A gang of overly tattooed young lesbians had brought their mountain bikes and their weirdo partially-shaved-head haircuts. Some wore short-short cutoff jeans that showed off brightly colored tattoos. A few strait-laced older people were dressed in Dockers and Players Club jackets. The Indian family seemed the most elegant, as if they’d decided, at the very last moment, to head for San Francisco, having left their home in India with just the clothes on their back. An innocence and joy about them had caught his attention and made him stare. It was what he thought his family had once: simple joy.
A seagull came down to the quay and attacked a strip of carefully peeled, still-intact orange peel. The gull made un-bird-like noises as it headed skyward, its wings at full span, still hungry and disappointed perhaps, despite his dangling peel-prize.
“I say, is this the line to the ferry?” the Indian asked him again.
O’Higgins nodded. The well-dressed, casually chic Indian nodded back quickly, an obvious intelligence to him. His eyes sparked. The man had a handsome face with an affable expression that seemed to go perfectly with his lilting voice and striking blue eyes, a gift from the English who had ruled his country for 200 years.
O’Higgins had noticed the family when they’d arrived on the dock. It was hard not to, as the little girls were twins and very pretty, like their mother. The mother was slender, petite and spoke Hindi to the girls. He’d guessed the mother to be in her late twenties. She was very attractive, wore expensive looking clothes that made her stand out. The two girls were dressed in jeans, and had been running up and down the bird-shit splattered quay chasing each other. Their mother had given up trying to get them to slow down or stay in line. The little girls seemed happy, as if they hadn’t a care in the world. We had been like that, he thought.
It was that kind of day. Perfect for children, he thought, watching the girls, enjoying their gaiety and the sound of their excited voices. Their pretty brown faces shone. He wanted to ask their names, but that was out of the question. He couldn’t speak correctly when he was fighting this fear of open water. The strangled noises he made in sight of water were horrible, and the little girls would be frightened by the stuttering of a six foot-four Elephant Man-type weirdo.
People were shocked by his malady, and slightly afraid of him when he showed symptoms: sweating, stuttering, a dazed look as if he were a modern-day Frankenstein. Because he was a policeman, even if on leave, he knew his attention might be misunderstood. He’d kept an eagle-eye out for perverts himself, when out in public with his daughter. He ran across them every day in his line of work. They were like sharks, deep in the water until they attacked, leaving mangled bodies and mangled lives.
And like the sharks, they had all kinds of rights. Once caught, they could lie to his face. They could make fun of the victim’s weakness. Worst, they could explain what they enjoyed about killing people, in agonizing detail. And he could do nothing.
Once he’d slammed a suspect into a wall. The man had murdered an 18-year-old mother after raping her in her apartment. The man had no reason to kill her, but he had, simply for sport. An anonymous female clerk happened to be walking by the interrogation room, and reported O’Higgins’ act of violence. He’d been reprimanded, and the event duly recorded in his work record. His partner and others had lied for him, but it had done no good; the clerk stuck to her story. Later the suspect he’d “terrorized” confessed to killing sixteen women; he wasn’t sure of the exact number, as he’d been doing it for twenty years. No one laid a hand on him again, afraid for their jobs.
“Thank you. Would you mind holding our place in line?” the father asked him.
O’Higgins nodded.
“You speak English? Yes?”
“Ye — ye — yes,” O’Higgins said. He tried to get the word off his tongue. It was such a simple word, he thought, but it would not come out.
The man looked at him and instead of being afraid of him, as most were, he touched O’Higgins’ arm kindly and nodded, perhaps thinking him simple. O’Higgins would never forget the touch. It had soothed his stuttering. He would remember that simple kindness the rest of his life. It might have been the beginning of his recovery. Point Zero. There had to be a first step on all long journeys. It was something about the reaching out to him, a stranger, and touching him. As if to say, “Don’t worry, I am listening.”
“It’s — coming — now,” Michael said, forcing himself to turn and look out on the bay. “See.” He pointed toward Angel Island and the lovely white ferry on the water.
“Can you hold our place? Be right back. Children have gone off—again.” Their father smiled at him and took off down the long line of queued people in search of his wife and kids.
O’Higgins noticed he was carrying an iPad in a smart-looking blue-leather case. He smiled at the man and nodded. It was something that had been impossible for him to do, until that morning—smile. He liked the man. He liked his easy manner. He liked his white pants with a white jacket, which seemed so out of place among the crowds of serious hikers, the jean-clad majority waiting for the ferry, everyone very earnest—the gang of thumping lesbians in the lead, ready to storm the island with their German allies and make it theirs.
His doctor said he should try to smile. It was difficult, but he was trying. It was partially on his psychiatrist’s advice that he was here at all. The doctor suggested he stop going out only at night. She called it a cop-out; if he was truly interested in getting well, he had to “do normal things.”
She wanted him to start going out and sitting by the water, for starters. She was a bright woman, but sometimes he wanted to yell at her for being so certain of herself and her prescriptions. She’d never been to war. She’d never seen the remains of a serial killer’s work. She’d never worried about money. (He’d Googled her; she came from a wealthy family from the South Bay, and had gone to Stanford. Her grandfather had been an early investor in HP and made a fortune.) He wanted to dislike her, but he didn’t.
The fact was he liked talking to her. She was intelligent, and he admired that. She said he was to breathe deeply and try to face his fear. His psychiatrist was part of a new school of doctors who were rejecting the use of psychoactive drugs, based on data that said they didn’t really cure patients. Rather, the theory said, the drugs just masked their symptoms, making them dependent prisoners. Only the heaviest of doses would address phobias or repetitive syndromes, turning patients into semi-adjusted, emotionally dead zombies who had stopped washing their hands every five minutes, but could no longer feel joy or hate.
His sister was the one who suggested he get therapy. She’d stopped by the house one morning and rang the bell while he’d been asleep. He was dreaming about the day of the accident, as he did every time he slept. The dream was always the same, with little variation, but in the dreamscape he was always unaware of what was to come. That was the irony. That was why he liked to sleep and dream. It was only then that he felt normal.
During the day, he felt great tension and fear: fear that he would kill himself, and fear that he would live another minute more. It was fear of both. Life was a torture of minutes and recollections and long, empty days of driving or walking. He’d become a “Meanderthal,” a word he’d coined to describe the desire to peregrinate aimlessly on foot, another symptom of his mental turmoil.
He’d come to the front door in his sweatpants and a torn t-shirt, unshaven. His steps sounded heavy across the empty, untidy living room. He was a big man. He noticed how dirty the living room transom windows were. It had probably rained while he’d been in bed for the last twenty hours; the dirty windows were streaked by the rain and solemn-looking.
“I think you should see someone, Michael. It’s been months,” his sister said. She handed him a card with a doctor’s name, a psychiatrist. “She said I can’t make the appointment for you. You have to do that. You can get over this.”
His sister, the baby
of their family, turned and headed down his front stairs without saying another world. “They’ll want you back at work soon,” she reminded him. He’d not answered her. He had nothing to say. It was not anger, certainly not with his sister, who had stayed with him and his daughter those first few days after it happened. She had known he was not sane, and might try and harm himself.
He’d remembered a painting he’d seen once, of a black man drifting on a wrecked and tiny sailboat in the ocean. He dreamt he was on that boat at night, drifting with no land in sight. There were swells and sharks in the water. He’d woke up screaming so loudly that he’d hurt his voice. The next morning he’d made the appointment with the psychiatrist. It was either that or drive to the bridge—it was live or die, talk or end it.
The ferry had been crowded. As luck would have it he’d sat up on the aft deck, on a bench facing the Marin hills, along with the pretty Indian family. They were getting up and taking pictures of everything with their iPad, their gaiety infectious. He’d been silent. A few times the girls’ father had looked at him and smiled about his children’s hyperactivity, and for the first time since the accident O’Higgins found himself smiling back, unafraid of showing himself as he used to be.
It was those simple human exchanges that he would tell his doctor about later. It had shocked him, the profundity of the man’s simple kindness that morning on the way to Angel Island. It was a slight and meager smile, but it had happened, and without him thinking about it. It was a start.
And perhaps he’d fallen in a kind of love with the man’s wife. He had to admit it to himself, no matter how painful or shocking. He was attracted to the wife in the most profound way. She seemed like a goddess, the goddess of Gentleness and Beauty. He made the trip, his fear subsiding by the time they got to Angel Island. The woman’s smile, he thought, had the power to heal a man.
SFPD called that afternoon. He was to come back to work. His job as a San Francisco homicide detective was waiting for him, if he still wanted it.
CHAPTER 5
The Chaundhry mansion in Pacific Heights had an office suite on the first floor with spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay. O’Higgins was drawn to the opulent office’s bank of windows, lined up behind a huge and cluttered “power desk.”
From the office windows he could see Alcatraz, grey and forlorn, and beyond the Rock, Berkeley and parts of the East Bay. It seemed a wonderland of big-city lights. The city of his birth had always comforted him, like the face of a beloved person. San Francisco was his ultimate touchstone, its pulse his pulse, since his conception in the Mission District.
Marvin was outside speaking to the press, who had gathered outside on the street and were busy filing their first stories on the killings. They’d been expected. The two detectives had long ago decided to let Marvin speak to the press, as he was good at saying nothing in a forthcoming and affable manner the TV reporters especially appreciated. It was important in a high profile case to get the TV reporters on your side from the start, and professional affability was the key. Marvin, handsome, always made for good TV.
Things had moved quickly from a rather typical crime scene to an extraordinary one. The TV reporters, whose producers monitored the police band, had heard the first dispatch calls, which would have included a call sign for homicide, sending a patrol car to the address. The TV people had put two and two together, linking the house with the wealthy Chaundhry family. Three of the city’s major TV stations had sent satellite trucks to the scene. Their trucks parked in a line along the street with their satellite dishes extended, looking like metallic mantises.
Michael turned and surveyed the antique desk, where a large computer screen glowed. The computer had been left on. He tapped the space key with his iPhone, staying away from the edge of the space bar. A spread sheet popped with multiple rows. The rows were titled in a foreign language; Hindi, he guessed. He sat down and wondered what the time stamp on the file might show. He was working. Someone came to the front door? Did he open the door to his killer? Or did the wife kill them both, and then concoct a story about being out of the house?
He stood up, making sure he didn’t disturb the welter of papers around the keyboard. He looked carefully at the hulking Regency-style desk and began to pick through the piles of documents stacked on it.
Indian newspapers, printed out emails, several yellow legal pads were stacked around the computer’s screen. A recent copy of the Chaundhry SA annual report to stockholders had a glossy cover showing an assembly line and computer motherboards being manufactured in a pristine factory. It was the desk of a man who seemed to be buried alive by his work.
He flipped through some of the paper documents, most of which were in Hindi. There was something from a law firm in the Channel Islands in English. He looked about for the husband’s cell phone, hoping to find it on the desk, but didn’t see it. No secretary? Maybe during the day. He would have to ask the wife.
A reference book showed a picture of a Blackberry on the cover. The writing was in English and seemed to have an official Indian government seal of some kind. He found an envelope from Lockheed Martin, the American aerospace company, and opened it. It held half a dozen plastic wafers, clear and very thin. He took one out and tried to bend it, but it wouldn’t bend. Still looking for Chaundhry’s cell phone, he dropped the clear wafer back in the envelope and put it aside. He noticed that the wafer was extremely sharp, nicking his finger.
He couldn’t touch the body and search for the victim’s cell phone—a Blackberry, he suspected. Only the coroner’s investigators were allowed to go through the dead-man’s pockets, or allowed to touch a victim’s body at all. He’d always thought it a great irony that a homicide detective was prohibited from looking through a victim’s clothing immediately, but they were. Often they would have to spend precious time identifying the victim when their purse or wallet was lying on the body, and right in front of them. But I know who this victim is … billionaire industrialist name of Rishi Chaundhry. Mr. Chaundhry had his life taken … by someone.
A family photo stood to the right of the computer in a wide and expensive-looking silver frame. It showed the four of them. The mother — Asha, he finally remembered — was looking at her husband lovingly. It was a professionally done portrait, no doubt, with a telltale staged quality. Everything perfect. The two little girls wore beautiful matching yellow saris.
He walked to the bookcase across the room. The latest Michael Connelly novel had a bookmark in it. O’Higgins had read the novel and liked it; he was a fan. Rows of shelves held books in Hindi and English, a whole row of business titles, some new, others leather-bound and obviously only for show, bought by the pound.
More photos showed what looked like extended family, back in India, judging from the exotic backgrounds. There was a sculpture in bronze of an elephant, some kind of Indian god he’d seen before. Ganesh. He turned and saw a safe, a large one, in a closet. The closet door had been left wide open. The safe was sitting in plain sight and looked brand new.
He walked to the closet, where a light was on. Inside was a metal rack for clothing, but nothing was hung on it. There was nothing else in the closet but the safe and an old-school telephone book, also brand new, lying on the hardwood floor and still wrapped in plastic, unopened.
O’Higgins squatted and examined the front of the safe. It had no marks on it at all. The safe’s door had a logo of a bulldog. He looked again for obvious marks along the safe’s door, but saw none.
God damn it …. It wasn’t looking good for the wife, he realized. The girl upstairs was beautiful, everything about her. Any man might be tempted. It was a cliché, but that didn’t make it any less possible. But the wife was a beauty herself. He remembered looking at her on the bow of the ferry. He’d been ashamed of himself. It was the first time since the accident that he’d noticed a woman in that way, felt her sexual pull.
He stood up and walked out of the
closet. No one had broken in. The house had a state-of-the-art security system, and they had no report of an alarm going off. He went back to the computer, struck a key and tabbed through to the desktop. He saw an Xfinity.com icon. He clicked through, and the screen split into multiple views: the front door, monitored by a video camera trained on the foyer.
On the computer screen, he saw Marvin come up the stairs to the front door and enter the house. A second camera picked up Marvin moving through the huge foyer. The husband had had a preview of who was at the front door. The nanny had been upstairs. Had someone come to the door, forced their way in and killed the two? It seemed unlikely, as no alarms had been triggered. Was it someone Chaundhry knew, someone he simply let in?
A sign in the front garden notified everyone that the home was protected by a well-known security-system company. O’Higgins had checked the house’s perimeter doors—the ones facing the backyard were all double French doors. They were undisturbed and double locked from the inside. They’d seen no obvious sign of a break-in anywhere on the ground floor.
His cell phone rang.
It was Marvin. “Where are you?”
“First floor, in the office, to the left of the stairs.”
Marvin stepped into the office through the open door.
“Fuck. You won’t believe this, but the Assistant District Attorney just called me and said he wants to visit the scene,” Marvin said.
“What?”
“That’s right. He will be here in less than an hour,” Marvin said.
It was unprecedented. The District Attorney’s office never involved themselves with a case at this stage, unless it was political in some way. The case was barely three hours old.
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