There were two dead bodies on it, laid out side by side. They were probably nude, but it was hard to tell—because of the flies, and because of what the flies had done to them. The woman had been cut in half at the waist, and both their faces had been carved with Glasgow smiles that reached their ears.
“Did Patrick Wong have a wife?” Carver asked. “A girlfriend?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe both,” Carver said. He took one step closer and looked down. “He’s wearing a ring, but she isn’t—you think that’s even him?”
“Could be. Body’s about the right size.”
A fly landed on the inside of Jenner’s safety glasses. He swatted it away, knocking the glasses askew on his face.
“Fuck this,” Jenner said. “We need moonsuits. We need the ME van and a camera crew.”
“We’ll check the rest of the place first, and then the next apartment. We should at least tell Hernandez the right number of bodies when we call it in.”
Jenner nodded, and they went back to work.
9
THEY’D SPENT HALF an hour going over Patrick Wong’s apartment, and then they’d picked the lock on 302 and found Patrick’s neighbor.
She hadn’t been cut in half or sliced up: she’d just been shot once in the forehead. They’d found her in her bed. There’d been a lump under the blankets, near her side. They’d lifted the blankets back, releasing flies and all sorts of wriggling things that had never until that moment seen light. They stood looking at the woman and what had died next to her. There was a photograph of a dog on the woman’s nightstand, but the body was too decayed to know for sure if that was it. The flies were everywhere. Crawling on their faces, trying to get under their masks.
They’d called Hernandez and then stayed on the scene to coordinate with the ME and the forensic technicians. They’d gone downstairs to wake the neighbors. No one could remember when they’d last seen Patrick. No one knew anything about the woman who lived with him, or about the woman down the hall.
Now he and Jenner were changing into their workout clothes in the Bryant Street headquarters. The three bodies were downstairs in the morgue, waiting in the cold storage chamber for their turn on the autopsy table.
It was four thirty in the morning when Carver’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and glanced at Jenner.
“It’s Hernandez,” he said.
“Then you better.”
He swiped the screen to take the call.
“Carver,” he said.
“Jenner’s with you?”
“Yeah.”
“You back in the building?”
“In the locker room.”
“I need you both in my office.”
“Give us five minutes.”
“I’ll give you one.”
She hung up.
“You catch that?”
“Yeah,” Jenner said. “Here it comes. The shitstorm.”
They finished dressing without saying anything else, and then they came out of the locker room and went to the elevators.
Carver tapped twice on the frosted-glass window. Hernandez’s name was printed on it in gold letters, the paint almost new.
“Come.”
He opened the door and they went in.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” he said. He looked to his right and saw the chief medical examiner in the chair opposite Hernandez’s desk. “Dr. Alexander.”
“Come in and close the door,” Hernandez said.
He stepped the rest of the way in, and Jenner followed. There was only one free chair, so they stood with their backs to the door.
“Dr. Alexander was just giving me some preliminary findings. And I wanted you to hear it,” Hernandez said. She looked at the ME and said, “Tell them what you just told me.”
When Erika Alexander turned to them, Carver understood the position she was in. She was smart enough to know something was wrong, but she didn’t have enough facts to know what it was. That makes two of us, Carver thought.
“I haven’t done the autopsies yet. But I already got an ID on the male. Patrick Wong had a DNA profile on the system. A sexual assault, ten years back. So the lab ran that.”
“A match?” Jenner said.
Dr. Alexander nodded.
“I haven’t identified the women. But the man is definitely Patrick Wong. And then the other thing I mentioned to the lieutenant was time of death. You know I can’t be exact with that. But it’s got to be at least a month. The forensic entomologist will tell us more, but at these temperatures, blowflies take around four hundred hours to develop from an egg, through the maggot phase, and into a fly—you figure two weeks, per generation.”
“There was more than one generation?”
“Three, maybe. And another one well on its way—I understand the room was full of flies?”
“You got that right,” Jenner said.
“So we know it’s Patrick Wong, and we know he’s been dead at least a month,” Hernandez said.
“Correct.”
“Thanks, Erika,” Hernandez said. She pointed to the door. “I don’t want to keep you.”
Once she was gone, Hernandez motioned for Jenner to shut the door again. She nodded at the empty chairs, and they took them.
“Okay, Jenner,” she said. “You heard her, and you know what it means. So explain yourself to me.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t, or don’t want to?”
She waited for him to answer, but he didn’t.
“On Friday, you told me you spent Thursday night talking with Patrick Wong about Johnny Wong.”
Jenner nodded.
“Does Patrick have a twin brother?”
“No.”
“You’ve seen Patrick before. Interrogated him, even, after some of those old arrests. You remember what he looks like?”
“Yes.”
“So if you were talking to a guy on Thursday who wasn’t Patrick Wong, you’d know it, right? And you couldn’t have been talking to Patrick Wong on Thursday because he was dead. Really dead.”
Jenner nodded again.
“I want to see your notes. Did you even take any?”
“I don’t know,” Jenner said. “I thought I did, but I can’t find them.”
“You can’t find them? Did this even happen? When you talked to me on Friday, were you lying, or just hallucinating? I mean, it’s got to be one or the other, right? And neither’s good for a man who walks around the city with a gun.”
“I wasn’t lying,” Jenner said. “I told the same thing to Carver on Sunday, and he —”
“We’ll get to Carver. We’ll get to him right now.”
“What about me?” Carver asked.
“Where to even start?” she said. “You say you’re sick. You email Friday morning, but no one saw you on Thursday night, even though you and Jenner were on duty. You’ve never taken a sick day unless you’re checked into a hospital. Not once, in thirty-five years.”
Now it was Carver’s turn not to answer. Like Jenner, he couldn’t explain himself. And like Jenner, he didn’t want the lieutenant to know how deep the rabbit hole went. He didn’t know whom he could rely on. He’d worked with Hernandez for only the last year and a half. She was a fine lieutenant, but he didn’t know enough about her to trust her.
“So I start to wonder: What are these guys up to?” she said. “And luckily for me, there’s an easy way to check. I remote logged in to your car’s GPS, to find out where you’ve been.”
Jenner looked up. “You’re allowed to do that?”
She ignored him.
“Do you know what I found?”
“The memory was cleared,” Carver said.
“That’s against policy, and you know it,” she snapped, raising her voice for the first time. “How am I supposed to convince anyone—the commissioner—that you’re not covering your tracks?”
“I didn’t clear it.”
“Then who did?”
�
��If you can log in to it remotely,” Jenner said, “it could’ve been anyone—it could’ve been you.”
She leaned back in her chair and put her palms flat against her desk blotter.
“You’re two of my best inspectors. I don’t think you’re killing off gangsters, a couple rogue cops. I don’t think it, but I don’t know it. I do know you’re not telling me something, and I know I’m not going to get it out of you. And the commissioner isn’t giving me any breathing room here.”
“There are seven commissioners,” Carver said. “In case you forgot.”
“And only one matters,” she answered. “But maybe you don’t appreciate that.”
He appreciated very little about Lyndon Ivies. He’d seen the black motorcades going north over the bridge, shadowed from above by helicopters. He’d watched the other commissioners and the mayor turn into nodding sycophants, diminishing a little more each year until they were as thin as the papers they rubber-stamped. A river of money must have been flowing through the city government, but Carver didn’t know where it was coming from or what it was buying, aside from cops and limousines. There were stories around the station, of course. If you wanted to moonlight, and if you could keep your mouth shut, you could do well for yourself. There were guys thirty years younger than him, still in uniform, buying new condos in the high-rises south of Market. But none of those men were too clear about who they were working for, or what they were doing to earn their upgraded lifestyle. If Ivies had a patron, Carver didn’t know who it was. Not that he’d pressed hard, or made much of a point of trying to learn. If he started getting answers, then he’d have to make decisions.
Maybe he’d been too complacent about the way things were. He was just Inspector Ross Carver, Homicide Detail. He wasn’t dirty, but he got his hands bloody now and then. Whenever he did, the City thanked him for his good work. No one ever sat him down and gave him the big picture, and that was just fine. He could come home, and sit in his father’s chair, and not have any regrets. Until now, that had been enough.
“It was Ivies, wasn’t it?” Carver asked. “He told you to check the GPS.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not going to say yes, and I’m not going to say no. But I’ll tell you one thing he did say: If you two don’t have a rock-solid explanation for everything we just talked about, I’m putting you on administrative suspension. So I’ll have that story, right now, or I’ll have your badges and weapons. I don’t like it any more than you do, but there it is.”
“Is this a real suspension?” Carver asked. “Because it sounds more like something Ivies cooked up. Unless we get a hearing.”
“Forget the union and your hearing. This will be real enough once I have your badge.”
Carver looked at Jenner. They didn’t have a story that would satisfy Hernandez. They didn’t even have a story that satisfied themselves. It was like every interrogation room he’d ever seen: if they opened their mouths, they’d make it worse. Jenner’s nod was almost imperceptible. At least they understood each other. They always had. This time it was especially easy to agree; there was no other choice.
Carver’s gun was underneath his hooded workout sweatshirt. He unholstered it and set it on Hernandez’s desk. Then he put his badge next to it. Jenner did the same, and they went to the door.
Carver turned and leaned in before he closed Hernandez inside her office.
“Call me when you need us back,” he said.
They were in the parking garage behind the entrance to the morgue. They had stopped in a dark circle where one of the overhead lights was broken. Carver couldn’t remember the last time he’d been outside his apartment without the small tug of his gun on its holster.
“You want to go somewhere, get a cup of coffee?” Carver asked.
Jenner shook his head.
“I need to go home and cook breakfast. Rosaline’s dropping Cora off at seven. I get her today—she spends the night. I can’t fuck it up.”
“Then I’ll call you tomorrow. I might know more by then.”
“You know something I don’t?”
“Maybe.”
“You gonna call Henry Newcomb and get his take on the bodies?”
Henry Newcomb, the former chief medical examiner, was the father of an old friend of Carver’s. His son was gone, but Henry was where he’d always been, shuffling around his house on Bay Street and breathing oxygen through a tube.
“I never call him—we only talk face to face. And before I bother a ninety-year-old man, I’ll see if my lead pans out,” Carver said. “Something happened to us on Thursday night. I don’t know what it was, or if it’s tied to what we saw tonight. But we’re going to find out.”
“You think the lieutenant’s part of it?”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Maybe it happened to her, too. You smell it in her office?”
Jenner looked up, recognition and relief on his face.
“Like burnt metal,” he said.
“You’ve been smelling that since Friday?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too,” Carver said. “It’s on everything.”
“It was on the crime scene bag,” Jenner said, quietly. “Not just on it, but in it. There’s only one reason we’d have had that out.”
“We were at a scene,” Carver answered. “We had a body. And then something happened. We’ll figure it out. But when we meet up next, be on your toes—and just go with me on it. You’re going to walk in on the middle of something, and you’ll have to figure it out. You get me?”
“I get you.”
“See if you can pick up a couple of burners. We’ll need a way to talk.”
“All right.”
Jenner held out his hand and they shook.
Carver stepped into the hallway outside his apartment at five thirty. The winter sun wouldn’t be up for two hours. As he was putting the key into his lock, he heard Mia’s door click open. He turned.
“Ross,” she said. She was leaning from behind the door, and he couldn’t tell if she was dressed or not. “You’ve had a long night.”
He pulled the key from the lock and pocketed it. He didn’t know what to say to her.
“Why don’t you come inside?” she asked. “I still have the cassoulet. I’ll open a bottle of good burgundy.”
For the last two hours, he’d heard nothing but the ceaseless buzz of flies, but all that faded when he looked at her. God, she was lovely.
“All right.”
“It’s rich, the cassoulet. With duck. And with the wine, it’ll be perfect.”
She opened the door for him and stood in full view. She was wearing a long white robe, made of silk. He came in and waited while she shut and locked the door behind him. He set his duffel bag on the floor by the door and then went with her into the living room. The layout was the same as his apartment, but that was as far as the similarity went.
She had cherry floors and exposed brick walls, and art that could hang alongside anything in the Legion of Honor. The curtains drawn across the windows were so heavy that they blocked not only the light but most of the sound from the alley. He saw no TVs, no computers, no telephones and no radios. Instead, she had books. Hundreds and thousands of hardback volumes on shelves built throughout the apartment. It smelled like the Rare Books room of the San Francisco Library—aged leather and the exotic musk of dry paper. He could also smell the violet water she must have touched to her neck. He thought she might have used a cedar comb on her hair; when she passed him to step into the kitchen, the air that moved with her smelled like the forests up north. The forests that had been there when he was a boy, before the ancient groves had been wiped out by the years of drought that preceded the rains.
She pointed him to a stool at the island bar in the kitchen.
“Sit,” she said. “I didn’t even ask if you like red. I also have a chilled white Bordeaux.”
“I’ll have what you’re having.”
“Then we’re having red.”<
br />
She knelt at the wine cabinet under the counter and came up with a dark bottle. She set it down next to the stove, and he looked at it while she opened a drawer to get her corkscrew. The bottle didn’t have anything on it. He could see the glue marks on the glass where the label had once been, but someone had washed it off.
She came back with the corkscrew and a paring knife to cut the tin capsule from the bottle’s top.
“How do you know what it is, without a label?”
She tilted the bottle so he could see its bottom. There was a small sticker there. On it, in neat script, was written: Côte de Nuits, ’96.
“Why take it off?”
“It’s the wine I want, not the label.”
She turned to a cabinet and brought out a pair of glasses. She poured a splash of the wine into one glass, lifted it by its stem, swirled it, then passed it to him. He took it and brought it to his nose, closed his eyes, and breathed in. Then he drank the sip she had poured, letting it glide onto his tongue and rest there. He opened his eyes and gave the glass back to her.
“That’s wonderful.”
He’d never had anything like it. He could taste the grapes and the earth they’d grown out of, and the sun that had ripened them through the end of a dry summer.
“Good.”
She poured wine into both glasses and then held hers up to him.
“Thanks for coming in.”
He touched his glass to hers.
“Let me get the oven going,” she said. “Then we can drink wine and you can tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Who says there’s anything on my mind?”
“Me,” she said. “I’m good at faces.”
She turned to the oven and lit it, then went to the refrigerator and brought out a lidded clay pot. She put it on the counter and pointed with her wineglass into the living room. There was a pair of wing-backed leather chairs facing the fireplace. A low walnut table sat between them.
“Let’s sit in there. We’ll be more comfortable.”
He followed her to the chairs and sat. Everything about the night seemed far away now. Stepping into Mia’s apartment was like traveling to another continent, in another time. She put her glass on the table, knelt to light the fire, and then sat down opposite him. She folded her legs underneath her in the chair and balanced her wineglass on her right knee, one finger keeping it upright.
The Night Market Page 9
