-Why are you talking to me, then?” Carlucci asked.
“I have been advised that it was in my best interest to speak with someone about the case. I have been advised that unless I did, the constant and rather annoying requests for interviews would not cease. Eventually, I was told, I might even become the subject of a subpoena. You are the supervising officer of the case. You are a lieutenant, a superior officer in the department. I prefer to speak with you.”
Too good to deal with the peons, Carlucci thought, wanting very much to come out and say it. But it wouldn’t be helpful.
“Do you know why your daughter met with me?” he asked.
Katsuda shrugged. “You asked her to.” Telling him that the Mishima phone lines, too, were under surveillance, although that didn’t come as a surprise.
“Do you know what we talked about?”
“No, but I can guess. My daughter had an obsession with a group of medical terrorists called Cancer Cell. I can think of nothing else she was involved with that would be of any interest to the police.”
“She was involved with Cancer Cell?”
Katsuda shook his head. “Poor choice of words. The earlier phrasing is more accurate. An obsession. She was fascinated by them, and did what she could to learn about them. I tried to discourage her in this, but she was quite stubborn.”
“What do you know about Cancer Cell?”
Katsuda gave a sigh of exasperation. A warning, Carlucci guessed. “I don’t know anything about them. They were my daughter’s obsession, not mine. They seemed dangerous. I avoid danger whenever possible.”
Carlucci didn’t push it. He didn’t think he was going to come away from this interview with much, but he wanted every chance he had, and he wanted it to go as far as possible. He took a copy of the sketch artist image from his coat pocket, awkwardly unfolded it with his right hand, then leaned forward and held it out to Katsuda. Katsuda took the picture and studied it for a few moments, then looked up.
“Do you recognize her?”
Katsuda handed the picture back to Carlucci. “She looks vaguely familiar. Who is she?”
“We think a friend of your daughter’s. A close friend.” Katsuda stared at him for a minute, his gaze unblinking. “My daughter was not a lesbian.”
“I didn’t say she was.” Toni Weathers was right. There was something odd about this.
“You certainly implied it, Lieutenant.”
“It’s a possibility, that’s all.”
“No.” Katsuda crisply shook his head, his eyebrows furrowed. “It is not a possibility.”
He held up the picture again, moved it closer to Katsuda. “You don’t know her.”
“No. As I said, the picture is familiar. If she was a friend of my daughter’s, I may have met her, or seen her at some time. But I do not know her.”
Carlucci refolded the picture and stuck it back in his jacket. “So you don’t think we can solve your daughter’s murder?”
“No.”
“Is it just your daughter’s murder, or do you think the police are generally incapable of solving crimes?”
“I believe they are generally ineffective.” Katsuda smiled. “I am just being frank, Lieutenant. If a major crime is committed on camera, or in front of numerous witness, or you have a confession, the police do an adequate job of following through. But when something is difficult and motives are obscure, as in my daughter’s case, you are hopelessly lost. You simply do not have the resources, financial and otherwise, and the world has become much too complex.”
“Are you undertaking your own investigation?” Carlucci asked. “With your own resources, ‘financial and otherwise’?”
That is my business, Lieutenant, not yours.”
“It is very much my business, Mr. Katsuda.”
Katsuda shook his head. “Not if I say it isn’t. You are forgetting who has the power here, Lieutenant. It is not you.”
“You might be surprised.”
Katsuda smiled, amused. “I don’t think so.” He stood up. “I would say our interview is at an end.”
Carlucci remained seated for a few moments, angry with himself for responding that way. Katsuda was right about the power, on a surface level. But there were other kinds of power, and Katsuda didn’t know everything. He finally got up and shook Katsuda’ s hand.
“Thanks for talking to me,” he said.
“I doubt if I was much help.”
“That’s all right. I guess neither of us expected much.” He started walking toward the wall he had come through, though at the moment there was no opening. He stopped a few feet from it and waited.
“Lieutenant.”
“Yes.”
“Why did someone try to kill you?”
Carlucci turned back to look at him. “I don’t know.”
“Were you chasing rats?” Katsuda asked, smiling slightly.
Carlucci’s breath caught for a moment. His heart beat hard against his chest, somehow noticeable right now. He was surprised by what Katsuda had just revealed, and by the fact that he had revealed it at all. It told him something important about the man.
“Yes,” Carlucci said. “I was.”
“A dangerous occupation.”
-So it seems,” he agreed.
“Perhaps you should give it up.”
“The rat is dead.”
“No great loss for the world, I imagine. But no great gain, either. Nothing changed.” Katsuda touched his hair with his fingertips. “Good night, Lieutenant.”
Carlucci started to turn, then stopped. “The woman out front, at the desk.”
“My assistant. Yes?”
“What happened to her?”
“What happened? To her face, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing. She did not like the face she was born with, so she changed it. I’m certain I can arrange the same thing for you, if you wish.”
Carlucci shook his head. “I’ll pass.”
This time when he turned around, the wall was opening, and he walked through.
CHAPTER 23
Cage wandered the streets of the Tenderloin in a kind of trance. Nikki was dying. He knew that, and he couldn’t get away from it. He had been back to see her twice more, but each time she’d been worse; neither time had she been coherent enough to talk. Neither time had she known he was there. She was dying.
It was midafternoon and the heat was intense. The air was heavy and muggy, but he hardly noticed it. The heat kept the street and sidewalk traffic light, which was just fine with him.
He bought a beer from a young woman caged into a tiny kiosk out on the edge of the sidewalk. Money went into one slot, the beer emerged from another, cold and wet. Cage could barely make out her features behind the narrow, thin bars, back in the darkness. She must be baking in there.
He sat on the curb in the shadow of a delivery truck and drank his beer. There was a sense in the street of people waiting waiting for darkness, waiting for the temperature to drop, waiting for energy to return. Waiting for Nikki to die.
Jesus. And how many other people were going to die? In the days since his talk with Dr. Sodhi, Cage had made a few calls to other doctors and street medicos both in and out of the Tenderloin. Nothing explosive was happening yet, but cases were cropping up everywhere, many of the people already dead. Most inside the Tenderloin, but a few outside. No one thought too much about it yet, because no one was seeing more than one or two, and some none at all. Just another mystery disease or toxin attack. But the symptoms were too damn close to what Tito, Stinger, and Nikki all had.
Cage knew. Something was happening out there. Something was about to break out.
And he had helped Caroline work her way into Cancer Cell and the Core, right into the middle of it.
The street got suddenly quiet. There was a long break in the traffic, and Cage stood, stepped out from behind the truck, and looked out into the street. Nothing at first, and then he heard the first cries and moans, and he knew
what was coming—a Plague Parade.
Christ, that’s just what he needed now. He almost walked away, almost hurried in the opposite direction where he could try to find a bar or a café, anyplace inside where he could avoid seeing it. But he remained where he was, and waited for it to reach him.
Once a month or so a Plague Parade would appear on the streets of the Tenderloin. The name wasn’t really accurate; none of the people in the parades were dying of diseases that were truly plagues unless you considered life in the twenty-first century a plague. But that didn’t stop them from using the name; it sounded better. Or worse.
The street was completely clear now. Groups of plague hierodules would have gone ahead and set up human barricades on the planned route men and women in hooded robes and carrying censures, legless men on motorized wheeled platforms, Screamers with their mouths surgically sealed, humming through metal nose tubes. And here, people were clearing out from the sidewalks without any help, ducking into buildings and alleys, shops and cafés; those who remained waited for the parade with exhausted acceptance or morbid interest.
An extremely tall woman led the parade. She wore a black and white body-stocking skeleton costume, a grinning skull mask over her head. Arms and legs movingly nimbly, the skeleton woman danced from side to side as she led the parade down the street. But her dancing and grinning mask were the last vestiges of gaiety in the Plague Parade.
Following the dancing skeleton came two rows of four-wheeled carts pulled by barefoot men naked except for tattered loincloths. Each row consisted of six carts, and sitting in each cart were two or three people. Hand-painted signs hung from the sides of the carts, announcing the diseases within:
ANKYLOSING SPONDYLITIS
LUPUS
EPSTEIN-BARR
HEPATITIS G
MALARIA
MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS
…and so on. Cage picked up the pattern right away: They were all chronic illnesses.
Next in the parade, on foot or wheeled platform, came the physical birth deformities section. People hobbled along on clubfeet, or with one leg noticeably shorter than the other, some walked by with short, flippered arms or deformed heads, and a small group of legless men pulled themselves along on wheeled platforms, digging spiked knuckles into the pavement with each swing of their arms. Two women led by children walked with clouded white eyes gazing up at the sky, wearing signs that said “Blind from Birth.”
Then came the strangest part of the parade, something Cage had never seen before. Two lines of hooded figures moved slowly past, bodies swaying in unison to a subtly shifting, deep, and penetrating hum. He could not tell if the hum came from the marchers, or if it was being generated by some electrical device. Stranger still, even though it was midday and the sun was shining directly onto the street, the hooded figures were surrounded by a pulsing, dark blue glow that obscured the figures and the air around them; as they walked past, even people standing on the opposite side of the street became distorted and weirdly shadowed. And most disturbing of all, when Cage looked at the heads of the hooded figures, he could see nothing within the hoods, only a darker blue glow and darker shifting shadows, as if there were no heads or faces within. A terrible, cold shudder went through him, and he wanted to turn away, but he was transfixed, and could not tear his gaze from them until they were completely past him and nearly half a block away.
Dizzy and buzzing inside, he finally turned his head and stared down at the ground, trying to regain his equilibrium. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he had just witnessed something terrifying. The rest of the Plague Parade moved past him, but he hardly noticed any more of it, hardly saw the caged wagon of half-naked and completely insane people leaping and shouting and shaking the bars, or the pedalcarts loaded with people in the late stages of terminal diseases. He was barely aware of where he was.
But by the time the tail end of the parade approached, he was feeling almost normal. He watched the last of the stragglers limp and drag past him—a young man with no hair, no left hand, and no left eye, and half a dozen surgical scars across his chest and abdomen; and a woman and child, both blond, apparently mother and daughter, walking hand in hand. Around the girl’s neck hung a cardboard sign lettered in black marker:
LEUKEMIA
NO MONEY
The girl was listless, her feet dragging. The mother was angry and defiant.
Half a block farther on was the rear guard of the hierodules, walking backward, facing the vehicle traffic that inched along in their wake, filling the street once again. Cage remained where he was until all signs of the parade were gone, and the streets and sidewalks were back to normal.
Back to normal. And what good was that? A hopeless, deteriorating state of affairs.
He looked down at the empty beer bottle in his hand. He wanted to throw it through a window, or smash it over someone’s head, smash it over his own head. Instead, he tossed it into a trash bin, crossed the street, walked down to the end of the block, and entered a phone bank. Time to try calling Eric Ralston again.
The bank was a narrow, dark aisle lined with small, cramped private booths. Signs above each booth declared, in all seriousness, that the phone lines within were guaranteed to be cleared and clean. No one believed the signs.
He ran his phone card through the reader, and punched in the number for the CDC in Atlanta, which he’d now memorized after half a dozen calls in the past two days. Half a dozen calls to Ralston, half a dozen messages left, and no calls returned.
Cage had gone to medical school in San Francisco with Eric Ralston, and they had become friends, despite being headed in different directions afterward Cage had gone to Southern California to do image enhancements and make money, while Ralston had joined the CDC. Cage’s life and career had changed drastically since then, but Ralston had remained at the CDC, where he was now some kind of research director. They had stayed in touch over the years, talking by phone every few months, seeing each other maybe once or twice a year.
The call went through, a woman answered, and Cage asked for Ralston’s office. When he got Eric’s voice-mail system again, he defaulted out of it and back to the woman.
“Yes, can I help you?” the woman said.
“My name is Dr. Ryland Cage, in San Francisco, and I’ve been trying to reach Dr. Eric Ralston for two days,” he said. “I’ve left several messages, but he hasn’t called back. It’s urgent that I speak with him, so I need to know if he’s actually been in his office, or is he away?”
“Just a minute, Dr. Cage, let me check.”
He crouched on the floor of the cubicle while he waited, the phone cord barely long enough. Quiet strains of chamber music played over the phone; at least there were no commercials or promotional announcements.
A couple of minutes later the woman came back on. “Dr. Cage?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Ralston is out of the office. He’s in the field, and he has been for several days. It’s an open-ended assignment, so there’s no way to know when he will be back in the office.”
“Goddamnit.” Cage closed his eyes for a moment; he wasn’t going to give up. “As I said, it’s urgent that I speak to him. There must be a number I can call to reach him, wherever he is.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cage, you should know that I can’t give out that information.”
“I have to speak with him as soon as possible.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cage. If you want to leave a message, I will note that it’s urgent, so if he calls in—”
“Goddamnit, I’ve already left messages, and—” She hung up.
Cage remained in a crouch, holding the silent phone to his ear and staring stupidly at the cubicle door. He breathed deeply and slowly, stood, and then punched in the CDC number. The same woman answered.
“Please don’t hang up on me,” he said, working hard to keep his voice calm and reasoned, afraid of pissing her off again. “This is Dr. Cage, and I apologize for losing my temper with you.”
&
nbsp; There was a long silence, and he was afraid she had hung up on him again. But then she spoke.
“Apology accepted,” she said.—And I’m sorry I so easily lost patience with you. It’s been a little hectic around here lately.”
“Why?” Cage asked. “Something going on?”
“Oh, who knows? They don’t tell the support staff anything. They have panic attacks around here all the time and most of them turn out to be for nothing. But we always pay for it with this insanity.”
“Yeah, that figures. All right. I know you can’t tell me where he is, or how to reach him. But could you get a message to him, telling him that I’ve called several times, and that it’s urgent I speak with him, give him my phone and pager numbers?”
The woman sighed. “It won’t be easy. When they’re out in the field, it’s an `emergency only’ status for contacting them.”
“This is an emergency,” Cage said. “It really is.”
“Okay,” she said, relenting. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks. I really appreciate it.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
He gave her the two numbers, added the clinic number; she read them back to him, and said she would get to it as soon as she could.
“Thanks again,” he said. “Keep my numbers, and the next time you’re in San Francisco give me a call. I’ll buy you dinner.”
“Call me when you’re in Atlanta,” she said. “You’ll never see me on the West Coast.”
“I will. What’s your name?”
“Never mind. Just call here, and if you recognize my voice, we’ll go from there.’
Cage laughed. They said their good-byes, and he hung up the receiver.
Back out on the street, in the oppressive heat and sun, Cage’s foul, despairing mood returned in full force. He wasn’t going to hear from Eric, and even if he did it wouldn’t do any good. Afraid to commit resources to something without convincing evidence, afraid to look foolish as they had so many times in the past thirty years or so, no one at the CDC would do anything until it was way too late.
He stood in front of the phone bank, the sun baking him, his head swimming, and his vision bleaching. Where was he? Thinking, figuring, he worked out that he was only five or six blocks from Hanna’s Hophead Hovel. Cage hadn’t been there in months. Hanna’s was a hip spice bar, décor from eighteenth-century China, pictures on the walls of people smoking opium, fake opium pipe candleholders on the table, dark shaded lamps. But in the basement rooms below was the real thing an opium and hash den, with rooms rented out by the hour and servants who would bring you your drug of choice and watch over you.
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