Night work (19 page)

"Has anyone ever contacted you, inquiring about Banderas?"

"No." And, her prim expression added, she would not have told them had they asked.

Hawkin thanked her in his warmest fashion, which made no impression
at all on her disapproval. As he and Kate left, he glanced at his watch.

"Too late for lunch?" he asked, sounding hopeful.

"Didn't you eat?"

"I had a late breakfast. I don't really eat breakfast at
home these days. Jani turns green if she's around anything but
dry cereal and herb tea before noon. Morning sickness--though I
don't know why they call it that, since it lasts most of the
day."

"Let's go eat, then."

It was coffee that Al seemed to crave even more than food, since
Jani's hormones had abruptly found the merest whiff of the stuff
instantly nauseating. He seized the cup as soon as the waitress had
filled it, drank half of it down, and sat back with a sigh of
contentment.

"Is Jani okay other than morning sickness?"

"She's fine. She's even gaining a little weight,
though I don't know how since she never seems to eat. She went in
yesterday and heard the baby's heartbeat. Said it sounded like a
bird's."

"I'm glad for you both. For all of you."

"Jules said to say hi, by the way. So," he said in an
abrupt change of subject, "how do we tie these two bastards
together?"

Two men who lived their lives miles apart, both literally and figuratively, brought together by the means of their deaths.

"Could it be a coincidence, that they both had a history of abusing women? A more or less random stalker?"

Al was shaking his head, not so much in disagreement as an
expression of bafflement. "What're the odds? A blue-collar
baggage handler in his fifties who beats his wife in South San
Francisco and a young hotshot software salesman with a bachelor pad and
a habit of raping strangers?"

"We need to take a closer look at Matty's victims. Maybe one of them has a brother who works at the airport."

"Be nice."

"Hey. Things happen sometimes."

"I'll hold my breath," Al said sourly.

"We're going to need to do all the airport interviews
again, as well as follow-ups with all the people who worked with
Banderas or lived near him," said Kate, making notes.

"The women, for sure."

"What about handing some of it over to what's-her-name--Wiley? She seemed good."

"If you think you can talk her into working with us instead of
going it on her own, sure. She struck me as a one-man show. One-woman
show."

Til talk to her."

"If she's available this afternoon, you could drop me
back at the software place, I could get started on those."

"Might be better tomorrow," Kate said. "I need to
be back in the City before five. I've set up a couple of
interviews on another case and I'd like to clear them up."

"What case is that?"

"It's something I'm helping Boyle with, while
Sammy's out." And as their lunch arrived and they both dug
in, Kate told her partner the sad story of Pramilla Mehta, concluding,
"It's probably just an accident, her silk skirt brushing
against the kerosene stove. Like that woman in the camper van last
winter." One of San Francisco's sizable population of
transients, this one not strictly homeless although the roof over her
head was attached to wheels, had been cooking up what investigators had
originally suspected was a batch of drugs but had turned out to be
supper, when either the stove malfunctioned or she had stumbled into
it. The woman did not die, but she had spent many weeks in the burn
unit wishing she had.

"And this is Boyle's case?"

"He caught the call. I had a word with him this morning, told him I'd make a few phone calls for him."

Hawkin knew his partner too well to be fooled by her casual tone. He
fixed her with a stony eye. "How are those headaches of
yours?"

"They're fine, Al. No problem."

He did not believe her. "See if you can get someone else to
give Boyle a hand. You're going to be too busy to do it
justice."

"I'm kind of committed, Al. And, I promised Roz Hall I'd look into it."

"Roz Hall? What's that woman got to do with the case?"

"That's just it: I'd rather she didn't have
anything to do with it. She's convinced that Pramilla's
death is a case of bride burning. I thought if I stepped in, it'd
keep her from going on a crusade with the papers."

"Martinelli, you only have so many hours in the day."

"If things get too crazy, I'll ask you to explain that to Roz."

"Want me to write her an excuse slip, like I do for Jules?"

"Let's not go overboard on this fatherhood thing, okay, Al?"

Chapter 11

"HOMICIDE," THE PATHOLOGIST SAID to Kate, peering
happily up at a set of X rays. "No doubt. See all that stuff just
behind her right ear? Compression fracture. Made by something long and
thick, like a piece of half-inch metal pipe or a fireplace poker, but
not the sharp edge of the masonry hearth she was found next to. Nope,
no way. Wrong angle, too. She'd have had to fall out of the sky
onto it--with her arms at her sides--to get that angle of
blow. She was hit, arranged, and set alight."

"Homicide," the arson expert declared, tapping
lugubriously on the precise lines of his sketch. "The evidence is
consistent with a scenario whereby the victim was rendered unconscious,
the kerosene stove was raised and propelled across her supine form,
then set alight. Note the path of the accelerant: Had she fallen
directly into the stove, one would expect to see the deepest burns
nearest the area onto which the kerosene spilled--the arm and
upper torso had she hit the stove that way, along with a fan along the
path of the spill. However, instead of that we see the body lying at
approximately a right angle to the spill, and underneath it. In other
words," he said, relenting, "she went down, then the stove
went down but perpendicular to her fall. And before you ask, yes, she
could conceivably have moved after the fire began, and repositioned
herself, but considering the head injury I would say she was
unconscious when the fire started."

"Murder," Kate said to Al, tossing the file temptingly
onto the car seat next to him. "Somebody whacked her, laid her
out to make it look like she'd hit her head on some bricks, and
then kicked the stove over to burn the place down. Actual cause of
death was smoke inhalation, but she'd have died of the burns or
the head injury."

"Murder," repeated Hawkin, putting away the photographs
they had picked up from the lab and taking up the file portrait of the
victim, angling it to catch the fading light. "A pretty little
thing. She doesn't look much older than Jules."

"She wasn't. That's the photo her father had taken
back in India when Peter Mehta's inquiry letter first arrived.
She was about fourteen."

"Mail-order brides, in this day and age. So who did it?"

"The husband sounds borderline retarded with a temper
that's had the police out twice, the sister-in-law's a
stone bitch, and Peter Mehta himself is a businessman who looks for
results. And the girl wasn't pregnant a year after he'd
bought her for his brother."

Hawkin shook his head, dropped the photo back into the file, and
slipped his half-glasses into his breast pocket. "You still want
to get involved with this?"

"I told Boyle I'd give him a few hours, like this
business of getting the reports while he's in court, and
I'll go along with him to the Mehta house this evening. I know
we've got Larsen and Banderas, but that's it at the moment.
That gangbanger case is solved, we're just waiting for him to
show his face again, and there's not a hell of a lot more I can
do on last month's drug dump. It's dead." This was
closer to outright lie than exaggeration: a homicide detective was
never without work. Still, the urgency of open cases varied
considerably, and in recognition of this unhappy fact of life, Hawkin
did not challenge her.

"Just don't let that Hall woman give you a hard time about it, okay?"

"She'd give me a harder time if I ducked out of it."

"ARE YOU SAYING THE girl was murdered, Inspector Boyle?"
Peter Mehta asked in disbelief. It was an hour later, and he reached
over and turned on the desk lamp as if to throw light on more than
their faces. The window in his study fell instantly black.

Mehta was not what Kate had expected of a man who bought his brother
an underaged wife from an Indian village. She wasn't quite sure
what exactly she had expected, but it wasn't someone so
very...

American. His features were Indian, yes, and his clothes slightly
more formal than she imagined the usual Californian executive wore at
home. And the house itself was somehow ineffably foreign--the air
scented with exotic spices instead of the usual stale coffee and air
freshener, the furniture larger and ever-so-slightly more opulent, the
colors more intense. Like the difference between a plain black dress on
a skinny woman and a designer dress on a fashion model; hard to say
where the difference came in, but it was clearly there.

Even Mehta's voice was faintly foreign as he addressed Tommy
Boyle and, at his side as silent partner, Kate. Not so much an accent,
she decided, as the feeling that his parents might have had accents. A
rhythm, perhaps, that became more pronounced under stress. Such as now.

"Is that what you are telling me, Inspector? That the death of my brother's wife was a murder?"

"It looks that way, Mr. Mehta," Boyle told him.

"My God. And in my own home. Who would want to do something like that?"

"Did you have any visitors during the day, that you know of?"

"I am certain my wife would have told me. She is not in the
habit of letting strangers into the house while I am away."

"But friends?"

"Women friends, sometimes, yes. But hers, not the
girl's. She was allowed only to invite friends while I was home.
We had a small problem once with Laxman becoming disturbed by one of
her visitors, and so she saw her friends in the evenings and weekends,
or out of the house."

"And you were not at home that day, Mr. Mehta?"

"It was this time of evening--no, a little earlier. We
had not yet eaten dinner, but yes, I was home. Having a drink here in
my study while my wife cooked."

"And your brother?"

"Upstairs in his room. At least, he came down from there
when... I saw him come down the stairs when I came through the
house to show the fire department where to go."

"And the children?"

"The younger ones were in their rooms, watching television. My
son Rajiv was at the kitchen table doing his homework. He was the first
to see the fire, and he shouted at my wife. She ran in here to get me,
and I telephoned 911. But I told all this to a dozen people the other
night."

"We're just confirming our notes, Mr. Mehta. Do you mind if we take a look at the place where Pramilla died?"

"Yes, certainly. You were here the other day, were you
not?" he asked, looking from Boyle to Kate and back again.
"Forgive me, there were so many people here, the police and the
fire department..."

"I was here, yes. Inspector Martinelli was not."

"Of course. Please, come this way."

Mehta led them out of the office, which was just inside the front
door, and back through the house, past a formal dining room and an
adjoining closed door that gave off the fragrance of exotic spices and
the mundane sounds of running water and dishes clattering. Mehta paused
to switch on the lights, and a garden sprang into view. They stepped
out of a sliding glass door onto a brick patio surrounded by a patch of
lawn and some unimaginative shrubs. Patio and lawn were scattered with
heavy cast-iron garden furniture, a child's tricycle, several
dismembered dolls, and a soccer ball. A door with a curtained window in
its upper half stood to their right, an entranceway to the breakfast
area and the kitchen beyond.

In sharp contrast to the fragrant kitchen, the garden stank of smoke
and wet ashes and a faint trace of burning flesh, a smell which no one
who had worked with a charred corpse ever forgot. Yellow crime scene
tape was festooned around the shrubs, everything in sight had a thick
coating of gray ash, and one whole half of the garden looked as if it
had been through a hurricane, the plants flattened, smaller flowers
uprooted by the force of the fire hoses. Kate circled around a chaise
lounge with mildewing cushions and stepped down from the bricks onto a
concrete driveway that ended abruptly at the source of all this
devastation, the remnants of the burnt-out shed where the child-bride
Pramilla Mehta had died.

It looked to have been a shoddy structure compared to the
substantial bulk of the house, and it had burned fast and
hot--judging by the heavy charring on the wooden fence ten feet
away that had nearly gone up as well. A pan that looked like a shallow
wok lay buried under the fallen roof, and a set of three metal kitchen
canisters lay flattened, either by heat or under the boots of the
firemen. Preservation of a crime scene was never high on the fire
department's list of priorities.

"This was a sort of outdoor kitchen, as I understand it?" Kate asked Mehta.

"I had it built for her," he answered. "Two women
in a kitchen is not always easy, and my wife, Rani, complained that the
girl was becoming difficult. Always underfoot, wanting to use the stove
to cook her own food--although she was not a good cook and it was
not necessary, as the family eats together. In the interest of harmony,
we needed a separate area for the girl."

"Why didn't you build a proper structure? Why a plywood shed with a kerosene cook stove?"

Mehta sighed and ran a hand over his face. "I must have been
asked that question fifty times in the last few days, to the point that
I now ask it of myself. The insurance people are the most insistent,
and the building inspectors. I can only say that it seemed a logical
idea at the time, to put up a strictly temporary structure--it was
a kit, from a gardening supply shop--and furnish it the way the
girl was used to. She came from a very poor background, the sort who
cooks over a cow dung fire and dreams of the day when she could have a
kerosene cook stove and a refrigerator proudly displayed in the living
room with a doily across the top. I wasn't about to have an open
fire out here, and I didn't want to run electricity into a shed,
but I thought the stove a safe compromise. The entire project was my
brother's suggestion, in fact, and it did serve to calm the
waters. Until this."