by Neil Mcmahon
“I don’t know what it is,” Monks said, which, in the light of day, was becoming truer. “A friend, a psychologist, approached me.”
Monks laid the printout of the four missing NGIs on a stainless steel dissecting table: Wayne Prokuta, Kenneth Foote, Brad Kurlin, and Caymas Schulte. Roman scanned the litanies of violence, drumming his fingers. The drumming slowed, then stopped.
They had first worked together more than a decade earlier at Bayview, when Monks was head of the ER and Roman, assistant pathologist. When the missing tape incident occurred, and Monks had been forced to divide the world between friends and others, Roman stood firm. A year later, he became chief pathologist at Mercy and Monks was unemployed. Among the first things Roman had done was to use his influence to bring Monks to Mercy’s ER.
“All these men have disappeared after release,” Monks said. “The follow-up’s piss poor and there’s reason to think at least one has been killed. I’m wondering if any have turned up in the morgues.”
“Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that I have any moral objections to lying. I’m just not good at it.”
“The fewer people who know about this, the better, Roman. My friend was contacted by somebody who may be the killer.”
Roman looked up owlishly.
“I assume that means you’d like these ASAP?”
“Sorry to be pushy.”
“I have a backlog of patients, but none of them are urgent appointments. I can get anything in San Francisco and Marin. Maybe San Jose. Sacramento and Mendocino are long shots. I don’t know the MEs in those areas.”
Monks said, “There’s one more. Robert Vandenard IV.”
“Vandenard?”
“He was the heir. Committed suicide in ’87 or ’88. The body was found near Napa.”
“Carroll. Asking about these other guys is one thing. With a name like Vandenard, people might want to know why.”
“It could be the most important one.”
“I’ll think of something,” Roman said. “Why don’t you check hack about noon.”
The medical records building at Clevinger Hospital was gray and uninviting. Alison had only been inside a few times. Files for current patients were kept on-ward, with aides transferring them as needed.
Posters in English and Spanish—NOTICE! AVISO!—papered the lobby walls, proclaiming information everyone either already knew or cared nothing about. The chipped Formica counter was an uncomfortable orange color that reminded her of Dreamsicles she had eaten as a kid.
The clerk, a sinewy black woman with a long slender neck, ignored her for the requisite minute or so. Finally she looked up from her computer monitor, busy fingers pausing. Her name tag read Ms. Willis.
“I need access to Dr. Jephson’s audit,” Alison said. “I work for him.” She held up her ID card.
“You new here, miss?”
“No.”
“Uh-huh. Cause unless you’re authorized, there’s a procedure. You fill out a form—” a brilliant red-tipped fingernail jabbed at a stack of papers in a plastic stand “—and leave it there.” The finger sliced through the air to another untidy pile of perhaps twenty, waiting to be collected. “You come pick up the files when they’re ready. We’ll call you.” She swiveled back to her computer, as if to avenge the waste of her time.
“I’m sorry, but it has to be now.”
“You and everybody else.” The red-tipped fingers danced across the keyboard.
“I’m trying to save you trouble. I can work here, I don’t need to take them out.”
Ms. Willis exhaled. “How many files?”
“Sixty-eight.”
She sank back in her chair. “Honey, you have got to be kidding.”
“I wish I was.”
She stood, came to the counter and examined Alison’s ID.
“You’re on Three-Psych, huh?”
“Yes.”
“How long you want here?”
“Two hours?”
“You’re going to do sixty-eight files in two hours? I thought it’s the patients supposed to be crazy over there.” She sniffed in exasperation. “Come on.”
Lugging briefcase and purse, Allison followed Ms. Willis through the racks into the hospital’s memory. They passed a few others, pallid shapes moving like spectral souls in a purgatory of weary search for information, endlessly removing and replacing files for their own obscure purposes. Which included the illegal sale of confidential material, such as bungled medical procedures, to lawyers, who would then contact the victims to instigate malpractice suits.
She settled her things in a carel, then stood before the section of shelves marked DR. JEPHSON AUDIT. It was several feet wide and reached from her waist to above her head: the files of sixty-eight NGIs, killers, rapists, child molesters, men like John James Garlick who were murderous bombs primed to go off at the next chance. Some of the files were inches thick.
If Naia was a released NGI, it was just possible that somewhere, in one of them, there would be a hint: mention of a lost girl. Of belated mastery; a trauma victim seeking to relive the experience again and again, until he or she felt control had been gained. Of cobras—which, the dictionary had confirmed, were of the genus Naia.
Alison scanned as fast as she could, skipping the thousands of pages of medical records and psychiatric evaluations, concentrating on criminal histories and interviews—especially interviews with Dr. Francis Jephson, who was emerging in her mind as the primary candidate for Naia.
The man she had been working for, harboring this secret. Someplace short of outright psychosis, a no man’s land of compartmentalization: one aspect moral, the other deadly, and the two able to exist side by side without apparent conflict. Last night’s conversation couched in symbols, hiding behind another form of mask. The den, a secret storehouse of violence. The lost girl, innocence or restraint. Naia, the cobra, the personality that acted out. Underneath a placid exterior life, the intense superiority of being the only one who knew the truth.
Perhaps even a darker heart: the savage thrill of releasing killers among the unsuspecting—and then killing the killers.
She turns them on each other and harvests the victors.
Her search turned up nothing. Except that toward the end, head aching from small print and fluorescent lights, she discovered that the file of one Thomas David Springkell, released 3/14/88, was missing.
Stover Larrabee sipped black coffee, grimacing. They were at a Zim’s on Nineteenth Avenue, an old-fashioned diner busy with customers who looked like they spent a lot of time there. It was a few minutes before 10 A.M.
Monks said, “Sorry to get you up so early.”
“I’ll get over it. Naia, huh?” Monks detected a note of admiration. “Sounds like she ought to be on the SFPD payroll.”
“Smart enough to set up a man like Caymas Schulte,” Monks said. “Strong enough to take him out. God knows what else.”
“What seems clear is that Dr. Chapley has attracted the attention of a highly dangerous individual. She should leave the area immediately. Contact the FBI. Consider assuming a new identity until Naia is apprehended.”
“She’s unwilling to do that. She’s convinced she’s not in danger, that there’s a trust being extended. If she violates it, that might anger Naia. I’ve thought about approaching the police on my own.”
“Except she might be right?”
Monks exhaled. “It’s not my decision to make. Yet.”
Larrabee said, “Have you considered the possibility that Dr. Chapley is somehow involved in this?”
“She likes to play games, Stover. I can’t believe she’d pull something that would scare a teenage kid. But I can sure believe she’d flirt with trouble, past the point of sense.”
Monks studied the several photos of Francis Jephson that Larrabee had downloaded from computer sources. He was built slightly, with a fine-boned handsome face: a distance runner, Alison had said.
“You think Naia could be a man? Jephson, cross-dre
ssing?”
“He might have fooled a kid like Tanager,” Monks said. “It’s tougher to believe he could give a blow job to somebody he’d been doing therapy with and not have the guy recognize him.”
“Not that tough.”
Monks smiled. “What do you think about having him picked up?”
“What you’ve got on him now isn’t going to keep him in jail. It would wave a red flag. Put Dr. Chapley right where she’s afraid of being.”
Monks said, “What do you suggest?”
“Keep gathering information and try to get something solid linking Jephson to a murder. If it doesn’t happen quick, I think Dr. Chapley’s going to have to go into hiding, whether she wants to or not.” Larrabee finished his coffee and stood. “We’ve got two hours. Wonder what Bernard Capaldi’s doing this morning?”
Bernard Capaldi; friend and attorney to the Vandenards. Almost certainly the man who had arranged for Robby literally to get away with murder once. Maybe twice.
“Dennis seemed to think he was dying,” Monks said.
“He might have us thrown down the stairs. On the other hand, there’s nothing like a ticking clock to make a guilty man talkative.”
As they walked to the car, Larrabee said, “You ever been around that? Somebody who comes across as normal, and then in an eyeblink turns into a batshit killer?”
“Plenty of marines.”
“If we do meet Naia and you figure it out, try not to let her know it,” Larrabee said. “Although she will.”
The man who answered the door at Bernard Capaldi’s Pacific Heights home looked more like an ex-boxer than a butler. Monks and Larrabee waited in a tiled foyer while he stepped into a side room to announce the visitors. The rooms partially open door gave a glimpse of video monitors from surveillance cameras around the property.
He came back out and faced them, neither polite nor rude. “Mr. Capaldi will be down in a few minutes. You gentlemen care for something to drink?”
They declined. He led them into a drawing room with ocean-facing windows that reached from the floor almost to the twelve-foot ceiling, and a central curving staircase with ornate balustrades. A Steinway grand piano occupied one corner. The woodwork glowed with the sheen of generations of care.
Monks had seen photographs of Bernard Capaldi in his glory days. He was a commanding presence, tall and spare, with the arched nose and ascetic features of a Renaissance-era Italian cardinal.
It was the same man who came toward them now, pushed in a wheelchair by a pretty nurse, but he had shrunken into himself. His face was gaunt, his hair a silver mist, and his skin had a yellowish waxy quality that Monks recognized, of someone nearing death. But the presence remained.
Capaldi smiled faintly. “A physician and a private detective. I think I can assume this is not a social call.” He patted the nurse’s hand. She tucked the blanket around his lap and left.
“Mr. Capaldi,” Larrabee said. “We know you don’t need to cooperate with us. But we believe there’s a tangible danger to our client.”
“Are you Larrabee?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The Larrabee who shot that Fisherman’s Wharf mugger, back—when was it, ’86?”
“Yeah.”
Monks turned to him, astonished. He had not known.
Capaldi said, “And got suspended?”
Larrabee nodded, tightlipped.
“Is that why you left the police force?”
“It figured in.”
“Not very fond of lawyers, I’d guess?”
“Some more than others.”
Capaldi laughed, a ghostly hacking sound. “Are you taping this?”
“No.”
“I hardly need to point out that it would be a waste of time to try to depose me.”
Monks said, “Osteosarcoma?”
Capaldi’s gaze sharpened. “Correct.”
“I’m told it’s hellish.”
“If you can imagine having your bones chewed out from the inside.”
“I’m sorry,” Monks said, feeling the inadequacy of the words.
“I’m eighty-four, Doctor. I have no complaints. But I tire quickly.” His eyebrows rose in query.
Larrabee said, “We’re representing a client who’s looking into the past of Dr. Francis Jephson.”
“Jephson,” Capaldi said musingly. “Haven’t heard that name in years.”
“It’s come clear that Robby Vandenard was in a position to compromise Jephson. Ruin him, even send him to prison. Was there any suspicion that Robby was murdered?”
Capaldi considered for half a minute.
“The answer is no, there was no such suspicion. A shotgun that had belonged to his father was still in his hand.”
Monks recalled the deserted Napa mansion, with its neglected vineyards and the ominous doors closing off the site of Katherine Vandenard’s murder. And nearby, the place Robby had chosen to take his own life.
“Would we he justified in suspecting that strings were pulled in getting Robby into Jephson’s program at Clevinger Hospital?”
He deliberated again. “I’ll allow your suspicion to rest unchallenged.”
“Do you think Robby killed his sister?”
“Yes.”
Larrabee turned away, hand going to his hair.
“Are you shocked, Mr. Larrabee? The rights and wrongs of it were cloudy. It was not a crime of hatred: the opposite. Robby knew what he was, early on in his life. Knew the world would see him as ugly and twisted. He saw Katherine as his other half. Beautiful, desirable. But she grew up ahead of him and began to reject him. The pivotal incident seemed to be that he spied on her having sex with a boyfriend. It came home to him that he was losing her, and that, he could not bear.”
“So you hired Jephson to cover for him.”
“Again, it wasn’t that simple. I was loyal to the family. I acted in what I believed to be their best interests. There seemed no point in destroying another child’s life. But by the time it was all over—” Capaldi waved a hand in eloquent weariness. “I regretted bitterly the part I’d played.”
Monks said, “What made you choose Jephson? He must have been just out of residency.”
“I didn’t choose him. Robby did. He had seen several other psychiatrists in the years before Katherine’s death. Hadn’t gotten along with any of them. But there was a chemistry between him and Jephson. Robby would ask to see him. They’d go for walks together. When the murder occurred, he was the obvious choice.”
“Did it ever occur to you that Jephson might have condoned it? Even planted the idea?”
Capaldi was silent. His gaze appeared to be fixed on the windows. Finally he said, “That’s territory I don’t dare enter.”
“And yet you hired him again, when Robby killed Merle Lutey.”
Capaldi turned back to them, looking frailer. “Gentlemen, I’m afraid I’m wearing out.”
“Mr. Capaldi, does the name Naia mean anything to you?”
“No.”
A thin finger pressed a button on the wheelchair. The nurse walked briskly back into the room. As she wheeled him away, he waved an impatient hand at their murmured thanks.
“The guy was a vicious fuck,” Larrabee said. “Pistol-whipping women after he got their purses. That kind of shit.” He gunned his Taurus through a yellow light on Geary, heading back toward Mercy Hospital. “It was night. I chased him three blocks. The cocksucker got rid of his gun somehow, it was never found. The defense established reasonable doubt that he was the same guy.”
“Kill him?”
“I wish to Christ I had. Blew out his spleen. The city paid alt his medical bills, gave him a fat settlement, and suspended me.”
“Did they ever convict him?”
“Nope. But the muggings stopped.”
Monks and Larrabee followed Roman Kasmarek into his glassed-in office in the morgue.
“San Jose and Mendocino were busts,” Roman said. “No reports on Kenneth Foote or Caymas Schulte. I�
��ve got a call into Napa for Vandenard.”
Monks said, “Capaldi seemed convinced that Robby was a clear-cut suicide.”
“Capaldi’s been wiping those people’s asses for fifty years,” Larrabee said. “Let’s see what Dr. Kasmarek has to say.”
“I got luckier close to home,” Roman said. “Walter Bruggeman, in Mann, remembered the Brad Kurlin case quite well. He died in a fire, apparently one he set.”
Brad Kurlin, known killer of six by arson. Released as rehabilitated by Dr. Francis Jephson.
“There were a couple of things Walter wasn’t entirely comfortable with. But nobody wanted to take it any further, even the family.”
“Things such as?”
“The body was badly charred. But the way Kurlin had fallen, the right side was more protected. There were bits of a foreign substance in the heel of that hand; DE, diatomaceous earth. It’s composed largely of tiny shell fragments, so it survived the fire.
“In itself, the DE’s not much help. It’s widely used, industrial filters, swimming pools, things like that. Kurlin could have picked it up anywhere. It would have to have been imbedded forcefully—say, he slipped and fell.
“But there was another thing that didn’t make it onto the report. A possibility that the tendons behind the right knee were severed.”
Monks said slowly, “You’re suggesting he’d been hamstrung?”
“To cut those tendons accidentally, you’d have to be thrashing around pretty hard. Of course if you’re being burned alive, you probably are. The off-the-record take was, the fire moved a lot faster than he thought. It blocked whatever exit he’d figured on. He tried to kick out a window, the flames exploded, he tore himself up on the glass. Fell back inside and smoke got him.”
“Does that work for you?”
Roman shrugged. “The ME’s job is to establish a cause of death. From there it’s up to law enforcement to worry about the why’s.
“But this gets more interesting. I hit the long shot. Prokuta.” Roman spread out a faxed document, from the coroner’s office of Solano County.
They leaned over the report: dated 4/9/91, for Wayne Prokuta, bludgeoner of an elderly woman. Spring floods had washed up his body in the morass-like delta of the Sacramento River, into which he had presumably thrown himself several months earlier. The cause of death was listed as suicide by drowning. Prokuta had still been wearing the remnants of a coat with heavy barbell weights in the pockets.
