you yes, as far as I can remember, I stocked those bins twice in the last half year or so, once in Fremont, where I worked in October, and the other in my own store just before Christmas when three men were out sick and the shelves were bare in the evening. I’d have to look up the precise dates.”
That she did not expect them to believe her was clear in her stance and the tip of her head. Kate figured the woman’s alibi must be ironclad, for her to so patently not care if they believed her or not—although very possibly she would still show them an amused defiance if she had no more to vouch for her than her own empty bed. Kate found herself liking the woman, rare enough when it came to a witness and a potential suspect, for her straight spine and her simple ambitions and her willingness to take a stand here in this community of little hope.
“Any chance you might have handled any of that candy any other time?” she asked. “Maybe helping someone scoop some out, or a bag spilling at the register, something like that?”
Mkele thought about it, and then shrugged her strong shoulders. “I don’t remember that happening, but it’s not impossible that it did. Things get busy, you know, ”specially if you’re talking about as far back as Christmas. By the end of the day you wouldn’t remember
Kate nodded, took a card from the pocket in her notebook, flipped the book shut, and dropped it in her pocket. She stepped forward with the card in her left hand and her right hand outstretched.
“Thank you, Ms. Mkele,” she said. “Let us know when you figure out those dates, or if there was any other time you might have handled wrapped candies. We’ll give you a call if anything needs clarifying.” Mkele looked at Kate, and at her hand; then she reached out and took both card and hand.
The local man and Hawkin moved with Kate toward the door. The two San Jose detectives hesitated but followed in the end, leaving Miriam Mkele in command of her diminutive but colorful field of battle.
Chapter 21
DISMISSING THE TWO PATROLMEN to resume their centurion duties, the detectives moved off to safer ground, a twenty-four-hour coffee shop next to the freeway. Its garish color scheme, Kate had read somewhere, was specifically designed to discourage customers from lingering over their coffee.
It worked on five plainclothes cops as well as it did on the sales reps and the families heading for Portland or Los Angeles. They discussed briefly the odds that Mkele had been lying to them and that she was somehow involved, decided that they had no evidence either way, divided up the tasks of checking up on her story, and in twenty minutes they were out the door.
In the parking lot Hillman, the older of the two San Jose detectives, took Kate aside in that helpful and avuncular manner that always made her jaw clench.
“Look, Martinelli,” he began, “we weren’t actually finished with Mkele.”
“No? We had her answers, and she said she’d call us back with the other information.”
“She’s an ex-con. You have to push them. Always.”
“Thanks for the tip, Hillman, but let’s see if she comes across before we go back and push her around.”
“It’s just that you really can’t be friendly with a witness, especially a shady one. Like that business with the handshake—what if she’d refused to shake? You’d have looked like an idiot.”
“Well, Hillman, I guess I don’t mind looking like an idiot. Better than actually being one. I’ll let you know when she calls.” Kate stood her ground and waited for Hillman and the others to get into their cars and drive away. Al leaned against their car with his face turned away, so none of them but Kate knew that he was grinning at the exchange.
When the others had left, Al went back inside to phone Marcowitz from a ground line, for the added security. When he came out of the restaurant, Kate watched him closely, trying to guess what the Man in Black had said, but Al just walked along, head down either in thought or in well-concealed anger.
“Well?” she asked when he was sitting beside her.
“They’re doing the interviews.”
“Ah. Well, we knew they’d take over eventually. What does he want us to do? Type up their field notes?”
“Not quite that bad. I told him I wanted to take another look at the Traynor crime scene, he said fine.”
Kate suspected that it had not been quite such a simple exchange, but she would not argue. She started the car and, without discussing the matter, took the entrance for the freeway north and drove for three miles. She then exited, circled under the freeway, and resumed the trip heading south, back toward San Jose. After a mile, the sign for the Safeway market where Mkele worked came up on the right, readily visible from all lanes in both directions, instantly accessible from an exit two hundred yards from the front doors. Kate kept her foot on the accelerator, saying only, “I assume we don’t need to see the inside of the store.”
“We could stop off and pick up some milk on our way home,” Hawkin answered. “If curiosity gets the better of us.” From the sound of his voice, that was not likely.
The factory where Lennie Traynor worked, lived, and had nearly died was a seedy three-story cement-block cube dropped into a parking lot. It was half a mile from the flight path of the low-flying jets, whose exhaust had deposited black shadows on every upper surface. All the grimy-windows on the lower floor had bars on them, and a scattering of boarded-over windows on the upper floors testified to the accurate aim of the local throwing arms. Traynor’s room was on the southwest corner of the top floor. The metal fire escapes on two sides did not appear to have been extended down or even greased in decades, which meant that entrance by Traynor’s attackers had to have been through the doors.
A new chain hung on the metal gate that a San Jose officer opened for them. The original chain, with its cut link and the lock still attached, was in the San Jose lab for comparison with the bolt cutters. Kate drove through the gate and around the cube to pull in near the five unmarked and two patrol cars that were parked at the side entrance. She flipped her badge at the uniformed who popped out of the door; the woman nodded and stepped back inside.
Traynor’s two black-clad attackers had jumped him as soon as he came out the side door on his rounds, firing the taser into their victim’s back and then, as soon as he dropped, cuffing him and hauling him back through the door. He had fallen onto the edge of the step, giving him the scalp wound that left drops and smears up the steps and through the doorway, each drop now flagged and numbered for the police photographs. In two places, feet had stepped into drops of blood, and the lab was working on identifying the shoe by the scraps of track left on the worn linoleum.
Traynor’s keys had been found on the floor near where he lay, dropped there after his attackers let themselves in. Their mistake had been in assuming that Traynor had not set the alarm as he came out through the door: The alarm set itself automatically every time the door was closed, and sounded in the local precinct house if it was not coded off within ninety seconds. The relatively sophisticated system had been installed eight years earlier at the insistence of the insurance company when intruders had snuck in twice while the night watchman was off in the grounds. It had been a pain in the neck of the local patrol under previous night watchmen, but Traynor never once forgot to code
Al paused on the doorstep and looked across the parking lot at the chain link, razor-wire-topped fence and the street beyond.
“They must’ve been watching him, to get his rounds down,” he said. “Just not close enough to see him punch in the code. From a car down the street it’d just look like he was slow in putting the key in the lock every time.”
Kate looked up at the inadequate bulb in the fixture overhead, and agreed: At night, the subtle shift in the arm movements of a man, particularly one wearing a heavy jacket and seen from the back, would not be easy to catch.
They walked through the open door and into a familiar world of crime scene investigation, flags and chalk marks and swags of yellow tape. Fingerprint powder added its grime to all the likely nearby surfaces, but it didn’t look as if the intruders had left behind any prints except that of Miriam Mkele on the cellophane wrapper of a piece of butterscotch. Traynor’s keys had given up only his own prints, smudged in places by their rubber gloves.
Traynor had been dragged inside less than ten feet, just far enough to get the door closed, leaving him well away from the window. Blood from his scalp had formed a pool the size of a man’s hand in the place where he had lain until the paramedics arrived. Although two shoe-prints outside held out some hope as belonging to the invaders, the inside evidence had been tracked and smeared into uselessness during the urgent process of saving Traynor’s life. Crime Scene personnel had done their best with sketches and photographs and evidence bags, but
