from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. She pulled the left edge away from the wall, saw that there did indeed seem to be something other than blank wall behind it, and found a curtain pull. She tugged at the cords, the drapes obediently parted, and then Kate was stumbling back, badly startled.
For a brief but intense moment, she thought that she was being attacked by a wild woman with blood on her teeth. She could almost smell the blood, splashed around the woman in a pool, and then the hallucination faded, leaving her to gaze in mingled amazement and horror at the image before her.
The painting on the wall was enough to give a man nightmares. It showed a woman of sorts, but this was a woman who would have caused a playboy to shrivel, would have given pause to the most ardent feminist, would have had a Freudian rapidly retracting that plaintive, worn, masculine query concerning what women wanted.
For what this lady wanted was blood.
And had it, as Kate could well see. The deep blue, larger-than-life female was wading through a lake of the stuff, splashing it around, looking drunk with it. Kate recognized her instantly as the subject of Roz’s thesis, Kali with the necklace of skulls and the belt of human hands, laughing her terrible pleasure at the decapitated head she held up in one of her four arms, a bearded face with blue eyes and a mole next to his nose, which seemed oddly familiar to Kate. Gentle Jesus meek and mild would be eaten alive by the goddess, and Kate could understand why the curtain normally hid her from view.
There were not as many prayers and thanks offerings in the two bowls attached to her wall, either, clear indication that Kali was a bit strong for most of the women who came here to free themselves from a battering relationship. It would take most women some time to get in touch with this degree of anger.
But if that was so, then whose slips of paper were these? They read only
And right at the bottom, uprooted by Kate’s curious forefinger, a lump of cellophane-wrapped butterscotch.
Chapter 24
KATE SNATCHED HER HAND out of the bowl as if she’d been burned, but she scarcely had time to contemplate the awful implications of contaminated evidence before a noise came from behind her back. She whirled around, her hand plunging of its own accord toward the butt of her gun, but she froze when she saw the cluster of women in the doorway.
Diana Lomax stood just inside the room, taken aback at Kate’s sudden reaction. Behind her stood Crystal Navarro and a couple of the other residents, with two young children. Crystal and the children had quite obviously never seen the painting of Kali, because all three were gaping at it, bug-eyed.
“Blessed Jesus!” Crystal blurted out. “I didn’t know them curtains had anything—”
“Who did this?” Kate demanded of the shelter director.
“Did what?” Diana asked in confusion.
“That… thing on the wall. Who painted it?”
“That? It is a bit strong, isn’t it? One of our volunteers asked if we—
“Who. Painted. It.” Kate leaned forward, and Diana took a step back.
“Phoebe Weatherman. Carla’s secretary?”
“We’ve met,” Kate told her, not entirely accurately. “When did she paint it?”
“Not very long ago. January, maybe? Yes, it must have been just after the first of the year, because her daughter-in-law Tamara was killed by her second husband just before Christmas. Phoebe loved Tamara like a daughter, far more than she loved her own son.”
“Tamara.” A woman of that name had appeared somewhere in the history of this convoluted case. Who… ?
“Yes. Tamara Pickford. A lovely, lovely person. She was one of our first residents, nearly seven years ago. That’s when Phoebe began to get involved,” she added.
“Phoebe,” Kate repeated, and revelation opened in her mind like a flower. Phoebe Weatherman, a physically strong woman with a figurine of Kali the Destroyer on her desk, who four months ago had been handed a whole world of pain, cause enough to hate the entire male sex. Phoebe Weatherman, always in the background—how did the Womyn Web site put it?—cloaked in invisibility? Who was more invisible than a dowdy secretary? What better disguise for a vengeful goddess to assume?
And that bearded head… “What was Tamara’s husband’s name?” Kate asked sharply. She became aware of Agent Marcowitz looking over the heads of the women, alert but not knowing yet what had happened.
Diana thought for a minute before shaking her head. “It was her second husband and I don’t remember…” Then she turned to crane her head at the hallway, looking past the women at a figure who stood just out of Kate’s line of vision, near the front vestibule. “Carla?” she called. “What was the name of Tamara’s second husband?”
An instant of silence fell over the gathering, and then came a voice, clear and pregnant with meaning.
“His name was Lawrence Goff,” Carla Lomax said, and took a step forward so she could meet Kate’s eyes.
That was why the face on Kali’s decapitated head looked familiar: Larry Goff, the December victim, killed in a Sacramento hotel by a woman dressed as a prostitute.
“Marcowitz,” Kate began to shout, Stop her, Marcowitz, but she got no further than his name before the knot at the door flew apart in several directions at once. Crystal Navarro had abruptly realized that the two young children were staring in fascination at the naked, brutal, blood-soaked painting on the wall, and over their loud protests she seized their shoulders to force them out of the room. A split second later, Carla Lomax grabbed a couple of the women, shoved them hard at Marcowitz, and ordered, “Keep him here.”
And then the lawyer turned and fled.
The women rose up in fierce obedience against the agent, protecting their advocate against this unknown male oppressor in the suit, just as Crystal’s two small charges came smack between them, and the hallway burst instantly into a welter of struggling, shouting man, women, and children. Kate lunged for Carla, came face-to-face with her cousin instead, and spent five critical seconds wrestling with Diana before need overcame caution and she flipped the director hard into the pile of shrieking, outraged women (Marcowitz ending up on the floor beneath them all) and waded through legs and over backs and out of the chapel doorway. The front door had opened and slammed shut again before Kate had made it into clear hallway; Carla’s back was disappearing around the corner by the time Kate worked the automatic door latches and flung herself into the shelter’s front yard.
Kate scrambled after the lawyer, who had kicked off her heeled shoes to sprint along the pavement in her stocking feet. It quickly became apparent that Lomax had spent more hours running the hills of the city than Kate, and many more than Marcowitz, somewhere in the rear. Kate wasted no breath in shouting; she merely ran, chin down and arms pumping, gaining slowly and painfully, risking cars’ bumpers at crowded street corners, dodging kids with basketballs and homeless women with shopping carts, pounding along the sidewalks to the shouts of protest and anger and the encouragement of a pair of enthusiastic prostitutes on their way to work who whooped and shouted, “You go, girl!” as the two women flew past.
Where the hell was a cop when you needed one? she cursed silently. Or the goddamn FBI? And why would good citizens ring 911 when the neighbors had a loud party but not when a plainclothes cop was trying her damnedest to run down a suspect?
The end came in a flash, more than half a mile from where it began. Carla chose a street thick with commute-hour crowds, where she lost ground breaking through the pedestrians as surely as if she had been breaking trail through deep snow. She felt Kate closing behind her, shot a glance behind and saw her pursuer too close, and shot to the right to risk a desperate leap in front of a moving bus that would have cut Kate off had Carla made it.
She did not. The bus was traveling slowly, but the inexorable force of it hurled the lawyer into the air to smash against the side of a parked car. She lay draped across the hood for a moment, then melted down onto the ground and lay still.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Kate’s breath had almost returned to normal, Marcowitz had summoned uniformed cops from all over the city, the paramedics had forced their way into the center of the chaos, and Carla Lomax was still alive. Unconscious, and so she remained. Kate stayed with her until the lawyer was taken through the doors of the operating room, and then she paced up and down in the sterile corridor while the surgeons
