The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  “It targeted one thing. If the analyzer found something with a molecular weight of 637.73, the virus just tossed that out. So there’d just be a blank in the printed chart, like nothing was there at all.”

  “A dark spot in the spectrum,” Caleb said.

  “That’s right. A hole.”

  Caleb breathed out and looked at his car’s ceiling, running the math and adding the atomic weights until he’d built a molecule in his mind.

  “It’s vecuronium, isn’t it? The dark spot, 637.73, that’s vecuronium.”

  “You got it,” Henry said.

  “Holy shit.”

  “It’s bad,” Henry said. “I mean, Jesus Christ, he can get into my lab. In the basement of the police station.”

  Caleb put the phone back on speaker and started to drive again.

  “He was in my goddamn lab,” Henry repeated.

  “Are there suspects?”

  Henry coughed.

  “Everyone with an access card is a suspect.”

  “How many people is that?”

  “We don’t know,” Henry said. He was whispering, but his voice was edged with rage. “Every card’s supposed to have a unique code number—so you know who’s coming in and out. But someone in IT fucked up, and all the lab cards have the same code. And no one’s got a list of who got a card.”

  “Don’t you have security cameras?”

  “Sure we do, but this must’ve happened months ago, before the first killing. The cameras record on DVR, and those get overwritten every thirty days unless someone pulls it.”

  “You’re just finding all this out tonight?”

  “Like I said,” Henry whispered. “I’m in a pile of shit, and it’s over my head. The FBI’s been chewing me a new one the last two hours, and every time they take a break, they tag Garcia in.”

  “Kennon didn’t ask me anything about viruses,” Caleb said. “But I might’ve made things worse for you.”

  Henry breathed out.

  “What,” he said, slowly, “did you do?”

  “You told me I shouldn’t lie to him,” Caleb said.

  “Oh shit, Caleb.”

  “I mentioned what Marcie’s lab looked like. Compared it to mine. But he already knew I don’t see her socially. So obviously he wanted to know why I knew anything about her lab.”

  “So you told him we’re friends?”

  “That we went way back. And Henry—I think he recorded it.”

  “He was wired?”

  “I think so. And that’s not all. I’m sure he was there. Maybe for both—when they came for my dad, and when they found me. I don’t know what that changes.”

  It was the first time he’d spoken of what had happened that directly in more than twenty-five years. But it didn’t feel like a new turn. Every conversation he’d had with Henry in all that time, and every silence between them, had to carefully skirt those rocks.

  Caleb took a right on Geary and made it through two intersections before a red light caught him. He flicked on his windshield wipers and watched them sweep away the beads of rain, watched the water run in streamlets down the edge of the glass, catching the colors of the traffic light.

  “I thought that was sealed,” Henry finally said. “Or that they kept your name out of it. At least, the part about the hospital.”

  “That doesn’t mean people can’t talk about it. There are the articles, and there are people who know. But if Kennon’s who I think he is, it wouldn’t matter. Because he was there.”

  “Do you remember anything else?” Henry asked.

  “I remember everything about the hospital. Langley Porter.”

  “I meant from before that. And what happened right after.”

  “No,” Caleb said, flatly. “Now what?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. “If Kennon asks me what we’ve been up to, I’ll have to tell him. I might get taken off the case. I might—but that part’s not your problem. And if he asks me about the other thing—I don’t know.”

  “If he asks, just tell him,” Caleb said.

  “Tell him what?”

  “Whatever you think happened,” Caleb said.

  “Fine.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” Henry said. “Look, I gotta go. Garcia and the FBI guys are in there waiting on me. Kennon will be here any minute. Just . . . don’t call me for a while, okay? I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  Henry hung up. Caleb drove another five blocks, the glow of the cell phone screen lighting his face from its place on his lap. Finally the screen dimmed on its own.

  There was a good grocery store on Stanyan Street, across from the east end of Golden Gate Park. He wandered side streets for an hour until he got there, his thoughts descending through the full spectrum—Henry to Kennon to Bridget—before finally settling on Emmeline. He remembered the way she’d played the piano for him, holding back her voice as she sang so the words would remain a secret between them. If they were making love, if she needed to bite into his shoulder to soften the sounds of her pleasure, her voice would be that way.

  That was enough to hold him, a stake deep enough to keep his thoughts from straying back to Kennon. To Bridget. He needed that. A place to turn, a point of focus. Anything that could carry him away. Jameson and Berthe de Joux were good, but Emmeline was so much better for it. He thought of her arms around him, her slim body pressed against his. So little between them.

  When he got to the store, he parked and switched off the engine. He sat with his eyes closed, listening to the rain on the metal roof, thinking of the meal he’d cook for her. He took his time planning it, working through each step until he had the entire process. Then he got out of the car and buttoned his jacket against the light rain.

  He was almost to the half-circle of light spilling from the store’s glass front when three women exited the sliding door in a flowing knot, swift and graceful. They wore black cocktail dresses under their long coats, and each of them was carrying a bottle of wine. By the time he recognized them, he’d gone too far into the light to turn for the shadows without calling more attention to himself. He could already smell the tangle of their perfumes, could see the streetlights’ reflection in their hair and in the polish of their jewelry. They saw him, and their conversation ended as if a door had shut on it. They stopped, and stood looking at him. The one in the middle spoke.

  “Caleb? Do you remember me?”

  She gathered the lapels of her trench coat in her free hand and pulled them together beneath her throat. Then she looked at her friends and flicked her eyes ahead to their car. The two of them looked at her and then at Caleb, and then one of them started toward the car. The other girl looked at Caleb a moment longer, and then followed.

  When they were alone, Caleb nodded at her.

  “How are you, Paula?”

  She shrugged.

  “We’re going to see Bridget,” she said. She raised the bottle of wine, then lowered it. “A little party, at her studio.”

  “That’s good.”

  “That she has some company? Because she’s too fucked up to go out? Yeah. That’s good.”

  “Paula—”

  “I know what happened, the fight you had, okay? She told me. It wouldn’t have bothered a lot of girls. But Bridget’s different. For her? That was a deep cut.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and stepped back from her.

  “She couldn’t have told you everything,” he said. “Because she doesn’t know everything. And she never let me explain.”

  Paula shook her head.

  “It’s not just that. It’s everything.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How she wakes up and you’re not next to her? Because you went back to the lab? How even when you’re with her, sometimes you’re not— You know what I’m talking about, so don’t look at me like that. Don’t even think about looking at me like that.”

  “I’m not looking at you any way, Paula.”

>   She took a step toward him and pointed the base of the wine bottle at his chest.

  “And it’s not just what she told us. It’s what we told her.”

  “You told her what?”

  “Come on, Caleb. This isn’t 1950. You meet a stranger at a gallery opening, you don’t just move in with him. You get a background check first. And if you don’t do it, your friends will.”

  She stared at him, breathing out slowly. She’d lowered the wine bottle, but she was still holding it by its neck.

  “If you read those stories,” he said, “you know you didn’t get the whole thing. They have gaps, and they admit it.”

  Even here, with Paula confronting him, he was thinking about the holes in the spectrum. A virus on the San Francisco medical examiner’s mass spectrometer was inconceivable to him. There could only be a few dozen people in San Francisco who had the necessary skills to write a program like that, and he probably knew them all. Marcie Hensleigh and Joanne Tremont were both on the list.

  Paula leaned to look past him, and he turned to follow her line of sight. Her two friends had backed off about twenty feet. They stood under a dim streetlamp, in front of their car. Rain angled through the lamp’s hazy cone of light, and the girls stood with their coats bunched around them, watching Caleb. Their phone screens lit their faces. They were recording him, as if they thought he might strike out at Paula. He took a step away, to ruin their expectations.

  He couldn’t remember their names. But he was pretty sure the two of them had spent the night in front of his fireplace after one of Bridget’s gallery openings. Drunk and draped around each other, wrapped in the blankets he kept near the couch. They hadn’t thought there was anything wrong with him then, even if they had done a background check. Even if they had known they were houseguests of the late Caleb Ellis Sr.’s son.

  He nodded at them, and then turned back to Paula.

  “And besides,” he said, “those stories don’t have anything to do with me. They’re about something that happened to me.”

  “I didn’t say you did anything wrong,” she said. Her voice was low and calm, and her face softened as she spoke. She’d been angry before, but that was gone now. “You were a kid. Your dad—he did what he did. But Bridget had a right to know, okay? So I told her.”

  “Okay.”

  He was glad for the distance between them.

  “If it’d happened today, it would’ve been different,” she said. “You know? They wouldn’t have let you out of their sight. And then maybe at least the other thing wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Sure.”

  “But Bridget still needed to know.”

  “Jesus, Paula.”

  He started toward the store, but she stepped to her left and cut him off.

  “What do I tell Bridget?” she asked. “I’m going to see her in twenty minutes.”

  “Whatever you want. Clearly.”

  He went around her and into the store.

  When he came back to his house, he put the groceries away and then took Bridget’s paintings, carried them into the bedroom, and leaned them against the wall inside her empty closet. As if by shutting them away he could close off that part of his heart. Then he went into the kitchen, uncorked a Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc, poured a glass for himself, and kept the open bottle on the counter. He’d need it in a few moments.

  He knelt and opened a cabinet, taking out a pair of maple cutting boards and a stockpot. Emmeline wanted to watch him cook, and there would be plenty left for her to see at midnight when he arrived. But he wanted to make a stock and reduce it first, to save time later. He coarsely chopped carrots, celery, shallots, and an onion. At the store, he’d bought eighteen live oysters, and he sorted through these now, picking six for the stock and saving the rest for later. He shucked the oysters over the pot so that it caught both their meat and their liquor. Then he added the vegetables, threw in a sachet of bay leaves and peppercorns, and covered everything with a cup of the white wine and a splash of cold water.

  While the stock came to a boil, he cleaned the cutting boards and the knives he’d used, and then stood with the wineglass, looking out the window at the incandescent fog below the hill, the ground-clinging clouds lit from beneath by sources Caleb couldn’t see. There would be streetlamps down there, and Christmas lights blinking on the eaves of the row houses. Illuminated windows spilling the light of family dinners, front rooms brimming with guests. But all that was obscured. Caleb just saw a glowing blur of gray.

  Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, he thought.

  Bridget would go to Grace Cathedral just before midnight. If things had gone differently this week, he’d have been there too. It would have been his first service there. If they did a candlelight service, he’d have watched the firelight spread wick to wick from the front of the cathedral until Bridget lit her candle from her neighbor’s flame before turning to him. Offering him, as ever, her heat and light. And then he would have held her right hand with his left, their white candles guttering hot wax onto the paper hand guards, the flames bending and smoking as the congregants sang. Going home, they’d have heard the midnight bells toll most of the way down Nob Hill, would have felt the bronze vibrations deep in their stomachs at each church they passed.

  He didn’t know how to approach Bridget, even in his thoughts.

  He’d been standing in this spot when she’d thrown the tumbler last week. Now he moved close enough to the dark window glass that he could see the transparent reflection of his face. The wound on his forehead was mostly healed. The cut had scabbed over, and the split edges of the skin were crawling back toward each other, cells knitting a new matrix. The surrounding bruise had first faded to yellow, then dropped out of sight beneath his tan.

  But a cut on the surface was never the whole story. Half an hour with Henry in his basement morgue could teach that simple lesson. He wondered if the past seven days could be explained by a few laws of physics, whether all of his actions since Bridget threw the tumbler—his nocturnal hunt to find Emmeline, the hours he’d spent with Henry’s drowned men—were merely an equal and opposite response to what she’d done. Perhaps it carried much further past that.

  Caleb turned when he heard the stock begin to boil. He walked to the stove and lowered the flame, then used a skimming spoon to strain the froth. He twisted the bezel of his watch to set a timer, and went to take a shower.

  His phone rang at ten o’clock and he jumped for it, looking at the screen. But the number wasn’t what he’d expected.

  It was Bridget.

  He set the phone on the kitchen counter and stepped away, watching it. Each unanswered ring pushed him into a deeper shade of darkness, a steep gradient that dropped away to black. He didn’t want to think about what was in those shadows, all the way at the bottom. And he knew answering, just saying her name, would stop his slide and throw light all around. But he didn’t pick up, because it would mean the end of a different sort of hope.

  A darker desire.

  After five rings, the call went to voicemail. He went to the refrigerator, poured another glass of wine, and cursed himself.

  Emmeline called at eleven fifteen, and he answered right away.

  She didn’t talk immediately, so all he heard was the hum of their connection. Wherever she was, it sounded windy, and there was traffic. Cars on wet streets, squealing brakes as trucks eased themselves down one of the city’s steeper hills. Caleb sank to a crouch on the floor in front of the refrigerator, the phone pressed tight against his right ear and his hand covering his other ear so that he was nowhere but with her.

  She breathed in and he listened.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Two thousand seven Franklin Street. Can you find it?”

  “I’ll be there,” he whispered.

  “Don’t bring your phone, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. He’d have agreed to anything. He was standing in blinding darkness and her voice was a
cold glow. Her voice was the only thing in the world, so of course he’d move toward it. It didn’t matter what might lie between them.

  “You remember our promises?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say them,” she said.

  Her voice was a whisper, but there was a new note in it. It was something more than desire, past need. Desperation, maybe.

  “I will never lie to you,” Caleb said. “I will never hurt you.”

  “Because you’re my friend?”

  “I am.”

  “Then come to me. Find me.”

  Sixteen

  THE ADDRESS SHE’D given on Franklin Street was in the northern part of the city. He had plenty of time to get there. Enough leeway that he could swing past one of the two other addresses he’d looked up before coming to the garage.

  Joanne Tremont lived near Cathedral Hill. Marcie Hensleigh and her husband lived in Pacific Heights, just blocks from his rendezvous with Emmeline. He didn’t want to see either of them, didn’t want to talk. He just wanted to drive past their apartments in the anonymity of the night, wanted to idle awhile nearby and see if their windows were dark or lit. He wanted to watch and see. Joanne knew about spectrometer software, and she knew about pain. On top of that, she was nervous about the grant, which was the sole source of her income. So she was under pressure.

  Marcie’s possible motives weren’t as clear. As a suspect, she seemed like a stretch. It would be a hard sell to Henry or Kennon. But Marcie had the skills to manipulate her software, and she had something Joanne lacked.

  She had access to her own lab.

  Of all the people in the world who could have written the virus, Marcie was the only person who could easily install it. So he went to her house.

  He wasn’t sure how long he spent on the street, parked in the heavy shadows beneath a row of eucalyptus trees. He kept the headlights off but left the engine running and in gear, his left foot on the clutch. There was an illuminated row of bay windows above Marcie’s narrow garage, but he never saw her silhouette pass them.

  He thought of getting out, crossing the street. Climbing her steps and poking his finger through the mail slot in her front door, kneeling to peek through that narrow slit. But there’d be no purpose in that. It was no way to learn about her. Finally, he looked at his watch and saw the time was short. Marcie could wait, but Emmeline couldn’t.