and confusion and dread all pushed at her, and useless self-criticism, but above all came sorrow, for the loss of such a thing of beauty.
Laxman Mehta had been found in an alley behind a bar in the Castro.
Dead.
Strangled.
And wearing handcuffs.
Chapter 13
THE FADING COLORS AND images of the dance she had just seen jostled in her mind with the reality of what Kate was seeing. It was night here, too, the alley dark and filled up with flitting, shifting shadows, and there were the uniformed guards of the city’s peace, moving about the alley as if it was a narrow stage depicting gritty, urban life. Her imaginary song of the city was as ominous as any of the oboe’s notes, and the setting considerably uglier. All it needed was a bloody knife sticking out of the alleyway.
Kate shook her head to clear it of fantasy. No knife here, no theological speculation about virgin goddesses, no costumes and beautiful sets. Just brutal death, and a crowd of people. The ops center seemed to have pulled out all the stops on this one, and called in everyone from foot patrol to the lieutenant. Most of the personnel were standing around with nothing to do, since a scene had to be worked in sequence. Press photographers snapped away at the teams leaning against the wall and laughing, and she sent a uniform over to have the technicians take their waiting out of sight. Then Kate went forward to look at the body.
A person would never know that this had been a beautiful male creature. (“Black am I, and beautiful” echoed in Kate’s ears in painful contrast to the swollen-tongued, dark-faced figure at her feet.) Between the distortion and suffusion of the strangulation and the postmortem trauma of being (apparently) dragged and kicked, the only thing Laxman Mehta looked like was dead.
She did not even bother to pull back the remains of his shirt to look for a taser burn. It was possible that an experienced pathologist in a brightly lit morgue would be able to pick out the difference between one slightly red area and another, but Kate couldn’t, and certainly not in a dark alley.
The flash of cameras and a raised chorus of voices from the street made her look around to see Al Hawkin letting himself through the screens Kate had ordered put up. Nothing like a body behind a Castro district leather bar to pique the interest of readers over their morning coffee.
“You must’ve driven like a maniac,” she greeted Al.
“Got lucky with traffic. Was the press here when you arrived?”
“Yeah, but the foot patrol had them under control. No scene contamination except for the guys who found him.”
“Talked to them yet?”
“They’re inside with the patrol. I told him to get them some coffee. Kitagawa caught this one. I guess he’s the one who called you?”
With the possibility of a serial killer on their hands, word had been spread throughout the Bay Area that any dead male who had been strangled, showed taser marks, or had a history of abuse against women should be brought to their attention. She and Al had decided to keep the tenuous link of candy in the victims’ pockets to themselves for the moment. Leaks were all too common, and it was good to sit on one mark of the killer—if mark it was.
“Yeah. I told him we’d assist. He said he’d get Crime Scene started here, then go tell the family and seal the guy’s rooms until they can get over there.” Al dropped his voice further. “You look at the pockets yet?”
“The ME did. Didn’t find any candy exactly, but he found a little plastic bag of something that looked like seeds and stuff.”
“Seeds? Like sensemilla, you mean?”
“More like caraway or something—and some little colored thingies mixed in with it. Like those sprinkles you put on top of kids’ birthday cakes, you know?”
Al shrugged his shoulders. “Doesn’t sound much like caramel chews and chocolate bars to me, but we’ll see what the lab says. Are they about finished here?”
“I think so.” Kate signaled that the body could be bagged and taken away, and walked with Al toward the kitchen entrance of the bar. “Al, one thing. You didn’t meet him, but that was one gorgeous young man when he was alive.”
“Why, Martinelli, I didn’t know you cared.”
“I’m not interested, Al, but I’m not blind. I remember thinking at the time that he’d cause a riot in a place like this.”
A stranger might be excused from thinking there was already a riot going on inside. It occurred to Kate that the insulation in the walls and windows must have cost a pretty sum; from the outside all she had heard was the muffled hum of a beehive with an underlying thudding sound of a beating heart. Inside, Al had to shout in her ear to be heard.
“Is Kitagawa still here?”
“He’s gone to notify the family,” she shouted in return. “He said he’d bring back a photo.”
The bar was just what the Christian Right had in mind when it referred to the hellfire sins of San Francisco, Sodom-by-the-Bay. Had one of their straight-ace photographers made it inside the door, he could have shot a random roll that would have scared the socks off Middle America and made them join in fervent prayer for an earthquake along the San Andreas Fault.
Kate, though, had no problems with the place. Were it not for the stink of sweaty males with booze and controlled substances oozing from their pores, she might even have enjoyed it, if for nothing more than the display (using the word in more than one sense) of black leather fashions and the impressive creativity of the human male when it came to threading sharp metal objects through parts of his anatomy. Put one of those gigantic car-lifting magnets in the ceiling and switch it on, she reflected, and half the men here would slap up against it, spread-eagled like flies on a windshield.
“What are you grinning at, Martinelli?” Al yelled in her ear. She just shook her head and pushed forward toward the bar.
There were two men working, expertly banging down full glasses and change with one hand and scooping up empties and money with the other, bantering at the top of their lungs with the customers and singing occasional snatches of music with the recorded cacophony belting out of the speakers. Kate, the only woman in the place as far as she could see, leaned against the corner of the polished wood and waited for the nearer bartender to approach. When he did, she flipped open her badge holder to identify herself and in one smooth movement the man’s hamlike hand shot out and folded the ID shut and back into her palm before anyone noticed it.
He leaned across the bar at her. “You want to shut the place, Martinelli, or you want to talk to me?”
Kate drew back to study his face and realized that she knew him—or at least, she’d met him. She thought.
“Dimitri?” The man who had passed through her kitchen some months before, working on some project with Lee and Jon, had left her with the impression of a retired wrestler in a tweed jacket, not this slab of muscle glued into a garment that was more than half missing. He had also been lighter by about six ounces of surgical steel, some of which Kate had to deduce by the shapes of the hoops and bumps under the sleek leather. He grinned at her with perfect white teeth and pulled up the top of the bar to let himself out. Nodding amiably at Hawkin behind Kate’s shoulder, the bartender paused to swat a willowy figure on one half-protruding and nicely shaped buttock and, when his victim whirled around, Dimitri jerked his thumb in the direction of the huge mirror in back of the bar. The shapely man extricated himself from his companions and made for the service side of the bar, leaving Dimitri to push his way through the crowded room with Kate and Al Hawkin on his heels.
The office was also heavily insulated, and a relief. He waved them to a tight circle of half a dozen chairs and continued on through a narrow door, leaving it ajar so he could talk.
“You’re here about that boy in the alley?” he called to them.
“You know anything about it, Dimitri?”
“Only that two of my customers stepped out for a breath of air and had the shock of their lives. Your nice patrolman took them home, by the way—one of them couldn’t stop crying and began to need his asthma inhaler. I have their address for you.”
The sound of running water stopped, followed by a soft pop followed by a slick rubbing noise. Dimitri came
