The Art of Detection (41 page)

Kate studied him out of the corner of her eye. “You’re not talking about the investigation, are you?”

“Actually, no metaphor intended. I just thought it was interesting, that the reason the ground is different—green basalt, for your information, unlike the rocky sandstone you see on the opposite hill—is that over here is the remnant of a long-extinct underwater volcano.”

All Kate could think of to say was, “Well, I guess we know something Sherlock Holmes didn’t.”

“Thank God for that. So: five and a half minutes, start to finish, assuming the perp knew exactly what to expect here.”

“I agree. He’d have had to know the layout of the gun itself, and that there was just a simple padlock on this door. The padlock anyone could see, but surely there aren’t that many people who know what’s behind the door?”

“You’d say we’re looking at someone from the headlands?”

“Or someone who’s taken a tour of these installations.”

“No, that’s no good. It has to have been someone who knew the story itself. Unless Gilbert gave it to someone here, it’s more likely that the perp assumed the story’s description of the site was accurate. That once he’d pulled off the padlock, he’d find a room behind it that more or less corresponded with the given details.”

Except that the body in the story was a young officer, not a middle-aged man in a silk dressing gown. Kate shook her head to dislodge the persistent, fictional Jack Raynor, then turned the gesture into a denial that fit their discussion.

“I’d say he at least came here and saw the outside of the emplacement. People don’t tend to carry pry bars around in their cars.”

“Unless you’re a builder,” Hawkin noted, but before Kate could recall if they had any carpenters in their pool of suspects, he went on. “Was the killer planning every step, do you suppose? Or making do as he went?”

“A bash on the head causing death by heart attack isn’t exactly premeditated murder.”

“I agree, the death itself may have been accidental, or at least premature. But the disposing of the body was thought out.”

“But why here?” Kate asked, making her contribution to the reasoning.

“Lieutenant Jack Raynor.” Al’s eyes were following the bird that sailed far above their heads, but Kate thought his mind was focused elsewhere.

“Which brings us back to the story,” she said.

“I wonder why the author didn’t put his name on it? Or her name. Seems to me that would be an automatic thing for a writer.”

“Unless the writer was pretending to be someone else. Like Arthur Conan Doyle. Or unless it had a title page that got lost.”

“If so, it wasn’t numbered. The thing starts on page one.”

“You think it might be a forgery after all? Elaborate, but everyone seems to agree that the stakes are pretty high.”

“Is that a hawk or a turkey buzzard?” he asked suddenly.

Kate craned to look at the dark outline. “I don’t know. Can you see if the tail is brown?”

“Too far away.”

“Then it could be either. Does it matter?”

“No. Although it might have contributed to the decision to put the body inside the battery. If Gilbert was killed by a friend, that is, someone who didn’t care for the idea of wildlife treating Philip Gilbert as dinner. It would also explain why, although he couldn’t do much to rearrange the body, what with rigor, the clothing had been tidied around it.”

“But we know he was put here by someone who knew him. I refuse to believe that bringing him to this gun emplacement was accidental.”

“Of course not, but I mean someone with an emotional attachment to Gilbert. Something that went beyond their mutual interest in Arthur Conan Doyle.”

She thought about that for a minute, then said, “We assumed he was in his dressing gown because he was getting ready for bed, but he could have been getting up. Either in the morning, or after a, what, romantic interlude?”

“Sex,” Al said bluntly. “What did the autopsy say?”

“Swab was negative, but if he wasn’t penetrated, and if he’d had a shower afterwards, it would be hard to tell. There was nothing on the sheets.”

“On
his
sheets, no.”

“You think he could have been killed elsewhere?”

“The urge to get a body out of one’s house is considerable. If he’d died at home, the killer might have been more tempted just to arrange the body at the foot of the stairs or something and sneak away.”

“But we found Gilbert’s blood on the back of the chair, and the statue is broken and missing.”

“The placement of the blood doesn’t make me happy.”

“What do you mean? The vic was plenty tall enough to clear the top of that chair.”

“But if somebody hits you hard enough on the right side of the head to knock you out, will your torso remain sitting upright in your chair? And will your head lean neatly back against the rest, in the direction the blow came from, and bleed gently into the leather?”

Kate’s eyes narrowed as she visualized the room, the chair, the television set, the stain. “You would if your basher grabbed you and dragged you back.”

Hawkin nodded, but said, “That would take some doing, to swing the statue and step forward in time to catch your vic before he fell out of the chair. Plus, there was no trace of blood on the carpet from a dropped statue.”

Kate squinted in thought. “What if he used the statue to bash Gilbert, but it didn’t break? And then he saw that Gilbert was falling, so he stepped forward and let go of it.”

“It would have hit the carpet.”

“Or he could have sort of tossed it behind him. It would break against the floor in back of the chair, explaining the piece we found and the tiny shards in the carpet.”

“Yes,” he said dubiously.

“So, would you rather have two doers here, one to whack and one to catch?”

“That doesn’t feel right, either. It’s nothing,” he said and stood up from the bench, shaking out the dregs from his cup. “I just like to be able to feel how a thing happened, and I can’t here.”

Kate drained her own cup and dropped it onto the thermos. “So, what next?”

“No motive, no suspects. We need to reconstruct his last days.”

“Bank statements and credit card records should be in any time.”

“Those’ll be a good place to start,” he agreed. “You make an appointment with Jeannine Cartfield?”

“I threatened to arrive with uniforms and take her away in a black and white if she didn’t set up a time. I’m going to see her tomorrow afternoon.”

“While you’re doing that, maybe I’ll take a swing at the neighbors. You had a couple twinges there, didn’t you?”

“The helpful guy across the street and the night nurse who lives next door,” Kate recalled.

“I’ll see what I can get out of them.”

“When we finish, that’s pretty much the entire run of contacts and records, and as far as I can see we’ve got nothing. Until Crime Scene coughs up a report, what else do you want to do?”

Far too early to consider the case cold. Still, it was one of those times Kate was grateful that at least the victim didn’t have a family to answer to.

“You’ve got something this weekend, don’t you?”

“Just a trip to Point Reyes.”

“The whole weekend in Point Reyes, according to Lee. She made it very clear that I was not to expect you to show up for anything short of a hostage situation, with me as hostage.”

Kate gave him a wry grin. “She’s even rescheduled her Saturday client so we can have all day there. But honest, it’s just Point Reyes, I can get away for part of the time.”

“Well, let’s see what we come up with tomorrow. It might be helpful to take just an hour or two and go over the high points, set things up for Monday.”

“Say the word. I won’t even tell Lee it’s your fault.”

“My vulnerable organs thank you,” he said.

They climbed off the table and went to lock up, but instead of turning to the room, Hawkin continued on to the far end where the tunnel opened up for the gun, long gone from where they were. He stood, looking out over the gray-green Pacific, then shifted to study the ridge at the top of the cliffs.

A trail ran the cliff top between DuMaurier and Battery Mendel to the north, but to the south the ground was rough and overgrown. Hawkin set off in that direction, picking his way in inadequate shoes, with Kate behind him. A tongue of rock (gray, Kate noted) protruded into the ocean, creating a miniature bay far below, with refrigerator-sized rocks in the place of a beach. The swell of waves beat and retreated, beat and retreated, the white foam broken here and there by the heads of jagged black boulders.

In any number of places around their feet, the thin covering of soil gave way before a protruding knob of the substratum. Most were considerably smoother than their brothers in the sea below; some might have been chosen by a man looking for a place to sit and smoke a small cigar while he looked over the moonlit sea.

Hawkin murmured under his breath. “‘I am a young artillery officer, fully dressed, anticipating a difficult interview.’”

Kate picked it up, and said, “‘It is two o’clock in the morning, at thirty-something degrees north, with a moon that is five nights after full.’”

“Lot of changes in eighty years, huh?”

“You think? ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell?’ Matthew Shepard and Gwen Araujo?”

“Christ, cheer me up why don’t you, Martinelli? Come on, we got a case to solve.”

They fastened the padlock back on the door, restored the crime-scene tape, and wrestled the spare tire between them down to the car’s trunk. The winter green of the hills glowed in the sun as they passed through the headlands. A family with a small child in a backpack waited to cross the road, the infant staring seriously at them. Traffic was picking up on the bridge, and Al dodged through side streets to miss the worst city congestion.

They got back to the Hall of Justice shortly before four o’clock, to find the last month’s bank statement and records from two of Gilbert’s three credit cards waiting for them—an unusually fast response from the paper bureaucracies. Kate dug into those, Al laid out his interviews from Monday and Tuesday, and they worked in relative silence until it was time to go home.

It was just as well they chose the virtue of procrastination; if they had buckled down and built up Gilbert’s final hours then and there, they’d have had to throw out all their calculations come morning.

SEVENTEEN

H
awkin picked up Kate at nine o’clock Friday morning, and drove to the Gilbert house. He had gone past the Hall of Justice to retrieve the Gilbert hard drive from the crime lab, and she connected it to the monitor and various cords, and turned it on. Al sorted the papers onto the low table, and as she waited for the computer to hum to life, Kate noticed the light on the answering machine, which had not been blinking the day before. She stretched out an arm to hit the play button, and the mechanical voice informed her that a message had been left at one-twelve the previous afternoon, a couple of hours after they had been there.

“Mr. Gilbert,” said a chipper soprano voice, “this is Angie from Goode’s Porcelain Repair. We have your bird ready for you, it looks just like new. You can pick it up Tuesday to Saturday from ten to six. Bye.”

They stared at each other for a moment, jaws dropped, before Kate whirled and tugged open drawers in search of the phone book. However, the machine’s surprises were not over yet. Message two, left about half an hour before they had arrived that morning, was another woman. By contrast, hers was a voice haughty with authority, although she sounded to be trying for a more friendly, even folksy, air.

“Hello Philip, this is Louisa Brancusi. You told me to give you a couple of weeks, and since it’s two weeks today, I thought I’d give you a ring. You can reach me today in the office or on my cell, or any day, really. I’m going to be back in the Bay Area next week, I’d love to talk further. I know you have my numbers.”

The machine added,
End of messages.

There was no point in speculating while there was information to be had. Kate found the Yellow Pages and discovered, rather to her surprise, that there was such a category as Porcelain Repair. And Goode’s was top of the list.

The chipper Angie answered. Kate identified herself, briefly explained that she was investigating the death of the man who had left an item for repair, and asked what Angie could tell her about it. Angie hesitated, and Kate resigned herself to having to go down in person—some people had no trust, particularly for things that mattered little. But Angie surprised her.

“Oh, that’s too bad. Mr. Gilbert seemed really nice, and he was so upset about breaking his bird. It was a prize of some sort, for a book he’d written. When you say you’re investigating his death, do you mean he was…murdered?”

“It’s possible,” Kate told her. “I’m going to put you on the speakerphone now, Angie. My partner is here, too, and it’ll save me from having to repeat what you say. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“It’s Lieutenant Al Hawkin,” she said, and hit the speaker button.

“Hello, Angie,” Al said.

“Hi.”

“Okay,” Kate resumed. “You say Mr. Gilbert broke the statue by accident?”

“Yes, he said he bumped against it on a shelf and it fell onto the floor. Broke in about a dozen pieces. Like I said, he was terribly upset, because although the thing isn’t very attractive in itself, and it probably cost a fraction of what I’d had to charge for repairing it, the value’s in what it means to the owner, you know?”

“I understand. Can you tell me what day this was?”

“Sure, just a minute.” There was a sound of paper rustling, then Angie’s voice. “The tag says January twentieth. That was a, let’s see, a Tuesday. And it was the afternoon, if it matters. Not too long before closing. That’s not on the tag, but I remember.”

“Great. Now, Angie, can you tell us anything more about what he said, how he acted? Just anything that made an impression on you.”

“He was tall and he had a big nose, I remember that. A little snooty but kind of embarrassed too about his clumsiness. Polite. And he made a face over the estimate but he didn’t try to argue me down. People do.”