“With something other than hands,” Al added as he lifted back the collar of the man’s plaid shirt. Something had torn into the soft skin of the throat, chafing it raw as it did its work.
The man had blunt features, cropped hair, and the coarse bloom of long-term alcohol use in his nose. His belly was big and soft although his chest and upper arms appeared muscular where his shirt had been pulled away by the paramedics. He wore a jeans jacket but cotton-polyester uniform trousers, and a belt with a buckle declaring the man’s loyalty to Coors beer.
“Are his hands tied?”
Al tugged at the inert shoulder, which showed signs that rigor mortis was passing off, to reveal the man’s thick wrists. They wore a pair of regulation police handcuffs identical to those in Kate’s bag. Neither of them commented on the cuffs, but Al held the man’s torso off the ground until Kate had removed a fat wallet from the hip pocket of the pants, then eased the body back down until it was lying as it had been when Kate arrived on the scene.
“Not robbery.” It was Al’s turn to point out the obvious. A gold band dug deep into the flesh of the man’s meaty ring finger, and in his wallet were eighty-two dollars, a stack of membership cards to video rental parlors, a credit card, and a California driver’s license that identified the corpse as one James Larsen, with an address in the bedroom community of South San Francisco. A working man’s address to match his clothes and his hands, and somewhat out of the ordinary for a San Francisco homicide victim.
They patted down James Larsen’s pockets with care, since the rubber gloves both detectives wore gave no protection against the myriad of sharp and potentially lethal objects people carried around. Kate found a ticket stub to an action movie dated three days before, six coins, a used handkerchief, and the wrapper from a stick of beef jerky. No keys. Al slid a hand into Larsen’s left-side jacket pocket and pulled out three cellophane-wrapped pieces of candy: a lump of hard butterscotch, a flattened square of striped coconut chew, and a squashed wad of something red and soft. Mr. James Larsen, it would appear, had had a sweet tooth.
Hawkin dropped the candies into an evidence bag and stood up to let the rest of the team move in. The photographer took a few close-ups to go with his earlier shots of the crime scene as it had appeared before anyone went near the body, and the Crime Scene officers bent to their labors. Kate and Hawkin walked over to where the techs were leaning against their van, the smoke from their cigarettes mingling with the tang of eucalyptus in the cool night air. All four city employees ignored the calls of the gathered news media as if it had been the noise of so many plaintive seagulls.
“Any idea when the autopsy’ll be?” Al asked them.
“Might be tomorrow, more likely the next day. The morgue’s pretty crowded.”
“Let me know.”
“But I can tell you now what they’ll find,” the man continued.
“Clogged arteries, a bad liver, and strangulation,” Hawkin offered.
“A taser.”
“What?”
“A stun gun, taser, whatever you call it. One of those things women carry. It wouldn’t have killed him, but whoever did this used one to put him down.” The tech threw his cigarette on the pavement and ground it under his heel, blithely contaminating the periphery of a crime scene, then led the two detectives over to the body. He squatted and pulled the plaid shirt back again from Larsen’s strong chest. “That’s a taser burn,” he asserted, pointing to a small red area, and looked up to catch their reaction.
There was none. Both detectives kept their faces empty, and Al merely said, “I suggest you keep that theory to yourself,” casting a quick glance over his shoulder at the waiting reporters, and allowed the process of removing the body to go on.
Still, Kate made a note of what the tech had said before she followed Al over to where they had parked their cars.
“It looked more like a bruise to me,” she said firmly, as if saying so would make a bit of difference. Her partner grunted. “And really, even if it is a taser—”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Al remarked, and walked over to give the reporters what little he could. Or would.
The taser, if the mark on James Larsen’s chest was not bruise, birthmark, pimple, or the growth of some exotic contagion, would create a problem, because that was how the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, that source of sly jokes at school parties and embarrassment to mayors and cops, began life: with a taser.
The reign of the Ladies (quickly shortened by an admiring public to the LOPD, although they referred to themselves as merely the Ladies) had begun back in late January, when a lowlife named Barry Doyle was acquitted of statutory rape. Belinda Matheson, aged fifteen years and ten months, had gone cruising with some friends with a borrowed ID that looked very like her (hardly unusual, since it belonged to her older sister) and declared her to be twenty-one. Doyle was twice her age, although his boyish features had a vague resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio, and the combination of his cute face, his clever flattery, and his illicit booze had landed the teenager in Doyle’s bed. Her parents, apoplectic with worry by the time Belinda dragged herself home the next afternoon, furiously pressed charges, but Doyle had a good lawyer and drew an inexperienced prosecutor who allowed a jury that was predominantly male and exclusively unmarried or divorced. The combination of testimony—that Doyle had been seen to check Belinda’s ID, reassuring himself that she was no minor; that she had looked to be the person on the license (this bolstered by a blowup photo of Belinda in adult makeup and upswept hair); and most damaging of all, that she was by no means an innocent (this last from an ex-boyfriend who showed great promise for stepping into Barry Doyle’s sleaze-covered shoes)—conspired to produce a verdict that had Doyle, owner of six adult video parlors and a topless bar that the jury knew nothing about, crowing his victory over the forces of “disgruntled feminists and other human rights fascists” right there on the courthouse steps—and announcing that he was in turn suing the Matheson family for the “emotional, financial, and professional damage” he had suffered through their “cold-blooded deception.” He ended his impromptu press conference by looking straight into the nearest television camera and declaring, “Fair’s fair, Belinda.”
Shortly before midnight that same day, following a wild celebratory dinner, Doyle vanished somewhere between his car and his front door. He was discovered eight hours later by morning commuters, quite alive if spitting with rage, stark naked and spread-eagled across the window of a building under renovation. His genitals had been dyed purple (as could be seen from the cars that were soon at a complete halt on the freeway) and the duct tape that suspended him from the window frame ripped most of the hair off his wrists, ankles, and face, but most shocking (and delicious) of all was the revelation that underneath the purple dye, he had been tattooed. The phrase I SCREW CHILDREN was now an indelible part of Barry Doyle’s equipment, until such time as he was driven to submit to the pain of eradication, and the note duct-taped to his backside put the cap on the episode: fair’s fair, dick.
—
Oh joy, oh ecstasy, on the part of all the world that had never flirted with the idea of bedding an underage girl. And oh the discomfort, oh the uneasy shriveling felt by all society’s members (so to speak) who had. A thousand duct-tape jokes bloomed on late-night television, the color purple took on a whole new significance, tattoo artists became the heroes (and the suspects) of the hour. The Ladies instantly overtook their predecessors in the Only-in-San Francisco category, the gay/lesbian/bi/ and-a-few-straights protest group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In three days the Ladies had half a dozen fan Web sites, twenty designs of T-shirts for sale around the city’s tourist sites (all of them purple), and a hundred jokes about how many Ladies it took to tattoo a man. (A representative answer: None at all, if he’s a true Dick.) Even Doyle’s friends began to forget that his name was Barry.
Since then, the Ladies had struck twice more. Their most visible action was when a billboard went up, again overlooking the freeway and this time only five hundred yards from police headquarters, showing the face of a prominent local politician superimposed on a male with a naked child in his lap (the politician took an immediate extended vacation, considered by all a sure admission of guilt). Taped to the billboard’s access ladder was a note saying:
NAUGHTYBOY.
—
Their third strike was against a chronic flasher out in the Sunset, overcome by a taser-wielding duo and duct-taped, naked and face-forward, to embrace a metal lamppost on a very cold night. The note taped to his
