Everyone Pays (19 page)

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

MICHAEL

I was saved one cold afternoon on a Tenderloin street six years ago—years I spent getting clean and becoming ordained. I found my path in that time but didn’t find Him. That came later.

The day I was saved, I waited for my meal with the other vagrants at Glide Memorial Church. Ahead of me, a woman slept on a box, sitting up against the wall of a dirty building. I studied her, noticing her thin, greasy hair. Blonde.

Rain soaked her thin jacket. She didn’t mind. A dirty hood covered most of her hair. She slept with her head back, her cheeks thin, even thinner than the rest of ours—drug addicts all.

When the door opened at the head of the line—time for dinner already at three thirty, so early and better to get a spot in the lines for a bed at the shelters—she didn’t move. In minutes, the line began its grueling shuffle forward. Lost souls creeping toward our food. Eventually, the progress reached us, and someone woke her with the toe of his boot. She began screaming, shaking her hands and crying out that she wasn’t ready. A volunteer of the church told us to walk around her.

“Leave me alone!” she called out in pain.

She was losing her place, someone muttered.

The volunteer repeated, “Keep the line moving.”

I watched her put herself together, such as it was: she gathered herself to stand, jostling the separate pieces of her body onto her too-thin legs covered in tight, dirty jeans that had trailed down her heels for so long they’d worn through. She wore white sneakers, so dirty they told tales of where she had been, what ruin she’d traversed.

By the time I reached her, she pushed off the wall, then wobbled and fell against me. I caught her against my chest, but she pulled away.

When I steadied her with a hand on her elbow, she screamed, “Don’t touch me.”

Her head nodded, then popped back up to face forward. She was on the dose, still knocked out in the afternoon. They would never let her in. I followed when she stepped out of line and wandered onto Ellis Street in front of a honking car that barely stopped. She walked on, careening forward, carrying a purse that hung to her waist, its strap threatening to fall from her shoulder.

“Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.

When she didn’t hear, I asked again. Louder. But I
did
nothing. I was into my own brand of ruin then, my own destruction with pipes and needles, and I didn’t have conviction or faith. Or Him.

“What?” she called out, not to me or to the dealer who answered, a man who spent his days on that particular corner.

I waved him off to leave her alone. She walked on, heading toward Market. This was when I knew something terrible would happen, that I should stop her. I knew not to let her walk onto the Muni tracks, but I did nothing. I watched as she pushed her hood back and shook her thin blonde hair in the rain. Her cheeks were sunken; she didn’t see the same world as the rest of us, and I couldn’t imagine where she understood herself to be.

Then she turned her hood up again and walked forward, leaning into the strut so that I couldn’t stop her if I’d wanted. She pushed her body down the hill past Golden Gate Avenue and followed Seventh as it jagged across McAllister. By the time she reached the bottom of the hill, she was running. I did my best to keep up, didn’t want to scare her—a part of me feared that I had, that she ran from
me
, but she never knew I was there. She ran from her own demons, those that spoke only to her ears.

The Muni car never saw her coming. If the driver did, it wouldn’t have mattered; she ran right in front, into it head-on. I’d never seen Him make such a mess of a human body, couldn’t believe she had held all that inside of her until then—every inch of the red guts and tubes, every pint of the dark juice—inside of her from the moment she’d woken on the box.

He showed me. That was the first I’d seen of His acts.

She had held all the demons and torment, all that, inside her for as long as she could. Now it was revealed to me.

People screamed, and I didn’t linger. It was my first moment of belief, a belief so pure that I had no sense where it had come from—almost as if the same strange bolt that caught her, caused her to throw herself into the train, had caught me too, made me bear witness to her end. Later I knew it to be one of His signs.

She was the first. The one I couldn’t help.

I walked straight back to Golden Gate Avenue, turned into St. Boniface, and pounded on the wooden door, calling out to the priests to let me in. Father Kevin answered. He brought me inside through God’s grace, let me sit, listened until I told him why I had come, and then he let me sleep on the floor.

Only much later could I fully understand why he did this. Of course, it was Him.

In this manner, I was once saved. When I found Emily, I knew it was my purpose to save another.

That was when I first heard His words.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

DONNER

So we found ourselves on the seventh floor of General again, this time waiting for Dr. Matal to finalize paperwork and sign Emily out. We had called in Coggins and Bennett, used our task force chip to get them right over. I briefed them on the case as they drove to Bernal Heights. They knew most of the backstory on the priest, and I brought them up to date on the dirty poker circle, Emily’s relationship to the priest, what we knew of it, and where things stood with Steele, Weber, and Meaders. They’d heard about Heyes already.

Meaders himself, I was happy to be rid of; my own idea or not, I was glad to be out of his apartment. Waiting around wouldn’t cut it. A dead end is one thing, a slow-burn stakeout for an action addict, hopped up on caffeine and adrenaline, is another.

It all took less than an hour, transit included, and Matal greeted us as if she’d been counting the seconds.

As I poked my head into Emily’s room, she was still sitting on the bed with that sour expression, hollow cheeks and stern eyes, arms crossed over her chest. She looked a little better for her few days of civic care. Her skin had a slightly healthier glow.

Dr. Matal came in to give her a final examination: felt her neck for her lymph nodes, listened to her chest and asked her to cough. I almost expected her to bang on Emily’s knees to see if her feet popped up.

Matal waved us into a corner with her lips pursed. “She’s yours now, Investigators. This woman isn’t suffering from any known trauma and has basically a clean bill of health, all things considered. Given her past medical history, there’s not much more we can do for her. She’s stable.” Then she turned back to her patient. “Good luck, dear. I really wish you all the best.”

For her part, Emily wasn’t interested; she gazed at the floor, doing everything she could to avoid acknowledging the doctor’s interest. Even if the care had helped, she had yet to take a shine to Hendricks, the doctor, or myself.

“Okay,” I said, “why don’t you get dressed, and then we’ll take you wherever you want?”

She still wore the standard hospital issue. The clothes she had worn were folded at the foot of the bed.

“I’ll wait outside.” Hendricks went out and shut the door.

“Go ahead.” I bent over, patted the stack of clothes.

Emily slipped her feet down to the floor. She sat at the edge of the bed like that for almost a minute, breathing hard. I could hear a wheeze in her chest. Below her gown, her legs were basically bones with skin. Even seeing this drug-addled emaciation on the streets all the time, I found it hard to believe her condition given her age. Meth did terrible things.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, biting her top lip.

“These are your clothes,” I said.

She tried saying something, asking a question I couldn’t understand. Finally, she took the pad and pencil off the chair.

Him,

she wrote.

Where is the Father Michael?

I held out my hands. “We don’t know. We need to talk to him. Where do you think we can find him?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she stood and dropped off her hospital gown. I couldn’t believe what I saw: her legs were nothing compared to the hollows of her chest. I had never seen a person look like that, not at any age; the closest form her body compared to was an undernourished dog. I could see all her ribs, her collarbone, the balls of her shoulders. How Meaders and the others could do anything to her, I couldn’t believe, wouldn’t understand.

Her hips looked like I could circle them with my hands.

“How did you—What did he do to you?” I asked.

She turned to face me. I saw the scars on her arms. She had a better chance of having HIV than not.

“Don’t you have a family?” I knew it was a stupid question, that my asking wouldn’t resolve broken bonds. She glared back, pointed to the pad.

“Him,” she said. “He is.” I could understand the words. No mistaking them even from her mouth.

She slipped a red Chicago Bulls T-shirt over her head, pulled on a black zip-up hoodie.

I wondered where this would end, where she’d go once we caught him and what she would do. We would catch him; I was sure of that. Just a matter of time. I didn’t know if she’d be better off then, or worse. I had no idea how to help her. What did she have to look forward to? How would she not wind up dead? Maybe it was all a question of religion, the afterlife—two things I didn’t understand.

“What do you want?” I asked. “Where can we take you?” If it would get her out of the city, out of this life, I would let her go. Put her on a bus and get her clear of it all.

“Him,” she said again. She sat, unfolded a pair of worn, dirty jeans and guided her legs into them, first one, then the other. “He will—” The rest of the sentence was unclear; she’d either said that he would “tell me” or “kill me.” I didn’t know which, though the difference was an ocean.

“What makes a priest kill people?” I asked. My biggest question in the open. I tried to come at suspects from odd angles, not to let them know what I really wanted, but now I put it out, simply asked. All I could do was wait for her answer.

She gave it to me too.

“He’s punishing sinners.”

I was sure of her words and that she believed them.

“He’s killed four men. We have to stop him. Help us.”

She shook her head. “No. Help him. Help him give me salvation.” She wriggled her thin shoes on. “He’s absolving me.”

“So what’s that mean? Where do you end up when he’s done?”

She shrugged. “He takes me.”

I squinted at her, trying hard to read her face for the words’ meaning. What did she want from him? What was she willing to let him do?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“You ready to go?”

She stood up, held out her wrists as if I might cuff them or help her slice them open.

“Come on.” I opened the door to find Hendricks leaning against a wall. When I barked at him, he moved aside. We turned and made our way back through the range of beds, curtains, doctors, nurses, and patients. I did my best to respect everyone’s privacy, but there wasn’t much of it. Everyone’s worst problems were right out in the open here. Through windows in doors or gaping holes in the curtains, I could see it all: breakdowns, crying jags, and attempted suicides.

We walked Emily out through all of it, leading her, hoping she’d do nothing more than follow. We would take her out into the night with us: first to the Hall and then where? I wasn’t sure.

But we were doing the right thing as much as I understood it, accepting responsibility, watching over our case as a priority to our lives. This was what honorable police work was supposed to be about.

Dr. Matal stood by the nurse’s station as we got to the exit.

“Just need you to sign this, Investigators. Then she’ll be released to your custody.” She looked to Emily and said, “How’s that sound?”

Emily could’ve done a lot worse, but all she did was shake her head. I was grateful she didn’t cause a scene or start fighting. I took the pen from the doctor and signed the sheet on her clipboard.

We took the elevator down and walked out into the night then, Emily in her dirty clothes, skin-tight and shabby, Hendricks and myself—tired, worn out, on our own—heading to the parking lot of SFGH and bound for the Hall.

The first thing Emily did when we got outside was ask a guy in a gown, holding on to an IV pole, for a smoke. He got pissed off right away; he was down on his luck, clearly. Unshaven and wearing only bed slippers in the cold night, his greasy red hair hanging almost to his shoulders. He wouldn’t have many in the pack, and the next could be hard to come by.

“Come on,” I told her. “I’ll buy you your own pack.”

We stopped the car at a gas station on Potrero, the first place where I could buy the cigarettes. She wanted Marlboros, reds. What else?

When I came back with the pack, she tapped them down hard for a few blocks as we drove. As with any witness we couldn’t predict, someone who rode with us but might not be all there, we put her in the backseat, behind Hendricks, and I sat sideways, watching her the whole time.

Hendricks rolled down her window, said, “You’re not smoking where we’re going, so you might as well get it done in the car.”

When I asked how she was feeling, she didn’t respond, just gestured at the car’s lighter and waited with the cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Once I pushed it in, she looked out at the road, the lights of the city. That was when it started to rain.

I could smell the ash and dirt in the air first, then the oil from the asphalt, mixed with gas. Finally the lighter popped out. I held it as Emily lit up.

After that all I smelled was her smoke. It hung thick in the car, reminding me of my old habits, my own solitary smokes in the night. Luckily, reds were far enough from my palate that I had no urge to join.

“You hungry?” I asked.

She didn’t answer that either, and I knew it would be a long night. I raised my eyebrows at Hendricks, and he returned the look. After a couple blocks, I turned on the radio, flipped to KCSM, and let jazz spread into the car, hoping it might help, knowing it wouldn’t.