truth to tell, a nice cold, obviously dead corpse that everybody stayed well away from was much easier to work with; here, the most they could hope for was that somewhere down the line they would find traces of Traynor’s blood on a suspect’s shoes.
Kate stood and read from the rough report she’d been given, comparing the statements of Hillman and the reporting officers with the scene before her. Everybody seemed to agree that Traynor had been dragged into the office, turned onto his back, had a length of red silk, light but strong and measuring fifteen by forty-nine inches, twisted around his throat. The state of his fingernails and the marks his boot heels had left on the floor showed that he had been conscious enough to struggle, but there was no doubt he would have succumbed had not the local patrol car happened to be bare minutes away when the alarm call came, and had one of the attackers not happened to see the marked car approaching. The attackers had fled, pausing only to kick Traynor or bash him with the bolt cutters (in petulance, or rage, or a last attempt at quick murder?) before escaping down the hallway toward the main doors. No breach of the fence had been found, so it was assumed the black-clad would-be killers had slipped back out through the ill-lit parking lot and the wide-open gate while the patrol officers were busy discovering Traynor. One of the patrol officers noted that he had glimpsed a very clean, light-colored, late-model four-door compact parked on the street a couple of blocks away, noticeable because it was an incongruity in the area, and that when he had driven past the spot after processing the Traynor crime, the car was no longer there.
Kate and Al walked away from the relative bustle of the office where the attack had taken place, through the echoing factory building. The owner had closed the place for a couple of days to reassure the workers that he cared, not so much for Traynor but for the safety of his fellow employees. The two San Francisco detectives traced the route of the two attackers where they had raced through the lower floor, taking a couple of wrong turns that resulted in knocked-over equipment and piles of paperwork and indicating that they did not know the building from within. The intruders had finally reached the double glass doors that faced the street. There one of them had paused to fling a handful of nine mixed, cellophane-wrapped candies back into the entrance hall and across the receptionist’s desk. Now a scattering of flags showed where they had landed: mostly on and under the desk, where they might well have been overlooked as something the receptionist had dropped had Hawkin not specifically asked Hillman about them.
The attackers had left no prints; they had made a careful surveillance of their victim’s habits; and they knew that there was a backup escape route, if not its exact path.
“They’re careful,” Al said, voicing Kate’s thought.
“What about that car?”
“San Jose’s out canvassing the neighborhood, to see if anyone in the area saw it. And they’ll stick up a notice board if they don’t get anything, see if some passerby remembers it.”
“Pretty anonymous vehicle,” Kate remarked.
“You think deliberately?”
“If I were knocking off a guy, I sure wouldn’t leave my own car around the corner.”
“Rental, then? Clean, white, four-door?”
“Worth a try, don’t you think?”
“The feds probably thought the same,” Hawkin said repressively.
“Well, I guess we’ll find out as soon as we start asking, if there’s been someone ahead of us.”
“You want to begin with the airport? Biggest car rental around, I’d have thought. Of course, we’d more or less have to tell Hillman what we were doing, it being his patch. And Marcowitz, of course.”
“Of course. But maybe we shouldn’t waste his time until we’ve finished.”
“That’s what I like about working with you, Martinelli,” her partner said with satisfaction. “It’s the meeting of true minds.”
With FBI involvement, any line of inquiry on the part of the local forces ought to be directed by the feds. If, however, the local cops didn’t get around to mentioning some ongoing piece of their investigation while it was actually being pursued, well, that was understandable— sometimes you had to go back and dot the i’s and cross the’t‘s later. And if they happened to find something that contributed to the case, and managed to run it down before returning to their desks and dutifully reporting in, any official reprimand would be more than balanced by their own satisfaction—and that of their departmental colleagues. Especially if that contribution was large enough. Solving the crime and getting killers off the street was obviously the main goal, and they would not do anything deliberately to compromise that, but it was always nice when the overworked and under-equipped locals pulled off something the big guys couldn’t.
So their slow and circuitous route back to the Hall of Justice took them into virtually every car rental place on the peninsula. Most of the agencies said, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, that they would draw up a list of cars matching their description and which had been out the night before, and who had rented them, and get the list to them in a day or so. The two biggest agencies at San Francisco International, though, were both highly automated and eager to help, and both offered to provide a printout. And no, there had been no one else around asking for that information in the last day.
They drove out to the airport and picked up both lists, added them to the growing stack, then retreated to a nearby restaurant to replenish their energies with a drippy hamburger for Al and a blackened chicken salad for Kate. They spread their papers out to look them over as they ate.
It was a daunting pile, even for detectives well used to paper chases. There were hundreds, thousands of white four-doors for hire in the peninsula, and most of them were in circulation. Some of the lists were handwritten and half legible; others gave every car in the agency regardless of make and color and left it up to them to decipher the identifying code. Some of the lists went back weeks; one was dated for April, but of the previous year.
Kate sighed, turning over the cold remnants of her fries with her forefinger, and decided to phone home. She got up to use the toilet, tried the public phone, found the line busy, and came back to find Hawkin digging into a huge construction that seemed to be equal parts chocolate and whipping cream. She ordered a double espresso for herself and thumbed disconsolately through the stack of papers.
“This is hopeless,” she began to say, when simultaneously her beeper went off and her eye snagged on a name. The name had to be a coincidence, if an odd one, and the number on the pager display was her own. Still, she tugged the piece of paper out to mark the place before she went back to the pay phone.
Annoyingly, the number was again busy. She hung up, waited half a minute, and tried again. This time Lee had it on the first ring.
“Hello?”
“Hi babe, it’s me. I got your page—I tried to reach you myself ten minutes ago. What’s up?”
“When are you coming home?” Lee’s voice sounded either tired or stressed, and Kate’s fingers whitened on the receiver.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Just—” Lee bit off a sharp demand, and went on with deliberate calm: her reasonable therapist’s voice. “I just need to know when you’ll be back.”
“I could be there in forty minutes, less if Al lets me stick the flasher on. What do you need?”
“It’s not that urgent, I’m just trying to organize something and it was stupid to make arrangements for a ride if you were about to walk through the door, is all. You sound like you’re occupied.”
“I am, but it’s nothing urgent. I’ll drop Al at the—”
“Kate, stop. It’s fine. It’s just that Jon is out with Sione and I hate to beep him, but Maj called up all in a dither about something Roz is doing, so I told her I’d go over and hold her hand. It’s nearly Mina’s bedtime, or she’d come here. I could get the Saab out, but I know that—”
“Lee, no, that’s a really terrible idea. I’ll be home in half an hour, surely it can wait that long?”
“No, no, I don’t want you to break off, I only wanted to know if you happened to be about to drive up any minute. I’ll call a cab.”
“Promise me you won’t try to drive?” Lee hadn’t driven a car since she had been shot, and although her legs were stronger, their reaction time was undependable. On city streets, in city traffic, it would be criminally foolhardy.
“I promise.”
Maj in a dither didn’t sound like anything worth breaking speed limits for; indeed, considering the frequency of Roz’s passionate causes, it didn’t even sound like something worth missing her coffee for.
“But Maj is okay?” she asked Lee, just to make sure.
