The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  “I thought the family and the police were keeping it quiet,” Henry said. “Anyway, he was a software engineer. Last time anyone saw him alive was at the bar in the Drake Hotel. Nice, upscale kind of place.”

  “And the first guy I looked at, what about him?”

  Caleb already knew this man’s first name from talking to the bartender at House of Shields, but he couldn’t tell Henry that. He wanted to help Henry, and he didn’t mind helping Kennon, but he’d drawn a circle around Emmeline in his mind. A circle that contained everything about her, about their relationship. He didn’t understand why it was there. Maybe Emmeline had slipped into his thoughts with her promises, set its boundaries with her song in the dark, and sealed it with the press of her body against his. He’d lie to his best friend before he’d risk her.

  “Richard Salazar,” Henry said. “Partner at a law firm on Market Street.”

  “Makes it easier, having names.”

  “You get over it.”

  Caleb let that go without saying anything. Even Henry had cracks. He’d seen that for himself. The work was getting to Henry, putting him on edge. Things like having to do an autopsy on a ten-year-old girl’s head. Henry’s daughter was about that age. And for that, Caleb wanted to give his oldest friend something. Wanted to give him facts he could use to put at least one problematic case to rest. He tried to think how to explain it.

  He sat tracing his fingers in the woodgrain patterns of the table. Outside, a gull landed on the rail and tucked one of her feet up into her feathers, out of the rain. Caleb watched the gull through the fogged glass, and then looked back at the table.

  “Same person who murdered Richard Salazar murdered Charles Crane,” Caleb said. He looked up and saw Henry was watching him closely. “It was harder to trace in Crane, but the chemical signatures were identical—vecuronium, followed by a wallop of thujone. Three or four hours of torture. Intense pain. Then another shot of vecuronium to get him in the water.”

  Henry nodded.

  “This means the others are probably linked too.”

  “Yeah.”

  They sat listening to the rain hitting the decks and running down the sloped windows of the pilothouse.

  “So we’ll need to run the tests on the others. Either send Marcie to your lab, or have you come in and look over Marcie’s shoulder. But what’re we doing on the boat?” Henry said. “How are we supposed to find the dump sites?”

  “Crane’s skin samples.”

  “What about them?”

  “You said he had hex bolt marks across his back, right?”

  Henry nodded.

  “Marks like that, he’d have to get wedged under something pretty quickly after he went in the water?” Caleb asked.

  “That’s right. Before he went into rigor. He stiffened up around the bolts. Like a wax mold, cooling down. And he had livor mortis—his blood settled and left bruise marks on the side of his body facing down. Most bodies in the water don’t do that. They stay moving, the blood doesn’t settle. So if he had livor mortis, he was wedged under something early on. Within the first hour.”

  Caleb pulled a sheaf of paper from his backpack and set it on the dinette table between them. Printouts from his lab.

  “Which means,” Caleb said, “if we can figure where he got stuck, we’ll know he went into the water somewhere nearby. The bay’s got currents, but they’re not random. We can map them, come up with a probable entry point. Wherever the victims are going in the water is probably close to where they’re getting tortured. Somewhere safe for the killer. Maybe his house. Maybe just a place he uses.”

  Henry glanced down at the paperwork. It was mostly charts and graphs. Tables of chemical symbols.

  “What’d you find?”

  “High concentrations of sodium hydroxide and pure aluminum. You know what those are, together?”

  Henry shook his head.

  “The two most common ingredients in drain cleaner,” Caleb said.

  “Okay.”

  “It gets even better. His skin—the silt packed in the pores of his skin—had traces of synthetic estrogen and progestogen. Also the metabolites of acetaminophen, fluoxetine, and citalopram. Now, tell me—where would you find drain cleaner, birth control pills, Tylenol, and the two most popular antidepressants in America, plus a hundred other drugs and common household cleaners?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “It’s easy,” Caleb said. “Sewage treatment plants. The outflow vents.”

  Caleb reached into his backpack and pulled out his atlas of the bay. He set it on the table but didn’t open it.

  “They treat the sewage, but only biologically,” Caleb said. “Not chemically. The effluent’s mostly sterile. But if you take a birth control pill and a Tylenol every morning, and your boyfriend’s on Prozac, and sometimes you pour Drano down your kitchen sink—all that stuff goes into the bay pretty much the same way it went down the toilet or the drain. And that’s probably why Crane didn’t get torn up by crabs. He was stuck in a biological dead zone.”

  Henry took the printouts and leafed through the pages. He pushed them back across the dinette table to Caleb.

  “So we’re cruising to sewage treatment plants?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “I got them mapped out. There’s five within ten miles of the Golden Gate Bridge, on the current paths. If we get silt samples, I can match one of them to the profile I got from Crane. Each one’s got a different signature, I bet.”

  “Because the people at the other end of the pipe flush different stuff.”

  “Exactly,” Caleb said. “Say a hundred thousand women taking birth control live in houses connected to the South San Francisco plant. So that effluent will show high marks for estrogen. Maybe the Treasure Island plant has less than a hundredth of that, but everybody there’s on Zoloft. Who knows, until we take the samples? But I bet one of the five samples will match what I found in Crane’s skin.”

  Henry took the atlas and opened it to the page Caleb had marked with a sticky note. He studied it awhile, then slid the book back across the table.

  “Sewage samples,” Henry said. “On my day off. That’s great. What’d you bring for lunch?”

  “Clam chowder. Sourdough rolls.”

  Henry gave that tolerant smile of his.

  “Put it in the fridge.”

  It was too cold and wet to go up on the flying bridge, so Henry worked from the inside steering station. He pushed the transmission into forward and they wound out of the marina, going no more than three knots. They passed an empty dock draped in sleeping sea lions, then motored along the side of Pier 39 until they cleared the breakwaters and entered the open bay.

  “Where to?” Henry asked.

  “We’ll start with the Southeast San Francisco plant, then work around the bay counterclockwise.”

  “Down near Islais Creek?”

  “That’s right.”

  Islais Creek was south of China Basin and the AT&T ballpark, five nautical miles down the shoreline from Pier 39. When they were past the no-wake zone, Henry opened the throttle until Toe Tags pushed through the flat water at six knots. He steered southeast, parallel to Embarcadero Drive.

  “How’re you getting the bottom samples?” Henry asked.

  Caleb got his backpack from the bench at the dinette table and opened it. He’d tied an empty soup can to a two-hundred-foot length of parachute cord, and had used duct tape to fix a handful of lead weights to the can’s lip. He held it up.

  “When it hits the bottom, the weight should tip it so it digs in and fills with silt when I start pulling it up. If I bring it up nice and slow, the silt shouldn’t wash out.”

  Henry looked away from the window and studied the can and string Caleb was holding.

  “You make that all by yourself, or did NASA pitch in?”

  “This is all me.”

  “Amazing.”

  “I know. Want me to make some coffee?”

  “Now you’re talking.�
�

  Yerba Buena Island was less than a mile to port, but Caleb could see it only on the radar screen. The rain was coming heavily now, and Toe Tags was bobbing in low waves rolling up from the south. A pair of cormorants swimming on the rain-pocked swells saw the boat and dove beneath the surface at the same time.

  “When we get to the site, you know exactly where the effluent pipe is?”

  “Supposed to be about three hundred yards straight out from the mouth of the creek. Not too deep. Maybe eighty feet.”

  “I’ll try to hold in one spot. When you’re sampling, stand in the bow. Prop wash at the stern will screw you up.”

  Caleb nodded. They still had twenty minutes until they reached the creek’s mouth. Henry looked out the starboard windows and then out the stern windows, back along the industrial shoreline leading up to the bridge.

  “Long way to drift,” Henry said.

  “Tidal current runs this way. Straight north. Then it curves between North Beach and Alcatraz to head out to the Golden Gate.”

  “Still a long way.”

  “Some of the others are closer. But I thought it’d be better to get them all.”

  “So if I have to testify about it, I can say we checked them, ruled them out.”

  Caleb nodded. That had been exactly his thought. He knew how careful Henry was on the stand. He liked to show the jury the methodology he used, liked to impress them with the weight of skill and knowledge underlying his findings.

  The mouth of Islais Creek cut through an industrial wasteland, each bank lined in gray concrete and rusted iron. A huge sign on the shore faced out to the bay and announced, in red block letters: NO ANCHORING—UNDERWATER PIPE. Henry put the engine in neutral and they drifted up into the wind until they came to a stop. Then he gave pulses of power to the prop to hold their position.

  “What’s our depth?” Caleb asked.

  Henry glanced down at the depth sounder’s display.

  “Twenty-five meters.” He put his finger on the color display and traced the line of hazy green dots. “Looks like a soft bottom.”

  “Think what’s down there.”

  “Check this out,” Henry said. He traced a red blur on the depth sounder display. “That’s the pipe. Looks big enough to drive a bus through.”

  “We’re right on top of it?”

  Henry nodded and looked up from the display. “You got some latex gloves?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Try not to spill any of that shit on my nice clean deck.”

  The cold rain was blowing at an angle, so that it hit his face in spite of the hood. He went up to the bow and leaned over the water. Henry kept the boat aimed into the wind, steady over one spot. Caleb coiled the parachute cord in his hand, then tossed the can so that it hit the water ten feet in front of the bow. He let the thin rope pay out as the weighted can sank, feeding out line until loops of it floated on the water because the can was already at the bottom. Then he started to draw it in, pulling slowly and gently, hoping the lip of the can would tip into the silt and dredge along it before it started coming up.

  In a minute, he could see the can in the dark water under the bow pulpit, and then it was dangling in the air. He lifted the can up over the rail, poured off the water, and looked inside. There was an inch of black muck at the bottom. It smelled like dead fish. He took the glass vial from his pocket, slipped the rubber stopper out, and poured a teaspoon of the liquefied silt inside. Then he stopped the vial, put it back into his pocket, and dropped the can back into the water, shaking it on the end of the rope until it was clean.

  “Success?” Henry asked when Caleb stepped back into the warmth of the cabin and shut the door.

  “Yeah.” He took the sample from his pocket, showed it to Henry.

  “I’ll call Jacques Cousteau, let him know what we’ve accomplished here.”

  “Don’t forget the Patent and Trademark Office.”

  “You should label that vial.”

  “I brought stickers.”

  He sat at the dinette table and peeled off his gloves. Then he took the stickers and a marker from his backpack. Henry had put Toe Tags back into gear and was bringing her about.

  “Where to now?”

  “Northeast side of Treasure Island.”

  “All right.”

  “If we figure out where the bodies are getting dumped, what do you think Kennon and Garcia will do with it?” Caleb asked.

  “I don’t know. Outta my league. But I think they’ll take anything they can get. Talking to them, it sounds like they’re stuck.”

  “How’s that?”

  “These cases are hard—killers who murder people they don’t know,” Henry said. “There’s no link between any of the victims, no connection between the victims and the killer. No motive. No witnesses.”

  “None that are talking, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “If the killer’s meeting these people in bars, someone must’ve seen something. But Kennon hasn’t found anyone yet.”

  “The vecuronium is a solid lead. They running with that?”

  Henry nodded.

  “They are, but it’s slow. Checking every hospital, every pharmacy. See if there’s any missing. If anyone’s been getting it without a good reason.”

  “They think it’s a doctor?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Caleb hadn’t thought that much about it. But he nodded.

  “Doctors would be good suspects. Or nurses. A pharmacist, even. Not because of the knowledge it’d take—”

  “The knowledge is nothing. Anyone could figure that part out,” Henry said. “It’s the access.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Vecuronium’s not common anymore,” Henry said. “They’ve got better stuff for surgery.”

  “It’s still around.”

  “But you can’t just pick it up on the street. It’s not like there’s a black market for it. So it’s someone who’s got access to a hospital, or a pharmacy. It’s gotta be.”

  Caleb’s phone started to ring inside his pocket.

  “You wanna get that?” Henry asked.

  Caleb pulled it out and looked at the screen.

  “It’s Bridget. I better. I’ll go outside.”

  He stood on the aft deck, close to the back of the cabin, where he was out of the rain and wind. The wake was a trail of green and white froth leading across the dark water, the low swells rolling underneath it.

  Bridget was crying.

  He had the phone to his ear, holding it close so that he could hear her sobs, trying to discern if there were any words in there. She’d been crying since he answered the phone and he hadn’t heard her actually say anything yet. It had been almost two minutes.

  “Bridget?”

  “I—I don’t want—Caleb—”

  “Bridge?”

  “I miss you.”

  “Honey,” he whispered.

  “I can’t do this.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” he said. He wasn’t even sure what they were talking about. He was looking at the bay, the cold water the color of wet slate. He wondered how deep it was, how many bodies they were passing over. People nobody bothered to look for anymore.

  “I do. I have to—I just can’t. I miss you.”

  “Bridget, I don’t know—”

  “Tell me you love me. Don’t make me wait for it. Tell me.”

  “I do love you. You know that.”

  “Do you really?”

  She fell into a long series of sobs. He’d once read something that came back to him now. There was a pheromone in women’s tears, a chemical signal held over from some cave of prehistory, meant to be a subtle tug on the men it touched. It would be on her face and on her phone, would get onto her fingers when she wiped her cheeks, so that everything and everyone in contact with her would be brushed with the invisible hue of her loneliness. It would disperse like that, one hand to another, through the city. A single drop of ink spreading in clear water until the gla
ss goes dark.

  “Bridget,” he said, whispering. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I can’t do this, Caleb. I really can’t.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “This. What we’re doing now—what I’m doing. I thought I could, when I left. But now I don’t know.”

  He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He cupped his hand over the phone so the wind wouldn’t scream into the silence.

  “Caleb,” she whispered. “I thought about it. What you did. Maybe you did it the wrong way. Maybe you should have told me sooner. But I could get past it, because I think I know why you did it, what you were trying to save us from. I think— Are you even still there?”

  Finally, the silence stretched to a length even she couldn’t cross. She hung up.

  Caleb returned the phone to his pocket, but didn’t go back inside. He moved around to the side deck and faced into the rain, letting it wash him with its cold touch. But he knew nothing would clean away the thing he’d just done. She’d been holding her hand out, and even then, when she’d given him that chance, he’d been thinking of Emmeline.

  “You okay?”

  “I guess,” he said. He took off his raincoat and hung it on a peg next to the door. “It’s— I don’t know.”

  “Complicated?”

  “It’s more than that. It’s a fucking disaster. I don’t know what’s happening anymore.”

  He sat down again. They were about to pass under the eastern span of the Bay Bridge. The white tower, rising five hundred feet above the water, disappeared into low clouds.

  “You want, I can ask Vicki to—”

  “No,” Caleb said. “I mean, that’s nice of you. And I know she’d try. But I don’t think it’d help.”

  “You’re right.”

  Henry drained the last of his coffee and then pointed ahead. Parts of the old Treasure Island naval station were poking through the white-gray blur.

  “You said it’s on the northeast corner?”

  “Yeah. Here,” Caleb said. “I’ll get the chart.”

  The last stop, after samples from Oakland and Tiburon, was the Sausalito-Marin sanitary plant, a mile south of the Sausalito Ferry landing. By the time they found the end of the discharge pipe, it was half past three in the afternoon, and there would be only another hour of true light.