The first two were missing most of their teeth and he moved closer, surprised how much it affected him, the rise of emotion, sorrow, and the recurring sense of having failed her. Several skulls had desiccated skin, hair hanging. He couldn’t remember seeing any reports in recent years of grave robbing but skulls were also trafficked online. He knelt and with the light checked the teeth of three. Their ground down molars made him think they were elderly and he abandoned an idea this was a trophy display of a serial murderer. This was something different, a gathering, a statement of some kind.
When he returned the light again to the upper skulls he saw a flash of reflection as the light bounced off something shiny. He stepped closer and was fairly sure it was glass but decided to wait on the CSI team and moved back toward the steel ladder and stopped. He took several photos and scanned the space once more, two bunk beds, the set-up around the cot with the bloodstained mattress. He moved as close as he felt he could to the cot and stood a long moment looking at it. Then he turned to the other things in the shelter, canned food, a contraption below the ventilation duct that appeared to be something you sat on and pedaled. He saw more stored goods, leaking batteries, and Korean War vintage water storage containers.
Fallout was like pumice in consistency. Gamma rays coming off it all traveled straight. You needed to get where the gamma rays couldn’t get to you and wait for the radiation level to die down, so you could then climb to the surface and start civilization from scratch. He was young when these shelters were getting built and judging from the contents he guessed this one dated to the 1960s.
He moved the light beam up to the airshaft again and remembered Coryell’s dark eyes as she described faint screams lost to the rain. She was sure enough to call 911. He remembered Albert Lash inviting him back to the house for a drink after the homicide investigation stalled, Lash a likeable storyteller and tenured history professor at UC Berkeley best known for writing pop culture history. His books sold well and very well. Raveneau read several after Coryell disappeared. Lash made the characters interesting enough and you got a story and a hook in the present. He wrote a history of San Francisco through the eyes of the San Francisco Police Department; he started researching that one before she disappeared and picked it up again after remains and clothing found on a western slope of Mt. Tamalpais were identified and DNA confirmed in the spring of 2004 the remains belonged to Ann Coryell. Her skull was never found.
When Lash was forced to take a leave of absence from UC he taunted SFPD by deepening his research for the police viewpoint book. He interviewed homicide inspectors, including Raveneau, and they couldn’t have been more cooperative with him. It was a dance. Raveneau drank gimlets with Lash. He sat in Lash’s library, Lash the literary squire in those conversations, the professor confident in his grasp of the elements of truth. Lash praised Ann Coryell for brilliance and pitied her instability, calling it the price of genius. Before her remains were found he held that she fled the pressure of her thesis and grad school.
Lash said, ‘I write books for people who watch TV. I’m as ordinary as them, but Ann saw history. It blew through her like a wind. She understood the core of us more than I ever will.’
A minor Coryell cult formed after her death. That had to do with her blog, her writings, and after her death, a book. He brought the flashlight beam to the cot one last time and then to the skulls. Raveneau had seen three satanic murder sites in twenty years and a few other cult killings, but he didn’t see cult here. The candles and cot and meticulous arranging of the skeletal bones and belongings on the rotted Army blankets gave him the feeling the skulls were arranged to communicate something distinct and possibly far worse.
He lingered at the base of the ladder until it came to him. This was Cambodia and the killing fields, or Rwanda and the inside of a church. He was looking at homage to genocide, a nod to the ninety thousand stacked skulls Genghis Khan left at the gates of Delhi. The cold air settled around him and he held the light to the skulls one last time then climbed the rungs.
H
ugh Neilley was one of the two SF homicide inspectors who worked the Coryell killing. He was also the uncle Baylor mentioned and an old friend of Raveneau’s, which was a lot of coincidence if Raveneau believed in coincidence. Hugh was still with SFPD though not with the Homicide Detail. His homicide career ended in 2004 when he volunteered to leave after his drinking became an open problem. Friends arranged for a transfer to the Southern Precinct, and he had been there ever since though was due to retire at the end of this year. That was less than three months away.
Hugh sounded as if he’d just been laughing at something as he picked up the phone and asked Raveneau, ‘Where the hell have you been? I thought I’d be back at Homicide trying to figure out what happened to you. I’ve left you two messages in the last two weeks. Don’t I rate at all anymore?’
‘I’ve been swamped. We cleared another old one with a DNA match and I was in New Mexico finding our guy when you left the first message.’
‘What about the second?’
‘I’m calling you right now. I’m out at Albert Lash’s house. I just met your nephew. His crew demolished a garden shed yesterday morning and found an old bomb shelter with skulls and two partial skeletons in it. Stop me if you already know this. Did your nephew tell you this last night? He didn’t call us until this morning.’
‘No, he didn’t tell me, but we’ve been arguing. Is her skull in there?’
‘I don’t know yet. There are fourteen skulls.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, that’s the count, and we’ve got everybody on their way here. The hatch cover was under a lattice of deck boards inside the garden shed.’
‘And we missed that when we searched Lash’s place?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t believe that. I’m driving out there right now. I need to see this.’
‘Don’t come out yet. It’s going to be a zoo here the rest of today and into tonight. I just want to know if your nephew told anybody yesterday what he found. The demo crew here, these four young Hispanic guys, claim he didn’t say anything to them.’
‘Those guys are all scared of police. They’re all going to say they don’t know anything.’
‘We separated them. We talked to them. La Rosa is very fluent and she doesn’t think he said a word to them. I’m not reading anything into it, but it’s odd. Why don’t you ask him about it?’
‘You know I will. I’ll let you know.’
Raveneau was willing to leave it at that. He knew plenty about Hugh’s saga with his nephew. He knew Hugh would question him hard.
‘I’ve got to come out there, Ben. I can’t take this. I was in that garden shed when we searched his place. Well, you know that, you were there, but I was in that garden shed. I stood on those boards. I remember that, and I was there last Saturday. It’s not on the plans. The architect missed it. That garden shed was full of old pesticide bottles. The contractor got a hazardous waste company out there to clean it out.’
Raveneau wasn’t close enough to Hugh anymore or, more to the point, Hugh wasn’t close enough to the homicide office anymore for Raveneau to say much more, yet Hugh was one of the two original homicide inspectors, so he would be briefed. He was going to be in on the investigation and Raveneau decided to tell him about the cellphone.
‘We’ve found an iPhone with the skulls that wasn’t even manufactured until after Lash was in a wheelchair. Someone else has been in there. The phone number is an active account.’
‘I’ll see you there. I’m coming out now.’
‘No, you’re not.’
Raveneau listened to Hugh a little longer then broke off the call. He spent the next two hours with the coroner, the Chief Medical Examiner, and a forensic anthropologist. The ME, Hayes, decided to tag the skulls with numbers and then bring them out individually in body bags after the CSI crew finished. The fire station over on Grove Street brought in more lights for the CSI pair. The iPhone, the glass face of which Raveneau’s flashlight beam had caught, went into a clear plastic bag and then into Raveneau’s trunk. The phone was going with him.
A sheet was slid under each partial skeleton to lift them away from the floor. The rotted blankets, the clothing, shoes, all the personal effects came out, then the cot and mattress. The leaking batteries were left and the swollen cans of food, as well as the rest of the furniture and kitchen utensils and supplies. The candles were bagged individually with the hope there might be touch DNA.
The iPhone was on a trajectory of its own now. It got checked first for trace DNA and turned out to be wiped clean. Raveneau plugged it in and charged it and la Rosa started chasing down the Verizon account. It was registered to a corporation with a Belmont apartment building address though the phone had a New York prefix. A single phone number was in Contacts and before calling it they talked it through.
‘Someone knew the construction was coming,’ Raveneau said, ‘and the phone is there for us. Let’s call it. It’s what we’re expected to do.’
They moved into an interview room and put the iPhone on speakerphone so they could tape the conversation. La Rosa went quickly through it once more. No apps, photos, email accounts, nothing but a single name under Contacts. The name input was Call Me.
‘Ready?’ she asked and without waiting tapped the phone number. The phone rang four times, followed by a click followed by a humming, and they heard static and a recording started to play.
‘Old school,’ la Rosa whispered, meaning the outdated answering machine, and Raveneau nodded. The voice was male, disguised but not muffled, the tone matter of fact.
‘Money borrowed is repaid with money. Lives taken must be repaid with lives. America owes for the genocide of the western expansion. A first payment will be made very soon in San Francisco.’
It ended there, clicked off, and the connection broke. They listened to it twice more and then la Rosa looked up with puzzlement, asking, ‘Why do we get all the freaks? Why don’t they stay on the east coast or Texas or wherever they’re from? The genocide of the western expansion, I have no clue what that means. Did he mean the Western Addition? Is this a racial deal?’
‘I get it.’
‘You know what he’s talking about?’
‘Yeah, it’s how we dealt with the Native American tribes. It’s about the Indian Wars. Ann Coryell, the woman who lived in Lash’s guest house, wrote about unreconciled genocide and what it does to our collective psyche.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘She wrote about what genocide does to a society.’
La Rosa sat on that for a little bit then asked, ‘We’re supposed to pay now for something that happened in the nineteenth century?’
‘That’s what he’s saying, that’s what I hear. Ann Coryell’s thesis was that if genocide isn’t acknowledged and answered it never goes away. A society carries it and its culture is stunted.’
‘What are we getting into here?’
‘Right now we need to get a search warrant to get into an apartment in Belmont.’
T
he apartment building was soot-colored and four stories. The property manager, Lisa Berge of Berge Properties, was parked out front along the curb in a shiny black Lexus, and after a polite exchange of cards Raveneau handed her the search warrant. She read it with a look of disdain but didn’t comment until they were upstairs and she was unlocking the door of 4F.
‘I resent the search warrant but I’m not surprised and I called our lawyer yesterday after I got off the phone with you. Police are very heavy-handed nowadays. My grandfather started this business and we’ve survived three generations by keeping our word and protecting our reputation.’
‘We don’t want to hurt your reputation,’ la Rosa said. ‘We’re responding to a phone threat.’
Raveneau didn’t hear what came after that. On a counter in the kitchen was a cordless phone cradled in a vintage black plastic answering machine. He pulled on latex gloves and used a pencil eraser to push the button to replay the recording. Nothing played. He rewound. He pressed play again then checked the connections. The answering machine was simple and familiar. He used to have one just like it and didn’t miss it at all. He turned to Lisa Berge.
‘What happened to the tape? Has the renter been here?’
‘No, and we cancelled his lease. He won’t be back.’
Raveneau checked the machine again before disconnecting it. He paused as he realized the tape was missing. Then he slid it into an evidence bag and searched the rest of the apartment as la Rosa talked with Berge in the corridor. The apartment was a one-bedroom and nearly empty. A flat screen TV faced a couch and coffee table. It could have been a hotel room, except for one thing. On a nightstand was a black plastic iPhone case. Like a scavenger hunt he thought, geo-caching. They were being led along, and he stared at it knowing that he was going to slip it carefully into a bag and they would take it with them and there wasn’t going to be any DNA or prints. It would be as clean as the iPhone.
None of this fit with the investigation he imagined. He shouldn’t have imagined anything but so many times over the decade since Coryell disappeared he had turned different ideas in his head.
On the drive here la Rosa asked, ‘Why did you give Ann Coryell your cell number if the officers were already there and writing a report?’
‘Because I knew she wasn’t going to call nine one one again. It was her third call in a week and the responding officers were pretty close to believing Lash. They were on his porch when I got there. I could hear him. Lash was selling that she was brilliant but fragile, and he invited all three officers to come over for a drink when they were off duty. He wanted their stories. He told them about the book he was writing. Coryell was scared but determined, and I don’t think she knew what to do next.’
‘And you slept through her call?’
‘I don’t really know what happened. I was tired. It was late. I ate a little and drank a couple of glasses of wine before I went to bed. The phone was on the nightstand next to the bed, but I may have accidentally turned off the ringer. I’ve thought about it over and over, and I still think about it.’