“It’s good of you to let her use it.”
Leila actually blushed. “Yes, well, I’ve been there myself, and she’s getting too old to live out of plastic bags.”
Kate opened her mouth to ask if Beatrice slept here occasionally, then closed it again. Time enough for questions that might compromise the insurance and zoning. She merely wrote out a receipt, pocketed the key, thanked Leila, and went back out to her car.
In the Homicide room, at her desk, on that Friday night, Kate sat for a long time and stared at the telephone. She did not want to pick it up. She wanted to go home and rub Lee’s back or watch some inane musical video or listen to Lee’s voice reading from a novel. She did not want to make these telephone calls because she was afraid of what she was going to learn, and when she learned it, she knew whom she would blame.
Kitagawa and O’Hara came in then, speaking in loud voices, and in order to avoid having to talk to them she picked up the receiver and tucked it under her ear. She began to look up the telephone numbers and then made her calls.
After the fifth call, a faint hope began to stir: Maybe she had been wrong. Alarmist. But the optimism was premature: At the seventh morgue, this one in Santa Cruz, they had a Jane Doe, Beatrice’s size, Beatrice’s age, with Beatrice’s hair and eye color. She’d been found four days ago up in the hills, by hikers. Dead at least three days before that. Not pretty. Sure, there’d be someone there all night.
Kate sat and rubbed her eyes, hot and gritty and wanting nothing but to close for a long time. Too late to phone Lee, let her know she wouldn’t be in? Yes, it really was. Lee used to sleep very little—four, five hours a night. Now she needed eight hours, or she ached. Sometimes took a nap. Why are you thinking about that? Kate asked herself. Christ, this is a shitty job.
Phones had been ringing on and off. Now Kate heard her name called, and she automatically picked up the receiver.
“Martinelli. Oh, Al, thanks for calling. Sorry to wreck your weekend. Yeah, she disappeared, but I think I found her. The Santa Cruz morgue. Yeah, I know. I’m going down to see her. Want me to call you from there? You don’t have to come. You’re sure? You promise Jani won’t hate me? Well, leave her a note, maybe you’ll be back before she wakes up. I’ll leave now. Right. Bye.”
It was like old times, driving a sleeping Al through the rain into the Santa Cruz Mountains. This time, however, their goal was not the forest site of three murdered children, their first case together a year earlier, but the sterile, temporary repository of one elderly woman.
When Kate rolled to a stop and pulled on the parking brake, Al woke up, ran his hands over his face, and bent forward to look at the windshield. “It’s deja vu all over again,” he commented.
“How about next year, come March, we arrange a case that takes us to Palm Springs or something?”
“I’ll put in a voucher for it tomorrow. Do you know where—”
“Through there.”
Into the cold, inhuman space that smelled of death, up to the body, leaning over the gray face: Yes. Oh yes: Beatrice Jankowski.
“I hadn’t realized how old she was,” Kate said bleakly.
“She had false teeth,” commented the morgue attendant. “Taking them out makes anyone look shriveled up. Is her family going to want her shipped, do you know?”
“I don’t know if she had a family.”
“We’ll hang on to her for a while, then.”
“Do you have a copy of the autopsy report?” Al asked.
“I don’t think so. You’d have to check with the investigating officer. I think that was Kent Makepeace. I can tell you it was homicide.” He reached down and turned Beatrice’s head to one side, revealing the damage beneath the clotted gray hair on the right side of her skull, between the ear and the spine. “Somebody hit her, hard.”
♦
TWENTY-FIVE
♦
Many of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste.
The mere fact that an identity had been given to a body in the morgue hardly justified rousting the investigating detective out of his bed at four o’clock on a Saturday morning. Even Al Hawkin had to admit that. So he and Kate found an all-night restaurant and ate bacon and eggs in an attempt to fool their bodies into thinking it was a new morning rather than a too-long night, and at six they made their way to the county offices. At 6:30, Hawkin succeeded in bullying an underling into phoning Makepeace. At seven o’clock, they were in his office being shown the case file.
“That’s right,” he was saying, fighting yawns. “Completely nude, no false teeth, not even a hairpin.”
“She wore several rings,” Kate commented.
“That’s in the path report. Couple of nicks on her fingers, scratches that showed where the rings’d been cut off her postmortem. Her hands were so arthritic, I’d guess he tried to pull them off and couldn’t get them over her knuckles, so he had to cut them. She was also moved around after death, a couple of rug fibers and marks on her legs, probably transported in a car’s trunk. Nothing under her fingernails but normal dirt—she didn’t scratch her attacker, no defense marks on her hands, nothing. About the rings, though.” He sounded as if he was beginning to wake up, and he took a large swallow of coffee from his paper cup to increase the rate of coherency. “We did a ground search, especially up and down the road. Among the crap they picked up was a ring. There should be a photograph here somewhere.” He dug back into the file, flipped through the glossy photographs of the nude woman sprawled in the leaves, gray hair snarled across her face, and pulled out the picture of a large fancy ring with a cracked stone. He laid it on the desk between them.
Kate peered at it. “It looks like one of hers. I’d have to ask her friends to be sure. Where was it?”
“Whoever dumped her pulled off the main road down this dirt road.” His finger tapped a long-range photo that showed Beatrice as a mere shape in the corner. “He couldn’t go any farther because of the gate, but you can’t see the place from the road. The ring was on the left side of the road going in, where it might have fallen when he opened the driver-side door. If it was in his pocket, say, and fell out. Of course, it could’ve been there for a week or two.” He sipped at his coffee, then added, as if in afterthought, “There was a partial on the ring, halfway decent. So let us know when you have prints on a suspect. Other than that, we didn’t find a thing. Wasn’t raped or assaulted, no signs that she was tied up, just a sixty-odd-year-old woman in fairly good condition until she ran into a blunt instrument.”
“The pathologist doesn’t seem to have much to say about the weapon,” Hawkin commented. He had put his glasses on to look through the file.
“There wasn’t much to say. No splinters, no rust or grease stains, no glass splinters. A smooth, hard object about two inches in diameter. Three blows, though the first one probably killed her. Could’ve been almost anything. What’s your interest in her, anyway, to drag you down here in the middle of the night?”
“It’s related somehow to the body that was cremated in Golden Gate Park,” Hawkin replied.
“No kidding? I read about that. And I used to think we had all the loose ones rolling around here.”
“We have our share. Can I have a copy of all this?”
“Sure. Here, you take any duplicates of the pictures. If you want copies of the others, let me know and I’ll have them printed. Let me go turn the Xerox machine on.”
Kate turned the car toward the mountainous Highway 17 and began climbing away from the sea. The morning traffic was light, the rain had stopped at some time during the night, and Kate drove with both eyes but only half a mind on the road.
“It was the newspaper story,” she said abruptly.