Bones of the Barbary Coast (27 page)

31

T
HE SUN'S DISK rested briefly on the rooftops to the west, then started to slip behind them. Ray worked his way back toward the trapdoor, drawing the ring of tar closer. Between gusts of wind, the oily stink of it surrounded Cree, not unpleasant. Ray looked happy—no, joyous, she thought—as if the hard work and height and company suited him. Cree could feel it herself: the cleansing sunlight, blinding at such a low angle, the big sky overhead, the enormous but muted energy of the city all around.

"You mentioned me to Bert, right?" Ray asked. "That's what got him thinking about me?"

"I didn't know you two had . . . any previous contact. I was just chatting about my day."

"So now what? My sending him those e-mails proves I'm a killer. Got any ideas about how to defuse his interest?"

"Not at the moment."

"Terrific. Fucking terrific." Ray frowned as he worked. Cree crossed her arms and took a turn around the shrinking square of untarred roof, getting chilly. Neither said anything for a few minutes. The low beams had turned Ray into a half orange-gilded, half blue-shadowed man, and he was hurrying now, working against time.

"Can I ask you a question?" he called. "On a somewhat different topic?"

"Maybe."

"You're . . .
normal,
Cree. You look it, anyway. What you said in the plaza, one thing on the outside, one on the inside—I work on that stuff all the time. You can see why. But why should an attractive, smart, agreeable person feel that way?"

"Everybody has some dissonance there," she hedged.

Ray nodded, accepting the point, accepting that she wasn't ready to confide in him.

She found a screwdriver and levered open the last remaining bucket, then decided the best help she could offer would be to get out of the way. She climbed back through the trapdoor to the platform and down the narrow ladder to the floor.

She turned on a few lights and wandered in Ray's studio. What she'd taken for abstract paintings turned out to be hugely enlarged X-rays, all of the head and neck. In some, she could still make out the faint ghosts of fleshly features: lips, a nose, an ear. But Ray's focus was obviously the bones, cropping the images until they became abstract patterns of graduated light against the deep-space emptiness of the dark film. She'd learned enough anatomy from Horace to name some of the features: an orbit, with just enough of the nasal aperture to reveal what it was, became a portal to a vast and mysterious interior. The zygomatic arch, that delicate bridge of bone just behind the eye, enlarged so it became a cathedral's flying buttress, a lovely soaring arc. A left lateral cranial view, cropped horizontally so that the segments of cervical spine became a short, vertical band along the far right that created a rhythmic counterpoint to the horizontal palisades of the teeth. There were a few MRIs among the larger pieces, computer-generated whole-head images in overbright colors, not as successful.

Another piece of the Ray puzzle, certainly, but what did it imply? The subject matter could be seen as morbid, but back east she'd known artists who painted nothing but dead babies or women wrapped in barbed wire, and got big write-ups in the
Globe
or the
Times
for it. And the compositions were really quite wonderful, reverently turning the arcs and planes and articulations of the skull into architectural forms. Having worked with the wolfman's bones, she could understand the fascination.

Wliat's inside,
she decided. That was the central motivation she sensed in all her encounters with Ray: He was compelled to look through exteriors, celebrating the secret world of unseen forms. In fact, the X-rays seemed to probe even further than the bones, turning them into partial transparencies that revealed infinite space just beyond.

What's inside? What's
beyond
inside? She came at it from a very different angle, but her own motivations were very much the same.

The windows had gone gray by the time the hatch cap thumped into place and Ray started down the ladder. He crossed the room and she thought to ask him about his work, but when she looked over at him, she was startled to see him changed. His exuberance was gone, replaced by a strained weariness. His face was red and tar streaked, eyes bulging, the weals on his face purpling.

"Sorry you had to wait. I appreciate it."

"Are you okay?"

"Ah, just a headache. The sun in my eyes, my head's full of spots. The fumes. I'll be fine. Listen, I know we've still got stuff to talk about, but I have to go get this shit off of me and take a shower. I am also starving. Are you up for talking over dinner somewhere? I know this isn't a social occasion, but if I don't eat something I'm going to keel over."

Cree thought about it briefly. "Don't keel over," she told him.

They took her car, Ray giving directions. He still looked tired, but a shower and clean clothes revived him considerably, and by the time they made it to the restaurant he had mostly rebounded. They ordered a bottle of wine and plates of exotic noodles that combined food traditions from three continents. It was a pleasant little place on a side street in Noe Valley, only a few minutes drive from Ray's.

"I had an idea for you about the paradoxical aging indicators," Ray said. "Did Horace explain them?"

"The teeth and palate? He mentioned them yesterday."

"Fascinating, isn't it? That this guy's most 'wolfish' characteristics, the lengthening of the maxillary bones, nasals and mandible, and the growth of his big canines, occurred in a rather sudden, rather late, developmental phase."

"Suggesting to you that he was a bona fide werewolf?"

"No." Ray chuckled. "I was thinking of how to narrow your search parameters. His birth date was probably around 1866, but you're most likely to find records of him when his more extreme features developed. That's when he would really have become an oddball—would really have been noticed. Probably late eighties, early nineties."

"Good point."

"And I had another idea that might help you locate records." Ray's brightness was returning fast, and he seemed pleased with himself as he sipped some wine, gazed through it at the candle, tasted it again. "It has to do with who would have noticed him or cared about him enough to leave a record of him."

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"Well, he was a freak, a monster. Think about it—the average person on the street would have reacted to him with, what . . . avoidance, revulsion, fear, derision. But some kinds of people would have had other responses, dependent on their outlook. Hucksters, sleazy showmen, they'd have wanted to exploit him to make a buck. Doctors and scientists would have had a clinical interest, would've wanted to study him—or help him. He would've been a natural object of suspicion and accusation, so the police might have paid attention to him. He'd have elicited compassion in those inclined to be compassionate, and spiritual and moral concern from religious people."

"Pretty astute social psychology."

"But then I was thinking, you have to think about the era—how the Victorians would have reacted to him. It was a different time, beliefs were different, ideas were in flux. If he did look like a wolfman, there'd be the werewolf mythology to deal with."

Cree's cell phone went off in her purse, and seeing it was Bert, she apologized to Ray and took the call. He was just checking in, he said. He sounded distracted, fumbling for what to say, and she wondered how much he'd had to drink. Conscious of Ray's presence, she arranged to meet with him tomorrow and hung up as quickly as she could.

"Bert?"

"Bert."

"How would Uncle Bert like it if he knew you were consorting with the enemy?"

"Nobody's the enemy! I don't know. I don't know how to fix this, but I'll damned well figure it out."

Their food came, and Ray tucked into his noodles with enthusiasm. Cree found the flavors agreeable, but she had no appetite. Bert's call had brought the whole problem back. The look in his eyes as they'd walked on Bryant Street had spooked her—for all his gritty charm and offhand moments of grace, Bert had an opaque place inside him, a walled-off core that she could not see into.

"Keep going," she prompted. "You were talking about how people thought of werewolves in the 1880s."

After seeing the wolfman's bones, Ray had bought a couple of books on lycanthropy, and Cree had read up on the subject after her visit to the Southwest, trying to learn more about the tradition of Navajo Wolves. They spent the next half hour comparing notes, listing kinds of werewolf. There was the Hollywood variety, a make-believe of sudden transformation, Jack Nicholson suddenly sprouting hair and fangs and overwhelming sex appeal. But that was just a celluloid update of old folktales, widespread for thousands of years, which in turn were based on the really ancient tradition of shamans and priests seeking animal forms to gain animal powers. It was a resonant symbolic idea, but not only that. Modern anthropological research into therianthropy, animal-man combinations or transformations, showed that present-day shamans took herbs and animal glandular extracts containing powerful psychoactive chemicals that did indeed radically change their thinking and behavior.

The 1600s and 1700s saw a rash of trials of admitted, self-proclaimed werewolves, such as the Gandillon family, Gilles Gamier, and Peter Stump. Today they'd have been called serial killers, but the era lacked a scientific or psychological perspective to describe psychopaths who murdered and mutilated multiple victims. It would have been too distressing, anyway; people preferred to externalize the cause of such gruesome acts, blame them on a supernatural process and an animal shape.

With advances in science and psychology, perspectives changed. In the 1700s and 1800s came the psychiatric lycanthropes, people believing themselves to be werewolves and acting out wolfish behaviors. It was practically a fad diagnosis among medical professionals during the wolfman's lifetime, and didn't fully fade from medical literature until the 1960s. Now it was just diagnosed as schizophrenia, with a lupine delusional focus.

Cree drank the last of her wine and poured another half inch. The restaurant was tastefully New Agey, with soft lighting, candles, a string quartet playing over the speakers, impressionistic floral paintings on the walls. The dozen or so other customers were mostly couples, chatting quietly, laughing, holding hands. Ray talked with enthusiasm, as if completely unaware of how strange and dark their subject was in this context. Comparing notes on werewolves. And yet he was right, she needed to consider this. In the 1880s, scientific perspectives were just starting to take hold and were usually wildly inaccurate. The average person would probably have seen the wolfman through the lens of the old superstitions and would have felt an instinctive, visceral fear of his strangeness.

"But the biggest category," Ray finished, "is the 'werewolves' who were brought to trial, tortured and killed during the Inquisition. Garden-variety eccentrics, herbalists, hermits, holdout pagans, individualists—anybody who didn't fit cultural norms had a tough time when the witchcraft hysteria was in full bloom. Ten thousand werewolves, burned alive between 1200 and 1600."

Thinking of what that number meant in human terms awakened a familiar pang in Cree: all the senseless pain people inflicted on each other. Apparently feeling the same thing, Ray subsided suddenly, his thoughts veering elsewhere. Or maybe his headache had returned.

"So . . . which kind are you, Ray?" Cree smiled, letting him know he could take it as banter.

He glanced up, surprised, then pleased. "All of the above? None of the above? I guess I don't quite know yet. How about you, Cree?"

32

B
ERT PUT THE bag of tools on the front seat of the Suburban, checked his guns, and drove down toward the Bay waterfront. The area immediately around Raymond's warehouse wasn't conducive to surveillance, too exposed, but luckily the railroad and finger channels restricted the number of routes leading out. He chose a spot near the first intersection where Ray would have a choice of directions, then parked the truck and waited, hoping he was right that Ray would go out for Friday night entertainment. The position was good, with a clear view of every car that came out of that section. There weren't many.

When the red Honda SUV approached the intersection, he didn't recognize it until it stopped and the streetlight at the corner lit Cree's face. She was at the wheel, Ray was in the passenger seat. A strange sensation ignited in Bert's gut and burst upwards into his chest, somewhere between outrage, fear, betrayal, sorrow, curiosity, what else he didn't know. There was no way they could see him through his tinted glass, but he reflexively hunched lower in his seat. To his astonishment, they both looked relatively relaxed, Cree looked in control. She even chuckled at something Ray said. Like she had made some kind of social contact with the freak.

But you couldn't be sure, it could all be an act, and anyway he should know where they were going. Change of plans.

He waited until the Honda turned and was past him, then fired up the truck, figuring he'd give them a block lead before he'd pull a U-turn and follow. But then a semi loaded with crushed cars pulled up alongside and stopped at the light. Cut him off completely, no view, no way to move. Bert pounded the wheel in frustration. By the time the light changed and the big rig eased its long ass out, there was no sign of Cree's car.

He took the U anyway and scouted the streets for a time, hoping he'd pick them up again. But no luck. He tried to imagine where she would be going with Scarface, and couldn't. Waves of frustration and anxiety pummeled him until he felt shaky and breathless, and all he could think of was to call her.

He sighed out loud with relief when she answered. It was an effort to make himself sound normal when he hadn't thought through what he was going to say and was out of breath from the surge of fear.

But she sounded like her regular self. He asked if they could get together tomorrow, go over a few things, she said she could meet him early afternoon. Listening carefully to the nuances of her tone and wording, he heard nothing to suggest she was being coerced or was in danger.

"How you doin'?" he asked when he couldn't think of what else to say. Trying to sound like an uncle: "You doin' okay?"

"I'm doing fine. How about you?" A little chilly, like his question had been patronizing.

"Stellar," Bert told her.

Wherever she was, she didn't seem to be immediately at risk. So it was back to the original agenda. This might be his only chance. He turned the truck and drove back to Ray's place.

The street was dark and deserted. Bert pulled up a hundred feet west of the place and backed the Suburban into the shadow of a defunct box truck. He put on a pair of gloves, checked his guns again, and gathered up his duffle bag. His heart did jackrabbit stunts as he walked to the man door in front of Ray's minivan and bent to check the locks.

The noise of dogs barking and the rattle of chain-link came from just around to the left, several dogs really having shit fits. Bert got out his picks, but then decided the first order of business had to be shutting up the animals, they'd clue anybody nearby that something wasn't right. He dug in his duffle, found the can of Mace, walked over to the storage yard fence. Three big dogs barking and snarling and leaping, and he recognized them: his tormentors from the morphing e-mails and pop-ups. Their self-righteous territorial ire pissed him off. He took a couple of shots of them with his digital camera, portraits to match the e-mails, then came up and sprayed them as they lunged against the mesh, right in their eyes, right down their throats, and in seconds they were scraping their paws over their faces, stumbling blindly, whimpering, wheezing. There was some satisfaction in putting them in their place.

Back at Ray's door, the first lock went quickly but the second gave him trouble. It was taking too long, this had to be in and out, eventually somebody would come by and see him. Originally he had wanted this to be totally covert, leaving nothing that would clue Ray he'd been here, but he'd already done the dogs and anyway seeing Ray with Cree had ignited something inside him. It scared him to think she didn't have a better grasp of what she was dealing with, was getting chummy with this psycho. Maybe a message was in order here: Letting Ray know Bert was onto him, wasn't a stickler for procedural niceties, could very well save Cree's life.

He took out his department-issue pry-bar. It was a heavy, forked steel shaft designed for breaking open even armor-clad doors, and he worked it into the crack at the bolt and levered it with all his weight. First time nothing, then again and nothing, but the third time he heard something give in the jam. Being out here, exposed, he felt freakishly nervous, energized, strong as a bull. Another all-out crank and the door flew open.

This was where it got scary. He and Nearing and Koslowski had talked about it from time to time, about the mind-set of any cop who bent the rules. They'd agreed that with this kind of thing, once you'd made the decision you had to go at the job with a commitment to stick it out, to see it through and get it done no matter what it required. No bet-hedges or half measures. For a cop breaking the law, it was all or nothing. Stepping inside Ray's, that was the point where he crossed the line. The point of no return.

He didn't hesitate.

Inside, he could tell it was cavernous and hollow even before he panned his flashlight through the empty warehouse. For a second his wired-up high faltered: Maybe Ray really didn't live here and there was nothing to find. But then he shined his flashlight to the left and saw a brick office pod cut into the space, topped by raw plywood construction, and he put it together. He walked over to the inner door, tried it, found it locked. He put his duffle down again, got out the picks, and then thought,
screw it.
The lock popped with one good yank of the pry-bar, and then he was inside.