Authors: Laurie R. King
Only two of the unsolved rapes had taken place since Banderas came out of prison. As Hawkin had said, the man was cautious.
"He never hurt any of the women beyond the rape. Though
that's bad enough," he hastened to say, "but even a
couple of the victims said he was 'polite." Seems to me a
strange way to describe a guy who's just raped you."
"Do you suppose he'd have let the next woman to see his face go free?" Kate asked him.
"Not if it cost him another spell in prison. But someone has
taken that choice out of his hands and put the problem on our
desk."
"So you think there's someone out there taking care of the bad guys?"
"Doesn't it look like that to you?"
"No chance of a copycat?"
"The taser and cuffs were described in the paper, but they all
just said 'strangled' without giving details. And they
certainly don't have the candy in the victim's pockets. I
wouldn't have even thought of it as evidence with Larsen, but
with this victim, it looks like it is."
"Banderas didn't really look the sort to carry a
chocolate bar in the pocket of an expensive suit, true, but I
don't know that I'd count it as a clear mark of a
serial."
"We'll see."
"Christ, I hope not," Kate said fervently. Two was quite
enough, and she'd just as soon leave a question rather than have
a third body to confirm Al's theory. However, the question was
further complicated just before noon when the preliminary results from
the Banderas car search came up with an empty insulin pen, found in the
back of the glove compartment, with no name on it of either patient or
pharmacy. They had planned on searching the Banderas apartment later
that afternoon, but with the possibility that a diabetic had been found
in the possession of a chocolate bar, they called Marin to let them
know that the SFPD was serving a search warrant in their jurisdiction,
put on their coats, and left.
Banderas had lived in a condominium north of Mill Valley, a modern
apartment complex filled with successful young singles and childless
couples where both partners worked. Parking was in a three-story garage
connected to the buildings by walkways, not outside the apartment
doors, and the Banderas apartment was near the complex's
entrance; none of his neighbors would ever know when he was home or not.
His apartment was unrevealing, the living quarters of a bachelor who
ate out a lot and brought work and women home. There was an assortment
of exotic condoms in the table beside the bed, a stack of the classier
kinds of frozen dinners in the freezer, and a set of copper cook-ware
that looked as if it had never been used. He wore expensive clothing,
with a flashy taste in suit lapels, shirt collars, and neckties, and
owned five more pairs of shoes as expensive as those he had died in,
plus an assortment of loafers and athletic shoes. The paintings on the
wall were splashes of bright color that did not mean much of anything
except that he knew walls needed to have them, a painting in the
bedroom showed a well-endowed naked blond woman either making love with
or struggling beneath a clothed man, and he owned a lot of very
hard-core pornographic videos, some of them violent, with one player in
the living room and another in the bedroom. The room did not have a
mirror on the ceiling, but the place looked as if Banderas might have
thought of it.
Kate stood with a copy of a video entitled
She Really Wants It
in her hand and called to her partner in the next room, "Al, do we have to like this guy?"
"No, Martinelli. So far as I know there's no law yet that says we have to like our victims."
"Good thing," she told him, and went back to work.
The most interesting discoveries, however, were those the search
team had already found in the bathroom. Two different discoveries,
actually, although the detectives could have predicted the presence of
a pouch of fragrant leaves and a small vial of white powder, with the
attendant paraphernalia for marijuana and cocaine. The other find was
even more interesting: a small machine for testing blood sugar, used by
diabetics, and two disposable needles in the wastebasket. There was
also a multi-use insulin pen like that found in the car, only this one
was half full and had Banderas's name on the pharmacist's
label.
Matthew Banderas had indeed been a diabetic; a diabetic who died with a candy bar in his pocket.
Professionally, Banderas was a computer man, in software sales.
Going by the bank statements in his desk drawer, he was good at his
job. Kate copied down the telephone number for the company, and its
Santa Rosa address.
The last incoming call had been from a woman, who had left a message
on the answering machine. A series of messages, in fact. Her name was
Melanie, and she had started out teasingly inquiring where he was and
ended up, five messages and six hours later, just plain mad.
"Damn it, Matty, where are you?" her voice demanded, and
the phone went dead. Hers were the only calls, beginning at 8:32 Friday
night, ending at 3:14 Saturday morning. By the last one, Melanie had
been more than a little drunk.
One of the apartment's two bedrooms had been made over into an
office, with boxes of forms and sample disks, three computers, and two
filled filing cabinets. Kate flipped open the man's laptop, Al
pulled a chair over to the filing cabinets, and silence fell.
Half an hour later they were startled by a deep male voice in the
next room saying in a plummy English accent, "There is a visitor
at the door, sir." Kate was out of her chair with her gun in her
hand before she realized what she was doing; Al was on his feet almost
as quickly. They both stared at the door expectantly, and Al said in a
loud voice, "We are the police; please identify yourself."
There was no response, not even the sound of startled movement. Kate
held her gun up and edged toward the study door, where she popped her
head out briefly for a cautious glance at the living room. There was no
one visible. She opened her mouth to make her own demand, and another
voice came, this time that of a woman, sultry and slow.
"Open up the door, you sweet thing, you."
Puzzled now, Kate looked at Al, and the two of them made their way
cautiously into the living room, checking out every nook and broom
closet in the intervening space. Bedroom, bath, and kitchen were
cleared, and they stood in the living room between the black leather
sofa and the huge gilt-framed mirror, waiting. When a voice came for
the third time--this one a smarmy-sounding male with a heavy
French accent declaring, "Eh, beeg boy, you have a fren' at
ze door"--Kate whirled and nearly shot out the speaker next
to the front door before she finally registered the mechanical quality
of the sound. A fourth voice sounded immediately on the heels of the
stage Frenchman (this one a Southern belle drawling "Hey there,
honeybun, there's somebody here to see y'all"), and
then a fifth, which was the same English butler's voice they had
first heard. The pounding started as the person with a finger on the
voice-doorbell got tired of waiting.
"Matty," a woman's voice called. "Matty,
come on! I know you're home, your lights are on. And don't
tell me you've got them on some kind of timing device, I'm
just going to stand here with my thumb on the bell until you get sick
of these goddamn voices and--"
It wouldn't take long to get sick of the cycle of
announcements, Kate thought. Under the repetition of the four voices,
coming from a box next to the door where clever-boy Banderas had
adapted the normal chimes to a high-tech version of a doorbell, Kate
slid her gun away and pulled open the door, to find herself
face-to-face with a gorgeous, polished young woman who could have been
a fashion model, dressed in skintight jeans, a low-cut and extremely
well-filled top that did not quite reach a very shapely navel with a
gold ring in it, a black leather bomber jacket, and shiny high-heeled
boots that she might well have bought from one of the shops that Kate
had gone into inquiring about recreational handcuffs. All she needed
was a whip in her hand, but in truth, she seemed quite unconscious of
the dominatrix overtones in her attire. She might have been a
six-year-old dressing up in net stockings, makeup, and a miniskirt for
Halloween, having not the faintest idea why it was incongruous.
As this was going through Kate's mind, the woman was in turn
staring at her, looking surprised at first, then suspicious and
resentful until finally, taking a closer look at Kate's
undistinguished form and uninspired trousers and shirt, surprise again
took precedence.
"Where's Matty?" she demanded.
"Matthew Banderas?"
"Yeah. Of course Matthew Banderas, this is his house. Who the hell are you?"
Kate pulled her ID out of her pocket and showed it to the young
dominatrix. "You're a friend of Mr. Banderas?" she
asked.
"Yes, I am. Where is he?"
"Come in please, Ms., um--?"
"Melanie Gilbert. Where's Matty? What's happened to him?"
"I'm very sorry, Ms. Gilbert, but Mr. Banderas was killed last night in San Francisco."
"What? Oh, no." The woman gaped at Kate, looking
astonished but not teary. She scarcely noticed Kate's hand on her
elbow, gently but firmly drawing her inside to the leather sofa.
"Oh, poor, poor Matty. I can't believe it. What
happened?"
As soon as she was safely inside and the door shut behind her, Kate
let go of the slim, leather-jacketed arm. Gilbert was not exactly
devastated to hear of her friend's death, Kate was relieved to
see. Telling loved ones was hard; telling friends and acquaintances,
once they were past the initial shock of it, often led to interesting
pieces of information being shaken out of the tree of knowledge.
"Can I get you a glass of water, Ms. Gilbert?" Kate
asked. She had never known why this was the traditional means of
offering support; the times she had received shocks the only drink
she'd wanted was alcoholic and preferably bottomless. Still, it
did give the woman a chance to gather herself together, while allowing
Kate to look as if she cared, and in this case let Al Hawkin sit down
beside Matthew Banderas's girlfriend with the heaving breasts and
the demure navel ring. This was one female who would respond more
readily to the masculine touch. At which Al Hawkin was an expert.
Al gave the young woman a minute to sip her glass of
room-temperature, chlorinated water before asking her in a gentle
voice, "Ms. Gilbert, can you tell me how you know Matthew?"
Formality combined with the intimacy of the victim's first name,
Kate noted, and the emphasis on the relationship, not (yet) the more
pertinent facts such as time and place.
"I'm an actress," she told them. "I met
Matty when I was doing a job for his company last year, acting in a
piece of film that they wanted to use in their software. I'm
really not sure how they do it, something about feeding the film into
their computers and using it from there. I think they were using it to
demonstrate some editing software they were developing, or something.
Anyway," she continued, relieved that these technical details
were out of the way without any questions from her audience,
"that's when I met Matty, when he came by the set one day
to watch. We went out to dinner afterward, and, well, you know."
"What was your relationship with Matthew?"
"My relationship? I loved Matty, or at least I more or less
did; anyway, I liked him a lot. I slept with him, if that's what
you mean, but we never lived together."
Hawkin considered his next question carefully before deciding to ask
it. "Did you know that Matthew spent three years in prison for
raping a woman?"
"Matthew?"
Her pretty face twisted in
disbelief. "No, you've got the wrong man. In fact, you
probably have the wrong man entirely--Jesus, Matty's gonna
flip when he gets home and finds you here."
"Ms. Gilbert, I'm sorry. Unless Matthew had a twin
brother who was carrying Matthew's ID, your friend is dead."
Melanie Gilbert pulled back from the edge of the hysterical thoughts
she had been about to succumb to, and studied Hawkin's craggy
features. She gave a small sigh, and slumped down into the black sofa.
One melodramatic tear ran slowly down her cheek, and her chest heaved
impressively.
"Matty? A rapist? God. You really are sure?"
"Yes."
"Oh," she said, and then in a different voice, one that
suddenly recognized the implications, she said, "Oh. Oh my God.
Rape? Did he hurt her? I mean--"
"No. Kidnapping and rape, but not battery."
"But still. Shit, I was sleeping with a
rapist.
How could I not--jeez, that's so creepy. I feel like throwing up."
Kate suddenly had enough of the sexy young actress's attempt
to find out how she ought to be feeling, and stood up to go to the
kitchen and find the coffeemaker. She suddenly realized that they
hadn't stopped for lunch, that she was tired, hungry, edgy, and
depressed, and was fed up with this young airhead with the twinkle of
gold in her navel who was trying to talk herself into being shocked
when she was really more than half titillated. Al Hawkin's voice
went on as Kate found a gleaming gold French press coffeemaker, a bag
of Italian roast coffee (pre-ground, for which Lee would have deducted
points), and instead of a kettle, an attachment on the sink that
dispensed near-boiling water. Kate spooned grounds into the coffeemaker
and ran steaming water on top, and while she waited the requisite
couple of minutes for the grounds to subside, she leaned against the
tiled counter listening to the conversation in the next room.
"Ms. Gilbert, did you ever hear Matthew say anything about
being harassed or threatened, either here or at work? Receiving letters
or phone calls, anything like that?"
"No, I don't think so. Matty never talked much about
work, though I know that his new boss is a real bitch. And,
hey--somebody at work keyed his car back near Christmas, left a
really nasty scratch. And there was somebody here in the apartments
that kept stealing his parking place, but since they're not
really assigned or anything, he couldn't do much about it."