worked.
The corridor was where Hawkin finally caught up with her. They’d spoken a number of times in the four hours since Kate had found herself standing over Carla Lomax’s still form, and she was quite aware of the case going on in her absence, but the dull meaty thud of the bus hitting Carla’s body, the inarticulate cry and the uncoordinated flail of limbs had dominated every intervening moment.
“How is she?” were Hawkin’s first words.
“Broken bones, her spine is okay, but there’s cranial swelling. They’re trying to relieve it—she’s been in there a couple of hours. No idea what damage there might be, probably won’t know for a day or two.” She ran a hand through her short hair, feeling suddenly as if taking a step, even speaking, would be more effort than she could face. Hawkin saw
“If you up and shot her, she might be dead,” he pointed out. “How’s your blood sugar?”
“What?”
“Food. Lee told me to tell you that lunch was a long time ago.”
She tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “I want to crawl onto that gurney and go to sleep. Have somebody put a sign on me so they don’t roll me into the OR and cut something off, would you?”
Instead, he bullied her to the hospital cafeteria, a place that dispensed calories and caffeine around the clock. When she was looking less gray, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheaf of at least fifteen message slips. She groaned.
“I’ve been through them,” Hawkin hastened to say. “I made some of the calls while I was waiting to see the Man in Black. Most of them are routine, though you might like to know that Miriam Mkele phoned, to tell you that she might’ve handled a bag of spilled candies at the register the first week of February, a Wednesday or Thursday. What that tells us I don’t know. The only thing I couldn’t deal with were the ten calls from Peter Mehta. I phoned him back but he didn’t want to talk to me, so I said you’d get to him when you could. He said any time no matter how late, but since that was a couple of hours ago he’s probably left half a dozen more messages by now.”
“You get what it was about?”
“R02 Hall.”
“Shit.”
“She’s called a news conference tomorrow morning, told Mehta that she intends to tell the world that he and his whole community burn brides.”
Kate put her aching head in her hands, feeling the dry sandwich she’d just eaten turning to stone in her stomach, and feeling the world begin to whirl slowly around. While she’d been busy stamping out one flare-up, behind her back a volcano had begun to swell. “Shit,” she said again. “Lee must be going nuts. Do you want me to call Mehta? What time is it, anyway? Midnight?”
“Not quite. It’s eleven-fifteen.”
“I was sure my watch had stopped. I want to stay around until she comes out of surgery.”
“Do you need to wait here? Or we could go see Mehta, then come back and check on her? He said he’d be up late.”
“Oh hell, there’s nothing I can do here. Let’s go. But look, what did Crime Scene find at the shelter?”
“No prints on the candy, sorry to say, except the edge of your finger. But the Kali painting was definitely done by Carla’s assistant, Phoebe Weatherman. And Weatherman’s house is full of the same kind of pictures.”
Kate’s brain began sluggishly to move. “She was also active in the shelter—she was there for a while the night James Larsen was killed. And she fits the description of Traynor’s bigger attacker. And even the woman who rented the car—with a black wig and glasses…”
“Anyway,she’sskipped—I’vejustcomefrom herplace,Crime Scene’s taking it apart now. There’s a warrant out for her. Her daughter-in-law, name of Tamara Pickford, wasn’t actually killed by her ex-husband. She died of—”
“An accidental overdose of pain pills, after her husband violated a restraining order and left her with a broken arm and a smashed jaw. I remember from the report on Goff. Damn it all, anyway. Phoebe Weatherman,” Kate said. “Set off by her daughter-in-law’s death. Why the hell didn’t her name come up in the Goff investigation reports?”
“A very convoluted set of name changes—Weatherman is the woman’s third name since she gave birth to the child who was first husband of Tamara Goff-formerly-Pickford-formerly-Lopes.”
“It wasn’t Roz, then, after all.” She did not know how she felt about that, probably wouldn’t know for some time, but even then she was aware that the relief she felt was heavily colored with shame, and that she would not be able to look at Roz Hall for a long time without being aware of it.
“Certainly she wasn’t directly involved in Traynor’s attack,” Al confirmed. “She’s been far too visible the last few days.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
“That doesn’t mean she isn’t in there somewhere,” he warned.
“Oh, she’s involved somewhere, even if it’s only planting the idea of a vengeful goddess into Phoebe’s mind. Or Carla’s. And she knows it, or suspects it. I wonder if that’s why she’s gone after the Mehtas with such a passion. Denial and guilt and the feeling that if she wasn’t involved, she should have been? God knows. I’ll have to ask Lee,” she said, completely unaware of her identification of Lee with the Almighty.
“You stay here,” Hawkin told her. “I’ll round up a uniform to babysit Lomax if she comes out of surgery before we get back.”
“Expecting a confession, Al?” Her voice was bitter; he glanced at her sharply, but said nothing.
Considering Carla Lomax’s condition, the uniformed guard was probably a waste of the taxpayers’ money, but she was there as much to keep camera lenses out as to keep Lomax from escaping, and Kate suspected she would earn her pay. They gave her their various numbers, she promised to pass the information on to any replacement guard, and Kate and Al left her to it. Halfway to the elevators, the two detectives came to a dead halt. Diana Lomax was emerging from the steel doors, deep in conversation with several supporters, among them Maj Freiling. Kate could see the coming confrontation, and she quailed.
“I can’t face them, Al,” Kate told him in something close to despair.
“So don’t,” he said simply, and took her arm to steer her back down the other way, up and down a lot of stairs, and eventually through the still-crowded emergency room (more dormitory for the area’s homeless at this hour than it was hospital) to the parking lot.
“Where the hell did I leave my car, anyway?” Kate asked Al. “Oh yeah, Marcowitz drove to the shelter, so it’s still at the lot. You’ll have to drive me by so I can fetch it. Ah, hell; what am I thinking about? The hospital doesn’t need me to watch over Carla Lomax. Let’s go and pat Mehta’s hand, and then you can take me home and I’ll see if I can get Lee to talk Roz out of her news conference, and then we’ll all get twelve hours’ sleep and live happily ever after.”
“If that was an offer of your guest bed,” Al said, “thanks, but I think that tonight I need to be in my own. I can drop you by your house, or the lot.”
“The lot, thanks. Is there any reason to go by the shelter, or the two women’s houses?”
“Marcowitz has his teeth into those.”
A vivid and surreal image floated through Kate’s tired mind, of the strong, shiny teeth of the Man in Black sunk deep into the front corner of a trim little cottage. She shook her head to clear it.
“Did he say anything to you about what happened at the shelter?”
“Not much, just enough so it was obvious he feels he screwed up.”
“He did. We both did.” And Carla Lomax was paying the price.
Kate half hoped they would find the Mehta house dark and silent, allowing them to pass by to their waiting beds, but such was not to be. All the outside lights were glaring and the downstairs windows were lit up, including Mehta’s front study. The two detectives sighed simultaneously, and got out of the car.
The moment they set foot on the walkway, the front door flew open, revealing an unshaven, uncombed Peter Mehta, dressed in a dark jogging suit and carrying a heavy stick in his right hand. They froze.
Hawkin cleared his throat. “Mr. Mehta, would you please put down your club?”
The man in the doorway looked at the object in his hand and reached down to prop it in the corner. The two detectives resumed their journey up the walk and into the house. Mehta began speaking rapidly before the door was shut.
