Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  She paused, but he said nothing, his face showed nothing, and she thought she could trust him. At least as far as she intended to trust him.

  “Because the ‘delicate job,’ as you put it, has to do with my daughter.”

  15

  ZOE LOOKED down at the white plastic body bag that lay on a stainless steel gurney in the morgue. Too small surely to hold even the shrunken remains of an old homeless woman.

  “Do it,” she said.

  Christopher Jenkins, the assistant medical examiner, studied her face, a worried look on his own. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go through with this back in the viewing room, by video?”

  “I want to see her. I need to see her, Chris.”

  “I don’t know …,” he said, although he was already reaching for the bag’s zipper, “I could catch all kinds of grief for breaking protocol, even though most of the guys around here know you.” He pulled the zipper open just far enough to expose the head.

  Zoe had steeled herself, yet she still wasn’t prepared for the gut punch of seeing her grandmother like this.

  Katya Orlova’s face was like gray putty, the bones sunken, nothing left of the pretty young woman in the silver-framed photograph. But in her gut and in her heart, Zoe knew her. This was the woman who’d given her own mother life. Zoe had never realized before how primal were the ties of blood. She felt something for this woman. Not love—that was both too deep and too shallow a word. A bond, perhaps. A blood bond.

  Yet this was also the woman who’d dropped her daughter off at an orphanage and disappeared. For forty-nine years. What loving mother could do such a thing? Had she been running even back then from whatever had finally killed her?

  “Why?”

  Zoe hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud until Jenkins said, “We’ll get the bastard, Zoe. It’s early yet.”

  Zoe stepped back and turned away from the body. The morgue was supposed to have an excellent ventilation system, but she would swear the smell of death hung in the air like an oily cloud.

  “It might help to know …,” Chris Jenkins said, as he zipped up the body bag. “I don’t think she was homeless for long. She had some fairly expensive dental work done recently, and she didn’t have lice or any of the other parasites you can’t help but pick up living on the streets. Also, if she hadn’t been murdered, she would only have lived another month or so at the most. She was riddled with cancer.”

  Her grandmother had been dying of cancer? Was that why she was here? Zoe wondered. Had finding out that she was about to die driven her to reach out to the family she’d abandoned so long ago? Except she hadn’t reached out. Surely, she meant to, though. She had a piece of paper with my name and address on it. A piece of paper she’d tried to swallow right before she died. To keep it from her killer? But why?

  And whatever the reason, did it go all the way back to that young woman in the photograph? Had the seeds of her death been sown that long ago?

  “Inspector Mackey said the murder weapon had been left in the body,” Zoe said. “Can I see it?”

  Jenkins hesitated a moment, then shrugged. “It’s in the lab.”

  He led the way, holding open the door for her. “Did anyone ask you yet about giving us a DNA sample? It would give us a pretty definitive answer on whether the vi—the woman is your grandmother.”

  “Whatever I can do to help.”

  The cops would need the DNA test to compile their case, but she didn’t. She knew the murdered woman in the body bag was her grandmother. Katya Orlova.

  The blood bond.

  “WE DUSTED THE weapon for prints,” Chris Jenkins said, as he snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Nothing. Not even a smudge. There were fibers, but they were all consistent with her clothing. Nothing extraneous.”

  He opened a manila envelope and upended it so the knife slid hilt first into his hand. He held it out, twisting his wrist back and forth like Darth Vader wielding a light saber. The dull gray blade was long, double-edged, with a hooked point.

  “You don’t run across a knife like this everyday,” he said. “It’s Russian, called a kandra. It took some digging, but I got the manufacturer nailed down to a small, nameless reindeer herder on the slopes of Siberia…. Zoe, that last bit was a joke.”

  But Zoe couldn’t even manage a smile. In some dark corner of her heart, she’d been afraid there’d be something about the murder weapon to connect it with her mother. That it was some rare Russian knife was probably not good.

  Jenkins rebagged the weapon and held up a cotton swab. “Open please.”

  Zoe opened her mouth and he swabbed the inside of her cheek.

  “I don’t know how much you know about maternal-lineage testing,” he said, “but it uses a unique form of DNA found in the part of our cells responsible for energy called mitochondrials. They’re passed down directly through the maternal bloodline.”

  “A blood bond,” she said, marveling again at the thought.

  “Yeah, you got it. Mitochondrials mutate so rarely over time, theoretically we could trace every woman alive today back to the first female homo sapien.”

  He held up the swab. “We’re talking one hundred and seventy thousand years’ worth of evolution, and on the end of this little piece of cotton I’ve got Eve.”

  IT WAS DARK by the time Zoe left the Hall of Justice. The rain had fizzled into a thick mist. She zipped her black leather bomber jacket and turned up the collar against the winter cold, but it didn’t help her insides.

  She’d parked the Babe farther down on Bryant, underneath the freeway. It wasn’t the best part of town, and so she kept a wary eye out. The streetlamps barely penetrated back here among the concrete stanchions, and the wind whipped empty food wrappers against her legs.

  There was little traffic, the only other pedestrian a ponytailed man who was chaining his bicycle to a row of mostly empty newspaper vending machines. She made eye contact as she passed. He nodded back at her and smiled.

  She stepped off the curb to go around to the driver’s side of her car, digging in her purse for her keys, then heard a footstep behind her. She caught a blur of movement out the corner of her eye—

  The ponytailed man, swinging the bicycle chain at her head.

  She ducked and spun around on the ball of her foot, but not quick enough. He whipped the chain around her neck, jerked her off her feet, and dragged her deep beneath the overpass. The chain dug into her throat, cutting off her air. She threw her satchel off to the side, but his eyes didn’t even follow it.

  Not a mugger. One of the abusers then, looking for his woman? Or … Oh, God, is he going to rape me?

  His hot breath blew against the side of her face. “Where is it, bitch?”

  What?

  Zoe went limp, trying to draw the man off-balance, but he didn’t fall for it. Instead he tightened his grip on the chain, and black spots danced before her eyes.

  “Now you listen,” the man said, in a heavy Russian accent. “I am going to ease up on this chain a little and you are going to sing for me like tweetie bird. The old lady wouldn’t cooperate and she took a knife in the heart. How about you not being so stupid?”

  Her chest heaved, and she fought back panic as her lungs strained for air. This was the man who’d killed her grandmother and now he was after her. But why? What did he want?

  Hot breath again. “Now, I want the altar of bones, and you are going to have just one or two seconds to tell me where it is. If you don’t, I’ll choke you with this chain until you black out. When you come to, I’ll have a knife pointed at your eyeball, and if you don’t tell me then, I’ll pluck out your eye like a wet grape.”

  As soon as Zoe felt the pressure of the chain ease, she slid her right leg back and twisted sharply away from him, whipping her fist across her body and smashing it into his throat.

  He reared back, gagging.

  She pivoted, lashed out with her right leg, and kicked him hard in the groin. It was only a glancing blow because he moved s
o fast, but it was enough to double him over. He hugged himself, cursing her, cursing the pain.

  A siren cut through the night. Red and blue lights flashed.

  The suddenness of it stopped Zoe for a split second, just long enough for the ponytailed man to turn and hobble away.

  She started after him, screaming, “You bastard! Why did you kill her? What do you want?”

  Tires squealed. Feet pounded behind her. A man’s voice bellowed, “Police! Both of you, stop right now!”

  Zoe—not sure how clear the cops were on who had been assaulting whom—stopped. But the ponytailed man kept going, still half-crouched over, but picking up speed.

  Zoe pointed and yelled, “He’s the one. Stop him.”

  The ponytailed man was running full out now. Zoe started after him again, but one of the cops grabbed her arm. “Oh, no, you don’t, lady. You stay right here until we can get this sorted out.”

  Zoe watched as the cop’s partner took off after the ponytailed man. But he was at least fifty pounds overweight and he ran like a Teletubby, and she thought he had a better chance of having a heart attack than of catching the perp.

  A COMPUTER SALESMAN had called 911 on his cell to report a woman being mugged beneath the overpass, and the patrol car had been idling at a stoplight only a block away over on Ninth Street.

  Zoe let the beat cops go on thinking it was a mugging, and she gave a statement saying she hadn’t gotten a good look at her attacker.

  After the cops left, she got in her car and looked up Inspector Sean Mackey’s cell number on her PDA. He answered halfway through the first ring.

  “It’s me. Zoe. Zoe Dmitroff. I—”

  “Where in hell are you? Never mind. I’m parked outside your loft. Get over here—we need to talk.”

  She opened her mouth to tell him what he could do with his attitude, then suddenly she was back under the overpass, a chain digging into her throat, cutting off her air.

  “Zoe?”

  She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  She lived six blocks away, off South Park, in a turn-of-the-century brick bakery that had been converted into lofts and apartments during the dot-com boom. In the nineties the neighborhood had bustled with purple-haired programmers and venture-capital highfliers, but they’d disappeared with the bust. At least now, Zoe thought as she pulled the Babe into a space behind Mackey’s silver Taurus, it was easy to find a place to park.

  He had his butt hitched up on the hood, his arms crossed over his chest, a frown on his face.

  When she opened her car door, he unfolded his arms and straightened. The frown stayed. “I really ought to slap your ass in jail for interfering with a homicide investigation—” He cut himself off when she walked up to him and he got a good look at her face. “What happened?”

  Her throat closed again, the smell of oily metal chain filled her nostrils. She wanted to gag. She started to reach up and touch the raw bruises on her neck, but stopped when she saw how badly her hand shook.

  “What?” Mackey said.

  “I just met my grandmother’s killer, Mack. Up close and personal.” Then she started laughing a little hysterically because it sounded so crazy. “He tried to strangle me with a bicycle chain.”

  Mackey gave her a long, hard look, then reached out and tilted her chin up and to the side to get a better look at the marks on her neck. “You really did meet up with him.”

  She nodded, swallowed around the tightness in her throat.

  “Tell me.”

  She told him, feeling stupid that she’d been distracted and allowed herself to be taken by surprise. She gave him as many specifics as she could remember, such as the man’s breath had smelled of wine and garlic, and that he spoke English with a Russian accent.

  “And his shoes looked Eastern European. You know—thin leather and pointed toes, with the heels kind of built up to make him look taller.”

  Mackey nodded, writing it down in his notebook. When she was done, he called in to have an all-points bulletin put out on the suspect, then he took her through it again, and then a third time.

  He said, “What’s this altar-of-bones thing he wants so bad that he’s willing to kill and torture an old woman and her granddaughter to get his hands on it?”

  “I have no idea. None, Mack. I swear.”

  “You sure? No clue?”

  She shook her head. “Wait, I just remembered something else. He was wearing this thick brown sweater and there was a rip—no, a cut on the sleeve, and I could see a bloody bandage through it. I hope my grandmother did that. I hope it hurt.”

  “Yeah, she did slice him up some,” Mack said. “The ME found a cut on her palm, and blood that wasn’t hers on the front of her coat and on a piece of broken bottle at the scene. We’ll run the DNA through CODIS, but that always takes time.” He thrust his fingers through his hair. “Do you think this could have anything to do with your family business? That this guy is one of your mother’s Russian goons … what’re they called?”

  “Vors. You don’t seriously think she up and decided yesterday to start whacking her nearest and dearest one at a time? Why would she do that?”

  Mackey shrugged. “You tell me. I mean, we’re talking about the woman who had the head of her brother-in-law’s top enforcer delivered to him in a ten-gallon bucket of butter pecan.”

  “It was her cousin-in-law. And the head belonged to a guy who’d killed more people than Ted Bundy, but I get your point. I know she can be ruthless, but this afternoon when I showed her the crime-scene photo and told her who it was, she was shocked, Mack. I really think she believed her mother was already dead all these years.”

  “She said your grandmother had a husband.” He took his notebook out of his pocket again and flipped it open. “A Mike O’Malley. You know anything about this stepfather of hers? Your mother claimed not to remember much.”

  Zoe shook her head. “Until today I never even knew he existed. But the ponytailed man can’t be him. He’s much too young. Late thirties at the most.”

  Mackey said nothing more, only looked at her, and his face softened. “Look, I know you’re beat. But if you could come back down to Homicide and give a description to our sketch artist, maybe go through some mug books?”

  Zoe brought her hand up to her neck. She kept thinking she could still feel the chain there. “Can I at least take a shower first? I feel filthy.”

  “Yeah, okay. I got a shitload to do back at my desk, anyway. You go on up, shower, have a cup of tea. Or better yet a stiff drink. We can hook up later on the mug book.”

  Zoe tried to smile, but her face felt tight. So she nodded instead and started for the door to the bakery. Then she stopped and turned back. “You asked me about the altar of bones earlier, when you first told me about my grandmother. How did you know it was what the killer was after?”

  “I didn’t. It was something else …” He hesitated.

  “Come on, Mack. I know you guys like to hold things back, but he was going to cut out my eye.”

  “Your grandmother lived for a few minutes after she was stabbed. Long enough to talk to the guy who found her. The guy thought she told him, ‘They didn’t have to kill him. He never drank from the altar of bones. I got it back.’ “

  “Kill him? But that sounds like somebody else was murdered, too. Oh, God, Mack, do you think it’s …?”

  “Somebody connected to you? Another long-lost relative, maybe? I don’t know.”

  Zoe tried to think what it all meant, but she couldn’t. She was too shaken, too scared. “And how do you drink from an altar of bones? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Nothing about this case makes sense.”

  THE DOOR TO the first-floor rear apartment opened as soon as Zoe entered the bakery. A tall Hispanic woman with blue-black hair and a priest’s eyes stepped out into the foyer.

  “Hey, Maria,” Zoe said. “How’s it going?”

  Maria Sanchez was hardly recogniza
ble from the woman Zoe had saved from a murder rap five years ago. Zoe had been fresh out of law school then, working for the public defender’s office and getting all the dregs cases, the sure losers, when the night-court judge had assigned her Maria’s case: an immigrant woman from Nicaragua, who had put a shotgun to her husband’s sleeping head and blown it off.

  Zoe would never forget the first time she’d seen Maria, sitting on the narrow cot in a city jail cell. A woman whose soul seemed more battered than her face. A woman whose eyes were dead. But as they spoke, Zoe realized that what she thought were dead eyes, what she thought was a loss of hope, was in fact its exact opposite. Deep inside her Maria Sanchez had a human dignity so pure and strong, Zoe had never encountered its like before. In spite of all the evidence against her client—fingerprints, gunshot residue, even a well-Mirandized confession—Zoe had never wanted to win a case so badly.

  To this day, she wasn’t sure how she pulled it off. She thought that in the end Maria Sanchez herself had most swayed the jury, simply by taking the stand and telling her story. And when Zoe walked out of the courtroom that day with a free Maria by her side, she’d known what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

  For years Maria had sold hot tamales and burritos from a handcart on Mission Street during the day and waitressed tables at night, but just last month she’d finally opened up her own taqueria down by the Giants’ baseball park. Usually Zoe wanted to talk and let her hair down with Maria, but not tonight. Not when she felt so battered herself.

  “Did that policeman find you?” Maria asked. “He wasn’t after one of your chicas, was he?” Maria always called the women Zoe rescued chicas no matter what their age.

  “No, it’s not that. I was sort of a witness to a case…. Listen, I’m going to go on up. I’m not feeling so hot tonight and—”

  “Sí, sí, you go on up…. Wait a minute, though. The mailman left something with me for you. He said he found it stuck in the bin beneath the mailbox, where he leaves all the catalogs and magazines. But it never went through the postal system. See—no stamps and no postmark.”