The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  “I guess that might work,” he said. “Beats the alternative, anyway.”

  “It’ll work. Just get me within five feet of the fuel dock, and I’m gone.”

  Henry looked at him, then finished his drink and put the glass back on the chart table.

  “Tell me this. And tell me the truth. Is Kennon looking at you as a suspect?”

  “A suspect? A suspect? Henry—I’m a witness.”

  “Did Kennon tell you that?” Henry asked. His voice was thick and urgent. “Did he tell you, in those exact words, that you’re not a suspect?”

  “He just asked me questions. Asked where I was, asked for help identifying people.”

  Henry looked away from him.

  “Shit,” he muttered. Then he looked back at Caleb, caught his eyes and held them. “If he comes to talk to you again, you watch out. You understand me? You think very carefully about what you say to him. And don’t you ever tell him a lie.”

  “I just went into House of Shields, after Bridget left. I was staying at the Palace, and all I wanted was a quiet drink. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kennon’s the best detective in California? That what you said? If he’s that good, I don’t have anything to worry about.”

  Henry tapped the throttle to slow the boat down even more. A tanker was passing in front of them, five hundred yards ahead, steaming toward the Golden Gate and the open Pacific. They watched it pass, a city of lights moving at ten knots. When it was gone, Toe Tags rocked in its wake. Henry pivoted on his seat and faced Caleb again.

  “Caleb, you’re a scientist, so you think in terms of true and false,” he said. He was speaking calmly and quietly. There was no anger in his voice anymore. “You don’t understand police work, so let me explain something to you. For a detective, being good and being right don’t always match up. They don’t even have to match up. Kennon’s good. Very good. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be right every time. So if he comes at you again, you fucking better be careful.”

  “Now you’re starting to scare me.”

  “Then maybe you’re getting the point.”

  Caleb jumped off the side of Toe Tags, hit the wet surface of the fuel dock at the Gashouse Cove marina, and skidded to his knees. He stood and brushed himself off, adjusting his backpack. His kneecaps and palms stung. He watched Toe Tags slide away, churning a white path in the black water. The sheet over the body had blown loose at the bottom. A stiff foot stuck out. Caleb looked around, but the marina was empty. He hitched up the pack, walked up the gangway, and stepped ashore.

  He cut across the Fort Mason Great Meadow and in front of Ghirardelli Square, then walked half a mile down Beach Street until he reached the parking garage where he’d left his car. Five minutes later, he drove out of the garage and continued down Beach Street to Embarcadero. Pier 39 was across the street. A white van from the medical examiner’s office was parked on the brick-lined pavilion in front of the Aquarium of the Bay. Its yellow lights were flashing and its back doors were open. It was flanked on one side by a police cruiser and on the other side by a black SUV. A uniformed policeman stood watch over the three cars, but it was too cold and rainy for there to be much of a crowd. Caleb merged onto Embarcadero going southeast. He drove slowly, rubbernecking to the left, but didn’t see anything else. Just the three vehicles and their lone guard, the yellow lights of the morgue van flashing across the front of the aquarium.

  A few minutes later, as he was passing Pier 15, a pair of police cruisers raced by in the opposite direction. Their roof lights were flashing but their sirens were silent. He heard the sound of their engines, the wet rush of their tires carving through the puddles. Cars traveling in the other direction pulled to the curb to let them pass.

  The lab was dark. But Joanne Tremont’s office was lit up, the light spilling out under her door onto the gray linoleum. Caleb put his backpack in his office, and then went back down the hallway and tapped on Joanne’s door.

  “Yeah?”

  He opened the door and leaned against the metal jamb.

  “Caleb.”

  “You were looking for me?”

  “Everybody’s been looking for you. I was starting to get really frustrated, and then I heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “Back in August, when I started, you gave me a bunch of contact numbers,” Joanne said. “Remember? So when I couldn’t reach you, I tried the backup mobile number.”

  He gestured at one of the two chairs opposite her desk, and she nodded. He came in and sat.

  “You talked to Bridget?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to get dragged into stuff like that.”

  “She didn’t tell me anything that was, you know, personal. She said she didn’t know where you were. Hadn’t seen you since Saturday. So I put it together.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that. After I figured it out, I’ve been covering for you.”

  “With the NIH?”

  She nodded and looked at her computer monitor for a moment. He couldn’t see what she had on the screen.

  “We still have until the end of January to get the additional data sets they’re asking for. So it’s not a big deal,” Joanne said.

  “That’s a relief.”

  “I mean, it isn’t a big deal, is it? You understand what they want?”

  “I do. I’ll have it.”

  She leaned back in her chair and yawned.

  “Good, because that’s the part I don’t know much about. I can explain the theory and the process. But you’ve had all the data sets. Whenever they want to get into that, I’m out of my depth.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Caleb said. “I know they’re asking a lot—”

  “Twenty?”

  “But it’s not insurmountable. We’re nearly halfway there. The VA hospital’s coming up with new tissue samples every couple weeks. Think of their patient population—not just guys with the kind of pain we need, but guys with bad wounds who don’t mind volunteering.”

  “Our kind of guys,” she said.

  Caleb nodded.

  “I run them when they show up. The VA samples. The sooner, the better. And everything’s lining up the way we’ve been saying all along.”

  “There’ll be time?”

  “We’ve got till the end of January.”

  “Last Friday in January.”

  “That’s next year,” Caleb said. “Plenty of time.”

  She smiled. They both knew it was a matter of weeks. He stood and turned to leave.

  “Caleb?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m really sorry about Bridget. I know how much you liked her.”

  He nodded and left, shutting the door quietly. Before he went back to his office, he switched on the lights in the main lab and powered on the gas chromatography mass spectrometer. He checked the log-in sheet next to the machine. The only initials for the last week were Joanne’s. He hadn’t logged his own uses. Joanne was meticulous, followed all the procedures. But he went through the full maintenance checklist anyway, to be sure each stage of the analyzer had been properly cleaned and reset.

  His equipment came from the far end of the quality and price spectrum, and made Marcie’s little toxicology lab in the morgue basement look like a middle school science project. There were reasons the papers coming from Caleb’s lab were a gold standard at conventions and in journals. His equipment was one of them. He’d taken the royalties from his early patents and reinvested in his facilities, so that his lab, even before he was invited to UCSF, was peerless. But the main reason was simpler: Caleb had checklists for everything. And he followed them, every time.

  “Hey, Caleb?”

  He looked up. Joanne stood at the far end of the lab.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you check the readouts on the uninterruptable power supply?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Just look them over before you run anything. When I came in, the
door to the power supply closet was open, and when I shut it, I noticed the utility tunnel was open too.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know if someone’s been in there,” she said.

  “I’ll double check,” Caleb said. “Before I run it.”

  “I can send an email to all the lab techs. Remind them to shut everything.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Go ahead and do that. We’ve got some new people.”

  “And some old people who’ve forgotten the rules,” she said.

  “Copy the whole staff, maybe.”

  He watched as she went back down the dark hallway. While the sample oven finished heating, he walked to his office and started planning the tests.

  When he was leaving the lab at midnight, his phone vibrated in his pocket just as he was getting into his car. He shut the door, then took out the phone. It was a text message from Henry.

  Call me.

  He put the phone in the cup holder between the seats, started the engine, and drove out of the garage onto Parnassus. At the first red light, he changed his mind and put the phone on his lap. He dialed Henry’s cell and put it on speaker.

  “Got your text,” he said when Henry picked up. “This a good time?”

  “Yeah. They’re all gone now.”

  “You’re still at Bryant Street?” Caleb asked.

  The light turned green and he shifted into first and let out the clutch. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but it wasn’t up the hill. It wasn’t home.

  “Cleaning up. Finished the autopsy.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Big night here. And not just because of what we found in the water. You were right about Marcie. She’s a good scientist. I shouldn’t have doubted her.”

  Caleb took a right and started working through the quiet avenues toward Lincoln Way, which paralleled Golden Gate Park all the way to the ocean.

  “What happened?”

  “While we were poking around in the bay, Marcie spent the day in the lab. She’d taken apart her machines twice and couldn’t find any hardware problems. So this time she brought in a software guy from Hewlett-Packard.”

  “And?”

  “He found a virus.”

  “Jesus, where?”

  Caleb nearly missed a stop sign. He saw it with just time enough to come to a skidding halt, the car fishtailing on the wet pavement. The phone fell into the foot well. When the car was stopped, he reached down and found it.

  “Everything okay?” Henry asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You driving?”

  “Yeah. The virus, where was it?”

  “Mass spectrometer’s software package. The Hewlett Packard guy pulled the hard drive and he’s taking it down to San Jose, see if he can figure out what the virus is.”

  Caleb put the car into gear again and drove the rest of the way to Lincoln. He took a left at the green light and drove west, toward the ocean.

  “Her equipment—the computer tied to the spectrometer—is it networked?”

  “No, that’s the thing,” Henry said. “It’s a standalone machine. To infect it, someone came into the lab, uploaded it by hand. You ever heard of anything like that?”

  “Viruses in spectrometer software? No.”

  “Me neither,” Henry said.

  “You think it’s connected to these killings?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. “Maybe we’ll know more when we find out what it is. What it does.”

  At the intersection of Lincoln and Sunset Boulevard, Caleb hit a wall of fog. He slowed from twenty-five miles an hour to fifteen, and then to less than ten. The last thirteen blocks to the ocean would be a gray, blind crawl.

  “How’d the autopsy go?” he asked.

  “Same as the others.”

  “ID him yet?”

  “Got a print match with DMV. Name was Justin Holland—an architect or something. Went missing two nights ago. I talked to his boyfriend to get the confirmation.”

  “Went missing from another bar?” Caleb asked.

  “They haven’t tracked it down, but probably,” Henry said. “If he didn’t use a credit card, like the others, we may never know. All the boyfriend knew was he was going to meet a client for dinner somewhere around Nob Hill. Never came back.”

  Caleb had to swerve around a car that had stopped in his lane with its hazard lights flashing. It appeared out of the thick fog so suddenly, it was as if someone had conjured it from a black cloak. Caleb twisted the wheel hard to the left and missed its bumper by inches. He drove another block, then put on his turn signal and got back into the right lane. He slowed to a couple miles an hour, then remembered Henry was still on the line.

  “What about a cause of death?”

  “The HP guy swapped out Marcie’s hard drive with a new one. So she ran the toxicology. About an hour ago, she confirmed everything you’ve been telling me.”

  “Vecuronium?”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “And thujone. She didn’t go as far as you with the metabolites, the order of doses. But we’ve got the basic picture.”

  “I can give you a little more,” Caleb said.

  He glanced in his rearview mirror. There had been a car behind him when he’d pulled onto Lincoln, but after he’d gone into the fog, it had disappeared. The car he’d swerved to miss was lost as well.

  “You already ran the effluent samples?” Henry asked.

  “You’ll probably guess what I found. Given where we found the body.”

  “It’s the Sausalito plant, isn’t it?”

  “Sausalito. Without a doubt.”

  Henry sighed and Caleb knew he was thinking through things. Trying to figure out how he could get that information to Kennon without involving Caleb in any way.

  “This is what you need to do,” Caleb offered. “Have Marcie test the skin samples from Charles Crane. Now that her spectrometer’s working, she’ll find the sodium hydroxide, no problem. Probably the synthetic estrogen, too. Once she sees that, she’ll know Crane was near a sewage treatment plant. So then tell Kennon to take a lab tech on a police boat to go pull effluent. Have Marcie test that. She’ll get a match with Sausalito, and I’ll be out of it.”

  “That’ll work,” Henry said. “And now that Marcie’s up and running again, I can get her to test the samples we preserved from the other possible victims.”

  “I know you need to keep me in the shadows,” Caleb said, “but you think you can keep me in the loop?”

  “I’ll try. This is gonna turn into a major shitstorm, though.”

  “And Kennon?” Caleb asked. “What’ll he do next?”

  “You just watch out for him. Remember what I—”

  Henry cut off, and Caleb could hear a phone ringing in the background. He heard Henry pick it up and speak quietly into it, the words too muffled to hear. Then his voice was back on the line at full volume.

  “Hey. I gotta go.”

  Henry hung up. Caleb put the phone back into the cup holder and finished his slow drive to the beach. He parked along the seawall opposite the Dutch windmill and got out of the car. He walked along the concrete wall until he found the stairs leading down to the beach, and then he sat on the step where Bridget was sitting when he’d pulled the glass shard from her foot. It was so foggy he couldn’t even see the waves, but he could hear them heaving and breaking on the beach. He put the pad of his index finger on the gravelly concrete where Bridget’s blood had fallen. That stain had long since been ground away by the sand and the rain, but he remembered where it had been.

  When the cold found him through his raincoat, through the sweater he wore underneath it, he got up and went back to the car. He sat with the engine running and the heater blowing. He’d been awake for so long now that his face felt numb. He backed out of his spot and drove north along the ocean, then jagged at right angles through the numbered avenues above Golden Gate Park until he reached Geary Boulevard. He parked in front of a liquor store he�
�d visited a few times before—it was, in fact, where he’d bought the bottle of Laphroaig on Henry’s boat—and saw through the lit-up windows that the place was still open.

  He got out of the car, went in, and asked for Berthe de Joux.

  Fourteen

  HE DIDN’T OWN a slotted silver spoon or a proper reservoir glass. Instead, he used a handheld kitchen sieve balanced over the rim of a tall glass tumbler, and he poured the ice water from a glass pitcher. The sugar cube melted into the spirit, and the drink turned from green to foggy white. He left the makeshift absinthiana on the counter and took the drink to the kitchen table, holding a paring knife in his left hand. Bridget’s package was there, still unopened. He slipped the blade between the edges of the wrapping paper, sliced through the tape, and took the paper off.

  Under the brown paper, she’d wrapped the unframed canvas with a layer of gauzy foam sheeting. He took this away and then stood looking at the painting. He knew exactly what it was, and where it was, because he’d just been there. And, in any case, he’d never let the place drift more than arm’s length from the center of his thoughts. She’d painted the beach across from the western end of Golden Gate Park. The beach on a foggy day, so the wet sand melted into the breaking waves, so the mist-laden air blowing off the ocean and the low-ceiling sky blended softly together. The painting’s focus was clear at the center but blurred out to the edges, drawing his eye and fixing it on a single spot on the beach, at the bottom center of the painting, where a jagged shard of green-blue glass waited in the sand like a shark’s tooth. Beyond that, cutting through the seawall to the left side of the painting, was the staircase.

  There was a second canvas behind the first. He lifted it out and removed the foam wrapping.

  This painting was a soft, cottony white. Gray lines of shadow ran across it at angles, so that the canvas did not look flat. A red S-shaped mark was smeared across the middle, as though Bridget had dipped her hand in red paint and quickly moved it across the canvas as an afterthought. It would be easy to mistake this painting for an abstraction. But he saw it for what it was: a still life. Though she hadn’t titled it, he knew what the plaque would say if he’d found this in a gallery instead of on his kitchen table.