The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  It was six months since the accident, and the Trident didn’t look any closer to reopening. The windows were boarded up because every pane of glass had shattered with the force of the barge’s impact. There was a chainlink fence across the front of the wooden pier. Beyond that, the contractors hadn’t done much.

  One car passed, and then the seafront promenade was empty. Caleb walked along the fence and came to its center. The gate stood open, the chain and lock hanging over the latch. He took the phone from his pocket and turned it on as he walked across the pier’s disjointed wooden deck.

  On the planks next to the restaurant, someone had erected a dome-top temporary garage tent. Caleb’s shadow disappeared from beneath him as he walked past the reach of the streetlamps. When he pulled back the tent’s canvas flap, rivulets of beaded rainwater ran off to his feet.

  For a moment, he thought the tent was empty. But then his eyes compensated for the shadows and he was looking at the back end of the Invicta, at its elliptical rear window. Its trunk stood open an inch, as if it hadn’t been shut hard enough. He lifted it, and used the phone’s screen as a light.

  The only thing in the trunk was a black dress shoe. A man’s shoe.

  He backed out of the tent and looked up at the side of the restaurant. Of course there was no light coming from it. There was just enough space between the side of the tent and the building for two people to walk side by side. Emmeline had led him through this gap when she brought him upstairs to make love to him. Her hands had been on his arm, her body pressed close. He followed her route a second time.

  In the back, near the drop-off where the end of the pier had collapsed into the bay, he found the staircase. He stood at its foot but didn’t climb it. He heard the foghorn, three miles away on the concrete fender of the bridge’s south tower. A few feet below him, the bay rippled between the pylons. When the tide went out, the current would run away from the shore before bending due south. Kennon’s number was in Henry’s phone, and he dialed it.

  Kennon picked up immediately.

  “Inspector?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Caleb Ellis—Caleb Maddox.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll tell you where I am, if you come alone.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything. I’m looking at you.”

  Caleb jerked around, looking back toward the streetlights where the pier met the shore. There was a dark SUV parked at the curb, the silhouette of a man standing at its bumper.

  “Come around and stand in front of the tent,” Kennon said. “Keep the phone on your ear and put your other hand on your head.”

  Caleb did as he was told.

  Standing in front of the tent, with his back to the Invicta, he watched Kennon come through the gate. He had his gun drawn but was holding it by his thigh, its muzzle pointed at the planks. He hung up his phone and pocketed it. Caleb kept his phone where it was.

  “Step to the building, put your hands on the wall.”

  Kennon gestured with the gun, using its barrel to point to the restaurant’s wood-planked side. Caleb put his hands on the boards and stood with his feet apart.

  “You were at Henry’s?” Caleb asked, over his shoulder. “That was you coming in?”

  Kennon nodded.

  “He didn’t know or he’d have shouted. But Vicki’s phone can track his. Handiest app I ever saw. Put your nose against the wall.”

  Kennon started patting him down: arms, sides, crotch, and legs. He pulled out Caleb’s wallet and rifled through it. Then he stood and took the phone from Caleb’s hand, and in the same motion brought Caleb’s left arm around behind his back. When he had the cuffs on, he stepped back.

  “Turn around,” Kennon said.

  Caleb leaned against the wall and watched Kennon holster the gun. After he snapped the leather band in place, he held his palm a moment over his chest. He took a step back from Caleb and looked down, breathing hard through his nostrils.

  “You okay, Inspector?”

  “Fine.”

  But he wasn’t fine. He was sweating all over, though the air couldn’t have been more than forty degrees. He took his hand off his chest and used it to wipe sweat from his forehead.

  “You gonna read me my rights?”

  “You know ’em?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then we’ll skip it. Save it for when we get to the station,” Kennon said. “You called me. So what’s on your mind?”

  “Look in the tent.”

  Kennon backed toward the front of the tent, not taking his eyes from Caleb. He took the front flap and pulled it back, then looked inside. He glanced back at Caleb to be sure he wasn’t moving, then pulled the flap back farther. He stared into the tent for half a minute, then let the door flap fall closed.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  He stopped midstep on his way back toward Caleb, pausing to twist his neck side to side, like a boxer working out a kink between rounds. He looked at his right hand, running the pad of his thumb against the four fingers. Then he touched the lapel pocket of his jacket, where he’d put Caleb’s wallet.

  The sweat was back on his face.

  “That’s a Black Prince,” Caleb said. “Invicta only made fifteen. And probably only one like that.”

  “There’s nothing—”

  The scream cut Kennon off. He jumped, but Caleb wasn’t surprised at all.

  It was a man’s scream, low and rattling. The kind of sound a bull might make in an abattoir. It fell away, then came again, louder the second time—the man had only paused to draw a deeper breath. It was coming from inside the building.

  Kennon drew his gun and grabbed Caleb’s shirt collar.

  “The stairs—where are the stairs?”

  “In back.”

  “Get in front of me. Go!”

  Kennon spun Caleb by his shoulder and shoved him forward, the gun’s muzzle digging between his shoulder blades. They ran between the tent and the building and turned the corner, and then Kennon was hitting him on the back of the head with the side of the gun.

  “Go up! Don’t even try to get behind me.”

  He ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, not trying at all to be quiet. Kennon herded him from behind. When they reached the landing, Kennon grabbed the chain between Caleb’s cuffed wrists and yanked him away from the door. Then Kennon reared back and kicked the locks. The door frame’s dry wood splintered with the first kick and cracked in half with the second. The frame spun inward with the door, carrying the three sets of deadbolts with it.

  Kennon was breathing in a whistling gasp so loud that Caleb could hear it over the screams from inside. But the inspector didn’t pause. He swung Caleb into the room, pushing him down and to the side so that Caleb went sprawling across the floorboards, taking most of the weight of the fall with his left shoulder.

  At first, he thought the place was on fire. That the whole floor was on fire. But then his eyes found a reference point and focused. He was looking at a sea of votive candles. Thousands of them. Everything that had been here before was gone. The only things left were candles, and a mattress in the center of the floor.

  Emmeline was getting up off her knees. She’d been kneeling at the head of the mattress. The skirt of her black dress was spread on the floor, a shrinking circle as she slowly rose up. A cobra, coiled and rising. Next to her, tied up on the mattress, was a fully dressed man. He was twitching, his whole body coming off the bed in the worst of the spasms. There was something on his face.

  Caleb struggled to get up but couldn’t. He got to his side and fought against the cuffs. Kennon stepped into view. He was trying to hold the gun on Emmeline but his arms weren’t steady. The gun was pointing closer to Caleb than to her.

  “Stop,” he said.

  His voice was choked. He had to work to get the words past some obstruction in his throat. He bent forward, suddenly, and caught himself with one hand on his knee. Like a runner who hits his limit. Winded and beaten. When K
ennon looked up, Caleb could see veins and tendons bulging on his neck. Their eyes met.

  “Don’t move,” Kennon said.

  This time, his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

  Emmeline stood to her full height and took a step toward Kennon. He fired the gun at her. Caleb didn’t know if he was trying to hit her or not. A candle inside a glass sphere exploded three feet from Emmeline’s ankle. Closer, in fact, to Caleb’s head. Behind her, the man on the mattress went on twitching. The device clamped to his face was made of iron. Thumbscrews ran along both its sides in double rows.

  “Inspector, you’ll hit somebody,” Emmeline said.

  She kept coming toward him. Her dress was cut long in the back, so that its hem trailed on the floor behind her, a black train. Emmeline stepped carefully between the candles, but her dress swept over them. They tipped, spilling wax, sending up smoke as they went out. Caleb got to his back and struggled until his cuffed hands were behind his thighs. He didn’t take his eyes off Emmeline.

  “You look sick, Inspector,” Emmeline said. “I could get you something to drink. A glass of water, maybe? Something a little stronger?”

  Kennon fired again and Emmeline didn’t even flinch.

  The bullet missed her by ten feet, punching a hole in the back of the building.

  “Stop—”

  “You should be more careful what you touch,” Emmeline said. “Some things can go right through the skin.”

  Kennon fell onto his knees. His face was purple.

  “Maddox—” he said.

  But Emmeline just shook her head.

  “If you want to talk to Caleb, look at him,” she said. “You’re looking at me now.”

  Kennon took one hand off his gun and held his throat. But with one arm, he wasn’t strong enough to hold up the gun. He dropped it, then tipped over as he tried to get it again. Emmeline walked slowly to him, her dress flowing with the sway of her hips. When she got to the gun, she moved it beyond Kennon’s reach with a slide of her high heel.

  “It’s dangerous to take a man’s wallet,” Emmeline whispered. “You never know what might be on it.”

  Caleb bent his knees, then brought his hands up and pulled his legs through the loop of his arms. With his hands in front of him, he rolled to his knees. Then he picked up Kennon’s gun.

  Emmeline finally turned to him.

  “Hello, Caleb,” she said. “I think your friend’s been poisoned.”

  He held the gun on her, and she just looked at him. He was on his knees still. Kennon lay between them, and had stopped moving. They both looked at him.

  “Maybe he’s done now, though,” she said. “Do you think so? He looks done to me.”

  “What are you?” he whispered.

  “Yours,” she said. “All yours.”

  The man on the mattress had finally stopped screaming. Blood was spreading from beneath his encapsulated head.

  Emmeline walked past Caleb to the door. The train of her dress was smoldering in the back, where it had dragged through hot wax and candle flames. She paused on the landing and looked back through the open door. She raised her gloved hand to him. He thought of the way she’d held it against the window glass when she dropped him off. It was a goodbye, but it was also a promise. And Emmeline kept her promises. All of them.

  She nodded at him, reading his thought straight from his eyes.

  “Soon,” she said.

  Then she was out of sight, going down the stairs. He looked at his shaking hands on the gun. He’d never put his finger on the trigger.

  When it started, the Invicta’s big straight-eight sounded like thunder.

  Like thunder at night, when the storm is close enough to wake you up and rattle the windows. He closed his eyes and listened to it move away, listened until it was gone. Then he dropped the gun and went to Kennon.

  But Kennon was gone too.

  Twenty-Six

  SAUSALITO’S POLICE STATION was a little brick building on Johnson Street, so close to the Trident that he was in the car with Garcia for only a minute before they pulled him out and walked him upstairs from the sally port. The interrogation room was about the size of his bathroom. He was sitting on a lightweight plastic chair with his wrists cuffed to a metal handrail mounted on the wall. There was a white-topped table in between him and Garcia. None of the others had come into the room, but he guessed they were standing in the viewing chamber on the other side of the mirror. Or watching through the camera mounted in the corner.

  Garcia finished reading aloud from the back of a white postcard.

  “You understand your rights as I’ve read them to you, Dr. Maddox?”

  “Yes.”

  His left eye was swelling up, so he had to pivot his neck to see Garcia clearly. The clean line of stitches on his forehead had broken open, either when Kennon threw him into the room, or when one of Garcia’s men tackled him and broke his shoulder.

  “I don’t know if I can help you, if you decide to talk,” Garcia said. “I’ve got so much shit on you, I don’t even need to ask questions. But if you want to explain, want to take a shot, I’ll listen. Maybe you know something I don’t.”

  Caleb looked up at him.

  “I didn’t do this,” he said. “Kennon had a heart attack. When you got there, I was trying to help him.”

  Garcia raised his eyebrow.

  “He came in, arrested you, and then he just dropped dead?”

  “It wasn’t like that. He’d just run up the stairs—kicked in the door. He threw me across the room to keep me out of the way. And then he saw her. Saw what she was doing to the man.”

  “That man,” Garcia asked. “When’d you find him?”

  “When we came in the door—when Kennon kicked in the door and we went in. He was on the mattress.”

  “I meant before that. Did you see him before Marcie Hensleigh, or was it right after?”

  “I never saw him before tonight, when Kennon and I found him.”

  “Yeah,” Garcia said. “Okay. We’ll get to that.”

  He looked over his shoulder at the mirror on the wall behind him. He made a hand gesture Caleb couldn’t see. Then he turned back to Caleb.

  “And Kennon—autopsy’s gonna say it was a heart attack?”

  “Yes,” Caleb said.

  “Because you know all about autopsies, don’t you, Dr. Maddox?”

  Caleb shifted in the chair. If he scooted it closer to the wall, he could fold his hands in his lap.

  “I know about autopsies,” Caleb said. “But I also know what I saw. And it was her.”

  “Great,” Garcia said. “Now you’re going to tell me about the girl. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.”

  “Emmeline,” Caleb said. “Her name’s Emmeline.”

  “I listened to Kennon’s tape,” Garcia said. He had a notepad on the table, but he wasn’t writing on it. He was just watching Caleb. “His conversation with you, at UCSF. So I know what you said she looks like. And I talked to everybody who was in House of Shields the night you said you met her. So here’s my question. Bear with me, because it sounds like a joke.”

  Garcia stared at him, and Caleb didn’t look away.

  “It’s one in the morning,” Garcia said, “and there’s nine straight guys in a bar. Not a girl in sight. Then Bettie Page walks in, wearing nothing but a nightie and some heels. And not one guy in the place—not one, including the bartender—notices her.”

  Caleb looked away, looked at his hands and the cuffs biting into them. Garcia paused and waited until Caleb raised his face. Then he went on.

  “Except you,” he said. “You noticed her. So what I want to know is, how am I supposed to believe that?”

  “I can’t tell you what anyone else saw.”

  “You know Spondulix? Place on Nob Hill?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “Kennon sent me there to check it out. You know they got a video camera behind the bar?”

  “No.”

  “It was recording.�
�

  Caleb held on to the metal bar so Garcia wouldn’t see his hands shake. But Garcia wasn’t looking. He was reaching down, taking something from his briefcase. When he sat up again, he had a tablet computer. He turned it on and scrolled through a menu, then set it on the table between them. On the screen was a black-and-white still frame.

  The camera must have been mounted well behind the bar, where it could keep an eye on the cash register. But in the background, Caleb could see himself. He was holding a votive candle and a glass of absinthe. From the camera’s angle, you couldn’t see the piano. Couldn’t see the piano bench.

  “You want me to hit play? You wanna watch it?”

  Caleb didn’t say anything, but Garcia’s hand went to the screen and hit a button. The still frame came to life. There was no sound, just the pixelated, low-quality video. Caleb watched himself on the screen. He was swaying back and forth.

  His lips were moving.

  “Weird, don’t you think?” Garcia said. “I wonder what you’re singing.”

  “I wasn’t. There’s a piano there. Outside the shot. She was playing it for me.”

  “Kennon dies of a heart attack, and no one sees it but you. Emmeline walks into House of Shields, and no one sees her but you. Bridget gets thrown off your back deck but doesn’t remember a thing. And Emmeline goes to Spondulix, has three drinks, plays the piano, cleans the place up after you leave, and never once walks across this camera’s line of sight?”

  Caleb shook his head.

  “I don’t know what she did after I left.”

  “You know what else is on this tape? If you scroll it back another two hours before your little song and dance there?”

  “No.”

  “Justin Holland. He went out for dinner with a client that night. Afterward, he stopped in Spondulix for a drink, by himself. We’d never figured out where he went, until just now, thanks to you. But he was sitting there for fifteen minutes—wait, you know who Justin Holland is, right?”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Of course,” Garcia said. He bounced his palm off his forehead. “Because you just happened to find him in San Francisco Bay the next night, right? That’s what you told Kennon, and Henry backed it up.”