs—the victim's underwear—but he either destroyed them or hid each one. Assuming he was behind all of these.”

  In addition to the three for which Banderas was chief suspect, there was a whole string of unsolved rapes, three of them clearly related by place, time, and technique, two others with more tenuous links. Eight times over the last seventeen years some unidentified predator had waited for a lone woman to come out of a convenience store at night, forced himself into her car at gunpoint, driven to some dark place, raped her, and left her naked, bound, and missing her underwear. He always wore a mask and gloves.

  None of the series had taken place while Banderas was incarcerated.

  “Why didn't anyone catch this bastard?” Kate asked incredulously.

  “No forensic evidence, and you can't lock a guy up on a similar MO. The one conviction, the woman bit him on the face and the mask came off. She identified him at the trial. But because he didn't finish up like he usually did—he dumped her out in the hills, didn't take a souvenir, didn't tie her up—there wasn't much point in going for the whole series. And he wore a condom, so there wasn't even any DNA.”

  Only two of the unsolved rapes had taken place since Banderas came out of prison. As Hawkin had said, the man was cautious.

  “He never hurt any of the women beyond the rape. Though that's bad enough,” he hastened to say, “but even a couple of the victims said he was ‘polite.’ Seems to me a strange way to describe a guy who's just raped you.”

  “Do you suppose he'd have let the next woman to see his face go free?” Kate asked him.

  “Not if it cost him another spell in prison. But someone has taken that choice out of his hands and put the problem on our desk.”

  “So you think there's someone out there taking care of the bad guys?”

  “Doesn't it look like that to you?”

  “No chance of a copycat?”

  “The taser and cuffs were described in the paper, but they all just said ‘strangled’ without giving details. And they certainly don't have the candy in the victim's pockets. I wouldn't have even thought of it as evidence with Larsen, but with this victim, it looks like it is.”

  “Banderas didn't really look the sort to carry a chocolate bar in the pocket of an expensive suit, true, but I don't know that I'd count it as a clear mark of a serial.”

  “We'll see.”

  “Christ, I hope not,” Kate said fervently. Two was quite enough, and she'd just as soon leave a question rather than have a third body to confirm Al's theory. However, the question was further complicated just before noon when the preliminary results from the Banderas car search came up with an empty insulin pen, found in the back of the glove compartment, with no name on it of either patient or pharmacy. They had planned on searching the Banderas apartment later that afternoon, but with the possibility that a diabetic had been found in the possession of a chocolate bar, they called Marin to let them know that the SFPD was serving a search warrant in their jurisdiction, put on their coats, and left.

  Banderas had lived in a condominium north of Mill Valley, a modern apartment complex filled with successful young singles and childless couples where both partners worked. Parking was in a three-story garage connected to the buildings by walkways, not outside the apartment doors, and the Banderas apartment was near the complex's entrance; none of his neighbors would ever know when he was home or not.

  His apartment was unrevealing, the living quarters
of a bachelor who ate out a lot and brought work and women home. There was an assortment of exotic condoms in the table beside the bed, a stack of the classier kinds of frozen dinners in the freezer, and a set of copper cookware that looked as if it had never been used. He wore expensive clothing, with a flashy taste in suit lapels, shirt collars, and neckties, and owned five more pairs of shoes as expensive as those he had died in, plus an assortment of loafers and athletic shoes. The paintings on the wall were splashes of bright color that did not mean much of anything except that he knew walls needed to have them, a painting in the bedroom showed a well-endowed naked blond woman either making love with or struggling beneath a clothed man, and he owned a lot of very hard-core pornographic videos, some of them violent, with one player in the living room and another in the bedroom. The room did not have a mirror on the ceiling, but the place looked as if Banderas might have thought of it.

  Kate stood with a copy of a video entitled She Really Wants It in her hand and called to her partner in the next room, “Al, do we have to like this guy?”

  “No, Martinelli. So far as I know there's no law yet that says we have to like our victims.”

  “Good thing,” she told him, and went back to work.

  The most interesting discoveries, however, were those the search team had already found in the bathroom. Two different discoveries, actually, although the detectives could have predicted the presence of a pouch of fragrant leaves and a small vial of white powder, with the attendant paraphernalia for marijuana and cocaine. The other find was even more interesting: a small machine for testing blood sugar, used by diabetics, and two disposable needles in the wastebasket. There was also a multi-use insulin pen like that found in the car, only this one was half full and had Banderas's name on the pharmacist's label.

  Matthew Banderas had indeed been a diabetic; a diabetic who died with a candy bar in his pocket.