Rivera thought, If my luck could be bottled, it would be classified a chemical weapon. He read through the coroner's report again. "Cause of death: compression fracture of the fifth and sixth vertebrae (broken neck). Subject had lost massive amounts of blood — no visible wounds." On its own, it was a uniquely enigmatic report, but it wasn't on its own. It was the second body in a month that had sustained massive blood loss with no visible wounds.
Rivera looked across the desk to where his partner, Nick Cavuto, was reading a copy of the report.
"What do you think?" Rivera said.
Cavuto chewed on an unlit cigar. He was a burly and balding, gravel-voiced, third-generation cop — six degrees tougher than his father and grandfather had been because he was gay. He said, "I think if you have any vacation time coming, this would be the time to take it."
"So we're fucked."
"It's too early for us to be fucked. I'd say we've been taken to dinner and slipped the tongue on the good-night kiss."
Rivera smiled. He liked the way Cavuto tried to make everything sound like dialogue from a Bogart movie. The big detective's pride and joy was a complete set of signed first-edition Dashiell Hammett novels. "Give me the days when police work was done with a snub nose and a lead sap," Cavuto would say. "Computers are for pussies."
Rivera returned to the report. "It looks like this guy would have been dead in a month anyway: 'a ten-centimeter tumor on the liver. Malignancy the size of a grapefruit."
Cavuto shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth. "The old broad at the Van Ness Motel was on her way out too. Congestive heart disease. Too weak for a bypass. She ate nitro pills like they were M&M's."
"The euthanasia killer," Rivera said.
"So we're assuming this was the same guy?"
"Whatever you say, Nick."
"Two killings with the same MO and no motive. I don't even like the sound of it." Cavuto rubbed his temples as if trying to milk anxiety out through his tear ducts. "You were in San Junipero during the Night Stalker killings. We couldn't take a piss without tripping over a reporter. I say we lock this down. As far as the papers are concerned, the victims were robbed. No connection."
Rivera nodded. "I need a smoke. Let's go talk to those guys that got hit at the Laundromat a couple of weeks ago. Maybe there's a connection."
Cavuto pushed himself out of the chair and grabbed his hat off the desk. "Whoever voted for nonsmoking in the station house should be pistol-whipped."
"Didn't the President sponsor that bill?"
"All the more reason. The pussy."
Tommy lay looking at the ceiling, trying to catch his breath and extricate his right foot from a hopeless tangle in the sheets. Jody was drawing a tic-tac-toe in the sweat on his chest with her finger.
"You don't sweat anymore, do you?" he asked.
"Don't seem to."
"And you're not even out of breath. Am I doing something wrong?"
"No, it was great. I only get breathless when… when I…"
"When you bite me."
"Yeah."
"Did you…"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Are you?"
"No, I faked." Tommy grinned.
"Really?" Jody looked at the wet spot (on her side, of course).
"Why do you think I'm so winded? It's not easy to fake the ejaculation part."
"I, for one, was fooled."
"See."
He reached down and unwrapped the sheet from his foot, then he lay back and stared at the ceiling. Jody began to twist the sweaty locks of his hair into horns.
"Jody," Tommy said tentatively.
"Hmmm?"
"When I get old, I mean, if we're still together…"
She yanked on his hair.
"Ouch. Okay, we'll still be together. Have you ever heard of satyriasis?"
"No."
"Well, it happens to real old guys. They run around with a perpetual hard-on, chasing teenage girls and humping anything that moves until they have to be put in restraints."
"Wow, interesting disease."
"Yeah, well, when I get old, if I start to show the symptoms…"
"Yeah?"
"Just let it run its course, okay?"
"I'll look forward to it."
Rivera held a plastic cup of orange juice for the mass of plaster and tubes that was LaOtis Small. LaOtis sipped from the straw, then pushed it away with his tongue. The body cast ran from below his knees to the top of his head, with holes for his face and outgoing tubes. Cavuto stood by the hospital bed taking notes.
"So you and your friends were doing laundry when an unarmed, redheaded woman attacked you and put all three of you in the hospital? Right?"
"She was a ninja, man. I know. I get the kick-boxing channel on cable."
Cavuto chomped an unlit cigar. "Your friend James says that she was six-four and weighed two hundred pounds."
"No, man, she was five-five, five-six."
"Your other buddy" — Cavuto checked his notepad for the name — "Kid Jay, said that it was a gang of Mexicans."
"No, man, he dreamin'; it was one ninja bitch."
"A five-and-a-half-foot woman put the three of you big strong guys in the hospital?"
"Yeah. We was just mindin' our own bidness. She come in and axed for some change. James tell her no, he got to put a load in the dryer, and she go fifty-one-fifty on him. She a ninja."
"Thank you, LaOtis, you've been very helpful." Cavuto shot Rivera a look and they left the hospital room.
In the hallway Rivera said, "So we're looking for a gang of redheaded, ninja Mexicans."
Cavuto said, "You think there's a molecule of truth in any of that?"
"They were all unconscious when they were brought in, and obviously they haven't tried to match up their stories. So if you throw out everything that doesn't match, you end up with a woman with long red hair."
"You think a woman could do that to them and manage to snap the neck of two other people without a struggle?"
"Not a chance," Rivera said. His beeper went off and he checked the number. "I'll call in."
Cavuto pulled up. "Go ahead, I'm going back in to talk to LaOtis. Meet me outside emergency."
"Take it easy, Nick, the guy's in a body cast."
Cavuto grinned. "Kind'a erotic, ain't it?" He turned and lumbered back toward LaOtis Small's room.
Jody walked Tommy up to Market Street, watched him eat a burger and fries, and put him on the 42 bus to work. Killing the time while Tommy worked was becoming tedious. She tried to stay in the loft, watched the late-night talk shows and old movies on cable, read magazines, and did a little cleaning, but by two in the morning the caged-cat feeling came over her and she went out to wander the streets.
Sometimes she walked Market among the street people and the convention crowds, other times she took a bus to North Beach and hung out on Broadway watching the sailors and the punks stagger, drunk and stoned, or the hookers and the hustlers running their games. It was on these crowded streets that she felt most lonely. Time and again she wanted to turn to someone and point out a unique heat pattern or the dark aura she sensed around the sick; like a child sharing the cloud animals flying through a summer sky. But no one else could see what she saw, no one heard the whispered propositions, the pointed refusals, or the rustle of money exchanging hands in alleys and doorways.
Other times she crept through the back streets and listened to the symphony of noises that no one else heard, smelled the spectrum of odors that had long ago exhausted her vocabulary. Each night there were more nameless sights and smells and sounds, and they came so fast and subtle that she eventually gave up trying to name them.