The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  Caleb parked a few blocks from the Hall of Justice and walked past drunks slumped in doorways. He sidestepped a scattering of streetwalkers headed to a bus stop after the evening’s run of bail hearings. He wedged the cooler under one arm, took out his phone, and called Henry.

  “I’m half a block away. Everybody else gone?”

  “Just me and the dead,” Henry said. “I’ll meet you by the back door.”

  Henry hung up and Caleb put his phone back into his pocket. He followed the chainlink fence and then stood close to the back wall of the Hall of Justice, where he’d be in the shadows and where the rain, falling at an angle, wouldn’t reach him. He wondered if Kennon and Garcia worked in here. Probably they had desks in the downtown headquarters. But they’d be in and out of this building all the time: it had the bodies.

  The steel door opened, sending a shaft of light across the broken asphalt.

  “Caleb?”

  “Over here.”

  They shook hands and Henry held the door for him. They didn’t talk until they got down into the medical examiner’s suite. They went into the main autopsy room and suited up at the wash station.

  “Go heavy on the Vicks,” Henry said. “Or you’ll be sorry.”

  “I’m already sorry.”

  Caleb put a glob of the cream inside his mask and spread it around. Then he wiped the excess under his nostrils. The menthol vapors made his eyes tear up. After he put on his gloves, Henry led them to the portable cold storage unit. Henry took out his keys and opened the locked chamber adjacent to the last victim.

  “Got a tentative ID, but we won’t release it till the family’s been notified,” Henry said. He looked sideways at Caleb. “Know how you ID a guy who’s been in the water eight weeks?”

  “No. And I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Guy soaks that long, his skin loosens up. You cut around his wrist with a scalpel and then you can peel his hand off in one piece. Like taking off a glove. Fingernails and everything. Turn it right side out, and put your own hand in it. That’ll stretch out the maceration wrinkles. Then you’ve got on this glove. You get an ink pad, and get a print. Like going to the DMV.”

  “You actually did that?”

  “That’s standard.”

  “Remind me not to eat at your house anymore. Unless Vicki cooks.”

  “I was wearing gloves.”

  “Yeah—two pairs.”

  Henry opened the cold chamber door and rolled the cadaver tray out on its slide tracks. The corpse was covered with a sheet. It looked like a big man. He had maybe seventy pounds on Caleb.

  “Already got samples for you—made two sets while I was getting Marcie’s. But I thought you’d want to see this.”

  He pulled the sheet off.

  Eight

  “GOOD GOD,” CALEB said. “Is that—”

  He turned away, pressing the surgical mask tightly against his face.

  “What?”

  “Is that,” he waved his hand at the cadaver, but still couldn’t finish. He took a couple shallow, testing breaths, then tried again. “Is that . . . normal?”

  Henry nodded.

  “Adipocere. They used to call it corpse wax. You stick a body in deep, cold water for a month, it’ll happen. Bacteria get in, hydrolyze the fat. Turn it into soap. Cutting through this guy’s stomach was like working on a bar of Ivory. Remember Cub Scouts? When we made the soap carvings?”

  Caleb nodded, still pressing the mask against his face with the fingers of his left hand.

  “Just like that,” Henry said. “Smelled worse, though.”

  The cadaver looked like something from Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors. The man was bloated, and there were crevasses in his flesh splitting down as deep as his rib cage, where small sharks and crabs had focused their scavenging. But saponification had turned the corpse hard and yellowish so that he looked like a work of wax sculpture. It was grotesque, but it was so far beyond anything Caleb had seen before that it didn’t seem quite real. Caleb looked at the body’s right arm. All the skin was missing from his hand. Gray-pink muscle clung to white bone.

  Caleb blinked away the menthol tears and swallowed.

  “You wanted to show me something?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Check these out.”

  Henry put his index and middle fingers on the man’s neck, as though he were checking the jugular for a pulse. There were two red holes in the skin there, about an inch apart. Each hole was the diameter of a small pencil eraser.

  “Holy shit,” Caleb said. “Those look like—”

  “Cutaneous current marks.”

  “What?”

  “Electric current marks. From a stun gun.”

  Caleb bent down and looked at them more closely. He was holding his breath, pressing his lips together behind the surgical mask so that nothing got in. The holes weren’t deep at all. They’d looked like punctures, but from close up he could see they were thin abrasions. Surface burns.

  “Yeah,” Caleb said, after he’d stood and stepped a comfortable distance away from the cadaver. “Makes sense. Anything else you wanted me to see?”

  “Step over here, to the other side.”

  Caleb came around the end of the cadaver tray. Cold air was pouring out of the open stainless steel-chamber and pooling on the floor at their feet. He stood on the slick tiles next to Henry.

  “Look at this,” Henry said. He was touching the other side of the man’s neck.

  “Needle mark?”

  “I think so,” Henry said. “I think the adipocere let us see it. When the fat hardened into wax, it preserved the needle hole. Made it wider, even.”

  Henry took the sheet and covered the corpse again, then pushed the tray back into the cold chamber. He closed the door and locked it.

  “Let’s wash up and sit down in my office a minute. Bring that cooler. I’ll give you the samples.”

  Henry’s office was nice enough, but it was still in the basement of a public building. And in a morgue. Caleb sat on the worn leather couch and looked at the degrees on the wall behind Henry’s desk. They’d gone to Cal together, but afterward Henry had gone east for medical school and Caleb had gone west across the bay for his Ph.D. Henry shut the door, rounded the desk, and sat in his chair. He had a pair of Tiffany desk lamps, almost ridiculously out of place in the concrete-walled basement office. He switched them on, then cut the overhead fluorescent tubes by flicking the switch on the wall behind his computer monitor.

  A two-inch-long cockroach was sneaking along an electrical conduit bolted to the wall just below the ceiling. Caleb watched it.

  “Get you a drink?”

  “Jesus, yes,” Caleb said, looking away from the insect.

  He’d washed his face twice in a bathroom sink, but the smell of menthol was still running through his nose. The Vicks hadn’t masked everything, though, and even now, on the couch, he could smell the drainpipe stench of the morgue.

  Henry leaned down and opened a lower desk drawer. On the back wall, the roach slipped and fell. It landed on the frame of Henry’s Yale diploma, clawed its way back to the conduit, and carried on. Henry came up with a pair of cloudy glass tumblers and a bottle of Jim Beam.

  “Still keeping it classy,” Caleb said.

  Henry had been unscrewing the cap from the bottle, but he paused and looked up.

  “This morning, I did an autopsy on a ten-year-old girl. All I had was her head. I go through the motions, write a report. Cause of death? How the fuck should I know? All I have is a head. Marcie took samples, but I don’t know if she’s really doing her job or not. So when I come in here and pour a drink, is it classy? I don’t know. Do I care?”

  “Make mine a double,” Caleb said.

  Henry smiled in that thin, tolerant way of his.

  “Always the same Caleb. At least there’s one thing I can count on.”

  Henry poured the drinks and passed one of them to Caleb. He reached across the desk and they clinked the rims of their glasses toget
her. Caleb took a sip of the bourbon and breathed the warmth out through his nose. The colored lampshades threw a pattern of light that highlighted the water stains on the wall. Some previous occupant of the office had hidden the worst of these with a framed René Magritte lithograph. The Treachery of Images. Caleb stared at that, the pipe and the French script beneath it, and then closed his eyes. He leaned back on the couch, the tumbler cupped in his hand.

  “First guy we looked at, his neck was all torn up,” Caleb said.

  “Crabs did that.”

  “So if he’d had the stun gun marks, you wouldn’t have seen them?”

  “That’s right. The other six, too—all torn up. Crabs. Marks might’ve been there, but we wouldn’t have seen.”

  “Okay. Same for the needle marks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d they find the guy today?”

  “Same as the last one. Going under the Golden Gate on the falling tide.”

  “He was bobbing around in the bay for eight weeks, and no one saw him till now?”

  “He wouldn’t have been floating most of that time. When a body goes in the water, it sinks—doesn’t float until decomposition builds up enough gasses inside to make it buoyant. That could take either hours or days. But this guy’s got some marks on his back. Impressions. They look almost like big hex nuts—inch and a half, two inches across. In a line across his shoulder blades.”

  Caleb opened his eyes and brought his head up.

  “You think he got wedged under something?”

  Henry nodded and sipped his bourbon.

  “He’s drifting along with the current, on the bottom, and gets jammed under something,” Henry said. “Stays there, eight, maybe ten weeks. Then, in the last couple days, he gets jostled loose. He’s buoyant now. So he pops up, starts floating on the outgoing tide.”

  “How come the crabs didn’t pick him apart like the others?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The tissue you got for me, that includes skin samples?”

  “Yeah.”

  Caleb closed his eyes again and put his head back on the cushion.

  “What are you thinking?” Henry asked.

  But Caleb just shook his head. He didn’t really know yet. He just had a hunch.

  He parked in his garage at midnight after dropping the samples in his lab. He’d started the initial run of tests, then spent an hour answering emails. Now he came into the house and stood looking at the shadows. Listening. There was a soft creak, like someone taking sliding steps in socked feet on the wood floor in one of the other rooms. It came again, from somewhere else. Then there was just silence.

  “Bridget?”

  He waited, but there was no reply. Of course she wasn’t here. It was just the house settling on its pylons. It did that all the time, but at night it was quiet enough to hear it. Caleb walked the rest of the way into the living room and turned on a lamp and the gas fire. His heart had flicked awake for a moment when he’d thought Bridget was in the house, but now he felt himself going back to sleep. He wanted to eat, but couldn’t imagine going through the effort of finding something, of putting food into his mouth and chewing it. He dropped onto the couch and the moment he kicked off his shoes and put his feet on the armrest, his phone rang.

  He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the screen. A San Francisco number with no name to it. A pay phone, maybe. He swiped the screen and put the phone to his ear.

  “This is Caleb.”

  For a second there was only silence. He was suddenly sure of what he was about to hear. His entire body went tense. The world underneath him was made of paper stretched drum-tight over a void. The slightest wrong move and everything solid could tear out from beneath him. He closed his eyes and held so still that he might have been asleep.

  “Caleb,” she said.

  Her voice was just as it had been before, in House of Shields: a whisper as cool as a night breeze, the accent impossible to place. On the second syllable of his name, her tongue would have brushed just behind her upper teeth, and then she’d have closed out the sound with her lips together, like a blown kiss.

  He didn’t speak because he couldn’t. She’d frozen him with just a whisper.

  When he didn’t answer, she went on.

  “That was the most beautiful thing, what you did. No one’s ever done anything like that for me.”

  He rolled off the couch and moved on his knees to the skirt of stones around the fireplace. He leaned close to the flames to be in their light and warmth.

  “I needed to find you,” he said.

  “Because you want to know my name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should I tell you now?”

  “Please,” Caleb whispered.

  “Emmeline.”

  “Emmeline,” he repeated. The sound felt like three low waves gently washing past him. “Where are you?”

  “It’s not where I am that matters. It’s where I’ll be at three a.m. Will you meet me?”

  “Yes. God, yes.”

  “Good. Come to Spondulix. I know you won’t be late. But don’t be a minute early, either.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “Not before three.”

  He started to answer, but she was already gone.

  By the time he’d showered and dressed in a clean suit, it was only twelve thirty. It had been nine hours since he’d talked to Kennon, but that could just as well have been a decade ago, on another continent. The same went for seeing Henry in his morgue, or coming home a few moments ago to a flutter of hope that Bridget had come back.

  Emmeline, he thought.

  And just by thinking it, he could smell her. He let that take him for a moment. It was like walking into a midnight garden. He thought of honeysuckle hanging from a trellis, the leaves and white blooms beaded with cold rain. He steadied himself and looked back at his computer.

  Spondulix was a few blocks from Grace Cathedral, in an alley reaching off Powell Street. But he couldn’t find anything else about it. Other than a single pinpoint on the map, it was a blank space on the Internet. That didn’t matter. She had chosen the place, and she would be there. So it was the right place, whatever it was.

  He had more than two hours to travel just five and a half miles. But as exhausted as he’d been since Saturday, now he had too much energy to stay in the house. He took his keys and his coat and went out to the garage. He drove down the hill and through the Inner Sunset, the avenues empty of traffic. Some of the houses had Christmas trees in their windows, strings of white lights trimmed along their porch rails and under their eaves. The rain started again as he crossed Golden Gate Park, and then he was driving down Geary to the slow rhythm of his windshield wipers. The heater had just started to blow genuinely warm air when he parked in front of Mel’s Drive-In at one in the morning. He shut off the engine and sat looking at the blue and red neon lights lining the front of the diner. For the first time since Saturday night, not only was he hungry, but he knew he could actually eat.

  Caleb had finished his omelet and was waiting for the waitress to refill his cup of coffee when his phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the screen, expecting to see another pay phone number.

  But it was Bridget.

  Two in the morning, and it was Bridget. He swiped the screen and brought the phone to his ear, shielding his mouth with his left hand.

  “This is Caleb.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m out. Eating a late dinner. Where are you?”

  “At the house—your house. I’m outside. I came to drop something off for you. Something I made. But the garage door was open, and your car was gone, and I saw the front window was broken. So I was worried.”

  Caleb leaned to the side and hunched closer to the phone while the waitress reached across from the other side of the table and refilled his coffee. He met her eye and nodded. Then he whispered into his hand.

  “I guess I just forgot to close the garage. I’
ve been—busy. Henry’s got something going on, and I’ve been down at his office. And in the lab.”

  “Are you okay? Caleb?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right,” she said. He could picture her standing in the driveway, leaning against the side of her Volvo. Looking at the broken, boarded-up window and wondering how much of the story he wasn’t telling her.

  He could tell her to go inside, to wait for him. That he was just down at Mel’s and he’d be back in ten minutes. And he came close to it, but in the end he said nothing at all. After a while, Bridget broke the silence. She was always the one to do that, to take a breath and put her head down, then come across whatever gap lay between them.

  “So anyway. I have a thing for you,” she said. “I was going to put it on your doorstep, where you’d find it in the morning when you went for the paper. But you haven’t been getting your papers. They’re all stacked up. So I’ll put it in the garage, with the papers. And I’ll close the door for you.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “It’s nothing. I mean, no—that’s not true. It’s something. I worked on it awhile. Since before, you know, what happened Saturday. Because I know how you are. I knew you’d like it, like to sit and look at it. And when I finished it, I still wanted you to have it. Maybe tomorrow, after you look at it, we can try talking.”

  “Okay.”

  “You asked me a question that time, right before I hung up on you—”

  “Don’t,” he said, too quickly. He didn’t want to know. Not now.

  “But—”

  “It’s okay, Bridget. Forget it. All right?”

  “Okay,” she said. “But, Caleb?”

  “Yeah?”

  In the pause, he felt the floor shift as if a fault had slipped.

  “I’m really sorry I threw the glass,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that. I had a right to be mad. I still have a right to be mad. But I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t. None of it is. Not what you did, not what I did. But please, let’s talk in the morning, okay? Or the afternoon?”

  “Okay.”