“No. He must be after my time in San Jose.”
“Sounded competent, but a little irritated that the feds are all over him.”
“I can understand that. Are they taking it over?”
“No. Just getting in his way at the moment.”
“What’d he say about the MO?”
“Two attackers, a taser for sure, regulation handcuffs, they had a scarf around his throat before they were interrupted. Didn’t wait around to finish him off, just ran. Cops didn’t see them go, they went out the other side of the building.”
“What about the candy?”
“Ah. Marcowitz hadn’t gotten around to mentioning that to him. I asked Hillman to look, and to keep it under his hat, both that I’d asked and if he found any. He called me back just before you picked me up, to say they’d found a handful clear at the other entrance. One print— they’re running it now.”
“A print? That’s great,” said Kate, meaning it profoundly. Any small thing to break the back of this increasingly scary case was fine with her. “Who’s the vic?”
“Guy named Traynor, Lennie Traynor. A true creep. Makes Larsen and Banderas look like Citizen of the Month, gives Mehta a run for the stupid prize.”
“What does he do, murder grannies?”
“Plays with kids,” Hawkin said succinctly. They drove in silence through the night.
LENNIE TRAYNOR, BOTH IN history and in the flesh, was the sort of creature guaranteed to make a cop bristle. Knowing he’d probably been abused as a child himself didn’t help; both of them—particularly Hawkin, with an adolescent stepdaughter at home and a baby on the way—saw him sitting in the hospital bed and felt a quick urge to grind him underfoot and finish the assailants’ job. Traynor felt their instantly suppressed contempt, and cringed further. That too did not help.
Traynor had one felony conviction behind him, for raping a thirteen-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome, and a string of other charges, two of which had been plea-bargained down to misdemeanors. He had been driven out of two communities unwilling to harbor a sex offender before he landed in an industrial area of San Jose with few families, and found an employer who was happy enough to hire the unhirable, on the cheap and no questions asked. Traynor worked as a janitor in a small assembly plant for low-tech computer parts, and was given a dank room in exchange for doubling as night watchman.
His nocturnal lifestyle undoubtedly contributed to his crawled-out-from-under-a-rock appearance, but all in all, the police faced with his problem wished that he had stayed under his rock, or died there quietly.
Instead, unlikely as it seemed, Traynor had been lucky. Bashed, taser-zapped, and half strangled he might be, but he was alive, and as he told his story for what must have been the dozenth time, it became obvious that only luck had saved him.
Traynor’s job was literally half his life. His commitment ran from six at night to six in the morning, day in and day out. He was free to take days (or rather, nights) off with prior arrangement, but he had only done so a handful of times in the three years he’d worked there, and his two-week annual holiday was more often than not cut short by boredom.
His sole forms of entertainment, it seemed, were the walks he took every morning when his shift had ended and the cyber-crawls he indulged in on his top-of-the-line computer system. His declarations of healthy exercise and intellectual curiosity were dismissed by Kate and Al, as they had been by every investigator who had stood in the room before them, but whether or not he logged on to child pornography sites was not currently their concern. It was the walks they were interested in, the long wanders in the surrounding housing developments during the hours when children were walking to school or waiting for buses.
He’d been seen, and recognized, three and a half months before, and for the third time a group of concerned parents began to organize a neighborhood against him. Mothers pointedly shepherded their children to the school gates, petitions were drawn up, the kids began to watch for him. So he retreated, and for six weeks had stayed in his cave.
Things quieted down, and Traynor lay low, and interest waned. He bought an elderly dog from the pound to keep him company, a quiet dog that slept most of the day and was content with walks around the weed-lined parking lot. After a while, though, when Traynor judged that interest had moved on, he snapped the dog’s leash on, piled him into the car, and drove him a few miles away for a daily walk—at the hour when the neighborhood was waking and its bright and freshly scrubbed children were going off to school.
Had the dog been more lively or appealing, Traynor might have gone his way in peace for a good long time. The dog, though, was as scruffy and unkempt as its owner, and a few weeks later one mother who jogged in the mornings was talking to another mother at a parents’ meeting, and his identity came out.
There was nothing against him but distaste and profound apprehension, no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing, but a sex offender was required to register with the police in a new area, and although he was not proposing to move into the neighborhood, he was frequenting its sidewalks.
It might well have died down, given time. After all, Traynor had a car, a twelve-hour day, and all the residential neighborhoods of the Bay Area at his command. However, in the midst of it a young girl disappeared from her home two miles from Traynor’s factory, and even though he had a firm alibi for the time (three of the factory workers had seen him walking the dog in the parking lot) and even though the police quickly determined that the girl was a runaway (the diary entry she left might have been ambiguous, but the story she told her best friend was not), Traynor had already been put in the spotlight. Two days later his name was on the Web site hit list. Letters began to arrive, notices went up on phone poles throughout the area, and pickets set up outside the gates. Phone calls came, so that when the task force team had reached him the day before, he thought it another one and cut them off hastily. His increasingly nervous boss gave him two weeks’ notice, one of the factory workers who had four children put a brick through Traynor’s windshield, and shrill voices were raised in the City Council meeting.
Then the night before, a few minutes short of eleven-thirty, a pair of black-clad figures wearing hoods and gloves broke into the factory with a pair of bolt cutters. They ambushed Traynor on his rounds, stunned him with a taser, slapped handcuffs on his nerveless wrists, and prepared to throttle him with a length of red silk. Unfortunately for them, but to the dubious benefit of Traynor’s life, they assumed that the night watchman was the sum total of security at the factory, and on their way in the door tripped an old but still efficient silent alarm. One of Traynor’s assailants heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, looked out the window, and saw the patrol car responding to the alarm. The two intruders fled with their job half complete, although the blow one of them dealt Traynor’s head, either with a boot or the abandoned bolt cutters found nearby, added to the bad gash he had sustained in his original fall, nearly did him in.
So here he lay in his hospital bed in the small hours of the morning, a victim no one had the least scrap of sympathy or indignation for, his lank and thinning hair half shaved off to mend the two scalp wounds, black of eye, hoarse of voice, and trying hard to maintain the moral superiority of the assault victim under the cold, knowing stares of hospital staff, police, and the dread FBI. Even his fingers were repellent, thin white tentacles plucking nervously at the sheets, and Kate found herself wondering what had happened to the only true victim here, the poor dog.
She realized that Traynor had come to the end of his well-practiced narrative and‘ was waiting for questions with resigned apprehension. Hawkin had his back to the room, looking out of the third-floor window, apparently leaving it up to her.
“Do you have any idea who they were, Mr. Traynor?” she asked, but he was shaking his head before the question was over.
“They could have been anyone. Just that they were women.”
“How do you know that, Mr. Traynor?”
“How do I…? You mean, how did I know they were women?”
“Yes,” she said with exaggerated patience. “Their voices, their bodies, did they smell of feminine hygiene spray, what?”
The pasty face went pink with embarrassment. “I… well, the way they moved, I guess. And their clothing was not so heavy I couldn’t tell, er—
“That they had breasts and hips?”
His blush deepened at her blatant reference to a woman’s body; he nodded, studying his hands.
“What about their voices?”
