Bones of the Barbary Coast (9 page)

10

C
REE'S MAP SHOWED Mars Street as a short, curving way just above the big bend on Market Street. She followed Bert's directions and parked just as the streetlights winked faintly alight against a sunset-rouged sky. Five fifteen: She was a little early.

Bert's house stuck out from the steep hill on stilts, at the top of a wooden stairway that angled between trees and shrubs. It looked a little low-rent up there, especially compared with the modern concrete and stucco places on either side. She began climbing the steps, wondering why Bert had sounded so tense when she'd called. Maybe he'd broken down and decided to tell her whatever it was he'd been holding back from the start.

Looking up at the house, she could see through the deck doors to where lamps made circles of yellow on the inner walls and ceiling. After a moment, Bert came into view. He paused with his arms out to each side, head tipped back, then glided to the right, disappearing and then reappearing with the same smooth motion.

Puzzled, she lingered at the fourth landing. She couldn't see his legs or feet, but his big, white-shirted body turned, sidled, spun right back with surprising grace and precision. It took her another few seconds to realize that he was dancing. She couldn't hear the music, but she could see the beat in his movements.

There was something touching about a big man moving that way, an older man, his clumsiness turned unexpectedly effortless and gallant, and suddenly the memory came to her: Right, Bert danced. He used to grab Mom and make her dance to the radio, Pop looking on amused and indulgent, Mom pretending to hate it but looking pretty with her cheeks flushed. Bert was into swing and ballroom, which even back then had seemed old-fashioned. Looking at him now, Cree felt a brush of nostalgia and compassion: an older man, dancing alone—at once charmingly old school and a little sad.

"Get you anything? Beer, cocktail?" Bert tucked his rumpled shirt in over his belly and tipped his head toward the kitchen, which was separated from the main room by a high counter. He had turned off the music the moment she rang the doorbell.

"No booze yet, thanks—I'm going to meet Dr. Skobold later to help him with the bones. Maybe a Coke?"

Bert went around the bar, opened the refrigerator, and took out a can. He set her up at the counter with a glass of ice cubes, then found a bottle and poured half a glass of whiskey for himself. Cree sat on one of the stools while Bert stood uneasily on the other side.

"Place is a mess," he apologized. "Long days on the job, trying to close things out. You know."

"No, this is really nice—right in town but so private! You must have great views when the sun's up."

"Pretty good, yeah." He sipped his whiskey, bit his lips, looked away.

Actually, the house seemed worn, tired, like Bert himself. The smell of stale cigarette smoke, trails worn in the rugs, a sagging couch, not much on the walls besides taped-up posters
(or
older popular films and jazz concerts: the house of a solitary person.

The silence had gone on for too long. "But those stairs! My God, Uncle Bert, your own Stairmaster, every day. Must keep you in great shape."

"Don't I wish." He took a swig of whiskey, Cree tasted her Coke. There was another silence that Bert chickened out of first: "Yeah, I didn't ask you about yourself much. I mean, I don't know . . . social life. Guys."

She had learned to say it concisely and without excess emotion: "I had a very hard time after Mike died. It took me a long time to stop missing him."

Bert's eyes dodged.

"I have some very good friends," she went on, feeling pressured for more. "For the last year I've been seeing a guy in New Orleans when our work schedules allow it. Now there are some complications with that. I'm a little unfamiliar with this stuff, but I gather it's pretty typical and . . . uninteresting. What about you? I remember hearing you got married—"

"Divorced. Twenty-three years ago."

"Seeing anybody?"

He looked downright unhappy again, shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. "I'm a little past my prime, Cree."

She would have disagreed just to make him feel better, but he was too tense, none of this was working out. Personal chitchat was clearly not Bert's strength, and love life was not a good topic for either of them right now.

"So what's up, Uncle Bert? Sounds like you've got something for me?"

"Yeah. There's some stuff you need to know about."

He led her through the living room and down a short hall, into a little room set up as an office. A computer monitor glowed from the clutter on a big steel desk.

"About ten days ago, I got a problematic e-mail." He clicked the mouse to open a file on the computer and after a moment an image materialized.

At first glance, Cree thought it was just a dog—the neck and head of a pointy-eared, gray dog, staring straight at her with its head slightly cocked. It took her a few seconds to notice the subtle morphing that had been done: The eyes were disturbingly human, the mouth shortened to the front of the muzzle and rimmed with a pinkish ridge that suggested human lips. The flesh-toned nose was too rounded and prominent.

A dog becoming a man. Or a man well on his way to becoming a dog.

"What in the world—?"

"That's what I've been asking."

"Who's it from?"

"Anonymous. Address is a Hotmail account,just a random string. I sent a reply, asking who I had the pleasure of addressing, but my message bounced back. 'Undeliverable, recipient's account no longer in service.' "

"A gag e-mail? Everybody's got a joker in their address book, right?"

"Except that I've gotten two more since this one. All with the disappearing address of origin."

Bert opened another photo. This one looked like a Doberman, but again the features had been perverted by adding human elements: a disturbing swelling of the forehead, human eyebrows and eyes. The head was upraised, the almost-human lips parted over snarling dog teeth. There was no mistaking the menace implicit in this one.

"So . . . what does it mean to you? Something to do with the wolfman's bones?"

"Yeah, the part-human, part-canine thing, that was my first thought. Plus I got the first one four, five days after we retrieved the bones. But now I'm wondering if it's got some other elements. Let's go back in the other room, I'll explain."

Back in the living room, Cree sat into the sagging couch and saw that the coffee table held a dozen or more manila folders and ring binders: case files. Murder books.

Bert sat heavily next to her and lifted an ankle to his knee, jiggling his foot as he took a pull from his drink.

"I thought about whether the messages were connected to the wolfman. Horace has been keeping a lid on it at his shop, but there's no question other people have seen the bones. There's the crime scene crew and the people in the ME's office. There's Horace's assistant, there's whoever Horace had do his lab work. But I'm thinking it's something else. Somebody with an ax to grind with me."

"Like who?"

"My first thought was, every cop has creeps he's put away who eventually get out and don't exactly wish him well. When I was in Narco, I put away hundreds of shitheads, most of them are back on the street by now. In Homicide, I've put down quite a few, and some of the ones who got murder two or manslaughter are probably out, too."

Bert stood up suddenly, swigged from his glass, and began pacing back and forth, a man working himself up to something. "But I don't think that's it, either."

"I'm listening."

He set his drink aside to lean over Cree with his knuckles on the coffee table. He was breathing hard, and his eyes were full of a dangerous worldliness. "First we need to get something straight. Back at the house, you asked me if I believed in werewolves, right? And I said I don't. Superstition, Hollywood, bunch of crap. But you're right, that's not the whole answer. Where I'm at now, I'm looking back at thirty-five years of dealing with the bad things people do to each other. I know how they prey on each other. I got a good memory, Cree. I remember it all. An endless string of bad shit—dead people, wounded people, tortured people. They do it in stupid ways and violent ways and devious ways. Nobody turns into a wolf. People who do this shit don't have to.
They're wolves already."

He looked so tormented and baleful that against her will she broke eye contact. She leaned away from his red face, feeling a little pulse of fear like a tiny artery throbbing at the back of her brain.

"Okay. So tell me w7here you went with this. How it connects."

Bert drained his glass and grimaced as he struggled to get himself under control. He came around the coffee table, tugged up his trouser legs, and sat.

"These are case files I've been taking another look at. Over the years, there are gonna be cases that stand out, right? Some are the ones that got under your skin, you can't shake the images of What you saw. Some are the ones you had a feeling about, you knew you could've solved them if you'd gotten one more break. But you never did, now they're languishing and cold and the guy who did it is still out there, laughing his ass off."

Bert half opened a file, then closed it again and looked at her with concern. "There are photos in here, not so nice to look at. You up for that, or—

"I can probably handle it," she lied. "But thanks for asking."

11

B
ERT READ FROM reports and summarized each file as Cree leafed through the materials. They were older cases Bert had handled himself or ones he'd worked along with other jurisdictions. The cause and manner of death varied, but they all had one thing in common: Bert hadn't liked the outcome. There were two stabbings, a shooting, a blunt-object battery; the morphing e-mails must have gotten Bert thinking about dogs, because several files concerned unsolved dog-attack deaths. A couple were ten years old, one in San Francisco, one in Oakland, animals never identified. Four years ago, a toddler killed after wandering away from a family outing in San Bruno State Park, just south of San Francisco, death attributed to dogs or coyotes. Three years ago, an elderly woman dead in Sausalito, animal never located. Bert had even pulled up a death attributed to accident, a man who fell down the stairs in his house and then was partially eaten by his own dogs after they went unfed for several days.

After eight or ten, Cree could no longer absorb the details. When they closed the last of the folders, she leaned back, feeling stunned and sick.

"You're saying there's a murderer who didn't get caught. You had suspicions at the time, maybe you had other suspects who never panned out, who slipped through your fingers. And now the killer is sending you e-mails."

"Right now, all I'm saying is
maybe."

"Assembling this material was a lot of work. When did you first get the idea there was something to look for?"

Bert bit his lips and turned partly away. "For the last six months, I been looking back. Wanting to clean up anything I'd let get away from me. It was kind of on the side, but then I began getting the e-mails with the morphs. But it wasn't just the messages. All they did was reinforce the sense I've had all along on every one of these. Most of these files I just dug out today."

Cree thought about that. "Why would this hypothetical killer suddenly start sending you messages?"

"Guy's taunting me. I must have gotten close to him and he's reminding me. He must know I'm retiring, wants to rub my nose in shit because I didn't catch him. Trust me, these guys often do this. They like to challenge you. They half-want to get caught, and they love the attention, makes them feel important. He doesn't want me to fade away without a last fling at it, because when I fade away, so does he."

"But—"

"I figured you'd be skeptical. But take a look at this." Bert selected two files, the older dog attacks. "One of these was mine, right? The other was Oakland's, but we got together because of the similarities. Me and the lead from Oakland, we didn't like the way the animal never turned up, couple other details. We batted around the idea that these were actually homicides, somebody using dogs to kill. See?"

She looked where Bert's thick finger indicated, a memo from back then. She smelled the booze on Bert's breath and was hit by a sudden yearning for a stiff drink herself, then remembered she needed to stay alert for her session with Dr. Skobold. That gave her a jolt, and she looked quickly at her watch.

"Seven fifteen! How long does it take to get to Berkeley from here?"

"This time of night, not too bad. Half an hour."

She shook her head, trying to rattle away the dazed feeling. "I should go to the bathroom and then head over there."

Bert started stacking the case files. Cree went down the hallway to the bathroom, where she shut the door and leaned her head against it with her eyes closed, trying to overcome the sensation of hurtling. After a few minutes, she splashed water on her face and patted herself dry with one of Bert's smelly towels.

When she came out, he was up at the front of the house, putting his jacket on.

"Going out?" she asked.

"I got errands to run. I had a lot on my plate even before this stuff came up."

"Well, you're going to have to talk to me first." He hesitated, so she pointed at the kitchen bar and ordered him curtly, "I need a drink of water. Then talk. And don't give me any bullshit."

His eyes narrowed, but he went to the sink and filled a tumbler for her. She drank it greedily. Afterward, they stared at each other across the bar.

"I don't know what to think, Uncle Bert. I mean, I don't have much experience in forensics or criminology, but it just . . . I don't know. Did you talk to your lieutenant about this?"

"No. Because I know what he'd say. 'Bertie, you're hanging up your hat in three months. Why go looking for problems? At some point we all gotta hand off the baton.' Or he'd say I was reaching, the whole thing was thin. But how many times have I heard that over the years? Brass, they're thinking about budgets, case loads, processing rates. They forget about the victims, the survivors, the perpetrators. The reality!"

He came around to Cree's side of the bar and perched on one of the stools, arms folded across the barrel of his body, waiting for her response.

"So you called me here to help you chase down this supposed murderer? Because you want to go out with a bang, but you know your lieutenant won't give you any support resources, and you need someone to help with legwork? You misled me?"

"No! Jesus, what do you think I am? When I called you, all I had was the bones!"

"You said you got the first e-mail message ten days ago. You called me, what, eight days ago."

Bert's eyes slipped away, came back angry and defensive. "Like you said, at first I figured maybe it's somebody pulling my leg. I didn't put the whole thing together in my mind until like two days ago, you were already on your way. So help me. Christ, one reason I showed you this stuff is I figured you should have fair warning, it could get strange around here, maybe you want to stay out of it."

"If it doesn't tie in with the bones, how am I involved anyway? You said there was no connection."

"Maybe there
is
a connection. This guy, he's got to be someone I talked to back then, somebody I looked at or got close to without knowing it. Maybe he knows about the bones, too, maybe he's got some inside access. How the hell do I know?"

She studied him. Clearly, Bert wasn't used to being interrogated; he was used to being on the other side. She felt bad for him, perched on his chair, caught out like a schoolboy.

"Hey, Uncle Bert," she said, as gently as she could manage. "We're family, right? Almost, anyway. How about you just tell me what's on your mind. Let's sort it out from there."

He tried to keep his hackles up, but he looked relieved. He checked her face, checked his watch, checked the floor. "No way am I going to put you in harm's way. I just wanted to warn you—the bones, maybe it's not as simple as it looked at first. And as long as you're here, maybe you could keep your eye open for the connection. If there is one."

She studied him and decided he was probably telling the truth. If there was some connection between the bones and the e-mails, he was certainly right to bring it up.

"Here's the deal. I don't want you to bullshit me ever again. No beating around the bush." She paused, astonished at the Brooklynese in her voice, as if she'd absorbed it from the air in Bert's house. "Just tell me what's on your mind, let me sort it out myself, my way."

"Okay."

"And I have to be honest with you. One, I'm not a criminal investigator, I don't know anything about police work, I'm not going to be any good to you. I can't, and I won't, it's just not something I can do. Okay? Two, I'm not buying your theory one hundred percent. About your e-mails connecting to these old cases. About the cases being linked or the animal attacks being homicides. I'm sorry, but that's how I see it."

He nodded and stood up. "Good. Fine. Hey, I'd like nothing more than being proved wrong, believe me. Now we gotta go or we're both gonna be late."

He seemed more relaxed as he locked the door and escorted her to the stairs outside, as if coming clean had let some pressure out. When they got to the edge of the light cast by his motion-detector spot, Cree couldn't see a thing; beyond the top step, the stairs were just an abyss of darkness. But he took her arm in a solid grip, and she measured her steps by his.

"Takes a while to get used to it," he said. "Could break your neck. Me, by now I could do it blindfolded."

They descended into the night, into the foliage that rose thick around the stairway. In places, she was completely night-blind, but she felt Bert's bulk next to her, his firm careful hold on her arm and his steady tread. Uncle Bert, from back when.

"I saw you dancing," she confessed. "When I was coming up the stairs. I remember when I was a kid, you dancing in our kitchen."

Face invisible, Bert snorted softly. They moved on down.

"You looked . . . you looked good. Like a guy who knows what he's doing. Who's still got the stuff."

"Yeah," he said wearily, more to himself than to Cree. "A regular Fred Astaire."