The medical clinic was housed in an abandoned park maintenance building. A long line of people stretched from the clinic, snaking past the van. Seeing the police van, the people shifted and turned to one another, whispering and gesturing, though they didn’t leave.
“They must have something special going on,” Paul said. “Line that long. Inoculations, maybe.”
“Maybe I should stay with the van,” Tanner said.
Paul gave a short, hard laugh. “One of us better.”
Paul got out of the van and walked toward the clinic. The people in line tensed, staring at him as he walked toward the building. Tanner sat behind the wheel, the heat building up inside the van despite the open windows. But he did not feel like moving. The people in line stopped staring at the van, but they did not seem to relax much. They looked like they had been in line a long time, and many of them tried to get off their feet without sitting in the mud, which wasn’t easy. Most of them looked ill as well as exhausted.
Tanner glanced over the treetops and could just see the top of the hill rising from the island in the middle of Stowe Lake. It had been a long time since he had been on that hill, and he wondered if he was going to have to do something similar again. He hoped to Christ he wouldn’t, but he did not have a good feeling about it.
A few minutes later Paul returned to the van with Patricia Miranda, one of the clinic’s volunteer med techs. Tanner had met her two or three times before, and she shook his hand with a smile.
“This van.” She shook her head, then turned to the people in line. “They are not police,” she said, loud but calm. “They have medical supplies for the clinic.” Then she repeated it in Spanish. The people in line visibly relaxed, though their wariness did not disappear altogether.
“What’s going on?” Tanner asked. “Fever inoculations?”
“No,” Patricia said. “Wish it was, though it’s probably too late for most of them. No, we managed to get several thousand sets of nose filters. A lot of the people here had enough money once to get plugs implanted, but most haven’t had a filter change in years, so we’re trying to do them all.”
Tanner sniffed, twitching his nose at the thought. He was due soon himself. He looked up at the hazy sky, thinking about the crap that got into his lungs even with the filters.
“Tanner, Patricia wants me to help out here for a while,” Paul said. “You want to just go on without me? I’ll give you the keys to the clinic and you can just drop the stuff.”
“How long you think you’ll be?”
“An hour, hour and a half tops. I’ve got my own shift at the hospital tonight.”
“I’ll wait. There’s something I want to do, if it’ll be all right to leave the van awhile.”
Patricia nodded. “It’d probably be fine, but I’ll get a couple of people to watch it.”
They unloaded cartons, leaving only Paul’s share in the back of the van. Then Tanner locked the van, and Paul and Patricia went into the clinic.
Tanner walked through the heart of the squatter zone, along the slick, muddy paths. Most of the tents were makeshift, heavily patched, the walls sacrificed for the roofs; the shanties were not much more solid than the tents, providing shelter from the rain but little privacy. Clothes on people were as patched and tom as the tents, often revealing unhealed wounds and large streaks of fever rash. As he walked along, half-naked kids came up to him and begged, hands held out. But they were listless and halfhearted, as if they recognized that anyone walking among them would have little or nothing to give away.
Smelling smoke and roasting meat, Tanner came to a large open area between two groups of shacks. A fire pit had been dug in the center of the clearing, and a wide, blazing fire burned within it. Above the fire, on crudely made roasting spits, were several small, unrecognizable animals (raccoons? dogs?), and one much larger, headless beast that Tanner was pretty sure was a horse. Fifteen or twenty men and women stood around the roasting animals, talking and drinking from unlabeled bottles.
He worked his way through the shanties and tents, feeling more and more closed in by them as he went. Eventually the zone ended and he reached the denser foliage of the woods. Tanner pressed on, the way slightly uphill now, and a few minutes later emerged from the trees. He crossed a narrow strip of broken pavement and stopped on the bank of Stowe Lake.
Tanner stood at the water’s edge and looked across to the island that filled so much of the lake. The island was a heavily wooded hill, its peak the highest point in the park. At the top, there were views of the entire park and close to half the city. Also at the top was a small, muck-filled reservoir that had once held two naked, chained bodies.
Tanner looked up at the top of the hill, remembering. He had been alone that day, too, and it was alone in the muggy afternoon heat that he had pulled the two dead women from the water, naked but covered with green and brown muck. Chained together at the wrists and ankles, face to face, as if embraced like lovers.
He walked along the edge of the lake for a few minutes, then crossed one of the bridges to the island. He stopped at the foot of the long trail that curved around the island and up to the top of the hill. Tanner did not know why he was doing this, but he knew he would not go back until he did. He started up the trail.
It had been hot and muggy that day, just the way it was now. There had been a crazy run of other murders in the city, and Tanner and Freeman were on loan to Homicide to help out with the casework overload. But Freeman had called in sick that morning, and Tanner was working alone out in the avenues along the park when the virus came through the system giving the location of the bodies. He was given the option of waiting until one of the regular Homicide teams was freed up, but he couldn’t stand the thought of the bodies staying in water any longer than necessary. It was irrational, but there it was. And so he had made this climb alone, knowing what he would find at the top.
He knew there would be no bodies this time, but that did not help his mood much. It was, he feared, only a matter of time. A slight breeze took the edge off the heat, whispering through the ragged eucalyptus trees that still survived. His view of the park and the city expanded as he climbed higher. He stopped at one point, almost at the top, and looked down at the sprawling squatter zone. Separated from the zone by only a narrow strip of trees were the Japanese Tea Gardens. He could see the wealthy tourists walking along the tended paths, sitting in the tea pavilion.
Next to the tea gardens was the De Young, and as he looked at it Tanner thought he glimpsed movement within the wreckage of crumbled stone and thick vines. He stared a long time, watching, but did not see anything more. Animals? Or people living in the ruins? It would not be surprising.
He resumed the climb. A few minutes later the trail widened to an open area at the top of the hill. The concrete reservoir was still there, still filled with more muck than water. A heavy, warm stench rose from it, worse than the stink of the slough the other day.
Tanner sat on the concrete rim and stared down at the muck-covered water. He wondered what else was at the bottom of the reservoir. Probably it would never be drained and cleaned out because no one wanted to know. Just like everything else. He picked up a stone, tossed it into the water. The stone hit the green muck without a splash and slowly sank. It was going to be one hell of a summer.
8
NIGHT. SMOKE IN the air. Sookie sat in the open window of her room on the upper floor of the De Young. She could see the glow from burning lamps, the flicker of the tent-city fires. Smelled the smoke, the cooking meat, the shit from the portable toilets. Heard the murmur of voices, singing.
She didn’t need anyone, she could take of herself. She sniffed once. Crazy people, living in the tents. All jammed in together, crawling over each other. They had nothing. Sookie had lots of things.
Sookie lit a cigarette, then climbed down from the window ledge. She lit the set of five squat candles arranged on the plastic crate in the center of the room. The candlelight, quivering, cast shadows at the edge
s of the room.
The room was small, but the walls were intact. In the corner nearest the window was her bed—a sleeping bag on top of two thick layers of foam rubber. The walls were covered with yellowed newspapers. And along the walls were the makeshift shelves and boxes that held her things.
Sookie moved along the walls, taking inventory. She liked doing it, taking stock, checking things. Looking, picking up a few. Touching. The things she found in empty houses and apartments. She was good at finding things other people couldn’t see. Finding good things other people thought were worthless. Her things.
Two plastic mushrooms. A light bulb with a tiny hole and blue swirls of color around the hole. A set of shattered headphones. Neatly wrapped bundles of computer cable. An L-shaped length of shiny copper pipe.
She stopped and picked up the large wood woman. The top half of the woman came off, and inside was a slightly smaller wood woman. It, too, came apart, another smaller woman inside. They went on like that, ten of them until, at last, Sookie would find a tiny wood woman that did not open. She loved opening the women, one after another, but she was always disappointed when she reached the last. She expected something more.
Sookie put down the woman, moved on. An energy band that blinked dim red light, slower and fainter each day. Three neuro-tubes. A jar filled with pieces of green broken glass. Six wooden chopsticks. A clear glass ashtray.
She knelt and pulled out the box of her own private things—the few items she had not found, that she had owned ever since she was a child, that she had taken with her when she had left the place she herself had never called home. Looking at them, touching them, always made her feel both sad and special. Now she just looked at them without touching. The silver metal bracelet with her other name engraved on the band: Celeste. A string of tiny red beads. A clear glass figurine of a cat. And a drawing she had made once of an angel. She had never hung the picture because it frightened her. It pulled her, held tightly onto her, but it also scared her. My angel, she thought.
Sookie shivered, put away the box. She moved around the rest of the room, faster now, hardly looking anymore. She finished at the bookcase next to the bed, filled with books and magazines. On the floor was the pocket dictionary she used to help her with words she didn’t know. Sometimes, when she was in the mood, she was quite a reader.
But not now. She returned to the window, looked at the lamps, the glow of fires. Look what I have, she thought. She clambered onto the ledge, one leg dangling outside. Look. Sookie slowly, repeatedly banged her fist against the windowsill, and closed her eyes tight.
9
TWO MORE BODIES were found. Two men, this time, pulled out of Balboa Reservoir. The newspaper made much of the fact that it was the first repeat use of a given body of water. Tanner, reading the paper in a cafe on Columbus, doubted it meant anything. What the two new bodies did mean, though, was that now he had to go back to Carlucci.
He set down the paper and looked out the window at the early-morning streets. Here, close to the border of the Financial District, the streets were busy, filled with people and cars, delivery trucks and flashers, scooters and runners—an economy that thrived on the edges of the District, living off the workers who ventured a block or two out of the District during daylight hours. When darkness fell, the area narrowed, became a blazing finger of the Chinese Corridor stretching all the way to the Wharf.
Once, Tanner’s father had told him years before, this area of the city had not been part of Chinatown. It had been called North Beach, and had been heavily Italian—which explained the two or three Italian restaurants and the few cafes like this one. But Tanner’s father had never explained what had happened to the Italians.
Tanner drank slowly from his coffee, putting off what he knew he had to do. He had been afraid of this on the Carousel Club balcony, watching the two bodies being pulled from the slough, but he had hoped it was a fluke, an isolated blip, and not a resumption of the killings. So much for hope. Tanner wondered if he would still be alive at the end of the summer.
He glanced back at the newspaper. This time there was a lurid photo of the bodies. The newshawkers, taken by surprise when the first two had been pulled from the slough, were now on fire alert, shadowing the police.
Tanner flipped over the newspaper, hiding the picture, then finished his coffee. It was time to see Carlucci.
Spade’s was half-empty when Tanner arrived. Between mealtimes. The ion poles were turned up, sparks flying, as if Kingston wanted to scare away potential customers.
Carlucci was alone in his booth, staring at the empty seat across from him, tapping at the table with a pen. Kingston was nowhere to be seen. Tanner slid into the booth, and Carlucci blinked several times, as if coming out of a trance.
“My day is fucking complete,” he said.
“I need to talk to you.”
“So talk.”
“Not here,” Tanner said.
“Terrific. Melodrama.”
“I’m not screwing around.”
Carlucci waited, staring at him. “Is it about…?” He left it unfinished. Tanner nodded. “All right,” Carlucci said. “Should’ve known.” He wrote something on a piece of paper, folded it several times, then handed it to Tanner.
“Thanks,” Tanner said. He put the paper in his pocket without looking at it, then got up and left.
At three-thirty that afternoon, Tanner stood beside a massive concrete pier support, the freeway overpass above him casting a wide shadow. Traffic above rumbled, but was muted, a muffled echo. Two supports down from him, several teenagers in whiteface and pulse-jackets gathered, huddled around a black cylinder. A sudden explosion of sound rocked the air, music blaring from the cylinder, and the crisscrossing bands on the jackets began pulsing colors with the beat.
Tanner saw Carlucci come around a corner, then cross the street carrying a paper bag. When he reached Tanner, he opened the bag, took out two cups of coffee, and handed one to him. They popped the lids and stood without speaking for a few minutes, sipping at the hot coffee and watching the kids down the way. Already a steady procession of customers had begun, mostly teenagers with a few adults to change the pace. As Tanner and Carlucci watched, they could see the exchanges—money for packets. The kids weren’t even trying to hide it.
“Not my jurisdiction,” Carlucci said.
Tanner understood. Carlucci was Homicide. If he followed up everything he saw happening on the streets, he’d never get to his own job. Unless it turned to murder, Carlucci would let the kids be, though Tanner knew he didn’t like it.
“Would have been yours,” Carlucci added.
Tanner nodded. They didn’t say anything else for a while, then Carlucci finally asked, “So what is it?”
“You’re not going to like this.”
Carlucci snorted. “Figured that one out all on my own, Tanner.”
“Three years ago,” Tanner began. “One day, a message gets delivered to me and Freeman. Inside a sealed envelope, a single sheet of paper with just two words. ‘Angel wings.’ Then two figures. Ten thousand slash one million. And then the name of the man who sent the message. That was all.”
“And who was that?”
“Someone who claimed to know who the killer was. Those two numbers. Ten thousand dollars was admission price for a meeting, and one million for the info.”
“All right, cut the phony suspense. Who sent the message?”
“Rattan.”
“Christ!”
“I told you you weren’t going to like it.”
Carlucci looked down at his coffee, grimaced at it. “So what did you do?”
“Nothing. We talked about it, tried to figure how to run it. If we went upstairs with it, we were pretty sure it would be killed. Pay ten thousand dollars to a scumbag who’d jumped bail and disappeared with a couple dozen felony drug charges outstanding? They’d argue that he couldn’t know anything, that some cop had leaked the info to him about the angel wings.”
Carlucci n
odded. He stopped grimacing, now just sipped his coffee and watched Tanner, listening.
“So we thought about going after it on our own. We thought we could come up with the ten thousand from slush funds, and if it turned out Rattan’s information was good, they’d have to buy it upstairs.”
Tanner paused, looking at the kids. Business was complete—it didn’t take long—and they turned off the cylinder, packed it away, and moved on. In a few minutes they’d probably be setting up shop elsewhere.
“We hadn’t decided for sure. It would have been a hell of a job because we’d have to track down Rattan ourselves. He was offering to sell, but he wasn’t going to come to us.” Tanner paused again. “Then Freeman got killed. I had other things to deal with for a while.” The scar on his back began to itch just thinking about it. “By the time I got back to it, I realized it had been a long time since any new bodies had turned up. So I held off, hoping the killings had stopped. After a few more months, it looked like they had. I left it alone.”
“And then you quit the force.”
Tanner nodded.
“But now the killings have started again.”
Tanner nodded once more. Carlucci finished his coffee, dropped the cup and crushed it into the dirt with his shoe.
“Christ,” Carlucci whispered. He looked at Tanner. “Why did Rattan go to you and Freeman?”
“Probably because he thought he could trust us.”
“Was he right?”
Tanner shrugged. “Sure. We’d dealt with him before, you know how it goes down sometimes. And we wouldn’t have screwed him over.”
“Could you trust him?”
“In the right situation. We would have trusted him with this deal. It was worth the risk.”
“You think his offer was legit?”
Tanner hesitated before answering. He and Freeman had talked a lot about that. The key issue.
“He might have been wrong,” Tanner said. “But I think he believed he knew who was doing the killing.”
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