their deaths.
“Could it be a coincidence, that they both had a history of abusing women? A more or less random stalker?”
Al was shaking his head, not so much in disagreement as an expression of bafflement. “What’re the odds? A blue-collar baggage handler in his fifties who beats his wife in South San Francisco and a young hotshot software salesman with a bachelor pad and a habit of raping strangers?”
“We need to take a closer look at Matty’s victims. Maybe one of them has a brother who works at the airport.”
“Be nice.”
“Hey. Things happen sometimes.”
“I’ll hold my breath,” Al said sourly.
“We’re going to need to do all the airport interviews again, as well as follow-ups with all the people who worked with Banderas or lived near him,” said Kate, making notes.
“The women, for sure.”
“What about handing some of it over to what’s-her-name—Wiley? She seemed good.”
“If you think you can talk her into working with us instead of going it on her own, sure. She struck me as a one-man show. One-woman show.”
Til talk to her.“
“If she’s available this afternoon, you could drop me back at the software place, I could get started on those.”
“Might be better tomorrow,” Kate said. “I need to be back in the City before five. I’ve set up a couple of interviews on another case and I’d like to clear them up.”
“What case is that?”
“It’s something I’m helping Boyle with, while Sammy’s out.” And as their lunch arrived and they both dug in, Kate told her partner the sad story of Pramilla Mehta, concluding, “It’s probably just an accident, her silk skirt brushing against the kerosene stove. Like that woman in the camper van last winter.” One of San Francisco’s sizable population of transients, this one not strictly homeless although the roof over her head was attached to wheels, had been cooking up what investigators had originally suspected was a batch of drugs but had turned out to be supper, when either the stove malfunctioned or she had stumbled into it. The woman did not die, but she had spent many weeks in the burn unit wishing she had.
“And this is Boyle’s case?”
“He caught the call. I had a word with him this morning, told him I’d make a few phone calls for him.”
Hawkin knew his partner too well to be fooled by her casual tone. He fixed her with a stony eye. “How are those headaches of yours?”
“They’re fine, Al. No problem.”
He did not believe her. “See if you can get someone else to give Boyle a hand. You’re going to be too busy to do it justice.”
“I’m kind of committed, Al. And, I promised Roz Hall I’d look into it.”
“Roz Hall? What’s that woman got to do with the case?”
“That’s just it: I’d rather she didn’t have anything to do with it. She’s convinced that Pramilla’s death is a case of bride burning. I thought if I stepped in, it’d keep her from going on a crusade with the papers.”
“Martinelli, you only have so many hours in the day.”
“If things get too crazy, I’ll ask you to explain that to Roz.”
“Want me to write her an excuse slip, like I do for Jules?”
“Let’s not go overboard on this fatherhood thing, okay, Al?”
Chapter 11
“HOMICIDE,” THE PATHOLOGIST SAID to Kate, peering happily up at a set of X rays. “No doubt. See all that stuff just behind her right ear? Compression fracture. Made by something long and thick, like a piece of half-inch metal pipe or a fireplace poker, but not the sharp edge of the masonry hearth she was found next to. Nope, no way. Wrong angle, too. She’d have had to fall out of the sky onto it—with her arms at her sides—to get that angle of blow. She was hit, arranged, and set alight.”
“Homicide,” the arson expert declared, tapping lugubriously on the precise lines of his sketch. “The evidence is consistent with a scenario whereby the victim was rendered unconscious, the kerosene stove was raised and propelled across her supine form, then set alight. Note the path of the accelerant: Had she fallen directly into the stove, one would expect to see the deepest burns nearest the area onto which the kerosene spilled—the arm and upper torso had she hit the stove that way, along with a fan along the path of the spill. However, instead of that we see the body lying at approximately a right angle to the spill, and underneath it. In other words,” he said, relenting, “she went down, then the stove went down but perpendicular to her fall. And before you ask, yes, she could conceivably have moved after the fire began, and repositioned herself, but considering the head injury I would say she was unconscious when the fire started.”
“Murder,” Kate said to Al, tossing the file temptingly onto the car seat next to him. “Somebody whacked her, laid her out to make it look like she’d hit her head on some bricks, and then kicked the stove over to burn the place down. Actual cause of death was smoke inhalation, but she’d have died of the burns or the head injury.”
“Murder,” repeated Hawkin, putting away the photographs they had picked up from the lab and taking up the file portrait of the victim, angling it to catch the fading light. “A pretty little thing. She doesn’t look much older than Jules.”
“She wasn’t. That’s the photo her father had taken back in India when Peter Mehta’s inquiry letter first arrived. She was about fourteen.”
“Mail-order brides, in this day and age. So who did it?”
“The husband sounds borderline retarded with a temper that’s had the police out twice, the sister-in-law’s a stone bitch, and Peter Mehta himself is a businessman who looks for results. And the girl wasn’t pregnant a year after he’d bought her for his brother.”
Hawkin shook his head, dropped the photo back into the file, and slipped his half-glasses into his breast pocket. “You still want to get involved with this?”
“I told Boyle I’d give him a few hours, like this business of getting the reports while he’s in court, and I’ll go along with him to the Mehta house this evening. I know we’ve got Larsen and Banderas, but that’s it at the moment. That gangbanger case is solved, we’re just waiting for him to show his face again, and there’s not a hell of a lot more I can do on last month’s drug dump. It’s dead.” This was closer to outright lie than exaggeration: a homicide detective was never without work. Still, the urgency of open cases varied considerably, and in recognition of this unhappy fact of life, Hawkin did not challenge her.
“Just don’t let that Hall woman give you a hard time about it, okay?”
“She’d give me a harder time if I ducked out of it.”
“ARE YOU SAYING THE girl was murdered, Inspector Boyle?” Peter Mehta asked in disbelief. It was an hour later, and he reached over and turned on the desk lamp as if to throw light on more than their faces. The window in his study fell instantly black.
Mehta was not what Kate had expected of a man who bought his brother an underaged wife from an Indian village. She wasn’t quite sure what exactly she had expected, but it wasn’t someone so very…
American. His features were Indian, yes, and his clothes slightly more formal than she imagined the usual Californian executive wore at home. And the house itself was somehow ineffably foreign—the air scented with exotic spices instead of the usual stale coffee and air freshener, the furniture larger and ever-so-slightly more opulent, the colors more intense. Like the difference between a plain black dress on a skinny woman and a designer dress on a fashion model; hard to say where the difference came in, but it was clearly there.
Even Mehta’s voice was faintly foreign as he addressed Tommy Boyle and, at his side as silent partner, Kate. Not so much an accent, she decided, as the feeling that his parents might have had accents. A rhythm, perhaps, that became more pronounced under stress. Such as now.
“Is that what you are telling me, Inspector? That the death of my brother’s wife was a murder?”
“It looks that way, Mr. Mehta,” Boyle told him.
“My God. And in my own home. Who would want to do something like that?”
“Did you have any visitors during the day, that you know of?”
