O’Higgins looked at the officer. She was upset. He could tell she was trying to be professional, but her expression was betraying her. He’d seen the same tipped-over expression in Iraq. A set of headlights came up the street from the east, and he hoped it was his partner.
He glanced at his watch. The fog felt almost like rain against his face as he walked toward the scene, following Madrone. Dispatch hadn’t mentioned any missing girls. It was worse than he’d thought, he realized. There might be more victims in the house, and they might be children.
He handed Madrone his card with his cell number. He told her to start questioning the immediate neighbors about anything they might have seen that would help, and to note who had security cameras. If she found the children with a neighbor, he said, she should call him.
O’Higgins opened the elevator door and stepped back in surprise. He recognized the dead man who was lying face up, his knees buckled, his throat showing a small gash almost like a tear.
O’Higgins had met him casually a week before, waiting for the ferry to Angel Island. No one else would know that except the victim’s wife, who might or might not remember him. Either way, it would not keep him from being the lead detective, he decided. The victim’s face had a terrified expression. Had the man realized he’d been mortally wounded before he died? Probably.
The man he’d been introduced to as “Rishi” that day on the ferry had bled out on the floor of the elevator. A bloody shoe track led from the elevator in a confused, dragged-around-and-stopped pattern toward the kitchen, fading out halfway down the hallway.
He closed the elevator door and studied the bloody shoe prints in the hallway. It looked like just one set, as Madrone had suggested.
The victim was the man he’d met, he was sure of that. He’d met the wife, too. He couldn’t recall her name, but he remembered her. She’d been quite beautiful. Their two little daughters had been with them.
Marvin Lee walked up to the house’s huge double glass front doors and came into the foyer. All they were missing were the criminalists O’Higgins had called, a photographer and a blood specialist.
“That’s him, Mr. Rishi Chaundhry?” Marvin Lee said, coming down the wide and brightly lit hallway toward the elevator.
O’Higgins, crouching, turned from the shoe prints and looked up at his partner.
“Yes.”
Lee was black, tall and handsome. He wore a teal green suit and a starched white shirt and a grey tie. Natty, as usual.
Marvin touched O’Higgins’ shoulder in a sign of welcome. That was all Marvin would do to mark their reuniting. It was reassuring nonetheless, and O’Higgins appreciated it.
The light was on in the elevator. The dead man’s white dress shirt was blood-soaked, the entire front. Both detectives were silent for a moment, running the scene in their heads — how it must have come down inside the elevator in those last seconds.
“So the victim is riding in the elevator and the assailant stabs him in the throat? The killer has got to be splattered with the victim’s blood when he walks out of the elevator . . . he had to be close enough to stab him … No, not necessarily,” Marvin said, answering his own question. “Could have confronted the victim as he stepped out of the elevator. You’ve got to hold the door open? It’s self-closing.”
“No arterial blood anywhere out here on the wall or floor,” O’Higgins said. The hardwood floors were clean other than the shoe prints. Blood on the white walls or floor would have been easy to see. “Maybe on those stairs?” he asked, pointing to a staircase with an oriental runner that led up to the second floor.
O’Higgins walked toward the stairs looking at the hallway, but saw nothing, not even the one set of shoe prints he’d seen going toward the kitchen. The floor on this side of the elevator was clean.
“No. Nothing.”
“So the killer catches him in the elevator,” Marvin said. He leaned in, keeping his feet in the hallway. He could see that the victim’s blood had run off the elevator’s floor and out via the slight half-inch gap between the elevator and the hallway.
They saw no obvious defensive wounds on the dead man’s hands. Marvin shone his light on the elevator’s elegant wood-paneled walls, revealing nothing obvious. They saw no sign of a struggle. He looked at the bottom of the victim’s shoes, which were both stained with blood.
“Stepped on his own blood?” O’Higgins said from behind him.
“Yeah. He’s not going to have zeroed out, blood pressure-wise, for a minute or so. They struggled in there before he collapsed, right?” Marvin said. “Long enough for the blood to pool. Maybe the asshole who killed him kept the door shut — you know. Till the guy died.”
“Blood on the killer?” O’Higgins said. “From that wound. It’s going to shoot out of that kind of wound.”
“Lots, you’d think. Like a fire hydrant in summer,” Marvin said. “Why isn’t there blood on the walls?”
“And no obvious cast-off from the weapon,” Michael said. Weapons left their own blood signature, a cast-off pattern that was easily distinguished from other bleeding-event patterns.
“Let’s go eyeball the other victim,” Marvin said. “Poor fucker, slipping around in his own blood. Jesus!”
They took the stairs up to the third floor. On the way up the stairs Michael told Marvin, who was moving up the carpeted stairs ahead of him, that he had met the victim and his wife casually on the way to Angel Island just the week before.
“So what. Won’t matter,” Marvin said tersely as they walked down the third floor hallway. They were both looking for blood on the hardwood floor or painted-white walls, but saw none. Michael glanced ahead and noticed that the ceiling heights were ten feet or higher. The walls were freshly painted everywhere, stark eggshell white.
“So someone kills her first? He would have left something on the carpet after all that blood downstairs, if someone had killed her after the husband.”
Michael’s cell phone rang. “O’Higgins.”
“Sir, it’s Officer Madrone.”
He put the call on speaker so Marvin could hear. “Yes?”
“Sir, someone from the Indian Consulate is here. They want to come in and speak to you.”
“Well, don’t let them in,” O’Higgins said.
“Yes, sir.”
He ended the call.
“What the fuck? Indian Consulate?” Marvin said, his face twisting with annoyance.
“High profile, double homicide in Pacific Heights,” Michael said. “That’s what the fuck it is.”
“Hey, what did you expect your first time back, a jumper? Shiiiit. And I know this family, too,” Marvin said. “There was an article in last Sunday’s paper about them. Society people. Billionaire. Sunday magazine, SF Gate. You can expect the press here very soon, my man. Educated White People in vans searching for the truth between commercials.”
They made their way down the long hallway. Marvin opened doors, making sure there were no more bodies. They got to the master bedroom; it was empty, the bed made. The room was beautiful. Modern Indian art hung on the walls—oil paintings. The sparkling rich-people room was huge and looked like it could have been in Architectural Digest.
“Everything perfect like a movie set,” Marvin said, admiring all the touches. He’d grown up poor in West Oakland, without a mother, and had a real respect for money and what it bought. He was the first to admit it.
They found the second victim, a young Indian woman, maybe twenty or even younger, in the bathroom at the opposite end of the hall from the master bedroom and across from another bedroom. She’d obviously been taking a shower when she was attacked. She had been stabbed repeatedly six or more times, on her left side alone. The stab wounds had been washed clean by the shower. Steam had created a thin red film that clung to the bright white subway-tiled walls of the shower stall, a grisly red mist. The girl was na
ked and had fallen with her two legs under her, supine, her back arched, her head partially turned toward them. She had a strange expression on her face — not quite a smile, but almost. O’Higgins had seen it on the face of countless other murder victims. A grim half smile left by Death’s passing.
“So our guy cuts a throat downstairs. He or she then walks up here covered in blood, which they don’t seem to get on anything. Not the floor, not the carpet, not the white walls—nothing. So — it’s the other way around. She’s killed first,” Marvin said.
O’Higgins looked around the bathroom. Marvin’s voice had a certain tone, one he seemed to take on at murder scenes, as if he’d been running and was slightly out of breath. It was his way of coping with the stress of seeing someone so vulnerable, so brutally put down.
The dead girl’s jeans, sweater and panties were neatly folded on the end of the bedroom’s queen-sized bed. The room was neat, with Indian art on the walls as well. He could see the girl’s laid-out folded clothes through the open bathroom doorway. The killer must have seen them, too. Perhaps they’d signaled to him that the victim was in the bathroom?
The bathroom was orderly, no struggle. Whoever killed her had walked in and attacked her while she was showering, O’Higgins thought. He noticed a small bruise on the girl’s cheek, the size of a fifty-cent piece and perfectly round.
“So someone opens the shower door and bam,” Marvin said. “Psycho time. Just like the movie.”
“Yes. Maybe she knows them,” Michael said. He looked at the stab wounds. They were all equal in width, washed very clean and all on her left side. No more than an inch wide, he thought.
“She turns toward the attacker when she’s stabbed — where was the wife?” Marvin asked.
“At the grocery store, she told patrol,” O’Higgins said.
“So is the husband screwing the nanny? She pops her nanny, then does Dad up close and personal? No sign of forced entry, patrol told me,” Marvin said.
“No, I don’t think so,” O’Higgins said. “I doubt it was that simple.”
Marvin looked at him, his handsome face quizzical. They lived by Occam’s-razor logic, namely that the obvious explanation was usually the explanation, which in turn would point to an obvious suspect. But an attractive live-in nanny spoke for itself.
“Why not?” Marvin said. “Look at her. She’s beautiful, man.”
“I met the wife, that day on the ferry. I don’t think she’s a killer. Not the woman I met,” O’Higgins said.
Marvin looked at him as if he’d heard him say that Martians were responsible for the murders and they could go home now.
Before the accident that so changed him, he would not have excluded the wife without first assuming she had an obvious motive—jealousy and opportunity. Most people were killed by someone they knew. But something had grown in him since the accident, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, a kind of second sense. He was sure, in his gut, that the young wife and mother he’d met on the ferry was not a cold-blooded killer. It surprised him that he would allow himself to think that. He knew it was unreasonable to harbor prejudice of that kind, especially for a homicide detective. But he did.
“Yeah, okay. The wife is pretty. That’s really what you mean,” was all Marvin said before they headed back downstairs. O’Higgins knew he’d shocked him. It was unprofessional, even absurd.
CHAPTER 4
One week before the murders
There was a super high tide that morning. O’Higgins could hear the bay splashing against the pilings beneath the hoary dock while he was waiting for the 11:00 a.m. ferry that would take him to Angel Island. The slapping sound of water: euphonic, the analog of a Japanese flute, hauntingly austere.
He’d been concentrating on the water’s sound in hopes that the strange music would soothe his fear of riding the ferry. It wasn’t working. He was getting anxious, and he couldn’t even see the ferry yet. It was quite possible, he realized, that he might not be able to board, much less take the short ride across Raccoon Strait to Angel Island as his psychiatrist had suggested.
Dr. Schneider said he had to begin facing his irrational fear of open water in order to deal with it, especially since he was going back to work soon. He was psychologically adrift and knew it. He’d not shot himself, but he had gotten into a fist fight over a parking space. A hulking college kid had said, “Go fuck yourself,” and O’Higgins enjoyed the beating he dished out between parked cars. Each punch was a relief as the kid’s face slowly turned to hamburger under his blows. The kid’s nose split first. Blood splattered the kid’s new chrome rims. O’Higgins had jumped in his car and escaped the parking lot before the police arrived, but barely.
***
The day of the accident, the fog, so heavy in the early hours, had cleared by ten in the morning, but only for about an hour, in time for them to see the Farallon Islands miles away. The City and the Golden Gate Bridge were behind them and getting smaller.
He’d thought the islands beautiful: artillery-grey, stark, dangerous, their waters full of great white sharks. He’d always been attracted to the Farallons, to the island’s great masses of birds that called the rocky islands home. Had he been attracted to the Farallons’ well-known dangers, too? Their savage quality. Had something savage lurked in him since coming home? Something from Iraq that had gone dormant while his wife was alive — but now?
They’d had lunch, sandwiches his wife had made the night before: raisin bread with peanut butter and honey, his favorite. She’d sent him out to the Whole Foods to buy cookies for their lunch. It was almost noon when they ate. The air felt cool, the boat was running well. They were relaxing, heading due west. Everything seemed fine. He noticed the fog pouring over the Marin headlands at Muir Beach, but for the most part it would stay north of Tomales Bay in July.
He’d been wrong. By 12:30 the fog was pushing south, blue-white, primitive looking. In a short time it closed around them, unexpectedly. The Farallons disappeared. He felt uneasy. Visibility dropped to 10 feet and the wind, which had brought the fog, had also brought unexpected swells.
They’d decided to turn back because the swells had grown from practically nothing to five feet, and both his wife and his daughter were getting seasick. Even he, who never got seasick, started to feel queasy.
It was 1:07 p.m. when the tiller broke, the principal bolt that held the shaft. A clanging buoy sounded far in the distance. He remembered that sound. It haunted him now—its ugly clanking bell, somewhere in the grey mist. For several agonizing minutes he’d done everything he could to fix the useless tiller as the boat spun rudderless. His queasy feeling turned to panic. It was the same kind of panic he’d felt in Fallujah after a direct hit vaporized several of his men, leaving their positions vulnerable to being overrun.
To his horror, as soon as the tiller broke, the boat had turned broadside into the grey waves. He’d been going for the radio, to call for help — the radio just out of reach in the boat’s tiny cabin — when they were hit broadside by a wave.
He’d heard the sickening sound of down-flooding, an unmistakable sucking noise the ocean makes as water swamped the boat’s small cabin, pouring in as they went over, the deck listing horribly now and sending gear sliding into the ocean. Water snuffed out the little Cumming’s engine. It was a sound he would never forget, that coughing death of his engine.
A second wave slammed into the boat violently knocking it down into a deep trough, the boat’s port side deck completely submerged. The violence of the blow tore the lead-weighted keel off their hull in the bargain, insuring the sailboat would not right itself, and would sink from the torn gash in the hull—quickly.
Jennifer had been standing near him as the second wave, a ten-footer, crashed down on them. He’d grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. They’d landed in the rough water together.
***
He spotted the A
ngel Island Ferry approaching, tumbling forward, pushing across Raccoon Strait, its gleaming white steel hull looking stark and clean and powerful. He felt something hopeful in the way the ferry progressed. Everything is a progression. The whole world turning toward day or night, love or hate, war or peace, lovers turning to lovers, sheets, breasts, awkward wanting love. Aching love. The moment of separation and the moment of complete unity. Nothing is dialed in; it’s all chaos, an anthill of dreams and delusions; human beings always on the march toward what? Toward … Death? Is that it, then? All of this means what? And what was he now, if he could not be a father and husband? He’d failed at the most important task a man is ever given: keeping his family safe.
He forced himself to stare out onto Raccoon Strait until he had to turn away. Was he really going to go out on the open water? Shit. Could he possibly stand the overwhelming, mouth-twisting fear? He would break out in a sweat. He would even stutter, something added to the growing constellation of psychosomatic maladies that were attaching to him like barnacles on a ship’s hull, immobilizing him, sapping the life force that had once been so strong.
He sat with the fear dancing wildly, daring him to do something about it: get up and run away, perhaps? Back to his car? He sat ignoring the dare, listening to the slapping sound of the tide while sitting on a new plastic bench, his palms pressed into its slick, brand-new-feeling plastic slats. What kind of world made plastic benches, he wondered, suddenly angry. Where were the green benches of his childhood? Green wood benches that were marked by carvings: “Love Ronny” “I was here”— rough and human-friendly. Was everything going to be plastic? Was everything to be drained of life’s touch? Death too had a plastic feeling, the faces of the dead plastic-looking and dirty. Fallujah stuck with him, its senseless slaughter. And after all that suffering, it belonged to the “enemy” again, he’d read.
“Is this the queue for the ferry to Angel Island?” a man asked him. He was well-dressed, about forty, dark-skinned, standing in line next to him. His English had a sing-song quality. O’Higgins guessed the man was an Indian, and probably on holiday. He’d been surrounded by tourists waiting for the ferry: American day-trippers, poor whites from Virginia, lacking confidence; blue-eyed, sturdy German families, kitted out with expensive dusty day-packs and the latest hiking shoes, ready to take on the world. Angel Island was next to be stormed.
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