“So what happened to her body?” Eddie said.
“Well, naturally,” Pearson said, “a crowd’s starting to gather. The body’s lying there for two, maybe three minutes, when suddenly a large blue van pulls up and out hops these two guys. Both Caucasians. I got detailed descriptions. One of them’s a big young hulk in his late twenties—like you, Eddie, only a few inches taller—and the other one’s older—by a decade, at least—and average size, and sports a pot belly. Sort of like you, John.”
“Go on,” John said, clenching his teeth.
“Well, the younger one hoists up the body and puts it in the back of the van.”
“What the hell for?” John said.
“No one knows,” Pearson said. “Maybe these two were out collecting bodies for Doctor Frankenstein, and they happened by at an opportune moment.”
John sighed. “No wonder you’re still in a uniform.”
“You got a better theory?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Well don’t start thinking one up. Not just yet, anyway. There’s plenty more to tell, and wait’ll you hear this.”
“Just spill it.”
“Okay,” Pearson said. “As I was saying, one of Doctor Frankenstein’s helpers is putting the body in the back of the van. Suddenly the crowd starts to realize something’s not right here. Everybody knows you don’t touch the body till the cops come and take photographs, everybody watches TV. So the crowd starts yelling, telling these guys to leave the body alone. But they don’t listen, and so someone in the crowd decides he’s going to be a super hero.”
“Oh, no,” Eddie said, running a hand through his buzz-cut.
“I got his name here.” Pearson thumbed through his notes. “Fred Ames. His wife’s over there. Black one. Monique Ames.”
John followed Pearson’s pointing finger to a weepy young woman squatting on the curb, bright orange panties flickering from the depths of her dark green skirt like a torch in a cave.
“So where’s this Fred?”
“Good question. Fred hopped into the back of the van and started fighting with the big guy just as the other drove off.”
“Meanwhile, the body is on the floor of the van?” John said.
“Yep,” Pearson said.
“Holy shit,” Eddie said. “You get the license plate?”
“Nope. They covered up the tags, probably with black electrical tape. I put an APB out for an old, dinged up blue Chevy Astro LT with hidden plates and a dead body in it.” Pearson smirked. “You’d know that already if you’d turned on your radio on the way over here.”
“What’ve we got inside the yellow tape?” John said.
“Not my job, and the lab’s not here yet.”
John glanced around. “No lab yet? Tell them for me I want everything they can get out of that muck.”
“Right,” Pearson said.
“And find yourself some help collecting statements,” John said. “I don’t want anybody who knows anything to go anywhere without first giving a statement.”
“Original,” Pearson said. “Guess you watch your share of TV too.” He walked off toward a pair of uniforms who had just arrived on the scene.
John turned to Eddie. “Let’s go inside.”
The inspectors were on a flight of white marble stairs, about to enter the Windsor building from the main entrance, when Eddie’s hand-held radio began to bark. A panicked patrol officer was calling for an ambulance. The officer had found a young adult black male with multiple stab wounds sprawled in a loading zone near the corner of Fremont and Mission—about six blocks away from the Windsor building. Super hero Fred Ames, John presumed.
“She must’ve jumped,” Tom Mahorn told The Wizard through his cell phone. He sat on the edge of a twin-size bed, bathed in the weak, jaundiced light of a dingy motel lampshade. “I only meant to frighten her a little, so she’d do what I say, and meet me outside the building. Guess I screwed up big time. I’m sorry.”
Tom’s ass-chewing began. The sound in his ear grew so loud that he had to move the phone receiver a few inches from his ear. Meanwhile, he took nervous sips from a bottle of Beck’s beer.
“Don’t worry,” Tom interjected at one point. “The cops don’t have the body. We do.”
This stopped the ass-chewing, but only briefly, only until Tom revealed that a crowd had watched as he and Daryl took the body away. “No cause for concern,” Tom said. “We hid the license plates to the van. Got away scot-free, I’m sure of it.”
Silence on the other end. Then a question in a low growl. “What are you holding back?”
How does he know
? Tom wondered. Rubbing his forehead, finding it moist, he said, “Well, there was this black man who, uh, tried to intervene in our affairs . . . ”
More ass-chewing. The worst yet. Nearby, on the other bed, Daryl lay on his stomach, eyes open, chin resting on top of one of those roof beam forearms. Ears straining, no doubt.
The ass-chewing ended abruptly. Then came instructions.
“Yes, of course,” Tom said into the phone. “That’s what I thought we should do. But I thought it would be best to check with you first. But then I had trouble locating you. No one seemed to know where you were . . . Yes, sir. I understand. Right. Don’t worry, I’m familiar with the area. I know where to go to take care of things, both things.”
The Wizard finished giving instructions and hung up. Tom sighed heavily and turned to Daryl.
“Just as I figured. He wants us to bury the body someplace safe nearby here, so we don’t take a chance on getting caught with it out on the road.”
“Then we go home?” Daryl said.
“Then we gotta get rid of the van. As a precaution. He told me how he wants it done.”
“Can I ask you something, Tom?”
“Shoot.”
“Aren’t you scared when you talk to The Wizard?”
Tom laughed. “I was this time, but not usually.” He stood, his beer bottle empty. “When you reach my level, Daryl, you talk to The Wizard pretty regular. You get used to it.”
“Weren’t you afraid he’d know you had a beer in your hand?”
“Naw. This far north, we’re uh, outside of his psychic radar range.”
Or are we
? Tom went to the ice bucket, pulled out another beer, held it out to Daryl. “Want a cold one?”
Daryl shook his head emphatically, still refusing to violate the prohibition against alcohol consumption. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Sure.”
“Why don’t we want the cops to have Esperanza’s body?”
“It’s like I told you before,” Tom said, “when you asked me why we had to pick up the body in the first place. You’re not authorized to know.”
John found the antiseptic smell of the hospital air pleasing. The potent mix of cleaning chemicals supplied him with a reassuring hint of order in the seeming chaos of the emergency unit. He and Eddie approached the front desk.
“Fred Ames,” John said, flashing his badge at a nurse. “Stabbing victim. How’s he doing? Last we heard, he was still in the OR. We want to talk with him, if at all possible.”
The nurse dialed her phone to check on the patient’s status. John told Eddie he had to take a leak and stepped around the corner and into the men’s room. After relieving himself at the urinal he lit up a Camel and leaned against the sink.
Without a corpse, the investigation was off to a slow start. The two key witnesses at the crime scene—Maggie Phelps and Lydia Grant—were convinced that Esperanza Chavez had suffered her first migraine headache, a massive one, and then flung herself off the building in a state of frightened hysteria. Yet Maggie, the office mate, had failed to observe any of what a medical examiner would call
preceding symptoms
.
Esperanza hadn’t appeared fatigued or irritable beforehand, hadn’t reported seeing any flashing lights, and so on. And migraine sufferers, he had to assume, rarely killed themselves to relieve the pain.
Plus a migraine didn’t begin to explain the two men who’d stolen Esperanza’s corpse . . .
None of the witnesses had recognized the two body snatchers or their blue van. Fred Ames might provide a lead, though. He’d been inside the van. He might enhance the physical descriptions of the suspects. Or recall items inside the vehicle, or details of speech or dress, pointing to the identities of the two men. He might even provide a name—if one of the body snatchers had shouted to the other during the getaway.
Lastly, there was the vomit. From the wastebasket in Esperanza’s office. That might turn up something in the lab. Maybe she’d been a drug user. Or maybe she’d been drugged.
He flicked his ashes into the sink bowl just as someone pushed through the hallway door. Eddie. Following in behind was a sweaty, mad-haired surgeon in green operating garb, who shook his head gravely.
“ ‘But who polices the police?’ Apparently me. Smother that cigarette, Inspector.”
“Sorry.” John crushed his Camel against the heel of an uplifted shoe. “What about Fred Ames?”
“I’m afraid he just expired.”
“Shit.” John crossed himself. “He say anything first?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Murder weapon?”
“Blunt instrument. A large screwdriver, if I had to take a guess. These were deep puncture wounds to vital organs. The heart, the lungs. Mister Ames should be leaving for the morgue any minute now.”
On the way to the parking lot, Eddie said, “Got a call from Frank Pearson while you were in the head.”
“And?”
“He phoned Esperanza’s parents to deliver the bad news, like you asked.”
“And?”
“Says the family told him Esperanza used to be in a cult.”
“A cult? What cult?”
Eddie said, “It’s called, ‘Earthbound.’ ”
“Never heard of it.”
“She ran away from ’em, the parents say. A few months ago. Parents want to talk to us real bad. They’re convinced the cult’s to blame for her death.”
“How?”
“They don’t know, exactly. But you ask me, they just put us on the right track. Who else besides a cult would be crazy enough to steal a corpse?”
John nodded. “Let’s go see the parents.”
Eddie drove, heading for Oakland after a stop at a Subway shop for sandwiches. They ate wordlessly in the car in traffic. Midway across the Bay Bridge, centered in a vast ring of city lights, John broke the silence.
“Cult, huh? Bad place for a young woman. For anyone.”
Eddie grunted, switching lanes. John gazed out the passenger side window at the glassy void of black water below.
Geary Street, San Francisco, 1977
They stood on the front steps of an old yellow brick church, John holding tight to his mother’s hand. She was introducing him to their new reverend. The man wore a white suit and sunglasses, even though it wasn’t sunny, and he had black hair and long sideburns, like Elvis. He extended his hand to John.
“
Hi, I’m Reverend Jim Jones.”
“
Shake his hand, John,” Mother said when John felt too shy about it. “He’s going to be famous one day.”
Still John refused.
The reverend smiled and gave John a pat on the top of his head. “Welcome to the People’s Temple.”
“We spoke to Esperanza’s parents last night,” John said, taking a seat alongside Eddie in front of Captain Switzer’s desk. An open laptop severed his boss from view at the neck. “According to Mister and Missus Chavez, their daughter spent two years living in central California in a cult known as ‘Earthbound.’ Four months ago, she returned home, ‘escaped,’ in her own words.”
Switzer’s chubby, detached head might’ve been the man in the moon’s for all the reaction it showed. Typical Switzer.
“And early this morning,” Eddie said, “Tiburon PD located the blue van. A resident, who lives beside one of those tiny, little coves on the peninsula, happened to be up at dawn, nursing her ten month-old, and heard a big splash outside.
“They fished the vehicle out, then ID’d the owner through the serial number, which had been torn off the dash, but under the hood, the radiator support emission decal was still legible, and not many civilians know that’s another spot where the serial number gets recorded.”
Switzer nodded. “Not many.”
Eddie checked his notepad. “The vehicle’s registered commercial. Belongs to an organic farm down in Tulare County, called ‘Natural High Farms.’ We made some calls, and you guessed it, it’s Earthbound’s farm. Their headquarters, in fact.”
“Good,” Switzer said. “Now all we have to do is obtain a warrant and search that farm for our two perps.”
“Problem,” John said. “Tiburon PD not only helped us out, but they fucked things up for us too. After they traced the vehicle, they contacted the farm.”
“Shit,” Switzer said, his lips barely moving.
John’s cell phone vibrated in his shirt pocket. A peek at the number on the caller ID screen made him grimace. Teresa again. He thumbed the
off
button before tucking the phone away. His head pounded from a fresh hangover.