The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

  “It was a give-and-take, wasn’t it?” he asked. “She got what she was looking for. You would’ve let her have it for free, but she gave you something back. She told you why she needed it.”

  “And it helped—it really did,” Johnny said. “Knowing that it wasn’t just me. That there was something wrong with the world. That I could control it, even just a little.”

  He finished his drink. Carver had lost count of how many he’d gone through. But his face wasn’t flushed and his speech was sharp and perfect. It occurred to Carver that he might not be drinking anything stronger than mineral water.

  “There’s one more thing,” Carver said. “A request.”

  “All right.”

  Carver looked toward the fish tank. The bartender had his back to them. He was watching Dolphina as he polished the last of his glasses.

  “I want Sam to drive the car,” Carver said. “He and I, we get along just fine. But I can’t say the same about your other guys.”

  They got out of the limousine on Baker Street, across from the Palace of Fine Arts. Spotlights in the gardens lit the dome, and its reverse-image shimmered on the surface of the lagoon. They watched the limousine disappear, and then Mia turned to him.

  “You didn’t say where we’re really going.”

  “I didn’t want them to know,” he said.

  He gestured toward the marina, which began across the street from them.

  “When I was a kid, I had a friend who lived over there on Bay Street. His dad’s pushing ninety now. But if we knock in the middle of the night, he’ll let us in.”

  “It’s not a place they’d think to look?”

  “He’s not family,” Carver said. “We don’t email, don’t talk on the phone. I come now and then, see how he’s doing. Bring groceries, make dinner. That kind of thing.”

  “You must have been close, to stay in touch so long.”

  Carver shook his head. They hadn’t stayed in touch the entire time. He started walking with her along Baker Street. There were stray dogs ahead of them, but there was no traffic.

  “It was fifteen years ago,” he said. “Henry sent me a note. He’d heard I was a homicide inspector. Maybe he saw something in the paper. He thought we could meet now and then. Discuss cases.”

  “He was a detective?”

  “He was the chief medical examiner. But when I was a kid, he had to resign. He’d made a mistake—a bad one.”

  People had died, including an assistant ME and three cops. Even fifty years on, he was a pariah. Out of the entire San Francisco Police Department, only Jenner knew of Carver’s friendship with Dr. Henry Newcomb.

  “If someone tracks us there, he’ll get hurt,” Mia said.

  “Henry’s seen hurt. He can handle himself.”

  “All right,” Mia said. “If there’s nothing else.”

  It was the only place Carver could think to go. Every hotel would ask for an ID except the shooting galleries in the Tenderloin. Carver didn’t know who or what was hunting them, but if it wasn’t safe to talk on the phone or send an email, he wasn’t about to put their names into an online guest registry. And Mia would attract more attention in the Tenderloin than they needed.

  Carver led them between the silent row houses of the marina, then under the rhododendrons lining Divisadero. There was no tail that he could see, but he was thinking about what Johnny Wong had said. A bird might not be a bird anymore. And what about rats? There were plenty of them, sliding along the street gutters. If he worried too much about what he couldn’t control, he’d never get anywhere. So he led them to Henry’s house.

  Carver climbed the steps and knocked. Mia stood next to him, facing the dark street.

  “Will we wake him?” she asked.

  “If we have to.”

  But it didn’t sound as if they’d woken him. Carver could hear him coming. It was three in the morning, and the neighborhood was as still as the dead streets around Calvin Tran’s garage. Carver heard the creak of old floorboards, the arthritic gait. Then the locks were turning. Four deadbolts and two chains. The door opened a crack and there was a sliver of Henry’s face. The oxygen tube ran across his cheek and under his nose. The rest of it was hidden behind the door.

  “Ross—are you in trouble?”

  “I need help.”

  “You better come in.”

  He stepped back, pulling the door open, and then he saw Mia. She didn’t move at all, but Henry looked as if he’d taken a blow to his gut. He took four steps back, knocking a stack of books from the entry table. Carver went through the door and took hold of Henry’s arm and shoulder.

  “Take it easy,” Carver said. “You’ve got to breathe.”

  Henry looked at him as he recovered, his nose struggling against the oxygen tube. Finally, when he could breathe well enough to speak, he turned to Mia.

  “Miss Westcott,” Henry whispered. “You were never supposed to come here. You need to get inside. Right now.”

  28

  AT FIRST, CARVER wasn’t sure what Mia would do. She looked as if she might bolt down the steps and then flee up the street. He was ready to chase her, if it came to that. She was frozen as she weighed the danger. Henry pushed himself back up and brushed Carver away from him. He held out his hand.

  “Mia, please,” he said. “You can’t be out on the streets. Not like that. They’re looking for you. They must know who you are by now.”

  “Henry,” Carver said. “What is this?”

  “And the cameras, they’re everywhere,” Henry went on.

  If he’d heard Carver at all, he didn’t care. He was focused entirely on Mia.

  “If one caught your face just right, don’t you know they’d have you in a minute?”

  Mia looked once more at the street. Carver didn’t understand what was passing between Henry and Mia, but he knew what Mia was thinking. She couldn’t run from this. There was no distance she could travel that would take her safely beyond its reach. She wanted her life back, but the only way toward the past was by pushing forward. She stepped through the door and Henry closed it behind her. He threw the deadbolts and hung the chains.

  Mia walked out of the entry hall and into the drawing room. There were bay windows facing the street. She pulled the curtains closed, then stood before one of the stuffed chairs facing the fireplace.

  “I don’t understand,” Carver said. “You know each other?”

  “She doesn’t know me,” Henry said. “We’ve never met.”

  “But you know who she is.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Mia said. “He’s George’s man in San Francisco. There was someone who gave the signal when George wanted to reach me. Someone who watched for my sign, if I had something to send.”

  Carver looked from Mia to his old friend. Henry was shuffling into the drawing room. He wore heavy wool socks under his dressing robe. The oxygen cylinder was inside a black canvas satchel strapped around his waist.

  “Is that true, Henry?”

  “I didn’t know him as George,” Henry said. “He had a different name for me. But otherwise . . .”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why the hell would I tell you a thing like that?” Henry said.

  “You didn’t trust me?”

  Henry slowly sat in the chair opposite Mia.

  “You’d have thought I was crazy, and that was too much of a risk. Then you’d stop coming, and I needed the information.”

  “About my cases.”

  “One more way to keep our fingers on the pulse,” Henry said.

  “How long have you known?”

  “About the devices?” Henry asked. “Decades. Thirty-nine years. I found out a decade after I left the ME.”

  “How did you find them?” Mia asked.

  She sat down, using no more than an inch of her seat’s cushion.

  “Lawyers,” Henry said. “Plaintiffs’ lawyers, guys with money to burn. They hired me to find a link between brain lesions and prescription d
rugs. These patients, they’d all died showing Creutzfeldt-Jakob symptoms ​—”

  “Say that again?” Carver asked.

  “It’s a degenerative neurological disorder,” Mia said. “A prion disease—it turns your brain into sponge.”

  “There were two clusters of people with symptoms,” Henry said. “But they didn’t test positive for any prion disease. So the lawyers were looking for anything and anyone to pin it on.”

  “Where?” Mia asked. “The clusters, where were they?”

  “One was near Death Valley. The other one was up north. A village in Humboldt County. The sorts of places you’d go if you wanted to test something dangerous.”

  “What did you find?” Mia asked.

  “I didn’t do MRIs,” Henry said. “George showed me yours, and they’re the best pictures we have. I didn’t have anything like that. I was running tissue samples through a mass spectrometer, looking for drug metabolites bound to the lesion sites. But I was finding things that shouldn’t be in the brain. Shouldn’t be in the human body in the concentrations I was seeing.”

  “Like what?” Carver asked.

  “Rare metals—tantalum, niobium. Stuff you see in superconductors and electronics. I knew something was there, but I didn’t know what. I’m sure Mia can guess what I did.”

  “You started prepping samples for an electronic microscope. You wanted to see it with your own eyes.”

  Henry nodded and looked at the lithograph above the fireplace. It was a signed Magritte, The Treachery of Images. Carver knew he used to keep it in his office. He also knew that in his bedroom, Henry had a framed Laurent. A view from Angel Island, done in oils. He didn’t keep it where visitors could see it, where they might ask him how he’d come to own it.

  No one came by a Laurent lightly.

  “Mass spectrometry is blind,” Henry said. “It’s just numbers and graphs. I wanted to see it, wanted to know what I was dealing with—I’ve still got it, the first one I found. It’s here, in the house.”

  “You found one of the spheres,” Carver said.

  “They weren’t as round back then. They’ve evolved. They’ve gotten smaller, and they’ve gotten better. Someone must have worked out the early problems, because those clusters—the people dying of lesions—you don’t see those anymore.”

  “Or they got better at covering them up,” Mia said.

  “Or that,” Henry said. He looked at Carver. “It isn’t magic. It’s not like they drifted down from space. They built them in a lab and let them loose. We didn’t know what they were for until later, when MRIs showed us what they tapped in to. Now we know. It’s just greed—pure greed.”

  They were in Henry’s kitchen, sitting around the breakfast table. Carver had made coffee, letting Mia tell their story as he worked. When she was done, he poured a mug for each of them and passed them around. She stirred cream and sugar into hers, then drank it down all at once.

  “What happened to George?” she asked Henry. “They got him, didn’t they?”

  He nodded.

  “I saw a pair of stories in the news,” Henry said. “The first was a day before they got Hadley. A man—a neurosurgeon—was missing in New York. And then, a week later, a body in the Meadowlands.”

  Henry’s nose was red where the oxygen tube chafed at it, and his eyes were tired. What little hair he had left was as white as new paper. But he was strong, still. Carver had no doubt that he would have checked Mia’s window every day, would have relayed messages and gone to the dead drop in Golden Gate Park. He’d never hidden his disappointment with the world, and now Carver understood that it wasn’t just the idle talk of a bitter man. Henry hadn’t lost hope that he could make things better. That there was time to amend his mistakes.

  “You’re sure it was George?” Mia asked.

  “There was a name,” Henry said. “The stories had a name. I hadn’t heard it, but I had a bad feeling. I looked him up online and found a picture.”

  “You knew where Mia was,” Carver said. “And that she was in danger. Why didn’t you warn her?”

  “The moment they got Hadley, Mia knew the danger,” Henry said, and she was nodding before he was done. “And if they got George, their next jump would be me—because we talked directly.”

  “If you’d tried to warn me,” Mia said, “you might have just led them to me. And if they knew about me but not you, it could’ve worked the other way. It was the right thing—and what were we supposed to do?”

  “Another thing helped,” Henry said. He looked at Carver. “I knew who lived across the hall. That made it easier.”

  “Which was no coincidence, was it?” Carver asked.

  Now he realized, finally, what had happened. Everything had been set up from the beginning.

  “You and George did this,” he said. “You put her next to me for a reason.”

  Henry stalled before he answered. He picked up his coffee and took a sip, then set it down and stirred more cream into it.

  “I don’t know what George was thinking,” he said. “It wasn’t his call. But I know what I thought. You’re a homicide inspector. We knew they killed people to keep their secrets. The chances of you running into this were close to one hundred percent. I thought it could be another way in.”

  Carver turned to Mia, who was studying the undissolved sugar at the bottom of her mug.

  “Did you know that?” he asked her. “That I was part of your job?”

  “Ross—everything I’ve told you has been true.”

  “You’re not answering the question.”

  “I never lied to you. And I never did anything to put you in harm’s way.”

  Carver couldn’t look at her. He put his hand on Jenner’s briefcase, which lay on the table between them. He knew they were watching him. Watching to see if he could set Jenner aside and focus. To see if he would accept the role they’d chosen for him, if he could believe what they were telling him. He hadn’t been able to cross that line for Mia because he’d only just met her. But he’d known Henry his entire life. He was an old man now, bent with regret. But he wasn’t a liar. The only thing that kept him going was his honesty.

  “You asked why I didn’t tell you,” Henry said. “But it was the same for all of us. We only get recruited when we’ve already joined. When there’s no other choice.”

  “Recruited to what?” Carver asked. “What did you make me join?”

  “A good cause,” Henry said. “At least, what’s left of it.”

  Something touched Henry’s eyes for a moment, and then bled away. Carver couldn’t be sure what it had been. He hadn’t seen Henry Newcomb smile in fifty years, so he doubted it was that.

  “Open the briefcase,” Henry said. “Find out what Johnny Wong gave us.”

  Mia lowered the blinds at the kitchen window and Henry dimmed the light. Carver pushed their coffee mugs to the side and opened the envelope that Johnny Wong’s men had put into Jenner’s briefcase.

  There was a single piece of paper inside. A photograph printed from an online news article, blown up to fit the page. Seven people stood on a low stage in a hotel ballroom. Two men were shaking hands for the camera, one of them holding a small wood and brass plaque. The men and woman behind them on the dais appeared to be clapping. Someone had drawn a circle around one of the faces in the back row. That would be Alex, the man who’d approached Johnny Wong for the Laurent job.

  There was nothing incriminating about the photograph. It was just an awards ceremony. Yet Hadley Hardgrave had died for this, because of what Johnny Wong had told her. He could tie Alex and the man holding the plaque to the Laurent job, and to twelve murders. But that wasn’t all. Add what Hadley knew, and it could stop the world mid-spin. The paintings hadn’t been about money. The man pulling the strings had more than he could ever spend. The Laurents had been gifts for a job well done, for work that had infected and darkened the world.

  Carver laid the photo on the table, then took a step back so Mia and Henry could study
it. After a moment, Mia pulled away and turned to him. Henry was still bending close, holding himself against the table’s edge with both hands. His eyes wouldn’t focus past a few inches.

  “I don’t understand it,” Mia said. “I mean, I see the man Johnny Wong circled—Alex. And the one next to him is the man you knocked out—he killed Hadley. But who are the rest of these people?”

  Henry shook his head, but Carver stepped back between them. He touched one of the faces in the back row.

  “This woman—Lieutenant Hernandez, from Homicide.”

  “Your boss?” Henry asked.

  “She suspended us. Pulled us off the case.”

  He moved his finger to touch the head of the man who’d just presented the plaque.

  “This is Lyndon Ivies. Nine years ago, he’d just gotten on to the police commission. There’s seven commissioners, but it’s like Hernandez always says—only one of them matters. Ivies.”

  “And the other people?” Mia asked.

  “This guy, in the back, he was a federal judge. Dead six years. Next to him, that was the President of the University of California. I forget his name. I think it was Thomas Skidmore. He cut the ribbon when we opened the new joint forensics lab. He shook my hand.”

  “Is that who I think it is, getting the award?” Henry asked. He was squinting through his glasses. “My eyes aren’t what they were.”

  “That’s Sheldon Lassen.”

  “The Sheldon Lassen?” Mia asked.

  “There’s only one I know about,” Carver said. “I met him, too. Same day as Skidmore—it was Lassen’s company that built the forensics lab.”

  “Ønske,” Henry said. “It makes sense.”

  Henry unzipped his belt pack and twisted the knob on his oxygen bottle to give himself more of the gas.

  “It has a medical division,” Mia said. “Laboratory equipment. Pharmaceutical research.”

  Carver looked at the photograph. Sheldon Lassen was wearing a pinstriped suit and a black bow tie. His curly hair was silver-gray and went past his collar. He looked like a philanthropist, the kind of man used to accepting awards and cutting ribbons. But he’d stolen an entire collection of Bridget Laurent’s best work, and in doing so had paid for twelve deaths. The man standing behind him would eventually film himself killing Hadley Hardgrave, who had discovered Lassen’s greatest secret. She had followed the trail from the Laurent job to the things eating through her mind. She’d known that if she solved one crime, she’d solve the other. None of this would have been enough for Carver to get a warrant. But Hernandez had taken care of that problem by suspending him. He didn’t need a warrant.