Night Work

night shifts.

“So the candy is a pun,” she mused, “an offering of Kali to Kali. And that was very interesting about the seedy stuff not being candy, to his mind anyway.”

“But would Carla and Phoebe have known it wasn’t an Indian kind of candy?”

“They know about Kali.”

“That doesn’t mean they know Indian culture.”

“True,” she agreed, and sat motionless in the moving car. Outside the windows, the city’s night song came to Kate’s ears, muted and atonal, unpleasant and as jangled as her nerves. After a few blocks, she said, “I’ll ask Lee to call Roz first thing in the morning, see if she can persuade her to lay off Mehta. If there’s anyone she’ll listen to, it’s Lee.”

“It’d be nice to be able to stop her without having to put a gun to her head,” Hawkin said. Kate was not sure he was actually joking.

At the parking lot beneath the perpetually laden freeway, Kate’s car started immediately, to her relief, and it seemed to drive itself up the silent streets to die old house on Russian Hill. The house was still and quiescent when she let herself in, the entrance and hallway lights the only bulbs left burning. She phoned the hospital again, which gave her no changes, and then, hating the world, the city, and her job in that order, Kate set the alarm for six A.M., less than four hours away, stripped her clothes off into a heap on the floor, and crept into the blessed shelter of the bed.

Lee woke up and turned over, nuzzling into Kate with a questioning noise in the back of her throat and then an actual question.

“Is everything okay?”

Kate, realizing that she could trade a few minutes now for a longer sleep in the morning, shifted around to put an arm around Lee.

“I need you to do something for me, sweetheart. Did you know Roz has called a press conference in the morning about the Mehta family?”

“God, do I ever. Maj was on the phone most of the evening.”

“Well, there may not be anything that any of us can do, but Roz might just possibly listen to you.” Lee started to protest, but Kate pushed on. “Carla Lomax and her secretary were the ones behind those murders. We haven’t actually arrested either of them, because Carla ran in front of a bus while I was chasing her and is still in recovery and Phoebe’s disappeared, but they will be charged with Larsen and Banderas for sure, as well as a man in Sacramento and probably in a few days Laxman Mehta, although the investigation’s still going on. Oh yes, and the attempted murder of a guy named Traynor in San Jose.”

Lee was fully awake now. “God, Kate, that’s—what, five assaults? Why? And what does Roz have to do with it?”

“They began with straightforward revenge, it looks like, and from there decided to become vigilantes. And I believe that the reason Roz is so hot to get Mehta is that she knew, on some level, that the two women were involved in something. I think we’ll find that she introduced them to the idea of the goddess Kali as a feminist avenger, and they ran with it. Sweetheart, blackmail her, for my sake. Play on her guilt, her responsibility for twisting those two women. Even if it’s not true, it’ll make her slow down and think. Yes, love,” she said over Lee’s protests, “I know it’s unscrupulous and unfair and everything else, but Roz is about to set loose a tornado on the city that’ll make it nearly impossible to investigate the Mehta case with any hope of conviction, and might well drive the Mehtas back to India and out of our jurisdiction. And you can tell her that, too, if she’ll shut up about it; tell her anything, just so she gives me time.”

Kate felt as if her voice was at the end of a dim corridor, echoing and growing fainter, but she waited until Lee had agreed to try, agreed to reach Roz early in the morning, before she let herself go. The last thing Kate said before sleep claimed her was, “Could you change the alarm clock to eight?”

Chapter 25

IT WAS NOT EIGHT, she saw, it was twenty past seven, and it was not the alarm, but the telephone.

“Martinelli,” she croaked into the receiver.

“It’s me, love,” Lee’s voice said into her ear, “I thought you should know that I just got to Roz’s house and she isn’t home. We’re heading over to the church; I’ll ring you back as soon as we find her.”

“You blessed among women,” Kate said, already on her feet. “I love you.

“I know you do. Now go have a shower.”

Kate’s shower lasted perhaps ninety seconds and then she was pulling on clothes over her still-damp skin and running a comb through her wet hair. She trotted downstairs and had just poured herself a cup of very stale coffee when the phone rang again.

“Roz’s secretary said that Roz phoned Peter Mehta at about quarter to seven this morning. They had a short talk and then she just drove off, about five minutes ago.”

“Okay. She may have gone over there for a private talk, a little last-minute conflict resolution.” It would be like Roz, but it made Kate uncomfortable to think of Roz facing the furious Peter Mehta by herself. “Look, I think I’ll run by there, see if I can get her to leave him alone. You stay put, I’ll phone you when I find her.”

“There’s coffee in the—”

“Got it. ”Bye.“

She took one large swallow of the hot greenish substance and abandoned the cup.

The Mehta house was about ten minutes away on a good day. Kate made it in eight, charging up the hills and squealing around the corners, and even managed to punch in Hawkin’s pager number at an unavoidable red light to leave a message.

Still, Roz had gotten there first. Her Jeep was in the driveway but there was no sign of her, or of Mehta. Kate eyed the drawn drapes, and decided that she did not really want to be in there alone with an angry man who met police officers at the door with a club in his hand—the memory of the last time she had ventured into an unknown situation with minimal backup was all too clear in her mind and on her scalp. Feeling a little abashed, she put in a call for assistance, but did not wait for the patrol car to arrive.

The doorbell brought no immediate response, nor did a heavy fist on the door. If the family heard her, they probably thought she was just an early reporter. She eyed the sturdy wood briefly before deciding that, even if she could think of an excuse, her shoulder would shatter before the door budged, so she headed around the house toward the remembered kitchen door, where she might well find the family at breakfast, Roz with a cup of coffee in her hand, beaming at them all in her inimitable friendly manner, creating reason and compromise out of angry divisiveness as she had so often done.

The gate in the high wooden fence was latched. Kate cursed under her breath, made sure her gun was secure in its underarm holster, and scrabbled up to pull herself over. She paused to peer over before committing her heel to the fence top, lest Mehta be standing there with his club—or a shotgun—but the empty driveway stretched out along the wall of the house to end at the burnt-out patch that had been Pramilla’s kitchen, and her pyre. Kate continued pulling herself up, and over, and landed on the other side only slightly bruised and winded.

Kate was not aware of sliding her gun out of its holster, but somehow it was in her hand as she moved briskly down the concrete drive and rounded the corner of the house, and then the world blew up in her face.

Twin shrieks of pain and terror soared above the breathy whump of exploding gasoline. Without thought Kate hit the hard ground rolling, and felt more than saw the expanding cloud flash over her head and puff out, leaving at its source a dancing pond of flames from which two figures trailed streams of fire. Mehta’s arm was alight to his elbow, but he was already pulling off his dressing gown and beating at the flames with it. At his feet, wavering in the heat, lay a compact black shape that a part of Kate’s mind registered as a taser.

Mehta was up and out of danger, but not Roz. She was lying with her legs deep in the very hottest part of the flames, writhing feebly and trying with a clear lack of coordination to pull herself away. Her trousers were burning and her cries of terror and pain seemed to fill the air. Kate’s gun went into its holster as she ran to grab Roz under the arms to drag her back from the worst of the flames, but the fire followed them, loath to let its prey go, and Roz still burned. Casting around desperately for something to smother the flames, Kate spotted the mildewy cushions of the lawn furniture; she snatched them up and threw them over Roz; the stubborn flames hesitated, then billowed up again around the thick pads. It was a nightmare, this heaving tangle of flowered cushions and squirting blue fire