The Poison Artist Read online

  Bed Sheet, with Blood.

  Bridget Laurent, Oil on Canvas

  Either painting would stand alone, but together they told a secret story. She meant for him to hang them in his office, or somewhere in the house where guests might look at them. So that people would see her work and what she’d made for him without understanding the history linked to it. The wound and the intimacy that had followed. How she had been cut open and then opened herself to him.

  Caleb sat on one of the chairs and drank the absinthe in one swallow.

  When he woke on the couch, it was ten in the morning. He went to the bathroom and stood in the shower under a stream of hot water. He looked at the date on his watch and tried to piece together the day of the week. He’d talked to Inspector Kennon in his kitchen on Wednesday afternoon, and afterward had gone to the morgue to look at the carved-soap corpse of Charles Crane. Early Thursday morning, shortly after the last time anyone saw Justin Holland alive, he was with Emmeline in the bar under Nob Hill. He’d lost most of that day passed out on the couch, spinning through images. He’d spent Friday with Henry on Toe Tags, and Friday night in his lab.

  Today was Saturday. A week now, since Bridget left.

  All seven days were a blur. He’d been fully sober and awake for about ten minutes since last weekend. There were three things he remembered with lucid clarity, each tied to Emmeline. A few moments in House of Shields. An hour or so in Spondulix. Half a minute in his living room, frozen by her voice over the phone. She was like something that had drifted to earth from a dark place in the sky. Transfixing. Every time he tried to shut her from his mind and pull himself back to where he’d been last week, he thought of her voice as she sang to him by candlelight. That desperate, lonesome whisper.

  I don’t have any friends.

  He tried to picture her as a little girl, sleeping in the back seat of a car parked on a dirt lane in the woods, left alone to wait for a man who wasn’t her father. There was a moment in Spondulix when she’d almost pulled the shroud off that man, her life with him. But she’d stayed her hand, had backed away. He thought of the promises they’d made. Even now, looking through the haze of everything that had happened since, the vows didn’t seem trivial at all. They had weight and consequence.

  Park Chow on Ninth Avenue served brunch until two o’clock, and it had a fireplace. He parked on the street a block away and walked to it with his hands in his pockets, the wind in his face.

  Then he sat at a table near the fire, drinking coffee and waiting for his meal. The side of his coat facing the hearth steamed as it warmed. He could smell the lanolin in the wool, but Emmeline’s perfume rode over it. It was like stumbling into a clearing in the trees at night and being washed suddenly by moonlight. He touched his phone in his pocket, his sole source of connection to her, and as he did so, it began to ring.

  He pulled it out quickly, looking at the incoming number. A pay phone, maybe. A prickle of electricity ran from his shoulders to his fingertips. He answered, hitting the screen with his thumb and moving his left hand to shield his mouth. She spoke before he did.

  “Hello, Caleb.”

  He closed his eyes to take himself out of the restaurant. He didn’t want to be anywhere but with her voice.

  “Emmeline.”

  “Did you have a good time? On our date?”

  “I did.”

  “It was a date, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I promised I’d call soon. Was this soon enough?”

  Caleb bent toward the table, wanting to hold this conversation close. The ice under his skin told him that if anyone overheard, if there were any witnesses to his connection with her, he would lose her forever.

  “It could’ve been sooner. But I’m glad you called. I wanted you to call.”

  “Were you thinking about me?”

  “Ever since I first saw you.”

  “You’d like to see me again?”

  “Please.”

  “Tonight, then. You can meet me at midnight.”

  It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t take it for one. She offered it like a gift.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’ll be there. Just tell me where.”

  “No,” Emmeline said. “I’ll call tonight with that. But at midnight, I’ll be hungry. Can you cook, Caleb?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you make me dinner?”

  “I’d love to,” he said. He wondered if she planned to show him where she lived, or if they were going to slip into another closed bar. “Will I cook it there, or should I make it before I come?”

  “I want to watch you. There’ll be a nice kitchen. Everything you’ll want. You can take your time—I won’t rush you, or get underfoot. I’ll just watch.”

  “What should I make?” Caleb asked. “What do you like?”

  “Whatever you want—I’ll be hungry. And I’ll bring the wine.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll think of something.”

  “Of course you will,” she whispered.

  He could almost feel her breath against his ear. He knew if she were sitting next to him, her cheek would be on his shoulder. And she would want to be near the fire, because she would be cold.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” she said.

  She hung up before he could answer.

  When he opened his eyes, his plate was in front of him. The waitress had come and gone, but he hadn’t noticed at all.

  The second level of the Parnassus parking garage at the medical center was mostly empty when he pulled into his space. He switched off the engine and sat with his eyes closed for a while before getting out of the car. He knew why he was going to such lengths to hide Emmeline. Whispering his phone conversations, leaving her out of anything he told Kennon. It was guilt. What he was doing to Bridget was shameful. She’d left him, but maybe that was just part of trying to stay. A way of telling him how she felt. Yet he was acting like they’d been apart for a year. He didn’t want anyone to see that. He didn’t want to see it himself, but that wasn’t enough to change his course. Because when Emmeline called him tonight, he’d answer. When she told him where to go, he’d race there with a pounding heart.

  Being at work now was the best thing.

  It would hold his mind to something else. He could force himself into the NIH project, could begin the process of fixing the data sets the audit committee wanted to see. He opened his eyes and stepped out of the car. Deeper in the garage, he heard a car door slam, heard the double beep as remote door locks engaged. He walked out into the lane between the rows of parking stalls, heading for the stairwell.

  “Mr. Maddox.”

  He stopped and turned, looking at the man who stepped out from between two cars.

  “Inspector,” he said. “Where’s Garcia?”

  Kennon waited until he’d closed the gap between them, and then he made a gesture with the back of his hand, a sweep to indicate some faraway place.

  “Saturday,” Kennon said. “With his family, I guess.”

  “Guys like you get days off?”

  “He does,” Kennon said. There might have been a smile there, but it was hard to tell. His salt-and-pepper mustache hid it. “Can we sit in your office a minute?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Marcie Hensleigh.”

  Caleb nodded and reached into his pocket to get out his access card.

  “Sure, Inspector,” he said. “Follow me.”

  There was coffee in the break room. Caleb wasn’t sure who had made it, or how long ago, because the lab was empty. But it was still vaguely warm, and it smelled okay. He poured two mugs and heated them in the microwave, and then led Kennon to his office.

  “Take the couch.”

  Caleb went around his desk and sat. Kennon put his overcoat across the arm of the couch and put his fedora on top of it. As he sat down, he took a small spiral-bound notebook from his back pocket. There was a nub of a pencil jammed into the notebook’s wire coil, but Kennon
didn’t pull it out.

  “You know her,” Kennon said. “Right?”

  “Marcie?”

  Kennon nodded.

  “We met at Stanford. She was a graduate student when I was doing a postdoc year, and we shared lab space. We coauthored a paper.”

  “You keep up with her at all?”

  “Stay in touch, you mean?”

  “Yeah, stay in touch.”

  “Not much. I see her at scientific conventions, and when we run into each other, we’re friendly. So I know what she does now, for the city,” Caleb said. He looked at Kennon. “What’s going on?”

  “What can you tell me about mass spectrometers?” Kennon asked.

  Caleb frowned at his desk’s leather blotter, as if resigning himself to being kept in the dark. He had a pretty good idea why Kennon had come, but he couldn’t show that.

  “What would you like to know?”

  “For starters, how they work. What they do.”

  “You want all the details, or, like, the view from thirty thousand feet?”

  “Let’s start with the big picture,” Kennon said. “Pretend I don’t have a Ph.D. from Stanford. That I’ve just got a bachelor’s in criminology and a semester of law school.”

  Caleb thought of Henry’s voice when they were motoring back across the bay toward San Francisco. You fucking better be careful, he’d said. Kennon had the pencil in his hand, the tip poised above the lined notebook paper.

  “Imagine you’re standing out on the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge,” Caleb said. “A good, strong wind’s coming off the ocean, blowing into the bay. You’ve got a bowling ball and a volleyball, and you drop them both. Where’s the bowling ball hit the water?”

  Kennon looked up.

  “Right underneath me, more or less,” he said. “It’d fall straight down.”

  “That’s right. Now where’s the volleyball hit?”

  “A little farther out. Farther away from the bridge. The wind would carry it some.”

  Caleb nodded.

  “That’s everything you need to know about mass spectrometry. I take a sample and put it into a heating chamber. Molecules get ionized by an electron source—they get an electric charge—and then carried along a racetrack by a magnetic field. There’s an electromagnet that deflects them around a corner, just like the wind coming under the bridge. The lighter particles get deflected more than the heavier ones. They hit an ion trap at the end of the racetrack and a particle detector records where they hit.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you get an incredible amount of data. A spectrum of molecular weights. If you look at it on a chart, it looks like the EKG of a man on cocaine—crazy spikes and troughs. You run it through computer software, use libraries of data from known samples, and you can figure out the molecular components of just about anything. It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic picture.”

  Kennon spent a moment writing, the notebook balanced on his knee. Then he looked back up at Caleb.

  “The software—where’s it come from?”

  “Depends on the lab and the machine. There’s three ways to go. You can get off-the-shelf stuff that’ll cost anywhere from five hundred to ten thousand dollars. You can get shareware for free. There’s a government lab in Switzerland that puts out a good free program called SpecServe.”

  “And if you don’t go either of those routes?” Kennon asked.

  “Some of us use custom software.”

  “That’s what you’ve got?”

  Caleb smiled. His lab was the envy of the world. At least once a month he led scientists and foreign delegations on tours through his fifty-thousand-square-foot facility.

  “I run an off-the-shelf commercial program called Spectral Wave. But I have three Cray clusters out there, so I also run parallel programs. I have a modified version of the Swiss program, and then I run a wholly custom one.”

  Kennon was writing fast, and looked up when he was done.

  “What’s a Cray cluster?”

  “A modular supercomputer. You can buy as many pods as you want, and link them.”

  “Who modified the Swiss program you run?”

  “I did.”

  “And you wrote the custom program, too?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “I thought you were a chemist or a toxicologist or something,” Kennon said. He was watching Caleb closely, his gray eyes unblinking behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “My undergrad was computer science. And most of the hard sciences overlap with CS now,” Caleb said. “You can’t get away from it.”

  “So you’re running three programs, for what? Each crosschecks the others?”

  “So I can verify my own results in one run. But I still don’t see what any of this has to do with Marcie. Is she— I mean, I don’t know what’s going on. Is she in trouble?”

  Kennon jammed his pencil back into his notebook. He pulled back the lapel of his jacket and Caleb could see the shoulder holster of the gun he wore. He put the notebook into his inner jacket pocket.

  “Not in trouble, no,” he said. “You mind showing me your lab? The equipment?”

  “Sure,” Caleb said. “I can show you around. The machines aren’t powered up, so if you want a demonstration, it’ll take a while to get everything hot.”

  “I just want to look.”

  “It’ll be different from Marcie’s lab,” Caleb said. He stood and came around the desk, then paused at the door, waiting for Kennon to go out of the office first. “Her lab’s a workhorse. And small. This is a research facility.”

  Kennon stood, and for just a second, while the inspector was in profile, Caleb saw a flash of red light come from the right-hand pocket of his suit pants. It was just a blink through the fabric and then it was gone. There was a thin rectangular bulge there. Caleb looked away quickly, out into the lab. He thought Kennon hadn’t seen.

  “You’ve been in her lab, then?”

  Caleb started out the door, so that his back was to Kennon. Don’t you ever tell him a lie. He hit switches on the wall that turned on the lights and the overhead ventilation fans. Caleb spoke without turning his head, just loud enough that Kennon would be able to hear him over the din of the fans.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m friends with Henry.”

  “Henry Newcomb? The medical examiner?”

  “Yeah—we grew up together,” Caleb said. He turned and looked at Kennon. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Kennon said. “It’s just, I talk to him a lot. And he’s never mentioned you.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Is it?” Kennon asked. “You’ve known him your whole life?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Except for the two months you and your mom were in Langley Porter, and the two weeks after that when you disappeared, you saw him all the time.”

  He’d known it would come up. Talking to Kennon in the back of the SUV outside House of Shields, he’d known. Now Kennon had brought it all the way out, had tossed it on the floor for both of them to look at.

  “Isn’t that right, Mr. Maddox?”

  Caleb shrugged and led him into the lab, staying ahead so Kennon wouldn’t see his face.

  Fifteen

  THOUGH IT WASN’T quite five o’clock, it was dark when he left the lab. He drove down to Lincoln, then wound through the park and into the Richmond district, taking random turns and watching his rearview mirror. Everything about Kennon put him on edge. When he was satisfied no one was following, he pulled over briefly and took out his phone. He called Henry, put it on speaker, and then kept driving.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Caleb. You alone?”

  “One second.”

  A background swirl of voices rose to a crescendo as Henry walked away from wherever he’d been sitting to find a more private place. A moment later, there was only silence.

  “Sorry,” Caleb said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt something.”

  “It’s fine,”
Henry answered. “Still at Bryant Street, but I’m outside the conference room. We’re waiting on Kennon, anyway. What is it?”

  “If Kennon’s not there yet, it’s because he was with me.”

  “He came to see you?” Henry asked. His voice dropped to a hush. “Again?”

  “He asked about mass spectrometers. About the software. He wanted to get a look at my lab. Said it was about Marcie.”

  Henry sighed.

  “We’re in a pile of trouble for how we handled things yesterday. Marcie and I.”

  “The virus?”

  “We shouldn’t have given the hard drive to the guy from Hewlett Packard. It was a crime scene, and we screwed up Kennon’s chain of evidence. He drove out to San Jose and got the drive, then turned it over to the FBI early this morning. They’ve got a cybercrime division, and they’re all over it.”

  Caleb saw an empty parking spot and pulled over. He turned off the speakerphone and put the cell phone to his ear, lowering his voice so he wouldn’t be shouting at Henry.

  “They find anything yet?”

  “You’ll keep it a secret?”

  “Henry—”

  “Sorry. I know you will.”

  “You better know it,” Caleb said. “What is it?”

  Caleb looked in his rearview mirror while he waited for Henry to speak. There was a car at the far end of the avenue, stopped at the curb a hundred feet away. Its headlights were on but it hadn’t moved for at least ten seconds. Then Caleb saw a growing bar of light as a garage door scrolled up on the other side of the street. The car took a sharp left and pulled into its garage. Caleb looked back out the windshield.

  “You still there, Henry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d the FBI find?”

  “The virus and the killings are connected. The virus interfered with Marcie’s spectral analysis. It kind of sat between the analyzer and the graphic output algorithm. So it could call the shots between the two.”

  “You mean it changed the results?” Caleb said. “Skewed what Marcie saw on the graphs?”