Bones of the Barbary Coast (7 page)

8

D
R. SKOBOLD HAD kindly agreed to meet with her during his one o'clock lunch hour, with the understanding that his time was very limited. Figuring in drive times, that meant Cree had three hours for a visit to the New Main Library; if the San Francisco History Room there didn't have what she needed, it could refer her to other libraries, private collections, or museum archives. She parked in a pay lot and walked across the plaza between the ornate Edwardian dome of City Hall and the white art deco facade of the library

The fog was gone and San Francisco's pastels and whites were crisp against a blue sky. Despite only six hours of sleep, she felt energized by the morning sunshine, and dealing with Bert didn't seem such an imposing problem. The guy was closed off, but she'd work on him, spend some off-duty time with him. Encourage him to call Mom, too, get reconnected there; maybe help him think more positively about life after retirement. She'd figure out who his wolfman was and clear up that one little piece for him.

Today, the first step would be the house itself. Somebody had built it, owned it, lived in it; somebody had knowingly or unknowingly hosted the wolfman, knowingly or unknowingly repaired the floor above his crypt.

The History Room was on the sixth floor, a huge square space filled with rows of counters, tables, and computers, with a few microfilm cartels set up along the left side. The archivist gave Cree an overview of resources and steered her toward a likely starting point, the indexes to the Sanborn Insurance Company maps. The hand-inked neighborhood maps showed every street and structure and had been redrawn often enough that she could determine within a year or two when the house had been built. She compared her city map with the old index maps to find the right blocks, then filled out a requisition form and took several microfilm reels back to a viewer.

She scanned through the sliding frames until she found the right cross streets, and soon located the footprint of the house, just as it was today: a rectangle with its narrow end facing the street, long side stretching back into the lot, a short L wing at the rear. The most interesting feature of the 1905 map was that it showed another house immediately adjacent on the downhill side, where the terrace garden was now. She made a photocopy of the frame, then rewound and worked her way backward in time through the other spools. Both houses were represented on the earliest Sanborn map, 1886.

Next she moved to the records of the Spring Valley Water Company, which supplied water to San Francisco from 1861 to 1915. Their ledgers recorded when a tap was first turned on at a given address and who paid for it, so by going back and forth between water records and the Sanborn maps, she was able to piece together a rough history of the two properties. The house where the bones were found was built in 1881 by a James Marcus, then sold to a Hans Schweitzer in 1882. Schweitzer was still listed as owner on the 1905 Sanborn map and received water there until 1914, when someone named O'Brien took over the water account. The house next door had been built by somebody named Jackson around 1880, but the house had disappeared from the first map drawn after the quake, and Schweitzer's name appeared in that lot's empty rectangle.

Probable sequence of events, she figured: The Jackson house had suffered quake damage, part of it toppling into the Schweitzer house, killing and burying the wolfman; the Jacksons had not rebuilt but had sold the lot to their neighbor, Schweitzer, who had opted to leave it empty and create the garden terrace. Schweitzer had sold both properties to O'Brien in 1914, and the open space had been preserved by every owner since.

She left the library at twelve thirty, pleased with her progress. Even Joyce would be impressed—after only three hours into her first research day, she had the owner's name for the property during the period in question, plus a general history of the house and the lot next door.

The feeling didn't last. The plaza was a gathering place for homeless people, who huddled among the trees with shopping carts and bags, eating scavenged lunches. Crossing the square again, she passed close to a huge man with long hair matted into dreds and a beard full of food debris, dressed in layers of tattered clothing that made him bulky as a bear. When he saw her, he sort of
reared,
swinging toward her and baring rotten teeth. Cree quelled the startle reflex, kept a neutral face, avoided eye contact, and swept quickly past. Her chest panged in sympathy but, like anyone who had lived in big cities, she knew it was best to slip through these encounters. Joyce called it the metropolitan glide.

Afterward it occurred to her that maybe the wolfman had been in a similar situation. Maybe he'd been one of those Barbary Coast derelicts that Bert had talked about. She could easily imagine the scenario: Shunned because of his deformities, homeless, scrounging a living, he'd secretly camped out in the gangway between the Schweitzer and Jackson houses, or had found his way into Schweitzer's basement. He'd set up his nest of rags, like the homeless people here, on the night before the quake. He might have been still asleep when the world fell on him at five thirteen the next morning. The wolfman might have no connection whatever to the Schweitzers or their house, to anyone or anything. Maybe no record of his life or death existed anywhere.

She felt her mood sag, but then reminded herself it was still very early in the game. And there were always the bones.

Skobold looked up from his lunch, a submarine sandwich on a sheet of waxed paper. She was early, and from the way his eyebrows appeared over the rims of his glasses he was surprised by her sudden appearance. He was sitting behind his desk while a younger man half-sat on one corner of it, gesturing with a manila envelope. The other visitor turned part way toward her and gave her a smile.

Skobold swallowed. "Ah. Ms. Black, meet Cameron Raymond. Ray, Cree Black."

" 'Ray'?"

"Because of the last name and because I'm a radiologist. It was inevitable." Ray's grin moved further up the side of his face.

He wore jeans and a white shirt and had the rangy, trim build of a very fit man. A nice face, Cree thought, handsome yet strangely shy or self-effacing. He shook her hand with a short, firm squeeze.

"Ray works at Temple Microimage, the lab that's doing the imaging work on our . . . um, newest guest. He's the man I turn to when I need the kind of advanced analysis we'll be doing in this case. He's just brought some new films, which I'm very much looking forward to seeing."

"And I should be getting back," Ray said. "But give me a call, Horace; we'll talk when you've had a chance to look them over."

As he turned toward the door, Cree was startled to see the scarring that distorted the left side of his face. A weal of swollen tissue like a braid stretched from the corner of his lip to just in front of his ear, pulling the skin of his face and tugging down the corner of his eye. She almost gasped from a mix of sympathy and shock, and from the way he averted his eyes as he left, he clearly noticed her reaction.

Skobold stared after him with a mournful, troubled expression, then raised a forefinger to request patience as he returned to his lunch.

Cree sat on a plastic chair and waited, feeling bad about the way she'd reacted to the radiologist's scarring. She considered asking Skobold about him, but decided it would seem rude. Through the door to the lab, she could see several people clustered around Karen Chang and her partially completed reconstruction. The pallet had been removed from the back of the room, and she thought about asking Skobold where the wolfman had gone, but then worried he'd see it as her rushing him.

To make conversation, she picked up a photo of Skobold standing next to a plump, cheery-looking woman about his own age. "Your wife?"

Skobold looked mildly alarmed. "Sister," he said through his food.

Another photo showed Skobold with his arm around the shoulders of a handsome, dark-haired young man, much younger, in a graduation robe. Cree took it from the shelf and admired it briefly. "Is this your son? He's very handsome!"

This time he looked positively stricken. "My partner, Ms. Black," he said gravely.

Cree's mouth opened and shut of its own accord. "I'm on a real roll here, aren't I."

Skobold stared at her as he nibbled a trailing tag of lettuce, then turned businesslike: "I'm happy to meet with you briefly now, but as I said, I can only spare fifteen minutes. And I haven't had time to do anything more with the wolfman."

"I'm hoping the questions I have are general enough for you to have an opinion after even your limited examination to date."

He gestured with his sandwich for her to continue.

"You mentioned that the crime scene people retrieved various artifacts with the bones. What sort of artifacts?"

"Broken china, splintered furniture . . . um, a galvanized tin bucket, that sort of thing. Bertie will have an inventory."

"Any clothing?"

"Just rags—shreds, really. The fluids of decomposition hasten cloth decay—they provide a growth medium for molds, bacteria, and insects. Really, only the hard parts survived—the buttons, some rivets. No zippers back then."

"So . . . when you find a body like this, can you tell what happened? From the position of the bones? I mean, what happened before death or at death as opposed to after death?"

"Aha. An excellent point. One of the subdisciplines of the field is called
taphonomy.
It's the science of determining what happened to remains after death—the process of decomposition, damage or distribution by natural forces or by human action. For example, you find a human skeleton distributed over several of acres of woodland. Does that mean somebody murdered the deceased, dismembered him, and scattered the parts? Or were they dragged by animals, washed by flood waters, or moved inadvertently during logging operations? Understanding taphonic factors can be crucial to determining time, cause, and manner of death."

Skobold paused until she nodded to show she understood. "I wasn't present at the retrieval, but from looking at Bertie's photos of him in situ I can safely say he died where he was found. From the position of the bones, I suspect he was standing at the time of the earthquake."

"Standing in the basement? Or standing outside and caught up in an avalanche of stuff?"

"I don't know. It's an interesting point."

She waited quietly as Skobold ripped off several more bites. At last he patted his mouth with a napkin, stood, and came around the desk. As Cree stood to follow him out, Skobold paused to tap the photo she'd commented on earlier, a grin suppressed at the corners of his mouth.

"Yes, very handsome," he said. "I'll relay your compliments to him."

He led her through the lab, explaining quietly that he had moved 3024 to the back room to keep him out of view of the graduate students who were now7 working with Karen Chang. He unlocked a door on the far wall, ushered her through, and shut it behind them. When the overhead fluorescents fluttered alight, Cree saw a small, windowless chamber lined with shelves full of boxes, bottles, and equipment. Skobold went to the wolfman's pallet and drew the fabric carefully down to the skeleton's knees. They both contemplated that shocking bony face as Cree unfolded the page on which she'd jotted her most pressing questions.

"Can you tell much about his condition at time of death? His health history?"

"Not too much on this individual yet, but in general—most definitely
yes.
An early physical anthropologist once said that bones provide every person with an epitaph. But now the science has improved to the point where we can more accurately describe bones as our posthumous
autobiographies.
Your bones are a diary that you've kept and added to every day of your life."

"That's a beautiful concept!"

"My favorite challenges are the osteo-archeological ones, where ancient remains are found and I am asked to decipher the social and physical environment from the bones. What did this woman do for a living? What diseases did this man have in childhood? Was this person rich or poor, a slave or a king? Was this child killed as part of a religious rite, or for the sheer nutritional value of his flesh? With current techniques and technologies, we can reliably answer many such questions."

She gazed down at the wolfman, catching a sense of the bones as Skobold saw the bones: bearers of encrypted stories, Rosetta stones of whole lives.

Skobold pulled over a floor-standing lamp consisting of a circular light tube with a magnifying lens at the center. He adjusted the reflector, then picked up one of the leg bones and laid a finger near the knob at the upper end.

"Before I can sculpt a face, I need to know everything I can about the individual I'm attempting to re-create. How old? How tall? What race? Fat or thin? Healthy, or a victim of chronic disease? Any determination I make will improve the degree of likeness I can achieve. To make those decisions, I'll look at the bones' appearance very closely, measure them, and compare their numbers to statistical baselines compiled from thousands of individuals."

"But will the baselines really be helpful? Won't his deformities throw you off?"

Skobold looked pleased with her. "An excellent point. No, we probably can't apply typical standards to, for example, his rate of growth. Or, if we see anomalies in his bone makeup, we have to ask if they're the result of environmental conditions—disease or poor diet, perhaps—or a coproduct of his deformity, perhaps caused by the way his genes triggered growth. With a subject like this, we'll have to put together data from a wide variety of indicators. And, of course, any historical information you can provide about him would be enormously helpful."