Destroying Angel

by Richard Paul Russo

  It had been hot and muggy that day, just the way it was now. There had been a crazy run of other murders in the city, and Tanner and Freeman were on loan to Homicide to help out with the casework overload. But Freeman had called in sick that morning, and Tanner was working alone out in the avenues along the park when the virus came through the system giving the location of the bodies. He was given the option of waiting until one of the regular Homicide teams was freed up, but he couldn’t stand the thought of the bodies staying in water any longer than necessary. It was irrational, but there it was. And so he had made this climb alone, knowing what he would find at the top.

  He knew there would be no bodies this time, but that did not help his mood much. It was, he feared, only a matter of time. A slight breeze took the edge off the heat, whispering through the ragged eucalyptus trees that still survived. His view of the park and the city expanded as he climbed higher. He stopped at one point, almost at the top, and looked down at the sprawling squatter zone. Separated from the zone by only a narrow strip of trees were the Japanese Tea Gardens. He could see the wealthy tourists walking along the tended paths, sitting in the tea pavilion.

  Next to the tea gardens was the De Young, and as he looked at it Tanner thought he glimpsed movement within the wreckage of crumbled stone and thick vines. He stared a long time, watching, but did not see anything more. Animals? Or people living in the ruins? It would not be surprising.

  He resumed the climb. A few minutes later the trail widened to an open area at the top of the hill. The concrete reservoir was still there, still filled with more muck than water. A heavy, warm stench rose from it, worse than the stink of the slough the other day.

  Tanner sat on the concrete rim and stared down at the muck- covered water. He wondered what else was at the bottom of the reservoir. Probably it would never be drained and cleaned out because no one wanted to know. Just like everything else. He picked up a stone, tossed it into the water. The stone hit the green muck without a splash and slowly sank. It was going to be one hell of a summer.

  EIGHT

  NIGHT. SMOKE IN the air. Sookie sat in the open window of her room on the upper floor of the De Young. She could see the glow from burning lamps, the flicker of the tent-city fires. Smelled the smoke, the cooking meat, the shit from the portable toilets. Heard the murmur of voices, singing.

  She didn’t need anyone, she could take of herself. She sniffed once. Crazy people, living in the tents. All jammed in together, crawling over each other. They had nothing. Sookie had lots of things.

  Sookie lit a cigarette, then climbed down from the window ledge. She lit the set of five squat candles arranged on the plastic crate in the center of the room. The candlelight, quivering, cast shadows at the edges of the room.

  The room was small, but the walls were intact. In the corner nearest the window was her bed—a sleeping bag on top of two thick layers of foam rubber. The walls were covered with yellowed newspapers. And along the walls were the makeshift shelves and boxes that held her things.

  Sookie moved along the walls, taking inventory. She liked doing it, taking stock, checking things. Looking, picking up a few. Touching. The things she found in empty houses and apartments. She was good at finding things other people couldn’t see. Finding good things other people thought were worthless. Her things.

  Two plastic mushrooms. A light bulb with a tiny hole and blue swirls of color around the hole. A set of shattered headphones. Neatly wrapped bundles of computer cable. An L- shaped length of shiny copper pipe.

  She stopped and picked up the large wood woman. The top half of the woman came off, and inside was a slightly smaller wood woman. It, too, came apart, another smaller woman inside. They went on like that, ten of them until, at last, Sookie would find a tiny wood woman that did not open. She loved opening the women, one after another, but she was always disappointed when she reached the last. She expected something more.

  Sookie put down the woman, moved on. An energy band that blinked dim red light, slower and fainter each day. Three neuro-tubes. A jar filled with pieces of green broken glass. Six wooden chopsticks. A clear glass ashtray.

  She knelt and pulled out the box of her own private things—the few items she had not found, that she had owned ever since she was a child, that she had taken with her when she had left the place she herself had never called home. Looking at them, touching them, always made her feel both sad and special. Now she just looked at them without touching. The silver metal bracelet with her other name engraved on the band: Celeste. A string of tiny red beads. A clear glass figurine of a cat. And a drawing she had made once of an angel. She had never hung the picture because it frightened her. It pulled her, held tightly onto her, but it also scared her. My angel, she thought.

  Sookie shivered, put away the box. She moved around the rest of the room, faster now, hardly looking anymore. She finished at the bookcase next to the bed, filled with books and magazines. On the floor was the pocket dictionary she used to help her with words she didn’t know. Sometimes, when she was in the mood, she was quite a reader.

  But not now. She returned to the window, looked at the lamps, the glow of fires. Look what I have, she thought. She clambered onto the ledge, one leg dangling outside. Look. Sookie slowly, repeatedly banged her fist against the windowsill, and closed her eyes tight.

  NINE

  TWO MORE BODIES were found. Two men, this time, pulled out of Balboa Reservoir. The newspaper made much of the fact that it was the first repeat use of a given body of water. Tanner, reading the paper in a café on Columbus, doubted it meant anything. What the two new bodies did mean, though, was that now he had to go back to Carlucci.

  He set down the paper and looked out the window at the early-morning streets. Here, close to the border of the Financial District, the streets were busy, filled with people and cars, delivery trucks and flashers, scooters and runners—an economy that thrived on the edges of the District, living off the workers who ventured a block or two out of the District during daylight hours. When darkness fell, the area narrowed, became a blazing finger of the Chinese Corridor stretching all the way to the Wharf.

  Once, Tanner’s father had told him years before, this area of the city had not been part of Chinatown. It had been called North Beach, and had been heavily Italian—which explained the two or three Italian restaurants and the few cafés like this one. But Tanner’s father had never explained what had happened to the Italians.

  Tanner drank slowly from his coffee, putting off what he knew he had to do. He had been afraid of this on the Carousel Club balcony, watching the two bodies being pulled from the slough, but he had hoped it was a fluke, an isolated blip, and not a resumption of the killings. So much for hope. Tanner wondered if he would still be alive at the end of the summer.

  He glanced back at the newspaper. This time there was a lurid photo of the bodies. The newshawkers, taken by surprise when the first two had been pulled from the slough, were now on fire alert, shadowing the police.

  Tanner flipped over the newspaper, hiding the picture, then finished his coffee. It was time to see Carlucci.

  O O O O

  Spade’s was half-empty when Tanner arrived. Between mealtimes. The ion poles were turned up, sparks flying, as if Kingston wanted to scare away potential customers.

  Carlucci was alone in his booth, staring at the empty seat across from him, tapping at the table with a pen. Kingston was nowhere to be seen. Tanner slid into the booth, and Carlucci blinked several times, as if coming out of a trance.

  “My day is fucking complete,” he said.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk.”

  “Not here,” Tanner said.

  “Terrific. Melodrama.”

  “I’m not screwing around.”

  Carlucci waited, staring at him. “Is it about... ?” He left it unfinished. Tanner nodded. “All right,” Carlucci said. “Should’ve known.” He wrote something on a piece of paper, folded it several times, then ha
nded it to Tanner.

  “Thanks,” Tanner said. He put the paper in his pocket without looking at it, then got up and left.

  O O O O

  At three-thirty that afternoon, Tanner stood beside a massive concrete pier support, the freeway overpass above him casting a wide shadow. Traffic above rumbled, but was muted, a muffled echo. Two supports down from him, several teenagers in whiteface and pulse-jackets gathered, huddled around a black cylinder. A sudden explosion of sound rocked the air, music blaring from the cylinder, and the crisscrossing bands on the jackets began pulsing colors with the beat.

  Tanner saw Carlucci come around a corner, then cross the street carrying a paper bag. When he reached Tanner, he opened the bag, took out two cups of coffee, and handed one to him. They popped the lids and stood without speaking for a few minutes, sipping at the hot coffee and watching the kids down the way. Already a steady procession of customers had begun, mostly teenagers with a few adults to change the pace. As Tanner and Carlucci watched, they could see the exchanges—money for packets. The kids weren’t even trying to hide it.

  “Not my jurisdiction,” Carlucci said.

  Tanner understood. Carlucci was Homicide. If he followed up everything he saw happening on the streets, he’d never get to his own job. Unless it turned to murder, Carlucci would let the kids be, though Tanner knew he didn’t like it.

  “Would have been yours,” Carlucci added.

  Tanner nodded. They didn’t say anything else for a while, then Carlucci finally asked, “So what is it?”

  “You’re not going to like this.”

  Carlucci snorted. “Figured that one out all on my own, Tanner.”

  “Three years ago,” Tanner began. “One day, a message gets delivered to me and Freeman. Inside a sealed envelope, a single sheet of paper with just two words. ‘Angel wings.’ Then two figures. Ten thousand slash one million. And then the name of the man who sent the message. That was all.”

  “And who was that?”

  “Someone who claimed to know who the killer was. Those two numbers. Ten thousand dollars was admission price for a meeting, and one million for the info.”

  “All right, cut the phony suspense. Who sent the message?”

  “Rattan.”

  “Christ!”

  “I told you you weren’t going to like it.”

  Carlucci looked down at his coffee, grimaced at it. “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing. We talked about it, tried to figure how to run it. If we went upstairs with it, we were pretty sure it would be killed. Pay ten thousand dollars to a scumbag who’d jumped bail and disappeared with a couple dozen felony drug charges outstanding? They’d argue that he couldn’t know anything, that some cop had leaked the info to him about the angel wings.” Carlucci nodded. He stopped grimacing, now just sipped his coffee and watched Tanner, listening.

  “So we thought about going after it on our own. We thought we could come up with the ten thousand from slush funds, and if it turned out Rattan’s information was good, they’d have to buy it upstairs.”

  Tanner paused, looking at the kids. Business was complete—it didn’t take long—and they turned off the cylinder, packed it away, and moved on. In a few minutes they’d probably be setting up shop elsewhere.

  “We hadn’t decided for sure. It would have been a hell of a job because we’d have to track down Rattan ourselves. He was offering to sell, but he wasn’t going to come to us.” Tanner paused again. “Then Freeman got killed. I had other things to deal with for a while.” The scar on his back began to itch just thinking about it. “By the time I got back to it, I realized it had been a long time since any new bodies had turned up. So I held off, hoping the killings had stopped. After a few more months, it looked like they had. I left it alone.”

  “And then you quit the force.”

  Tanner nodded.

  “But now the killings have started again.”

  Tanner nodded once more. Carlucci finished his coffee, dropped the cup and crushed it into the dirt with his shoe.

  “Christ,” Carlucci whispered. He looked at Tanner. “Why did Rattan go to you and Freeman?”

  “Probably because he thought he could trust us.”

  “Was he right?”

  Tanner shrugged. “Sure. We’d dealt with him before, you know how it goes down sometimes. And we wouldn’t have screwed him over.”

  “Could you trust him?”

  “In the right situation. We would have trusted him with this deal. It was worth the risk.”

  “You think his offer was legit?”

  Tanner hesitated before answering. He and Freeman had talked a lot about that. The key issue.

  “He might have been wrong,” Tanner said. “But I think he believed he knew who was doing the killing.”

  “But he wasn’t going to give that information to us for nothing,” Carlucci said. “And never has.” He looked away, slowly shaking his head. “Jesus Christ. Trying to find that fucker now is going to be a lot harder than it would have been three years ago.”

  No shit, Tanner thought. Three years ago it was felony drug charges. Now Rattan was also wanted for killing two cops. For more than a year he’d managed to stay hidden despite one hell of a hunt-down. He had to be so deep inside the Tenderloin he probably never saw the sun.

  They both remained silent for a long time. Carlucci, gazing off into the distance, was probably doing a lot of the same thinking Tanner had done over the last few days. Tanner didn’t think he was going to like Carlucci’s conclusions any better than his own.

  “I’m going to have to get back to you,” Carlucci finally said. He was still gazing into the distance, along the line of shrinking highway piers. “I want to talk to a couple of people, but it’ll stay tight, believe me.”

  “You’re not going upstairs with this, are you?”

  Carlucci turned to look at him. “Not a chance.” He paused. “Rattan came to you and Freeman. Freeman’s dead. And you’re out.” Paused again. “You’ll come in and work this?”

  “I’m going to have to, aren’t I?”

  Carlucci stared at Tanner for a minute, then said, “I’ll call you.” Without another word he turned and crossed the street, leaving Tanner alone under the freeway.

  Tanner sipped at the coffee. It was cold. He drank the rest of it anyway, crushed the cup in his hand, then dropped it next to Carlucci’s.

  TEN

  WHEN TANNER CAME out onto the roof, Alexandra was already there, seated near the far edge, cider machine hissing beside her, surrounded by half a dozen cats. Tanner carried his chair across the roof, watching the cats get up and move aside to make room for him. The moonlight glinted off paws and legs—all of Alexandra’s cats had at least one metal prosthetic limb. Kubo had all four, and his paws clicked loudly on the rooftop gravel until he settled under Alexandra’s chair.

  She stood and bowed gracefully, folding her long, thin body nearly in half, her pale hair touching the ground. “Good evening, Mr. Tanner.” She laughed, straightened, and sat back down.

  “Hello, Alexandra.” Tanner set up his chair beside her.

  Alexandra poured two steaming mugs of cider and handed one to him. “How’s the smuggling trade?” she asked.

  “You should know,” Tanner said. “Don’t you have the stats for it?” Alexandra did statistical research and analysis for a corporate law firm in the Financial District. She spent half her time at the company doing research for radical underground organizations and her own personal interests.

  “Black-market pharmaceutical trade is up eleven percent over last year,” she said. “But I haven’t been able to find a thing on black-market gourmet foods. Care to provide me with some figures so I can start a database?”

  Tanner smiled and shook his head. He sipped at the cider, which was hot and strong, with a deep kick. The sky was nearly clear, only a slight haze muting the stars and moon. A regular, almost explosive pounding sounded from the north, maybe near the water. Two green flares
shot across the peak of Telegraph Hill, illuminating the jagged ruins of Coit Tower, followed by a short burst of gunfire. Then the quiet and the dark returned.

  “People are funny,” Alexandra said. It was her standard beginning when she wanted to talk about something she’d been researching.

  “What now?” Tanner asked.

  “These murders. The ‘Chain Killer.’ A lot of people in this city are scared out of their minds by this guy.”

  “Shouldn’t they be?”

  Alexandra shook her head. “Not the way they are. The numbers aren’t right. Last year in this city, seven hundred ninety-three people were killed in race riots. About fifteen hundred were killed in the so-called drug wars. Three hundred seventeen died from tainted prescription pharmaceuticals. Eighty-nine died in the explosion in Macy’s, one hundred fifty in the Unicorn Theater bombing. Ninety-three in the Shaklee Building fire, seventy-five in the Market Street gas leaks. And sixty-nine students mowed down at the USF anti-draft rally.” She waved her hand. “I could go on. I didn’t even bother digging up the numbers for other murders, or car-accident fatalities, anything like that.” She paused, looking at Tanner. “Let’s face it, sometimes life in this city is a horror show.” She paused again. “So how many people did this ‘Chain Killer’ murder the first time? Thirty-seven over a two-year period. Add four new ones, and that’s a total of forty-one in the last four and a half years. I’m not saying the killings aren’t awful. They are. And I’m certainly glad I’m not one of those forty-one. But it’s a relatively small number, compared to the others I just gave you. If this guy scares them so badly, they should be crapping their pants on a daily basis just at the thought of living in this city.”

  Tanner smiled. “Some people do,” he said. He drank from the cup, looking at Alexandra over the rim. She seemed genuinely puzzled. “I know what you’re saying, but you should know it’s never that simple. It’s more than the numbers. People don’t understand these killings. Everything else you mentioned, people can understand why they happen. They don’t like it, but it makes sense. Race riots? Awful, but comprehensible. The Macy’s fire? Terrible, but only an isolated incident, and the cause was known. And people know you’re asking for trouble if you walk in certain parts of the city after dark, or some parts any time of day. They understand that.” He paused. “But people can’t make sense of the Chain Killer. Nobody has any idea who it is, why he kills, no pattern to when or where. Which means that it could happen to anyone, at any time, so there’s nothing, absolutely nothing they can do to protect themselves.”