The Art of Detection (3 page)

“Can you call if you’re not going to be home for dinner? I told Nora we’d make pizza.”

Nora was neatly distracted from the disappointment of Kate’s departure by the reminder. “Yay, pizza!” she cried with a jubilant dance.

“It should be fine, it may not even be our case, depending on how the lines are drawn on jurisdiction, but the d.b. lived here, so they offered us a look-in.”

“Oh, what a treat,” Lee said dryly.

“What’s a deebee?” Nora piped up.

Kate gave her partner an apologetic glance and opened her mouth to try for an explanation about dead bodies that would satisfy the child without planting macabre images in her impressionable mind, but Lee had already begun with, “Well, you see, sweetheart…” Kate slipped away, letting Lee deal with that particular matter.

Seventeen minutes later, Kate was out in front of the house, waiting for Al Hawkin’s car to round the corner. A neighbor came along the sidewalk at a snail’s pace, a dog leash in one hand and a toddler’s hand in the other. She greeted Kate, reminding Kate of the planning meeting the following week at the preschool, inquiring about the acupuncturist Lee had mentioned a while ago, and tossing out ideas for the upcoming street fair. The entire conversation was held with the woman moving slowly past, never quite coming to a halt while dog and toddler explored the street; the trio continued at the same pace until the corner, when they turned toward the park.

Kate smiled, and raised a hand to wave to another neighbor. She and Lee had lived in the Noe Valley neighborhood for nearly eight years, and never had a place felt more like home. Kate rarely thought anymore about the magnificent house on tony Russian Hill where they had once lived, cop and therapist rubbing shoulders with the city’s cream of socialites and politicos. That place had been Lee’s, an inheritance from her overbearing and disapproving mother, and had looked out on two incomparable bridges, San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz Island, and Mount Tamalpais in the background. When Lee finally decided to put the house on the market, it had sold before the print was dry on the advertisement, for more money than Kate could envision.

They had traded the gorgeous, intricately constructed Arts and Crafts–style house with the million-dollar view for a tumbledown Victorian whose chief virtue in their eyes was also, as far as the listing agent was concerned, its chief drawback: The elderly couple who had lived in the house all the five decades of their married life, unwilling to abandon the upper levels but increasingly unable to negotiate the stairs, had hacked up the back rooms and put in a tiny elevator.

Kate turned to gaze affectionately at the house. Most buyers would have been daunted by the enormous expense of ripping out the mechanism and restoring the rooms to their previous condition, but for Kate, the one-person elevator had been her personal deciding factor in its favor: Lee would never have agreed to its installation, but if it was here anyway, well, why not make use of it? The personal lift, just large enough for the wheelchair during Lee’s bad times, was an unvoiced recognition that the effects of the bullet through Lee’s spine, twelve years before, would never completely leave them; it had made their lives infinitely simpler.

The enormous price brought by the Russian Hill house had enabled them to make other renovations, from new carpeting and fresh paint to a complete rebuilding of the kitchen. Lee had also set up her therapy rooms in the front and was seeing clients again.

Most of all, however, what they had gained with the move was a thing that neither had known they needed: a community. They had traded socialites for Socialists, politicos for legal-aid lawyers, middle-aged white faces for a rainbow coalition of young families. Of the seven people Kate saw as she passed down the front walk that morning, she knew five of them by name, and had eaten dinner with three of those. Two doors down lived Nora’s best friend, an eight-year-old girl from China, the oldest of three multiracial children adopted by a bank manager and his aromatherapist wife. Lee’s longtime caregiver lived with his new family three blocks away. The woman in the big corner house had recently opened up a Montessori-style child-care facility, which meant that Nora could spend two afternoons a week with her friends. Typically, last summer the neighborhood association had voted to close the street one Sunday so everyone could hold a block party.

Small-town life in the big city.

Al’s car appeared around the corner. Kate waved one last time, to the woman she sometimes went jogging with (who this morning was out running with her black Lab instead), tossed her coat and briefcase into the backseat, and hopped in beside him.

“How’s the kid?” he asked before her buckle had latched.

“Perfect, as always. And yours?”

“They’re all fine. Jules has a major crush, I quote, on her lab partner, Maya is thinking about a summer camp run entirely in Latin, and Daniel has discovered guns.”

“Oh, Jani must be pleased about that.”

“The genetic inclination of boys, I suppose, to make weapons out of anything. Sticks, Legos, organic vegetarian hot dogs.”

“I know, I see it all the time at Nora’s preschool.”

“Still, he’s also into sports—he’s wants to try out for Little League next year. That’s where I was, throwing balls for the second-graders.”

Al was enjoying his second trip through parenting, at the same time his grandchildren were coming along. He sounded more than happy about the whole thing.

“So, speaking of boys and their guns, what’s with this one up at Point Bonita?”

“Philip Gilbert, white male, fifty-three. And no guns there, not at first sight.”

“But Mr. Gilbert didn’t just walk up there and die?”

“There’s a scalp wound, but the coroner says it doesn’t look massive enough to kill him.”

“Coroner? Not ME?”

“Marin caught it and declared death, the Park people didn’t think they needed to call in our ME as well. Seemed to think Marin wouldn’t mind transporting the body to us.”

Kate looked at the side of his face, but neither needed to say it: The San Francisco ME wasn’t going to be pleased with the arrangement. “So,” she said, “the vic was shooting up out in the woods? Or maybe a little sex play that got rougher than he’d intended?”

“If so, he drove in wearing his pajamas, and barefoot. In January,” Al added unnecessarily. “The rangers say he wasn’t a park resident and he wasn’t at either of the last two conferences held there. Once they have a picture they’ll take it around and ask if anyone knew him, but in the meantime, like I told you, they’re pretty sure he was dumped. No sign of the car DMV has registered to him, so I sent a uniform to drive past his home address, see if it’s there.”

“But who’s got the case? And why isn’t it just Marin’s?”

“Interesting question. From the little I could get out of the Park investigator I talked to, they need to look at a satellite GPS to decide just what slice of the park the body’s in—if it’s a federal area, that’s one thing; if it’s found in a place that used to be owned by the state before the park was glued together, that’s another. I’d say most likely it’s up to the loudest voice. Which sounds like the Park Police supervisor. Who wants to give it to us.”

Kate had been peripherally involved with the issue before, when it came to prosecuting in a park murder in the late Nineties. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area—Ocean Beach, the Presidio, various forts, Crissy Field, and the lump of headland across the Golden Gate Bridge—was an anomaly on the face of the National Parks Service, the only national park located within the boundaries of a city. Some crimes were handled by the Park’s own Criminal Investigations Branch, located in the Presidio. Others, particularly the major crimes, were given over to other law enforcement entities.

Who got jurisdiction often depended on historical definitions: A major crime taking place in areas that had been under local control before the GGNRA would be handed to the local force; if that same crime took place in a part that had been an Army base, it might well go directly to the FBI. It was a constant headache, and although cooperative statements such as the recent Interagency Agreement went far to smooth things out, in practice the work just went ahead and got done by whoever got there first. Or, as Al said, who had the loudest voice.

As with most policing, it was all in personal contacts.

“You know Chris Williams?” Hawkin asked her.

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s an Investigator with the Park’s CIB, I met him a couple years ago on a case. Nice guy. Anyway, he agreed with his supervisor that we should be brought in. They’ll stay involved, of course, since there’s a question of illegal disposal, but unless they find something there to show the vic was killed in the park, they’ll probably want us to have it. Since, like I say, he lived in the City.”

“If he was wearing pajamas, how did they ID him so fast? Did he have his wallet in the pocket?”

“He’s got a medical necklace, one of those that holds pills and tells the EMTs you have diabetes or whatever. He’d engraved his name and that of his doctor on it. The doctor happened to be on call, he confirmed that the patient matched the d.b.’s description, gave Williams his address.”

“Did he have diabetes?”

“Heart condition.”

“So it could have been an argument and somebody hit him with a frying pan, or he could’ve dropped dead in what they used to call a ‘compromising situation’ and hit his head on the way down. And whoever was with him panicked and drove him to the nearest convenient open space?”

“Could be.”

Kate’s proposed scenario became less likely the farther into the park they ventured: As drop spots went, this one was hardly convenient. They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, thick with traffic on this first sunny Saturday after a week of rain. Pedestrians, bicyclists, and parents pushing strollers washed in both directions, dodging the occasional stationary photographer—few people just stood and looked at the view, not with the fog lying just offshore to make the breeze cool and damp. Dodging the usual tangle of cars waiting to get into the viewing spot, Hawkin pulled off immediately after that and circled under the freeway to climb into the headlands.

Al’s eyes were on the curving road and the parking areas busy with cars, motorcycles, bicyclists, and human beings of all sizes, shapes, and geographic origin, but Kate swiveled around to admire the view. The bridge rose magnificent and orange, the city beyond it looking so cinematically perfect as to seem artificial. Traffic slowed, then crawled; they were going uphill, but bicyclists passed them. After a while, they saw why: Two Park rangers with a portable barrier were directing cars to the right, away from the road along the cliffs.

When they eventually reached the two uniforms, Hawkin waved his badge and told the nearest that they were heading for the crime scene. The man nodded and said, “If you wait to get through the tunnel, you’ll be all day. You better go this way.” He signaled to his partner to shift the barricade and let them pass.

Not that they could move a lot faster once they were past the traffic stop: Bicyclists had been permitted to continue and, given the unexpected luxury of a road unimpeded by cars, were meandering across both lanes, their heads angled toward the view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. Hawkin narrowly missed colliding with three oblivious cyclists, and honked at a fourth (who promptly fell over at their front bumper). Both detectives were relieved when they reached the final barricade, at the place where the road narrowed and larger vehicles were banned. The ranger there was turning even the bikers back, but for the SFPD, he pulled back the gate to the one-way section of road. Al drove forward, and the bottom of Kate’s stomach dropped out.

The paving appeared to launch its traffic directly out into the gray-green water far, far below. Kate gulped, but before their tires actually took to the air, the track shifted to the right, maintaining its tenuous hold on solid ground, although the thin metal guardrail seemed more suggestion than protection. The roadway was a trickle of asphalt laid along the edge of the world, set with long, wavering striations of close-growing weeds, green lines horribly suggestive of the inevitability of the earth’s surrender to the sea; in some of the bends, the green cracks resembled the tracings on a topographical map, accompanied by an alarming dip on the ocean side of the road. Kate would have clung to the landward side, but Hawkin blithely followed the shortest route, aiming directly for the gathering of cracks. A gust of wind scrambled up the cliffs and shook the car, testing its hold on the asphalt. Kate shut her eyes.

“Hope to God you had your brakes serviced recently,” she said, her voice tight.

“Been meaning to have them looked at,” Hawkin mused, pumping his foot a little to imitate brake failure.

“Funny man,” she said grimly, and fixed her eyes with determination on the hills to her right.

The earth here was red where exposed, the plants gray nearest the cliffs, greener now that they were retreating a little from the hungry bays and inlets. Bushes grew low along the cliffs, stunted by the constant blow from the sea, but here and there sprang odd clumps of trees, as if small, random patches of woodland had been preserved from the saw. Ancient metal doors surrounded by equally worn concrete were set into the hillsides, remnants of a race of particularly warlike hobbits. Traces of fog played with the shoreline, filling the westernmost trees for a moment, then dissipating. They could hear a foghorn not far away.

Finally nearing a few buildings, what passed on the headlands for civilization (Kate tried to silence her shuddering breath of relief), they saw a very cold-looking Park ranger huddled into a folding chair. At their appearance, she uncrossed her arms and rose stiffly.

Hawkin left his window up, pressing his badge against the glass. The pinched face looked disappointed and nodded for them to continue, then she pulled a hand out of her pocket to make a rolling gesture at the window. Hawkin lowered it a few inches; a wave of frigid air poured in.

“I wonder, would you mind reminding them that I’m still up here? I haven’t had a break in three hours. I could really use a cup of coffee and a toilet.”