anatomy read:
BITDRAFTY?
—
The official Departmental line, of course, was that vigilante actions of this sort were wrong, dangerous, and not to be tolerated. But there were as many cracks about frostbite within the walls of the Justice building as there were outside, and a cop only had to murmur the words “duct tape” to have the room convulsed.
Other actions had been attributed to the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, both in the Bay Area and across the state, but none were certain, since they lacked the hallmark humor. The police had no more idea who the Ladies were (or even if they were actually women) than they had in January. The obvious suggestion, that some of the “nuns” of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had decided to grow teeth, was investigated, but no links were found beyond the middle words in the two names and their clear common regard for irreverence. No fingerprints had been found on the duct tape, no identifiable evidence recovered from the crime scenes, the three notes were on paper sold by the ream in chain stores and generated by software and a computer and printer that half of the state could own. Even the billboard, as public an act as could be imagined, had been a fast strike involving prepainted sheets and wallpaper glue. All the police knew was that the Ladies struck at night, and that two of their actions had involved tasers.
And now a man with a possible taser burn on his chest lay dead.
Crime Scene agreed that, particularly as the rain seemed to have stopped for the night, it would be far better to leave the site until morning. Al arranged for the road to remain closed off and for the scene to be guarded from the depredations of the cameras, before the two detectives went to interview their only witness.
The jogger who had come across the body seemed to be just that, not the murderer returned to the scene to “discover” his victim. He even produced the stub from an airline boarding pass to prove that he had only returned that morning from a business trip. They thanked him and left, and then set off to the Larsen home, to make the announcement and see what they could see.
THE LARSEN ADDRESS WAS in South San Francisco, half an hour down the peninsula from the city and a different world. The big white letters on the hillside declared South San Francisco to be THE INdustrial CITY, a place dominated by San Francisco International and all the freight, crated and human, that the airport moved.
The Larsen house proved to be one of a thousand cramped stucco boxes thrown up after the war. Even in the inadequate illumination from their flashlights and one dim street lamp, the house showed every year of its half century. Weeds grew in the cracks of the walkway, the cover of the porch light had broken and been removed, and the paint was dull and beginning to peel. Al put his thumb on the bell, and after a minute of no response pounded on the door, but the house remained dark. A trip around the building with flashlights at the windows showed them merely the untidy interior of a tract house, so they split up, heading in opposite directions along the street to stop in at every house where lights still showed. When they met up again to compare notes, the information each had gleaned from the neighbors amounted to the same thing.
The Larsen family had lived here for at least ten years. James worked as a baggage handler at the airport, his wife, Emily, kept house. Their two kids were grown and moved away. His wife had recently left him, and the across-the-street neighbor he went bowling with, the only one who might possibly know where Larsen’s wife or kids were, was away on vacation, due back in three or four days. The one piece of information Kate could add concerned the Larsen car, a six-year-old Chevrolet sedan. DMV gave her the license number, and as they sat in the front seat of Kate’s car to write up their field notes, she put out a bulletin for the car. Then, since there was not a great deal more they could do at that time of night, and since there seemed to be no immediate reason to roust a judge out of bed to sign a search warrant, they went their separate ways through the dark and drowsing peninsula, and were both in their beds not so much after midnight.
A deceptively ordinary beginning to a far from ordinary case.
Chapter 2
ONE OF THE MEDICAL techs had talked. Either that, or the
James Larsen had a lengthy arrest record, though only two convictions: one for drunk-and-disorderly at the age of nineteen, and one five years before his death, for assaulting his wife. In the twenty-five years between those two convictions, Emily Larsen had been a regular visitor to the hospital emergency room, but had consistently refused to press charges. Only in recent years, when the law was changed to make spousal cooperation unnecessary for domestic violence prosecution, had Larsen been vulnerable.
Since then he had been careful. The police still came to his house every six or eight months, but they had not arrested him again until the end of February, when the beer binge that he had begun the day before fed into resentments real and imagined and was topped off by his anger over his favorite team’s defeat, leaving Emily bleeding onto the floor of the emergency room. He had been arrested and charged with attempted murder, and bail was placed too high for him to reach. Three weeks later the charges were reduced, to battery and assault, and a tired judge had sentenced him to time served, a year of probation, a hundred hours of community service, and marriage counseling. He then turned Larsen loose. Two weeks after that, a pair of SFPD homicide detectives were standing over his corpse.
Just before his release from jail, according to the neighbors, Emily had packed her bags and been driven off by a woman in a Mercedes; she had not been seen since. Or heard from: Emily’s few acquaintances did not know where she was, her sister in Fresno hadn’t spoken with her since early March, and their father, in a rest home near Fresno, neither knew nor was he interested.
When Emily Larsen had not shown up at her house the following morning, Kate had asked the phone company to preserve the records of the incoming calls for a few days, and then made out a request for a search warrant on the records for the Larsen phone. It was the previous month’s phone bill that gave the missing woman away. Four days before her husband was released from jail, Emily had made a telephone call to a lawyer’s office in San Francisco. Kate, working her way through the calls, heard the greeting “Law offices” and knew she’d found the wife. She identified herself, asked to speak with the partner who was representing one Emily Larsen, declined to be called back, and settled in with her heels on the desk to wait. She listened to the piano music of call-holding coming through the receiver, understanding that legal dignity required that a cop be made to wait. She’d done the same herself to lawyers. With the phone tucked under her chin, she sat tight and glanced through a stack of memos and Daily Incident Recaps that had been accumulating on her desk. The recaps, in addition to the usual list of attempted robberies, hit-and-runs, and sexual assaults, included the laconic description of assault by a chronic urinator who was proving a nuisance to passers-by—particularly those on bicycles. The memos included one decree (what Kate reckoned was the thirtieth such issued) that department personnel were not, under any circumstances, to make jokes about the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, or duct tape, or the color purple. Another memo was the announcement that an unknown group had been plastering up flyers seeming to advocate the extermination of all male children, which caused Kate to read it more closely and shake her head. She was looking at a third memo bearing a stern reminder concerning the cost to local supermarkets of the oversized plastic shopping carts favored by the homeless, when the music in her ear cut off abruptly and a woman’s voice spoke in her ear.
“Inspector Kate Martinelli?”
“That’s right.”
“Carla Lomax here. I believe we’ve met, at a fund-raiser for the teen shelter. I certainly know your name.”
And reputation, Kate thought. In fact, she’d counted on it. “Good, then you’ll know I’m not the bad guy here. I’m trying to reach one of your clients, Emily Larsen.”
“What makes you think—”
“She called this number on March sixteenth, a few days before her abusive husband was freed from jail. A day or two later, some woman came to the house and drove Emily Larsen away. Her husband has died. I need to talk with her.”
“What happy news.”
“I beg your pardon?”
