It dawned on me that the boy had no idea that he was talking with an Israeli, because as far as I could tell, Ari’s accent was identical to his. I smiled and looked vacant in what I hoped was the proper public manner for the girlfriend of an Iranian guy. At the end of the meal, Ari paid in cash, not a credit card with his giveaway name on it. He left a good tip, too.
We walked outside just as the rain started. As we scurried across the street, dodging cars, I saw Hansen loading scrap glass into the back of his truck. Brand-new glass gleamed in the bay window of my apartment.
“All done,” Hansen called out.
“Thanks!” I said and waved.
We managed to avoid Mrs. Z as we went upstairs. I’m sure that she needed to lie down and rest after writing the check for the windows. As soon as we got inside the apartment, Ari strode over to the new windows to examine the workmanship. I turned on the heat.
“What was all the conversation about?” I said. “In the restaurant, that is.”
“I was asking him how Johnson got up to the roof,” Ari said. “The night you were attacked, no one in the restaurant would tell the police anything. It made me wonder if they’d assisted him.”
I experienced a retroactive frisson. “Uh, had they?”
“No, or at least, I doubt it. The waiter was too forthcoming. The Shah’s Iran was a police state, and this new regime is no better. One gets used to acting ignorant around authorities. They saw Sanchez as a threat and told him nothing.”
I was planning on running various Agency procedures that evening in the hopes of picking up traces of the coven members and through them, of the hooded man. I changed into work clothes, a pair of jeans, and a green top with a watercolor print and a deep V-neck. When I booted up my computer for a routine run on TranceWeb, I found nothing new in my inbox.
“I still haven’t gotten that file on Reb Ezekiel,” I said.
Ari muttered something in Hebrew, then took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. “I’ll see what I can do to speed things up,” he said. “The sodding thing should have come through by now. I wonder if someone’s intercepted it.”
“Could be, but I’ll bet the bureaucrats just haven’t cleared it yet. It has to come to the Agency via the State Department and the two guys there who know we exist. I—”
His cell phone went off with a loud burst of sour Bach. We both yelped. He clicked it on and wandered into the kitchen to answer the call in private, but he reappeared almost immediately.
“It’s Sanchez,” he said to me. “Evers apparently committed suicide this afternoon.”
I murmured something unladylike. Ari alternated between listening to Sanchez and relaying the details.
“He drowned in the bay right by the Ferry Building . . . around four o’clock . . . jumped from one of the piers . . . witnesses . . . they said what?”
A long pause while I squirmed in curiosity. Four o’clock—just about the time when I should have been doing an LDRS on Evers. Thanks to Hansen, I’d missed the chance, not that I could have reached Evers to warn him. By the time we’d headed for the Persian restaurant, Evers must have been dead.
“That doesn’t seem possible,” Ari continued. “Yes, yes, I know you’re not having a joke on me . . . a rogue wave? But he did jump . . . ah, then the wave came . . . heroin addiction, certainly but . . . yes, O’Grady’s lot will be interested in this. Tomorrow? Very well . . . nine o’clock, then.”
He clicked off the phone and returned it to his shirt pocket.
“We’re going down to Sanchez’s office?” I said.
“No, we’re meeting him at the Ferry Building. Early, of course, while the chain of custody’s intact.”
“The what?”
“While the police are still in charge of the site, the tape up, officers there, and so on. Once they’ve left the scene, even for five minutes, any evidence anyone finds isn’t valid in court. So since Sanchez wants to go over the site in daylight, they’ll have to keep it sealed off all night.”
“Good. I want to see where the murder happened.”
“I take it you don’t think this was suicide.”
I walked over to the windows and stared out at the raindark sky. Off to the west, the clouds glowed silver and gold from the setting sun. For one brief moment, I could see in the swirling glare the horses and the chariot of the sun, rolling toward the horizon with Apollo at the reins. The Collective Data Stream tugged at my conscious mind.
“No,” I said. “I think someone pushed him in, one way or another, and then the wave finished the job.”
“A natural wave?”
“No, not there, with the water hemmed in by piers and breakwaters and ferries. It would take a howling winter storm to raise enough water to force someone under.”
Ari slammed his right fist hard into the palm of his left hand. “I should have seen this coming,” he said.
“So should I, and more likely me than you. In fact, since I didn’t see it coming, I wonder if the murderer got the idea at the last minute, a totally unplanned impulse.”
“True Chaos behavior, then?”
“It could be, yeah. Or panic.”
I wished I could speak with the recently dead, the way that psychics do on TV, but that’s fiction. I couldn’t get Evers’ side of the story. As much as I’d disliked him during our brief meeting, no way did he deserve to die, especially not by drowning a few yards from dry land.
CHAPTER 4
BETWEEN THE TELEVISION NEWS AND THE INTERNET, we got the public version of Evers’ supposed suicide before we went to meet Sanchez. That night I read aloud the newspaper account off my computer screen while Ari flicked around the television channels, looking for coverage.
Plenty of witnesses saw Evers walking along the Embarcadero, a troubled man from the look of him. One witness said he seemed drunk, because his eyes were glazed, and he staggered at moments. At the south end of the main Ferry Building, he turned down the alley that runs between the buildings toward the wharflike area that houses the Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. Before he walked out on the concrete jetty, he stopped for a moment and looked up at the sky.
He started walking again, then broke into a run, stumbled and screamed, kept running across the market square. At the wooden railing he hesitated again. One witness described him as looking like a baffled bull, turning this way and that. Finally, he climbed the railing and plunged in before anyone could stop him.
He floated, flailing his arms, bobbing up and down, while a good Samaritan on the jetty yelled at him to stay calm. It took this would-be rescuer some seconds to strip off his jacket and kick off his shoes, then climb the railing. He was just about to dive in when the wave—a perfect arc of glassy green water—rose up and swallowed Evers. The rescuer dove anyway, found Evers, and hauled him to the jetty, where other passersby helped pull both of them out.
“It’s ridiculous!” Ari snapped. “Just one single wave, not a sign of any others, out of nowhere.”
“Ridiculous, you bet. Also deadly.”
“Here are more pictures.” Ari gestured toward the TV with the remote. “Come watch.”
He’d found my favorite TV news reporter, Vic Yee, interviewing the would-be good Samaritan, a young African-American man, still damp and shivering, who described himself as a strong swimmer. He’d once worked as a lifeguard at one of the local YMCAs.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” the guy told Yee. “It looked like something out of the movies, you know, special effects.”
“So this wave,” Yee said, “broke and fell over the victim?”
“Yeah, just like a breaker on the beach. The weight of the water pushed him under and then the back current dragged him out toward the bay. So I jumped in and got him, but it was too late.”
Yee turned and faced the camera. “The victim was pronounced dead on arrival at General Hospital. Police are withholding his name until they notify the next of kin.”
Ari and I already knew the victim’
s name, of course. Ari clicked off the TV, then tossed the remote onto a pile of books on the coffee table.
“It’s a good thing,” Ari said, “that a lot of people witnessed this, or no one would believe it.”
“You bet,” I said. “But whoever murdered Evers gave his hand away with that wave. He must have been nearby and seen that Evers was about to be rescued. It strikes me as a desperate move.”
“Let’s hope someone noticed him, then. Or would he be noticeable? Waving his arms, muttering curses—that sort of thing. Well, assuming it was a he, not a she. We don’t really know which.”
“No, unfortunately. I’m pretty sure we can eliminate Satan as a suspect, however.”
“Yes, and you’re quite right: it does remind me of that girl who drowned at the beach.”
“You bet. In this case, it sounds to me like our murderer had already ensorcelled Evers and told him what to do before he sent him on his run down the pier.”
“What did he do to make the wave appear?”
I thought—hard—for a minute. “I’m only guessing, but I’d say he summoned more Qi and sent it flying at the surface of the water. If he hit the angle just right, it would scoop up a wave ahead of it. He’d have to move his hands a lot, yeah, but by then everyone would have been looking at Evers and the guy trying to save him.”
“Summoned Qi?” Ari looked at me with a martyred droop of eyelids. “Very well, I’ll take your word for it.”
In the chilly morning, we headed out to inspect the murder site. We ended up parking under the Embarcadero Center complex that housed Evers’ office, just a short walk from the Ferry Building itself, a huge gray edifice that stretches the length of a city block right next to the Bay. Until they finished the Bay Bridge, way back when, this building functioned as the transportation hub for the entire Bay Area. Now, while actual ferries still run to a few locations from the piers around it, it mostly houses restaurants and bars.
At the south end of the Ferry Building, we found chaos in full swing, the human kind, not the psychic version. Saturday was market day, but temporary metal barriers festooned with yellow police tape still barred the entrance to the walkway leading out to the market area. A line of uniformed police, truncheons out and threatening, stood in front of the barrier. Trucks loaded with fruit and vegetables had defiantly double-parked in every “No parking” zone available. Angry merchants stood on the street side of the barrier yelling at the cops. Pedestrians waving empty shopping bags milled around, confused and annoyed. TV trucks and men with cameras and sound equipment wandered through the melee.
When Ari showed his Interpol ID, a uniformed officer pulled the barrier aside just enough to let us pass. I glanced over at the huge window as we walked by the building’s end wall and saw gawkers staring out in our direction. Since I can’t throw wards through glass, I had no way of discovering if any were Chaos spies.
More uniformed officers wandered back and forth across the market square itself. I noticed that they were all staring at the ground as they walked. Bundled in a gray raincoat, Sanchez was pacing up and down near the wooden railing that edged the area. Beyond him stretched the Bay waters, dark green and flecked with white; choppy, certainly, but I saw nothing that could be described as a real rolling breaker. Still, open water lay right at hand for someone adept at handling Qi to fashion into a killer wave.
When Ari hailed him, Sanchez left the railing and hurried over to meet us. He was a tall man, with jet-black hair and thick eyebrows over dark eyes that glared at the world around him. He dispensed with any sort of hello.
“I’ve gone over your report,” Sanchez said to Ari. “Evers sounds like a man on the edge to me.”
“Edge of suicide, you mean?” Ari said. “I’m not sure I’d say he was that desperate, but then, he had a lot to lose if news of his addiction got out.”
“And all that weirdo occult shit wouldn’t have done his reputation any good.” Sanchez frowned out at the Bay. “I don’t mind telling you that he had important connections in local politics. I’ve been harassed over the phone a couple of times already.”
“They want you to keep it quiet, huh?” I joined the conversation.
“Nailed down and shut up tight, yeah. They say it’s because he was in the middle of handling a couple of very important divorces.”
“I don’t get that.”
“Let me just say that the word blackmail’s been thrown around.” Sanchez paused for a small bitter smile. “People tell their divorce lawyer unpleasant stories about their spouses.”
“So you haven’t ruled out murder.”
“You’re quick on the uptake, O’Grady. Let’s just leave it at that.”
I had no intention of pressuring him, not yet anyway.
“Something else I don’t get,” I said instead. “Why seal off this area? What are your men looking for?”
“We don’t know.” Sanchez took off his rain hat and ran a weary hand through his hair before continuing. “Several witnesses swore they saw Evers reach into his pockets and throw a number of things onto the ground before he climbed the rail. No one saw them clearly, but one man thought he saw a plastic bag with white powder in it. If it was, I’m assuming it’s smack. The powder, I mean, not what the witness said. We kept this area sealed off all night, so if it exists, it’s still here.”
“Have you found anything?” I said.
“A lot of trash. Used tissue, candy wrappers, that kind of crap. Who knows who threw it down? Oh, and one peacock feather. There must have been someone from Marin County here.”
He laughed, I didn’t. A devotee of the Peacock Angel had left a calling card. Murder, I thought, for sure.
“Anyway,” Sanchez continued, “let me tell you what we know so far.”
Because of those important connections, the powers that be had called in Sanchez immediately rather than leaving the investigation to lesser officers in Homicide. Normally, the police would have looked into a case of suicide only to dot all the i’s and cross the t’s on the report. Sanchez and his team had spent long hours the evening before, interviewing some eighteen witnesses who’d come forward to say they’d seen Evers on his last walk.
“Everyone,” Sanchez said, “told us that he looked drunk or drugged. The autopsy report’s not in yet, but I’m betting the blood tests show heroin in his system.”
“Could be.” I was betting against it. Ensorcellment leaves no traces that show up in laboratory tests, but I played along with Sanchez’s theory because I wanted something out of him. “I wonder if the person who sold it to him was still close by.”
“It’s possible. Several witnesses saw the victim come out of the Ferry Building. He seemed to be accompanied by several other men. I say ‘seemed’ because there’s so much foot traffic around here. We can’t be sure that they were actual associates. They might have just been exiting at the same time.”
“Yeah, for sure.”
Sanchez took a small notebook from his inner jacket pocket and flipped it open. “One witness did see Evers stop to speak to a loiterer who’d been standing outside the building. Evers fumbled in his pocket and gave the man something. The witness thought it was money, because the man he spoke to looked like one of the homeless. The witness didn’t see this person hand Evers anything in return, but I wonder.”
“So do I,” I said. “Dealers get very good at passing bags back and forth without anyone noticing.”
Sanchez nodded and frowned at his notes. During this conversation, Ari had been standing nearby, listening, I’m sure, but also keeping a watch on the police officers searching the ground. Sanchez flipped a page in the notebook and smiled.
“Here it is,” he said. “I’ve got an alert out for this homeless man as a person of interest. Even if he’s not a dealer, he’ll still have information we can use, assuming he’s not too crazy to remember what happened.” He cleared his throat and read aloud. “A white male about five foot eight, thin, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, slightly stoopshoul
dered. Long gray hair and beard, with long sideburns like an Orthodox rabbi—”
Ari spun around and walked over to stand just behind Sanchez.
“Probably brown eyes,” Sanchez went on. “The witness wasn’t close enough to tell eye color. The person of interest’s face was wrinkled and tan, like he’d spent time in the desert, the witness said. He was wearing a pair of torn and faded black pants and a black suit jacket, also torn and stained in places.”
“Any hat?” Ari said.
Sanchez flinched. Ari could move quietly when he wanted to, and the lieutenant hadn’t noticed him come up.
“Yeah,” Sanchez said, “a black Giants cap that looked brand-new.”
“Huh,” Ari said.
Sanchez looked at Ari and raised an eyebrow. Ari smiled and said nothing more. Sanchez turned to me.
“Do you want to interview Evers’ secretary?” Sanchez said. “I’m going to his office.”
“Will she be there on Saturday?” I said.
“Yeah, she offered to come in to meet me there.”
“I do want,” I said. “Thanks.”
With Embarcadero Center so close, Ari and I headed off on foot, but Sanchez lingered to give instructions to the officers manning the barrier. Ten SWAT team members in riot gear had joined the line. We made our way through the mobs and crossed the street, which by then was totally blocked with farm trucks, Muni buses, pedestrians, and cars. Horns blared, drivers shouted. A distant streetcar clanged in rage.
As soon as we’d gotten far enough away to hear each other, I said, “Reb Ezekiel?”
“The description fits,” Ari said. “Except for the choice of hat, but some kind soul might have given that to him. On the other hand, we could be dealing with coincidence. It’s not an uncommon description.”
“Not in Israel, maybe. What Sanchez called long sideburns aren’t hot fashion items around here.”
“That’s a very good point. Let’s hope the police can round this fellow up, and then we’ll know.”
In the Embarcadero Center, we rejoined Sanchez at the base of the elevator tower leading to Evers’ office. During the ride up, I asked the lieutenant a few more questions and got some details about the men seen leaving the Ferry Building at the same time as Evers—all of them business types, all of them, it seemed, wearing gray or blue suits. One among them was indeed short and pudgy, and another was tall and rail-thin, but so were hundreds of thousands of men in the Bay Area.
Water to Burn Page 7
