Night work (33 page)

Kate decided enough was enough, said good night to Al and the
others, and took herself home. Lee was still awake, and called down the
stairs as Kate was unloading her burden on the hallway table.

"That you, Kate?"

"What's left of me."

"Would you give Roz a call? I told her that if you were in before eleven, you would."

"What does she want?"

"She didn't say."

Kate seriously considered ignoring the request, but in the end she
did phone Roz's number, bracing herself for another demand from
Roz: an illicit look at someone's file, perhaps, or a request to
be on a panel in Washington, D.C. But to her surprise, Roz did not seem
to want anything, only to know if Kate had had a chance to glance at
the manuscript, and if she had any questions. Kate rubbed her forehead
wearily, grateful that telephones did not have viewers, and told her
that no, she did not.

Kate then climbed the stairs to bed, and to Lee, and then to sleep.

To jerk awake at 3:09 the next morning with the phone shouting at her, and Al's voice on the other end of the line.

Telling her there had been another one.

Only this one was still alive.

"DETECTIVE'S NAME IS HILLMAN," Hawkin told her in
the car on the empty freeway headed south down the peninsula.
"Ever meet him?"

"No. He must be after my time in San Jose."

"Sounded competent, but a little irritated that the feds are all over him."

"I can understand that. Are they taking it over?"

"No. Just getting in his way at the moment."

"What'd he say about the MO?"

"Two attackers, a taser for sure, regulation handcuffs, they
had a scarf around his throat before they were interrupted.
Didn't wait around to finish him off, just ran. Cops didn't
see them go, they went out the other side of the building."

"What about the candy?"

"Ah. Marcowitz hadn't gotten around to mentioning that
to him. I asked Hillman to look, and to keep it under his hat, both
that I'd asked and if he found any. He called me back just before
you picked me up, to say they'd found a handful clear at the
other entrance. One print-- they're running it now."

"A print? That's great," said Kate, meaning it
profoundly. Any small thing to break the back of this increasingly
scary case was fine with her. "Who's the vic?"
'

"Guy named Traynor, Lennie Traynor. A true creep. Makes Larsen
and Banderas look like Citizen of the Month, gives Mehta a run for the
stupid prize."

"What does he do, murder grannies?"

"Plays with kids," Hawkin said succinctly. They drove in silence through the night.

LENNIE TRAYNOR, BOTH IN history and in the flesh, was the sort of
creature guaranteed to make a cop bristle. Knowing he'd probably
been abused as a child himself didn't help; both of
them--particularly Hawkin, with an adolescent stepdaughter at home
and a baby on the way--saw him sitting in the hospital bed and
felt a quick urge to grind him underfoot and finish the
assailants' job. Traynor felt their instantly suppressed
contempt, and cringed further. That too did not help.

Traynor had one felony conviction behind him, for raping a
thirteen-year-old girl with Down's syndrome, and a string of
other charges, two of which had been plea-bargained down to
misdemeanors. He had been driven out of two communities unwilling to
harbor a sex offender before he landed in an industrial area of San
Jose with few families, and found an employer who was happy enough to
hire the unhirable, on the cheap and no questions asked. Traynor worked
as a janitor in a small assembly plant for low-tech computer parts, and
was given a dank room in exchange for doubling as night watchman.

His nocturnal lifestyle undoubtedly contributed to his
crawled-out-from-under-a-rock appearance, but all in all, the police
faced with his problem wished that he had stayed under his rock, or
died there quietly.

Instead, unlikely as it seemed, Traynor had been lucky. Bashed,
taser-zapped, and half strangled he might be, but he was alive, and as
he told his story for what must have been the dozenth time, it became
obvious that only luck had saved him.

Traynor's job was literally half his life. His commitment ran
from six at night to six in the morning, day in and day out. He was
free to take days (or rather, nights) off with prior arrangement, but
he had only done so a handful of times in the three years he'd
worked there, and his two-week annual holiday was more often than not
cut short by boredom.

His sole forms of entertainment, it seemed, were the walks he took
every morning when his shift had ended and the cyber-crawls he indulged
in on his top-of-the-line computer system. His declarations of healthy
exercise and intellectual curiosity were dismissed by Kate and Al, as
they had been by every investigator who had stood in the room before
them, but whether or not he logged on to child pornography sites was
not currently their concern. It was the walks they were interested in,
the long wanders in the surrounding housing developments during the
hours when children were walking to school or waiting for buses.

He'd been seen, and recognized, three and a half months
before, and for the third time a group of concerned parents began to
organize a neighborhood against him. Mothers pointedly shepherded their
children to the school gates, petitions were drawn up, the kids began
to watch for him. So he retreated, and for six weeks had stayed in his
cave.

Things quieted down, and Traynor lay low, and interest waned. He
bought an elderly dog from the pound to keep him company, a quiet dog
that slept most of the day and was content with walks around the
weed-lined parking lot. After a while, though, when Traynor judged that
interest had moved on, he snapped the dog's leash on, piled him
into the car, and drove him a few miles away for a daily walk--at
the hour when the neighborhood was waking and its bright and freshly
scrubbed children were going off to school.

Had the dog been more lively or appealing, Traynor might have gone
his way in peace for a good long time. The dog, though, was as scruffy
and unkempt as its owner, and a few weeks later one mother who jogged
in the mornings was talking to another mother at a parents'
meeting, and his identity came out.

There was nothing against him but distaste and profound
apprehension, no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing, but a sex offender
was required to register with the police in a new area, and although he
was not proposing to move into the neighborhood, he was frequenting its
sidewalks.

It might well have died down, given time. After all, Traynor had a
car, a twelve-hour day, and all the residential neighborhoods of the
Bay Area at his command. However, in the midst of it a young girl
disappeared from her home two miles from Traynor's factory, and
even though he had a firm alibi for the time (three of the factory
workers had seen him walking the dog in the parking lot) and even
though the police quickly determined that the girl was a runaway (the
diary entry she left might have been ambiguous, but the story she told
her best friend was not), Traynor had already been put in the
spotlight. Two days later his name was on the Web site hit list.
Letters began to arrive, notices went up on phone poles throughout the
area, and pickets set up outside the gates. Phone calls came, so that
when the task force team had reached him the day before, he thought it
another one and cut them off hastily. His increasingly nervous boss
gave him two weeks' notice, one of the factory workers who had
four children put a brick through Traynor's windshield, and
shrill voices were raised in the City Council meeting.

Then the night before, a few minutes short of eleven-thirty, a pair
of black-clad figures wearing hoods and gloves broke into the factory
with a pair of bolt cutters. They ambushed Traynor on his rounds,
stunned him with a taser, slapped handcuffs on his nerveless wrists,
and prepared to throttle him with a length of red silk. Unfortunately
for them, but to the dubious benefit of Traynor's life, they
assumed that the night watchman was the sum total of security at the
factory, and on their way in the door tripped an old but still
efficient silent alarm. One of Traynor's assailants heard the
sound of an approaching vehicle, looked out the window, and saw the
patrol car responding to the alarm. The two intruders fled with their
job half complete, although the blow one of them dealt Traynor's
head, either with a boot or the abandoned bolt cutters found nearby,
added to the bad gash he had sustained in his original fall, nearly did
him in.

So here he lay in his hospital bed in the small hours of the
morning, a victim no one had the least scrap of sympathy or indignation
for, his lank and thinning hair half shaved off to mend the two scalp
wounds, black of eye, hoarse of voice, and trying hard to maintain the
moral superiority of the assault victim under the cold, knowing stares
of hospital staff, police, and the dread FBI. Even his fingers were
repellent, thin white tentacles plucking nervously at the sheets, and
Kate found herself wondering what had happened to the only true victim
here, the poor dog.

She realized that Traynor had come to the end of his well-practiced
narrative and' was waiting for questions with resigned
apprehension. Hawkin had his back to the room, looking out of the
third-floor window, apparently leaving it up to her.

"Do you have any idea who they were, Mr. Traynor?" she
asked, but he was shaking his head before the question was over.

"They could have been anyone. Just that they were women."

"How do you know that, Mr. Traynor?"

"How do I...? You mean, how did I know they were women?"

"Yes," she said with exaggerated patience. "Their
voices, their bodies, did they smell of feminine hygiene spray,
what?"

The pasty face went pink with embarrassment. "I... well,
the way they moved, I guess. And their clothing was not so heavy I
couldn't tell, er--

"That they had breasts and hips?"

His blush deepened at her blatant reference to a woman's body; he nodded, studying his hands.

"What about their voices?"

"The only thing they said--the only thing I heard them
say--was when I was already half unconscious. I heard the word
'cops," and then the pressure went off my throat and after
that I passed out. I suppose when they hit my head."

"Just the one word?"

"Nothing else. Their silence was... scary. Unearthly.
Just some grunts while I was... I was screaming, I'm afraid,
as soon as I had my voice back, asking them why they were doing this.
Begging them to stop. They never said a thing."

For the first time Kate was aware of a faint brush of compassion for
Lennie Traynor, but it did not last long. Instead, she pressed him for
details about the two figures.

One, it seemed, had been taller and stronger than the other, and it
had been this taller person who was in charge. She (if she it had been)
had come at him with the taser in hand and had handled him like a rag
doll, flipping his stunned body over and wrenching his arms back for
the bite of the handcuffs. It had been her black hood looming over him
when he found himself faceup again, she who whipped a silken billow of
dark red out of a pocket and wrapped it around his throat, she who
tightened and twisted and began to fade from
view
as the oxygen ceased to reach his brain.

"What was the hood like?" Kate asked.

"Black. One of those knitted ski things."

"So it had eyeholes?"

"I saw her eyes, yes."

"What color were they?"

"Brownish, I guess."

"Mr. Traynor, you were looking into her eyes while she was
trying to kill you. Surely you remember what color they were."

"Light brown. Lighter than yours. Maybe hazel?"

"And the skin color around them?"

"She was white, not black. Maybe a light Hispanic. Not Asian, anyway."

"Makeup?"

"No," he said, not sounding at all certain.

"Perfume?"

"Unh-uh. She smelled like sweat."

"Bad? Like she hadn't washed in a while?"

"No. Sweat like she'd been exercising. Fresh. Not stale or strong."

Not a nervous sweat, then, the smell of fear that Traynor had been giving off since they entered his room.

"About how tall was she?"

"I went over all this with the others," he protested feebly, his hand coming up to touch his bruised throat.

"Nearly finished. How tall?"

"Taller than me--but then, dressed all in black and
standing over me, she seemed bigger than she was, I think. I was only
facing her for a second or two, but she still seemed a little taller
than me. Maybe a couple of inches. I'm five seven."

Brown-eyed Roz Hall stood five feet ten, Kate's traitorous mind got in before she ruthlessly turned it to other things.

"Mr. Traynor, were you aware of people hanging around the factory at night, telephone calls, that kind of thing?"

He looked at her as if she were raving. "It's been nuts
around here the last few weeks. I told you about the picketers and
the--"

"I mean single people, not groups of protesters. A car parked
across from the entrance, say, or the dog barking at the
darkness."

"Maybe. I don't know, I've been kind of jumpy."

"What did you think you saw?"

"Well, Popeye--he's my dog, or he was until I took
him back to the pound over the weekend. Anyway, he was showing the
strain about, oh, maybe a week ago. I'd be sweeping up or doing
my rounds and he'd be whining at the door to get out or getting
under my feet. Drove me crazy."

"What night was this?"

"There were a coupla nights. Monday maybe? And then not the
next night, he slept like usual, but again on Wednesday."

"What time would it have been?"