Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  Mackey reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a handful of photographs. “You know this woman?”

  Zoe was a criminal-defense attorney; she’d seen crime-scene photos before. And Mackey had only given her headshots so there weren’t any visible wounds, just some blood around the old woman’s sunken mouth. But something about her, something so vulnerable in those opaque, staring eyes, pulled hard at Zoe’s heart. She knew—without quite knowing how she knew—that this poor old woman had died alone and afraid.

  “No, I don’t think I know her…. Should I? What happened to her?”

  “She’s a homeless woman who was stabbed late last night in Golden Gate Park. On Kennedy Drive near the Conservatory of Flowers. The murder weapon was left in her—some weird kind of knife I’ve never seen before. This guy and his friend were tooling along in his new Jag when they interrupted the killer in the act. Literally. She died on him before the ambulance could get there, and I know that had to’ve been tough on him, but now he’s got a rant going with the media about poor old homeless women getting shivved on our city streets. There’s a real shit storm going on down at the Hall.”

  Zoe looked at the crime-scene photo again, drawn by those dead, staring eyes, and she felt almost swamped by feelings of sadness and loss. It didn’t make any sense. She didn’t know this woman, but it felt as if she ought to know her. It was her eyes. Something about her eyes …

  “Do you—” Zoe’s voice cracked, and she had to start over. “Do you know who she is yet?”

  “Not exactly,” Mackey said. “We canvassed the park and found a trannyho called Buttercup who cruises the Panhandle, and who claims they were both part of a colony camping out in the woods behind the Conservatory. He … she … said the old woman’s name was Rosie something.”

  Zoe tore her gaze away from the eyes in the photograph. She looked up to catch Mackey studying her, concern on his face, but also with a cop’s wariness.

  “I’m sorry, Mack, but I just don’t know her. What made you think I would?”

  He reached in his pocket and this time pulled out a clear plastic evidence envelope. “The ME found this caught way in the back of her throat. Like maybe she’d tried to eat it to keep her killer from getting hold of it. It was pretty badly chewed up, but those guys in the lab can do wonders these days.”

  The envelope held a shredded scrap of paper, scribbled on in pencil. The writing had been chemically enhanced, but even then only part of it was still legible. Zoe could read enough of it, though, and a chill settled over her.

  “It’s my home address. Not my office. My home.”

  She looked up at Mackey, who exchanged cop looks with Wendy Lee, then cleared his throat. “You ever hear of something called the altar of bones?”

  “No, but it sounds weird. What is it?”

  In typical cop fashion he didn’t answer. Instead, he produced another plastic evidence envelope and handed it to her. “This photograph was in the pocket of the old lady’s coat. We figure it was taken back in the late fifties to go by the clothes and hairstyles. Are either of the two people in it familiar to you?”

  Zoe looked down and felt the spit dry in her mouth. It couldn’t be, simply couldn’t be.

  It was an old black-and-white snapshot of a pretty blond woman in her twenties standing with her arm around the shoulders of a little girl of about six. The little girl wore pigtails and a parochial-school uniform and smiled widely for the camera. They stood in front of the entrance to Twentieth Century–Fox studios. Zoe knew it was Twentieth Century– Fox studios because her mother had this same photograph, or rather a larger version of it, in an ornate silver frame on the desk in her library.

  “But I don’t … It doesn’t make any sense. How did she get this?”

  “So you’ve seen it before?” Mackey asked. “Or the people? You’ve seen them before?”

  But Zoe didn’t really hear him, she was staring at the photograph’s crimped corners, at how badly it had faded over the years. Something had been spilled on it at one time—coffee? blood?—staining the sky above the studio sign. But then it had been lived with and loved by an old homeless woman who had been murdered, not carefully preserved in a silver frame.

  It began to rain again, fat drops splattering the plastic envelope, as Wendy Lee came up to look over Zoe’s shoulder. “Our vic’s had a rough go of it and a lot of time has passed since this photograph was taken, but the ME thinks it’s the same woman. They’re going to run a photo analysis program later to get a more definitive answer.”

  “But they can’t be the same,” Zoe said. “The woman in this picture is my grandmother. And her name wasn’t Rosie. It was Katya. Katya Orlova. Only she’s been dead for almost fifty years.”

  13

  ZOE GUNNED the Babe.

  She snagged a yellow light, zipped across Market, hooking a left first chance she got, then right onto Franklin. No way would she stay on Van Ness with its traffic lights turning red at every cross street. She went up, up, through the wind-whipped rain, eyes peeled for cops. A lot of them knew the Babe, and those who didn’t would still just love to ticket a vintage baby blue Mustang.

  She broke a good-size law, not allowing a pedestrian to waltz out in front of her, drenching him instead, but she had to get to her mother ahead of the cops. She had to find out how an old homeless woman who came to be murdered in Golden Gate Park turned out to be the same grandmother who’d died in an automobile accident years and years ago.

  But the only way you ever had a hope of getting the truth out of Anna Larina Dmitroff was to catch her by surprise. If Zoe could get to her mother first, if she could to look into her mother’s face, into her eyes, maybe something would bleed through that cold, hard mask she wore.

  Almost there. Her wipers drug across the windshield, fog piled up inside. The Babe had good rain traction—she cut off a yellow cab, swerved around a big honker Lexus, curses and middle fingers flying in her wake, nearly ended up in the yard of a tall, skinny Victorian. She cut a hard left on Washington, spraying water like a rooster tail, nearly skidded into a parked Toyota, rolled through the stop signs at Gough and Octavia, and two blocks later swung into the driveway of her mother’s mansion on the crest of Pacific Heights, the Babe’s tires squealing. It was twelve minutes exactly since she’d left Mackey and his partner, Wendy Lee, telling them she was due in court. She’d watched them drive away, then ran around to the alley behind the bodega where she parked her car.

  And now she’d beaten them here, thank God, but she had to hurry.

  Wind drove the rain into her face as she raced up the steps of the huge granite-and-glass house. But the sight of the tall, ebony double doors, with their sterling-silver handles, stopped her cold.

  Thirteen years ago, on the day of her high school graduation, she had walked through those doors and out of her old life with nothing but a duffel bag full of clothes. She swore to herself she would never come back, but she should have known better. You can escape some of your past, but not all of it.

  Zoe drew in a deep breath, lifted her head, and pressed the bell. Less than five seconds later it was opened by a man with no neck and hands the size of turkey platters. She shoved past him, probably not smart since she could see he sported a gun in a shoulder holster under his loosely cut black jacket.

  “I’m her daughter,” Zoe said as he grabbed her arm. “So if you’re fond of your hands, you’d better take them off of me.”

  The man had a weathered face, weary eyes, and fast reflexes. He immediately released her.

  “Where is she?” What if she wasn’t here? Please, God, she had to get to her mother before the cops, she—

  “The pakhan,” he said, “is up in the library.”

  Zoe wasn’t about to get in the coffin-size elevator. She ran up all four flights of the sweeping limestone stairs, but at the top another door stopped her.

  This one was made of solid, shining mahogany, and on the other side of it was Anna Larina’s sanctuary. Thirteen years
since she’d been inside this house, and two more since she was inside that room. Not since a summer’s day when she was sixteen, the day her father had gone in there and sat down at her mother’s desk, a giant slab of black marble. Sat down, put a gun under his chin, and pulled the trigger.

  Zoe had been the only one in the house that day, the only one to hear the shot. The one who had seen the blood soaking into the ivory silk Persian sarouk and teak floor, who’d seen the splattered bits of gore. The one who’d had to look into was left of her father’s face.

  ZOE FLUNG THE door open with such force it banged against the wall.

  Her mother looked up from a laptop computer screen, while her right hand went under the black marble desk to where she kept a Glock 22 on a spring-loaded shelf. Anna Larina Dmitroff had not connived and fought and murdered her way to become the boss of a Russian mafiya family by being careless.

  “Zoe,” she said, and Zoe was surprised to see real shock and concern flash across her mother’s face. “Why are you here? Has something happened?”

  “Why? Would you care if something had?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I would care.” Anna Larina, who’d half stood up, settled once more behind the massive marble desk. “You’re looking a bit harried and damp, but otherwise well. All grownup,” she said, assessing her daughter now with cool, indifferent eyes. “But, since in all these years I haven’t received so much as a Christmas card from you, I could only assume something dire has happened to bring you here now.”

  Zoe had to set her teeth to keep from screaming. God, how she’d always hated that light, dry voice that could mock and cut and scar so easily. Thirteen years and nothing had changed. One look at that beautiful but soulless face and all the old bad feelings came rushing back, mixing in her blood like poison.

  She needed to pull herself together, to push her emotions down deep. She knew from bitter experience that you couldn’t show so much as a flicker of feeling to Anna Larina, show her anything like love or hate or fear, or even anger, because feelings opened you up and then she would eviscerate you. Quickly and cleanly.

  Zoe walked toward the great black marble slab of a desk slowly, to give herself time. The room was beautiful but cold, like the woman who occupied it. Shaped like a triangle, it jutted out into the sky like a ship’s prow, overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Against the one wall not given over to the floor-to-ceiling windows stood expensive Scandinavian bookcases. They held some books, but were mostly filled with the finest pieces of her mother’s antique Russian icon collection. When Zoe was a little girl, it had hurt so much to think these icons mattered more to her mother than she did.

  She set the crime-scene photo she’d filched from Mackey carefully down onto her mother’s desk. “Look at this and tell me what you see.”

  Anna Larina laid both hands flat on either side of the photograph and looked down. She studied it in silence, while Zoe studied her. Absolutely no hint of recognition, no hint of shock, no hint of anything.

  She looked up, met Zoe’s eyes full on. “I see some random old woman who looks dead. Did you expect me to know who she is?”

  “Oh, please. Are you really going to try to pretend that you don’t recognize your own mother?”

  It was a deliberate slap, a hard one. Her mother’s head jerked as she stared back down at the death photo. Her hands, still lying flat, turned white at the knuckles. But beyond that small reaction it was still impossible to tell what she was thinking, what she was feeling.

  Zoe knew her mother could order one of her enforcers, her vors, to whack someone as easily as she could order up a pot of tea, but she didn’t believe her mother was responsible for this if for no other reason than it was sloppy, and Anna Larina Dmitroff was never sloppy. Zoe had wanted to rattle her, though, and she had.

  She picked up the silver-framed picture on the desk—an enlarged version of the one in the glassine envelope Mackey had shown her—and laid it faceup next to the crime-scene photo. “Do you see the resemblance now? She’s got our eyes. Or rather we have hers.”

  “I don’t—” Anna Larina cut herself off. Zoe saw her mother swallow convulsively but she didn’t say anything more.

  “You don’t what—believe it? Because she died in a car accident when you were eleven? Drove off a cliff and into the ocean in bad weather and left you to grow up in an orphanage. Did you actually see her buried, Mother? Or did you just make the whole thing up to keep me away from her?”

  Anna Larina seemed not to have heard her. “She is so old here. So old.” She lightly touched the face of the woman in the crime-scene photograph with the tips of her fingers. “All these years I’ve seen her in my mind the way she was then. Young and beautiful, so full of life and laughter. She had the sweetest laugh. I always thought of rose petals when she laughed because of how the sound of it would curl up on the edges. Just like rose petals do.”

  Her voice trailed off and her mouth softened a little. “Odd how I just remembered that, and now she’s dead.”

  “Not just dead, Mother. Murdered. Or don’t you know a crime-scene picture when you see one?”

  Anna Larina pushed the photograph away from her. “Yes, of course I do.”

  She got up from her desk and went to close the door. The click of the latch as it swung shut seemed loud in the taut silence.

  She stared at Zoe, letting the silence drag, then she said, “I thought she was dead. I never lied to you to keep you away from her. That’s ridiculous. She didn’t want me. Why in hell would she want you?”

  The words were spoken in that cool, emotionless voice, but Zoe had seen a dark emotion flare in her mother’s eyes. Hurt, yes, but something more. Guilt? Fury?

  Zoe looked at this woman who was her mother. The sculpted cheekbones and high forehead, smooth as a polished seashell. The gray eyes, wide-spaced and tilted at the corners. Anna Larina’s age had always been a closely guarded secret, but she had to be almost sixty by now. Yet she seemed not to have aged a day in all these years. I could be looking in a mirror, Zoe thought, and the horror of it twisted in her like a knife in the guts.

  If she’d inherited her mother’s face, had she also inherited her black soul?

  Anna Larina’s full mouth curved into a wry smile. “What are you looking for, Zoe? The mark of Satan on my brow? Proof that we aren’t anything alike, after all? That’s what you’ve always been afraid of, isn’t it? It’s why you ran away, why you’re on that battered-women’s crusade of yours. You’re trying to buy your salvation by atoning for my sins.”

  Zoe felt a sharp pain in her arm. She looked down and saw her fist was clenched in a tight knot. She uncurled her fingers, made herself breathe. “Don’t flatter yourself. Right now all I want to know is how the woman who gave you birth ended up homeless, living with the winos and drug addicts in Golden Gate Park.”

  “I don’t—Golden Gate Park?” Anna Larina waved a hand at the photograph on the desk. “Is that where she …”

  “Was murdered? Yes. It happened in front of the Conservatory of Flowers. She was stabbed with a knife. The cops didn’t know who she was at first—”

  “And yet they came hotfooting it right to you with their crime-scene photos? So either they’re psychic, or you’re not telling me everything.”

  God, the woman is quick, Zoe thought. She needed to remember that. She’d learned in the martial arts not to let the enemy get inside your moves or inside your head; she needed to remember that Anna Larina was her enemy. Her mother was her enemy, and in her heart of hearts, since she was the smallest child, she’d always known that. She just didn’t know why.

  “Before someone rammed a knife up to the hilt in her chest,” Zoe said, deliberately making her words blunt, shocking, “your mother managed to swallow a piece of paper. Or half swallow it. It had my name and address on it.”

  Another cold smile curled Anna Larina’s mouth. “Good Lord, how deliciously mysterious of the old woman. She knew where you were, yet she couldn’t m
anage to find the time in between panhandling and urinating in doorways to drop by to see you before she was stabbed? No? Well, what a touching scene we all were spared.”

  “For God’s sake, Mother.”

  “‘For God’s sake, Mother,’ “Anna Larina mimicked. “What do you want from me, Zoe? Tears? I used mine up a long time ago.”

  Zoe uncurled her fist again, drew in another deep breath. “I thought maybe she’d been here to see you. Because how else would she have known about me?”

  Again Zoe saw something flicker deep in Anna Larina’s eyes. She knows something, Zoe thought. She knows what brought her mother here.

  After a moment, Anna Larina shrugged and said, “It’s not like either of us has been hiding out in the witness protection program. A three-minute search on Google would’ve done the trick.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and went to look out the wall of glass, although there was nothing to see today, no bridge or bay, just clouds and rain. “So are we done here now, Zoe?”

  “No, we are not done, Mother. Not even close. Let’s say for the moment I believe you. That this is all such a big surprise to you. Was any of that sappy orphanage story you fed me over the years the truth?”

  “Oh, God,” Anna Larina said in a burst of sudden and genuine exasperation. “What a stubborn little bitch you are, and, yes, of course you got that particular attribute from me. Very well. I’ll allow you five more minutes to probe away at the festering childhood wounds you imagine I have, if only you will promise to leave me in peace afterward.”

  Anna Larina took a package of cigarettes and a gold lighter out of the pocket of her black cashmere pants and lit up. She watched the lighter’s flame a moment, before she snapped it closed.

  “The orphanage,” Zoe said. “Was any of that real?”

  “Oh, it was real all right. A big, ugly brownstone run by the Sisters of Charity in a run-down part of Columbus, Ohio. There were even bars on the windows, although I suspect they were more to keep the neighborhood riffraff out then us little Orphan Annies in. It wasn’t all gruel and daily beatings, but it was still pretty grim. Only my mother was very much alive when she dumped me off there. Me and one small suitcase of clothes and a cardboard box with a few of my treasures.”