Roarke walked out of the office, hearing nothing but the rush of blood in his ears. He was shaking with anger. Reynolds had never directly interfered with one of his cases before; he couldn’t believe it was happening now.
Fuck that
, he thought.
Fuck it
.
Epps was waiting for him in the hall. Tall, dark, imposing as always, but there was just something about him that made Roarke stop.
“Looking pretty intense, there,” Roarke said. His skin prickled with anticipation, and not the good kind.
“There’s been another killing,” Epps said.
Roarke felt his breath catch, and suddenly the ground didn’t seem so incredibly stable. “A family?” he managed.
“No. One of hers,” Epps said.
Chapter Nineteen
As they drove into Golden Gate Park, Roarke sat like a concrete statue in the passenger seat. He felt as if he would explode at any second. Epps kept glancing at him from the driver’s seat. Finally he spoke. “Maybe Reynolds is right. It’s a hell of a long shot.”
“It’s the Reaper,” Roarke said.
“So – we work the Lindstrom case while we wait for the DNA analysis and go in with more—”
Roarke interrupted. “How did we find out about this homicide so fast?”
Epps stared out the windshield. “I’ve been monitoring all male homicides in the city and surrounding areas since you got back from San Diego.”
For one second Roarke felt a blinding rage. He breathed in and used all the self-control he had to tamp it down, and he stared out the window until he felt sanity returning. Furious as he was, he had to wonder just a little if he had started to lose all objectivity. He had not in any way been anticipating another killing from Cara. He was still reeling that one had occurred under their noses, or what would have been under their noses if they had been in the city at the time.
In reality another killing from Cara was the most obvious thing that was going to happen.
Epps, on the other hand, had not only anticipated it, he’d apparently been watching out for exactly this. Casting a net, as it were.
Roarke was jarred from his thoughts as they turned onto the curve of Conservatory Drive. The white palace of the Conservatory of Flowers loomed up into view and he knew he had to focus.
He knew the park and this area of it well. The tunnel where the body had been found was across the road from the Victorian extravagance of the conservatory. A romantic setting by day; musicians hoping to score spare change from the tourists used the short arched ivy-covered tunnel to play in because of its acoustics. At night it was a favorite rendezvous for addicts and dealers. The victim, Danny Ramirez, had apparently been accosted while dosing in the tunnel.
Epps parked on the road above the tunnel, and they walked downhill on the path under towering eucalyptus and cypress. Yellow crime scene tape kept the usual bedraggled onlookers from approaching the tunnel, but they watched the cops working the scene with interest. Epps spoke low.
“It was around midnight. He probably met a dealer here. It’s an easy drop off.”
A loud and familiar voice spoke behind them. “Aww, don’t tell me the Feebles are on this.” Epps and Roarke turned to see a figure shambling from the tunnel, a large bald man dressed in khaki pants and a Hawaiian shirt, Birkenstocks flopping on his feet. He had the rubbery, horsey face of a comedian: thick lips and bulbous eyes, and a jock’s body gone to seed.
Epps harassed him back. “Oh my Lord, who let Mills out of the asylum?”
SFPD homicide inspector Clifton Mills was one of San Francisco’s myriad eccentrics. He’d read everything Kerouac and Kesey ever put to paper and had probably lost half of his not inconsiderable brain cells to acid at Dead concerts while Jerry was still alive. Other cops tended to think he was one burger short of a Happy Meal.
Mills stopped in front of the agents in a truculent stance and looked them up and down.
“Why oh why would the Most Illustrious be interested in my poor little homicide? For that matter, why would anyone? Guy was pond scum. Has a sheet as long as my dick.”
“For what?” Epps asked tensely. Roarke was equally tense beside him.
“The
milieu
doesn’t give you a hint?” Mills opened his arms expansively. “Where do I start? Pimping, pandering, sodomy, forced oral intercourse, trafficking of minors…”
Epps gave Roarke a significant look. Exactly the kind of criminal Cara was prone to target. They both knew it.
“So why wasn’t he locked up?” Roarke asked.
Mills looked injured. “I have to spell this out? You got to get the girls to testify and they just won’t. This one was a Romeo.” He meant a pimp who alternately romanced and terrorized his stable, a master at emotional manipulation.
A CSI shouted for Mills and he bellowed back, “Hold your shit!” But he headed back toward the tunnel, leaving Epps and Roarke alone.
Epps was looking at Roarke.
Roarke began. “We don’t know—”
“Bullshit we don’t,” Epps said, a soft explosion. “
You
know. M.O., victim profile. She is what she is. She does what she does.”
Mills hustled back from the dark mouth of the tunnel, Birkenstocks slapping on the asphalt. He was singing his own version of a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune Roarke recognized only because
Oklahoma
! had been a favorite show of his musically-inclined mother. “
Th’
lawmen and th’ Feebles should be friends
….”
Mills broke off the song and grinned at the agents. “It’s my lucky day. Someone saw it.” He beckoned them toward the tunnel.
As they stepped into the arch of the tunnel the cold hit Roarke, a good fifteen degrees cooler inside the passageway. Then came the coppery stink.
Stark halogen lights lit up the garish scene. Arterial spray was splashed on the rounded walls. The coroner crouched beside a crumpled body in massive pool of congealing blood.
Mills gestured. “Meet the corpse formerly known as Danny Ramirez. And behold… our evidence.” He shined his Maglite toward an edge of the lake of red. Roarke caught the glint of metal: a gold band around a small tube.
“Lipstick case,” Mills informed them. He angled the flashlight again to reveal a smear of a footprint in the pimp’s blood.
“Angle of the spatter means my bad guy killed him from here.” Mills directed the flashlight to the opposite side of the corpse and the blood pool. “Held him, slashed him. Don’t know why that lipstick and print would be way over there unless someone else was standing there. Dropped the case, stepped in the blood to get away. Probably one of Ramirez’ girls.”
“We need to talk to this wit,” Epps said.
“Nuh uh,” Mills said cheerfully. “Not until you tell me what this is all about, friend.”
“We’re looking for the doer,” Epps told him.
Mills snorted. “City gonna give him a medal?”
Epps shook his head. “Not him. Her.”
“
Her
?” The detective glanced toward the corpse in its bloody pool. Roarke knew what he was thinking. This was not something they saw every day. Mills turned back, looking from one agent to the other. “Wait a minute. You know my perp?”
“We might,” Roarke acknowledged.
Mills drawled. “Boys, we need to talk. Preferably someplace my reputation won’t be compromised by me being seen fraternizing with Feebs.”
“We’ll meet you,” Roarke said. “Text when you’re finished.”
They met downtown at Bourbon and Branch, a former 1920’s speakeasy that had been converted into a millenial speakeasy. The luxurious dark space boasted velvet-papered walls and gleaming dark wood beams under a spiky Art Deco chandelier, a cigar shop and smoking parlor, and five secret tunnels built in the Prohibition days. In the evenings reservations were mandatory, but Epps, with his horror of the ordinary, had cultivated the management. The agents didn’t even have to use the password to be shown directly into “The Library,” with its classic pressed tin ceiling and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes. Bartenders in Roaring Twenties attire were busily mixing specialty cocktails at the two bars.
“Overpriced tourist trap,” Mills grumbled as he joined them at a high-backed booth.
“Beats hell out of your North Beach cop dives,” Epps retorted.
In truth you’d have to be comatose not to appreciate the period elegance of the place. Roarke could feel the dark and resonant ambiance working to slow his racing thoughts. He wondered briefly if he’d ever experience as much of the real San Francisco if Epps weren’t so insistent about doing it right.
A waitress set down their drinks and when she was out of earshot, Mills leaned forward. “I fully expect the good dirt. Word is you got yourselves some kind of exotic, a triple serial or something.”
At least
, Roarke thought, and saw the same thought reflected in Epps’ face. Mills looked from one to the other.
“So? Did I hear y’all say my doer is a woman?”
Epps slid the police sketch of Cara across the table.
Mills whistled softly. “Mamacita. She a working girl?”
“No,” Roarke said tightly. Epps gave him a brief and ambiguous look.
Mills slapped his hands on his knees. “Someone needs to set me up with this babe. She killed Danny Boy she’s all right by me.”
Epps exploded. “So that’s okay, now? Seriously? Killing people?”
Mills was taken aback for a moment. “I miss something here?”
The tension between Epps and Roarke was so thick either one of them could have walked across it. Again, this was not lost on Mills. “What is she, Most Wanted or somethin’?”
“She’s dangerous,” Epps said softly. “You watch yourself, this case.”
“Aw, now you’re scarin’ me,” Mills said cheerfully, but then his eyes turned shrewd. “You want her so bad, why isn’t she on the news?”
Epps glanced at Roarke and said nothing.
“She knows we know she’s in town, she’s gone,” Roarke said. “She’s been under the radar for years.”
Mills swished his frothy cocktail. “Okay. So why? Why is she doing it? And what’d she do to get you feds after her?”
Roarke found himself unable to speak. After a moment, Epps said, “Some kind of vigilante thing, we think. She killed one of ours, and five, six other men interstate. That we know of. Cuts their throats, mostly, but not always.”
Mills could only stare for a moment. “You shitting me?” Neither agent said a word. The detective whistled under his breath. “Busy girl.”
“Probably not even close to half of it,” Epps said, without looking at Roarke. Roarke didn’t say anything. He
knew
they didn’t know even half of it.
Now Mills laughed, but the sound was hollow. “Kay, now you guys really
are
freaking me out a little bit.”
“Freakish is what it is,” Epps said.
“So you taking this case away from me or what?” the big man asked.
“It’s not like that,” Roarke said.
It’s just complicated
, he thought.
“You know we love you, Mills,” Epps said. “Enough here to go around.”
“Good. Cause I wouldn’t want you guys to have all the fun. And this one is giving me a hard on just thinking about it.”
“We’ll deal you in,” Epps assured him. “But we need to find the girl. The wit.” Despite Cara’s trail of murders, they had no material witnesses to any of the homicides… except Roarke himself.
“Right,” Mills said, staring into the archaic dimness of the bar. “Right. So there’s that halfway house on Belvedere. Intake for minors they try to get off the street.” Roarke nodded, vaguely familiar with it. “You want to talk to Rachel Elliott. If anyone knows Danny’s girls, she would.”
Chapter Twenty
Belvedere Avenue was in the heart of the Haight. Roarke and Epps drove past old buildings painted in rainbow colors, bottom floors largely taken up with cafés and grunge boutiques, top floors occupied by tenants who still strung beads from the windows as curtains, clinging to the Summer of Love dream.
Roarke looked out through the passenger window at the stopped clock on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. For him it was the most obvious symbol of the neighborhood. San Francisco, especially this district of San Francisco, was a time capsule. While other cities kept their history alive through carefully calculated tourism campaigns, San Francisco held to its mythos with an almost violent longing, and people still came from all over the world for a taste of the psychedelic experience.
A clutch of ragged teenagers was seated cross-legged on the sidewalk below the clock.
More of them on the streets than ever
, he thought bleakly.
Two blocks up from Haight Street, the shelter was an old Victorian of an unlikely shade of pink, or some kind of purple, maybe, he wasn’t sure.
“Mauve,” Epps said under his breath as they walked up the steep front stairs. The porch was gated and they were buzzed in after announcing themselves into a speaker on the wall.
The heavy door clicked open automatically as well. Inside, the tall bay windows were filled with crystal light catchers. They walked into a hallway full of rainbows. The room to their left was filled with battered and overstuffed furniture, some tables, a massive old television. The lounge. The room to the right was an office. A set of stairs in the hall led up, and another set led down. Roarke could hear feminine voices on the lower floor, and the bass-heavy thump of street music. In the hall there was a wall of pictures. They were all of teenage girls: snapshots, printed-out candids from camera phones. Not just dozens but hundreds, rows of them, so many he felt an uneasy twinge, looking at them.
A woman stepped out of the office as the door jingled closed behind them. For a moment her hair was haloed in the bright sunlight, then she stepped forward and Roarke could see her clearly.
Rachel Elliott was in her mid-thirties and tired, but pretty in an earthy, classically San Francisco way. Her hair was red-brown and curly, past her shoulders, and her body was toned, no doubt by all the endless walking on the nearly vertical San Francisco streets. Her eyes were gray and wary. Cop’s eyes. The rest of her was softer. She looked the two men over and Roarke could see in that one take that she had a long history of dealing with law enforcement, some of it good, some bad.