The Poison Artist Page 7

  Seven

  CALEB WAS ON the couch with a wet washcloth rolled up and draped over his eyes when the doorbell rang. He sat up and looked at his watch. Three in the afternoon. Bridget taught a painting workshop at the Academy of Art University on Wednesday afternoons, so it wouldn’t be her. Of course, he was supposed to be at work too, so if her life had become anything like his, maybe she was on the doorstep.

  The bell rang again.

  “Coming.”

  He tossed the washcloth on the coffee table and glanced in the dining room and kitchen on his way to the foyer. The house was still pretty clean. Since coming home on Sunday afternoon, he’d spent almost all of his time in bars or at work, and hadn’t eaten anything at home. So he hadn’t had time to tear the place apart. But he didn’t look so great himself, which he knew without looking in a mirror. He’d fallen asleep on the couch at five a.m., still wearing his suit. Two hours later, he was up just long enough to leave a voicemail for Andrea to tell her he wouldn’t be coming in till the late afternoon. If at all. Then he was asleep in the same spot, the phone still in his hand.

  He reached the door and opened it without looking through the peephole. The man on the doorstep was using the side of his palm to brush beads of rain off the front of his overcoat. He looked at Caleb and nodded.

  “Went to your office first,” he said. “But they told me to come looking for you here. Remember me from Sunday night?”

  “Detective Kennon,” Caleb said.

  “Inspector Kennon,” the man corrected. “SFPD’s old-school.”

  “Sorry.”

  Kennon glanced to the right of the door, pointing with the fedora in his hand.

  “That the window you punched out?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “Girlfriend back, or you here alone?” He was looking at Caleb’s rumpled suit and untucked shirt, at the half-formed scabs on Caleb’s fingers. He could probably guess the answer to that one.

  “It’s just me. What’s going on?”

  “I wanted to ask a few follow-ups, see if I can figure out who was in the bar that night.”

  “Just questions?”

  “That’s all.”

  “All right, then.”

  Caleb didn’t open the door any more than he already had, and he didn’t move back to let Kennon in. Kennon looked at the porch and then leaned to look past Caleb into the house.

  “It’d be easier if we did it inside,” Kennon said.

  Caleb didn’t want to let him in. When he’d answered the door, the detective’s eyes had moved quickly across his face, and then he’d nodded slightly, as if he’d just checked off the last box on some unseen list. Kennon knew something about him, or thought he did. Maybe the easiest way to send him away would be to give him what he wanted. Or maybe, for a thing like this, there was no easy way. Caleb stepped back and opened the door.

  “Want a cup of coffee or something?”

  Bridget had owned the coffee machine, so there was just an empty space on the counter between one of the knife racks and the toaster. Caleb turned on the flame under a teakettle and dug in the back of the cupboard until he found the French press he’d used before she’d moved in.

  “Where’s Garcia?” he asked.

  “Running down something else. But I finished my stuff, figured I’d start at the beginning. See if I can’t shake anything loose that didn’t come down the first time.”

  Kennon was sitting on one of the stools with his elbows on the kitchen counter. Caleb stood opposite him. When the kettle whistled, he poured the water into the press and then a moment later, after pushing the grinds to the bottom, poured coffee into mugs. He passed one to Kennon, sliding it over the black granite.

  “Thanks. Smells good.”

  “I don’t know what else I can tell you,” Caleb said. “I told you everything I remembered when we talked in the car.”

  Kennon either didn’t hear him or simply didn’t care to acknowledge what he’d said. He looked around the kitchen, studying the countertops and the walls, then pivoted on his stool and looked at the dining room and, beyond that, the living room.

  Then he turned back to Caleb.

  “How’s that hand? Getting better?”

  Caleb looked at the backs of his fingers.

  “Okay. Not paying much attention to it.”

  “Out late again last night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That a regular thing for you, or just something you started after the girlfriend left?”

  “New thing, I guess. Since Bridget left, I’ve—”

  But he couldn’t finish the sentence. At least, not without telling Kennon more than he was willing to tell. He looked out the kitchen window, into the fog blowing over the rail of the deck.

  “You what? Since Bridget left, what?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been handling it well.”

  “Your secretary said you’d been coming in late this week.”

  “You talked to Andrea?”

  “Sure.”

  Kennon left it at that. He picked up his mug and held it just in front of his chin, breathing in the coffee steam with his eyes closed. Then he took a sip, set the mug down on the counter, and turned it to look at the emblem on the front.

  “Stanford, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Undergrad, or for the Ph.D.?”

  “Ph.D. I went to Cal for undergrad.”

  Kennon rotated the mug until the university’s seal faced Caleb.

  “Those are good schools,” Kennon said. “Selective.”

  Caleb nodded.

  “Any trouble getting in?”

  “No.”

  The inspector looked at Caleb and laid his hand on the leather document folder next to him. He opened its cover an inch and looked inside it, then focused again on Caleb.

  “Now you’re researching pain at UCSF.”

  Caleb had been bringing his mug to his lips, but he put it down on the counter. Some of the coffee sloshed over the side.

  “Must’ve been a long sit-down you had with Andrea.”

  “Nah. Don’t get on her case. She just told me you’d been feeling bad this week. Said to come find you here. But I Googled you. One of your papers came up, and I read the abstract.”

  Caleb nodded. That was fine. It wasn’t Andrea’s fault he wasn’t in the office when a homicide detective came looking for him.

  “If you want, I’ve got a couple extra copies of the journal.”

  Kennon turned down that offer with the back of his hand, then wrapped his palm and fingers around the mug again. It was cold in the kitchen, with all the west-facing windows taking the full force of the wind.

  “I wouldn’t understand it. But it looks like interesting stuff. And how’s a guy get into studying pain, anyway? I mean—there some kind of background there?”

  Caleb couldn’t help flicking his eyes away from Kennon’s face to watch the detective’s fingers tapping at the corner of his leather document folder. He wanted to reach across and take it, wanted to flip it open and see what was inside. The man was going to his lab, talking to his secretary. He was checking up on Caleb, and there’d be more on the Internet than just the academic articles and the patents. Caleb started to bring his hands together, but then stopped and kept them where they were. It wouldn’t help anything to seem nervous.

  “Nothing like that,” Caleb said, looking out the window now. “No background, or whatever you want to call it. It’s just an interesting problem of chemistry, of physiology. Kind of thing I’m good at.”

  “How’s that work?” Kennon asked. “Running blood through a mass spectrometer, figuring out how much pain someone’s been in.”

  “Chemicals. Guy gets hurt, his endocrine system responds. Adrenaline, endorphins. Damaged cells dump out different histamines. There’s paracrine signaling going on—that’s cell-to-cell communication—with compounds like prostaglandin and thromboxane. Bunch of other stuff. Pain leaves markers, and I’m following th
em. To quantify it.”

  “So you can say, like, ‘On a scale of one to ten, this guy’s suffering is a nine point five.’”

  Caleb nodded.

  “It’d help doctors. Patient comes in, says his pain’s unbearable, asks for a narcotic. Oxycontin, morphine. Guy might just need an aspirin. And maybe the grandmother in the room next door’s in nonstop agony but she doesn’t want to say.”

  “Don’t know about doctors,” Kennon said. “But cops and DAs will love it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Capital murder, penalty phase. Get an expert on the stand, have him tell the jury how much the victim suffered. That’d be like a magic bullet—for getting death sentences.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Kennon shrugged.

  “Kind of stuff I think about,” he said. He brought his coffee to his face and breathed in, but didn’t drink any. “And pain’s not the only thing you’re studying right now.”

  “I’ve got several things going. Totally different projects.”

  Kennon set down his cup.

  “I saw another paper. The thing with DARPA and the frog guy.”

  “Herpetologist. Dr. Reed-Giles.”

  “Lot of red tape, dealing with toxins like that? What’s it—”

  “Batrachotoxin.”

  “Batrachotoxin, right. Kind of hard to pronounce. But I mean, you don’t just keep it in the house, do you?”

  Caleb turned and looked over his left shoulder, wondering if he’d left any of the bloodstains on the kitchen floor. He couldn’t see any. He looked back at Kennon, who was still studying him, waiting for an answer.

  “The median lethal dose is ninety micrograms—a couple grains of salt,” Caleb said. “And all you’d have to do is touch it.”

  He reached across and took Kennon’s right hand, turning it over on the counter so it lay palm up. Kennon tensed his wrist but didn’t try to pull his hand away. He looked at Caleb, let Caleb uncurl his index finger against the granite.

  “This a paper cut, right here?”

  “Yeah.”

  He let go of Kennon’s hand.

  “That’s all it’d take. It’d look just like a heart attack. So the answer to your question is yes, there’s red tape. A lot of it. And no—I wouldn’t keep it around the house. It’s in the lab. Signed and sealed, and in a safe.”

  Kennon nodded and took his hand off the counter, brushing his thumb across his fingertips before wiping his palms down the front of his jacket. Caleb poured the rest of the coffee into Kennon’s mug.

  Caleb stared out the windows at the gray-white blur.

  This was such a good city for a girl who wanted to stay unseen. By daylight, it was hidden half the time. Secretive. At night, when the rain came in and the streetlights were an amber haze, and you were trudging alone down an empty trolley line because it was three a.m. and you were drunk—when you stopped to catch your breath at the top of a hill and caught sight of the bay and its black water reflecting the city like a sheet of shattered glass—in those moments, the city was a dreamscape. A dream she moved through as freely as the fog.

  Kennon was watching him.

  “There anything you wanted to ask me about?” Caleb said.

  “You said you might be able to recognize the other people in the bar that night if I showed you pictures.”

  “You’ve got pictures?”

  Kennon nodded and tapped the leather document folder on the counter next to his coffee mug.

  “We talked to all the bartenders, made a list of the regulars. Then we found pictures of them. Found some others, too. People who might’ve known the victim.”

  “You’re not saying these are the people who were actually there that night,” Caleb said. “These are just the people who might’ve been there.”

  “That’s right.”

  Even with that caveat, Caleb felt a prickle of interest. He reached across the counter and put his hand on the leather folder.

  “May I?”

  “Please.”

  Caleb slid the folder across and opened it. Inside was a manila envelope.

  “In here?”

  Kennon nodded, and Caleb bent the copper tabs back and opened the envelope. He pulled out a half-inch stack of photographs printed on high-gloss inkjet paper. He went through the forty pictures quickly, thumbing them onto the counter in a loose stack. The pictures were a mix of driver’s license photos and candid shots culled from the Internet. Most of the regulars were men, and the few women weren’t even close. When he got to the end of the stack, he went through it a second time, a little more carefully now.

  Midway through, he set aside one of the photographs.

  “This guy, I think, was down at the end of the bar.”

  “Okay. Anyone else?”

  “I don’t think so. I was pretty drunk by the time I got in there.”

  “You went through that in a hurry the first time. Looking for someone in particular?”

  Caleb felt the skin around his eyes tighten. When he looked up, Kennon was watching him closely.

  “There was a bald guy—came in, had a drink, and left. I thought I might recognize him, is all.”

  “That it?”

  “Anyone else tell you about him? The bald guy?”

  Kennon just looked at him, another of his long pauses. The bartender surely would have remembered the girl who’d ordered absinthe. Kennon would have talked to him, either in the bar or down at the station, in one of the interrogation rooms. So if Kennon didn’t know about the girl already, the bartender must have held out on him. There were plenty of reasons a man might not want to tell the police about a girl like that. Or else Kennon knew about her but wanted to see how far Caleb was willing to go to lie for her. But when Kennon spoke again, he changed the subject entirely.

  “Maddox—that wasn’t always your last name, was it?”

  Caleb shook his head.

  “My mom remarried when I was fourteen. She changed her name.”

  “And yours went along for the ride.”

  “Something like that.”

  Kennon nodded, then drained the rest of his coffee. He pushed the empty mug back across the counter, to Caleb. Then he just sat, his fingers tapping on the stone as he looked at Caleb.

  “Mr. Maddox,” he finally said. He scooped the photographs off the counter and slipped them back into the envelope. He put on his fedora. “Thanks for the coffee, and the time.”

  After Kennon was gone, Caleb stood on the back deck for half an hour, leaning against the redwood rail and letting the cold mist blow into him until his suit was soaked. On the night after it ended with Bridget, all he’d wanted was to go somewhere quiet. Some place he could sit and drink whiskey, and think about her. As if by sitting on a barstool and concentrating on his memories of Bridget, the two of them together, he could bring everything back. She had loved him so much, so fiercely, until her hand found the tumbler. If there’d been anything wrong, some little crack that widened on its approach to last Saturday, he’d missed it. And now he’d lied at least twice to a homicide detective who’d known Caleb’s true name. He was helping Henry with something he shouldn’t touch at all because he was a witness. He thought of Bridget less than he thought about a girl he’d met for five minutes in the dark.

  Five minutes that spun through his mind in a ceaseless whirl.

  Her hand on his wrist. Her whispered breath brushing his earlobe. Her naked back, waiting for his touch. The silk dress she’d worn had been so gossamer-thin that if she’d reached to unclasp the strap at the back of her neck, if she’d let it slip past her hips and down to the floor, it would have pooled at her feet and spread there like spilled water.

  She was like a dark star passing overhead. She eclipsed everything that guided him, but he couldn’t see her. He looked out at the grid of avenues below the hill. Streetlamps were flickering and coming on, though it wasn’t quite four in the afternoon. He went inside and stripped off his suit, then took a sho
wer and dressed. When he came back to the living room he sat on the couch and picked up his phone.

  He dialed Henry’s cell number.

  “Just wanted to see what’s up. This a bad time?”

  “It’s a perfect time,” Henry said. “I was about to call you.”

  “Something happen?”

  There was a rustle from Henry’s end of the line. Caleb could picture him looking around the office, cupping his left hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.

  “They brought in another one,” he whispered. “Just now.”

  Caleb was silent, staring at the fire. Henry went on in his low voice.

  “There’ll be a crowd in here for the autopsy. Inspectors from SFPD, some guys from the Marin County sheriff’s office. But if you can, come by around eight.”

  “I can make it. This new guy, he’s like the others?”

  “Looks like. Same shoulder-girdle bruises. No ID yet, and he’s been in the water a while.”

  “What’s a while?”

  “More than eight weeks. When you come, bring your cooler. And don’t eat a big dinner.”

  “Sure,” Caleb said. He paused, remembering why he’d called. “Guys coming in for the autopsy, those the same detectives working the other case?”

  “Yeah. Once the rest of the lab results come back, if they’re what we think they are, SFPD will probably go nuts. Put together a task force, set up a tip line. But right now, there’s just two inspectors.”

  “They any good?”

  “The lead guy, Kennon, is the best in the city. Maybe in the state. Been on the force so long, he’s seen everything twice. I don’t know his new partner, but if he’s working with Kennon, he’s probably good.”

  “They know we’re talking?” Caleb asked. He put his feet on the coffee table and laid his head on the backrest.

  “Christ, no. And it’ll stay that way. That’s trouble I don’t need.”

  “Okay. Good. I’ll see you sometime after eight.”