Night Work

“The only thing they said—the only thing I heard them say—was when I was already half unconscious. I heard the word ‘cops,” and then the pressure went off my throat and after that I passed out. I suppose when they hit my head.“

“Just the one word?”

“Nothing else. Their silence was… scary. Unearthly. Just some grunts while I was… I was screaming, I’m afraid, as soon as I had my voice back, asking them why they were doing this. Begging them to stop. They never said a thing.”

For the first time Kate was aware of a faint brush of compassion for Lennie Traynor, but it did not last long. Instead, she pressed him for details about the two figures.

One, it seemed, had been taller and stronger than the other, and it had been this taller person who was in charge. She (if she it had been) had come at him with the taser in hand and had handled him like a rag doll, flipping his stunned body over and wrenching his arms back for the bite of the handcuffs. It had been her black hood looming over him when he found himself faceup again, she who whipped a silken billow of dark red out of a pocket and wrapped it around his throat, she who tightened and twisted and began to fade from view as the oxygen ceased to reach his brain.

“What was the hood like?” Kate asked.

“Black. One of those knitted ski things.”

“So it had eyeholes?”

“I saw her eyes, yes.”

“What color were they?”

“Brownish, I guess.”

“Mr. Traynor, you were looking into her eyes while she was trying to kill you. Surely you remember what color they were.”

“Light brown. Lighter than yours. Maybe hazel?”

“And the skin color around them?”

“She was white, not black. Maybe a light Hispanic. Not Asian, anyway.”

“Makeup?”

“No,” he said, not sounding at all certain.

“Perfume?”

“Unh-uh. She smelled like sweat.”

“Bad? Like she hadn’t washed in a while?”

“No. Sweat like she’d been exercising. Fresh. Not stale or strong.”

Not a nervous sweat, then, the smell of fear that Traynor had been giving off since they entered his room.

“About how tall was she?”

“I went over all this with the others,” he protested feebly, his hand coming up to touch his bruised throat.

“Nearly finished. How tall?”

“Taller than me—but then, dressed all in black and standing over me, she seemed bigger than she was, I think. I was only facing her for a second or two, but she still seemed a little taller than me. Maybe a couple of inches. I’m five seven.”

Brown-eyed Roz Hall stood five feet ten, Kate’s traitorous mind got in before she ruthlessly turned it to other things.

“Mr. Traynor, were you aware of people hanging around the factory at night, telephone calls, that kind of thing?”

He looked at her as if she were raving. “It’s been nuts around here the last few weeks. I told you about the picketers and the—”

“I mean single people, not groups of protesters. A car parked across from the entrance, say, or the dog barking at the darkness.”

“Maybe. I don’t know, I’ve been kind of jumpy.”

“What did you think you saw?”

“Well, Popeye—he’s my dog, or he was until I took him back to the pound over the weekend. Anyway, he was showing the strain about, oh, maybe a week ago. I’d be sweeping up or doing my rounds and he’d be whining at the door to get out or getting under my feet. Drove me crazy.”

“What night was this?”

“There were a coupla nights. Monday maybe? And then not the next night, he slept like usual, but again on Wednesday.”

“What time would it have been?”

“Late on Monday—yeah, I’m sure it was Monday, first day of the week—or really Tuesday morning, I guess. After Late Night was over anyway. But Wednesday night was earlier, I was mopping the rest rooms and he kept trying to track across where I’d just mopped. Maybe nine, ten? Close to nine, I guess.”

“But you yourself didn’t hear or see anything?”

“Nah. Just the dog. Jeez, maybe he was trying to warn me, you think? Maybe I should get him back from the pound. Problem is, I don’t know where I’m going to be. I don’t suppose you know… ?”

Kate shook her head and snapped shut the notebook she’d been writing in. “We’re from San Francisco,” she told him. “You’re not our—our responsibility.” She had nearly said problem, which would have been the simple truth. Nobody liked protecting a piece of slime like Traynor, though obviously they had to. It was complicated by the question of his own potential as a suspect of purveying kiddie porn, and how the authorities might take the evidence that had fallen into their laps completely by accident and in the course of a different case, and render that evidence both useful and untainted by questionable means. One tangle, thank God, that she and Al could walk away from.

Which they did. They said a thanks to the room in general, which could be taken as being aimed at Traynor but which they all knew was meant for the cop at his side, and left the battered pedophile to his ambiguous future.

Chapter 20

AL WAS SILENT AS they passed through the sterile corridors of the hospital, as he had been during the entire interview with Traynor. “So, what do you think?” she asked him as she got in behind the wheel of the car.

“I think that if I saw him walking that dog of his next to Jules’s school, I’d castrate the bastard myself with a dull knife.”

The sentiment and the mild obscenity were so unlike Hawkin that Kate stared at his profile. He was not kidding. She opened her mouth to make a joke about the effects of pregnancy hormones on the human male, but then she noticed the hard clench of his jaw and decided that maybe she’d let it pass. In her experience, limited though it was, she’d found that pregnant women seemed to develop areas of humorlessness. It appeared to be contagious to the partner.

She put the car into gear and began to thread her way out of the hospital parking lot. “No security cams in the factory building,” she said after a minute. “That’s too bad.”

“Have any of the victims on the hit list been black?” Hawkin asked in an abrupt non sequitur.

Kate thought about it. “I think some of the guys are. Yeah, I’m sure there were half a dozen black guys—I remember at least two of the photos. As for actual victims, the auto mechanic in New York was black, I’m pretty sure.”

“But none in the Bay Area.”

“Larsen and the guy in Sacramento, Goff, were both Anglo, and now Traynor. Banderas was Hispanic, but I thought he looked more Mediterranean, Italian or Greek. Mehta was Indian, but again, pretty light-skinned.”

“Does that say anything to you?” he asked.

“Not really. Could be they’re white women, like Traynor thought, and they’re either afraid of messing with black men or else they figure it’s not their business. Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to that community yet. On the other hand, they could be black women out to eliminate their traditional tormentors. I don’t think we can make any assumptions, Al.”

“What about methodology?”