The Poison Artist Page 6

  “What you said. That you’re hard to find. But they found you—so I could.”

  She closed her eyes again, put her head back onto the rounded lip of the bath. She relaxed, let her body slip into something very close to sleep, so that he could draw her.

  Of course, he’d never told her about being lost. He didn’t know what she knew, or what she guessed. For a moment, he just stared at her, the charcoal pencil motionless in his hand.

  “Draw,” she said, without opening her eyes. “It’s okay.”

  He started again, and that was as close as they ever came to the blank space in Caleb’s history, the blind fog that Henry called the lacuna. She must have known most of it, and maybe it was better that way. If she knew but hadn’t wanted to talk about it, then maybe she never would. More than anything, he didn’t want to talk about it. The pencil’s tip trembled against the paper as he began filling in the shadows beneath the raised tub.

  When he woke on the couch in the cold December light, he walked into the kitchen, where he’d laid out the drawings on the granite countertop. He thought by daylight they’d look amateurish. Laughable. That their failed conception and execution would finally purge House of Shields from his mind. But the drawings were better than any he’d ever done. She was so lovely that if he closed his eyes and balanced himself against the counter, he could feel his entire body pulling toward her, like a compass needle swayed off its true course by an anomaly in the shape and tug of the earth.

  He made it to work almost an hour before lunch.

  During the night, he’d been too lost in the drawings to drink anything, and that was a mercy this morning because he’d slept so little. Andrea caught him as he was shutting the door to his office.

  “They’re waiting upstairs, in the conference room.”

  “Who’s waiting?”

  “Joanne. And that man from NIH.”

  He stared at her, trying to place it.

  “The grant review?” she offered.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry.”

  By the time he came in, his graduate fellow and the NIH grant auditor had given up on small talk and were just staring at the rolled-down screen. The visitor’s badge clipped to the auditor’s lapel said his name was Dr. Greckin. Caleb couldn’t remember if he’d ever spoken to this man or not. He followed the man’s eyes and looked at the screen. The lead slide was the title of his last paper:

  QUANTIFICATION OF PAIN:

  A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING SUFFERING

  Maybe not his best title ever. But the work was good. Caleb dimmed the lights and let Joanne start the slide presentation. He watched without a word. Every time Dr. Greckin stopped her to ask a question, Joanne would stare at Caleb, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, she would shrug and answer the question herself. She was doing fine, but Caleb wasn’t making either of them look good.

  At the end, Greckin stood and began gathering handouts from around the table.

  “Dr. Maddox, this was interesting, but—”

  “But what?” Caleb said.

  It was the first he’d spoken since the meeting started, and he regretted it right away. He’d meant it as a simple question, but the words were bits of broken glass in his throat. The man thumbed through the stack of printouts and then looked at Caleb.

  “They’re not what we asked for. We understand the theory. We need the backup data. That’s all—just hard data.”

  “It’s almost ready.”

  “All we need is a little support to justify the money. It’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s coming. We’re getting new samples almost every week.”

  “Good.”

  The man shook Joanne’s hand on his way out. Caleb came around the conference table and held out his hand.

  “Glad to finally meet you,” Caleb said.

  Greckin shook his hand, but looked at Caleb with his head half-cocked.

  “We met twice,” he said. “In September.”

  Caleb watched him until he was gone. Then he turned to Joanne.

  “It’s not a problem,” he said.

  She looked at her laptop screen, started closing out of the slide presentation.

  “That’s good. Because it looked like a problem to me.”

  “I’ve got more than he knows. Some of the new sets are really good.”

  “You might’ve given him a hint,” Joanne said. She slammed her laptop closed and put it into her shoulder bag. “I could’ve picked a lot of programs. I signed on with you because I wanted to do some hard science—in a lab with full funding.”

  “We’ve got full funding. And we’ll keep it.”

  “And what was that last bit? You don’t remember Bethesda? We were there for three days.”

  “Sorry,” he said. He stepped past her, into the hallway. “It’s been a hard week.”

  She called after him, but he didn’t stop. When he got to his office, he shut the door and locked it. He sat behind his desk, closed his eyes, and put his thumbs on his temples. When Bridget threw the glass, she’d done more than just knock him down. He needed to get up, though. To get back to where he’d been last Friday, before the fight. The data wasn’t coming in as fast as the NIH wanted, but what was coming was good. He could put it all together by the deadline and keep at least that much intact.

  Joanne knocked and called his name. When he didn’t respond, she tried the door handle. It jerked up and down but didn’t turn. She slapped the door in frustration and walked away.

  He waited until she was gone, then sat up and switched on his screen. It took him an hour to force his mind into Henry’s problem, but once he was in it, he stayed with it to the end.

  The hostess led Caleb past the bar and the tables in the front of the restaurant to the grotto-like back room, where Henry was waiting at a half-circle booth. Caleb slid in and let the hostess put the napkin across his lap.

  “Sorry,” Caleb said. “Had to go home first. Shower, change clothes.”

  He’d shaved and put on a better suit, had then taken the time to comb his hair well. The bruise on his forehead was turning yellowish, but it looked all right in the low light. The light in Farallon’s back room was dim enough to hide nearly anything.

  “I ordered wine,” Henry said, looking at his forehead. “You gonna be okay with that?”

  Caleb held up his right palm, as if giving an oath.

  “I won’t go crazy. Maybe just six or seven bottles before dessert.”

  Henry smiled.

  “Good. You’ll like this one. But if we’re having six more bottles, we’ll need cheaper ones.” He looked at Caleb and added, “Seriously, though. Take it easy.”

  The sommelier came and uncorked a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, poured a swirl of it into Henry’s glass, and waited for Henry to nod. Then she filled Caleb’s glass, topped Henry’s, and left the bottle on its coaster. Henry watched her go, then turned to Caleb.

  “Bridget’s still—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Henry sipped his wine. “What’d you find?”

  “Your guy drowned. Magnesium in his left ventricular blood was elevated. He breathed in seawater while his heart was still beating, then died before it finished circulating.”

  “So Marcie’s report is right? There was nothing else?”

  “Marcie’s calibration curve is flawed,” Caleb said. “She used a sodium fluoride blood preservative, which is standard, but she didn’t calculate the right compensation to account for it in the tests. And her preservative’s contaminated—someone must be pouring one bottle into another to save shelf space, then accidentally mixing in other stuff—but Marcie, some of what she picked up, she probably wrote off as preservative. Noise in the data. Other stuff, she just missed. I can’t explain why. It wasn’t hard to find.”

  “Shit.” Henry pushed his wine away. “What’d she miss?”

  “You’d need a pen and paper, and you’d n
eed to be ready to write fast, because it’s a long list. But the two standouts were thujone and vecuronium.”

  “Vecuronium’s a muscle relaxant.”

  “A fast one,” Caleb said, nodding. “Shoot a guy with ten milligrams, he’ll be on the ground in sixty seconds. Put him in the water, no chance he’d make it. This guy’s blood was full of the unmetabolized drug. If he hadn’t died, his liver would’ve eliminated it in eighty minutes. So he was incapacitated when he hit the water.”

  Henry took his wineglass by its stem and slowly twirled the Cabernet inside it. A waiter approached, but Henry waved him off.

  “So it’s murder.”

  Caleb nodded. “That much vecuronium, no way he could’ve gotten into the bay without some help. So, yeah. Murder.”

  “We’re gonna have to go back, run the other six.”

  “You want, send Marcie to my lab. Let her run the other six on my equipment.”

  Henry looked up.

  “Give her a clean way out? She finds it in your lab, then I know the problem is my equipment and not my toxicologist?”

  “Something like that,” Caleb said. “Who knows? You’re a smart guy. Maybe you could parlay that into a budget increase.”

  Henry laughed, but the change dropped off his face as quickly as it had come.

  “They catch a guy, it goes to trial, some defense lawyer’s gonna ask why the first six reports said ‘drowning’ and then we go back and find a bunch of stuff we missed.”

  That was Henry’s problem to figure out. Caleb just did the science. But now something else was bothering Henry.

  “And what about the shoulder-girdle bruises?” Henry asked. “If he had a muscle relaxant, he wasn’t thrashing. So how’d he get the bruises?”

  Caleb drank some of his wine and thought how to explain it.

  He wasn’t quite sure when he’d last eaten, or what that had been. He’d been living on loneliness and obsession since Saturday night. He was getting a break from it now, with Henry, but as soon as he left the restaurant and was alone again, it would come back. But that was all right. It was like pulling out thorns. Maybe it was better to just work them out and take the pain.

  Bleed until it was better.

  “Caleb?”

  “Sorry,” he said. He put his wineglass down, saw it was empty. “I think the shoulder-girdle bruises are where the thujone comes in.”

  “I’ve never heard of thujone.”

  “Neither had I. Had to look it up. It’s an organic. A ketone, pretty close to sugar. But it’s a poison. High dose, it’ll cause thrashing.”

  “I don’t get it. Why mix that with a muscle relaxant?”

  Caleb almost smiled. This had taken him the longest to puzzle through. He still liked his work enough to appreciate it when the pieces fit together neatly.

  “It didn’t make sense until I started looking at the metabolites—the breakdown of the drugs in the system. And the timing. That’s critical. This guy got vecuronium twice. You can read the metabolites in his liver like tree rings. First dose was about four hours before he died. When his liver cleared it, he got thujone—a lot of it. Then he got another shot of vecuronium, right before he went in the water.”

  Henry nodded.

  “I see what you’re saying. Someone shot him with muscle relaxant to get him under control. Took him somewhere safe, strapped him down and did something to him for three hours. Then shot him with muscle relaxant again and dumped him in the bay to die.”

  “That’s pretty much it. Except, there’s one other thing,” Caleb said. “I’ve been researching the physiological effects of pain. How it changes the body, at a chemical level. And I’m getting good at it—still trying to get NIH funding to finish what I started. Learn how to measure it.”

  “You told me,” Henry said. “A while back. But I thought you were just looking for the poisons, what Marcie missed.”

  “I did a breakdown of things his endocrine system pumped out the last three hours he was alive. Ran the histamines, too. Shit’s off the charts. Before he died, he went through as much pain as a man can take. Three hours, maybe more. Total, unbearable agony.”

  “So it’s not just a run-of-the-mill murderer, is it?”

  “Not at all,” Caleb said. “This is new science. So new you probably couldn’t get it into court. But I thought you should know.”

  “Should we order?” Henry asked.

  When he left the restaurant, Caleb went to the garage where he’d parked his car. The folder with his drawings was in the trunk. He took it out and tucked it under his arm. He’d done five drawings altogether. Just thinking of it now made his right hand cramp up. He’d cut the edges of each with a box knife and a straight edge, and had put them inside oversized stationery envelopes. Because he didn’t know her name yet, there’d been only one way to address them. He’d scanned one of the drawings, then cropped the image on his computer, singling out her face. He’d printed five copies of that onto heavy bond paper. After trimming the images to neat squares, he’d pasted her face over the flaps of the envelopes like wax seals.

  He walked west on Post Street, away from Union Square.

  Men stood in the shadows of gated doorways and asked for change. These were Henry’s people. His customer base, just filling in the days until it was their turn to visit Henry’s basement on Bryant Street. One man came out of his doorway and followed Caleb with a crumpled prescription for Oxycontin.

  “You fill it, and we’ll split it,” the man said to Caleb’s back.

  Caleb turned south on Jones and dropped down the hill to the intersection with O’Farrell. This was Bourbon and Branch, but the sign on the corner was just a plain, backlit white rectangle extending from the building’s side:

  ANTI-SALOON

  <><><>

  LEAGUE

  San Francisco Branch

  Est. 1920

  His reservation wasn’t until eleven. He decided to walk around the block. Though he’d never been here, he knew the rules were strict. You couldn’t ring the buzzer before your time. And that was fine with him. To have structure to the search. Rows and columns. He knew how to conduct a search like that.

  Fifteen minutes later, he came back to the corner of Jones and O’Farrell. He pressed the buzzer and looked at the speaker mounted on the wall. The brass grate was covered with a patina of green oxide. Whoever was on the other end made him wait. But he didn’t press the buzzer again. Finally there was a break of static from the speaker.

  “Password?”

  “Bitters and rye,” he said.

  The door clicked open. He felt his way down the dark hallway and stepped into the main room of the speakeasy. When he came into it, and saw the pressed-tin ceiling, and the way the glass-spiked chandelier lit the room like a snarl of burning teeth, the shadows cloaking the rest of the room in thick velvet, he knew this was the right bar. She could glide across this dark space and materialize onto a stool next to him the way fog settled into the valleys between the hills, nestled there in the cool shadows, and became something solid. Something real enough to touch. To taste. He knew she’d been here, as surely as he’d felt the touch of her lips on the absinthe glass at House of Shields when he’d traced its rim. He sat at the bar and waited for the bartender to work his way over.

  “Yessir?”

  “Let me have a Martin Mills. Make it a double.”

  That would set him back two hundred dollars, if they even had a bottle of it. But he thought it would get the bartender’s attention.

  It did.

  The man ran his hand along the front of his black tie and down the gabardine-covered buttons of his vest. He leaned against his side of the bar.

  “Neat?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “You want a back with that?”

  “Glass of ice water.”

  The man used a stepping stool to reach the niche in the wall with the Martin Mills. He poured it into an old-fashioned glass and brought it over with the ice water. Caleb took the
glass of bourbon and slid one of the envelopes back across the bar in exchange. His finger was above the portrait he’d pasted to the flap.

  “She comes here sometimes,” Caleb said. “Keep it behind the bar, where you’ll remember it. When you see her, give it to her.”

  The man hesitated, and Caleb slid the envelope an inch closer.

  “What is this?” the bartender asked. He hadn’t touched the envelope.

  “I need to see her again. I don’t know her name.”

  The man looked at the envelope a long time, his hands on the bar. Then he took it and put it out of sight. He nodded at Caleb and brought the bottle of Martin Mills back. He added a quarter of an inch to Caleb’s glass.

  “You’ll need it.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He stayed ten minutes at Bourbon and Branch, finishing his drink. The bourbon was smooth and clean, a low fire. When he stood from his stool to leave, he slid three hundred-dollar bills under his empty glass. He could afford that, for now. And there’d be new funding coming in a few months.

  Then he was wandering back toward Union Square, pulling his coat close against the wet wind and sidestepping the beggars who’d staked their places with flattened boxes and scraps of blankets.

  By three a.m., he’d covered ten miles and had delivered all five envelopes. He’d found two teller machines during the night, drawing cash to replenish what he was leaving on bar tops. He’d drunk Martin Mills and old Scottish single malts, and at the last place, up in North Beach, he’d had Berthe de Joux. In that basement-level speakeasy, instead of a carafe of ice water they’d given him a crystal reservoir held aloft by a silver statuette of a nude Venus. To start the drip, he only had to twist a tap on the reservoir’s side.

  The bartender hadn’t taken the final envelope until Caleb pushed it another inch across the bar to show the corner of the bill beneath it.

  Now he was walking down Powell Street, listening to the cable rattle in its guide path under the tracks in the middle of the street. At the intersections of eastbound streets, when the fog broke, he could see the curving lights of the Bay Bridge on its transit to Yerba Buena Island. He was twenty blocks from his car, but needed the walk before he’d be ready to drive anywhere.