“We’re closing in,” Kate told her. She rarely went into detail with Lee on an active case, both from professional scruples and as a way of separating home from job, but this case in particular had developed so many prickly areas—from Roz’s presence in its periphery to the ambiguous righteousness of the feminist vigilante—that she did not know where to pick up the thread even if she wanted to. Better to let the tangled story sort itself out without Lee’s involvement, especially considering the hour. So it was merely, “We’re closing in,” and a few minor details before she threw down the distraction of Jules writing to her jailed abductor, which kept Lee happily chewing on that question until they were pulling up to their curb.
Chapter 23
I WAS BUSY, protested the young woman at the airport car rental agency. It was nine-twenty on Monday morning, and Britany Pihalik was still busy, fending off telephones, customers, and pushy cops all at the same time. Kate kept any mote of sympathy off her face, knowing that to appear implacable was in the end the quickest for everyone, and eventually the young woman gave in, turned her name card around on the counter, and led the two detectives into an empty break room. She offered them coffee, which they declined, took a can of diet Coke from the refrigerator for herself, and settled them at a table.
Kate handed her the printout with the name Jane Larsen circled on it. “What can you tell us about this woman?”
“I’d have to look it up—no, wait a minute. I remember her. It was the lady with the mangled card.” She gave them a perky look as if happy to have satisfied their curiosity and ready to get back to work now, and seemed mildly surprised that they had more questions.
“Could you tell us about her, please?” Hawkin asked.
“Nice lady, truly ugly hair, kind of stupid—her, I mean, not her hair. Though her hair was pretty stupid, too. Anyway, she hands me this credit card that looks like she fed it to a pit bull, said it’d fallen out of her purse and her husband ran over it with the car. But the computer took it, I didn’t even have to enter the numbers like we do sometimes when the magnetic strip is wrecked, so it was okay.”
“Did you take a close look at it?”
“No,” she said flatly, clearly thinking the question, to use her favorite word, stupid.
“Did she have any other form of ID?” Kate asked.
“Of course.” Ms. Pihalik obviously was getting no very high opinion of the police department. “We can’t let them rent a car without a valid driver’s license. She had one, I rented her a car, she left.”
“Was the name on the license Jane Larsen?”
“Yes. No. No, it was her middle name. Elizabeth, something like that. Maybe not Elizabeth, because it was something as, you know, dreary as Jane, and I remember thinking it was too bad she didn’t have at least one interesting name to choose from. But then she was pretty dreary herself.”
“Was the name Janet? Mary?” Headshakes, continuing through the suggestions of “Patricia? Cathy? Susan?” until Kate got to “Emily?” A headshake began, cut off by consideration.
“Emily might’ve been it. Yeah, that sounds right, I think it was Em-fly.”
Kate did not kiss her, although it was tempting. “You don’t have security cameras here, do you?” she asked. Unless they were hidden, Kate hadn’t seen any.
“Not inside. There’s some in the lot.”
“What did the woman look like?”
“Like I said, dreary. Dull. That ugly black hair—a really crappy dye job, might’ve even been a wig—and with these heavy glasses that were all wrong for her. Baggy clothes, like she didn’t want anyone to see her body, though it didn’t really look that bad to me. Little bit fat, maybe.” Coming from a broomstick like Britany Pihalik, Kate guessed that “fat” described anything more than three percent body fat.
“Height?” Kate asked. “Eye color?”
“Taller than me, three or four inches—and I had heels on, so she was maybe five, um, nine? ten? Big, like I said. Not really fat, I guess, just kinda, what? Chunky? Muscular, like. I don’t remember her eyes. They might have been blue, or brown.”
Helpful, Kate thought; at least they knew not to look at anyone with pink or purple eyes.
“Your machine didn’t make an actual impression of the card, did it?” Hawkin asked.
“Like one of those old back-and-forth machines with the what-you-call-it, carbons? No, it reads off the strip unless that’s been scrambled by the person keeping it in an eelskin wallet or putting it down next to a strong magnet. Then we have to key in the numbers by hand. But like I said, hers was okay.”
“Ms. Pihalik, the list you gave us yesterday was reservations and a few walk-ins. I’d like to see the actual final list of names taken from the credit cards themselves.”
“I’d have to ask about that. I don’t know if I’m allowed to give it to you.”
“Maybe we should check with your supervisor?” Hawkin gently suggested.
She look relieved. “Sure, just a minute,” she said, and went to the door to call in a taciturn young man not much older than she was, who wore a lapel pin declaring him to be Jim Tolliver. He heard their request, scratched for a moment at a flare of acne on one cheek, and then shrugged.
“I don’t know why not. But it’d be faster if you could just look at the screen instead of printing out everything.”
So Ms. Pihalik went back to her customers and Mr. Tolliver went to a free terminal, and while the detectives looked over his shoulder he scrolled through the previous day’s rentals until he came to larsen. But it was not jane; it was james. The card’s user might have hammered the S and the second half of the M into invisibility, but the computer was not fooled, and had Britany Pihalik not been so distracted, she might have noticed.
Mr. Tolliver seemed to think she should have, distraction of line-out-the-door customers or no distraction. He bristled in righteous anger, leaving Kate and Al to study the record. There was, however, little to see except that the signature had been close enough to pass at a glance.
As evidence, the faked car rental could have been more specifically damning, but there was no doubt that it constituted a solid piece of work. They had sat on it for too long, however, and could not justify the additional hours of going through the videotapes of the external security cameras in hopes of glimpsing a face. It was time to report in.
“REPORTING IN” QUICKLY E V O L V E D into “being called on the carpet.” The official disapproval of their independent tactics—from lieutenant, captain, and deputy chief, everyone, it seemed, but the chief of police and the mayor himself—was indeed balanced against the quality of the evidence they had dug up (in the minds and faces of their own people—Marcowitz was not so easily mollified), and by hanging their heads in meek (if mock) submissiveness while they continued to thrust out in front of them the tangible results of their borderline insubordination, they defused the wrath of officialdom to a tongue-lashing none of them took very seriously. When it was over, the higher ranks left, satisfied that the lieutenant could handle it from here.
However, Agent Marcowitz remained, sitting in a chair slightly removed from the police department personnel and saying nothing. The Man in Black (actually a dark charcoal, Kate noticed, and very nicely cut) dominated the meeting precisely by doing nothing, not even shifting in his seat, until the official reprimand had run its course. Then he uncrossed his legs, and the three remaining members of the SFPD turned to him as if for judgment.
“We agreed that you would keep me in the loop at all times,” he said.
“We phoned you as soon as we had something firm.” Kate’s protest sounded feeble even to her own ears; far better to have stayed silent.
“What do you propose to do now? If I may be allowed to ask.”
“The videotapes of the rental lot need to be gone over, the car found and checked for prints.”
“I’ve already sent agents to get that under way.”
“Traynor’s own history needs to be looked into, in case this is the work of one of his victims, parents at the school, that kind of—”
“We are assisting Detective Hillman with that line of inquiry.”
“Which leaves the interviews of our own pool of suspects here.”
“Suspects.”
“Possible suspects, should I say? Nothing on any of them except opportunity.”
“And an agreement with the philosophy of the group calling itself the Ladies.”
“What philosophy? That some men are lowlifes and need to be stepped on? I don’t know too many people who would disagree, cops included.”
