“Recently?”

“Last week. Do you think that could have been… whoever?”

“We’ll try to find out, Ms. Gilbert. Well, I don’t know that we need to keep you any longer today. Could we have a phone number, in case we need to ask you anything else?”

She gave them a list of numbers: her home number and her cell phone, her agent’s number and his cell phone, and was trying to think of anyone else besides her sister and her ex-husband when Al plucked the paper from her fingers and shooed her out the door. When it had closed behind her, the two detectives looked at each other.

“Whew,” said Al.

“That woman’s in the wrong business,” Kate agreed. “She’d make a fortune with a whip in her hand. Those boots alone would have a masochist squirming.”

“You think she…does?”

“I strongly doubt it. Her face looks like a schoolgirl’s. Mixed signals, you know? I think it’s just her idea of fashion.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed, Martinelli.”

“Not my kind of thing, Al,” she said evenly. Still, as she turned back to the Banderas files, she couldn’t help wondering how Lee would look with a ring in her navel…

ONE DAY PROVED TO be all they had before media hell broke loose. Sundays were generally a slack day for news, but the morning paper had the Banderas murder screaming across the front page:

SECONDSEXPREDATORKILLED

The article beneath the headline reviewed the full details of the Larsen and Banderas murders, only this time the reporters had both men’s history of crimes against women. The use of tasers to overcome the two men underscored the possible link with the “feminist vigilante group,” the LOPD, with which tasers were now firmly linked in the popular imagination. An adjacent article bore the eye-catching heading HATE crimes classification asked, and Kate read with growing amazement that a delegation of “prominent businessmen” had been to see the mayor the previous afternoon, asserting that since the Ladies’ attacks and the two murders had all been aimed exclusively at heterosexual males with light skin, the attacks should be classified as hate crimes and pursued with all the commitment that the City had come to demonstrate in its prosecution of gay bashing.

Kate put the paper on the kitchen table for Lee’s bemusement and left for the Hall of Justice, where she finished filling out as best she could the highly detailed VICAP forms for the FBI, asking if they had any crimes on the books that fit the profile of abusers, tasers, handcuffs, and including the possible link of candy. As Kate was reading it over, wondering if there were any more blank spaces she could fill, the telephone rang.

“Seen the paper?” Hawkin asked without preliminary.

“It tells everything except who done it,” she noted. “Why didn’t they call and ask for a comment?” It was the usual way reporters notified the cops that a story was coming, in the recognition that cooperation worked better in the long run, but there had been no such message waiting for them when they stopped in at the Hall of Justice the night before.

“New girl,” Hawkin answered. “Gung ho. We’d better get up to the condos early before the place is under siege. Meet you at the Hall, or at your place?”

“Why don’t you swing by here? Give me a chance to answer some of the messages.”

“Fine. See you in a bit.”

The messages were mostly from the media, and a few clearing up details in the Larsen case. Kate placed another call to the desk sergeant in Marin, suggesting that someone from the department might want to join them for an exchange of notes before the news reporters added “lack of interdepartmental communication” to their string of gibes. She left various numbers for the Marin detective to call her back, then trotted for the elevator.

The Marin detective rang them back when they were halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Inspector Martinelli?” the voice said. “Sergeant Martina Wiley here.”

“Hello Sergeant, thanks for calling me back.”

“I can guess what you want to talk about. I’m over here talking to a woman who lives upstairs from the Banderas apartment. I think you might want to join me.”

“Er. Do you have any idea what kind of car she drives?” Kate asked. There was silence for a minute as Wiley gave this odd question her consideration, then Kate heard the receiver being half muffled and through the barrier Wiley’s voice asking, “What kind of car do you have?” Kate could not hear the answer, but Wiley supplied it. “A red Porsche.”

“Okay,” said Kate with satisfaction. “What apartment are you in, Sergeant?”

“Number three-fourteen.”

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

The woman in apartment 314 did not look the type to drive a flashy car. Nor did the modern furnishings fit with the small woman dressed in jeans, a vastly oversized sweatshirt, fuzzy slippers, and plaster. The last item covered her left arm from knuckle to elbow, and half a dozen stitches had recently been removed from the still- swollen cut on her left eyebrow. That whole side of her face was yellow-green with fading bruises and she held herself stiffly, either from fear of causing pain, or from fear itself.

Kate and Al introduced themselves to Martina Wiley, who had answered the door with the air of a family friend and then took them across to the breakfast nook to meet the woman.

“This is Rachel Curtis,” she said. “Rachel, these are two detectives from San Francisco, Kate Martinelli and her partner, Al Hawkin. They’re investigating the murder of your neighbor Matthew Banderas.”

Rachel Curtis flicked a glance at Kate and then Al, but kept her attention on the woman who had taken on the role of savior. Kate was distracted for a moment by the contrast between the cop and the victim, who might have been handpicked to illustrate the word opposites. Wiley was big, black, strong, and bristling with intelligence and energy. Curtis was about five feet tall and thin to the point of anorexia, with dark brown chin-length hair, pasty white skin, glasses, and no more energy than yesterday’s pasta.

Kate shook herself mentally, and sat down in a chair across from the battered woman.

“Rachel was beaten and raped eleven days ago,” Wiley told them bluntly. “She never saw her attacker, didn’t recognize his voice. She was stopped in a parking lot by a man with a gun and a mask, who put a pillowcase over her head and drove her away. He raped her, dragged her out of the car, kicked her four or five times, and walked off.”

Kate and Al looked at each other, and Kate cleared her throat. “Did he say anything at all?” she asked the woman. Slow tears had begun to dribble down Rachel’s battered face, which Kate imagined had happened more or less continuously for the last week and a half.

“He said, ”Hold it‘ when I got to my car and then, “Get in the passenger seat.” And then later, when he’d… Afterward, he told me not to move. Then he smashed the windows of the car and banged it with something hard, and after that it went quiet. I was lying on some rocks or sticks that were hurting me, and it was cold, so when nothing happened for five or ten minutes I figured he’d gone so I started to sit up and pull the thing off my head and then he was there shouting and kicking me. I curled up again and put my arms around my head, and he stopped, and then after a minute he told me not to move at all, and if I did he’d kill me. And then he said something about nothing being mine, and that was all. I must’ve laid there for at least an hour, but when I finally pulled off that pillowcase he was gone and my car was there. The tires were flat and all the glass was gone and the body smashed up, but he left the key and I could get one of the doors open, so I drove to the nearest road and found a gas station and a phone.“

“What do you think he meant by nothing being yours, Ms. Curtis?” Al Hawkin asked. He had taken care to remain, literally and figuratively, in the background. Some rape victims could not stand being around men for a while, others found men more comforting than their possibly judgmental sisters. Rachel Curtis seemed oblivious of pretty much everything outside of her misery and Martina Wiley, and looked at him uncomprehendingly. Al tried again. “Can you try and remember his exact words?”

“They were, ”You don’t own anything,“ or, ”You don’t own everything.“ Yes, I think it was that: ‘You don’t own everything, you bitch.” And then I heard glass break again. I think he was smashing the headlights.“

“I see,” Hawkin said, and he did. They thanked the woman, apologized for bothering her, and walked with Martina Wiley out onto the third-floor covered walkway, where they could talk away from the victim’s ears.

“Sounds like Banderas?” the sergeant asked them. “I looked up his sheet after I saw the paper this

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