Night work (35 page)

DISMISSING THE TWO PATROLMEN to resume their centurion duties, the
detectives moved off to safer ground, a twenty-four-hour coffee shop
next to the freeway. Its garish color scheme, Kate had read somewhere,
was specifically designed to discourage customers from lingering over
their coffee.

It worked on five plainclothes cops as well as it did on the sales
reps and the families heading for Portland or Los Angeles. They
discussed briefly the odds that Mkele had been lying to them and that
she was somehow involved, decided that they had no evidence either way,
divided up the tasks of checking up on her story, and in twenty minutes
they were out the door.

In the parking lot Hillman, the older of the two San Jose
detectives, took Kate aside in that helpful and avuncular manner that
always made her jaw clench.

"Look, Martinelli," he began, "we weren't actually finished with Mkele."

"No? We had her answers, and she said she'd call us back with the other information."

"She's an ex-con. You have to push them. Always."

"Thanks for the tip, Hillman, but let's see if she comes across before we go back and push her around."

"It's just that you really can't be friendly with
a witness, especially a shady one. Like that business with the
handshake--what if she'd refused to shake? You'd have
looked like an idiot."

"Well, Hillman, I guess I don't mind looking like an
idiot. Better than actually being one. I'll let you know when she
calls." Kate stood her ground and waited for Hillman and the
others to get into their cars and drive away. Al leaned against their
car with his face turned away, so none of them but Kate knew that he
was grinning at the exchange.

When the others had left, Al went back inside to phone Marcowitz
from a ground line, for the added security. When he came out of the
restaurant, Kate watched him closely, trying to guess what the Man in
Black had said, but Al just walked along, head down either in thought
or in well-concealed anger.

"Well?" she asked when he was sitting beside her.

"They're doing the interviews."

"Ah. Well, we knew they'd take over eventually. What does he want us to do? Type up their field notes?"

"Not quite that bad. I told him I wanted to take another look at the Traynor crime scene, he said fine."

Kate suspected that it had not been quite such a simple exchange,
but she would not argue. She started the car and, without discussing
the matter, took the entrance for the freeway north and drove for three
miles. She then exited, circled under the freeway, and resumed the trip
heading south, back toward San Jose. After a mile, the sign for the
Safeway market where Mkele worked came up on the right, readily visible
from all lanes in both directions, instantly accessible from an exit
two hundred yards from the front doors. Kate kept her foot on the
accelerator, saying only, "I assume we don't need to see
the inside of the store."

"We could stop off and pick up some milk on our way
home," Hawkin answered. "If curiosity gets the better of
us." From the sound of his voice, that was not likely.

The factory where Lennie Traynor worked, lived, and had nearly died
was a seedy three-story cement-block cube dropped into a parking lot.
It was half a mile from the flight path of the low-flying jets, whose
exhaust had deposited black shadows on every upper surface. All the
grimy-windows on the lower floor had bars on them, and a scattering of
boarded-over windows on the upper floors testified to the accurate aim
of the local throwing arms. Traynor's room was on the southwest
corner of the top floor. The metal fire escapes on two sides did not
appear to have been extended down or even greased in decades, which
meant that entrance by Traynor's attackers had to have been
through the doors.

A new chain hung on the metal gate that a San Jose officer opened
for them. The original chain, with its cut link and the lock still
attached, was in the San Jose lab for comparison with the bolt cutters.
Kate drove through the gate and around the cube to pull in near the
five unmarked and two patrol cars that were parked at the side
entrance. She flipped her badge at the uniformed who popped out of the
door; the woman nodded and stepped back inside.

Traynor's two black-clad attackers had jumped him as soon as
he came out the side door on his rounds, firing the taser into their
victim's back and then, as soon as he dropped, cuffing him and
hauling him back through the door. He had fallen onto the edge of the
step, giving him the scalp wound that left drops and smears up the
steps and through the doorway, each drop now flagged and numbered for
the police photographs. In two places, feet had stepped into drops of
blood, and the lab was working on identifying the shoe by the scraps of
track left on the worn linoleum.

Traynor's keys had been found on the floor near where he lay,
dropped there after his attackers let themselves in. Their mistake had
been in assuming that Traynor had not set the alarm as he came out
through the door: The alarm set itself automatically every time the
door was closed, and sounded in the local precinct house if it was not
coded off within ninety seconds. The relatively sophisticated system
had been installed eight years earlier at the insistence of the
insurance company when intruders had snuck in twice while the night
watchman was off in the grounds. It had been a pain in the neck of the
local patrol under previous night watchmen, but Traynor never once
forgot to code
it
off, and the police had not responded to the factory alarm since he had taken over.

Al paused on the doorstep and looked across the parking lot at the chain link, razor-wire-topped fence and the street beyond.

"They must've been watching him, to get his rounds
down," he said. "Just not close enough to see him punch in
the code. From a car down the street it'd just look like he was
slow in putting the key in the lock every time."

Kate looked up at the inadequate bulb in the fixture overhead, and
agreed: At night, the subtle shift in the arm movements of a man,
particularly one wearing a heavy jacket and seen from the back, would
not be easy to catch.

They walked through the open door and into a familiar world of crime
scene investigation, flags and chalk marks and swags of yellow tape.
Fingerprint powder added its grime to all the likely nearby surfaces,
but it didn't look as if the intruders had left behind any prints
except that of Miriam Mkele on the cellophane wrapper of a piece of
butterscotch. Traynor's keys had given up only his own prints,
smudged in places by their rubber gloves.

Traynor had been dragged inside less than ten feet, just far enough
to get the door closed, leaving him well away from the window. Blood
from his scalp had formed a pool the size of a man's hand in the
place where he had lain until the paramedics arrived. Although two
shoe-prints outside held out some hope as belonging to the invaders,
the inside evidence had been tracked and smeared into uselessness
during the urgent process of saving Traynor's life. Crime Scene
personnel had done their best with sketches and photographs and
evidence bags, but truth to tell, a nice cold, obviously dead corpse
that everybody stayed well away from was much easier to work with;
here, the most they could hope for was that somewhere down the line
they would find traces of Traynor's blood on a suspect's
shoes.

Kate stood and read from the rough report she'd been given,
comparing the statements of Hillman and the reporting officers with the
scene before her. Everybody seemed to agree that Traynor had been
dragged into the office, turned onto his back, had a length of red
silk, light but strong and measuring fifteen by forty-nine inches,
twisted around his throat. The state of his fingernails and the marks
his boot heels had left on the floor showed that he had been conscious
enough to struggle, but there was no doubt he would have succumbed had
not the local patrol car happened to be bare minutes away when the
alarm call came, and had one of the attackers not happened to see the
marked car approaching. The attackers had fled, pausing only to kick
Traynor or bash him with the bolt cutters (in petulance, or rage, or a
last attempt at quick murder?) before escaping down the hallway toward
the main doors. No breach of the fence had been found, so it was
assumed the black-clad would-be killers had slipped back out through
the ill-lit parking lot and the wide-open gate while the patrol
officers were busy discovering Traynor. One of the patrol officers
noted that he had glimpsed a very clean, light-colored, late-model
four-door compact parked on the street a couple of blocks away,
noticeable because it was an incongruity in the area, and that when he
had driven past the spot after processing the Traynor crime, the car
was no longer there.

Kate and Al walked away from the relative bustle of the office where
the attack had taken place, through the echoing factory building. The
owner had closed the place for a couple of days to reassure the workers
that he cared, not so much for Traynor but for the safety of his fellow
employees. The two San Francisco detectives traced the route of the two
attackers where they had raced through the lower floor, taking a couple
of wrong turns that resulted in knocked-over equipment and piles of
paperwork and indicating that they did not know the building from
within. The intruders had finally reached the double glass doors that
faced the street. There one of them had paused to fling a handful of
nine mixed, cellophane-wrapped candies back into the entrance hall and
across the receptionist's desk. Now a scattering of flags showed
where they had landed: mostly on and under the desk, where they might
well have been overlooked as something the receptionist had dropped had
Hawkin not specifically asked Hillman about them.

The attackers had left no prints; they had made a careful
surveillance of their victim's habits; and they knew that there
was a backup escape route, if not its exact path.

"They're careful," Al said, voicing Kate's thought.

"What about that car?"

"San Jose's out canvassing the neighborhood, to see if
anyone in the area saw it. And they'll stick up a notice board if
they don't get anything, see if some passerby remembers it."

"Pretty anonymous vehicle," Kate remarked.

"You think deliberately?"

"If I were knocking off a guy, I sure wouldn't leave my own car around the corner."

"Rental, then? Clean, white, four-door?"

"Worth a try, don't you think?"

"The feds probably thought the same," Hawkin said repressively.

"Well, I guess we'll find out as soon as we start asking, if there's been someone ahead of us."

"You want to begin with the airport? Biggest car rental
around, I'd have thought. Of course, we'd more or less have
to tell Hillman what we were doing, it being his patch. And Marcowitz,
of course."

"Of course. But maybe we shouldn't waste his time until we've finished."

"That's what I like about working with you,
Martinelli," her partner said with satisfaction.
"It's the meeting of true minds."

With FBI involvement, any line of inquiry on the part of the local
forces ought to be directed by the feds. If, however, the local cops
didn't get around to mentioning some ongoing piece of their
investigation while it was actually being pursued, well, that was
understandable-- sometimes you had to go back and dot the
i's and cross the't's later. And if they happened to
find something that contributed to the case, and managed to run it down
before returning to their desks and dutifully reporting in, any
official reprimand would be more than balanced by their own
satisfaction--and that of their departmental colleagues.
Especially if that contribution was large enough. Solving the crime and
getting killers off the street was obviously the main goal, and they
would not do anything deliberately to compromise that, but it was
always nice when the overworked and under-equipped locals pulled off
something the big guys couldn't.

So their slow and circuitous route back to the Hall of Justice took
them into virtually every car rental place on the peninsula. Most of
the agencies said, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, that
they would draw up a list of cars matching their description and which
had been out the night before, and who had rented them, and get the
list to them in a day or so. The two biggest agencies at San Francisco
International, though, were both highly automated and eager to help,
and both offered to provide a printout. And no, there had been no one
else around asking for that information in the last day.

They drove out to the airport and picked up both lists, added them
to the growing stack, then retreated to a nearby restaurant to
replenish their energies with a drippy hamburger for Al and a blackened
chicken salad for Kate. They spread their papers out to look them over
as they ate.

It was a daunting pile, even for detectives well used to paper
chases. There were hundreds, thousands of white four-doors for hire in
the peninsula, and most of them were in circulation. Some of the lists
were handwritten and half legible; others gave every car in the agency
regardless of make and color and left it up to them to decipher the
identifying code. Some of the lists went back weeks; one was dated for
April, but of the previous year.

Kate sighed, turning over the cold remnants of her fries with her
forefinger, and decided to phone home. She got up to use the toilet,
tried the public phone, found the line busy, and came back to find
Hawkin digging into a huge construction that seemed to be equal parts
chocolate and whipping cream. She ordered a double espresso for herself
and thumbed disconsolately through the stack of papers.