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justified rousting the investigating detective out of his bed at four o'clock
on a Saturday morning. Even Al Hawkin had to admit that. So he and Kate found
an all-night restaurant and ate bacon and eggs in an attempt to fool their
bodies into thinking it was a new morning rather than a too-long night, and at
six they made their way to the county offices. At 6:30, Hawkin succeeded in
bullying an underling into phoning Makepeace. At seven o'clock, they were in
his office being shown the case file.
'That's right," he was saying, fighting yawns. "Completely nude, no false
teeth, not even a hairpin."
"She wore several rings," Kate commented.
"That's in the path report. Couple of nicks on her fingers, scratches that
showed where the rings'd been cut off her postmortem. Her hands were so
arthritic, I'd guess he tried to pull them off and couldn't get them over her
knuckles, so he had to cut them. She was also moved around after death, a
couple of rug fibers and marks on her legs, probably transported in a car's
trunk. Nothing under her fingernails but normal dirt she didn't scratch her
attacker, no defense marks on her hands, nothing. About the rings, though." He
sounded as if he was beginning to wake up, and he took a large swallow of
coffee from his paper cup to increase the rate of coherency. "We did a ground
search, especially up and down the road. Among the crap they picked up was a
ring. There should be a photograph here somewhere." He dug back into the file,
flipped through the glossy photographs of the nude woman sprawled in the
leaves, gray hair snarled across her face, and pulled out the picture of a
large fancy ring with a cracked stone. He laid it on the desk between them.
Kate peered at it. "It looks like one of hers. I'd have to ask her friends to
be sure. Where was it?"
"Whoever dumped her pulled off the main road down this dirt road." His finger
tapped a long-range photo that showed Beatrice as a mere shape in the corner.
"He couldn't go any farther because of the gate, but you can't see the place
from the road. The ring was on the left side of the road going in, where it
might have fallen when he opened the driver-side door. If it was in his
pocket, say, and fell out. Of course, it could've been there for a week or
two." He sipped at his coffee, then added, as if in afterthought, "There was a
partial on the ring, halfway decent. So let us know when you have prints on a
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suspect. Other than that, we didn't find a thing. Wasn't raped or assaulted,
no signs that she was tied up, just a sixty-odd-year-old woman in fairly good
condition until she ran into a blunt instrument."
'The pathologist doesn't seem to have much to say about the weapon," Hawkin
commented. He had put his glasses on to look through the file.
'There wasn't much to say. No splinters, no rust or grease stains, no glass
splinters. A smooth, hard object about two inches in diameter. Three blows,
though the first one probably killed her. Could've been almost anything.
What's your interest in her, anyway, to drag you down here in the middle of
the night?"
"It's related somehow to the body that was cremated in Golden Gate Park,"
Hawkin replied.
"No kidding? I read about that. And I used to think we had all the loose ones
rolling around here."
"We have our share. Can I have a copy of all this?"
"Sure. Here, you take any duplicates of the pictures. If you want copies of
the others, let me know and I'll have them printed. Let me go turn the Xerox
machine on."
Kate turned the car toward the mountainous Highway 17 and began climbing away
from the sea. The morning traffic was light, the rain had stopped at some time
during the night, and Kate drove with both eyes but only half a mind on the
road.
"It was the newspaper story," she said abruptly.
"What was?"
"Her picture was in the Wednesday paper. The article quoted her as saying
she'd seen John talking with a stranger from Texas, she seemed to think we
should let Sawyer go because of that. Two days later, she was missing."
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For a long time, Al did not answer. Kate took her eyes off the road for a
moment to see if he had fallen asleep, but he was staring ahead through the
windshield.
"You don't agree?"
"We don't know anything about the woman. It's a little early for jumping to
conclusions." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]