Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Acknowledgments
Read More from Jonathan Moore
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Moore
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moore, Jonathan, 1977– author.
Title: The night market / Jonathan Moore.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017044907 (print) | LCCN 2017047822 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-544-93185-5 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-544-67189-8 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Thrillers. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3613.O56275 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.O56275 N54 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044907
Cover design by Brian Moore
Cover images © JMGehrke / Getty Images
Author photograph © Maria Y. Wang
v1.1217
For Bert T. Kobayashi, Jr., with gratitude.
1
CARVER PULLED TO the curb behind the chassis of a burned-out car.
Across the intersection was the billboard, six spotlights along the bottom. They shined upward, lighting the sign, throwing its shadow across the vacant building behind it. The rest of the neighborhood was dead. A moonscape of abandoned warehouses, everything picked over twice. Walls punched in with crowbars, wires and plumbing stripped out. Even the streetlights were gone; in Bay View and Hunter’s Point, copper was worth more than light. Kids were creeping in from the edges to steal bricks now. They could take them by the bucketload to the salvage yards south of town and trade them for day-old bread. He knew about that from last night.
But no one had touched the sign. Maybe it made them feel better, having it lit. He turned on the windshield wipers so he could see it clearly. He thought about getting out of the car. He’d be able to see all of it if he walked to the middle of the intersection. He’d almost done that last night, too, when he’d been lost in the dark, driving back from the scene. Shaking still, from the gunfire. Tonight he’d driven this way just to see it again. He didn’t have any business here. No one did.
The sign was brand new, but he couldn’t imagine who would have put it here. A place like this? They might as well have buried it in the desert.
It was selling perfume, a fragrance called Black Aria. The woman in the ad was an actress. He knew her face but not her name. His grandfather might have known. Elizabeth something? Or Audrey, maybe. She lay on her stomach, her chin propped in her hands. Her knees were bent so that her bare toes pointed straight up. She was surely nude underneath the black sheet that was draped over her, covering no more than it had to. Sheet or not, every curve was there, defined in bare skin or beneath the indents and contours of satin.
It was all digitized, of course. Just another seamless fake. The real Elizabeth, or Audrey, wouldn’t have posed like this. Not back then, whenever she was alive, and not to sell perfume. People used to have standards. But those were gone now and they weren’t coming back. Like the burned-out car, like the whole of Hunter’s Point. The bottle hovered above her bare shoulder blades, the crystal vial so thick it looked like ice. The liquid inside was the color of old blood.
The warmth started while he was looking at the sign. It began somewhere near the base of his skull and followed along his spine until it had spread through him entirely. Then the feeling inverted and his skin went cold. The hair on his arms stood straight out. It was thrilling, ranking right up there with the rush he’d felt last night after the shooting had stopped and he’d realized he hadn’t been hit. If anything, it was better.
It was so quiet that he could hear the low hum coming from the billboard’s spotlights. Six slightly different tones combining into a curious chord. It might have been engineered to draw him closer.
He remembered television advertisements he’d seen as a kid. A Saturday-morning parade of things he’d wanted desperately and then forgotten about. He didn’t think he was going to forget about this. Of course, he had no use for perfume. He didn’t wear it, and he had no woman to give it to. But that didn’t seem to matter, because what he was feeling was far beyond desire. It was the crushing need a drowning man has for another breath.
He stepped out of the car and looked across the intersection. A flock of small birds, sparrows maybe, came swirling out of the darkness like a storm of leaves. They landed in unison on the roof of the scorched car, then turned toward him. He heard tiny claws tapping on the steel, felt a hundred pairs of black eyes watching him.
He was standing in a neighborhood that was waiting for a wrecking ball. Bulldozers had been idle on its perimeter for months. When the last condemnation orders came, they’d lower their blades and roll. The demolition teams meant to wipe away everything the thieves hadn’t already taken. They would knock down row houses and wire C-4 into century-old factories to make way for the sparkling future. He’d seen the model in City Hall. White concrete and black glass transforming the neighborhood into an autonomous shipping center. An unpopulated city from which driverless delivery trucks would glide north on pavement so smooth, their tires would barely whisper. Drones would hum upward from rooftop landing pads, packages dangling beneath them as they sped over the blocks of unlit tenements and into San Francisco. In City Hall, he’d seen no plan in the models for the residents who would be displaced. Maybe they were supposed to sell bricks.
He reached into the car and switched off the headlights, and then the street was blackout dark. The ruins around him disappeared. There was just the sign.
Finally, he let himself walk out into the intersection. He stared up at the dead actress and the perfume she’d been enlisted to sell. It wasn’t just the woman, wasn’t just the suggestion of her naked body under the sheet. It was the bottle and the lettering and the way the spotlights fell onto the black background, making something so bright out of a void. As if he’d struck a match in a mineshaft, and diamonds in the thousands came glittering back from the walls.
He couldn’t say where the peace came from, but he knew exactly what it was doing. It was cleansing him. Each swell took away a layer of darkness. In a moment he’d be bare; last night would be gone. He stood in the rain and savored that.
He only turned away when his phone rang.
2
HE ANSWERED IT in the car, wanting to be out of the sign’s reach before he spoke to anyone.
“It’s me.”
“You coming, or what?”
It didn’t matter what Jenner was saying. He could be dictating a form over the phone, or tellin
g a kid to drop a gun. His voice never rose above dead calm. That made Jenner the kind of man people usually listened to, but the kid last night hadn’t. He hadn’t dropped his gun, either.
“I lose you, Carver?”
“Sorry—on my way.”
“Call came in and we’re up,” Jenner said. “You knew we were up again, right?”
“Sure.”
“Where are you?”
“Close to last night’s scene,” Carver said, after a pause. “There was something I wanted to see again. The call, it came just now?”
“Just now. I hung up, I called you.”
“Be out front in five. We’ll go in my car.”
“You were out there?” Jenner asked. “You got questions about last night?”
“Not about you—you did just right. Plus there’s video,” Carver said. “So don’t worry about it.”
“Okay.”
Carver could see the expressway ahead. No one had stolen the wiring up there—the commissioners and the mayor could ignore Hunter’s Point until the redevelopment was done, but not the new expressway. Its art deco streetlights glowed in a curving run toward the city center, where there was enough midnight light to make a false dawn beneath the fog.
“Tell it to me,” Carver said.
“I talked to the lieutenant first. It started with 911. Some lady called from Filbert Street. Said her neighbor’s screaming. Patrol comes, front door’s locked.”
“Okay.”
“When she tells me this, the lieutenant, she’s got the patrol guys on hold. So she patches them in, and they tell me from there,” Jenner said. “I got it straight from them. They’d knocked on the door, shouted Police, the whole thing.”
“Nobody home?”
“Nobody.”
“What time was that, they knocked? We could establish —”
“Jesus, Ross, you told me to tell it. I’m telling it. You want to let me?”
“Go ahead.”
“You’re throwing me off,” Jenner said. “They knock just after midnight. How do I know? They radio dispatch at twelve oh five. Say they’re getting out of the vehicle, going to the door. They make enough noise knocking and yelling, and after five minutes the neighbor lady comes out.”
Carver steered onto the entrance ramp. The pitted asphalt gave way to the new expressway. It was like driving on a black mirror.
“The lady tells them she’s never heard anything like it,” Jenner said. “The screams, I mean. Said he was so loud, it was like he was in the room with her.”
“She know him?”
“Ross, I don’t know. I’m telling it. I’m not leaving anything out,” Jenner said. “So, he’s screaming. Like a madman, she says. Makes her blood go cold, all that. She goes to her window, peeks through the curtain. It’s dark over there, across the street. But she sees someone in an upstairs window. He’s beating on the glass. Naked and bloody, and beating on the glass.”
“Just one guy? Not two?”
“She just sees him, the one guy. So when patrol hears this, what she saw in the window, they come off the porch and go back to the street. One of them gets the spotlight out of the vehicle, and asks her which window. She points, and they light it up. Then they see it.”
For the second time that night, Carver felt his skin tighten, felt his hairs stand up. But this time, it wasn’t good. He took his foot off the accelerator and slowed down. He knew what Jenner was about to say.
“The window, it was covered with blood,” Jenner said. “Handprints—he’d been slapping it with his palms.”
“Trying to get out.”
“That’s right,” Jenner said. “Trying to get out. Thick glass, I guess.”
“We’ll see when we get there,” Carver said. “How thick it is. But . . . so now they go in.”
“They see the blood, they figure it’s time to go in. They get the ram out of the trunk, punch down the door. And you’ll like this: The door was on a chain. Locked from the inside.”
“Okay.”
“They clear the downstairs first. Nobody’s home. There’s a basement, but it’s empty when they scan it. Windows are locked from the inside. Same for the back door,” Jenner said. “So then they go up. They find him in the front bedroom, second floor.”
“And —”
“He’s dead,” Jenner said. “But these two are smart. They’re not staying in patrol forever. They back the hell out. They don’t touch anything. They secure the place and call the lieutenant from the front porch. She calls me.”
“When they say dead—how’d they know, if they didn’t touch anything?”
“I asked them,” Jenner said. “You think I wouldn’t? They said I could take their word for it.”
“Take their word.”
“They said I should get down there,” Jenner said. “See for myself. You almost here?”
Carver rolled up to the old headquarters on Bryant Street, and there was Jenner, under the cone of a streetlight. He’d turned his trench coat’s collar against the rain. When Carver slowed, Jenner shielded his eyes with his hand, then got in.
“Took long enough.”
He slammed the door. The rain was running off his smooth head.
“Five minutes,” Carver said. “What I told you.”
“In this, that’s long enough.”
Jenner took a white handkerchief from his jacket pocket and used it to wipe down his scalp.
“Some people have hats,” Carver said. “You could look into it. Where we going?”
“Filbert Street. Near Telegraph Hill. I know the place.”
They crossed Market Street, broken glass glittering back from the pavement and then crunching as they passed over it. They were at the edge of the Financial District, which had been smash-and-grab territory for as long as Carver could remember. But now it was empty. Even the shops that still had glass in the windows were closed. An advertising kiosk at a bus stop lit up as they went by, triggered by their motion. It treated the vacant sidewalk to poster-sized images of a tropical beach. Neither of them asked where everyone was, but Carver guessed they were both wondering.
They didn’t see a single pedestrian until they crested Nob Hill, and then they found the missing populace. At the top of the rise, they had to slow to pass through a standing crowd. Men and women were stretched in a three-block line to get into the Fairmont Hotel. Its marble-columned façade had been draped entirely in black fabric, the gauzy cloth tied in place with red silk ribbons that circled the building. Strings of Chinese paper lanterns weaved through the grounds, and ten thousand people stood in the rain, waiting. Some of the men wore black capes, and most of them carried paper lanterns. Scattered inside the crowd were homeless men. Barkers and distributers, hired part time to hand out glowcards advertising whatever they’d been paid to hawk tonight. Most of the women were holding baroque carnival masks to their faces. Jewels flashed all around their eyes. Carver could smell the perfume, the scented skin powders.
“What is this?” Carver asked.
“I don’t know,” Jenner answered. “It’s not your usual mob. Push through—there’s a gap to the right of this guy.”
Carver put his hand on the horn to clear a way forward. The crowd parted, but one man remained in the middle of the street. He was holding a brass candle-lantern in his cupped hands, and he stood staring upward, his face as blank as the orange-black fog.
“Unbelievable,” Carver said.
He steered around the man, then accelerated past the crowd.
“And not a patrol officer anywhere,” Jenner answered. “You think I ought to call it in?”
“You think?”
Instead of reaching for his cell phone, Jenner folded his hands on his lap and leaned back.
“That’s right,” Carver said. “Not our thing.”
Coming down the hill, they saw a straggler on the sidewalk, the strange silhouette of his plague-doctor mask extending from the outline of his tricorn hat. He carried a silver-tipped cane
in one hand, a white globe lantern in the other. The neighborhood was dead for two blocks after that, until they came upon a lone streetwalker struggling up the incline. She wore white patent heels, and little else. She didn’t try to signal them as they passed, and kept her head down. By then they’d entered a dark block. Smudge pot oil lamps burned in a few of the tenement windows; unlicensed and unlit drones flew in and out of the broken windows at the top floor of one of the buildings like oversized flies. They were taking pictures, following people. Ferrying goods that weren’t fit to be seen on the street.
The streetlights picked up again a minute later, and Jenner leaned forward.
“Hang a right on Filbert,” he said. “Place is two, three streets past Washington Square.”
Carver made the right turn.
“I see it.”
It would have been hard to miss. An SFPD cruiser was double-parked in front of the house, its rooftop lights pulsing blue and red. There was an ambulance on the other side of the street. The two paramedics were just sitting in the back looking at their phones.
An officer in a black slicker came out of the shadows and aimed a flashlight at Carver, who came to a stop next to the man and rolled down his window. When the patrol officer leaned down and looked into the car, rain slid off the top of his plastic hat cover and dripped onto Carver’s arm.
“Carver and Jenner, Homicide.”
Carver took his badge from his jacket pocket and handed it to the patrolman, who glanced at it and handed it back. He pointed ahead.
“You can park behind that car, sir. House is right there. We were the first officers on the scene. I’m Roper and my partner’s Houston. She’s watching the back door.”
“Anybody been inside besides you?”
“No, sir.”
“Is the medical examiner here?”
“No, sir.”
“What’s with the ambulance?” Jenner asked.
“We didn’t ask for it. Dispatch must’ve done that on its own, when the lady called in the screaming.”
“But the paramedics didn’t go in?” Carver asked.
The Night Market Page 1
