Read The Art of Detection Online
Authors: Laurie R. King
Tags: #Policewomen - California - San Francisco, #Police Procedural, #Mystery & Detective, #Murder - Investigation, #Kate (Fictitious character), #General, #Martinelli, #Policewomen, #Mystery Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #San Francisco, #California, #San Francisco (Calif.), #Fiction
The Art of Detection
CONTENTS
This book, as all others, I put at the feet of Kate Miciak, editor and friend, without whom my words would just lie on the floor, kicking feebly.
PROLOGUE
K
ate Martinelli had been in any number of weird places during her years as a cop. She’d seen the dens of paranoid schizophrenics and the bare, polished surfaces attended by obsessive compulsives; she’d seen homeless shelters under a bridge and one-room apartments inhabited by families of twelve, crack houses that stank of bodily excretions and designer kitchens with blood spatter up the walls, suburban bedrooms full of sex toys, libraries filled with books on death, and once an actual, velvet-lined bordello.
She’d never seen anything quite like this.
The outside had looked normal enough, a San Francisco Victorian not far from Kate’s old Russian Hill neighborhood, tall and ornately traced with gingerbread decorations. Actually, in its subdued colors it was considerably more sedate than several of its neighbors—the days of fuchsia and viridian Painted Ladies had passed, mercifully, but brightness and contrast were still too great a temptation for many owners.
The first indication of the house’s true nature stood just outside the door, a small brass knob below a neat enamel plaque that said
Pull
.
Kate, feeling a bit like Alice faced with the vial reading
Drink me
, obediently reached out and pulled. When she let go, the little knob jerked back into place and a bell began to clang inside the house—not ring: clang.
The sound died away, with no indication of life within. She rang a second time, with the same lack of result, then she turned around and shrugged at the occupants of the departmental van and the green Porsche, who had hung back until the notification was finished. Since it appeared that the notification was finished before it began, it was just a matter of getting a film record of the house before they went through it, and to have Crime Scene do a quick once-over to be sure the crime had not taken place here. The chances against it were minuscule—why would any murderer remove a body from its own home to dump it?—but the walls had to be checked, the car gone over.
Kate and the Park detective, Chris Williams, split up to hunt down a neighbor with a key.
They did not find such a thing, but a neighbor across the street, a man in his thirties with thinning hair and a boyish face, pruning his roses in a button-down shirt and white pullover, told them that as far as he knew, a single man lived in the house. However, he did know the name of the occupant’s security company. A phone call and twenty minutes’ wait brought a company truck, from which hopped a brisk young woman with fifteen earrings and bleached-blond hair a quarter of an inch long. She looked at their IDs carefully, made a phone call to confirm that they were who they said they were, then cheerfully unlocked the door for them—or rather she first locked the door, then unlocked it: The dead bolt had not been set, only the automatic lock in the knob itself. Shaking her head at the carelessness of clients, she removed the key from the dead bolt and handed it to Williams, along with the code for the alarm box that her paper said was behind a picture just inside the door. Williams gave Kate the key and wrestled the door open against the heap of accumulated mail inside, moving rapidly along the walls and pulling aside half a dozen pictures before he located the alarm panel, behind a framed pen-and-ink drawing of two men in old-fashioned dress, walking on a street. He hurriedly tapped out the sequence of numbers, using the end of a pen so as not to obscure any possible fingerprints. The official housebreakers held their breath, and when the alarm did not begin screaming, the woman from the department’s photo lab stepped inside and started the video camera running. Kate said to the security woman, “Thanks, we’ll hang onto the key.”
“My notes say there’s a pad upstairs, too, on the door to the third-floor study. Do you want me to open that as well?”
“Sure.”
The young woman ducked inside and headed for the stairs, with Kate’s companion on her heels to make sure she touched nothing. Kate stepped into the victim’s house, and with the first breath of pipe tobacco, lavender, and furniture wax, the Wonderland imagery returned, more strongly: She was in another world.
She was also in a remarkably ill-lit world, as the late-January evening was coming on fast and the light switches proved even more thoroughly hidden than the alarm panel had been. Tamsin the photographer wandered off through the gloom, playing the camera through the rooms and up and down the walls, but Kate thought her colleague was working faster than usual, as if afraid that soon she would be recording the inside of a cow’s stomach. Kate trotted after Williams to get his car keys, went out to get her flashlight from the briefcase she’d left in his car, then knelt inside the door to pile the mail to one side: The earliest postmark was from the twenty-second of January, nine days before. When the mail was in order, she stood and wandered from the entrance foyer with its dangling bell and framed etchings into the shadowy rooms beyond, openmouthed with disbelief.
The fireplace, for example. It was a cramped, iron-lined box that would have spilled any self-respecting log onto the carpet, which she thought explained the shiny brass bucket of black lumps. Except that, this being San Francisco in 2004 and not London in nineteen-whenever, the regulations against burning even the cleanest of anthracite coal were stringent. And so the fireplace was in fact a fake, with black and red pseudo-coals that glowed and pulsed and gave out no more heat than a lightbulb. Still, the coal in the brass bucket—wasn’t it called a scuttle?—was real.
Her companion came back downstairs, thanking the security company representative as he ushered her out the door, standing back to allow Crime Scene in, then stepping outside himself to make a phone call. Lo-Tec glanced around and, without a word, got out the equipment to search for organic trace evidence, blood spatter and the like: The darkness just meant he didn’t have to switch off lights.
There was not much to see in the lower floor, no sign of blood or disturbance, only the one ashtray to collect, no unwashed cups or glasses. The sound of Williams’s voice outside stopped, and he came into the sitting room saying, “The upstairs study wasn’t locked, but there’s a safe—Jesus…” He stood staring at the walls.
Kate lifted the powerful beam of her flashlight off the laden bookshelves and asked, “You think we can get some lights on in here?”
“There don’t seem to be any.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, there have to be lights. There’s one on over the stairs.”
“Well, there’s things on the wall that look like light fixtures, but I don’t see any switches.”
Kate played her flashlight beam at the walls, and there, indeed, were fluted glass shapes that could only be light-covers. She walked over to the nearest and peered up at it, frowning, then stretched up an arm to jiggle what looked like a key. A faint hissing noise emerged from the fixture, and she hastily turned the key back until it stopped.
“Hey Chris, do you see a box of matches anywhere?” she asked. Williams shone his own light around, bringing it to rest on the mantelpiece. He picked up an ornate little box, shook it, and at the familiar noise, handed it to Kate. “Thanks. Hold your light on this thing for a minute,” she told him, sliding the butt of her flashlight into a trouser pocket. Gingerly, she opened the stopcock a partial turn and lit a match, holding it to the place where the hissing noise seemed to originate. With a small pop, the flame ignited, and the gloom in the room retreated a bit. Both cops watched the glowing white bowl of the light warily, but when it neither exploded nor sent flames crawling up the wall, Kate went to two other lights and set them aglow.
“Are those things legal?” her temporary partner asked.
“I’ve never seen anything like them before,” she replied, adding, “outside of
Masterpiece Theatre.
”
“It reminds me of something,” Williams said, looking around the space.
“Yeah. A movie set.”
Dark red flocked wallpaper, thick velvet drapes that seemed to suck out the weak dusk light from the windows before it could reach the room—and apparently the air as well, for the atmosphere, though cold, was stuffy. The furniture was of a kind that would have been out of date in her grandmother’s time, everything heavy and upholstered except one badly sprung wickerwork chair angled in front of the fake fire. Beside this chair stood a fragile-looking table with an inlaid top all but invisible under a jumble of objects, including two pipes and a laden ashtray that went far to explain the stuffiness of the room. Through the gloom she could see a desk, on one corner of which stood a tall sticklike telephone with the earpiece on a cord, straight out of the dawn of the telephone era. Even the drinks tray looked as if it had been brought here in a time machine, cut-glass decanters clustered around one of those tall bottles wrapped in silver mesh that swooshed fizzy water into glasses in period movies.
“I know what this is meant to be!” Williams exclaimed.
“A museum?”
“Just about. Look at this,” he said, and Kate turned to see him studying a heavily gouged patch of the flocked wallpaper—and not random vandalism, she realized, but in lines. “You ever read the Sherlock Holmes stories?”