High fog rode the treetops and obscured the upper reaches of the world’s most famous bridge, transforming it into a mere string of lights held up by stubby towers. A clot of fog settled across the roadway and then swept on, and when it lifted, they saw the cluster of official vehicles.
The coat Kate had worn for the relatively mild night down in the center of town was completely inadequate against the damp gale rising up from the sea. The yammer of voices and radios could not drown out the heavy pounding of the surf and the noise of the wind ripping through the cypress and pine trees. A foghorn groaned on and off; a nearby eucalyptus crackled with the brisk passage of air. Kate could also hear a noise like sobbing—but it
Fortunately, this body hadn’t been stripped. The victim, like James Larsen, even had his wallet. At first glance, it was about the only thing the two men had in common. At first glance.
MATTHEW BANDERAS HAD BEEN a fit and successful thirty-two-year-old man who had given a lot of attention to his appearance.
Now he was lying in a heap at the side of the road like a sack of discarded garbage, down the hill from the Legion of Honor museum, where he had been found by the two teenagers out to enjoy the solitude, the lights of the bridge, and each other. Matthew Banderas wore a suit that had cost more than James Larsen made in a month, with another month’s salary on his feet. Two years’ worth of Larsen salary was parked a short distance up the road, with a vanity plate reading matman. There was not even any physical resemblance between the two men: Banderas was little more than half Larsen’s age, and had it not been for his surname, Kate would have taken him for Italian or perhaps half-Greek, for his skin was only faintly swarthy, his expensively styled hair thick and Mediterranean black. Nothing at all like Larsen.
Except that Matthew Banderas had a pair of police handcuffs on his wrists.
And a taser had left its mark on his flat stomach, just below the rib cage.
And he had been strangled to death.
In the left-hand pocket of his expensive jacket Kate found a wrapped chocolate bar, still soft with the fading warmth of Banderas’s body. She dropped it into an evidence bag, and held it up thoughtfully.
Hawkin watched as Banderas was loaded up into the van, and rubbed his chin unhappily. “This is not good,” he said. “This is really not good.”
Kate could only nod. The moment she had seen the handcuffs she knew they were in grave trouble. They were now dealing with a serial killer, which aside from its own urgency would mean complicated, painstaking work under the full cacophony and glare of a media circus. She stood and shivered as she looked out over the Golden Gate, at the dark sea that lay between the heights occupied by the museum and the Marin headlands on the northern shore, and she became aware of the first gathering of news reporters on the crest of the road behind them.
“I’m surprised the TV cameras aren’t here already,” she said bitterly, “Guess it’s too late for the eleven o’clock news.”
Hawkin heard the dread in her voice, and knew all too well the reason for it. From the day they had been made partners, he new to the City and she new to the job, they had been faced with one high-profile case after another: the world-famous artist Vaun Adams, the renowned lesbian radical Raven Morningstar, Al’s own stepdaughter’s kidnapping—all made national, even international headlines. By now the press had only to hear the name Martinelli and they came baying. More than once she had thought about changing her name, coloring her hair, and going back into uniform for a nice anonymous foot patrol beat. She figured, though, that if she did she would be sure to stumble on Jimmy Hoffa’s skeleton, or the president of the United States shooting up in an alley.
“Look,” Hawkin said abruptly. “You don’t need this. Let me get one of the others in on it.”
It was tempting, very tempting, but after a minute Kate shook her head. “It’s too late. I’m already involved— they won’t leave me alone.”
“Sure they will. I can ask—”
“Al? Leave it. I can’t let them rule my life.”
“Okay,” he said. Both of them knew he had enough authority to shift her off the case; both knew he would do so if things got too crazy. He signaled that the techs could bag up the body and take it away. As he and Kate turned to look at the two teenagers in the back of the police cruiser, the boy trying to act manly as he comforted his girlfriend, whose endless whimpering was getting on everyone’s nerves, Hawkin said, half to himself, “I don’t know whether to hope this guy Banderas has a history of wife beating, or hope he doesn’t.”
MATTHEW BANDERAS DID NOT have a history of spousal abuse.
Matthew Banderas had a history of rape.
Chapter 6
THE MURDER MADE THE papers in the morning, but although the articles speculated on the possible links between this victim, James Larsen, and the lighter pranks of the LOPD, they did not yet have the key link of the criminal history of the two murdered men. It would only be a matter of time, however, and with that knowledge riding on their necks, the two detectives threw themselves at the case. Early on Saturday morning they met up in the Hall of Justice, to get the search warrants under way and to track down their latest victim’s past.
Banderas had only been arrested once, shortly after his twenty-sixth birthday. For that he had stood trial, been found guilty, and served just under three years. The light sentence had been a result of his plausibility on the stand, and was further reduced by his spotless behavior in the low-security prison. Still, neither detective believed that the one rape was his only instance of aberrant behavior.
“How many rapists do you know who started when they were in their mid-twenties?” Kate asked Al skeptically, and indeed, when they began to dig, they found that Banderas had been closely investigated for three other rapes since his eighteenth birthday, all of them let go by a lack of evidence the district attorney found adequate enough for conviction. The one time he had been caught was seven and a half years before.
Hawkin shook his head. “He was a very clever boy. He took souvenirs—the victim’s underwear—but he either destroyed them or hid each one. Assuming he was behind all of these.”
In addition to the three for which Banderas was chief suspect, there was a whole string of unsolved rapes, three of them clearly related by place, time, and technique, two others with more tenuous links. Eight times over the last seventeen years some unidentified predator had waited for a lone woman to come out of a convenience store at night, forced himself into her car at gunpoint, driven to some dark place, raped her, and left her naked, bound, and missing her underwear. He always wore a mask and gloves.
None of the series had taken place while Banderas was incarcerated.
“Why didn’t anyone catch this bastard?” Kate asked incredulously.
“No forensic evidence, and you can’t lock a guy up on a similar MO. The one conviction, the woman bit him on the face and the mask came off. She identified him at the trial. But because he didn’t finish up like he usually did— he dumped her out in the hills, didn’t take a souvenir, didn’t tie her up—there wasn’t much point in going for the whole series. And he wore a condom, so there wasn’t even any DNA.”
Only two of the unsolved rapes had taken place since Banderas came out of prison. As Hawkin had said, the man was cautious.
“He never hurt any of the women beyond the rape. Though that’s bad enough,” he hastened to say, “but even a couple of the victims said he was ‘polite.” Seems to me a strange way to describe a guy who’s just raped you.“
“Do you suppose he’d have let the next woman to see his face go free?” Kate asked him.
“Not if it cost him another spell in prison. But someone has taken that choice out of his hands and put the problem on our desk.”
“So you think there’s someone out there taking care of the bad guys?”
“Doesn’t it look like that to you?”
“No chance of a copycat?”
“The taser and cuffs were described in the paper, but they all just said ‘strangled’ without giving details. And they certainly don’t have the candy in the victim’s pockets. I wouldn’t have even thought of it as evidence with Larsen, but with this victim, it looks like it is.”
“Banderas didn’t really look the sort to carry a chocolate bar in the pocket of an expensive suit, true, but I don’t know that I’d count it as a clear mark of a serial.”
