Night Work km-4

by Laurie R. King

  Finally, late that evening, Al laid his hand on Kate’s collar and dragged her away from her computer terminal to a late-night diner much beloved of the cops who worked out of the Hall of Justice. Kate’s back felt permanently hunched, her fingers crabbed into the typing position. She couldn’t remember when she had last eaten, or what.

  They had been living on coffee for all that long day and craving a strong drink for the last half of it, so they both compromised and had a beer with their hamburgers. Kate swallowed deeply and closed her eyes in appreciation; following that brief vacation she sat forward and returned to work.

  “I can’t believe how long it takes sometimes for things like this Web site to come to light,” she groaned.

  “It’s only been up for, what was it, twelve weeks?”

  “Closer to fourteen.”

  “And there’s obviously a lot of personal support for the list, off-Web contacts that can’t be traced. All the Web site says is, Here’s the guy’s name and where he lives; here’s what he’s accused of; let him know how you feel. Nothing about murdering him or hounding him to suicide. I personally can’t see that there’s anything illegal about it. What’s the precedent, anyway? Can you get a restraining order against a Web site?” Hawkin wondered.

  “Unless there’s a really clear link between a violent act and a Web site’s ranting, it’s hard to shut it down,” Kate reminded him. Al no doubt knew this, but he tended to push the electronic world as far away from his life as he could.

  Their food arrived, hot and beautifully greasy, and they turned their attention to it. In a short time Kate was contemplating a few limp and lonely french fries and thinking that the hamburger really hadn’t been as large as it looked. The waitress, standing by the table as if summoned, asked if they wanted something else.

  “Actually,” Kate told her, “I’d like the same again.”

  “For me, too,” said Al. “And another couple of beers.”

  The two partners sat without speaking, suspended between the points of work and companionship, hunger and satiation. When the second half of their meal came they ate and drank with an almost ritual slowness, and both sighed at the end.

  “I didn’t realize I was so hungry,” Al said, sounding amused.

  “What’s that phrase? My sides were clapping together like an empty portmanteau.” Kate belched demurely and pushed away the plate, leaving the trimmings of lettuce and orange slice. “Whatever a portmanteau is. So, Al. What do we do? Are these about to become the feds’ completely, or still ours, or what?”

  “They’re still ours until they kick us off. The hit list is their business—we just uncovered it. You did. Though I wouldn’t wait for any more thanks than you’ve got.”

  “I won’t. So it’s back to our very own trio of abusers.”

  “And possibly what’s-his-name, Goff, in Sacramento.”

  “Be nice to find out if anyone in the city has regular contact with Ms. DeVries and her list. You suppose the FBI will tell us?”

  “I don’t think we should wait for that either.”

  It was frustrating not knowing what information would come from the federal investigation-and frustrating to know that the feds might well solve all three murders in one day, by working them from the opposite direction.

  “We go on as before?” Kate asked.

  “Who knows? We might even get there first.”

  “I suppose,” Kate said thoughtfully, “it doesn’t really matter where the killer—or killers—found out about their victims. I mean, they could have gotten the names out of newspapers and court reports, inside contacts in the hospitals and shelters, even just word of mouth. Man beats wife, the neighbors know. That seems to be the way the Ladies find their victims. Berry Doyle and the rest of the LOPD victims aren’t on the Web site.”

  “But, who would respond to stranger’s troubles by killing the stranger’s abuser, or rapist? A lot of people might want to , but wanting is a long way from doing. Strangling an unconscious stranger isn’t a thing just anybody can do. Assuming, as we have been, that they are strangers.”

  “I agree,” she said. “It takes someone with a major load of resentment and anger. Cold rage.” The word brought to Kate’s mind the troubling title she’d seen on Roz’s desk. “You know, Roz Hall’s Ph.D. thesis is on ‘women’s rage’ and something about violent goddesses. Maybe I should take a closer look at it.”

  Hawkin cocked his head at the tone of her voice. “And at her?”

  Kate rubbed her face tiredly. “I’ve been turning that over in my mind a lot, and I just can’t say what I think. She’s an obvious candidate, because she’s so involved in the movement here, but you know, I can’t see it, can’t see her working herself up to that kind of hatred. Still, God knows she’s a woman with a lot of sides to her. I think it may be time to ask some hard questions about her alibis for the nights involved.”

  “Probably better if I do it. I’m not a friend.”

  “Let me start, see what I come up with. I’ll hand it over to you if there’s not a conclusive negative.”

  “Who else, other than her?”

  Kate gazed off into the night street outside the diner, assembling her thoughts. “We tend to think of anger as a sudden thing, an eruption into violence that fades and is over, either permanently or until the next time.” Most of the homicides they dealt with were this way, either in the home fueled by alcohol and stress or on the street corner fueled by drugs, territoriality, and young male hormones. Hawkin nodded, and Kate went on. “Serial killers are something else, of course. They work either on voices in their heads or sexual impulses. Anger feeds into it, but it’s secondary.” Again Hawkin nodded, and Kate sat forward, laying her forearms out on the worn Formica table.

  “Then there are the terrorists, mass or serial killers who tie their anger in with their intellect.” God, she thought uneasily; could I describe Roz Hall any more clearly? “For them, rage is channeled through political action; their personal resentments and injuries, all their personal histories are given meaning by what they do. Revenge is taken not on the individual soldier who beat you up or the guy from the other side who blew up your little sister with a pipe bomb, but on all of ‘them,” the whole group that soldier or the bomb-thrower represent.“

  “Sounds like you’ve talked this over with Lee,” Al commented.

  “No.” He looked up at the tight, brief negative, and she had to explain. “I can’t go into this without making Roz a part of it, and Lee and Roz are close. They were lovers, a long time ago, and Roz has done an enormous amount in bringing Lee back to life. We owe her a lot. I owe her. They’re family.”

  “I don’t know that Roz has anything to do with these murders—like I said, I can’t believe she does. But I think she has either knowledge or at least her suspicions. She talked about the inviolability of confession in a way that sounded… potential. As if nobody had come to her yet to confess, but she thought they might. And the subject matter of her thesis shows she’s been thinking about the idea of women’s anger for a while.”

  “Terrorism, like Peter Mehta said. Against abusers.” Hawkin sounded more thoughtful than dubious.

  “Selective terrorism. Although if they could come up with a way to eliminate large numbers of abusers at one throw, I doubt that they’d hesitate.” Kate thought of the flyer advocating poison pills for male babies, triggered at the first sign that the boy was becoming abusive.

  “Terrorists generally go for publicity,” Al objected. “Why haven’t they sent in a manifesto to Channel Five or the New York Times?”

  “Maybe they thought they’d see how many they could get away with before it came out and the abusers started to watch their backs.”

  Hawkin took a thoughtful bite of his elderly orange slice. “So, not one vigilante, but ‘they.” How many do you see here?“

  “I suppose it could be one person.”

  “Male or female?”

  Kate started to answer, then closed her mouth an
d thought for a minute. “You know, we’ve been thinking of this as a woman’s thing, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be a man. Someone who lost a sister, maybe, or whose daughter was raped. God,” she said with a laugh, “wouldn’t that be ironic? Woman’s revenge carried out by a man.”

  “Sensitive New Age guy goes overboard.”

  Kate rolled her eyes. “Now you’re writing newspaper headlines?”

  “I may need a second job to support the new kid. But you were saying it could be one, or—?”

  “If it’s a single individual, a woman, she’s got to be strong enough physically to handle a man the size of James Larsen, and with an immensely strong personality that could plan and carry out a series of methodical murders without falling apart.”

  “Either that or she’s nuts.”

  “Either that or she’s nuts,” Kate agreed. “But even that is a form of strength. If it’s a group, on the other hand, I’d say it has to be a small one, probably no more than two or three. Like you said, finding a person who could help you commit murder in cold blood wouldn’t be that easy. Anything but a very tight group, you’d have someone who talked or bragged or fell to pieces with remorse.”

  “I agree. But finding them through the Web site is no longer our business. Unless, of course, we happen across the bigger picture in our own investigation.” Hawkin scratched his bristly jaw and shoved back his chair. “Time to go home, Martinelli. Get your beauty sleep, give Lee a back rub, sing Gilbert and Sullivan karaoke with Jon.”

  Kate too got to her feet. “You make it sound so attractive, Hawkin.”

  They sorted out dollar bills for the waitress, and went their separate ways.

  When Kate got home she found the lights turned down and the house’s other residents asleep. She also found a package waiting for her on the table in the hall, an oversized mailing envelope containing something the shape and weight of a box of typing paper. Clipped to the end of the envelope was a note in Lee’s writing that said:

  Roz came by with this tonight, said she had the impression that you wanted to see it so she printed you a copy.

  Hope you’re not going to try to read it in bed.

  —L.

  It was a box of typing paper, or 487 sheets of it, anyway, unbound. On the first page was the title.

  women’s rage and men’s dishonor: manifestations of the violent goddess in the hebrew bible

  Chapter 18

  KATE HAD NO INTENTION of settling in to read 487 pages of turgid doctoral prose, not after the day—the string of days—she’d had. She made herself a cup of decaf coffee that was mostly hot milk and sat at the kitchen table with the massive piece of work to glance through it, more so she could tell Roz she’d done so than from any great interest.

  Two and a half hours later she suddenly realized that if she didn’t go to bed soon, she would not be going to bed at all. Once she had decided to skip over the lengthy footnotes with their detailed discussions of opposing points of view and debates of the subtle meanings of words and objects, the text moved right along. Indeed, instead of the usual dry technical language employed by every thesis Kate had ever seen, Roz wrote in straightforward, even lyrical English prose that drew the reader on, and in, as if this was a popular work designed to inspire a general audience. Why was she surprised, Kate asked herself; everything that damn woman set her hand to was compelling, why not her doctoral thesis?

  Like most nominal Christians, and most enthusiastic believers as well, Kate had never given much thought to what came Before Christ. Oh sure, the Old Testament had been around before the New, which explained its complexity and seeming lack of unifying theme, but before the Old Testament there were what? Patriarchs and Canaanites and goatherds and things, wandering dimly through the desert.

  In Roz’s hands the Bible came alive, revealing itself as a document of the human spirit with roots reaching far back into the history of humankind, before the stories were written down, back to an age when high-tech weaponry was made out of bronze, and even stone.

  The name Baal appeared on page three, abruptly calling to mind Kate’s long-ago Sunday School classes taught by the tightly girdled Miss Steinlaker. The priests of Baal, it had been (and for an instant Kate was back in that drafty church classroom with Miss Steinlaker looming over her, smelling of chalk, perfume, menthol cigarettes, and the musk of unwashed clothing). The priests of Baal had lit something on fire, hadn’t they? Or perhaps had failed to do so. Kate blinked, and the classroom vanished, and Roz was explaining that Baal was a Canaanite storm god, a young warrior deity about whom hymns were written down on clay tablets, describing Baal as the Rider on the Clouds. Then a thousand years later the Israelites came out from Egypt and settled in the land, and soon they, too, were speaking of their God as a young warrior heaving thunderbolts across the sky, calling Him “Rider on the Clouds.”

  It was not stealing, Roz explained firmly, and it should not be thought that the people Israel were trying to change their God’s nature or attach other gods to His coattails in a sort of religious corporate takeover bid. It had to do with framing a language of theology, using the images and descriptions of others to more richly describe the wonder of the one true God’s majesty and complexity.

  If this was so, Roz then asked rhetorically, what of the images and language that described the unique actions and characteristics of the goddess figures so common in the ancient Near East, Anat and Asherah, Ishtar and Inanna? Were they simply condemned as idolatry, as the Prophets would have us believe? Or did their poetry and songs, their epithets and personalities, resonate so strongly in the minds of the people that, despite the goddesses’ inextricable connection with the forbidden fertility cults and their obvious antithesis to the masculine figure of Yahweh, God of Israel, some of their nature survived in Him, some of the goddesses’ stories became adopted and adapted by the people Israel?

  This question came a bare twenty pages into the document, and amounted to Roz’s introduction, laying the groundwork for the thesis itself.

  The thesis being that Yahweh did indeed come to incorporate certain characteristics of a group of Near Eastern goddess figures whom Roz classified as Warrior Virgins—virginity, as Roz had mentioned the night of Song but had been too distracted to explain, being for divine beings not indicative of physical innocence but rather a state of proud independence from males, of not being defined by their male consort.

  As role models for women set on taking back the night, these goddesses were a fearsome bunch. Take the verses illustrating the goddess Anat:

  Heads roll about like balls,

  hands fly up like locusts,

  like a swarm of grasshoppers, the warriors’ hands.

  Anat ties the heads as a necklace,

  she fastens the hands around her waist…

  Her soul swells up with laughter,

  her heart bursts with joy. Anat’s soul is joyous

  as she wades to her knees in the blood of soldiers,

  to her thighs in the gore of warriors.

  No, thought Kate, Miss Steinlaker had never told her Sunday School class about this.

  There was the goddess Inanna, who aside from being a goddess of fertility was also a fearsome warrior:

  In the mountain stronghold that holds back homage,

  the very vegetation is cursed, The city’s great gates,

  O Inanna,

  you have burnt to ash.

  Its rivers run with blood,

  the people cannot drink.

  Then came the Indian goddess Kali, a close cousin to the virgin warriors of the Middle East, who lived in the cremation grounds, ate pieces of the bodies, and wore a necklace of human heads and a belt decorated with severed hands. She was followed by a description of the bloodthirsty Egyptian Hathor, appeased only by a great flood of red beer poured across the land like the blood she takes it to be. The Mesopotamian Ishtar called down a raging storm on humanity until they floated like dead fish on the sea, and the Greek Demeter condemned the e
arth to bare sterility to revenge the abduction and rape of her daughter.

  Why do people think of goddesses as wide-hipped, large-breasted, loving bringers of fertility? Kate wondered uncomfortably. These women were terrifying.

  Kate went to pour herself a glass of wine, looked at the rich red liquid in the glass, and dumped it down the sink, taking instead a shot of nice safe amber brandy from the cooking supplies. She continued reading, about revenge and wrath and the sheer joy of killing, and she winced when she came to Roz’s description of Kali:

  She is young and beautiful, old and haggard, dark-skinned as a blow in the face of the pale, high-ranking Aryan castes, savage and loving and utterly enamored with bloodshed. Kali is created by the great goddess Durga for the express purpose of conquering a monster able to kill any man who comes up against him—but not, it turns out, any woman. Kali glories in death, decorates herself with pieces of her victims, and allows no man supremacy, not her enemies, not even her consort, who lies beneath her in intercourse. She is the advocate and protector of India’s poor, India’s acknowledgment that inside every woman lurks a force of immense power that, when loosed, exults in the destruction of men, that longs to trample even the most beloved of males underfoot, to wade in his blood and eat his carcass.

  Sweet Jesus, Kate reflected, taking a large gulp of the brandy, what must Roz’s thesis supervisor be making of this? And did Roz need to be quite so graphic, even loving, in these descriptions of gore and destruction?

  Perhaps that was the point: that even an ordained minister with a pet dog named Mutt, a weekly salary, and a mortgage could feel that urge, primal and terrible.

  With a convulsive shudder Kate shoved the entire thesis together and back in its box. She felt trapped by a visualization of what this group of vigilantes—selective terrorists—could do if they took this stuff seriously. Would they begin gutting men next, instead of a nice tidy strangulation? Hacking off body parts for Kali to wear? or—Christ!—eat?

  She drained her glass, considered and rejected a refill, and, knowing she’d never get to sleep with those images crowding into her mind, went in to the television. An old movie, she decided—if she could find one without gore, abuse of women, or a woman taking revenge. Which left out Jon’s collection of Bette Davis films, and half the suspense movies. She was faced with Jon’s musicals or Lee’s science fiction, and whereas the latter often involved wholesale slaughter, the former induced in Kate the very desire to commit it that she was trying to avoid. Even Men in Black had a downtrodden woman whose husband gets his due. To say nothing of reminding her of Agent Marcowitz.