“We didn’t let them. They weren’t happy about it.”
“That’s fine, Officer. Have Houston come through and meet us on the front porch.”
Carver put up his window and drove to the parking space Roper had pointed out. He popped the trunk and went around the rear to get their crime scene bag. He looked around the neighborhood again, but saw no faces in the windows. Sparrows perched on the power lines. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. They never used to come out at night, but the last few years, he’d been seeing them all the time.
“We’ll suit up out of the rain. Talk to the officers before we go in.”
“Fine with me.”
Carver lifted the bag out of the trunk before Jenner could help him with it. He wasn’t about to let his junior partner carry all the weight.
“Let’s go.”
Roper and Houston looked like a couple of high school kids dressed up as cops, but that was hardly new to Carver. Most rookie patrolmen these days looked like they’d just cut class. Roper straightened up and saluted when Carver stepped onto the porch.
Instead of saluting back, Carver took off his hat and shook the rain from it.
“Stand down, son.”
“Yessir.”
Carver looked them over. Houston was maybe two years younger than her partner, and much better-looking, but they had the same bearing.
“Army?” Carver asked.
“The Marines, sir,” Roper said.
Houston nodded.
“I’m Inspector Carver, this is Inspector Jenner. Jenner told me what you told him on the phone. You did good work.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You find out whose house this is?” Carver asked.
“Yes and no. Houston, she found the deed online. It’s titled to a corporation —”
“Something called the MMLX Corporation,” Houston said.
“—but it’s not registered in California —”
“Nevada,” Houston said. There were beads of water in her dark hair, and they caught the revolving lights from the patrol car.
“—so we just have an agent of record, and that’s a corporation too,” Roper finished.
“In other words, no idea whose house it is. No idea if the dead guy belongs in it,” Carver said.
He was looking at Houston’s wet hair, the way it was reflecting the lights from the top of their cars. He thought of the jeweled masks he’d seen on Nob Hill, the women in their finery waiting outside the Fairmont. Why would someone wrap an entire hotel in silk?
“Yes, sir.”
Every night in the city was like a long-running dream. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d stood outside in the sunlight.
He shook it off and looked at Roper.
“What about the neighbor, the one who called 911?” he asked. “She around somewhere?”
“In her house, across the street,” Houston said. “Asked her to sit tight till someone comes to talk to her.”
“Anyone else come forward? Other neighbors?”
“No, sir,” said Roper. “Seen them looking through the curtains, though. So there’s people around.”
“Anything you want to add before we go in?”
“No, sir,” Roper said. He looked at his partner, who nodded at him and made a signal with her hand, cupping her fingers to her lips.
Roper turned back to Carver and Jenner.
“Except, you’ll want to suit up. Masks, gloves. Houston and I, we were in Kinshasa on an Ebola operation. Two outbreaks ago. Never saw anything worse than what’s upstairs.”
“You want to elaborate?”
“It’s just, the guy looks like he got cooked,” Roper said.
“And eaten,” Houston added.
“We can’t explain it any better than that,” Roper said.
There was a wooden bench and a potted rosebush next to the front door. Carver put the duffel bag on the bench and unzipped it. He and Jenner stood next to each other while they donned the garments of their trade: plastic shower caps and clear safety goggles, blue latex gloves and cellophane booties to go over their shoes. They slid on paper surgical masks and clipped pen-sized cameras to the sides of their glasses so they could record what they saw inside.
“You check the whole house before you pull back?” Carver asked.
Roper looked at Houston, and she looked at Carver and then shook her head.
“We never went to the third floor,” she said. “We found the body on the second and that’s when we pulled out.”
“You go in the basement?”
“We just scoped it from the kitchen—nothing.”
“All right,” Carver said. He pointed to the Ønske thermal scope on Houston’s utility belt. “Mine got smashed last night. Let me borrow that.”
She unclipped the scope from her belt and handed it to Carver. He switched it on to check the battery level.
“Good,” Carver said. He looked at Jenner. “You ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
Carver hadn’t gotten a good look at the house from the outside, but when they stepped through the splintered door and into the entry hall, he knew it must belong to someone very rich. Anything on this street, in the shadow of Coit Tower, was worth a fortune. That was a given. Because of that, most of the row houses were subdivided into condos. But this place was an undivided three floors, plus whatever was in the basement.
The floors were made of book-matched koa planks, and the walls were some kind of stone. Alabaster, maybe. Spotlights mounted flush with the floor illuminated a row of gyotaku prints on one wall: octopi dipped in their own ink and pressed in death poses on ancient rice paper. On the far side of the entryway, Jenner was standing in front of an oil painting that took up most of the wall. It showed the beach across from Golden Gate Park on a fog-bound day. Everything blue-gray, like smoke in the winter.
“That a Laurent?” Carver asked.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jenner said, turning around. “I think it’s stolen.”
“When the Legion of Honor got hit, ten years ago,” Carver said. “I remember that.”
Jenner nodded.
“Ballsy, putting it by the front door. Or the guy didn’t expect a lot of company.”
“You want to look around down here, or go up?” Carver asked.
Jenner answered with his eyes, looking to the ceiling.
They moved to the staircase, their cellophane-wrapped feet crinkling with each step. The stairs were wide enough to climb side by side. At the first landing, where it got dark, they stopped and turned on their flashlights. Then they rounded the corner and ascended into the shadows.
“You think Houston and Roper are an item?” Jenner asked.
“I don’t know.”
“They finish each other’s sentences,” Jenner said. “Makes it likely, in my book.”
“Sometimes you finish my sentences.”
“You know what I’m talking about. Plus, you saw the way he was looking at her. And her at him.”
“I think it’s none of my business,” Carver said. “I can tell you that. Forget what the policy says. Who cares, if they’re doing good work.”
“I think it’d be really nice,” Jenner said. “You know? A partner you could spend time with. Someone who really understood you. Who could be gentle with you.”
“You want to put in for a new partner, I think Ray Bodecker’s looking for one.”
“I said gentle.”
“Tough shit, then,” Carver said. “Here, look at this.”
He moved his light along the wall at the top of the stairs. There was a bloody handprint on the wallpaper. Carver pictured a man running up the stairs, stumbling at the top, and catching himself against the wall. Shoving himself off and sprinting in a new direction. The blood was laid on thick enough that it ran to the wainscoting.
They climbed the rest of the way to the second story.
“I don’t see any on the floor,” Carver said.
“Any what?”
“Blood—if he had it on his hands when he was running up, you’d think there’d be some on the floor.”
“Maybe he was covering a wound till he got to the top. Holding his hand over it. There’s a light switch,” Jenner said. “Want me to hit it?”
Carver looked up and saw where Jenner was pointing his flashlight.
“Don’t,” he said. “House like this, who knows what it might do? I don’t want to turn on a fan, stir things up.”
“Make a wall swing around, send out an army of robot vacuums. That kind of thing.”
“Now you get it,” Carver said. “When the techs come, they’ll have lights. Until then, let’s stick with these.”
Jenner aimed his light on a spot farther down the upstairs hallway.
“There’s your blood on the floor.”
“Hold up,” Carver said. “Make sure you don’t step in any.”
“I’ll go behind you. That way, we step in it, it’s your fault—but what’s that?”
Jenner’s flashlight was illuminating a lump on the floor, ten paces ahead of Carver. They went up to it and stopped.
“A sparrow?” Jenner asked. “Whatever it was, it got stomped on.”
Carver crouched, holding his light close to the small bird’s broken body. Its left eye had been smashed. A thin steel ring was visible in the back of the socket. Tiny shards of black glass lay on the floor near its beak. Its feathers were threaded with shiny black strands that Carver guessed were photovoltaic filaments. There was no blood.
“I don’t think it’s a bird,” Carver said. He didn’t touch it, whatever it was. He thought of the sparrows lining the power lines outside. They’d all been facing the same direction, staring into the house’s bedroom window.
“Then what is it?”
“We’ll bag it later and take it to the lab. But if you want a guess, someone really wanted to keep an eye on this guy,” Carver said. He stood up and looked down the hall. “Let’s go find him.”
Before they went to the front bedroom, Carver took Houston’s thermal scope and switched it on. He put the viewfinder to his eye and did a slow scan of the second floor, then looked up at the ceiling. Houston and Roper hadn’t gone to the third floor, but after they’d backed out of the house, they’d been watching the front and rear entrances. They’d kept the stair landing in sight, so anyone coming to the entry level would have been in plain view. If anyone was hiding in the house, that person could only be on the second or third floors.
“How’s it look?”
“There’s a hot water heater right above you. Good size on it,” Carver said. “But nothing else. No one’s up there.”
Carver clipped the scope to his belt and led the way forward. After they came into the bedroom, their flashlight beams picked out the blood marks on the walls, the thick smears on the window. The dead man must have hit it fifty, sixty times to get that many prints on it.
“You smell that?” Jenner asked.
They were all the way into the room now.
“Yeah,” Carver said. “I don’t know what it is, though.”
He could smell blood drying on the Persian carpet, could smell the fresh linens on the four-poster bed. There were vanilla-scented candles on each nightstand, and he could smell those, too, even though they weren’t lit and their wicks were clipped flush to the wax. With each breath, he caught the usual scents of fresh death. This early, they weren’t so bad. Urine and bile, mostly. But another smell was braided in, a single thread so intertwined with everything else, it was almost impossible to pick out.
“Like ozone,” Jenner said. “You know? Out in the country, when a storm’s coming.”
“Maybe,” Carver said.
But it wasn’t right at all. It was like saying that rage was red. That your first love was clear and cool, like a drink of water from a springhead. Some things couldn’t sustain a comparison, and this smell was one of them.
“Roper said the dead guy was between the bed and the window,” Jenner whispered.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s check it out.”
They moved around the end of the bed, letting their flashlight beams rove the floor and the walls.
“There,” Jenner said. “You see that? Holy shit.”
Carver let his light slide along the body. From the head—or at least, what he thought was the head—down to the feet, and back. He swallowed once behind his surgical mask.
“What time did the lady call?”
“Midnight,” Jenner said.
“Roper and Houston, they rolled up at twelve oh five?”
“That’s right.”
“Lady saw someone beating on this window at midnight?”
“That’s the story.”
“Holy fuck,” Carver said. He wanted to sit down, but he didn’t want to touch anything in the room. “You getting this? With the camera?”
“I’m getting it.”
Carver had to stop his gag reflex. He brought his gloved fist toward his facemask, then thought better of it. He dropped his hand back to his side, and spent ten seconds working his throat and clenching his teeth.
“You okay?” Jenner asked.
Carver nodded and breathed in slowly.
“The lady,” he said. He swallowed. “She say anything about him being covered with that stuff, whatever it is?”
“Just saw a guy in the window. Said he might be naked. That he was bleeding.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Jenner said. “Nothing about this. This doesn’t even look like what Roper and Houston described.”
“Cooked and eaten.”
“Maybe last month,” Jenner said.
“Don’t touch anything.”
“You couldn’t make me, Ross. Not with a gun to my head,” Jenner said. “What is it? I mean, what the fuck?”
“I don’t know.”
They heard a knock from downstairs, and Roper called up.
“Inspector Carver?”
“What is it?” Carver yelled back.
“The paramedics say if you don’t need them, they’ve got better things to do.”
“Let them go, Roper,” Carver said. “We don’t need them.”
“We definitely don’t need them,” Jenner added, low enough that only Carver would hear it.
Their beams converged on the body. Just an hour ago, this had been a man. Now he looked like gray moss. Like a carpet of it spread across a rot-shrunken log. Carver could see the bones of his fingers, could see the riverine fissure marks in his skull where patches of scalp had been eaten away.
“Is that —”
He stopped and bent closer. Whatever it was, it was moving.
He thought of an old time-lapse film he’d seen of a coral reef, the brain corals expanding at night as they put out their tentacles to feed, then contracting by day. All of this sped up, a year or more of days and nights flickering by in half a minute. The corals pulsed like breathing things, growing infinitesimally between cycles. He edged closer to the body, holding his breath.
“Jenner, you see that? You see what it’s —”
The sound of shouting stopped him. Voices from below, boots on the stairs.
“Jesus, now what?” Jenner said.
Carver swung to face the door. Already, Jenner had his gun out, balanced over his flashlight. Carver reached beneath his jacket and drew his weapon, unclicking the safety as he went to a firing stance on his knee. He saw the lights coming up, and put pressure on the trigger as he called out.
“SFPD! You’re coming into a crime scene and you want to back the fuck off!”
The footsteps stopped. The cold glow of the intruders’ lights went still.
“Yeah?” The voice was muffled, as if it came from behind a window. “We’re FBI, and we’re coming up. So you want to stand the fuck down.”
The men on the stairs didn’t wait for an answer before they started moving again. They came to the second-floor landin
g, six of them in full biohazard suits, their faces invisible behind reflective glass plates. They came down the hall without speaking. Just their boots on the floorboards, the hiss of positive pressure venting from behind their helmets. When they were at the threshold of the bedroom, Carver’s light found the letters stenciled on the point man’s chest.
FBI.
He holstered his weapon, then turned to be sure Jenner was doing the same. Carver stood.
“Inspector Carver, SFPD. This is Inspect —”
“I only give a shit about one thing—how close did you get to him?”
It was hard to tell which of them was talking. They had gathered six abreast inside the bedroom door, and now they were moving again, advancing on Carver and Jenner. The LED lights built in to their fully enclosed hoods picked out dust motes floating between them. The air was thick with them, but there hadn’t been enough light to see until now. They were the same color as the moss growing on the dead man. The FBI agents were dressed to weather a night on Venus. Looking at them, Carver felt naked in his thin gloves, his cheap paper mask.
“How close?” the suited man repeated.
“What?”
“Goddammit, the body. How close?”
“Four, five feet.”
“You can see it in the air,” another voice said. “Like it’s gone full bloom.”
It was hard to tell, because of the suit, but the point man seemed to nod his head. He turned to his men.
“Get these assholes out of here. Decon truck,” he said. He turned back to Carver. “How long were you in here?”
Carver and Jenner looked at each other. Jenner’s face was gray and drained.
“Thirty seconds,” Carver answered. But even as he said it, he wasn’t sure it was true. He had no idea how long they’d been standing above the body, repulsed and transfixed in equal measures.
“Longer,” Jenner said. “A couple minutes, in this room. Five in the rest of the house.”
“Then you better get moving. And fast. If you’re lucky, there might still be time,” the suited man said. He turned back to his team. “Take them.”
A man grabbed Jenner by the elbow and yanked him forward.
“Decon truck?” Jenner said, looking back to Carver.
The man put his rubber-gloved hand between Jenner’s shoulder blades and shoved him forward.
The Night Market Page 2
