The Art of Detection (6 page)

“And there’s no sign of dragging?” Kate asked, hoping it didn’t sound like a suggestion that Crime Scene might have overlooked anything.

“In the hallway, we didn’t find anything detailed enough to lift, other than the possible wheelbarrow or bicycle. Outside in the open, there’s been too much rain to leave us anything. Inside here, the floor looks like it was wiped, probably with a towel. We haven’t found much to lift. Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ve taken soil samples, in case it comes to matching the ground to a wheel somewhere. And of course once we unwrap him in the lab we’ll see what he has to tell us. Maybe the perp left hairs across the middle by a fireman’s carry.”

“Any idea why someone would want to stash a dead body here?”

“None whatsoever,” the woman replied with a grin that said,
Not my job, thank God,
and bent down again to her work.

Chris Williams waited while the two San Francisco detectives looked the scene over, then led them back outside the battery, where the noise of the generator dropped enough to carry on a conversation. He waved at the men of the Marin Coroner’s office. The two disentangled themselves from the picnic table and grabbed their equipment, pushing past the detectives impatiently. Kate noticed Hawkin glance surreptitiously at his watch, and realized that this was the second time he’d done so.

“You need to be somewhere, Al?”

“Not really. Maya has a thing, I told her I might not be able to make it.”

“I don’t know that there’s a lot more we can do here. Is there, Chris?”

“Your CSI will be here for another hour or so, and since my supervisor made me Incident Commander, I’ve got to hang on here. After we’re finished, though, I’d like to go with you to do the notification, if you don’t mind. I could give you a call and you can meet me there, if you like?”

Kate turned to her partner. “Al, why don’t you go on back and I’ll hang out here until Chris is ready to go—let me just come with you and fetch my bag.”

Williams spoke up. “If you want to leave anything here, you can have the ranger on duty down there stick it in my car. I gave him the keys.”

“Nah,” said Al, “I’ll just call and tell Jani I’m going to be late. It’s only a meeting about a school trip in the spring.”

“Al, look, Chris and I can do the notification, and he can take me home afterwards.”

“You sure?”

“Why not? I may even be back in time for Nora’s homemade pizza.”

“I’ll be thinking of you as I grind my way through the raw vegetables.”

“Jani still have you on the low-fat diet, huh?”

Her partner’s look was eloquent, although as she watched him set off down the hillside, she had to admit that the minor heart scare he’d had the previous year had done him a lot of good. He was in better shape than when she’d first met him, what was it, a dozen years ago?

The younger, fitter, more conventionally good-looking man at her side was also watching Hawkin’s steady progress down the hill, and he now said, “Must be great to work with a man like him.”

“He’s been a good partner,” she agreed; sometimes she and Al acted like an old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences.

“You know, he’s one of the reasons I’m a cop. My first year in the criminal justice program down in LA, when I was thinking that this whole cop thing wasn’t for me, he came to speak to one of the classes. This would have been maybe fifteen, sixteen years ago. He was just such a…solid person, I decided to stick with it. I think maybe I wanted to be like him when I grew up.” Williams was grinning when he said it, but Kate thought it was not altogether a joke. Once she’d made it past the initial intimidation factor, she’d wanted to grow up to be like Hawkin, too.

“Anything I can do to lend a hand?” she asked.

“Nah. I’m just here to oversee, when they quit we can go.”

“Okay. You mind if I go down and talk to the Park rangers? Not taking statements, just to get a feel for the place.”

“Help yourself.”

“I’ll watch for you in the parking area. Which car is yours?”

“Dark blue Jeep.”

“Honk if you don’t see me,” she said, then launched herself down the hill in Hawkin’s footsteps. To her chagrin, her progress was no more nimble than her partner’s had been.

SHE found her pet ranger, Dan Culpepper, down in the parking area, patiently explaining to a hiking couple that no, they could not let their three large dogs race around unleashed, tormenting the wildlife. He nodded in sympathy with their plaints, agreeing that it was a pity that modern life did not allow for all the traditional freedoms, and gently mentioned that the fines were considerable, although if they agreed to keep the animals leashed, he would not write up a ticket this time. Grumbling but fatalistic, the pair tugged on the nylon that attached them to a couple hundred pounds of dog, and staggered off in their wake.

“Squirrels have rights, too,” Kate commented.

Dan grinned at her, looking like a schoolboy, and said, “I didn’t think that was quite the argument to use with them. Talking about the fines is usually more effective.”

“Still, interesting job you have. From homicide to leash laws in one morning.”

“And by this afternoon it’ll be drunks falling in the lagoon; never a dull moment. Something I can help you with?”

“I just thought I’d take a look at the place. Living in San Francisco, I know all about the Presidio, but this is mostly a patch of hillside I see from the other side of the bridge. You have a YMCA conference center here, and year-round housing?”

“We have what are called park partnerships—the Y conference center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Marine Mammal Center, the Discovery Museum—nonprofit organizations with interests that overlap those of the headlands. And that need cheap housing.”

“Now that coastal defense takes place in Nevada and the Army doesn’t need the barracks.”

“That’s right.”

“How many people live here, full-time?”

“In the whole park? Gee, let’s see. Maybe eighty or ninety. Most of those work for one of the nonprofits.”

“And the conference center, how often is that used?”

“Constantly. There’ll be some group or another in there more than three hundred days a year.”

“And the park hours?”

“It’s an open park. The visitor center’s only open during the day, of course, but we never shut.”

“And there’s no guard shack, to check people in and out.”

“No.”

Kate began to see the problem.

“No gates.”

“No. Well, there’s a gate at the top of the one-way section along the cliffs, but anyone can come in through the tunnel, around the clock.”

“And you probably don’t have any closed-circuit cameras on the roads.”

“Nope.”

“And this close to”—Kate thought maybe she shouldn’t use the word
civilization
—“the Bay Area, you don’t have problems with vandals?”

“Oh, some, sure. But we do have night patrols, and if anyone hears something they call us. That’s the advantage of live-ins. I admit, we have had a few problems with full-moon skateboarders, down the cliff road.”

Kate felt herself go pale. “Kids ride skateboards down that road? At
night
?”

“Sometimes they use bicycle headlights strapped to their helmet. They’ll have a buddy drop them at the top and drive around to pick them up at the bottom. Or sometimes they’ll break the lock, that doesn’t happen often, it’s too much work. They only get one or two runs in before someone calls us.”

She suppressed a shudder, and pulled her mind back from the sensation of flying out over a cliff in the moonlight.

“Tell me about Battery DuMaurier.”

“Actually, DuMaurier was the only single gun to be established in Fort Barry, a part of the expansion in—”

Kate interrupted. “What I’m wondering is, why was the body left in that particular spot? I’d have said it’s hardly the first place that springs to mind.”

“That’s for sure. If you want to leave a body here, Wallace is closer to the road, Alexander is more private, Mendell doesn’t even have padlocks to break. Maybe it was just the challenge?”

Great, thought Kate. A killer with a quirk. “As far as you know, there haven’t been other bodies found there?”

“We’ve had deaths in the park, sure. Heart attacks mostly. But specifically DuMaurier? Not that I know of.”

Still, Kate told herself, you never know: They might do a five-minute search through the records and find that the tall, skinny man in the pajamas had been chief suspect in an assault at Battery DuMaurier two years before or something, and this would turn out to be the assault victim’s revenge and statement. Stranger things had happened.

Kate thanked her informant and wandered off to look over the remains of Fort Barry. Forty minutes later the faint echo of a car horn reached her where she stood on the windy bluff overlooking the ocean. She looked back at the parking area, saw the figure standing beside the blue Jeep, and waved a wide response before starting back along the crumbling concrete of Mendell.

When she reached the car, she found Lo-Tec Freeman and his new partner packing up their kits and Williams leaning against the Jeep, talking to Dan. As she came up, the Park CIB detective stood away from the car and shook hands with the ranger, saying, “I’ll be back Monday to look over the records. Thanks a lot.”

“Happy to help. Have a good weekend, you two.”

“Ready?” Chris asked Kate.

“Sure. You got everything?”

“Such as it was. We put another padlock on and sealed the door, but I don’t think there’s much there. However, I had a call from Hawkin to say that he had someone dig into the records, and it looks like maybe Gilbert lived alone.”

“You want to go anyway?”

“Oh yeah, just wanted you to know that we might not have to break the news to anyone. Al also asked me to tell you that he’d talked to your lieutenant, but you’re to phone him, too, when you’re finished at the house.”

It did cheer the drive back across the bridge, thinking that they might not have to face the whole shock-and-grief process, and that it would only be a matter of finding what the house could tell them.

And when they had eventually followed the young woman from the security company through the front door, what the house had to tell them was that, from gas lamps to icebox, its master had been a bizarrely committed devotee of a character of detective fiction.

TWO

L
ee, you know anything about Sherlock Holmes?”

Kate was sitting in the room with the flocked wallpaper, talking on her cell phone, a scrap of technology that felt like some intrusion from another universe. Still, Gilbert’s wicker chair was surprisingly comfortable, and the usual sounds made by Crime Scene—voices, footsteps—were oddly soothing in the otherwise empty house.

“Sherlock Holmes? A self-medicating bipolar with obsessive-compulsive tendencies,” said the psychotherapist. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing, just that our victim seems to’ve had a serious thing for the man.”

“My sweet, you do know that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character?”

“Not too sure this guy did. You should see his place.” Kate stood up to look at another drawing like that concealing the door alarm, but this one showed a single man holding a flower in one hand, and behind it was nothing but a patch of wall. She sat down again.

“That’s where you are?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to let you know that I may be late for pizza. We’re waiting for the vic’s lawyer to come, he says he has the combination to the safe, but he wouldn’t give it to us over the phone.”

“That’s okay, we’ll save you some. Will you be back for bedtime?”

“Absolutely.” Even if it meant she had to borrow Williams’s car to drive across town and back just to tuck Nora in; she’d only missed a handful of bedtimes in the last three years.

“I’ll let her know. Say hi to Al for me.”

“He went back already—there was a school event he needed to be at.”

“Okay, well, have fun with the pipe and violin.”

“And you with the pizza.”

As she flipped the phone shut, a voice said, “Sorry about your dinner.”

She turned around in the chair, to see the Park detective running his gaze methodically along the shelves. He had gloves on, as she did. Lo-Tec had found no particular reason to think this was a crime scene, but still.

“It’s nothing. But if we’re still here at eight, I’m going to need to leave you alone for a little while. I like to say goodnight to my daughter.”

“Her name’s Nora?” he asked. “I heard you say something to Hawkin about Nora’s pizza.”

“Right.”

“It’s a nice, old-fashioned name.”

“A variation on her mother’s name—Leonora.”

Chris turned around with a puzzled look on his face. “She’s adopted, then?”

“Oh, no. Lee—my partner—is her biological mother.”

“Ah,” he said, understanding at last. “Sorry.”

Sorry for the misunderstanding, Kate translated, not sorry that she was a lesbian. It was somewhat surprising that he hadn’t already known who (and what) she was, and encouraging to think that the name Kate Martinelli no longer produced instant flags of alarm in people’s minds. Her last bout with infamy had been several years earlier; with any luck, the next would be a long time coming. She stood and dropped her phone into her pocket.

“Finding anything of interest?”

“The whole place is weirdly fascinating—you know that antique telephone actually has a dial tone? But not a lot of paperwork—it must all be in the safe.”

They had found the safe in the third-floor office, but the woman from the security service did not have its code. When the photographer finished with the desk, Kate went back upstairs to make a methodical search through it for any record of Philip Gilbert’s family. She found no trace of them, but she did spot a letter from a law firm across the Bay in Oakland, something to do with establishing a nonprofit foundation. She called the number on the stationery, listened to the recording, then dialed the number it referred her to in case of emergency. It took her some time to convince the answering service to hunt the lawyer down, but when she had done so, her cell phone rang in barely two minutes.