Night Work

of this? And did Roz need to be quite so graphic, even loving, in these descriptions of gore and destruction?

Perhaps that was the point: that even an ordained minister with a pet dog named Mutt, a weekly salary, and a mortgage could feel that urge, primal and terrible.

With a convulsive shudder Kate shoved the entire thesis together and back in its box. She felt trapped by a visualization of what this group of vigilantes—selective terrorists—could do if they took this stuff seriously. Would they begin gutting men next, instead of a nice tidy strangulation? Hacking off body parts for Kali to wear? or— Christ!—eat?

She drained her glass, considered and rejected a refill, and, knowing she’d never get to sleep with those images crowding into her mind, went in to the television. An old movie, she decided—if she could find one without gore, abuse of women, or a woman taking revenge. Which left out Jon’s collection of Bette Davis films, and half the suspense movies. She was faced with Jon’s musicals or Lee’s science fiction, and whereas the latter often involved wholesale slaughter, the former induced in Kate the very desire to commit it that she was trying to avoid. Even Men in Black had a downtrodden woman whose husband gets his due. To say nothing of reminding her of Agent Marcowitz.

In the end she fed an old Peter Sellers Pink Panther movie into the player, and fell asleep on the sofa before it was through.

BY THE CLEAR LIGHT of a far too early morning, it was difficult to justify the night’s heebie-jeebies as anything but overwork and an overactive imagination. After all, none of the corpses had been mutilated and there was no sign of escalation into mass slaughter. The Ph.D. thesis Roz was writing might have some link with the hit list victims, but it was, as Roz herself had said and Kate had to admit, an academic investigation, not a vigilante manifesto.

Still, Kate could not shake the image of the warrior-goddess wading in a pool of men’s blood, that “immense power that exults in the destruction of men” loosed on the world. (How did Song put it? “Lovely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.”) Kate did not want to read the rest of the pages, but she knew she would, and that night, after a day spent in painstaking and excruciatingly slow telephonic investigation, she picked up the typescript again, warily.

It appeared, however, that the worst of Roz’s flight of fancy (if that was what it was) had been confined to the beginning, and the author now set about demonstrating just how the worship of goddess figures might have been transferred over to the cult of Yahweh. Roz took a passage in the Gilgamesh epic where the goddess Ishtar “cries out like a woman in travail” bemoaning her destruction of her people, for “are they not my own people, whom I brought forth?” and compared it with Yahweh’s cry “like a woman in travail” in the Book of Isaiah. She then set about building on the common theme throughout the Old Testament (which Roz consistently called the Hebrew Bible) of God’s wrath overflowing, the furious arm of a vengeful God turned against his faithless people, only to be drawn back before complete destruction could descend.

And this is the point, Roz asserted, at which God and goddess are one, that God’s love—often using a word based on the Hebrew for womb—is love “as of a mother for the child of her body.” God could no more destroy his— or her—people than a mother could cease to love a child she had given birth to.

All very heavy stuff, and although Kate didn’t exactly feel a headache coming on, she found herself hoping that she would, so she would have an excuse to stop reading. It soon became obvious, however, that the bulk of the tome’s latter half was made up of the highly technical material of pure thesis, heavily footnoted, concerned with alternate translations, parallel meanings, the problems of something called a hapax legomenon (whatever that was), and the minutiae of dating texts and text fragments. Kate leafed through page after page of typescript studded with what looked like three different alphabets, one of which was Hebrew. Some of the footnotes in this section took two or three pages to work themselves out, and Kate made no attempt at following any of it, relieved that it was nearly over.

Then, at the very end, after the bibliography in fact, an additional and still-rough chapter had been appended. After a moment Kate realized that it was the result of the Song performance they had all seen the other night, the interpretation of the Song of Songs that had so excited Roz. “Pope,” it seemed, was not the Roman pontiff but one Marvin Pope, who had developed the idea of a link between the Indian Kali and the Canaanite Anat, both of whom took vast joy in spilling blood, both wearing belts of hands and necklaces of skulls, both being absolutely essential, in spite of their murderous tendencies, to the continuation of the universe. Or rather, precisely because of their tendency to give vent to murderous bouts of rage, for without Anat’s fury, Baal the storm god could not bring the life-giving rains and the land would go sterile; without Kali, Shiva’s dance that heralded both the end and the beginning of time would fail.

Kate felt as if her head was about to explode. She scratched her scalp hard with her short fingernails, wondering why she was wasting so many hours on this airy-fairy nonsense that she hadn’t a chance of fully understanding. It was pointless—after all, wasn’t pointless one synonym for the word academic?—but she could not shake the feeling of a connection here. She could smell it coming off the paper in front of her, faint and evocative but there.

But how? And where?

One more possible victim had been added to their list during the day. A resident of King City, a few hours’ drive into the Central Valley south of San Francisco, had disappeared five weeks ago and been found last week in a brushy area frequented by coyotes and half a dozen other kinds of scavengers. About all the pathologist could tell was that the man had been strangled. Whether he’d been zapped by a taser or once had a candy bar in his pocket was anybody’s guess. He was, however, a wife-beater, and his name was on the hit list, along with his address and phone number.

Quite a number of other men on the list had admitted to receiving harassing calls and letters. The majority assumed at first that the team’s call was yet another one, so the people wielding the phones had learned to speak fast, firmly, and with blatant if not entirely genuine expressions of sympathy in order to avoid hang-ups.

Two men thought they were currently being stalked, one in Huntsville, Texas, the other in Reno. Seven had been attacked already, either personally or by something being thrown at, splashed against, or painted onto their houses. One man had seized on the suggestion of a taser-wielding attacker that one of the less experienced members of the team had let slip, but further interviews made it fairly clear that he was more than a little unbalanced and would have taken up the mention of alien abduction with equal enthusiasm.

Five men had disappeared completely, seven had moved but been in communication with family or friends, and three names were either mistakes or jokes or complete fabrications—one of them Kate’s suggested addition to the list, a hardened but exceedingly wily child-abuser by the name of Al Martini. That had appeared during the afternoon, causing a few minutes of near-hysterical levity on the part of the frustrated and overworked team, bent over their terminals.

Kate decided enough was enough, said good night to Al and the others, and took herself home. Lee was still awake, and called down the stairs as Kate was unloading her burden on the hallway table.

“That you, Kate?”

“What’s left of me.”

“Would you give Roz a call? I told her that if you were in before eleven, you would.”

“What does she want?”

“She didn’t say.”

Kate seriously considered ignoring the request, but in the end she did phone Roz’s number, bracing herself for another demand from Roz: an illicit look at someone’s file, perhaps, or a request to be on a panel in Washington, D.C. But to her surprise, Roz did not seem to want anything, only to know if Kate had had a chance to glance at the manuscript, and if she had any questions. Kate rubbed her forehead wearily, grateful that telephones did not have viewers, and told her that no, she did not.

Kate then climbed the stairs to bed, and to Lee, and then to sleep.

To jerk awake at 3:09 the next morning with the phone shouting at her, and Al’s voice on the other end of the line.

Telling her there had been another one.

Only this one was still alive.

Chapter 19

“DETECTIVE’S NAME IS HILLMAN,” Hawkin told her in the car on the empty freeway headed south down the peninsula. “Ever meet him?”