Night work (37 page)

"What's Roz got in her teeth now?"

"It's that Indian girl again, Pramilla Mehta," Lee
said. "Roz has decided to link up in solidarity with a group in
India that's working to expose dowry deaths for what they
are."

Kate dragged her thoughts away from San Jose and back to the larger
picture. "But I thought she was convinced that Laxman Mehta
killed her? What can she do about him? He's dead--our
problem now, not hers."

"She thinks the family encouraged him, maybe even drove him to it."

"Christ. So what is she going to do?"

"Big picket lines in front of his company, and the city is
looking into the contracts it has with him, thinking of
canceling."

"Well, that certainly sounds like Roz."

"They're also putting together a public memorial service for Pramilla."

"Who is they?"

"I swear, Roz has half the organizations in Northern
California involved. This is going to be big. Huge. And, I'm
afraid, divisive. There's a large Indian community in the Bay
Area, and they're all going to feel targeted, even those who have
nothing to do with dowries. You know how it goes with ethnic groups,
they all get jumbled together in the popular mind. Anyone wearing a
turban is a follower of the Ayatollah; anyone with an Arab name sides
with Saddam."

"I know. But I'm sorry, babe, this all sounds like
business as usual for Roz. Why is Maj so upset about it this
time?"

"A combination of things. Maj's not feeling very well,
and the pregnancy is interfering with her own work. And the timing is
bad, coming just when her work is going through a demanding phase, and
Roz had promised to be more available for Mina. Plus that, Roz's
church is making noises about cutting back her funding--they say
they're paying her to be a parish priest, not a political
organizer, and the congregation is being neglected. So there's
that worry as well. But I think what has Maj so concerned is the degree
of Roz's involvement. For some reason this girl's killing
has pulled all of Roz's levers at once, and it's making her
a little crazy. That's not a diagnosis, by the way," Lee
added, in a welcome breath of humor. "She's out to make
Pramilla Mehta a saint and a martyr, or at least a household name, and
you know how good she is at playing the media game."

Kate agreed: Roz was an artist at manipulating the media.

"But it takes a massive jolt of energy to get the PR wheels
going, so she's pulled out all the stops. Statements issued,
photo ops, interviews on national television, in and out of the
mayor's office and the supervisors', phone calls to the
governor and any senators she can get through to. The president has
heard of her, and Oprah is interested."

"So she's running on empty, no food or sleep, and Maj is waiting for the crash."

"You know, it really is an addiction, this kind of righteous
campaign. When it ends, as it has to, the drop-off is a steep
one."

They had seen it before, but Maj had to live with it, and would be
picking up the pieces at a time when she would be ill equipped to do so.

"Is there anything you can do?" Kate asked.

"Not really. You know Roz. If you try to shake some sense into her, it just makes you the enemy."

"Hard on Maj."

"Yes. And Mina is confused, too. But enough--it
won't help anyone if you and I get sucked in. What happened with
your day?"

"We're closing in," Kate told her. She rarely went
into detail with Lee on an active case, both from professional scruples
and as a way of separating home from job, but this case in particular
had developed so many prickly areas--from Roz's presence in
its periphery to the ambiguous righteousness of the feminist
vigilante--that she did not know where to pick up the thread even
if she wanted to. Better to let the tangled story sort itself out
without Lee's involvement, especially considering the hour. So it
was merely, "We're closing in," and a few minor
details before she threw down the distraction of Jules writing to her
jailed abductor, which kept Lee happily chewing on that question until
they were pulling up to their curb.

Chapter 23

I WAS BUSY, protested the young woman at the airport car rental
agency. It was nine-twenty on Monday morning, and Britany Pihalik was
still busy, fending off telephones, customers, and pushy cops all at
the same time. Kate kept any mote of sympathy off her face, knowing
that to appear implacable was in the end the quickest for everyone, and
eventually the young woman gave in, turned her name card around on the
counter, and led the two detectives into an empty break room. She
offered them coffee, which they declined, took a can of diet Coke from
the refrigerator for herself, and settled them at a table.

Kate handed her the printout with the name Jane Larsen circled on it. "What can you tell us about this woman?"

"I'd have to look it up--no, wait a minute. I
remember her. It was the lady with the mangled card." She gave
them a perky look as if happy to have satisfied their curiosity and
ready to get back to work now, and seemed mildly surprised that they
had more questions.

"Could you tell us about her, please?" Hawkin asked.

"Nice lady, truly ugly hair, kind of stupid--her, I mean,
not her hair. Though her hair was pretty stupid, too. Anyway, she hands
me this credit card that looks like she fed it to a pit bull, said
it'd fallen out of her purse and her husband ran over it with the
car. But the computer took it, I didn't even have to enter the
numbers like we do sometimes when the magnetic strip is wrecked, so it
was okay."

"Did you take a close look at it?"

"No," she said flatly, clearly thinking the question, to use her favorite word, stupid.

"Did she have any other form of ID?" Kate asked.

"Of course." Ms. Pihalik obviously was getting no very
high opinion of the police department. "We can't let them
rent a car without a valid driver's license. She had one, I
rented her a car, she left."

"Was the name on the license Jane Larsen?"

"Yes. No. No, it was her middle name. Elizabeth, something
like that. Maybe not Elizabeth, because it was something as, you know,
dreary as Jane, and I remember thinking it was too bad she didn't
have at least one interesting name to choose from. But then she was
pretty dreary herself."

"Was the name Janet? Mary?" Headshakes, continuing
through the suggestions of "Patricia? Cathy? Susan?" until
Kate got to "Emily?" A headshake began, cut off by
consideration.

"Emily might've been it. Yeah, that sounds right, I think it was Em-fly."

Kate did not kiss her, although it was tempting. "You
don't have security cameras here, do you?" she asked.
Unless they were hidden, Kate hadn't seen any.

"Not inside. There's some in the lot."

"What did the woman look like?"

"Like I said, dreary. Dull. That ugly black hair--a
really crappy dye job, might've even been a wig--and with
these heavy glasses that were all wrong for her. Baggy clothes, like
she didn't want anyone to see her body, though it didn't
really look that bad to me. Little bit fat, maybe." Coming from a
broomstick like Britany Pihalik, Kate guessed that "fat"
described anything more than three percent body fat.

"Height?" Kate asked. "Eye color?"

"Taller than me, three or four inches--and I had heels
on, so she was maybe five, um, nine? ten? Big, like I said. Not really
fat, I guess, just kinda, what? Chunky? Muscular, like. I don't
remember her eyes. They might have been blue, or brown."

Helpful, Kate thought; at least they knew not to look at anyone with pink or purple eyes.

"Your machine didn't make an actual impression of the card, did it?" Hawkin asked.

"Like one of those old back-and-forth machines with the
what-you-call-it, carbons? No, it reads off the strip unless
that's been scrambled by the person keeping it in an eelskin
wallet or putting it down next to a strong magnet. Then we have to key
in the numbers by hand. But like I said, hers was okay."

"Ms. Pihalik, the list you gave us yesterday was reservations
and a few walk-ins. I'd like to see the actual final list of
names taken from the credit cards themselves."

"I'd have to ask about that. I don't know if I'm allowed to give it to you."

"Maybe we should check with your supervisor?" Hawkin gently suggested.

She look relieved. "Sure, just a minute," she said, and
went to the door to call in a taciturn young man not much older than
she was, who wore a lapel pin declaring him to be Jim Tolliver. He
heard their request, scratched for a moment at a flare of acne on one
cheek, and then shrugged.

"I don't know why not. But it'd be faster if you
could just look at the screen instead of printing out everything."

So Ms. Pihalik went back to her customers and Mr. Tolliver went to a
free terminal, and while the detectives looked over his shoulder he
scrolled through the previous day's rentals until he came to
larsen. But it was not jane; it was james. The card's user might
have hammered the S and the second half of the M into invisibility, but
the computer was not fooled, and had Britany Pihalik not been so
distracted, she might have noticed.

Mr. Tolliver seemed to think she should have, distraction of
line-out-the-door customers or no distraction. He bristled in righteous
anger, leaving Kate and Al to study the record. There was, however,
little to see except that the signature had been close enough to pass
at a glance.

As evidence, the faked car rental could have been more specifically
damning, but there was no doubt that it constituted a solid piece of
work. They had sat on it for too long, however, and could not justify
the additional hours of going through the videotapes of the external
security cameras in hopes of glimpsing a face. It was time to report in.

"REPORTING IN" QUICKLY E V O L V E D into "being
called on the carpet." The official disapproval of their
independent tactics--from lieutenant, captain, and deputy chief,
everyone, it seemed, but the chief of police and the mayor
himself--was indeed balanced against the quality of the evidence
they had dug up (in the minds and faces of their own
people--Marcowitz was not so easily mollified), and by hanging
their heads in meek (if mock) submissiveness while they continued to
thrust out in front of them the tangible results of their borderline
insubordination, they defused the wrath of officialdom to a
tongue-lashing none of them took very seriously. When it was over, the
higher ranks left, satisfied that the lieutenant could handle it from
here.

However, Agent Marcowitz remained, sitting in a chair slightly
removed from the police department personnel and saying nothing. The
Man in Black (actually a dark charcoal, Kate noticed, and very nicely
cut) dominated the meeting precisely by doing nothing, not even
shifting in his seat, until the official reprimand had run its course.
Then he uncrossed his legs, and the three remaining members of the SFPD
turned to him as if for judgment.

"We agreed that you would keep me in the loop at all times," he said.

"We phoned you as soon as we had something firm."
Kate's protest sounded feeble even to her own ears; far better to
have stayed silent.

"What do you propose to do now? If I may be allowed to ask."

"The videotapes of the rental lot need to be gone over, the car found and checked for prints."

"I've already sent agents to get that under way."

"Traynor's own history needs to be looked into, in case
this is the work of one of his victims, parents at the school, that
kind of--"

"We are assisting Detective Hillman with that line of inquiry."

"Which leaves the interviews of our own pool of suspects here."

"Suspects."

"Possible suspects, should I say? Nothing on any of them except opportunity."

"And an agreement with the philosophy of the group calling itself the Ladies."

"What philosophy? That some men are lowlifes and need to be
stepped on? I don't know too many people who would disagree, cops
included."

"Alibis," Marcowitz merely said, a cool word to let the air out of her heated digression.

"We were told that your people were taking over there.
That's why Al and I took the time to go hunting down the
car."

"The preliminary interviews are under way. I understand you yourself give Rosalyn Hall an alibi."

"That's right. I talked with her on the phone at about ten-forty Saturday night."

"Did she phone you?"

"I phoned her, returning her call. On her home number, not her cell phone," she added before Marcowitz could ask.

"Any reason to think she was actually at home when she took it?"

With an effort, Kate reined in her patience. "I heard the dog--all right, I heard
a
dog," she corrected herself before he did. "But no noises
to indicate she wasn't at home. I suppose it's conceivable
that she had the call forwarded to her cell number, but the delay in
ringing is usually noticeable. Does she have call forwarding on her
home phone?"

Marcowitz did not bother to answer. "What had she called you about?"

"Nothing, really. Just to ask if I'd gotten a manuscript
she'd left at the house, and to talk about how things were going.
Just conversation."

"At twenty minutes to eleven?"

"Roz is a night owl."

"So she arranged for you, a friend and investigating officer,
to give her an alibi on the night a man was attacked, wanting only to
talk about her Ph.D. thesis."

Put that way, the call sounded far too convenient for words, but
Kate could only shrug and say, "It's awfully elaborate. And
shaky. How could she know when I would call?"

"It wouldn't matter when you called, would
it?
If she was home at ten-forty, and she left immediately after you hung
up, granted she would have to move fast, but she could conceivably have
been present at the Traynor assault. The silent alarm was triggered at
eleven twenty-seven."