The Thin Edge

by Peggy Townsend

  The description Steve Porter had emailed listed Ruiz as five foot eight and 175 pounds, and while this guy was closer to 164—one of an anorexic’s talents was gauging weight to within a few ounces—Aloa supposed time on the street could account for the lost pounds.

  The robed and hooded priest raised his staff and banged it twice on the floor.

  “We gather in justice,” he called. “We gather in the Lamb’s name.”

  Quickly, the congregants arranged themselves in a circle and Aloa maneuvered herself so she stood next to the hooded worshipper she thought might be Ruiz.

  “We gather to celebrate another victory,” the priest said.

  “In the Lamb’s name,” the worshippers said and thumped their staffs.

  “We gather to rid the world of sin.”

  “In the Lamb’s name,” the worshippers recited and banged their sticks again.

  Aloa had just spotted a crude tattoo on the back of her neighbor’s hand—a melting clock that, in prison, signified the passage of time—and so nearly missed the last stick thump.

  Could she have found Ruiz this easily?

  Keeping an eye on the suspicious worshipper, she followed along with the ritual as best she could, giving thanks for the hood, which obscured the fact she was a woman and also her ignorance of the words being chanted. When the violinist began a slightly off-key tune, the priest took his place next to the cross, preaching about how drugs ruined the bodies gifted to mankind by the Creator and how those who peddled these temptations were animals who deserved to be killed and burned in the fires of hell. He spoke of a world where addicts were locked up until hard labor cleansed them of their sins. He spoke of self-punishment and purity, of handing out justice when it was needed, of pain and death for dealers who peddled temptation to others.

  Excitement rippled through the crowd and Aloa stifled the urge to flee.

  “Is there one among you who will show their readiness and their piety?” the priest called, lifting a length of chain wrapped in barbed wire from the foot of the cross.

  “I will,” cried a hooded man in neatly pressed denims who stripped off his shirt and took the chain. “I will be pure. I will serve the Lamb,” he said and slapped the chain across his bare back, drawing blood.

  “Again,” cried the crowd.

  Aloa swallowed the bile that rose in her throat as the man struck himself over and over.

  “He is pure and ready for his task,” the priest said when the man finally collapsed, exhausted and dripping blood, only to be carried off by two congregants who dumped him unceremoniously on the long table on one side of the room. But as the pair returned to the circle, Aloa’s heart gave a thud of recognition. One of the hooded men wore a pair of run-down cowboy boots engraved with a coiled snake. Just like the hollow-cheeked man outside Elvis’s tent.

  Aloa forced herself to concentrate even though her mind was racing. She watched as the priest came around the circle with a chalice, announcing it was the Lamb’s blood and asking for an oath of cleanliness and purity before each person took a sip. Aloa avoided his eyes when it was her turn. “I give my oath to you,” she recited in a low voice and took a small taste of what seemed to be cranberry-grape juice. Behind the priest came the man in the cowboy boots, holding the metal symbol he’d unhooked from the inverted cross.

  “I am your servant,” each person said and kissed the edge of the emblem.

  “I am your servant,” Aloa dutifully proclaimed when it was her turn, but after she’d kissed the symbol, a tingle of foreboding ran through her. She didn’t know if it was her imagination or if the guy in the cowboy boots had hesitated before he moved on. Did he sense she wasn’t a man, or worse, somehow recognize her from the tent city? Her civilian mind told her to leave, but her journalist’s brain told her if she didn’t confirm Ruiz’s identity now, she might never get the chance again.

  The violin sounded. The circle began to move.

  “We follow your word,” the congregants sang. “We die so that we may live.”

  Aloa recognized this part of the ceremony and moved along with the group. When they came to the end of the song, Aloa banged her stick along with the others. “Justice for all,” she called out, her voice joining those of the other worshippers. She could hear the tattooed man next to her breathing hard.

  “Remember those who have died for your justice,” the priest said. “Those we have cleansed with your holy sword.”

  He lifted a tablet and voices mumbled the names on the list.

  “Lester Holman. Billy Lisowski. Pablo Ruiz. Star Felice. Elvis Nash.”

  The dead.

  Aloa felt herself pale. It wouldn’t do any good to look for Ruiz. It was time to get the hell out of there.

  Aloa slipped from the room the minute the ceremony ended and strode down the hallway into the factory space, resisting the urge to hurry or to look over her shoulder. No need to arouse suspicions if she didn’t have to.

  The outdoor spotlight shined through the building’s highest windows, turning the abandoned factory into a world of hulking shadows and whispered pasts. Her Timberlands crunched glass and dirt as she followed the pathway through the machinery and metal that had once turned out handsome and sturdy ships.

  A hundred yards to the door.

  “Hey!” A voice pierced the semidarkness.

  Aloa stiffened but didn’t turn or change pace.

  “Come back here. Show yourself,” the voice commanded.

  Aloa glanced over her shoulder to see a shape coming down the hallway toward her. Was it the snake-booted man?

  “Identify yourself,” the voice ordered.

  Aloa knew she had exactly two choices at that point—to bluff or to run.

  It took only a nanosecond to choose.

  She dropped her stick and ran.

  Behind her came a shout and the slap of boots. She strained her eyes in the semidarkness and yanked off the hood, which was blocking her view. Thanking her father for his lessons on focus and memory during their bird-watching excursions, she turned right and vaulted over a long workbench before ducking under a length of metal roofing, which leaned against a pile of lumber.

  She grabbed the corrugated roofing sheet, causing the edge to slice into the soft part of her palm. Ignoring the pain, she shoved the roofing toward her pursuer.

  She heard him grunt an oath as the metal crashed into bone and flesh with a sound like thunder. She turned and ran again, veering around some kind of giant cogwheel and finding another path through the detritus.

  Fifty feet to the door.

  “I see you,” her hunter called. He was coming after her, leaping over a three-foot-high pile of pipes she’d been forced to swerve around and thus lose ground.

  Windmilling her arms, she plunged right again and jumped over a low metal rod she hoped he might not notice. Another thump came and a shouted oath. She ducked low and threaded her way through the junk, praying he wouldn’t see her. The old pickup truck blocked her way and she scrambled through the rusted-out cab. But instead of sprinting out the door as her pursuer would expect—and where open ground would allow him to catch her—she stopped and slid underneath the gutted vehicle. She hoped the darkness would hide her.

  The truck shook as her hunter climbed through the cab and continued on. She calmed her breath, pulling her phone from her pocket, thumbing it to life and holding it against her chest. The darkness had given her an idea. Plan B, she thought.

  The factory door slapped open. Another string of curses.

  Footsteps came back in her direction and the truck shook again.

  Aloa willed her fluttering heart to calm.

  “I’ll find you,” the man who hunted her called out. Then, “Hey, you,” he shouted to someone nearby, “come and help me. We’ve got an intruder.”

  Suddenly, a pair of cowboy boots appeared inches from her face, followed by a bent knee.

  Shit.

  The shadowed face of the snake-booted man appeared in her vision.
r />   “Gotcha,” he said, reaching to grab her.

  “Maybe not,” Aloa said and thrust her phone at her pursuer’s face. The flashlight on her phone was small but powerful and the man roared, reaching blindly for her. But Aloa was already sliding out from under the truck and running.

  Aloa knew she had only a few seconds before the snake-booted man regained his vision, so she turned right at the door instead of left toward the hole in the fence. She thanked the weather gods for a fog that seemed thicker and even more impenetrable than when she’d arrived. She sprinted across the empty lot that spread out from the warehouse, then slowed to quiet her footfalls. At the far corner, she listened, heard only silence, and scrambled over the chain-link fence. She dropped to the ground and jogged through an alley she thought led toward the waterfront and her trusty CB-350.

  Back home, Aloa threw off the secondhand clothes, took a hot shower, and tended to the wound on her hand. If the worshippers’ mumbled list was what she thought it was, then Pablo wasn’t hiding. He was dead.

  She debated calling Quinn, but it was late and she knew the congregation, along with all the accoutrements of the vigilante church, were already long gone. She poured herself a glass of wine and paced the length of the house. Streetlights shined gauzily through the fog and squares of light glowed from the apartment building across the way.

  Calmer now, she went to her desk, opened her notebook, and began making a list of what she knew. Putting pen to paper always organized her thoughts. Partway through, she paused, set down the wine, and reached for her phone.

  Her finger swiped through the photographs of the street where Elvis’s body had been found: the office building, a parking structure, a row of converted live/work spaces. She stopped and swiped back one shot.

  PETERSON AND SONS PACKING CO. read the faded sign painted high on the exterior of a restored brick building.

  Aloa skimmed again through her list, felt a stir of excitement, and turned to her laptop. If she was right, she knew where Pablo might be found.

  DAY 9

  Rick Quinn ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape and headed toward the sidewalk where Aloa waited. His face was grim.

  “All right,” he said, stopping in front of her, “time to tell me how you found him.”

  “Is it Ruiz?” Aloa asked. She’d arrived early at the industrial area to avoid the questioning eyes of workers coming in for their shifts. She’d parked her bike and begun to stalk the neighborhood, checking dumpsters and peering into the branches of the few trees that were there. She’d walked the entire perimeter of a long concrete building and ducked down to look under what appeared to be an abandoned tractor-trailer rig. She finally found what she was looking for in a thick clump of berry vines behind a vacant factory building at the far end of the street: a green duffel bag leaking the sickly sweet scent of decay.

  “We’re pretty sure it’s Ruiz,” Quinn said gruffly. “Now talk. And don’t play Ms. I-Can’t-Reveal-My-Sources with me.”

  “I’m not sure I like your tone,” Aloa said.

  “I’m not sure I like you going around the city finding dead bodies.”

  “Just one dead body,” she corrected.

  “Don’t make me arrest you for interfering with an investigation.”

  For a moment they glared at each other.

  Aloa knew Quinn could, and would, make good on his threat if she forced him into a corner. “All right. You win,” she said finally and pulled out her phone, showing him a photo of the spot where Elvis’s body had been found. “See that faded old sign on that building? The one that says Peterson and Sons Packing Co.?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “I was thinking about how each of the vics died—shot with a bolt gun before their throats were slit—and it hit me: that’s how pigs and cattle are slaughtered.”

  “So?” Quinn asked.

  “So that old sign on the building meant there used to be a meat-packing plant where Elvis’s body was found. I did a search for slaughterhouses in the city and came up with an 1860s map. Sure enough, the bodies of Billy, Elvis, and the woman named Star were each found where a slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant used to be.” She swung her finger in an arc. “And this was Butchertown. There were five or six slaughterhouses here.”

  She’d read reports about San Francisco’s rapid rise in population from 1860 to 1870 and how residents began to complain about the noise and smell of the slaughterhouses in their midst. The area around Mission Creek, called Old Butchertown, was especially bad. The slaughterhouses there would dump their waste into the slow-moving waterway, which required two or three tides to eventually wash the offal into the bay. The stench of rotting flesh and curdling blood was horrific. Public health officials, believing noxious odors could affect a person’s health, cracked down.

  Eventually, the city forced slaughterhouses farther south. There, the abattoirs were built on stilts over the bay waters. The spot where Aloa and Quinn stood was at the heart of the city’s second Butchertown.

  “I guess I was right,” Aloa said.

  Behind Quinn, a swarm of technicians and police officers scoured the crime scene, gathering evidence and taking photos.

  “How long do you think Ruiz was there?” Aloa asked, remembering the bag’s smell.

  “A couple of weeks, at least,” Quinn said.

  “Before Corrine Davenport was killed,” Aloa said.

  “Yup.”

  There went her Some-Other-Dude-Did-It theory.

  “I don’t suppose you also have an idea who’s killing these folks?” Quinn folded his arms across his chest.

  Aloa squinted into the gloom, the image of the strange ritual with its inverted cross and weird symbol rising in her head.

  “I might,” she said. “You saw the circle-with-a-triangle spray-painted on the duffel bag?”

  Quinn nodded. “It was on the other duffels too. We were keeping that quiet, though.”

  Aloa knew police often held back certain details, but if she’d known about the symbol, she would have alerted Quinn to the church—and Elvis might still be alive. She gave a silent curse.

  “So I need to tell you that there’s this church, actually more of a cult, called the Church of the Sacrificial Lamb and they have these weird ceremonies,” Aloa said.

  For the next twenty-five minutes, Aloa laid out what she knew and had witnessed, describing the symbol she saw and sketching a map of the abandoned factory and its makeshift church. She told Quinn she’d witnessed two of the ceremonies and that they’d happened right after the killings of Star and Elvis.

  “Are you dumb or do you just have a death wish?” Quinn had exploded when she’d finished telling him about the snake-booted man and how she’d escaped him at the abandoned factory.

  Aloa lifted her chin. “I was trying to confirm what I’d heard. Or would it have been better if I let you storm into a church service and be wrong?”

  Quinn looked skyward and blew out a long breath.

  “Be at the station at two. We’ll need a formal statement and also to see if we can get a sketch of the guy in the cowboy boots.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Good,” Quinn said.

  He turned and ducked back under the crime-scene tape. “And don’t be late,” he warned.

  Aloa undressed on the laundry porch, shoved her clothes into the washer, and went to take another shower. The smell of dead body was still in her nostrils and in her mouth, and she scrubbed herself under the stream of hot water before slathering her body with lavender-scented lotion. It was an old cop trick, trading one strong scent for another, but it was only partly successful, and she knew lunch, and possibly dinner, were out.

  She made a pot of coffee and threw herself into the chair at her desk. If Ruiz wasn’t the killer and it wasn’t Burns Hamlin either, then who was it? Could it be somebody from Christian Davenport’s past?

  She called the regional office of the FBI, where an officious-sounding agent told her the agency wasn’t i
nvestigating the case and even if they were, they wouldn’t say anything about it to a reporter.

  “Have a nice day,” the agent said and hung up before Aloa could get in another word.

  “Well, you’ve just made that impossible,” Aloa muttered.

  She sat back in her chair and tapped the end of her pen against her teeth.

  There were always ways around an obstacle.

  She flipped through her notebook, spotted the name of Davenport’s superior officer while he was at the detention center in Afghanistan, and smiled. It took her an hour of research plus another call to Steve Porter before she found the number for Retired Army Lt. Tim Everson.

  “I don’t talk to reporters,” Everson said after Aloa identified herself and told him the reason for her call.

  “Mr. Davenport was the one who told me about you. We’ve been talking.”

  “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  Aloa kept her patience. “He told me that he asked you to help him kill himself but that you wouldn’t do it. You told him a real warrior stayed alive to fight.”

  Long seconds of silence followed. “OK, ask your questions. But just so you know, I might not answer.”

  “Fair enough.”

  According to Everson, Davenport had never mentioned any threats against him as a result of the cases he’d worked, and while there were a lot of people in the Middle East who probably hated Davenport, they were either in prison, dead, or scratching out a living in a village somewhere and couldn’t afford to fly halfway around the world to kill Davenport or his wife. “He was a hero. He didn’t deserve what happened,” Everson finished.

  “Tell me more about him,” Aloa said.

  “Chris was good at what he did. He was smart, driven,” Everson said. “He could find the needle in the haystack, then figure out what thread it was connected to. He could match wits with the best of them, stay in the booth for as long as it took. Real interrogation isn’t like in the movies, Ms. Snow. Real interrogation is about patience and intelligence and paying attention. It’s about being willing to live every day in a pit of deceit and hate and stink. Try spending hours listening to some guy talk about how infidels deserve to be killed and their women raped and not reacting while you pick up the bits and pieces he drops and figure out he was a weapons smuggler or a bomb maker for the bad guys. Chris could monster better than anybody I knew.”