Authors: Laurie R. King
"I see," Lee said, and from the way she said it, she truly did. "I'm sorry."
"No apologies," Kate said firmly. "It happened, it was both our faults, it's over."
The last candle flared wildly a handful of times and went out, leaving them in the dim light filtering in from the kitchen.
"And you," Kate said. "What was that look that went between you and Maj?"
Lee shifted, would have sat up but Kate held her, and she subsided stiffly, then relaxed again.
"It was something Roz had just said about love and rage. Roz
had a terrible childhood, I think. She never told me directly, but from
things she said in passing over the years, I gather that she had one of
those mothers who enjoys ill health while manipulating everyone with
her weakness, coupled with an emotionally destructive and often absent
father. Both of them alcoholics, and Roz an only child. So although she
has built herself a gorgeous, strong, competent persona, when it slips,
there's a lot of pain and anger underneath. Maj and I are two of
the few people who have seen it."
Much as Kate would have enjoyed hearing the gritty details of the
golden girl's dark side, she had no right to ask, and Lee would
very probably not tell her if she did. So Kate just pulled Lee to her
feet, handed her the crutches, and gathered up their discarded items of
clothing so as not to give Jon evidence of their activities when he
came in.
Mind and body now restored to an equal state of tiredness and
satisfaction, Kate followed her partner's slow progress up to
their bedroom, where she slept very well indeed.
ON THE SURFACE, the murders of James Larsen and Matthew Banderas
were linked, by method and by the glaring fact that both men had been
multiple offenders--Larsen against his wife, Banderas against a
number of women. Still, surface links were often misleading. Which
meant that nothing could be assumed, that painstaking detective work
was the only option, both now in looking for someone to arrest as well
as far down the line when court testimony loomed.
Every neighbor in the condo complex was interviewed, briefly or in
depth. The members of the health club Banderas belonged to, his
coworkers, his brother, the guys at the bar he frequented, all were
noted, all were asked the necessary questions. On Monday morning, Kate
tried to track down Banderas's "real bitch" of a
boss, but she was out of town, at a conference in Cincinnati until
Wednesday. Kate left her number, and turned to the other interviews on
her schedule.
Wednesday morning Janice Popper surfaced, back from Cincinnati but
pleading a burden of accumulated work too deep to fit in an interview
with the police. She suggested Friday, Kate countered with some very
mild hints about the possibility that the police were capable of just
showing up that afternoon regardless of Popper's work, and in the
end they compromised on Thursday afternoon. Popper's voice came
over the line as brisk to the point of coldness. She made no pretense
at being upset over her employee's death; made no bones about the
fact that she had neither liked nor much respected him.
"Frankly," she told Kate, "I think he
would've quit before too much longer. Either that, or I'd
have been forced to fire him. Oh, he was good enough at his job, but he
was one of those men who just can't deal with having a woman
giving him orders. He'd alternate between trying to flirt and
trying to treat me as one of the guys--you know, a dirty joke to
see what you'll do and then getting all righteous if you
don't laugh. I didn't know about his history until
I'd been here a couple of weeks, and it made sense. It also made
me very nervous, wondering what he'd do if he got angry at me. I
know that if he'd shown up at my house one night, I sure as hell
wouldn't have let him in. Look, I've got to go. I'll
talk with you tomorrow."
Kate thanked the woman for calling back, and went back to typing up
the endless reams of reports and interviews that constitute
investigative work. Half an hour later, her phone rang. She picked it
up, thinking it would be another reporter wanting a quote (although
interest was beginning to wane, thank God).
"Martinelli," she said brusquely.
"Kate? Oh, God, I'm glad I--oh, Kate, I don't know what--"
"Who is this?" Kate demanded. Her voice cut through the woman's panic like a knife.
"Roz. This is Roz. Oh, Kate, look. I really need you. Need to talk to you, I mean. Can you--"
"Roz, what is it? Has something happened to Maj--or the baby?"
"No, no," she snapped impatiently, as if Kate were being
rather stupid. The cool annoyance made a startling contrast to her
agonized voice an instant before. "It's really too much to
go into on the phone. Can you come here?"
"Now? Where are you?"
"At the church. Kate, can you come?"
Kate stifled a sigh.
"Okay, Roz. Let me just finish what I'm doing and I'll be there within an hour."
"Thanks," she said, and hung up. Kate stared at the
phone, wondering what would reduce calm, competent Rosalyn Hall to a
state of gibbering rudeness.
It was not panic--Kate saw that the instant she walked into the
church office fifty minutes later. She had never before seen Roz Hall
consumed by fury, so she did not at first recognize the body language
of the people in the outside office as fearful, merely seeing the
tension in their faces and the apprehension in the white-eyed glances
they cast at the closed door. A raised voice in monologue came from
Roz's office, and Kate paused to ask the young man sitting at the
desk marked (humorously, Kate hoped) secretary if she could go in.
"If you really want to," he said ominously.
"What's happened?"
"Oh, she'll tell you," he replied.
One of the cluster of women in the other corner muttered, "You
mean there's someone in the City who hasn't heard
yet?" The comment sparked a flare of nervous and quickly
damped-down laughter. Kate marched over to the closed door, rapped on
it briskly and, without waiting for permission, turned the knob and
walked in.
Roz Hall stood bent over the telephone on her old wooden desk,
wearing her clerical collar, a suit that meant business, and a clenched
look of absolute rage. She jerked upright at Kate's unceremonious
entrance, dragged her fingers through her hair, and barked into the
phone, "Never mind. I'll take care of it myself,"
before slamming it down on the base.
Roz glared down at the quivering phone for several intense seconds.
Then, with an enormous effort, she gathered up the energies that were
racing through her and turned them on Kate--who very nearly
stepped back under the impact of Roz's concentrated outrage until
the minister suddenly and unexpectedly smiled, and all the murderous
antagonism in the room flipped back on itself and slipped away into its
box. Kate even caught herself smiling back, and wondered at the ease
with which Roz had switched off the stream of fury in full spate to
invite Kate instead to join her in a little self-deprecating humor.
Machiavellian, Roz had described herself? Oh, no--Machiavelli had nothing on Roz Hall.
But still Kate smiled, in uncomprehending but true sympathy, and Roz
shook her head at herself and said, "What time is it? Not even
four? God, I need a drink. Join me?"
"No thanks."
"Coffee then. Grab a seat." She circled her desk,
reaching out in passing to give Kate's arm a quick squeeze that
managed to express apology, affection, and gratitude all at once, and
walked out the door. Kate pulled a chair away from the desk, and as she
was lowering herself into it, she glanced out into the next room and
saw Roz with her arms around the "secketary," wrapping him
in a long hug. After a long minute, she released him and went to the
others, giving each of them the benediction of her embrace. The level
of tension in the building plummeted, the faces started to beam again.
When each person had been given a hug, Roz stood back.
"I'm sorry, everyone. I'm a bitch and I don't
deserve your help. Look--why don't you all go out and have
something to eat? I don't know if it's lunchtime or
dinnertime, but you must need something after the kind of day
I've put you through. Just stick the answering machine on and get
out of here. And Jory, would you be a dear and put on a fresh pot of
coffee before you go? Thanks. All of you."
She hit just the right note to let her acolytes know that she was
okay, that they were safe, and that whatever problems they had been
facing would resolve themselves. Tight mutters gave way to relieved
chatter, and Roz came back in and walked over to a cabinet.
"Have a seat, Kate. You sure you don't want something stronger than coffee?"
Kate shook her head at the proffered bottle. Roz splashed a generous
amber inch in the bottom of a glass, tipped it down her throat in a
single gulp, and shuddered as it hit. After a moment she poured another
inch in the glass, capped the bottle and put it away, and took her
drink over to the three tall filing cabinets that stood shoulder to
shoulder against the wall. With a minimum of searching she pulled out a
well-filled ma-nila folder, handed it over to Kate, and then dropped
into a comfortable chair across from her guest, who sat waiting for an
explanation before committing herself to the folder.
Roz took a sip from her drink, put it on the low table between them,
and reached up irritably to peel off the stiff clerical collar. She
dropped the curling tongue-depressor shape of white plastic onto the
table, loosened the collar of the shirt itself, and sat back with a
sigh, rubbing her throat with her eyes shut. It was all done so
naturally, Kate couldn't tell if Roz even knew it was deliberate,
this clear declaration that although the lesser beings in the outer
office could be given a pat and dismissed as the worshipers they were,
Kate was to be considered a near-equal.
A near-equal she wanted something from.
"Do you remember last week I told you about an Indian girl?" Roz asked.
Kate thought back; a week ago at dinner, it seemed like a lot
longer. "Someone came to talk to you about the situation while
you were at the women's shelter," she remembered.
"Amanda something."
"Yes. The Indian girl died last night. They're treating
it like an accident, although her husband has a history of violent
behavior."
"Roz, what are you talking about?" Kate asked sharply.
"He burned the child to death," Roz said, her face as
bleak as her voice. "It's done all the time in India, and
now they've done it here. Look at the file, Kate. It's all
there."
Now Kate looked at the folder, which bore the label
Bride Burning.
It consisted of clippings from newspapers and magazines, most of them
foreign, and a number of journal reprints and articles downloaded from
the Internet. Kate picked out one at random and read the brief account,
written in oddly stilted English, of a sixteen-year-old bride from the
Punjab district of India who brought to her marriage a dowry of what to
American eyes seemed a peculiar assortment of goods, including a color
television, a sewing machine, and a motor scooter. She went to live
with her new husband's family two hundred miles from her village,
under the same roof as his parents, his brother's family, two
unmarried brothers, and a younger sister.
Eight months later the bride was showing no signs of pregnancy, the
television was on the blink, and her in-laws were demanding that the
dowry be increased by three hundred rupees and a refrigerator. The
girl's parents had gone heavily into debt to pay for the wedding
and the agreed-to dowry; they would be very lucky to pay off what they
already owed before they died, and could afford no more.
Shortly after her first anniversary, the bride was dead in a
"kitchen accident" involving spilled fuel from the cook
stove and a match. The groom's parents were arrested, tried, and
found not guilty due to lack of evidence.
That was not the end of the story, either. In a final, macabre twist
that, had Kate not been a cop she might not have believed, two years
later the groom was offered his dead bride's younger sister in
marriage. The girl's family was forever "besmirched"
(the article's evocative word) by their daughter's death,
and could not hope to find a clean husband for the girl who remained.
The groom was reported to be thinking it over while the prospective new
wife's family decided if its dowry might stretch to a
refrigerator.
The whole story sounded fantastic to the point of absurdity, from
the motor scooter dowry to the blithe assumption that the dead
woman's own sister might be willing to walk into this nightmare.
Kate had been a cop long enough to have seen a little of everything,
but this tale stretched credibility.
However, there were other such stories in the file--a dozen,
fifteen, twenty-five sets of names, places, and
"accidents," Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and otherwise, from
lower-, middle-, and upper-class families. It was appalling.
"Jesus," Kate said finally. "This sounds like something out of the Dark Ages."
"It's terrifying, isn't it? An indication of the
complete and utter insignificance of women, just a burden to everyone.
And the frightful irony of women oppressing women. But you know, I do
honestly love India. I've been there half a dozen times and
I'm only beginning to see the country. I love the place, the
people, the way it opens my eyes and my heart to go there. Is your
coffee okay?"
Kate hadn't even noticed its arrival. She picked up her mug
obediently and took a swallow. It was not hot, but it helped take the
taste of those articles out of her mouth.
"And I detest the country as well," Roz went on.
"The people can be so incredibly rude, and gracious at the same
time. They can be cruel and hateful, greedy and so affectionate.
"They call India the meeting place of opposites, and
it's true--extreme opposites, too, not the watered-down
sorts of contrast we have in this country. There are the Jains, who
wear masks and sweep ahead of themselves as they walk so they
don't cause harm to so much as an ant, while at the other extreme
there're these robbers who live in the hills and come down to
murder and pillage, and they make movies about them, have fan clubs,
everything. And of course every so often there's a paroxysm of
religious-slash-cultural hatred and a few thousand people are
slaughtered.