Blood Ties (2 page)

She was a small woman, with the light bones of someone destined to stay slender. Her eyes were open. There was no expression in them, but there never was. Ellen didn't see any obvious wounds or ligature marks around her throat.

She found herself staring at the arm stretched out into the path, and then she realized why. There was a band on the wrist where the rainwater seemed to be beading differently. Ellen took a pair of latex gloves out of her jacket pocket and put them on. Then she reached out to touch the skin. It felt sticky. The murderer had probably used duct tape to bind his victim's arms together. In a week they would probably identify the brand, which probably wouldn't bring them any closer to catching the son of a bitch but at least would provide one more homely detail to add to their impression of him.

“You'll have to pardon me, Inspector Ridley.”

Ellen looked up and saw Allen Shaw, MD, Chief of Forensic Pathology for the City and County of San Francisco, standing almost directly above her. He was wearing a clear rain slicker over his brown suit and holding a black medical bag in his left hand.

She was surprised to see him because Dr. Shaw was not known to be a particularly zealous public servant. It was unusual to find him out this early on a Sunday morning, attending to a routine suspicious death. He had assistants for that sort of thing.

“All yours, Doc,” Ellen said, releasing her hold on the victim's wrist and stepping a pace back down the slope.

“Much obliged.”

Dr. Shaw frowned at her and crouched beside the body. He was a heavyset man in his early sixties, so that was a laborious process. He opened his bag, pulled on a pair of latex gloves and took out a fingerprint kit.

“You'll oblige me even further if you'll stick around long enough to take these up to my truck,” he said as he began inking the fingers of the dead woman's hand. “I'll hardly be a moment.”

The coroner's van was parked just at the edge of the bluff, and a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat was standing in front of the open rear door. She almost snatched the fingerprint card out of Ellen's hand.

Sam was still talking to the fisherman. When he finished he glanced in her direction and Ellen nodded toward her car.

“I think we've got a situation here,” she told him. “Shaw's down there. The first thing he did was take prints. They're being faxed in right now.”

“Since when can't they wait to print her at the morgue?”

“My point exactly. You check the missing persons sheets lately? I don't happen to recall seeing Reese Witherspoon's name on the list.”

Sam appeared not to have heard. He was staring out at the highway, where cars were crawling past and a group of about thirty onlookers had already gathered beyond the yellow police tape.

Some were just passersby, and some, the Fans, had probably heard a report over their shortwaves and come running. Their cars were curbed across the highway, pulled up on the muddy shoulder.

They looked the usual sort: mostly male, mostly young to midthirties, mostly giving the impression they had nothing better to do with their lives than be flies on the wall at every murder investigation since the Stone Age. They would hang around until the body was brought up, or until somebody got annoyed and went over to start handing out parking tickets.

Ellen glanced at them and then almost as quickly looked away.

“What do you think, Ellie? Did Our Boy get the door prize this time? You suppose maybe he killed somebody the world might miss?”

“Where's the photographer, Sam?”

“Say what?” He looked at her as if she had just lapsed into Norwegian. “He came with Shaw, so I guess he's down with our mystery guest.”

“I think I'll go tell him to take some shots of the crowd.”

“Why? You see a familiar face?”

“I don't know.”

“Woman's intuition?” He smiled, as if he had decided to indulge her in a whim, and then he turned to look back toward the trail down to the beach. “I'll see if I can scare him up.”

“And tell him not to announce himself, pretty please. Some people are camera shy.”

“I think he probably knows that, Ellie.”

As soon as she was alone, Ellen started to feel bored and then apprehensive. She glanced at the gray dawn sky and it occurred to her that she should probably phone Mindy Epstein, her roommate during their last two years in college, whom she was supposed to be meeting for lunch today to hear the details of her second divorce. Mindy was probably asleep in the arms of some new gentleman friend—Mindy had no gift for abstinence.

Ellen's parents had almost certainly gone out somewhere last night, probably until the small hours. They had a wide circle of friends and belonged to a number of clubs, and her mother was fervently sociable.

It was a Sunday morning and, except for fishermen, murder victims and cops, everyone was home in their beds. Even Gwendolyn was doubtless still asleep in her cage, dreaming of lamb chop bones.

Which constituted one more reason to resent the perpetrator, who had already started out on the wrong foot by leaving his victim on what amounted to a cliff face, where there was no room for a proper workup of the scene and where a nasty night could reasonably be expected to have scrubbed everything squeaky clean.

Ellen's taste in homicides ran to dimly lit walkups, where the bedroom carpet was matted with fiber evidence and the light switch was always smudgy with fingerprints. It all might end up as nothing, but it gave you hope and something to do, and you didn't have to stand around thinking about how clever this particular nut job was beginning to seem and how if you caught him at all it would probably be just dumb luck.

Ellen was reasonably sure he had killed at least twice before. There were at present two uncleared homicides of women, both apparently random and both what might best be described as recreational murders—someone's idea of fun—but there was nothing specific in their methods or physical circumstances to connect them. Nothing except a certain polish to both performances.

The first victim was three months ago, a seventeen-year-old hooker, but already beginning to be known to the vice squad, who worked the downtown hotels and had turned up in a bathtub at the Marriott. Somebody had stuffed the muzzle of a .22-caliber pistol about four inches up her rectum and then fired off two rounds, hollow points that disintegrated without hitting anything vital but had torn her insides apart so that she bled to death in seconds. No evidence of sexual assault and, needless to say, nobody heard the shots, nobody saw anything, there were no prints and no trace of the weapon, and the room hadn't been rented in three days. A “Do Not Disturb” sign was found hanging from the bathroom doorknob.

The murderer, who thereafter was referred to by Sam as “Our Boy,” couldn't have gotten off to a worse start because, as it happened, the victim was known to Ellen.

Four years before, while she was still in her first year with juvie, Ellen had arrested a thirteen-year-old named Rita Blandish for shoplifting at a gourmet food shop in North Beach. It was the second time in less than a week the manager had caught her at it, so he detained Rita in his office and called the police.

She was a dark-haired little thing, vaguely pretty and still on the innocent side of puberty, and she was clearly terrified. She sat on the chair beside the manager's desk, tears running down her face and her eyes wide with dread.

While her partner sat with the manager and filled out the complaint form, Ellen took Rita outside to their car.

Once she had the girl in the rear passenger compartment, which was as secure as any jail cell, Ellen climbed into the front passenger seat and twisted around to look at her prisoner through the clear plastic barrier.

“What did you steal?”

Immediately Rita began shaking her head, so fast she might have given herself whiplash.

“I didn't steal anything,” she almost shouted. “I was gonna pay for it.”

Ellen made a sound that was just short of an exasperated laugh.

“You know, you're not going to do yourself any good by lying, so let me rephrase the question. What did you steal?”

“Two cans of tuna fish.”

Instantly Rita began to cry again, and Ellen was left to wonder why any little girl who hadn't even had her first period yet would steal tuna fish. Candy, yes. Something fancy and expensive, sure. But not tuna fish.

She couldn't help herself. Ellen felt sorry for the little tyke.

“You know, it isn't going to be that bad,” she said. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen last August.”

And here it was October. As old as that.

“Well, nobody's going to assume that you're a career criminal at thirteen. Have you ever been arrested before?”

“No.”

“Then you'll probably only get a little probation. And when you turn eighteen your juvenile records are sealed. It isn't going to follow you through life.

“So, why tuna fish?”

“What?”

“Why did you steal tuna fish?”

Her question seemed to perplex Rita—not the question itself but why anyone would need to ask.

“You can go a long time on a can of tuna fish,” she said.

*   *   *

A little investigating cleared up the mystery of why the nutritional value of tuna fish might be important. While Rita was enjoying her first dinner at the Juvenile Detention Center, Ellen drove over to the address Rita had listed as home. It was a down-at-heel apartment building in the Mission District, and Ellen had to phone the owner, whose number was conveniently listed in the entranceway above the mailboxes, before she could get into Number 105.

There were the usual signs of recent human habitation—dishes in the kitchen sink, a sweater lying across the back of a chair in the only bedroom, et cetera—but the clothes closet contained only what one assumed was Rita's meager wardrobe and the bathroom had been pretty well cleaned out. There was an empty box of Playtex tampons in the wastepaper basket, but no other sign that the apartment was inhabited by a woman old enough to be Rita's mother, and evidence of any male presence was completely absent.

The refrigerator and the kitchen cabinets were almost empty of food, which explained why Rita had been stealing tuna fish.

At thirteen years old she had been left to fend for herself. What choice did she have except to steal?

“Mom took off,” was the way Rita explained things, the next morning. She didn't seem to regard it as anything like an unusual occurrence, so perhaps it had happened before.

“When did she do that?”

“Eight or nine days ago. I'm not sure. It was a Friday.”

“Where did she go?”

The only answer was a shrug.

“What about your father?”

But Rita just looked at her blankly, then said, “Mom had a lot of men friends.”

In the end Ellen talked the gourmet-food-store manager into dropping the charges, and Rita was classified as an abandoned child. She was put into foster care.

Nothing was ever again heard of her mother.

Thereafter, Ellen kept a loose watch on little Rita, and it turned out to be a sensible precaution. At its worst, foster care was little more than a racket, and Rita's first such home was pretty bad. Ellen got her out of that, and her second placement seemed to be a little better. At least, Rita wasn't complaining.

There was some trouble along the way, usually with boys or what passed among adolescents for recreational drugs. And then, the previous year, Rita simply disappeared.

*   *   *

And now she had turned up again, dead for probably a little less than twenty-four hours, crouched naked in a bathtub at the Marriot Hotel with a wide smear of dried blood trailing down the inside of her left leg from her anus.

Her face was turned to the right, as if the killer had twisted her head around, perhaps for the pleasure of watching her death agony. Ellen had recognized her at once.

It was too much. Ellen simply stood up and walked out of the room. When Sam followed her, he found her sitting on the corner of one of the twin beds, sobbing.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

It was a fair length of time before Ellen was able to answer him.

“No, I'm not all right,” she said, her voice ragged. “I knew that girl from juvie.” Her shoulders hunched in a despairing shrug. “Sam, if ever there was a kid who didn't get the breaks, it was her.”

Sam gave her about two minutes to settle down, and then he shook his head.

“We all get cases like that,” he said, wistfully. “I remember once…” And then his voice trailed off, as if whatever memory he was on the point of relating had suddenly engulfed him.

When he spoke again, his voice was almost grim.

“Ellie, very few people deserve to get murdered, but we're homicide detectives, not social workers. Injustice is our stock-in-trade. Now get back in there and tell me what you see.”

Ellen got up from the bed and did as she was told. She would be fine, she thought. Or at least okay.

But she promised herself that Rita Blandish would have her revenge.

*   *   *

Then, last month, a man in North Beach had taken his car out of the garage, noticed a bad smell and opened the trunk. There he found the body of a woman who had lived directly across the street, a saleswoman named Kathy Hudson with no known boyfriends, reported missing by her mother the week before. Her throat had been cut, very carefully, so that it took a while for her to die. There was minimal blood in the trunk, indicating she had been killed elsewhere, and the man who owned the car had just that afternoon returned from a two-week vacation in the Philippines. No suspects, no leads, no useful physical evidence.

Like everyone else, murderers sharpened their skills with practice, and both of these crimes were what Sam described as “quality work,” not the kind of slapdash performance you see in your garden-variety sex slaying. The odds of two such virtuosos operating in the same city at the same time were not very good.