Night work (39 page)

This left the fourth wall, which was completely concealed by a
heavy, dark red velvet curtain that stretched from wall to wall and
ceiling to floor. She pulled the left edge away from the wall, saw that
there did indeed seem to be something other than blank wall behind it,
and found a curtain pull. She tugged at the cords, the drapes
obediently parted, and then Kate was stumbling back, badly startled.

For a brief but intense moment, she thought that she was being
attacked by a wild woman with blood on her teeth. She could almost
smell the blood, splashed around the woman in a pool, and then the
hallucination faded, leaving her to gaze in mingled amazement and
horror at the image before her.

The painting on the wall was enough to give a man nightmares. It
showed a woman of sorts, but this was a woman who would have caused a
playboy to shrivel, would have given pause to the most ardent feminist,
would have had a Freudian rapidly retracting that plaintive, worn,
masculine query concerning what women wanted.

For what this lady wanted was blood.

And had it, as Kate could well see. The deep blue, larger-than-life
female was wading through a lake of the stuff, splashing it around,
looking drunk with it. Kate recognized her instantly as the subject of
Roz's thesis, Kali with the necklace of skulls and the belt of
human hands, laughing her terrible pleasure at the decapitated head she
held up in one of her four arms, a bearded face with blue eyes and a
mole next to his nose, which seemed oddly familiar to Kate. Gentle
Jesus meek and mild would be eaten alive by the goddess, and Kate could
understand why the curtain normally hid her from view.

There were not as many prayers and thanks offerings in the two bowls
attached to her wall, either, clear indication that Kali was a bit
strong for most of the women who came here to free themselves from a
battering relationship. It would take most women some time to get in
touch with this degree of anger.

But if that was so, then whose slips of paper were these? They read only
Thank you Kali Ma
and
Be with us,
and were for the most part printed anonymously. Marigolds lay in
Kali's thanks bowl, mixed with a few still-fragrant narcissus, a
child-sized glass bracelet, a gold wedding band, and a Polaroid
snapshot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

And right at the bottom, uprooted by Kate's curious forefinger, a lump of cellophane-wrapped butterscotch.

Chapter 24

KATE SNATCHED HER HAND out of the bowl as if she'd been
burned, but she scarcely had time to contemplate the awful implications
of contaminated evidence before a noise came from behind her back. She
whirled around, her hand plunging of its own accord toward the butt of
her gun, but she froze when she saw the cluster of women in the doorway.

Diana Lomax stood just inside the room, taken aback at Kate's
sudden reaction. Behind her stood Crystal Navarro and a couple of the
other residents, with two young children. Crystal and the children had
quite obviously never seen the painting of Kali, because all three were
gaping at it, bug-eyed.

"Blessed Jesus!" Crystal blurted out. "I didn't know them curtains had anything--"

"Who did this?" Kate demanded of the shelter director.

"Did what?" Diana asked in confusion.

"That... thing on the wall. Who painted it?"

"That? It is a bit strong, isn't it? One of our volunteers asked if we--

"Who. Painted. It." Kate leaned forward, and Diana took a step back.

"Phoebe Weatherman. Carla's secretary?"

"We've met," Kate told her, not entirely accurately. "When did she paint it?"

"Not very long ago. January, maybe? Yes, it must have been
just after the first of the year, because her daughter-in-law Tamara
was killed by her second husband just before Christmas. Phoebe loved
Tamara like a daughter, far more than she loved her own son."

"Tamara." A woman of that name had appeared somewhere in the history of this convoluted case. Who... ?

"Yes. Tamara Pickford. A lovely, lovely person. She was one of
our first residents, nearly seven years ago. That's when Phoebe
began to get involved," she added.

"Phoebe," Kate repeated, and revelation opened in her
mind like a flower. Phoebe Weatherman, a physically strong woman with a
figurine of Kali the Destroyer on her desk, who four months ago had
been handed a whole world of pain, cause enough to hate the entire male
sex. Phoebe Weatherman, always in the background--how did the
Womyn Web site put it?--cloaked in invisibility? Who was more
invisible than a dowdy secretary? What better disguise for a vengeful
goddess to assume?

And that bearded head... "What was Tamara's
husband's name?" Kate asked sharply. She became aware of
Agent Marcowitz looking over the heads of the women, alert but not
knowing yet what had happened.

Diana thought for a minute before shaking her head. "It was
her second husband and I don't remember..." Then she
turned to crane her head at the hallway, looking past the women at a
figure who stood just out of Kate's line of vision, near the
front vestibule. "Carla?" she called. "What was the
name of Tamara's second husband?"

An instant of silence fell over the gathering, and then came a voice, clear and pregnant with meaning.

"His name was Lawrence Goff," Carla Lomax said, and took a step forward so she could meet Kate's eyes.

That was why the face on Kali's decapitated head looked
familiar: Larry Goff, the December victim, killed in a Sacramento hotel
by a woman dressed as a prostitute.

"Marcowitz," Kate began to shout, Stop her, Marcowitz,
but she got no further than his name before the knot at the door flew
apart in several directions at once. Crystal Navarro had abruptly
realized that the two young children were staring in fascination at the
naked, brutal, blood-soaked painting on the wall, and over their loud
protests she seized their shoulders to force them out of the room. A
split second later, Carla Lomax grabbed a couple of the women, shoved
them hard at Marcowitz, and ordered, "Keep him here."

And then the lawyer turned and fled.

The women rose up in fierce obedience against the agent, protecting
their advocate against this unknown male oppressor in the suit, just as
Crystal's two small charges came smack between them, and the
hallway burst instantly into a welter of struggling, shouting man,
women, and children. Kate lunged for Carla, came face-to-face with her
cousin instead, and spent five critical seconds wrestling with Diana
before need overcame caution and she flipped the director hard into the
pile of shrieking, outraged women (Marcowitz ending up on the floor
beneath them all) and waded through legs and over backs and out of the
chapel doorway. The front door had opened and slammed shut again before
Kate had made it into clear hallway; Carla's back was
disappearing around the corner by the time Kate worked the automatic
door latches and flung herself into the shelter's front yard.

Kate scrambled after the lawyer, who had kicked off her heeled shoes
to sprint along the pavement in her stocking feet. It quickly became
apparent that Lomax had spent more hours running the hills of the city
than Kate, and many more than Marcowitz, somewhere in the rear. Kate
wasted no breath in shouting; she merely ran, chin down and arms
pumping, gaining slowly and painfully, risking cars' bumpers at
crowded street corners, dodging kids with basketballs and homeless
women with shopping carts, pounding along the sidewalks to the shouts
of protest and anger and the encouragement of a pair of enthusiastic
prostitutes on their way to work who whooped and shouted, "You
go, girl!" as the two women flew past.

Where the hell was a cop when you needed one? she cursed silently.
Or the goddamn FBI? And why would good citizens ring 911 when the
neighbors had a loud party but not when a plainclothes cop was trying
her damnedest to run down a suspect?

The end came in a flash, more than half a mile from where it began.
Carla chose a street thick with commute-hour crowds, where she lost
ground breaking through the pedestrians as surely as if she had been
breaking trail through deep snow. She felt Kate closing behind her,
shot a glance behind and saw her pursuer too close, and shot to the
right to risk a desperate leap in front of a moving bus that would have
cut Kate off had Carla made it.

She did not. The bus was traveling slowly, but the inexorable force
of it hurled the lawyer into the air to smash against the side of a
parked car. She lay draped across the hood for a moment, then melted
down onto the ground and lay still.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Kate's breath had almost returned to
normal, Marcowitz had summoned uniformed cops from all over the city,
the paramedics had forced their way into the center of the chaos, and
Carla Lomax was still alive. Unconscious, and so she remained. Kate
stayed with her until the lawyer was taken through the doors of the
operating room, and then she paced up and down in the sterile corridor
while the surgeons worked.

The corridor was where Hawkin finally caught up with her.
They'd spoken a number of times in the four hours since Kate had
found herself standing over Carla Lomax's still form, and she was
quite aware of the case going on in her absence, but the dull meaty
thud of the bus hitting Carla's body, the inarticulate cry and
the uncoordinated flail of limbs had dominated every intervening moment.

"How is she?" were Hawkin's first words.

"Broken bones, her spine is okay, but there's cranial
swelling. They're trying to relieve it--she's been in
there a couple of hours. No idea what damage there might be, probably
won't know for a day or two." She ran a hand through her
short hair, feeling suddenly as if taking a step, even speaking, would
be more effort than she could face. Hawkin saw
it
and pushed
her into a nearby plastic chair. She shook her head in despair.
"If I'd just up and shot her she might be in better
shape."

"If you up and shot her, she might be dead," he pointed out. "How's your blood sugar?"

"What?"

"Food. Lee told me to tell you that lunch was a long time ago."

She tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.
"I want to crawl onto that gurney and go to sleep. Have somebody
put a sign on me so they don't roll me into the OR and cut
something off, would you?"

Instead, he bullied her to the hospital cafeteria, a place that
dispensed calories and caffeine around the clock. When she was looking
less gray, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheaf of at
least fifteen message slips. She groaned.

"I've been through them," Hawkin hastened to say.
"I made some of the calls while I was waiting to see the Man in
Black. Most of them are routine, though you might like to know that
Miriam Mkele phoned, to tell you that she might've handled a bag
of spilled candies at the register the first week of February, a
Wednesday or Thursday. What that tells us I don't know. The only
thing I couldn't deal with were the ten calls from Peter Mehta. I
phoned him back but he didn't want to talk to me, so I said
you'd get to him when you could. He said any time no matter how
late, but since that was a couple of hours ago he's probably left
half a dozen more messages by now."

"You get what it was about?"

"R02 Hall."

"Shit."

"She's called a news conference tomorrow morning, told
Mehta that she intends to tell the world that he and his whole
community burn brides."

Kate put her aching head in her hands, feeling the dry sandwich
she'd just eaten turning to stone in her stomach, and feeling the
world begin to whirl slowly around. While she'd been busy
stamping out one flare-up, behind her back a volcano had begun to
swell. "Shit," she said again. "Lee must be going
nuts. Do you want me to call Mehta? What time is it, anyway?
Midnight?"

"Not quite. It's eleven-fifteen."

"I was sure my watch had stopped. I want to stay around until she comes out of surgery."

"Do you need to wait here? Or we could go see Mehta, then come
back and check on her? He said he'd be up late."

"Oh hell, there's nothing I can do here. Let's go. But look, what did Crime Scene find at the shelter?"

"No prints on the candy, sorry to say, except the edge of your
finger. But the Kali painting was definitely done by Carla's
assistant, Phoebe Weatherman. And Weatherman's house is full of
the same kind of pictures."

Kate's brain began sluggishly to move. "She was also
active in the shelter--she was there for a while the night James
Larsen was killed. And she fits the description of Traynor's
bigger attacker. And even the woman who rented the car--with a
black wig and glasses..."

"Anyway,she'sskipped--I'vejustcomefrom
herplace,Crime Scene's taking it apart now. There's a
warrant out for her. Her daughter-in-law, name of Tamara Pickford,
wasn't actually killed by her ex-husband. She died
of--"

"An accidental overdose of pain pills, after her husband
violated a restraining order and left her with a broken arm and a
smashed jaw. I remember from the report on Goff. Damn it all, anyway.
Phoebe Weatherman," Kate said. "Set off by her
daughter-in-law's death. Why the hell didn't her name come
up in the Goff investigation reports?"

"A very convoluted set of name changes--Weatherman is the
woman's third name since she gave birth to the child who was
first husband of Tamara Goff-formerly-Pickford-formerly-Lopes."

"It wasn't Roz, then, after all." She did not know
how she felt about that, probably wouldn't know for some time,
but even then she was aware that the relief she felt was heavily
colored with shame, and that she would not be able to look at Roz Hall
for a long time without being aware of it.

"Certainly she wasn't directly involved in
Traynor's attack," Al confirmed. "She's been
far too visible the last few days."