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took out several clear plastic deli boxes filled with soft squares, white,
orange, and a bilious pink color.
"Burfi, he said, offering them a square of mealy and cloyingly sweet white
stuff that tasted like perfume. "Carrothalwa, and almondburfi. And there are
alsogulab jaman andjelabis, which my wife makes sometimes, but I would call
those desserts or pastries, not candy."
Kate was having trouble with the substance in her mouth, but Hawkin swallowed
hard and said thickly, "What about those little assorted seeds and stuff?"
"Seeds? You meansaumf? Not candy, no. You might call it a snack, I suppose,
though I'd say it's more a breath freshener." He rummaged through another
shelf and came out with a packet of loose seed mix with colored specks,
apparently identical to the little bag of seeds Laxman had carried in his
pocket. "Americans don't tend to chew things, other than gum, but we
chewbetal, which makes one spit, orsaumf, which doesn't. Chewing or not
chewing is a cultural difference."
"But it's not candy?"
"Not by any stretch of the imagination, Inspector."
Their strange questions had woken his curiosity, but they did not choose to
enlighten him. The patrolman arrived a minute later, and they left, reassuring
Mehta, hit by a sudden return of anxiety, that they would do their best to
deflect Roz Hall. They turned the house over to the uniform and settled into
their car, with Hawkin behind the wheel.
Kate, oddly, felt less tired than she had. Thatburfi or whatever it was had
been sweet enough to raise the blood sugar of a corpse; maybe the department
should lay in a supply for those long night shifts.
"So the candy is a pun," she mused, "an offering of Kali to Kali. And that
was very interesting about the seedy stuff not being candy, to his mind
anyway."
"But would Carla and Phoebe have known it wasn't an Indian kind of candy?"
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"They know about Kali."
"That doesn't mean they know Indian culture."
"True," she agreed, and sat motionless in the moving car. Outside the
windows, the city's night song came to Kate's ears, muted and atonal,
unpleasant and as jangled as her nerves. After a few blocks, she said, "I'll
ask Lee to call Roz first thing in the morning, see if she can persuade her to
lay off Mehta. If there's anyone she'll listen to, it's Lee."
"It'd be nice to be able to stop her without having to put a gun to her
head," Hawkin said. Kate was not sure he was actually joking.
At the parking lot beneath the perpetually laden freeway, Kate's car started
immediately, to her relief, and it seemed to drive itself up the silent
streets to die old house on Russian Hill. The house was still and quiescent
when she let herself in, the entrance and hallway lights the only bulbs left
burning. She phoned the hospital again, which gave her no changes, and then,
hating the world, the city, and her job in that order, Kate set the alarm for
six A.M., less than four hours away, stripped her clothes off into a heap on
the floor, and crept into the blessed shelter of the bed.
Lee woke up and turned over, nuzzling into Kate with a questioning noise in
the back of her throat and then an actual question.
"Is everything okay?"
Kate, realizing that she could trade a few minutes now for a longer sleep in
the morning, shifted around to put an arm around Lee.
"I need you to do something for me, sweetheart. Did you know Roz has called a
press conference in the morning about the Mehta family?"
"God, do I ever. Maj was on the phone most of the evening."
"Well, there may not be anything that any of us can do, but Roz might just
possibly listen to you." Lee started to protest, but Kate pushed on. "Carla
Lomax and her secretary were the ones behind those murders. We haven't
actually arrested either of them, because Carla ran in front of a bus while I
was chasing her and is still in recovery and Phoebe's disappeared, but they
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will be charged with Larsen and Banderas for sure, as well as a man in
Sacramento and probably in afew days Laxman Mehta, although the
investigation's still going on. Oh yes, and the attempted murder of a guy
named Traynor in San Jose."
Lee was fully awake now. "God, Kate, that's what, five assaults? Why? And
what does Roz have to do with it?"
"They began with straightforward revenge, it looks like, and from there
decided to become vigilantes. And I believe that the reason Roz is so hot to
get Mehta is that she knew, on some level, that the two women were involved in
something. I think we'll find that she introduced them to the idea of the
goddess Kali as a feminist avenger, and they ran with it. Sweetheart,
blackmail her, for my sake. Play on her guilt, her responsibility for twisting
those two women. Even if it's not true, it'll make her slow down and think.
Yes, love," she said over Lee's protests, "I know it's unscrupulous and unfair
and everything else, but Roz is about to set loose a tornado on the city
that'll make it nearly impossible to investigate the Mehta case with any hope
of conviction, and might well drive the Mehtas back to India and out of our
jurisdiction. And you can tell her that, too, if she'll shut up about it; tell
her anything, just so she gives me time."
Kate felt as if her voice was at the end of a dim corridor, echoing and
growing fainter, but she waited until Lee had agreed to try, agreed to reach
Roz early in the morning, before she let herself go. The last thing Kate said
before sleep claimed her was, "Could you change the alarm clock to eight?"
Chapter 25
IT WAS NOT EIGHT, she saw, it was twenty past seven, andit was not the alarm,
but the telephone.
"Martinelli," she croaked into the receiver.
"It's me, love," Lee's voice said into her ear, "I thought you should know
that I just got to Roz's house and she isn't home. We're heading over to the
church; I'll ring you back as soon as we find her."
"You blessed among women," Kate said, already on her feet. "I love you.
"I know you do. Now go have a shower."
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Kate's shower lasted perhaps ninety seconds and then she was pulling on
clothes over her still-damp skin and running a comb through her wet hair. She
trotted downstairs and had just poured herself a cup of very stale coffee when
the phone rang again.
"Roz's secretary said that Roz phoned Peter Mehta at about quarter to seven
this morning. They had a short talk and then she just drove off, about five
minutes ago."
"Okay. She may have gone over there for a private talk, a little last-minute
conflict resolution." It would be like Roz, but it made Kate uncomfortable to
think of Roz facing the furious Peter Mehta by herself. "Look, I think I'll
run by there, see if I can get her to leave him alone. You stay put, I'll
phone you when I find her."
"There's coffee in the "
"Got it. 'Bye."
She took one large swallow of the hot greenish substance and abandoned the
cup.
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