Bones of the Barbary Coast (37 page)

50

B
ERT'S PLACE LOOKED like a treehouse, perched up in the fog-thickened shadows of foliage. There were no lights in the windows, but Cree trotted up the steps anyway. Starved, she had taken the time to grab dinner and drop her research notes at the motel, and night had come while she'd showered.

Talking with Horace last night had filled her with a contradictory sense of anxiety—no, more like dread—and hopefulness. She swore that if Bert was home she'd drink with him, she'd dance a waltz or a goddamned tango if that's what it took to make contact. His vocabulary for intimacy was so different from hers, but she swore she'd decipher it.

Open the door,
she thought. Let him out of the confines of his loneliness, his obsession with past injuries and horrors. Let a little light in.

She rang the bell and knocked on the door, but there was no answer, no sound of movement inside. Almost seven o'clock: She wondered where he might be at this hour on a Sunday night, and that begot a fresh wave of concern. She hurried down the steps, into the car and through the night streets to Ray's house.

The east-side streets were anything but picturesque, not San Francisco postcard material. Some blocks were lit with acid orange, some cold blue, both turning the gritty industrial streets a harsh chemical color. In the darker side streets, a few lanterns glowed under the tarps of the homeless encampments, but aside from a few ragged shadows lurching on the sidewalks there were no pedestrians and almost no car traffic.

An idea had occurred to her as she was leaving Bert's. A plan, actually. It was a little risky, certainly, but probably the best option under the circumstances. A way of killing several birds with one stone. It was not really conniving, not duplicitous, she kept telling herself, not if she did it with genuine concern for Ray's well-being and sincere interest in him as a person, as a friend. And she was curious. There was an important element missing from her understanding of him. She could almost
see
it in him, a knot of idea and feeling she couldn't untangle with either her psychological training or her intuitive, empathic skills. She was increasingly certain it was central to Ray and to the whole problem.

The lights in Diamond Intermodal's windows showed he was home. She rang the bell, heard the dogs bark and go silent, and a moment later Ray opened the door. She sensed more than saw the dogs, moving in the darkness behind him.

"Where have you been, Ray? I've been calling all day!"

"Just being incommunicado for a bit. I do that now and again. But it's great to see you. Come in."

"It's not too late for a visit?"

"Are you kidding? For you it's never too late!"

The dogs had mostly recovered. They greeted her with cautious interest, flattered her with wagging tails, and followed behind her into Ray's living room. Ray gestured her to the couch and sprawled onto a big leather chair, one leg over its arm, face angled so she saw only his good side. He looked tired, pleased to see her, and worried.

"I've always been the bad-news-first type," he told her guardedly.

"Nothing particularly new to report. I was coming back from downtown, thought I'd . . . just check in, see what's going on."

He looked at her skeptically. "As in making sure I haven't done anything stupid?"

"Not exactly. But you're welcome to reassure me."

"If you're talking about Bert, no, I haven't seen him or killed him or whatever you're worried about. And he hasn't succeeded in killing me, apparently. But I did do something stupid."

Something about the way he talked, she had to wonder if there was dodge hidden in his words. But that was probably just paranoia. "What was that?"

"Went for a run after what was already a long night. I wanted to go yesterday, but it took me all day to fix my doors, and then I got called in for a late shift at the MC, a couple of the radiology people were out sick. So I went for my run afterward, down on the coastal range. Predawn's a beautiful time to do it, but stupid when you're that tired—I fell and knocked my head, scratched my hands up. Actually, I haven't been to bed at all, it's been this and that since the minute I got home." He winced a grin as he showed her the bruises near his ear and the abrasions on his hands.

"Ouch," she sympathized. "Looks like my timing is bad. I was hoping maybe you'd want to go for a drink or a walk or something. But you should get some sleep."

"Sleep? Hey, it's still the weekend for another few hours. The body is tired but the soul is ever willing." Her proposal clearly pleased him. He swung his legs off the arm of the chair, groped on the floor for his shoes, and began putting them on.

"I'll bring you up to date on my wolfman research," Cree said. "I found a few more details. Maybe you'll get another one of your brainstorms."

She couldn't see his face, but his hands hesitated at his shoelaces. "Brainstorms," he echoed quietly, "I can pretty well guarantee."

Ray knew the esoteric pleasures of his home city. Cree drove as he navigated them north to Lombard Street, then west past Cree's motel and on into the Presidio. The great bridge appeared and disappeared as the streets wandered, great orange glowing towers and twin arcs of amber orbs muted in a thickening haze. They parked in a pullover and got out into a chill, moist wind. Cree put on a sweater and the windbreaker she kept in the car, but Ray didn't seem bothered by the cold.

They hiked along the road, through the visitor center lot, out onto the bridge. Traffic roared past only a few feet away, but its manic energy and noise couldn't compete with the majesty of the structure and its setting. The towers were impossibly tall, fading into dull glows toward the tops. Below, the plane of dark water was rimmed in lights of different colors, streetlights along the shore promenade, crisper city lights along the southern shore and the blurry ones on the far side. Lost in the expanse, the scattered running lights of smaller boats and huge freighters moved slowly. The great cables soared upward in a steepening curve, while below the bridge deck an abyss of empty space gaped. The Pacific was invisible, but she could hear its vastness in the music of half a dozen foghorns, near and far.

"This is perfect, Ray," she said.

"Strong medicine," he agreed. In the regularly spaced sidewalk lights he looked weary but unmistakably proud, as if the mighty bridge and heroic landscape were something he'd made himself.

She caught him up on what she'd learned about the house. It took fifteen minutes just to reach the first tower, geologically massive and dizzyingly foreshortened seen from so close. Cree admired the great iron plating and rivets, then bellied up to the railing on the far side of the pillar to stare out at the Bay and the distant, hazed glow of the cities on the eastern shore. The tower offered a welcome bulwark against the traffic rush and unrelenting ocean wind.

"So," she said, "tomorrow. At the church. Any ideas about what we might find?"

"I don't know. Something about Hans and Lydia. They were fairly prominent, well-off, probably big givers at the plate, right? And she volunteered at the mission. There's got to be something on them."

"Think there's any chance of finding reference to the wolfman himself?"

"No." He looked a little dejected at the admission.

They both hunched on the railing and stared out for a while as the moist cold worked its way into Cree's clothes. A tanker slid out from under the bridge in the center of the channel, and they watched the line of running lights stretch like train windows, froth silvering the hull. Two or three blocks long, Cree thought, yet tiny as a silverfish beneath the monumental, impossible bridge.

After a time Ray asked quietly, "Doesn't it kind of drive you crazy? Wondering who he was? What was going on?"

"Completely. My mind won't leave it alone. Horace is the same way—he can't stand a mystery that eludes him. Sounds like you're one of the same species, huh?"

"Yes." Ray grunted. "But what kind of critter is that? The kind so strongly compelled by a mystery?"

"Homo sapiens,
I think they're called." Cree grinned.

"I mean, what? Was he . . . deranged, retarded, they kept him down here like an animal, a prisoner? Was he actually dangerous, violent? Or was it just a matter of keeping him
hidden,
of Victorian shame—could he have been Hans's kid from a prior marriage?"

She could feel Ray's urgency mounting, tilting toward desperation, and she needed to damp it before it swept her along with it. "We're working on it, Ray. We'll figure it out."

"Or maybe he
preferred
being down here, out of the light, away from people, I could easily see that. Or—"

"Or maybe he didn't live down here at all. If we'd found the bones in a bathroom, would you assume he lived on the crapper?"

Ray looked at her, astonished. " 'Crapper.' "

"Born in Brooklyn. Pop was a plumber." She laughed at his expression. "And now I think we better head back before I freeze solid."

Back at Diamond Intermodal, Ray opened a bottle of Shiraz and they sat in the living room to sip it and talk.

Another late-night session, easier this time. Ray put on some cello music and turned on a little gas fireplace, blue flames lapping to orange. If she hadn't felt so uneasy about her plan for later, it would have felt very nice in his living room. Outside, the chill fog smothered the building, but this was a sanctuary of warmth, color. Ray sprawled sideways, hammocked in his big chair, Cree stretched out her legs on the couch. The dogs drowsed noisily on their various rugs.

Their second late night together, the trust had grown, and at one in the morning it didn't seem strange to ask if she could spend the night on his couch. Ray had begun to look strained, eyes bloodshot, face puffy, and was clearly staying up only to be polite. He made a bad joke about priests, rabbis, and kangaroos to reassure her, then set her up with a quilt and pillow and bumbled off to his bedroom. The dogs shambled after him.

Cree turned out the living room lamp and lay on the couch, but she didn't undress. At the end of the hall, Ray's light went out, and she faintly heard the creak of his bed as it received his weight. She waited until she heard Ray's snores, deep and slow, then sat up and pushed the quilt aside.

Not duplicitous,
she kept telling herself.
Not sneaky, Ray, truly, just necessary.

51

T
HE GLOWING DIGITS of the clock on Ray's desk ticked ahead to one fourteen. Cree groped in her purse and dug out the digital camera and her little high-tech LED light. Barefoot, she crept out of the living room and into the hall. The bathroom seemed a good place to start: If Ray did wake, she'd have a reasonable excuse to be there, and with the door closed she could risk putting on a light. The dogs appeared in the bedroom doorway with a little rainfall noise of claws on hardwood. The advancing wall-to-wall big animal shadows gave her a little jolt, but they were calm, just checking on who was up and around. They put noses to her and wandered peacefully away toward the kitchen. She let out a breath she didn't know she'd held.

She shut the bathroom door soundlessly, turned on the overhead, and stood wincing in the glare. Cree Black stared at her from the mirror, looking guilty as hell.

Not betrayal or hypocrisy,
she kept telling herself.
Not cold and calculating.
Not deceitful and invasive, not in this situation.

So why was she so wired up? She was 99 percent sure she'd find only exculpatory evidence, or none. Mainly, it was the question of what would happen if he caught her at what she was about to do and took it the wrong way.

Ray, you have to understand. This is the only way I'm going to prove to Bert
that you're okay. If he keeps on like he is, something bad is going to happen. I'm
going to give him the information he wants so that I can prove him wrong, so that
he'll get off your case.

There was also the missing element, the secret side of Ray that even in his most candid moments wasn't quite clear to her.

She swung the cabinet door open and found only shaving cream, shampoo, the usual. No suspicious collection of pharmaceuticals. Ray must keep them all in his bedside table, as Bert had said—if Bert was even telling the truth about that. After the medicine cabinet, she went through the chest of drawers and the linen closet. Just bathroom stuff.
No mummified fingers or ears, Bert.

She turned off the light and slipped back into the pitch-black hall. For a few seconds she held still, letting her eyes readjust, listening carefully. Ray's snoring came faintly from the bedroom, its cadence unchanged.

She glided into the living room, thought about the desk and the drifts of correspondence on it, decided to go there last. A single big dog shadow drifted in from the kitchen, paused, turned around, vanished. Cree crept up the exposed stairs to the studio, forgetting the top door's noisy hinges until the screech startled her. She froze and waited until she'd gotten her heartbeat under control before she eased the door slowly open and just as slowly shut.

Colder up here. The ambient light was a little better, vague city-night glow coming through the tall windows, enough to make out the contours of the room. The maps Bert had mentioned were at the top of her list. She spotted the drafting table straight ahead, not far from the head of the stairs, started to go over, then thought she'd wait until her eyes had recovered better from the bright bathroom.

Instead she padded over to the workbench with the computers and other equipment. She scanned the equipment, saw nothing of particular interest: cameras, printers, cables, pads with notations or sketches on them. A professional-size vinyl sign printer explained Ray's enlargement process.

Back at the end wall, she used her light to look at the huge photos Ray had hung. As before, her primary response was ambivalence. As pure compositions, they were gorgeous, celebrations of beautiful curving forms, pale arcs set against a deep darkness like the night sky, like the vaulted ceiling of a planetarium before the show began. They captured something mystical and revelatory. But cranial injuries, broken bone edges or foreign bodies, were always just visible, too, clearly part of Ray's intent. And the thought of someone taking these shots, manipulating and lingering over their cold dead subjects—that was unsettling. Which was the real key to Ray? Beauty or death?

A few MRIs were hung with the others, much smaller and not as successful. The computerized process made uneven blots and irregular rings of rainbow hues in the sectional view of someone's skull. One clearly included a peanut-shaped thing with branching roots, probably a tumor. They were too digital for her taste, the colors too harsh, the compositions not at all elegant like the others. She shined her light behind the MRIs and a few of the big ones, but didn't find any titles or other information.

Back at the coffee table, she swept her little light over books, a thick manila envelope, a scattering of pens. As Bert had said, the books were medical and psychological titles concerned with violent behavior. Suspect? Ray made no effort to conceal his desire to understand the more troubling aspects of human behavior, and Cree had a whole library on similar topics. There was also a lycanthropy book Ray had mentioned,
The
Werewolf: Myth, Madness, and Metaphor,
spread open, facedown. When she turned it over, she found that it was open to a horrible woodcut of the Beast of LeGevaudan, ripping and rending one of its many victims. Abruptly it occurred to her that the Beast didn't fit any of the neat werewolf categories she and Ray had talked about. One of history's best-documented werewolves, yet no one had ever figured out what the creature really was. It made her wonder if she'd oversimplified things, overlooked something important. Her heart fluttered as she turned the book over again. Sneaking around in someone else's house, without his knowledge, was not good for the nerves.

The manila envelope contained photos. Cree slid out the thick sheaf and fanned them on the table and got another shock as her light revealed faces—the faces of corpses. No mistaking it. She controlled her breathing with difficulty as she looked through the collection. There were at least two dozen black-and-white studies of heads and faces, some badly damaged and gruesome, some serene and perfect. On many, Ray had drawn crop lines and other notations, as if he'd played with compositional ideas. From the steel surfaces or zippered edges of body bags visible around the edges, it appeared that every photo had been taken in a lab or morgue.
Not at crime scenes!
she reassured herself. The memory of the noise she'd heard from Skobold's meat suite carne back to her, the long drawers opening and closing, and suddenly she knew where Ray had gotten at least some of these.

Okay,
she told herself breathlessly,
photos of corpses. Not souvenirs, a
project.
Art works, an artistic experiment.

Or was it? Ray was a student of death. Why the obsessive interest? And how far had it taken him? For an instant she remembered the savagery of the dogfight and, worse, the darkly joyful reflection of it in the faces of the audience. Would Ray be tempted to delve into that as well?

Her hands shook as she put the photos away and positioned the envelope as it had been. The cold was beginning to ache in her feet and creep up her legs. Time to look at the maps and go downstairs. Then she'd leave this place. Get a little distance on Ray.

She could see the maps better now, four paler rectangles against the wall above the drafting table. She stifled her jitters, crossed over to the wall and put her light onto the maps. The legends at the top told her Bert was right, they were topo maps of state parks. Where Ray took his night runs, his wild pilgrimages. The one on the far right was where that toddler had been killed, San Bruno State Park, traced with pencilled-in paths and X's that marked points of particular interest. She wished she had looked at Bert's crime scene map and could see right now whether it corresponded with Ray's markings.

Maybe she should have taken Bert more seriously.

She got her camera ready, fighting her swelling anxiety: Ray really might get a little uncool if he caught her at this. She set the camera for low-light mode, checked the LCD to make sure the map was tightly framed, and snapped the shot. She zoomed in and took a series of detail shots, then reviewed the photos in the monitor to make sure Ray's pencil lines were visible.

Everything seemed a lot less certain than it had an hour ago. Maybe her empathic identification with Ray had confused the rational part of her brain, which just like Bert had been telling her there was something amiss. It wouldn't be the first time. One of the gravest dangers of her penchant. She was panting in shallow breaths and had to shut her eyes for a moment:
Easy now. Easy. Slow deep breaths. Settle. Go slow. Don't get spooked. Go slow.

Back downstairs. This time she remembered the creaking door, but the agonizing slowness it required made her very tense. All she felt was the desire to hurry, hurry to leave here. At the same time, she knew she should try to keep perspective. Okay, Ray took pictures of corpses, but it didn't mean he was a killer. Yes, he had an urgent fascination with some morbid issues, death and violence, but he'd been out front about it.
Urgent,
definitely the word for Ray. Maybe just too urgent? The way Cree was urgent about similar topics, or some other way? Similar, she decided, but not the same. Coming at it from a different angle, a different motive. For a moment she felt a pattern taking shape in her thoughts, but she was too jittery and it darted away from her.

She descended into the living room with utmost stealth, then stood and studied the dark hallway to the bedroom until she verified that nothing was moving. She couldn't hear Ray snoring anymore, but the dogs weren't up and there was no sign of activity.

Over to the desk. Holding the flashlight between her teeth, she leafed through the many envelopes to find that Bert was right again—path labs, hospitals, some police labs. But which ones? Were any of the labs connected to Bert's collection of dog attack deaths and murders?

She slipped papers out of one envelope, tried to make sense of the medical jargon, couldn't quite. Looked at more pages from different labs, read carefully, thought maybe she understood some of it. By the third she'd begun to see the pattern. She grabbed at the other envelopes, pulling out one sheet after the other. A sensation like vertigo hit her as she realized what she was looking at.

A little noise whispered behind her.

She spun, heart hammering. Something moved at the end of the hallway, then materialized as a canine shadow. The other two dogs followed, and all three took up a position in the middle of the room, oriented toward her. A half-second later she noticed the shape that was higher up at the edge of the hall doorway, the dark motionless blob of shadow.

Ray's face, leaning out of the dark hall to watch her.

"Hi, Cree," he said quietly, sadly. "Finding anything good?"