Night work (29 page)

"The hit list."

"Exactly."

"Do I see where this is going?" Al asked slowly, and
Kate knew him well enough to hear the excitement in his voice. She
hugged herself to keep warm.

"You do. It took me forever, but I found one that is a kind of
mirror image. It's called Womyn of the EVEning--that's
w-o-m-y-n, and the e-v-e in evening is capitalized. It's only
been online since January, which may be why nobody's heard about
it. It isn't one of those governmental lists, notifying residents
they might have a sex offender as a neighbor. This one's a list
of suspects who are known to beat their wives, abuse kids physically or
sexually, or rape women. Each guy is given a case history, his arrest
and conviction record, and a list of the things he's suspected of
that he didn't get taken down for because the courts
weren't able to prove anything further. You know the
routine--tainted evidence, a withdrawn statement by a victim or
witness, circumstantial evidence without direct corroboration, that
sort of thing. There were a couple of plea bargains for lesser
offenses. God knows where all their information came from, though it
looks to me like somebody's getting into things they
shouldn't."

"Hackers?"

"Or an inside source."

"How many on the list?"

"Two hundred fourteen names."

"
What?
In four months? Christ, Martinelli."

"Makes you think, doesn't it? It's compiled by a
woman who seems to be somewhere in Nebraska. People send her names, and
if they match her criteria--that's what she calls
it--she adds them to the list, with their phone numbers and
addresses. I've sent her an imaginary case, to see what she does
with it, what kind of checks she runs."

"Are any of our--" Al started, but Kate was already there.

"They're all on it. All three."

Al was silent, then said what was on both their minds.

"That takes it out of our hands for sure. Have you called Marcowitz yet?"

"My next call, after I talked to you."

"The feds'll be embarrassed that you found it first," he said, pleased at the idea.

"I thought I might point that out, if they try to cut us out of the loop completely."

"Blackmail, Martinelli? Not nice."

"Just doing my job, Al."

"Sure you are. Find anything else interesting on the list?"

"Don't know about interesting, but there's going
to be a hell of a lot of work there. But Al? There are a bunch of
connecting sites, things like legal information for victims,
do-it-yourself PI work, how to go underground, that kind of thing. I
haven't been through all of them yet, but I had two interesting
hits. One of them was a self-defense site that talked about, among
other things, buying and using various kinds of taser." Hawkin
grunted in reaction. "The other--frankly, I don't know
what to think. Roz Hall's church has a Web site two links
away."

Chapter 16

KATE HAD NOT BEEN inside Roz and Maj's house since the
previous Thanksgiving. It looked as if she was not about to enter it
today, either, since there was no response to either doorbell or
knuckles. She had thought she was early enough to catch them, and
Roz's red Jeep stood in the driveway, but the house was empty.
Try again later.

She had her car door open when Maj's boxy white BMW rounded
the corner, lights on and wipers going against the morning drizzle. It
signaled its turn to an empty street and pulled sedately into the
drive. While Kate waited for the doors to open, she reflected that
either cars were no indication of personality, or else a certain degree
of incompatibility was no bad thing in a relationship: Whereas Roz
drove a big, battered, once-flashy but still new vehicle that already
had a dozen political stickers superimposed in layers on the back
bumper, Maj stuck to the car she had bought new twelve years before, a
car as immaculate and scrupulously maintained as its owner, which
usually wore a single bumper sticker, scraped off and changed two or
three times a year at Maj's whim, its message either puzzling or
humorous, if not both. Her most recent one, Kate noticed, declared that
real women drive stick. The BMW, needless to say, had a manual
transmission.

The car doors opened and the two women got out, followed by a large
black dog, which shook itself damply, spotted Kate, and launched itself
down the sidewalk toward her as if she was either a long-lost soul mate
or a mortal enemy. Before Kate could decide between pulling her gun or
a swift retreat into her car, Roz spoke sharply and the dog skidded to
a halt, casting Kate a longing glance before it returned to Roz's
side.

"You're up and around early," Roz declared. "Were you looking for us?"

"I thought I missed you. I should've called first."

"Maj just dropped Mina off at school and circled around to
pick me up from my run. I don't think you've met the newest
addition--this is Mouton, also known as Mutton, or Mutt to his
friends."

"Mutt?"

"What can I say? It's what he answers to."

"Because he's a mutt?"

"No," said Roz, bending down to take the dog's
damp head between her hands and rub it vigorously back and forth.
"It's because he's just an overgrown lamb," she
crooned at him, to his ecstasy.

Mutt was mostly black Lab with the addition of something from the
fluffier end of the gene pool, and he did look a bit like a sheep. A
wet, smelly, wriggling sheep who, when his mistress had released him,
wanted nothing but to bound up into Kate's arms but settled for
washing the back of her outstretched hand with an enthusiastic tongue.
Perhaps a black sheep, Kate thought, noticing Maj's disapproving
glance at the animal's damp and sandy feet. How did one train a
dog to wipe his feet at the door?

"He's very nice," she said obediently, though
she'd never been much for dogs. "How long have you had
him?"

"Couple of months. He belongs to a friend who moved back to
England. She couldn't stand the thought of locking him up for
their six-month quarantine, so we sort of inherited him, unless she
decides to come back. Mina adores him, and Maj approves of the way he
forces me to get some exercise. Want a cup of coffee?"

"Love one."

"Are you in a hurry?" Roz asked over her shoulder, her
key in the lock. "If you're not, I'll jump in and out
of the shower first so we don't have to leave all the windows
open. Mutt doesn't mind my delicate fragrance, but human noses
tend to twitch."

"Shower ahead, there's no rush."

Mutt did have the manners to shake himself before entering the
house, and he pounded up the stairs on Roz's heels. Maj shook her
head affectionately and led Kate back into the large, spotless, very
Scandinavian-looking kitchen to put on a pot of coffee for Roz and Kate
and a cup of herbal tea for herself and the baby. She moved more
heavily these days, balancing against the weight in front, and Kate
reflected that on the way over this morning she had seen four other
pregnant women, at various places along the streets. Either half the
city was pregnant, or she had babies on the brain.

"The smell of coffee doesn't bother you?" Kate
asked. Giving up coffee for nine months if Lee got pregnant was not an
appealing thought.

"No," Maj replied. "Should it?"

"My partner Al's
wife
is pregnant and says that coffee makes her sick. I just wondered if it's a common reaction."

"Coffee doesn't affect me. It's odd things like
chicken and celery that get to me." She shrugged. "Who
knows?"

"How's my step-goddaughter? Over her monkey phase yet?"

"I wish. She found a book on Jane Goodall last week. Now she wants to go to Africa and live with the chimpanzees."

"And you? Getting any work done?" A person tended to
forget that Maj Freiling had a life out from the shadow of Roz Hall and
the family structure, but that was partly due to the general
uncertainty about what Maj's job was. It was neither psychology
nor brain surgery, but existed somewhere between the two, and seemed to
consist of conversations with researchers on how people thought. She
was, Kate knew, working on and off writing a book, which Lee had
explained as having to do with sex-linked characteristics and gender
role expectations, but that too was made up of apparently unrelated
fragments rather than a unifying thesis. Today's conversation was
typical.

"Oh, yes," Maj answered. "I came across an
interesting man at San Francisco State who is looking at the complexity
of our perception of a person's voice, how we can judge sex and
age, education and authority just by a few words over the telephone. He
is working from an evolutionary viewpoint, the question of why a
person's voice perception is so capable of reading subtle clues,
almost as much as visual perception. I am more interested in the
consequences, but I am thinking of adding a chapter, or at any rate a
few
pages, on the subject. It is most distracting," she added with a
laugh, seeing that Kate was not following any of it. Her accent, almost
nonexistent in everyday conversation, became more precisely European
when she spoke about her work, Kate noticed, and wondered what message
this voice perception carried.

They drank their hot drinks and talked about this and that, and then
Roz came back in, her hair wet and Mutt's nearly dry, to pour
herself some coffee and a bowl of cereal.

"Want anything to eat?" she asked Kate, who declined the
offer. "Well, let me fill up your cup again and we'll get
out from under Maj's feet."

Roz's office was as untidy as the kitchen was neat,
bookshelves sagging, a door-on-sawhorses set up at a right angle to a
sturdy oak desk, both entirely buried in books and files and computer
printouts. Roz walked around to the niche surrounded by desks and
shelves and balanced her bowl and cup on top of a stack of folders. She
waved Kate to the chair across from her and began to spoon up her
breakfast.

"What have you found about Pramilla Mehta?" she asked
around a mouthful of granola. "Can you prove yet that her husband
killed her?"

"The investigation is, as they say, ongoing."

Roz peered at her over the laden desk. "You can't talk about it."

Kate pulled a face. "It's difficult. He was clearly
mentally deficient, and possibly mentally disturbed. We're having
a profile put together, to see if he had a potential for violent
outbursts followed by careful planning. I mean, we know he could be
violent, but the cover-up is the question. I personally don't
think he did, but then I only met him once, and he wasn't in very
good shape at the time." If Roz was either surprised or
suspicious at Kate's willingness to share information, she did
not show it, but Kate knew that there would be no forthcoming
information from Roz if Kate did not at least give the appearance of
openness. And she had actually not given Roz anything that wasn't
in the papers.

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.