Last Ferry Home

by Kent Harrington

  The two looked at each other, more like drowning people than like doctor and patient. She moved back in her chair, trying to take back her authority, reload the doctor program. He heard her snap her pen closed.

  “It was foggy,” he said. “I didn’t believe the fog would come back, you see …” he drifted into silence.

  Their eyes remained locked.

  “It was around noon . . .” he said. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  She said nothing, but kept looking at him. The room was completely silent. In the distance he could hear a siren wailing, an ambulance heading down California Street far below them.

  Before he could really start, their hour was up. He got only to the point of their sailing under the Golden Gate, passing its north tower. He was relieved. He got up and left.

  Schneider realized for the first time that the traditional hour limit was more about the medical business than it was about medicine. Now it was she who was angry like a hunter who’d missed a clear shot. The bird had passed over her head. She called in his Valium prescription.

  CHAPTER 2

  Day of the murders

  Every spring, two massive eucalyptus trees behind Detective O’Higgins’ house became home to a flock of crows. The crows had to fight off red-tailed hawks that targeted the crows’ eggs. The battles took place across a sleepy blue and radiant Marin County sky all summer long, violent and graceful fits of high-speed flight that often ended in a shapeless, plummeting death. The crows died defending what was theirs, torn apart in mid-air by the bigger, more powerful hawks. But the crows always came back the following May.

  But it was March now and the sky outside his place in San Rafael was bleak, grey, and without depth. The crows were gone, and would not be back for months. He missed them. He had something crow-like about him, he’d thought, since the accident, in his battle to remain sane and upright. The madness-hawk wanted him dead. It would attack without warning, hoping to knock him out of the sky.

  A rain storm made an intense roof-thumping, at times becoming so loud O’Higgins stopped what he was doing. The intense pounding reminded him of the cacophony of combat: gunfire and shouted orders. He saw platoons of dirty Marines shaping up, their black-plastic knee pads covered in a fine white dust, their young faces shaded by helmets. The troopers looking at a toppled Fallujah, full of “the enemy.” The chaotic sound of the storm became the sound of helicopters and the screams of wounded, mostly civilians, being treated by twenty-year old medics who were out of their depth, their rubber-gloved hands gut-stained. Behind them depleted uranium rounds penetrated concrete flats, block after block pulverized, hunks bitten off by Marine artillery and contaminated for generations to come. They were, of course, “winning.” The generals in the Pentagon could go play golf at US taxpayer expense.

  Most of his men had never read a real book or seen the inside of a museum. They’d been moved on, grade by grade, through a system that handed out a vending-machine education and didn’t care about them. Mothers who worked for minimum wage and couldn’t afford childcare left them in front of SpongeBob SquarePants, brown and black and white mothers who had no idea where Iraq was. Their young sons were hapless, though singularly brave at times, punching above their weight, trying to be what their officers expected—brave Marines. O’Higgins knew they were pawns in a great game run by the super-rich for the benefit of the über-rich, who were living in unimaginable wealth and privilege.

  They’d been Hell’s Guards. But to what end? Guarding what, and for whom?

  Some of his men were vaporized, and disappeared altogether—as if they’d never existed, their young lives folded into nothingness and back to where life came from, our shared universe of nothingness. It was a revolving, impossible-to-comprehend continuum from conscious life to oblivious death, oscillating on the battlefield and in a mother’s silent womb.

  Lost in that noisy past, O’Higgins realized the chaotic house-pounding was just the storm that had come in late that morning, and not the other thing. He went back to paying bills, knowing exactly where he was again. He regretted that he was not back at war, where things would be simple to understand, and his life evaded, or ended if he were lucky.

  The once-sterling personal qualities that had made him so formidable and successful as a homicide detective, and before that as a Marine combat officer, had vanished on a Sunday afternoon due west of the Golden Gate Bridge, on a 40-foot all-wood sailboat that had sunk eight months before, killing his wife. He blamed himself. The facts were horrifically simple yet profound, like life itself.

  His iPhone rang at almost exactly 6:00 p.m. This was the day he was back from leave and on call, whether or not he was fit for duty, or ready to go back to work as a homicide detective.

  The sergeant on the line gave him the quick facts: two bodies had been found in a mansion on Broadway, in San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood. Patrol had cleared the house. A women had been taken to the hospital. No details beyond that. O’Higgins listened carefully to each word, weighing it. It’s official, he told himself as soon as he ended the call. I’ve caught a murder case and am back to work. And it’s a double.

  He set his phone down on the cluttered kitchen table: piles of unopened mail; unread Wired magazines, his wife’s subscription; delinquent notices from the IRS, along with a raft of unpaid bills alongside that morning’s dirty breakfast dishes.

  He finished making out the check he’d been writing to his daughter’s dance school in Sacramento, where she’d gone to live with his sister: $150 dollars. It was important he get that paid, he told himself. He finished filling it out, then signed it.

  He found a book of stamps in his makeshift office and put the check in an envelope. He walked outside, not bothering to put on a jacket, to drop the envelope in the mailbox. The driving rain felt good as it pelted his shoulders. He put the mailbox’s flag up. His partner, Detective Marvin Lee, called. The air around him smelled strongly of eucalyptus and rain. He spoke standing in the pelting downpour.

  “That you, white boy?”

  In their practiced shorthand, the detectives agreed to meet at the scene.

  O’Higgins went back into the house in his soaking t-shirt. He got ready to go to work for the first time in months, walking through an empty and frightening house of sweet memories. Dusk dragged daylight’s dream down Mount Tam and began to shutter San Rafael, leaving randomly gleaming strings of twinkling storefronts along Fourth Street. Humanity’s throbbing pulse pushed through a dim winter twilight. Murder or no murder, life goes on.

  All dispatch had told them was that a well-known businessman and a young woman, perhaps the man’s wife, had been found murdered at the address on Broadway. The tony address signaled to the detectives that they would very likely be dealing with extremely wealthy people, perhaps even celebrities of one kind or another — investment bankers, or even Hollywood types.

  Celebrities, or at least very rich people, the detectives knew from experience, meant the crime scene could be chaotic. Top-notch lawyers would be called immediately. The press would show up and bear down on the police in search of something, anything, they could sell as news. The District Attorney herself would be involved from the start, as rich people meant she had to appear large and in charge.

  It seemed like a bad way to start over. But he’d caught a double in Pacific Heights, and that was life. He’d laid in his funk hole since the accident. It was time to get up and face the enemy again, like it or not.

  CHAPTER 3

  O’Higgins slowed his Ford and rolled down the window, identifying himself to an older patrol officer he recognized, who was keeping traffic off the 2000 block of Broadway. Patrol had created a cordon sanitaire around the scene, closing off both ends of the block, letting in only cars belonging to residents who had driver’s licenses proving they lived on the street.

  He pulled his car over and turned off his
headlights but left his parking lights on, parking just down from the scene. He picked up his phone and noted the time for his report: 7:08 p.m. It would mark the time of his officially taking over the crime scene. Everyone now — patrolmen, criminalists, coroner’s investigators, all the crime scene’s players, even the body handlers from the mortuary — would acknowledge his authority, in some cases grudgingly. He and his partner were the generals in Homicide’s well-ordered hierarchy.

  As usual, he sat for a moment at the wheel of his car and took the scene in before being deluged by an infinite number of details. He didn’t want to overlook what the killer, or killers, had seen when they came and when they left the scene. And he wanted to postpone, if for only a moment, the heavy responsibility that was waiting for him.

  He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand as he had when heading out on a sortie — everyone getting ready to man up, pretending not to be afraid but afraid nonetheless, smacking weapons and hoping for the best. There was luck in warfare, as in everything else.

  The fog, blowing in from the west, was obscuring whole sections of the street. He looked directly above him at the street light and saw ineluctable specters ripped apart by the wind, turning fog into smoke-like tendrils crawling over roofs, slipping under the yellowish street light as they moved east. Are they Death’s flag? The scene reminded him of the accident, his daughter’s cry for help when it happened. It was fog that had worked against him that horrible afternoon. It was the enemy no bullet could kill.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the wet street painted by a patrol car’s blue and white flashing lights, the sidewalk where neighbors were gathering in nattering groups, their well-to-do white faces yellow under the streetlight. He turned back and faced the three-story mansion where the murders had taken place, perhaps only an hour or two before. Three uniformed patrol officers were chatting at the foot of the mansion’s stairs. One of the officers, a young woman, turned and walked his way. She was wearing a yellow rain slicker made wet by the fog, which seemed to reflect all the strange light on the street.

  O’Higgins noticed how well lit the block was. All the street lights worked. So different from the Mission District or Hunter’s Point, where the street lights might be shot out by gangsters who preferred to have streets dark. Not here, baby. Here it’s all lit up. This is big money, he thought, taking in the fabulous homes around him: Tudor, a huge Cape Cod on the corner, Art Deco, and a Craftsman-inspired mansion where the murders had taken place. These were fabulous places of the über rich. The houses, even at night, looked immaculate. Many were several stories, their front yards starchy, manicured by gardeners and signaling extreme wealth. Their latticed-and-box-hedged landscaping spoke of lifelong privilege, big-time universities and the rest of it. The untouchables.

  He looked for his partner’s car, but didn’t see it.

  He saw a lone metal For Sale sign swinging on its chains down the street. Pedestrians on the sidewalk directly across from the scene were showing the cold’s effects, their faces partially hidden by coat collars and luxe scarfs. He didn’t want to get out of the car and go to work. Didn’t want to assume the dreadful responsibility that would be thrust at him as soon as he stepped out onto the street and took charge.

  The female patrol officer walked toward him, trying to keep the crime scene’s log book’s pages from blowing up off her clipboard. The sheets flapped, and she clutched them against her fog-wet yellow rain slicker.

  A patrol car’s lights, at the west end of the street, danced across the faces of cops standing in front of the scene. He could see the patrolmen looking his way, anxious to speak with him. They had been in charge of the crime scene since the discovery of the bodies. It was a double murder, and would be double the work for him and his partner. Was he up to it? All eyes on you now.

  Shit! Why couldn’t I have caught a suicide? Suicides were easy as you could get in the homicide business, as the victim and the suspect were all in the room together. No pressure there. Over his career he’d had lots of those. If they jumped from the SF side of the Golden Gate, SFPD sent out homicide detectives. He’d called families all over the country and the world to explain that their loved ones had jumped from the Golden Gate. He’d thought of it himself. Maybe he too would have taken “the down elevator,” as his first partner called it when they watched a 20-year-old Chinese girl bob in the bay, the Coast Guard trying to fish her tiny body out of the ugly dark water with a hooked steel pole.

  He remembered her hair, which was very long. The dead girl’s boyfriend had left her, they learned from her suicide note, which she’d carefully taped to her refrigerator. O’Higgins had read it standing in her quiet apartment, with just the sounds of Muni bus brakes as a kind of funeral music. The first line of her handwritten note said:

  It’s Sunday. I know I shouldn’t do this, Mom and Dad … Maybe if it were Monday, but it’s Sunday and I’m alone. So alone now.

  He’d told his partner he would handle it, the call to the girl’s family. He postponed it for a long fifteen minutes while he stared at the note on the refrigerator. The word Sunday had been underlined. What was it about Sunday, he’d wondered? His daughter had been born in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. It had been a joyous day.

  He’d taken out his cell phone and made the call to Los Angeles. The girl had left her parents’ phone number and address on a separate Post-It note, knowing they should be notified. It was a hard call to make. He’d made others over the years, but that young girl, her apartment so clean and tidy, stuck with him, as if they’d been friends.

  Why hadn’t someone, just one person, made a difference that Sunday? If someone had smiled at her on the way to the bridge. Just one person might have made a difference. But that was life. People fell through the cracks.

  The patrol officer, log-book in hand, knocked on his window.

  O’Higgins rolled it down and signed in, noting the time in the logbook: 7:10 p.m. “What we got?” he said gruffly.

  “Two dead inside the house. One in the elevator on the main floor. A second body on the third floor in the shower stall. A young female. She was stabbed repeatedly. It looks like the guy in the elevator had his throat cut, and he bled out.”

  “Okay,” O’Higgins said. “My partner, Detective Lee, should be here soon.”

  “Yes, sir,” the officer said. She looked very young, only twenty-two or three at most. Fresh-faced white girl. He got out of the car, reached into the backseat for his coat and slipped it on. It was cold outside.

  The wind whipped around them. The patrol officer wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She did have a tattoo of some kind on her ring finger, he’d noticed.

  “The father of one of the victims called 911, dispatch said. But he wasn’t here when we arrived. The wife came home as we were clearing the house. She says she’d run down to the Safeway on Marina Boulevard and was only out of the house for half an hour or less. She was hysterical. We called an ambulance. She was that bad off. They took her to Mount Zion. She’s there now. It seems the woman’s two small girls are missing from the home. It looks like the Jane Doe in the bathroom was the nanny. The woman’s husband is the other victim.”

  “So, two bodies,” he said, looking at the house. “No others?”

  “The husband and the nanny. That’s all we found,” the woman said. “I’m Officer Madrone.”

  “Thank you, Madrone. Who caught the handle?”

  “My partner and I. I found both victims. My partner stayed with the wife after she arrived. I finished clearing the house with another officer who arrived to back us up. It was — the wife was pretty bad off, sir, screaming. It was difficult to get much from her.”

  “Anything I should know walking in? Anything I should be careful about not disturbing?”

  “Bloody footprints in the hallways. The wife stepped in the elevator and tried to resuscitate her husband, and she made a mess. The husban
d is lying in the elevator on the first floor. I turned power off to the elevator. I had to open the elevator door to check and make sure there was a body in there. That’s what the first call told us, nothing was mentioned about a second body. I used the emergency off button so it couldn’t be called to another floor. The wife said their name is Chaundhry. They’re from India.” She looked at him. “That’s about it.” She was short and thin but stood ramrod straight, and seemed to have some mettle. He wondered how someone like her, so physically unimposing, chose to become a cop.

  “Okay, I’ll get to it,” he said. “Anyone else step in the elevator, compromise the scene in any way?”

  “No. Neither one of us did, anyway. The girl is lying in the shower stall. Looks like she was stabbed in the shower. I turned off the water. It was still running when I found her. I don’t know why I did — but I did turn off the water, sir.”

  He nodded. He recognized a military bearing in the officer. Perhaps it was the way she’d said “sir;” she seemed used to delivering it.

  “I’ll go up and take a look. Be sure to have my partner sign in. The criminalists too, they’re on their way. No one else goes in. So if the victim was the nanny, where are the kids?”

  “Not clear. The wife said something about her daughters being at a neighbor’s. She went crazy. Really crazy. She was looking for them hysterically in the house, afraid they’d been harmed. We didn’t find her girls. I looked everywhere. I thought maybe they’d hidden somewhere, if they’d been there at all. They could be in the house still, I guess, but I didn’t find them. I’m not sure the wife understands the nanny was killed too. She found her husband just as we arrived. We stopped her from going upstairs. She was screaming for the nanny to come help her.”