Just a few months back, she had detected a pair of rubber-soled sneakers sliding through the second-floor kitchen window overlooking the alley behind the store. The intruder had made a daring leap from the roof of the alley Dumpster, giving him a precarious finger-hold grip on the window’s exterior ledge. Dangling down the side of the building, the young City Hall intern had managed to push open the unlocked windowpane and pull himself inside.
Isabella’s shoulders stiffened with disapproval. The antique shop wasn’t the only target of the intern’s extracurricular investigations.
It was this persistent snooping, she suspected, that had led to Spider’s downfall. Somewhere along the way, he had unearthed a secret that was meant to stay hidden.
• • •
CONTEMPLATIVE, ISABELLA RETURNED her attention to the art studio across the street.
Monty’s lanky silhouette could still be seen storming about the open room. With the picture frame now thoroughly demolished from his frenzied stomping, he threw his hands up and clasped them over his head.
As Isabella studied the scene, her extraordinary vision honed in on an item that her human had, predictably, missed.
A vaporous being, not discernible to human eyes, trailed two steps behind the tormented artist, energetically keeping pace with Monty’s agitated gait.
It was the spiritual presence of the young man who had been viciously slain two months earlier. He was dressed in the same style of clothes he’d worn during his breakin to the Green Vase: a long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of worn blue jeans, a baseball cap pulled down over his dark-skinned forehead, and high-top canvas sneakers.
The bridge of Isabella’s nose crinkled and her ears turned sideways, an outward expression of her inner bafflement. Some answers eluded even her cunning insight.
After much thought and analysis, she couldn’t figure out what Spider’s ghost was doing in Jackson Square—or why he had chosen to haunt the city’s soon-to-be inaugurated interim mayor.
The Reporter
Chapter 7
YESTERDAY’S NEWS
SAN FRANCISCO’S DAILY newspaper occupied an Art Deco–style building at the corner of Fifth and Mission. A square tower ridged with streamlined piping rose from the grimy front entrance. Just above street level, a series of small reliefs depicted vintage scenes of printing and reporting.
Decades of pollution and rain had grayed the stone facade. The aging structure was as much of a relic as the Linotype presses it had once housed.
The faded retro design seemed to fit right in with the surrounding neighborhood’s mix of auto body shops, secondhand thrift stores, seedy hotels, and industrial warehouses. The bus stop shelter across the street was scarred with countless spray paint markings. Makeshift cardboard tents had been pushed up against the back side of the shelter’s plastic sheeting, the temporary home to a rotating pool of vagrants. Scattered trash littered the sidewalk, and a stale stench of sweat and cannabis hung in the air.
A less discerning eye might have recoiled from this grim setting. But for Hoxton Finn, one of the city’s veteran reporters, the newspaper’s offices couldn’t have been situated in a better location.
The building was eminently functional, blessedly lacking the so-called improvements that often came with modern-day infrastructure. Automatic lighting systems that flicked on and off as a person entered and exited a room annoyed him to no end.
As for temperature controls, the heat that emanated from the building’s network of ancient water pipes was more than sufficient. He would rather work from a cardboard box by the bus stop than behind a sealed window in a room pumped with central air.
In terms of convenience, the spot was unmatched. One block south of Market, the paper’s offices were only a short walk to both City Hall and an underground station for the BART and Muni lines. Multiple cabstands were within a few minutes’ reach. Hox could easily get anywhere he needed to go with minimal cost and hassle.
The gritty scene that played out each day near the building’s front steps was, in his opinion, one of the office’s highlighting features.
There was no risk the place would ever be described as pretty.
• • •
AFTER MORE THAN twenty-five years of reporting, Hoxton Finn’s broad shoulders and chiseled chin were recognized throughout the city. Taxi drivers, policemen, street vendors, and bankers knew him on sight—and everyone called him Hox. He was a fixture, an eccentric in a town that venerated caricature.
The reporter brushed all notion of celebrity aside. Divorced with no children, he preferred his own company to that of others. Gruffly succinct, he was direct in his questioning and sparing in his follow-up, a no-nonsense man living in a nonsense-filled world.
The juxtaposition was often jarring—for both sides.
For the last several weeks, however, the community had been spared the brunt of Hox’s caustic jabs. He’d spent every waking hour sequestered inside the newspaper’s offices, barricaded behind the locked door of a third-floor conference room.
Piles of news clippings, Internet printouts, files, and handwritten notes were spread across the room’s wooden table. A ceramic mug emblazoned with the logo of the local baseball team occupied one of the table’s few open spaces. The residue from several pots of coffee stained the cup’s interior.
Insulated from phone calls, drop-bys, and the other distracting nuisances that typically occurred at his assigned desk in the newsroom, Hox had devoted his full attention to the table’s accumulated papers and files, stopping only for the occasional takeout delivery or a nap on the floor.
The reporter’s clothes bore the wrinkled fatigue of the most recent all-night session. A tweed jacket had been tossed over a nearby chair, and the sleeves of his collared shirt were rolled up to his wrists. His denim blue jeans sagged around his waist, the fabric tired and loosened from lengthy wear.
Rubbing his temples, Hox shut his eyes and groaned. It had been far too long since his last shower. A lawn of peppered gray stubble had sprouted across the lower half of his face, and he smelled almost as fragrant as the homeless men camped outside.
A migraine pounded inside his forehead, knots of tension strafed the muscles in his neck and lower back, and his left foot throbbed with pain.
The last ache emanated from the amputated stub of his big toe. It was an old injury, the result of an inadvertent mishap with a Komodo dragon during a visit to the Los Angeles zoo a few years back.
He’d been accompanied by his now ex-wife, a famous movie star best known for her role in a box office thriller set in San Francisco. They’d been fighting nonstop for months, and the relationship was on the verge of a breaking point.
Nevertheless, the star had used her celebrity to finagle a behind-the-scenes visit with the showcase lizard. It was a special anniversary present for her worldly reporter husband, a man for whom it was impossible to select gifts. The toe-chomping melee that followed had resulted in an emergency room visit, an unsuccessful toe reattachment surgery, several weeks of sensational tabloid stories, and the eventual filing of divorce papers.
Hox had never blamed the movie star for the injury, but whenever he felt a shot of pain in his foot, his already dour disposition tended to darken.
It reminded him of what he had lost—far more than just a portion of his toe.
• • •
WITH A YAWN, Hox opened his eyes and stared bitterly at the piles scattered across the table, a clutter that represented the collective intel on the Spider Jones murder.
He’d started with the newspaper’s findings and added on from there. Copies of the police reports took up one corner of the table. The files he’d bullied out of reporters from competing news agencies had landed on another. Internet printouts on any number of random queries that had struck him as potentially useful filled in the rest.
Hox had reviewed each item multiple times. He had considered the evidence from every possible angle and drawn out endlessly varying scenarios. But the anticipate
d insight had yet to appear. He was no closer to finding an answer than when he had started this exercise.
There was still something missing.
Throughout his long career, the veteran reporter had covered the entire range of issues related to state and local politics. A couple of overseas sabbaticals had taken him through war zones, political unrest, and countries wracked with famine. He had seen it all: the whimsical, the bizarre, and the totally outlandish. He’d experienced up close the worst greed, corruption, murder, and brutality had to offer.
But never had a story gripped him with such an intense fervor.
He was immersed in an unsolved murder—one in which he was personally involved.
Chapter 8
THE SPIDER FILES
HIS MIND INTENSELY focused, Hox leaned back in his chair. Turning away from the table, he propped his sock-covered feet on the nearest heating pipe and stretched his arms up over his head.
The horrifying murder of the young intern had shaken everyone who worked at City Hall. For Hox, who spent several hours each week inside the building covering the city’s political beat, the incident had been particularly disturbing.
The night of the young man’s death, mere minutes before the attack, Hox had passed the doomed intern on the central marble staircase. The reporter was on the descent, preparing to head home, while the intern was climbing up toward the ceremonial rotunda.
He was likely the last person, other than the murderer, to have seen Spider Jones alive.
• • •
HOX QUICKLY BECAME obsessed with the crime, its troubling anomalies, and the related reams of unanswered questions.
First off, why Spider? Why had such a nonthreatening, seemingly unimportant person been targeted for such a violent stabbing? What had the intern done to attract that level of vicious rage?
By all accounts, Spider was an affable young man, good looking and with an easy sense of humor. There was no indication he had any enemies. He was enthusiastic about his work, but not in competition with anyone else at City Hall. His position in the mayor’s office was so far down the totem pole, few people even knew who he was—that is, until after his murder.
What had triggered the killer’s attack? Had Spider simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Hox stared at the conference room ceiling, his mind rehashing the same outline of issues and concerns that he had reasoned through countless times before.
Shifting from motive to the matter of the two primary suspects, Hox reached for his file on Sam Eckles.
“The frog guy,” he muttered as he riffled through the pages to a photocopy of Sam’s driver’s license. A ruddy-faced man with tousled hair, ragged beard, and a slightly dazed expression peered out from the paper.
Sam’s ten-year stint as a City Hall janitor had been relatively uneventful. Despite the overlap in their locations, Hox had never engaged with the man. He had only a vague recollection of the hulking red-haired brute in coveralls pushing a refuse cart.
The building’s infamous frog invasion that had led to Sam’s termination, however, was a far more vivid memory.
Hox thunked his thumb against a newspaper clipping covering the story.
“The slimy critters were all over the place,” the reporter groaned, remembering the scene.
A ribbiting, croaking mass of several thousand amphibians had surged into City Hall from an improvised tadpole farm in the basement, covering the marble floor beneath the main rotunda. During the height of the occupation, frogs could be seen lounging on the central marble staircase, meandering down hallways, and loitering in the rest rooms. It had taken weeks to get them cleared out.
Hox shook his head, cringing at the recollection. He didn’t share the frog phobia that had caused the current lieutenant governor, then San Francisco’s sitting mayor, to suffer a state of near mental collapse, but after the City Hall invasion, Hox had seen enough amphibians to last him a lifetime.
“Sam Eckles,” Hox summed up, slapping the file shut. “Clearly an odd bird.”
But was he a knife-wielding killer? Grimacing, Hox found himself circling back to the same tired conclusion.
“I just don’t see it.”
• • •
“NEXT UP, JAMES Lick,” Hox grunted as he switched to the slim folder containing the few details known about the second murder suspect. If Sam had gotten into trouble, Hox was willing to bet James Lick was the instigator.
The only picture in the file was a black-and-white image of a man who had died in 1876.
“Not the current Lick.” Hox frowned. “Obviously.”
The lean face and strong hawkish nose belonged to a San Francisco millionaire who had made his fortune in real estate during the Gold Rush boom. An eccentric, notoriously miserly gent, Lick never forgot the penniless years he endured before landing his windfall. Even after becoming one of the wealthiest men in California, Lick continued to wear cheap threadbare suits and to shun luxuries like expensive restaurants, which he deemed frivolous and unnecessary.
Lick’s name was still prominent throughout the Bay Area, commemorated on freeways, high schools, the San Jose observatory that his estate endowed, and, most recently, as the namesake for a North Beach fried chicken joint.
Hox held up the photo, staring at the man’s steely eyes. For his money, the original James Lick would have made a good murder suspect. Surely the man who hid behind this mask was just as menacing.
“I can only guess,” Hox mused grouchily. “No one knows who you are.”
Even though the Lick restaurant had been wildly popular during its short North Beach run, the proprietor had kept his real identity a secret. A grungy fellow in ripped-up overalls had handled the counter operations. The man behind the famous fried chicken recipe, the one responsible for obtaining the diner’s requisite licenses and lease, remained an enigma.
Hox glanced down at the open file in his lap. The only other paper in the folder was a green-colored flyer that had accompanied the restaurant’s takeout packages. The flyer provided a brief historical background on the millionaire miser James Lick. There was no reference to the man behind the alias.
Hox tossed the second sheet back into the file with disgust.
“I never liked fried chicken,” he groused bitterly.
Once more resting his head against the back of the chair, Hox reflected on a last Lick-related item. In the police report, which he could now recite by memory, there was no mention of how the fried chicken Lick had been matched with the description of the second fugitive, an elderly man with thinning white hair and short rounded shoulders.
Hox blew out a frustrated sigh. “Yet another missing piece of information.”
• • •
THE REPORTER GAZED silently at the ceiling, the somber lines deepening in his weary face as he reached a last question, one that bothered him more than all the others.
After leaving the empty supervisors’ chambers, Hox must have passed within feet of the murderer. The villain would have been lurking in the shadows, knife in hand, as Hox crossed through the ceremonial rotunda and started down the staircase. He could have easily been caught up in the attack.
The face of the grinning intern flashed through Hox’s head.
Why had he been spared Spider’s fate?
Chapter 9
THE MINUTES BEFORE THE MURDER
AS HAPPENED EVERY time Hox reviewed the details of the Spider Jones case, the analysis inevitably led him to revisit his own firsthand account of the minutes before the murder.
The reporter had been extensively debriefed by the police both on the night of the crime and in the days that followed. He had repeated his story on multiple occasions for the investigating detectives. In his mind, he had played the sequence over and over again.
No matter how many times he ran through the short scene, he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d forgotten something from his brief, but now crucial, interaction with the young intern.
As Hox sa
t in the makeshift war room, sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, and disheveled, he envisioned the episode once more, letting each step of the memory unfold in slow motion.
• • •
FOR ALMOST A half hour following the conclusion of the supervisors’ meeting, Hox had sat in the empty chambers, staring down at the vacant podium as he pondered the board’s mayoral selection. He’d remained in the public arena–style seating long after everyone else had left, alone—or so he thought—with his thoughts.
“Montgomery Carmichael,” he’d groaned in disbelief. “How could they have picked Montgomery Carmichael?”
Finally, he got up from his chair and began a brooding march out of the building. He’d spent much of the day chasing the renegade alligator all over town, and the stub of his left toe felt as if it were on fire. That, combined with the appointment of the most ill-qualified mayor in the history of San Francisco, had put the reporter in a particularly foul mood.
Still muttering under his breath, Hox turned from a second-floor hallway and stepped into the ceremonial rotunda. A glint of light reflected off the Harvey Milk bust, and Hox paused to look at the slain supervisor’s smiling bronze face. He could almost hear the sculpted metal figure laughing at the ridiculous situation that had unfolded in the supervisors’ chambers.
Grumbling bitterly, Hox started the descent down the marble stairs. Lurching from one slick step to the next, he looked out across the dimly lit interior.
The huge crowd that had attended the supervisors’ meeting had dispersed, quickly emptying out of the building, and the lighting system had been switched to its reduced nighttime setting.
Despite the vast windows along the upper portions of the north and south walls, the night’s dense fog masked the moon and stars, leaving only the eerie glow from a few scattered lamps inside the darkened structure.
Hox paused as a slim figure entered the main rotunda, crossed to the bottom of the stairs, and began to jog effortlessly up the steep steps. It was a young man in blue jeans, high-top sneakers, and a T-shirt. He wore a baseball cap pulled down over his brow.
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