The Poison Artist Read online

  Henry leaned all the way across the wobbly table and whispered.

  “Because none of these guys has a good reason to be dead. I think it’s murder. I just can’t prove it.”

  The days were so short now. By the time they parked in the police lot under the I-80 overpass, it was just past five and the sky had been dark nearly half an hour. Caleb followed Henry along the chainlink fence rimming the county jail, then through a back entrance into the Hall of Justice. The building was a seven-story concrete rectangle, as drab and severe as a Soviet apartment block. Caleb had never figured out if it was grim by design or if that was just a result of economics and function.

  They took the stairs to the basement level, and Henry swiped his key card to bring them through a series of locked doors in the medical examiner’s suite until they were standing in front of a four-body portable cold chamber unit. Music was playing from somewhere. There always seemed to be a radio left on down here at night. Maybe it made it easier to work in the morgue by yourself.

  “You mostly hear about overcrowding in the jail,” Henry said, nodding at the portable cold chamber. “Got it here, too.”

  Caleb was carrying a small Styrofoam cooler and he set this on an empty stainless-steel autopsy table next to its drain hole. He opened the cooler and looked at the glass sample vials he’d brought.

  “Come over here—there’s coats and gloves.”

  Caleb went to the wash station and took a white lab coat off one of the wooden pegs. He buttoned it up and then pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Henry handed him a pair of protective glasses and a surgical mask.

  “You did the autopsy already?” Caleb asked. He glanced down into the sink and saw an aluminum tray with a scatter of scalpels and saws that hadn’t been washed yet. A pair of long-handled pruning shears leaned to one side in the basin. The black blades were flecked with bits of tissue.

  “Yesterday, late evening. They found him in the afternoon. Tourist on the Golden Gate Bridge spotted him, called it in. A police boat came out and got him. Soon as he came in, I bumped him to the head of the line.”

  Henry took a jar of Vicks from his pocket and held it out, raising an eyebrow. Caleb waved it off, then changed his mind when he saw Henry dip his finger in and wipe some of the cream on the inside of his surgical mask.

  “You moved him up because the others bothered you.”

  Henry nodded, then pulled on a pair of gloves and slipped the mask up from his neck to cover his mouth.

  “He wasn’t a jumper?”

  “Those’re easy to spot. Broken ribs, punctured lungs. Torn aorta, lot of times. Besides, they’ve got cameras up there now. Been at least four days since anyone jumped.”

  They went back to the portable cold chamber. It was divided into four sections, each accessed by a square steel door. The chamber had to preserve a chain of evidence, so each door was separately locked. Henry keyed open one of the doors, then pulled the cadaver tray out on its slide tracks. The body was covered with a green sheet. Henry wheeled a metal autopsy table alongside.

  “You want the feet or the head?” he asked.

  “Head.”

  They eased the cadaver tray off its tracks and set it on the autopsy table. Henry shut the cold storage chamber, and then they wheeled the table into the main workspace. Except for the lingering smell, these places always reminded Caleb of industrial kitchens. Deep stainless-steel sinks lined one wall. Farmer’s market produce scales hung above the sinks, where the drips would be easiest to clean up. The cutting tools lined an entire wall.

  “Who took the tissue samples?” Caleb asked.

  “Marcie.”

  “Any embalming fluids used?”

  “No. I didn’t freeze him, either. And we put the organs back inside the chest cavity before we sewed it up. I knew you’d need to take a look at this.”

  Henry took the sheet and pulled it back so the cadaver was exposed from the knees up. Caleb stared, too tired to be shocked by the sight of the corpse.

  “I thought this was supposed to look like a drowning.”

  “The face? You get that when a body comes from water. They sink, then go along the bottom. Face down. There’s a strong current under the Golden Gate when the tide changes. So he’d have been hitting things at a good clip.”

  This man’s face looked like he’d been thrown from a moving car. Caleb knew part of it was just the normal, post-autopsy distortion. During the examination, Henry would have cut around the man’s scalp, would have folded his face down past his chin before using a cranial saw to get at his brain. Afterward, a mortuary assistant would have fit the skull back together and stapled around the incisions. Faces never looked quite right after that. But this man’s face was worse than usual. It was abraded and sliced, as if he’d washed back and forth on a barnacle-covered rock. The tip of his nose was gone and his chin bone was visible through a deep cut.

  The man was completely unrecognizable.

  He might have been the man from House of Shields. It was certainly possible. But Caleb wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, either.

  “Looks like there’s bruising around the cuts,” Caleb said. “Bleeding under the skin. I thought dead bodies didn’t bleed or bruise.”

  “Can’t say. Floaters are hard. They’ll get postmortem wounds and go on bleeding. Especially when they’re floating head down.”

  “You can’t say from the autopsy that he just drowned?”

  Henry shook his head. “That’s the problem with drowning. There’s no bright-line test. He had middle-ear hemorrhages. You see that in drowning victims—no one knows for sure why. But it’s not conclusive. You could see mid-ear bleeding from a head trauma. An electrocution, even. Same for the pink froth we found in his trachea.”

  “What about fluid in the lungs? I thought that’s what you guys look for in a drowning.”

  “Sure. But after ten, twelve hours in the water, there’s no way to say if it’s drowning or pulmonary edema from heart failure. Head injury can do it too.”

  Caleb nodded and pointed at the man’s left thigh and buttock. Each had been torn open.

  “Shark do that?”

  “Little one, probably. Looks even worse if you roll him over. There’re sevengill sharks in the bay. Threshers. They’ll scavenge a corpse.”

  “What about these bruises?” Caleb asked. He touched the man’s shoulder just above his right clavicle. There was a deep, fresh-looking bruise there.

  “Shoulder-girdle bruises,” Henry said.

  When Caleb just looked at him, Henry explained.

  “Sometimes, when a guy’s drowning, he’ll start panicking. Struggle gets so violent, he tears his own muscles. Maybe that’s what happened.”

  “Or?”

  “Or maybe someone tied him down by his chest and shoulders while he was having some kind of seizure. Big straps, so there’s no rope marks.”

  Henry turned to look at the cadaver. Behind his protective glasses, the lenses of his silver-framed eyeglasses caught the harsh overhead light and glared.

  “You mean a drug-induced seizure.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. His eyes seemed to follow the course of rough sutures holding together the Y-incision on the man’s chest. “That’s what I’m talking about. They all had those bruises, you know. All seven. What’ll you need here?”

  Caleb closed his eyes and forced himself to think about it. He was so exhausted, he almost tipped over. But he held on to the raised edge of the cadaver tray and worked through it.

  “Blood from both ventricles, if there’s any. If his heart was still beating when he breathed in saltwater, magnesium concentration in the left ventricle could be a little higher. I’ll want slices of everything,” Caleb said. “Brain, lung, liver, kidneys.”

  He put his gloved thumb and forefinger on the man’s left eye and pried it open. Then he looked at the right eye. Both were still clear and turgid.

  “Doesn’t look like Marcie took any fluid out of his eyes, but I’ll
want it.”

  “What else?” Henry asked.

  “If there’s no urine, get some bile. Cerebrospinal fluid. Subcutaneous fat and skeletal muscle. If you saw anything that might be a needle injection site, take the fat and muscle around it.”

  Henry looked at the cadaver. Little bits of sand and algae still clung to the folds of his skin.

  “Might need a talk with Marcie. She’s not as thorough as she used to be,” Henry said. He was walking to an instrument tray. “Anything else?”

  “Just a printout of her report. You do yours yet?”

  “Holding back till you and I sort this out,” Henry said. He took a fine-bladed scalpel and pointed to a desk on the other side of the room. “Her report’s in that green folder.”

  “What about time of death? Got an estimate?”

  This wasn’t an imperative for Caleb’s work, but drugs in a dead body degraded like everything else. Knowing how long the man had been dead would help him figure out what kinds of chemicals had been in his system before he died and they started to break apart.

  Henry looked at his feet while he thought.

  “He was definitely alive at two a.m. on Sunday morning. Bunch of witnesses can put him in a bar called House of Shields, right till closing. Closing’s at two. After that, it’s hard to say. They pulled him out of the water a little after three o’clock yesterday afternoon—you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m just not feeling so hot. Go on.”

  “Well—see the maceration on his hands? Those prune wrinkles? Takes time to develop, especially in cold water. These aren’t too far along. He probably wasn’t in the bay more than eight hours. I’d guess he either died in the water, or right before he went in. So time of death is just around sunrise, Sunday morning.”

  “Got it,” Caleb said.

  His thoughts tumbled down a dark alley. Bridget stood at one end and the woman from House of Shields waited at the other. Kennon and Garcia were in the shadows. He closed his eyes and thought of the woman’s touch, the way she’d frozen him on his barstool with nothing more than a whisper of breath across his earlobe and a brush of her hand. What would it be like if she put her arms around him? If she let the length of her body slip against his?

  “Take Marcie’s report and go sit down in my office. You need it. I’ll get you when I’m done.”

  “Thanks. I’m not— It’s the body, I guess.”

  “They do that.”

  Henry dropped him off at the UCSF Medical Center at eight o’clock. He stood with the Styrofoam cooler in his hands and watched his friend drive away. Then, when the car was gone, he set the cooler on the sidewalk and dug out his cell phone. He turned it on and waited for it to connect to the network. There were no voicemails or new texts. Just an endless scroll of emails from work.

  He was putting the phone in his pocket when he changed his mind. He dialed Bridget’s cell number, tucked the cooler under one arm, and walked to a concrete bench next to the hospital bus stop. She answered it quickly.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  She could have said anything in that tone and he’d have known this conversation was going nowhere. He lowered the phone from his ear, his thumb over the button to cut the connection. Then he brought it back up.

  He made a sound, but it wasn’t even a word.

  He couldn’t think what he’d wanted. Her first words had burned that thought to its foundation.

  “What did you want?” she asked. “Jesus, Caleb. You made this call, not me.”

  “Your voice. I wanted to hear your voice. But this isn’t it.”

  “Yes it is. This is my voice. This is my voice saying Fuck you. This is my voice saying Don’t call—”

  He hung up, then switched off the phone. He cocked his arm to pitch it into the street, but stopped himself.

  He’d need a phone. This phone.

  There was a chance, however slim, that someone else would call. He’d left this number on a napkin at House of Shields. He calmed himself with that thought, however desperate it was. Then he turned the phone back on, pocketed it, and carried the cooler into the lab.

  He knew she was nearby, the woman from House of Shields.

  He’d spent his life finding things no one could see. Poisons, pathogens. Some people didn’t even believe they existed until he showed them how to look. He knew more about her than he had about anything else he’d searched for. He knew what she looked like, knew the perfume she wore. That wasn’t all. He knew the temperature of her skin, the pressure of her breath in a whisper, the shade of her eyes in a dimly lit room. The shape of her naked back, like a violin carved in ivory. So she could be found. He would study the problem until he saw the secret way in. The hidden passage, the swinging wall.

  He took Henry’s samples and transferred them to a cold storage unit, doing it entirely by touch and feel. He’d closed his eyes. It was easier that way, in the false darkness, to remember the scent of her perfume. If he wrapped his mind around her—if he protected his memory of her the way he’d shield a candle flame with a cupped hand when he walked room to room to check his house in a storm—then the memory wouldn’t fade. He could huddle up close to it for warmth and let it sustain him until he found her.

  If that wasn’t faith, then there wasn’t any such thing.

  Six

  HE KEPT A small flashlight on his keychain for the sole purpose of having a way to light the footpath when he walked home from the lab after nightfall. He’d seen a bobcat once in its beam, the wild cat’s eyes green-gold in the light for an instant before it ran growling into the shadows. Tonight he saw nothing but eucalyptus leaves and mud on the path. When he got home, he used the light to check that his boarded-up window was still intact.

  It was midnight when he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the coffee table with a pad of heavy drawing paper and a set of charcoal pencils. He’d spent three and a half hours in the lab, building a calibration curve and then running the first set of samples through the gas chromatograph and the mass spectrometer. He wasn’t finished, but he’d seen enough to know Henry’s hunch wasn’t misguided. But that wasn’t on his mind now. He could finish it in the morning, and then go see Henry.

  He took one of the pencils and looked at its tip in the firelight, then practiced with it on the first blank sheet in the sketchpad. A rough sketch to start with. Lines and a little shading. He gave himself ten minutes for it, closing his eyes now and then to shield the memory and let it grow bright again. When he was done, he turned the paper to the fire and looked at it a long while, making adjustments until he was satisfied it was right.

  It wasn’t until Bridget moved in that his childhood habit of drawing developed any kind of focus. She would stand behind him sometimes at the kitchen table, reaching around to guide his right hand with hers, her cheek on his shoulder. Her voice had been soft but sure. She’d wrap his finger in a scrap of chamois and use it to blur the shading and the lines. When the lesson was over and they moved on to something else, their fingers were blackened with carbon as if they’d been hauled in to a police station. Printed and booked for a crime.

  When he got better, she would model for him.

  There was a clawfoot tub in the master bathroom. She would sink into it and lie still with her eyes closed and her arm trailing from the side, one finger just touching the wooden step. He would sit on the floor against the wall and sketch her, and they would talk quietly like that until the water got cold.

  So he was confident he could draw the woman, could capture in charcoal the way she’d looked that night. He ripped the rough sketch from the pad and set it aside. Now he repeated the same drawing, but the execution was more precise. There was no more experimentation.

  She’d taken ahold of his wrist to move his hand until the carafe was at the right height. That was the instant he captured: the second just before she let go of his wrist, two of her fingers already off and her index finger brushing along the rise of his tendon as if feeling for his pulse. The
crystal reservoir glass stood on the bar between them, covered by the silver slotted spoon and topped with a cube of sugar. He drew this from a perspective just behind his left shoulder, so the side of his head was a shadow in the lower right corner of the drawing. From this angle, the loveliness of her face and the interaction of their hands could play across the main space of the sheet. Shading darkened half her face and torso, but this only set the rest of her off. Gave her depth and shape. The rest of House of Shields came through in hints. A gilded lamp leaned from the shadows. A bottle on the back bar glowed from the chiaroscuro darkness. He knew now that there was a dead man on the far side of this scene, where the background went to full black. But that man wasn’t a part of this. The light and the focus were drawn to her. Drawn to their hands together, to the story of longing set in motion by that touch.

  It took two hours to finish it, drawing without pause. His hands were black with carbon, and bloodied where the scabs had pulled free. He went to the kitchen and washed them, then came back to the coffee table carrying a good fountain pen. On the left corner of the drawing, he wrote the same note he’d put on the napkin at House of Shields.

  He could take the drawing upstairs to his study, scan it, and print a hundred copies. But something in him knew she would only respond to an original. You couldn’t simply mimic the motions of a prayer if you expected it to work. You had to say it anew each time. On your knees.

  He stretched his arms and moved his shoulders around to loosen them, and then he sharpened the charcoal pencil and started again.

  Once, while she was in the tub and Caleb sat drawing her by candlelight, Bridget had opened her eyes. She’d brought her head up from the edge of the bath, her hair dripping onto her shoulders and her breasts, and she looked at him.

  “Why didn’t I find you sooner?” she asked.

  “I’m hard to find.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You know what?”

  The candle flames whickered when he sat up from the wall.