The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  Caleb looked at the tablet’s screen. In the video, he was setting the candle on the corner of the piano. Then he walked out of the shot. Because it was happening off screen, Caleb couldn’t explain it to Garcia. But Emmeline was holding him right then. Putting his jacket around his shoulders and pressing herself against him. Nothing between them at all, except a little bit of fabric.

  Garcia pushed the tablet closer to him.

  “How many patient data sets were you missing for the NIH grant application?” Garcia asked.

  “What?”

  “We’ve been talking to Joanne Tremont. Talking with her a lot. She’s been hounding you to finish the data sets. You needed patients in pain—folks willing to skip any kind of meds.”

  “That’s true. And I have the data.”

  “But hardly anyone volunteers to skip morphine when they need it. Or they’ll hold off a little while, and then cheat on you. Or they weren’t in any real pain to begin with. So you didn’t have enough backup. The NIH thought your data was thin.”

  “It’s good data. I have the backup.”

  “Sure you do. You found a nice way to beef it up, didn’t you?” Garcia said. “You made sure they didn’t get anything for the pain. And there was plenty of pain.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Joanne told us about the samples. How they just started showing up in the lab, with VA hospital patient charts. Special deliveries, huh?”

  “I have a contract with the VA.”

  “Maybe that’s why we found a stack of blank VA charts in the Sausalito kill house. The sample tubes, the needles,” Garcia said. “How much money’s riding on the grant?”

  Caleb looked at the cuffs on his wrists. The locks that held him were so simple. He could open them in a minute if he had the right tool. He looked back at Garcia, who was answering his own question.

  “Funding for years—millions of dollars. Right?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “It was a lot of pressure, wasn’t it?” Garcia asked. He was leaning forward, his elbows on the narrow table. “A lot of stress. Not knowing if you were going to lose it. All those people counting on you to get it. Joanne, Andrea. Half a dozen lab techs.”

  “Anyone who’s in charge of anything has people counting on him,” Caleb said.

  “But not everyone cracks,” Garcia said. “You cracked. But you’ve got special circumstances, don’t you? Maybe it wasn’t really even the money. Maybe that was just an excuse you gave yourself and it would’ve happened anyway.”

  Caleb didn’t answer, but he didn’t look away. He thought of Bridget, exploding in anger when he told her about the operation he’d gotten. She’d shoved him back, ripped his hands away from her shoulders. Screamed that he was a liar, that he’d been leading her on. The tumbler was the first hard object she found, and she’d thrown it blindly, as hard as she could—

  “Dr. Maddox?”

  “What?”

  “Did you hear my last question?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You went to see Henry Newcomb in his office in September, right after you got the operation, didn’t you?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “You were upset—and drunk. In fact, you were so worked up, he took notes after you left. You told him Bridget was pressuring you, but you couldn’t do what she wanted. And you were worried about the grant. So much money.”

  The video clip on the tablet computer was looped. Caleb stared at the grainy image of himself, swaying in the darkness with a candle and a drink. He didn’t look well. His shirttail must have come out of his pants while sitting with Emmeline, and his pale face glistened with sweat. Without the piano’s sound, his movements made no sense: he might have been too drunk to stand still. He might have been muttering to himself. But if he looked bad, it was because the shot was too tight to bring in any context. Had the camera been three feet back, it would all make sense.

  “You know what else he told me?” Garcia asked.

  “I couldn’t guess.”

  “He thinks he’s figured out what’s wrong with you,” Garcia said. “So let’s talk about that.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “The girl in the painting,” Garcia said. “The Haas-Lilienthal house, where you disappeared.”

  Caleb looked up from the video screen and met Garcia’s eyes.

  “I was twelve when that happened. When I was taken.”

  “Taken?” Garcia asked. “That’s the story you’re sticking with?”

  “You’ve been talking to Henry too much. And if you read the file, you know I don’t remember any of it.”

  Garcia looked at his watch, then looked at the mirror behind him.

  “That field trip your class took, Henry said it was your first day back in school. You’d been out two months,” Garcia said. “You remember why.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with anything.”

  “When you’re twelve years old, and you watch your father tie your mother in a chair, watch him cut and sew her for three days before he puts his brains on the ceiling with a shotgun—that has something to do with everything. So it’s not like you weren’t carrying some weight,” Garcia said. “Breaking under the strain of it, maybe. Even without that last act, your dad’s masterpiece, you might’ve broken. Kennon told me what it was like in there, inside your house. Henry, too.”

  “Why don’t you just bring Henry in here? If you’re going to sit there and tell me what he thinks.”

  Garcia nodded.

  “He’s here. But I don’t think he wants to see you.”

  “That’s big of him.”

  “Kennon took a picture of your mother’s face, after your father finished with her. And after he finished with himself, I guess. I saw it, the picture, and you know what it made me wonder?”

  “No.”

  “Bridget,” Garcia said. “Were you really going to do all that to her?”

  Caleb sat without saying anything. He stared at the tabletop, the bland whiteness of it, and tried to fight down the heat he felt flooding into his cheeks.

  “No one knows everything your dad used on your mother. But you’d know, wouldn’t you? What he used on your mom. He made you watch. Did you have that all lined up for her? The chisels and everything else?”

  Caleb didn’t answer. He could still hear her screaming: Wake up, Caleb! But he hadn’t been able to do anything for her when Emmeline got up from the bed and turned to her. When he looked up again, Garcia was talking. He wasn’t sure how much he’d missed, but didn’t really care.

  “—know that about fingerprints, right?” Garcia was saying.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Fingerprints? How they stay the same your whole life? The way they look right now is the way they looked when you were twelve, except back then, your hands were a little smaller.”

  “And so what?”

  “So, we found your room, in the Haas-Lilienthal house,” Garcia said. “Henry said you were good at finding things, but I don’t think any of us understood it—really understood it—until we saw that door. I’d never seen anything like it, that room. And your prints are all over it.”

  “I only went in there once, and I didn’t touch anything.”

  “Maybe you’ve only been once lately. And haven’t touched anything lately. But you were touching all kinds of stuff back then. When your hands were smaller.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Garcia shrugged.

  “It meant a lot to Kennon, to finally figure it out.”

  “I bet.”

  “You know it was him who found you?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “He mentioned it.”

  “He was there all three times. When your father finally did what he’d been working up to. When you disappeared. And then when you came back, he was the one who found you. Your neighborhood was his beat. So when you got the gag off and started screaming, he was the first one.”

  “
That’s great.”

  “If he hadn’t come and untied you and your mom, she’d have bled to death and you’d have starved. And then after the hospital, when you disappeared, he never stopped looking. If he hadn’t seen you on the porch, who knows? You might’ve wandered off again. Gone back into your room.”

  Caleb squeezed the bar in his hands and looked back at the tabletop. For the last week, he’d been terrified that the floor beneath him might give way and drop him into oblivion. Now he’d have given anything for that to happen.

  “So I hope for your sake you didn’t actually kill him. That it was just a heart attack. Because if you killed the man who saved you twice?” Garcia said, leaning across the table and whispering. “The man who lifted your mother into the ambulance? Who found the bolt cutters to let you loose? I don’t know. I don’t know what they should even do to someone like that.”

  “Fuck you, Garcia.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about the batrachotoxin,” Garcia said. “Henry already did.”

  “Then fuck him, too.”

  “You left the safe open, after you escaped the hospital. Before you left, you smashed the vials all over the floor. But we wore hazmat suits when we went in. So nobody else died. You can thank Henry for that,” Garcia said. “And Henry? He’s been a good friend to you. Said you’re the smartest person he’s ever known—also, the most delicate. Maybe that’s over now, the friendship. But he tried.”

  “I didn’t—”

  Caleb stopped and looked up. He finally met Garcia’s eyes. For the first time in this conversation, he was absolutely sure about something.

  “No one can get into that safe. No one.”

  It was so easy to say, because it was the truth. But then, in the long silence, he had to think about what it meant. He glanced down at his hands, which had gone pale and cold from the pressure of the cuffs.

  Finally, Garcia answered.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  He tossed his notebook onto the table. He still hadn’t written anything down.

  “Emmeline—is she like a voice in your head, or can you really see her?”

  Caleb watched the video screen, remembering the first notes of the song she’d played. Like a patter of rain against the windows of a house that lay far from any other. If they could go away somewhere, just the two of them, the rain would sound like that against the windows of their bedroom.

  “Not gonna bite at that?” Garcia asked.

  Caleb shook his head and leaned closer to the screen. Emmeline wasn’t in the shot, but maybe he’d be able to see her shadow. Something. Anything to show she was there. The glass sphere had been so warm in his hand. Heat and light against the cold green of the absinthe in the reservoir glass. He watched his lips move to the words as Emmeline sang them.

  Garcia reached across the table and pulled the tablet computer away. He shut off the looping video and put the tablet into his briefcase.

  “She’s real,” Caleb said. But he could hear the threads of fear and strain woven into his words. He sounded like a man holding on to a high ledge by his fingernails. “I’ve met her. Touched her.”

  “Sure you have,” Garcia said. “Problem is, nobody else has. Because she doesn’t exist, except in your head and in a painting.”

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Garcia pushed his chair back and crossed the room. He stood with his back to Caleb, blocking the doorway as he leaned through it. Whispers batted back and forth. Then Garcia stepped out into the hall and let the door click shut behind him. Caleb sat with his hands cuffed to the rail and tried not to look at the mirror on the other side of the room. There’d be a crowd on the other side of it, watching him. He hung his head low, so they wouldn’t see his face.

  Garcia came back after five minutes. He set a few sheets of paper face-down on the table, then slid into the chair and put his elbows on the table, his fists leaning in to each other. He went straight to it.

  “Back in September, you were in the morgue,” Garcia said. “You told Henry about the operation, told him about all these—how would you say it?—these concerns you had. Bridget. The NIH, breathing down your neck. And then, right in the middle of that, Henry got a phone call. Had to take it. So you stepped outside his office, didn’t you?”

  Garcia was staring at him so hard, it was like being in the searchlight of Henry’s boat. The shadows were darker for it.

  “You had ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Totally alone in the morgue. And that’s when you put the virus on Marcie’s mass spectrometer. Because the killings started that night. Charles Crane walked into a bar and stepped right out of this world. He was the first, wasn’t he?”

  Caleb sat in silence for a long moment, staring at the table. He thought about what it might feel like to fall through the floor. The darkness underneath everything was terrifying, but once you were in it, it was like a black cashmere cloak. Warm and safe.

  She’ll take care of this, Caleb thought.

  “Dr. Maddox?”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “We’ll see,” Garcia said. “Electronic data’s hard to erase. Even for a clever guy like you. And the FBI’s all over this.”

  “Then they’ll clear me.”

  “I doubt it,” Garcia said. “But maybe you can explain this. How many people called you on December twenty-third?”

  Caleb didn’t have an answer, and shook his head to show it. He wasn’t even sure of today’s date, couldn’t begin to track backwards through the days and nights of this week.

  “I’m talking about the day you made dinner for Emmeline. How many people called you?”

  “Just two. Bridget and Emmeline.”

  “Emmeline called you while you were eating brunch at Park Chow, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Called you from a pay phone, from a number you didn’t recognize.”

  Caleb nodded.

  “And you talked to Henry while you were driving around. You called him. Before you went to the grocery store on Stanyan and ran into three of Bridget’s girlfriends.”

  “Yeah,” Caleb said. “That’s right. I called him.”

  “That’s it for phone calls on the twenty-third, right?”

  “That’s it.”

  Garcia took the paper and flipped it over. He slid it across the table so that it was in front of Caleb.

  “We found your cell phone, in your house. That’s a printout of your call log, from December twenty-three.”

  Caleb looked at the page. The first entry was an outgoing call to Henry’s number. There was nothing earlier than that, but there should have been a short call in the morning. An incoming pay phone call.

  “This isn’t complete,” Caleb said. “You didn’t write them all down.”

  Garcia shook his head.

  “It’s all there.”

  Caleb looked at the other two items on the list.

  There was a missed call from Bridget, and then, later in the evening, there was a call from a San Francisco number he didn’t recognize.

  “That one,” he said. He couldn’t point at it because his wrists were cuffed to the bar. “On the bottom. And that’s when she called me. Just after eleven o’clock, to tell me where to go.”

  “You think?” Garcia asked. He leaned across and took the paper. “You think that was Emmeline?”

  “It’s when she called. At eleven o’clock. That’s the only phone call I got at eleven.”

  “That’s Marcie Hensleigh’s number,” Garcia said. “She called you, just like she said she would. She waited awhile for Henry, for him to call back with your number. And when he didn’t come through, she figured it out some other way.”

  Caleb didn’t look up. He closed his eyes and leaned in to the wall.

  When Emmeline left the Trident, as Kennon lay dying, she’d held her open palm against an invisible pane of glass that separated them. She’d been waving goodbye, but it was a promise, too. She’d kept all her promises to him so far.r />
  Soon, she’d said.

  Caleb looked up at Garcia and pushed himself away from the wall.

  “I want to call a lawyer.”

  “You know what’s a pity?” Garcia said. “There’s only one guy in the world who knows everything that happened in that room tonight. You. And you’re out of your fucking mind.”

  Twenty-Seven

  IT WASN’T UNTIL three thirty in the morning that they finished the jurisdictional paperwork to transfer him to Bryant Street. Sausalito’s police station was mostly empty as they filed through it, though a few men and women stood up from their cubicles to watch him go by. Garcia walked behind him, his hand on Caleb’s shoulder as they went down the stairs. A uniformed cop named Gedarro was in front.

  Then they were in the garage bay at the sally port. An SFPD cruiser was parked inside. The patrolman opened the rear door, then put his hand on the back of Caleb’s head.

  “Easy now.”

  His hands were cuffed behind him again, so that he had to lean forward, his face close to the metal grate that separated the back seat from the front. He didn’t move far enough inside. When the officer slammed the door, something was jabbing him in the thigh.

  Garcia sat in front. He leaned around and looked at Caleb through the cage wall.

  “Comfortable back there?”

  “Fine.”

  Gedarro got behind the wheel and started the engine. They pulled out, took a right, and started rolling toward the water. Gedarro was looking in the rearview mirror.

  “No escort?”

  “They didn’t tell you?” Garcia asked. “Some traffic thing, near the bridge. They knocked on the door and told me before everyone cleared out.”

  Caleb had moved away from the door now, but something was still stabbing his leg. It was the paperclip, the little U of wire he’d been using to short the bike’s ignition circuit. He’d been frisked twice tonight, but both Kennon and Garcia had missed it. It was wrapped in a fold of medical tape, and had probably been stuck inside the seam of his pocket lining. They’d been looking for knives and tools, not pocket lint.

  “You want sirens?” the patrolman asked.

  “That’s okay,” Garcia said. “No sirens. I think Sausalito’s had enough tonight.”