Bones of the Barbary Coast (13 page)

Ray grinned and seemed to appreciate the insight. But his hand rose unconsciously and brushed the damaged side of his face, and Cree realized she was talking to somebody who knew a great deal about that feeling. A man who walked around charming people with half his face and scaring them with the other had to have a unique sense of himself in relation to the rest of the human race.

"So you're doing the X-rays on . . . Dr. Skobold's special project?"

"Yes. I work part-time for the UCSF Medical School, part-time for Temple Microimage. That's a private lab that does specialized radiology, ultrasound, microphoto, and magnetic resonance work. I've done jobs for Horace for, oh, the last ten years or so. I like Horace a great deal. What's your connection? I was surprised that he mentioned 3024 while you were there."

"I'm a private investigator. I'm doing historical research for the identification effort. Dr. Skobold invited me to help him work on reconstruction, too. We cleaned the bones last night, and I'll be going back there again tonight. It's a fascinating process."

Ray bobbed his head thoughtfully. " 'The wolfman.' How do you like the nickname?"

"I don't know anything about the anatomy side. I'm just looking for records of a human male with severe congenital defects, born between 1865 and 1885, died in the Great Quake."

Before Ray could reply, a professional-looking pair approached them from his bad side. The woman wore a burgundy pants suit, heels, pearls, expensive hair, and a look that suggested a career in finance or government; the man was the male equivalent, with gray temples brushed back, a deep tan, a flawless charcoal pinstripe. When they saw Ray, their faces took on a sudden, unnatural neutrality, and their path veered slightly as they slid on past. Cree knew it was just what she had done with the homeless man yesterday, but she couldn't help frowning after them.

Ray stared after them for the duration of one long, pale blue gaze and a lazy blink. It was like a slow shutter dropping on a camera, recording their image. For a second he seemed to sag, and then he was checking his watch and starting to make leave-taking movements.

"So," she asked quickly, "you going to be doing any more work on the wolfman?"

"Probably. I expect Horace will want a closer look at the palatine sutures and the cementum annulation."

The anatomy was all Greek to Cree, but she smiled anyway. "Well, maybe I'll see you over at the lab, then."

He must have seen her friendliness as social damage control after the executive couple, because for an instant he iced her with that same flat, pale gaze he'd given them, turning his face so that the scars were very visible. It was as if he was daring her to show revulsion, or trying to intimidate her, punish her for her sympathy. Or maybe once his resentment awakened, it didn't shut down immediately. It was hard to read intentions on a face so divided.

Across the street, the clamor reached a frenzied climax, followed by a rush of applause. Cree took her time inspecting his face, then met his eyes again and decided to take a chance. He was being his weird self; she'd be hers.

"So . . . would you like to sit for a while?" She moved her books and sidled to the left of the bench, making room. "If you've got any great ideas about where to look for our guy, I'd be glad to hear them."

Surprised, he lost a beat, then beamed a big smile. And then Cree's cell phone went off in her purse. She glanced at the caller ID: Uncle Bert.

"Oops! Lousy timing. I better take that," she said apologetically. "Nice seeing you, Ray. Let's get together another time, okay?"

"Another time," he echoed. "Definitely"

15

R
AY DROVE EAST on Cesar Chavez toward home, looking forward to the meeting he'd scheduled for this afternoon. Last night's marvelous, epiphanic encounter with the deer had honed his hunger in a way that couldn't be ignored. This guy LeGrand, out at the wolf place in Lafayette, sounded like someone who could answer some of his questions.

But first he wanted to ask Horace about Cree Black, what a private investigator from Seattle was doing researching the wolfman.

He'd enjoyed her comment about feeling like a stranger—an unexpected admission from a person outwardly so pleasant and normal and a surprisingly frank remark to make to someone you didn't know. She was attractive, with red-brown hair loose on her shoulders and eyes that conveyed an intriguing mix of vulnerability and unflappability But he'd gotten suspicious when he'd learned of her involvement with the wolfman, and added to the usual stuff he felt downtown, he'd felt the urge to test her.

And she'd been gloriously unfazed by his weirdness. Inviting him to sit—he got the sense it was a sincerely friendly gesture and, at the same time, a way of telling him to fuck off with the scary-face shit.

As a result, he'd liked her immediately. He sincerely hoped that wouldn't be a problem.

Ray's house was a massive, dirty-brick warehouse, set on a channel that fingered in from the main quay of the bayside waterfront. Truck-loading bays lined most of the street-side facade; a mesh-fenced yard wrapped it on the east and south, empty but for weeds and a few old cargo containers that would have become condos for homeless people if the dogs didn't run them off. The facility had once provided transshipping services for goods brought on the big ships, storing the box-car-size containers until they could be put aboard trains or trucks. Ray had left the Dimension In-termodal sign on the bricks, but the business had gone under twenty years earlier, and the building and grounds had gone to seed long before he'd inherited it from his mother's brother. It w7as strictly chance that he'd come into possession of it, but had he searched the world over he doubted he could have found a place more suited to him.

Over the years, most of the larger port-related industries had moved across the bay to deeper channels and more modern facilities, and now his neighbors were smaller warehouses, auto body shops, small-scale steel fabricators, low-end commercial printers, and a scattering of artists. Many of the buildings were empty, surrounded by rusting steel sheds and decrepit hoist equipment, creating a postindustrial wasteland atmosphere that Ray cherished. He liked the way Dimension Intermodal's abandoned, forbidding exterior masked the secret oasis of comfort and beauty inside. Sort of a metaphor for the guy who lived there.

He backed up the van, got out, unlocked the steel-clad man door, and came back to hoist a couple of sacks of dog food onto his shoulders. The dogs heard him coming and made yips and howls
of
anticipation.

Inside, the building was as big as an airplane hangar, one large room with brick walls cut by tall windows of milky glass, an expanse of cement floor, a flat, iron-trussed roof forty feet above. Cut into the space against the bay-facing wall were the former administration offices, which he had appropriated as his living quarters. On the ground floor he'd set up his living room, kitchen, and bedroom, and then on the flat roof above them he'd built his studio, just a big hollow7 box that housed his enlarging equipment, computers, and private gallery. The rest of the building he'd left as he'd acquired it: a huge, empty, littered cavern. Pigeons nested in the roof superstructure and their shit gave sections of the floor a Jackson Pollock look.

Home.

He crossed over and unlocked the interior door and the three dogs came around him. Confiding trusting gazes, noses in the crotch, leaps and licks to the chm, great olfactory interest in the dog food bags. Alpha dog was bringing home the bacon.

Family.

"Okay, you guys," he scolded. "Okay. Let me through. Down, Fritz." He dropped the bags and squatted to give the three of them some mammal time, roughing up their coats, tugging their ears, enduring their mouthings. After a few minutes, he broke away to pour kibble into their bowls. Nothing like a fresh bag; they went at it as if they'd been starved.

He called Horace's lab phone, got his voice mail, then tried his cell phone.

Horace answered immediately. "What can I do for you, Ray? I'm walking into a meeting at this very moment."

"I ran into that woman, Cree Black, downtown. Told me she's all the way from Seattle to look into the wolfman skeleton. I wondered why."

"Oh, Ray," Horace said, vastly weary. "What."

"What's the deal? Just curious. You hired her?"

"No."

"So
Marchetti
hired her? From
Seattle?"

"She volunteered—she's the daughter of an old friend of his. She's also an extremely bright woman and a skilled researcher. Bertram's in the same position I am. He wants very much to ID the poor fellow, but he doesn't have the time or resources. I'm very glad to have her on board for the effort."

Ray felt disappointment and behind it a surge of anger and bitterness. He didn't say anything.

"It's not your concern, Ray."

"You'll need work on the sternal rib ends. There are developmental anomalies all over those bones. You'll never age him without more work on the palate and teeth."

"You're right. In fact, you're prescient. I'm planning to messenger the skull and some ribs over to you first thing tomorrow. But so what? Why—"

"I can't work with anybody connected to Marchetti."

"Nobody's asking you to," Horace said. "Just do your job, send me the bill. Why should you care? Now I really have to go."

Ray didn't say anything.

Horace didn't hang up. Ray heard him sigh, and then he said softly, sadly, "Oh, Ray. Cameron. What's different about this? You've worked on Bertie's cases before, you've never crossed paths, we've managed just fine, haven't we? But more important, speaking as someone who admires your talents, who considers you a friend, I have to ask, Doesn't there come a time when—"

"Don't try to play the diplomat here," Ray snarled. "You're a sweet guy. Not everybody is a sweet guy like you."

The rage mounted and he would have gone on, but he heard the sound of Horace disconnecting. Ray pitched the receiver at the wall so hard it exploded into pieces, then swept the counter with his forearm so that cans and dishes scattered, shattering and rolling. The dogs scrabbled to the far end of the room and looked at him with terror in their eyes.

Instantly he regretted worrying them. He got his breathing under control and made reassuring noises as he retrieved pieces of the handset, looked them over, threw the thing away The dogs calmed a little. He realized he'd have to hurry to pick up the mess if he was going to get to his appointment on time.

Given its small size, Ray figured the wolf was a female. Her yellow eyes flicked at his, and from the way her body stiffened he could tell the animal had gone into high alert. She no doubt smelled the dogs on him.

The wolf moved over as Judd LeGrand swung the door all the way open and appraised Ray from the hallway. He looked just the way Ray had pictured him from their phone conversation: mid- to late-fifties, maybe five-eight, with a tanned, deeply seamed face and red hair cut bristle-short and going to gray. His T-shirt and black jeans were snug on a tense, hard body. Unlike the wolf, he met Ray's eyes and didn't look away.

"Mr. Raymond, I take it. I'm Judd LeGrand. And this is Reba. Come on in—she won't bite unless you provoke her."

The house was a one-story stucco ranch surrounded by acres of mostly open land, a mix of suburban estates and older farms scattered widely among the hills above Lafayette. LeGrand led Ray back into an open-plan living and dining room, where windows gave long views to the northwest, arid downward slopes that yielded in the far distance to flatter ground, trees, a few tiny rooftops. The sliding rear door opened to a large yard occupied by a wooden barn with an attached mesh-fenced kennel at the rear. Ray didn't see any of the kennel's occupants, but as he was looking a woman came around a corner, kicked open a door in the barn, and disappeared inside.

"So," Ray began, "I take it you've been working with wolves for quite a while?"

"About twenty years. We started with just rehabbing an individual animal now and again, and then got involved with reintroduction efforts. I do some lobbying and teaching, but mainly I'm in it so I can hang out with the wolves. You want to see the setup?"

"You bet," Ray told him.

LeGrand blocked the rear doorway so Reba couldn't get through, let Ray out, then followed and shut the door. From the redwood deck, Ray could see that the whole compound was surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Toward the front, a wooden palisade fence blocked views of the road; against the gray boards stood a long row of smaller cages that Ray realized were rabbit hutches. A wolf-food farm.

LeGrand gave him an overview of the operation. They owned twelve acres, but only about a third was fenced. There were six kennels, so that was the limit of the wolves they could handle at any time. Moeris Foundation was one of a network of facilities that took in wolves that had been injured or trapped or that had been bought as pups by people who thought they wanted an unusual pet but found they couldn't manage an adult. Some were reintroduced to the wild, some brought to zoos or teaching programs. Right now there were three besides Reba.

LeGrand spoke in a gruff voice, informative but not warm, and his gestures were tight as he pointed out various features. Definitely former military and a guy who made it plain he could take you or leave you. Out here in the sunlight, his eyes slitted and seemed suspicious and appraising. Ray liked his style.

They were still on the porch when the woman emerged from the barn, carrying a couple of big plastic pans back toward the house. She was Judd's age, had the same leathery skin, and wore faded jeans and a plaid shirt tucked in to reveal a busty, narrow-hipped figure. When she got to the deck, she raised her eyes and smiled, but Ray noticed the tick of reaction as she saw his face.

"Mr. Raymond, this is my wife Emily. Sugar, this is Cameron Raymond. He's the one who called earlier."

Emily said hello, carried the pans past them, and went into the house.

"So," Ray began, "tell me how you got into this. Why you wanted to save wolves."

"I don't save wolves. They save me."

"How so?"

"I don't make a secret of the fact that I had a hard time in Vietnam and a hard time when I came back. Wolves turned me around. I cite my experience because I figure it shows the benefit of working on behalf of a good cause. Helping restore wolves allows me to give something back to the world. To preserve one of God's noblest creatures. It helped me get on my feet again, and it helps others, too. One of our most successful programs is geared toward putting veterans, prisoners, and juvenile offenders in contact with wolves. Alcoholics and substance abusers, too—just being around a wild animal helps them get outside the spiral of their own problems."

Ray decided that the story explained the seamed faces, the rough voices, the dulled edge just behind the sharp: Judd and Emily were exalkies, no doubt met each other in recovery, found wolves instead of Jesus.

"Yeah, I saw that on your Web site. Buy why wolves? Why not, oh, raccoons? Or squirrels."

LeGrand frowned. "Trying to be funny?"

"No, no. Rhetorical. I can think of a lot of ways wolves are special, but I want to hear your take on it. How contact with a big predator is different."

LeGrand turned another notch toward Ray and made no move toward the kennel. In the bright sun, his eyes were almost lost in the shadows of his brows. "You know, we didn't talk much about you. Why you're interested. What you're after here today."

They locked eyes but were interrupted when a snarling came from the barn, followed by the sound of a scuffle. A big gray wolf came into one of the runs, trotted its length, pivoted, trotted back, disappeared inside.

"What I'm after is, I want to know more about wolves. And, frankly, I'm just as interested in you. I want to know what you went through and what you found in working with wolves that helped you pull your shit together."

For the first time, LeGrand's eyes moved to the scarring on Ray's face. He sucked his cheeks and seemed to deliberate, then tipped his head toward the kennel. "Let's go take a look."

LeGrand went on past the barn to the far end of the kennel runs, where he stopped and whistled. Ray could see indistinct shapes moving in the darkness of the low doorways, but no wolves came out.

"They come when you whistle?" The thought disappointed Ray.

"No. They come out when they're curious. But something's throwing them off today. That growling, that's fairly unusual. I don't know what's up with them."

"Do you ever have more wolves than there are slots in reintroduction programs?"

"Rarely."

"Rarely, but sometimes. What do you do then?"

LeGrand's eyes went to Ray's again, studying first one eye and then the other, back and forth. "They have to be put down."