The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  She looked up at him.

  “That’s it, I guess.”

  Caleb didn’t know what to say. She’d done it again, immobilized him.

  “You should go,” she said. “I’ll clean up.”

  “All right.”

  He stepped closer to the piano and set the candle on its lid, then moved toward the edge of the little stage.

  “Wait.”

  She stood and came to him. She took the empty glass from his hand and set it next to hers. They didn’t kiss. It was better than that. She shrugged off his coat and put it around his shoulders, and then wrapped herself around him, her cheek pressed just beneath his collarbone. He put his face down into the dark nest of her hair. It was still wet from the rain, and cool, though his own hair had long since dried.

  “Thank you,” she said. She held him tightly. “We’ll keep our promises, right?”

  “We will.”

  “Go on home. I’ll see you.”

  “You’ll call me?”

  “Soon.”

  She let go of him and sat again on the piano bench, her back to him. He looked at her a moment, her bare white shoulders and the raven-spill of her hair in the candlelight. Then he turned and showed himself out.

  Ten

  HE DIDN’T GO home. That would have been impossible.

  He wandered up to California Street, then back toward Grace Cathedral. He felt like he had a second heart, something that beat a countercadence to his normal pulse, so that he was both out of control and twice as alive. Part of that was the absinthe. He knew that. But most of it was Emmeline. He would have stayed in that underground bar with her, drinking absinthe and listening to her sing at the piano, until the sun burned itself to ashes. He jaywalked across California Street and then stumbled west, toward the church and his car. For a minute, he stopped and leaned his shoulder against the wrought-iron pole of a streetlamp, holding his arms across his chest. Steadying himself, keeping the remnants of her embrace close to his skin. Then he went on.

  He drove into the Tenderloin and stopped outside an all-night bodega that existed for no reason but to flout every liquor law known to San Francisco. He went in and asked for absinthe. Berthe de Joux. When the man just gave him a blank look, he bought a bottle of Jim Beam. Then he went back to his car and drove to the Inner Sunset, winding up to Parnassus and parking at his spot in the medical center. He took off his coat and wrapped it around the bottle of Beam, pausing next to his car to close his eyes and absorb the smell of Emmeline’s perfume. She’d been so close to him, for so long, that he was permeated with it. As if he’d swum across a river to reach her.

  He was wide awake when he sat at his desk at five in the morning, sipping bourbon straight from the bottle and chasing it with black coffee he’d brewed in the break room. He used his computer, setting out a plan for testing the samples Henry had given him, the slices of tissue from the saponified man.

  He had a hunch about the skin samples.

  The first man he’d seen had been coated in silt and algae; the second man had been jammed against the ocean bottom for weeks in one spot. The sand, and anything in the sand, would have worked into his skin. It would have filled the microscopic crevasses and packed the pores. There was an opportunity there, maybe. He took another sip of the bourbon and began to build a calibration curve.

  The next time he called Henry, maybe he’d have something better than a cause of death. He might have a plan, a way to get them close to the killer.

  At eight in the morning, Andrea knocked on his door and stuck her head in. He had just enough time to put the bottle of bourbon on the floor, out of sight. But he knew how he’d look.

  “You doing okay, Caleb?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Can I leave at lunch? Maggie’s school let out for Christmas break, and I don’t have a sitter lined up. Nick’s got her till one, but after that, he’s gotta work.”

  Caleb waved his hand at the concern on her face.

  “It’s fine. Take as long as you need.”

  “Thanks, Caleb.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s slow around here anyway.”

  Andrea looked down at her fingers on the outer door handle. She was confused, he thought. Maybe embarrassed for him. He hadn’t been in the lab enough this week to have an opinion on how busy things were. He was less than a third of the way through his unread email.

  “Joanne’s been looking for you,” Andrea said. “All day yesterday. I think she’s worried about the grant. She had a conference call with some guys in Bethesda.”

  That got Caleb’s attention. He pulled his chair closer to the edge of the desk, bumping the bottle of bourbon at his feet. It tottered on its glass bottom but didn’t tip over.

  “She needs to talk about something, she’s got my email.”

  “You’ll be in all day?”

  “No. I’ve been here all night. I’m heading home in an hour or two. I just need to finish running something.”

  Andrea nodded and backed out of his office. She shut the door.

  The sun had only been up an hour when he got back to his house. He waited for the garage door to roll up, then drove inside. There was a paper-wrapped package leaning against the inside door, a stack of bagged newspapers in front of it. He looked at them a moment before shutting off the car. Part of him wanted to just throw the transmission into reverse and drive back down the hill, then out of the city. North, south, or east—it didn’t matter as long as it was away from all the points of pressure twisting in on him. Bridget and Emmeline; Henry and Kennon; Joanne and the National Institutes of Health. Instead, he hit the button on the sun visor and watched in the rearview mirror as the garage door closed. When it was down, he switched off the car’s headlights and sat in the dark with his eyes closed. After about a minute, he realized the engine was still running. He shut it off, then got out of the car, holding his breath against the exhaust. He took Bridget’s package and brought it inside.

  He put Bridget’s gift on the dining table but didn’t open it. It was a painting, and it would be beautiful. But he wasn’t ready to look at it. Even with Bridget all but standing in the dining room, he couldn’t let go of Emmeline. Her perfume’s scent was on his coat; the memory of her hands lay upon his skin.

  “Jesus Christ, Caleb,” he said. “Come on.”

  He put the coat over the back of a chair, then walked to the phone on the wall. He unplugged it, then took out his cell phone and turned off its ringer. There were decisions to be made, and they would have to be made soon, but so long as neither woman could reach him, he could stay balanced in between. He took the bottle of Jim Beam and had one last long pull from it, then chased it with cold tap water from the sink, leaning down to drink straight from the faucet. He hadn’t been in his own bed since getting out of it on Saturday morning, but he thought it wasn’t time yet. The couch would do for today, again. At least it was close to the fire, and he needed that.

  He kicked off his shoes and turned on the fire, then lay on the couch under his tartan blanket.

  It started as soon as he closed his eyes.

  The couch began to spin and his mind spun with it, the previous day’s images caught like rafts of debris in a whirlpool. He saw Kennon in his kitchen. Then the soap-rotten corpse. Henry holding up his own hand to demonstrate how he’d peeled the man’s skin off like a glove, in search of prints. He heard Bridget’s voice on the phone and saw the waitress’s eyes as she poured his coffee. There was Andrea looking at the doorknob because she was embarrassed for him. Embarrassed by the state of him.

  And he saw the shadows swaying in Spondulix as he stood above and beside Emmeline with a candle, lighting the keyboard for her as she played. Then Kennon was asking who he’d been looking for when he’d flipped through the stack of pictures too quickly, after his rush to find Emmeline drove him through the snapshots at a finger-fumbling sprint. He felt his face burn again with the s
hame of being caught in a lie, and then there was the smell of the morgue and the sound of the cockroach running along Henry’s office wall, chitinous claws on damp concrete.

  The memory-pool widened.

  He saw Bridget—saw the first time she’d stood before him wearing nothing but her panties, her other clothes spread across his floor where she’d shed them. She held her forearm across her tan breasts and came up to him with hesitant steps so she would not break open her wound, closing the distance between them because she was too shy that first time to stand afar and be seen. He remembered the way his hands had fit around her bleeding foot barely an hour before that moment.

  Emmeline was pressing his sliced-open fingers between her silk-lined palms. Her cool whisper, You have to be careful, Caleb. There was a painting on the wall behind her. He couldn’t see it for the shadows, but it made him cold.

  Emmeline’s breath brushed his ear: We’ll keep our promises, right?

  He finally wrapped his thoughts around Emmeline, wound them tightly enough to keep his mind from drowning in the day. It was like holding on to a tree to stay in one place against the force of a flood. He clung to her, latching on to the memory of her arms around him as they said good night, no space between them at all. His face in her hair, the beaded rain cold on his skin. He held on to her until the flood subsided, until the spinning images of the day finally dried up, and then he followed her down the stairs again and back into the darkness of the hideaway bar under Nob Hill. The bar no one knew about. The bar that was open for them, and only for them, when the rest of the city was a rain-wrapped dream.

  Buried in those shadows, he slept at last.

  He didn’t remember getting up, or going to the dining room to get his jacket from the back of the chair. But he must have. When he woke, well past nightfall, the jacket was rolled into a pillow between the crook of his elbow and the side of his face. He stayed like that a while, his cheek on the soft wool of the jacket, watching the fire and not wanting to look at the time.

  When he did get up, he went into the kitchen. According to the microwave clock, it was a minute past midnight. He turned on the flame under the kettle, then washed the French press, which was still sitting in the sink from after his conversation with Kennon. While the water heated, he found his cell phone and checked it.

  One missed call from Bridget, eight hours ago. No messages, no texts. And no calls from pay phones.

  He set the phone on the counter, upside down, so he wouldn’t see the screen if it lit up. He went upstairs to his study and got his laptop computer, a hardbound copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference, and a spiral-bound atlas covering the Bay Area. The kettle was whistling when he came back to the kitchen. He booted the laptop and logged in to his remote office connection, tying himself into the lab’s network. After a few sips of coffee, he started where he’d left off: analyzing data from the initial tests he’d run on the tissue samples cut from the saponified man. Interpreting the chromatograph signatures and the spectrometer printouts, working backwards from the metabolites to build a story about the man’s last few hours alive.

  They couldn’t have been pleasant, those last three or four hours. By the time the clock showed six a.m., he was sure of that much.

  By sunrise, he was showered, shaved, dressed, and sitting in the same booth at Mel’s he had the morning before. He ordered an omelet and a short stack of pancakes. Coffee and orange juice. While he waited, he took out his phone and dialed.

  “I wake you?”

  “Christmas vacation—kids are out of school. They got me up at a quarter to five. Vicki sleeps with earplugs,” Henry said. “So, lucky her. What’s up?”

  “Any chance you can miss work today?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Caleb could hear a television in the background. Cartoons, maybe. Henry’s kids were talking above the show’s volume.

  “It’ll be worth it. I promise. How’s Toe Tags?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Engine’s fixed?”

  “Three, four weeks ago. Swapped out the heat exchanger.”

  “The morgue can spare you. Let’s meet at the wharf—eight thirty work?”

  “All right,” Henry said. “I’ll make it. Want to tell me what we’re doing?”

  “We’re gonna figure out where the bodies are getting dumped,” Caleb said.

  He saw movement and looked up. The waitress was standing across from him with the coffeepot. Caleb put his hand over his mouth and whispered.

  “I gotta go. Call me if you can’t make it.”

  Caleb parked in a public garage near Fisherman’s Wharf and walked over to the pier. There were flyers taped to all the parking meters. He stopped to look at one, crouching low enough to read it.

  HAVE YOU SEEN JUSTIN HOLLAND?

  The text ran above the picture of a handsome thirty-year-old man in a business suit. Caleb stood and turned around, scanning the empty block. Identical flyers plastered every vertical surface for two blocks. But the fringe of phone numbers at the base of each flyer was untouched.

  He bought sourdough rolls and takeout containers of chowder at a restaurant in the Pier 39 concourse, carrying the food away in a brown paper bag. He found Henry on a bench near the locked gate that accessed the marina’s floating docks.

  “You’re early,” Caleb said.

  “Because you always are. What’s that?”

  Caleb hefted the brown paper bag.

  “Lunch.”

  “I meant the backpack,” Henry said, nodding his chin at the black strap on Caleb’s left shoulder.

  “Some gear for getting samples. Maps. Stuff for you to read.”

  “We’ll be out long enough to need lunch?” Henry asked. He stood and began leading them toward the gate.

  “Gotta cover fifty nautical miles. We might be out all day.”

  “Good thing I topped off the tanks last week.”

  “I’ll pay you back for the fuel,” Caleb said. “This was my idea.”

  “If it’s about the murders, it’s on me. It pans out, I’ll get reimbursed.”

  Henry unlocked the gate and held it open for Caleb. They walked down the sloped gangway to the floating docks, then followed a path between sailboats and cabin cruisers until they reached Toe Tags. Henry had bought her from a retired medical examiner in Los Angeles. Not just because of the name—though Caleb was certain the name played an outsize role in Henry’s decision—but also because she was a beautifully kept trawler: thirty-six feet of oiled teak and polished bronze from stem to stern, with steering stations both in the protected pilothouse and aloft on the flying bridge.

  Caleb hadn’t been aboard since the summer, when he’d come with Bridget. Henry and Vicki had taken them for a weekend at Angel Island while their kids were with Vicki’s parents. The four of them sat up late around the boat’s dinette table, drinking wine and lingering over a dinner Caleb cooked, talking by the light of the oil lamps mounted on brass gimbals around the cabin.

  Bridget’s way of saying thanks for that trip now hung on the teak bulkhead in the saloon, and when Caleb unlocked the pilothouse door with Henry’s keys and stepped into the cabin, he stood looking at it. She’d painted it at dawn, after rowing ashore alone while the rest of them slept, then standing on the dock and looking back at the boat in Ayala Cove, back across the stretch of water toward Tiburon. The warm glow of lights from inside the boat’s cabin shimmered atop the ripples in the calm anchorage.

  To Caleb, this painting captured everything important there was to know about boats, and about Bridget. There was the dark water, and the darker hills in the distance beyond it, and the dawn sky was the gray-purple bruise of a day that would bring wind and rain. And yet there in the center of this, the boat sat so gracefully upon the water. Comfortable and at ease in the dark cove, beneath the uncertain sky.

  She would keep you warm, carry you through any passage.

  “She talking to you yet?” Henry asked, leaning in the doorway.


  Caleb turned away from the painting.

  “She called. Yesterday, I think. And she dropped off a painting for me.”

  “So things are looking up?”

  Caleb shrugged.

  “Hard to say,” he said. He handed the key ring back.

  “Don’t tell me your girlfriend’s complicated. No one would believe that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe I was too hard on you, when we talked before.”

  “Probably not.”

  Henry stepped past Caleb and sat at the wide helm seat in the starboard corner of the cabin. He fit the key into the ignition and started the engine. Its cylinders caught right away and then chugged along with a lazy rumble.

  “Gotta idle her a while, warm her up before we go. Sit down. Tell me what we’re doing.”

  Eleven

  THEY SAT OPPOSITE each other at the mahogany dinette table on the port side of the cabin. It was cold inside, and the windows were fogging with their breath, but that would clear soon enough. Henry had switched on a pair of small space heaters, and their wire coils were already starting to glow nicely. Caleb could feel the vibration of the engine coming up through his elbows, which rested on the tabletop. Outside, a flurry of rain whipped across the deck.

  “The soap man, you identified him?” Caleb said.

  He wanted to be able to think of him as a person instead of a horror sculpture. A name would help.

  “Family confirmed. Name was Charles—”

  “Charles Crane?” Caleb said.

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  “He was in the newspaper. There were flyers up and down Haight Street.”

  Henry tilted his head, then accepted it with a nod.