The Art of Detection (11 page)

No sign of enemies yet, no greedy relatives, no love life, even.

So why had Philip Gilbert ended up in a deserted gun emplacement on the Marin headlands?

The sun did not tell her, so she dusted herself off and went inside to see how Crime Scene was getting on.

This time, they had turned the study inside out, scrutinizing not just the walls, but the floor, the underside of the desk, and all the room’s furniture. Almost immediately, they had discovered the remnants of a bloodstain along the headrest of the tufted leather chair. The chair had been thoroughly wiped (with, it later turned out, an old sponge from the bucket of cleaning supplies kept under the bathroom sink across the hall) but Luminol showed an outline of where the blood had been, a rough smear approximately four inches by two. They found no fingerprints at all along the top of the chair, and only those of Gilbert and one other (who turned out to be the cleaning woman) on the bucket. In fact, there were a limited number of prints from the rest of the top floor as a whole, most of those Gilbert’s with an assortment of others in the study itself. The ground-floor rooms gave forth a daunting number, but that would be expected, if he used the rooms as his meeting room and showplace. The basement held an impressive collection of wine, but little else, and most of the surfaces were so dusty that they could not concern the events of the past two weeks.

The sheets on most of the beds had been clean and unused, the exception being Gilbert’s bed on the third floor. Those sheets had shown no indication of sexual activity, and there had been nothing of interest in the laundry basket.

However, on an upper shelf in the closet attached to that same room, the team had found a box of bullets and a can of gun oil. The box was half empty, both it and the can were covered with dust, and the rag draped across the can of oil had not been used in months, possibly years. The bullets were .38s, but they had found no sign of a gun.

“Maybe he just bought them to pound into the wall,” Kate suggested, holding the evidence envelope up to the light.

“What?” Crime Scene Maria asked.

“Nothing.”

The most promising piece of evidence was the object Kate had spotted between the filing cabinet and the wall: an irregular slip of black porcelain an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide.

“There were also some tiny splinters of the same material in the carpet under the chair,” Lo-Tec told her. “We’ve got those in the vacuum. Although it looks like they cleaned it up pretty thoroughly—nothing in the trash and the vacuum bag has been emptied.”

Kate held this evidence bag, too, up to the light and studied the tiny, sharp-sided remnant, seeing the trace of fingerprint powder. “No print?”

“That would’ve been too lucky.”

“We can always wish for some blood and hair?”

“It looks pretty clean, but we’ll see.”

“Where did you find it?”

He handed her his characteristically neat sketch of the room: rectangular space, door on the left, chair in front of it facing the television on the right-hand wall, desk and computer wrapping around the upper wall, narrow shelf running the squared U shape at the top of the room, a complete wall of bookshelves along the bottom wall. The hidden scrap of black-glazed porcelain had been lodged behind the filing cabinet immediately to the left of a person coming in the door, directly below the shelf holding the awards. If Gilbert had been watching the television, an assailant could have snatched the statue off the shelf, taken one step forward, and swung it right-handed at the seated man’s head, which in Gilbert’s case would have protruded five or six inches above the top of the chair. His injury had been just behind his temple, indicating that he turned his head as the blow was falling. If the statue had been particularly fragile, pieces of it would have flown in all directions, lodging in Gilbert’s garments and hair, the carpets, and the chair. Most of the bits would have fallen down or continued their trajectory to the left, but the killer might well have kicked one chunk out of sight, in back of the filing cabinet, away from the rest and outside the easy reach of a broom. Even if the statue had been too sturdy to shatter into a thousand pieces, clearly it had broken. They would find traces on Gilbert, and they would find it in the clothing of his assailant.

And if they found half-healed cuts along the right hand of a suspect, they would know that the assailant had not worn gloves.

“One last thing,” Lo-Tec told Kate. “We’re taking the hard drive, but there’s one hookup I can’t immediately tell what it goes to. The way it’s set up, it’s like he intended to put a viewer onto the front door that he could check from upstairs, but I can’t see any camera there. The wire runs inside the wall, so it’s tough to trace. I don’t want to bother taking the place apart now, since we’ll find where it goes anyway as soon as we get into the hard drive, but I just thought I’d mention it.”

“A security camera of some kind?”

“Nanny-cam, front door viewer, webcam, no telling. I’d normally leave the hard drive for our computer guys, but if you think it’s important I’ll open it up myself and see what I can find. Might take a while.”

“How long have you been on?”

“Nine hours. Twelve yesterday.”

“It’s Sunday afternoon, man. Go home, it’ll wait.”

“Okay, but if you see a camera lens poking out of somewhere, let us know.”

“And if you find a video of someone bashing our guy, don’t hesitate to call.”

There were no other chunks of black-glazed porcelain, but the team had collected bags of vacuumed evidence from each room, and would see what they found. They collected their evidence bags, packed up the Gilbert computer, carted all the material and equipment out to the van, and Kate locked the Gilbert house behind them not long after five o’clock. The winter sun was still above the horizon.

KATE arrived home to discover Lee and Nora in the kitchen and half the neighborhood in the backyard: Lee had organized a potluck barbecue, including all the usual suspects.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said to Kate. “I just couldn’t bear to waste the sunlight.”

Kate kissed her partner, who tasted of some exotic marinade, and then kitchen assistant Nora, who tasted of cinnamon. “Of course not. I just have to check my e-mail and phone Al, I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

“Any longer and you get to do the dishes.”

Since Kate generally did the dishes anyway, this was not much of a threat. She trotted upstairs and locked her gun away, changed into jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and plopped down in front of the desktop.

Tom Rutland had e-mailed her the promised list of Gilbert’s relatives and the members of the Sherlockian dinner club. She had not checked her e-mail that morning, but found that this had been sent off less than two hours after he had left the Gilbert house the night before.

Kate printed the document, and mused over the names of the dining club:

Philip Gilbert

Wendell Bauer

Jeannine Cartfield

Alex Climpson

Soong Li

Ian Nicholson

Geraldine O’Malley

Rajindra Pandi

Thomas Rutland

Johnny Venkatarama

Alphabetical, but for Philip Gilbert, and unlike Gilbert’s, which stood unadorned at the top, all the other names were followed by two or three phone numbers, home addresses, places of business, a few fax numbers, and, for six of them, e-mail addresses.

An extraordinarily cooperative lawyer, indeed.

The other e-mails did not seem to be of any importance, so she closed the computer down and punched Al’s number on the phone.

“Hey,” she said when he answered. “Lee’s organizing a barbecue, if you guys aren’t doing anything for dinner.”

“Yeah, she called and invited us, but we’re entertaining some of Jules’s friends. Mostly a boy. How’d it go?”

“Crime Scene found blood on the back of Gilbert’s armchair—just a little, but they said they’d hurry that one through the lab for us. And I managed to reach most of the neighbors, nothing that jumps out at me from what they had to say—I’ll write it up and give it to you tomorrow. And I have the names of the next of kin. Should I call them tonight? The ex-wife’s on the East Coast.”

“Kind of late. Tomorrow’s fine, since the lawyer seemed to think none of them were very close to the man.”

“I’ve got to say, that lawyer of Gilbert’s bothers me. He’s too helpful by far.”

“A helpful lawyer? Definitely suspicious,” Al growled. “Let’s go arrest him now.”

“I don’t mean—”

“Yeah, I know. We’ll do a search on him tomorrow. Still set for the bank in the morning?”

“I thought I’d go in early and make these calls. Meet me at the office?”

“Will do.”

“See you then,” Kate said. “Hi to Jules and the others.”

“And to Lee.”

But before going back downstairs, Kate did a quick search on Thomas Rutland.

He moved along the edges of the Bay Area social elite. He had established himself among the corporate executives of the dot-com boom, which had gone bust but was beginning to show signs of recovery. A cursory glance at the appearances of his name showed that he was a regular at San Francisco social events—one
Chronicle
photograph showed him at a table before the annual Black and White Ball, laughing with five other formally clad power brokers. The only indication that he was not truly one of the blessed was the eagerness of his laugh, and a slight yearning in the arm that stretched along his companion’s seat back.

Or perhaps that was Kate’s imagination.

As she’d thought, Rutland’s legal life dealt with dollars, not with the everyday crimes of drugs, prostitution, and violence. The only sign of conflict she came across in her brief read was the statement that he had divorced three wives, which seemed a bit excessive for a man not yet forty-five.

The doorbell rang, and she made haste to shut the machine down and join the others.

Jon Sampson was just coming in the front door when Kate got downstairs, followed by his partner Sione, who cradled their sleepy two-year-old daughter, Lalu, to his chest. Once upon a time, Jon had been Lee’s client, then later her caregiver, in the months after the shooting when she had needed help just to get around. Now he was simply her friend—and Kate’s, which still rather surprised her, considering how grating she had once found his personality. The child in Sione’s arms stirred, spotted Nora, and flung herself in the direction of the older girl, to spend the next two hours glued to Nora’s hip, blond Nora’s little Polynesian shadow. Kate handed Jon a beer and his partner a Pellegrino—Sione was a dancer, in constant battle against his own hearty Polynesian genes.

Roz Hall arrived, ordained minister and powerbroker, followed by gorgeous sixteen-year-old Mina, who carried a promising-looking bowl; nine-year-old Satch, whose arms were full of baguettes; and an elderly Mutton, whose graying muzzle was stretched around a soggy tennis ball, and who immediately attached himself to the Nora-Lalu duo. Roz swept through the house and out the kitchen door into the yard, calling out instructions to her children and dog, catching up a glass of wine as she passed, greeting every person with a hug or a kiss or both, then taking over a chair that immediately became the center of the party. She greeted those she knew, shook the hands of the two adults she did not, then launched with her usual panache into her own inimitable brand of News of the Day. However, instead of some juicy tidbit concerning the mayor or City Hall, her first announcement was that Mina had driven them over.

“Well done, Mina,” Jon said. “How many bicyclists did you kill on the way?”

“Not one,” the girl shot back, “and I missed most of the joggers I was aiming at.”

“Better luck on the way home,” he commiserated.

“No Maj?” Lee asked Roz, when Roz’s partner failed to bring up her customary quiet place behind the rest. Maj—pronounced “My,” although her looks were far from Scandanavian—was Mina and Satch’s birth mother, an expert on the human brain, and a woman with a history of devotion to shadowy radical causes.

“She’s helping out a friend who was in that church in Marin this morning. She’s all right, but shaken, as you can imagine. Maj’s spending the night with her.”

Talk veered in the direction of the catastrophe, but Lee eyed the kids running around at their feet and interposed firmly, “I’m sure there’ll be more about it in the papers tomorrow.” Obediently, they turned to other things.

“How’s the new hizzoner, Roz?” Jon asked.

“Surprising us all,” she admitted. San Francisco’s new mayor had looked so clean-cut and talked so correctly, everyone had assumed that, Democrat or not, he would tug the city back toward the right. Instead, even the most fearful of pundits were admitting to a cautious optimism, Roz among them. Maj had told Lee, who had told Kate, that Roz was spending a considerable amount of time with the man, a task she appeared to find more energizing than frustrating, rare with politicians. The mayor seemed honestly interested in what his city had to tell him, and in Roz, he found a voice both articulate and experienced.

Before the last election, rumors had made their way around the city that Reverend Roz Hall would cast her hat into the ring. Everyone who was anyone in the city considered themselves a friend of Roz’s; a few of them even were. Kate, too, had considered herself a friend until Roz, and especially Maj, had skirted far too close to felonious acts for a cop’s taste. But that was nine years ago, when Maj was pregnant with Satch. With Roz’s burn scars as a visible reminder of consequences, and the sobering effects of motherhood, Maj had stepped back from the borderlands of activism. Over the last year or two, Kate had begun to relax and see them socially again, brought together by Lee, the children (Mina sometimes babysat Nora), Maj’s apparent reformation, and most of all by Maj’s cancer scare the year before.

Kate wondered how Roz had kept the scandal out of the newspapers. To this day, few people even suspected that public office would blow up in Roz’s face and peel her family wide open: Kate had never heard so much as a whisper linking Maj with the group of feminist vigilantes that had set the entire city on its ears. But the tie was there, if more philosophical than purely criminal, and since that episode, Roz had seemed content to play the role of backroom powerhouse in the city’s politics. However, it was beginning to sound as if the new mayor might be Roz’s conduit back into the center of things.