them to jail: no problem.
But damn it, Erasmus was different. She could not shake the image of him as a priest, but it wasn’t even as simple as that. She had, in fact, once arrested a Roman Catholic priest, with only the mildest hesitation and no regrets afterward. No, there was something about Erasmus—what it was, she could not grasp, could not even begin to articulate, but it was there, a deep distaste of the idea of putting him behind bars. She would do her job, and if necessary she would pursue his arrest to the full extent of her abilities, but lying in bed that Tuesday morning she was aware of the conviction that she would never fully believe the man’s guilt.
Well, Kate, she said to herself, you’ll just have to dig deeper until you find somebody else to hang it on. And with that decision, she threw back the covers and went to face the day.
Her hopeful determination, however, did not last the morning. When she arrived at the Hall of Justice she found two notes under the message clip on her desk. The first was in Al Hawkin’s scrawl, and read:
The other had been left by the night Field Ops officer:
At five minutes after eleven, Kate was on Twenty-ninth Avenue, looking at a row of pale two-story stucco houses with never-used balconies and perfunctory lawns. Number 982, unlike most of its neighbors, did not have a metal security gate in front of the entrance. It did have a healthy-looking tree in a Chinese glazed pot sitting on the edge of the tiled portico. When she pressed the doorbell, a small dog barked inside, twice. She heard movement—a door opening and a vague scuffle of footsteps above the noise of traffic. The sound stopped, and Kate felt a gaze from the peephole in the door. Bolts worked and the door opened, to reveal a slim woman slightly taller than Kate, her graying blond hair standing on end, her athletic-looking body wrapped in a maroon terrycloth bathrobe many sizes too large for her. Kate held out her identification in front of the woman’s bleary eyes, which were set in rounds of startlingly pale skin surrounded by a ruddy wind-roughened forehead and cheeks. Ski goggles, Kate diagnosed.
“Inspector Kate Martinelli, SFPD. I received a message that you have information pertaining to the cremation that occurred in Golden Gate Park two weeks ago. I hope this isn’t a bad time.”
“Oh no, no. I was up. The friend who was watching my dog just brought her back. Come on in. Would you like some coffee? It’s fresh.” She turned and scuffled away down the hallway, leaving Kate to shut the door.
“No thank you, Ms… ?”
“Didn’t I leave my name? No, maybe I didn’t. I’m Sam Rutlidge. This is Dobie,” she added as they entered the kitchen. “Short for Doberman.”
Doberman was a dachshund. She sniffed Kate’s shoes and ankles enthusiastically and wagged her whip of a tail into a blur, but she neither jumped up and down nor yapped. When Kate reached a hand down, Dobie pushed against it like a cat with her firm, supple body, gave Kate a brief lick with her tongue, and then went to lie in a basket on the lowest shelf of a built-in bookshelf, surrounded by cookbooks. Her dark eyes glittered as she watched them.
“That’s the calmest dachshund I’ve ever seen,” said Kate.
“Just well trained. Sure you won’t have some?” She held out the pot from the coffeemaker. It smelled very good.
“I will change my mind, thanks.”
“Black okay? There isn’t any milk in the house, none that you’d want to drink, anyway.”
“Black is fine. Do I understand that you’ve been away, Ms. Rutlidge?”
“skiing. I’ve been in Tahoe for the last couple of weeks, I got back after midnight last night. It was stupid to call at that hour, I guess, but somehow you don’t think of the police department as working nine to five.”
“The department works twenty-four hours. Some of us are allowed to sleep occasionally. How did you hear about the cremation?”
“I was reading the papers. I’m always so wired when I get in after a long drive, especially at night, there’s no point in going to bed, since I just stare at the ceiling. I make myself some hot milk, soak in the bath, read for a while, just give myself a chance to stop vibrating, you know? So anyway, I went through my mail and then started leafing through the newspapers—the neighbor brings them in for me—and I saw that article about the body being burned, the day I left.”
“You left for Lake Tahoe on the Wednesday?”
“Early Wednesday. I like to get out of the Bay Area before the traffic gets too thick.”
“You didn’t see any news while you were at Tahoe?”
“I was too busy.”
“So you read about it at—what, one or two this morning?”
“About then. Maybe closer to three.”
“What made you think to call us?”
“Well, the first papers were really general, and aside from the fact that it was so close to here, I didn’t really think about it. I mean, I don’t know any homeless people.”
Kate made some encouraging noise.
“Then for a couple of days, there wasn’t anything, or if there was, I didn’t see it—I wasn’t reading very carefully. Then on Monday, there was another article, with a picture, and as soon as I saw the man, it all came back to me.”
“Which man was this?”
In answer, the woman stood up and went out of the room. The dog raised her sleek head from her paws and stared at the door, attentive but not concerned, until Sam Rutlidge came back with a section of the paper, folded back to a photograph. She laid it on the table in front of Kate and tapped her finger on the bearded man who was standing on a lawn in front of about twenty other men and women, reading from a book.
“Him. I saw him coming out of the park, not far from the place where they… burned the body the following morning. I saw him Tuesday morning. And he seemed really upset.”
“What time was this?”
“About quarter to ten. I had an ten o’clock appointment and I was running late because of a phone call, so I was in a hurry. I usually go up a block to the signal or down to Twenty-fifth to get onto Fulton, but I was in such a rush and it would’ve meant turning the car around and there was a truck down the block, so I just went straight down to Fulton and turned left as soon as I could.” She glanced uncomfortably at Kate the defender of law and order. “I’m a careful driver,- I’ve never had a ticket. Looking back, I know how stupid it was, to shove my way in when the traffic was thick and the pavement was wet from the fog, but as I said, I was in a hurry and not thinking straight. I cut it kind of close, and one of the cars slammed on its brakes and honked at me as I moved through his lane to the outside lane.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kate said. “I’m not with the traffic division.”
“Yes, well. It was stupid. I wouldn’t have hit the car, but I did scare him, and he went past, shaking his fist out the window at me. And then I saw that man.” She pointed toward the newspaper. “I noticed him because he seemed to be shaking his fist at me, too, but as I went by, I could tell he wasn’t even looking at me. He’d have had to turn his head to see my car, and he hadn’t; he was looking straight ahead.”
“What was he looking at?”
“Nothing, as far as I could tell. He was coming out of the park on one of the paths, not quite to the pavement, and he was holding that big stick of his, shaking it, sort of punching it into the air as he walked along.”
“You’d seen him before?”
“Oh yes, he’s a regular in the park. We call him ‘the Preacher.”“
“ ‘We’ being…”
“There’s a group of us who run three times a week and then go for coffee. We tend to see the same people.”
“Did you ever talk with him?”
“The Preacher? Not really. He’d nod and wave and one of us would call hi, but nothing more. He struck me as
