“Anything else?”
“That’s everything, Deputy Chief. I wanted to explain the situation to you before the housemaids give you their version. I suppose this makes me a suspect, but you have to believe me, I had nothing to do with Dr. Ashton’s death.”
“Do you have a weapon?”
“No, sir. I wouldn’t know how to use one.”
“And would you know how to use a scalpel?”
“A scalpel? No, of course not.”
After Galang Tolosa left his office, the deputy chief called his assistant.
“Did you catch much of that, Petra? What did you think?”
“That Mrs. Ashton had more than enough of a motive for getting rid of her husband, and the butler for helping her.”
“Do you think Ayani’s the kind of woman who could electrocute her husband with a Taser?”
“No. She’d probably put an Ethiopian viper in his bed. But I think there’s one detail Galang Tolosa forgot to mention.”
“What?”
“He and Ayani are lovers. Hang on, boss, don’t interrupt. There are a lot of aspects to their relationship: they’re accomplices and confidants, she protects him, and he must be the only man who knows every inch of her body and can satisfy her sexually.”
“Jesus! You dream up some perverted things, Petra!”
“I don’t dream them much, but I bet you Galang’s got an extensive repertoire. If you like, I’ll tell you exactly what kind of genital mutilation Ayani suffered when she was eight: excision of the labia and clitoris. It’s no secret—she has talked about it publicly. I could show you a video, so you can see what they do to young girls with a blunt knife or a rusty razor blade, no anesthetic.”
“Thanks, Petra, but that won’t be necessary.” Bob sighed.
February
Thursday, 2
Blake Jackson’s numerous responsibilities now included Save-the-Tuna, the cat Carol Underwater had given his granddaughter. The kitten was a lot of trouble, but he had to admit that the little animal turned out to be good company, just as Elsa Domínguez had predicted. Amanda had named her after her imaginary friend from childhood; no one in the family saw the irony in the cat being fed canned tuna.
“How’s Save-the-Tuna, Grandpa?” Amanda asked. “I really miss her.”
“Clawing the upholstery to bits.”
“That doesn’t matter, the furniture’s all old. What’s happening with your book?”
“Nothing yet. I’ve been mulling over your idea of a crime novel.”
“I was thinking about that today,” his granddaughter replied. “We’re studying autos sacramentales. Do you know what they are?”
“No idea.”
“They were morality plays in Renaissance Spain, similar to those of medieval England—allegories about the struggle between Good and Evil. Good always triumphed, but Evil always had the most interesting role—no one would go to see an auto sacramental that didn’t have a load of vice, sin, or cruelty in it.”
“What’s that got to do with my book?”
“The formula for crime thrillers is pretty much the same. Evil is personified by a criminal who challenges Justice, and loses, and gets his punishment, and then Good triumphs, and everyone is happy. Got it?”
“I think so.”
“Listen, old man, you stick to the formula and you got nothing to lose. I’ll give you more advice later—the next session of Ripper is about to start. You ready?”
“Ready. See you online in a minute,” said her grandfather, and hung up.
Minutes later, all the players were sitting at their computers, and the games master opened the proceedings.
“We’re going to set aside the cases of Ed Staton and the Constantes for a moment and focus on Richard Ashton. Kabel’s got some news for us. Go ahead, Hench.”
“The night of his death, a swastika was carved into Richard Ashton’s chest. The equilateral cross is a symbol that has been used by many cultures throughout the ages, from the Aztecs to the Celts and the Buddhists—but most of all it’s associated with the Nazis.”
“We know all that, Kabel,” his granddaughter interrupted.
“I read it in Ingrid Dunn’s report. Amanda’s father, I mean Deputy Chief Martín, gave me written authorization to go through the department’s files on Ed Staton and the Constantes, so, using the same letter, I asked to see Richard Ashton’s file, and they gave it to me. According to Ingrid Dunn, the swastika was carved using a number-eleven scalpel with a triangular blade and a sharp point. It’s a common tool, easy to get hold of, used to make precision cuts and right angles. The swastika was so clear-cut, it’s possible the killer used a stencil.”
“I didn’t see anything about this in the media,” said Sir Edmond Paddington.
“The deputy chief kept that piece of information under wraps. It’s the ace up his sleeve that might help identify the killer—so it would be a bad idea to reveal it now. When the body was taken away, no one noticed the swastika because Ashton was wearing a T-shirt, a shirt, and a cardigan; it was only discovered when they undressed him at the morgue.”
“Wasn’t there blood on his clothes?” asked Esmeralda.
“The incision was relatively shallow, and it was made postmortem. Corpses don’t bleed.”
“Where exactly did they cut the swastika?”
“In the photo it’s up high, above the sternum,” said Amanda.
“The killer would have to have taken off his cardigan and shirt,” mused Sherlock Holmes. “Otherwise it would have been impossible to take Ashton’s arms out of his T-shirt and hitch it all the way up to his neck to cut the symbol into the upper part of his chest. He’d have had to dress him again after.”
“The swastika is a message,” said Abatha.
“Who knew Ashton’s habits, that he often slept in the study?” Esmeralda asked.
“Only his wife and the butler,” said Amanda.
“Ayani wouldn’t have cut a swastika into her husband’s body, even if he was dead,” offered Abatha.
“Why not?” said Esmeralda. “She could have done it to throw people off the scent. That’s what I would have done.”
“You’re a gypsy, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do,” argued Paddington, maintaining the racist and sexist attitudes of his character. “But a lady would never commit such a repugnant act—and what’s more, she wouldn’t be strong enough to manhandle the body. It has to be the butler.”
Everyone laughed at the classic solution—the butler did it—and then they explored the possibility that the crime was ideologically motivated, since Ashton had been accused of being a Nazi. Sherlock Holmes pointed out a parallel with Jack the Ripper, who had also mutilated his victims with a scalpel.
“One theory has it that Jack the Ripper had some medical training,” he reminded them.
“That’s not much of a basis for speculation,” said Paddington. “You don’t need to be a doctor to cut a symbol with a scalpel and a stencil. It’s easy—even a woman could do it.”
“I’m not sure. . . . I have an image in my mind, like a vision or a premonition,” said Abatha, who had gone so long without eating that she was starting to hallucinate. “I think the three cases we’re investigating are somehow related.”
Time was running short, so Amanda closed the session with instructions to look for possible connections between the cases, as Abatha had suggested. What they were dealing with might not be the simple bloodbath Celeste Roko had predicted, but something a lot more interesting: a serial killer.
Saturday, 4
Bob Martín kept odd hours, sometimes working two days straight without sleeping. For him there were no public holidays, no vacations, but he did spend as much time with his daughter as possible on the weekends when she stayed with him. Every other Friday, Blake Jackson would drop the girl off at Bob’s apartment or at his office after she had had dinner with her mother, then pick her up again on Sunday and drive her back to the boarding school if Bob wasn’t free. In the fif
teen years since his divorce, Bob had dragged his daughter along to so many crime scenes, for lack of a babysitter, that the whole San Francisco Police Department knew her. The closest the girl had to a female friend was Petra Horr, from whom she wheedled the information her father tried to keep from her. According to Indiana, Bob was to blame for Amanda’s morbid fascination with crime; Bob, on the other hand, had been convinced that from the moment she was born, crime was Amanda’s true calling: she would end up a lawyer, a detective, a policewoman, or, if worse came to worst, a criminal. She would succeed on either side of the law. That Saturday he had let her sleep in while he went to the gym and stopped by the office, before picking her up at midday and taking her to her favorite eatery, the Café Rossini, where she could gorge on sugar and carbohydrates. This was another point of contention with Indiana.
Amanda was waiting for him, wearing sandals and a sarong she had wrapped around herself in a not-so-traditional way. When he pointed out that it was raining, she put on a scarf and a woolen Bolivian cap that covered her ears, tied under her chin by two multicolored braids. The girl settled Save-the-Tuna into her basket, a gift Elsa Domínguez had brought back from Guatemala. The little animal could be remarkably unobtrusive, curling up in the basket for hours without a sound in places where pets were forbidden. Everyone at the Rossini knew what was in the basket, but Danny D’Angelo had made it clear that anyone who complained about the cat would have to answer to him.
Danny greeted them in his usual flamboyant manner. He did not need to take their order, as they always had the same thing: cheese omelet and a coffee for the deputy chief, a selection of cakes and a mug of hot chocolate with whipped cream for his daughter. He brought their food and apologized for not being able to stay and chat; the place was full, as usual on weekends, and there were people on the sidewalk waiting for a table.
“Grandpa saw Richard Ashton’s autopsy report, Dad. You didn’t tell me about the swastika. Anything else about the case you haven’t told me?”
“For your peace of mind, honey, I can promise you that Ayani’s beauty hasn’t interfered with my policeman’s instinct the way you thought it would. Ayani’s at the top of our list of suspects. We interrogated her, and the servants too. The big surprise is that the missing socks turned up.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, and it was completely weird. Get this—Mrs. Ashton got a package in the mail with a book and her husband’s socks. The package went through a lot of hands in the postal service, but the contents have no fingerprints—they were handled with gloves or else meticulously cleaned.”
“What kind of book?” asked the girl.
“A novel. Steppenwolf, by a Swiss German writer named Herman Hesse, a classic published in 1929 before the rise of Nazism. One of the psychologists at the department is studying the copy, looking for some sort of message—there must be one, or why send it to Ayani?”
“Do you think one person could have committed all three crimes?”
“Which crimes?”
“The only interesting ones we’ve got, Dad—Ed Staton, the Constantes, and Ashton.”
“What are you talking about? They have nothing in common.”
“They were all committed in San Francisco.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Serial killers usually target the same type of victim, the motive is usually sexual, and they work to a kind of pattern. The victims in these crimes are completely different, the MO is different, even the weapon isn’t the same. I have the whole department looking into them.”
“Separately? Someone needs to look at them together.”
“That someone is me. But the cases aren’t linked, Amanda.”
“Listen to me, Dad—don’t dismiss the possibility that they might be the work of a serial killer. This kind of crime is really rare.”
“You’re right about that. Most of the murders we deal with are gang-related—they come from turf wars, fights, or drugs. The last serial killer round here was Joseph Nasso, who was accused of murdering a series of women between 1977 and 1994. He’s seventy-eight now, and about to go on trial in Marin County.”
“I know, it’s all in my file,” said Amanda. “Nasso refused a lawyer—he’s planning to defend himself. He expressed no remorse, he’s proud of what he did. But if these murders were committed by the same person, I think he’s proud too. I think he’s leaving signs or clues to mark his territory.”
“Is that what it says in the serial killer handbook?” teased the deputy chief.
“Wait, I’ve got it here,” she said, scrolling through the notes on her cell phone. “Listen to this: most serial killers in the United States are white males between the ages twenty-five and thirty-five, though other races are also represented; they tend to be lower- or middle-class; they act alone, motivated by psychological gratification; they have typically suffered from neglect or sexual or emotional abuse in childhood, and they’ve been on the wrong side of the law, through robbery or vandalism. They’re arsonists and sadists, and they torture animals. They suffer from low self-esteem, and a total lack of empathy for their victims—in other words, they’re psychopaths. Some are insane and suffer hallucinations, believing that God or the devil has sent them to wipe out gay men, or prostitutes, or people of other races or religions. The sexual motive you referred to will often lead them to torture or mutilate their victims for pleasure. For example, Jeffrey Dahmer tried to turn the young men he killed into zombies, drilling holes in their skulls and injecting acid into their brains; he even practiced cannibalism to—”
“Amanda, that’s enough!” Bob was livid.
“One more thing, Dad—”
“No, Amanda! I know all this, we studied it at the academy. But it’s not something you should be filling your head with.”
“Please, listen! Something’s not right. Most serial killers have a low IQ and limited education. But in this case, I think the guy is really smart.”
“You do realize it could be a woman,” said Bob. “Although I admit it’s not common.”
“Absolutely. It could be my godmother.”
“Celeste?” asked her father, surprised.
“To make sure her prediction comes true, to prove the stars are never wrong,” argued the girl, with a wink.
The deputy chief fervently hoped his daughter’s fascination with crime would soon pass, just as her obsessions with dungeons, dragons, and vampires had. This was what he had been assured by Florence Levy, the psychologist Amanda had seen as a child and whom Bob had just consulted on the phone. According to Ms. Levy, it was simply another manifestation of the girl’s insatiable curiosity, another intellectual game. As a father, Bob was worried by Amanda’s new hobby, but as a detective he understood better than anyone why a person might have a fascination with crime and justice.
Indiana liked to claim there was no such thing as good or evil; that evil was simply a distortion of natural kindness, the expression of a sick soul. For her, the prison system was a form of collective vengeance used by society to punish those who transgressed, locking them up and throwing away the key and making no attempt to rehabilitate them—although she reluctantly admitted that there were some irredeemable criminals who had to be incarcerated so they didn’t harm others. Bob found his ex-wife’s naïveté maddening. Ordinarily, the drivel she came out with didn’t bother him, but she planted these ridiculous notions in Amanda’s head; she failed to protect her, not taking even the minimal precautions any normal mother would. Indiana was still the same idealistic girl who had fallen in love with him at the age of fifteen. They had both been kids when Amanda was born, but he had grown up since, he had toughened up, become experienced; he had become “an admirable man in some respects,” as Petra Horr put it after a beer too many. Meanwhile, Indiana was stuck in an endless puberty.
In my line of work, he thought, I’ve seen too many horrors to harbor any illusions about human beings: they’re capable of the worst atrocities. There aren’t many decent people in this s
crewed-up world—there’s a reason the prisons are full to bursting. Okay, so prisons are full of the poor, of drug addicts, of alcoholics, of petty criminals, while gangsters, rogue traders, and corrupt politicians—the people who commit crime on a large scale—rarely get caught. I know that, but I’ve still got a job to do. There are crimes that turn my stomach, that make me want to take the law into my own hands: pedophilia, child prostitution, human trafficking, and don’t get me started on domestic violence. How many women have I seen murdered by husbands or lovers? How many children who have been beaten up, raped, abandoned? And the streets of San Francisco are getting more dangerous all the time. Prisons are the most profitable business in California, and the crime rate is still rising. As far as Indiana is concerned, that’s proof that the system doesn’t work, but what’s the alternative? Without law and order, society would be ruled by terror. By fear. Fear is the root of all violence. I suppose there are people, like the Dalai Lama, who achieve a heightened state of consciousness and are not afraid of anything, but I’ve never met them. As far as I’m concerned, to live without fear is ridiculous, it’s sheer stupidity. Not that I’m saying the Dalai Lama is stupid, obviously—the guy must have some reason to go around smiling all the time—but I’m a cop, and a father, and I know all about violence, perversion, and depravity. And I need to prepare my daughter for that. But how do I do that without destroying her innocence? Hell, let’s be realistic, he concluded. What innocence? Amanda’s seventeen, and she’s studying gruesome murders in detail. It’s like she’s planning to commit one herself.
Sunday, 5
Ryan Miller went to pick up Indiana from the house on Potrero Hill at 9:00 a.m., as agreed, ignoring the depressing TV weather forecast, still optimistically planning for the two of them to take their bikes and head out to the woods and hills of West Marin. The water on the bay was choppy, the sky the color of lead, and the chill wind would have discouraged anyone less single-minded and in love than Ryan. He was getting ready to win Indiana’s heart with the same fierce determination that had served him in battle, but he knew that meant a steady advance. He could not storm in; he might frighten her, which could cost him the extraordinary friendship the two of them had forged. He needed to give her time to get over Keller, but he wasn’t planning to give her too much time. He had already been very understanding, and as Pedro Alarcón pointed out, someone smarter might turn up and sweep her off her feet. Better not to think about that eventuality, since it meant he would have to kill the guy, he thought with a certain excitement, disappointed that the rules of war did not apply in such cases—how much easier it would be to just do away with a rival, no questions asked. Though it had only been three years, he felt he had been part of Indiana’s life for all eternity, that he knew her better than he knew himself. But now that the opportunity had finally presented itself, she seemed depressed, not open to a new relationship. She went on working, but even Ryan, who considered himself the least perceptive of her patients—being incapable of appreciating the subtleties of Reiki or magnets—could tell that she lacked her usual vitality.