Bones of the Barbary Coast (26 page)

29

T
HE HOMICIDE UNIT'S office on the fourth floor of the Hall of Justice was a cramped labyrinth of pathways between overflowing green metal desks fronting paper-stuffed half-wall cubicles. On the walls hung drymark boards listing case actions pending, interspersed with framed photos of cops arresting people or newspaper articles reporting convictions on cases apparently dear to the hearts of the inspectors. The air was close with the smell of paper and humanity

Bert occupied the far corner, the last and most cluttered of a row of desks. Ordinarily the unit's inspectors worked in teams, he explained, but with his job mostly paperwork at this stage he was a solo for now; his former partner was already hooked up with Bert's replacement. He gestured for Cree to sit, then settled himself into a creaking chair beneath ceiling lights that cast the pouches under his eyes into sharp relief. Cree had spent another frustrating morning searching for records for Schweitzers or Jack-sons, but she'd been thinking mainly about Bert and Cameron Raymond. She had decided to tell him about Ray, but the decision made her uneasy.

"How's it going?" he asked.

"Frankly, it's slow, Uncle Bert. I'm basically spinning nay wheels, so far."

"We knew it would be slow. That's why I asked you. Big favor, I know
it."

"I did find reference to Schweitzer. I don't know much about him other than that he was a contractor, fine masonry a specialty, and that he married someone named Jackson, probably one of the people who owned the house where the terrace is now. And I took a look at one of the private collections. It's got a lot of possibility but it's in transition and disordered, so it's going to take a while to get through it. I'll go back tomorrow."

Bert bobbed his head. "How about the bones? You and Horace make any headway?"

"We did some measuring last night. Horace says bone development is paradoxical, meaning he's getting conflicting age indicators from different bone features. The best he can do so far is that our guy was between early twenties and early forties."

"Huh. Too broad to help you. Well, when he does give you a number, you can put it in the bank. He's the best, Horace."

She lowered her voice, even though none of the nearby desks was occupied. "He told me about you and Cameron Raymond."

Bert went instantly poker faced. "Okay. Good."

"Why good?"

"Because I got to thinking about Cameron Raymond, too. After you mentioned you'd run into a guy with bad scarring named Ray."

"Shit."

"Yeah, 'shit' as in 'shit happens,' except around here we say 'people
do
shit'." Bert's voice had turned acid. "Did he tell you Cameron is an artist? Move your chair around here, you can see the latest 'art' by our friend Cameron."

Cree scooted the chair so she could see the computer monitor, which showed a page of text. She started reading, but Bert waved his hand in front of her.

"Just watch."

After about a minute, she jumped as an image popped onto the screen. A dog-faced man. This one had more human features, with the canine qualities suppressed, which somehow made it even more frightening. It vanished before she could look closely at it. The image had come and gone like a subliminal thought. Bert made a low noise in his throat.

"Listen, Uncle Bert—"

"Hang on. Keep watching."

Soon another pop-up appeared. This one was in black and white, a medieval woodcut print of a hunchbacked upright wolflike creature ripping parts off somebody on the ground. It was there and gone, leaving its reversed afterimage on her retinas.

"There's one more," Bert said. "But you get the idea. They might not show for a while and then they'll pop like this. I asked our IT guy about it, he said, Yeah, it's a problem, you're going along and a Viagra ad comes onto your screen. They're like a virus, they get into your computer and activate themselves. He's got some software that'll get rid of them but I'm gonna leave these on in case they end up having evidentiary value. In the meantime, I gotta live with them. Son of a bitch."

"When did you start getting these?"

"This morning."

So Ray hadn't backed off. She was surprised as much as disappointed. She would have sworn he'd been sincere when he'd said he was done. It disturbed her to think he could misrepresent himself so convincingly. What had he said?
The wolf you don't see. The wolf you don't know is there.

Another inspector came into Bert's end of the room, then a second. They saw Cree, nodded, began conferring. The additional company wasn't to Bert's liking. He stood up, suggested he could use a smoke, maybe Cree wanted to go for a walk. On their way out, he introduced her to the others as his niece.

Outside, Bert lit up immediately and blew a series of smoke signals as they walked along a block made up of seedy store fronts, mostly bail bondsmen with a scattering of convenience stores and auto glass places in between. With the heavy traffic on Bryant Street and the relentless rush from the 101 overpass, Cree had to walk close by Bert's side so they could hear each other.

"So what are you going to do?" she asked.

"Take a closer look at him."

"What are you thinking? On the basis of these e-mails, Ray's your murderer?"

Bert's mouth puckered and his eyes went flat in a way Cree did not like. "Mainly, I'm thinking that if Cameron Raymond didn't get enough back in eighty-one, there's plenty more where that came from."

"You don't think maybe he already got more than he deserved?"

"These scumbags, it's never just one thing! Don't think that just because he and his buddies got caught robbing that one store it was the only thing they ever did. Don't think he's been clean since then, either."

"Horace knows Ray fairly well and thinks he's a good person."

"Yeah, and that's something Horace and I are gonna have to talk about, him working with Raymond all these years, keeping it from me." Bert spat, the idea of Horace's betrayal heating him up. "I went through an administrative investigation over what happened. They looked up every orifice in my body, they looked back at every thing I'd ever done, personal finances, friendships, everything. It put me under the thumb for a long time, even if they clear you it's a permanent stigma, you think I wouldn't have moved up a couple more grades by now? Then the civil suit, that's months of meeting with lawyers and depositions and court dates, your bosses do not like that. You sit there in court all day, listening to them tell this bullshit about you, then you get home at night and read the same crap in the newspapers. Five, six weeks, you don't know how it'll turn out, the suspense isn't good for your digestion, okay? This was only like three years after Megan. Fran and I were holding onto our marriage by our fingernails anyway, then Raymond comes along and I'm up to my neck in shit. For Fran it was the straw that broke the camel's back. So don't tell me about poor little Cameron."

Bert had cranked himself up again, enough that a couple passing the other way glanced at him with mild alarm. He threw his cigarette down and stepped on it without breaking stride.

"There's something else you should know about Raymond. He came up on my radar another time. This was eight, nine years after my first thing with him, when I was just starting out in Homicide. I remembered something, it was eating at me since you clued me to him the other night, and today I went and found it. Cameron Raymond was on a witness/suspect list for a homicide in Berkeley about fourteen years ago. I wasn't lead, but I was involved because there was a possible San Francisco link. So today I got hold of the file and looked at the contact lists and sure enough there's Cameron. He was the Berkeley side's guy, so it wasn't our job to interview him. I remember now, back when his name came up, I thought, there's that little punk who cost me my marriage and nearly my job. I thought it was one hell of a coincidence that a scumbag I knew from before was now connected to a murder."

Cree felt a shiver of wariness. She couldn't tell whether it came from the possibility that Ray was a murderer or the fact that Bert's theory was ramifying in this direction. "Tell me about it."

"It was a nasty one, a slice and dice. With those, first thing you gotta consider is a jealous lover, so the Berkeley cops looked at the vic's girlfriend and any other boyfriends she might have had. And who do you think she threw over, like two years earlier, for the guy who got killed? Your buddy Ray. They talked to him a couple of times."

"But they didn't arrest him?"

"No. I told the Berkeley people they should take a closer look at him.

But they didn't. In fact, they nailed somebody else. A weak case, I thought."

"And what did the jury think, Uncle Bert?"

He waved his hand as if swatting at gnats. "Never came to trial. Guy hung himself in holding. Berkeley dicks figured that was tantamount to a confession."

"So now what are you going to do?" Cree asked.

"Whatever I think necessary."

"Did you talk to the people in Berkeley about why Ray wasn't a suspect? It seems to me you should respect their judgment."

Bert flashed her a look that was at once insulted and disdainful as he brought out another cigarette, put it to his lips, took it away and spat some tobacco. "Next order of business. Where we at with the wolfman? What's next? We need some headway on this thing."

Cree bristled at his way of cutting off discussion, his whole way of talking to her. She let the chill show in her voice: "We're meeting for a short session tonight. Horace has some other commitment later."

"I was hoping you could come over to my place, maybe tomorrow, look at some more stuff I've put together. On that other thing."

They had stopped at a streetlight as a bunch of motorcyclists went past, racketing Ninja-style Japanese bikes in every color. Cree stared at the glistening rainbow parade, fighting the temptation to return Bert's dismissive treatment.

When the din faded, Bert cleared his throat uneasily. "Maybe we could grab dinner first. Least I can do is feed you right while you're down here."

"We'll see how my schedule is."

He heard that as it was intended. He lit his cigarette and didn't say anything as they crossed the street and started along the next block.

"What I mean is," Bert continued, "fuck
me.
I'm sorry."

That pulled Cree up short. They stopped and faced each other in front of an Italian-style cafe with the smell of roasting coffee gusting out its front door. Bert frowned down at his cigarette, lifted his eyes with some effort to Cree's.

"You're pissed because of the way I talk. I'm working on it, Cree. I'm a little rough around the edges. Guys who spend too long in the cop shop, we get like this. You gotta know you're good for me, okay? I mean it. You show me I got a lot of catching up to do, learn how to be a human being again. Stick with it, yeah?"

She hadn't thought him capable of so much introspection or humility. Surprise: Just when you wanted to kick him, he showed a lopsided charm. He stood there with a hat-in-hand expression, waiting for some response, wary of her.

"What am I gonna do with this guy?" she said at last. The wrords came all the way from Brooklyn, something she must have heard her mother say. She had to grin as she took his arm and turned him toward the cafe entrance. "You're breaking my heart," she said. "Buy me a cup of coffee."

30

R
AY'S ADDRESS WAS listed in the phone book. It took Cree a while to find the place, over on the east side in an area of warehouses and port-related businesses. Several nearby streets ended in encampments of homeless people with rows of defunct cars, stretched tarps, trashcan firepits. Ray's street dead-ended at an overgrown chain-link fence, and at first she thought she must have the address wrong. But her mental lens shifted when she pulled up at the huge dirty-brick warehouse and saw Ray's minivan parked in front. She thought of the industrial places her artist friends had moved into in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle; maybe this was a Bay Area equivalent.

It was six o'clock. The sky was still bright, but the sun was getting low and putting shadows along the buildings, and Cree briefly wondered if she was being smart or crazy in coming here.

She went up to the steel door and pushed long and hard on the doorbell button. A harsh bleat echoed inside, followed by the sound of barking from the fenced storage yard to the left. She couldn't see the dogs, but their fury disturbed her.

"Hey! Cree! Fantastic!"

Ray stood at the top of the facade wall, forty feet almost directly above her, shirtless against the bright sky.

"We have to talk, Ray," she called.

"Sure! But I'm in the middle of a tricky job. Can you wait for like an hour, or—"

"No."

"Then you'll have to come up."

He disappeared before she could answer. Out of view, he made a short, sharp whistle, and the dogs went silent.

When he opened the door, Ray was wearing beat-up fatigues, rubber boots, and work gloves. His pants and bare chest were smeared with black smudges. Now that he was closer, she could see that he was superbly muscled, the hard, squared-off build of a triathalon competitor.

"I'm in the middle of resurfacing my roof," he explained. He grinned broadly and made no attempt to avert the scarred side of his face.

Cree didn't return the smile. "I was foolish enough to hope you'd quit harassing Uncle Bert. But now he's got werewolves popping up on his computer."

Ray stepped back and turned. "We'll have to talk while I work, Cree. Sorry. I have to finish it while there's still daylight. The stuff sets up if you leave it too long, it's a big mess."

She tried not to show any reluctance as she strode past him and into the warehouse. It was huge, empty and echoing, a rubble-strewn, brick and concrete cavern without any sign of any domestic presence. But Ray led her to a subsection cut into the rectangle, and when he opened the door Cree was surprised to enter a nice kitchen with hardwood cabinets and glistening appliances. The living room was tastefully decorated with yellow oak floors, white-painted exposed brick, a good dhurrie rug, a white leather couch.

Ray continued ahead of her up a flight of stairs against the far wall of the living room. "There's a ladder up through my roof. You have a problem with heights?"

"Not that I know of."

They came out into a big open room as high as it was wide, lit by tall, narrow windows. Near the top of the stairs, a couch, coffee table, bookshelf, and some potted lemon trees made a little island of domestic comfort, but the rest of the room was all bare brick and functionality: computers and photo equipment on long work tables, huge abstract paintings on the walls, racks of empty frames, rolls of canvas. Ray's studio, she realized, where he'd created his morphs.

A metal ladder was anchored on the bay-side wall, rising thirty feet to a platform like a fire escape landing just below the ceiling. From the platform a shorter ladder angled up to a little square of open sky. Ray went right to the main ladder and began climbing.

"I sent those pop-ups along with the first three," he called back. "Like two weeks ago. They're basically just adware, with a sneaky little activation delay."

"They've really pissed him off."

"They don't do any system damage. And they're easy to get rid of, all he has to do is—"

"He's not getting rid of them. He's saving them in case they end up having evidentiary value."

Ray stopped, hanging easily halfway between roof and floor as he frowned down at her. " 'Evidentiary'?
Of
what?"

"That's what we better talk about."

"Huh. Yeah, sounds like we better." He continued up.

Cree watched him from below, legs and rear and the foreshortened rippling wedge of back. She couldn't help but think he'd thrown her some kind of a challenge, a test of her motivation or mettle. Or maybe not. Whichever, this was some kind of turning point, because she either said to herself,
I don't trust him, I don't want to talk to him that badly, and I don't trust
myself to climb up there.
Or she said,
I trust him enough, this is important, and I
can handle it.

Ray reached the platform, clambered over to the other ladder, and disappeared through the hole into the sky. Cree considered the ladder for another moment, then put her hands on the flaking iron of the first wrung and began to climb.

When she emerged from the trapdoor, Ray was thirty feet away on a vast expanse of flat roof, shoving a push broom through a thick tarry puddle. Ten or twelve metal cans of asphalt sealer, some empty, were ranged along the edge, where a knee-wall rose above the roof surface. Ray had sketched out a square in fresh black, about forty feet on a side, and was working his way back toward the hatch. The muscles of his shoulders and arms striated as he worked, his belly divided into sharp squares now sheened with sweat. She pondered the tar buckets and the nearly superhuman effort it must have required to get them to the roof.

"Nice up here, isn't it?" he said, not looking up.

"Very nice."

Beyond Ray's building, a paved yard the size of a football field ended at a narrow canal on the south and the open water of the bay to the east. In the sunset light, the distant buildings of Oakland seemed to smolder, pink-orange and heat rippled. Far out in the bay, a cargo ship burdened with containers in faded rainbow colors pushed a rim of froth through the metallic waves; along the near shore, a ragged line of gantries dwindled away south into smog-muted distance. Cree went to the knee-wall, looked down at the littered field where the dogs roamed, then stepped quickly back, amazed that Ray had stood so casually on such a precipice.

"I just do the part over my quarters," he called. "If I had to do the whole thing I'd go bankrupt as well as crazy. Anyway, the rest, I don't care if it leaks."

"Ray, we—"

"A little preface here," Ray said. "I don't think the way other people do. I never have. I don't see the world or people or my own actions in a very conventional way"

"The fact hasn't escaped my notice."

"It's just what you said, the dissonance between self and the rest of humanity, the inner and outer? For me, the way it comes across is, the harder I try to be clear and straightforward, the more I sound like I'm trying to be scary or mysterious. If it bugs you, give me a kick in the pants or whatever, but don't hold it against me. Okay?"

"I'll remember that. So here's my preface. This isn't a social occasion, Ray I'm just trying to prevent something stupid from happening. I came to convince you of the seriousness of the situation you've created."

He tipped another dollop of tar from a barrel, then began spreading and smoothing the glistening black spill. She couldn't help but admire the good lines of limb, the forceful grace of movement, his genuine pleasure in the day and the work. But in the angled sunlight she could see that his whole torso was etched with a skein of innumerable fine scars, paler lines just visible against the tan, and she felt a prickle of wariness on her skin.

"Bert knows it's you who sent the e-mails."

Ray glanced up, shrugged, went back to work. "So I spammed him. So sue me."

"It's more complicated than that. He still hates you for getting him in trouble back then. He blames you for his divorce. And he's considering you a suspect for some . . . for another crime from around fourteen years ago."

"What?!" He stopped, straightened, rested his broom.

Cree had watched his response carefully, looking for the microsecond of calculation or concealment in the eyes. His incredulity seemed perfectly genuine.

"Back when I was at UC Berkeley, a woman I had dated knew somebody who was murdered. They questioned me about it. Is that what he's talking about?"

"That, and some others. Including several unsolved dog-attack deaths."

For a moment Ray seemed struck speechless. "The guy's really gone nuts," he muttered at last.

"Yes, that's about what he thinks of you."

"And what do
you
think?"

"I must be hoping he's wrong."

He searched her face, a penetrating pale blue gaze. The sun glistened on the tight surface of his facial scars.

"Right," he said. "Jesus. You're a brave lady. Coming out to see a guy who's a scar-faced weirdo at best and who just might be a violent psycho. Up on the roof, too."

He continued his inspection of her eyes as if looking for something specific inside her head, then grunted softly and smiled.

"Thanks," he said.