Ripper

  “Then we called Mamá from the van,” her sister chipped in, nodding to Elsa, who was sobbing quietly in her seat, clutching Blake’s hand.

  “I told them to come to Mr. Jackson’s house immediately,” said Elsa. “What else could they do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Bob suggested, “call nine-one-one, maybe?”

  “The girls don’t want trouble with immigration, Bob,” explained Blake. “They have work permits, but most of their workers are undocumented.”

  “As long as they’re legal, they’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “That’s what you think. You’re not an immigrant with a Hispanic accent,” his ex-father-in-law replied. “Rachel Rosen was really suspicious. Nobody ever visited her, even her son didn’t have a key to her apartment—only Alicia and Noemí, who dropped off the cleaners every week. They’re bound to be treated as suspects.”

  “Judge Rosen’s things never went missing,” explained Alicia. “That’s why she finally trusted us with a key. In the beginning, she’d stay to keep an eye on us, she’d count the cutlery and each piece of clothing that went into the machine—but later she relaxed a little.”

  “I still don’t understand why you didn’t call the police,” said Bob, reaching for his cell phone. Blake stopped him.

  “Bob, wait!”

  “We been working in this country for many years, we’re decent people,” sobbed Elsa Domínguez. “Please, señor, you know us—what if they blame my girls for this lady’s death.”

  “Don’t worry, Elsa, it’ll all be cleared up quickly,” Bob reassured her.

  “Elsa’s worried about Hugo, her youngest,” Blake cut in. “The kid’s had run-ins with the police, as you know—you’ve helped him yourself a couple of times, remember? He did some time for violence and robbery. Hugo has access to the key for that apartment.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the deputy chief.

  “My brother lives with me,” Noemí explained. “We keep the keys to the houses where we work in a cabinet in my room with the clients’ names next to them. Hugo’s a bonehead, he gets mixed up in all kinds of stuff, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Your brother might have gone to Rosen’s apartment to rob her . . . ,” the deputy chief speculated.

  “And you think he was going to string that woman up? For God’s sake, Bob!” pleaded Blake. “Help us out here, we got to keep the boy out of this.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible. We have to interrogate anyone who had contact with the victim, and Hugo’s name is bound to come up in the investigation. I’ll try and give him a couple of days. I’m heading back to the office. In ten minutes, make an anonymous nine-one-one call from a phone booth and report the crime. You don’t have to give your names, just Rosen’s address.”

  The deputy chief stopped at a gas station to fill up, and just as he expected, within minutes his cell phone rang: Petra Horr, telling him that a body had been found on Church Street. He drove toward the address while his assistant, with her usual military efficiency, filled him in with the basic information on the victim: Rachel Rosen, born 1948, graduated from Hastings, worked as a lawyer for a private firm, then as a district attorney, finally as a judge in the juvenile court, a post she held until her death.

  “She was sixty-four, ready to retire next year,” Petra added. “Married David Rosen, separated, not divorced, one son, Ismael, who lives in San Francisco and seems to work in a liquor store, but I still need to confirm that. He hasn’t been informed yet. I know what you’re thinking, boss—the husband is always the prime suspect—but David Rosen’s got a rock-solid alibi.”

  “Which is?”

  “Died of a heart attack, 1998.”

  “Just our luck, Petra. Anything else?”

  “Rosen never got on with her daughter-in-law, so she grew apart from her son and three grandchildren. As for the rest of her family, she’s got a couple brothers in Brooklyn, apparently hasn’t seen them in years. Sounds like she was a bitter, twisted woman. Not exactly friendly. She had a vicious reputation at the court—her sentences were feared.”

  “Money?”

  “That I don’t know, but I’m looking into it. Want to know what I think, boss? She was a spiteful old bitch who deserved to burn in hell.”

  By the time Bob got to Church Street, opposite Dolores Park, half the block had already been taped off, and police were diverting traffic. An officer escorted him to the building, where the porter on duty, a Hispanic guy named Manuel Valenzuela, about fifty years old and wearing a dark suit and a necktie, explained that he had not made the 911 call. He only realized what had happened when two cops showed up and ordered him to open Rachel Rosen’s apartment with his master key. He said he’d seen the lady for the last time on Monday, when she last picked up her mail, but she hadn’t done that Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday—so he figured she was out of town. Sometimes she would go away for a few days at a time; it was part of her work. That morning he called up to her apartment just after eight, when his shift had hardly started, to ask if she wanted him to bring her all the mail that had stacked up, plus a package that had arrived the afternoon of the day before—but nobody picked up the phone. Valenzuela assumed that if she was back from her trip, she was probably in the park. Before he had time to start worrying, the police, a fire crew, and an ambulance arrived, making enough noise that the whole neighborhood knew about it.

  Bob ordered the doorman to stay at his desk and give the minimum of information to the other tenants in the building to avoid any panic. Then he took the mail and the package and walked up to Rachel Rosen’s apartment. Sergeant Joseph Deseve, the first officer to respond to the 911 call, was waiting. The deputy chief was glad to see him: he was a sensible guy with years of experience, and he knew how to handle a situation like this one. “I restricted access to the apartment,” the sergeant told him. “I’m the only one who’s entered the crime scene. We had to use force to stop some reporter coming in who’d managed to get all the way up here. Beats me how the press finds out before we do.”

  The victim’s penthouse had windows overlooking the park, but net curtains and thick drapes blocked out the view and any daylight, giving the place a funereal atmosphere. Its owner had decorated it with dilapidated antique furniture, imitation Persian rugs, gilt-framed paintings of bucolic landscapes in pastel colors, plastic plants, and a sideboard with glass doors where a whole menagerie of Swarovski glass animals was on display. The deputy chief saw it out of the corner of his eye as he went into the bedroom.

  The officer blocking the entrance stepped aside when he saw them. Joseph Deseve stayed in the doorway while the deputy chief went in with his little Dictaphone to record his first impressions—they were often the most accurate. The judge was barefoot and wearing her pajamas, just as Alicia and Noemí had said, hanging from the fan in the middle of the room, and gagged with duct tape. Bob noticed immediately that her feet were touching the bed, which meant that it might have taken her hours to die as she fought instinctively to hold herself up before fatigue won out, or she fainted and was strangled by her bodyweight.

  He crouched down and examined the carpet, confirming that the bed had not moved from its usual place, then stood up to look at the fan. He stopped short of climbing onto a chair or the table, since the forensics team would need to take fingerprints first. It was strange, he thought, that the fan had not come away from the ceiling during the victim’s desperate struggle.

  The process of decomposition was well under way: Judge Rosen’s body was swollen, her face distorted, her eyes bulging. The skin was streaked black and green like marble. From the look of the body, Bob deduced death had probably occurred some thirty-six hours before, but he would rather wait for Ingrid Dunn to arrive than speculate.

  He took off his latex gloves and face mask, and stepped out of the bedroom, giving orders for it to be locked and guarded. He called Petra so she could notify the medical examiner and the various crime scene officers who would need to e
xamine and inventory the contents of the room, and photograph and film the body before it was removed. He shivered as he zipped up his jacket, realizing that he was hungry, and hadn’t had his usual morning coffee. In a flash, he saw Karla standing naked, holding two cups of coffee—her long-limbed body like a heron, all protruding hips and collarbones, and the generous breasts she’d saved up for three years to buy—a strange, exotic creature from another planet who had appeared in his kitchen by accident.

  While Sergeant Deseve headed down the street to corral the press and the rubberneckers, Bob Martín drew up a list of the people he needed to question and then sifted through what had arrived in the mail for Rachel Rosen—a few bills, a couple of catalogs, three magazines, and an envelope marked “Bank of America,” as well as the package, which contained another crystal animal. Bob called down to the lobby, and the doorman explained that Miss Rosen had received one every month for years.

  Shortly afterward, the forensics team showed up en masse, led by Ingrid Dunn and accompanied by Petra Horr, who had no reason to be here and as a pretext had brought the deputy chief a supersize latte, as though she could read his mind. “Sorry, boss,” she explained, “but I couldn’t stand it, I had to see her with my own eyes.” Bob remembered the story Petra had told him on a night of celebrations that had begun with mojitos and beers at the Camelot—the old Powell Street bar where cops and detectives often went after work—and ended in tears and confidences in Petra’s apartment. They had gone out with some fellow officers to celebrate O. J. Simpson’s conviction in Las Vegas—thirty-three years for kidnapping and armed robbery—which they welcomed as irrefutable evidence of divine justice. The admiration they all used to feel for the man’s talents as a football player had turned to frustration thirteen years earlier, when he was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend despite overwhelming evidence against him. Police officers across the country felt they had been mocked.

  That memorable evening in the Camelot had been in December 2008, at which point Petra had already been with the department for some time. Toting up the years they had been working together, Bob was astonished to realize that she had not aged a single day—she was still the little imp she had always been, the one who after three mojitos had become sentimental and dragged him back to her bare rented room. At that time Petra was living like a penniless student, paying off the debts left by an itinerant husband who had hopped off to Australia. Petra longed for some human warmth, and both she and Bob were unattached, so, taking the initiative, she began to fondle him. Bob could hold his drink a little better than she could, though, and with what little clearheadedness he still possessed, he decided to let her down gently. If he didn’t, he was sure they would both regret it in the morning. It was not worth risking their excellent working relationship for a few drunken kisses.

  They lay down fully clothed on the bed, and she laid her head on his shoulder and recounted all the troubles she had known in her short life while he half-listened, fighting off sleep. At sixteen, Petra had been sentenced to two years in prison for possession of marijuana, partly because of the incompetence of her public defender, but mostly because of the legendary strictness of Judge Rachel Rosen. Those two years had turned into four when another young prisoner ended up in the infirmary after an altercation with her. According to Petra, the other girl had slipped and hit her head on a concrete pillar, but Rosen had considered it aggravated assault.

  Half an hour later, when they had taken down Rachel Rosen’s body from the fan and laid it on a gurney, Ingrid Dunn reported her initial impressions to the deputy chief.

  “At first glance, I figure time of death was at least two, maybe three days ago. Decomposition may have been slowed because the apartment’s like a fridge. There no heating in this building?”

  “According to the doorman, residents are responsible for regulating and paying for their own heating. Rachel Rosen was not exactly short of funds, but she suffered the cold. Cause of death seems obvious.”

  “She died of asphyxia,” said Ingrid, “but not from the rope around her neck.”

  “No?”

  The medical examiner pointed out a thin blue line, different from the marks left by the rope, and explained that the injury must have been sustained while the judge was still alive, since it had caused bleeding from ruptured blood vessels. The groove marks caused by the rope supporting the weight of the body showed no sign of bruising because they had been made postmortem.

  “The woman was strangled and then hanged at least ten or fifteen minutes later, by which time a body no longer bruises.”

  “That explains why the fan didn’t come loose from the ceiling,” said Bob.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “If the woman had been standing on tiptoe, struggling for her life, as we thought at first, the fan would never have withstood the pulling and jerking.”

  “If she was already dead, why hang her?” asked the ME.

  “You tell me. I assumed the tape was put over her mouth to stop her screaming—I mean, while she was still alive.”

  “We’ll know for certain when I remove the duct tape at the autopsy, but I can see no reason why they would gag her after she was dead.”

  “For the same reason they hanged a corpse.”

  After the body had been taken away, the deputy chief left the forensics team to get on with their work and invited Ingrid Dunn and Petra Horr to breakfast. This would be their one moment of peace before they plunged into the maelstrom of a new investigation.

  “Do you believe in astrology?” he asked his companions.

  “In what?” said the ME.

  “Astrology.”

  “Absolutely,” said Petra. “You won’t catch me missing Celeste Roko’s horoscopes.”

  “I don’t believe any of that drivel,” said Ingrid. “What about you, Bob?”

  “If you asked yesterday, I would have said no.” The deputy chief heaved a sigh. “Today I’m not so sure.”

  Saturday, 11

  Out of consideration for Elsa, who had helped raise his daughter and had been with the family for seventeen years, the deputy chief arranged to meet Hugo Domínguez at the home of his sister Noemí, in the Canal area of San Rafael, rather than questioning him down at the precinct as per standard procedure. He brought Petra Horr along so that she could record the statement. As they drove, she explained to him that 70 percent of the residents of the Canal area were low-income families from Mexico and Central America, many of them undocumented, and that several families would often share a house just so they could make the rent. “Have you ever heard of hotbeds, Chief?” said Petra. “It’s when two or more people take turns using the same bed at different times.” They passed “the stop,” where, even at three o’clock in the afternoon, a dozen men were waiting for a truck to pick them up and give them a couple of hours’ work. The neighborhood had an unmistakable Latino feel, with taco stands, markets selling products from south of the border, and signboards in Spanish.

  The block where Noemí lived, one of several identical buildings, turned out to be a concrete hulk painted the color of mayonnaise, with tiny windows, outside stairwells, and doors that opened onto narrow covered walkways where adults gathered to chat and children to play. From the open doorways came the sound of radios and televisions tuned to Spanish stations. They climbed two flights of stairs under the hostile gaze of the tenants, who were clearly suspicious of strangers and could sniff out a cop at fifty paces, even those in plainclothes like Petra and the deputy chief.

  The inhabitants of the apartment—two rooms and a bathroom—were waiting for them: Noemí and her three children, a teenage niece whose belly was as swollen as a watermelon, and Elsa’s youngest son Hugo, aged twenty. The father of Noemí’s children had vanished into thin air shortly after the birth of the youngest child, who had just turned five, and Noemí had a new partner, a Nicaraguan immigrant who theoretically lived with them whenever he happened to be in the Bay Area, but, being a trucker, was awa
y most of the time. “I’ve been lucky,” as Noemí put it; “I found myself a good man, and he has a job.” A refrigerator, a television, and a sofa jostled for space in the living room.

  The pregnant teenager appeared from the kitchen carrying a tray laden with glasses of chilled horchata, nacho chips, and guacamole. As her boss had told her not to refuse anything she was offered so as not to seem rude, Petra made an effort and tasted the pale, dubious-looking concoction, which, as it turned out, was delicious. “It’s my mother’s recipe,” explained Alicia, who appeared just at that moment. “We make it with ground almonds and rice water.” She lived with her husband and two children a block away, in an apartment very similar to her sister’s, but more spacious because they were the only family living there.

  Six months earlier, Bob had been seconded to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office to advise on gang-related crime, so he was not about to be fooled by Hugo Domínguez’s appearance. He assumed the boy’s sisters had convinced him to wear a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of chinos instead of the vest and low-slung baggy jeans—precariously belted below the navel, crotch hanging down to the knees—that gangbangers always wore. The long-sleeved shirt concealed his tattoos and the bling around his neck, but his haircut, which was cropped at the sides and long at the back, as well as the piercings in his face and ears, and most of all the attitude of arrogant contempt, clearly marked him as a gangbanger.

  The deputy chief had known the boy all his life, and he felt sorry for him; he had grown up under the thumb of a family of strong women, just as Bob Martín had been raised by a grandmother, mother, and sisters who all had temperaments of steel. Hugo was on file as being a deadbeat and a fool, but Bob did not think the boy was bad by nature, and with a little help he might avoid ending up in prison. The deputy chief had no wish to see Elsa’s son behind bars, to see him join the 2.2 million convicts in America—a higher number than in any other country, including the worst dictatorships, making up 25 percent of the world’s prison population: a nation imprisoned within a nation. He found it difficult to imagine Hugo committing premeditated murder, but he’d had a lot of surprises in this job, so he was prepared for the worst. Hugo had dropped out during his freshman year in high school, had had run-ins with the police, and was now a young man with no self-esteem, no papers, no work, and no future. Like so many others in his circumstances, he had gravitated toward the violent culture of the streets because he had no alternative.