The Art of Detection (40 page)

“That’s a soda spritzer, I think,” Kate told him.

“A gasogene, if memory serves. They tend to blow up on a hot day.” He put the thing down gingerly, examined the bone-handled jackknife sticking up from the mantelpiece, then touched the small embroidered shoe that had been nailed up to one side.

“He had a pouch of tobacco in that,” Kate said. “Only tobacco, as far as I could tell.”

“No hypodermic needles with cocaine in them?”

“Hey, I forgot about that.”
A self-medicating bipolar.
“No, we didn’t find any needles.”

He passed into the kitchen, running his eyes over the archaic fittings. “An odd thing to overlook. I’d have expected absolute verisimilitude.”

“Right. Well, maybe he had his drugs hidden in the cut-out pages of one of the books. We didn’t take them all off the shelves.”

She’d meant it as a joke, but to her alarm, Hawkin eyed the laden shelves speculatively. However, in the end he turned away to climb the stairs.

The bell in the hallway began to clatter and dance furiously in the silence, and Kate went to let Lo-Tec Freeman in. The crime-scene inspector held out a piece of paper. She took it, and he shouldered his way past her without a word, leaving Kate to puzzle over the sheet.

It was the DNA results of the blood found on the chair upstairs, a match to Gilbert’s blood.

“Thank you, Lo,” she said fervently.

He shrugged, his print kit already in his hand, no classic rock tunes being sung today: Humiliation deadened the songs. Not only had Lo-Tec missed the scrap of porcelain, but she had scooped him in the webcam business, and moreover, he had missed this hidden button. Which was fine with her, if it brought her results, but she didn’t want him permanently disgruntled.

“There was no reason to suspect this was here,” she told the back of his neck. He said nothing. “I didn’t even know about the webcam until late on Monday.”

He peered at the job. “I saw the hookup on the computer, I should’ve known.”

“Well, when you develop clairvoyance, Lo, you might put in for a raise.”

He grunted, but from the angle of his shoulders, Kate thought he was somewhat mollified.

His next grunt was one of disappointment. He brushed the rest of the frame to be sure, and lifted a number of prints, but said, “These’ll be the vic’s. The print on the button itself is nothing but smear, most likely from a glove. I’ll check these others and see, but don’t hold your breath.”

She thanked him and let him out, then worked the deadbolt handle a couple of times, thoughtful. If you had this kind of self-locking door, you probably would get in the habit of not bothering with the deadbolt unless you were going away for the weekend. Probably why builders stopped using them, to force people to attend to their security by the actual turn of a key.

On the top floor, she found Al in the doorway to the study, holding the photographs Kate and Williams had taken when they first arrived. The dried liquid in the bottom of the glass on the table had smelled like brandy, the contents of the marble ashtray all appeared to be pipe scrapings, the DVD in the machine had been the reproduction of a 1927 movie about, inevitably, Sherlock Holmes.

A name Kate was getting pretty sick of, by this point.

“It looks like he was sitting with a glass of brandy and a pipe,” she told her partner, “getting ready to watch this old movie, maybe to make notes about it—there’s a file in the cabinet full of notes about old movies, and his prints were on the glass, the pen, and the TV remote—when someone walked up behind him and knocked him out with this missing statue. He must have heard them because his head was turned slightly toward the door—the blow hit on his right temple instead of the side of his head. He bled onto the chair, but just a little—the perp probably grabbed a towel to wrap his head in. The killer cleaned up the pieces of the statue, except for one that ended up under the filing cabinet near the door. And as soon as it was dark, he put him in the car and drove him across the bridge.”

Hawkin dropped the photos onto the low table and sat down in the tufted leather chair. He reached back with his right hand to feel the chair behind his head. “Gilbert was six feet?”

“Just a little over.”

“I guess it’s possible. Anyone shorter, I’d wonder.”

Kate eyeballed the distance from Al’s skull to the chair, and nodded. “Anyone under about five eight couldn’t have bled on that spot, even if the perp managed to hit his head above the back of the chair. But I’d say Gilbert was just tall enough.”

Al put his shoes onto the edge of the table, then said, “Where are his slippers?”

“What?”

“He was found with bare feet. Was he the sort to sit around in a silk dressing gown, pajamas, and nothing on his feet?”

“There’s a pair under his bed on the second floor,” she remembered. “And maybe one in the closet. I’ll go see.”

The modern bedroom had no slippers. She trotted down the stairs to its old-time equivalent, and saw the down-at-heels pair she remembered on the floral carpet beneath the bed. In the armoire was a pair of more ornate Moroccan foot coverings, which she thought might go well with the dressing gown Gilbert had been found in. She touched neither pair, but went back up to Al, who was still in Gilbert’s chair, reading the reports of Gilbert’s death.

“There are two pairs in the bedroom downstairs. I’ll take them to the lab for prints. I should have caught that.”

“I have the advantage of looking at the scene with ninety-nine percent of the work already done,” he said, dismissing her self-criticism. “What about prints in here?”

“Mostly Gilbert’s, the others belong to the lawyer Rutland and some of the dinner group. Gilbert had them up here after the party in early January—the housecleaner wiped down all the woodwork once a month, and she’d done it the previous Thursday.”

“Any sign of disturbance from carrying him down the stairs? If he’d been wearing shoes, he might have scraped the wallpaper, but he wasn’t. You know, I wouldn’t think it easy to sling a dead weight of, what, one hundred sixty pounds across your shoulders and walk down two flights of stairs, but there were no signs of dragging, either here or on the body.”

“Which means we’re most likely looking at a strong, fit male. Probably a man,” she corrected, remembering Jeannine Cartfield’s build and grip. “I could do a fireman’s carry of one hundred sixty pounds if I had to, but not for long and definitely not down those stairs.”

“And there’s no blood here except for the chair back.”

“The fibers the ME found in the head wound might turn out to match Gilbert’s bath towels,” Kate mused.

“That would support an unpremeditated bashing. If so, the perp might have found sheets to wrap the body in so it didn’t pick up fibers from his car, but what about the wheelbarrow?”

“
If
he used one—those prints in the emplacement were not exactly definitive.”

Hawkin didn’t answer, since there wasn’t much to say on the matter. He flipped through a few pages. “What about the fragments of statue?”

“What about them?”

“You’d expect to find signs of them along the trajectory of the blow, but it looks like most of the pieces were between the chair and the door.”

“Except for the one behind the filing cabinet; the pieces were teeny, like sawdust. He could have transferred them to the carpet from his shoe, after cleaning up.”

“Any signs of cleaning up? In the broom or dustpan, the vacuum, the mop?”

He knew there were not. “He used rags or paper towels, like I do when I drop a glass on the kitchen floor.”

“And took the rags with him?”

“Since they’re not in the garbage can.”

Hawkin scowled at the crime-scene sketch, folded his reading glasses away into his pocket, and said, “Let’s go back to where he was found.”

THURSDAY traffic across the bridge was not as heavy as it had been the previous Saturday, and they drove underneath the northbound freeway and wound their way into the park. Kate turned in the direction of the one-way tunnel, no more keen on launching a car down the precipitous cliffside as a driver than she had been as a passenger. The signal light at the tunnel’s entrance showed red; they waited for the green, Kate thinking of the story’s narrator and his dashboard-denting trip through this same tunnel. The thing might be fiction, but the writer’s terror had been heartfelt.

Cars emerged from the tunnel’s end, and a couple minutes later, the light went green. This route wound among the park housing, artists’ studios, information center, and other buildings without signs; Kate’s thoughts again wandered to the story at the center of this case, and she shook her head ruefully.

“What’s wrong?” Al asked.

“Oh, I just keep catching myself thinking about that story as if it was an actual case. I was looking at those buildings and wondering which one Jack Raynor and his killer lived in.”

“Yes, I know what you mean.”

They kept to the left at the Y, passing the Nike missile site, then circled around the conference center and the path leading to the lighthouse, finally pulling in across from the entrance to the DuMaurier battery, at the top of the hill they had been required to hike up the week before.

The entrance to the gun emplacement was still roped off with yellow police tape, but from its sagging appearance and the fresh footprints within, more than one visitor had ignored its message and pulled it up to pass beneath. Fortunately, the padlock had been replaced on the door to the room where Gilbert had been found; Kate paused at the entrance to the open-ended concrete tunnel and shone her flashlight at the ground.

“They found the tread marks along here, but after a week there was no telling if they came from a wheelbarrow or a bicycle. It could even have been a jogging stroller—God knows there’s plenty of those in Marin.”

Hawkin walked to the other end of the tunnel, to the amphitheater-like circle where the gun itself had once stood. The hillside spilled down toward the sea; two men strolled along the cliff top going north, while a woman with one child on her back and a toddler in a stroller—a thick-wheeled jogging stroller—passed them headed south. The wind was unrelenting; off to the right, two bright kites strained hard against their strings.

Kate tucked her hands under her arms, wishing she’d brought a warm hat. After a while, Hawkin had absorbed everything the view had to tell him, and retreated down the tunnel. Kate followed, digging the padlock key from her pocket. The hasp sprang open with the ease of unweathered metal; the two detectives drew out their flashlights and stepped inside.

The smell of death was nearly gone, faded beneath the musk of damp. The floor had been vacuumed for evidence by the crime-scene team, but the old concrete walls were untouched, spalled and peeling. Kate’s beam caught on a drop of water, trembling on the tip of one of the nascent stalactites.

“He came at night,” Hawkin said. His voice echoed back at them from the hard surfaces.

“Most likely,” Kate agreed. Nobody would risk unloading a body in pajamas in broad daylight. Fog might have made a reasonable substitute for dark, but if Gilbert had died as they thought, on or around the twenty-third of January, the fog had not cooperated. Rain, yes, but the risk would have been considerable.

“What are the travel restrictions in the park at night?”

“There aren’t any restrictions,” Kate said, with a brush of memory from the idea of midnight skateboarders.

“So he could have driven up to the battery’s front door, carried the body in, dumped him, been away again in, what, five minutes?”

“Longer if the lock was still attached. He would’ve had to come here, break the lock open, go back for Gilbert, either carry or wheel him inside, then pull the lock shut again.”

“Let me have your car keys,” Hawkin said, and they went back to the entrance. She watched him walk to the car, open the trunk, then walk to the driver’s door and get in. When the door opened again, she noted the time on her watch. He walked briskly up the hill, ducking under the yellow tape and past Kate into the tunnel. At the door, he paused to work his flashlight back and forth as if using a pry bar, and after a reasonable expanse of time, pushed the door open.

He half-trotted back out the tunnel and through the trees to the car. Its trunk went up; Hawkin disappeared behind the raised trunk lid; the car bounced around a few times; and after a minute he reappeared, staggering out from behind the car with its spare tire balanced precariously across his back. Bent double beneath the awkward object, he plodded slowly up the hill.

Kate watched, suddenly apprehensive: A man who’d had a heart scare probably shouldn’t be hauling spare tires around. However, when he went past her he was not breathing with any particular difficulty, and when he came out into the tunnel again sans tire, he appeared neither winded nor in any discomfort. He pulled the door shut, hung the lock back in place and pretended to thumb the screws back into the wood, then trotted back to the car and jumped behind the wheel. Kate marked the time and walked down to join him.

“Just short of five and a half minutes,” she told him.

He got out of the car with a thermos in his hand, and led her over to the picnic table where the Coroner’s men had gathered that first day. The two detectives sat on the table part with their feet on the bench and their backs to the battery, looking across the hills that were the Golden Gate and the rich orange bridge that spanned it. Al unscrewed the thermos, poured the coffee into its two cups, and set the larger one next to Kate while he rummaged in his pocket for a packet of sweetener. A large bird rode the wind, tipping and turning to maintain itself over a spot on the ground far below.

Al leaned forward and cupped his hands around the steaming cup, blowing gently across its top. “Would you have noticed that the soil here is different from the rest of the headlands?”

“No. Maybe if I’d first seen the two sides from a boat.”

“When I was here on Tuesday, Dan Culpepper thought I should be educated about the headlands. So in between interviewing the residents, he lectured me on the history of the lighthouse, the difference between cannon and mortar, and the nature of Nike missiles. And he covered the ground. Two plates meet just offshore, the North American and the Pacific. The San Andreas Fault defines the coast. And right here? We’re sitting on top of a volcano.”